When you have more than 3,700 brewers in a country, some toes are going to be stepped on. Those digits should never belong to a brewery’s customers.

Observers like to dedicate a lot of breath and letters to craft beer’s litigious side. Brewers are running out of names, they say. They’re trying to trademark fairly universal beer terms such as IPA and nitro. The bigger brewers are pushing the smaller ones around. It’s a giant legal sandbox in which nobody in craft beer circles has any fun and fewer and fewer craft brewers can play together nicely.

This is the business portion of craft beer’s burgeoning existence, and it’s bumming people out.

Recently, however, the fights have spilled over from phone lines, e-mail chains and courtrooms and into the public forum. That’s bound to happen in a subculture as obsessive as craft beer, but it certainly doesn’t help when brewers themselves are shouting their grievances to the crowd.

Beer drinkers got an early taste of that bitterness back in January, when Petaluma, Calif.-based Lagunitas filed suit against Chico, Calif.-based Sierra Nevada over the graphic representation of IPA on the packaging of Sierra Nevada’s yet-to-be-released Hop Hunter IPA. Lagunitas owner and founder Tony Magee only exacerbated the situation by taking to Twitter, first to explain the reasoning behind the suit and, later, to announce that he was withdrawing the suit.

“These days, with the prevalence of social media, the court of public opinion matters a lot,” Magee said at the time. “Those are our customers talking.”

Yes, but that doesn’t make it a great idea to talk back to them. Larry Bell has spent the past 30 years growing his Kalamazoo, Mich.-based Bell’s Brewery from a home-brewing supply shop to a craft beer giant that produced more than 300,000 barrels last year. While he’s received help from investors, he’s been slowly buying them out in preparation to hand over the brewery to his children. His daughter, Laura Bell, already serves as the brewery’s vice president.

“ By trying this matter in the court of public opinion instead of the trademark office, both breweries succeeded only in airing some procedural dirty laundry that in no way helps beer drinkers or buyers. ”

By unwritten craft beer law, Bell has been running his business “The Right Way.”

That perception shifted in early March, when Bell’s asked 500-barrel Sylva, N.C., brewery Innovation Brewing to withdraw its trademark application for its name. Bell’s thought the Innovation name was close to two of its slogans — “Inspired brewing” and “Bottling innovation since 1985.” Word of that dispute reached Innovation’s Western North Carolina brewing community, home to nearly 20 breweries in Asheville alone, and a Change.org petition against Bell’s began stacking up signatures. A GoFundMe page to cover Innovation’s legal fees also popped up. An Asheville bar took Bell’s beers off its taps.

Of course, the perception that Bell’s had filed a lawsuit didn’t help matters. Laura Bell took to Twitter and Facebook to explain that the brewery had not, in fact, filed a lawsuit against Innovation. It was protecting a trademark (which you kind of have to do when one is in place), it had reached out to Innovation personally (only to be brushed off) and offered several other solutions that Innovation rejected.

Innovation, meanwhile, followed Bell’s lead with a Facebook post of its own. Owners Chip Owen and Nicole Dexter responded that the Bell’s request was “like a lawsuit,” that there should be no confusion about the name, that Laura Bell’s call to their brewery came too late, that Bell’s only offered them $2,500 and that Bell’s should have accelerated the trademark process if it wanted a swift resolution.

This is the part where we just sigh and shake our heads.

By trying this matter in the court of public opinion instead of, you know, the federal trademark office, both breweries succeeded only in airing some procedural dirty laundry that in no way helps beer drinkers or buyers. By opening those screeds with pap like “To Our Wonderful Craft Beer Community” and “To Bell’s customers and the passionate craft beer community,” each tried to play to what they clearly believe is craft beer fans’ inflated sense of justice and moral clarity. Never mind that the customers of each brewery are members of that same community, or that this whole thing could have been resolved behind closed doors if Bell’s just kept its mouth shut and Innovation had the good sense to, you know, bring a lawyer to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to defend its trademark application.

Craft beer picks the worst times to forget it’s a business. This whole incident could have been a lesson to other breweries about how to prepare for a trademark proceeding and how to properly research a brand name before both applying and attempting to trademark it. Instead, we get some heated, but half-baked, rhetoric from both sides and a “boycott” — one of many that beer fans regularly engage in when a decision isn’t made as they see fit — that didn’t make it to the tipoff of the first March Madness games.

Bell’s is one of craft beer’s greatest independent success stories and this little hiccup isn’t going to stop any but the most stubborn and lunk-headed zealots from drinking its Two-Hearted Ale IPA or summer Oberon Ale. Innovation, meanwhile, is a member of a Western North Carolina beer industry so vibrant and powerful that it coaxed Sierra Nevada and Colorado’s Oskar Blues and New Belgium to open East Coast breweries there. Despite the social media drama, both of those breweries will escape this exchange just fine.

It’s craft beer brewers in general who need to learn to zip it, follow procedure and handle their breweries like the businesses they are. The court of public opinion is powerful, but there are a whole lot of matters that are better off settled out of that courtroom: Which is home to a hanging judge with a bad ear.

Jason Notte is a freelance writer based in Portland, Ore. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Huffington Post and Esquire. Notte received a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University in 1998. Follow him on Twitter @Notteham.