Blue Moon Deceptive Marketing Class Action Should Continue, Plaintiff Says

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Beer drinkers who filed a deceptive marketing class action lawsuit against MillerCoors LLC told a California federal court that the allegations over its Blue Moon beer should not be tossed.

Plaintiffs Evan Parent filed the Blue Moon class action lawsuit against MillerCoors in April, saying that Blue Moon customers were deceived by the beer maker into thinking that Blue Moon beer is a craft beer, when it is allegedly mass produced by MillerCoors.

In its motion to have the Blue Moon class action lawsuit dismissed, MillerCoors argued that “craft beer” and “crafted” or not deceptive terms because craft beer does not have a legal definition.

“MillerCoors urges the Court to ‘construe the term ‘craft’ in accordance with its ordinary or natural meaning,’ However, Parent says that the terms do have meanings that are commonly understood.

“As far back as 1986, a ‘craft brewery’ was defined as a ‘small brewery using traditional methods and ingredients to produce a handcrafted, uncompromised beer that is marketed locally (and is) True Beer,” Parent says in his opposition to the motion to dismiss.

MillerCoors cited Webster’s Dictionary to make a case for a more broad definition of craft beer, which says, “‘to make or produce something with care or skill.”

“However, if MillerCoors had looked a few entries further, it would have discovered that the same dictionary it cites also defines the term ‘craft beer.’ That is, ‘a specialty beer produced in limited quantities,'” Parent argues in his motion to keep the Blue Moon class action lawsuit.

The Blue Moon craft beer class action lawsuit was first filed by Parent in April in a California state court. It was transferred to the federal court in June.

According to the Blue Moon class action lawsuit, a craft brewery is defined as a “small, independent and traditional” brewery that produces “less than 6 million barrels of beer annually,” is “less than 25 percent owned or controlled by a non-craft brewer,” and makes “beer using only traditional or innovative brewing ingredients,” according to the Brewers Association, a trade group that promotes independent craft brewers.

MillerCoors began making Blue Moon beer in 1995 “to compete in the burgeoning craft beer market” when it was still the Coors Brewing Company and Blue Moon was sold “under the name, Blue Moon Brewing Company,” the Blue Moon class action lawsuit says.

Parent explains that “Blue Moon Brewing Company is a small, limited capacity brewery located inside Coors Field, home to the Colorado Rockies baseball team. The Blue Moon beer that is sold in stores is not brewed at or by the Blue Moon Brewing Company. Rather, it is brewed by MillerCoors at the company’s Golden, Colorado and Eden, North Carolina breweries,” where MillerCoors makes other beers such as “Coors, Milwaukee’s Best, Miller High Life, Hamm’s, Icehouse and Olde English.”

Parent says in his class action lawsuit that he wouldn’t have paid as much for Blue Moon if he had known that it was mass produced.

Parent is represented by James M. Treglio, R. Craig Clark, Dawn M. Berry and Veronika Snoblova of Clark & Treglio.

MillerCoors is represented by David T. Biderman, Julie L. Hussey, Julie E. Schwartz and Lauren B. Cohen of Perkins Coie.

The Blue Moon Craft Beer Class Action Lawsuit is Evan Parent et al. v. MillerCoors LLC et al., Case No. 3:15-cv-01204, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California.

UPDATE: On June 16, 2016, for the second and presumably last time, a federal court has dismissed a consumer class action lawsuit over whether Blue Moon beer can truly be described as “craft beer.”