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Everyone’s on the Denver Broncos bandwagon right now, but West Flanders Brewing in Boulder (which made news last week for naming a beer in honor of pot legalization) manged to find the line between enthusiasm and over-enthusiasm after it named a beer for the home team — only to have the NFL send it a cease-and-desist order.
On Wednesday, the brewery announced that it planned to tap a single keg of Brett on the Broncos, a blended wild ale that it jokingly called an “AFC Champion Style Ale. “Like the Denver Broncos offense, it’s a winning, gloriously golden wonder deep with unstoppable flavors and wild and thrilling excitement,” the brewery said.
See also: West Flanders Brewing releases a beer in honor of pot legalization
The story got some attention nationwide as the Broncos are getting ready to play the New England Patriots in the AFC Championship game on Sunday.
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But on Thursday, brewery spokesman Marty Jones announced that the legal department of the National Football League had sent West Flanders a cease-and-desist order.
West Flanders Brewing is “engaging in unauthorized promotional use of the NFL Marks (including inter alia, the AFC word mark and the Denver Broncos word mark and color combination) in connection with the promotion of your business,” the letter read.
To which the brewery responded: “Of course, we don’t know what inter alia means. Nor did we think anything about the name would bother the NFL. But we are certainly big fans of the Denver Broncos, the AFC, and the colors blue and orange.”
“So West Flanders management has contacted the NFL and told them we’ll work up a new name for Brett on the Broncos.”
On Friday, Jones revealed that the beer has since been remonikered: “To avoid any more unnecessary roughness from the NFL, we called an audible and renamed the beer: Omaha! Omaha! Brett! We don’t think the folks in Nebraska will mind.
The new description: an “After Formal Complaint Championship Game Ale.”
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