Moonshiner and University Battle Over Rights to ‘Kentucky’

Moonshiner and University Battle Over Rights to ‘Kentucky’

WHITESBURG, Ky. — Booze packs a bite in this bend of Appalachia, area authoritative bootleg is steeped in bounded lore. But if Colin Fultz, the grandson of a bootlegger, opened a gourmet distillery actuality endure fall, he ran afield of a spirit even added almighty than white lightning: University of Kentucky basketball.

With his outlaw grandfathering — who spent 18 years abaft confined for smuggling — actual abundant on his mind, Mr. Fultz, a agent and onetime atramentous miner, set out to backpack on his family’s attitude in a legal, and thoroughly modern, way.

He tinkered with recipes, aggregate peaches and blackberries into brew brewed in his garage. He assassin a advocate — “My wife got on me, said I was traveling to get into trouble,” he said — and adapted an old car dealership, area he now distills and sells fruit-infused whiskey, confined it in thimble-size cups from an exposed-brick tasting bar.

But Mr. Fultz aswell approved to cast his business name: Kentucky Brume Moonshine. And that, sports fans, is how a booze maker anguish up suing the University of Kentucky — the basketball behemoth astral by its “Big Dejected Nation” of admirers — in federal cloister over a axiological question: Who owns the rights to the name of the state?

The university says it does; it wants to block Mr. Fultz from trademarking “Kentucky Brume Moonshine” for T-shirts, hats and added accoutrement (though not his moonshine) awash in his distillery allowance shop. It registered the chat “Kentucky” with the United States Apparent and Cast Office for accouterment in 1997, 19 years ago.

“‘Kentucky’ is our affair — not the brume or the moonshine,” said Jason Schlafer, the university’s controlling accessory able-bodied director, who oversees business and licensing for the Wildcats, Kentucky’s sports teams.

But actuality in Whitesburg — a little city-limits of about 2,100 humans on the North Fork of the Kentucky River, area an anniversary abatement anniversary showcases abundance heritage, music and crafts — the university’s attitude has gone down about as calmly as a attempt of bathtub gin, even with die-hard Wildcats fans.

“U.K. basketball is our cultural icon, it’s what brings Kentuckians together,” said Dee Davis, admiral and architect of the Center for Rural Strategies, a nonprofit that seeks to advance amusing and bread-and-butter altitude in the region. “So it’s actually asinine that the university would decay its time aggravating to go afterwards some poor abundance entrepreneur.”

University able-bodied departments about the nation accept developed more advancing about arresting what they see as their bookish property; in 2006, the University of Alabama sued an artisan who corrective football scenes, allurement a federal adjudicator to bar him from appliance the school’s “famous blood-soaked and white blush scheme.”

And while a amount of accessible universities, in places like Georgia, Michigan and Ohio, aswell own rights to their accompaniment names, several experts in apparent and cast law adumbrate Mr. Fultz — who is already affairs T-shirts in the allowance boutique — will get his cast in the end.

Trademarked accompaniment names activity “a actual attenuated ambit of protection,” R. Polk Wagner, a law assistant and bookish acreage able at the University of Pennsylvania, said.

Rebecca Tushnet, a assistant at Georgetown University Law Center who has brash Mr. Fultz’s lawyer, said it is hardly abnormal for a university to try to accomplish its trademarks. “But this addled me as appealing austere overreaching,” she said.

Mr. Fultz, a Republican, was so incensed he is now active for accompaniment representative. “No one being should own the name ‘Kentucky,’” he said.

Whitesburg is in the affection of Eastern Kentucky atramentous country, a arena adversity from job losses and bread-and-butter harder times. Authoritative acknowledged moonshine, in a accompaniment accepted for its bourbon, is a hot new trend. So if Mr. Fultz, 45, proposed the abstraction of an flush distillery, Mayor James Wiley Craft saw it as a way to access tourism downtown.

They formed calm on a plan for Mr. Fultz to clean the old car dealership, which was endemic by the city. Mr. Craft, 70, a advocate (and a alum of the University of Kentucky law school) says the abstraction took a bit of affairs to the City-limits Council; Whitesburg was dry until 2007, and “the association of authoritative booze in the city” did not go over well.

The six-member board breach 3 to 3; Mr. Craft casting the tiebreaking vote in November 2014. “It was an abominable fight,” Mr. Fultz said, in his bendable abundance twang. “They was like: ‘Alcohol is bad enough. We don’t charge a distillery.’”

Despite his bright ancestors history — his added grandfather, not the bootlegger, was dead by a brother-in-law “in a activity over a section of land” — Mr. Fultz is a amiable man. But if attorneys for the state’s flagship university, 145 afar abroad in Lexington, beatific him a letter endure October, one ages afterwards he opened, vowing to “consider added activity as it deems necessary” if he did not carelessness his appliance for a accouterment trademark, he and his advocate took it as angry words.

“The endure affair you do is blaze off a aggressive letter in Eastern Kentucky,” said his lawyer, Jim Francis, who said one of his own ancestors was dead in the region’s abominable Hatfield and McCoy feud. “That alone after-effects in one thing: You’ve got a activity on your hands.”

Mr. Schlafer, the university able-bodied official, says the letter was a pro forma access to negotiations, and insists that the university — whose able-bodied administration generates $123 actor a year in revenue, mostly from basketball, football and media rights — has the appropriate to assure “the backbone of that brand.” He said mostly, the university wants to accumulate Mr. Fultz from business Kentucky Brume Booze shirts in the school’s signature colors, dejected and white.

“We had consistently hoped we could accept a conversation,” he said.

Instead, Mr. Francis — who complains that the university does not aces on big companies, like Kentucky Fried Chicken — filed clothing in federal cloister in Lexington, gluttonous to force the university to bead its action to the trademark. The university has asked a adjudicator to abolish the case, on the area that as an arm of the accompaniment it has absolute amnesty and cannot be sued. Both abandon are acquisitive for a accommodation soon.

Mr. Francis says that no amount what happens with the cast application, he expects the absolute amnesty catechism to go all the way to the Supreme Court.

Here in Whitesburg, Mr. Fultz, who could be begin one contempo afternoon bond blackberries (his admired drupe for additive moonshine) in a stainless animate brew tank, is aggravating to aggrandize his apprentice business. He catholic to New York not continued ago to appear a barter appearance with adolescent distillers and winemakers, area he met with distributors.

“We got abundant acknowledgment from Canada,” he said.

He has been advancement harder for accompaniment representative; he has antagonism in the Republican primary, which is May 17. He insists that he is still an agog affiliate of the Big Dejected Nation: “I mean, everybody about actuality is a big Wildcats fan.”

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