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Wednesday, March 28, 2001
Bay Area businessman completes 20-year odyssey to bring Budvar to U.S. shelves
By Jennifer Hamm
Ever since Kip Bruzzone sipped his first Budweiser Budvar during a year abroad in the late 1970s, he's been on a quest: To bring what he thinks is one of the world's best beers to the United States.
One small problem stood in his way. It was illegal.
A messy, decades-long, international trademark war over who has the rights to the name Budweiser -- battled out between Czech brewer Budejovicky Budvar and U.S. giant Anheuser-Busch in courts around the globe -- has kept the Czech brew off American shelves for the past 62 years.
But Bruzzone, who runs a liquor distributorship outside of San Francisco and the Budvar brewers have finally found a loophole. They simply changed the beer's name to Czechvar, and, with little fanfare, restarted exports to the United States in November.
HOW TO GET IT
For a list of U.S. distributors carrying Czechvar, please see
www.czechvar.com
Budvar officials declined to comment on their long-awaited re-entry onto enemy turf pending a Wednesday, March 28, press conference.
But the move hasn't gone unnoticed. Officials of St. Louis-based Anheuser-Busch, who have invested extensive resources in trying to prevent the Bohemian brew from reaching U.S. shores, say there's not much they can do about Czechvar. The world's largest brewer acknowledges the loophole is legitimate.
"We have no objections to the Czech brewer selling in the United States under other names. They have a legal right to," said Stephen Burrows, president and chief executive officer of Anheuser-Busch International Inc., in a prepared statement. "What they cannot do is infringe on our trademarks Budweiser, Bud or other related terms. They are some of the most valuable trademarks in the world, and we will protect them."
That's just fine with Budvar. With the company's internationally known swirling red script on the Czechvar label, the only aspect that has changed is the name, just enough to comply with the trademark restrictions.
The company is counting on devotees like Bruzzone -- and European expatriates and Americans who have tasted Budvar while traveling in Europe -- to figure out that Czechvar is really the other Budweiser.
Bruzzone thinks it will work.
"We call this the holy grail of beer because of the pilgrimages people make to buy it," he said of the lager. "They are exactly like me. They love the beer and they go to great lengths to get it."
A long road
Perhaps no one has gone to greater lengths than Bruzzone.
After realizing that the world-class beer he sampled couldn't be bought in the United States, he visited the then-communist-controlled Budvar brewery in Ceske Budejovice in the mid-1980s, trying to sell them on the benefits of figuring out a way to export to America.
"They were very nice and polite. ... I was making good headway," he said. "Then, they had the Revolution, and it was back to square one."
In recent years, he's been working with the current management of Budvar -- still state-owned -- on ways to get the beer onto the lucrative U.S. market.
They hit upon the name-change idea, and "went back and forth for years and years" with different potential names. One suggestion was to drop the "b," and call the beer "Udvar," but the Budvar representatives didn't like the idea.
"After 20 years you get frustrated," Bruzzone said, adding that he has a stack of documents 7 inches (18 centimeters) thick from his efforts over the years. "It doesn't matter what you call it. Let's just get it packaged and get it in."
Whether Czechvar will be able to survive on the cutthroat and crowded U.S. liquor market, where branding and marketing can be as important as quality, remains to be seen.
Gerald Weisel, who has been ordering Czechvar for his Burlingame, California, Wiemax Wines and Spirits ever since he spotted it in his distributor's catalog two months ago, thinks it's not as simple as just showing up.
"It's a famous beer in Europe and I thought maybe our customers would enjoy tasting the real thing," he said. But the market is small, and in a good month, he's only been able to unload one case of Czechvar.
"I imagine they'll have a tough time getting it to be especially popular without a little push," he said.
Budvar came up with some wink-and-nod slogans to help the cause: "Czechvar: It's really what you think it is." "You said it, we can't." Another distributor, Czech Beer Importers of Darien, Connecticut, plans to use the slogan, "Only the name has been changed to protect the beer."
Bruzzone said he thinks Czechvar will thrive regardless of the name, thanks to its quality and word-of-mouth. He's got good reason. In the mid-1980s, when he realized setting up an export deal would be tougher than he had thought, he brought a few cases of Budweiser Budvar back on his own, relabeled them, and sold them in his Morgana, California, spirits store. Word got around that Budvar was available, and expatriates from Austria, Germany, Russia and Latvia started showing up.
Though he couldn't replenish his supply when it ran out, the impression was made. Customers gave Bruzzone their phone numbers and asked him to call if he ever got another shipment.
"I kept those cards for 10 to 15 years, and called every single one of them" when Czechvar arrived in November. All who hadn't moved came in and bought multiple cases. "It shows you how loyal they are," he said.
Deep roots
The complicated trademark dispute goes back more than a century. Anheuser-Busch says it started using the Budweiser name in 1876, 19 years before Budvar started operations. But the Czechs insist they've been making beer in the same city for 700 years, a city that was known until early this century as Budweis -- Budweiser means brew of Budweis.
According to the St. Louis-Post Dispatch, the Czechs claim to have a letter from Anheuser-Busch founder Adolphus Busch, dated 1894, saying he modeled his beer on the brew made in Budweis.
But Anheuser-Busch claims Budvar didn't start touting itself as Budweiser until the 1960s, long after the U.S. brewer had invested hundreds of millions of dollars in building up the name.
The two companies hammered out an agreement in 1939 in which the Czech brewer would pull out of U.S. markets and focus on Europe.
Since then, the two have challenged each other in courtrooms around the globe. Many courts have sided with Anheuser-Busch, while in other parts of the world, Anheuser has had to vary the name "Budweiser" to monikers such as Anheuser B or American Bud.
As far as Bruzzone sees it, Budvar has been patient, and its new Czechvar venture is fair.
"The Czechs have kept their agreement," he said. "And the Americans have done nothing but test that at every turn they can."
-- Jana Donovan contributed to this report.
Jennifer Hamm's e-mail address is jhamm@praguepost.cz
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