Camden Town Brewery accused of bullying

We came across an episode which sheds some interesting lights on crowdfunding's claims to be the people's way.

Camden Town Brewery has been a great success to date  - it recently raised over £1m on Crowdcube to prove it - although it had to retrospectively reduce its valuation due to selling 20% to a German firm for considerably less than the crowd had paid.

That aside, it had another issue at the turn of year with a small micro brewery based in Norfolk. Redwell had a beer called Hells Larger - so do Camden. Redwell claimed that Hells is a generic German term for a type of lager - which is why they chose the name. Actually the official term in German is Helles but it's close enough we feel. So Camden have taken them to court  - the High Court where things start at £30,000. We feel that Camden have no case and that they are bullying what is a genuine small business, creating jobs in an area where unemployment is traditionally high. It maybe an interesting case - since when did Hell become the property of one company? It does Camden no favours and they should really know better.

To round this one off - Redwell tried the crowdfunding route to raise money to fight the case on Idiegogo.  It bombed. They are still selling Hells Lager so the fight is still on.