The same typeface, a very similar style (including the predominant yellow), and above all, no doubt about the name… It was enough to alert the legal teams at the beer giant “LEFFE” (with an “E” at the end) to the need to get the craft beer brewer “LEFF” (without an “E”) to see reason and “stop using the name”. For Philippe Le Saux, owner of the “Brasserie Artisanale du Leff”, who hails from LanLeff in Côtes-d’Armor, a village with a river called the “Leff” running through it, yielding to the Belgian giant’s demands is out of the question: “I have no wish to withdraw from this adventure or to change anything whatsoever.”
The former bar owner dreamt of setting up his own brewery for thirty years; Philippe Le Saux doesn’t really want this to end up in court; he admits he couldn’t afford it, and if it came to that, “It would be David against Goliath”.
The well-known Belgian brand, for its part, is bringing to bear its precedence, and the law tends to be intractable in such cases; as for the Breton craft brewer, his response is: “Well, there’s a Dinan in Brittany too, isn’t there? Which town came first?”
