Under Court Threat from The Bike Lane, New Leesburg Brewery Changes Name

According to its Facebook page, the former Bike Lane Brewing in Loudoun County has changed its name.

The brewery (101 Loudoun St. SE, Leesburg), which was challenged by The Bike Lane in Reston for having a similar name, will now be known as Bike TrAle Brewing. In addition, its scheduled opening date has been pushed back a week to Oct. 28 to accommodate for the change.

Earlier this month, the owners of The Bike Lane (11943 Democracy Drive) announced they would seek legal action to bar the brewery from using its originally planned name.

“We feel that having a business named so similar and located on the same trail (the W&OD), only a few miles away, will confuse both our current and future customers,” wrote co-owners Anne and Todd Mader in a letter to customers. “This company has refused to change their name, so we are left with no other option than to ask the courts to have them change their name.”

The brewery’s location is about 1/4-mile from where the W&OD Trail crosses King Street in Leesburg. Its Facebook page was updated Saturday announcing the name change.

The Bike Lane, which has announced it will soon leave Reston Town Center, plans to stay near the W&OD Trail in Reston when it moves. As part of the move, the Maders say, they will expand to include their own micro-brewery and coffee house. This further complicated matters with the new Leesburg brewery, they say.

Bike TrAle Brewing co-owner Greg Perlberg previously told Reston Now that The Bike Lane had been threatening his business with legal action for months, and that he was not “cordially asked” to change the name as the Maders asserted in their letter.

Perlberg applied for a trademark to the name “Bike Lane Brewing” in July 2016. The Bike Lane, which also operates a shop in Springfield, is trademarked under the name Fairfax Cyclery Inc. t/a The Bike Lane.