A Cease and Desist Before the Doors Even Open
Lance and Anjalie Wassink had a plan. They were going to open Legacy Winery & Spirits inside Terra Station, a $32.5 million mixed-use development on School Avenue in Hudsonville, Michigan, and give their community something it had never seen before. A tasting room. A working distillery. And a bourbon experience straight out of Bardstown, Kentucky. Then a letter arrived.
A cease and desist from one of the largest bourbon producers in the world landed on their doorstep before the tasting room had even served its first glass. The issue? The word "Legacy" paired with "whiskey" on a front label. Apparently, that combination belongs to someone else — someone with deep pockets and a legal team to back it up.
"Apparently, they trademarked the name 'Legacy' with the word whiskey. You can't have both on a front label," Anjalie Wassink said.
She declined to name the company that issued the notice, but made it clear the operation they were up against was no regional player. This was a global bourbon brand flexing its legal muscle against a small husband-and-wife distillery that hadn't even opened its tasting room yet.
The Cost of Someone Else's Trademark
The fallout was immediate and expensive. The Wassinks had to throw out $2,000 worth of pre-printed bourbon labels — labels they had already paid for, designed, and ordered in preparation for launch. On top of that, attorney fees added another "couple thousand dollars" to the bill. For a small operation still waiting on a tasting room permit, those costs hit hard.
"It's irritating, but we're blessed that we don't have to completely rebrand," Wassink said.
That silver lining exists because the business operates as a winery as well. A winery can hold the Legacy name. The trademark conflict is specific to the whiskey side of the operation, which means the distillery itself — as a brand, as a business, as a place — gets to keep its identity. But the bourbon line? That had to go back to the drawing board.
What came out of that process is actually something worth talking about.
Enter the Barrel Thief
The Wassinks are rebranding their bourbon line under the name Barrel Thief — a name that carries real weight in bourbon culture, even if most Americans outside of Kentucky have never heard the term.
Barrel thieving is a tasting experience that originated in Bardstown, Kentucky, which holds the widely recognized title of bourbon capital of the world. Rather than sitting down with a flight of bottled and proofed expressions, participants get the bourbon taken directly from the barrel — uncut, unfiltered, at full barrel strength — poured straight into their glass. It is about as raw and honest as whiskey tasting gets. There is no water added, no blending for consistency, no processing to smooth the edges. What comes out of the barrel is exactly what goes into the glass.
The Wassinks say their operation will be the first in Michigan to offer the experience. If that claim holds, it is a genuine distinction — not a marketing spin, but a real first for the state's growing craft spirits scene. For anyone who has ever wanted to taste bourbon the way the distillers actually experience it, before it gets dressed up for the shelf, this is the closest thing to that.
The name Barrel Thief, then, is not just a workaround forced by legal trouble. It is a nod to a specific tradition in the heartland of American whiskey — one that the Wassinks are now staking their brand identity on.
A Summer Opening, Community Support Needed Now
The original plan was to open the tasting room in May. That timeline slipped after the process of acquiring a tasting room permit took longer than expected. The couple now expects to open later in the summer, and they say the trademark dispute itself should not push that date back any further.
In the meantime, Legacy Winery & Spirits is keeping its doors open through production facility tours. Visitors can walk through the operation, see how the product is made, and purchase bottled wines and spirits before the full tasting room experience is available. Tickets run between $25 and $30 per person, and reservations can be made at legacywineryspirits.com.
Anjalie Wassink has been direct about the situation facing the business right now. The delays have created real financial pressure, and the community's support during this stretch matters more than it might seem from the outside.
"Because we've been pushed back, we really need the community's support right now to just stay afloat," Wassink said. "Everyone can try what we have coming before the tasting room opens."
That is not a throwaway line. For a small craft operation absorbing legal costs, permit delays, and scrapped label inventory before the tasting room has served a single customer, local traffic through those tours is not just a nice thing — it is a lifeline.
This Has Happened Before in West Michigan
The Wassinks are not the first small distillers in the region to find themselves in a trademark dispute with a company that outguns them in every legal and financial category.
Eastern Kille Distillery, which operates out of Grand Rapids, went through almost the exact same experience in 2019. They had been operating under the name Gray Skies Distillery when a company with a similar name came after them legally. The fight dragged on for roughly a year and a half before the distillery decided to settle by rebranding entirely.
It was not a decision made from a position of weakness so much as one made from clarity about priorities. Co-owner Brandon Voorhees put it plainly.
"We would rather put our time, efforts and resources into making products," Voorhees said. "That's what we're passionate about. Instead of sitting in law rooms and meetings with lawyers, we really want to be focusing on how we can make our craft distillery better."
The original name carried meaning. Gray Skies reflected the distillery's location just off the eastern bank of the Grand River, and the word "Kille" — now part of the distillery's permanent identity — comes from Middle Dutch, a language that has not been spoken in centuries. In that language, "kille," pronounced like "kill," means waterway or riverbed. It was chosen deliberately, with the intention that its obscurity would make it safe.
"We felt that using an old, Middle Dutch language was pretty safe and is making our name unique to us and who we are," Voorhees said. "We're not just a brand, we're a distillery full of Grand Rapidians, Michiganders that are making product we're passionate about."
That was not enough to protect them. And it is worth sitting with that for a moment — a name pulled from a language that has been extinct for generations, chosen specifically because it would not conflict with anyone, still got dragged into a trademark dispute.
The Bigger Picture for Small Distillers
What is happening in West Michigan reflects something playing out across the American craft spirits industry. Small producers operate in a legal environment that was largely shaped before they existed. The trademark system is not designed to protect them — it is designed to protect whoever got there first and can afford to enforce it.
Large spirits companies have teams dedicated to monitoring trademark filings and marketplace activity. When a small distiller in Michigan uses a word like "Legacy" alongside "whiskey," that triggers an alert somewhere, gets reviewed by counsel, and results in a letter. The small distiller, meanwhile, may not even know there was a conflict until that letter shows up.
The financial asymmetry is almost comical. A global bourbon brand issuing a cease and desist spends less on that letter than Legacy Winery & Spirits spent on the labels they had to throw away. The enforcement cost for the big company is negligible. For the small one, it is a real hit.
And yet both the Wassinks and the team at Eastern Kille have responded the same way — not with bitterness toward the craft, but with a commitment to getting back to the work. Rebrand. Refocus. Keep making the product.
What Barrel Thief Means Going Forward
When Legacy Winery & Spirits opens its tasting room later this summer at Terra Station in Hudsonville, the bourbon on the menu will carry a different name than originally planned. But the Barrel Thief series may end up being the more interesting story because of what it promises to deliver.
If the Wassinks follow through on bringing the barrel-strength, straight-from-the-cask tasting experience to Michigan for the first time, they will have turned a legal setback into a genuine point of distinction. Instead of simply selling bottled bourbon under a name that sounds like dozens of other labels, they will be offering something experiential — something that rewards the kind of whiskey drinker who wants to understand what they are drinking, not just consume it.
That is a harder thing to trademark. And it is a harder thing to take away.
