On Wednesday afternoon, rain and hail plopped and plunked on the shipping container that serves as a construction site office for Mark and Jo Brinkerhoff in Castle Rock.

“We have faced some adversity,” Mark Brinkerhoff said as he motioned to their project.

“And now it continues,” his wife added with a short laugh.

Since 2021, the couple has spent $7.5 million on two buildings — a 9,000-square-foot cocktail lounge and event space, and a 2,600-square-foot steakhouse — in the Promenade at Castle Rock shopping center. Construction is to be completed by year’s end.

Mark Brinkerhoff, left, and father William Brinkerhoff (Courtesy photo)

The restaurant will be named The Brinkerhoff, an homage to Mark’s family and its 40-year legacy of popular restaurants in the Denver area, including La Loma. The lounge will be called Bar Hummingbird, an homage to Jo’s Mexican heritage, to which the hovering little birds are important, as well as Castle Rock’s location within hummingbird migration paths.

Or maybe it won’t be.

On May 24, the Brinkerhoffs were sent a cease-and-desist letter by the exclusive Castle Pines Golf Club. “We must demand that you change the name of your proposed bar,” it said, “to a name that does not include the word hummingbird or an image of a hummingbird.”

“It was out of total left field,” Mark Brinkerhoff said during an interview in the shipping container. “I was totally blindsided. I don’t understand why there would be any concern.”

The Brinkerhoffs are no strangers to the posh country club. Mark’s great uncle was a founding member and his grandfather was a charter member. His first job, at 13, was at the club. And, while not members, the couple lives on Castle Pines Golf Club property.

The respective logos for Bar Hummingbird, top, and Castle Pines Golf Club, bottom. (Court records)

In what’s called a Hummingbird Cottage. On Hummingbird Drive.

Hummingbird logos are everywhere at Castle Pines. They’re at the entrance gate, on the wine glasses, on the decanters, on the water bottles, in the ice cubes and on the golf pencils. The hamburger buns there are branded with a silhouette of two hummingbirds in flight.

That ubiquity, coupled with the Brinkerhoffs’ longtime connections to the club, leads Castle Pines to believe that Mark and Jo’s origin story for Bar Hummingbird “lacks credibility,” as its attorneys wrote in a June 28 cease-and- desist letter obtained by BusinessDen.

“It is plain to the club that (Mark) would not have adopted the name Bar Hummingbird but for the fact that he lives on club property, on Hummingbird Drive, in a Hummingbird Cottage,” that letter alleges. “In other words, the club’s hummingbird trademark was (his) inspiration.”

“Their position,” Mark Brinkerhoff said Wednesday, “was not, ‘Let’s find a solution.’ It was, ‘Go away.’” Despite his family’s prominence, he calls it a “David-and-Goliath situation.”

“Could we have just changed our name? Yes. But that would have had ramifications too,” explained Jo Brinkerhoff, referring to marketing and brand-recognition costs.

So, rather than comply with the cease-and-desist demands, the Brinkerhoffs asked a federal judge in Denver on Monday to decide whether Bar Hummingbird’s name and logo violates Castle Pines Golf Club’s trademarks and whether it will confuse future customers.

The Brinkerhoffs are adamant that their logo is unlike the club’s, that their businesses will appeal to a vastly different customer base (the general public rather than private members), and that the club’s trademark pertains only to golf products and services, not a bar.

“Plaintiff has established its own goodwill in the bar and restaurant industry,” lawyers for Brinkerhoff Restaurants wrote in their complaint this week, “and does not desire nor need to trade off the goodwill that the defendant has established in the golf industry.”

Spokespeople for Castle Pines did not answer requests for comment on the dispute.

An artist rendering of the future Bar Hummingbird, with The Brinkerhoff restaurant in the background. (Courtesy Brinkerhoff Restaurants)

Mark and Jo Brinkerhoff hope that by proactively asking U.S. Magistrate Judge Kathryn Starnella to settle the matter, they can have an answer before their restaurant and lounge open. The couple says that their costly project is financed by a loan collateralized by their home, meaning that “everything is on the line,” in Jo’s words, as it moves ahead.

“This is not just a business to me,” she said over a crash of thunder. “It is personal.”