Atlas Brew Works still has a tank full of beer it can’t sell in kegs, thanks to the federal shutdown that has shuttered the agency that approves its labels. Now, the Ivy City brewery has filed a suit against the acting U.S. attorney general, claiming that its inability to sell labeled beer is a violation of its First Amendment rights.

In a suit filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in D.C., Atlas notes that the government has approved labels for its cans of The Precious One, an apricot IPA, but not the labels for its kegs, known as “keg collars” before the shutdown began. Those kegs can’t be shipped out for sales outside of D.C. without label approval from the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau: Doing so would violate federal law.

“We see our labels as a form of speech, that’s how we speak to our consumers,” says Justin Cox, founder and CEO of Atlas. “We’re unable to exercise that right without approval from the federal government.”

The shutdown has been the subject of multiple lawsuits against the government, including one from last week that argued making federal employees work without pay is a form of unconstitutional involuntary servitude.

Atlas and Gura are suing acting U.S. Attorney General Matthew Whitaker (who’s just passed two months on the job), and seeking an order that would prohibit him from enforcing federal law if Atlas does package and sell its labeled kegs without label approval.

The suit cites several cases in which the content of beer labels was ruled a form of protected free speech, including a 2015 case involving Maryland’s Flying Dog Brewery and objections to its Raging Bitch beer. This Atlas case is slightly different, because it concerns the labels themselves, not the content of them.

“What the government should not say is, ‘We’re not even going to look at [your label]. We don’t have funding to review your label, so if you publish it, it’s a crime,'” says Alan Gura, the attorney who filed the suit on Atlas’ behalf this week, and who represented Flying Dog in 2015. (He’s also known around the District as the lawyer who successfully challenged D.C.’s concealed-carry ban in 2017.)

Cox says there’s nothing unusual about the keg collar that is currently being held up: There’s the Atlas logo, the typical government health warnings, and the amount of beer inside.

“We don’t want Atlas to be prosecuted for speaking to its customers,” Gura says. “We can’t force the government to reopen, we can’t make them go to work, but the court should not allow Atlas to be prosecuted for speaking without an unavailable license.”

According to the suit, the first 40 barrels of The Precious One have been sitting in a tank at Atlas since January 3. The beer is set to expire in 120 days, which gives the company until the beginning of May to unload the brew. But more pressingly, Cox previously told DCist, the beer is taking up room that could be occupied by Atlas’ next seasonal beer, pushing their entire 2019 production schedule.

“If this goes on indefinitely, at some point in time, this will shut down the brewery,” Gura says. “They need to be able to sell the beer that they make. If you don’t have labels, you don’t have a business.”