Tim Mak
collects some amusing examples of federal beer-label censorship in
a
Daily Beast piece about Kent “Battle” Martin, a
“pedantic pain in the ass” at the Treasury Department’s Tax and
Trade Bureau with wide authority to decide what brewers may say
about their products. A sampling of Martin’s decisions:
Battle has rejected a beer label for the King of
Hearts, which had a playing card image on it, because the heart
implied that the beer would have a health benefit.He rejected a beer label featuring a painting called The
Conversion of Paula By Saint Jerome because its name, St.
Paula’s Liquid Wisdom, contained a medical claim—that the beer
would grant wisdom.He rejected a beer called Pickled
Santa because Santa’s eyes were too “googly” on the label,
and labels cannot advertise the physical effects of alcohol. (A
less googly-eyed Santa was later approved.)He rejected a beer called Bad Elf because it featured an “Elf
Warning,” suggesting that elves not operate toy-making machinery
while drinking the ale. The label was not approved on the grounds
that the warning was confusing to consumers.
As I reported
back in 1994, when beer labels were overseen by the Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF), this sort of thing has been
going on for many years. One of my main examples was Grant’s
Scottish Ale, a Washington beer that briefly came in six-packs
labeled with nutritional information. The BATF found that
intolerable, not because the information was inaccurate but because
it was “misleading.” How so? Federal alcohol regulations forbid
false or misleading claims about “curative or therapeutic effects,”
and the BATF cited a 1954 regulatory interpretation concluding that
“any reference to vitamin content in the advertising of malt
beverages would mislead a substantial number of persons to believe
that consumption of the product would produce curative or
therapeutic effects.”
After the brewery’s owners went public with the dispute, the
BATF started picking other fights with them. It suddenly decided
that Grant’s Spiced Ale, a seemingly straightforward name that the
brewery had used for years, was “frivolous.” Meanwhile, it gave a
pass to far less descriptive names such as Labatt’s Blue (which is
not blue), Pete’s Wicked Ale (which is not malevolent), and
Blackened Voodoo (which is not seared, spiced, or magical).
The arbitrary power wielded by federal alcohol
regulators stems from vague, subjective rules such as the ban on
misleading claims and the ban on references to psychoactive effects
(a rule that did in The Kronik, a beer that California’s Lagunitas
Brewery was forced to rename; it is now called, appropriately
enough, Censored Ale).
There is also a rule against “obscene or indecent” representations,
which the BATF invoked in 1986 to force the redesign of an Italian
wine label featuring an etching of a winged woman whose “upthrust
and very evident” breasts had to be removed.
Worse, brewers (and manufacturers of other alcoholic beverages)
have to deal with this sort of nonsense at the state level as well.
In 1998 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit rebuked the
New York State Liquor Authority for trying to ban Bad Frog beer, which regulators did
not like because its namesake amphibian was depicted on the
label “with the second of its four unwebbed ‘fingers’ extended in a
manner evocative of a well known human gesture of
insult.” In 2009 the Michigan Liquor Control Commission
banned Flying Dog’s Raging Bitch, a Belgian-style IPA, because it
did not like the name. It reversed
that decision two years later after discovering this
thing called the First Amendment. The Alabama Alcoholic Beverage
Control Board evidently had no problem with Raging Bitch, but in
2012 it
banned the sale of Founders Brewing
Company’s Dirty
Bastard Scotch ale, even while allowing Stone
Brewing’s Arrogant
Bastard Ale (not to mention Fat Bastard
wines).
For years the Texas
Alcoholic Beverage Commission enforced a bizarre, inaccurate
nomenclature for beer labels, calling malt beverages “beer” if they
contained up to 4 percent alcohol by volume and “ale” if they were
stronger than that. Meanwhile, it banned words that it deemed
references to alcoholic content, going so far as to instruct
Austin’s Jester King Brewery that it could not call its strong ale
(the name of a beer style) “strong.” Those rules were
overturned by a federal judge on First Amendment grounds in
2011.
The one clear legal defeat for federal alcohol regulations
came in 1995, when the Supreme Court unanimously ruled
that the Treasury Department could no longer stop brewers from
telling their customers how much alcohol was in their beer. Yes,
that was an actual rule enforced by federal government, on the
theory that beer drinkers needed to be protected from such
information, lest they choose the brand that gave them the most
bang for their buck. Fortunately, regulators still have the power
to shield consumers from images of playing cards and googly-eyed
Santas.
[Thanks to Chaz Lakip for the Daily
Beast link.]
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