Baby's Back on Michigan Beer Bottle

GRAND RAPIDS, MI – A Michigan brewery’s breakfast baby is back after a regulatory snafu.

The label that features a Norman Rockwell-esque baby happily spooning a bowl of oatmeal in his mouth was absent from bottles of Founders’ Breakfast Stout beer for four about months, but it wasn’t because fans threw a crying fit over the use of a baby to hawk beer.

They loved it, for the most part, Founders said on its website. The brewery received more than 1,800 voice messages, some of them included in a YouTube video at the bottom of this story, begging the baby to come back. Some of the messages were “touching,” Founders noted, and some were “a little odd.”

Founders had to jump through a couple of regulatory hoops to get the baby back on the bottle in Michigan.

The Michigan Liquor Control Commission fined Founders $300 and ordered it to remove all bottles of Breakfast Stout from its Grand Rapids taproom in August after an investigator discovered the decade-old label hadn’t been registered. Breakfast Stout bottles with the label were not pulled from Michigan store shelves.

The Breakfast Stout baby “left the crib for a bit,” Founders said, but have been back since December after the brewery registered the label.

A temporary label had asked fans who missed seeing his cherubic face “to call and let him know just how much they were pining for him,” according to Founders’ Facebook page. Announcement that baby was back generated only positive comments.

The Breakfast Stout baby has had a bumpy ride elsewhere.

When a New Hampshire lawmaker wanted to serve the Breakfast Stout in a tavern he owns, lawmakers approved legislation that gave the beer and spirits industry a pass on regulations that ban images of minors on alcoholic beverage labels as long as they didn’t appear to be actively promoting drinking.

New Hampshire’s Democratic Gov. Maggie Hassan vetoed the legislation in June, arguing a baby on a beer label could promote underage drinking and undermine the state’s efforts to control it.

“Substance misuse, including alcohol misuse, continues to be one of the major public health and safety challenges facing us as a state,” Hassan said in her veto message. “Moreover, statistics suggest that New Hampshire has among the highest rates of underage drinking in the country.”

Within days, both chambers of New Hampshire’s legislature voted to override the veto.

In Alabama in 2012, alcoholic beverage regulators refused to allow Founders to sell its Dirty Bastard and Backwoods Bastard beers because the labels contained a word they considered “objectionable” under a broadly worded administrative code.

Regulators later reversed the decision.