Vintage 1990s Bad Frog Beer Label 🐸 Frankenmuth, MI Brewery NOS Advertising, Banned in 8 States

He Just Don't Care 🐸 A Vintage 1990s Bad Frog Beer Label, Frankenmuth Brewery, Michigan - Banned in 8 States

Size: 4 3/4" x 4 1/2"

I still smile every time I pull one of these out. An unused Bad Frog Beer bottle label on metallic gold: AN AMPHIBIAN WITH AN ATTITUDE across the top, BAD FROG in big red letters, a photographic bullfrog raising the finger you think he's raising, BEER, and HE JUST DON'T CARE, plus A RICH, GOLDEN AMBER BREWED FROM SPECIALLY SELECTED BARLEY AND HOPS and 12 FL. OZ. (355 ML). Up the sides run the government warning and the brewer's line - brewed and bottled for Wauldron Corp. of Rose City, Michigan, under license by Frankenmuth Brewery Inc., Frankenmuth, Michigan - and the 1990s bottle-bill roll call: NY, MA, OR, ME, IA, VT, CT, DE 5 cents, MI 10 cents, CA cash refund. Every one I have is unused, never on a bottle.

🐸 A T-shirt frog

Bad Frog started as a T-shirt. Jim Wauldron was drawing animal graphics for shirts, and the story that's been passed down among collectors is that his boss took one look at his frog and called it too soft, too wimpy to sell. Wauldron's own telling is that it all happened at his small graphics firm in Rose City in 1994, where the frog got the name WIMPY - so he toughened it up and gave it an attitude. The shirts sold, people started asking where they could buy the beer on the shirt, and in October 1995 there was a beer. The first cases came out of the Frankenmuth Brewery.

⚖️ The frog goes to court

By the brand's own count it was banned in 8 states. In Pennsylvania the Liquor Control Board's chairman, John E. Jones III, banned it himself - the same John E. Jones who, as a federal judge, later decided the 2005 Dover intelligent-design case. New Jersey and Ohio said no too. In New York the State Liquor Authority turned the label down twice, and Bad Frog sued; in 1998 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled for the frog, and Bad Frog Brewery v. New York State Liquor Authority is still read in commercial free-speech law. The fight itself is remembered as much of a drag on the company's growth as the bans ever were - the frog won, but the legal bills left a mark.

🍺 Little Bavaria

Frankenmuth is the Bavarian-heritage town people call Little Bavaria, and it had been brewing a long time before Bad Frog showed up. Local history holds that John Matthias Falliers set up the first brewery in town back in 1857. Martin Heubisch and Wilhelm Knaust built a brewhouse on the Cass River in 1862, John G. Geyer bought it in 1874, and as Geyer Bros. it stayed in the family for generations. Old-timers in town still tell it that during Prohibition the Geyer brothers kept the lights on by selling malt extract - officially for home baking, though the not-so-secret understanding was that most of it ended up as the base for home brew. Geyer closed in 1986, new owners reopened the plant in 1987 as Frankenmuth Brewery, Inc. - the name on this label - and then in June 1996 a tornado tore through downtown and shut the brewery for years, a chapter locals still talk about.

📺 Frog mania

For a few years the frog was everywhere. By the brand's own account it made CNN, CBS, NBC, FOX and ABC and got two features in Playboy, reached 32 states, and put the frog on race boats, trucks and snowmobiles. Not bad for a T-shirt.

🐸 About these

They're 4 3/4 by 4 1/2 inches. Frame one for a bar, a man cave, a beer-label collection, or a lawyer who loves the First Amendment. The supply is finite - nobody's printing these Frankenmuth labels again, and once these last unused ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.