These brands may be sophomoric, but apparently they are not illegal. The first is bottled by Minhas Craft Brewery of Monroe, Wisconsin. The second is bottled by Arcadia Brewing Company of Battle Creek, Michigan. If it’s tough to imagine who would buy or drink these beers, or where are the limits, just try to imagine the opposite adjective. For a lively discussion of whether such labels go too far, follow these links about Lubrication (by Clown Shoes).

I would have thought John Robert McCulloch would get his keester sued off. But maybe he’s right and it’s the soda people who grabbed his brand and ran with it. The approval mentions that “Mountain Dew is the brand John McCulloch sold vodka under from 1885 until put out of business by Prohibition.” I’d wager that’s earlier than Pepsi or any of its forebearers put the lithiated green soda into commerce. As it turns out, Wikipedia confirms that:  “The original formula (for the soda) was invented in the 1940s by two Tennessee beverage bottlers, Barney and Ally Hartman, and was first marketed in Marion, VA, Knoxville and Johnson City, Tennessee. … The Mountain Dew brand and production rights were acquired by PepsiCo in 1964, at which point its distribution expanded more widely across the United States.” The Hartmans got the name from “a colloquial term for moonshine whiskey” and got the trademark rights soon after. The McCulloch website makes it quite clear that Mountain Dew was widely used on spirits well before the soda came along. The site also has a lot of old-fashioned spirits advertising, along with the quaint and none too subtle tagline “The Whiskey Without a Headache.”

Here is a lot of chickness. Witness it. Chick light beer is brewed and bottled by Minhas Craft Brewery of Monroe, Wisconsin. The website explains that Chick Beer is:  “The beer for women.  A premium light American lager, Chick is the only beer brand designed for women, who drink 25% of all beer sold in the U.S.”

Over on the right is Skinnygirl which of course is Tequila with natural flavors. Forbes says Beam paid Bethenny Frankel an “eyebrow-singeing $100 million” for the brand a few months ago:

That deal, which features a multi-year payout along with sales from her ever-expanding line of Skinnygirl products, bolstered Frankel’s bank account by an estimated $55 million in the past 12 months, according to sources close to Frankel (she won’t comment on the numbers); TV, we figure, earned her a mere $700,000.

The Chick has about 97 calories per 12 ounces of beer, according to the label. And the Skinnygirl has about the same number of calories, per 4 ounces. Neither appears to have any fat.

Sen. Charles Schumer spoke at a Finger Lakes winery late last week and said many wine labels take too long to get approved. He was especially concerned about labels submitted to TTB by New York’s more than 300 wineries. MPNnow.com reported:

the delays — sometimes up to three months — result in wineries not being able to market their wines. The Washington, D.C., agency’s staff has been shaved by budget cutbacks over the last decade while the tide of label-approval applications from wineries nationwide almost doubled from 69,000 in 1999 to 132,500 in 2010, said spokesman Tom Hogue. “And that doesn’t take into account any of the time going back and forth with applicants to make sure labels they’ve submitted actually meet the legal requirements,” Hogue said.

John Martini, co-owner of Anthony Road Wine Co. said:

label approval used to take a week. One label he submitted online May 12 was approved June 15, but he said he has heard horror stories of approvals taking 75 to 90 days. He said new wineries often have long delays because their labels don’t meet the specifics of the label law, which was approved after Prohibition ended. However, he said, “Every winery has a goofy TTB label story.”

The Senator’s press release, and letter to TTB, are