Man, I hope nobody tells these customers about Flying Dog’s Raging Bitch.

Heinen’s, a grocery store chain in Ohio, has decided to pull Maryland-based DuClaw Brewing* Co’s Sweet Baby Jesus from their shelves due to customers having an ouchie in their fee-fees over the name invoking the ur-Christ figure. Totally what Jesus would do! You’d expect something like this out of Birmingham, Alabama, but Cleveland? No wonder that city can never have nice things.


This comes, ironically enough, after Sweet Baby Jesus ran away with a poll a month ago about which beer Cleveland-dwellers were most excited to try. Also ironically, there’s another beer on DuClaw’s roster whose name would be a far more fitting target for a complaint.

The really annoying part of this is that Sweet Baby Jesus isn’t even very good. It tries to do way too many things at once and winds up not doing any of them particularly well. A peanut butter-chocolate beer is one of those ideas that sounds brilliant in theory but could never hold up to the ideal you’ve built up in your mind—like french fries on a sandwich or Howard Dean running for President. Unlike those, at least, Sweet Baby Jesus isn’t exactly bad, it’s just nothing particularly special.


The good news for DuClaw is that the beer is still selling well at other stores. It would thus be unlikely major retailers like Giant Eagle would pull the beer, which is great news for people like me who like to liberally sprinkle exclamations like “Jesus tapdancing Christ!” into everyday speech, and not so good for people who think folks on the teevee still shouldn’t be allowed to say H-E-double-hockey-sticks.

* Part of me wonders if breweries like Flying Dog and DuClaw popped up in Maryland as a response to the existence of the used toilet water known as National Bohemian. Granted, a beer would need to cure all forms of cancer and solve the income inequality crisis while riding a space unicorn to counterbalance the existence of Natty Boh, but it’s a start.