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Coors Original: An appreciation

As with most important pieces of writing, this one begins with a reference to Smokey and the Bandit. In Hal Needham's seminal 1977 film, Burt Reynolds plays Bo "Bandit" Darville, who, in exchange for $80,000, agrees to move 400 cases of contraband Coors from Texas to Georgia so that a couple of good old boys can have a right party. The movie raked in over $126 million ($450 million today) at the box office, and, for me, gave concrete form to a five-year-old's foggy notions of adulthood—it was gonna be one giant high-speed carnival of semi trucks, CB radios, and black Trans Ams. It pains me to report that I'm a pathetic 0 for 3 on that count, although I have managed to develop quite a taste for Coors.

This may sound absurd to anyone born after 1975, but there was actually a time when Coors—and I mean Coors, not the watered-down Silver Bullet stuff your girlfriend drank on spring break—was, bar none, beer of choice for the man's man. Both Hud and the real-life Paul Newman loved the stuff. Tom Waits was known to knock back a few. Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young swilled it while hanging out in Laurel Canyon (okay, so Nash was never quite a paragon of masculinity, but back in the day Stephen Stills was a country-blues-slinging demigod—look it up). And what did The Graduate's Benjamin Braddock take to drinking while drifting in the pool after getting his first taste of red-hot American cougar? Coors.

Aside from a passion for the one true Banquet Beer, what these guys have in common is that they did their drinking on either Pacific or Mountain Time. Because until 1981, Coors was only available west of the Mississippi. This helps explain why Universal could plausibly concoct a Burt Reynolds flick out of little more than a mondo beer run across the Deep South, and why Red Sox legend Carl Yastrzemski was known to load up the team plane with cases of Coors after a swing out West. Rumor has it even President Gerald Ford liked to smuggle the stuff back home on Air Force One, and my father, a corporate pilot, regularly employed the same technique after shuttling some bigwigs out to Denver. I can still picture him walking in the door with a triumphant grin, briefcase in one hand and case of Coors in the other. I would have been pretty young, but I was old enough to know that what was in that case was some pretty cool shit.

Fast-forward to 2009. Coors is very much not cool. You could actually say that—despite being legally available for decades in all 50 states—it's not even sold widely enough to be uncool. This is a shame, because Coors is a damn good-drinking summer brew. Sure, that's at least partially because every time I crack a can (or longneck, if I can get my hands on one) I'm channeling the great Paul Newman. (Somehow I don't get the same feeling from a bottle of balsamic.) And sure, Coors isn't technically a "great beer." But then, what makes for a great beer in technical terms probably isn't something I'm going to want to drink on a hot summer afternoon. In those circumstances, I want something that goes down easy and tastes good doing it, not layer after layer of complexity ripe for expounding upon between sniffs and sips. Just take a swig, shut the hell up, and toss the bocce, dammit.

If I've managed to convince you to give the Banquet Beer a try, allow to me to offer a few words of advice. First, the stuff's got to be cold—not just cold enough to make those mountains on the can turn blue, but 30-seconds-shy-of-frozen-solid cold (honestly, this is sound advice for pretty much everything sold in 30-packs). But even more important than temperature is freshness. Again, this is always true, but never more so than with the Banquet Beer. When past its prime, Coors' slight hint of hops can get overwhelmed by its signature toasty flavor, lending the beer can a slightly sour tang. Fortunately, every case is stamped with a date indicating the day by which retailers are supposed to pull unsold cases from the shelves, not when it was produced in a highly animated, computer-controlled manufacturing facility...I mean, brewed. Unfortunately, because there are too few Coors aficionados out there, it's not uncommon to find cases languishing on shelves long past their official date—and much, much longer than the date by which I recommend drinking it. (As a rule of thumb, look for a date stamp at least a month and a half into the future; a full two months is ideal.) This creates a vicious cycle where the beer doesn't sell because of what's on the shelves, and what's on the shelves isn't very good because it doesn't sell.


I'm pretty sure that guys like Hud didn't give a fuck about such things, but then, back in the sixties there were enough Coors-swilling roughnecks around to make sure that the stuff in stores was always fresh. So take this as both recommendation and challenge: Buy a case. And if you like it, buy another. And another. If enough people follow suit, I may never encounter a bad case of the Banquet Beer again. Just remember to drink—and compare yourself to Paul Newman—in moderation.

TYLER THORESON Photos: AP (Newman); Courtesy Everett Collection (Braddock); Universal Pictures (Smokey)