§ Coors §

Beer snobs and the British heap much derision upon this beer, like all popular brands. (The preferred style of beers being so different in the isles than in America this is somewhat understandable, but not really fair.) As a non-aficionado of beer I have found little difference between Coors and any of the more expensive microbrew beers the few times I have tasted any of them. All taste bloody awful to me. But as a Coloradan I feel that I must defend Coors on general principles and provide some information about the company.

Adolph Coors and Jacob Schueler founded the business as the Golden Brewery in AD 1873. Seven years later Coors bought out his partner and changed the name to the Coors Brewing Company. The brew they were making was a light yellow pilsner in the style of Czech beers and made mainly with rice.

Prohibition, from AD 1916 until 1933 (it started three years earlier in Colorado) hurt the company terribly, of course. But it did survive and with half the brewers of the country out of business the business was able to greatly expand its distribution across the western United States. The slogan "Brewed with Pure Rocky Mountain Spring Water" first appeared during this era of expansion.

Due to the problems with transporting the beer they introduced the first all aluminum can in AD 1959. (Something many think was a mistake, but it did make the company a lot of money.) Until AD 1981 Coors was not distributed east of the Mississippi River and had an interesting mystique. During the 1960's many college students would go on long road trips to Colorado in order to haul back large amounts of their favorite beer. President Gerald Ford even brought back cases of the beer on Air Force One whenever he visited the state and the movie Smokey and the Bandit featured Burt Reynolds bootlegging Original Coors to the east. It was thought at that time that it was much superior to brands like Budweiser and other more common beers. It was the microbrew of the 1960's and 1970's!

So either Coors beer has gone downhill since then (possible) or what people think a beer tastes like is very much influenced by their perception of it. If it is common then it cannot possibly be good for anything but getting drunk. This is much more likely in my opinion.

I usually describe this as the Vodka Theory. This is a purely personal name for the phenomena of acquired tastes and a blatant plug of another one of my nodes.

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