The Sports Fan has long been besieged by beer advertisements during those necessary evils we know as pitching changes and TV timeouts.
But this year, watching the Rockies fumble and fail and fall to the bottom of the N.L. West — a talentless ghetto where, as of this writing, the Arizona Diamondbacks lead the division with a lackluster 40-40 win-loss record — commercial breaks are a welcome reprieve from the horror show on the diamond at Coors Field.
However, the incessant Coors Light campaign currently peppering the ballgame breaks has given me pause.
Our brethren brewers over in Golden are marketing “know-when-it's-cold” bottles that turn blue when their “frost-brewed” beer reaches 39 degrees, using NASA temp-sensitive thermal chromatic ink technology. They're claiming their hooch is the “coldest tasting beer” on the market. They've added a “frost brew liner” to their cans, assuring it will stay colder longer than an MGD or Bud Heavy. And, most recently, they're selling cans with a “vented wide mouth for a smooth refreshing pour” — an effective 12-ounce beer bong.
Allow me to point out that none of these features actually tout the quality of their suds. And allow me to translate:
Know-when-it's-cold bottle: Our beer, when you place it in a refrigerator or cooler, will get cold and more pleasing to the palate. Ok.
Coldest tasting beer: Our beer tastes, not good, not hoppy or nutty or barley-y, but, um, it tastes, well, “cold,” which is not actually a measurable aspect of taste. What bottled water, I wonder, is the wettest?
Vented wide mouth can: Our beer cans need not be stabbed open with a key in order to be shotgunned. You can pour these mothers down your derelict throat as quickly as you wish.
Recent Coors commercials have shown CEO Pete Coors in an idyllic Colorado mountain scene, saying his great-grandfather, Adolph, chose to brew here because it was “the only place with water worthy of his beer.”
Another commercial focused on the shotgun-ready vented cans, features a guy sneaking away from his girlfriend to booze it up with his friends by saying his buddy “needs to vent.”
The one that got me sneering, though, focused on the bottles that turn blue when the beer gets cold: A guy pulls a Coors Light from his fridge, ecstatic that it has turned blue. At the same time, his wife runs from the bathroom, ecstatic that her pregnancy test has also turned blue.
I'm sorry, Mr. Coors, but if I am pounding your super-cold, easy-to-chug piss beer, I doubt I will wake to find a beautiful and bubbly wife emerging from a bathroom with news of our child-to-be.
No. More likely, Mr. Coors, I will wake up in some county jail with herpes and a hangover.
But I must commend Coors for its candid get-it-cold-and-chug-it marketing strategy. Most beer companies choose instead to tickle the smarmy tendencies that lurk in the soul of every Sports Fan, shamelessly objectifying women (see the Bud Light “. . . and twins!” campaign) or tapping into Arian superiority complexes (see Bud's atrocious black-guys-talk-funny “Wazzup!” campaign) or senseless bull that only a beerdrunk couch potato could appreciate (see Spuds McKenzie, beer-loving frogs, Real Men of Genius).
Of course, here in Zillionaire Snobville nobody drinks Coors unless they are indulging in the Little Annie's $3 shot-and-a-beer blackout special.
We are better than that, I guess. And we are lucky enough to have local beers like Flying Dog and Fat Tire and scores of Colorado micro-breweries (Colorado reportedly has more than any state other than California). And thanks to a couple of fun-loving trustfunders, we now have the brand new Aspen Brewing Company on Mill Street, which whips up some damn good beer.
I am not a beer snob, and have been known to sip on the Coors and Coors Light and the PBR and — on one regrettable occasion at Belmont Park circa 1999 — warm Genesee fetched from a garbage can.
But I do believe in honest advertising. And, strange as it is, our boys at Coors are giving us that. Thank you for allowing me to vent.
The research for this column rendered Andrew Travers nearly catatonic. When he gets out of rehab, he will retrieve your messages at andrew@aspendailynews.com.
