Category Archives: masculinity

Paul Newman

“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.”

—Tyler Thoreson, “Coors Original: An Appreciation” (2009)

Other famous Coors fans? Burt Reynolds, at least in Smokey and the Bandit, a movie whose McGuffin is smuggling a truckload of Coors from Texas to Georgia. Also, king-of-cool Steve McQueen, who not only loved the stuff so much he asked for it on his deathbed, but for whom the beer figured so prominently in his cosmology, a lover once described his penis as “two Coors beer cans welded together.” Then there’s singer-songwriter John Denver, baseball hall-of-famer Carl Yastrzemski, 38th President of the United States Gerald Ford, the late, great Ray Bradbury, and E.T. the Extra-Terrestial. Yes, even E.T.

Now, I realize that appealing to celebrity is a common fallacious appeal to authority, but maybe, just maybe, these (white, save for E.T.) guys knew something – at least when it comes to easy-drinking, pale, fizzy lagers in a can – the beer connoisseurs don’t.

Dean Martin

Keith Richards

Coors the company, it must be said, has, by some accounts, a pretty shady record, Ice Cube’s recent shilling for them notwithstanding. But that certainly doesn’t make them unique among corporations.¹ Assuming products can stand on their own merit regardless of what company produced them, let it be said that I like their beer, not their (past) politics. Besides, I never pay for my Coors, I steal it.²