Why Was Coors Beer Illegal East Of Texas?

Coors beer was not pasteurized, so it had to be kept chilled until it was consumed. Coors could only verify this in its regional area. And because Coors was not marketed in the East, there was no provision for collecting state alcohol taxes on shipments of Coors beer.

Why was Coors not allowed past Texas?

Don’t Miss A Drop – Get the latest in beer, wine, and cocktail culture sent straight to your inbox. Turns out the plot of Smokey and the Bandit is centered on one lovable tycoon’s deep-seated thirst for Coors. And, yes, Burt Reynolds’ untameable sexuality.

1. The back story of how Smokey got made is a bit more interesting: prolific Hollywood stuntman Hal Needham was working on the set of Gator and was given a gift of (illegal) Coors.
2. You read that right.
3. Coors, ubiquitous potion of good time brohood, was once illegal in certain states.
4. The movie was made in the late ’70s, and at that time, Coors was actually a regional product.

It was made in Colorado, but because it wasn’t pasteurized and contained no preservatives, shipping could get a little tricky. Coors didn’t get national distribution until 1986, Which is why, in the 1970s, Coors wasn’t actually licensed to sell east of the Mississippi, making it, briefly, a rare and sought-after product.

1. Per Time Magazine, Gerald Ford, Eisenhower, and Paul Newman hoarded the stuff.) Coors’ cachet aside, Needham wasn’t a big beer fan, but he did notice that the Coors would disappear out of his trailer in small increments.
2. Finally he figured out the maid was stealing two bottles a day.
3. Realizing how important this beer was, to some anyway, he thought “bootlegging Coors would make a good plotline for a movie.” So in between being thrown around and set on fire and stuff, Needham actually wrote the script for Smokey and the Bandit,

He showed it to his roommate at the time, who thought the dialogue was “horrible” but the plot was good enough. We’ve all had opinionated roommates, but Needham’s roommate was actually Burt Reynolds, the number one box office star at the time, and the inspiration for many a misbegotten mustache.

1. Reynolds helped Needham get the movie made, and the rest is Dixie car chase and Coors history.
2. If you, like us, don’t quite know the story itself, here it is: basically, a wealthy Texan caricature named Big Enos (say it out loud) Burdette and his son—Little Enos (say it out loud)—want some Coors.
3. Four hundred cases of Coors.

Quickly. Why? Well, for obvious reasons. Big Enos (say it out loud) is sponsoring a car in some Atlanta race and wants to “celebrate in style.” Which, per all logic and human reason, means with 400 cases of Coors. Big and Little Enos are also kind of sociopaths, or just the type of people who have money and use it to send normal people on weird errands.

• They want the Coors, sure, but they want to drink it in Georgia, a state where it wasn’t legally sold at the time.
• Their solution is to offer rodeo truck driver Bo “Bandit” Darville $80,000 to go pick it up in under 28 hours.
• Which, in the annals of weird errands for rich people, has apparently never been done before.

Most of the movie involves Bandit doing crazy sh*t with his Pontiac Trans Am to run interference for the truck full of 400 cases of Coors driven by his friend Cledus “Snowman” Snow (they didn’t spend a lot of time brainstorming on that nickname, and we’re fine with that; plus, Cledus has a great Bassett hound named Fred, so he’s OK in our book).

There are great car stunts in this movie, plus Sally Field playing a character named “Frog,” which is almost all you need in a film. But then, yeah, the cherry on top, Sheriff Justice. (His son was supposed to marry Sally Field, she ditched it and hitched a ride with Bandit, which is part of the reason why he has so much heat on his tail.) This is where we say “spoiler alert”: despite Sheriff Justice’s best efforts, the Bandit and Snowman get their haul in on time.

It’s a squeaker, ‘cuz it’s a movie, but they get the job done. Except, since it’s a movie, the job isn’t really done. Little Enos (say it out loud) now wants clam chowder from New England in some other insane and arbitrary amount of time. Possibly a sequel that was never made, but then again, people are probably more interested in a truck full of beer then a truck full of creamy shellfish soup.

Why was Coors not allowed East?

The lack of Coors beer in the East back in the 70’s had nothing to do with ‘not being allowed’. It was simply a matter of distribution and capacity. There was a time when Coors didn’t produce enough beer to provide availability east of Kansas City.

When was Coors allowed east of the Mississippi?

1978 — The brewery introduces Coors Light, marking the first time in 20 years that it makes more than one style of beer.1981 — Distribution begins east of the Mississippi River for the first time.

What beer were they smuggling in Smokey and the Bandit?

Smokey and the Bandit
Theatrical release poster by John Solie
Directed by	Hal Needham
Screenplay by	James Lee Barrett Charles Shyer Alan Mandel
Story by	Hal Needham Robert L. Levy
Produced by	Mort Engelberg Robert L. Levy
Starring	Burt Reynolds Sally Field Jerry Reed Jackie Gleason Paul Williams
Cinematography	Bobby Byrne
Edited by	Walter Hannemann Angelo Ross
Music by	Bill Justis Jerry Reed
Production company	Rastar
Distributed by	Universal Pictures
Release dates	May 19, 1977 ( Radio City Music Hall ) July 29, 1977 (Los Angeles)
Running time	96 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$4.3 million
Box office	$300 million

Smokey and the Bandit is a 1977 American action comedy film starring Burt Reynolds, Sally Field, Jackie Gleason, Jerry Reed, Pat McCormick, Paul Williams and Mike Henry, The directorial debut of stuntman Hal Needham, the film follows Bo “Bandit” Darville (Reynolds) and Cledus “Snowman” Snow (Reed), two bootleggers attempting to illegally transport 400 cases of Coors beer from Texarkana to Atlanta,

Is Coors still unpasteurized?

Products – For much of its first 100 years of existence, Coors beer was marketed solely in the American West, While California and Texas were part of the 11-state distribution area, Washington and Montana were not added until 1976 ( Oregon did not approve sales in grocery stores until 1985).

1. This gave it mystique and made it a novelty, particularly on the East Coast, and visitors returning from the western states often brought back a case.
2. This iconic status was reflected in the 1977 film Smokey and the Bandit,
3. The company finally established nationwide distribution in the United States in 1986.

In 1959, Coors became the first American brewer to use an all- aluminum two-piece beverage can, Also in 1959, the company abandoned pasteurization and began to use sterile filtration to stabilize its beer. Coors currently operates the largest aluminum can producing plant in the world, known as the Rocky Mountain Metal Container (RMMC), in Golden.

RMMC is a joint venture between Ball Metal and Coors, having been founded in 2003. In the mid-1970s, Coors invented the litter-free push tab can, in place of the ring pull-tab. However, consumers disliked the top and it was discontinued soon afterward. Coors Light was introduced in 1978. The longtime slogan of “Silver Bullet” to describe it does not describe the beer, but rather the silver-colored can in which Coors packaged the beer.

Coors once produced Coors Light in “yellow-bellied” cans like the full-strength Coors. However, when the yellow coloring was removed, and the can was left mostly silver, many dubbed the beer the “Silver Bullet”.

What happened to Coors beer?

Coors Light & Keystone Beers Removed from Shelves Due to Quality Concerns Courtesy of The Image Party/Shutterstock Consistency in brewing is tricky. It’s something every brewery deals with. Though, those issues tend to stay behind the doors of a brewery and don’t often make it into the public eye. That’s not the case, however, at Molson Coors right now.

The company has removed packs of and Keystone Light from stores in multiple states due to an unspecified quality issue. The company has issued a voluntary withdrawal of beers produced on a single canning line at its Trenton Brewery. The company provided a statement to Thrillist, saying that what is taking place is not because there are no health or safety concerns related to the cans.

“We recently became aware of an issue on only one canning line at only one of our breweries that supplies these two beers to a relatively small number of states,” the statement reads. Though, there are no details on the problem. It only says that the withdrawn cans do “not post a food-health risk, but meet our quality standards.” The withdrawal was conducted with stores and distributors, but if customers encounter any quality problems, a representative tells Thrillist they should call 1-800-645-5376.

​​Coors Light 12 Pack 12oz. Cans – UPC: 00-71990-00048 Coors Light 18 Pack 12oz. Cans – UPC: 00-71990-30017 Coors Light 24 Pack 12oz. Cans – UPC: 00-71990-31600 Coors Light 30 Pack 12oz. Cans – UPC: 00-71990-30030 Keystone Light 15 Pack 12oz. Cans – UPC: 00-71990-48045 Keystone Light 24 Pack 12oz. Cans – UPC: 00-71990-48006

The voluntary withdrawal comes after videos have circulated on social media of customers getting cans filled with a gelatinous liquid instead of light beer. highlighted two videos that show drinkers, Though, the timing of the withdrawal may be a coincidence.

Which Coors was kidnapped?

References –

1. ^ Dutcher, Brandon (April 1994). “For Adolph Coors IV, Money Couldn’t Fill the Emptiness Inside”, Double Dutch, Retrieved 21 April 2015,
2. ^ “1996 interview with Joe Corbett”, The Denver Post,2009-08-25, Retrieved 2018-08-03,
3. ^ “Denver Brewer Coors Missing; Fear Kidnap. Deserted Car, Motor On, Found”, Los Angeles Times, February 10, 1960, Retrieved 2010-07-15, Adolph Coors III, wealthy brewer and industrialist, vanished from his blood-flecked vehicle on a rural road yesterday, touching off a vast manhunt in the Rocky Mountain foothills west of Denver.
4. ^ Jump up to: a b “A Look Back at the Coors Kidnapping Case”, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Retrieved 2018-08-03,
5. ^ Jump up to: a b “How an Escaped Convict Terrorized the Coors Beer Dynasty”, Vice,2017-09-19, Retrieved 2018-08-03,
6. ^ “The Death of an Heir: Adolph Coors III and the Murder That Rocked an American Brewing Dynasty”, Longreads,2017-09-26, Retrieved 2018-08-03,
7. ^ Moore, James (2018). Murder by Numbers – Fascinating Figures Behind The World’s Worst Crimes, History Press.p.127. ISBN 9780750981453,
8. ^ “The way it was: Today in history – Sept.15”,2016-10-19, Retrieved 2018-08-03,
9. ^ “Crime History: Coors brewery heir killed in botched kidnap attempt”, Washington Examiner,2011-02-08, Retrieved 2018-08-03,
10. ^ Jump up to: a b c d e Bovson, Mara. “The case of Adolph Coors”, NY Daily News, Retrieved 2018-08-03,
11. ^ Jump up to: a b Eddy, Cheryl. “On the Run From One Murder, He Accidentally Committed Another—And Joined the FBI’s “Most Wanted” List”, Gizmodo, Retrieved 2018-08-03,
12. ^ “Ex-convict, 80, who killed Coors scion takes his own life”, The Seattle Times,2009-08-27, Retrieved 2018-08-03,
13. ^ “Coors killer Corbett takes his own life”, The Denver Post,2009-08-25, Retrieved 2018-08-03,
14. ^ “Colorado Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame”, Retrieved September 25, 2010,

Is Coors still a light beer?

Coors Light is a 4.2% (US) ABV light beer brewed in Golden, Colorado; Albany, Georgia; Elkton, Virginia; Fort Worth, Texas; Irwindale, California; and Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

When was Coors kidnapped?

Coors Kidnapping Ransom Note The Coors kidnapping ransom note was analyzed by the FBI Lab and is believed to have been typed on Corbett Jr.’s typewriter. (Click image to view high-res.) In 1961, Joseph Corbett Jr. was convicted and sentenced for the murder of Adolph Coors III, heir to the Coors Brewing Company fortune.

• On February 9, 1960, a milkman discovered an abandoned station wagon blocking the middle of the bridge over Turkey Creek near Morrison, Colorado.
• The milkman reported it to the local police, who determined the car belonged to Adolph Coors III, who now appeared to be missing.
• The next day, the FBI’s Denver Division, as a result of the federal kidnapping statue, joined the case to provide assistance to the state and local investigators.

Coors’ wife Mary received a typewritten ransom note and contacted the kidnapper, but she never heard back. The FBI Laboratory took a look at the evidence, including the note, while state and local law enforcement began pursuing a lead—a canary-yellow Mercury that had been seen in the area.

The driver, Walter Osborne, had disappeared, but not before obtaining a gun, handcuffs, a typewriter, and an insurance policy—whose beneficiary was Joseph Corbett. As it turns out, Corbett’s son had previously been convicted of murder but had escaped from prison in California. The FBI obtained a fugitive warrant for Corbett Jr.

and placed him on the Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list. In September 1960, some hikers came across pants bearing Coors’ initials, which led investigators to Coors’ remains. The case remained of significant interest to the public and the media, and ultimately, magazine readers in Canada broke the case wide open when they reported a man who resembled Corbett Jr.

1. To the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the FBI.
2. The next day, the manager of a rooming house in Winnipeg reported a man who looked like Corbett Jr.
3. Had stayed at her losing and was driving a fire-engine red Pontiac.
4. This new information led a Vancouver Police officer to report a similar vehicle to the authorities, and with the assistance of the FBI Toronto Legal Attaché office, law enforcement approached the hotel room where Corbett Jr.

was staying, and he surrendered. Corbett Jr. was tried in Colorado on the murder charge and was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

What is the nickname for Coors beer?

For over a century, Coors Banquet was Coors, and while you might know some of its yellow-bellied legend, there’s plenty of history you’ve no doubt overlooked. Thrillist laid out as much as we could find below, because we couldn’t bear the thought of you spending another day not realizing that Clint Eastwood and Ray Charles once sang a duet about well, we’ll get to that. ITS ROOTS RUN DEEP Founded in 1873, Coors was nicknamed “Banquet Beer” by Clear Creek Canyon miners, who’d drink it in banquet halls or huge banquet tents when there were no halls. The name didn’t become official until 1937, when Coors sought to combat the Depression with a strain of nostalgia that somehow didn’t involve the 1980s, IT’S A SURVIVOR Coors navigated a Banquet-free Prohibition by operating a porcelain plant (chemical and scientific porcelain had previously been imported from war-ravaged Germany), as well as making non-alcoholic Coors Pure Cereal Beverage, government-controlled distilled alcohol (diverted to pharmacies for sale to people with prescriptions ), and malted milk – which they produced until 1957 and sold as far away as Australia, giving it far wider distribution than Coors Banquet. IT WAS A HOMEBODY Between Prohibition and 1976, Coors was available in only 11 states, all in the West – the stuff was unpasteurized, contained no preservatives, and had to be kept cold, so long journeys just weren’t a possibility. The first steps towards national distribution actually came in the 1950s when Coors helped pioneer the use of cold filtering, sterile filling, aluminum cans, and refrigerated trucks, but it wouldn’t reach all 50 states until it landed in Indiana in 1991, IT WAS BIG ON ENTERTAINING In the 1940s, the beer sponsored radio’s The Coors Show, a variety program featuring the likes of Duke Ellington and Mel Torme. In the ‘50s, Coors got behind one of the first TV series to air in Colorado, I’m The Law, a police drama starring gangster movie icon George Raft (one thing you didn’t know about George Raft: he was born George Ranft). IT LAY IN FIELDS OF GOLD Grover Coors was best buds with comic legend W.C. Fields, who, as evidenced by this holiday note, diligently refrained from taking advantage of the friendship. IT STARTED A CULT By the late 1960s, Coors’ scarcity had helped it cement cult status. According to legend, Eisenhower and Gerald Ford packed it aboard Air Force One, and Ford had it served at the White House mess every Thursday. Dean Martin drank it in a western, and Keith Richards kept it handy onstage, Paul Newman flat out told Roger Ebert, “The best domestic beer, bar none, is Coors.” IT WAS MUSIC TO CLINT’S BEERS Clint Eastwood and Ray Charles even sang a duet praising Coors – ” Beers to You ” – for the soundtrack to Any Which Way You Can, a movie that also starred an orangutang. If this song doesn’t move you to tears, your heart is colder than a frosty American lager. IT WAS VALUABLE CONTRABAND Coors’ cult status fueled America’s most refreshing smuggling spree. A 1974 Time story, “The Beer That Won The West”, told of one enterprising guy who made weekly refrigerated truck runs from Denver to Charlotte, “where he sold it to restaurants and country clubs for as much as $1 a can, better than triple the retail price of about $1.50 a sixpack “. IT WAS EASTBOUND AND DOWN That smuggling directly inspired Smokey and the Bandit : while in Georgia coordinating stunts for the Burt Reynolds flick Gator, Bandit director Hal Needham’s “driver captain” gifted him some cases he’d sneaked in from California. IT ALSO INSPIRED THE SINCEREST FORM OF FLATTERY In the mid 1970s, a Michigan brewer introduced “Korr’s Original Steam Beer”. The packaging closely resembled Banquet, and the name – which claimed to reference the “korr” of the hops, something that doesn’t actually exist – ripped off both Coors and a certain beloved San Francisco brew. IT. WELL. In 1979, Coors invented the sport of jumping off a high, rocky embankment into a pool of Rocky Mountain spring water while wearing only a pair of jeans and a thick beard, a pastime which would go on to rival skiing and kayaking as iconic “High Country” activities, IT WAS THE SEXIEST NCIS star Mark Harmon was Coors’ spokesman throughout the mid 1980s. In 1986 – smack in the middle of his Banquet tenure – he was also named People ‘s Sexiest Man Alive, This was definitely not a coincidence. IT WAS SPACED OUT An even more out-of-this-world spokesperson: E.T., the Extra Terrestrial, who in perhaps the greatest “drink responsibly” advisory ever encouraged Coors fans that instead of driving, they should “phone home”. OUR NEIGHBORS TO THE NORTH ARE VERY INTO IT Banquet wasn’t available in Canada until 2013, but Canadians apparently already loved it: the long-awaited move north was in part spurred by a Facebook page – Bring Coors Banquet to Canada – and it paid off immediately. Said one Alberta storekeeper, “New stock is gone before we know it, with customers buying it by the flat “. IT’S THE STUFF HEROES ARE MADE OF In January ‘14, a vacationing fire captain driving from Austin to Houston passed an 18-wheeler whose breaks had caught on fire. He and the driver snuffed the flames using the truck’s cargo, Coors Banquet – a Donner Party-like last resort, but it worked, and the captain’s chief backed the agonized decision: “I support the extinguishment of fire, no matter what the cost”.

When did Coors start selling in Texas?

Muscling In On Texas Beer W hen the Adolph Coors Company of Golden, Colorado, decided last summer to expand its network of beer distribu­torships into South, Central, and East Texas, it was almost as if Coors had announced plans to award perpetual-motion money machines.

Never in the history of Texas business would so many try so hard to win something so ostensibly ordinary as the opportunity to sell beer. The Coors Company was besieged with more than 4000 applications for the new distributorships, including en­tries by John Connally, Spiro Agnew, Allan Shivers, a string of professional athletes, and several men who have rid­den rocket ships to the moon.

Soon they and hundreds of other celebrities, poli­ticians, businessmen, competing-brand distributors, and ordinary beer drinkers across the state and around the country found themselves in the midst of a com­petition many would later describe as the most grueling thing they’d ever endured.

• They answered exhaustive personal, political, and psychological question­naires.
• They compiled vast amounts of valuable local market data.
• They esti­mated.
• They interviewed.
• They sweated.
• And all the while, they eyed each other nervously as rumors about who already had a distributorship “in the bag” flew from tongue to print.

For all but a few, the effort and wor­ry proved fruitless. Between mid-August and the end of December, Coors gradu­ally revealed the selection of 29 groups of men to distribute its beer in Houston, Austin, San Antonio, Waco, and eigh­teen other towns from Laredo to Long­view.

As it turned out, many of the high and mighty previously rumored and/or reported to have won a Coors distribu­torship wound up empty-handed. For­mer Vice President Agnew even with­drew his application in the wake of ad­verse publicity. Among the chosen few were a heavy sampling of astronauts, professional ath­letes, and men with useful political con­nections, including a number of present and former government officials.

Con­trary to its own publicly quoted state­ments, Coors also chose several men with prior experience in the beer indus­try, including at least five who had previous connections with the Coors Company itself. Of the 29 distributor groups, all were composed of political conservatives; only five included men with Spanish surnames; and none in­cluded women or blacks.

• But more sur­prising, the majority of new distribu­tors were not even residents of the areas they were designated to serve.
• These developments immediately pro­voked a great deal of controversy, ill will, and—not incidentally—free pub­licity.
• Local and national media played up the choice of men like moonwalker Alan Shepard and ex-Dallas Cowboy star Bob Lilly.

Frustrated applicants all over the state alleged that the whole selection process had been predeter­mined from the outset, and that Coors had simply used the opportunity to col­lect some free market information. Black and Mexican-American leaders leveled charges of racial discrimination in the awarding of distributorships, and two Chicano groups announced boycotts of Coors.

Others, including many success­ful applicants, simply expressed befuddlement over the types of criteria Coors used in making the selections. Mean­while, executives of other leading na­tional and Texas beer companies braced themselves for what one predicted would be a marketing “Battle of the Trenches.” For the Colorado-based brewer, this brouhaha was hardly new.

Though known in business circles as a “super straight arrow” organization, Coors’ iconoclastic financial and marketing practices have won it a reputation as the “brewery that breaks all the rules.” The company also has a long history of political turmoil revolving around the arch-conservatism of the founding fam­ily, and a standing feud with the press.

• Typically, its response to allegations of preselecting its new Texas distributors and favoring trustworthy conservatives continues to be a repeated “no com­ment.” But despite certain difficulties here and in other parts of the nation, Coors has had few problems selling its beer to consumers.
• Although Coors mar­kets in only eleven western states, it is the country’s fourth-largest brewer, be­hind Budweiser, Schlitz, and Pabst, who distribute their beers across the country and around the world.

In ten of its eleven marketing states, Coors is the number one selling beer, with market shares ranging from 40 to over 70 per cent. The eleventh state is Texas, where Coors already ranks third, ahead of such home brews as Pearl and Lone Star, de­spite having penetrated only one-third of the total market area.

And all this sales success has been accomplished with less than half the paid advertising spent by the other leading brewers. Coors, it seems, need rely only on word-of-mouth and the thousands of dollars of free publicity generated by aficionados across the country. It is, as has been written so many times, the favorite beer of Paul Newman, Presi­dent Ford, Henry Kissinger, Kissinger’s bodyguards, Ethel Kennedy, the Boston Red Sox, the Miami Dolphins, and thousands of other less prominent “Coors runners” from coast to coast.

In the East, where Coors is not officially marketed, beer drinkers pay as much as $15 a case for cans and bottles of the smuggled brew. A recent article in the New York Times described Coors as “the most chic brew in the country,” and it even remains the top seller in Chicano neighborhoods despite the company’s checkered history of minority relations and the diligent efforts of boycott leaders.

1. Coors’ recent expansion in Texas, while no doubt increasing the Coors’ myth, has also raised a number of in­triguing questions about the way the Colorado brewer does its business.
2. The most persistent questions concern Coors’ new distributors.
3. How were they chosen? What are the stakes? How good a deal did they get after all? But before these are answered, an even more fun­damental question must be considered: what makes Coors so special? Most of the company’s competitors and a great many plain old beer drink­ers attribute Coors’ enormous popu­larity to a kind of Rocky Mountain “mystique.” They say that Coors, or “Colorado Kool-aid” as it is sometimes called, is actually just another light, rather tasteless American beer; only its unavailability—the fact Coors is so hard to get in most parts of the country—makes it so much in demand.

Company president Bill Coors natu­rally takes issue with this point of view. “There’s no mystique about Coors’ pop­ularity,” he has said on several occa­sions. “It tastes better than other beers, that’s all.” However, repeated blind taste tests sponsored by various newspapers and magazines have cast con­siderable doubt on whether the cele­brated Coors’ taste differs at all from that of other premium American beers.

• In most tests, even prideful, experienced beer drinkers have been unable to dis­tinguish Coors from such brews as Schlitz, Bud, and Miller High Life.
• Still, there are several things about the beer and the company that may make Coors leave a distinctive—and not always favorable—taste on the palates of beer drinkers and non-beer drinkers alike.

One is the emphasis on what Coors proudly calls “quality control.” The company is truly fanatic about it on several levels. For example, Coors has a longer brewing process and spends more on beer ingredients than any other major American brewer. Its barley is a special Moravian strain grown by its own special farmers with special certi­fied seeds.

Its rice and hops are also the best a brewer can buy, while its water is said to be “pure Rocky Mountain Spring Water.” Part of the difference—if any—in Coors’ taste may be attributable to using slightly less of the tangy ingredients (malt and hops) and slightly more of the bland ingredient (rice) than is common among other leading American and foreign brewers.

It is thus light-bodied, but it is not a “lite.” Coors has the same alcohol content (3.5 per cent by weight, 4.5 by volume) and calories (137 per 12-oz. can) as other leading beers like Bud and Schlitz. Coors does, however, have a longer fermentation and aging process.

By means of chemical additives, some major American brew­ers have reduced their entire brewing time to less than three weeks. Coors takes about 70 days to complete its total brewing cycle, and nearly two months of that time involves the aging process alone. At no time is Coors pasteurized, as are almost all other U.S.

beers. Pasteur­ization involves killing the yeast culture by means of heat and thus may alter the flavor of the beer. According to the New York Times article, Coors stopped pasteurizing its beer almost twenty years ago when the company determined that “heat is an enemy of beer.” Consequently, Coors should be kept refrigerated until consumed in order to insure the proper taste and freshness.

Unlike other brewers, Coors does not maintain a warehouse at its brewery, but immediately ships out each batch of beer in refrigerated railroad cars; the company insists that distribu­tors and retailers keep the brew con­stantly colder than 40 degrees. If these “quality-control” steps are followed, the product the consumer gets in each bottle or can of Coors is tantamount to a draft beer, since it has been kept cold from the brewery to the beer drinker’s mouth.

However, anyone who has traveled much in the western states may have noticed cases of Coors stacked about, unrefrigerated, in retail stores. The Coors Company, meanwhile, is perhaps even more unusual than the beer it manufactures. In an industry characterized by the predominance of corporate giants and the folding of small independent breweries, Coors has remained for all intents and purposes a family-owned-and-operated company.

In fact, it was not until last June, after re­ceiving a $50 million dollar inheritance tax bill from the IRS, that the Coors family reluctantly decided to take public money. Even then, it merely issued Class B common (non-voting) stock, which insured that actual control of the company would remain firmly in the arch-conservative hands of the Coors family.

That is undoubtedly the way com­pany founder Adolph Coors would have wanted it. He started the brewery 103 years ago as a young German immi­grant, and passed the creation on to his American-born son Adolph, Jr., who in turn passed it on to his sons. Today, it is third-generation president Bill Coors, 59, and executive vice president Joe Coors, 58, who run the brewery’s day-to-day operations.

(Their older brother Adolph III was killed in a kidnap-ransom affair in 1960.) What the Coors family has built in the Rocky Mountain foothills west of Denver is nothing less than the largest beer-manufacturing plant in the world—capacity over twelve million barrels per year—and an almost completely self-contained $585 million corporate empire.

The brewery in Golden stretches through the valley and around the side of the mountain, covering some 3100 acres in all. In addition to its beer­making crews, Coors’ local work force of 7500 includes a construction and engineering crew who are expanding the plant at a rate of 10 per cent each year.

• The company also owns its own bottle-making plant, rice mills, barley fields, and even some natural gas re­serves to insure a power source.
• It is also remarkably clean about the way it runs these facilities.
• Long before environmental protection became both fashionable and court-ordered, Coors established itself as the industry leader in ecology and recycling.

It introduced the aluminum can way back in 1959 and has since developed and promoted a cash-for-cans program that has collected roughly 190 million pounds of discarded containers for all beer and soft drink brands, and pays out some $5 million to consumers each year.

• At the same time Coors has refined its en­gineering and production techniques to the extent that its own immediate plant wastes are merely a fraction of those expelled by other leading brewers.
• Coors’ traditionally sparse advertising contains no man-made objects other than the beer can itself: the rest of the picture is simply mountains and trees and bubbling streams.

This resolute environmentalism is not the picture of Coors that leaps to the minds of most organized political groups left of Ronald Reagan. Thanks in large part to the activities of executive vice president Joe Coors, the company has a reputation as being one of the most virulently right-wing enterprises in America.

• Joe Coors’ views first became publicized during the late Sixties and early Seventies when he served as a member of the University of Colorado Board of Regents.
• A contributor to the John Birch Society, he was so enraged by hippies, student activists, and other “pleasure-loving parasites,” that he fi­nanced an alternative student news­paper.

Later, even that Coors-sponsored campus publication felt compelled to editorialize against him when he at­tempted to oust the college president because of a dispute concerning the Students for a Democratic Society. In­cidents like that prompted one fellow University of Colorado regent to label Joe Coors—not the students—”the chief disruptive factor” on campus at the time.

1. Furious at the way the media handled the events of those years, Joe Coors decided to start his own television news service, Television News, Inc., which has thus far lost more than $5 million.
2. One of Richard Nixon’s last official acts as President was to nominate Joe Coors for the board of the Corpora­tion for Public Broadcasting.

President Ford later resubmitted the nomination, but the Senate Commerce Committee cited a possible conflict of interest, and members of the communications sub­committee tabled the nomination, effec­tively killing it. Among the factors working against Coors in addition to his ownership of TVN was the disclosure of two letters he had written the CPB board while his nomination was pend­ing.

• One apparently sought to influence CPB editorial policy, while the other requested special CPB consideration for Coors’ attempts to set up an earth-satel­lite system to enhance his broadcasting enterprise.
• Coors family politics have naturally had a major effect on life back at the brewery.
• For years black, Chicano, lib­eral, and labor groups have attacked and boycotted Coors for alleged dis­crimination in hiring practices and union paternalism.

The Colorado Civil Rights Commission has twice found the company guilty of discriminating against black employees, and the Eco­nomic Employment Opportunity Com­mission is currently suing Coors for sex and race discrimination. According to the EEOC complaint, virtually all of Coors’ female employees are confined to secretarial-type jobs, and virtually all its racial minority employees per­form semi-skilled or unskilled jobs.

Despite generally high pay and the existence of a union, ordinary white male employees do not exactly enjoy ideal working conditions either. Com­pelled to take lie-detector tests before being accepted for employment, Coors workers may be fired for any of 21 reasons, which include “making disparaging remarks about the employer” and doing anything “which would discourage any person from drinking Coors beer.” Such provisions presumably insure that “qual­ity control” extends to the brewery workers as well as to the beer.

What the company would character­ize as an attempt to extend the concept of “quality control” to distributors and retailers has recently landed it in serious trouble. Last fall, the Supreme Court upheld a wide-ranging complaint by the Federal Trade Commission that found Coors guilty of unfair marketing prac­tices and restraint of trade.

According to the FTC, Coors engaged in price fix­ing; intimidated retailers and distribu­tors; refused to let certain retailers sell its beer; tried to maintain territorially exclusive distributorships; and attempted to keep people from selling and/or transporting Coors out of its eleven-state market area even after the beer had left Coors wholesalers.

Part of the reason for some of the company’s be­havior may be its concern that its un­pasteurized beer be kept cold until con­sumed; Coors smugglers and dealers who fail to keep their supply refrig­erated may spoil the taste, the company says. But this does not explain another practice discovered by the FTC: telling tavern owners they would not be sup­plied with any Coors unless they served no other draft beer.

1. Until last year, Coors had withstood all its trials and tribulations without any significant loss of revenue.
2. Then the company suffered a new experience: an actual drop in sales.
3. The chief losses were sustained in Coors’ rich California market, and in Arizona and New Mexi­co, where sales declined an average of 5 per cent.

Was this because of boycotters? Or bad weather? Or bad salesman­ship? Or has the Coors mystique finally begun to wear off? “We’re not exactly sure what hap­pened out there,” says one of Coors’ company spokesmen. “It’s the first time we’ve had a surplus of beer since World War II.” This surplus is what has im­pelled Coors to embark on its first ma­jor territorial expansion program in over a quarter-century: the recent move in Texas.

Coors has actually served parts of Texas since 1948, when it moved into El Paso, and later, portions of West and North Texas. In 1966, the company granted distributorships in the Dallas-Fort Worth markets and as far south­west as Brownwood and Del Rio. Still, company executives used to describe their domain as “ten states plus Texas,” since Coors had distributorships cover­ing only 35 per cent of the total Texas market area.

Then, last July, about a month after going public on the stock market, Coors announced it would com­plete its penetration of the third-best beer-drinking state in the nation. Exact details of the way Coors de­cided to pick its new Texas distributors are hard to come by, since the company refuses to provide more than a general account of its procedures.

And it ap­pears that different approaches may have been used in different parts of the state. Still, a review of the forms and questionnaires sent out to applicants and interviews with those who suc­ceeded and those who failed provide the following basic scenario: Coors first sent letters to all those who had made prior written inquiries about the possibility of obtaining a Tex­as distributorship, and asked them to send a letter reaffirming their interest.

The company says it had some 4000 such inquiries on file, many of them over ten years old, and that this first letter-only stage resulted in cutting the number of applicants in half. Next, Coors sent out questionnaires asking for detailed personal background infor­mation, and for such financial data as a complete projection of five-year cash flows, the type of financing to be used, the number of investors, and so on.

• These questionnaires asked that appli­cants frame their answers in reference to specific distributor areas whose boun­daries had been determined by the Coors Company (for example, south­west Houston, northwest San Antonio, etc.).
• The questionnaires also asked about political and civic involvement, and if the applicant would submit to an attitude survey and a lie-detector test.

Estimates of the time and expense necessary to complete this initial ques­tionnaire range from ten days and a few hundred dollars to a few months and several thousand dollars. One successful applicant said he put in three months of basic research, including one month of concentrated time spent on developing the questionnaire into a unified presentation; out-of-pocket expenses, he es­timated, were in the neighborhood of $500.

Another successful applicant with prior experience distributing another brand—and distributors of almost every Coors competitor applied for the new distributorships—said the questionnaire was “the hardest thing I’ve ever done.” He and other applicants familiar with various types of franchising operations agreed that the Coors questionnaire was far more exhaustive—and exhausting—than applications for any other type of franchise business.

After this questionnaire stage, the procedures varied from district to dis­trict, but a look at how the process was handled in Houston provides some idea of the overall design. According to one successful Houston applicant, each of the questionnaires was studied by two panels of people at the Coors brewery.

For the Houston area, this task involved the perusal of some 800 sets of forms and presentations. By this sort of re­view, the number of Houston applicants was cut to 350, and then to 50. Next, the Coors selection team scheduled per­sonal interviews with these 50 groups in Houston. Some applicants say the Coors people stressed questions about political involvement.

Others, particularly the successful ones, say that the interviews essentially repeated and expanded upon the questionnaire. At any rate, the Coors interviewers then handed out a 9-page, 114-ques­tion psychological attitude survey which they asked applicants to complete and return to the brewery.

• “Would you want a position of such high authority that many of your decisions would be certain to hurt some people?”• “Do you get pleasure from the feel of a good tool in your hands?”• “Do you feel most people will tend to misrepresent the facts if they have something to gain by doing so?”• “Do you sometimes feel it neces­sary to act harshly in order to teach someone a lesson?”• “Do thoughts about what you ought to be doing keep you from ever relaxing completely?”

Shortly after the personal interviews—too shortly to have had time to pro­cess the attitude survey, some applicants say—the Coors Company made another cut, reducing the number of groups still in the running for the six Houston area distributorships to twelve.

• These twelve groups then flew to Golden for another round of personal interviews at the brewery.
• A little over a week later, half of the twelve groups were recalled to the brewery and told they had been awarded Coors distributorships for the Houston area.
• For some, it would turn out to be the best news since the building of the Manned Space Craft Center.

For others, it meant frustration and failure. As the names of the new distributors for Hous­ton and other Texas cities were an­nounced, rejected applicants across the state charged that the whole selection process had been rigged from the beginning. Nowhere were businessmen more incensed than in San Antonio, where Coors interviewed just six out of 800 original applicants.

Only one group of San Antonians was eventually se­lected for the four Alamo City distribu­torships; the other three went to runners-up from Austin. Coors simply passed over the cream of the Anglo business community, including such locally prominent applicants as former City Councilman Alfred G. Beckmann, former State Senator Nelson Wolff, and former Chamber of Commerce presi­dent and television executive Bob Roth.

“Looking back on it, these Coors peo­ple may be smarter than they have been given credit for,” one prominent San Antonio businessman remarked cynical­ly. “By getting us to fill out all those forms, they got the benefit of several thousand dollars worth of research and information they otherwise would have had to pay for.” Even more maddening to some San Antonians was the fact that Coors com­pletely ignored the city’s Mexican-American majority.

• San Antonio’s one Mexican-American distributor is from Austin.
• Coors turned down men like Bexar County Commissioner Albert Bustamante, who applied in partnership with the city’s most successful Mexican-American businessman, Frank Zepulveda, known in some quarters as “Mr.
• West Side.” “I think what they did is an insult to the Mexican-American com­munity,” Bustamante says.

“Our group had a man who has built up an $18-million-a-year produce business. Just from a public relations standpoint, it would make sense to have selected him. But because Coors ignored the local community, they’re gonna find hostility in the community leadership.

1. This is surfacing more and more.
2. There is already a boycott by LULAC and the GI Forum.
3. I don’t believe in boycotts personally, but I’ll let the organizations who want to do it go ahead.
4. I just can’t understand why Coors did what they did.
5. Why choose an outsider? Why im­port a Mexican-American? We’ve got quite a few of them right here.” However, San Antonians were not the only ones to see local citizens passed over in the awarding of distributorships.

As it turned out, the majority of men Coors selected were not residents of—and not necessarily applicants for—the areas they were eventually designated to serve. In fact, at least two of the state’s new wholesalers were not even residents of Texas at the time they were selected.

1. The announcement of the new Coors distributors also prompted charges of racial discrimination based on the fact that only 5 of the 29 groups chosen in­clude men with Spanish surnames and none include blacks.
2. Obviously, Coors is right-wing, redneck, conservative, and Dixiecrat,” rails black State Repre­sentative Mickey Leland of Houston.

“They’re racist—it’s as simple as that. A lot of black people applied, but they were obviously not given any real consideration. It should be incum­bent upon the black community to boy­cott the hell out of Coors, but black people will probably drink a greater percentage of Coors than anyone else.” Among the black applicants for Coors distributorships was Dr.

Marion Ford, a well-known Houston dentist and entrepreneur who applied with a group including former State District Judge Andrew Jefferson. Dr. Ford stops short of the language used by Leland, but agrees that black applicants apparently did not get fair consideration. “It’s real­ly a problem with Coors,” he says.

“I don’t think the government should tell them who to award their franchises to, but, at the same time, there has to be a sense of fair play. Many blacks buy and drink Coors, yet not a single distributor­ship was awarded to a black. And you had some super-blacks—what I call ‘super-niggers’—applying.

1. This kind of thing is very bad.
2. It perpetuates a cer­tain negativism.
3. Right now, I’m trying to decide how to handle an appeal to the company based on a sense of fair play.” Is it true, then, that the whole selec­tion process was predetermined from the beginning? As one frustrated appli­cant puts it, “It looks that way,” but a month-long investigation uncovered only hearsay evidence that a few of the most prominent new Coors distributors may have known early in the game that they had “the inside track.” At the same time, many of those previously rumored or reported to have obtained a Coors franchise (Agnew, Connally, former Governor Allan Shivers, House Speaker Billy Clayton, San Antonio business­man-politico John Monfrey) did not get one.

Some people who were close to the Coors family (Alan Shepard, for one) ended up with a distributorship; other long-time friends ended up with nothing. Successful Coors applicants all deny that there was any sort of pre-selection; in fact, nearly all say they can only specu­late on the reasons why they in partic­ular were chosen since Coors never ex­plicitly told them.

The company itself will make “no comment” on the sub­stantive aspects of the competition, ex­cept to say that it chose “the best” of the applicants and that the Coors family had no personal involvement in the selection process. Still, a look at the list of 29 new Tex­as distributor groups reveals a number of significant patterns on Coors “qual­ity-control” team.

One is the choice of several men with high-level political connections. The company truly had its pick of the crop here, as nearly every name politician in the state had made application. The best known of those Coors finally selected is former Austin Mayor Roy Butler, one of the most powerful businessman-conservatives in the capital city.

1. Coors granted Butler the sole rights to Austin and Travis County, the most sought after of all the Texas distributorships because of its size and large student population.
2. Less well known but no less well con­nected is the team of Ralph O’Connor, 49, and Manuel A.
3. Sanchez III, 34, winners of one of the six Houston-area distributorships.

By far the richest in­dividual on the Coors team, O’Connor is the son-in-law and business associate of Brown & Root and Texas Eastern co-founder George R. Brown. O’Connor’s partner, Manny Sanchez, is a smooth-talking former regional director of the Department of Housing and Urban De­velopment who was educated at the University of Pennsylvania’s prestigious Wharton School of Finance.

He is also a former high-ranking employee of Wil­son Industries, a firm run by another George Brown son-in-law, Wally B. Wil­son of Houston. Sanchez, however, says political ties really had little to do with his success; Coors selected O’Connor and him because, as he remarked, “We’re faithful, loyal, kind, obedient, true, and we drink beer.” Also among the ranks of the political­ly connected members of the Coors team are William R.

Jenkins (Columbus-El Campo), an aide to Lieutenant Governor Bill Hobby and nephew of former top LBJ aide Walter Jenkins; Roland R. Nabors (San Antonio), the director of the Tax Records Division of the State Comptroller’s Office; and Aus­tin attorney Charles Crenshaw (Beau­mont), a former assistant attorney gen­eral who is the father of pro golf star Ben Crenshaw.

1. Then there are the publicity genera­tors, the celebrities.
2. Should Coors ever decide to market on the moon, they have two distributors who are already familiar with the territory: Alan B.
3. Shepard (Houston), the first American in space and the fifth person to walk on the lunar surface; and Charles M.
4. Duke (San Antonio), the tenth man on the moon.

The Coors team also includes a professional football player, former Dal­las Cowboy tackle Bob Lilly (Waco), and two baseball players, Bob and Ken Aspromonte (Houston). Some of Coors’ selections, though not surprising in and of themselves, contra­dicted Coors own publicly quoted state­ments about the kind of men they were looking for.

Last summer, Bill Coors told a meeting of New York stock mar­ket analysts that Coors seeks distribu­tors “with no previous experience in the beer industry,” adding that “an experienced beer distributor would have a dif­ficult time with us.” But, true to its image as “the brewery that breaks all the rules,” Coors awarded 9 of the 29 new Texas distributorships to groups which included men who had prior ex­perience in the beer industry.

In fact, at least 6 of the new distributorships went to men who had prior experience with the Coors Company itself. Again, the company had its pick of the crop, as at least one present or former distributor of every other conceivable brand made application.

Among the more notable of those selected are Joe Polichino, Sr., and Jr.; the elder Polichino has been distributing beer in Texas since the Re­peal of Prohibition and is a former president of the Wholesale Beer Dis­tributors of Texas. Of the 29 distributorships, then, only 12—or slightly less than half—went to groups of men who could be classified solely as small, independent business­men with no major beer, political, or celebrity experience.

And all of the new distributorships went to conservatives. Not all of Coors’ more illustrious new distributors have proven themselves to be such outstanding businessmen, how­ever. Take Alan Shepard. In 1969 he was the co-chairman of the board of the First National Bank in Baytown, and, along with two partners, held controlling interest in the bank.

• By the time Shepard was bought out, the bank had been the subject of considerable adverse specula­tion in banking circles and had suffered such a blow to its reputation that it changed its name and its charter from national to state.
• While Shepard cannot be tied directly to any of these problems, his stewardship did not set new records for good management.

Nonetheless, stars like Shepard and the other politically connected members of the Coors team may soon come in handy. In addition to its other battles, Coors expects to be skirmishing in the Texas Legislature. One of its pet bills will probably be legislation to permit sale of its seven-ounce can, or “split”; this smaller container has proven to be highly popular among Coors’ female customers in other states because each can has about half the volume and calories of a twelve-ounce can.

1. Coors is also likely to push for approval of its newly developed plastic container.
2. Beer industry reaction to Coors’ move in Texas and its new distributor­ships has been mixed.
3. We don’t even speak the word of that,
4. That com­pany that brews out there in that west­ern state,” storms Pearl beer executive Frank Horlock, who himself once ap­plied for a Coors distributorship.

“I’ve been giving them about all the free word-of-mouth advertising I’m gonna give them. People ask me at parties, ‘What do you think about Blank’ and I tell them how great Blank is, and what a nice guy Bill Blank is. Well, I’ve just decided to wise up.” Those who will talk about Coors seem to be bracing themselves for what Lone Star executive Barry Sullivan pre­dicted would be a marketing “Battle of the Trenches.” “In no case will the re­tailers be granting any more overall space in their stores to beer,” he explained.

Coors will have to get its space just like any other new brand that is introduced. That’s why it’s important for us to have people in there battling. For example, when Coors opened in Waco with fourteen trucks, we sent fourteen of our men to Waco and vis­ited every account. It only makes good sense to protect what we’ve worked so hard to build.” Executives of other brands, most notably Schlitz and Budweiser, said this so-called “Battle of the Trenches” is something that goes on every day.

Coors, they said, would prompt no spe­cial response from them. Some even seem half-glad Coors has finally made its inevitable expansion here. “We’re ready to get it on with anybody,” says Houston Schlitz distributor Hal Hill­man. “When Coors gets full distribu­tion, they’ll be just another competitor.

And its gonna be more competitive here in Houston than in any other market they’ve been in yet.” Of course, Houston is the city where Coors has an astronaut, two baseball players (if a former Astro can be con­sidered an asset), a long-time beer in­dustry leader, and a relative of po­tentate George Brown.

In most markets, Coors has done exceptionally well against the same type of brand com­petition it will face in its new Texas territories. After the initial “give-it-a- try” rush, Coors usually emerges with about 15 per cent of the total market the first year, then enjoys growth rates that eventually reach between 40 and 70 per cent of the market.

Ex­ecutives of other brands are quick to point out that this process took a little longer than usual in Dallas. Coors’ ini­tial market share there was only 11 to 12 per cent, and it took nearly seven years for Coors to attain its present number one standing with 40 per cent. But that time lag is at best small con­solation for the competition.

Who will get hurt the worst? Will home brews like Pearl, Lone Star, and tiny Shiner be forced out of business? Or will the majors bear the brunt of the loss? Schlitz, which holds over 40 per cent of the market, and Budweiser, which holds about 20 per cent, current­ly rank one and two in Texas.

1. They have the most to lose.
2. However, experi­ence in other Coors states has shown that these two national beers remain heavy contenders, continuing to hold onto 20 and 30 per cent of the market.
3. It is the smaller local beers and beers on a downward trend in sales which suffer the most.
4. In Texas, this would likely mean Shiner and Pearl.

Lone Star may perform slightly more successfully against Coors because of its current up­ward trend, and its youth-popular Long Neck bottle. Then again, it is in the youth market that Coors often scores its biggest gains. Of the other national beers, Millers may prove a surprisingly strong challenger.

Its new Miller Lite is far and away the fastest-growing beer in the country; in fact, demand has been so great that wholesalers have been hard pressed for months. While acknowledging the probable success of Coors in Texas, other beer industry sources express serious doubts about the success of certain of the new distributorships.

The chief trouble, as they see it, is that Coors granted too many distributorships in large cities like Houston, where there are six (including Conroe), and San Antonio, where there are four. Other brands generally have only two Houston distributors (Schlitz has just one), and only one San Antonio distributor.

1. Although the Coors Company is characteristically close-lipped about its reasons for dividing territories, one fac­tor it does cite is the enormous initial capital cost.
2. Most of the new metropoli­tan distributors agree that a good ball­park figure for the total investment necessary is $1.2 to $1.5 million, in­cluding at least $300,000—and some­times more—in cash.

There is no fran­chise fee, since Coors distributorships are by appointment only, but this total investment figure is still considerably more—some say half a million dollars more—than what it would take to launch a distributorship of another brand. The primary cause for these ex­tra costs is Coors’ insistence that ware­houses and trucks be kept refrigerated to less than 40 degrees.

• Nor does the high cost of selling Coors end with capi­tal investment.
• The need for constant refrigeration means higher costs for maintenance and, of course, utilities.
• If Coors had divided Houston into just two districts, the cost of the initial in­vestment necessary would have risen to more than $3.5 million for each dis­tributor.

Another reason Coors granted so many new distributorships may derive from the company’s recent sales decline in California. According to an invest­ment analysis by Goldman Sachs, one of the factors behind this unusual decline was a failure of the large Coors distributors there to market aggressively—either because of the size of their territories or because they relied on the seemingly inherent success of the Coors brand.

But Coors may have over-cor­rected. Under FTC rules, Coors dis­tributors are free to cross the boundary lines of their territories, and neither the company nor competing distributors can do anything to stop them. Some op­timistic rivals predict that if sales are slow, the new Coors distributors may find themselves in internecine battles to determine the survival of the fittest.

Coors’ largest wholesale outlet in Texas is the exclusive distributorship for Dallas, which was granted back in 1966 to a group led by Raymond Willie. Ac­cording to Willie, his distributorship currently handles approximately six mil­lion cases each year.

• At a profit of $1 per case—the industry average in Texas—this rather easily translates into a cool yearly profit of $6 million.
• Still, the beer business is a low-margin business—8 per cent is a large profit by industry standards—and Willie’s huge earnings are directly related to his tremendous volume.

None of the new Coors distrib­utors is expected ever to approach the Dallas volume—none of them have any­where near as large a territory. On the other hand, if each of them does only one-sixth as well—and this depends as much on the overall success of the brand as well as on their marketing skills—they will eventually become mil­lionaires.

• Because of the size of the ini­tial investment and the fickle nature of the beer market, it will probably take at least three years to tell whether Coors will prove to be a guaranteed bonanza for all 29 distributors.
• Should a Coors distributor not do well, he may find himself faced with a largely unanticipated problem: how to sell out.

Coors distributors are allowed to sell their businesses for whatever they can get. The hitch is that Coors must approve the buyer. Coors’ former Del Rio distributor, D.R. Dixon, is current­ly suing Coors, claiming that Coors re­fused to let him freely negotiate the sale of his distributorship.

• Dixon’s attorney says the distributor had a group of buy­ers who agreed to pay $300,000 for the Del Rio outlet; then the buyers went to Golden, talked to Coors, and returned to say they would pay only $200,000.
• After the papers were signed, the group paid only $100,000.
• Coors, as usual, will not comment.

Should one of the new Coors distrib­utors get stuck with a losing business, he may well find himself with no viable means of support. Most, though not quite all, have resigned from their pre­vious jobs and divested themselves of other franchises and time-consuming business interests.

• In general, Coors re­quires that the beer business be their distributors’ primary occupation—something Coors no doubt feels will en­hance “quality control.” Roy Butler, for example, has had to sell his lucrative Lincoln-Mercury car dealership.
• Not too surprising, however, Coors new Texas distributors voice absolutely no qualms about what they got and how they will do.

They are, to a man, elated over their appointments. “I wouldn’t exactly call it a money machine,” says one. “I’d call it an opportunity ma­chine. But if I work hard, I will make money.” The only voices left to be heard are those of Texas consumers, and their most significant comments will be made at the cash register.

Coors is already available at new outlets in Waco, Pales­tine, and Longview. Roy Butler’s Austin Coors is scheduled to open on April 1. The San Antonio and Houston distribu­tors have set May 1 and May 15 as their target dates. The rest of the new outlets should be in operation by midsummer. Most expect to price their beer about the same as Schlitz and Budweiser or per­haps a little higher.

They must, after all, maintain quality control. : Muscling In On Texas Beer

When was the Coors beer boycott?

The Coors strike and boycott was a series of boycotts and strike action against the Coors Brewing Company, based in Golden, Colorado, United States. Initially local, the boycott started in the late 1960s and continued through the 1970s, coinciding with a labor strike at the company’s brewery in 1977.

The strike ended the following year in failure for the union, which Coors forced to dissolve. The boycott, however, lasted until the mid-1980s, when it was more or less ended. The boycott began in 1966 as a regional affair coordinated by the Colorado chapter of the American GI Forum and the Denver-based Crusade for Justice.

These two Hispanic groups initiated a boycott due to the Coors Brewing Company’s discriminatory practices that targeted Hispanics and African Americans, Additionally, they opposed the Coors family’s support of right wing political causes. Soon afterward, the boycott expanded through much of the American West,

1. By the 1970s, the boycott covered much of Coors’ market area and involved Hispanic, African American, and women’s rights groups, as well as labor unions and LGBT activists,
2. The latter group opposed Coors’ practice of using a polygraph test during their hiring process, which they alleged allowed them to discriminate against LGBT individuals.

In San Francisco, the city’s LGBT community and the Teamsters union allied to promote the boycott that involved noted gay rights activist Harvey Milk, In April 1977, members of Brewery Workers Local 366, which represented over 1,500 workers at the company’s flagship Golden, Colorado brewery, went on strike over noneconomic issues related to, among other things, the company’s use of polygraph testing and their 21 grounds for dismissal,

Shortly after the strike started, the AFL–CIO (the United States’ largest federation of labor unions) initiated a nationwide boycott of Coors. The strike lasted for over 20 months, during which time a majority of the union members went back to work without a contract after the company began replacing strikers with strikebreakers,

The company initiated a vote the following year over whether the local union would be dissolved, with a majority of workers voting to dissolve Brewery Workers Local 366. Despite this, the AFL–CIO continued their boycott. By the 1980s, Coors began making deals with several minority groups to do more business with minority companies and hire more minority workers.

Despite this, the boycott continued and expanded to include numerous other groups, such as the National Organization for Women and the National Education Association, However, in August 1987, the AFL–CIO agreed to end the boycott, with Coors making several concessions that included using union labor to build a new facility in Virginia and an agreement to an expedited union vote at its Golden facility.

In December 1988, workers at the Golden brewery voted against unionizing by a margin of over 2 to 1. The strike and boycott had a direct economic impact on Coors. The company’s market share in several western states dropped from over 40 percent to as low as 17 percent in the case of California,

1. Additionally, the boycott may have encouraged the company to expand nationally, as the company expanded its presence from 11 states in 1975 to 49 states by 1988.
2. In the LGBT community, the boycott left a lasting impact, as several groups and activists still object to Coors over the company’s past actions and the family’s continued support of conservative politics.

As late as 2019, Coors beer was difficult to find in any gay bar in San Francisco.

What beer is in Sons of Anarchy?

Sons of Anarchy Amber Ale is a collaboration between C20th Fox, Sudwerk Brewery, and Rewine. It is brewed in the village of Davis on the California coast, the backdrop for many TV series, and films. In the glass Sons of Anarchy pours amber with a light white head.

What does Coors stand for?

Hate on Display / COORS Family Skins ALTERNATE NAMES: Comrades of our Racial Struggle Group Status: Active COORS Family Skins (the word COORS is an acronym for “Comrades of our Racial Struggle”) is a racist skinhead group whose members are primarily based in southern California.

Why is Coors called Yellow Jacket?

Where does Yellow Jacket come from? – Certainly not from wasps. The term Yellow Jacket comes from the yellow label found on the Coors Banquet beer. Coors Original was originally introduced to Americans in 1874 by Adolph Coors (obviously). It’s been brewed with Rocky Mountain water ever since.

1. It strives to have that, “drinkable “Mile High Taste”.” that Coors Banquet is known for.
2. This beer ain’t no fancy seltzer.
3. Probably why they drink it on Yellowstone.
4. Definitely why Johnny Lawrence drinks it on Cobra Kai.1874 is cool and all, but Coors is still not the oldest brewery in the United States.

That’s Yuengling. Back in 2011, the Denver Post reported that Coors released commemorative yellow belly cans of Coors to the public. Yellow bellies were just another name for Banquet Beers.

Is Coors made by Heineken?

Our brand portfolio includes Ireland’s No 1 lager, Heineken®, Heineken® Light, Heineken® 0.0%, H41, Orchard Thieves, Orchard Thieves Light, Appleman’s®, Birra Moretti, Coors Light, Murphy’s and Beamish Stouts, Desperados, Tiger, Sol and Foster’s.

Why was Coors beer recalled?

A can of Coors Light [email protected] There might be some bitter beer faces at Molson Coors headquarters over the composition of beer in certain cans of Coors Light and Keystone Light, which have been recalled after some customers found them too slimy.

Although an email from a Molson Coors spokesman said, “There has been no recall of Coors Light or Keystone Light, and there are no food-safety issues related to either beer,” the email also says “we chose to work with our distributors and retailers to voluntarily withdraw impacted packs from the market.” Pulling products from the marketplace is the definition of a recall.

Most recalls of food and products are voluntary. “The impacted product does not pose a food-health risk, but it doesn’t meet our quality standards,” the email said. Twitter user ron_milfort tagged Keystone Light’s Twitter account in a post that read, “Just got another disgusting beer that was pure syrup.

1. I might have to start buying something else.” Twitter user aaw1124 posted that his Coors Light “was the grossest consistency I could imagine.
2. Thick and gelatinous.
3. I’ve never seen or unfortunately tasted anything like it.” @CoorsLight I opened a coors light tonight, mountains were blue, and it was the grossest consistency I could imagine.

Thick and gelatinous. I’ve never seen or unfortunately tasted anything like it. WTF — aaw (@aaw1124) June 10, 2022 The Molson Coors spokesman said, “There was a quality issue on one canning line that exclusively produces 12 oz tall cans at our Trenton brewery.

1. It impacted a only a small percentage of cans produced on the line and it has since been resolved.” The Molson Coors spokesman declined to name the “small number of states” that got the recalled beer (although the company did say Florida was in the clear). St.
2. Louis’ dominant supermarket chain Dierbergs announced it was pulling all lots of Coors Light 12-ounce cans in packs of 12, 24 and 30 and Keystone Light 12-ounce cans sold in packs of 15 and 24.

Molson says consumers with questions can call the quality hotline at 800-645-5376. This story was originally published June 15, 2022, 3:20 PM. Since 1989, David J. Neal’s domain at the Miami Herald has expanded to include writing about Panthers (NHL and FIU), Dolphins, old school animation, food safety, fraud, naughty lawyers, bad doctors and all manner of breaking news. He drinks coladas whole. He does not work Indianapolis 500 Race Day.

Why isn t Coors vegan?

by Molson Coors UK
Address:	137 High Street Burton-on-Trent, Staffordshire, DE14 1JZ England
Phone:	+44 (0)12 835 141 70
Fax:
Email:	http://www.molsoncoors.com/en/contact-us
URL:	http://www.molsoncoors.com/
Checked by:	Ian
Double checked by:	Tara, Alyssa, Stevie, Hannah, Mark, Rory, Greg, Anthony, Carla
Added:	over 6 years ago
Double Checked:	about 1 month ago

Company email (April 2023) “Madri Excepcional is not certified by the Vegan Society as being suitable for vegans. Isinglass finings are used during the Madri Excepcional brewing process. As you may be aware, finings are a traditional product and a natural raw material, that has been used in the process of clarifying beer and wine for thousands of years.

1. It is one of the techniques used to ensure the bright and sparkling appearance that many consumers really appreciate.
2. However, not all brands are produced with finings, and we can confirm that from our wider portfolio, our brands Cobra, Aspalls and Rekorderlig cider ranges are certified by the vegan society.” Company email (March 2023) “Staropramen products are suitable for vegetarians and vegans.

No animal products are used in production.” Company email (November 2022) re:Staropramen “Unfortunately, Staropramen which is brewed in the UK is not suitable for vegans.” Company email (December 2021) re: Staropramen “All Staropramen products with exception of COOL GREP have vegan/vegetarian status.” Company email (February 2021) re Coors Light: “Unfortunately Coors Light in the UK is not currently suitable for vegans.” Company email (February 2019) “We can confirm that Blue Moon is only centrifuged & not filtered so is not processed using any animal products.

Staropramen is currently filtered using Isinglass finings.” Company email (December 2017) “The only products we have that are suitable for vegans are:- Carling Cider Apple Carling Cider Black Fruits Cobra Grolsch” Company email (November 2017) re: Cobra “We can confirm that all our Cobra Lager products produced in the UK are approved by the vegetarian society, but have yet to have the same certification to be suitable for vegans.” Company email (January 2017) “We can confirm that unfortunately Coors Light Lager would not be suitable for vegans / vegetarians as it uses isinglass finings in the clarification process during production.

However the following beers in our portfolio are produced without using isinglass finings which may be of interest to you: Blue Moon Cobra Grolsch” Company email (April 2014): re: Grolsch “Here at Molson Coors UK we brew and package the Grolsch Premium Beer and can confirm that it is suitable for vegetarians and vegans.” Company email ( [email protected] ) regarding Cobra: “We can confirm that Cobra is suitable for Vegans.” Company email (May 2010): re: Grolsch “We can tell you that we don’t use animal-products.” Company email (October 2008): re: Grolsch “Grolsch is brewed using completely naturally processes and no animal by-products (isinglass, gelatin, cartilage, etc.) are used to brew the beer.

For reference, Grolsch received the “Best Vegetarian Beer” award in 2003 from the UK Vegetarian Society ( http://www.vegsoc.org/press/pressarchive/2003/pr50.html ).” Additional email: re: Grolsch “I’ve been to the Grolsch Brewery (which is 10 km from my house) and asked if their beer is vegan friendly.

They told me it is 100%.” Another inquiry re: Grolsch Carling Black Label (which isn’t vegan friendly) also stated that “Grolsch is our product which is suitable for vegetarians and vegans”

What country owns Coors?

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Molson Coors Beverage Company

Formerly	Molson Coors Brewing Company (2005–2019)
Type	Public company
Traded as	NYSE : TAP.A (Class A) NYSE : TAP (Class B) S&P 500 component (TAP)
Industry	Beverages
Founded	Molson (1786) Coors (1873) Merged (2005)
Headquarters	250 South Wacker Drive, Chicago, Illinois, USA
Key people	Andrew Molson, ( Chairman ) Pete Coors, ( Vice Chairman ) Gavin Hattersley, ( President and CEO )
Products	Beer, malt beverages, energy drinks, spirits and wines
Revenue	10.6 billion (2019)
Operating income	US$764.4 million (2019)
Net income	US$241.7 million (2019)
Total assets	US$28.9 billion (2019)
Total equity	US$13.7 billion (2019)
Number of employees	17,700 (2019)
Divisions	Molson Coors North America Molson Coors Europe
Subsidiaries	Molson Brewery Coors Brewing Company Miller Brewing Company The Beer Store (49%)
Website	molsoncoors,com

Molson Coors is a Canadian-American multinational drink and brewing company headquartered in Chicago, IL with main offices in Golden, Colorado, and Montreal, Quebec, Molson Coors was formed in 2005 through the merger of Molson of Canada, and Coors of the United States.

Why is Coors different?

Is Coors Banquet Better than Coors Original? – Most Coors drinkers seem to think so. Personally, I also prefer the sweeter and lighter taste of Coors Banquet. The malty beer which is Coors Original, with no adjuncts like corn syrup, can be too malty and a different taste for many Coors Banquet regulars.

• Coors Banquet wasn’t originally available in Canada until 2013 but apparently, the Canadians already preferred the Banquet rather than the Canadian-produced Coors Original.
• The long-awaited move North of the US border was brought about partly by a Facebook page “Bring Coors Banquet Back to Canada”.
• One user even suggested Canadians could swap some of their Canadian exclusive Molson beers at the border for supplies of US-brewed Coors Banquet.

Coors Banquet, many beer lovers argue, is a higher quality beer than Coors Original as it is only brewed in Golden, Colorado using the pure water of the Rocky Mountains, whereas Coors original is brewed at many breweries both in the US, Canada, and worldwide.

As any good brewer will tell you, a lot of the taste and consistency of beer comes from that water source. Different breweries in different locations can often brew the same beer but with a totally different taste profile due to the water composition. Coors Banquet also uses more traditional brewing processes such as filtering with Enzinger, using a closed horizontal box fermentation, and it is brewed in Huppmann kettles.

The Coors brewery in Colorado is still one of the largest single plants in the US and, although there are more efficient ways of mass-producing lagers, the Coors philosophy seems to be “If it ain’t broke then don’t fix it!

What is the original Coors beer?

Coors Original – Where to Buy Near Me Premium Lager · 5.0% ABV · ~170 calories · Golden, CO 📣 Add your business, list your beers, bring in your locals.

Serve or carry this beer? Add your business and list your beers to show up here! Want to grow your local beer scene? Become a BeerMenus Craft Cultivator!

Coors, nicknamed the “Banquet Beer,” was first introduced by Adolph Coors 1873. According to legend, thirsty miners in the late 1800s threw celebratory banquets with Coors as the honorary beer because of its superior craftsmanship. Prior to its nationwide distribution in 1981, Coors built a cult following, with presidents, movie stars and many others making special trips out west to buy it. The print menu customers want. Sell more beer: print menus designed to help your customers choose beers. : Coors Original – Where to Buy Near Me

When did Coors become available in Texas?

Muscling In On Texas Beer W hen the Adolph Coors Company of Golden, Colorado, decided last summer to expand its network of beer distribu­torships into South, Central, and East Texas, it was almost as if Coors had announced plans to award perpetual-motion money machines.

Never in the history of Texas business would so many try so hard to win something so ostensibly ordinary as the opportunity to sell beer. The Coors Company was besieged with more than 4000 applications for the new distributorships, including en­tries by John Connally, Spiro Agnew, Allan Shivers, a string of professional athletes, and several men who have rid­den rocket ships to the moon.

Soon they and hundreds of other celebrities, poli­ticians, businessmen, competing-brand distributors, and ordinary beer drinkers across the state and around the country found themselves in the midst of a com­petition many would later describe as the most grueling thing they’d ever endured.

1. They answered exhaustive personal, political, and psychological question­naires.
2. They compiled vast amounts of valuable local market data.
3. They esti­mated.
4. They interviewed.
5. They sweated.
6. And all the while, they eyed each other nervously as rumors about who already had a distributorship “in the bag” flew from tongue to print.

For all but a few, the effort and wor­ry proved fruitless. Between mid-August and the end of December, Coors gradu­ally revealed the selection of 29 groups of men to distribute its beer in Houston, Austin, San Antonio, Waco, and eigh­teen other towns from Laredo to Long­view.

1. As it turned out, many of the high and mighty previously rumored and/or reported to have won a Coors distribu­torship wound up empty-handed.
2. For­mer Vice President Agnew even with­drew his application in the wake of ad­verse publicity.
3. Among the chosen few were a heavy sampling of astronauts, professional ath­letes, and men with useful political con­nections, including a number of present and former government officials.

Con­trary to its own publicly quoted state­ments, Coors also chose several men with prior experience in the beer indus­try, including at least five who had previous connections with the Coors Company itself. Of the 29 distributor groups, all were composed of political conservatives; only five included men with Spanish surnames; and none in­cluded women or blacks.

But more sur­prising, the majority of new distribu­tors were not even residents of the areas they were designated to serve. These developments immediately pro­voked a great deal of controversy, ill will, and—not incidentally—free pub­licity. Local and national media played up the choice of men like moonwalker Alan Shepard and ex-Dallas Cowboy star Bob Lilly.

Frustrated applicants all over the state alleged that the whole selection process had been predeter­mined from the outset, and that Coors had simply used the opportunity to col­lect some free market information. Black and Mexican-American leaders leveled charges of racial discrimination in the awarding of distributorships, and two Chicano groups announced boycotts of Coors.

Others, including many success­ful applicants, simply expressed befuddlement over the types of criteria Coors used in making the selections. Mean­while, executives of other leading na­tional and Texas beer companies braced themselves for what one predicted would be a marketing “Battle of the Trenches.” For the Colorado-based brewer, this brouhaha was hardly new.

Though known in business circles as a “super straight arrow” organization, Coors’ iconoclastic financial and marketing practices have won it a reputation as the “brewery that breaks all the rules.” The company also has a long history of political turmoil revolving around the arch-conservatism of the founding fam­ily, and a standing feud with the press.

Typically, its response to allegations of preselecting its new Texas distributors and favoring trustworthy conservatives continues to be a repeated “no com­ment.” But despite certain difficulties here and in other parts of the nation, Coors has had few problems selling its beer to consumers. Although Coors mar­kets in only eleven western states, it is the country’s fourth-largest brewer, be­hind Budweiser, Schlitz, and Pabst, who distribute their beers across the country and around the world.

In ten of its eleven marketing states, Coors is the number one selling beer, with market shares ranging from 40 to over 70 per cent. The eleventh state is Texas, where Coors already ranks third, ahead of such home brews as Pearl and Lone Star, de­spite having penetrated only one-third of the total market area.

And all this sales success has been accomplished with less than half the paid advertising spent by the other leading brewers. Coors, it seems, need rely only on word-of-mouth and the thousands of dollars of free publicity generated by aficionados across the country. It is, as has been written so many times, the favorite beer of Paul Newman, Presi­dent Ford, Henry Kissinger, Kissinger’s bodyguards, Ethel Kennedy, the Boston Red Sox, the Miami Dolphins, and thousands of other less prominent “Coors runners” from coast to coast.

In the East, where Coors is not officially marketed, beer drinkers pay as much as $15 a case for cans and bottles of the smuggled brew. A recent article in the New York Times described Coors as “the most chic brew in the country,” and it even remains the top seller in Chicano neighborhoods despite the company’s checkered history of minority relations and the diligent efforts of boycott leaders.

• Coors’ recent expansion in Texas, while no doubt increasing the Coors’ myth, has also raised a number of in­triguing questions about the way the Colorado brewer does its business.
• The most persistent questions concern Coors’ new distributors.
• How were they chosen? What are the stakes? How good a deal did they get after all? But before these are answered, an even more fun­damental question must be considered: what makes Coors so special? Most of the company’s competitors and a great many plain old beer drink­ers attribute Coors’ enormous popu­larity to a kind of Rocky Mountain “mystique.” They say that Coors, or “Colorado Kool-aid” as it is sometimes called, is actually just another light, rather tasteless American beer; only its unavailability—the fact Coors is so hard to get in most parts of the country—makes it so much in demand.

Company president Bill Coors natu­rally takes issue with this point of view. “There’s no mystique about Coors’ pop­ularity,” he has said on several occa­sions. “It tastes better than other beers, that’s all.” However, repeated blind taste tests sponsored by various newspapers and magazines have cast con­siderable doubt on whether the cele­brated Coors’ taste differs at all from that of other premium American beers.

In most tests, even prideful, experienced beer drinkers have been unable to dis­tinguish Coors from such brews as Schlitz, Bud, and Miller High Life. Still, there are several things about the beer and the company that may make Coors leave a distinctive—and not always favorable—taste on the palates of beer drinkers and non-beer drinkers alike.

One is the emphasis on what Coors proudly calls “quality control.” The company is truly fanatic about it on several levels. For example, Coors has a longer brewing process and spends more on beer ingredients than any other major American brewer. Its barley is a special Moravian strain grown by its own special farmers with special certi­fied seeds.

Its rice and hops are also the best a brewer can buy, while its water is said to be “pure Rocky Mountain Spring Water.” Part of the difference—if any—in Coors’ taste may be attributable to using slightly less of the tangy ingredients (malt and hops) and slightly more of the bland ingredient (rice) than is common among other leading American and foreign brewers.

It is thus light-bodied, but it is not a “lite.” Coors has the same alcohol content (3.5 per cent by weight, 4.5 by volume) and calories (137 per 12-oz. can) as other leading beers like Bud and Schlitz. Coors does, however, have a longer fermentation and aging process.

By means of chemical additives, some major American brew­ers have reduced their entire brewing time to less than three weeks. Coors takes about 70 days to complete its total brewing cycle, and nearly two months of that time involves the aging process alone. At no time is Coors pasteurized, as are almost all other U.S.

beers. Pasteur­ization involves killing the yeast culture by means of heat and thus may alter the flavor of the beer. According to the New York Times article, Coors stopped pasteurizing its beer almost twenty years ago when the company determined that “heat is an enemy of beer.” Consequently, Coors should be kept refrigerated until consumed in order to insure the proper taste and freshness.

• Unlike other brewers, Coors does not maintain a warehouse at its brewery, but immediately ships out each batch of beer in refrigerated railroad cars; the company insists that distribu­tors and retailers keep the brew con­stantly colder than 40 degrees.
• If these “quality-control” steps are followed, the product the consumer gets in each bottle or can of Coors is tantamount to a draft beer, since it has been kept cold from the brewery to the beer drinker’s mouth.

However, anyone who has traveled much in the western states may have noticed cases of Coors stacked about, unrefrigerated, in retail stores. The Coors Company, meanwhile, is perhaps even more unusual than the beer it manufactures. In an industry characterized by the predominance of corporate giants and the folding of small independent breweries, Coors has remained for all intents and purposes a family-owned-and-operated company.

In fact, it was not until last June, after re­ceiving a $50 million dollar inheritance tax bill from the IRS, that the Coors family reluctantly decided to take public money. Even then, it merely issued Class B common (non-voting) stock, which insured that actual control of the company would remain firmly in the arch-conservative hands of the Coors family.

That is undoubtedly the way com­pany founder Adolph Coors would have wanted it. He started the brewery 103 years ago as a young German immi­grant, and passed the creation on to his American-born son Adolph, Jr., who in turn passed it on to his sons. Today, it is third-generation president Bill Coors, 59, and executive vice president Joe Coors, 58, who run the brewery’s day-to-day operations.

Their older brother Adolph III was killed in a kidnap-ransom affair in 1960.) What the Coors family has built in the Rocky Mountain foothills west of Denver is nothing less than the largest beer-manufacturing plant in the world—capacity over twelve million barrels per year—and an almost completely self-contained $585 million corporate empire.

The brewery in Golden stretches through the valley and around the side of the mountain, covering some 3100 acres in all. In addition to its beer­making crews, Coors’ local work force of 7500 includes a construction and engineering crew who are expanding the plant at a rate of 10 per cent each year.

• The company also owns its own bottle-making plant, rice mills, barley fields, and even some natural gas re­serves to insure a power source.
• It is also remarkably clean about the way it runs these facilities.
• Long before environmental protection became both fashionable and court-ordered, Coors established itself as the industry leader in ecology and recycling.

It introduced the aluminum can way back in 1959 and has since developed and promoted a cash-for-cans program that has collected roughly 190 million pounds of discarded containers for all beer and soft drink brands, and pays out some $5 million to consumers each year.

At the same time Coors has refined its en­gineering and production techniques to the extent that its own immediate plant wastes are merely a fraction of those expelled by other leading brewers. Coors’ traditionally sparse advertising contains no man-made objects other than the beer can itself: the rest of the picture is simply mountains and trees and bubbling streams.

This resolute environmentalism is not the picture of Coors that leaps to the minds of most organized political groups left of Ronald Reagan. Thanks in large part to the activities of executive vice president Joe Coors, the company has a reputation as being one of the most virulently right-wing enterprises in America.

• Joe Coors’ views first became publicized during the late Sixties and early Seventies when he served as a member of the University of Colorado Board of Regents.
• A contributor to the John Birch Society, he was so enraged by hippies, student activists, and other “pleasure-loving parasites,” that he fi­nanced an alternative student news­paper.

Later, even that Coors-sponsored campus publication felt compelled to editorialize against him when he at­tempted to oust the college president because of a dispute concerning the Students for a Democratic Society. In­cidents like that prompted one fellow University of Colorado regent to label Joe Coors—not the students—”the chief disruptive factor” on campus at the time.

Furious at the way the media handled the events of those years, Joe Coors decided to start his own television news service, Television News, Inc., which has thus far lost more than $5 million. One of Richard Nixon’s last official acts as President was to nominate Joe Coors for the board of the Corpora­tion for Public Broadcasting.

President Ford later resubmitted the nomination, but the Senate Commerce Committee cited a possible conflict of interest, and members of the communications sub­committee tabled the nomination, effec­tively killing it. Among the factors working against Coors in addition to his ownership of TVN was the disclosure of two letters he had written the CPB board while his nomination was pend­ing.

• One apparently sought to influence CPB editorial policy, while the other requested special CPB consideration for Coors’ attempts to set up an earth-satel­lite system to enhance his broadcasting enterprise.
• Coors family politics have naturally had a major effect on life back at the brewery.
• For years black, Chicano, lib­eral, and labor groups have attacked and boycotted Coors for alleged dis­crimination in hiring practices and union paternalism.

The Colorado Civil Rights Commission has twice found the company guilty of discriminating against black employees, and the Eco­nomic Employment Opportunity Com­mission is currently suing Coors for sex and race discrimination. According to the EEOC complaint, virtually all of Coors’ female employees are confined to secretarial-type jobs, and virtually all its racial minority employees per­form semi-skilled or unskilled jobs.

1. Despite generally high pay and the existence of a union, ordinary white male employees do not exactly enjoy ideal working conditions either.
2. Com­pelled to take lie-detector tests before being accepted for employment, Coors workers may be fired for any of 21 reasons, which include “making disparaging remarks about the employer” and doing anything “which would discourage any person from drinking Coors beer.” Such provisions presumably insure that “qual­ity control” extends to the brewery workers as well as to the beer.

What the company would character­ize as an attempt to extend the concept of “quality control” to distributors and retailers has recently landed it in serious trouble. Last fall, the Supreme Court upheld a wide-ranging complaint by the Federal Trade Commission that found Coors guilty of unfair marketing prac­tices and restraint of trade.

According to the FTC, Coors engaged in price fix­ing; intimidated retailers and distribu­tors; refused to let certain retailers sell its beer; tried to maintain territorially exclusive distributorships; and attempted to keep people from selling and/or transporting Coors out of its eleven-state market area even after the beer had left Coors wholesalers.

Part of the reason for some of the company’s be­havior may be its concern that its un­pasteurized beer be kept cold until con­sumed; Coors smugglers and dealers who fail to keep their supply refrig­erated may spoil the taste, the company says. But this does not explain another practice discovered by the FTC: telling tavern owners they would not be sup­plied with any Coors unless they served no other draft beer.

Until last year, Coors had withstood all its trials and tribulations without any significant loss of revenue. Then the company suffered a new experience: an actual drop in sales. The chief losses were sustained in Coors’ rich California market, and in Arizona and New Mexi­co, where sales declined an average of 5 per cent.

Was this because of boycotters? Or bad weather? Or bad salesman­ship? Or has the Coors mystique finally begun to wear off? “We’re not exactly sure what hap­pened out there,” says one of Coors’ company spokesmen. “It’s the first time we’ve had a surplus of beer since World War II.” This surplus is what has im­pelled Coors to embark on its first ma­jor territorial expansion program in over a quarter-century: the recent move in Texas.

1. Coors has actually served parts of Texas since 1948, when it moved into El Paso, and later, portions of West and North Texas.
2. In 1966, the company granted distributorships in the Dallas-Fort Worth markets and as far south­west as Brownwood and Del Rio.
3. Still, company executives used to describe their domain as “ten states plus Texas,” since Coors had distributorships cover­ing only 35 per cent of the total Texas market area.

Then, last July, about a month after going public on the stock market, Coors announced it would com­plete its penetration of the third-best beer-drinking state in the nation. Exact details of the way Coors de­cided to pick its new Texas distributors are hard to come by, since the company refuses to provide more than a general account of its procedures.

And it ap­pears that different approaches may have been used in different parts of the state. Still, a review of the forms and questionnaires sent out to applicants and interviews with those who suc­ceeded and those who failed provide the following basic scenario: Coors first sent letters to all those who had made prior written inquiries about the possibility of obtaining a Tex­as distributorship, and asked them to send a letter reaffirming their interest.

The company says it had some 4000 such inquiries on file, many of them over ten years old, and that this first letter-only stage resulted in cutting the number of applicants in half. Next, Coors sent out questionnaires asking for detailed personal background infor­mation, and for such financial data as a complete projection of five-year cash flows, the type of financing to be used, the number of investors, and so on.

These questionnaires asked that appli­cants frame their answers in reference to specific distributor areas whose boun­daries had been determined by the Coors Company (for example, south­west Houston, northwest San Antonio, etc.). The questionnaires also asked about political and civic involvement, and if the applicant would submit to an attitude survey and a lie-detector test.

Estimates of the time and expense necessary to complete this initial ques­tionnaire range from ten days and a few hundred dollars to a few months and several thousand dollars. One successful applicant said he put in three months of basic research, including one month of concentrated time spent on developing the questionnaire into a unified presentation; out-of-pocket expenses, he es­timated, were in the neighborhood of $500.

Another successful applicant with prior experience distributing another brand—and distributors of almost every Coors competitor applied for the new distributorships—said the questionnaire was “the hardest thing I’ve ever done.” He and other applicants familiar with various types of franchising operations agreed that the Coors questionnaire was far more exhaustive—and exhausting—than applications for any other type of franchise business.

After this questionnaire stage, the procedures varied from district to dis­trict, but a look at how the process was handled in Houston provides some idea of the overall design. According to one successful Houston applicant, each of the questionnaires was studied by two panels of people at the Coors brewery.

1. For the Houston area, this task involved the perusal of some 800 sets of forms and presentations.
2. By this sort of re­view, the number of Houston applicants was cut to 350, and then to 50.
3. Next, the Coors selection team scheduled per­sonal interviews with these 50 groups in Houston.
4. Some applicants say the Coors people stressed questions about political involvement.

Others, particularly the successful ones, say that the interviews essentially repeated and expanded upon the questionnaire. At any rate, the Coors interviewers then handed out a 9-page, 114-ques­tion psychological attitude survey which they asked applicants to complete and return to the brewery.

• “Would you want a position of such high authority that many of your decisions would be certain to hurt some people?”• “Do you get pleasure from the feel of a good tool in your hands?”• “Do you feel most people will tend to misrepresent the facts if they have something to gain by doing so?”• “Do you sometimes feel it neces­sary to act harshly in order to teach someone a lesson?”• “Do thoughts about what you ought to be doing keep you from ever relaxing completely?”

Shortly after the personal interviews—too shortly to have had time to pro­cess the attitude survey, some applicants say—the Coors Company made another cut, reducing the number of groups still in the running for the six Houston area distributorships to twelve.

These twelve groups then flew to Golden for another round of personal interviews at the brewery. A little over a week later, half of the twelve groups were recalled to the brewery and told they had been awarded Coors distributorships for the Houston area. For some, it would turn out to be the best news since the building of the Manned Space Craft Center.

For others, it meant frustration and failure. As the names of the new distributors for Hous­ton and other Texas cities were an­nounced, rejected applicants across the state charged that the whole selection process had been rigged from the beginning. Nowhere were businessmen more incensed than in San Antonio, where Coors interviewed just six out of 800 original applicants.

Only one group of San Antonians was eventually se­lected for the four Alamo City distribu­torships; the other three went to runners-up from Austin. Coors simply passed over the cream of the Anglo business community, including such locally prominent applicants as former City Councilman Alfred G. Beckmann, former State Senator Nelson Wolff, and former Chamber of Commerce presi­dent and television executive Bob Roth.

“Looking back on it, these Coors peo­ple may be smarter than they have been given credit for,” one prominent San Antonio businessman remarked cynical­ly. “By getting us to fill out all those forms, they got the benefit of several thousand dollars worth of research and information they otherwise would have had to pay for.” Even more maddening to some San Antonians was the fact that Coors com­pletely ignored the city’s Mexican-American majority.

San Antonio’s one Mexican-American distributor is from Austin. Coors turned down men like Bexar County Commissioner Albert Bustamante, who applied in partnership with the city’s most successful Mexican-American businessman, Frank Zepulveda, known in some quarters as “Mr. West Side.” “I think what they did is an insult to the Mexican-American com­munity,” Bustamante says.

“Our group had a man who has built up an $18-million-a-year produce business. Just from a public relations standpoint, it would make sense to have selected him. But because Coors ignored the local community, they’re gonna find hostility in the community leadership.

This is surfacing more and more. There is already a boycott by LULAC and the GI Forum. I don’t believe in boycotts personally, but I’ll let the organizations who want to do it go ahead. I just can’t understand why Coors did what they did. Why choose an outsider? Why im­port a Mexican-American? We’ve got quite a few of them right here.” However, San Antonians were not the only ones to see local citizens passed over in the awarding of distributorships.

As it turned out, the majority of men Coors selected were not residents of—and not necessarily applicants for—the areas they were eventually designated to serve. In fact, at least two of the state’s new wholesalers were not even residents of Texas at the time they were selected.

The announcement of the new Coors distributors also prompted charges of racial discrimination based on the fact that only 5 of the 29 groups chosen in­clude men with Spanish surnames and none include blacks. “Obviously, Coors is right-wing, redneck, conservative, and Dixiecrat,” rails black State Repre­sentative Mickey Leland of Houston.

“They’re racist—it’s as simple as that. A lot of black people applied, but they were obviously not given any real consideration. It should be incum­bent upon the black community to boy­cott the hell out of Coors, but black people will probably drink a greater percentage of Coors than anyone else.” Among the black applicants for Coors distributorships was Dr.

• Marion Ford, a well-known Houston dentist and entrepreneur who applied with a group including former State District Judge Andrew Jefferson. Dr.
• Ford stops short of the language used by Leland, but agrees that black applicants apparently did not get fair consideration.
• It’s real­ly a problem with Coors,” he says.

“I don’t think the government should tell them who to award their franchises to, but, at the same time, there has to be a sense of fair play. Many blacks buy and drink Coors, yet not a single distributor­ship was awarded to a black. And you had some super-blacks—what I call ‘super-niggers’—applying.

This kind of thing is very bad. It perpetuates a cer­tain negativism. Right now, I’m trying to decide how to handle an appeal to the company based on a sense of fair play.” Is it true, then, that the whole selec­tion process was predetermined from the beginning? As one frustrated appli­cant puts it, “It looks that way,” but a month-long investigation uncovered only hearsay evidence that a few of the most prominent new Coors distributors may have known early in the game that they had “the inside track.” At the same time, many of those previously rumored or reported to have obtained a Coors franchise (Agnew, Connally, former Governor Allan Shivers, House Speaker Billy Clayton, San Antonio business­man-politico John Monfrey) did not get one.

Some people who were close to the Coors family (Alan Shepard, for one) ended up with a distributorship; other long-time friends ended up with nothing. Successful Coors applicants all deny that there was any sort of pre-selection; in fact, nearly all say they can only specu­late on the reasons why they in partic­ular were chosen since Coors never ex­plicitly told them.

1. The company itself will make “no comment” on the sub­stantive aspects of the competition, ex­cept to say that it chose “the best” of the applicants and that the Coors family had no personal involvement in the selection process.
2. Still, a look at the list of 29 new Tex­as distributor groups reveals a number of significant patterns on Coors “qual­ity-control” team.

One is the choice of several men with high-level political connections. The company truly had its pick of the crop here, as nearly every name politician in the state had made application. The best known of those Coors finally selected is former Austin Mayor Roy Butler, one of the most powerful businessman-conservatives in the capital city.

Coors granted Butler the sole rights to Austin and Travis County, the most sought after of all the Texas distributorships because of its size and large student population. Less well known but no less well con­nected is the team of Ralph O’Connor, 49, and Manuel A. Sanchez III, 34, winners of one of the six Houston-area distributorships.

By far the richest in­dividual on the Coors team, O’Connor is the son-in-law and business associate of Brown & Root and Texas Eastern co-founder George R. Brown. O’Connor’s partner, Manny Sanchez, is a smooth-talking former regional director of the Department of Housing and Urban De­velopment who was educated at the University of Pennsylvania’s prestigious Wharton School of Finance.

• He is also a former high-ranking employee of Wil­son Industries, a firm run by another George Brown son-in-law, Wally B.
• Wil­son of Houston.
• Sanchez, however, says political ties really had little to do with his success; Coors selected O’Connor and him because, as he remarked, “We’re faithful, loyal, kind, obedient, true, and we drink beer.” Also among the ranks of the political­ly connected members of the Coors team are William R.

Jenkins (Columbus-El Campo), an aide to Lieutenant Governor Bill Hobby and nephew of former top LBJ aide Walter Jenkins; Roland R. Nabors (San Antonio), the director of the Tax Records Division of the State Comptroller’s Office; and Aus­tin attorney Charles Crenshaw (Beau­mont), a former assistant attorney gen­eral who is the father of pro golf star Ben Crenshaw.

1. Then there are the publicity genera­tors, the celebrities.
2. Should Coors ever decide to market on the moon, they have two distributors who are already familiar with the territory: Alan B.
3. Shepard (Houston), the first American in space and the fifth person to walk on the lunar surface; and Charles M.
4. Duke (San Antonio), the tenth man on the moon.

The Coors team also includes a professional football player, former Dal­las Cowboy tackle Bob Lilly (Waco), and two baseball players, Bob and Ken Aspromonte (Houston). Some of Coors’ selections, though not surprising in and of themselves, contra­dicted Coors own publicly quoted state­ments about the kind of men they were looking for.

Last summer, Bill Coors told a meeting of New York stock mar­ket analysts that Coors seeks distribu­tors “with no previous experience in the beer industry,” adding that “an experienced beer distributor would have a dif­ficult time with us.” But, true to its image as “the brewery that breaks all the rules,” Coors awarded 9 of the 29 new Texas distributorships to groups which included men who had prior ex­perience in the beer industry.

In fact, at least 6 of the new distributorships went to men who had prior experience with the Coors Company itself. Again, the company had its pick of the crop, as at least one present or former distributor of every other conceivable brand made application.

Among the more notable of those selected are Joe Polichino, Sr., and Jr.; the elder Polichino has been distributing beer in Texas since the Re­peal of Prohibition and is a former president of the Wholesale Beer Dis­tributors of Texas. Of the 29 distributorships, then, only 12—or slightly less than half—went to groups of men who could be classified solely as small, independent business­men with no major beer, political, or celebrity experience.

And all of the new distributorships went to conservatives. Not all of Coors’ more illustrious new distributors have proven themselves to be such outstanding businessmen, how­ever. Take Alan Shepard. In 1969 he was the co-chairman of the board of the First National Bank in Baytown, and, along with two partners, held controlling interest in the bank.

• By the time Shepard was bought out, the bank had been the subject of considerable adverse specula­tion in banking circles and had suffered such a blow to its reputation that it changed its name and its charter from national to state.
• While Shepard cannot be tied directly to any of these problems, his stewardship did not set new records for good management.

Nonetheless, stars like Shepard and the other politically connected members of the Coors team may soon come in handy. In addition to its other battles, Coors expects to be skirmishing in the Texas Legislature. One of its pet bills will probably be legislation to permit sale of its seven-ounce can, or “split”; this smaller container has proven to be highly popular among Coors’ female customers in other states because each can has about half the volume and calories of a twelve-ounce can.

Coors is also likely to push for approval of its newly developed plastic container. Beer industry reaction to Coors’ move in Texas and its new distributor­ships has been mixed. “We don’t even speak the word of that, that com­pany that brews out there in that west­ern state,” storms Pearl beer executive Frank Horlock, who himself once ap­plied for a Coors distributorship.

“I’ve been giving them about all the free word-of-mouth advertising I’m gonna give them. People ask me at parties, ‘What do you think about Blank’ and I tell them how great Blank is, and what a nice guy Bill Blank is. Well, I’ve just decided to wise up.” Those who will talk about Coors seem to be bracing themselves for what Lone Star executive Barry Sullivan pre­dicted would be a marketing “Battle of the Trenches.” “In no case will the re­tailers be granting any more overall space in their stores to beer,” he explained.

Coors will have to get its space just like any other new brand that is introduced. That’s why it’s important for us to have people in there battling. For example, when Coors opened in Waco with fourteen trucks, we sent fourteen of our men to Waco and vis­ited every account. It only makes good sense to protect what we’ve worked so hard to build.” Executives of other brands, most notably Schlitz and Budweiser, said this so-called “Battle of the Trenches” is something that goes on every day.

Coors, they said, would prompt no spe­cial response from them. Some even seem half-glad Coors has finally made its inevitable expansion here. “We’re ready to get it on with anybody,” says Houston Schlitz distributor Hal Hill­man. “When Coors gets full distribu­tion, they’ll be just another competitor.

And its gonna be more competitive here in Houston than in any other market they’ve been in yet.” Of course, Houston is the city where Coors has an astronaut, two baseball players (if a former Astro can be con­sidered an asset), a long-time beer in­dustry leader, and a relative of po­tentate George Brown.

In most markets, Coors has done exceptionally well against the same type of brand com­petition it will face in its new Texas territories. After the initial “give-it-a- try” rush, Coors usually emerges with about 15 per cent of the total market the first year, then enjoys growth rates that eventually reach between 40 and 70 per cent of the market.

Ex­ecutives of other brands are quick to point out that this process took a little longer than usual in Dallas. Coors’ ini­tial market share there was only 11 to 12 per cent, and it took nearly seven years for Coors to attain its present number one standing with 40 per cent. But that time lag is at best small con­solation for the competition.

Who will get hurt the worst? Will home brews like Pearl, Lone Star, and tiny Shiner be forced out of business? Or will the majors bear the brunt of the loss? Schlitz, which holds over 40 per cent of the market, and Budweiser, which holds about 20 per cent, current­ly rank one and two in Texas.

They have the most to lose. However, experi­ence in other Coors states has shown that these two national beers remain heavy contenders, continuing to hold onto 20 and 30 per cent of the market. It is the smaller local beers and beers on a downward trend in sales which suffer the most. In Texas, this would likely mean Shiner and Pearl.

Lone Star may perform slightly more successfully against Coors because of its current up­ward trend, and its youth-popular Long Neck bottle. Then again, it is in the youth market that Coors often scores its biggest gains. Of the other national beers, Millers may prove a surprisingly strong challenger.

Its new Miller Lite is far and away the fastest-growing beer in the country; in fact, demand has been so great that wholesalers have been hard pressed for months. While acknowledging the probable success of Coors in Texas, other beer industry sources express serious doubts about the success of certain of the new distributorships.

The chief trouble, as they see it, is that Coors granted too many distributorships in large cities like Houston, where there are six (including Conroe), and San Antonio, where there are four. Other brands generally have only two Houston distributors (Schlitz has just one), and only one San Antonio distributor.

Although the Coors Company is characteristically close-lipped about its reasons for dividing territories, one fac­tor it does cite is the enormous initial capital cost. Most of the new metropoli­tan distributors agree that a good ball­park figure for the total investment necessary is $1.2 to $1.5 million, in­cluding at least $300,000—and some­times more—in cash.

There is no fran­chise fee, since Coors distributorships are by appointment only, but this total investment figure is still considerably more—some say half a million dollars more—than what it would take to launch a distributorship of another brand. The primary cause for these ex­tra costs is Coors’ insistence that ware­houses and trucks be kept refrigerated to less than 40 degrees.

1. Nor does the high cost of selling Coors end with capi­tal investment.
2. The need for constant refrigeration means higher costs for maintenance and, of course, utilities.
3. If Coors had divided Houston into just two districts, the cost of the initial in­vestment necessary would have risen to more than $3.5 million for each dis­tributor.

Another reason Coors granted so many new distributorships may derive from the company’s recent sales decline in California. According to an invest­ment analysis by Goldman Sachs, one of the factors behind this unusual decline was a failure of the large Coors distributors there to market aggressively—either because of the size of their territories or because they relied on the seemingly inherent success of the Coors brand.

But Coors may have over-cor­rected. Under FTC rules, Coors dis­tributors are free to cross the boundary lines of their territories, and neither the company nor competing distributors can do anything to stop them. Some op­timistic rivals predict that if sales are slow, the new Coors distributors may find themselves in internecine battles to determine the survival of the fittest.

Coors’ largest wholesale outlet in Texas is the exclusive distributorship for Dallas, which was granted back in 1966 to a group led by Raymond Willie. Ac­cording to Willie, his distributorship currently handles approximately six mil­lion cases each year.

1. At a profit of $1 per case—the industry average in Texas—this rather easily translates into a cool yearly profit of $6 million.
2. Still, the beer business is a low-margin business—8 per cent is a large profit by industry standards—and Willie’s huge earnings are directly related to his tremendous volume.

None of the new Coors distrib­utors is expected ever to approach the Dallas volume—none of them have any­where near as large a territory. On the other hand, if each of them does only one-sixth as well—and this depends as much on the overall success of the brand as well as on their marketing skills—they will eventually become mil­lionaires.

• Because of the size of the ini­tial investment and the fickle nature of the beer market, it will probably take at least three years to tell whether Coors will prove to be a guaranteed bonanza for all 29 distributors.
• Should a Coors distributor not do well, he may find himself faced with a largely unanticipated problem: how to sell out.

Coors distributors are allowed to sell their businesses for whatever they can get. The hitch is that Coors must approve the buyer. Coors’ former Del Rio distributor, D.R. Dixon, is current­ly suing Coors, claiming that Coors re­fused to let him freely negotiate the sale of his distributorship.

Dixon’s attorney says the distributor had a group of buy­ers who agreed to pay $300,000 for the Del Rio outlet; then the buyers went to Golden, talked to Coors, and returned to say they would pay only $200,000. After the papers were signed, the group paid only $100,000. Coors, as usual, will not comment.

Should one of the new Coors distrib­utors get stuck with a losing business, he may well find himself with no viable means of support. Most, though not quite all, have resigned from their pre­vious jobs and divested themselves of other franchises and time-consuming business interests.

1. In general, Coors re­quires that the beer business be their distributors’ primary occupation—something Coors no doubt feels will en­hance “quality control.” Roy Butler, for example, has had to sell his lucrative Lincoln-Mercury car dealership.
2. Not too surprising, however, Coors new Texas distributors voice absolutely no qualms about what they got and how they will do.

They are, to a man, elated over their appointments. “I wouldn’t exactly call it a money machine,” says one. “I’d call it an opportunity ma­chine. But if I work hard, I will make money.” The only voices left to be heard are those of Texas consumers, and their most significant comments will be made at the cash register.

Coors is already available at new outlets in Waco, Pales­tine, and Longview. Roy Butler’s Austin Coors is scheduled to open on April 1. The San Antonio and Houston distribu­tors have set May 1 and May 15 as their target dates. The rest of the new outlets should be in operation by midsummer. Most expect to price their beer about the same as Schlitz and Budweiser or per­haps a little higher.

They must, after all, maintain quality control. : Muscling In On Texas Beer

Did the beer law change in Texas?

AUSTIN, Texas – Two bills filed in the Texas House and Senate last month could expand alcohol sales on Sundays. Senate Bill 1288 and House Bill 2200, filed by State Sen. Kelly Hancock (R-Fort Worth) and State Rep. Justin Holland (R-Rockwall) would amend the Alcoholic Beverage Code to change the definition of “liquor” under Texas law, so “spirit coolers” would not be included. (Photo by Gado/Getty Images) Canned cocktails have grown in popularity over the last few years, but under Texas law grocery stores and convenience stores are currently only allowed to sell beer and wine on Sunday. “As industries innovate and new products become staples in the marketplace, it only makes sense for us to take a look at ways government can reduce regulatory red tape,” said Sen.

1. Hancock in a statement to the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States.
2. I look forward to continuing to work on legislation that keeps free market principles at the core of Texas’ economic success.” A recent survey from the Distilled Spirits Council showed 86 percent of people believed the cocktails should be sold when other ready-to-drink beverages are available for purchase.

If passed, it would be another step in loosening Texas’s alcohol sales laws. In 2021, state leaders allowed beer and wine sales before noon on Sundays. They also voted to allow restaurants to continue allowing to-go cocktails after they were approved during the pandemic.

When was alcohol banned in Texas?

The Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution on national prohibition was ratified by the Texas Legislature in February 1918 and by enough other states by January 1919 to become law.

When was alcohol illegal in Texas?

With the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in January 1919, the Texas government quickly followed suit with their prohibition amendment on May 24 of that same year.