Epic Stupidity

Beer commercials, I swear they must recruit a special kind of imbecile to write them. I sometimes feel a little sorry for the copywriter who has to come up with a pitch for why you should, say, prefer Phillips 66 gas stations over not-Phillips-66 gas stations, especially when that name seems to be attached to a motley crew of franchisees ranging from almost-as-good-as-QuikTrip operations to third world shit holes.

So maybe I can cut the folks at Coors' ad agency a little slack for not having a product that's particularly inspiring. I mean, those mass market lagers are the commodity peanut butter of beer. They are insipid, perhaps none so much as Coors Light. The best thing I can say for the Silver Bullet is it's consistent. But the ad copy that says it's 'frost brewed?' That's just offensive.

Kids, if you don't dabble in zymurgy yourself, lemme clue you in on something: 'brewing' involves converting starch to sugar, which happens when a couple of enzymes in malt are at around 149ºF. Alpha amylase is active between 145ºF and 158ºF, beta amylase does its thing between 131ºF and frosty as 149ºF. After this step, the wort is drained from the grain and boiled for at least an hour with the hops preserve beer and make it bitter (though Coors Light is hopped below the threshold of perception for most people, it is still boiled with hops). Fermentation happens a little cooler, and in the case of a beer like Coors Light, it is lagered after that, and this last step can get borderline on frosty, but the beer has already been brewed before it hits the lagering tank.

So drink what you like, but Coors Light is not fucking 'brewed really cold.'

But Sam Adams' marketing crew seems bent on making Coors' agency look like geniuses.

From the blazing yellow of the afternoon sun to the fiery orange of an evening sunset to the electric blue tint of a summer night, the colors of Summer Ale and its crisp, citrusy flavor, are your perfect companion anywhere, anytime.

Okay, I can buy yellow and orange being colors you'll encounter in something Sam Adams brews. But blue?


When I got into brewing in 1995, not every liquor or grocery store had a bunch of craft beer styles on offer. I drank a ton of Sam Adams' Boston Lager back then, in part to harvest the bottles for my homebrew, in part because it was such a better beer than most of what was on the shelf. Why buy Sam Adams? Because it's an all malt beer with enough flavor and aroma hops that you can actually tell there are hops in it. It's just like how you subscribe to Playboy because then you get to see still photographs of nude women. Well, the way things have worked out Hef had to sell the Playboy Mansion, but Sam Adams has just become another version of Coors Light, selling beer that has, as its principle ingredient, advertising.

Advertising written by yahoos who think some blue on the six-pack carrier is a feature of the beer in the bottles.