Genuinely new ideas do not come around often in the beer business, and the ones that do mostly fail to fundamentally change it. Dry beer! Ice beer! Brut, black, and cold India pale ales! Et cetera. This is due in roughly equal measure to the vagaries of the three-tier system, the goldfish-brained attention span of the American drinking public, and the basic limitations of human creativity and zymurgical chemistry.
Much more often, brewers — or their counterparts in the marketing department, at least — find compelling new ways to repackage old ideas. Examples abound, but the one we’re going to talk about today is the nostalgia lager. These are brands that channel the Americana aesthetic with archival retro artwork or knockoffs homages thereof, to create lucrative new interest in the basic, bottom-fermented beer with which John and Jane Q. Guzzler have been familiar since the earliest days of their drinking careers. Some of them are genuinely old, like Hamm’s, Narragansett, and Miller High Life, while others are what people who use “creative” as a noun often call “fauxstalgia brands,” like JuneShine’s Easy Rider, Montucky Cold Snacks’ eponymous flagship, and so many others. Regardless, they’re all playing the same game, which is to evoke the myth of a simple and shared national past to sell more categorically unremarkable beer.
Lately, Coors Banquet is winning. And one of our least relatable billionaires knows why.
First, let’s put a little more definition around winning. The brand’s performance has been staggering this decade, even
