Coors Light

First Brewed: 1978
Brewery Location: Golden, Colorado, United States
ABV: 4.2%

History & Availability: Since I probably won't find Coors Banquet beer, I'll touch on the history of Coors as a whole here too. The Coors Brewing Company was founded in 1873 and was one of only a few US breweries to survive Prohibition by leaning heavily on non-alcoholic interests, including porcelain and malted milk. Historically Coors has been a regional-only beer, being marketed to the western half of the United States exclusively for over 100 years. Coors Light was introduced as the light beer fad was becoming popular, and by the mid-1980s the brand was being sold nationwide.

Appearance: Slightly paler than the other recent beers, Coors Light is more of a pastel yellow with little to no haze. Carbonation starts out strong but after the inital fizz there is literally no head at all besides a few bubbles coalescing by the edges. Within about 5 minutes there's almost no carbonation left in the beer at all.

Smell: Another beer that's very light on the smell. I guess they've put a lot of effort into making sure no one can actually smell their product. On the plus side, no metal. So I guess I can chalk this category down as completely neutral.

Taste: Unpleasant. It's another Labatt-style beer where taste is assumed to be the enemy, so the brew tends to stay away from any flavor in particular. Nevertheless, unlike Labatt, Coors Light has a weird unplaceable decomposing-wild-rice taste and is one of the few beers I physically wrinkle my nose at while drinking. Aftertaste is wet due largely to the lack of alcohol but helped along by the fact that there's no hops or malt flavor to speak of.

Mouthfeel: Fades away into nothingness even as you hold it in your mouth. Upon first sipping you'll notice a little bit of activity as the beer churns, but within a second or two the activity is gone and this beer feels like a very slightly carbonated water.

Drinkability: Much like all the other beers of the style, drinkability is the one place where these beers are above average. Coors Light is a drink that you can gulp down without any trouble, especially with the comparatively low alcohol content.

Overall verdict: D, we're skirting dangerously close to "offensively bad" but we're not quite there yet.