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Happy Labor Day weekend, everyone! While everyone else in the country is cracking open a cold brewski, you and I, good little Mormons that we are, will read books or something. Anyway, we won’t be drinking beers.
But if we were drinking beers, I hope we wouldn’t be drinking Coors. I don’t know a lot about beer (really! I don’t!) but I do know one thing: beersnobs agree that to really enjoy the flavor of a beer, you can’t drink it too cold. (This sounds legit to me—careful attention has proven that the same is true of cranberry juice.)
Coors, however, markets its product as being the coldest dern beer you ever done drank.
These ads make no sense to me. Besides the fact that advertizing your beer as best-cold is just admitting it doesn’t taste very good, how much control does the manufacturer really have over coldness? What if the Chevron station decides to save a few cents a day by raising the fridge temp a degree?
The Coors solution is to bring out The World’s Most Refreshing Can and advertize it to death during A’s games. So: now they’re in the can business rather than the brew business? I mean—apparently this marketing gimmick works—but shouldn’t the experience of drinking a beer be more about, I don’t know, the beer?
A Motley Vision 
If I understand correctly, alcohol has a lower freezing temperature than water. So for some people, the plus of beer is that it can be a really cold drink.
I’m trying to think of various Mormon arts applications. Reading about righteousness will make you righteous? I’m sure there are other possibilities, but I’m brain-dead tonight…
I don’t want to reduce the metaphor to a one-liner, but I think it’s more that the Mormon market focuses so much on the package that it ignores the substance of what’s inside.
I think it may be time for an intervention.
I think it’s more like we need to figure out how to help craft brews, including porters and stouts, gain more social currency.
If you try to haul MoLit outside its borders, Sherriff Buford T. Justice is gonna shut you down, Mr. Bandit.
Don’t go home, and don’t go to eat, and don’t send off your novel east of the Mississippi to one of them there New York editters. It wouldn’t look nice on my highway. Oh, you can THINK about it… but don’t do it!
Now put the evidence in the car, Junior.
Uh…yep. I guess 🙂 Which is why I’d like to figure out what I can do to get people east of the mississippi to drink my particular brand o moonshine.
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I’m not at all in favor of swooping in and being authoritative, but I like Lee’s moonshinery quite a lot.
And Wm makes what seems to me the most obvious point(s)—issues of packaging and supporting craft brewers. I also wonder how often we’re trying to sell the wrong thing. Who cares how cold our books are? People need to know they’re good.
That said, what I’ve been thinking about all weekend is how alcohol gets colder than water.
Doesn’t that hurt their teeth?
Yeah. I get some pretty bad toothaches even from cold drinking fountain water.
…. dude. It is about *what* we’re selling. I agree. The thing is, I think we have a drive, some of us, to sell mormon stories that are complex, and universally appealing. And I don’t believe that’s not possible. So.
… right now we’re kind of a microbrewery. A hangout for amateur guitarists… tourists… people who listen to NPR….
of course, we don’t wan to be coors either. We just want our microbrews to be enjoyed by as many as possible.