Why Coors Banquet Is Winning the Nostalgia Lager Wars

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 as the beer category has struggled to find its footing. And it’s heating up: “After growing dollars by 26.4 [percent] last year, Coors Banquet is still notching double-digit growth” on a trailing-four-week basis in the off-premise, Beer Business Daily reported in late June, citing Circana scan data. The trade outlet also noted that Golden’s iconic gold-labeled lager has clawed its way up its parent company’s leaderboard in off-premise dollar sales, from fifth at the end of last year to third, above High Life and Keystone and behind only Coors Light and Miller Lite.

Check the denominator: The oldest brand in MC’s top three still trails its light-lager flagship(s) by an order of magnitude in dollars. But it’s still gaining at a time when those brands are notching lukewarm comparisons as they lap their gains during last year’s Bud Light losses. BBD’s analysis of Circana figures shows the country’s second-biggest brewer up just one-tenth of a percent in volume and 1.3 percent in dollars in 2024, but “tough comps be damned[,] Coors Banquet is still flying.”

The brand’s performance against its fellow full-bodied American legacy lagers is pretty darn strong, too. NielsenIQ off-premise data shared with Hop Take by the consultancy 3Tier Beverages shows Banquet’s dollar sales growing more on a percentage basis over the 52 weeks through mid-June 2024 than Budweiser, Hamm’s, High Life, Narragansett, and Pabst Blue Ribbon. The brand was up over 26 percent in that period. ‘Gansett was next closest with 13.8 percent growth on a smaller base; Budweiser trailed the most, down over 11 percent on a bigger base. Flying, indeed.

Coors Banquet’s present success isn’t solely a function of the red-blooded, everyman look and feel that MC marketers have carefully cultivated. As the American drinking public writ large continues to show craft beer the cold shoulder, and millennial dads in particular age out of IPAs, Banquet’s actual liquid offers a more mature taste profile than full-blown light adjunct lagers with some of those vaunted “beer-flavored beer” flavors that attracted many customers to craft portfolios in the first place. You won’t catch your humble Hop Take columnist with a “yellow belly” in hand, on account of the namesake family’s politics, but I’m not incapable of acknowledging the beer is solid. It is!

Still, there are plenty of solid beers on the shelves these days (too many, even.) Banquet is going gangbusters while its generational peers are mostly just getting by. Why?

At long last, we’ve arrived at the “least relatable billionaire” portion of our programming. The ultrawealthy weirdo in question is Mark Zuckerberg, the awkward head honcho of the company formerly known as The Facebook. On Independence Day 2024, he posted an Instagram video (a Reel, if you will; I will not) of himself in a tuxedo riding a hydrofoil and holding an American flag in one hand. In the other: a tallboy of Coors Banquet. “Happy Birthday, America! 🇺🇸” read his caption; “Born in the U.S.A.” blared as the soundtrack.

The reception to this cringeworthy stunt won shockingly favorable coverage from both Fox Business and other conservative organs, as well as centrist colossus CNN. Zuck’s choice (or, more likely, his publicists’ choice; he seems to be amid a personal makeover/charm offensive lately) of Banquet didn’t guarantee the video would land, but it was the perfect prop for it. It’s an impossible-to-miss, nearly impossible-to-impeach totem of average-Joe affordability and Manifest Destiny-adjacent machismo that no other lager brand on the market can match on breadth or depth. It’s a billboard, basically, a lifestyle accessory akin to Montucky Cold Snacks but with wider brand recognition, stronger roots, and nary a whiff of twee liberal bullshit. It is the perfect beer for people who desperately want to adopt the United States’ swaggering frontier myth without endorsing its bleak realities.

In December 2022, I wrote that Banquet’s on-screen “Yellowstone” tie-ins was a smart continuation of Molson Coors’ efforts to “burnis[h] the brown-bottled beer’s pioneer bona fides with sponsorships of Professional Bull Riding, and collaborations with Brixton and Huckberry, two younger apparel brands with strong cachet among fratty fly-fishers and ski-patrol wannabes west of the Continental Divide.” By the looks of things, Mr. Meta feels likewise. As Washington Post tech columnist and extremely online “Extremely Online” author Taylor Lorenz joked in a comment beneath the video, “He’s running.” It’s a good joke (and I hope it stays that way). Banquet’s legacy as an emblem of only-the-hits American history helps it along.

How much MC’s marketers made it so is an open question. The old advertising saw about “50 percent of money spent on advertising” applies, and as so many beer-industry branding boners have shown, curating Pax Americana nostalgia is harder than it looks, and a moving target to boot. It’s also one of the oldest ideas in the U.S. beer business. Coors Banquet’s current bonanza is proof that it still has some juice.

🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now

Flavored malt beverages finally surpassed craft beer in dollar sales in the most recent four-week scan-data snapshot from Circana, according to Brewbound number-crunching of the same. If you told me a couple years ago that hard seltzers, teas, and the like would soon compose a more valuable segment than the whole of ~10,000 brewers’ off-premise output, I would’ve… well, I probably would’ve just shrugged and said “Yeah, that tracks,” because a couple years ago was 2022, and this writing was very much on the wall by then. But five years ago, I would have been fairly surprised at how swift the flip-flop in the segments’ fortunes had come to pass. It was pretty quick!

📈 Ups…

Athletic Brewing Co.’s valuation reaches $800 million after closing its latest fundraising round… Yuengling Flight, the Pennsylvania firm’s would-be Michelob Ultra contender, is up ~70 percent in both dollars and volume year-to-date, eesh… Congratulations to Bob Pease on his 32-year run at the Brewers Association and upcoming retirement as its president/CEO…

📉 …and downs

Farewell for now (and maybe forever) to Good Beer Hunting, which is going on “indefinite hiatus” after a ~15-year run of independent publishing… Analysis by the research firm Brand Finance puts Bud Light’s brand-equity losses at $500 million last year… A majority of states have no age minimum on their books for non-alcoholic lookalikes, if only we had some sort of federated body to write universal rules…

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