Coors Banquet

By John & Dad on October 9, 2008 (40 Comments)

For our recently fallen beer comrade Jerry Reed, who passed away on August 31, 2008, Father and Son Beer Love decided to devote a Thursday night review to the beer that Snowman and the Bandit worked so hard to deliver to the fine folks in Atlanta. This one’s for you, Snowman.

Coors Banquet, which also goes by Coors Original or just Coors, has been produced since 1873 in Golden, Colorado. It’s now owned and operated by the MillerCoors company. Surprisingly, Coors Banquet only has about 1.5% of the domestic beer market (Coors Light is around 15.5% of the market and Bud Light is by far the most popular domestic beer with about 34.9% of the market). You probably already know the story of Adolph Coors and probably wonder a little bit as you read this sentence why a strong, solid name Adolph isn’t that common any more. By this sentence you’ve probably realized why the name Adolph isn’t so common any more. We’ll leave it at that.

For our review we procured 24 oz (1 pint 8 oz) cans from the convenience store (Son Beer Love’s was even served up in a brown bag!) for $1.69 each. These are “cold activated” cans with a frost brew liner in them. The mountains on the can turn blue when the taste is completely obscured by cold. Only then is it safe to drink. Just kidding of course!

Coors Banquet weighs in with a 5% ABV and our beer temperature was 34.2 F, which was cold enough to activate the mountains on the can, which oddly, even when the can was empty, remained blue. We used a tall weizen glass for the pour which gave us an average 2″ fizzy white head that dissipated quickly and left a fair amount of head lacing in the glass. There was a lively amount of carbonation and the body was a clear sparkling yellow color.

There are just a few aromas we could note – grain and corn primarily. The corn smell is a little off-putting at first, but we think it just caught us a little of guard. As it warms we got some lemon and some light alcohol in the smell as well. On the taste side we got a mild lemon in the initial taste and the corn came in with the aftertaste. The initial flavor notes were a light sweet and the finish flavor was a very light sweet and a light bitter. The finish length was quite short and the mouthfeel was watery. The tongue hit was on the front of the tongue and there was virtually no body lacing in the glass. On the patented malt to hop scale it came in just about balanced. Not too malty, not too hoppy, not too much of anything.

For our bottom line notes we got a yes to drinkable and a yes to repeatable. We got a no to harmony, no to memorable, no to wow factor and no to buy again. We were on the fence with balance and can only say it had some – it’s super thin malts, but equally thin hops – so we guess that balances?

It doesn’t rub you the wrong way – it’s like a big glass of cold. We can say this – it smells like beer. Like it really smells like beer in the most common sense of the word – like the people on television who drink beer out of a can that has the word “beer” on the outside of it. It smells like that.

On a hunch, we took a swig out of the can and you know what – we think it tastes better out of the can than in the glass. Out of the can you get a nice little metallic profile that “works” with it. Plus, it just feels so right drinking this out of the can, the way you just know it was meant to be consumed. The way all those thirsty people in Atlanta no doubt drank it when it was delivered to them by Snowman and the Bandit.

It was a little bit of a surprising review for us. We felt pretty sure this would be one of our lowest ratings, but overall it wasn’t bad enough to pour out. The taste is somewhat like a slightly bitter flavored water. There’s more bitter in the finish of the beer than in a glass of water but not much. We actually did a blind taste test against the glass of water we normally have when we rate beers and the results, though not inconclusive, were quite closer than you would think.

It’s odd, we know, to rate something that doesn’t have much of anything to it with something higher than a zero, but would you rate a glass of water a zero? Something almost has to be overdone in the wrong direction to rate a zero. This isn’t enjoyable, per se, but it’s also not not enjoyable, if you catch our drift. Maybe the water from the Rocky Mountains makes a difference. Our final advice if you have to drink it – drink it cold, drink it quick and drink it out of the can.

And let’s remember, this one was for Jerry Reed, who’s up in heaven running his eighteen wheeler over motorcycles and feeding Fred all the hamburgers he wants. East Bound and Down, good buddy.

Coors Banquet Rating: 2 out of 10 (?)

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Beer Pairings: Beer and Poker Night

By John on June 27, 2008 (1 Comment)

So I posed a question recently on Twitter asking for some ideas on a good craft beer for me and the boys to consume massive amounts of at an upcoming poker night. The rules were simple – no high ABV and no high price tag.

A quick note – the Twitter beer community is fantastic – a great group of beer aficionados. I got some nice feedback from them (many thanks to those who responded) – Anchor Small Beer, Full Sail Session Lager, Goose Island Honker’s Ale, New Belgium Fat Tire, Lancaster Milk Stout and more. All beers that I’d either love to try or have had and enjoyed in the past. Only one problem – none of these are readily available here at any of my beer stores.

So Father Beer Love threw out a suggestion – we’d seen some mini kegs of a certain fantastic summer beer at World Market recently and couldn’t think of an occasion to justify the purchase. Well, we solved that problem last night.

That’s a Paulaner Hefe-Weizen 5 liter mini keg who also happened to come home with his twin brother. 10 liters of one of the best hefes on the market – $40 total. Do the math there – I don’t care if I lose at poker night, I came home a winner last night.

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Beer Love 2.0

By John on May 11, 2008 (No Comments)

We launched the first official redesign of the The BeerFathers web site this week, meaning we’re officially version 2.0, with a web 2.0 look. And officially we will never use that term again because we hate it.

This site redesign got started a little under a month ago and we took the opportunity to update a lot. Highlights include:

• We made the site much more aesthetically pleasing – cleaner graphics, larger fonts, wider layout, more breathing room, etc.
• We made the site much faster – like a billion times faster.
• We merged the beer blog and beer ratings together so they can live together in beer harmony. You can still pull out just the ratings if you like by clicking on Beer Ratings at the top of the page.
• We put the full content of the last 25 beer blog and beer rating posts on the home page so you don’t have to individually click on each post to read them. We hated having to do that just as much as you.
• We added some “meta data” to the beer ratings – namely you can now browse by Beer Styles – we broke these out into two main categories – Ales and Lagers.
• We put the full counts of the number of beers in each of our ratings categories so you know what you’re getting into.
• We put sortable beer results on all ratings, styles and search pages. This will give you a table where you can click on the header to sort by beer name, date reviewed, reviewer and number of comments.
• We made the search results a lot better and a lot more usable, especially if we don’t have any results matching your search.
• We added a Twitter feed so we can post quick micro-updates.
• We made the ads (hopefully) a little bit more relevant to the content.
• We did a lot of boring behind the scenes work to help with search engine results and things like that.
• And finally we’ve got a ton of ideas in the queue that we will push in the coming months. Videos, free stuff and more.

We welcome any and all feedback – Twitter us up or drop us an email. Cheers!

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New The BeerFathers Features

By John on January 18, 2008 (No Comments)

Though The BeerFathers web site already packs a good amount of both beer and love, we felt it was time to add something to the mix – a little lagniappe as we call back in the Bayou State. So, we decided to end our glorious one-way communication and give you some tools to interact with us directly on both our beer blog and our beer reviews. So on all those pages you’ll now find the ability to post comments and feedback about our posts. Think we’re full of it? You’re probably right – just tell us so. Think we’re spot on? You sound terrific – let us know. Have a good beer you’d like us to review? We’d love to review it – just say so. We hope you enjoy the new feature. In the meantime, drink and be merry.

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