Some Guy’s Adventures Through the Pint Glass, Part 4

Day 4: Thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said, “. . . I drank what?”

Nestled against an unforgiving shoulder of the Rocky Mountains is Golden, Colorado, home of the Colorado School of Mines, a nationally-renowned engineering school. The small but prestigious Mines is known for accepting a wide selection of gifted high school nerdlings, dorks, and brainiacs and transforming them—through the liberal application of heat, pressure, and homework—into shockingly successful paycheck magnets who have learned to design, build, test, demolish, or extract from the bosom of the Earth things that regular folks like you and me probably can’t even spell.

While you were doing kegstands, going shirtless in 5° weather to a football game, vomiting into your shoes (or somebody else’s), or showing up drunk, stoned, or naked to final exams, your contemporaries at the School of Mines were reading, computing, studying, stressing out, having minor emotional breakdowns, and then studying some more. Pressed to excel, the students at the Colorado School of Mines show a drive and motivation that matches their extreme intelligence, and this is why they’re out there earning bushels of money while the rest of us vegetate in front of the computer for hours on end, reading (or writing) pointless drivel² instead of checking the classified section for jobs.

. . . or at least that’s what they want you to believe, and by and large, the public has bought it. A closer look by a trained eye, however, reveals startling evidence to suggest that Mines students aren’t nearly as smart as they look:

First of all, they’ve freely chosen to live in a town that, on its best days, tends to smell like a frat-house carpet; 

Second, they voluntarily sequester themselves in an environment where the male-to-female ratio approaches roughly 1,732 to 1³;

Third—and most important—Mines students, on the relatively few times where they do relax (weekends, mostly, but also during E-Days, a traditional yearly celebration of drinking, games, and social interaction better described as the Orgy of Normalcy), all these alleged geniuses voluntarily and openly drink gallons upon gallons of

Coors Light, Coors Brewing Company, Golden, Colorado. 
 

It pains me to criticize any sort of alcoholic beverage, because they’re all very close to my heart, like beloved children that make me fall over and say rude things to strangers. And I realize that by criticizing Coors Light, I risk being savagely beaten by an angry mob of Orediggers swinging slide rules and graphing calculators, but I can’t help but tell the truth: this beer sucks.

Not only does Coors Light have an unfortunate tendency to taste like Windex⁴ when not sufficiently refrigerated, but also even its own advertising department makes it clear that even they don’t like the beer. Think about this: Coors Light, the “Silver Bullet,” is or recently was advertized as “the coldest-tasting beer in the world.” The coldest-tasting beer in the world. Seriously.

Look, people, cold is not a flavor. This is as dumb as calling it “the tallest-smelling beer in the world”—even if it’s true, it’s meaningless.

And beyond its coldness, you’ll rarely find flavor mentioned at all in Coors Light’s advertising. Instead, you’ll be told that the little mountains on each can will turn blue when the beer is cold. I can only assume that this was developed for beer drinkers with no nerve endings in their hands or tongues, because feeling a cold beer can is usually a good way of telling if it’s cold, and if that doesn’t work, actually drinking the beer generally does the trick.⁵

But that’s neither here nor there—more important is this: what does it tell you when the best selling point the marketing folks can find has to do with the can they put the beer in?

A: It tells you that this beer sucks (see above). If the packaging of your product is an actual selling point, you really ought to consider improving your product.

Don’t get me wrong, Coors Light isn’t poisonous or anything; I’ve had several drinks that were worse and not only lived through it, but probably became a better person for it. Coors Light is merely a colossal disappointment for somebody looking for a complex, flavorful beer. It’s certainly more than adequate as a chaser for that shot you’re going to regret in about forty-five minutes, or for washing down stronger drinks like unsweetened lemonade or lukewarm tap water. I don’t know how old you are, but no matter how young or healthy you are, you have only a finite number of drinks left to drink before you kick off. Make sure you make the right choice.

I’m afraid I have to give Coors Light my lowest rating yet: Three (3) snarling werewolves, one for each can of Silver Bullet that came out of the Beer Mystery Case.

For more of Some Guy’s Adventures through the Pint Glass, check here: Day 1  Day 2  Day 3  Day 4  Day 5  Day 6

NOTES
1. For example, I’ve never been able to spell “skyscraper” or “coal.”
2. Please note the proper spelling, drivel instead of dribble. As internet misspellings go, this one bugs me almost as much as “wallah” for “voilà.”
3. It could be argued that the skewed male-to-female ratio at the School of Mines does support the notion that the female students are pretty smart . . . but as women in Alaska like to say, the odds may be good, but the goods are odd.
4. Yes, I know what Windex tastes like. I suppose I’m going to get a lecture about this. What are you, my mother?
5. And if your tongue can’t tell you whether the beer is cold, what the hell does it matter what temperature it’s at anyway?