This is the school year’s first installment of On Tap the Yale Herald’s weekly beer column, written by Reviews Editors Theo Kubovy-Weiss and Thea Robertson. On Tap covers everything from Natty Lights to home-brewed stouts, aiming to expand Yale students’ tastes when it comes to the country’s most popular alcoholic beverage.
Banquet (n): an elaborate and formal meal for many people.
The Banquet’s name evokes grandeur, like this is the kind of beer you’d serve to a diplomat or a debutante while gorging on caviar. It positions itself as the beer of the aristocracy (Coors’s answer to Miller High Life’s “champagne of beers”), as if this would be an appropriate beverage to consume at the Metropolitan Opera or, like, the White House.
It is not. This is a frat beer, and no attempt by the Coors branding team can convince the public otherwise. It is cheap (a dollar a brew if you buy right), sold in units of 30, and its banana-yellow jacket can be seen littering the floors of Greek-lettered houses across the nation. Its flavor is subtle, but in more of an I’m-gonna-shotgun-this-super-duper-fast way than in a tastefully delicate way. A muted echo of banana trails each sip, leaving you with a lingering sweetness that blunts the alcohol’s bite. And the centrally-emblazoned Coors logo makes it hard to see the can as anything but a mass-produced vessel for 19-year-olds’ favorite brand of bread-water.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The Coors Banquet is an abundantly refreshing, impressively chuggable, and surprisingly inoffensive beer—one that can find its home at any party with people who prioritize intoxication over gustatory complexity.. And its cost-effectiveness makes this a great choice for the beer-averse-turned-beer-curious. One of our editors, an outspoken beer hater, gave this beer the high praise of “tolerable.”
Overall: 6.9/10
