Coors Brews Confusion With Decision to Put New Label on Its Beer

Coca-Cola Co.’s snafu with new Coke shows what happens when you change ingredients in a time-honored brew. Now Adolph Coors Co. has found out what happens when you keep the ingredients but change the label.

After the brewery slapped a new “Original Draft” label on its flagship beer last summer, some longtime Coors drinkers mistakenly thought the beer somehow had changed.

At taverns and liquor stores in El Paso and Southern California--two Coors strongholds--sales slowed as cans and bottles bearing the old “Banquet Beer” label gave way to the “Original Draft.”

“We thought the change would help us, but it kind of backfired,” Mark Martinez of the Coors Distributing Co. in El Paso said Thursday. “We were talking to the brewery to try to tell them how much it was hurting us.”

Coors, an up-and-coming contender in the beer wars, took notice.

Next week, Coors will begin selling the beer under its old “Banquet Beer” label again in El Paso and Southern California--alongside its “Original Draft” label.

Aimed at Younger Drinkers

“We were faced with a choice--argue with the customers and say it is the same beer or give them what they wanted,” Coors spokesman Doyle Albee said from company headquarters in Golden, a Denver suburb.

Coors’ experience recalls Coca-Cola’s experiment in 1985, when the soft-drink giant replaced its original cola flavor with a new formula.

Consumers demanded the old flavor. Coca-Cola brought it back three months later, renaming it “Coca-Cola Classic.”

Coors introduced the “Original Draft” label because Miller Brewing Co. was having success with an ad campaign that emphasized its draft beer, Albee said. He said Coors wanted consumers to know Coors has been putting draft beer in bottles since 1959.

“We also found that new graphics could attract perhaps a younger drinker, in the 21-to-25 age group,” he said.

The brewery began bottling the beer under the new label last July.

This fall, Coors officials were surprised to learn they had some disgruntled customers.

“We never in our advertising campaign said this is the same beer in a new package. Perhaps that added to the confusion,” Albee said.

He said that while Coors lost some business with the label change in a few locations, the “Original Draft” label already is building a following.