Coors Light Is Fair Game

If Coors wants to call its beer “the taste of the Rockies,” it shouldn’t use Virginia water in the Coors Light it sells in the Northeast, a federal judge said. U.S. District Judge Michael Mukasey lifted his week-old ban on a multimedia ad campaign unleashed last month by Coors archrival Anheuser-Busch Cos. of St. Louis. The pointed ads challenge Coors’ claim that its beer is made with only the purest Rocky Mountain spring water. The ads say that “a concentrated form of Coors Light leaves Colorado in a tanker and travels to Virginia,” where it is diluted with “local water” and bottled. By contrast, Anheuser-Busch Natural Light “leaves our breweries fresh and ready to drink,” the ads claim.

Coors, based in Golden, Colo., called the Busch ads false and misleading and filed a $10-million suit Aug. 7 in federal court.

Coors concedes that it built a packaging plant in Virginia in 1985 as part of its nationwide expansion. At least 65% of the Coors Light sold in the Northeast is bottled there.

Busch concedes that it uses the same concentrate method in bottling its beer. But it says Anheuser-Busch beer is fresher because it doesn’t ship the concentrate across the country in railroad tankers.

The judge declined to offer his opinion on that debate.

But he said Coors failed to show that the Busch ads were literally false. He also discounted a consumer survey Coors did to try to prove the ads were misleading.

Moreover, the judge said, it’s not right for Coors to argue that there is no difference between Colorado Coors and Virginia Coors.

“After having advertised for years that Coors beers tasted better than other beers because Coors beers are made from Rocky Mountain water, Coors now cannot seek (a court order) that would prohibit Anheuser-Busch’s hoisting Coors by its own petard,” Mukasey wrote.