![]() ![]() Ides was not very good, but thanks to these street-approved leading men it was suddenly very cool, and its share of the market was owed entirely to the patronage of hip-hop kingmakers. Snoop Dogg, Ice Cube, and the Wu Tang Clan all starred in commercials extolling the virtues of St. If you buy Colt 45 you will surely be in the bone zone.īut it was the glorification and validation of malt liquor in the hip-hop sphere of influence during the late '80s and '90s that completely changed the game and hardened the battle lines between concerned citizens and 40-ounce warriors. An attractive woman hangs on the shoulder of the malt-liquor-loving alpha male as he grins that beguiling and disarming grin and the text below declares, "It works every time!" In a TV ad Williams holds up a Colt 45 and tells us the two rules for a good time: 1) "Never run out of Colt 45" and 2) "Never forget rule number one." The camera zooms out to reveal an attractive woman and schmaltzy music plays in the background, music that sounds somewhat porn-y. Those Williams Colt 45 ads remain iconic. In the early '80s Colt 45 recruited no less than Billy Dee Williams, Lando Calrissian himself, as the charming and handsome champion of its brand. When brewers finally figured out that blacks were buying malt beverages at a higher rate than their white counterparts, the ad men dutifully went to work on exploiting that angle. Its earliest competitor for malt-beverage hegemony was Baltimore's own Colt 45. Country Club was literally attempting to push malt liquor on the sorts of people who frequented country clubs. The ad allows us to peek in on an imaginary world of dinner-jacket WASPs with parted hair guffawing (about the poors?) and merrily guzzling down Country Club malt liquor in fancy goblets. tastes exciting!" ad from 1955 is a far cry from the target demographic brewers of malt beverages aim to entice today. They focused on the radness of the slight bump in alcohol content compared to other domestics. Those early marketing campaigns weren't any more evil than any other marketing campaign, which to be fair is not some huge achievement. ![]() But then, in the beginning malt liquor was marketed quite differently, to an altogether different cohort. The higher-than-average alcohol content and the lower prices wreaked havoc on America's inner cities and vulnerable populations, and to walk around with a 40 in your hand is to be aware of this, to in some tiny way be complicit. ![]() To declare any sort of allegiance to malt liquor is to invite the unpacking of the efficacy and worth of a product with grim subtext and sinister undertones that include both predatory marketing against minorities on the one hand and well-heeled tourist appropriation on the other. Ferguson definition of beer, both beer and not beer, something that would alternatively be marketed as hip, then dangerous, then hip in a dangerous way. Out of this experimentation with corn and sugar and other adjuncts was born malt liquor, now found in 40-ounce bottles at any of your cheaper liquor stores.Īnd though it is very obviously beer, it's been sort of a relegated to a Plessy vs. Brewers in ye olden days were always on a quest to increase the alcoholic content of their brews, to give it a kick not seen since before Prohibition. The thing is, it's actually just foggy, straw-colored lager that relies not on hops but various adjuncts and is only not simply beer by dint of marketing strategies. Malt liquor is, to many folks, garbage water in sheep's clothing, or something somehow different than other sorts of more socially permissible swill like Budweiser or Coors. ![]()
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