Brewing a Boycott: How a Grassroots Coalition Fought Coors and Remade American Consumer Activism (Justice, Power and Politics)

Allyson Brantley has provided us with a concise look at a beer company, the politics of their ownership/leadership, and a 40+ year long grass roots movement to boycott the products of the Coors company.Brantley mines a number of sources, including contemporary newspapers and magazines, oral interviews, and company records to craft a story that is so much more than just one of a product boycott.Her work shows us how activists from many communities, including racial minorities, laborers (and the unions that tried to represent them), and members of the LGBTQ community banded together to boycott the signature Coors beer product that the brewery at Golden, Colorado produced. By binding these disparate groups together, Brantley has shown us how an unlikely coalition of people can have an impact on such a huge corporation as Coors.During the unexpectedly long boycott (Brantley traces it from its origins in the 1950's all the way into the 1990s), the reader sees a transformation in the Coors company, though it took quite some time to achieve many of the goals that the boycotters wanted.The most interesting part of this book to me was the tie to Conservatism and the Coors family relationship with candidate (and later President) Ronald Reagan. I found her analysis to be brilliant and the evidence easily showed how these ties to conservative politics lengthened the boycott.