Coors Light

Everything about Coors Light is organized around one idea: cold. The light lager from Golden, Colorado — the self-styled Silver Bullet — prints mountains on its cans that turn blue at fridge temperature, and its marketing has chased low temperatures ever since the first can in 1978.

The timing of that launch is the good part. A year earlier, Smokey and the Bandit was a nationwide hit built on a true premise: Coors wasn't sold east of the Mississippi, and the scarcity had turned it into a cult object Americans smuggled home in car trunks. Coors Light arrived riding that outlaw mystique — then outgrew it into one of the most ordinary, everywhere beers in North America, which is its own kind of victory.

It is now the flagship light beer of Molson Coors, poured across the U.S., Canada, and the UK; Brand Finance puts the Coors family at No. 12 among the world's most valuable beer brands.

The lightest shade of gold, filtered brilliantly clear, with carbonation that prickles more than it foams. Flavor arrives in a whisper — faint sweet corn and grain, a suggestion of hops — and exits clean. The real signature is texture: smooth, watery-light, best barely above freezing. When the can's mountains turn blue, it has reached the temperature it was designed for.