Allyson P. Brantley, Brewing a Boycott: How a Grassroots Coalition Fought Coors and Remade American Consumer Activism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021)

Allyson P. Brantley has provided us with an impressive, full account of just how complicated, significant, vulnerable, and often-forgotten consumer boycotts can be, based on the true story of just such a regional (then national) boycott of Coors beer in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Brantley, who teaches history at the University of La Verne, reveals how this iconic, evolving social movement began as a 1957 strike by United Brewery Workers Local 366, who called a boycott after the Coors brewery in Golden, Colorado, based on Coors’s union-busting attempts and “Golden’s draconian antipicketing ordinance” (19). That boycott ended with the strike, but resumed in 1970 as a Chicano community-led effort to pressure Coors to hire more Latinos. This boycott picked up supporters over the next two decades, including the LGBT community, African Americans, Teamsters, labor, and left groups. The boycott once even witnessed Local 366 opposing it as harming their livelihood. Those same brewery workers later united with the boycott when striking again in 1977 (109), only to have the AFL-CIO cancel the boycott in 1987, almost a decade after both the strike and union had been broken (171). Forces committed to boycotting Coors continued to “reconvene” (177) the boycott into the 1990s and as late as 2016 (186), tying the longtime conservative Coors family activism to the Donald Trump presidential candidacy that year. The legacy of the Coors boycott is more than those who still refer to drink their beer. As Brantley points out, “Newer generations of boycotters have followed suit, using the boycott tool as a means of political protest and retaliation….(5)” In this case, it was against a corporation that employed polygraph tests and whose executives helped launch the Heritage Foundation. Coors also learned it could both maintain union-busting and conservative activism as well as win back members of boycotting communities with well-publicized philanthropy.