Everything You Wanted to Know About the Historic Coors Boycott

“Brewing A Boycott” by University of La Verne history professor Dr. Allyson Brantley is a long overdue treatise on one of America’s most renowned and long-lasting product boycotts—the Coors Beer boycott.

And the Teamsters were right in the middle of it, from Colorado to San Francisco, to New York, to Teamsters Joint Council 42 in Southern California, to Texas, and many points in between.

Professor Brantley used her history roots to meticulously research and contact all living principals in the many-faceted boycott.  She ties together the boycotting interests of gays, Blacks, Chicanos, Union members distributing Coors products, Teamsters in Joint Council 42 Local Unions and of course, where it all began, the brewery workers in Golden Colorado.

In the day, members of the Coors family had a little something to alarm and enrage almost everybody, and the book details the evolution, sometimes painful and very frustrating, of a successful boycott. And primary in Joint Council 42 was Coors’s vow to break Unions and their members’ contracts.  Oldtimers will recall So Cal-based Union-busting attorney Erwin (Bud) Lerten, the prime go-to for Coors.

If you are an aficionado of local Labor history, this is the book for you.  Especially Teamster history.

You can purchase this book here, click the link: Brewing a Boycott | Allyson P. Brantley | University of North Carolina Press (uncpress.org)