{"id":7984,"date":"2017-10-13T00:12:04","date_gmt":"2017-10-13T06:12:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/?p=7984"},"modified":"2017-10-13T00:12:04","modified_gmt":"2017-10-13T06:12:04","slug":"thirty-years-after-slur-corona-getting-last-laugh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/thirty-years-after-slur-corona-getting-last-laugh\/","title":{"rendered":"Thirty Years After Slur, Corona Getting Last Laugh"},"content":{"rendered":"

“Corona is the New King of Beers,” reads a headline in The Wall Street Journal <\/i><\/a>from earlier this month. Maybe so. While the self-proclaimed King, Budweiser, watches sales shrink every year, Corona is actually pushing out new brands. In a direct challenge to Michelob Ultra, 90-calorie Corona Premier<\/a> makes its debut in February next year.<\/p>\n

It’s been a long road for the skunky yellow import. Back in 1987, exactly 30 years ago, Corona was almost killed in the US by a malicious rumor that Mexican brewery workers pissed in the vats. Just as Procter & Gamble once faced rumors that its moon-and-stars logo was linked to Satanism<\/a>, the piss rumor took on a bizarre life of its own. It had enough legs that store owners started refusing shipments, and sales crashed by 80 percent<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The rumor was eventually traced to a distributor for Heineken (the number-one imported beer at the time) and Corona was awarded $3 million in damages. It took every bit of that to rehabilitate Corona’s reputation, including a $500,000 infomerical beamed to television stations<\/a> via satellite.<\/p>\n

Today, though, Corona is by far the top-selling beer import<\/a> in the US. Meanwhile, Heineken has dropped to a distant third (behind another Mexican beer, Modelo). Heineken’s big rollout this year was a non-alcoholic monstrosity called “Heineken 0.0.” <\/a>A-B InBev is still churning out the Lime-A-Rita flavors and buying craft brewers, but its traditional heavy-hitters have gone flat. If Corona isn’t quite the new King yet, it is at least standing in the throne room.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Corona is the New King of Beers,” reads a headline in The Wall Street Journal from earlier this month. Maybe so. While the self-proclaimed King, Budweiser, watches sales shrink every year, Corona is actually pushing out new brands. In a direct challenge to Michelob Ultra, 90-calorie Corona Premier makes its debut in February next year. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":101,"featured_media":2318,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[75,333,721,73,722,60,82,578,1646,1813,2092],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7984"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/101"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7984"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7984\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2318"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}