Zima

1992 – 1993 · The clear craze

A beer with the beer taken out

Coors was the third-largest brewer in the United States and wanted a product for people who did not much like beer.¹³ According to Denver’s Westword, it spent a year and a half and a reported $3.5 million developing one.¹² The result was brewed like a beer and then filtered to remove, in the words of the brand’s own website, “all of the beer cues, including color, flavor, foam and aftertaste.”³³ Citrus flavouring went back in.

The timing was not an accident. PepsiCo, Gillette and Procter & Gamble were all selling clear versions of familiar products, and Miller was testing a clear beer.²⁵ Coors chose a name without the word beer in it. Zima is Russian for winter.³³

It went on sale in three test markets in September 1992, at a suggested $4.99 a six-pack.¹² In April and October 1993 Coors widened distribution to roughly a third of the country, and in December it announced a national launch.¹

1994 · The launch

A man in a black hat, and $38 million

Zima went national in February 1994: bars and restaurants first, supermarkets a month later.¹⁸³³ Slate later put the promotional budget at $38 million, more than Coors spent on Coors Light that year. The Denver Post’s estimate at the time was $50 million.¹³¹² Coors’s total advertising expense rose from $272.5 million to $327.6 million.³

The television campaign, by Foote, Cone & Belding in San Francisco, starred the comedian Roger Kabler as a pitchman in a black hat who replaced his S’s with Z’s and offered “zomething different.”¹²¹³ The ads did not say what Zima was. That was the point, and for a year it worked. Coors estimated that 70% of regular drinkers tried it.¹³

The company had spent about $120 million in 1993 on capital projects that included enlarging its Memphis plant for Zima.¹ In 1994 Coors sold 20.4 million barrels of malt beverages, and its filing credited Zima among the fastest-growing brands.²

1995 · The second year

“Everyone wanted it to be a fad”

The people who tried Zima mostly did not come back. Slate’s verdict was that it “tasted like tinfoil soaked in Fresca.”¹³ David Letterman made it a regular entry in his Top Ten lists.¹² In the second quarter of 1995 Zima volume was down about 60% on the year before, and Coors named it first among the reasons for a 36.5% fall in quarterly net income.¹²

The brand had also found the wrong customers, by its own lights. Coors had aimed it at drinkers aged 21 to 34, men above all, and told stores to keep it away from the wine coolers.¹²¹³ It sold best to young women. The account executive at the agency put it plainly: with a clear, citrus drink in a pretty bottle, “it’s definitely not seen as a hardcore, traditionally masculine drink, so it’s invited to be seen as wussy.”¹²

For the full year, Coors reported that Zima volumes fell about 49%. Because Zima earned a higher gross margin than its beers, the company’s gross profit fell too.³

I think everyone was waiting for Zima to fail. Everyone wanted it to be a fad.

1995 – 2007 · The reinventions

Gold, Citrus, XXX and back again

The first fix was Zima Gold: amber, 5.4% alcohol, aimed at men who wanted something stronger. It was tested in Omaha and Tucson in February 1995, went national in May and was withdrawn by late summer.¹²² Coors’s next annual report said, with unusual candour, that “the success of this product was not as expected.”³

The original survived. Slate reports 403,000 barrels in 1996 and a recovery to 610,000 by 2000, after Coors changed the formula to taste more like a lemon-lime soda and sold it as a hot-weather drink.¹³ A citrus version was tested in 1998.⁵ Japan, where Coors’s subsidiary was “focused on Zima,” became a steady second market.⁷

Then Smirnoff Ice arrived in January 2001 and the big brewers followed it with spirit-branded malt drinks of their own.²⁰ Coors told investors that Zima was “impacted disproportionately” by the newcomers.⁸ In 2004 it answered with Zima XXX, at 5.9% alcohol in flavours such as Hard Punch and Hard Orange. In 2007 it reversed again, with a lighter, fruitier Zima aimed at women in their twenties.¹³

2008 · The withdrawal

A letter to distributors

Coors’s U.S. business was folded into the MillerCoors joint venture on July 1, 2008.¹¹ The new company inherited a brand that, by Slate’s account, was still selling tens of thousands of barrels a year, and two fresh problems. Utah had passed a law requiring new labels, and MillerCoors pulled Zima from the state in September. California, one of Zima’s largest markets, began taxing flavoured malt beverages as distilled spirits on October 1.¹³

On Monday, October 20, MillerCoors told distributors by letter that production had stopped on October 10. Its chief marketing officer, Andy England, cited weakness in the “malternative” segment and declining consumer interest. Remaining stock was expected to last through December, and distributors were asked to fill the shelf space with Sparks, a caffeinated malt drink.¹⁴¹⁵

How many barrels Zima sold in its last year has not been published.

2017 – today · The afterlife

Back, for a limited time

Zima never stopped being made. Molson Coors kept selling it in Japan, where it was contract-brewed in China and, by one report, sold more than a million cases in 2013.¹¹²⁹

In February 2017 MillerCoors confirmed it would bring the brand back to the United States.²³ It went on sale for the July 4 weekend, to be sold only until Labor Day.²⁴ The company says two-thirds of the stock was gone within four weeks. It made 20% more for a second run in May 2018.²⁶ In 2019 it did not bring it back.²⁸

In Japan, shipments stopped at the end of 2021 after the pandemic closed the bars it depended on. Hakutsuru Sake Brewing relaunched it there on March 31, 2023.³⁰³¹ In the United States, Molson Coors let its trademark registration expire in 2024.³²