What You Don't Know About Coors Seltzer

When you buy your next 12-pack of hard seltzer – maybe the bestselling White Claw (via The Drinks Business) or maybe the brand-new Coors Seltzer – you're well on your way to consuming more than a gallon of beverage that eventually winds up down the drain. What if you could actually add water to America's rivers by drinking hard seltzer?

That's the concept behind Molson Coors' latest environmental cause. The Coors Seltzer 12-pack declares it boldly, in big print: "Seltzer with a mission." With every 12-pack sold, Coors will restore 500 gallons of fresh water in U.S. rivers. That's a pretty good tradeoff, considering only nine pints of water went into those dozen 12-ounce slim cans. Coors pointed out in a press release that Americans drank 87 million gallons of hard seltzer over this past summer. Even though the first cans of Coors Seltzer appeared on store shelves sometime around Labor Day (via Best Tasting Spirits), Molson Coors did contribute to that summertime total. The company released Vizzy hard seltzer in April (via Beverage Daily).

No matter whose seltzer it was, Molson Coors wanted to restore all those lost gallons by giving away 175,000 half-cases of Coors Seltzer. Coors says that by registering online for a free 12-pack, you're essentially volunteering to do some environmental work. The beer maker promotes the giveaway as "the easiest volunteer program on the planet." Where

Coors' ad agency obviously has given up on the idea that some sort of Greta Thunberg-like sacrifice is needed to save the planet. "If you want to change something in the world, you can't ask people to change their lives to provoke that change," the agency representative in charge of the Coors Seltzer campaign said. In other words, keep doing what you're doing: Drink hard seltzer, save a river. Who can argue with that?

Coors says it's committed to restoring 1 billion gallons of fresh water over the next year. The beer maker is targeting 16 watersheds as part of a broader water-restoration initiative called Change the Course. Coors is even helping to remove a dam on Sweetwater Creek in Florida so that fish can reach it (via Business For Water).

Molson Coors may be making up for all the gallons of water it uses to make beer and hard seltzer. But Coors helping fish is also good karma, considering some of the damage the company inflicted on the famous Rocky Mountain spring water that flows past its brewery in Golden, Colorado. A Coors worker in 2000 accidentally diverted beer to the on-site sewage plant, causing the plant to overflow beer and sludge into Clear Creek. The spill killed just about every fish in a seven-mile stretch of the creek, some 50,000 fish in all. A similar mistake at the brewery 10 years earlier killed 13,000 fish (via The Denver Post).