I always figured with St. Louis being the home of A-B it was hard to get anything beside Bud there.
Ya know, that makes a sequel set in 2005 on the same route (but w/ a different cargo, natch) seem like a fun idea! Or maybe we could sell the idea to tourists like the ones who take ‘Kennedy’s Last Ride’ in Dallas, but longer?
That’s one of the many things that peg me as a child of the 70’s - I grew up w/ the 8-track of that movie’s music being played all day many weekends of my childhood.
Well, I bought Cannonball Run on dvd, now I’ll have to find the Smokey movies and *Gumball Rally * while I’m at it - thanks a lot! 
I was able to buy Fat Tire in Topeka, Kansas night before last, and was not able to buy it in Dayton, Ohio the night before that. In Massachusetts I didn’t even ask. Fine by me - the less that goes east means the more for me.
To continue the hijack, when I moved to Colorado from Arkansas four years ago, Fat Tire was unheard of in Arkansas. (Someone I didn’t know actually mentioned Fat Tire to me, the day I was leaving to drive to CO. She told me she was having cases brought in for a Christmas party.) I fell in love with it in CO, then moved to DC for three years, where I couldn’t get. On a trip home to Arkansas a year ago or so, I remember seeing a sign for FT in a liquor store, but I don’t think they had it available. Now I’m living in Arkansas again, and it’s everywhere, at least in the town where I live. I don’t know how they did it, but it’s in every resturaunt in town, even ones that don’t have much beyond Bud and Michelob. Their distributer must have made a deal with the devil to go from unknown to ubiquitous in a place as untrendy as here. I don’t mind, though! I can even get New Belgium’s other brews like 1554 and Loft! Hooray, beer!
I’ve noticed it in Arkansas as well, Alan Smithee. I fell in love with Fat Tire when I lived in Boulder for six months back in 1993-94. I’ve never seen it in Memphis (where I’ve lived, off and on, for about ten years now), but I can drive five minutes, cross the Mississippi into West Memphis, Arkansas, and get it at the Walgreens that’s got the huge beer/liquor selection.
Those New Belgians make some terrific beers. I worked at a liquor store in Boulder, and we were encouraged to sample all the wares so we could make informed recommendations to customers. That was easily the coolest perk of any job I’ve ever had.
Actually, Coors beer was cold filtered and didn’t have to be refrigerated, even though it was unpasteurized. The refrigeration was part of the mystique.
Funny thing about Texarkana. The Texas side is dry. All the liquor stores are on the Arkansas side of town. If you drive down State Line you’ll see it lined with party barns and liquor stores – all on the east side of town. Unless the Coors beer was bootleg before he even picked it up, the legal beer would have been on the Arkansas side of town, meaning he’d take I-20 from Atlanta to Shreveport and then 71 from Shreveport to Texarkana; never even going into Texas. If they were avoiding the Interstate, then they’d have taken U.S. Highway 82, also not going into Texas. Furthermore, regardless of which route they took, even if the beer was bootlegged and needed to be picked up on the Texas side of town, the entire operation would have been confined to the city limits of Texarkana Texas, passing back into Arkansas before leaving the city limits. A Bowie County (Texas) Sheriff would have never been encountered.
As a native of Texarkana, that always bugged me. Incidently, I’ve lived on both ends of Smokey’s trip, even working in Jonesboro Georgia where the Texarkana scenes were filmed.
But remember, Jackie Gleason’s character was chasing down Sally Field for skipping out on the wedding. They could very well have followed her into Arkansas doing so. Burt Reynolds gets involved because of her, not because of the beer.
Was Coors beer of yesteryear like our modern day obsession with Cuban Cigars?
Everyone swears they are better because they are rare and/or forbidden?
I imagine when Castro dies, Cuba becomes Bahamas Norte and the embargo is lifted people will realize that Cubans don’t taste much different than Dominicans, Dunhills or Swisher Sweets.
I think on the day the embargo is lifted, I will have a Cuban Cigar and a can of Coors.
Get *Stroker Ace * while you’re at it…
The forbidden fruit always tastes the sweetest. Cuban cigars aren’t that great. There are better ones being made elsewhere.
Actually, I’ve been contemplating a ‘real life’ remake going south to north-bringing Sweetwater 420 from Atlanta to Minnesota. I knows I can beat their time!
On draft, possibly, but in a liquor store or even a supermarket you could always find Schlitz, Hamm’s, Stroh’s, Miller, etc. In fact, the first time I ever tasted Olympia was in St. Louis.
As long as the nitpicking fest is continuing. In the movie, Bandit ended you stealing the Coors from what looked like a distribution center, or at least a warehouse of some sort. I’m no TABC expert, but maybe it’s legal to have a beer warehouse in a dry county?
That’s a negatory, good buddy. I think I’d rather get a jabanero enema.
Everyone pretty much has it. One more point.
Coors chose not to distribute east of the Mississippi at that time due to production and supply chain limitations. (A modern equivalent is Yuengling, which has attained the same mystique and amateur bootleg activity as Coors had at that time). No one really cared that the Bandit was violating Coors internal marketing decisions 
The issue was taxes. If they picked it up in Texarkana, Texas, then the beer was taxed for Texas, and transporting it across the state line constituted bootlegging.
At the time (at least in Georgia) each individual can of beer and bottle of booze was identified with what state the taxes had been paid on it for. I haven’t seen those designations in years, so they must be tracking things via barcodes at the distributer level now.
Someone should populate the Smokey and the Bandit trivia page on IMDb with this wisdom … it actually makes the movie sort of interesting!
Trivia: the Stroker Ace theme song mentions a bandit being on Stroker’s tail.
Rather than the movie, get the book Stroker Ace. The movie is a joke…the book is actually funny, and full of NASCAR jokes from drivers on the circuit.