The Corona Mega Mystery in Full

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Those of you who follow me on social media may have seen part of the story I’m about to tell. This is the fullest version to date.

Thursday last, in the calm, normal time before the ice storm, Sally and I decamped to the Oregon Coast to celebrate an anniversary. En Route to Oceanside, an unincorporated town of 361, we stopped in Tillamook for dinner, selecting a Mexican restaurant I will not name in case it is on the fringes of an international beer-smuggling ring. Our server, who also seemed to be the owner, offered us a choice of one beer: Corona. He gestured at a cooler, but instead of seeing the familiar blue and white, it was filled with 1.2 liter bombers with labels the color of a paper bag. I write about beer for a living, and I spend a fair amount of time in Mexican restaurants, and I have never seen a bottle like that. Mystified, I asked about it, and he told us (paraphrasing here), “That’s the kind we get in Mexico.” He said it encouragingly, as if inviting me to sample a local delicacy.

The mystery deepened when he brought us quart-sized mason jars and the bottle, along with a full lime cut in two. Historically, of course Corona has come to the U.S. in a clear bottle, horribly light-struck. (I confess I haven’t tried the newish cans to see if they’re pre-skunking the beer for continuity.) The bottle he brought us was thick-walled and the beer inside absent any hint of skunk. It was, moreover, quite a delightful beer. The malt was present and on the bready/toasty side, and I swear I was getting delicate noble-hop spicing. It was extremely fresh and crisp. It held up beautifully to the cold January evening—and the spice of the food. It was a perfect example of why Mexican beer is taking over the U.S. market.

But: what the hell was this beer?

Every good mystery has clues, and I found a few. If you zoom in on the label, you’ll see that the beer is 4.5% ABV. That differs from the 4.6% you find in standard blue-and-white labeled Corona. Corona Familiar, the grand cru of the line, clocks in at 4.8%. Hmmm. Even more curious is the importer: Oz Trading Group of Hidalgo, Texas. Finally, that puckered label, which looks like it was laser-printed and applied with the wrong glue, homebrew-style, definitely seemed sub-professional.

Thanks to a reminder by Drew Starr, I think we can answer part of the mystery. In 2012, AB InBev (ABI) bought Grupo Modelo, Corona’s parent company, for $20.1 billion. For the the deal to proceed, the DOJ made ABI divest Modelo’s US holdings, transferring them (as well as a shiny new brewery) to Constellation Brands. So, if you go to Mexico and order a Corona, the beer is made by ABI. If you buy one in the US, it’s made by Constellation. Are they different? The version made by ABI—the “kind you get in Mexico”—is 4.5%, like the beer in Tillamook. Most suggestive!

Then there’s that Hidalgo-based importer—as unlikely as the brown-bottle Corona. When ABI purchased Modelo, this happened (and apologies for quoting Wikipedia, but in this case their prose is the clearest):

“Constellation had formerly imported Corona and other Modelo brands to the United States …. It now produces its own versions of those products for the US, with Modelo serving all other countries. The transaction included full ownership of Crown Imports LLC, which provided Constellation with complete, independent control of all aspects of the US commercial business; a brewery in Mexico; exclusive perpetual brand license in the US to import, market and sell Corona and the Modelo brands and the freedom to develop brand extensions and innovations for the US market.” (Emphasis mine)

If what I drank was indeed ABI-produced Corona, it is apparently coming across the border not entirely legally. I spent too much time digging around the internet trying to figure this out, and I came up dry. If you do a Texas business search, you can find the person who registered Oz Trading Group back in 2014, and that person has the same name as a Hidalgo city councilman with a colorful past. I couldn’t clarify whether they were the same man, so there the trail runs cold. Oz Trading seems to be a legit company (albeit with zero internet presence), but is its trade in Corona Mega a part of the white or gray market? Unclear—though it’s hard to see how it’s completely above board.

I can answer one question tangentially related to this mystery. The stuff they get in Corona bottles in Mexico is apparently tastier than the stuff we get here. And so, if you see a 1.2 liter bottle with a dodgy label at your local taco shop, buy it!