The Tampa Bay Lightning established themselves as a modern hockey dynasty of sorts this week by winning their second straight Stanley Cup Final over the Montreal Canadians. The club did this on home ice in Florida, and very soon, their fans will be able to drink that ice if they’re willing to give it a try.
Shortly after Bolts captain Steven Stamkos lifted the Cup for the second year in a row on Wednesday night, Coors Light announced that’s been taking some of that ice surface at Amalie Arena and will turn that into a celebratory beer for people in the Tampa area to drink at select bars.
Coors Light has been quietly scraping and collecting the actual ice from the rink and transporting it to its hometown brewery in Golden, Colorado to craft the game-winning Champions Ice brew. Coors Light will be filtering the ice during the brewing process, ensuring a refreshing, fully purified drinking experience.
It’s certainly a unique promotion, laid out on a website that listed 15 bars in Florida where the beer will be available. Starting on July 12, fans can get cans or a limited supply of 32 oz crowlers of the Coors Light made with rink water, which the company stressed will be filtered and made potable. Beers have certainly been made with weirder ingredients, as craft beer has made everything from glitter to oysters to even Rocky Mountain oysters part of the industry.
But filtering aside, hockey water is really gross: it’s skated on, spit on, snotted on, and remade again and again when it’s scraped, melted down and sprayed on the top surface to make it smoother. When it’s melted, it’s basically floor water. So this is fairly bewildering, to say the least.
It’s absolutely the first beer made with “championship ice” because, well, that water isn’t really reused for anything much. It’s not like a football or baseball playing surface that ends up mounted in a plaque or sold in a vial at a Major League team store. But perhaps this beer is meant more as a collector’s item than something actually worth drinking. If you’re in the Tampa area, well, you’ll be the first to find out.
