Blue Moon: Colorado's beer of presidents, flight attendants

Steve Slater's beer of choice?

First it was requested by James Crowley during President Obama's August 2009 beer summit on racial relations on the White House lawn, and now it has turned out to be the beer of choice for emergency-slide-exiting JetBlue flight attendant Steve Slater.

News organizations had reported earlier this month that Slater grabbed two beers from the galley after allegedly cussing out a passenger and before making his dramatic getaway while the plane was parked at JFK in New York.

And now TMZ has written that those beers were Blue Moons, which Jet Blue has recently added to its menu.

"Wow, I hadn't heard that," says John Legnard, of the Blue Moon Brewing Company @ the Sandlot, the Coors Field brewpub where the beer was born.

Legnard says Blue Moon's parent company, MillerCoors, didn't want to get involved with the publicity when the beer was at the White House in order to avoid any political issues. "We were just happy they were drinking beer and not wine," he says.

And the company won't be using this apparent marketing opportunity either.

"We're trying to stay away," says Blue Moon spokesman Tom Ryan.

He did confirm the the Blue Moons in question were bottles, however. Although the company began selling the beer in cans last May in some states (a full national roll out begins next month), they weren't on board the JetBlue aircraft.

"Bottles are working for them," Ryan says of JetBlue. "They might transfer to cans eventually, but they're using bottles now."

Cans would have made more sense on the emergency slide, however, not that Slater appears to have been thinking very clearly anyway.