I think you mean the first movie? The transporting of Coors at that time was against the bootlegging laws if I remember correctly.
Yeah, they weren't allowed to distribute east of the Mississippi I believe. That was the whole reason the Bandit and the Snowman were hired to run it in the movie, because they were driving it to somewhere in Georgia.
I remember taking a family road trip to Colorado as a kid in probably about 1982 and we had to bring a few cases of Coors back to my aunt in Illinois. Since it wasn't available there yet it was a real novelty, largely driven by the Smokey and the Bandit movies, I'm sure.
Christ, that was over 30 years ago. ~freebases Viagra~
And for the record, I assumed that most people would be aware of Smokey and the Bandit, I just wasn't sure how many of the under 40 crowd would be familiar enough with it to recognize it strictly from that picture of Big Enos and Little Enos with nothing else to tip them off (i.e., Burt Reynolds/his Trans Am), if they would know the storyline well enough to realize it was Coors being bootlegged, etc.