Retro LandShark Lager Beer Shark Fin Coaster 🍺 Margaritaville Jimmy Buffett Novelty Barware NOS

What's the Jimmy Buffett Song Behind the LandShark Fin? 🦈 A LandShark Lager Shark Fin Coaster, Margaritaville, Jimmy Buffett

Size: 6 1/4" x 5"

A die-cut beer coaster cut in the shape of a shark's fin, tan-gold board printed in dark green-black with a yellow offset shadow: the fin cutting up out of the waves between two little palm-tree islands, and under it LANDSHARK, PREMIUM Lager QUALITY. Every one I have is unused - never done a night's work under a sweating bottle.

Long before island lifestyle became a marketing category of its own, beach bars up and down the Florida coast were already leaning hard into shark lore, tiki torches and Jimmy Buffett songs on the jukebox in the corner, and this coaster comes straight out of that world. The beer only goes back to 2006 and 2007, so it's from LandShark's first years on - this version doesn't carry the copyright and Drink Responsibly lines of the 2011 printing.

🍺 Before LandShark, there was Corona

Buffett and Corona go back to 1984. He was sitting in his manager Howard Kaufman's office while Kaufman pitched Corona on sponsoring an Eagles tour, and Buffett piped up that he'd like Corona to sponsor him too. Then in 1992 Corona ran a Change your whole latitude campaign off the title of his 1977 album and trademarked the line without even telling him. Later Corona passed on brewing a beer for Margaritaville - so Margaritaville made its own, and plenty of Parrotheads took it to mean Buffett had dropped Corona.

🦈 Lone Palm, then LandShark

It started out in 2006 as the house lager in the Margaritaville restaurants, a 4.6 percent lager, and Anheuser-Busch brewed it in partnership with Margaritaville. It was going to be Lone Palm Lager, after a Buffett song, until consumer testing turned up the problem - nobody wants to drink a Lone. So they went with LandShark, and it burst onto the scene at Buffett's concert in Tallahassee on February 10, 2007, with the man himself on stage. The bottle says Margaritaville Brewing Co. of Jacksonville, a licensing name - Anheuser-Busch of St. Louis was doing the brewing. VinePair called it arguably the first real celebrity beer, years ahead of the band beers that came after it.

🎸 The song behind the fin

The name comes from Fins, Buffett's 1979 single, written with Coral Reefer Band members Deborah McColl and Barry Chance and writer Tom Corcoran. The land sharks in the song are the men circling a woman at a beach bar, and at the concerts, when the chorus comes around, the whole crowd puts their hands up over their heads in a fin and sways. The LandShark logo - a fin over squiggly waves with palm trees behind it - was already on concert merchandise before it was ever on a beer, and that's the picture on this coaster.

🏝️ Margaritaville

Margaritaville itself started small, with a T-shirt shop in Key West in 1985 and a café after it, and grew into restaurants, hotels and resorts, run for years by its longtime CEO John Cohlan. Buffett died on September 1, 2023, at his home in Sag Harbor, and the fins still go up whenever a bar band starts into Fins.

🦈 About these

They're 6 1/4 by 5 inches. Put one under a cold one on the porch, frame it for a tiki bar, or give it to the Parrothead who never misses a show. The supply is finite - nobody's printing this LandShark coaster anymore, and once these last unused ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.