Songfacts®:

• Toby Keith penned this uptempo break-up song with his frequent collaborator, Nashville singer-songwriter Bobby Pinson. The cut finds the narrator leaving a hoity toity woman, as he prefers more down to earth girls. "Hey I find what I want in a honky tonk," he tells us. "I like girls that drink beer."
  
  The tune combines the themes of Keith's 2003 single "I Love This Bar" and 2007 release "High Maintenance Woman."
• Released as the first single from Keith's seventeenth album, the cut follows another booze-titled release, "Beers Ago." "We were in the studio and everybody who heard it was like, 'You've got to release that,'" the singer recalled.
• Keith plugs his long-term sponsor, Ford, when he name checks their high end vehicle The Lariat. "Can't be seen in that thing in my Lariat. Ain't goin' down to the ball in your chariot. This high rise life just ain't for me," Keith sings.
• Keith explained that the song was inspired by his observations of the drinking habits of the fairer sex. "Ninety-nine percent of the women at the country club where I play golf, if they order an adult beverage will order something frozen or with an umbrella in it," he said. "I play with one of my best friends and his wife, and we'll be in there watching someone order vodka with a splash of orange juice and 7up with a twist of this or that. And my friend's wife will just, go, 'Two Coronas.' So we got to calling her 'Beer Drinking Shari.' Her face got red and I went, 'No, no. I like girls that drink beer.' And then I thought, well that sounds like a song title.
  
  
  When I was coming up, you could drink beer at 18," continued Keith, "but liquor wasn't legal until you were 21 in Oklahoma. So there were a lot of places you could into and have beer, so you'd see a lot of girls sitting around with longnecks. Now they've usually got a mixed drink or nothing at all. So we wrote it about a country club and this guy who moves out of the country into the city with his sugar mama. If anything, it kind of reminds me of Alan Jackson. Sounds like something he could have written. It's simple and so catchy. When I played it for the label it went to the top of the list immediately."
  
• During an interview with Tanner in the Morning at Charlotte's The New 103.7, Keith talked about the song's video, which features fans having fun at one of his live shows. "We shot that in the middle of the tour," he said, "and just told them, 'We're going to run this twice and film it, so if you want to get on camera, do your thing.'"