Tops [6], and he doesn’t have a Fetty Wap assist…

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[6.22]

Thomas Inskeep: One of the most relaxed singles King George has released this side of “Amarillo By Morning,” this ode to “a little time well wasted” goes down as easy as Kentucky bourbon and won’t leave you hungover in the morning.
[7]

Alfred Soto: The song is warm Bud in a plastic cup — “time well wasted,” “Friday night lights,” you get it — into which Strait pours thirty years of solid musicianship that has often rescued him from material this hokey and unambitious.
[5]

Scott Mildenhall: Some moments last a lifetime, and sadly this is one of them. George Strait doesn’t sound drunk, but he is rambling. It’s not aggressive, not objectionable; just unwanted. At the very least, though, it is a successful evocation of being approached by a lonely old stranger with little to say except “this country, eh?” and “women, eh?,” hoping to find someone on his page. Hopefully he does!
[5]

Brad Shoup: Talking to a drunk George Strait sounds like a slog, man. A 63-year-old man trying to figure out girls earns a stool scootch. “Cold Beer Conversation” never ambles past “People Are Crazy,” its clear forebear. Strait’s happy to drop intriguing snatches — I’d listen to an entire song about a sexagenarian grappling with his parents’ senility — but the total effect is exhaustion.
[4]

Edward Okulicz: Weirdly this song doesn’t make me think of beer, or any cold drink, at all. It’s a bit meandering in its immaculate craft, but it fits into that sub-type of country that feels like a comforting companion hearing you out between glasses of whiskey. I look forward to testing this out as I doze off in front of the country music channel. I mean, first I’d have to buy some whiskey, and learn to tolerate it, but I’m sure it’ll be great.
[6]

Micha Cavaseno: Surrender that doesn’t seem to ring too bittersweet upon its resignation to the pass of time, with a whole lot of fondness rimmed with the wisdom of someone who doesn’t fight the world but doesn’t seem to mind keeping themselves room for comfort.
[6]

Jonathan Bogart: As I age, I have diminishing use for the hard-partying sloganeering of all youth-oriented pop, whether EDM, rap, or bro-country. Maybe this is senescence; but it’s a pleasant, dignified senescence, swaddled in creature comforts and well-fortified against the elements. There are worse ways to go.
[8]

Anthony Easton: Strait’s voice, in its simplicity, with the Texan accent, is one of the great uncomplicated pleasures of country music — of music in general. This has been going on for so long that I worry we take him for granted. The little choices he makes here might seem accidental but are completely deliberate — how he doesn’t speed up, how it is a low slung swing, how he clips his vowels, how the vowels in “beer” work, how he sings “girl”s or “buzz,” the intricate guitar work that doesn’t seem that intricate. It’s not as much a masterpiece of a song, but a cumulative effect. 
[9]

Josh Langhoff: When my wife says all country singers sound the same, I imagine she thinks they all sound like George Strait. His middle-aged voice’s most distinctive feature, a taut low vibrato, appears only in the first verse of “Cold Beer Conversation.” (You can hear it more in his cover of Vicente Fernández’s “El Rey.”) The rest — grain, crags (“crazy old world”), thrown away phrase endings — constitutes a vocal stem cell, waiting to grow into different dudes with their own unique timbres and tics. Which is to say, among male country singers he’s the modern standard, but I prefer being able to tell blood from hair from teeth.
[6]