A couple pints

I was surprised to read this sentence in The New York Times:

On a Saturday night in Youngstown, Ohio, Representative Tim Ryan and Mrs. Clinton made a surprise visit to O’Donold’s Irish Pub and Grill for a couple pints of Guinness.

A couple pints? “The New York Times” Manual of Style and Usage (2015) requires of :

Used colloquially to mean a handful or a few, couple should always be followed by of (a couple of pomegranates , never a couple pomegranates ).

Bryan Garner’s (extensive) discussions of couple of and couple are helpful here. From Garner’s Modern American Usage (2009):

As a noun, [couple ] requires the preposition of to link it to another noun <a couple of dollars>. Using couple as an adjective directly before the noun is unidiomatic and awkward.

But Garner’s Modern English Usage (2016) acknowledges a change:

As a noun, [couple ] requires the preposition of to link it to another noun <a couple of dollars>. Using couple as an adjective directly before the noun has been very much on the rise since the late 20th century <a couple dollars>. This innovation strikes many readers as unidiomatic and awkward — or perhaps downright wrong. But the change will doubtless continue.

Garner calls the use of couple without of a “low casualism,” pointing out that the traditional phrasing a couple of is eight times more common in print: “idiom has not yet accepted this casual expression as standard.”

A Times reporter, or any other writer, could avoid these problems by using a fine Illinoism:

On a Saturday night in Youngstown, Ohio, Representative Tim Ryan and Mrs. Clinton made a surprise visit to O’Donold’s Irish Pub and Grill for a couple three pints of Guinness.

A related post
How many in a couple?