A Half-Hearted Light Beer Taste-Off
About a year and a half ago my fam-in-law drank a shitload of New England IPAs at Christmas, took notes, and rated them all. I wrote all about it right here! It’s not clear that the experiment’s results are worth a hill of beans to anyone, but the whole ordeal was a great excuse to amass and then consume and then write about a wide variety of New England IPAs, and that’s enough of a justification for us.
Now, we easily could have and probably should have left well enough alone. Instead, one year later, we went ahead and decided to spin that fun and successful thing off into a terrible sequel. Instead of comparing twenty-five heavy, juicy, tasty ales that come in five-dollar sixteen-ounce cans and fuck you up real quick, what if we took a hard U-turn and collected and drank and compared a whole bunch of the shitty diet wheat soda we call “light” beer? Might that be useful? Might that be, I dunno, at least a little fun?
No, of course not! That I am only just getting around to writing about this taste-off now, five months after its occurrence, will likely betray to you an overall lack of enthusiasm for everything that came after the planning stage of this experiment, from the monotony and displeasure of actually drinking eighteen shots of light beer to the complete sense of “who gives a shit?” that washed over us as we tabulated the results. Even our commentary, which had included quirky snippets like “dishwater” and “Chinese food vibes” and “can’t get past the ass” one year prior during the New England IPA tasting, was as bland and dull as the beer we were drinking. It turns out there are only so many gross things you can compare light beer to — farts, socks, cigarettes — and they’re not so much intended to be accurate descriptions of the swill we were ingesting as they were low-effort ways of saying, “yo, this beer sucks too!”
But despite an overwhelming collective desire to bail less than halfway in, our dumb little experiment was run to completion. It did yield results and I do have some rankings and observations and if there’s ever a time light beer can be — I dunno, appreciated is the wrong word, but tolerated? — it’s here and now in the bright and beautiful early days of summer. So without further ado — and certainly without a paragraph-long write-up on each beer, because oh God, imagine — here are the results of a half-hearted light beer taste off.
The Beers
Assembling the field was probably the most interesting part of the whole shebang. What we wanted was as wide a variety as possible of what could broadly be referred to as “American light lagers.” Everything we tested had to have an ABV at or below 4.3%, had to come in an aluminum can, and had to be explicitly branded or marketed as, you know, “light.”
First and foremost, we started with the big three: Bud Light, Miller Lite, and Coors Light. No light beer tasting would be complete without their presence. And although light beer is a distinctly American creation, we wanted to include as “international” an array as possible, and so we pulled in macrobrew offerings “from” Canada (Labatt Blue Light), Mexico (Corona Light and Tecate Light), and Europe (Amstel Light and Heineken Light). Next we backfilled the competition with a handful of B-tier brands both vaguely respected (Yuengling Light, Pabst Blue Ribbon Easy, and Narragansett Light) and widely reviled (Busch Light, Keystone Light, and Natural Light). Finally, we tossed in a couple of extra-light beers in Michelob Ultra and Corona Premier for the ketogenic crowd and topped the group off with a couple of craft brewery attempts at the style, Night Shift’s Nite Lite and Cisco Brewing’s Sankaty Light.
The Tasters
No surprise, we brought back the same exact crew from the previous year’s New England IPA taste-off: Devon, Shelby, Rick, Janice, and myself. My wife once again ran the blind taste test for the rest of us, withholding her judgments and leaving her takes on light beer where they belong, which is to say, several years in the rearview mirror.
The Method
All 18 beers were stored in an ice-filled outdoor cooler where they chilled for a few hours prior to the tasting. Samples were provided to the five tasters three one-ounce pours at a time in a predetermined but uniquely random order. Re-pours were available upon request. We each rated each beer on a scale from one to five, with three being the intended “average light beer.” The test took around an hour to complete. After all testers had submitted their scores, I normalized all of their ratings to give each tester a mean score of 3 and the same variance and then averaged those normalized ratings and then questioned all the decisions that had led me to this point.
The Results
Congratulations to — haha, okay, sure — Corona Premier for winning our half-hearted light beer taste-off (largely on behalf of Janice pushing it to the fucking moon, with a normalized score approaching seven on a scale from one to five). Let’s check in with the branding bros behind this relatively new concoction and see what they have to say about it:
Corona Premier is the first new Corona-branded beer in 29 years and was born from the desire to deliver the refreshing taste and authentic Mexican escape of the Corona brand with fewer calories and lower carbs, to appeal to beer drinkers looking for a more sophisticated light beer.
Hip hip hooray, then.
It’s worth noting — insofar as anything about this big dumb thing is noteworthy — that regular-ass Corona Light took fifth place and that the only other low-carb light beer in our tasting, Michelob Ultra, placed sixth.
Yuengling Light was one enormous outlier of a data point away from winning the contest, and coming in right behind it was — alright, why not — Heineken Light, I guess.
If there’s a single big take to walk away with here, it’s got to do with the caloric content of the beers. Yeah, it turns out that the lightest of the light beers were also the best-tasting of the light beers — or probably more accurately the least offensive. The waterier the better, it seems, because light beer flavor is bad. (Apparently the trendline seen here only has an R² value of 0.22, which means “caloric light beer is bad light beer” is a take that is 22% accurate and 78% horseshit, but, come on. Use your damn eyes.)
What else can we conclude? Basically nothing, which is just the way a half-hearted light beer taste-off should end. Miller Lite won the big macrobrew showdown against Coors Light and Bud Light, but it hardly won bragging rights with such pedestrian scores. The twenty-dollar-per-thirty-rack beers you haven’t tasted since your college days performed pretty poorly overall, but so did the craft breweries who bothered to stoop to their level. The “Mexicans” and the “Dutch” and the “Canadians” all appear to do American light lagers better than the “Americans” do, but that’s an awfully tough conclusion to hang your hat on with such limited sample sizes and such meaningless nation-of-origin designations.
And last but not least, how about a round of applause for Bud Light, the advertising behemoth that managed to come in dead last place, a true toilet beer among toilet beers. That warms my heart so much. Dilly dilly, assholes! (Note: Bud Light parent company Anheuser-Busch InBev owns seven of the eighteen brands included in the preceding test, including the overall winner, and made over $50 billion in revenue in 2018.)
My summary slide, then, contains a single takeaway: light beer sucks ass. If you have made it this far, thank you and I’m sorry. We’ll try to taste test something more interesting next time.
