WHAT A GREAT NEW BOTTLE WOW HOLY CRAP ITZ SO COOOOLL!!!

People used to ask me, back in the days before The Great Craft Rationalization®*, 'Lew, why don't you ever write about the regular beers? Budweiser, Miller Lite, Coors Light; you know, the beers everyone really drinks?!' And although I did write about beers like that sometimes -- more in a business mode, but I did write for trade journals, so you do; hell, I wrote two vodka pieces! -- and I made my mark writing about Yuengling, my response was usually something like, "Well, what can you say about them? 'Damn, this Budweiser tastes just like the last 100 Buds I've ever had!' They don't change, there's never anything new, and even the people who love them have nothing to say about the flavor past "crisp," "clean," and "great taste, less filling." There's just not a lot to work with there."

We are, after all, ultimately in the story business. Hats off to A-B, who did try to engage us by flying groups of beer writers to their hop farm and maltings in Idaho...but then that turned into a circular firing squad of mutual ethics accusations and just got ugly. And mostly, beer writers didn't write about mainstream beer.

Well...MillerCoors is changing all that! I've been seeing the teaser billboards on I-95 in Philly (one of the big Lite markets) for months now, and the new Miller Lite bottle is finally here! That's right, a NEW BOTTLE! Hot damn!

Yeah. A new bottle. And they're telling us amazing things about it (add your own excited exclamation points, I already took out most of the capital letters):

Consumers Overwhelmingly Prefer The New Bottle 2:1

We Win With Occasional Drinkers Who Preferred The New Bottle By Over 3:1 

We Win With All Ages (21-34, 35-40) Both Groups Prefer The New Bottle To Current (Younger By 19 Points, Older By 23 

We Win With Hispanics: Hispanics Prefer The New Bottle To Current By 20 Points 

Advantages Of The New Bottle Also Place Us In A Stronger Competitive Standing Relative To Bud Light

WOW! I guess all the beer geeks who say the different glassware really makes a difference may have a point, and Miller Lite is keying on it.

I'm yanking Miller's chain, but come on, guys... A new bottle? You already did that! Remember the Vortex bottle, back in 2010? Had a set of spiral grooves on the inside of the neck? Jay Brooks summed that up pretty well here, I mean, what's the point of swirling Miller Lite as it comes out of the bottle, to stimulate the lack of aroma? Maybe...except I did an interview that year with the folks from Owens-Illinois, who developed the Vortex bottle, that I never found a market for and never released...and it shines a light on things here. Have a look.

Within the consumer package and beer industry, people are looking for something new and different. It's important to differentiate. It brings added value and news to the marketplace. The Miller Lite brand has seen a lot of change and not all of it positive. It's innovation in terms of value and news to the brand.
 
Internal embossing is a tech that Owens-Illinois brought to the marketplace. It's the most significant change to the long-neck bottle since the twist-off cap. The  Vortex bottle is an example of how we can merge the science of glass with the art of package design to bring something the market hasn't seen before.

It's designed to differentiate the brand on the shelf. You get the decorative look, and a flat panel for the labeling. We're working with the customers and letting them lead with that effort.

Now...did you notice? Nothing about swirling the beer. That all came from craft guys who assumed it had to be for something. As far as O-I was concerned -- and I was talking to their beer marketing manager and the VP of global innovation -- this was about the look of the swirl. Even Miller never specifically said that the vortex was functional. It's about look. It's all about getting you to look at Miller Lite.

No kidding, right? They're just making up news to get themselves noticed! Because there's nothing new about Miller Lite!

But what about the constant stream of one-offs and one-time seasonals from craft beer? It's all about the beer! Is it? Or is it about getting you to notice them, shouting to be heard over the new darlings -- 16 oz. cans, 'slim' cans, open-top cans, nanobreweries, reality-TV breweries, collaborations -- and then moving on and making something else new?

Look, I like new beers. It's how things happen. But they ought to have some kind of intrinsic value. There are an awful lot of "me too" beers out there among all the innovative ones. It's almost reached the point where making a pale ale is innovative, as people run from them to make exotics.

New beer? New bottle? It's all attention for the brand. Miller Lite spins off way too much money to mess with it; you can't make a craft version (they tried that; major fail). But the craft brewers look at big crafts who leaned hard on a flagship -- Sam Adams, New Belgium, Sierra Nevada -- and they see them running into trouble with their street cred, being passed up as not really craft. (Admit it, if you haven't thought that about Boston Lager, Fat Tire, or SNPA, you've heard someone say it.) And we get new beers that are made just to have new beers. Better than a new bottle, but...where's it go? BeerAdvocate? Tickerville? Celebrator?

I dunno. It's how things work, but for what part of the market? Who reacts to this stuff, and is it enough to have a real effect? Is it just a new bottle?


*I just made that up, and you know, I kind of like it: it's when, about five years ago at the beginning of the Great Recession (I didn't make that up, apparently that's what we're calling the Wall Street debacle and the Stimuless® (yeah, made that one up too...it never caught on, but I haven't given up) now), craft beer stepped out of the background and became the superhero of the beer category by blasting through a collapsing market with hops-fueled double-digit growth. It's when the industry finally realized that this wasn't a fad, wasn't going away, and had to be taken seriously...and Blue Moon and Shock Top stopped being redheaded stepchildren at their parent companies.)  

Chill freezes

Bud Light Lime is apparently eating Miller Chill's lunch. Chill, which was an initial big success for Miller, has dropped in sales by 47%. Bud Light Lime, meanwhile, is being given credit for driving a 3.6% increase in sales volume for A-B in the quarter just ending.

Miller's scrambling to put a good face on things, but it looks like A-B's policy of fine-tuning their competitors' successes has served them once again.

Miller Lite Brewers Collection tasting

Time to taste the Miller Lite Brewers Collection. All three are poured in fairly similar, beer-clean glasses.

Miller Lite Amber: Aroma is somewhat sharp, grainy. Head forms well, and lasts. Don't know if I'd go "amber," more like a dark gold, but a nice color. More flavor than Lite, for certain, but hardly overwhelming. A light, malty/grainy flavor, ashy notes, a slightly sour aftertaste, doesn't break particularly clean. Fizzy. Overall impression: too much flavor for a Lite drinker, nowhere near enough flavor -- or distinction -- for a craft drinker. Third out of three, nothing to like here.

Miller Lite Wheat: Cloudy medium yellow; cloudiness is very uniform, most likely protein haze rather than yeast. Nice tightly bubbled head, and good retention. Beer looks quite nice. Whoa! Startling sweet orange nose, like an orange hard candy or gumdrop. (Obviously not a coincidence that the beer they chose to compare it with in the release was Blue Moon.) Dammit. The wheat beer here is, I suspect, not that bad. The body's right -- light-medium, creamy -- and there's a decent tart flip in the release. But that overlaid fakey-tasting orange ruins it. I'm obviously not sure where that's coming from -- could be sweet orange peel, could be essence -- but it's too much, and it's wrong. Tone it down, or make it less sweet, and you could have a winner here. With it, well, it tastes like your dopeass marketing team is running things, and they still don't really understand "craft beer." This makes me remember that before they came up with Miller Chill, the same group was considering a shandy. Sticking fruit in a beer don't make it "craft." Second of three, and that mostly on potential.

Miller Lite Blonde: Slightly ruddy gold color -- actually darker than I would have expected from a "blonde." Head is the worst of the three: big bubbles, not much retention, and hard to resurrect with swirling. Aroma's kind of interesting: some fruity/estery notes, a little malt, maybe some floral hop. Well...not too bad. There's some bitterness in the drink and the finish that spreads through the whole mouth, there's definite structure to this one, and it has -- shock! -- a good aftertaste. I'll probably finish this one with lunch, though I doubt I'd get one when I was out, unless I was faced with nothing but The Usual Suspects, or I wanted to go light on alcohol. If that was the case, I'd be happy to find this available, because it handily tops every big-selling light lager I can think of. First of three, by a large margin...a plausible session drinker.

That's just my opinion, of course, and I -- we -- are hardly the target market. It is worth keeping in mind that Miller is not aiming these at the die-hard craft drinker. The three beers they are compared to in the press release are Blue Moon, Fat Tire, and Bass Ale. Not the first choices of your basic BeerAdvocate, but strong sellers, and if Miller can grab some of that, they'd probably be happy.

Can they? I doubt it. "Miller Lite" and "craft" have a much stronger cognitive disconnect than "Sam Adams" and "Light." The packaging is very generic (though that could change), there's very little story here (the description on the neck ring of "Miller Lite Brewers Collection Amber" reads "AMBER: refreshing amber lager brewed with a distinctive rich finish"), there's none of the cues that casual craft drinkers key on.

If you're going to aim at that group, you've got to think about what they're buying: with Bass, they're buying import prestige; with Fat Tire, they're buying a different look and a quirky name/badge; with Blue Moon, they're buying a very different -- cloudy -- look and taste, and a pretty badge. They're buying flavor, too, don't get me wrong: all three of those beers are very different from mainstream lager (they are, really, if we're being honest). But the other factors are stronger.

The Miller Lite Brewers Collection has none of that, except the slightly different look, the Wheat most of all. It's Miller Lite, it says so right on the label. That's not different. There's no prestige, there's not a big difference in look, and there's no story. I know I sound like a different guy from the one who wrote about authenticity, but I'm talking about a different set of beer drinkers here.

I don't like conspiracy theories. I think most of the wacky shit beer geeks come up with about the evil marketers at the macrobrewers is just that: wacky shit. But I can't help thinking that this represents one of the recurring theories about why macrobrewers try craft-type beers: they do them in a half-assed way, designed to fail, so that they can point to them and say, "See? People don't really like this stuff. They're just buying it because it's small/local/trendy."

The one other time I really got that feeling was when I went to a Miller Reserve tasting back in the mid-1990s. The Miller rep set up her display, carefully arranged the cases of Miller Reserve Amber and Velvet Stout (which were actually pretty decent beers -- better than these), and then just went through the motions, monotone "Like to try Miller Reserve? No? Okay," inflection, and packed up on the stroke so she could get down to the serious business of selling Miller Lite. I never forgot that.

So I can't help feeling that someone or some group at Miller wants to sell craft beer, to make bigger, more characterful beers, and a bigger group sees that as diverting focus from Lite. So they set this whole thing up to prove that craft won't work for Miller.

As far as this goes, they're probably right.

Miller Lite Brewers Collection

Miller Lite Brewers Collection.

"Craft Beer. Done Lite."

I got 'em. They're going in the fridge. Miller Lite Amber, Wheat, and Blonde Ale. They're in test markets in Baltimore, Charlotte, Minneapolis, and San Diego now. All 4.2% ABV, all 110 calories per 12 oz. bottle, all 6.2 grams of carbohydrates...for those of you who are counting.

"Real craft beer taste and true light beer refreshment." Well... we'll see.

Miller Chill: someone else's beer

Well, I figured I should try the other 'Latinized' beer on the market, the one in national distribution: Miller Chill. Chill is doing very well, blew through trial runs and went national with a promotional budget that should be in the $50 million range according to what I was told. So when I stopped for ice in Portland last month and saw a bottle in the cooler, I figured I should try one.

You'll notice it's been a month, and I haven't done that until now.

I've been putting it off, and the only reason I drank it tonight is because I'm doing a piece on these beers and had to talk about it. I mean, a light beer with lime and salt? Yeah, well, I was right. It's not even a crisp, sharp lime flavor, and I didn't really taste any salt at all. It tasted like light beer with a small dose of 7-Up. I tried eating a pretzel with it, but it didn't help much. If you're looking for something really different, this isn't it. It's kinda different, but mostly it's not my kind of beer. It's someone else's beer.