Miller Lite Review

Overall 3.83 of 5 view all 18 reviews

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mrkstvns
Austin, TX

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The Horror. The Horror....

brew guru

Cons

anemic appearance, thin body, tastes bad with all food, Just not good., No Taste, Over carbinated

MAY

2008

It wasn't the first "light" beer, but it was certainly the first low-cal beer to actually be commercially successful, and it's based directly on the original low-cal brewing process originally concocted by the evil mad brewing scientist, Dr. Joseph Owades, while he was working at Rheingold.

Owades' process centers on using an enzyme called amyloglucosidase to break down solids to fermentable sugars, leaving the "beer" as flavorless, bland, and insubstantially thin as modern chemistry allows.

Owades' first attempt to commercialize the process was a beer called Gablingers --- a concoction that the market thoroughly rejected for one simple reason: it tasted horrible.

But in modern food processing, no bad idea shall go unrewarded, and so Miller picked up the concept in the 1970s as Miller Lite. The beer is every bit as horrible, bland, lifeless, and insipid as the original Gablingers on which it's based, but Miller did one thing Rheingold didn't. They hired a mercenary army of marketers to lie and say it tasted "great". It doesn't now, and never did, but when you have an endless barrel of cash to buy TV ads featuring athletes who don't care whether people see them drinking sissy beers and wearing womens' underwear, you can pretty much sell anything. Of course H.L. Mencken knew this when he uttered his famous analysis of the American consumer, "Nobody ever lost a nickel underestimating the intelligence of the American people." True, true...and Miller Lite proves it.

The beer looks as bad as it tastes. It's colorless, thin, and downright anemically unhealthy looking. It reminds me of how the water looks in one of those "low flow" modern toilets, which never seem to quite flush away all the piss. Miller Lite looks just like that --- not only is it piss, it's watered down piss.

Of course the bland flavor translates to bland aroma too. Sniff a Miller Lite and all you really catch is a faint chemical whiff. Could be because Miller also brews with chemically mutated hops, or it could just be that when you start with bad ingredients and use a bad process, you get a bad product. Papa Johns might find that "better ingredients make better pizza", but Miller knows that "chemically mutated laboratory products make mass market beer".

Miller Lite might be "less filling", but it sure doesn't "taste great". In fact, there's almost no flavor whatsoever to it. Their trucks are emblazoned with "taste a great pilsner beer", but I don't know why they'd be telling consumers to avoid Lite like the plague, because it's about as close to being a "pilsner beer" as this cup of French roast coffee I'm currently savoring.

What's the point of drinking *ANY* beer if you don't like beer flavor? And if you DO like beer flavor, why would you ever want Miller Lite since it has so little of it, and what it does have is bad?

Nasty stuff. And it's that way by design...