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| We're not drunks. This is Science! |
Unfortunately great beers come at a high price. Most decent beers can run you $7-$9 per 6-pack. Also, they tend to be pretty strong in both flavor and alcohol. Sometimes you just want a beer: Cold, clear, and cheap. You want a beer with a little alcohol, but not too much so that afterward you can go back to working on a project without having to worry about destroying your house or losing a finger. This is where the classic American light beer comes in. However, which one is the best?
Inspired by the “Life in the Great Midwest” blog’s Crappy Beer Challenge: http://lifeinthegreatmidwest.blogspot.com/search/label/Crappy%20Beer%20Challenge we decided to do our own Cheap Light Beer Challenge to determine which of them is the best of the bunch.We limited the beers to cheap domestics since the point was to get quantity over quality. Most of these beers can be found in 15, 18 and 30 packs that cost about the price of a six pack of decent beer.
Here are the contestants:
Michelob Light
Miller Lite
Keystone Light
Coors Light
Bud Light
Busch Light
Natural Light
Strohs Light
Miller High Life Light
L & I finally got our schedules coordinated and we invited a fellow beer fan over in order to make things more fun. We put the names in a pot and picked them out and put them on a playoff style bracket. Miller High Life was the odd-man out so we decided to use that one up against the winner. Each of us had our own bracket and scored the beers to our own tastes. In the end we all had a different winner. I’ll list my results below, and I’m sure my fellow testers will add their own comments later.
First up: Michelob vs Miller:
I poured both beers and attempted to compare the color and aromas of both. However, once in the glass, the beers look pretty much the same. They both had the same color and complete lack of head retention. Michelob has some odor, mainly of stale and musty, while Miller had no smell at all.
Taste-wise Miller was very bland while Michelob had a strong flavor and, as such Michelob was the winner… at first. There was some delay in moving on to the next round, and my samples sat out for a few minutes slowly warming up. I kept taking sips of each and, as things warmed up, I began to realy be able to taste Michelob’s stronger flavor. The problem with that was that I really didn’t like the flavor. It was musty, moldy, and dank. Yuck… so I changed my winner to Miller Lite.
Second: Keystone vs Coors
This one was the easiest choice of the night. Keystone just plain stank and tasted like a metallic band-aid. Coors, while not wonderful, had no odor and was pretty bland. Winner: Coors Light.
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| Some beer was so bad it got dumped in the pitcher. |
I could write up all the results of all the rounds but they all were pretty much the same. All of the beers were remarkably similar. The all had the same mild yellow color, with no head retention. My notes on the aromas contain comments like: “no odor”, “stale” and “old wet corn”. Flavor comments include: “bland”, “weird metallic”, and “band-aid”. The winner of each round came down to the beer that had the least offensive taste.
In the end Strohs Light won the main contest. It then went up against the Miller High Life wild card. However, at this point in the contest I was sick of the whole thing and I felt that both beers were equally unpleasant. If I have to choose, I’ll choose Strohs. So congratulations Strohs Light, you’re the lesser evil!
I have to say I was really kind of surprised by the results of this contest. I’d expected that I’d find the light beer that I really enjoyed not the one that I could slightly tolerate. If I had to do it again I think I might have to take a second look at Miller, Coors and Natural Light. Those three were most bland and were knocked out in the first round due to their lack of flavor. However, when the flavor of all of these beers is some variant of moldy corn mixed with used band-aid, maybe bland is better. The main outcome of this contest, for me at least, is that I have no desire to drink any of these beers ever again.
