Miller 64

When I was a kid, a product bearing the suffix "64" was considered to be something of value and its accessories could be widely celebrated years after the 64-ness had become outdated. Three Nintendo consoles later, the world is no longer so simple and predictable (thanks a lot, Obama).

The fact of the existence of Miller 64 should be onerous enough for any society. A low-calorie, low-quality beer, whose claims to healthfulness are given lie with minimal effort. To have this thing thrust upon us, promising beer with none* of the health drawbacks usually associated with beer is so absurd as to be grotesque. You'd almost think we've become a callow civilization, wanting all the good things in the world and accepting none of the negative consequences. Unless you consider a tasteless, essence-less facsimile of beer trickling down your throat to be a negative consequence. Which I do. 

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*None aside from the very small amount of alcohol, which, even at 2.8% ABV, is still technically a low grade poison. So why bother trying to make the product healthy in the first place, one wonders. But one is thinking too hard about this already.
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The marketing company with a brewery attached that is MillerCoors (not quite so as prolific as Sterling Cooper Anheuser Busch, but irritating in its own "us too" kind of way) has had this ad out for almost a year now. You've probably seen it if you've fallen asleep watching ESPN and woken up hours later, acutely aware that you've wasted your Saturday, a sting that's punctuated by having this self-satisfied bastardization of pub songs and sea shanties blared in your direction.

Let's take it from the top, shall we?

We run a mile before breakfast
If you're looking to lose weight, you should try running that mile immediately after breakfast. A big breakfast.

Sure, I had a salad for lunch
Oh, you poor, downtrodden thing, being able to afford a salad for lunch.

But a Miller 64 at dinner
Did your dinner have any say in this pairing? Or was it a plaintive, "No, that's fine. I'm just a baked chicken breast. Didn't even get a decent marinade because you're trying to keep fit. Miller 64 will do. You won't even know you're ingesting either of us, we're so tasteless. It's actually kind of perfect, in a way."

Oh yes, cause I've worked off my paunch
I'm going to pause here while one of the men in the ad boxes with a cute female partner (in case we hadn't already internalized the hardships they endure). Reasonably fit, basically attractive young men are talking at us about the healthfulness that can be had with the Miller 64 lifestyle. And, hey, I'm down for fitness. I think most of us could use more of it in our every day lives. But what state can a person be in where Miller 64 becomes a rational beverage? Someone looking to lose serious weight might consider doing without beer entirely. Or, if they must drink, they could opt for another adult beverage; most wines and liquors are in the 60-70-calorie range (I'll link you here again). It's all empty calories, however delicious (a word that obviously precludes the likes of Miller 64). The truly fitness-oriented are generally aware of this and are less inclined to consume alcohol for the sake of consumption. If one must imbibe Miller 64, I'm more likely to assume "misinformed alcoholic" than "health nut."

The other type of conscious dieter that might consider sipping a Miller 64 is an irreparably brain damaged person individual who's just looking to maintain his weight or maybe drop a couple of vanity pounds, in which case the health rules remain the same, if a bit relaxed. And, looking at the ad, all of these guys fall into this latter category. They're not even TV schlubby. They may not be Adonises (Adoni?), but seem above par for the real world.

This is what television does: it shows us pretty people. And it's not with the intent of making us feel bad, by the way. It's because we prefer aesthetically-pleasing things: people, landscapes, naked people, etc. But the natural consequence on our end is to feel worse about the way we look because everyone looks better than us. So here I see men who are likely in better shape than I am and I wonder, what sort of sacrifice did it require along with exercise and, gasp, salads for lunch?

"Miller 64," they sing back at me. "That's my option," I sigh, my face dropping noticeably. "Perpetual schlubbiness or stale piss water." It doesn't take me long to start asking: do I really enjoying being alive that much?

Cause we live a life of balance
That's not what that word means.

And no one can say that we're wrong
They saw this coming. The androids who wrote this took a hard look at the deed they were committing and they got an unfamiliar tingle of self-awareness. But before they could examine this new, unpleasant feeling, they looked down the road and saw sensible critique barreling in their direction at an alarming speed. And rather than reconsider their lives' choices and put an end to whatever douchebaggery they were involved in, they offered a childish "haters gonna hate," hoping to stymy any attempt of ours to tell them, "yes, you're wrong," as though someone might have room to say such a thing. But that couldn't be.

So here's to good Miller who cut out the filler...
Yeah, "filler." All that flavor and taste. Just gets in the way, amirite?  

...and made a beer worthy of song. 
At long last, man has found occasion to communicate about alcohol in verse. It feels like cheating to send you to a list of country songs about drinking, but I'm gonna do it, anyway.

To Miller 64
No.

To Miller 64
No.

To love, sweat, and beers...
How do you like that, they managed to fit the recipe into the song.

...and well-deserved cheers.
Cheers for what, exactly? For the kind of ill-considered life decisions that lead a person to spend money on an almost non-existent beverage in the hopes of being able to enjoy themselves guilt-free? Or for the courage it takes to say to another human being, likely acting in a professional capacity, "yeah, I'll have one of those." Or perhaps we're using collective well-wishes and good cheer to distract us from the sickly spittle we're about to pour into our faces.

Or maybe the cheers are for the ad execs who were forced to sit in a room, drinking their sample 64's until enough self-respect had been drained from them that this song seemed like a decent idea. Yeah, fine. Let's toast to them, the poor sods. And their widows and orphans, too; the ones who've had their loved ones ripped from them by something as coldly indifferent as alcohol poisoning and self-inflicted gunshot wounds to the chest.

If that last bit seems harsh, consider the psychological ramifications of thinking on the existential nature of Miller 64 for too long: "A beer couldn't possibly be 64 calories. And yet it tastes like 64 calories. Which means it doesn't taste like beer. So, what is it? What am I? Is it possible that I'm only a third as substantive a person as I pretend to be? Do I, too, have so flaccid a bearing that one could cast reasonable doubt on the reality of my existence?"

There's some kind of rule, or at least should be, that the more you have to tell people what a good time something was/is/will be, the more likely that is to be a lie. If the hype goes on long enough or becomes loud enough, you can fairly expect the thing in question to be unrepentantly awful. Like when Donald Trump talks about himself.

This, of course, is the macros' bread and butter. They cornered the beer market decades ago (to the tune of about 80%) by flogging a bland product designed to appeal to as many people as possible after the end of Prohibition. Since then, it's been a battle between the macros for as much of the revenue as can be had. This usually takes the form of insulting gimmicks, like Coors' blue mountains, intended to help the drinker tell when an aluminum can has gone cold. They're all slinging the same swill, so the only way to get separation is with a proxy mascot war or the occasional half-hearted experiment (Miller's taunting 64 calories have actually been undercut by Budweiser). To wit: they look at a nation desperate for relief from an obesity epidemic and its related health problems and they decide to help out by offering us... this.

To Miller 64!
FUCK. YOU.

Light Beer, Part III: What's It All About?

**This is Part III of an ongoing series.  Make sure to read Part I and Part II.**

Having examined the light beer industry's disdain for it's market and the dubious health claims of the product, all that remains is the final question: why.  Why have the American people (already afflicted by onerous problems in a changing world, requiring adaptation) so embraced the pale man's rendition of the proud lager beer?  This is admittedly difficult for me to examine on my own. 

I'd love to hear from people who genuinely like light beer.  I really would--this whole thing has been about trying to understand the hold that the lights have on the beer industry as a whole.  In lieu of that, I've come up with some of the fairest, most honest reasons that I think light beer maintains that hold: 

-It's just what I drink
I covered this a bit more dismissively in the last post (the oh-so-classy urine analogy), but in all seriousness, I do understand being a creature of habit.  At the end of a lousy day, or at a party with friends, we default the familiar comforts.  We just want to drink and relax and not think about tasting notes or hop profiles or write down our thoughts about the beer (I actually do this and it sometimes baffles me).  And there's something to be said for retaining the simple pleasures.  However, to me, this is a better explanation for the slummy regular beers--Budweiser, Coors, etc; those have more taste than a light, even if that says very little.  But why tout the--previously explored--half-assed health benefits?  Is it a throwback to our high school drink of (lack of) choice?  And how many other high school habits do you retain? 

-It's what Dad drank
We all are at times, for better and worse, creatures of the traits bestowed on us by genetics and upbringing.  If there was a lot of light beer in your house when you were a kid, it makes sense that you'd be attached to it as an adult; that old "familiar comforts" thing.  And while I don't think that my dad ever kept a lot of it around (I'd be more of a red wine guy, if I took after him in this regard), I do know that that taste he gave me of Coors Light when I was about ten probably informed--unconsciously--a lot of my future drinking habits.  This, to my mind, is an even more nostalgia-driven version of the above.  And as with the above, how many of your parents' habits do you usually exhibit when you can help it?  And, surely in this case, you can help it? 

-No interest in trying others
When I was in high school, my family moved to a rural area, where I met a probably 60-something-year-old man who had never gone more than ninety or so miles from his place of birth.  This was fairly common for his generation, but completely foreign to me.  He would never say that he had simply "settled," and neither would most light beer drinkers, I imagine.  However, that guy had a decent case for not roaming too far: it's a pain in the ass to move and he had never had a pressing need to do so.  What's keeping the light beer crowd locked into their habit?  That $2-3 extra per six pack?  That's fair but, similar to the health claims, if that amount will break you, you'd think you'd do without the booze altogether.

Some of this may be because craft beer can be hard--or impossible--to find in some parts of the country.  But this is slowly changing; as craft beer becomes more popular it will find more stable, if smaller, markets throughout the country.  The State of Alabama--a long holdout on this--recently raised the legal ABV limit in beer for sale from 6% to 13.9%, granting Alabamians access to a host of new craft brews.  More personally, while it's true I live in a very good beer town, there's still something heartening about seeing New Belgium beers stacked next to Budweiser at the grocery store.  Or when I'm wedding planning and I hear stories of weddings where guests (many of whom were of the light crowd) were offered the usual Miller Lites, but only went through a handful of those, while depleting the Abitas and Sierra Nevadas and later gushing about the beer selection.  Such breweries and their products are becoming less alien and more familiar to the casual beer drinker and someday they, too, may think, "yeah, sure, I'll splurge this once."  And that's how good beer spreads.  I don't demand that people drink higher quality beers, but I do ask that they try once in a while.  You might be surprised what you find.  Unless...

-You genuinely like it
Ah, yes, the (literally) inexplicable matter of taste.   We can go up and down a list of good-sounding reasons for why we've gravitate toward a certain type of beer, or music, or dating partner, but our preferences are based much more in irrational feeling and emotional attachment than many of us would like to accept.  I can explain my preference for Belgian Trappist ales and English session porters until you understand it, but never so that you share it.  For that, you'd have to drink some yourself, at which point you either begin to share that love or it was never meant to be.  The same way I've had many different light beers and have never once not wanted to gag.  And therein lies the problem. 


I stand by my opinion that the light beer marketing departments think people are stupid (more so than do most marketing departments).   I also stand by my take down attempt on light beer's health claims.  This is not solely about snobbery and I hope it doesn't come off as such.  I believe that the experience counts for as much as the ephemeral buzz and the fleeting taste on the tongue.  That experience ties into everything: the crowd (or lack thereof), the location, the reason.  The beer exists, by and large, to enhance those things.  You may not feel the need to enhance things any further, at least via the taste of your beer, but what's the harm?  I've survived the light beers I've had, just as I've survived bottom shelf whiskey and fast food.  But are we merely surviving?  What's the occasional excursion away from McDonald's and into even a three-star place?  You probably won't want that all the time, nobody does.  But done every once in a while, it'll open up new horizons and broaden experience.  Why should there be any resistance to that? 

This isn't a refutation of the light beer drinker (of the industry, perhaps definitely, but not the individual drinker).  It's an urging, a prodding to expand the scope of our collective experiences and not stick with the same old beverages just "because."  To push beyond the bland, narrow, and empty borders laid out for us by mega-conglomerates, who care nothing for their products (let alone their customers).  To deepen our understanding and appreciation of well-made, heart-driven beers that help make life worth living that much longer. 

What have we to lose? 

Light Beer, Part II: Your Health and You

**This is Part II of an ongoing series.  Read Part I here.**  

I've had people tell me that, even though they may usually prefer craft beer or other quality beers, they'll semi-happily drink Bud Light or Miller Lite if they're already drunk and especially if it's cheap or free.  And while that logic almost works, consider this scenario: someone offers you a tall, frosty glass of urine.  And it's free.  Free, ice cold, low calorie (no calorie?) piss.  How drunk do you have to be to accept it?  

While you're thinking about that, let's examine the health aspects of pee light beer. 

Now, as Miller Lite ads have so astutely observed, real men demand fewer calories.  That's how that works, right?  And that's why light beer is so desirable: because it's so much lower in calories.  Isn't it?  Eh, sort of.  The caloric range of beer varies, based on style, ingredients, brewing techniques, etc.  But you can usually expect the average can/bottle of light lager to come in at about 110 calories.  A can/bottle of regular beer (taking into account all styles) will come in at around 153 calories.   That's a 43-calorie difference.  Using the same source, that's the same as about half a McIntosh apple.  Can you honestly tell me you were going to use those extra calories (and remembering that an average adult male is allowed around 2,000 to 2,500 calories a day) on half a McIntosh apple? 

Oh, but we now have Miller 64 and Budweiser 55.  Can't argue with math.*  But let's consider these comparisons to some non-alcoholic beverages: A cup of black tea (no sugar or milk) is 2-5 calories.  A cup of coffee (as with tea, adding things to make cappuccinos or lattes will blow this out of the water) is 2 to 4 calories.  An eight-ounce glass of V8 is 50 calories.  Skim milk, a beverage that is beneficial for health, is about 55 calories per half cup.  Each of these is equal to, less than, or well less than even the phantom beverages of Miller 64 and Budweiser 55.  Even Coca-Cola--everyone's favorite healthy beverage--at 95 per eight-ounce glass, still has fewer calories than most light beers.  You want to go for no calories at all?  Try water--you know, the same thing you're currently drinking, except minus 55 calories and losing that stale cracker taste. 


Then there's another question: if you're watching your caloric intake that closely, should you be drinking beer at all?  Or any alcohol?  Finally, the booze comparisons: A glass of Pinot Grigio wine will be around 123 calories; Pinot Noir, about 122.  A shot of Grey Goose vodka (roughly similar to the amount of alcohol in a beer) is 69 calories.  Johnnie Walker Black Label Scotch (a personal favorite) is about the same per serving.  If that 50 to 100 calorie difference is really scaring you off of regular beer, you shouldn't be bothering with any of these, either.  And it's not as though alcohol does anything especially healthful for you (with the possible exception of red wine).  If you're a strict diet, booze should be one of the first things to go.  This guy says it pretty well:

Depending on your lifestyle, (light beer)'s either a half-assed indulgence or a half-assed health kick. I'll drink light beer when it's handed to me,*** but otherwise I base my beer choices on several different criteria, none of which involve calories. I'll get the cheap one or the good one or the high ABV one or the weird one, but I'll never get the one that wants a pat on the head for sparing me half an apple's worth of calories. 

But you just wanted to get drunk, you say?  Fair enough.  And it makes sense that you'd want so as quickly and as cheaply as possible.  (Never mind the fact that if that really is all you want, a handle of cheap whiskey or vodka will do the trick for a comparable cost)  Well, here's the problem: beer is not the ideal beverage for that task.  The average ABV of beer is around 4-6%.  A glass of wine ranges from 8-20% (a variance that surprised me some, actually).  And liquors often hover around 40%.  For the sake of ease of drunkenness, then, it's no contest.  You shouldn't be bothering with beer at all. (And, in that cheap handle comparison above, that one handle will have you and your party trying to hold on to the floor while the party next door is only halfway through their stupid goddamn beer-amid). 

And outside of the imperials and a few largely experimental beers, most people will be full before they can get drunk.  It's one of beer's great advantages, I find: I've had enough long before I'm too drunk.  If it's the buzz I'm after, I reach for scotch.  Not to say I haven't been drunk on beer, but the process is neither cheap nor quick.  And if light beer drinkers aren't going for cost or drunkenness, what are they after?

Well, we're back to the pesky question of personal choice again.  Someone may rightfully point out that people are going to drink what they're going to drink.  And, though shallow and obvious, it's true; I mentioned in my first post that taste is not a universal thing.  I also can't stop people from drinking light beer and I don't propose to; that, to my mind, would be both immoral and impractical, as well as generally douchey.  But prodding should be acceptable, yes?  Even as a polite (ha, who am I kidding) question on my end.  If you're a light beer drinker and you've made it this far (and again, ha), you should certainly have no problem confronting the question yourself. 

My question from the beginning has been why.  Along with women's clothing sizes and Jimmy Buffet's appeal, it's something I've repeatedly tried and failed to wrap my head around.  Why is light beer such an apparent (if, thankfully, diminishing) staple of our culture?  Why do we as a culture continue to embrace a beverage with no serious health benefits, little real chance for drunken carousing (yes, I'd consider that a reason), and less taste than many equally available alternatives?  And why are banality and mediocrity celebrated--or at least accepted--so readily in a nation that traditionally relishes its knack for innovation and ambition and betterment? 

Stay tuned. 

*Or can I?**

**I can.  

***Another common argument and where I differ with this sentiment: "I drink it because it's there."  Well, after first referring you back to my pee-drinking analogy above, I've long thought that "because I can" is among the worst reasons to do anything.  If you're hungry, are you going to eat those old batteries someone handed to you?

Light Beer, Part I: No, I Can't Taste It. And Neither Can You.

During this past month's NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament, world famous swill-slingers MillerCoors LLC ran a promotion entitled "Can You Taste It?"  Presumably, the slogan had a double-meaning; the "it" referring to both the premature tasting of victory in their contest, as well as the beer sponsoring the contest.  As a reference to the beer, yes, the slogan makes for an an easy target.  Frankly, I'd think less of myself for taking the bait.  However, I can use it to pivot onto one of my favorite hobbyhorses.*

*Fair warning: this will be a multi-part rant and may well become a recurring theme here on The Half-Drunken Scribe. 

Understand: I come here not to bury crappy regular beers.  Those exist, sure enough, but some things really are a matter of taste and there are some tongues you can't argue with (however obviously right your tongue may be).  No, this is about that special scourge upon the alcohol and party industries: the light beer.  Because--however I try--I cannot understand the mind that thinks a bland, hollow, often stale light beer is a reasonable beverage in any situation.  Of course, without sitting down with that person who genuinely likes light beer and sharing some of my favorites with him and him sharing some of his with me, this debate cannot be close to settled.  But I can try to explain where I and the other sneering, haughty beer snobs are coming from. 

Now, thankfully, the craft beer market is growing.  And that means that higher-quality beer is becoming more accepted and thus should become more accessible.  But there's a lot of room to go before it's on any even par with the mass-produced beers.  Or at least before large brewers take it, their product, and their target market seriously.  And there's the rub: the large, lumbering manufacturers and distributors.  There wouldn't be any point in this post--or in any of the invective hurled at the big beer companies by petty, angry beer snobs--if not for the fact that so much of it seems so earned.  It's not merely producing (I will not denigrate the noble word "brewing" by using it in this context) and advertising a lousy product and insisting that that product has "more taste" that make us yearn to hit back.  No.  It's the clear contempt they have for, well, everyone.  Allow me to demonstrate. 

To stick with our original target, I'm sure everyone's familiar with Miller's Man Card/Man Up series.  The ads that insist that not only do men face penalties from their friends for behavior that's annoying and borderline anti-social (though, honestly, those could be nice), but that drinking light beer is one of, if not the, major offense among these laws.  Consider this: not drinking light beer is unmanly.  Really think about that for a moment.  At which point did the concept fail to process?  Was it the sad, obvious appeals to an arcane version of masculinity?  That's where most people go, I think, and I can see why but, again, the obviousness of it obscures the larger point.  Maybe it was the part where drinking something that is by definition an abbreviated, sanitized version of something else is more in line with the lumberjack crowd?  That's where I had come down--and would still award points for it--until I thought about it a little longer.  See, the lampooned men in this series--though apparently given to poor-decision making--are being judged and threatened by their friends for their beverage choice.  And while this is a slightly exaggerated version of things men really do (if jokingly), how is it different from the supposed imperiousness of the beer snob?  I'll explore this further in a bit, but imagine how events would transpire if the defendants in the Man trials had instead purchased, say, an Anchor Steam and then said to their friends, "Light beers?  Really, gentlemen?" 

Or how about advertising executives overly large beer-producer Budweiser?  These guys assume that your need for their product is so great that you'd abandon hope of rescue after a plane crash if your other option is a rockin' Bud Light party.  Not "let's get back to land so we can taste Bud Light and maybe see our families again;" that I'd get.  No, this is more along the lines "screw the rest of our lives--the one I was leading doesn't compare to all this Bud Light!"  More than that, your addiction is so great that you're willing to overlook clear and present danger and the objections of your relatively on-the-ball significant other in order to get a taste of that sweet, sweet, low-calorie nectar.  And just because I think we need the reminder, this same publicly-traded company is also responsible for the farting horse ad and the Wassup guys.  Not to mention the "drinkability" campaign (how much deserved shit do you think McDonald's would get if they advertised their food as "edible?").

Then there's Coors' Blue Mountains ads that assumed there were beer-drinkers out there who were having trouble telling when their beer was cold enough to drink (this is how, if you hadn't figured it out).  I'm not even going to bother with the fact that beer being as cold as possible is actually bad for the beer.  The point is: they really think people are this stupid.  And they're telling us so to our faces.  And people keep buying Coors.  

Conceited shit like this is the problem.  It's not about beer snobs wanting to lord our knowledge appreciation of Belgian Trippels and seasonal IPA's over people who just want to relax with a cold one.  Yes, those snobs exist and you have my permission to shove that tulip glass with the tall, frothy head into their eye (or my eye).  We sometimes need that.  But have we grown so intolerable that we're the ones to be loathed over the mega-corporations who insult you in exchange for your money?  Or is this another one of those culture war battlegrounds, where good and decent middle Americans can write off perfectly good beers solely because they're enjoyed by European socialists and coastal elites?  And the chasm grows so wide that we can never attempt to understand each other, lest our cliff crumble, killing us all and, more importantly, losing the war? 

Is this where beer--mankind's impetus for giving up that whole hunter-gatherer thing--has been dragged?  If so, then truly nothing is sacred.  And if these greedy and cynical mega-brewers have really so debased one of my most beloved pastimes and hobbies, then hold on, because I have a lot more where this came from. 

Next time: the health implications of beer of all goddamn things.