“It’s always a bad sign when a company seems to think that its customers are morons.”
From a WSJ column exploring the reasons why sales of light beers are down. The author suggests the main reason is that they don’t taste good—or like much of anything—and no amount of advertising or marketing schemes can outweigh that in the long run. But just to be fair, he does taste tests of several light beer brands. The things some people will do for their jobs, right?
The results probably won’t be excerpted in any beer ads in the near future:
Taking notes in my blind tasting I quickly found myself running out of ways to describe vapid nothingness. Natural Light was “flavorless”; Michelob Ultra was simply “bland”; Coors Light was “blah”—though it did have the slightest hint of sweetness, as if an ounce of (bad) ginger ale had been diluted with pint of club soda. Miller Lite had a slightly foamier consistency (the Vortex bottle at work?) but no particular taste that could be discerned through the suds; Bud Light earned the honorific “least awful, but just barely.”
No wonder these beers are so heavily advertised. No one would think to drink them otherwise.