Miller Lite

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Miller Lite is the name of a popular pilsner beer sold by Miller Brewing Company of Milwaukee, Wisconsin with a 4.2% ABV. Sibling beers include Miller Genuine Draft and Miller High Life.

Contents 1 History 2 Ingredients 3 Advertising 4 Trivia 5 Notes 6 References 7 External links

[edit] History

Essentially the first mainstream light beer, Miller Lite has a colorful history. After its first inception as "Gablinger's Diet Beer," which was created by the Rheingold Brewery in New York in 1967, the recipe was literally given by the inventor of the light beer process to one of Miller's competing breweries, Chicago's Meister Brau, which came out with the Meister Brau "Lite" brand in the early 70's. When Miller acquired Meister Brau the recipe was reformulated and relaunched as "Miller Lite" in 1975, and heavily marketed using masculine pro sports players and other macho figures of the day in an effort to sell to the key beer-drinking male demographic. Miller's approach worked where the two previous light beers had failed, and Miller's early production totals of 12.8 million barrels quickly increased to 24.2 million barrels by 1977 as Miller rose to 2nd place in the American brewing marketplace. Other brewers responded, especially Anheuser-Busch with its heavily advertised Bud Light in 1982, which eventually overtook Lite in 1994. In 1992 light beer became the biggest domestic beer in America.

[edit] Ingredients

Miller Lite has an unusually high number of ingredients not normally found in beer, including manufactured chemical additives. The Center for Science in the Public Interest reports that the beverage contains propylene glycol alginate, water, barley malt, corn syrup, chemically modified hops extracts, yeast, amyloglucosidase, carbon dioxide, papain enzyme, liquid sugar, potassium metabisulfite, and Emka malt (a food coloring).^[1]

[edit] Advertising

Miller Lite is known for its long-running "Tastes great, less filling" advertising campaign, which was ranked by Advertising Age magazine as the 8th best advertising campaign in history. The campaign was developed by the ad agency, McCann-Erickson Worldwide.^[2]

As part of this campaign, Miller Brewing ran a series of highly distinctive television commercials in the winter of 1993–1994 showing several fictitious "extreme sports" such as "Wiener Dog Drag Racing" (which featured two wiener dogs facing each other at a drag racing strip, "Sumo High Dive" (which depicted a Japanese sumo wrestler diving off a platform) and "The Miss Perfect Face-Off" (which featured beauty pageant contestants playing ice hockey). The tag line that followed was, "If you can combine great taste with less filling, you can combine anything."

Starting on January 12, 1997, a series of surreal Miller Lite ads began to be produced, purportedly made by a guy named "Dick". They were hallmarked as such either at the beginning or the end of the commercial. Such commercials include one where a middle-aged guy sees the message "twist to open" on a Miller Lite bottlecap, and he proceeds to do the Twist.^[3]

In 2002, "Catfight", another high-profile commercial in the long-running "Tastes great, Less filling" campaign, was denounced by critics as depicting women as sexual objects.^[4]

In 2006, Miller Lite had an advertising campaign featuring celebrities that include actor Burt Reynolds, professional wrestler Triple H, comedian Eddie Griffin, and former American football player Jerome Bettis. The celebrities and along with other actors were in a "Men of the Square Table", a group meeting where they discuss different situations that should be included in the "Man Laws". The ads were developed by the ad agency, Crispin Porter + Bogusky/Miami, and were directed by comedy film director Peter Farrelly.^[5]

In the sport of NASCAR, Miller beer began advertising their Miller Genuine Draft beer on the #27 Pontiac of Rusty Wallace (later #2). Wallace switched to a Ford in 1994, and Miller switched their sponsorship to Miller Lite a couple years later in 1997. That sponsorship continues to this day, now on the #2 Dodge, driven by Kurt Busch, after Wallace retired in 2005.

[edit] Trivia

Miller Lite is the only major light beer in the United States to have the word "light" spelled differently from the traditional spelling. Some of the brand's radio advertisements allude to this, noting that Miller has no "GHT".

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

• Important dates in the history of Miller Brewing Co. San Antonio Express-News.

[edit] External links

• Video of the Wiener Dog Drag Racing commercial from 1993 courtesy of Wiener Takes All
• Wiener Takes All: A Dogumentary at the Internet Movie Database
• Official Miller Lite website
• Men of The Square Table