SPIRITS

Throwback beer can design has memories bubbling up

I am not a beer drinker; my father was.

I think he drank beer because it was easy, because he liked it, because it didn't kill the brain cells as efficiently as whisky or vodka. I remember how he used to make a point of ordering "the local beer" whenever and wherever he traveled. This habit may have been more a matter of convenience than anthropological study but it exposed him to all manner and styles of the brewer's art. He drank Jax and Dixie in New Orleans; Genesee Cream Ale in upstate New York; wheat dunkels in Bavaria; Tiger in Thailand.

He liked some beers more than others, but his on-the-road experiences never affected his home consumption patterns. I remember him drinking Carling Black Label when I was a little kid, and Olympia (and Hamm's) after we moved to California. The last 10 years or so of his life he generally bought what was on sale at the air base commissary. He consumed Busch and Old Milwaukee by the case. There were some brands that were too cheap for him, but not many.

In the suburbs where I grew up, most dads were beer men, and most of them decided on a brand early on. They drank Bud or Miller. A small minority preferred Schlitz. You opened a neighbor's refrigerator on a hot summer day and you were struck by the uniformity -- nobody mixed six-packs in those days.

To me it seemed a bit arbitrary, for I didn't see much difference between the big commercial brands. Based on my admittedly small sample, Miller and Bud seemed about as dissimilar as Coke and Pepsi, while Schlitz was as distinctive as RC Cola. I was sure that there were connoisseurs who could tell them apart while blindfolded, but I didn't really see the point. My friends and I would snitch whichever we thought we could get away with; we only pretended to care about the brand.

I think most people who read columns like this one probably have an attitude about the homogenized nationally advertised brands of American beer, but most Americans have better things to do than debate the relative virtues of pilsners and stouts. And it's not because they don't perceive the difference, it's just that they have an ecumenical attitude toward their subject. While beer drinkers are notoriously brand-loyal -- they drink some beers but not others -- most are not fiercely elitist about their chosen quaff. Leaving aside snobbery, the reason one chooses one beer or another often has little to do with the way a particular brand tastes.

There is a reason that beer marketing is so intense and fanciful.

And so Miller has -- for a limited time -- re-introduced the blue and white trade dress that adorned the first cans of Miller Lite when it was introduced nationally in 1975. It's an obvious nostalgia play, an attempt to connect with guys -- and I say "guys" because almost all beer marketing is aimed at a male demographic -- like me who remember what the dads (or the granddads) in their neighborhood drank. The throwback conjures associations, it re-links us to the past.

And it's working. Lite sales are up 6 percent since the introduction of the retro cans, which were timed to the release of Anchorman 2 in December. (Lite is prominently featured in the film, which is set in 1982.) MillerCoors Chief Marketing Officer Andy England says retro Lite cans are popular with older drinkers who remember the iconic blue and white cans and "millennials" who find it "authentic ... which is such an important trend these days."

TASTES GREAT?

Lite was once the most popular beer in the country, but it has slipped to fourth in recent years behind Bud Light, Coors Light and Budweiser. The campaign got me to buy a six-pack of "tall boys" and try it again, for the first time in probably 20 years. It still tastes the same, which is, to be truthful, inoffensive.

My father never drank Lite, but he liked the commercials, which featured sports figures like Bob Uecker and Ray Nitschke and later on Brooks Robinson and Gale Sayers. When he drank a Miller, which was rarely, it was always a High Life -- "the champagne of bottled beers." He wasn't concerned with watching calories. I don't think most dads were back then.

He never felt the need to educate me about beer -- he let me try a prophylactic sip when I was little, which satisfied my curiosity and deterred me from drinking it again until I was 15 or so (when we started filching it from the dads' refrigerators).

I drank it some in college; it was the default beverage at parties. I remember how some friends would goof on the sophisticates who made a point of drinking Heineken and St. Pauli Girl by bringing purple-labeled drugstore beer we'd picked up at the K&B to parties. (Sometimes we'd opt for the generic supermarket variety, with its black Helvetica font "BEER" stamped on an otherwise naked white can.) We even drank Pabst Blue Ribbon in those days. And Rolling Rock. Way before the hipsters moved on.

Later, I began to appreciate the vastness of beer and went through my "American beer is bad" phase. Now I recognize how complicated my relationship with the stuff is -- beer is a large subject, and a writing career could be sacrificed to describing and reporting on the various aspects of the beverage. I just don't have the time to learn enough about it.

If you've seen the new Lite commercials, you know how hard Miller is leaning on the nostalgia. The visuals have an Instagrammed look that evokes the '70s; the through line is that your dad drank Lite and he was cool. The tagline to one of the commercials is "We invented light beer. And you."

The first part of this claim is somewhat dubious. Miller acquired the formula for Lite when it bought Chicago's Meister Brau brewery in 1969. Meister Brau had been producing Meister Brau Lite, and other brewers were trying to sell "diet beer" before the birth of "Lite Beer from Miller." So maybe the copywriters are leaning on the homophone; maybe what they're really saying is "We invented Lite beer."

The second part is more interesting -- Miller makes a mild joke about how light beer led to more attractive men, which led to ladies liking them, which led to love and marriage and "you."

But archaeologists suggest that beer predates the discovery of wine and even bread; that wandering nomadic tribes, through trial and error, ascertained that wild barley mixed with water and fermented (by chance) with yeast was more potable than untreated water and less likely to cause gastric distress. It probably helped that it also produced a little buzz.

Some anthropologists -- a minority, but more than a crackpot few -- even believe it was beer, not bread, that was the driving force behind agriculture. That beer was the genesis of civilization, the primary agent of human cultural evolution. To take the trouble of selecting, saving, planting and nurturing seeds, our ancestors needed a sexier reward than mere bread.

So maybe the tagline isn't mere puffery. Maybe it's "authentic" truth-in-advertising.

Email:

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

blooddirtangels.com

Style on 08/17/2014

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