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Light Makes Right?

The Associated Press

The new low-cal beers like MGD 64 have far less alcohol as well.

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By EMILY FREDRIX

The Associated Press

Published: October 30, 2009

MILWAUKEE - How low can brewers go? Having conquered the beer-belly set, some of the nation's biggest brewers are trying to win over the six-pack-ab crowd with ultra-low-calorie suds.

The question is: Are drinkers willing to sacrifice flavor and a bit of the buzz? And how long before beer gets turned back into water?

Most regular American beers such as Budweiser have about 150 calories and 5 percent alcohol; most light beers contain about 100 calories and 4 percent alcohol.

The new brews, MillerCoors' Miller Genuine Draft 64 and Anheuser-Busch InBev's Select 55, are well below that. Their calorie counts are in their names, and they both contain less than 3 percent alcohol. Guzzling a whole MGD 64 or Select 55 is like taking a few swigs of a Bud.

It's an unavoidable tradeoff: To cut calories, beer companies reduce the amount of malted barley and other grains that are fermented during the brewing process. That, in turn, reduces the amount of alcohol in the brew. The result is a beer more like its main ingredient, water.

"You start producing something that could taste very, very thin," says Thomas Shellhammer, professor of fermentation science at Oregon State University. "That would be the challenge for the brewer, to produce something that still tastes like beer."

Light beers account for about half of the $99 billion-a-year beer market in the United States, according to the Beverage Information Group, a market research firm.

The market for super-low-calorie probably is small, said Eric Schmidt, the research firm's manager of information services.

MillerCoors says MGD 64 (slogan: "As light as it gets") has sold twice as much in its first year as Miller Genuine Draft Light, which it replaced a year ago. It would not release figures.

After a few weeks of testing Select 55 in 15 markets, Anheuser-Busch decided to expand into a dozen more starting this month. The company isn't sure whether demand for the beer will be big enough for it to go national.

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