Miller Lite

Miller Lite

Miller Lite logo
Manufacturer	Miller Brewing Company
Introduced	1973
Alcohol by volume	4.2%
Style	Pilsner

Miller Lite, also known simply as Lite, is a 4.2% abv pale lager light beer brand sold by MillerCoors of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States. Miller Lite competes with Anheuser-Busch's Bud Light beer. The company also produces Miller Genuine Draft and Miller High Life.

Miller Lite was essentially the first mainstream light beer. After its first inception as "Gablinger's Diet Beer," developed in 1967 by Joseph L. Owades, PhD, a biochemist working for New York's Rheingold Brewery, the recipe was 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 late 1960s. When Meister Brau ran into financial problems and sold its labels to Miller in 1972, the recipe was relaunched simply as "Lite" on packaging and in advertising (with "Lite Beer from Miller" being its "official" name until the late '90s) in the test markets of Springfield, Illinois, Knoxville, Tennessee, and San Diego, California, in 1973, and heavily marketed using masculine pro sports players and other, so-called, macho figures of the day in an effort to sell to the key beer-drinking male demographic. Miller Lite was introduced nationally in 1975. Miller's heavy-advertising 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, in particular Anheuser-Busch with its heavily advertised Bud Light in 1982, which eventually overtook Lite in sales by 1994. Anheuser-Busch played on the branding style of "Lite" by highlighting the fact that their beer was called "Bud Light," as "everything else is just a light." In 1992 light beers became the biggest domestic beer in America, and in 1998, Miller relabeled its "Lite" brand as "Miller Lite."