miller high life

"the champagne of beers" --what does that even mean?

i only ask because the question stems from a previous concern of mine, that being pabst blue ribbon has been the sovereign "hipster" beer for far too long.


--i literally found this image by googling "hipster +pbr". i could have have screen-captured the entire first page of results, but you can just google it for yourself.
since I was a freshman in college, the price of a thirty pack of this beer has gone up around $3.00, and i can't help but think this is at least in part because of its overwhelming popularity. pabst has been on top for a long time. check out this excerpt from a new york times article by rob walker:

Pabst Blue Ribbon -- P.B.R., as fans call it -- is currently enjoying a highly unlikely comeback. In 2002, sales of the beer, which had been sinking steadily since the 1970's, actually rose 5.3 percent. From the start of 2003 through April 20, supermarket beer sales are up another 9.4 percent. It is endorsed in ''The Hipster Handbook,'' a paperback dissection of cool, and is popping up in trendy bars from the Mission District to the Lower East Side.¹

first of all, lol @ "april 20." secondly, 2002! that's eight years. when was the last time something was en vogue for over five? the only other thing i can think of is wearing large sunglasses.

for me, these represent two failures of the "hipster" community, two weary warriors to whom we failed to give the proper viking funeral. i thought that the unspoken rule of "hipness" was that as soon as something is publicly acknowledged as being "hip" or "authentic", it ceases to be so. all i'm talking about is the concept of the backlash.

it's nothing new. we (young, comfortable white people, that is) have been doing it for a long time:


and we're still pretty good at it:


it's like the concept of the yin and the yang; as soon as a given item of fetish (that fetish being the fetish of authenticity) reaches a point of popular approval in its "hipness", it ceases to be "hip" and becomes "popular." the item of fetish must then be drug out into the street, flayed, and stoned to death like an adulterous woman in a developing nation.



so a replacement must be found for the tired old workhorse-in-wayfarers that is pbr. if it were up to me, its successor would be extra gold:

extra gold is full-flavored, obscure, and most importantly, actually cheap. apparently this urine-gold beer is the unwanted orphan of the coors brewing co. it's the only coors beer you won't be offered on a tour of their factory, and my local liquor store stopped carrying it when an increase in taxes meant it wouldn't be the cheapest thirty pack at the liquor store, anymore.

but i don't get to dictate what other people drink, so if there's going to be a successor to pbr, it's probably going to be something obvious and already almost as popular.

incipit miller high life.

miller high life thinks it's so cool.


what makes it different from, say, miller genuine draft? well, if you ever took the time to notice, you'd realize they're remarkably similar. from wikipedia:

MGD is actually made from the same recipe as Miller High Life, with a different treatment. It was developed to give High Life drinkers the same taste in a can or bottle as they found in non-pasteurized kegs.²

from personal experience, i can only attest to the fact that miller high life tastes a lot sweeter than miller genuine draft. it's like the difference between a bottle of chianti and a box of white zinfandel. from wikipedia:

The prevailing slogan on current packaging is "The Champagne of Beers", an adaptation of its long standing slogan "The Champagne of Bottle Beers". Accordingly, this beer is noted for its high level of carbonation, making it a very bubble-filled beverage, like champagne.³

hence the slogan! actually, that fits. it would make sense that a more bubbly beer would also be sweeter. from about.com:

Natural carbonation results from the fermentation process. Fermentation produces alcohol and carbon dioxide as yeast digests the sugar in the wort. ⁴

so an obvious explanation for the slogan could be that miller, in utilizing a beer recipe and fermentation process that called for the addition of extra sugar to the brewing process, simply called out the obvious similarity to sparkling wine production. sparkling wine does, indeed, get is carbonation from sugar. wikipedia again:

The amount of pressure in the wine is determined by the amount of sugar added during the tirage stage at the beginning of the secondary fermentation with more sugar producing increased amount of carbon dioxide gas and thus pressure in the wine.⁵

in fact, popular champagne was historically much sweeter than the champagne we drink today (we actually prefer something drier than most of our dead ancestors did!). and when i say we like them drier, i mean it. today the most popular variety of champagne is brut; brut contains less than 12 grams of sugar per litre. at the turn of the 20th century, popular champagne often contained as much as 300 grams of sugar per litre.⁷ that's a difference of 2,500%! so miller high life and the finest champagne have sugar in common. big woop. well, you know what else has extra sugar?

"Malt liquor is a strong lager in which sugar, corn or other adjuncts are added to the malt to boost the alcoholic strength."⁶
--wikipedia

so really, if its "the champagne of beers," then it's "the malt liquor of beers," too. and come to think of it, sparkling wine or even champagne is really just "the malt liquor of wines."
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¹http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/22/magazine/the-marketing-of-no-marketing.html
²http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_Brewing_Company
³http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_Brewing_Company
⁴http://beer.about.com/od/commercialbeers/f/fizz.htm
⁵http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparkling_wine#Bubbles
⁶http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malt_liquor
⁷http://www.openthatbottlenight.com/open-that-bottle-night-history.shtml