IF there’s one thing Americans love more than beer, it’s light beer — so much that the three best-selling brews in the US are all of the light variety, averaging a third fewer calories than their full-bodied cousins.
But now there’s a newer, even slimmer kid on the block, weighing in at just 64 measly calories, and it’s appropriately named MGD 64. You could drink two bottles of the stuff and still not have consumed the calories in a single bottle of original Miller Genuine Draft.
The drawback (you saw this coming) is that MGD 64 is not exactly what one would call an, ahem, artisan brew. In fact, we found it to be a lot closer to mildly flavored seltzer water than it was to beer.
“Light beer is basically just regular beer with a lot of water added, along with flavorless adjuncts like rice and corn sugar,
stuff that makes alcohol but doesn’t add many calories,” says Jonathan Forester, president of Forester Food Consulting in Bronxville.
“Who drinks something that has hardly any flavor to it?”
Our thoughts exactly. But as it turns out, even the most dedicated drinkers often turn to light beer, saying it allows them to drink for hours without getting too full. For purists like Forester, however, it seems no light beer will ever be good enough.
“In old Europe, light beer was what you gave your kids to drink because the water wasn’t safe,” he says. “If you are worried about real beer being too heavy, why not just put a shot of vodka in a glass of water and drink that?”
We gathered some of the best-selling light beers in the country, including the new MGD 64, for our own taste comparison.