Beer of the Weak

This is only our second installment of "Beer of the Weak," mostly for the reason that I would rather keep this a blog about beers that are great, versus a blog on beers that suck; however, in this case Miller has forced my hand.

During the summer, I found a distinct pleasure in kicking back on the couch with the windows open and following my local baseball team, the Brewers, on the television. These telecasts were inundated with an ad for a ridiculous new Miller product, "Miller Chill."

A variation on the Mexican tradition of a cervesa preperada (prepared beer), Miller Chill is a light lager that has lime and salt added to it, in the mode of the traditional serving method of terrible Mexican beers like Corona and Tecate.

Sounds like a terrible idea right? Well I figured that this product would quickly fade away, especially once the winter set in. I was wrong. Yesterday I saw an ad proclaiming that "even in winter, you need refreshment," or something equally banal.

This is yet another beer that never should have been. Now I'll admit that when you're sitting on the beach in the hot Mexican sun, having a light lager rather than stout makes a lot of sense; especially when, if you are actually IN MEXICO, you probably don't have all that much choice. I will also acknowledge that being in that sun drenched atmosphere, the idea of a lime in one's beer sounds refreshing. But how much of one's life is spent sitting on the beach in Mexico? If it exceeds one tenth of one percent, consider yourself fortunate, and fortunate enough to buy a better light lager than Miller Chill and fortunate enough to have someone apply the salt and an actual lime to the beer for you.

Aesthetically the beer is repulsive. As if you couldn't grasp the "with lime" phrase on the bottle, they had to make the bottle green, perhaps also trying to capitalize on the "Ecto Cooler as nostalgia" market.

As far as the lime juice is concerned, have you ever used that lime juice that you squeeze out of a lime shaped container? Not that great right? That's what it's like. Fresh limes actually floating in and mixing with the beer is much better.

I guess it's hard to say what the beer actually tastes like because it's obscured by the lime and the salt. Needless to say, as a brewer you're not going to be overly concerned with brewing a high quality lager when you're just going to pollute it with, what are in the culinary world, STRONG tastes like lime and salt.

I really hope that this beer does soon fade away, and I hope that Americans will be able to cope with their increased workload of having to arduously squeeze their own limes into their beers. Once again I hope that Miller takes their energies off of gimmicks and puts them into drinkable beers.