Logical attempts made to find the ultimate light beer

For this week’s beer review, we decided to settle an age-old debate: Which light beer is best?

Throughout our post-21-year-old lives, there have been many ‘experienced’ beer drinkers telling us which light beer is best to drink. Some had our best interests in mind; others taught us the best way to watch your wallet and calories. Jmay had a friend from high school whose mom would only drink Bud Light out of a bottle, no matter what. There are plenty of similar beer enthusiasts out there who swear by their beer and will never stray from it. We wanted to know who’s right, so we put our lab coats on and started experimenting to end the debate once and for all.

For this experiment, we tasted five beers: Bud Light, Busch Light, Miller Light, Michelob Golden Light and Coors Light. Chach, Jmay and our roommates, Mark R, Mark M, Mason and Ian all blindly tasted the beers. We then ranked them by flavor, best getting a score of five, and the worst getting a score of one. This helped us decide which beers were the tastiest. We also had each person try and taste which beer was which, both for fun and to see if we were truly deserving of being beer reviewers.

Mark Rosen went first, and he started out by sniffing all the beers and, after tasting them all, declared that the worst beer was “Definitely Coors, a FACT.” It, in FACT, was not Coors. Mark went on to rank Coors as his best beer and cried himself to sleep that night (we think). Mark did manage to identify Bud Light, but sadly, the rest were not guessed correctly.

Mason Meyer went next and was hating on Coors well before the tasting began. After lots of lip smacking and long decision making, he made decisions and awaited the results. While he did blindly rank Coors as his second worst beer, he went zero for five in identifying them. He came in with Busch as his go-to beer, yet like many other blind taste testers before us, his favorite was indeed ranked last. Even though Mason didn’t catch any W’s reviewing, he has been managing to get some dubs on Fortnite with Chach.

Mark McQuiston wanted to follow and swiftly went through his picks, perhaps to show Mason that it was possible to rank them in under 30 minutes. He said they are all very watery and that they should’ve all been tied for last. Because he had to rank them, however, he did so and put Busch as his top choice. Busch was the also the only beer he got correct, showing that he and Mark Rosen share more than just a common name.

Ian Aadland, our resident club hockey extraordinaire, rounded out the semi-pros with his palate. He, like Rosen, loved to sniff the beers, and claimed some to be “extra stinky” compared to others. However, it is important to note that Ian smells, so there’s a chance the ‘extra stinky’ was actually just his BO, not beer. Ian ended up going one for five as well, tying the Marks in an unsatisfactory attempt and proving his lack of expertise.

Jmay went next, thirsty to prove his taste buds were up to snuff and could piece together more than the amateurs. After tasting them all, he changed two guesses at the last second before finalizing his review. This would be the worst mistake of his life. Jmay went 3/5, and the two he switched turned out to be his only misses. He suffers from night terrors now, reliving the moment of the switch each and every night. Needless to say, he will be training nonstop to get back into shape for the next review.

Chach rounded out the reviewers with a PERFECT 5/5 REVIEW. He started off unsure, stating they all tasted quite similar, but after applying his astute taste buds he slowly but surely started ranking correctly. His legacy will now be secured, with a hall of fame bid coming his way after his astounding and decorated career ends, which we hope is no time soon.

Overall, the results of the experiment revealed this: Bud and McGolden tied for the most votes at 22, (remember the best beers got five votes, the next best four and so on until last place, which got one). Busch came in third at 17 with Miller shortly behind it at 16. Coors ended in a sad last place with 14 votes to its name. We concluded that that Miller had a different taste than the rest, which some people appreciated while others didn’t. We also realized there was little difference between taste, and to the average beer drinker, there was almost none at all. Nobody outside of Chach managed to guess them all correctly, with the non-reviewers not getting more than one correct. This shows that you can have your favorite light beer to obsess over and fight for, but odds are you don’t know the difference between your favorite and your worst enemy. There’s probably a larger life lesson in there somewhere, but we can’t find it — we’re beer reviewers, not scholars.