From Bloomberg Businessweek:
The Slow, Watery Death of Light Beer in America
It’s no secret that big industrial beers like Budweiser are in terminal decline in the U.S. thanks to the growing sophistication of American drinkers. So perhaps it was inevitable that light beers from the same monolithic brewers might suffer the same fate sooner or later. It turns out to be sooner than one might think.
Here’s a statistic that will hearten beer snobs and unnerve high-ranking people at Anheuser-Busch InBev and MillerCoors. Domestic light beer sales in the U.S. will hit a 10-year low in 2015, according to a report in Shanken News Daily. Light beer sales fell by 3.5 percent, to 98.4 million barrels, in 2013, and the e-mail newsletter projects that sales will decline by an additional 4.9 million barrels by 2015.
The biggest losers in the report are the obvious suspects. AB InBev’s Bud Light, the sector’s dominant force, suffered its fifth straight down year, according to the newsletter, dropping by 3.1 percent, to 37.6 million barrels. Coors Light lost 1.5 percent of its sales, and Miller Lite had an even worse year as sales dwindled by 5.9 percent.
There will always be some market for Miller Light, it is just that the playing field is being leveled and small craft breweries are now able to compete head-to-head with the multinational corporations.
Same thing happened 30 years ago with coffee.
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