Making light beer is really freaking hard
It probably says a lot about light beer that the man widely considered the inventor of low-calorie swill was a biochemist.
Joseph Owades, the man behind light beer, figured out the scientific elements of creating the beverage—and he did a bunch of research into the way yeast interacted with the starches in malt. He found an enzyme in yeast that removed much of the starch while ensuring the beer kept the properties of beer, and that led to the creation of Gablinger's Diet Beer, a brew sold through his employer at the time, Rheingold Breweries.
As you can tell by the name, the marketing prowess that light beers are famous for wasn't really in check at the time, and the beer quickly flopped—as did a follow-up product by Meister Brau that was allowed to use Owades' recipe. Nonetheless, Owades knew he was onto something.
"It was a common belief then that drinking beer made you fat," Owades said, according to his 2005 Washington Post obituary. "People weren't jogging, and everybody believed beer drinkers got a big, fat beer belly. Period. I couldn't do anything about the taste of beer, but I could do something about the calories."
His idea was too good to hide behind bad marketing. After a set of mergers, his process ended up in the hands of Miller Brewing, and soon after that, the basic formula was being used to create Miller Lite, which launched in 1975 to immediate success.
The invention of light beer, in some ways, is the easy part. The hard part involves making sure it comes out consistently, especially at the scale at which major brewers work.
A 2012 Mental Floss piece details exactly how complicated it is, highlighting the fact that a lot of factors are at play in ensuring the brews remain at a high quality, and how the light beer creation process—specifically how the fermentation takes place—is a major differentiator between good light beer and bad light brew.
"At all 137 Anheuser-Busch breweries around the globe, Budweiser and Bud Light undergo exactly five and a half days of primary fermentation and 21 days of lagering, all at 50°F, plus or minus one degree," the article explains. "Any warmer and the beer could end up thick and flabby, instead of 'clean, crisp, and fresh.'"
The magazine highlighted the story of a Brooklyn homebrewer who spent months trying to properly replicate Budweiser in homebrew conditions. It wasn't easy, but it won him an award.
It'll be the last award ever handed out for a light beer, a product that would fit perfectly into this holster.
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