Pabst Light’s Lane Is Narrow, But Legacy Brewers Can Pull It Off. Look At Yuengling Flight.

There are not a lot of “dynamic” segments in the American brewing business at the moment, on account of the entire beer market — nay, the beverage-alcohol market writ large — struggling to find sales in the face of our various and sundry national sh*tshows. Of them all, though, light macro lager is about as dull as it gets. Everybody knows that starting with Miller Lite in the mid-’70s, continuing on through the profanely expensive advertising slugfest we know now as the Light Beer Wars, and ending in the late aughts, when Bud Light’s sales volume peaked, the industry’s heavyweights have long since squeezed every last drop of transformative growth out of the high-profile, low-margin segment.

What Pabst Light, the newest release from the Pabst Blue Ribbon portfolio, presupposes is: What if they didn’t?

We’re going to find out the answer to this fun counterfactual together, because earlier this month, Pabst Brewing Company — that old Wisconsin juggernaut, basking in the sun-scorched climes of south-central Texas — announced that it was indeed making a proper play at the U.S. beer industry’s white dwarf segment. Weighing in at 96 calories, with a fairly elegant, monochromatic interpretation of PBR’s iconic branding, Pabst Light is rolling out across 50 states now. “The trucks are literally on the road as we speak,” says brand director Kim Oakley in a phone interview earlier this week. “We’re expecting to have pretty full distribution by the end of the month.”

It’s true that craft brewers have been laboring tirelessly to make craft lager happen for years, so it’s not like there haven’t been new entrants to the style. And contrary to some reports, it’s not true that this is Pabst’s first light lager. The company actually launched a short-lived beer called Pabst Light in 1983, according to a syndicated report from Ad Age published in October of that year. (Real Captain Fred-heads, if you know more, you know I’d love to hear from you: dave@dinfontay.com.) But as far as I can tell, this is the only time a top-five domestic American domestic macrobrewer has launched a straightaway light adjunct lager version of its flagship in my lifetime.

To wit: I was born in 1988, six years after August Busch III begrudgingly greenlit “Budweiser Light” in order to keep the deep-pocketed marketing whizzes at Phillip Morris from turning Miller Brewing Company into a serious contender for the national throne. And that was the last debut of what we now know as the American beer aisle’s “domestic premium” Big Three. Lite flicked on in 1974, cobbled together with an old Meister Brau recipe and a bajillion cigarette dollars; Pete Coors convinced Bill and Joe that the Silver Bullet had to happen circa 1978. In the rapidly consolidating beer business of the late 20th century, light beer was a dynamic segment. And though it did shuffle in from time to time with low-calorie line extensions like the aforementioned Pabst Light, plus Pabst Blue Ribbon Light (a mid-’80s rebrand of Pabst Light) and Pabst Easy (a 3.8 percent alcohol-by-volume also-ran), the country’s current fifth-largest brewer by volume was never a consistent part of it.

The pint-half-empty argument is that the firm is better off. Even notwithstanding the Bud Light fiasco, macrobrewers’ light lagers are at best a mature market, and at worst, a portrait of slow decay. ”We’ve seen the Big Three declining for a while,” says Mary Mills, a consultant at 3Tier Beverages. So has the off-premise writ large. Scan data for multi-outlet grocery, mass retail, and convenience stores tracked by market research firm Circana indicates that Bud Light, Miller Lite, and Coors Light were down an average of 5.9 percent in dollars and 7.5 percent in volume year-over-year for the 52 weeks through March 23, 2025. The beer category overall was down 1.1 percent and 3.1 percent in dollars and volume, respectively, in that frame. Pabst Light will have to try to find growth in a massive segment that’s currently shrinking.

“Full disclosure, it’s not easy to find the swim lane for this thing,” says Oakley. “But one of the really interesting things that the scan data was showing us is that PBR consumers actually buy across the category, across all the different price segments.” When Pabst Light hits shelves, it will be “price-aligned” with PBR, or maybe even a hair below it to encourage customers to try it. So even though it looks slightly more grown up — higher-end, I’d say — than the flagship, it’ll be sitting on the same rung of the price ladder, which will put it in the neighborhood of Busch (not Bud) Light.

This is a good place for Pabst Light to be for a few reasons. The first is the looming global recession (or worse), and the plummeting consumer confidence that it has ushered into the national zeitgeist. The second is that even as the Big Three have bled, Busch Light and other “domestic sub-premiums” have grown; even before Trump tanked the economy, media hysteria about Bidenflation had already sent shoppers reaching for lower shelves. There’s a bifurcation happening in this part of the beer aisle, says 3Tier’s Mills: “While it’s not those traditional premium lights, I think below and above [premium] has become kind of a growth thing, [especially] with new-to-world brands in this space.” Which gets at the third reason I like Pabst Light’s positioning: Oakley et al. resisted the temptation to chase Michelob Ultra.

Michelob Ultra! The red network’s slim-can saving grace! The most important and inimitable “anomaly” — Mills’ word, and well-chosen — of this century’s beer market! So far, at least. The siren’s song of Mich Ultra’s super-premium price point and enduring active-lifestyle appeal has lured macro rivals to mount challenges (Miller 64, et al.), piqued the curiosity of major craft brewers (see Sierra Nevada’s Sufferfest stumble), and even convinced its own parent company to try to replicate its astonishing “health halo” with the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it launch of Bud Light Next. With their 90-calorie profiles and slim cans, Corona Premier and Modelo Oro are the latest comers for Mich Ultra’s crown, and while they each had some early success, both are down low double-digits in the off-premise these days. “Michelob Ultra has built a really loyal consumer base,” says Mills, and woe to the brand that tries to fight it head-on.

Here, I think the latest light-lager success in the American brewing pantheon is instructive. Launched in early 2020, D. G. Yuengling & Son’s Yuengling Flight is a 95-calorie riff in a sleeker, more modern package than the rest of the Pennsylvania stalwart’s portfolio. I admit: I thought it’d crash and burn, especially since the country’s largest Brewers Association-defined craft brewer has marketed the 99-calorie Yuengling Light since 2001. But Flight has sorta-kinda soared, especially in the past year, notching 7.6 percent and 10.3 percent upticks in dollars and volume respectively, per Circana.

That success proves three things. First, my instincts are occasionally wrong; I know, I know, I’m just as shocked as you are. Second, legacy brands — and as the oldest still-operating brewery in the country, it doesn’t get more “legacy” than Yuengling — can still nail new product rollouts in old categories, even when the lane is narrow. And third, while running straight at the Big Three might be a (beer) mug’s game, there are still opportunities above and below the flagships. Flight, along with Garage Beer, Eight, and (maybe) Sam Adams American Light, are taking the over. Pabst Light will take its shot from just below.

Will it work? We’ll see. But everybody loves an underdog.

🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now

As you perhaps heard, last Wednesday Grandpa Tariffs announced a 25 percent levy on imported aluminum can empties and canned beer, regardless of their country of origin. At least, that’s how it sounded at first? And it would be a devastating blow for importers already trying to wrap their heads around the implications of how Trump’s tariffs on ~90 different countries — some of which are now on a 90-day pause? — might affect their businesses. But then, late last week, Beer Marketer’s Insights reported that that 25 percent tax hike might only apply to the metal that the beer is packaged within, not the actual liquid itself. Which would be better, of course, if that is indeed what our sh*tposter-in-chief means. But nobody really knows, is the thing. And what a thing it is.

📈 Ups…

The Guatemalan beverage giant behind Famosa Beer acquired SunnyD’s parent company last week in preparation to enter the U.S. market… THC beverages and other infused products boosted Minnesota muni liquor stores’ profitability in 2024… Congrats to Mirella Amato of the Wine & Spirit Education Trust on becoming the first person ever to earn top qualifications from the Beer Judge Certification and Cicerone programs… With the announcement of its long-rumored wine portfolio sell-off, Constellation Brands moves closer to being a beer-only company…

📉 …and downs

BrewHub’s bank foreclosed upon its Florida plant, but its chief exec says it’s just a “miscommunication”… Reyes Beverage Group consolidated more power by swiping High Noon’s business in California from the struggling Republic National Distributing Company…
Infamous Trump 1.0 charlatan Kellyanne Conway received a warm welcome at the National Beer Wholesalers Association’s annual legislative conference…

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