WHAT THE HELL!? America’s Top 10 Selling Beers (Are Awful)

“Eh, just put some rice water in it and say it enhances the flavor.”

~Budweiser

Beer is a lot like sex.  When it’s good, it’s really good.  And when it’s bad, you’re probably going to wake up the next day feeling empty, unsatisfied, and with an inexplicable headache.  But no matter how good or bad it is, America just keeps coming back for more.  And if this metaphor were to really hold its own weight, we’d have to hope that Americans in general prefer good beer, then.  Because who wants bad beer?  Date rapists?  The French?  Spuds McKenzie?

Nope, turns out fucking everyone prefers drinking shitty beer.  How else can you explain this blog post that lists the 10 top selling beers in America?  These beers are collectively so bad and un-American that we almost didn’t spot the egregious omission of Samuel Adams from the list.  We’re not saying Sam Adams is the best beer in America, far from it, but if you have an ambitious brewery that’s named after Sam fucking Adams, and it’s not in the top 10 of market share, someone fucked up (we’re looking at you, majority of beer drinkers).

Of course, when we at AFFotD feel the need to correct such misconceptions about the America’s fine assortment of fermented malts and hops, we do so with the calm, delicate prose that sets aside emotional responses, and instead delves into the topic with tact and understanding.  That’s why we present you…

WHAT THE HELL!?  America’s Top 10 Selling Beers (Are Awful)

While we understand there is a difference between a cheap beer and a quality, but more expensive, beer, we are here to urge you to think about your alcohol purchases logically.  Just like a lottery winner might not realize that taking their winnings in one lump, reduced sum is actually going to net you more money than having the full amount slowly handed out to you over 20 years, American drinkers have to realize that the more expensive beers will also get them drunker for their money, while greatly removing the beer-heavy hangover you get from pounding a case of Coors.  Remember America- certain beers may be cheap, but so are prostitutes that have latex allergies.

But if you won’t listen to us, we have no choice but to list all the top selling beers in America and tell you exactly what’s wrong with them enough that you will feel shame if you ever try to buy it from a liquor store in the future.

That’s right, we’re going to shame you into drinking good beers.  You’re fucking welcome.

#1:  BUD LIGHT (19.2% Market Share)

If we said something like “Bud Light is poison” you’d probably have a decent share of people rushing to say, “Hey man, Bud Light’s cheap!” or “Wait, did you say ‘Bud Light is poison’ or that you poisoned my Bud Light, because I’m feeling sort…” before crashing to the floor unconscious.  The people that think that Bud Light is quality beer are the same people who think that chemical castration is a spa treatment.  This is a beer so foul that they decided to make a version of it with more alcohol just so you could forgive them for making you drink it.

Bud Light is a beer that, in theory, makes you less fat than regular Budweiser, while trying to convince America that the calories are taken away by doing something other than making it less alcoholic.  But it’s not.  It’s a scientific fact that caloric intake doesn’t count when alcohol is involved.  Just take our word for it, we know we’re right about that.  Don’t try to Google it or anything, it won’t show up, it’s from a super obscure medical journal, but it’s totally true.

Anyway, Bud Light tastes someone filled a bottle with gutter water and decided to pour Splenda in it to get just the right level of gross sweetness.  And it’s responsible for nearly 20% of the US Beer market.  The fuck you guys?

#2:  BUDWESIER (12%)

Hey, but at least Bud Heavy doesn’t try to pass itself off as some sort of diet drink, right?  It’s the king of beers!  It’s brewed by Americans and…or wait, that’s right, it’s actually run by a Belgo-Brazilian multinational beverages company.

But, it’s got the finest ingredients, right?  Barleys, Hops, 30% bland, flavor destroying, cheap filler rice.  Wait, what?

So not only are we giving 20% of our business to these corner-cutting Euro-South-Americans with how much Bud Light we buy, but we’re letting regular Bud get in there too with another 12% of a market share?  What the hell are we doing here, America?  Budweiser may be 5% alcohol, but the remaining 95% is composed of trucker hat material and factory-rejected beer cozies.  In trying to figure out what to use as their logo, it ended up coming down to a last minute decision between a crown and an empty keg at a shotgun wedding.  And they meant to choose the shotgun wedding keg, the head of their in-house advertising was so preoccupied thinking of frogs and horses that he accidentally checked the wrong box.

We’re not saying that if you prefer to drink Budwesier that you’re somehow a bad person, but we are saying that you’re someone who likes the taste of prison wine, but who also likes their drinks to be slightly less alcoholic.

#3:  MILLER LITE (8.6%)

Miller Light is more American than Budweiser, which is like saying that Arnold Schwarzenegger has a larger penis than Danny Devito.  You’d assume that would be correct, but if you had to do your due diligence to find out for sure, you’d think less of yourself at the end of the day.  Yes, Miller chooses to misspell “Light” to please our American sensibilities.  And while it’s ultimately run by a collaboration between Canadian and British brewers, the actual company that brews the beer is headquartered in good old Chicago, Illinois.

But that’s where we draw the line.  The most common piece of internal dialogue you hear when someone orders a Miller Lite at a bar is, “Well, this bar is shitty and expensive, so I might as well get what’s on special.”  Miller Lite actually has about 40% less calories than Bud Light, to which we would retort, “Oh good for you, what do you want, a fucking medal?”

(No Miller, shut the fuck up about your gold medals– saying you got a gold medal for “Best American-Style Light Lager” sounds to us like that movie where Johnny Knoxville pretended he was retarded to win the special Olympics.)

4:  COORS LIGHT (7.8%)

Everything we said about Miller Lite can be said about Coors Light, only they can’t even muster enough effort to try to win fake awards, or make their beer taste like anything other than lightly filtered tap water with a quarter of a shot of Everclear in it.  If Miller Lite were Matt Damon, then Coors Light would be Ben Affleck.  Only in this case, Matt Damon is some dude who got his name in the newspaper for storming a White Sox game and punching a Kansas City Royals coach, and Ben Affleck is a drunk dude that turns blue when he gets cold enough.

Here’s something to keep in mind next time Coors launches a commercial campaign about how the letters inside the mountain will turn colors when it gets super extra awesome cold—the best way to mask the flavor of something that’s awful is to make it really cold.  So when you hear “two stage cold activation” what you should really hear is “this company spent millions of dollars researching products to let you know at what point you won’t taste the beer anymore.”

Which, if you don’t care about the taste, and just want the alcohol in your system, why don’t you start chasing rubbing alcohol with Listerine, like an adult?  Don’t worry, the blindness normally goes away in a few days.

#5:  NATURAL LIGHT (4.2%)

Natty Light would probably be higher on this list, in terms of usage, if colleges didn’t have so many damn rules on the books against hazing students.  Natural Light is one of the only beers on this list that has an entire section devoted to it in the Geneva convention.  No one knows what happens if you drop a lit match into a vat of Natural Light, because no one will do it once they’ve reached the step in the brewing process where they add processed human waste to the swill.  If someone ever tells you that Natty Light is your favorite beer, we have bad news—you’ve been tricked.  That’s not an actual person, it is a fully sentient Greek letter, and it’s already spiked your drink.  If you’re over the age of 22 and accidentally drink a Natty Light, it’s too late for you.  When you wake up you will find your apartment replaced by a trailer, and your job replaced by a domestic abuse charge.  This is how the Natural Light brewmaster gets his powers so he can focus on world domination.

Natty Ice is a shitty beer, basically.

#6:  CORONA (4%)

Corona doesn’t even pretend to be American, so of course we’re not going to take a shining to it.  Corona is the most popular export beer into America, but we don’t hate them for joining the fraternity of “totally shitty beers that Americans buy a lot of for some stupid reason.”  No, there are just so much better beers out there that it saddens us that Corona managed to win the arms race by doing everything in their power to make their beer worse.

Here are the facts—Corona put itself in a clear bottle to make it look different than the other beers.  Which is great, except for the fact that the reason why most beers are in brown bottles is so they can block out sunlight, since if you expose beer to sunlight it creates a chemical reaction that actually creates 3-methyl-2-butene-1-thiol, which is what actual skunks use as odor defense.  So Corona packages its beer in a manner to make it more likely to turn into sulfur.  Awesome.

And of course Corona puts corn in their beer.  Of course they do that.  Because corn is a cheap filler, and no one’s really giving a shit about the taste of the beer so long as they establish that you can jam a lime in there to cover up the skunked flavor and have your beer taste like a slightly alcoholic lime drink.  If you need to put a lime in your beer to enjoy the taste of it, that might just be a sign that you happen to like the taste of lime in carbonated beverages.  Which puts Corona somewhere between “Sprite” and “Sprite with vodka in it” as a tasty way to get drunk.

#7:  BUSCH (2.8%), #8:  BUSH LIGHT (2.8%)

It seems fitting that Busch and Bush Light both have the exact same market share.  That’s because every time you’ve had Busch in your life (hint, it was probably during a drinking game, in a red cup, at a party where you had been advised not to drink the jungle juice) you haven’t known if it was Busch or Busch Light.  Don’t lie and say you knew the difference.  You didn’t.  It’s like telling the difference between water coming from a Brita Filter and or a Pur, only the water sort of gets you buzzed, makes you feel really full, and gives you a hangover the next day even if you don’t get drunk off it.  We really don’t like this list.

#9:  HEINEKEN (2.4%)

Yeah, Heineken is the best beer on this list, but that’s like saying that Crash was the best movie to come out in 2004.  Not particularly stiff competition.  We’ll give these foreigners a pass on this one, since we do like the appearance the beer made in that My New Haircut video from like five years ago.

#10:  Miller High Life (2.3%)

We’re done, America.  Don’t worry we’ll get to work on a proper guide to beers you should drink, but until you get your game together, enjoy these shitty beers, along with all the bloated mornings and intestinal discomfort they’ll afford you.  You brought this upon yourselves, America.  We can’t clean every mess for you.  For shame.