When interviewing professional craft brewers, I ask a whole series of ice-breaking questions to get comfortable. “What do you like to drink when not at the brewery?” is a classic. The almost-universal answer? Coors Light or a similar light-lager beast.
It’s shocking until you dig into it. Think of it this way: you spend all day grinding over the minutiae of brewing—ingredient variance, yeast misbehavior, FV4 icing over, etc. Would you want to spend more time thinking over your moments of relaxation? When brewers get together, you’ll see them downing local lagers at prodigious rates.
Ultimately, that’s the classic appeal of the American lager in either its light or standard form. It’s a beer brewed to be drunk with a flavor that’s barely there and hardly memorable. It’s background music in pint form. While it may not be your quaff of choice, there’s a remarkable amount of skill in making a consistently thirst-quenching moment of nothingness.