Reject Miller Lite slopulism, embrace BuzzBallz alcopop-ulism

Last week, The Atlantic published a lazy take that, unfortunately, happened to focus on a subject relevant to our interests here. “The Bad Beer That’s an Incredible Beverage” by Tyler Austin Harper is a bad piece that’s an incredible prism for understanding how beer can continue to thrive as a symbol of populist Americana even as it continues to lose market share to flavored malt beverages, canned cocktails, and whatever we’re calling Cayman Jack these days.

Much like the New York Times Opinion section’s recent and hackneyed forays into thinking critically about the trade, Harper’s take advances the argument that the craft brewing “movement” (such as it is) has gone too far. It’s a mixture of personal preference and surface-level cultural observation of a piece with the dreck David Chang was pushing in the pages of Esquire literally a dozen years ago. Here’s Harper (emphasis mine throughout):

To Harper’s limited credit, there’s some truth to the notion that as the craft brewing industry’s early adopters have aged, some of them have sought out lower alcohol-by-volume types of beer, up to and including macro light lagers. This is not groundbreaking stuff, and it is complicated by the meteoric rise of craft nonalcoholic beer brands like Athletic Brewing Company (or it would’ve been, had Harper bothered to grapple with the existence of the country’s sixth-largest craft brewer at all.) Media critics can debate whether “craft beer too strong now” merits space in such an august Journal of Ideas™️ as The Atlantic, with nary a bottlecap’s worth of data to back up the claim. But directionally, this isn’t per se wrong. If only it had stopped there.

Alas, Harper does not stop there. Instead, clinging to the thin reed of thin beer, he ties to back into a shoddy faux populist assertion that Miller Lite, because of its blandness and flavorlessness—is the drink of choice of the true American volk, writing:

This may be how Harper views Miller Lite’s merits. But it is not how John and Jane Q. Guzzler (for whom he’s clearly trying to speak, what with the references to the odious “professional class” and his own modest upbringing) view the beer. Or, for that matter, any alcoholic beverage.

Look around you, man! Do a smidge of reporting! Miller Lite volumes were down 7% in multi-outlet grocery, mass retail, and convenience stores for the 52 weeks through April 19th, per market research firm Circana. It’s just the latest batch of bad sales data for Lite, which, having failed to lock in share gains during the Bud Light fiasco, helped persuade perennially indecisive parent company Molson Coors that it was finally time to jump into spirits-based canned cocktails. And what did it buy? Monaco, a brand of cloyingly flavor-forward spirits-based canned cocktails that advertises “2 SHOTS IN EVERY CAN,” sells in 70,000 convenience stores across the country, and was growing at ~8% volume when MC came calling, per NIQ scans provided by 3 Tier Beverages to Brewbound. If Harper’s theory that America’s hoi polloi are too noble for the effete affectation of flavorful, high-ABV drinks, there’s very little empirical evidence for it.

But of course there isn’t. Because if you’re trying to understand what’s happening within the American drinking public and/or America, this sort of patronizing faux populism—slopulism, in political-science jargon—isn’t very useful. Allow me to suggest an alternative: alcopop-ulism. Soft-to-hard crossover drinkalikes, bay-bee! If there’s a singular drink of the everyman in today’s United States, it’s stuff that tastes like soda, inebriates like liquor, and (as a thoroughly contemporary invention) evokes exactly zero nostalgia for some imagined, egalitarian past. For your consideration:

• With ABVs that range into the mid-teens and saccharine fruity flavors that could put a dentist on suicide watch, BuzzBallz is a billion-dollar brand;

• Fireball Cinnamon, a malt-based clone of the eponymous whiskey liqueur, is the 59th-best-selling beer in the country, per the latest Circana scan sheet;

• The best-selling craft beer in the country’s off-premise, Voodoo Ranger, is a high-octane family of—gasp!—big honkin’ IPAs that pioneered the—gasp again!—19.2-ounce stovepipe adorned with lowbrow label art;

And so on, and so forth. Real-world counterpoints to Harper’s confused veneration of Miller Lite abound. Anheuser-Busch InBev didn’t just buy BeatBox (11.1% ABV) for half a billion dollars because rank-and-file normies in the flyover states reject the “novel gustatory experience” of decadent coastal elites! The stuff is all novelty, from its wine-based composition, to its placement arbitrage, to its energy drink-esque flavors! And it’s already bigger than Bud Light Platinum or Stella Artois in dollar sales, per Beer Marketer’s Insights’ analysis in mid-April!

Harper doesn’t wrestle with any of this, perhaps because it would gut his thesis that there’s something innately, humbly, appealingly American about drinking mass-produced beer-flavored beer. If this was ever true, it is not true in 2026. The piece is an exercise in self-flattery that America’s brewers would be wise not to flatter themselves by taking seriously. Because: there are a lot of “incredible” beverages out there, and increasingly, they’re all vying for the same space in the c-store fridge. As the recent discontinuation of Schlitz demonstrates, beer brands can’t sustain themselves indefinitely on slopulist nostalgia—even if Atlantic staffers can.

📬 Good post alert

If you see a good post that the Fingers Fam should know about, please send me that good post via email, or a DM on Bluesky or Instagram.

🥃 It’s all popping off on the Uncle Nearest receivership docket

One can only imagine the questions Uncle Nearest cofounder, semi-exiled poster-in-chief, and failed Chapter 11 bankruptcy filer Fawn Weaver is lobbing at her generative artificial intelligence program of choice right now. It is of course Fingers’ advice not to consult ChatGPT et al. about anything, ever. But in the spirit of #ThePeoplesCEO’s apparent dalliances with legalistic large language models, here are some potential prompts:

Subscribe to Fingers to read the rest.