With Cheap Beer, Go Cheaper

Humor, Life by Lewis Corson — October 29, 2009 at 4:00 pm | 4 comments | | Print

After reading Carl Peaslee’s editorial on the dangers of playing CMC’s official sport, Beirut (or Beer Pong to those ignorant enough to think that BeerPong is not supposed to be played with four ping-pong paddles and four cups on each corner of a table), I was not phased… sorry, Carl. The story did, however, prompt me to begin thinking about the less flavorful but still very drinkable light beers that we go out and purchase to play Beirut. Keystone Light, Bud Light, Coors Light, Miller Lite, Natural Light are among the multitude of light beers that we use in drinking games because (a) each has about 5% alcohol and (b) light–>less filling–>more room for more beer.

With rhetoric running through my head about how Keystone is really not that different from Coors and how each student around the 5Cs seems to have an opinion on whether or not they like one of the aforementioned beers and why, I felt that a groundbreaking Thursday Night Catechization was merited.

The Beers: Miller Lite, Keystone Light, Bud Light, Coors Light and Natural Light

The Setup: 5 unmarked SOLO cups with a quantity of beer roughly equivalent to that used in Beirut.

The Participants: 11 males (2 inebriated) and 1 female (also inebriated) for 12 participants.

Questions: “What is your favorite beer out of these five?” and “How many samples will you guess correctly?” (Measure of Estimated Expertise).

The Scale:

1. Color: Participants decide whether each beer is Light (1), Cloudy (2) or Dark (3).
2. Strength: Beer, in terms of alcohol content, is either Weak (1), Moderate (2) or Strong (3).
3. Carbonation: Carbonation level is Flat (1), Bubbly (2), Strongly Carbonated (3).
4. Hops: It’s like bitterness… Neutral (1), Bitter (2) or Lotsa Hopsa (3).

The Results: Running a regression became too complicated for me so I decided to interpret the most interesting results instead:

• Miller Lite was identified as Natural Light by 58% of participants; Coors Light was identified as Keystone Light by 33% of participants; Natural Light was identified as Coors Light by 33% of participants.
• 50% of participants named Coors Light as their favorite beer while 25% of participants named Bud Light as their favorite beer.
• 8.3% of participants preferred Coors Light; 58% of participants preferred Bud Light.
• Participants believed they would guess 60% of samples correctly. Participants guessed 20% of samples correctly.
• 25% of participants were able to match their favorite beer with their preferred beer.
• Color, Strength, Carbonation and Hops (the measures of interest) turned out to be completely irrelevant in the study as they were roughly equitable across samples.

The Implications: Granted, this is a sample of 12 randomly-selected CMC students, which inherently skews our results. However, the economic implications of the results cannot be ignored when purchasing 30-racks. Why buy Coors Light instead of Keystone Light (a difference of roughly $8.00) when one third of CMCers wouldn’t know the difference? How about the $10.00 you could save by buying Natural Light instead of Coors light?

The Conclusion: We are neither well-qualified enough nor do most of us care enough to make snobby declarations about the marginal differences between cheap beers – either buy better beer or stop bitching. What is important, however, is that beer money campus job check from CMC sitting in your desk drawer and how it will be best put to use at VONS!