• by Richard Whitman , Columnist, February 19, 2019

Tastes Great! Yeah if you like corn in your beer.

As Bud Light and Miller Lite slug it out over which of their watered-down versions of beer is trying to put one over on the American public and which one is more in love with America’s farmers, Jim Koch, the founder of the Samuel Adams brewery weighed a few days ago with a post calling BS on both of them.

“To American craft brewers, this corn vs. rice vs. corn syrup debate is as silly as dilly dilly,” Koch wrote in a blog on the Sam Adams website. And as we all know, that’s pretty silly.

Bud Light started it with its Super Bowl ads condemning Miller Lite for using corn syrup in its brewing process, hoping, it’s been suggested, that consumers would confuse corn syrup with the more unhealthy high-fructose corn syrup. Miller Lite fired back noting that Bud Light uses a similar process with a different additive—rice. And that other Anheuser-Busch InBev brands use the same corn syrup Bud Light was slamming it for using.

Clearly Bud Light is trying to create a controversy, where one doesn’t exist. Kind of like Trump’s reasoning--if you can call it that--behind declaring a national emergency over his coveted Wall funding.

But as Koch points out, the beer battle is “like McDonald’s and Burger King arguing about grilling vs. broiling their burgers. Who cares? Fast food is still fast food … [and] don’t confuse fast food with slow food.”

It does seem to be a case of much ado about nothing. It brings to mind a PBS show I’ve been watching about dictators. One of the things they tend to do when things are headed south on the home front is try to create a perceived common enemy to unite the populace against.

For Bud Light, that perceived enemy is corn syrup. Guess we’ll see if the ploy works. Doubt it.