The Discontinued Miller Lite Beer Line That Didn't Stand A Chance

Miller Lite is a top 10 beer brand in the United States, which might lead you to believe that everything it touches turns to gold ... the gold of a chilled, refreshing beer, that is. Suffice it to say, brand loyalty did not go far in the case of Miller Lite Ice, a definitively failed experiment by Miller Coors. In 1993, under its brand-new Plank Road Brewery imprint, the company released Icehouse, a beer that capitalized on the ice beer trend of the 1990s. It debuted to tremendous acclaim. Perhaps emboldened by that success, Miller Lite Ice rolled out soon after.

To understand how Miller Light Ice landed on the list of discontinued beers you'll never see again, you have to understand the nature of the ice beer fad. Ice beer is chilled to less than 27 degrees — that's below the temperature at which beer freezes — and the ice crystals are then filtered out. This process creates a beer with less water that is, consequently, stronger than normal beers both in terms of alcohol content and flavor. Miller Lite was always going to be a weird candidate for the ice beer treatment, given that light beers are typically characterized by a less-concentrated, lighter taste and less alcohol by volume. What happens when you create a paradox in a beer can? Well ... perhaps predictably, it doesn't taste very good and people dislike the product.

Unfortunately, taste was an area where Miller Lite Ice struggled. On beer review site Untappd, the brand earned a tragic aggregate rating of 2.08 out of 5 stars from 322 ratings, indicating that the vast majority of drinkers did not like the beer. Over on Beer Advocate, a similar crowdsourced review website, not only did Miller Lite Ice earn a 57 / 100 score (signifying "Awful"), but many of the commenters simply did not hold back. "How the bloody hell can you take a LITE beer and make it into an ICE beer? Doesn't that cancel the whole thing out?!" one commenter demanded. "No words for this swill," another spat. Basically, Miller Ice Lite promised something that it couldn't possibly deliver, considering that a light ice beer is an oxymoron.

Although it's hard to pinpoint when exactly Miller Ice Lite got the axe, it seems to have fallen victim to a 2021 purge of several under-performing economy beers by Miller Coors. Among the fallen beers were Keystone Ice and Icehouse Edge, which seemed to indicate that the heyday of ice beer was truly behind us. Pour one out for Miller Lite Ice, and reflect on the sad fact that it probably never should have existed in the first place.