Ranking America's 10 Best-Selling Beers: What Tastes Best?
America — land of the free and home of the beer drinkers. If there's one thing that's certain, it's that Americans love their beer. This is probably why VinePair, a website that covers alcoholic beverages of all kinds, conducted a study on what brands of beer Americans drink the most. The ranking was based on total annual sales. The results? As Huffington Post phrased it, "deep down, Americans are frat boys."
Click Here for the Ranking of America's 10 Best-Selling Beers (Slideshow)
According to VinePair, these are the 10 best-selling beers in America, listed from least to most popular: Heineken, Busch, Michelob Ultra, Busch Light, Natural Light, Corona Extra, Miller Lite, Budweiser, Coors Light, and Bud Light.
What is it about these mostly all-American brands that keeps people coming back for more? One would assume it's the taste of the beer that makes sales so successful, but some of our tasters would probably disagree.
To solve the mystery of why these brands are so successful, we decided to conduct a taste test. In the test, the participants — all of them beer-drinking employees at The Daily Meal — blind-tasted each beer from the list, and, as you'll see, our palates didn't exactly match up with America's at large.
Take a look at the results of our taste test of the best-selling beers in America. After you see what our team had to say about how they tasted, ask yourself: When it comes to beer, what do the people value?
As No. 7 on Vinepair's list, we thought it safe to assume this beer would stay in the bottom five. Boy, were we right. In fact, Busch Light's scoring didn't come even come close to the beer that ranked as No. 9, and one of the tasters described it as "an offense to beer everywhere."
Budweiser was in the top three in terms of sales, so we were surprised to see it fall so low on our list. Maybe it's blind dedication to the classic brand that keeps the Bud drinkers so loyal, because according to our tasters, it isn't the flavor.
Click here to watch the Ranking America's 10 Best-Selling Beers: What Tastes Best? Slideshow.