Miller Lite: Tastes great, less filling — and, possibly, saved brewing in Milwaukee

There's brewing before Miller Lite, and there's brewing after Miller Lite.

When Milwaukee-based Miller Brewing Co. launched Miller Lite in 1975, light beer had a shot-glass share of the beer market in the United States.

Fifty years later, four of the top five beers in the country are light beers — a market segment that didn't really exist before Miller Lite.

"It revolutionized the industry — that's the simplest way to put it," said Benj Steinman, publisher and editor of Beer Marketer's Insights, a newsletter that has tracked the U.S. brewing industry since 1970.

Miller Lite also might have saved the beer industry in Milwaukee. Or at least, kept it from disappearing.

The beer helped Miller Brewing grow dramatically in the 1970s and '80s to become America's second-largest beer company, while Milwaukee's other two major breweries — Schlitz and Pabst — started to decline.