You can once again toast the holiday season in classic Brew City style because Miller has brought back its limited-edition Miller High Life lager in Champagne-style bottles.
It makes perfect sense that you can get "The Champagne of Beers" in a 750-milliliter Champagne-sized collectible bottle with a gold foil seal and a neck label ... at least for a little while.
But the bottles – which are back on store shelves now – will only be around long enough to help ring in the new year and then they'll disappear again, at least until next year.
Three years ago MillerCoors tested the bigger bottles in the Chicago market and brought them to Milwaukee the following year. In 2018 the bottles became be available nationwide. This year, Miller is doing a vending machine of the unique bottles in New York City.
"It’s a perfect shareable bottle, and we know the holidays are all about sharing beers and fun times with family and friends," Taylor Brown, Miller High Life’s brand manager, said in a statement when distribution of the bottles was expanded to Milwaukee.
"This is a way to remind drinkers we truly are the Champagne of Beers."
High Life, which Miller positioned as a high-end beer, debuted on Dec. 30, 1903, and the Champagne of Beers tag was a reference to the fact that the beer was packaged in a bottle – a rare luxury back then.
As my former colleague Jimmy Carlton noted in the past, over the next 80 or so years, advertising and labeling for "The Champagne of Beers" sold the bright, bubbly brew as a classy product whose glass bottle – Champagne-shaped with a long neck, sloping shoulders and usually wrapped with ornate foil – showed off its purity. In 1989, Miller started calling it "America’s Quality Beer Since 1855," before going back to the bubbly branding in 1998.
Miller painted a brand spankin' new High Life Girl in the Moon mural on its Milwaukee brewhouse this autumn.
You can learn more about High Life’s nickname history here.
The bottles retail for about $3.49 each.
If you're really looking to go all-Miller this holiday season, there's a new 2019 design for the Miller Lite ugly sweaters and matching accessories. You can see them all here.
Stay tuned because we might do some giveaways, too.
Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he lived until he was 17, Bobby received his BA-Mass Communications from UWM in 1989 and has lived in Walker's Point, Bay View, Enderis Park, South Milwaukee and on the East Side.
He has published three non-fiction books in Italy – including one about an event in Milwaukee history, which was published in the U.S. in autumn 2010. Four more books, all about Milwaukee, have been published by The History Press.
With his most recent band, The Yell Leaders, Bobby released four LPs and had a songs featured in episodes of TV's "Party of Five" and "Dawson's Creek," and films in Japan, South America and the U.S. The Yell Leaders were named the best unsigned band in their region by VH-1 as part of its Rock Across America 1998 Tour. Most recently, the band contributed tracks to a UK vinyl/CD tribute to the Redskins and collaborated on a track with Italian novelist Enrico Remmert.
He's produced three installments of the "OMCD" series of local music compilations for OnMilwaukee.com and in 2007 produced a CD of Italian music and poetry.
In 2005, he was awarded the City of Asti's (Italy) Journalism Prize for his work focusing on that area. He has also won awards from the Milwaukee Press Club.
He has be heard on 88Nine Radio Milwaukee talking about his "Urban Spelunking" series of stories, in that station's most popular podcast.
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