Soft Suds

Taking the kick out of beer

Like most beer ads, the TV commercial for Texas Select foams over with machismo. The blurb, aired in Houston and Dallas, portrays a group of poker-playing buddies whooping it up while holding aloft glasses filled with an amber beverage. Then comes the kick or, rather, the lack of one. Texas Select is virtually alcohol free. Claims the card-party host: "The guys couldn't tell the difference."

Texas Select is one of at least six new brews that look and taste much like regular beer but have little or no intoxicating effect. With these lighter-than-Lite beverages, U.S. brewers are making their boldest move since the introduction of low-calorie beer in the mid-1970s. Brewers hope the new brands will put fizz back into sales, which have gone flat following strong growth in the 1970s.

Next week the biggest U.S. brewer, Anheuser-Busch, will roll out a brand called L.A., for light alcohol, in ten test markets from California to Rhode Island. Detroit-based Stroh, the third-largest brewer, this week will announce a low-alcohol brand called Schaefer L.A. The customers thirstiest for the new brands are expected to be males over 25 who have begun to worry about their health. Industry watchers say Anheuser-Busch will spend up to $30 million on its ad campaign featuring such modern life-style exemplars as a businessman bicycling to his job and a fitness buff working out in a health spa.

Last August Cincinnati's Hudepohl launched reduced-alcohol Pace beer partly as an answer to Ohio's strict drunk-driving laws. A six-pack of Pace, with less than 2% alcohol, produces the effect of only three cans of regular beer, which contains about 4%. In beer-loving Australia, where lawmakers cracked down on drunk driving in 1976, low-alcohol brew has captured 10% of the market.

The new beverages generally mimic all the trappings of premium beer, including the price tag of $3 or more per sixpack. Moussy, a nonalcoholic Swiss-made product, is bottled like a prestige import beer, complete with foil wrapper. White Rock Products, which distributes Moussy (pronounced moose-y) in the U.S., expects to sell 650,000 cases this year. The company is now running a special advertising campaign in the Midwest aimed at churchgoers who have given up alcohol for Lent.