At the annual Nightclub & Bar Show held — where else — in Las Vegas, Miller Brewing CEO Norman Adami made some surprising admissions in a speech he gave last night. Perhaps they weren’t that remarkable when you consider that he was speaking to a group that consisted primarily of bar owners and it was reported by MarketWatch, a trade magazine that is read almost exclusively by the same people. If you want to know what’s really going on, a good place to start is to read what business people are saying to one another in the business press. There they generally speak with a great deal more candor because their audience is almost exclusively the business community. Since there’s less need to spin the news for the general populace of consumers, you can therefore often find some excellent nuggets of uncommon honesty.

Adami followed the line of reasoning Anheuser-Busch has recently taken that beer drinkers are switching to wine and spirits as they are “significantly outpacing the growth of beer.” He did, at least, acknowledge that craft beer and imported beers “continue to grow at a good clip.” A reasonable person at this point might look to the taste and more flavorful character of craft beers and many imports and conclude that perhaps it was time to stop making bland, flavorless mockeries of beer. Silly you. It’s the fault of marketing. It can’t be the product, it must be the way it’s presented. Adami said that in the mid-1990s, “brewers fell into a pattern of sameness in message, sameness in look and sameness in our products.” Oh, that must be it. He continued. “We were promoting sameness and increasingly going lowbrow. It is as if we were promoting beer as the official beverage of the knuckleheads.” He claimed the consumer “was looking for more diversity and style.” Diversity and style, huh? That sure sounds like a cry for flavor to me. Since the bland American-style pilsners that the big breweries continue to churn out like a bad science project gone awry are the very opposite of diversity and literally have no real style, wouldn’t the logical conclusion be to take a look at the products you’re offering?

Nobody says the big breweries can’t make a decent beer, which is why it’s all the sadder that they no longer do. There’s almost no one left alive who can remember what big brewery beer tasted like before World War Two. That’s when the slide toward mediocrity really began. The U.S. government asked the breweries to make watered-down versions of their beer because they didn’t want soldiers to be drunk while bullets were whizzing all around them, which is quite sensible. Of course, not drinking at all might have also made sense but those were different times and attidtudes were also different, to be sure. But the unfortunate result was that when the soldiers returned many of them also brought back a preference for the blander beers they had in the war. And every brewery was happy to oblige them since a watered-down beer is also a cheaper beer to make, which means more profits. So what began innocently, continued for decades of slowly making beer more and more bland until it reached its zenith in the early 1980s with the popularity of light beers. It’s hard not to see the ensuing microbrewery revolution of that same time period as a backlash to the bland beers of the day.

But as if you needed more proof that profit is king, Miller will not be improving the taste of its beer by the reintroduction of flavor to fight this crisis. Instead they will be “overhauling the packaging and marketing of its big domestic brands, including Lite, Genuine Draft and High Life, while heavily promoting imports including Pilsner Urquell and Peroni.” Well that ought to do it. Whew, dodged a bullet there. That should keep the shareholders happy.

He concluded by commenting that there are signs of “a reawakening in the American beer business. I believe the industry is going to get its marketing mojo back.” Well, what a bold prediction. That’s just what the American beer business needs: better commercials, better billboards, better sports sponsorships, better methods of selling but decidedly NOT better beer. If there was ever a better opportunity for craft beer to step in and fill the public demand for “diversity and style,” this is it.