Ranking America's 10 Best-Selling Beers: What Tastes Best?

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.

Busch's score on our list wasn't too far from its original ranking. Maybe that says something about the consistency of the Busch drinker. People who drink this brew are always drinking it for the same reason — whatever that reason may be.

In our opinion, this is a brand that truly represents college. In our taste test, "Natty" only fell one spot short of its VinePair ranking. It's safe to say that Natty will always bring out your inner college kid, no matter how it tastes. After tasting it, one staff member said it gave them a feeling of "football tailgate comfort." If you're a dedicated football fan, that's not a bad thing to have.

As it was No. 1 in the original lineup, we assumed this beer would land a spot in the top five on our taste test, but it just missed the boat at No. 6. Though it wasn't No. 1, our team wasn't as quick to criticize it as they were other brands. In fact, a taster even said its carbonation was "on fleek" — Vine-speak for smooth and nice.

As we approach the top five of our list, we're surprised to say that this beer received mixed reviews with our staff. One said that Coors Light was sweet and tasted like home, but others were less enamored of the flavor.

Corona scored better on our test than the original list, but it's in the top five of both. Maybe this is because of its distinctive taste, or maybe it's because everyone yearns for a Mexican vacation. Corona Extra had a decent score all around, but because of the consistent neagative comments on aroma, we're a little confused as to why. Seven of our tasters said the same thing: that the beer was skunky.  

Ladies and gentlemen, we've reached the top three, and boy, are these results interesting. Miller Light snatched the third spot on our list and the fourth on VinePair's. Once we started to gather our top results, you'd think the comments on the taste of the beer would start to say something along the lines of "Wow, this beer tastes good," or "How refreshing!" But no. The tasters didn't say anything bad, but they didn't say anything good either. Over half of them wrote things like "This tastes like nothing," or "Easy to get down."

At last! A beer that tastes like, well, beer. Considering that Michelob Ultra was our number two beer, we were surprised that one taster described it as resembling "muskrat fur that was soaked in beer." Other comments weren't exactly compliments, but multiple tasters simply said, "It tastes like beer." Considering that this was a beer-tasting, that's a good place to start.

Out of all of the contenders, our winner produced the most interesting results. That's right: the beer that came in last on VinePair's list was our grand prize winner. Heineken was one of the only beers throughout our entire test that received any real praise. Though our tasters didn't write about how absolutely amazing it tasted, they used its refreshing taste as another opportunity to criticize the other beers on the list. A couple stand-out reviews of Heineken: "I might consider drinking this outside of a college party," and "This is what beer should taste like." Congratulations, Heineken! What's the best beer in your state? Click here to find out.