There’s a Lite beer commercial that depicts a guy struggling up a mountain road. He gets to the top, and celebrates by pulling out a Lite, and dousing himself with it. That wouldn’t be particularly refreshing would it? Do people actually do this? Wouldn’t it make the rest of your ride sticky and stinky?
You missed the point of the commercial. They were implying that the light beer might as well be water. The idea they were playing on was cooling off by pouring a bottle of water over themselves.
I think they were mocking Michelob Ultra or Coors Light. Notoriously low taste watery beers.
Also I am going to move this to the Café.
I’m confused: I’ve always thought that the stuff Americans call light beer is alcohol-reduced, not alcohol-free. If I’m right in that regard, I’d be dazzled, because here an ad combining cycling with drinking alcohol wouldn’t fly at all. Biking drunk is almost as illegal as driving drunk, though the threshold is a bit higher, and you can lose your driver’s licence for cars biking intoxicated.
Light beer is fewer calories, not less alcohol particularly. But yeah, the joke in the commercial is someone using light beer like it’s water, because it has no taste. It’s an anti-light beer commercial.
Ok, that puts it in a different perspective. I thought the ad was shilling the beer as a refreshment for bikers.
Puts me in mind of the old Hobgoblin Brewery tag line:
“What’s the matter Lager Boy, afraid you might taste something?”
j
Sort of. It is, indeed, an ad for a light beer (Miller Lite, specifically), saying that other light beers taste like water, unlike Miller Lite, which they claim has more flavor.
Here’s the ad in question:
Except it is an ad for Miller Lite I believe. So they’re trying to position themselves as the lite beer that has taste. It isn’t true, but that is the aim of their ad.
Obligatory Monty Python reference [NSFW language]:
Still one of my favorite jokes.
I never knew that line came from Monty Python.
So what lite beers actually have Taste?
I remember Amstel Light wasn’t terrible and ice cold a Yuengling Light is pretty good. Are there others?
My answer, for what it’s worth:
Guinness isn’t a “light beer,” but it only has 125 calories in a 12-ounce serving, just 15 calories more than a Bud Light. So, rather than a watery “canoe beer,” have a Guinness. 
Interestingly, Wikipedia describes the composition of a “Radler” as a shandy consisting of 50% beer and 50% lemon soda. That said, I know someone who was nailed by the cops in America for bicycling drunk, and it did affect his automobile driver’s license, even though he was not driving an automobile at the time. It is totally illegal.
I think that ad wouldn’t be allowed here. Linking alcohol with operating a vehicle would be frowned upon.
That’s true, and though I don’t know the etymology of the word “Radler” (cyclist) for the drink, I know that it’s rather old and from a time when the DUI laws for cyclists were still lenient or non-existent, respectively, so cyclists who didn’t want to get too drunk had a radler rather than a beer.
It’s generally written up as public intoxication:
I’ve gone wine tasting – pedaling from winery to winery – on more than a few occasions. I checked before embarking 
But in some of the wine country areas, there are a fair number of miles between wineries, and/or you don’t have to hit every single one (blasphemy, I know), so there is a tendency to sober up, if only a little, as you pedal.
We did lose a man once. Hilly terrain. Hot day. Maybe too much hooch. Who can remember ??
As I recall, Miller Lite does have more of its peculiar flavor than even a modestly discerning palate can actually enjoy.
Obviously, a Radler is someone who rides a bicycle. For the drink, I found this:
The story goes that a group of cyclists arrived at the Kugler-Arm Gasthof in Bavaria one hot day in 1922 to find that the owner didn’t have enough beer to go around. The ingenious owner Franz Xaver Kugler mixed together half dark beer and half lemon soda and created a refreshing, low-alcohol drink that he named after the cyclists (Radler).
This page offers:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Radler
There are several theories about the origin of the beverage and its naming, but they are all dated in the 19th century, when the beverage became a popular thirst quencher with lower alcoholic content than beer within the emerging movement of recreational cycling among the working class.
This page has the same story as the first link.
it doesn’t. There are examples of the joke dating back to 1952.