See the title.
Miller High Life is their equivalent to Keystone. It’s a shitty beer. Shitty beers are cheaper because they cost less to make and can’t be sold for more.
For the same reason that Oldsmobile is no longer a car brand. (. . . your father’s Oldsmobile). High Life got old and tired. Genuine Draft outsold it so the only advantage, because it’s advertising is severely limited, is to sell it on price point to long time customers.
Ok, but I am wondering why it is cheaper to make.
Whether or not it’s shitty is a matter of opinion…
I’ll drink it, after all, it is “The Champagne of Beers!”
Why is it cheaper? Because they only collect the piss from the rookie horses! 
Back in college we knew it as Killer Low Life.
It doesn’t have anything to do with how much it costs to make one or the other. It is all about marketing studies. Miller High Life is a stodgy brand that doesn’t command a premium price. Miller Genuine Draft has lots of fans across age lines and they price it to match similar brands. The same is true for most products.
Of all the Miller brands, Miller Lite is by far the best selling brand. It is the second best selling beer in the US behind Bud Light. MGD is 7th best selling brand and High Life is 12th. I paid for the list of beer sales in the US, I’m going to get my money’s worth out of it. I used it to make the list of beers for Beer Madness that was in the Game Room last month.
Check my thread on this topic from 5 years ago.
Beer is a very cheap substance to make. There is no ingredient in beer that is costly on a commodity basis. Yes, you can spend a little more time and use premium commodities (barley instead of rice) to brew the stuff but its all very cheap. When you buy a premium brand you are buying a lot of advertising and yes, the advertising does cost money and the consumer has to pay.
How many Genuine Draft ads have you seen compared to High Life ads? There’s your cost. The cost difference isn’t at the brewery.
While there is a difference in advertising cost that simply isn’t the real reason. It’s because the brewery decided they wanted to sell the beer at that price point, period. Miller could flip the prices on MGD, Lite or High Life at any time. The margins on beer are large enough to allow the brewers to simply establish a price for their products at each tier they wish to exploit and the marketing costs, infrastructure costs and ingredient costs are basically irrelevant.
Miller sells:
Milwaukee’s Best at $3.99 a 6pk.
Miller High Life at $4.99 a 6pk.
Miller Genuine Draft at $5.99 a 6pk.
Peroni at $6.99 a 6pk.
The ingredients and production costs are negligibly different between the brands and the marketing costs are dictated by need. When MGD’s market share versus Bud slips they spend their money there, when Lite slips versus Bud Light they move it there, when High Life slips against PBR and Busch they move it there. It’s all a giant game of advertising Risk.
All beer pricing is strategic. Simple as that. If AB or another competitor drops their prices on a certain market segment Miller will match it. If Miller wants to exploit a certain price tier they will price one of their brands to fill that tier. If they want to attack a competitor they will slash prices. The prices are completely artificial and not connected to any cost in the brewery except on the most superficial level. As grain prices climb you might see the entire industry’s prices shift upwards my a quarter but it has nothing to do with one brand versus another.
Have you ever actually had it or are you judging based on its image? It’s actually one of the best - if not the best - domestic macrobrews.
Miller sells Peroni? And is Obamavania in a time warp? It’s $9.49 here.
I’ve tried it. I don’t like it.
I’ve seen drink specials on High Life at a few bars so it might be making a comeback in the same fashion as Pabst Blue Ribbon.
It must be, the most expensive beers we have here are $10.50-$11 for the regional microbrews or Euro imports–that is, I pay $10.49 for Pilsner Urquell or Guinness six-packs.
Meh? You are getting gouged my friend. Here’s a link to one of Chicago’s local discount booze stores and the 6pk price is $5.99. The typical grocery store or liquor store is gonna be about a dollar more.
http://www.samswine.com/peroni-pilsner-p-49791.html
Granted Chicago is a pretty cheap place to buy beer off-premise because of it’s location between the two big brewers and the insanely competitive market.
For the record I wasn’t intending to be precise with my prices quotes, I was simply making the point that brewers assign prices based on where they want the brand to sell relative to other brands. Beer is so cheap to make in those quantities, especially since the big producers buy grain futures and are insulated from price increases, that there’s essentially no difference between the brands cost. The prices are wholly artificial.
The marketing dollars spent are a result of the price point, not the cause.
Peroni is expensive here, too. It’s an import… how the hell can it be that cheap there?
It’s an “Import” and in some places the beer is contract brewed in Milwaukee. It’s as cheap as it is because SABMiller bought the brand and they are trying to leverage it as a direct competitor for Stella Artois which is an Anheuser-Busch/InBev brand. Stella obviously has much more market credibility so in order to get a foothold in key markets (of which Chicago is at the top of the list) they have to dramatically discount prices and finesse bar owners and liquor store buyers with perks to distribute it.
Odds are your market isn’t a focus for SABMiller and therefore the brand sells only where it’s specifically requested and it simply carries whatever price the local distributor passes along to the retailer and whatever price other import beers in that market command.
It simply further reinforces the fact that all beer pricing is tactical. It’s higher there because the brewer and distributor simply have no motive to make it cheap at the moment.
I’d say the OP asked the wrong question. The question should be “Why is Genuine Draft more expensive than High Life?” The answer, as explained in posts above, is because Miller chooses to market it as a (somewhat) premium brand.