Weaker Guinness headed for American lightweights

It looks like Americans are moving towards the lighter beers we know are lighter on the wallet.

Beer Business Daily writes that imported beer shipments to the United States are down 9.3 percent this year. That’s the equivalent of 160,000 cases per day. Canadian imports are apparently down a whopping 22 percent. Drinks writer Lew Bryson argues that this is creating the perfect opportunity for another category of beers to find success at the liquor store:

Imports — which are almost all light lagers — are pricier than comparable domestic beers because of shipping and the weak dollar. Craft beer’s increases are thought to be coming largely out of imports’ lost sales.

Perhaps in an effort to appeal to a fickle American market, Diageo, the brands giant that owns Guinness, is test-marketing something called Guinness Mid-strength in England. It has the same flavor and body, just a lower strength of alcohol. Which, as The Guardian notes, is a curious case of re-branding:
 

The new Guinness is called ‘mid-strength’ — a triumph of marketing semiotics implying a kind of prudent, reasoned, middle-way of inebriation — but then, I don’t suppose ‘New Weak Guinness’ would have

survived the first brainstorm.