Weird Facts about Miller® High Life® Beer

• Miller beer was named after the company founder Frederick Miller. In 1903, when Miller's son, Carl, sought a new name for the light-colored pilsner, his wife's uncle, Ernst Miller, chanced upon a building down in New Orleans called High Life Cigars. The Miller Brewing Company paid $25,000 for the factory and the right to use the name.
• During the Inca empire in Cuzco, Peru, beer made from maize was a luxury served by the state on ceremonial occasions.
• The Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock in December 1620, because, in the words of a diarist aboard the Mayflower, "We could not now take time for further search or consideration, our victuals being much spent, especially our beere."
• George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and William Penn brewed beer on their estates.
• Miller Brewing, founded twenty-one years before the first Budweiser was brewed in 1876, is the world's third largest beer producer (after Anheuser-Busch and Heineken).
• In 1855, Frederick Miller established a beautifully landscaped 20-acre beer garden in Milwaukee that attracted weekend crowds for bowling, dancing, fine lunches and old fashioned "gemutlichkeit." The garden caught fire on July 4, 1891, and was ultimately torn down in 1909.
• In 1850, Frederick Charles Best and his brother dug tunnels in the hills behind the Plank Road Brewery to store beer in the days before refrigeration. When Frederick Miller bought the brewery five years later, he expanded the tunnels to a total of 600 feet-enough to store 12,000 barrels of beer. With the advent of refrigeration, the brewery abandoned the caves until 1952, when a portion of the caves opened to tourists through the Miller Caves Museum.
• Hollywood actor Arthur Franz portrayed Miller Brewing Company founder Frederick Miller in a 48-minute commercial film, With This Ring, produced in 1955. The movie, filmed in Hollywood, Milwaukee and Sigmaringen, Germany, followed the story of a fictitious "brewer's ring" allegedly passed on from generation to generation over the 100-year history of the Miller Brewing Company.
• Beer is 92 percent water.
• Beer accounts for nearly 87 percent of all alcohol beverages consumed in the United States. The average American drinks approximately 23 gallons of beer every year.
• According to New York's Simmons Market Research Bureau, 55.1 percent of all beer drinkers surveyed in 1985 were college educated, while 38.9 percent of all beer drinkers were high school dropouts.