Rachel Sanders

When I really sit down and think about what I want in life, it more or less boils down to this: I want people to be glad when I walk into a room. And this year is the year I found a foolproof way to make that happen. Are you on the edge of your seat?

It's Bud Light Lime.

Specifically, enter the room in question holding a six-pack of Bud Light Lime. Preferably a room at a party; I wouldn't try this at your next important office meeting, although if you do, let me know how it goes. If you can't find BLL in bottle format, two or more jumbo 24-ounce cans are also an acceptable offering. You will be welcomed as (at least) a funny person with a developed sense of irony re: bourgeois status signifiers...or (at best) a Hero to the People.

Now, before you start mansplaining hops to me, hear me out.

First, Bud Light Lime is fucking delicious. If you think it isn't, you're probably confusing it with the Lime-A-Rita, a "flavored malt beverage" within the same corporate family that is cloyingly sweet and, even to those with a soft spot for it (hi), objectively disgusting. But BLL is a different animal. It's fresh. It's fizzy. It's not really sweet, even though your brain thinks it is. The lime flavor doesn't taste real, but it tastes the way it should. It also completely disguises the mild grossness of light beer in its natural state.

BLL is sort of like a gentle citrus soda that happens to be 4.2% ABV. It's the kind of thing you can drink happily and steadily for four hours at a summer barbecue, and the kind of thing that can make you feel like you're at a summer barbecue when you're actually at a house party in February that smells like the unwashed feet and seasonal affective disorder of 100 acquaintances.

In addition: Bud Light Lime is widely accessible, inexpensive, and guaranteed to be more popular at a gathering than yet another six-pack of Sierra Nevada or Sixpoint or whichever dumb beer is the "nice" beer that everyone buys where you live. There aren't many real benefits to be reaped from a food system dominated by mega-corporations that build products in a lab. BLL is one of them. Say thank you. Don't ask questions. Long live Anheuser-Busch!

Lastly, and this is the important part, bringing Bud Light Lime to a party makes you The Fun One. People will say, "Haha, that's so wacky! You're wacky!" And without knowing exactly why, they will like you a little bit more. They will try a Bud Light Lime in jest and find themselves thinking, Gosh, this stuff isn't bad. They will think of you, hereafter, as a person of humor and taste. Maybe they'll even bring BLL to a future party. Look at you! You've shared something good. You've made the world a better place. Cheers.

—Rachel Sanders