This has been a year of expanding l...

This has been a year of expanding line extentions and shrinking numbers for flavored malt beverages, or "malternatives." These sweet, low-alcohol beverages ground their natural audience in the 1990 among young adults raised onward sugary sodas. But behind the representations the biggest issue of the year has been a fight across the legal definition of the category itself.

This debate throughout the classification of malternatives--the question of "what is a beer?"--only surfaced in newly come years (see sidebar). But malternatives themselves have been in U markets for through the whole extent of a decade. Coors launched Zima, an early malternative, in 1993 Unlike the