Flaked Maize is the adjunct most responsible for what "American light lager" tastes like, and it's directly tied to the story told on the Pale 6-Row page: 19th- and 20th-century American brewers reached for high-diastatic 6-Row malt specifically because it could convert both its own starch and a large proportion of corn's zero-enzyme starch in the same mash.
Degermed for a reason
Most commercial flaked maize is degermed before flaking — the lipid-rich germ removed, since fats and oils left in the corn can contribute rancid off-flavours over time and interfere with head retention. What's left is flaked, gelatinised starch with very little else, which is exactly the "lighten the body, don't add character" role the ingredient is chosen for.
Colour contribution
At 0.5-1 °Lovibond, corn's colour impact is close to nothing even at a large percentage of the grist. A grist of 4 lb (1.8 kg) flaked maize alongside 6 lb (2.7 kg) base malt in a 5-gallon (19 L) batch comes out to roughly 2.9 SRM on the SRM colour calculator — nearly water-pale, which is the entire point of using it in a style meant to look and drink light.
No diastatic power — the whole reason 6-Row exists in America
Flaked Maize contributes zero enzyme content, same as any unmalted adjunct, and depends entirely on the rest of the grist's diastatic power to convert. This is the direct historical link to Pale 6-Row's higher enzyme content: a mash pushing corn toward its 40% ceiling needs meaningfully more enzyme margin than a modest 10-15% adjunct addition would, and 6-Row's extra headroom over 2-Row is what made that combination reliable at scale.
What it actually does to flavour and body
Flaked Maize thins body and lightens colour without contributing much flavour of its own — a mild, faintly sweet grain note at most. That neutrality is deliberate: American light lager and cream ale are built around a clean, crisp, minimally malty profile, and corn's job is diluting the malt character relative to an all-malt grist, not adding a flavour statement of its own.
Typical use
American light lager, cream ale, and some classic American amber lagers use flaked maize at meaningful percentages; it also appears in small amounts in various recipes purely for the slight body-lightening effect without a brewer intending to make an obviously "corn-forward" beer.
Not the same "corn" as priming sugar
Flaked maize and dextrose (corn sugar) both derive from corn, and the shared "corn" name occasionally confuses new brewers into treating them as interchangeable — they aren't. Flaked maize is unconverted starch that needs mashing alongside a diastatic base malt to become fermentable; dextrose is already-fermentable simple sugar, most commonly reached for as a priming sugar at bottling rather than a mash-tun ingredient. Using one where a recipe calls for the other produces a very different result, since flaked maize contributes real body-and-colour-lightening structure to the mash while dextrose contributes almost nothing but fermentable extract.
The alternative-adjunct question
Flaked rice delivers a similar body-lightening, colour-neutral effect with an even more neutral flavour and less risk of rancid off-flavour from residual lipid, since rice contains less oil than corn to begin with — many classic American lager recipes use one or the other somewhat interchangeably depending on regional tradition and availability, and the choice between them is often more about a brewery's history than any real functional difference in the finished beer.