Problems installing OSX from bootable USB drive

I'm trying to downgrade from 10.8.3 to 10.7.5, mainly because of the reduced battery life in Mountain Lion.
I have created a bootbale USB thumbdrive with 10.7.5 on it.
I restart the machine holding down the Option key, but the USB drive does not appear in the available drives. All that appears is the Macintosh HD and the 10.8.3 recovery.
Why is the USB not appearing.
I have a retina MacBook Pro 15 from mid 2012. It was shipped with Lion.
Nigel

Download on the iMac OS X Recovery Disk Assistant v1.0 and create a USB recovery disk.
Use that USB disk to boot your MBP retina.
Use the Terminal, that you find inside the recovery environment, to perform these commands
Verifiy that the main internal disk is labelled /dev/disk0
diskutil list
this command will completely erase the internal disk. Please change /dev/disk0 if your is different, (it should not).
diskutil eraseDisk jhfs+ "Macintosh HD" GPT /dev/disk0
Verify that you just have 3 partition, no more Recovery HD partition
diskutil list
/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *500.1 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD            499.2 GB   disk0s2
Quit Terminal and proceed with Reinstall Mac OS X
It'll take a lot of time, depending on the speed of your internet connection.
Please, do not hesitate to ask if you are in doubt

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