Canned Beer That’s Actually Good

Yet in the past several years the once-lowly can has been seeing its reputation grow in the craft-brewing community. Thanks in large part to new microcanning equipment, smaller brewers like Colorado’s Oskar Blues, Minnesota’s Surly Brewing, Oregon’s Caldera Brewing, and California’s 21st Amendment are able to enter the canned-beer business alongside mainstream brands like Budweiser and Miller.

Add one more: Just this past summer, New Belgium Brewing began canning its popular Fat Tire Amber Ale and selling it in 12-packs in limited markets across the western United States, in stores such as Fred Meyer and Whole Foods, with plans to expand.

“This really came out of our own lifestyles,” writes Greg Owsley, chief branding officer at New Belgium, on the brewery’s blog, the Tinkerer. “Now, I can finally take Fat Tire in the backpack, in the boat, all those places we felt a little guilty taking our bottles and treated them so preciously to make sure they didn’t break.”

New Belgium may be the biggest U.S. craft brewer to offer its beer in cans, but it’s Colorado brewpub Oskar Blues that’s credited as the pioneer in the microcanning trend: The company began canning its flagship Dale’s Pale Ale in 2002. Fans took notice, sales took off, and other brewers have since followed suit. According to Jennifer Hoover, marketing communications manager for the Ball Corporation—which manufactures aluminum cans for both majors and micros—the company’s customers now include “more than 30 craft brewers in the United States and 16 in Canada.”

Why Now?

A major impetus behind the recent microcanning trend is a change in canning technology, which for decades was geared toward large producers. The Buds and Millers of the world utilize massive industrial canning machinery and
Oskar Blues’ Gordon Ale, Old Chub, Ten Fidy, and Dale’s Pale Alepurchase blank aluminum cans by the billions every year, according to Hoover. The landscape changed, however, in 2001 when Canadian company Cask Brewing Systems began offering a manual, two-at-a-time canning system designed specifically for small brewers; Cask also worked out a deal with the Ball Corporation to make Cask’s cans available in smaller quantities (says Hoover: “The minimum order is generally 24 pallets per label or 196,056 12-ounce cans”). Oskar Blues was the first U.S. craft brewery to adopt Cask’s system—the Colorado brewer now offers several of its beers in cans, including Scottish ale Old Chub and even its monster Ten Fidy, a 10 percent ABV imperial stout—and as Hoover says, “the list continues to grow.”

Like screw tops on fine wine bottles, cans are deeply associated with a low-grade product. But as with wine, those associations are more myth than reality. In fact, the can is arguably better for the beer inside, which is fragile and easily damaged by exposure to heat, oxygen, and light. Dark brown glass bottles help with the light issue (and do a much better job than clear or green glass—take note, Corona and Heineken fans), but a can seals the deal more completely. That skunky association you have with canned beer? Most likely the package is not to blame.

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Canned Beer That’s Actually Good(cont.)

“Modern cans more securely isolate the beer, cutting off light and oxygen more effectively than capped or corked bottles,” says Alec Stefansky of Santa Cruz, California-based Uncommon Brewers. Plus, he says, “They’re lighter, and less susceptible to damage during transport and packaging.” No wonder, then, that when Uncommon began packaging its Golden State Ale and Siamese Twin Ale for retail this past spring, it chose cans over bottles.

Nor do the cans, as a rule, give beer a metallic, tinny taste. That’s because aluminum beverage cans—whether Fat Tire, Budweiser, or Mountain Dew—are lined with a thin, food-grade polymer coating, which means the beer never touches metal.
21st Amendment’s Brew Free! Or Die IPA and Hell or High
Watermelon Wheat Beer (The coating does contain BPA, but according to New Belgium’s Tinkerer blog the amount is minuscule.)

And if you’re still not convinced that cans don’t taste tinny, conduct a test yourself. As Joshua Charlton of distributor Pacific Libations notes, if you pour “the same beer from a bottle and a can into a glass,” easily “90 percent of people won’t know the difference.”

“I don’t know why the stigma still holds … craft from a can ROCKS!” writes user Deuane in the forums on the BeerAdvocate website. “Oskar Blues, Sly Fox, Surly, Southern Star, 21st Amendment … they all are quality beers regardless if from a can or a bottle.” Echoes user Nickls: “I just finished off a Ten Fidy, and had some Butternuts Snapperhead yesterday evening. Couldn’t find any traits that would suggest they were canned versus bottled, i.e. no metallic taste.”

Uncommon Brewers’ Siamese Twin Ale

Cans are much lighter to carry around, which means less gas used during shipping; plus they require fewer resources to manufacture, they’re more commonly recycled (the Container Recycling Institute claims that the can recycling rate is almost twice that of glass), they’re quicker to chill, and they can go places bottles can’t (beaches, parks, stadiums).

And canned micros may be just in time to capitalize on the retro-chic beer trend of younger drinkers embracing old-school brands like Pabst and Schlitz, which are often sold in cans.

Some restaurateurs, though, aren’t yet won over. Take the case of Uncommon Brewers. Stefansky says, “I recently had a local restaurant owner tell me flat out that she’ll never put a can on one of her tables.” So there’s still work to be done. “I’m hoping to change that opinion,” he says, “one customer at a time.”

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Kurt Wolff is editor/manager of Download.com and MP3.com, and author of The Rough Guide to Country Music. He’s written about food, drink, and travel for various publishers including Zagat Surveys, Lonely Planet, and the San Francisco Bay Guardian. He also wrote a beer column for the Guardian called Hopped Up.