The hottest idea in microbrewing these days is no real news to big brewers. It’s an idea that's been around since just after Repeal. (That’s “Repeal” as in the repeal of the 18th Amendment: Prohibition.) To the microbrewers, it may be a big revelation and something everyone’s scrambling to grab, but it’s hardly a big secret: it’s the can.
The only surprising thing is that it’s taken them so long to get around to it, because the can is a great container for beer. Snobs haven’t thought so for years; after all, beer comes in cans, wine comes in bottles. With corks in ‘em. Soda pop comes in cans. The can became just one more way the cork dorks could dismiss beer.
They were originally right. Back in the late 1930s, when beer was first put into cans, the cone-tops (early cans that looked like squat steel bottles with actual bottle-caps) and flat-tops (the regular steel cans you punched open with your “church key,” the triangular punch can opener) were soldered steel, and imparted a metallic taste to the beer. Beer would go cloudy if it stayed in the can too long. The heavy steel cans weren’t re-usable. The can was hardly an ideal package.
But people loved them. They didn’t break like glass, they were more colorful, they got cold faster, they were modern. Some of the appeal is their compact shape, a handful of happiness, a grain grenade. Folks didn’t care about the downside of canned beer, or at least didn’t care enough to stop buying it.
It took the Coors family’s obsession with getting their beer to the public with the least possible contamination to bring an affordable aluminum can to market. It’s one of the strange stories of business. Back in the 1950s, Coors was a family-owned regional brewery, trying hard to keep their light-colored beer from any kind of harm. There was a streak of looney in the Coors family, a good kind: they were nuts about maintaining the quality of their Coors Banquet Beer. So when a not-so-smooth operator named Lou Bronstein, an aluminum broker, came by to sell them on the idea of an aluminum beer can, he found people who were at least willing to listen to his scheme.
Before long, Bronstein sold them on the aluminum can idea, and moved on, leaving them to work out the details of production. Aluminum giant Alcoa actually fought Coors, telling them that there was no way to make an aluminum can for beer, even though a successful can would mean millions in business for Alcoa. Coors did what they always had done in the past: took the process in-house, spent money on research, and made it work. Coors made its own cans – and still does – and Alcoa was left scrambling to try to meet a market it said wouldn’t exist.
The aluminum can didn’t have to be soldered; it was punched out of a solid slug of aluminum and had a lid that was crimped on. The can was lined with a thin film of food-grade resin as a barrier against taste contamination. Once the problem of opening the can was fixed (anyone remember slicing your toes open on those damned pop-tops?), the can was suddenly the hot ticket for beer containment.
Except that beer snobs still think the can’s a low-class item that makes beer taste crappy. They can’t help themselves – it’s what they’ve always thought. Makes the beer taste funny, they say, bottles are better.
Grow up, get with it. When the
Chief Angry Troll and I
hit the mean streets of Prague last spring in search of enough pilsner to sink a fleet of battleships, about all we could find was draft and cans, big mothering cans that held half a liter each. The beer tasted great, time after time. All the nitro-fizz cans of stouts and ales – Guinness, Murphy’s, Boddington’s, Tetley’s, Young’s – taste like tap, they drink like draft. What’s the problem?
It’s all about making microbrewed beer seem even more different. Some fans of the bold stuff seem to have this warped idea that unless a beer comes from a tiny brewery in some funky old garage, cheese factory or morgue, brewed up on used dairy equipment and bottled by hand on a 100-year-old coal-powered bottler – and no twist-off caps, they’re a mark of the devil! – then it’s just not worth a damn, it’s tainted by compromise.
These things have nothing to do with the beer! They all have to do with not having the money to do things the way you’d want to. Then someone comes along and realizes that something new can be affordable, easier to use, and more beneficial than the norm.
That’s what’s going on with canned microbrews right now, thanks to the folks at the
Oskar Blues brewery in Lyons, Colorado. They took the plunge and bought a small canner, literally a hand-operated canner, and started canning their Dale’s Pale Ale (that's the photo on this page) and Old Chub Scottish Ale. These beers totally broke the mold of canned beer in the U.S., shattering the picture of canned beer as simply conveniently packaged suds. Dale’s is a hop-whipped beauty that just came in first in a
New York Times tasting of pale ales. Old Chub is a great name, and a big fat beer packed full of malt, totally unlike anything I’d ever tasted in a can before.
And surprise, surprise, it turns out that cans are a brilliant package for beer. After all, cans are shiny metallic cousins to the mighty friend of beer,
the keg. The two greatest enemies of beer freshness are light, which turns beer skunky, and air, which oxidizes beer and makes it stale. The can beats the bottle hands-down on the light problem; hello, Mr. Opaque. The canning process also limits the amount of air in the package, leaving less than all but the most expensively coddled bottle. If you’re feeling environmental, aluminum cans are cheaper to recycle than glass bottles, and the lighter can uses less fuel to transport.
Cans. They’re great for the beer, better for the environment, lighter to carry, and there’s a rush to put a much bigger variety of beer in them. Get off your can and grab a can as quick as you can.
