It’s that time of year again folks. On January 24 the nation celebrates Beer Can Appreciation Day. Laugh if you will, but the holiday is important to many people. There are thousands of beer can collectors out there…not to mention hundreds of beer can hat collectors. And don’t forget all the backyard barbeque chefs who specialize in beer can chicken.
And the starving college students selling crushed aluminum beer cans to buy text books.
The bright idea of putting beer in cans came to brewer Gottfried Kruegar back in 1933. He teamed with American Can Company to develop a container that was both pressurized and had a special coating to prevent fizzy beer from reacting with tin. After several years of experimentation, Kruegar introduced a test run of 2,000 cans. It was an unqualified success.
Today canned beer accounts for approximately half of the $20 billion U.S. beer industry.
Cans are easier to stack than bottles, are more durable and take less time to chill. They’re also easier to haul to the beach.
Until recently the craft beer industry was not swayed by the allure of metal. Many beer geeks insist a can is by nature an evil thing to seal fine beer into. That’s changing however as microbrewers become increasingly convinced that cans insure purity and taste.
A word about tops: the original 1935 beer can had a flat top, which remained the norm till about 1970. It’s hard to imagine in this day of feather-light aluminum that the first containers weighed nearly four ounces. It took an indispensible tool known as a church key…and a fair amount of effort… to pry them open.
The change that revolutionized everything came in 1963. Schlitz introduced the “Pop Top.” You put your finger into a ring, yanked, and bingo the can was open! Pull tabs were a beer drinkers dream and an environmental disaster. Pets and wildlife died from ingesting them, as did more than a few people who dropped the ring into their beer and then accidently choked on it. Pull tabs were around for a little over 10 years before they were replaced by the stay tab. Like its name suggests, the tab remains connected to the can where it can do a lot less damage.
A final holiday note: If you stacked all the cans of beer consumed in the US this year, you could go to the moon and back 20 times. That’s a lot of cans to appreciate.
And the starving college students selling crushed aluminum beer cans to buy text books.
The bright idea of putting beer in cans came to brewer Gottfried Kruegar back in 1933. He teamed with American Can Company to develop a container that was both pressurized and had a special coating to prevent fizzy beer from reacting with tin. After several years of experimentation, Kruegar introduced a test run of 2,000 cans. It was an unqualified success.
Today canned beer accounts for approximately half of the $20 billion U.S. beer industry.
Cans are easier to stack than bottles, are more durable and take less time to chill. They’re also easier to haul to the beach.
Until recently the craft beer industry was not swayed by the allure of metal. Many beer geeks insist a can is by nature an evil thing to seal fine beer into. That’s changing however as microbrewers become increasingly convinced that cans insure purity and taste.
A word about tops: the original 1935 beer can had a flat top, which remained the norm till about 1970. It’s hard to imagine in this day of feather-light aluminum that the first containers weighed nearly four ounces. It took an indispensible tool known as a church key…and a fair amount of effort… to pry them open.
The change that revolutionized everything came in 1963. Schlitz introduced the “Pop Top.” You put your finger into a ring, yanked, and bingo the can was open! Pull tabs were a beer drinkers dream and an environmental disaster. Pets and wildlife died from ingesting them, as did more than a few people who dropped the ring into their beer and then accidently choked on it. Pull tabs were around for a little over 10 years before they were replaced by the stay tab. Like its name suggests, the tab remains connected to the can where it can do a lot less damage.
A final holiday note: If you stacked all the cans of beer consumed in the US this year, you could go to the moon and back 20 times. That’s a lot of cans to appreciate.
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