We’re accustomed to pouring fine wines and champagnes from sleekly tapered green bottles with foil and corks. On the other hand, everyday food items—tomato paste, evaporated milk, chili—we scoop out of metal cylinders.
Some connoisseurs complain about a “tinny” taste in canned beer, but it’s all in their head.
Maybe that’s why the beer can gets no respect. It’s our favorite container for sipping suds out of… Americans emptied about 35 billion of them last year. But mention the beer can, and what comes to mind? Maybe Homer Simpson passed out on his couch, surrounded by drained Duff cans, or John Belushi crushing the empties against his forehead in Animal House.
Eight years ago, in researching an article for a trade magazine, I asked several leading craft brewers about the possibility of their canning beer. “Cans are for baked beans and soups, not fine beverages,” sniffed one. “I mean, barley wine in a can?!” asked another in disbelief.
Dale Katechis was once a scoffer. Katechis is the owner of Oskar Blues, a brewpub in Lyons, CO. “It initially started as a joke,” he said of his venture into canning. “Our brewer and I laughed about it. We called beer in cans ‘pusillanimous beer.’”
“One day I decided to make a phone call and start doing research. Our goal was to do something that was pretty zany at the time and kind of fun.”
Katechis decided to invest in a manual canner and seamer manufactured by a Canadian business called Cask Brewing Systems. In late 2002, Dale’s Pale Ale appeared in multi-hued aluminum containers. “Big, eh?” reads the slogan on the rim of the can. Indeed, Dale’s Pale Ale, measuring over 60 IBUs and vigorously dry-hopped with Cascades, is probably the most aggressively flavored beer ever canned in America. With an annual capacity, at the time, of about 800 barrels, Oskar Blues became possibly the smallest U.S. brewer ever to operate its own canning line.
The initial product was such a success that Katechis followed up by canning his Old Chub Scottish-Style Ale, a roasty, 8%-alcohol-by-volume winter warmer of a beer. In the 2-1/2 years since then, he’s built a new $2 million brewery, allowing Oskar Blues to triple its output. And if demand ever warrants, he has, waiting in the wings, a used Angelus filler purchased from an RC Cola plant in Columbus, GA. This “beast of a machine,” as Katechis calls it, can turn out up to 1,000 cans a minute.
Katechis ticks off the advantages of the can. Unlike a bottle, it won’t shatter into a hundred pieces when dropped, so it’s welcome on beaches, golf course and campsites where bottles are forbidden. It’s lighter than glass and more compact, so it’s preferred aboard airlines, where space is at a premium. (Katechis’ beers are served aboard Frontier Airlines). The can is completely opaque, so the beer won’t get lightstruck. Oxygen pick-up levels are as low or lower as with bottled beer. Once you’ve drained the can, you can easily stomp it flat and haul it to the nearest recycling center.
Some connoisseurs complain about a “tinny” taste in canned beer, but it’s all in their head, asserts Jim Fisher, vice president of packaging industry affairs for the Ball Corporation, the largest manufacturer of cans in North America. He notes that with modern aluminum cans, not only the insides but the lids are coated with a water-based epoxy, so that your lips never touch metal even when you drink directly from the can. “Any perception of metal is a perception as opposed to reality,” he insists.
“We’ve dispelled the myth of what cans have and don’t have to offer,” says Katechis. Partly due to his proselytizing, over a dozen U.S. microbreweries and brewpubs have added canning equipment. Micro-canners are popping up in the most unlikely places.
