Can the lowly beer can and high-style craft beer coexist?
The mere juxtaposition of the two is an oxymoron to some and heresy to others. Yet after years of resistance, if not outright disdain, a growing number of small U.S. brewers are braving beer snobs' barbs and putting their beer in aluminum. To find out whether tasty beer can come from a pedestrian can, we held a blind tasting -- and found an interesting answer.
When it made its commercial appearance in 1935, the beer can was high style, considered a marvel and a miracle. No more lugging beer home from the bar in heavy jugs or breakable bottles. It fit easily in that other newfangled contraption, the refrigerator, and you tossed it when you were done.
The beer can's big break came in World War II. Sturdy, stackable cans allowed patriotic brewers to economically ship millions of free cases to soldiers flung far across the globe. Legions of veterans, recalling that can of beer on a hot Pacific beach or the long march to Paris, came home with a nostalgic love of canned brew. Twenty years later, more beer was being sold in cans than in bottles. One barometer today: Anheuser-Busch Cos., with half the nation's beer market by volume, says it cans 48% of its brew. (Bottles are 42%, and draft makes up the rest.) Last year, about 31.8 billion cans were filled with beer or beer-based beverages like Smirnoff Ice, according to the Can Manufacturers Institute in Washington, D.C.
The beer-can revolution, however, fomented its own antican rebellion. By the early 1980s, the beer can became a symbol of everything that was wrong with brewing among a small, but growing, rank of brewers who were tired of what they called "national beer." In their view, the mass-produced, middle-of-the-road, light and overcarbonated beer being made by the likes of Anheuser-Busch, Miller and Coors was as soulless as the cans it usually came in (a judgment unsurprisingly not shared by the Bud, Miller or Coors folks). These brewers also feared that cans could taint the taste of beer.
To the bottling lines they went. They declared themselves "microbrewers," handcrafting small lots of beer they would put in the only vessel worthy of their beverage: the brown, light-deflecting glass bottle.