BEER CAN TURNS 75

Happy birthday to the humble beer can, which turned 75 this month. For the record, it was the Gottfried Krueger Brewing Company, based in New Jersey, which first launched beer in cans back on 24 January, 1935.

Significantly, that was only a couple of years after the end of the Prohibition era and while the Krueger sales people chose a single grocery store in Richmond, Virginia, as a market test, the beer can turned out to be a howling success. More than any other beer drinking nation, Americans have embraced the can as their preferred take-away container.

The United Kingdom soon followed suit but the beer can remained a rather minor attraction for British home drinkers. Those early beer cans were made from stainless steel and most were the traditional shape we recognize now, but some – like those made by London-based brewer Barclay Perkins in the late 1930s– mimicked bottles, complete with a conical neck and closed with a crown seal. Nicknamed “Brasso” cans because they resembled the popular silverware cleaning fluid container, these oddities are much-prized by can collectors around the world.

In Australia, Carlton & United Breweries first released canned beer in 1958 and the novel packaging medium caught on in a big way – more than two million cans were sold in the first month. The flat-top, relatively heavyweight steel cans had to be punched open with a device known as a “church key”; a free opener came with every dozen cans purchased.

While Victorians and other states embraced the beer can enthusiastically, New South Wales was more conservative and, generally, preferred their beer in glass bottles. In time, aluminium cans superceded steel ones and Tasmania, curiously, saw landmarks at both ends of technology, with Boags the first brewery to introduce the new-fangled aluminium cans in 1973, while Cascade was the last Australian brewery to keep producing the steel models into the late 1980s.

Perhaps the most spectacular beer can was the 26-ounce or 750ml Fosters Lager can which was exported to the United States during the 1970s. Apparently, the jumbo-sized tinnies were often mistaken for motor oil on shop shelves over there, which led to them being called “oil cans”.

The pros and cons of drinking out of either can or bottle are still hotly debated but – especially when it comes to outdoor drinking – the can has some obvious advantages. It’s lighter and more portable, protects beer better from ultra-violet light and, arguably, is more easily recyclable.

Of course, if we had fully-recyclable glass beer bottles – like most European countries - then the scales would tip further towards the case for glass containers over aluminium. Some people claim you get a metallic taste drinking from cans but this more likely to be in the mind of the beholder.

The late British beer writer Michael Jackson claimed that cans are “aesthetically unpleasant” and even suggested that large breweries with a sub-par batch of beer “will send it to the canning line”. Whatever the truth, few British breweries have embraced the beer can concept, especially for their home-grown ales.

Of course, when it comes to air travel, the can is the only choice offered to passengers wanting a beer. On the odd long-haul leg in or out of London, I’ve been lucky enough to score a can of Fullers London Pride, one of my favourite English real ales. Similarly, James Squire Golden Ale is currently available in cans on a certain dominant domestic airline.

Cans are currently in favour with certain American craft breweries, including the Oskar Blues brew-pub in Colorado which began hand-canning their beers in 2002 and saw an 800 per cent increase in sales. More recently, another Colorado micro-brewery - the long-running New Belgium Brewing Company – has started canned their flagship Fat Tire brand.

Some readers might recall that Matilda Bay Brewing’s Redback wheat beer was available in cans for a brief time in the early 1990s, after the pioneering WA outfit installed a canning line at their Fremantle plant. As it turned out, the canning line proved an irresistible attraction to Carlton & United Breweries who bought out Matilda Bay shortly afterwards, and started brewing and canning VB there for the Perth market.  

Here cheers to the good old tinnie.