Jon Abernathy

Canvolution

Quick, answer this question: When was the last time you had a beer from a can?

There’s a large percentage of you right now cringing and imagining an ice-cold can of [insert American Macro Industrial Lager here] and thinking, “No way.” A smaller (but hopefully growing!) percentage of you are nodding and thinking of that can of Oskar Blues Gordon, or Maui Coconut Porter, or 21st Amendment Monk’s Blood you enjoyed recently. You know.

Good beer can come in a can.

Oskar Blues Grill & Brewery was the first American craft brewer to can their beers, starting back in 2002. (There were a few brewers before that who contracted out the canning of some of their brews; Oskar Blues was the first to do it all in-house.) There is a whole list of good reasons why brewers could (and should) can their beers, but for Oskar Blues, the real reason was, “Why not?”

They were wanting to start packaging their beers, and an unsolicited fax from Canada’s Cask Brewing Systems planted the idea to can them. In other words, once they were done laughing over the idea, they came to “Why not?”

The rest, of course, is history, and Oskar Blues now offers a lineup of six canned beers: Dale’s Pale Ale (their flagship beer), Gordon, Old Chub, Mama’s Little Yella Pils, Ten FIDY, and their newest, Gubna Imperial IPA. Has canning hurt Oskar Blues’ beers? Not likely: all of them rate incredibly highly on RateBeer, and I can attest from personal experience that they are worth the high marks.

Despite the stigma associated with cans, they have a number of advantages over bottles that are hard to ignore:

• The aluminum is completely opaque to light, meaning the beer cannot become lightstruck (or “skunked”), a perpetual problem for bottles (particularly the green and clear ones);
• Cans are much lighter than bottles, which makes them easier to pack around with you and more economical to ship;
• Cans are more ergonomically efficient than bottles: they are stackable, (mostly) uniform in size and shape, and smaller than bottles;
• They chill down more quickly than bottles (since glass is an insulator);
• You never have to worry about broken glass (which makes them especially appealing to the environmentally-conscious outdoors crowd).

On the other hand, two of the main drawbacks to cans are the fact that canning is more expensive for a brewery than bottling, and homebrewers can’t re-use cans to package their beers.

Another notable canning microbrewer is 21st Amendment Brewery, who have been canning their beer since 2006 and have become a strong voice in the canning advocacy; with the release of their Monk’s Blood (a strong Belgian dark ale), they wrote:

Monk’s Blood is the first installment in our new Insurrection Series, a limited edition, four-pack release of a very special beer that rises up in revolt against common notions of what canned beer can be.

Monk’s Blood was released to great acclaim among the Brewerati late last year and is currently sitting in RateBeer’s 94th overall percentile—not too bad for a beer than comes in a can. The other two regular offerings are their perennial favorite Hell or High Watermelon Wheat (this beer is huge at the Oregon Brewers Festival each year) and Brew Free! or Die IPA (a tasty, hoppy American-style IPA).

So how does canned beer compare to bottled beer? Aside from simply trying some canned craft beers yourself to judge, the next best thing you can do is a side-by-side comparison of a can and a bottle of the same beer. While this might seem counter-intuitive, I know of at least three breweries that are producing both bottled and canned versions of their beers: New Belgium Brewing (Fat Tire Amber Ale), Big Sky Brewing (Moose Drool and Trout Slayer), and Anderson Valley Brewing (Poleeko Gold Pale Ale and Summer Solstice Cerveza Crema).

I actually did a side-by-side tasting of Big Sky’s Moose Drool last September, and chronicled it on my other blog. The big surprise of that tasting is that I found the canned Moose Drool to be the superior beer. It was a bit darker, richer, with a creamier body and more chocolate notes than I found in the bottle. I highly encourage any beer drinker to seek out and try the canned versus bottled side-by-side like this; it will help put to bed any notion that canned beer is in some way inferior.

Although than perception is on its way out; more and more craft brewers are canning their beers, and these are good beers too. And this past October, Buckbean Brewing Company of Reno, Nevada (of which you can read a bit about from Hop Press compatriot Ken Weaver here) hosted the first-ever Canfest, a canned beer festival with a Who’s Who of craft brewers in attendance. When there’s a beer festival, you know it’s becoming mainstream!

Finally, here’s a list (current as of last fall) of microbrewers who can their beers (credit to Charlie Papazian on a Beer Examiner article):

• 21st Amendment Brewery
• Anderson Valley Brewing
• Arctic Craft Brewery
• Big Sky Brewing Company
• Blue Mountain Brewery
• Bohemian Brewing Company
• Breckenridge Brewing Company
• Buckbean Brewing Company
• Butternuts Beer & Ale
• Caldera Brewing Company
• Carolina Beer and Beverage
• Coastal Extreme Brewing Company
• Cottrell Brewing Company
• David’s Ale Works
• Four Peaks Brewing
• Harvest Moon, Belt
• Heiner Brau, Covington
• High Noon Saloon, Leavenworth
• Kettlehouse Brewing Company
• Keweenaw Brewing Company
• Mammoth Brewery
• Maui Brewing Company
• Micro Packaging Solutions, Flagstaff
• Milwaukee Ale House, Milwaukee
• Mudshark Brewing Company
• New Belgium Brewing
• New England Brewing Company
• New South Brewing Company, Myrtle Beach
• Northwoods Brewpub and Grill
• Old Capitol Brew Works
• Oskar Blues
• Pete’s Place, Krebs
• Prescott Brewing Company
• Pug Ryan’s Steakhouse & Brewery
• Rochester Mills Brewer, Rochester
• SKA Brewing
• Sleeping Lady Brewing Company
• Sly Fox Brewing
• Southern Star Brewery, Conroe
• Spilker Ales
• Steamworks Brewing
• Stone Coast Brewing
• Surly Brewing Company
• Thunderhead Brewing Company
• Tommyknocker Brewing Company
• Top of the Hill Restaurant & Brewery
• Ukiah Brewing Company
• Uncommon Brewers
• Upslope Brewing
• Warbird Brewing Company
• Wynkoop Brewing Company, Denver

If you know of any others, let me know in the comments!

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