Canning Craft Beer

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Two scenes. First, 30 years ago, I’m on a tour of Anheuser-Busch’s Williamsburg, Virginia, brewery when something went haywire on a huge canning line. In the few seconds it took a worker to hit the big red STOP button, more than 50 cans of Bud had been sliced open, spraying beer all over the floor. Canning was high-tech, high-speed, and very much big brewery.

Second scene, five years ago, at the Oskar Blues Cajun Grille and Brewery in Lyons, Colorado, brewery owner Dale Katechis lined up two cans and filled them manually with Dale’s Pale Ale, a full-fledged hop-snorter of a beer. He sealed them and, after filling four more, pulled plastic six-pack rings down on them. It was the beginning of what Katechis calls the “Canned Beer Apocalypse,” a name that was a reflection of how funny the whole thing seemed.

Putting craft beer in cans was just not something you did. Light beer belonged in cans, and frat boys crushed the empties against their heads. Craft beer belonged in glass bottles—which were better for the beer in some vague, mysterious way.

Like other things the craft-beer business put forth as dogma—blending batches is cheating, pasteurization of beer is always bad, a bit of variation in your beer proves that it’s handcrafted—that was more a case of making a virtue out of necessity. Canning equipment was wicked expensive and massive, with more capacity than craft brewers needed. Used bottling lines could be gotten cheap from all the small soft-drink bottlers that were going out of business. A few craft brewers had their beers canned at other breweries, but it was sporadic, and the product was aimed mostly at boaters, sports arenas, and airlines.

European brewers had been putting their craft-type beers in cans for years. Czech pilsners come in cans, you can pop the top on a can of Belgian witbier, and Guinness Stout was a pioneer with its funny little plastic widget inside the can for creating the famous Guinness “cascade.” There’s even a Belgian sour ale that comes in a can. But in America, there was a stigma to the can that just wasn’t going away.

Then in 2001, along came a Canadian company, Cask Brewing Systems, that had developed a two-head manual can filler. Cask Brewing cut a deal with Ball Corporation to make relatively small lots of cans—a 150,000-can minimum, about a semitrailer load, instead of the million-can runs that were the standard. Katechis received their brochure and laughed—his craft beer in a can!—and then stopped to think about it.

That pause was providential. Cans put Oskar Blues on the map. Originally a sideline, something for brewpub customers to take home, the unexpected popularity of the cans—coupled with the brewery’s excellent beer—has led to growth of 2,000 percent since that first fill in November 2002. They’re moving into a new, much larger brewery building this spring.

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