Craft In A Can

If
there is an icon of mainstream beer, a thing that symbolizes
the kind of beer that craft beer drinkers love to hate, it
is the can. Beer cans are practically synonymous with
American light lager beers, despite the popularity of
imported nitrocans filled with Guinness, Abbot and other
beers. “Tastes like metal,” you’ll hear the geeks say of
beers from cans – and to be fair, you can hear that from
some mainstream drinkers, too.

News flash Craft
beer in cans is coming to a wholesaler near you.

There are some
out there already. Brooklyn Lager has been in cans for
almost three years, although it’s more a concession sale
item: stadiums, golf courses, trains, planes, etc. There
were some brewers in the Midwest who had their beer put up
in cans by larger brewers, shipping the beer by tank truck
and then picking up the cans when they were done. Portland
Brewing put their MacTarnahan’s beer in cans, but like
Brooklyn, they were mostly looking at the recreation and
concession market; you don’t see these beers on supermarket
shelves.

That’s where the
breakthrough is going to happen soon, and it’s largely being
driven by the success of one brewery: Oskar Blues Brewery,
in Lyons, Colorado. A couple months ago, I mentioned a
seminar on packaging for the brewpub at this year’s Craft
Brewers Conference that was presented by Oskar Blues owner
Dale Katechis. Katechis talked about how Oskar Blues got
into the canning business.

“We got a
brochure in the mail from Cask Brewing Systems, a company in
Calgary,” said Katechis. “They had a small canning machine
and six-pack assembler they were selling to small breweries.
I laughed at it. Then I thought I’d show it to Brian (Lutz),
our brewer, for a laugh. The whole idea made us laugh really
hard. It seemed funny to put a 65 IBU pale ale in
cans.”

“Then it wasn’t
funny any more,” he said, as he described the ‘light-bulb
moment’ that hit him. “We were already bottling in 22oz.
bomber bottles, and they had a cult following. Cans would
expand that reach, and get more people to our door. We could
send the brewer out the door to sell them, which is a good
way for him to get out of that tunnel vision thing: making
the same beer, every week. We stopped laughing and called
Cask Systems.”

Kersten Kloss is
the western sales manager for Cask Brewing Systems. “In the
198Os we were in the forefront of craft brewing,” he said.
“We set up brewpubs and breweries all over Canada.” Cask was
also servicing the Do-It-Yourself, or “U-Brew” brewing
business in Canada, known generally as Brew On Premise in
the US: places where people could come and brew their own
small batches of beer on solid purpose-built equipment and
bottle it for take-home consumption.

That’s where
they started with small canning machine technology. “We were
serving a small market of specialty packages, the U-Brews,”
Kloss said. “That market needed a better package than people
bringing in their bottles to re-use, and we developed a
manual can filler for them. That’s how we proved our ability
to sell to a niche market to the Ball Corporation, our can
supplier. They had tried to introduce canning technology to
the micro market 1O years ago, and it failed. The machinery
started at a quarter-million dollars, and the minimum order
was millions of cans.”

Cask’s initial
manual canning system is almost bedrock simple. “It’s a
2-head manual filler,” Kloss began. “You load the cans on
the filler two at a time. Then the filler blows a little
carbon dioxide in the can, fills it with beer, and applies
the lid on the foam. Then you put the can on the seamer. The
can is put on a rotating chuck, and that’s where the lid is
rolled on and compressed. It’s formed on the seamer. That’s
one of the nice things about cans: where bottles’ crimped
crowns don’t insure against air leakages over time, the can
seal is hermetic, it’s one unit, there’s no air leakage. You
don’t have light, you don’t have air, you don’t have
breakage.”

The third and
final step is to put the cans in the six-pack rings. “The
six-packer is a miniature manual “hi-cone” machine,” said
Kloss. “That’s what they’re called in the industry, hi-cone
machines. It’s a three-step process: you load the cans on
the packer, pull the lever and six plastic cones drop onto
the can tops. The operator puts the plastic six-pack rings
on the cones. Pull the lever again and the plastic rings are
pressed and stretched down over the cans, and the cones are
pulled out of the way.”

“While we were
working with the U-Brews, we were approached by several
small brewers in Canada,” Kloss said. “They were interested
in canning, and once we’d made some adjustments to air
levels and automated the process a bit more, it worked
great. We went to Ball about introducing that to the US
market, and they were all for it.” That’s when they sent out
the brochures that landed on Katechis’s desk.

Dale Katechis
became one of the most popular interviews in the craft
brewing trade press. Dale’s Pale Ale in cans was a quick
hit, boosting sales by an unbelievable 5OO% in the first
year. It was followed by a second successful release, Old
Chub, an even more outrageous beer to find in a can: an 8%
malty Scottish ale. The beers were soon found across the
country, coming in through various supply lines, some
authorized and some not. I got hold of some in Virginia, and
was blown away by the quality and punch of the beers. They
were solid craft brews, worthy of attention in any
package.

Which made me
wonder: wasn’t Dale’s first thought right? Isn’t it really
just a gimmick to put beers like these in cans? “A gimmick
is something that doesn’t hold any water,” Katechis replied.
“The thing has to have value. You have to want to
re-purchase. That’s the different between a gimmick and an
innovation. We want the people who love that type of beer to
buy this. I’m not trying to pull away the Lite drinker,
they’ll hate this beer. That’s not my market. I’ve got to
sell this to an educated palate. I think those people are
educated enough that you won’t sell them a gimmick. They’ll
buy it again if it hits home with them. It’s a 65 IBU beer
in a can. It’s not a joke!”

Some local
brewers agree. New England Brewing is out in cans and on the
shelves already. This pioneering Connecticut brewery has
been resurrected; and in a common example of the “brewery
DNA” that has provided this fledgling industry with a real
and interesting history, owner Rob Leonard has also
resurrected the Elm City label from the defunct New Haven
Brewing. It makes some sense: Leonard used to brew there.
New England Brewing has two beers in cans: Atlantic Amber
and Elm City Lager.

Why cans?
“Because we can!” Leonard says, puckishly. New England uses
the same 2-head Cask Systems manual filler that Oskar Blues
started out with. Leonard sees the low output as a plus: it
guarantees that there isn’t too much beer on the market,
which means the canned beer is fresh. He loves the
protection the can gives against light damage. “The can
blocks out all light,” he said, “and aeration levels are
much lower than bottles. The result: longer shelf life and
fresher product.”

I did see two
Massachusetts brewers at Katechis’s seminar: John Fahimian,
owner of The Tap brewpub in Haverhill, and Todd Marcus of
Cape Cod Beer. Fahimian was more interested in the idea of
packaging his beer in more conventional forms; he’d just
ordered a 22oz. bottle filler. But he had an open mind.
“Bottling or canning would be a great marketing tool to get
our place better known,” he said. “I want to sell more beer,
too. We have a lot of brewing capacity, and we’re only 3O
miles from Boston, but no one comes up.”

Marcus, on the
other hand, saw Cape Cod as a natural for canned craft beer.
“I want to package our beer,” he said, “and cans would be
great. There’s water all around us, it’s perfect. The
technology’s less of an issue now, it’s all been done. There
are a lot of marketing considerations: 4-packs, 6-packs,
12-packs, and all at completely different pricepoints. And
at a 15O,OOO minimum print run on the cans, you’ve got to
make a solid decision on what to can.”

Cans make a lot
of sense for the craft brewer, in a lot of different ways.
As Leonard points out, they are completely proof against
beer being light-damaged, the sole cause of ‘skunkiness’ in
beer. With equivalent filler equipment, cans are the equal
of bottles when it comes to low airs in the package, which
keeps the beer from becoming stale. Cans are lighter to
carry, much lighter to ship and deliver, and are much less
prone to breakage. And they take less energy to recycle than
glass.

Katechis agrees.
“Mainstream micro drinkers are used to getting their beers
in glass,” he said. “But the canned beer is a fresher,
better way to get beer to the consumer. We purge the cans
(with carbon dioxide): when the lid goes on, there’s nothing
but beer in there. The can has an enamel lining, a
water-based lining from the Ball Corporation. The beer
doesn’t sit on aluminum. The only part that could get
oxidized is the outside of the lid.”

What’s that all
mean to the consumer? Cans with craft beer in them represent
a package that’s lighter to carry, that eliminates the
possibility of skunking, that doesn’t go stale as fast, and
that can go places where glass bottles cannot, all at a
similar price – or lower. The can is the least expensive
individual package option for beer. What’s not to
like?

The Europeans
caught on a long time ago. I just got back from a trip to
the Czech Republic. Every major beer was available in 5OOml
and 33Oml cans, and often only in cans. It’s the preferred
package, after draft. The Belgian beer Wittekirke is
available in cans, even the vaunted Rodenbach, one of the
most assertive and unusual beers in the world, is in cans,
something that blows most beer geeks’ minds.

But do these
beers really taste good out of a can? Yes, of course they
do. Cans today are not what they were 3O years ago. They’re
light aluminum, and as Katechis pointed out, they’re lined
with a flavorless, harmless lining. Pop the tab, and the
beer’s ready for drinking, but Katechis doesn’t advise
drinking it straight from the can. “How many people buy a
Belgian tripel and drink it from the bottle?” he asked. “I
mean, if you want to drink a tripel out of the can, go for
it. But pour it in a glass and you’ll get a fresher
beer.”

If it’s so
darned great, why did it take so long? “I spent a lot of
time thinking about why no one else did it,” said Katechis.
“The only reason micros didn’t get into cans in the first
place was that it was cost-prohibitive. You have to put up a
lot of money for can inventory. The can companies weren’t
doing small lots.” Cask Brewing System changed all that,
just like Briess Malts changed the way malt was sold to
microbrewers back in the 198Os.

When I talked to
Katechis, he was in the process of finishing off a new 5OOO
square foot facility, with a new 72 head filler – a can
filler, of course. “At the size we’re at now, we’d have to
run that about 15 minutes a year,” he said with a laugh.
“But we’re able to finance it with the brewpub.” That neatly
proved his point about extending the brewpub’s reach with
cans.

“We could be on
the verge of something big,” said Katechis. “We weren’t
looking at a big home run, we were just intrigued, we were
challenged. But it turned into wildfire. Within two months
of thinking about it, we had a canned beer. That got us out
in the market, and we’re seeing a lot of pull-through. It’s
more portable, it’s environmentally friendly. A big part of
doing it was just to see what people thought. We know what
they think now. We have an airline contract with Frontier,
and we’ve moved into Arizona.” Why is Arizona a big deal?
Simple, says Katechis: it’s the state with the most boaters
per capita.

Craft beer in
cans could be a hot seller in hot weather, but where do you
put them to get the greatest movement? Do you put them with
the bottled craft beers, or with the other beers in cans,
which are mostly mainstream beers and a few imports, like
Heineken? “We’ve been telling people to put them with the
micros,” Katechis said. “But it’s an interesting question.
Some folks have been trying to talk me into placing it with
the imports. I want to be with the micros.

“We don’t have
the desire to be Budweiser,” Katechis said. “We wanted to do
something unique that shakes things up, that challenges the
mainstream. We get a kick out of proving people wrong. It
really is in the spirit of the micro industry. People say,
“Why get involved if it’s only 3% of the market?” Why else
do it? That’s how we choose to make our living. The canned
beer fell right in with that. It was maverick and
ground-breaking. It opened people’s eyes to what the can
could do.

“The can is the
most popular package for beer,” he said. “It makes sense.
The only big dark secret is people’s perception. Our job is
to get out there and prove that this is better way to
package beer. And it’s kind of fun that you can smash one on
your forehead when you’re done.” The can may be taking craft
beer where it’s never gone before.