Don’t Fear Canned Beer
Bottles or cans? Anyone who takes even a passing interest in craft beer will be able to hum this particular tune. Everybody has a take on the question of bottles versus cans, with a predictable mixture of fact and rumour on both sides of the debate.
At DeskBeers, we like people to drink alcohol at their workplace, and as such we don’t tend to be too judgemental. But we do very often meet people who have doubts about canned beer, and this short piece is for them. Don’t fear canned beer — and here’s why.
Cans store better
Things which harm beer while it’s being stored are oxygen and certain forms of light (in particular sunlight and fluorescent lighting). Bottles, especially the clear and green varieties (but even brown ones), are vulnerable to light, and this leads to “skunking,” a chemical reaction which basically results in sulphur compounds in your beer. Yum. Furthermore, bottles are not entirely impervious to oxygen, and oxidized beer = stale beer. Neither of these factors comes into play with canned beer, like, at all. Canned beer stays much fresher for much longer.
The planet will thank you
Bottles aren’t bad at all when it comes to the environment. Their composition typically includes 20–30% recycled material, and the silicon dioxide used in their manufacture is naturally abundant and can be mined with relatively low environmental impact. But glass is heavy, and needs more packaging for safe transit; transporting bottles therefore leaves a comparatively large carbon and land footprint.
With cans, however, the recycled component can be as high as 70%. Additionally, cans are much lighter, and require less packaging to ship (although we can tell you from experience that they’re not unbreakable). Although neither format is environmentally perfect just yet, green drinkers prefer cans.
You can stack them on top of one another to build a big tower
I mean, it’s not a deal breaker.
They look badass
Although a craft beer is ultimately judged on how it tastes, there’s no doubt that breweries who’ve readily embraced the design opportunities offered by cans are doing themselves no harm at all. Beavertown and Magic Rock, rightly, are acclaimed as trailblazers in can art, but at the moment we’re also really liking the cut of Electric Bear’s jib, and the awesome designs from Five Points.
There are some people in the industry predicting that beer bottles will be obsolete in the near future, especially given the popularity of cans in the USA. We’re not sure that would be such a good thing, as bottling remains vital for individual brewers, and small breweries, to get off the ground. To neglect this point would be to neglect a good chunk of what makes craft brewing so appealing: the idea of a level playing-field for brewers of all magnitudes to produce and share their beer. The oldest meaning of the word “bottle” (boðl) is “A place of residence; a dwelling; a house or other building.” Even if the significance of the beer bottle will one day be primarily historical, and even though the appeal of craft beer is in part its capacity to see tradition as just one narrative among others, there is a sense in which the home of beer will always be the bottle. However, from the cold hard perspective of making a beer taste and look as good as possible — which is what we’re really here for — it’s all about the cans.
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