The Evolution of Modern Beer Packaging
The glass bottle, without a doubt, has been the beer package that has had the most staying power, especially when you consider how long it’s been around and how pervasive it remains today.
For most of this country’s formative years, beer was typically dispensed from wooden kegs at the bar. Bottling in glass was happening by the late eighteenth century, but it was still a tiny percentage of the overall packaging mix. The bottles of the time were made of very heavy black glass that was used to contain many other types of products, as well. By the late eighteenth century, brewers were using purpose-made beer bottles. The advent of pasteurization made it possible to ship bottled beer long distances.
In the early twentieth century and during the period just after Prohibition, draft beer still dominated, though bottles started to close the gap and ultimately shifted the dynamic in favor of bottled product.
Throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, the glass bottle has taken many forms. Pre-Prohibition, bottles were commonly of the heavy glass variety, usually with the brewery’s name embossed in the glass. Containers of this type are popular finds among beer enthusiasts and collectors who frequent antique shops.
The immediate post-Prohibition period was something of a creative pinnacle for glass bottle design. It was around 1935 when the public first drank beer out of a stubby (sometimes called the “steinie”), that squat, stout-bodied, short-necked container that always manages to tug at one’s nostalgic heartstrings whenever a modern brewer releases a retro-inspired product in the stubby.
Bob and Doug McKenzie fans will recognize the bottle; it’s the very essence of Canadiana, as far as its beer culture is concerned. For a good quarter-century or so, up until the mid-’80s, it was the dominant package in the Great White North. (Those who remember the Bob and Doug film Strange Brew will recall that it was in a stubby that the infamous mouse lived.)
In the late twentieth century and prior to their nostalgic renaissance, Jamaica’s Red Stripe was one of the few mass-marketed brands to package its brews in stubbies.
In 2005, Hood River, Oregon’s Full Sail Brewing Company sought to connect the Pacific Northwest’s beer culture with its blue-collar roots when it launched Session Lager exclusively in stubbies. It continued the tradition when it expanded the line to include Session Black, Session Fest (winter seasonal), and Session Export.
Even more recently, MillerCoors got in on the act. Since the early 2000s—when the company was just Coors—the brewer had been trying to figure out just what to do with Coors Original. Coors Light had long surpassed it in sales. In 2007, the company reached back to the brand’s origins when folks had referred to it as “the banquet beer,” and the company rebranded it as Coors Banquet. However, as much of a throwback as it was trying to be, there was a certain retro aesthetic that was missing. In 2013, the nostalgic circle was complete when Banquet found its way into stubbies.
By the middle of the twentieth century, 12 ounces had become the standard bottle size for beer (11.2 ounces—330 milliliters—in Europe). That’s not to say there wasn’t any room for variation.
Stubby bottles of Full Sail’s Session Lager.
Those of us old enough to vaguely remember the ’70s and very early ’80s will remember that small, 7-ounce bottles were nearly as common as the ones nearly twice their size. These “pony” bottles started to disappear as quickly as breweries were vanishing during the period (though they did make a comeback, much like the stubby on a very small scale in the past decade).
By the ’90s, longneck bottles had become the standard and remain so to this day. What’s not so standard is the color of those bottles. And that’s not really a good thing because the color of a bottle (or lack thereof) really can affect the quality of the beer.
The more opaque the bottle, the better chance it has of keeping light out. And light is one of beer’s greatest enemies. Light negatively interacts with hops in beer, causing it to “skunk.”
Clear bottles are the absolute worst, yet some very high-profile brands insist on packaging their product in those. Green bottles are nearly as bad and a disproportionate number of brewers bottle their brands in containers of that color, as well. It’s very much the part of the trade dress of some brands—particularly certain well-known European imports.
As far as common bottle colors go, the dark amber/brown bottle really is the way to go because the depth of that color lets in far less light than bottles made of lighter green glass. Some glass manufactuers have even developed a black glass bottle, which turns the opacity factor up to eleven. Such bottles are a bit pricier and not widely available.
No glass tint is 100 percent impervious to light. But you know what is? Aluminum.
Yes They Can
Beer cans have been in circulation for more than eighty years. They first made their appearance on shelves in 1935 as the package of choice for the Newark, New Jersey-based Gottfried Krueger Company, producer of Krueger’s Special Beer and Krueger’s Cream Ale. The cans at that time, produced by American Can Company, were made of steel and required an opener—popularly known as a church key—to breach the flat metal top and deliver all of the sudsy goodness to a very eager drinker.
Around the same time that the world first beheld the steel flat-top container, a competing package came on scene: the cone-top. They were fairly bottle-like in appearance, at least as far as the top opening was concerned. They were sealed much like bottles, as well, with the metal crown closure that’s still used on beer bottles today. The upside of the cone-top can was that the brewer didn’t need to install an entirely new filling line to get its beer into the package. The cone-tops worked on the existing bottling machines of the day.
The late 1950s saw the introduction of the aluminum can; Coors usually gets the credit for being the first out of the gate with the newfangled container. MillerCoors celebrates January 22, 1959, as the day it says cans of its flagship brew revolutionized both beer and the overall consumer packaged goods industry.
Research began on the container in 1957 when William Coors, the president of what was at the time the Adolph Coors Company, tasked his staff of engineers with developing a solution that would cut down on packaging waste. The disposal of tin cans—by then, the standard packaging metal—created an environmental hazard.
Coors’s directive was fairly visionary for the time period, considering that recycling was barely on the public’s radar in the ’50s.
The resulting aluminum container bested the tin package in recyclability, and it also eliminated a supposed aftertaste that many swore steel imparted on the liquid.
However, the aluminum can’s adoption did not become widespread until the early 1960s when the pull-tab became the closure of the moment. It eliminated the need for the drinker to have a churchkey on hand; the opening mechanism was riveted into the top of the can and disposed of once removed.
Pittsburgh’s Iron City brewery is widely credited as the pull-tab pioneer, first incorporating it into its package in 1962, but it was Schlitz that really took it national the following year. Others quickly followed.
Pull-tabs may have been all the rage, but they were anything but perfect. Their sharp edges often cut the people pulling them off, and folks were just tossing them everywhere, will-nilly, causing a bit of an environmental nightmare. Finally, in the 1970s, packaging manufacturers unveiled the stay-tab, the go-to closure that remains on the can once opened—still the widest used today.
The Can Comeback
In the early years of craft brewing, there were two containers in which these specialty beers were packaged: a keg and a glass bottle. The perception of the aluminum can was that of an inferior package, the province of the Bud Lights and Keystones of the world.
In 2002, Dale Katechis—owner of the then five-year-old Lyons, Colorado brewpub Oskar Blues—kept receiving sales flyers and calls from a Canadian company called Cask Systems, trying to entice him to buying a small canning line for his growing operation. Katechis’s initially followed his instinct to ignore Cask’s sales team. However, Cask’s persistence paid off, and Katechis agreed to a meeting with them. By the end of the meeting, Katechis was sold and decided to do what seemed unthinkable—he put his flagship brew, Dale’s Pale Ale, in cans.
It may have been unthinkable, but it wasn’t unprecedented. In a 2013 cover story in All About Beer Magazine, beer historian and writer Tom Acitelli dispelled the myth that Oskar Blues was the first craft brewer to can. That distinction, he wrote, belonged to a much less celebrated company, Mid-Coast Brewing. In 1991, a full eleven years before Katechis first canned his eponymous pale ale, Mid-Coast released its aluminum-encased Chief Oshkosh Lager. Part of the reason the Chief Oshkosh story disappeared under a veil of obscurity was that the brand and the company folded a full eight years before Katechis became a metal head.
But, as Katechis proved, it doesn’t always pay to be first. And the five hundred-plus craft outfits that now are happily packaging their brands in the lightweight containers are only doing it because Oskar Blues made it “okay.”
It’s a shame that there was such a perception barrier to shatter to make cans an acceptable package for these higher-end beers. The package makes sense from so many standpoints: cost, environmental impact, logistics, and general product quality.
Many of those are intertwined. Cans are lightweight, so that means the trucks carrying them expend less fuel—good for the pocketbook and good for the environment. (Aluminum cans are also 100 percent recyclable.) The lighter weight of cans also means that the labor involved in their movement is less intense.
Additionally, cans are welcome in far more places than bottles: concert venues, beaches, hiking trails, public pools, and water parks—you name it. And then, of course, there’s the aforementioned opacity factor.
Canning Cottage Industry
Another key savings: Canning systems designed for small start-ups have been flooding the market in recent years, making it a fraction of the cost to package one’s beer than it once was when bottles were the only option. Companies like Cask Systems and Wild Goose have been developing solutions tailored to the smallest of the small. Cask’s entry-level machine was a manual, two-head filler that enabled brewers to fill and seal up to about twelve cans a minute. In an eight-hour shift, assuming a person does that one task all day or takes turns with others during that period, a brewery could fill a couple hundred cans shy of 6,000, which adds up to about 240 cases a day. If a brewery is operating five days a week, that’s 1,200 cases a week. These breweries are definitely of the micro- or even nano-level (“nano” being a new designation for breweries that are smaller than micros). But they wouldn’t be packaging otherwise. The only way their beer would be getting to the marketplace would be in kegs. A small system like Cask’s 2-header levels the playing field in some minor way, enabling small breweries to get their products into retail stores without having to invest in expensive bottling lines or pay a contract brewer to package their brands.
Eventually, when an operation of that size outgrows its manual canner, it can sell it to a next-generation start-up and trade up to a five-head automated system, which can fill about thirty cans a minute when running optimally. There’s also less manual labor involved, so a brewery staffer doesn’t have to be manning it at all times.
As more craft brewers were bit by the aluminum bug, more equipment manufacturers started getting in the game to offer solutions designed for everyone from the nano-brewer who’s just graduated from homebrewer, to the regional producers that require a machine that can fill and seam 280 to 300 cans per minute. Wild Goose Canning has become one of Cask’s most significant direct competitors, catering from the tiniest of operators to intermediate-size players. Its basic piece of equipment is its WGC 50, which is similar to Cask’s manual system and fills eight to twelve cans per minute. It increases from there, with a semi-automatic dual-head filler that can pack up to thirty-one a minute; a series of semi-automatic four-head fillers that can do up to forty-two cans per minute; and, finally, a system with two alternating four-head fillers, which, on a good day, can package up to ninety-five cans per minute.
When a brewery outgrows something of that size, it’s time to move up to a filler from big European producers like KHS or Krones, which in the past decade have increasingly courted the US craft market. Previously, getting a canning system meant that a brewery needed to be producing the kind of volume that a multinational like SABMiller or AB InBev was moving. But recognizing that small stateside brewers were in a mass embrace with aluminum, they started to deliver for the regional players. Oskar Blues itself, now operating three production breweries—its flagship in Longmont, Colorado (it outgrew its original site in neighboring Lyons), another it unveiled in Austin, Texas in 2016, and one it opened at the end of 2012 in Brevard, North Carolina—outgrew its original Cask system a long time ago. It’s now operating 280-cans-per-minute KHS solution.
Mobile Canning
These days, the micro players don’t even have to invest in an entry-level system if they don’t want to commit the capital or have the space to accommodate a canner. In the past half-decade, a new phenomenon has emerged that is taking budgetary and spatial constraints out of the equation: mobile canning. The concept is simple: A brewer makes its products, and when it’s ready to package it, the company offering the mobile canning solution brings it to the facility.
The business model was inspired by something that was going on in the wine industry for some time. Many vineyards aren’t large enough for bottling lines, so trucks loaded with bottlers would drive around, say, Napa, Sonoma, or Oregon, setting up camp at wineries in need of their services. Sometimes they’d stick around as long as a week until all of the necessary volume was packaged. Mobile canning works more or less the same way but with aluminum.
Two of the notable players in the mobile canning sphere have been California’s The Can Van and Longmont, Colorado’s aptly named Mobile Canning Systems (MCS, which partnered with Wild Goose to develop its solution). Yes, MCS’s headquarters is in the same town that’s home to Oskar Blues’s flagship brewery. Coincidence?
Usually, the mobile canning purveyors will wheel their systems off of their trailers, roll them as close as they can get to a brewery’s bright tank, and start filling.
Design Dynamics
The Can-aissance, or as Oskar Blues likes to call it, the “Canned Beer Apocalypse,” has provided an attractive canvas for label designers, as they have more space to play with to tell their visual story versus the typical front label and back label of a bottle. Now, images occupy all of the available space on 12-ounce, 16-ounce, and sometimes even 19-ounce cylindrical aluminum containers.
Connecticut-based New England Brewing Company has had a field day with its irreverent aluminum can designs. For one thing, a product’s name doesn’t get more creative than “668: The Neighbor of the Beast.” That’s the moniker for the brewery’s Belgian-style golden ale. (And it’s not completely out of left-field, either. Satan had a hand in the creation of the style to begin with. After all, Duvel, the brand that pretty much started it all, was named after the devil. Many products within the style that followed have been named everything from Satan Gold to Lucifer.)
A drinker who reads that on the blackboard of his or her local beer bar is likely to try it on name alone. But if it’s on draft only, they’re being short changed. The can for this brew is a stroke of genius, and the drinker must rotate it 360 degrees to view the entire cartoonish image. There’s an ominous, fiery glow emanating from house number 666. Next door, at 668, a rather meek, balding, middle-aged man in shirtsleeves is fetching his morning newspaper from the edge of his driveway. His look is one of put-upon resignation. The image would not be nearly as impactful if it were on a bottle.
San Francisco’s 21st Amendment Brewery—named of course, after the constitutional amendment that repealed Prohibition—knows how to get fairly elaborate with its can designs. For instance, the front of its Brew Free or Die IPA container looks like a fine rendering of Mount Rushmore, but spin the can around and Abe Lincoln has broken away from the other presidential icons with fists raised, ready for a brawl. Its Marooned on Hog Island oyster stout requires a full rotation to read the story that inspired the product and to see what’s happening on both sides of the island. Meanwhile, 21st Amendment’s Fireside Chat spiced winter seasonal features an artist rendering of FDR, complete with protruding cigarette holder, sitting next to the White House mantel, calming an anxious nation.
The opposite of iconic presidential leadership is portrayed in the design of Anti-Hero, an IPA from Chicago’s Revolution Brewing. The can design features a menacing military general whose head is a hop flower; behind him, other hop flowers are parachuting to the ground. The flip side of the can features Revolution’s signature raised fist.
The entire notion of craft brewing exists today because some people broke the rules and defied convention. In the twenty-first century, that tradition continues as a new generation of rule breakers are redefining packaging and labeling aesthetics by reinventing a container that was once written off as inferior, and can manufacturers continue to devise ways to reinvent the aluminum package to keep it fresh and relevant for new generations of drinkers.
In 2013, Crown Holdings introduced the 360 End, which enables the consumer to pull the entire lid of the can off, essentially turning the container into a drinking cup. The rationale is that it lets the drinker experience the full flavor and aroma of the beer if they’re not already pouring it into a glass. When consuming from a standard can, virtually none of the brew’s aroma is making it to the drinker’s nose, since the opening is too small.
Of course, it assumes that drinkers are being as fastidious about disposing of the tops as they are with the rest of the can (the lid has considerably more material in it than the mostly defunct pull-tab, which fell out of favor partially on environmental grounds).
Other suppliers, such as Ball Corp. and Rexam, have been marketing other solutions to make cans a bit more user-friendly. Normally, when a can is opened, there’s no turning back. A person has to consume everything contained within or toss significant quantities of the liquid when they can’t. But that could change if more brewers adopt resealable cans. Instead of popping the container open, consumers can slide it open and closed, much as they would with one of those revolving tops on a cardboard can of salt.
Then there are bottle/can hybrids that are just as reclosable. For all intents and purposes, they’re bottles; they just happen to be made out of aluminum. Anheuser-Busch has deployed aluminum bottles of Bud Light in some venues—particularly nightclubs where there’s a lot of human bouncing and gyrating, and beach and pool bars where glass is a no-no.
The crafts have also found a use for such containers. Even Oskar Blues abides. Back in 2012, the Colorado can evangelist teamed up with Indiana-based Sun King to produce the collaborative brew Chaka, a Belgian-style ale packed in Ball Corp.’s Alumi-Tek resealable aluminum pint bottle.
And, finally, an interesting little footnote to the whole modern canning revolution was the introduction of Churchkey pilsner, whose key point of differentiation was the fact that it’s packaged in the classic flat-top can. And, yes, it requires a church key, which comes packaged with every six-pack, to open it. It definitely appeals to those who are nostaligic and to those who just want the experience of opening a can of beer in the way it was done before most of the target consumers were even born. Fans of the HBO series (and subsequent misfire of a movie) Entourage will be thrilled to know that Adrian Grenier—who plays movie star Vincent Chase on the series—is one of Churchkey’s founders. Alas, not all celebrities can buy islands.
Growlers’ First . . . Growl
The most ubiquitous form of packaging for craft brewers is neither the aluminum can nor the single-serve bottle; it’s actually the growler. Not every brewery packages; many are draft only. And in the states that allow consumers to take beer home after their brewery or brewpub visits, the stuff’s going home in a growler. A modern growler is usually a 64-ounce or 32-ounce refillable glass bottle branded with the brewer’s logo and closed with a twist-off cap. Its contents are meant to be consumed within a day or two of the brewery visit. Its closure doesn’t have the same gas-blocking properties of the crown cap, which keeps bottled beer fresh much longer. The growler is the best way to enjoy brewery-fresh, draft-quality ales in the comfort of your own home.
But freshness and great taste had nothing to do with the supposed humble origins of the growler. The first receptacles to be called “growlers,” at least in the context of beer, were actually pails, not unlike the ones Jack and Jill carried up the hill on that ill-fated hydration-seeking expedition. Back in the nineteenth century it was common to use beer instead of water as a cooking base—a good hundred years before the beer cuisine revolution—mainly because beer was a purified product and less likely to kill you than the local water supply. And breweries of the time were happy to give away their less-than-marketable batches for free. There would be a tap reserved specifically for that purpose. And parents would usually send their kids to fetch a pail of beer (my, how the times have changed).
“It’s part of Americana that not everyone knows about,” says Connecticut-based beer history and breweriana expert Jeff Browning. “It was post-Civil War, pre-Prohibition—that’s the general timeline.”
Growler derives from an old slang term for “bucket.” References to growlers full of beer popped up occasionally in early-twentieth-century blues songs (which often can be the best historical sources when there’s no other physical documentation; people sang what they knew).
And though growler size has been standardized at half-gallon and quart sizes, there was no such delineation for the beer-fetching vessel.
“I’ve heard a lot of first-hand testimonies of people in their sixties and seventies whose mothers and grandmothers would recall going down to the brewery to get beer,” Browning notes. “A lot of people said it was their job, to get a pail of lager and bring it back home. It speaks to the fact that the breweries themselves were pillars of the community.”
The ManCan
Admittedly, it’s probably not the best product name, but it’s worth mentioning in the context of beer receptacles. There has been a growing market for stainless steel growlers, versus the traditional glass ones, but the ManCan takes that concept a step further. It’s a portable keg, available in 64-ounce and 128-ounce (one gallon) versions, complete with a CO2 regulator and tap system. The rationale is it keeps take-home draft beer fresh longer than the standard growler, the cap of which allows carbon dioxide to escape pretty quickly.
The ManCan personal keg.