It isn’t storage at home that’s the issue. It’s how the beer is stored at the retailer that matters most. A huge pyramid of Pyramid might make a good sales display but it’s hell on the beer. Add in fluorescent lighting, sun through the windows, no temperature control, etc. and you’ll see that the better the beer is packaged at the brewery, the greater the likelihood of the consumer getting it in good shape. It takes only a few minutes for beer to begin skunking when exposed to light.
Just in case anybody here isn’t aware, if you’re drinking the beer directly from the can or bottle, you’re doing it wrong. Pour it into a glass! If you can’t smell it, you can’t really taste it.
This is about craft beer. There has been a sizeable movement towards cans, especially in the US. Generally speaking we’re not talking about mainstream stuff now.
To use a UK craft example, Brew Dog lists Punk IPA as 1.80 GBP in both a 330ml can and a 330ml bottle.
The fact that a canning line is much cheaper than a bottling line sets the BS bar pretty high. From 45 RPM records to disposable razors, manufacturers can ALWAYS find some positive reason they use cheaper options.
If we’re talking about the better grades of beer here anyway, you don’t buy it from an end-cap pyramid and it’s probably been kept cool and dark since bottling.
Maybe. Maybe not. I’ve been around the brewing business for a few decades now. Quality control drives the craft guys the way cost drives the macros. Even wine is being canned now. Quality stuff, too.
I have come around on this issue. I snobbishly opposed it at first, but the proof is in the pudding. I have had excellent beers from a can, and have no problem with it. (Most recent example: Citra Hero from Revolution Brewing in Chi town. Yum-E!)
There are way too many brewers at too many levels to say none of them are driven by profit. It went past being (only) a “career of love” years ago and became something that could be exploited like any other existing market.
In any case, my argument here is “I don’t think it makes any difference, either way.” I’m willing concede, on purely technical grounds, that cans do all they are said to do. However, careful craft brewers, sellers and buyers would handle bottled beer in ways that make the advantages of cans moot.
Empty cans are also a lot easier to transport and return. You can even crush them to save space and still return them. There’s nothing worse than cleaning up after a cottage party and trying to stuff empty bottles back into the various sizes of soggy, ripped, and broken boxes and sealing them up with duct tape just to survive the trip to the beer store.
Here in Ontario, almost all bottles are cleaned and re-used. I’m sure you’ve all heard the stories of mice, bottle caps, etc. being found in beer bottles.
Myself, I prefer to drink out of a bottle and although cans are easier to cool, bottles stay cold much longer… besides using a can to play a little slide guitar doesn’t work nearly as well!
Nobody’s saying they’re not driven by profit; I think what people are trying to say is that a big piece of what (hopefully) differentiates them from their competition is their specific flavor profile, often hop driven, which is something that’s better protected by cans instead of bottles.
In other words, what drives their profit isn’t saving a cent or two per bottle vs. can, but rather by being able to sell a canned version of their IPA for 20 cents more, because hopefully the can protects it more.
In any event, I think it’s actually as much a fad as anything; there are lots of canned and bottled beers out there, and some breweries even do both without any significant difference in their product.
Are canning lines really cheaper? I went on a brewery tour a few years ago and they talked about the huge cost of canning as a relatively small volume manufacturer compared to bottling. They started with bottling and but they decided to add cans to their bottled line because buyers were demanding cans. I figured at the time the brewery made the big investment in canning because cans are cheaper than bottles and it would save them in the long run. Maybe it was even cheaper for them in the short run.
For storing, carrying or quick cooling, you can’t beat cans, but when I drink my beer, glass is the only way to go, IMHO. If it’s from a can, I pour it into a glass (which I prefer not to pour my beer, but that’s just me). My #1 preference is drinking it from the bottle.
Cans have the advantage of being able to be opened one-handed so I can keep the other hand on the steering wheel. Meanwhile bottles, once opened, can be tilted up between the eyes so I can still keep both eyes on the road while drinking. Cans block one eye. Cans also can be chucked out the window without causing potential damage to other car wheels or windshields.
The best packaging for keeping your beer colder longer would be plastic. Many European and Asian beer bottlers have switched to plastic bottles. The carbonated soft drink industry fully switched decades ago. The reason is that plastic is a much better insulator than glass or aluminum. Also less weight and breakage.
The North American beer industry conducted several studies about 10 years ago, once the costs of plastic bottles was similar to glass. They found that, yes that beer does stay colder significantly longer in a plastic container. However, consumer preference was for glass and aluminum because when the container touched the lips of the consumer, they felt the that glass and beer containers were colder, despite the liquid inside being warmer. Perception beats reality.
