I’ve been in PR all week. Beer bottles are 12 ounces but beer cans are only 10. Why? The only answer some locals in Ponce and San Juan told me is that they like their beer colder and the smaller cans allow them to drink it before the hot weather warms them up.
:dubious:
Doesn’t explain why bottles are 12 ounces. There are 7 ounce bottles around, but they are nowhere near as popular as the 12oz bottles.
And it doesn’t matter what brand. Medalla, Bud, or Heineken, all the beer cans are 10 ounces.
I’m thinking there is a factual (maybe legal) answer to this, which is why I put it in GQ.
Sounds like it’s a historical relic of a marketing tactic that turned into a regional taste. They mention it’s also popular in Maryland and a handful of other areas in the east and south.
More or less. 12 oz is 355 ml, Canadian beer comes in 340 ml bottles for whatever reason, so 11.5. Would be easier if they’d kept some English measures, like the English did.
Well, they did keep English measures. 12 imperial ounces is 11.5 us ounces. And, 12 imperial ounces is 340 ml. They are obviously keeping the same 12 imperial ounce bottle and relabeling for the US market.
But in fact in the UK beer cans might be 440ml or a tidy 500 ml, or, less commonely and so as to be a pint, 568ml. And I think there might be some that are 330ml. Much muddle.
500 ml = half a litre exactly. Makes perfect sense.
330 ml: well, it’s a third of a litre, with a very small margin of error. And 333.33333 ml is silly to print on a bottle. Of course, I get it.
But 440 ml is not an even division of a litre, or of a quart, or of anything. It’s just… 440 ml, out of the blue. Or so it seems to me. What am I missing?
Then there’s the 8-ounce pony cans, which in PR are sold only at the military stores (thus a telltale if you are trying to resell).
For a while in the 80s/90s we used .333 ml cans for sodas, but that has since reverted to having both 12 and 10 ounce cans – evidently some pop brands use the same can supplier as the beer companies. Some of the cans are locally produced and the product is bottled/canned locally, some import the cans and package locally, some is imported already canned. (Coca Cola for instance produces Coke base syrup in PR, so it cans locally)
What I want to know, conversely, is how come in Northern Virginia I only see beer can 6-packs in 16 ounce pints?
This is a relatively commonly asked question on the web but no one seems to know for sure. One speculation is that a full 440ml can weighs exactly a pound.
