I should have been mortified.
Instead, I was intrigued. There, in the refrigerated case of my local beer-rich bodega, was a six-pack of a brew that years ago had taught me what beer could be: Anchor Steam. But it wasn’t in the stubby brown bottles that had once declared the product as handmade and authentic. It was — gasp! — in cans.
When I was in college, canned beer meant corporate beer. It was the stuff that came in boxes of 36, brands that were bland and indistinguishable. Was it ever possible, in a blind tasting, to differentiate among Lite and Bud Light? Coors Light, Natural Light, Busch Light, or Keystone Light?
Canned beer meant cheap beer. Its sole selling point was that it promised the most buzz per dollar, perfect for the average fraternity party. What was it that John Belushi’s Bluto drank from in Animal House? A can, of course, which, when empty, gave him something to crush against his forehead. Funny, yes, but louche.
And speaking of louche, there’s always the judgment of that wonderfully nasty guide to status anxiety in the United States, Class, by the late literary historian Paul Fussell. When it came to beer, a drink dismissed by the good professor as either “college-boy” or “prole,” one’s social standing did depend in some measure on the container. “All things being equal,” Fussell wrote, “bottles are classier than cans.” The principle at play was that of archaism, according to Fussell. And I suspect that self-imposed difficulty was also part of the equation. Cans are easily opened with nothing but one’s finger. The better sort of bottle (status-wise) has long been one that, abjuring the ease of a twist-off top, requires an opener.
For the longest time, good beer was either on tap or came from a bottle, which was exactly how the craft beer crowd liked it. The reflexive contempt for cans helped customers discriminate, at a glance, the good beers from the watery swill. The logo of the Independent Craft Brewers Association, after all, is an upside-down bottle, not a crumpled can.
So what is delicious, historic Anchor Steam doing in aluminum cans?
Catching up.
It wasn’t until the summer of 2018 that Anchor Brewing made its flagship beer available in cans, and those were tall, narrow 19.2-ounce cans, as if it couldn’t quite bring itself to go all-in with the same sort of 12-ounce cans that one finds carpeting fraternity lawns. It’s only in the last year that Anchor caved.
But what did the brewery cave to? Certainly not any sort of imperative to sell cheap beer. No, it’s that over the last decade, there has been a transformation in how canned beer is perceived. The beer that broke the mold came from a Colorado brewpub called Oskar Blues, which two decades ago started canning Dale’s Pale Ale.
Dale’s Pale Ale wasn’t just good, but the contrarian packaging made it stand out from the madly proliferating craft brews in bottles, which is one reason breweries, such as Washington’s DC Brau, started putting their beer almost exclusively in cans. Brandon Skall is the co-founder and CEO of DC Brau, which makes excellent capital-themed beers. He said that when he and his co-founder were getting started in 2010, they followed the Dale’s Pale Ale lead: “The first piece of equipment we bought was a used canning line.”
When DC Brau came to market, there was still some vestigial disdain for beer in a can. “When we started, it was a challenge,” Skall said. The brewery ran into no few restaurants and retailers who tut-tutted, “If it were only in bottles.” But the co-founders made the right bet on what has proved to be one of the most significant trends in beer. “The vast majority of those opening craft breweries in the last five years have been all cans,” Skall said.
Insist on bottles, and you’re going to miss most of the best new brews in this golden age of great beer. So I have learned to stop worrying and love the can.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
