Yawn — canned craft beer no longer anything exciting - Marin Independent Journal

Last week, Fort Bragg’s North Coast Brewing Co. announced to media outlets that the longstanding veteran of the craft beer community is for the first time releasing a beer in cans.

I appreciated the press release, but I couldn’t help but think that this would have been novel and more newsworthy a decade ago. Coming in 2020, the announcement reminded me that the canned craft beer transition is no longer news. Rather, cans are now almost ubiquitous as the packaging style of choice for craft breweries (not to mention Budweiser, Coors, Miller and friends). Cans are light, sleek, smart and green, while glass bottles are seen as clunky artifices of the old-school past. In fact, more craft beer will soon be canned than bottled — a milestone expected this year.

Thus, canned craft beer is no longer a story in itself; it’s just business as usual for thousands of breweries. It would be more newsworthy at this point if a young brewery ventured into the retail market using glass bottles — something craft breweries increasingly want nothing to do with.

They either serve all their beer in glassware for onsite consumption, or they put it in cans — either crowlers for brewpub patrons to take home or 12- to 16-ounce cans for retail distribution. (Some breweries, including Deschutes and Lagunitas, sell singles in 19-ounce cans.) A small mobile service called the Can Van has cashed in on the can transition by doing much of the canning for Bay Area breweries, including Pond Farm, Iron Springs, Moylan’s and Marin.

But, many breweries are starting to invest in their own canning machinery. East Brother Beer, owned by Mill Valley residents Rob Lightner and Chris Coomber, opened in 2016 in Richmond. In the early days, the Can Van took care of their canning needs. More recently, Lightner and Coomber bought their own canning system.

More flexibility

“Makes more financial sense and gives us way more flexibility,” Lightner says.

Still, other breweries that established themselves during the peak of the bottling era have shifted to canning and, reportedly, finding takers for their secondhand bottling equipment is proving difficult to impossible.

The canned craft beer boom seems to have started with a company called Cask Global Canning Solutions, based in Canada. In 1999, Cask introduced a tabletop canning system that received praise from American homebrewers who tried it — mainly because the final product was easier to handle than beer in glass bottles.

But when Cask founder Peter Love presented the concept to commercial craft brewers, he remembers receiving harsh criticism.

Courtesy of Oskar Blues

Oskar Blues cans more than 200,000 barrels of beer each year.

“Several brewers told us, ‘That is the dumbest idea I have ever seen. No craft beer drinker’s going to buy beer in cans,’” Love says.

Catching on

Other craft brewers were not so bent on bottles, and Cask found its first client with Oskar Blues Brewery and Pub in Lyons, Colorado, — a tiny brewery at the time and now among the nation’s most recognized craft labels. Oskar Blues cans more than 200,000 barrels of beer each year, and Cask has meanwhile distributed 1,700 canning systems to beverage companies in more than 70 companies. Cask is currently working with new customers in Estonia.

In the United States, a shade less than 50% of craft beer is currently canned, and the Brewers Association’s chief economist Bart Watson said he expects the canned sector to surpass the bottled this year.

As more and more of the beer market shifts to cans, it becomes clear that the bottled beer industry was, for all those years, just a glass castle waiting to shatter.

Alastair Bland’s Through the Hopvine runs every week in Zest. Contact him at allybland79@gmail.com.

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