Today is Beer Can Appreciation Day. On this day in 1935, canned beer made its debut. The Krueger Brewing Company, in partnership with the American Can Company delivered 2,000 cans of Krueger’s Finest Beer and Kruger’s Cream Ale to faithful Krueger drinkers in Richmond, Virginia — 84 years ago today. Ninety-one percent of the drinkers approved of the canned beer — and the rest, as they say, is history.
Recently, we discussed (on this blog) the importance of the tin can that gets its special day every year on January 19. By the late 1800’s, cans were instrumental in the mass distribution of foodstuffs, but it wasn’t until 1909 that the first attempt to can beer was made. That first attempt was unsuccessful and it wasn’t tried again until the end of Prohibition in the United States.
In 1933, the American Can Company (after extensive research) developed a can that was pressurized and had a spacial coating to prevent the fizzy beer from chemically reacting with the tin.
After the successful experiment in Richmond, the concept of canned beer continued to be a hard sell, but Kruger’s (located in Newark, New Jersey) overcame people’s initial reservations and became the first brewer to sell canned beer in the United States. Within three months of introducing the cans, over 80 percent of beer distributors were handling Krueger’s canned beer and Krueger’s was eating into the market share of the “big three” national brewers — Anheuser-Busch, Pabst and Schlitz. The other companies jumped on board and by the end of 1935, over 200 million cans were produced and sold.
Cans had the added advantage that, unlike bottles, did not require consumers to pay a deposit. Cans also proved to be easier to stack, more durable and took less time to chill. Their popularity continued to grow throughout the 1930s. But canned beer popularity exploded during World War II when brewers shipped millions of cans of beer to soldiers overseas. Today, canned beer accounts for approximately half of the the $20 billion U.S. beer industry sales.
There is even an emerging trend of micro brewers starting to use cans.
Up until 1963, cans didn’t have a pop top — they were opened with a “Church Key.”
So let’s all raise a glass (or better yet, a can) to that great day in 1935 when beer was first sold in cans.
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