It’s in the Can: Why You’ll Be Able to Crush Beer’s Next Big Thing On Your Forehead

I just got back from a trip to Paonia, Colorado, a teeny town in the Western part of the state. Just a few thousand people, but big enough to have it’s own tiny micro-brewery, of course, Colorado being at the forefront of all things beery. It’s a nano-brewery, actually, meaning it only makes enough beer to sell right there on the front stoop of the place, which is in an old house on the main drag.

Until a few weeks from now, that is, when Revolution Brewing will expand to include a canning machine. That’s right, instead of a bottling machine, the owners of this small-batch, extremely artisanal craft brewery told me that they’re going to start with cans, the shape of all that Bud and Coors Light (which is also made nearby, by the way). The reason, they said, was that a canner takes up square feet, while a bottler takes up a room. And since your main goal with keeping beer fresh is to keep it from the light, cans trump bottles too. Not to mention they’re easier to recycle and get colder, faster. Hey, the guys at Guinness know what they’re doing.

Of course there’s more going on here, too, than just solving logistical issues. These days craft beers in cans are actually, well, kind of cool … meaning those who know their Butternuts Pork Slap from their PBR aren’t scorning the silver tubes any longer. A recent blurb about a few canned beers of note appeared in the NYC foodie newsletter TastingTable.com, as a matter of fact. (Their headline put it exactly right: “Can It, Beer Snobs.”)

It only takes a few great breweries canning their quaffs to change the scope of the liquor aisles in grocery stores, and plenty have already started producing: the nicely malty Dale’s Pale Ale, Butternuts, the hoppy and happy Sly Fox Pikeland Pils from Pennsylvania, Virginia’s Blue Mountain Brewery, everything from Oskar Blues.

This trend also appeals to both the back-to-basics comfort food movement and the retro-recessionista trend too, I think. You might be drinking a $18 six-pack, but the good ol’ boys at the barbecue will never know it. And silvery, shiny cans — which can support more design-work than most bottles — kind of look better, too: Who doesn’t have a grandpa with an old Schaefer’s (or Hamm’s, or White Horse, or Schlitz) tucked away on a shelf for posterity?

I also see it as one of those so backwards you’re on the cutting-edge type things: Modern canned beer chuggers are like the first drinker to start toting once-scorned pink bottles of rose to the dinner party, for example, or the first guest to drop a banana-cream pie (made with real vanilla beans and homemade ‘Nilla wafers, natch) on the potluck picnic table.

In other words, it probably feels pretty good to trump your friends with craft beer knowledge when somebody gives you a, “hey, what the hell is that you’re drinking?” The answer, now, is pretty good stuff.