Craft brewers adopt a can-do attitude

Whether they celebrate it as down-home and retro or sniff at it as downscale and tasteless, people have definite ideas about the kind of American beer that comes in cans: It's mass-produced, light-gold colored, mild-flavored, barely hopped lager.

That's why some Colorado brewers had a good chuckle in 2002 when Cask, a manufacturer of brewing equipment in Calgary, Alberta, faxed them about the idea of canning their beer. ''We laughed," says Dale Katechis, owner of the Oskar Blues brewpub in Lyons. ''We were making full-bodied craft beer, and the idea of putting it in a can was ridiculous." Good American craft beer, conventional wisdom dictates, comes in a brown bottle. (Some British brews such as Guinness retain their cache despite coming in a can.)

Recently, though, dents have started to appear in this uncanny idea. No longer just a cheap package for a cheap product, cans now allow luxury products to go where the fun is -- they're hip, they're impetuous, they're portable. In the past few years, more than two dozen craft breweries -- including several in New England -- have developed acan-do attitude about packaging their full-bodied, artisanal beers in aluminum. They include Coastal Extreme Brewing in Newport R.I., where the cans go into coolers for the beach and boating, and the formerly skeptical Oskar Blues brewery, whose cans are tucked into backpacks out West.

The bottle-only myth grew out of technological and economic limitations that brewers faced as American craft brewing blossomed in the late '70s, explains Katechis, the Colorado brewer. The only canning setups available, made for massive operations such as Anheuser-Busch, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and produce about 65 cases of beer per hour. They were out of range, both in price and brewing capacity, of small craft operations. Small-capacity bottling lines cost a lot less, so the craft beer revolution began in bottles. (The brewers used brown bottles because they let through the least amount of beer-spoiling UV light.)

But bottles aren't that portable. Katechis has many customers who stop in on their way to Rocky Mountain National Park. He wanted to package his beer so his customers could take it with them on their adventures. At Coastal Extreme, boaters and beachgoers told company president Brent Ryan that they loved his beer but couldn't take bottles with them on the water.

Cans are lightweight, especially once they're empty, and are virtually unbreakable and easily recyclable, so they can be taken to wilderness areas or stowed on a sailboat and carried home relatively easily. In 1999, Canada's Cask brewing equipment company began producing a small hand-canning line perfect for craft breweries: It can be operated by one person, produces about 20 cases per hour, and costs about $11,000.

''It's been quite a journey," says Jamie Gordon, Cask's technical sales representative for eastern North America. The journey began with convincing brewers that cans are a good package for their brews. ''It took a few guys like Dale to take the plunge," Gordon says. ''Now I hear brewers saying, 'I'm choosing cans because they're better protection for my beer' -- no UV light can get in, far less CO2 loss."

While Oskar Blues was completely sold on the can concept and began canning all of its Dale's Pale Ale and Old Chub Scottish Ale in 2002, Coastal Extreme and Sherwood Forest Brewery in Marlborough aren't doing the can-can exclusively.

''Some of our accounts couldn't sell the cans," Sherwood Forest owner Dave Lambert says. Lambert began by canning all his brew but now bottles year-round and cans in the summer.

Coastal Extreme will start releasing cans of its Newport Storm Hurricane Ale in May for the boating season. ''The stigma of cans hasn't completely eroded," says Ryan, whose company uses them as a supplement to bottles.

Part of that prejudice is the popular refrain that canned beer takes on a metallic taste. Advances in technology, including a more effective can liner that prevents the liquid from coming into contact with the aluminum, have solved that problem, according to many in the business. (Detractors point out that the can's top is not lined.)

Wayne Anderson, Oskar Blues sales director, points out that draft beer comes in aluminum containers. ''Think of [the can] as a 12-ounce keg."

Those who love craft beer will probably say they can tell if they're drinking canned because of the tinny taste -- as several of my colleagues did. But in a blind tasting of six pale ales served in glasses, none of the four tasters was able to differentiate canned from bottled. In fact, three of the four chose the canned Dale's Pale Ale as their favorite.

Brooklyn Brewery has been producing Brooklyn Lager in cans for several years. ''We did it," brewmaster Garrett Oliver writes in an e-mail, ''because there are many places where glass isn't allowed -- golf courses, stadia, airplanes, etc. We pretty much limit the cans to those places. Canning technology is now good enough that the flavor of the beer in cans is equal or superior to that in bottles. Like screw-caps on wine, [a can] still carries some stigma, but I think that's disappearing slowly."

The numbers bear that out. ''We're doing killer business with Oskar Blues," says Nick Blakey, beer manager at Bauer Wines on Newbury Street, a store that prides itself on its selection of high-quality beers.

And at Brookline's Wine Gallery, which also boasts an impressive array of artisanal brews, beer manager Kai McMurtry agrees. ''The cans of Oskar Blues are flying out of here," he says.

Cans, in fact, have reached some rarefied heights: Coppola Vineyards has put its Sofia blanc de blancs sparkling wine in a single-serving pink aluminum can with a straw attached.

With screw-top wine bottles, craft brews in cans, and now a little sparkler with a pull tab, the world of wine and beer is being turned on its head. Preconceptions about the superiority of the old ways are being crushed, and consumers are learning they cannot judge a beer by its container.