Brewing technology · Packaging
The beer can
A package that keeps out all light and nearly all oxygen, spent fifty years being regarded as the cheap option, and is now what careful breweries choose.
Before
Beer travelled in glass, which is heavy, breakable, and — unless it is brown — lets through the wavelengths that turn hop compounds skunky. Canning food was long established, but beer attacks bare metal and metal ruins beer, so the package was unusable without a lining that could survive carbonated, mildly acidic liquid.
After
Once the liner worked, the can was better on every physical measure: opaque, lighter, unbreakable, stackable, cheaper to ship, and with less headspace oxygen than a bottle. It nonetheless carried a cheapness that took decades to shed, because the beer that first came in cans was cheap. The craft sector’s wholesale move to cans from the 2000s reversed the association by pointing at exactly the properties that had been true since 1935.
The historical question this page exists to answer. How the technique itself works is on the brewing process pages linked below.
Why it spread
Two separate adoptions with fifty years between them. The first was industrial and price-driven. The second, from around 2010, was quality-driven and came from small breweries who wanted light protection and low oxygen for hop-forward beer — the same technology adopted twice for opposite reasons.
What it displaced: Nothing outright. Cans and bottles still coexist, with the balance moving steadily toward cans.
Who is credited
The first canned beer went on sale in Richmond, Virginia in 1935, produced for Krueger by the American Can Company after the liner problem was solved. This is a corporate development rather than an individual invention.
A contemporary record supports this attribution.
What people get wrong
Beer from a can tastes metallic.
The beer never touches metal — the interior is polymer-lined, and has been since the first cans in 1935. Any metallic impression in a can drunk from the can comes from the smell of the lid at the nose, which is why it disappears when the beer is poured into a glass.
Cans are the cheap option.
They were, because cheap beer arrived in them first. On the physical properties that matter to beer — light exclusion, oxygen ingress, weight — a can outperforms a bottle, which is why quality-focused breweries moved to them.
Questions
When were beer cans invented?
Canned beer went on sale in 1935, in Richmond, Virginia, produced for Krueger Brewing by the American Can Company. Canning itself was much older; what took time was a lining that could withstand carbonated, mildly acidic beer without either corroding or tainting it.
Connected
How it works: Packaging
Ingredients and packages: Aluminium can
Dated events: Beer is first sold in cans
In context: Packaging and reach · Modern beer
Last reviewed 2026-08-29.