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Cast your mind back to 1935. Prohibition, which had outlawed (if not prevented) the sale of all “intoxicating beverages” for 13 years, had been repealed two years prior. During that time, “near beer,” limited to 0.5% alcohol by volume, had been the only commercial option. Even once beer could be sold again, it was available only on draft or in glass bottles. However, beer can be spoiled by exposure to light, and bottles required a deposit from customers to be refunded when the bottles were brought back. In other words, there was room for improvement in the status quo.
Commercial canned goods had been on the market in America for over a century by this point, but according to local historian Lee Graves, canning beer presented special issues. Cans at that time were made from tin-plated steel, which gave canned beer a metallic, less-than-refreshing flavor. Everything changed when the American Can Company invented the keg-lined can, which featured a liner made from enamel and Vinylite, a resinous plastic material. Finally, beer could be pasteurized, shipped and stored in lightweight, disposable cans, but that didn’t mean that brewing companies were sold on the concept.
Only Gottfried Krueger Brewing Company, based in New Jersey, was willing to give it a shot. On the ACC’s dime, Krueger released a sample of 2,000 free cans in its local market, earning rave reviews — but the company was still unconvinced. If the new cans flopped, according to Graves, “it would have really damaged [Krueger’s] reputation.” As one last test, Krueger picked a market completely unlike its own: Richmond, where an ACC factory was located at the time.
Illustration by Thomas Cizauskas
Krueger’s Finest and Krueger’s Cream Ale hit city shelves on Jan. 24, 1935. “It was a huge success right off the bat,” Graves says. Soon, canned Krueger’s was available outside of Richmond, and canned beer was all the rage. Pabst Brewing Company started canning during that summer, and by December breweries in places as far-flung as Wales were giving keg-lined cans a shot. The rest, as they say, is history. By the end of 1935, more than 35 other companies were selling their beer in cans.
In 2013, Richmond’s Hardywood Park Craft Brewery released a cream ale with a flavor concept and can design explicitly nodding to the original Krueger brew. Fittingly, it was also the brewery’s first beer to be sold in a can. Like its predecessor, Hardywood’s cream ale was the first signal of a new path forward: The craft brewery phased out bottles completely in late 2023, citing sustainability.
“Aluminum is infinitely recyclable,” Hardywood Brewmaster Brian Nelson says, “and a lot of municipalities aren’t even recycling glass anymore.” Cans are also cheaper to ship and safer to dispose of, according to Nelson, all of which makes them the eco-friendlier option.
Ninety years on, the future for canned beer and other beverages still looks bright. According to the research firm IWSR, ready-to-drink beverages “were the star of the global beverage alcohol market,” being “the only major category to record volume growth (+2%), alongside a strong +6% uptick in value” in 2023. RTDs, a sector that also includes hard seltzers and canned wine and cocktails, are also on track to continue growing and become more sophisticated “as consumers explore more premium options [and seek] more affordable and convenient alternatives to traditional beverage alcohol categories.”
