Seventy-seven years ago this week, a new product appeared that would forever change the way Americans drank: canned beer. A scant two years after the end of Prohibition, Americans were thirsty. While canned food had been a longtime staple of American sustenance, beer had proven more challenging — the pressure of the fizzy beverage tended to burst tin cans. But after much experimentation and innovation, one can company found a way to package beer, and in doing so, created a classic American beverage.
The American Can Company had long been interested in developing a canned version of suds. The company had been formed in 1901 after Daniel Gray Reid, the “Tin Plate King,” purchased a controlling interest in several smaller can manufacturers. Its first president, William T. Graham, was no stranger to good fortune: His wife and daughter had been rescued from the foundering Titanic in 1912. American Can, which in its first decade produced 85 percent of America’s tin cans for preserving food, would experience similar good fortune in later years.
In 1909, Leopold Schmidt, a German immigrant and brewmaster, requested that American Can look into canning beer for his Olympia Brewing Company in Washington state. Cans were — in theory, at least — superior to bottles in several ways: They were easier to stack, and thus to transport; they didn’t break as easily; they were lighter; and they didn’t expose beer to sunlight the way bottles did. (Sunlight can damage the flavor of beer, leaving it sour and spoiled-tasting, or “skunky.”) The problem, however, was that, unlike beans, corn and tomatoes, beer produced pressure as it carbonated — and the outgassing tended to burst the flimsy tin cans of the time. Though American Can struggled mightily with the problem between 1909 and 1920, the onset of Prohibition slowed the project and the U.S. brewing industry ground to a virtual halt.
It wasn’t until 1933, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the 73rd Congress passed a series of laws repealing the Volstead Act, that American Can again took up the cause of canned beer. Working at a rapid pace, its engineers solved the exploding-can problem that September, producing the world’s first beer can. In addition to traditional tin, they reinforced the can with steel, which proved able to hold up to beer’s pressure. Drinkers opened the can with a “church-key” opener, a slice of metal with a sharp bill to punch a hole in the can’s flat top. But with this innovation arose more problems. Designers had to find a way to combat the fact that beer packaged in metal began to taste metallic or tinny. To counteract this, American Can inventors slathered the inside of the cans with brewer’s pitch, made from pine tar. The pitch insulated the can walls from the beer just like the inside of a keg; thus, their cans came to be known as “keglined.”
With their new cans in place, American Can was ready to sell the idea. At first, the nation’s “Big Three” breweries — Anheuser-Busch, Pabst and Schlitz — were suspicious of the idea, not wanting to risk their lucrative beer brands with new and commercially untested packaging. One small brewery, however, was willing to take the risk and give American Can’s innovation a try: the Krueger Brewing Company.
The brewery had been founded in 1908 by a German immigrant named Gottfried Krueger, who had come to the United States at age 16. Gottfried’s uncle John Laible owned a brewery in Newark, N.J., and the boy went to work for him, learning the art of beer-making. He succeeded not only as a brewer but a businessman, and by the beginning of the 20th century, he’d acquired holdings in most of the breweries in Newark, presiding over a company that produced 182,000 barrels of beer per year. In 1914, he and his wife, Bertha, sailed to their homeland for a visit; unfortunately, because of the outbreak of World War I, they weren’t allowed to return until the end of hostilities. It wasn’t until the 1920s that Gottfried returned to American to reclaim his foamy empire, by then severely devalued by the Volstead Act.
Gottfried died in 1926, but his company did not. His sons took over after his death, and seven years later, the Krueger Brewery accepted American Can’s offer to give canned beer a shot. After tweaking the brewer’s pitch mixture and commissioning 2,000 cans from American Can, Krueger Brewing sent 500 families four cans of Krueger’s Special Beer apiece, with a questionnaire attached. When the results came back, 91 percent of customers approved.
The cans still required some adjustments to the lining — brewer’s pitch proved too volatile, and didn’t respond well to beer’s pasteurization. In the next two years, American Can and Krueger Brewing teamed up with Union Carbide, a chemical company, to perfect the keglining process. Union Carbide’s researchers found that Vinylite, a plastic, was an acceptable substitute for brewer’s pitch. On Jan. 24, 1935, the first cans of Krueger’s Special Beer and Krueger’s Cream Ale hit the market in Richmond, Va.
No one could have predicted the product’s spectacular success. Krueger’s sales skyrocketed 550 percent in just two months. By Christmas 1935, 75 million cans of keglined beer had been sold. And by the end of 1935, American Can had gone from servicing one brewery to 20, including Pabst, then the largest of the Big Three.
Despite the beer can’s initial success, it didn’t actually surpass the bottle market until the 1960s. During World War II, the conservation of steel halted U.S. beer-canning operations, and brewers began looking for alternative canning materials. In 1958, Adolph Coors Brewing Company and Hawaii Brewing Company became the first breweries to offer aluminum cans. Lighter and easier to open than older cans, aluminum cans quickly became the beer container of choice. In 1963, the pop-top can was introduced by Schlitz, eliminating the need for a church-key. Soft drink companies, which had begun canning their products in 1938, shortly after beer makers took the plunge, also followed the pop-top trend. By 1968, 80 percent of cans were aluminum pop-tops, and the can had become the most popular form of beverage container.
In 2010, the United States produced approximately 33.8 billion cans of beer. Gottfried Krueger, of course, couldn’t have foreseen the spectacular success of the product his company would pioneer. Had he, though, there seems little doubt he would have found it uncanny.
Rob Ogden is a writer in Cleveland.