Microbreweries turn from glass to metal

Associated Press

LEWISTON, Maine

Canned beer isn’t just for swilling anymore.

Baxter Brewing in Maine has joined a growing number of small craft-beer breweries distributing their brews in cans — just like mainstream mass-produced beers — rather than in bottles.

A decade ago, it’s believed there weren’t any U.S. craft breweries canning their suds. Nowadays, nearly 100 sell at least one beer variety in metal.

Baxter Brewing founder and president Luke Livingston said cans are good for the beer, the environment and consumers, because they’re easy to take to places such as camping trips and golf outings.

Still, cans in some quarters have to overcome the stereotype of chugging contests or a beer-bellied John Belushi crushing cans on his forehead in the 1978 movie “Animal House.”

When Livingston decided to open a small brewery sans bottles, some people told him they would never stoop to drinking beer from a can — that bottles were way better, and draft beer was the best.

“My retort to those people is that draft beer comes out of a keg,” Livingston said at his brewery, located inside a former textile mill in this central Maine city. “And what’s a keg? A keg’s just a big can, it’s a big metal container.”

As the craft beer industry took off in the 1990s, small local and regional breweries distributed their ales, bocks, stouts and other varieties in bottles.

Craft beers generally are made in small batches by small breweries and are typically more complex in taste than mainstream beers. U.S. craft-beer brewers sold 282 million gallons in 2009, accounting for 6.3 percent of U.S. beer sales by value, according to the Brewers Association, a Boulder, Colo.-based group representing craft brewers.

While craft beer has been sold predominantly in bottles, cans have been equated with mainstream beers such as Budweiser, Coors and Pabst Blue Ribbon.

The tiny Oskar Blues brew pub in Colorado broke that mold in 2002, when it began canning its Dale’s Pale Ale beer by hand with a tabletop canning machine. Oskar Blues Brewery, which is widely credited with starting the craft beer-in-a-can trend, brewed about 18,600 gallons of canned beer that first year.

It was such a hit that the owner opened a brewery in 2008 with a high-speed canning line. Production this year is expected to reach 1.9 million gallons, with six different styles of beer.

Spokesman Chad Melis said Oskar Blues has tried to educate beer drinkers about the benefits of cans “one beer at a time.”

“It’s a little bit of an educational curve for people to get over the preconceived notion that cheap beer is in cans,” Melis said.