by MARK REUTTER

The humble beer can – a vessel grasped, popped open, chugged, crumpled and tossed away by millions of tailgaters and couch potatoes today – was once as coveted for its trendy portability as, perhaps, the iPod is now.

When beer in a can was first test marketed on Jan. 24, 1935 (Krueger’s Special Beer, in Richmond, Va.) the product became an instant hit. Within a week, half of the local distributors were offering canned suds. By the end of 1935, 160 million cans of beer had been sold nationwide.

Connoisseurs may have fussed over its “tinny” aftertaste, but the public, on the heels of Prohibition, loved the can for its convenience and ease of handling, not to speak of those brightly-colored wrappers emblazoned with big letters and mascots.

On the beer can’s birthday, let’s go back and look at how the repackaging of the world’s oldest alcoholic beverage not only revived the fortunes of Baltimore breweries and other companies, but lifted the spirits of a Depression-battered town.

Taming Turbidity

Beer dates back to the 6th millennium B.C. By the 16th century, it was being bottled and sold by monastaries. Putting fermented hops, malt, yeast and water into a can might seem easy, but it posed several technical hurdles, as researchers at American Can Co. discovered when they began experimenting with “near beer” in 1929.

First of all, the can needed to withstand the 80- to 90-psi pressure of pasteurization. Regular tin cans buckled and ruptured during pasteurization, spewing out their contents, while enameled cans underwent a meltdown, turning the brew milky white and undrinkable.

The steel industry came up with a strong material for canning, with the invention of “cold-reduced tinplate” in the early 1930s. Yet a major problem remained. Beer in contact with metal turned cloudy and foul tasting.

To develop a liner that would prevent “metal turbidity,” researchers tried flour, gum, resin and, reportedly, asphalt as a can liner. Nothing worked until American Can came upon a plastic copolymer that it baked inside the can and trademarked as “Keglined” cans.

A can in search of suds
After five years of trial and error, American Can Co. had developed a can, known as the “flat-top,” that looked remarkably like today’s 12-ounce standard beer can. It was much heavier than today’s can and consisted of three pieces, the body and two ends. The body was produced from a flat sheet of tinplate, which was cut and rolled to form the cylindrical body.

The body was then soldered along the seam and handed over to a Rube-Goldberg-like machine whose whirling discs fitted out the bottom of the can and curled around the edges of the cylinder to form a rim. After being “Keglined” with the plastic liner, the can was ready for the brewery.

Am Can wanted to make a big splash by wrapping its can around a famous national brand. But Anheuser-Busch and other large brewers didn’t think their customers would accept their suds in a can. So Am Can struck a deal with small Gottfried Krueger of Newark, N.J., to introduce the new product.

Krueger hedged its bet by selecting Richmond, far from its home base, as its test market. Such caution proved unnecessary. The first cans of Krueger were put on sale on January 24, 1935. Within months, sales had jumped 550 percent, and canned Kruegers were outselling bottled Budweisers.

Underscoring the product’s success was this arresting fact discovered by Krueger ad men – a majority of the early users thought canned beer tasted more like draft than bottled beer.

A surprise bonanza

The Sparrows Point mill, the only major producer of tinplate east of Pittsburgh, soon found itself in the middle of an unexpected boom. Sales of tinplate sheet, which could make 20 beer cans, soared, and management quickly decided to build a $16 million cold-reduced “ductile” tin mill in order to quench the public’s boozy infatuation.

So, too, Baltimore’s “Big Five” breweries – American, Free State, Globe, Gunther’s and National – realized they had to can a portion of their stock to stay competitive. But how to proceed? Having invested heavily in bottling equipment, the brewers were reluctant to spend more for new canning machines.

Baltimore’s bottlecap maker, Crown Cork & Seal, sensed an opportunity. In 1937, Crown introduced the “J-spout” can with a funnel-like top crowned by a standard bottlecap, which could be filled on existing bottling lines.

Other species of cone-top cans crowded onto the marketplace, so that barroom denizens could choose from high-profile and low-profile and raised-rib and inverted-rib cone tops and, if they took any notice, could contemplate an array of flat-bottomed and concave-bottomed cans.

Some of these cone tops were affixed with caps and could be opened just like bottled beer. Others were sealed in metal skins and required a “church key” opener to punch a V-shaped hole in the center of the can.

Branding the can

Besides being easy to stack and nearly indestructible, the can possessed another advantage over glass bottles – its entire surface could be used for promotion.

The very first can set the pattern for what today would be called product branding. The Krueger can was emblazoned with the Krueger “K-Man,” a stylized waiter in the shape of the letter K carrying a tray of canned beer and a glass.

The one-eyed handlebar-mustachioed “Mr. Boh” made its appearance on National Bohemian cans around 1950 and began a long run as one of the most recognizable icons in Baltimore. National Beer was sold to Carling in 1973 and brewing was abandoned in the city in 1978, but Mr. Boh has made a comeback, thanks to shrewd marketing, as an icon for yuppie lofts, tee shirts and trendy bars.

Perhaps the most unusual of the early cans was the “crowntainer” introduced by Crown Cork & Seal in 1940. The crowntainer consisted of a full can body and a small top lid. The body was stamped out into a cup shape and then rammed through a series of tungsten-carbide rings of decreasing diameter in a wall-ironing machine.

Crown advertised that this type of can was 25 per cent cheaper to make than a three-piece can, but the graphics were more limited. A coating of aluminum was placed over the entire can, giving it a gray base color. Applying art onto a cylindrical body was more difficult than on a flat sheet. Only four colors, plus the base coating, could be applied.

The crowntainer outlasted most other cone-top cans and stayed in production until about 1957.

Can miscellany

• The six-pack was born in 1936 as an adjunct to the beer can, but was swaddled in so much packaging that only a burly longshoreman might be induced to lug it home. Lighter packaging awaited the post-war years.

• In 1962, the first pull-tab beer can hit the market. In 1965, the ring-top can was introduced and in 1974, the short-lived push-button can was used on some brands.

• In 1965, aluminum beer cans were introduced and tin-free “skinny” steel cans were developed.

• In the 1980s, all-aluminum cans replaced steel cans due to their lighter weight and easier manufacturing properties.

• Today nearly all U.S. beer cans use aluminum stay-tab packaging and water-based internal coatings in place of plastic liners.

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There’s more on beer cans in Mark Reutter’s book, Making Steel. Sparrows Point. He can be reached at reuttermark@yahoo.com .