Stories like this really make my day: On This Day in History, 1935…
First canned beer goes on sale!
In partnership with the American Can Company, the Gottfried Krueger Brewing Company delivered 2,000 cans of Krueger’s Finest Beer and Krueger’s Cream Ale to faithful Krueger drinkers in Richmond, Virginia…
The response was overwhelming. Ninety-one percent of the drinkers approved of the canned beer. This drove Krueger to give the green light to further production. Within three months, over 80 percent of distributors were handling Krueger’s canned beer. Krueger’s was eating into the market share of the “big three” national brewers – Anheuser-Busch, Pabst and Schlitz. Competitors soon followed suit. By the end of 1935, over 200 million cans had been produced and sold.
The purchase of cans, unlike bottles, did not require the consumer to pay a deposit. Cans were also easier to stack, more durable, and took less time to chill. As a result, their popularity continued to grow throughout the 1930s. Then it exploded during World War II when U.S. brewers shipped millions of cans of beer to soldiers overseas. After the war, national brewing companies began to take advantage of the mass distribution that cans made possible. They were able to consolidate their power over the once-dominant local breweries which could not control costs and operations as efficiently as their national counterparts.
Today, canned beer accounts for approximately half of the $20 billion U.S. beer industry. Not all of this comes from the big national brewers: Recently, there has been renewed interest in canning from microbrewers and high-end beer-sellers, who are realizing that cans guarantee purity and taste by preventing light damage and oxidation.
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And the rest, as they say, is canned beer history – Cheers!.
