Everything you need to know about...cans

This issue, Nigel Huddleston looks at the history of the humble can

It all started for the can, as you might expect, in America.

Brewer Gottfried Kreuger, of Newark, New Jersey, made a major breakthrough in packaging two beers in metal cans on January 24, 1935. The American Can Company supplied the packs but had actually started working on trying to package beer in metal 26 years earlier.

The first European brewer to successfully package beer in cans was the Welsh brewer Felinfoel, less than a year after Kreuger’s pioneering work, using cans supplied by Metal Box.

The early cans had completely flat tops that had to be opened with a can opener, or a sardine can-style hook. United Kingdom partygoers were still having to hack cans open with old-fashioned openers, screwdrivers or chisels, the same with seven-pint party packs in the 1960s and 1970s. Although nostalgically linked with Watney’s and its Party Seven brand in many older drinkers minds, the seven-pint can, and a sister four-pint version, were first launched by Ansells in the 1970s.

Such mucking about had already become largely unnecessary with smaller cans with the emergence of the ring-pull. The first ring-pulls were invented by Ernie Fraze of the Dayton Reliable Tool Co and introduced by Schlitz in 1963.

Schlitz had been there at the start. Back in 1928, the company, along with Anheuser-Busch and Pabst, had experimented with canning “near beer,” the low and noalcoholic products produced by brewers during Prohibition.

But when “light” beer was legalised under a modification to Pr.....

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By Nigel Huddleston

Section : Beer Production

Page number : 32