1930s technology reaches today's microbreweries

It's all the rage, you see. Canning beer. Originally developed as a way to prevent the carbon dioxide that fizzes up your beer from escaping and protecting the beer from sunlight, which is the ultimate killer of beer, canned beer was a revelation. It made beer easier to transport, easier to shelve and gave more surface area to create sweet designs -- see Budweiser can.

Of course canned beer eventually became the exclusive province of mass-produced adjunct lagers and therefore associated with crap beer that could be bought in generic white cans with block "BEER" written down the side. (Note, I don't consider Budweiser crap beer. It's actually quite solid.) It didn't have to be this way. When craft brewing got going, bottles made sense on a number of levels. First, it was easy to reuse them, second it differentiated them from the mass-market beers and third, a bottling line is easier to do on a smaller scale than a canning line.

But a few years ago, canning started to come in vogue in craft brewing. The first I know of in Michigan was Keweenaw Brewing Company, which makes outstanding beer in the frigid Upper Peninsula. They design their cans with great vintage-style animations of men and women working in traditional UP jobs. At the Michigan Brewers Guild Summer Festival in Ypsilanti, I spoke with one of the brewers and he said the canning was strictly practical. On the peninsula, everyone boats and cans are better for boats. I still have a nice beer coozy from them.

Now a fairly new startup, MillKing It Productions, based in Royal Oak, MI is making two beers only in 16-ounce cans. One, the Brik Irish Red is a very solid session beer with malty taste, but fairly dry and with a nice foamy head. It's not as sweet or high in alcohol as say a Bell's Amber, and in a nice big can. It tastes better from a glass than a can - but all beer does. It also makes a pale ale, which I haven't yet tried. Big bonus, in Grosse Pointe sold the six-pack of 16-ouncers for $9.99.

Next on the horizon, Bell's is planning to can a few of its beers next year. After all, all those boaters out there are currently being deprived of Oberon and the Larry Bell thinks that's just unjust.