It’s happening! Gordon Biersch will put its beer in cans.
Local:
If it’s felt chilly around Taylor and Eighth streets in San
Jose, it might be because hell froze over at the Gordon Biersch brewery: Gordon Biersch is putting its beer into cans, a development co-founder Dan Gordon said he never expected to happen.
“I had to eat my words,” Gordon said recently as the first cans of Don Gordo Mexican-style lager rolled through the brewery’s sparkling new canning line, just in time to hit store shelves for Cinco de Mayo. “The technology has really developed in the last three years. And the beer coming out of these cans is indistinguishable from beer in a bottle.”
Gordon, who learned the craft of brewing in Germany, has always been a bit of a stickler when it comes to beer, insisting on exacting standards and traditional recipes.
And that included putting beer in bottles or kegs instead of cans, which were long the domain of mass-market brews like Budweiser, Pabst Blue Ribbon and Hamm’s.
Craft brewers — including locals like Hermitage, Camino and Santa Clara Valley — started switching from bottles to cans a few years ago, giving lowly aluminum a taste of hipster cachet.
But Gordon held out. His knock on cans wasn’t that they’re low-brow; it was a quality issue. Using scientific data, he determined that too much beer-ruining oxygen would get into cans — especially with less expensive, lower-quality machinery — than in bottles.
To him, that negated the economic advantages of cans, which are cheaper to produce,
transport and recycle, and have a smaller carbon footprint than glass bottles.
But Gordon Biersch ultimately invested $2 million into a state-of-theart canning line from Germany-based firm Krones, which keeps the amount of oxygen in cans about the same as in bottles.
The new data was enough to convince Gordon to change his ways — and get used to the quieter sound from the canning line, which lacks the cacophonous clink of beer bottles.
You can expect other Gordon Biersch beers to be available in cans soon, Gordon said. But he isn’t giving up on one tradition: If you’re having one of his beers from a bottle or a can, he recommends pouring it in a glass first.
“You don’t want to have the taste of metal on your lips,” he said. “Even if you’re drinking from a bottle, you’re missing out on the foam.”
BAY AREA’S BAR STARS >> The bar team at Paper Plane in downtown San Jose has been named one of the nation’s top 10 by the Tales of the Cocktail Foundation, and Mary Palac, Paper Plane’s Queen of Cocktails, made the Spirited Awards’ list of top 10 bartenders for the second year in a row.
“The only word that comes to mind is grateful. Paper Plane has deserved to be on this list for years. I couldn’t be prouder to be a part of this team,” Palac said in a Facebook post. “I often say, when people congratulate me or lift me up for my accomplishments, I’m not even the best bartender on my team.”
Kevin Diedrich of Pacific Cocktail Haven and Marco Dionysos of Mission District favorite ABV in San Francisco join Palac on the best bartenders list, and PCH’s bar team is one of the top 10 along with Paper Plane. Both PCH and SF’s Trick Dog are in the running for Best American Cocktail Bar.
During shelter-in-place, Paper Plane has teamed up with its sister venues, Miniboss and Super Good Kitchen, on takeout food and cocktails. But we’re looking forward to having all these bars back to full speed.
MOURNING AT A DISTANCE >> Silicon Valley’s nonprofit community is reeling over the news that Bill Del Biaggio Jr., the longtime executive chairman at Heritage Bank of Commerce and most recently at California Bank of Commerce, died Saturday.
A 1958 graduate of Bellarmine College Prep, Del Biaggio went to college at the University of Oregon and returned to San Jose, where he eventually ran his family’s beer distribution company until the early 1990s, when he founded Heritage Bank.
He and his wife, Helen, who died in 2014, were generous to various causes around the valley, including O’Connor Hospital, Via Services, the Boy Scouts of America, Unity Care, Family Supportive Housing, the American Diabetes Association and the Guadalupe River Park Conservancy.
Del Biaggio’s death follows that of another South Bay icon, real estate attorney Stan Berliner, on April 22 at age 83.
In 2017, Berliner retired from Berliner Cohen, the firm he co-founded in 1969, after a 50-year career in law. Because of the shelter-in-place order in Santa Clara County, the memorial service had to be held on Zoom.