Toiletpaper shortages, sure. Bicycle waiting lists. Yep. But a beer can shortage, too?
State’s breweries are grappling with a shortage of beer cans
Toilet paper hoarding. Flour shortages. Bicycle waiting lists. After so many months of sheltering in place, we’ve become accustomed to odd shortfalls. But one of the unforeseen consequences of the pandemic is a shortage of aluminum beer cans. The issue has been brewing for a few months, but it’s risen to worrying levels in recent weeks.
During pre-pandemic times, much of our beer consumption was at bars, restaurants and breweries, where it’s typically poured from a keg. But almost all the beer we’re consuming these days is to go. It’s picked up curbside at your local brewery or grabbed on a trip to the grocery store. Breweries have shifted their packaging to cans and bottles, with minimal kegged beer.
With many of the nation’s 7,000-plus breweries ordering more cans for their beer, a shortage was bound to happen eventually. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s recent reimposition of stricter guidelines, closing bars and restaurants to indoor dining, only hastens that issue.
But other factors have created a perfect storm. There has been an explosion of new canned products from major brewers, soda manufacturers and others, aimed at consumers stuck at home. Soda companies are quietly shifting production to only their most popular brands in an effort to keep up with demand. You won’t find Coke Zero in cans, for example, because the demand for regular canned Coca-cola is so high.
The Can Manufacturers Institute says demand for aluminum cans is at unprecedented levels, and the capacity to turn the raw materials into cans is what has become the — forgive the pun — bottleneck. Construction has begun on three new can manufacturing plants, but they won’t make a dent in the can shortages for at least 18 months.
Right now, most breweries can get their supplies, but some are starting to report delays: It’s taking twice as long for their can orders to arrive. And that makes planning more difficult, since predicting demand is also trickier under a pandemic. Many brewers are starting to seriously worry that the day is coming when cans will either take a prohibitively long time to arrive or be unavailable altogether.
A decade ago, this would not have been much of a problem, at least for craft breweries, who typically bottled their brews. The beer can made its American debut in 1935 and immediately became popular. By World War II, cans represented 10% of the beer market. After the war, can sales exploded, especially after Coors introduced the all-aluminum can in 1959. By 1970, cans were outselling beer in bottles, and that continued until the early 1990s, when more than twothirds of beer sales were in cans.
But for decades, beer cans suffered from a problem whose technical name is “metal turbidity.” Canned beer tasted funny because the metal leached into the beer, subtly altering its flavor. By the 1980s, scientists had improved cans’ internal coatings: They came up with a standardized organic polymer, essentially a water-based epoxy acrylic, so the beer never touches the metal.
But for beer aficionados, the damage was done. For years, there was a stigma against cans, with people continuing to believe that canned beer doesn’t taste as good — even though the problem had been solved.
Small craft breweries were still not using cans, but it wasn’t because of flavor. The sheer cost of canning lines, coupled with the minimum orders required by can manufacturers, put the expense beyond the reach of all but the biggest craft brewers.
Cask Brewing Systems, a Canadian equipment company, solved both those issues. Longtime salesman Kersten Kloss noticed can sales were picking up, but that the bar to entry for smaller companies was quite high. So he had his company’s engineers design a more affordable manual canning system, and a few years later, a slightly larger automated one. But perhaps more importantly, he persuaded one of the leading can makers, the Ball Corp., to reduce its minimum orders so small breweries could afford to introduce their beer in cans.
Colorado’s Oskar Blues Brewery was the first to start canning its beer. Its Dale’s Pale Ale was one of the first successes for micro-canned beer. In the Bay Area, 21st Amendment’s Shaun O’sullivan saw what Oskar Blues was doing and knew at once that cans were the future of craft beer. The brewery was the first in the Bay Area to hand can its beer. These days, nearly every brewery offers its beer in cans, especially the new and trendy ones.
How long we’ll be able to find beer in cans is anybody’s guess. In the meantime, save some for the rest of us by buying a few bottles, along with your cans, the next time you make a beer run.