How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bottle
Hello Esteeméd Readers,
Last week, we talked a bit about the ravages of time vis a vis beer, namely the effects that oxygen, temperature, and time have on packaged beer. Spoiler alert: avoid these in most cases. This week, however, I thought we’d chat about the containers themselves, in part because I think it’s interesting how perception has changed over time, lagging behind technology somewhat, and also because there’s a real-world application: the beers you, yes, you purchase from bottle shops.
We’ll restrict our discussion to single-servings of beer (in part because the bigger options, like kegs and mini-kegs, are basically all big cans), leaving us with two contestants in this high-stakes cage match: bottles and cans. While cans are, to my knowledge and in my experience, pretty exceedingly rare in places like Germany, they’ve now swarmed the US beer scene so thoroughly as to be unavoidable; indeed, were you to limit yourselves to bottles only, you’d be missing out on a huge portion of the market. Is that a good thing?
Fighting Back Beer Demons
I’ll save you some time: cans are better. Way better. I mean, absolutely no contest. I might opt for bottles if I wanted a ~touch~ better insulating properties (say, if I were aging a beer in a cave or something, where the temp isn’t constant, and the timescale is quite long, and where micro-oxidation might be a good thing), but aside from some potential fringe cases, the can wins the battle every time. Why? Principally, in its advantages against the bottle concerning oxygen and light.
As mentioned last time, oxygen is in the packaged beer context, broadly speaking, your enemy, and it turns out that bottle caps let a small amount of oxygen in over time (okay, in fairness that paper references screw caps, and the effect is quite small compared to oxygen ingress during packaging). I will grant you this, though: since counter-pressure bottle fillers seem to be more common than similar can fillers on a craft scale (for example, we can without counter-pressure, but our old bottle filler had such a feature), cans will quite possibly pick up more oxygen on packaging up front. So, honestly, this one’s more of a tie than a slam dunk for non-national craft beers. The next three items, though, are a touch bigger.
Light’s deleterious effects on beer are quite obvious to anyone with a sensitive nose who’s ever opened a clear glass bottle of a certain beach-hyping Mexican Lager brand. I actually love that beer in cans, but the clear glass version gets so much heat because of what’s called “skunking” or the “lightstruck” quality - when UV rays boogie down with certain hop chemicals, this off-flavor is produced. While brown glass bottles reduce this effect significantly (I can’t for the life of me find a good source for the science behind this), it can still occur in beer bottled therein with enough time and direct exposure, giving light-reflecting cans their biggest lead.
And while there are a few other points, like the faster rate of cooling that cans enjoy and the fact that they don’t explode into potentially dangerous and tough-to-thoroughly-clean shards when dropped (my favorite advantage of the bunch), I’ll leave you with a very modern comparison - the two vessels’ relative environmental impacts. It turns out that producing aluminum from scratch isn’t fantastic for the planet, but if you can use 100% recycled aluminum, their lighter weight and greater space efficiency (bottle necks are kind of a waste of space) give them the edge once you have to transport them any appreciable distance. That being said, glass bottles hold the clear edge environmentally over new cans despite this. A small asterisk: for homebrewers, I’d imagine reusing even a small percentage of your bottles makes them the better choice.
Conclusion
Okay, granted, cans aren’t quite the insane slam-dunk over bottles that I depicted a few paragraphs above, but I still find them superior, and they certainly don’t deserve the generally negative relative opinion that I...feel like I hear people express? Is that idea dead yet? Did this article need to exist? Who knows! But thank you for sticking with it til the end regardless, sport
Cheers,
Adrian “Lightstruck” Febre