10 Things to Consider When Buying Aluminum Beer Bottles

Can you guess the answer?

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Sprecher has been slinging beer in iconic brown glass bottles since . In January of , all of that will change, and Sprecher brews will find a new home in sleek aluminum cans. This has many longtime fans asking, why? Is beer better in cans or bottles? To answer the question, it’s worth thinking about taste, convenience, and environmental impact.

Taste

When it comes to beer, taste is the number one concern at Sprecher. So does beer taste better from cans or bottles? The answer is, neither. Beer tastes better when poured into a glass.

Our perception of flavor relies on a combination of senses–taste, smell, mouthfeel, sight, and possibly even sound (consider the satisfying sound of a can opening). When you drink from a can or a bottle, your nose misses the beer completely, and you cannot see the color of the beer, admire the foamy head, or listen to the sound of rising bubbles during a good pour. Put a beer in a proper glass, and you are getting the full sensory experience. Plus, who doesn’t love drinking beer from a hefty stein or a classy snifter? It just elevates the experience.

Still, you’re not always going to have a glass handy. So how do bottles and cans compare on taste? Some complain that canned beer tastes metallic. However, brewers started lining their beer cans with food-safe plastic to prevent metallic off-taste in the s, and they haven’t stopped since. If you are tasting metal, it’s because you’re smelling the can. So stop doing that, it’s weird! [1]

Bottles have a different taste problem. Unlike cans, bottles let a little light in. When UV light from the sun hits beer, it can cause chemical changes that result in an unpleasant taste. The term for the resulting product is–I kid you not–skunky beer (or ‘lightstruck beer’ if you’re a nerd). Brown bottles provide pretty good protection, followed by green bottles, with clear bottles obviously being the worst of all (sorry, Zima). Brown bottles are all well and good, but no glass provides better protection from skunkiness than a can. [2]

The verdict on taste: as long as you are not a can-sniffer, cans win out on taste. However, you should really be pouring your beer into a glass. Beers poured from a bottle or a can into a glass taste equally good, as long as they haven’t been skunked. Around here, we believe a Sprecher pint glass provides the best taste experience of all. But there’s more to the equation than taste.

Convenience

What about convenience? Sometimes beer sits around in your fridge, but beer is happiest when it travels places. It likes to go to parties, campouts, fishing trips, or wherever else you are going with friends. When you’re on the road with your brews, are bottles or cans better?

In this department, bottles have some major issues. They are heavy. They break, and nobody likes to open their trunk to find glass and beer all over the back of the car. This also makes them a no-go on most beaches and campgrounds. Finally, glass bottles can be harder to open in a pinch. Either you need a bottle opener, or you’re dealing with a twist-off. Twist-offs rate higher on convenience than regular bottle caps, but they can still come loose unexpectedly or get stuck.

Cans avoid all of these issues. Aluminum cans are lighter and much harder to damage. If you do manage to break an aluminum can, it’s probably your fault–and it won’t shatter everywhere. You can also open an aluminum can with ease, but it is unlikely to open on its own when jostled around.

The verdict on convenience:cans are lighter, less fragile, and easier to open compared to glass bottles.

Environmental Impact

The founder of Sprecher Brewery, Randy Sprecher, briefly went to school to oceanography before pursing his passion for brewing. During that time, he became aware of the harm that plastic does to the oceans, and committed to bottle all of his soda and beer in glass. Glass is easier to recycle than plastic, and has a lot to recommend it, but it’s not clear if selling beer in bottles or cans is more environmentally friendly.

Compared to glass, aluminum is more environmentally costly to mine, refine, and make into cans. However, aluminum is more likely to be recycled successfully, and its longer life cycle works towards balancing out the low initial costs of making new glass. Additionally, glass is heavier and requires more fuel to transport the same amount of liquid compared to aluminum.

The best thing to do is recycle your cans and bottles whenever possible. Encourage your local bars and restaurants to provide recycling options if they don’t already, and recycle at home if your local government offers recycling services.

The most environmentally friendly way of all to enjoy a beer is to drink draft from a reusable cup, or to bring draft beer home in a reusable growler. Kegs can be filled again and again–although emptying them is the fun part! [3]

The verdict on environmental impact: bottles and cans can both be environmentally friendly, but only if you recycle them! Better yet, drink draft beer from a reusable container.

The Bottom Line

All in all, cans have many advantages over bottles when it comes to packaging beer. Cans preserve taste better than bottles, they are more convenient, and they are easy to recycle over and over. That’s why Sprecher is making the change from brown glass bottles to aluminum cans. Whatever container your beer comes in, I recommend pouring it out into an ice-cold frosted glass, and enjoying it! Cheers!

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Sources

[1] Eddings, Bryce. “History of Beer Cans: How Did Beer End Up in a Can?” The Spruce Eats, July 22, , https://www.thespruceeats.com/beer-can-history-.

[2] Vinepair Staff. “What is Skunked Beer?” Vinepair, https://vinepair.com/beer-101/what-is-skunked-beer/.

For more information, please visit Aluminum Beer Bottles.

There was a time when craft brewers in the United States swore that they would never put their beer in cans. Eventually they gave into consumer demand and now aluminum cans are the portable packaging of choice for brewers across the country. Still, there are some that remain committed to glass and in Oregon a small group of brewers have been working with a company that will distribute reusable bottles.

Gigantic Brewing Co. in Portland, Oregon is one of the breweries in the program and co-founder and brewer Ben Love shared information about the initiative and experience.

 John Holl: How has the returnable bottle program been working and how did it come about?

 Ben Love: The Oregon beer recycling cooperative that runs all the beverage recycling in the state put together this program. There are a 12-ounce bottle and a 500ml bottle. It’s been working out in all honesty, because it comes to us, it gets filled, it goes out, gets used, returned washed and then comes back to us and we refill it. I don’t think I need to tell people that refillable packaging is where we need to be. We’re seeing big companies like Johnson & Johnson and Unilever that are already experimenting with refillable packaging and trying to make that a regular part of their business. It makes sense for beer too.

 John Holl: What are the benefits you’ve seen?

 Ben Love: We all throw tons and tons of stuff away and so refillable is better than recycling because the energy impact is really low, as opposed to melting it down and reforming it.

 John Holl: Is there a lot of interest, do you get contacted a lot by other breweries interested in the program?

 Ben Love: Unfortunately, it is mostly Gigantic and Double Mountain Brewery on the beer side that is championing this packaging. We’ve decided to stick to our guns and try to get the people that care about this stuff to buy beer in these returnable bottles.

 It’s a bit of an uphill battle. During COVID it worked out pretty well because no one was buying and draft so our bottles sales were really good and they are still good. We have customers that that love the bottles and love what we’re doing. And they obviously love the liquid inside of it. So they’re going to buy our beer whether it was in a bottle or a canner or whatever.

John Holl: Do the like the story behind the packaging?

Ben Love: They do. They really care about these things and want to buy things in a refillable package, as opposed to a can that gets recycled.

John Holl: So, it’s been a positive experience?

Ben Love: Customers are bringing us back the bottles all the time. Especially during COVID when we started doing home delivery. We’re like the milkman now.

John Holl: What sort of testing do the bottles go through?

Ben Love: Obviously, you’re cleaning everything out. And hopefully you’re not finding too many gross things inside of them. We ask customers to bring it back rinsed, but then it goes to a facility and they wash it, and then there are cameras and lasers that look for impurities or hairline cracks or anything else, and to make sure the bottle is actually clean and ready to go. Then it comes back to us.

John Holl: Any idea how many times a bottle might come through your brewery?

Ben Love: I think the average life is 25 fills and they can go longer than that.

John Holl: Do you think this will catch on?

Ben Love: I know at the end of the day that cans are lighter. If you’re going backpacking or going down to the lake or the river or whatever, it’s a lot easier to take some six packs of cans. But I do think people enjoy the experience of drinking out of a bottle a lot more. It’s just a throwback and a little more enjoyable.

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This article originally appeared on ProBrewer.com in February . All About Beer’s parent company has a partnership with ProBrewer.com to create original content for that website. New articles appear each week and subsequently are reposted on AllAboutBeer.com.

If you want to learn more, please visit our website Aluminum Spray Bottle.