Do You Like It in the Can?

I think I'll be talking about beer in cans a lot more here, pretty soon. The craft beer world is increasingly switching over to cans and in Virginia, there's even a mobile canner who will bring his machine to your brewery and can your beer in a day. It's pretty remarkable to see.

One day in Germany about ten years ago, they thought it was a good idea to start charging a deposit on all aluminum cans: 25 cents!!! It was part of an aggressive tactic to curb the amount of curbside and countryside garbage that had been accumulating. Bottles had a ten-cent deposit that kept most people from just throwing them in the street when they'd drunk all their beer, but aluminum had always gotten a pass. I think it was because of interests like Coca-Cola. Anyway, the huge deposit worked, but it also kind of backfired.

Greedy gas stations and the like demanded that you bring back your can with a token to that exact location. So, say you bought a can of beer from a 7-11, you couldn't just bring back your beer can to any old 7-11; you had to bring it to the same one, which really sucked if you were on a road trip. You just lost 25 cents a can, and the 7-11 just got free money.

Most places just stopped selling cans. See, bottles in Germany are where it's at. They reuse the bottles as many times as they can before recycling them. It's a great system, but Americans hate to reuse anything for some reason. They'd rather just skip to the recycling part. It's annoying for hardcore environmentalists to see this, but it is what it is. Americans refuse to reuse bottles and Germans place too large a burden on aluminum. But there's good news for the USA:

Aluminum is one of our most abundant and most easily recyclable resources!

In fact, I heard on NPR a while back that if we all just recycled everything aluminum, we could cease all mining operations of that material right now! And unlike plastic, we can recycle the same can an almost limitless amount of times.

And that's why I personally love the canning of beer and applaud the continued acceptance of it.