January 24, 1935: First canned beer goes on sale

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Canned beer makes its debut on this day in 1935. In partnership with
the American Can Company, the Gottfried Krueger Brewing Company
delivered 2,000 cans of Krueger's Finest Beer and Krueger's Cream Ale
to faithful Krueger drinkers in Richmond, Virginia. Ninety-one percent
of the drinkers approved of the canned beer, driving Krueger to give
the green light to further production.

By the late 19th century, cans were instrumental in the mass
distribution of foodstuffs, but it wasn't until 1909 that the American
Can Company made its first attempt to can beer. This was unsuccessful,
and the American Can Company would have to wait for the end of
Prohibition in the United States before it tried again. Finally in
1933, after two years of research, American Can developed a can that
was pressurized and had a special coating to prevent the fizzy beer
from chemically reacting with the tin.

The concept of canned beer proved to be a hard sell, but Krueger's
overcame its initial reservations and became the first brewer to sell
canned beer in the United States. The response was overwhelming. Within
three months, over 80 percent of distributors were handling Krueger's
canned beer, and Krueger's was eating into the market share of the "big
three" national brewers--Anheuser-Busch, Pabst and Schlitz. Competitors
soon followed suit, and by the end of 1935, over 200 million cans had
been produced and sold.

The purchase of cans, unlike bottles, did not require the consumer to
pay a deposit. Cans were also easier to stack, more durable and took
less time to chill. As a result, their popularity continued to grow
throughout the 1930s, and then exploded during World War II, when U.S.
brewers shipped millions of cans of beer to soldiers overseas. After
the war, national brewing companies began to take advantage of the mass
distribution that cans made possible, and were able to consolidate
their power over the once-dominant local breweries, which could not
control costs and operations as efficiently as their national
counterparts.

Today, canned beer accounts for approximately half of the $20 billion
U.S. beer industry. Not all of this comes from the big national
brewers: Recently, there has been renewed interest in canning from
microbrewers and high-end beer-sellers, who are realizing that cans
guarantee purity and taste by preventing light damage and oxidation.