EUGENE, Ore. — In the next few weeks, shoppers at local grocery stores and specialty beer shops will be able to pick up a six-pack of locally produced Hop Valley craft beer — in aluminum cans.
Long the preferred container for mass-produced, budget beer, aluminum cans are getting a major mak
eover by microbreweries across the nation.
Hop Valley Brewing Co. is the first of the Eugene-Springfield craft brewers to join what some are calling “the can revolution,” offering its DD Blonde and Alphadelic IPA beers in aluminum cans.
“It seems like every week another brewery is intr
oducing cans,” said Jonas Kungys, an owner and partner in Hop Valley, which operates a brew pub and microbrewery in Springfield’s Gateway area.
The 2½-year-old brewery started out making beer for its brew pub and draft beer accounts. Last year, it hired a mobile bottler and began selling its beer in 22-ounce bottles. When the owners recently discussed introducing six packs, “We thought maybe we should do cans,” Kungys said.
The more research they did, the more convinced they became that cans held the future.
“It’s way better for the beer, and it’s way better for the environment,” Kungys said.
Cans block sunlight completely and seal better than bottles, which keeps the beers tasting fresher longer, he said.
“UV light is death to beer,” Kungys said. “It makes it skunky.”
Aluminum cans also are more eco-friendly than glass bottles, he said. They’re easier than glass to recycle, and they’re 12 times lighter than bottles, so it takes less energy to transport the same amount of beer, Kungys said.
But don’t expect prices at the store to reflect cans’ lower costs of production and freight. Many craft brewers start canning using manual systems, which have high labor costs.
“Craft beer sells for around $10 a six-pack, whether in bottles or cans,” said Jamie Gordon, a sales official with Cask Brewing Systems, which is based in Calgary, Canada. Cask Brewing sold canning equipment to Hop Valley.
Some craft brewers that are canning actually charge a premium because the cans are so convenient, he said.
Cans are ideal for people who want to take a few beers hiking, boating, golfing, or to pools, concerts or stadiums where glass is prohibited, Kungys said.
“In Eugene, heck, everyone is so green that when you see the benefit of cans, it’s a no-brainer,” he said.
Local retailers say their customers like having cans as an option, and that’s especially true in the summer when they’re outdoors, out on the rivers or hiking in the mountains.
“It’s easier to pack an empty can out than an empty bottle out,” said Steve Johnson, wine and beverage sales manager for Eugene-based Market of Choice.
Eugene bottle shop, The Bier Stein, which carries canned beer from about 10 breweries, sells “a decent amount” of microbrews in cans, buyer and manager Dave Stockhausen said.
It would be a stretch for sales of canned microbrew to outpace bottles, he said. But the can trend emerged so quickly over the past few years, “It wouldn’t surprise me if five to 10 years down the road a lot of breweries offered their beers in cans, as well as bottles, or switched to cans altogether,” Stockhausen said.
Oregon, the nation’s second-largest producer of craft beer — California is the largest — was relatively late to embrace the can.
More than 200 microbreweries in North America can their beer, said Gordon, the Cask Brewing official. But only a handful of Oregon microbreweries do. They include Caldera in Ashland; Fort George Brewery and Public House, and Astoria Brewing/Wet Dog Cafe in Astoria; and Fearless Brewing Co. in Estacada.
More are getting on the bandwagon, however, Gordon said.
“Oregon is going to be our busiest state this year,” he said. By the end of the year at least 10 craft breweries in Oregon will be using Cask canning equipment, Gordon predicted.
The reason why the trend didn’t hit Oregon sooner, some in the industry speculate, is that small-scale, reliable, affordable canning equipment only became available in the past 10 years.
For years, bottling was the cheapest way to package beer in single-serving containers.
“You can basically do it by hand,” said Brian Butenschoen, executive director of the Oregon Brewers Guild in Portland. Simple systems use gravity to flow beer into bottles, which are hand-capped, he said. Or mobile bottling companies offer a low-cost way for breweries to get started, Butenschoen said.
It also has taken a while to overcome canned beer’s reputation as an inferior product, Gordon said.
“The reason that reputation existed was that the only beer put in cans was the mass-produced swill,” he said. “Brewers came to us and said, ‘You’ve got a great package, but I can’t use it because the image is that only cheap beer comes in a can.”‘
“There was only one way to change that image, and that was for people to put good beer in a can,” Gordon said.
It’s a myth that canned beer tastes metallic, he said.
“When you pour beer from a can or beer from a bottle into a glass and drink it, there’s no difference,” Gordon said. “There never has been a difference.”
The taste and quality of any beer, whether in a can or bottle, “can be hit and miss,” said Nikos Ridge, CEO of Ninkasi Brewery. “I think a lot of it has to do with how it’s done.”
Packaging Ninkasi in cans isn’t on the Eugene brewery’s immediate horizon, he said, although the trend is gaining traction in his industry.
“For us to do it at the scale we’re at would require a significant investment in equipment, and we’d want to make sure we had the equipment necessary to ensure the quality is there,” Ridge said.
Ninkasi has its own bottling equipment and has seen rapid growth since introducing six packs of 12-ounce bottles earlier this year, he said.
“We’ve gone from 30,000 barrels last year to what’s projected to be 55,000 barrels this year,” Ridge said. (A barrel is 31 gallons.)
Kungys envisions a day, not too far off, when sales of Hop Valley’s canned beer outstrip those of its bottled beer.
Gordon also predicts mass acceptance of canned microbrews.
“The sky’s the limit,” he said. The percentage of craft beer currently sold in cans is less than 2 percent but the growth rate of canned craft beer is 700 percent, he said.
A microbrewery, such as Hop Valley, can spend $15,000 and get started with a manual, entry-level canning system that can process up to eight cans a minute, Gordon said.
Automated lines sell for about $85,000 and process up to 30 cans a minute, he said.
Cans of Hop Valley beer are available at its brew pub and soon will be available locally at the Bier Stein, 16 Tons, and local grocery stores, including Market of Choice, Sundance and Red Barn, Kungys said. The retail cost of a six-pack will be $8 to $10, he said.
Hop Valley’s six-packs come bundled in a recycled plastic handle manufactured by PakTech Co., another Eugene company.
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