24 January: Beer Can Appreciation Day

Today is Beer Can Appreciation Day, because on this date in 1935 the first beer in cans was sold in Richmond, Virginia. 10 things you might not know about beer cans.

1. First of all, what are they made of? 75% of the world's drink cans are made from aluminium and 25% from Tin-plated steel.
2. The bad news is that it takes more energy to mine and produce aluminium than any other metal. To produce four cans from scratch would require enough energy to fill one of them with petrol.
3. The good news, however, is that aluminum is the most recyclable material on the planet. It can be recycled indefinitely. Making new cans out of old ones takes only five percent of the energy you'd need to mine the stuff.
4. The history of the beer can began in 1934 when the Kruger Brewing Company of Richmond, VA delivered four thousand of their newly developed beer can to potential consumers with a questionnaire. The product was well received by the test audience and Beer in cans went on sale proper on 24 January 1935.
5. The first brewery outside America to sell beer in cans was the Felinfoel Brewery at Felinfoel in Wales, also in 1935. Come the Second World War, the company was a major supplier to the troops abroad. They shipped over beer in cans rather than bottles as aluminium, being less dense than Glass, was cheaper to ship and didn't have to be returned to be re-used.
6. Beer in cans quickly became popular, which posed a problem for smaller breweries who couldn't afford to replace their manufacturing equipment. Hence, up until 1960 it was possible to get cans of beer that were shaped like bottles and sealed with the same bottle tops as their glass counterparts. However, as small breweries closed or upgraded their machinery, bottle shaped cans disappeared.
7. Early cans of beer required a can opener or a special tool known as a "church key" to get at the contents. In 1959, a man called Ermal Fraze forgot to bring a can opener to a family picnic and ended up using a car bumper to open his beer. This got him thinking that there must be an easier way to open the damn things - so he invented the now familiar pull tab. People of a certain age will probably remember pull tabs which came off the can completely - but these weren't ideal because they created a litter problem which was bad for wildlife. Variations in which people pushed the tab into the can with their fingers weren't ideal either because they could cut their fingers or their mouths on the sharp edges. In the 1970s Daniel F. Cudzik invented the "Stay-Tab" in which the tab was pushed into the can using a riveted lever.
8. Purists often say that beer from cans tastes metallic. It shouldn't, because beer cans are lined to stop the beer from coming into contact with the metal. It may be that the metallic "taste" is actually the smell of the metal can entering the drinker's nose (as most of taste is actually smell) so pouring the contents into a glass should solve that problem. If it doesn't, the beer is probably off.
9. More advantages of cans over bottles: cans, being factory sealed, are more airtight so the beer is less likely to become oxidised. They also shutout UV light, which bottles don't, and UV light can react with the chemicals in hops to produce a chemical called 3-methyl-2-butene-1-thiol, which is a bit like sulphur.
10. Collecting beer cans was a popular hobby in the 1970s and 1980s and people who were into it formed a club, The Beer Can Collectors of America, later re-named the Brewery Collectibles Club of America to make it sound more modern. Even so, the hobby could be dying out. In 2009 membership had fallen from 11,954 to 3,570. The average age had risen to 59, with only 19 members under 30.

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