Craft Breweries can shortage?

I was told that Forgotten Boardwalk experienced a can shortage during the past Summer.

 

The USA production has been going down for some years. That does make for a commodity shortage for aluminum.

 

I take it reading comprehension isn't your strong suit? One person mentioned that the minimums were high and that smaller breweries were switching to slapping labels on blank cans, but other than that o one is claiming that (most) breweries are having trouble filling a minimum order, because this is shortage is coming from the can producers.

Take off your tinfoil hat and stop thinking there's a fucking conspiracy behind every door nd that breweries are looking to manufacture crises in order to raise prices. For the vast majority of breweries, the price of their beer has been on par with inflation on everything else that the consumer price index tracks. For example, the wholesale price I pay for Sierra Nevada has gone up roughly 12% since December of 2009, which is just over 2% per year. Meanwhile, the CPI as a whole has gone up 11.2% in the same period. I bet I could run numbers on 6 packs from Deschutes, Lagunitas, Sam Adams, Stone, Rogue, Widmer, Firestone Walker, and probably any other brewery in our database that was around 6 years ago and find roughly the same percentage change.

Yes, there's trendy new breweries that come out of the gate and charge $15 for a 4 pack of overhyped IPA, there's outliers like Goose Island jacking up prices on BCBS by 20 something % since last year, and there's random breweries like The Bruery that have always charged a huge premium for their products, but the vast majority of breweries have simply increased prices at a rate that allows them to stay slightly ahead of inflation, which is what any smart company would do.

 

Here's an interesting stat. Canned beer as a total percentage of all beer sold in the US peaked in 1990 at 60% of the total market. After than it went steadily down, until it reached 48% in 2004. Since then, it has been inching up again - reaching 54.1% in 2013 (last year listed at The Beer Institute's site's Packaging Mix - the BI, sadly, no longer appears to post online the entire set of Brewers Almanac statistics).

BUT - the beer market today is larger than 1990's, so the amount of canned beer is now about the same - ~112 million barrels of beer were canned in both 1990 (60% of 192.5m bbl) and 2013 (54.7% of 204.6m bbl).

Turns out, too, that the 4 plants ABI sold to Ball were primarily soft drink can plants (I guess the difference being the linings? Or maybe just the majority of their customers.) and AB kept 7 beer can mfg. plant which produced (in '09) 60% of their needs, as well as a commit from Ball to continue to product for AB. Ball later closed two of AB's plants a few years later. MillerCoors has a joint venture with Ball in Golden, CO to operate the largest US can plant.

 

I was curious about the future of the large Ball facility in Eden, N.C. because of the closing of the Miller Brewery next door. Seems like an opportunity for them to maintain production.

 

According to the Brewers Association, canned beer while growing faster than the total "craft" segment itself, is only "...10% of total craft volume..." (in 2014). Lots of bottles still being filled.

 

Soft drinks would have liners, as those products have a pH lower than beer. Think of using the cola of your choose to make a penny shine, or make a chrome bumper gleam.

 

Yes, I realize that - should have made it clearer that I was wondering if there is a different liner for pop cans - why else (well, other than local customers - brewers or soft drink bottlers) would some plants concentrate on soft drink cans and others on beer?

 

The coffee had not kicked in - yes you would know that!

As far as I can tell, BPA is used in those cans as a liner. Maybe someone who works in the industry can educate us on any difference.

 

Yeah, BPA is also in most of the US soft drink cans - I have a vague recollection of reading (or maybe I just jumped to that conclusion?) that the linings for soft drink cans are thicker or otherwise different due to the high acidity of the contents. Maybe it was here? Where they don't really say the linings are different (and I jumped? )...

 

That might make good sense, as beer is in the 4.0-4.5 pH range, soft drinks are around 2.5-3.0 pH.

I managed to knock some AL foil off a counter into a bucket of Star San, pH <3, and when I noticed it a couple days later, it looked like grandma's doilies.

 

Those kind of numbers would not give a lot of confidence to a CEO thinking of an investment in increased production. Especially in an industry that is closely tied to soda and big beer sales. Both of these are declining. And as much as it is important in our life, canned craft beer is a very minor component of their demand.

 

Maybe this will help? One of the three can manufactures, Crown, is building a new plant in upstate NY:
http://www.crowncork.com/news/press...pecialty-beverage-can-plant-tioga-county-ny-1

 

Sorry if I missed something like this in earlier posts, but it's not about raw material shortage or aluminum prices. Deep-drawing tooling for stretching that lovely thin can to shape is not cheap (or common, but certainly exists...), and minimum quantities at production facilities (like all at once, in a batch they can invoice) is a real thing. But the printing thing is a bigger issue. Setting up to print directly on a small-batch beer's can could be outrageously expensive. Here in Michigan, for example, Black Rocks and Vivant both have a default "limited-release" can which has an adhesive decal for the specific beer it is applied to. It has a few lines of text and a consistent barcode (which most places with automated machines take back, and reject the printed label's barcode...) and it is an incredibly good idea. Way easier to swap out the fluid in the big tanks they're filling from whenever necessary, than change the CNC-controlled painting/printing program. Plus, you can peel off the labels and stick them on stuff if you really like the beer...

 

A small brewery near me just started canning their beers a few weeks ago. They purchase 16 ounce blank cans and they place a label on those cans:

 

When I read your thread title, my first thought was "yes, they can. Duh."

Guess this is to be expected with rapidly escalating demand and the shift away from good old glass.

Save the Bottles!

 

I know out here in LA Refuge Brewing has been help up on getting their grapefruit IPA out the food by this, as have others. So I know this has been a real problem for companies that are growing rapidly.