Is there really in difference between beer in a can versus in a bottle?

And it would seem that canning too fast can (no pun intended) cause issues as well.

I had an extensive 'back & forth' e-mail exchange with the owner/brewer of a local brewery about problems with their canned product after they installed a new canning line. The owner/brewer informed me that they were learning during the early implementation of their canning runs and that when they exceeded 32 cans per minute they had issues. It was quite an educational exchange but it didn't fix the bad beers I purchased and he made zero effort to make things right. I had not purchased any of the canned beers from that brewery since that incident out of principle. That brewey's cans today are likely OK but if a business owner does not make right when they sold a customer bad product they do not deserve any additional money from me.

Cheers!

 

Nicely done!

 

I know one thing--I've barely grazed both cases of bottles and cases of cans with a dolly in a walk-in, and it's the cans that (explosively) fail. If you hit a case of cans with the force it takes to break a bottle, you'll probably lose two cans.

 

I would imagine bottles are better for packaged conditioning, but I don't know why. I just don't see can conditioned beers, it's always bottled conditioned.

 

Why not? It’s a sealed container what difference might it be between glass or can in conditioning? I really don’t know.

 

Pressure tolerance (and not all glass bottles are created equal in this regard)... but some brewers are "can conditioning."

 

That would be reusing as opposed to recycling?
Hopefully this procedure is being used every where for glass.

 

Part of the "problem" in recycling glass, is the main raw ingredient to make new glass is clean sand, which is cheap and abundant almost anywhere in the world. Whether it's recycled glass or new sand the process of melting it down to make the bottles is the same. Which means that if recycled glass has to be transported further than the nearest sand pit, then costs push towards making new glass bottles really quick. And that's before adding the complications of color sorting and impurities of recycling streams.

If glass recycling is desired, then reusable bottles is the way to go, because then you save the energy of melting glass/sand and making new bottles. The next best thing is repurposing the glass for something else, like construction fill you mentioned.

 

I already discussed above that as a homebrewer reusable bottles would be A-OK with me!

It is not always a easy job to thoroughly characterize the benefits of reuseability. I have read folks post in the past that when you factor in the costs of transporting the bottles back to the specific brewery, washing the bottles (water, energy and labor costs), and other factors that reusable bottles are not cost (and conservation of resources) effective. I personally do not have the knowledge to perform such an analysis so....

Perhaps if the beer industry were to standardize on a bottle design that any brewery could reuse, perhaps this would be a cost/resource effective solution? It is my understanding that Germany has a system like this but I do not know if it is sustainable simply via economics or more like a sort of mandated thing.

Cheers!

 

If they (Russian River) ever can Pliny, I doubt I am able to tell the difference (if any).

I normally do not drink Pliny after 21 days old, so can or bottle, I don't think there will be any detectable difference.

What I can say is that after 30 days, there is a noticeable difference between 30 days and fresh Pliny. At least I can detect it.

 

They have canned dry hopped Pliny this year

 

For me personally, there's no difference in taste when drinking out of a can or out of the bottle. But the feeling of drinking is different. If I'm at a fancy pants formal gathering, I would like to drink out of a bottle and hold it with pinky out since it makes it feel like my $50 suit is able to hang with the rest of the fancy pants (fake it til you make it). But if I'm with the boys, holding a can feels more casual and homey. And it's safer and friendlier to throw cans at your boys than to throw bottles.

 

Just to double check, your are referring to Pliny for President here?

https://russianriverbrewing.com/pliny-for-president/

Cheers!

 

No, this one:

 

Interesting. So there are multiple Pliny type beers that have been canned.

 

I believe that they said that DDH Pliny was born of some tweaking to the recipe for P4P (which has been made for the last 4(?) election cycles) to make a more regular beer. Its worth remembering that RR is only a couple years into operating with tremendously more capacity thanks to their lovely Windsor facility, so canned Pliny variants will probably be something we can all look forward too

 

Totally agree! I wonder if the high speed he's running at allows insufficient time for the beer to foam up and then he's still essentially capping on air. I have no money for breweries that don't care about their product, customers or employees.

 

Totally agree! I wonder if the high speed he's running at allows insufficient time for the beer to foam

I have no idea if this has taken off or not as I sadly no longer in Oregon - but some breweries there launched a pilot program to utilize returnable bottles. I found this super interesting as it was a Venn diagram of things I like: Beer, Economics and Sustainability.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesal...rst-statewide-refillable-bottle-system-in-u-s

 

Hopefully some BA from Oregon can provide some input as to whether this localized reuse of bottles is still being implemented now (2021).

I read this article a couple of years ago and I thought it was wise to utilized a common (standard) bottle that multiple breweries could utilize but the aspect of bottle washing was stupid; from the article (with emphasis in bold by me):

“OBRC is talking with the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality about quantifying exactly how much carbon the new program is saving, and they're working on bringing a bottle-washing facility to Portland. Until that facility is built — likely by 2020 — all the refillable bottles will be sent to a facility in Montana to be washed.”

So, they are trucking all of the returned bottles to Montana, having them washed there, and then they trucked back to Oregon. Lots of CO2 emissions there! Plus fuel/transport costs.

And they started this program prior to asking “the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality about quantifying exactly how much carbon the new program is saving.” So, for all that was known this program (especially considering trucking to/from Montana) may even be worse for the environment?

I am very well acquainted with conducting system analyses (but not for the beer industry) and the value of the results is very much predicated upon the assumptions made and the scope of the analysis performed. Two people (or organizations) could come up with very different answers because they made differing assumptions and considered differing scopes while performing their analyses.

Cheers!

 

When I was a child, most drinks sold in glass bottles carried a returnable deposit.