Well, there definitely are people that do.

Working at a supermarket for the time being, I get a great sense about who consumes what. Specifically I work in the beverages department, alcoholic and non-alcoholic.

(Please note: I currently live in Germany where alcohol consumption is legal at 16 years of age. You can buy a .5 liter can o' Becks beer for approximately 50 cents in any supermarket in the country.)

We sell about *3* times as much beer in cans as we do in bottles. Bums come in at any time of the day and buy beer in cans. Old ladies come in and get their beer in cans. Teenagers sidle in and get a couple cans, of course, actually paying for them is only an option...

Basically, most people will settle for canned beer. Bums don't care about the quality of their alcohol. Neither do teenagers, who just want to get high quick. And old ladies do it because of the cheaper price tag.

Besides the obvious advantages of beer in bottles, they are also much easier to recycle. In Germany, the bottles are returned for a refund and are washed and refilled.

Drinking beer in a can symbolizes that you don't give a fuck. If you truly drink beer for the taste (which is something I can only understand in the case of Guinness), you will buy your beer of choice by the bottle. Or straight out of the keg (even better).

This has been a Standard Nodeshell Rescue.

Of course we drink beer from cans. It's the most efficient way to do it.

• Even if you look at the same brand you will get more beer for your cash if you buy the canned version.
• Cans tend to hold more beer, so you have to make less trips to the fridge during your session.
• Cans can be chilled faster so you don't have to wait so long to get a drink. (However, I concede that your beer will stay cold for longer if it's in a bottle.)
• Cans can easily be crushed and so take up less room in your bin.
• Modern cans are one piece affairs, leading to less littering in the form of discarded bottle tops.

Beer is a nice drink to have when you are hot and tired. It's good to sit around with a few cans and chat, play video games or watch a movie and it provides a gentle way of getting comfortably drunk over a prolonged period. You can make a pleasant evening out of it.

So remember kids, the packaging is nothing to get snobbish about. It's the beer that's the point.

Most of you who are reading this, and do enjoy drinking beer will probably agree with me that bottled beer does taste better than canned beer. That's the reason why I usually drink beer from bottles (or freshly drawn from the tap of course).

However, there are some situations when you want to drink beer but can't get a hold of bottles so you are forced to fall back to canned beer.

A very good although personal example is a camping site of a concert festival. Naturally, glass bottles aren't allowed there, so it's canned beer for three days. Lots of it.

Of course drinking beer in the summer sun with some nice friends and good music definitely means having a good time (at least to me =).

So after that everytime you get a hold of a can of beer I remember such days and suddenly it tastes much better. Actually, canned beer is the best for just that reason.

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Is anybody able to come up with some good factual reasons why canned beer shouldn't taste as good as those in glass bottles? I'd be really curious.

Understanding a little bit about beer fizziology (some folks call it "beer chemistry") goes a long way to understanding the problem with beer packaging.

Beer is best consumed when it is alive, when the brewing yeasties continue to reside in the ale. The best place to find such is in a pub in, say, Dublin, where the ale continues to ferment in the keg ("cask-conditioned"), producing a softly carbonated, full-flavored elixir.

Because beer is full of lovely fermentable sugars, however, bacteria love to share in the feast. The alcohol produced by the yeast helps suppress the unwanted bacteria (except in some lambics--see jdorje's lovely write-up). Hops also help deter the wanton bacteria. For brew kept in ideal conditions (a pub cellar) that is consumed relatively quickly, hops and alcohol are enough.

With the industrialization of food production and marketing, however, the local brewery went the way of the local mill, bakery, and shoemaker. Beer now faces major obstacles from brewery to your lips.

Improving packaging naturally ...

One way to make the beer travel better is to up the hops and alcohol level. The British did just that when exporting their ales to troops occupying India, creating what is now called India Pale Ale (IPA) (see sneff's wonderful treatise on IPA). If you love hops (think bitter) and a good buzz, India pale ale can be heavenly.

90% of making good beer is keeping everything sanitized. As long as a cask of beer is consumed in a month or two, the few bacteria that wander into the process remain woozy enough not to reproduce so much as to cause a problem (male humans face similar problems when swimming in booze, though through a different mechanism). If beer sits on the shelf for more than a month or two, this is not enough. Buying beer by the keg for consumption in a month works for a pub, but most drinkers cannot consume such quantities at home (though many try). It also involves a minimum amount of intelligence fiddling with CO2 regulators and such, intimidating the nontechies among us.

Extending shelflife with heat...

Louis Pasteur was a great man, who did a lot to save a lot of people. Pasteurization effectively kills the teeny critters that reside in beer, both yeast and bacteria. Unfortunately, it also affects the taste. Still, bad beer is better than no beer, and a great beer that has been pasteurized still tastes mighty fine.

In the United States, pasteurized beer cannot be labeled "draught beer." To "draught" (or "draft", a word that has unpleasant undertones for those of us who remember the Viet Nam War) means to pull, and a draught beer is one that has been "pulled" from the cask sitting in the pub cellar. Draught beer in the States now means a beer that has not been pasteurized. The commercial brewers get around pasteurization by microfiltering their product, which, alas, also filters out much of the flavor.

Increasing portability...

Ale has been bottled since at least the 16th century, and has a long and varied history, which perhaps I will node someday. The problem with bottling with glass, however, is that light can affect hops. The skunkiness in beer results from some light transforming the isohumulones in hops, a process called photodegradation. Researchers at the University of North Carolina isolated the compounds in 2001--the resulting free radical from light struck hops is called (I kid you not) "skunky thiol."¹

The best way to minimize this is to use brown glass. Corona marketers came up with the brilliant idea of tossing a lime in the bottle (covers a lot of errors). Miller Brewing Company uses a special hop extract that appears immune to skunking.

Heineken has an interesting problem. The beer is traditionally stored in green bottles⁴, which do not prevent skunking. As a premier beer, it is often found showcased under fluorescent lights in your local liquor store. As a result, a generation of imbibers has learned to "appreciate" skunked beer, an acquired taste. The first time I tasted unskunked Heineken was in Amsterdam--I remember it tasted good--I remember little else. Today Heineken offers clever advertising to keep its product "kewl," but if you want a better sense of its truer nature, drink it canned.

Canned? You Meisterbrau moron! Everyone knows bottled is better than canned...

Canned beer has an evil reputation, some of it earned, but most of it not. The first canned beer in the United States was developed in Newark, New Jersey, just a block away from the flashpoint of the '67 riots. The Gottfried Kreuger Brewing Company and the American Can Company had to overcome two problems. First, cans in those days were opened by taking off the whole lids, which made for sloppy drinking. Second, beer reacts with steel, and can create (as canned beer drinkers can attest) a funny metallic taste.

The two companies created the can opener, which they supplied with the brew. They also figured out a way to line the can to minimize the metal taste. Today's manufacturer's package canned beer with barely a problem.

So why the canned taste? The liner is on the inside, not the outside. If you buy your beer in a metal can, pour it into a glass. That simple. The metal taste comes from sucking the beer straight out of the can. Do a blinded taste test. If you cannot tell the difference (and please be aware that some companies serve different products with the same name in different packages³), then forego "kewl" and save a few pennies.

In summary, then, traditional draught enjoyed while sitting in a pub with folks who love life tastes best.⁴ Canned beer tastes better than skunked beer. Light protected bottled beer tastes better than beer sucked straight out of the can. And all beer tastes better than water

Bottoms up!

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¹David Williamson, UNC News Services, Public Release Date October 17, 2001
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2001-10/uonc-ucf101701.php
This was actually supported by the NSF--your tax dollars ar work.

²filoraene pointed out to me that Heineken is bottled in brown bottles back in the Netherlands; maybe the Heineken execs figure most Americans would not notice a bit of skunkiness.

³Guinness in the can is not the same formula as Guinness in the bottle, and neither is the same as real draught--again another story for another node.

⁴Michael Jackson (the beer connoisseur, not the other one) argues that beer always taste better in a good pub. "People are always asking which is best, draught, bottled or canned beer? The strongest argument in favour of draught beer is its habitat. To drink draught beer, one goes to a pub. The delight in the pint is doubled by the context in which it is enjoyed."
http://www.beerhunter.com/documents/19133-000073.html