If you had tried to put beer in a tin can in 1933, you wouldn’t have ended up with a drink, you would have ended up with a bomb. While canned food had been a staple for a century, the first canned beer was delayed by a huge engineering problem. Beer presented a physical nightmare that the Big Three brewers, Pabst, Schlitz, and Anheuser-Busch, were terrified to touch. The problem was the physics of pasteurization, which required internal pressures of 80 pounds per square inch. It was a force that routinely caused early prototype beer cans to bow, leak, or literally explode.
This is the story of how a small, struggling brewery in Newark, New Jersey partnered with the American Can Company (CanCo) to take an engineering gamble that the giants of the industry thought was a suicide mission.
The First Canned Beer “Quick Specs”
- The First Canned Beer: Krueger’s Finest Beer (January 24, 1935).
- Why the Delay in Canning Beer? Standard cans couldn’t handle the 80 PSI required for pasteurization without exploding.
- The “Metallic” Taste Fix: A secret lining called Vinylite acted as “invisible glass” to stop the beer from eating the metal and the beer from having an awful metallic taste.
- The Opening Hack: The cans were so strong they required the invention of the Church-Key opener just to get inside.
The First Canned Beer: An Overnight Success Decades in the Making
The first beer to ever be sold in a can was Krueger’s Finest Beer, brewed by the Gottfried Krueger Brewing Company of Newark, New Jersey. When those first 2,000 cans went on sale in Richmond, Virginia, in 1935, it looked like an overnight success. In reality, it was the end of a desperate, multi-decade engineering war. To understand how Krueger finally made it to the shelf, we have to look at the secret work the American Can Company was doing during the ‘Dry’ years, and the violent physics they had to overcome to keep their prototypes from turning into bombs.
The American Can Company’s quest to can beer didn’t stop during the Dry years. In fact, they were laboring in the dark throughout Prohibition, perfecting their designs without a legal market to test them in. It was a massive industrial gamble; they spent years engineering solutions for a product that was technically illegal to sell. But that persistence meant that when the 21st Amendment was finally ratified, CanCo wasn’t starting from scratch, they were already standing at the finish line, waiting for a brewery brave enough to take the first shot.
The 80 PSI Shrapnel: Why Early Beer Cans Were Pressurized Bombs
These first cans that Krueger used to can beer were made by the American Can Company or CanCo, out of Pacific Grove, California. This company had started trying to develop beer cans as far back as 1909 but they gave up fairly soon. As I said, getting beer into a can was a feat. Why? Well, beer can generate a pressure over 80 pounds per square inch inside the can, which was well over what the cans of the time could withstand.
The 80 PSI required for pasteurization didn’t just cause small leaks; it turned early prototypes into shrapnel. Because 1933-era tin cans relied on a simple ‘lap seam’ (where the metal edges just overlapped), the internal gas expansion would cause the side seams to unzip violently or the flat ends to dish outward until they buckled and sprayed hot beer across the factory floor. It wasn’t just a manufacturing defect, it was a pressurized bomb. Anything over 40 pounds per square inch pressure, if it didn’t outright explode the cans, would certainly cause them to spring leaks.
It took 100 years after the invention of the food can for beer to be canned because of the extreme 80 PSI pressure required for pasteurization.
The Five-Layer Fold: How the Double-Seam Defeated the Physics
To prevent the ‘unzipping’ seams, the American Can Company moved away from the traditional, flimsy ‘lap-seam’ and perfected double-seam technology. This wasn’t just a better weld; it was a mechanical marvel where the edges of the can body and the lid were curled together and flattened into a five-layer interlocking fold.
This double-seam acted as a structural ‘girdle’ around the top of the can, allowing it to finally contain the 80 PSI of a pasteurized beer without the metal buckling. However, this ultra-strong vault presented its own problem: it was so tough that the company had to invent a brand-new way for consumers to actually get to the beer inside.
The Penny Problem: Why Early Canned Beer Tasted Like Metal
The strength of the can wasn’t the only problem. The other problem was that it was a can! Beer is acidic, so early cans would have been corroded by the beer, infusing it with a God-awful tin can taste. The ‘metallic’ taste wasn’t a hallucination. Because beer is chemically active product, it would pick up iron and tin ions from the can walls within days. To survive, the American Can Company had to find a lining that was essentially an ‘invisible glass.’
While competitors were trying to improve the metal, CanCo realized the secret wasn’t in the steel, but in creating a molecular barrier, essentially turning a tin can into a glass-lined vault. The goal was to protect the beer from the inside of the can and to protect the can from the beer. And, they had to do this while keeping the cans inexpensive. After all, glass bottles were well established and had none of these problems. Plus, many of them could be returned and refilled.
Vinylite: The “Invisible Glass” That Almost Worked
The American Can Company’s solution, Vinylite, developed by Union Carbide. It was a heat-fixed plastic film that prevented any molecular exchange between the beer and the metal. While it was remarkably effective for the time, the early application process was imperfect; any tiny ‘pinhole’ gap in the lining would still result in a ruined batch. This inconsistency is exactly why many early adopters remained convinced that glass was the only way to protect a beer’s true profile. This stigma against canned beer still exists to this day.
While glass was the gold standard for flavor purity, it left the door open for UV rays to create skunked beer, problem the opaque can solved instantly.
The “Instructional Can”: Why the First Beer Cans Came with a Manual
Those new strong beer-can tops that kept the can from leaking or exploding caused it’s own simple, but maddening problem. The very same reinforced, heavy-duty rim that kept the can from exploding also made it nearly impossible to open with a standard kitchen knife or a traditional 1930s lever-opener. The American Can Company hadn’t just built a container; they had accidentally built a vault. It was the ultimate engineering irony: the American Can Company had spent 20 years trying to keep the beer in, only to realize they had made it too difficult for the consumer to get it out.
While modern drinkers debate whether beer is better in chilled glasses or frosted mugs, the 1935 consumer was just trying to figure out how to get to the beer inside the cans without cutting themselves. These early cans would have been a quite a change to existing beer customers. They were difficult to open, as all cans of the day were.
One advantage of the beer cans was that the entire top did not have to be removed, as with canned foods. You just needed to punch a hole to drink out of. To do this, the customer had to use something sharp like a church-key style can opener. The cans devoted a lot of label space to telling customers how to open them, with two pictorial instructions and a picture of a can opener one side. The company also distributed these can openers with the shipment. For theses reasons, the early beer cans were called “instructional cans.”
The Can Company Invents the Familiar…Bottle Opener?
The Can Company had also invented and manufactured these openers that were used to punch holes into the top of the cans. That means that the Can Company is responsible not only for the first successful beer cans, but also for the church-key style bottle opener that every beer drinker is familiar with! The name “Church-Key” was a sarcastic joke because the opener looked like the large keys used by monks to open church doors (and, by extension, the monastery beer cellars).
You probably have one of these “bottle openers” in your kitchen drawer right now. It has one curved and pointy end, with a tab for gripping the can rim, used to punch holes, and another, non-pointed curvy end, used to remove the caps from beer bottles. I think we owe the Can Company a debt of gratitude! These openers were one of the most simple but effective tools ever invented, and even though the usual modern design is a bit different, the concept is still pretty much the same. Ironically, we more often use them to open bottles and most of us tend to call them a bottle opener!
Engineering 101: The Principle of Least Effort
When it comes to engineering, the church-key is a masterclass in the Principle of Least Effort. It uses a simple first-class lever to concentrate manual force into a single, pressurized point, easily piercing steel that would otherwise require a machine to breach. By using a single piece of stamped metal with no moving parts, the designers eliminated every possible point of mechanical failure. It is a rare example of ‘Perfect Design’, a tool so efficient that, nearly a century later, it hasn’t been improved upon because there is simply nothing left to subtract.
The “Reputation Shield”: Why the First Canned Beer Launched in Virginia
It was a fairly bold move for Gottfried Krueger to market beer in a can. Customer acceptance was certainly an issue and there was every reason for the company to expect the new cans to fail. And, this answers the question as to why a brewery based in Newark, New Jersey, shipped its first cans all the way to Virginia! This was far away from the brewery’s home market to keep them fairly dissociated from the product if it were to fail so that the company’s reputation on the Northeastern seaboard was not affected.
The “Cream Ale” Controversy: What Was the True First Canned Beer?
However, the cans were a success and many customers seemed to like them better than bottles. Post-prohibition drinkers were used to ‘sketchy’ alcohol like needle beer, so a sealed, factory-labeled can actually offered a new level of perceived safety and quality control. Based on this initial success, the company followed Krueger’s Finest Beer, in 1935, by putting Krueger’s Cream Ale into cans.
The “Test Batch” Debate: Why Krueger’s Finest Still Claims the Crown
It is a common historical trap to confuse a “test batch” with a “market failure.” While some sources claim Krueger’s Cream Ale was the “real” first because it was the first mass-marketed success, it is quite clear that Krueger’s Finest was the beer that actually broke the engineering barrier.
The 2,000-can shipment of Finest wasn’t just a prototype; it was a verified consumer trial. Because most people had not had legal beer for over a decade due to Prohibition, the stakes were incredibly high. If those 500 households had reported a “tinny” taste or exploding cans, the “Cream Ale” launch would have never happened. Krueger’s Finest did the “dirty work” of proving the 80 PSI science was sound.
Krueger’s was selling a simple, drinkable Finest Beer, long before the modern IBU arms race changed how we measure hops. It was marketed for the home—a place where people could find out if beer is truly more relaxing than the spirits they’d been drinking during Prohibition.
First Major Breweries Put Beer in Cans
The success of the first canned beer was enough to cause many other breweries in the U.S. and abroad to follow suit. In August 1935, Pabst began canning beer, the first major brewery to do so. Then, Schlitz followed a month later. By the end of that year, 37 American breweries were canning beers.
Soon, a rival to the Can Company’s can, which they had named “Keglined,” was developed by Crown Cork & Seal Company, which perfected a process that allowed them to produce a two-piece steel can with a neck and a crown cap, the ubiquitous standard bottle cap that the company had invented. They called this “the Crowntainer” and it held a quart of beer. These cans could be opened more like a bottle.
The first aluminum beer cans appeared in 1958, and the first cans with ring-top openings appeared in 1965, which had a metal loop that was pulled to remove a metal tab, creating an opening to drink out of. This explosion in canned variety eventually led to the marketing wars of the 1970s, including the famous legal battle over the lite vs. light beer trademark.
Further Reading: Your Beer Questions Answered
- Do “Hoppy” or IPA Beers Last Longer Than Regular Beer?
- Does the Flavor of Beer Get Better as It Ages?
- Will Letting a Cold Beer Get Warm (and Then Cold Again) Ruin It?