Remember the scene in the movie The Jerk where Navin Johnson, played by genius Steve Martin, screams that “he hates these cans!” as a disgruntled man taking rifle shots at Navin misses and hits a wall of oil cans? Well, turns out that craft beer drinkers and craft beer makers have anything but hate for cans. In fact, demand for cans is so high that can suppliers are having trouble keeping up and brewers are being turned away.
Craft brewers produce one out of every 10 beers sold in the United States. That may not initially sound like a lot, but when you consider that craft beer’s retail dollar value is $19.6 billion, compared to the total U.S. beer market’s $101.5 billion, you understand that that’s a hell of a lot of beer being sold by craft brewers. And those numbers are growing every day. The news recently broke that, as of November 30, 2015, there were a record 4,144 breweries in the United States, most of which are considered craft brewers. There are 1,800 more breweries planning to open in the coming months. Per the Brewers Association, craft brewers sold 22.2 million barrels worth of beer in kegs, bottles and cans in 2014.
As the supply of beer increases and the trend towards canning continues, can manufacturers are feeling the squeeze. In recent years, breweries have turned to cans as their container of choice. Cans are typically cost-effective and easier to ship and store, and consumers enjoy how easy they are to carry. They also allow brewers to differentiate themselves from the pack through unique and creative designs. Also, craft brewers can pack their product into 16-oz. cans to further differentiate themselves from mega breweries like Bud and Coors, which rely on 12-oz. cans.
Can manufacturers such as Crown are raising their minimum orders to help keep up with demand. Crown has started to turn away smaller order requests and even inform their customers that they can no longer provide their printed cans. Crown, which provides cans to some of our favorite breweries (Avery and Upslope to name a couple), along with fellow manufacturers Ball and Rexam, are requiring upfront payments and order sizes that are difficult for many smaller breweries to meet. For example, Crown used to accept orders of 100,000 cans, but will now require a minimum order of 200,000 cans.
Brewbound details that customers can still get plain Crown cans, but that they must turn to shrink-sleeve wraps for any branding, which is a difficult task for mid-level breweries. “It’s not an option for us,” says Heather Sandborn of Rising Tide Brewing Company in the same Brewbound article. “We are buying multiple truckloads at a time of the same can. It [shrink sleeve] is a great option if you are running a smaller number of labels but it doesn’t make sense at our scale.”
According to the New York Times, signs of the shortage started showing up over the summer.
Perhaps breweries can invest in their own canning equipment, but that can be a steep investment and learning curve to climb.
The can shortage just might mean that breweries have to rely on bottles, but bottles have limitations on packaging creativity and are more expensive—plus, switching can cause many headaches in the production process. A can shortage may just mean that your favorite beer may be a bit harder to get your hands on—or it could be met with some incredible beer ingenuity as entrepreneurs find ways to help brewers meet the demand.
