The 10 Most Iconic Beer Cans and Innovations of All Time — and How They Changed Packaging Forever

Please consider the beer can. The aluminum cylinder is one of beer drinking’s greatest inventions, equally a standard accessory at bars, concerts, and backyard BBQs, and a status symbol for drinkers seeking out the latest aromatic double IPA. Behold what I’m holding! Might I crack a can for you, too?

“The idea of packaging being your first handshake with a customer is true,” says Isaac Arthur, co-founder of CODO Design, an Indianapolis-based food and beverage branding firm.

Since the early 20th century, breweries and can manufacturers have grappled with finding the right format to package beer in a portable can. Bottles are great, but their heavier weight and possibility for breakage means that “aluminum [cans have] become the gold standard,” says Oceania Eagan, founder and creative director of Blindtiger Design, which specializes in craft beer.

The first beer can was sold in 1935, and from that point forward breweries and manufacturers have tinkered with form, function, and gimmicks to deliver the most memorable beer-drinking experience possible. From Guinness nitro widgets to Coors’ color-changing mountains, and the rise of the 16-ounce can, here are 10 of the most iconic beer cans and innovations over the last 90 years.

The First Beer Cans Are Perfected

Brewers began considering canning beer in 1909, according to archaeologist and beer-can collector David Maxwell’s paper “Beer Cans: A Guide for the Archaeologist.” Two holdups: Tin cans weren’t sturdy enough to contain highly pressurized beer, and technology didn’t yet exist for internal can coatings. When beer reacts with metal, it produces precipitated salts “rendering the beer discolored and undrinkable,” Maxwell writes.

Prohibition paused research, but it ramped up as repeal neared. The American Can Company created a stronger steel can and developed an enamel and brewer’s pitch lining, before switching to synthetic vinyl. (Epoxy resin linings are standard today.) Gottfried Krueger Brewing of Newark, N.J., tested packaging the first beer in cans — Krueger’s Special Beer — in fall 1933, before releasing it and Krueger’s Cream Ale commercially in 1935. By year’s end, 18 breweries were canning beer, according to Maxwell’s paper.

Cone-Top Cans Make the Format More Accessible and Affordable

Credit: Morean Auctions

Beverage cans took time to arrive at their sleek, cylindrical form. In the 1930s, as cans emerged as viable beer vessels, manufacturers experimented with different shapes — including cone-top cans with conical, easy-to-pour spout tops. Resembling bottles, these crown-capped steel cans could run on existing bottling lines, allowing smaller breweries to package them without investing in canning lines.

In 1935, G. Heileman Brewing of La Crosse, Wis., became the first brewery to package its beer in cone-top cans (check it out!), and various designs followed over the decades. The heavy format was phased out by 1960, but its legacy remains as a transitional bridge in can design.

Opening a Beer Gets Easier With Pittsburgh Brewing’s Snap-Top Can

Credit: Brewriana

In the late 1930s, breweries began adopting flattop beer cans that required a can opener to puncture triangular holes for sipping and pouring. Church keys, as the openers were called, were popular until 1962. That year, Pittsburgh Brewing Company introduced snap tops — removable tab tops — on its flagship Iron City lager, in partnership with aluminum giant Alcoa.

“Beer packaging’s early roots innovated out of making beer consumption more convenient,” says Ben Butler, founder of design agency Top Hat.

Companies such as Schlitz, then a national giant, jumped aboard the pull-tab train that became standard on roughly 75 percent of the country’s beer cans within a decade, according to the Brewery Collectibles Club of America.

P.S. In 2012, actor Adrian Grenier founded the short-lived Churchkey Can Company that required drinkers to open its cans with an actual church key. “Folks just want to crack open a beer and enjoy it rather than the novelty of fiddling around with a key,” Eagan says.

The StaTab Sets the Can-Opening Standard

Credit: Rusty Cans

Pull tabs, which evolved to include ring-pull tabs, were equally convenient and wasteful. Drinkers pulled them off and tossed them aside, and “they used to lay around on roads like cigarette butts,” says Mike Schacherer, the executive creative director for design agency Little.

In 1975, engineer Daniel F. Cudzik of aluminum firm Reynolds Metals (best known for Reynolds Wrap) filed a patent for a can-opening device that stayed attached to the can. Known as the StaTab, it first appeared that same year on beer cans from Falls City Brewing in Louisville, Ky.

The tab has “become the standard of today’s canned beverage,” Maxwell wrote.

The Mountains Turn Blue for Coors Light

Credit: Coors Light

Crisp, easy-drinking light beers are best served cold, as frigid temperatures amplify carbonation and enhance refreshment. To hammer home the ideal serving temperature of Coors Light, Coors Brewing (now part of Molson Coors Beverage Company) worked with Chromatic Technologies to develop a color-changing label. When the beer reached the optimum drinking temperature — around 43 degrees Fahrenheit — Wilson Peak, the 14,023-foot mountain featured on the can, would turn blue.

The innovation first rolled out in the U.K. in 2007, before hitting Canada the following year and arriving in the U.S. in 2009. By 2011, the color-changing cans helped catapult Coors Light past Budweiser to become the second-best-selling beer in America.

“They elevated the package beyond just a beer carrier to being a downright symbol for the brand,” Schacherer says.

Crowlers Make It a Breeze to Bring Beer Home From a Brewery

Bringing draft beer home from a brewery once meant lugging a 64-ounce glass jug known as a growler. The novelty of fresh beer soon met the reality of cleaning and storing the costly and cumbersome containers. “You would go to somebody’s house, they’d have, like, 50 growlers from all the breweries they visited,” Schacherer says.

In 2013, Oskar Blues production manager Jeremy Rudolf began tinkering with vintage tabletop canning machines — the kid used to seal tomatoes — and discovered that the contraption could be modified to fit Ball’s 32-ounce cans. Crowlers, as Ball dubbed the oversize cans, helped revolutionize taproom to-go sales by offering a clean, recyclable packaging alternative.

“The Crowler quickly replaced the growler,” Schacherer says. During the pandemic, the cans became an economic lifeline for breweries and bars that had plenty of beer in kegs, but no customers to drink pints on-premise.

The 16-Ounce Can Ascends Thanks to the Alchemist’s Heady Topper

Credit: The Alchemist

The craft brewing industry has long used packaging as a way to stand out. Early breweries like Sierra Nevada used brown glass bottles to differentiate themselves from green-glass imports like Heineken and canned domestic lagers.

The shift toward cans began in 2002, when Canada’s Cask sent Oskar Blues a fax promoting its two-vessel, hand-canning system. “We laughed hysterically for six months,” founder Dale Ketechis told me for a 2006 article in alternative newspaper New York Press. “Then one day I stopped laughing.”

As craft breweries grew in number, so did their embrace of cans — culminating in a 2011 seismic, supersized shift. That year, the Alchemist Brewery in Vermont began canning its Heady Topper double IPA in 16-ounce cans. The move helped turn canned IPAs into fetish objects and ushered in the era of the smooth, fragrant hazy IPAs.

For small breweries, “a 4-pack of 16-ounce cans became a more economical way to get their beer out,” Eagan says. The 16-ounce can “became the de facto craft format in the early 2010s,” Arthur adds, fueled by “the birth of mobile canners that allowed small breweries to distribute.”

Guinness Delivers a Draft-Only Experience With Nitro Can

Credit: Guinness Storehouse

In 1959, Guinness perfected the technique of nitrogenation — adding nitrogen to beer to create a creamier, more consistent, longer-lasting head. The signature two-minute pour became synonymous with the stout, spiking sales and eventually leading the Irish brewery to invest in R&D to replicate the experience in packaged form.

The process began in the late 1960s, and it took nearly two decades for Guinness to perfect the widget, a device that nitrogenates beer inside the can and which the brand debuted stout in 1989. (In a 2004 poll, readers of an Irish magazine named the Guinness nitro widget the top technology advancement in the preceding 40 years, besting the internet.)

“Real innovation solves a problem or creates a new experience,” Arthur says of Guinness bringing a bar experience inside homes around the globe.

Adds Eagan, “Nitro Guinness is the only way to experience a true Guinness.”

19.2-Ounce Cans Replace Bombers for Single-Serve Occasion

Over the last 90 years, breweries have experimented with packaging sizes to stand out, from 7-ounce Coors cans introduced in 1959 to five-liter Heineken kegs. (In the 1960s, there were even gallon cans of beer.)

During the late-2000s, 22-ounce glass bottles — a.k.a. bombers — became the favored format for trying new craft beers. But the can boom relegated the oversize bottle to the recycling bin. Their replacement: 19.2-ounce cans regularly filled with double IPAs and other potent beers.

“The 19.2 has exploded because it hits a real sweet spot,” Arthur says. The format excels in both concert venues and convenience stores, delivering a boozy bang for the buck.

Packaging 19.2-ounce cans of strong IPAs is now smart, essential business for breweries. “More of us have updated our packaging lines to ensure we have the ability to meet the growing demand from customers,” says Walt Dickinson, co-founder of Wicked Weed Brewing in Asheville, N.C., which now offers its flagship Pernicious and Imperial Perni-Haze IPAs in 19.2-ounce cans.

Printed Cans Minimize the Need for Wasteful Packaging

Innovative liquid and label design were hallmarks of 2010s craft beer. Each week, breweries released fresh beers wrapped in eye-catching sticker labels — perfect for ascendant social-media platforms such as Instagram, but problematic for recycling.

Stickers and plastic shrink sleeves must be removed from cans to ensure that they can be properly recycled, a step many drinkers (myself included!) often forget. But over the last few years, cutting-edge technology has allowed breweries to digitally print labels on cans.

“Digital can printing is now displacing labels and shrink sleeves from the market in a big way while also providing an environmentally sustainable solution,” Eagan says. “This was a dream only 10 years ago.”

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