Uncanny

No, I'm not bitter at all that Ken Wells gets paid to drink beer and write about it in the Wall Street Journal. I'm sure the deadline pressures are intense and the expectations high. "C'mon Ken, finish that beer up and turn in your latest piece." Life is rough, isn't it?

This time around Ken has been tasked with taste testing craft beers that come in cans:

Can the lowly beer can and high-style craft beer coexist?

The mere juxtaposition of the two is an oxymoron to some and heresy to others. Yet after years of resistance, if not outright disdain, a growing number of small U.S. brewers are braving beer snobs' barbs and putting their beer in aluminum. To find out whether tasty beer can come from a pedestrian can, we held a blind tasting -- and found an interesting answer.

He goes on to provide an overview of the history of the beer can and why beer purists came to associate cans with everything wrong with the brewing industry in America. In recent years, more and more craft brewers have been looking into canning their brews for a variety of reasons:

Cans are user-friendly. They stack and store well in refrigerators and coolers; they chill quickly and have the tactile benefit of feeling cold; they make nice billboards for their contents; and they are welcomed in many places where bottles often aren't -- around swimming pools, marinas and beaches, on boats and golf courses and aboard commercial airplanes. Indeed, one craft canner, Portland Brewery of Portland, Ore., has gotten its MacTarnahan's Amber ale on Alaska Airlines flights. Cans also block out all light, which along with heat is a major spoiler of beer.

James Page, a local brewer has also come out with a canned product in order to get Northwest Airlines to offer it on flights. Those of us who fly Northwest on a regular basis certainly appreciate the expanded offering.

But what about the taste?

We assembled in The Wall Street Journal's downtown Manhattan offices, and I poured the beer out of sight, presenting it in a proper beer glass and then pouring samples for the panel. I provided only spare information: I would pour the beers by style, starting with lagers and ending with dark ales, and every style would include a mix of cans and bottles. I told the panel if they thought strongly that a beer was canned, they should say so. I asked them to rate all the beers on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the highest.

The results?

Details are in the accompanying chart, but of the 16 beers tasted, canned brew, in average scores, rated four of the five top spots, though the top-rated beer was Stone's India Pale Ale in a bottle with a rating of 8.8. The canned Scape Goat Pale Ale popped an 8 and Old Chub Scottish Ale a 7.8. Two other canned offerings scored higher than 7.

One other thing became clear -- on the taste front, cans weren't much of an issue.

This is a definitely a topic that we will be bring up with Mark Stutrud from Summit on tomorrow's NARN show.

Meanwhile, I hope that Ken Wells gets a chance to relax and enjoy the weekend with a good beer. He's probably worked up a powerful thirst with all the backbreaking work he's been doing of late.