#HTE
The Design Evolution of Beer Can Openings
The greatest technological challenge of the 20th Century was not the moon landing; it was how to get fresh, delicious beer from a brewery into a customer’s belly. Prior to the 1930s if you wanted beer, you and a guy named Amos rolled a barrel from the brewery back to your village, tapped it, and distributed it into jugs. (One benefit of this method was that in a financial pinch, the barrel could be worn in lieu of clothing, but it was otherwise inconvenient.)
Glass-bottled beer also existed, but you try transporting a crate of it over a bumpy wagon trail without breaking any of the bottles, especially while you’re drinking from one.
In the 1930s manufacturing technology made a huge leap forward: It become possible to seal beer inside of steel cans.
Cans were easier to stack, ship and carry, weighed less than glass bottles and were less prone to breakage. One drawback was that you could not break a can over a counter and brandish it during a saloon brawl, but this was offset by the fact that you could crush one against your forehead, which never failed to impress the ladies and establish you as “a real character.”
But they key problem with cans was how to get the beer out of them. The tops of these cans were flat…
…so either you or Amos had to make sure you had one of these on hand at all times:
That “church key,” as it’s called, was used to lever two triangular piercings into a can, one for your mouth, the other for airflow.
Seeking a better way, innovative package designers of the time then developed the cone-top can in 1935:
If you ask me, this is kind of a lateral move. You still needed to carry an implement around, in this case a bottle opener rather than a church key. But one benefit was that you gained a bottlecap with each can. (During the Great Depression, bottlecaps were basically your kids’ Xbox.)
Both the flat-top can and the cone-top persisted into the 1950s and ‘60s. But in 1959 an engineer named Ermal Fraze was on a family picnic and forgot to bring a church key. Fraze was forced to open his beer cans using his car bumper, like some kind of alcoholic MacGyver. He subsequently invented the pull-tab:
Fraze patented it in the 1960s and sold the rights to Alcoa, and it became the standard can aperture.
As convenient as the pull-tab was, it became a bit of a public nuisance and a hazard. Some folks ripped the tab off and threw it on the ground, creating litter; others simply dropped the tab inside the can, betting that it wouldn’t work its way back out. As you can imagine, emergency rooms started seeing people who had accidentally swallowed these tabs.
Seeking a way to not have a loose tab, in the 1970s Coors experimented with this cockamamie “push tab” can:
The smaller hole was for drainage, the larger hole was for drinking out of. But the problem with this design is that folks would often cut their fingers on the sharp edges of the apertures while trying to open them. Coors doesn’t taste great to begin with and it tastes even worse when mixed with blood.
Finally, in 1975 inventor Daniel F. Cudzik created the pop-top can we all know today:
This created no waste. But again there was, of course, a downside. (For chrissakes why is drinking beer so hard?!? It’s like the gods are against us.) The aperture was relatively small…
…and with no means of airflow, pouring the stuff into your mouth can be turbulent. While it creates an amusing glug-glug-glug noise, that loses its charm pretty quickly.
In the 1990s can manufacturers finally began widening the mouth…
…which ameliorates, but does not completely solve, the glugging issue. In my own experience I’ve found that it’s very difficult not to spill beer on your shirt after having just ten or eleven of these.
In more recent years we’ve seen a newer method: The full aperture end. Companies like Australia’s BentSpoke Brewing Co. are using these huge pull-tab lids:
I like the look of these, and I’m assuming the can’s lip is far back enough from the edge that you won’t cut your lips on the sharp edges. But Australian beer judge Chris Shanahan isn’t a fan, calling the cans “a retrograde step in my opinion, reminiscent of the first detachable rip-tops [which led to] discarded tabs from beer and soft drinks [littering] the ground everywhere.”
I suppose that disposing of a wide lid, especially on a camping trip, is a bit more of a hassle than storing bottlecaps, since the lids are larger and sharper. What do you think a good design solution would be? Perhaps create some way that the lid can somehow be shoved into a cavity in the bottom of the can?
I invite Core77 readers to come down to our offices, with a six-pack under each arm, and we can throw some of these back and brainstorm a bit. Also bring some chips, maybe some dip, and I wouldn’t say no to cold cuts either.
http://www.core77.com/posts/59733/The-Design-Evolution-of-Beer-Can-Openings