#HTE

Core77 Reader’s Wife Designs the Perfect Beer Can Opening

After seeing our post on The Design Evolution of Beer Can Openings, reader Devin Sidell’s wife may have designed the perfect beer can aperture. To get you up to speed, we were discussing how a single opening in a can leads to “glugging,” i.e. turbulence while drinking since there’s no airflow. Users of early flat-top beer can designs thus punched two holes in them:

Well, Sidell took the time to Photoshop up this clever way to solve the problem using the modern-day tab:

Pretty brilliant, no? “The top being for the intake of air and the bottom for drinking, of course. The tab can already swivel so it can perform the same action twice.

"I’m sure this has already been done,” Sidell writes, “but I’m just curious why it’s not on cans already.”

If it has been done, we can’t find it. Here’s a photo from the Budweiser Brewery showing a bunch of different can apertures that have been tried over the years:

I don’t see any tab-based dual aperture designs there.

About four years ago Miller experimented with a “punch top can” design that had a little second tab the user could punch open with a key or similar. 

Unsurprisingly, a rather stupid news report emerged attempting to sow fear among parents, claiming that the design was meant to encourage the shotgunning of beer:

This is about glugging, people, not shotgunning!

So, Sidell, to address why this hasn’t been done: My guess is that A) no company wants to deal with whatever perceived backlash Miller might have faced, and/or B) the added manufacturing cost is perceived as not worth it because C) customers ultimately don’t care. This is what I hate about having a design background; you can’t help but notice these little ways that an experience could possibly be improved, however minutely, then realize that most of society is not that interested.

In any case, Sidell, or should I say Mrs. Sidell, I like your design! “I…have to give credit to my very creative wife,” Sidell writes, “who basically gave me the answer to the design in about .02 seconds of me asking her!”