While the first patent for the tin can was awarded in 1810, engineering problems would delay the realization of the beer can for more than a century. Beer can exert more than 80 pounds per square inch of pressure, which led to ruptures, and lining had yet been optimized to prevent the taste of metal from leaching into the fluid. The American Can Company managed to solve the first two problems by 1923, three years after the Volstead Act put an end to selling beer in any form, and it was their cans that were used for the first 2,000-can run of Krueger’s Finest a decade later. (These were sold in Virginia, as Krueger didn’t want to damage his brand in his home state if the experiment failed.) Eighty-five percent of surveyed consumers said that canned beer was closer to draft in taste than bottled beer, and the ease of transport endeared the format to brewers.

Because beer takes up a lot of space, its distribution has typically been limited to regions nearby its location of production. As Liesbeth Colen and Johan F. M. Swinnen wrote in an anthology article, “Beer Drinking Nations: The Determinants of Global Beer Consumption,” brewers expand “mostly through mergers and acquisitions and brewing licenses for in-country production of foreign beers rather than actual trade of beer.” This is fine for Budweiser, which can just open a new brewery geographically close to whichever market it wants to break into. But craft brewers are often deeply invested in their own regionality, if perhaps more for leveraging identity than quality control. (This is a quandary Lagunitas and Ballast Point will be facing imminently, after their respective high-profile purchasing by Heineken and Constellation, respectively.)

In 1935, Pabst became the first large brewery to can, producing the earliest iteration of what is probably canned beer’s most famous image, as well as an early hipster fetish-object. These original beer cans were heavy; they first were tin, later steel, then eventually incorporated aluminum sides. They were flat-topped and could only be opened by jabbing a hole in them with a church-key style tool.

Production of beer cans halted during the Second World War, as metals were prioritized for the war effort. After the war, the Aluminum Corporation of America, otherwise known as Alcoa, helped drop the price of aluminum and broaden its market, which had been narrowed by wartime strictures. This push included Marianne Strengell’s Forecast Rug—a promotional rug made almost entirely of aluminum—recently on display at the Museum of Arts and Design.

When the Hawaii Brewing Company introduced the first all-aluminum beer can in 1958, it made the shift partly for weight savings. The aluminum slugs and tops transported from the mainland weighed far less than the materials necessary for the former tinplate cans (two pounds versus five, for every 24 cans). Structural issues, including inadequate lining, led to the cans being pulled, which seems to have been a factor in the brewery’s bankruptcy. In 1962, Iron City Beer of Pittsburgh (Alcoa’s hometown), introduced an easy-open can with an Alcoa opening tab. The next year, Schlitz would roll out this model nationally, and in 1965, the finger-loop was introduced. In 1969, canned beer sales first surpassed bottled.