Nashville's portable local beer offerings have improved yet again, just in time for swimming pool and boat season, two locations that are notorious for forbidding glass containers. Now in addition to Fat Bottom, Jackalope, TailGate and Little Harpeth, Black Abbey will be available in 12-ounce cans for your convenient consumption.

Black Abbey founders John Owen and Carl Meier recently joined with brewery employees for some early morning canning courtesy of Toucan Mobile Canning, which set up a portable packaging line on the brewery floor in less than an hour and was soon canning almost two cases of Black Abbey's The Champion each minute.

Initially, Black Abbey will be allocating their cans for sales at the brewery and at local bottle shops. Draft will still be the distribution of choice in bars, and they don't intend to get into grocery store sales until they have saturated the specialty beer and liquor stores. You won't miss the bold black design of their new cans, or as Toucan owner Mo Oelker pitched them about a year ago, "Black Abbey — black cans." The look is definitely striking, especially when you see more than a quarter-million empty cans stacked on pallets in the back of the brewery waiting to be filled with The Champion, The Rose and 5 Points IPA someday soon.

The official can launch party will be at Black Abbey's Fellowship Hall at 2952 Sidco Drive this Wednesday, March 23, starting at 3:30 p.m. You can be among the first folks to buy a sixer or a case to go, but thanks to Tennessee's odd laws, you cannot legally pop a top on a can in the taproom.

So to get off to what Meier is calling a "shotgun start" (wink, wink) and to support their friends at Craft Brewed, Black Abbey is throwing another She-can-igans party the next day at the retail establishment in Melrose beginning at 5 p.m. Come ready to congratulate the team on their new development and possibly to punch a hole in the bottom of a can.



