I’m about to head out on a three day jaunt through the woods of Crawford Notch, NH (with a very important stop at Moat Mountain Smokehouse & Brewery in North Conway on my way home) but I found a great article from the Durango Herald this morning which I wanted to pass along.

The article highlights a few Colorado breweries — Ska Brewing Co. and Steamworks Brewing Co. — who have recently discovered the benefits of putting their beer in cans. According to the Durango Herald,

When Ska Brewing Co. debuted a beer in February, it released the ale in bottles and cans, hoping to capitalize on a growing trend in the brewing industry.

Five months later, cans of the Modus Hoperandi India Pale Ale are outselling the same beer in bottles by 2-to-1.

Ska is selling so many cans the company is struggling to brew enough beer to keep up. The Durango brewery recently added two, 2,790-gallon fermenting tanks to fulfill demand.

And how fitting is it that this year marks the 50th anniversary of beer in cans (Coors first canned beer in 1959 at its facility in Golden, CO). But Oskar Blues was the first craft brewery to really put its beers in cans — they first put Dale’s Pale Ale in cans in 2002 — and since then, growth in the segment has exploded. Today, forty North American craft brewers now can their beer, including seven in Colorado alone.

“The bottle inevitably falls short of the can,” said Gamble [beer manager at Star Liquors in Durango], citing fresher smells and sharper taste from cans. “It generally seems to be a little bit better product.”

Brewers touted the portability of beer cans that can be taken on the river, to the golf course or down the trail. Aluminum cans are also more easily recyclable and lighter to transport.

The article from the Durango Herald is a good read and one which helps to further taut the benefits of cans over bottles when it comes to better beer. What do you think? What’s your favorite canned beer?

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I just wanted to pass along a neat article from MSN which friend passed to me a few days ago about an extremely microbrewing trend emerging around the country which I had never heard of called “Nanobrewing”. According to MSN,

“The nanobrewery concept allows one or a few good craft brewers to spend a few weekends a month brewing batches of beer that can be sold to pubs in their communities,” Hall, a full-time physicist, told Newsday in March. “The model isn’t one that focuses on eventual growth. The nanobrewer isn’t going to quit his day job. They are brewing because they love the process and want to share the results with the people in their neighborhoods,”

The article goes on to explain how Nanobreweries are capitalizing on the new-found (or re-energized) DIY ethos in America and the breweries themselves, if you can call them that, are recalling a historical time way-back-when when people would brew for their households and communities on a very, very micro level.

The Nanobrewery concept reminds me a lot of CSAs for beer. I thought it was a neat example of, I guess, one step above homebrewing and really exemplifies the “craft” in craft beer. What the article didn’t explain was just how small you have to be to qualify as a “Nanobrewery” (are there any special requirements or are they all under the radar?). There are some pretty damn small breweries here in the Northeast but I hadn’t ever heard the term before. Do you have a favorite local Nanobrewery, or do you belong to one yourself?

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