Celebrate Beer Can Appreciation Day
Today is Beer Can Appreciation Day – the day we celebrate the beer can and all it does.
They may seem small, but cans are a huge part of the American beer business. More than 62% of all of the beer brewed and sold in the United States is packaged in aluminum cans, and that’s up from 56% just 10 years ago. Looking at imported beer, more than 26% of the beer that gets brought into the United States comes in cans, up from just 16% in the last decade.
A year’s worth of canned beer sold in the United States would fill the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool 527 times over. You could stack all of those cans end-to-end, and they would reach from the Earth to the Moon and back 12 times!
Unfortunately, the price of the aluminum that goes into beer cans has skyrocketed because of the 10% tariff on imported aluminum enacted last March. Last spring, modeling by John Dunham and Associates projected the tariffs would increase American brewers’ costs by $347 million per year. Since that time, brewers large and small have seen the costs of their cans go up, regardless of where they are made or how much recycled material is used to make them. That’s why the Beer Institute is working hard to eliminate the aluminum tariffs and bring transparency to aluminum pricing.
Beer is America’s favorite beverage alcohol, and the aluminum can is America’s number one beer package. So crack open a can and from all of us here at the Beer Institute, Happy Beer Can Appreciation Day. Cheers!
