The lingering memory of past mistakes
# 39: Oskar Blues Ten Fidy
Canned beer has kind of a bad rep, some of it undeserved, kind of like screw-top wine bottles. If packaged right, there’s no difference in quality from cans and corks and metal caps, but still, it just doesn’t seem as classy.
Beer cans had a very bad start. The first beer cans weren’t the convenient pop-top aluminum cans of today, but more like the cans of pinto beans and pumpkin pie filling that are gathering dust in the back of your pantry. The American Can Company, partnering with Gottfried Krueger Brewing of Newark, produced the first canned beers, “keg-lined” with an enamel coating to keep the beer from reacting with the steel. They were lighter than glass bottles, more durable, stackable, but required special tools to open. All a bottle needs is something with a lip—a belt buckle, a door handle—and the leverage is already there, but these thick steel monsters demanded a church key in every kitchen and tackle box. American ingenuity and spunk eventually overcame this problem, producing first the pull tab, bane to barefoot beachgoers, and eventually the attached tab on a thin aluminum can we still use today, just in time for hair metal and the New Romantics. But convenience is still its downfall. Canned beer is meant to be, or least most often is, drunk from the can, so even though the inside was coated from the very start, sticking your nose and lips right into that metal top can give beer the metallic taste that everyone was always looking for. Just pouring it out first fixes that, but who’s going to pack pint glasses along with the folding chairs and cooler full of cans?
So I was a little surprised to see an imperial stout in a can. “Pack it in, pack it out” suggests that Oskar Blues feels that campers deserve fancy beers, too, and that seems like a nice sentiment. I’m not camping, so I used a glass. It came out thick and tarry black, hardly any carbonation, and it smells like super-roasty malts and coffee. The taste adds some cherry-like fruitiness, and some vanilla. It’s huge and creamy, and all the flavors blend together nicely on top of a base of roasted malts, big and charred and bitter but not overwhelming. This is a pretty nice beer, not as complex as some imperial stouts, but a solid and tasty take on the style. I’m still a little weirded out by the can, though.