Profile America: Canned Beer

Tuesday, January 24 — An innovation in product packaging — and a staple of TV advertising — is having its 82nd anniversary today: Beer Can Appreciation Day. The first canned beer went on sale on January 24, 1935 as a marketing test in Richmond, Virginia, by the Gottfried Krueger Brewing Company of Newark, New Jersey. Experiments with putting beer in cans had taken place as early as 1909 but the technology of the time couldn’t stop the beer from interacting negatively with the metal of the can. Prohibition delayed further development. By the late 1960s, canned beer sales exceeded that for bottled beer. There are some 1,745 breweries in the U.S., employing about 38,000 people in a nearly $35 billion per year craft.

You can find more facts about America from the U.S. Census Bureau online here.

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