Craft brewers running out of cans

The surge in US craft brewers canning rather than bottling their beers is leading to producers struggling to get their hands on the format.

Demand has grown so great that the chief producer in America, Crown, has upped its minimum order to a size many smaller breweries can’t meet.

According to the New York Times, breweries began to notice the squeeze in the summer of this year after Crown upped its order from 155,000 to 200,000 cans and orders began taking months rather than weeks to fulfil.

As Tim Doward, a mobile canner, told the paper: “That’s a lot of cans to store, it’s a lot of cash to lay out, and the little guys just don’t have that.

“Crown was working with people and they’re very interested in the craft industry, but it just caught them by surprise.”

Brewers are exploring alternatives, Rockaway Brewing in New York raised US$30,000 to buy its own canning machine recently, and there are small canning operations around the country but not enough to satisfy demand.

With the US craft beer industry in double digit growth, the situation is likely to become ever more acute.

Cans are not the only resource the boom in craft beer is putting under pressure, it was recently reported that hops were in increasingly short supply, not helped by poor harvests of late.