In most cases, cans will be the best way of packaging beer. But there are exceptions. Will North asked packaging and brewing experts to share the key considerations that should shape your choice of cans or bottles.

As a first step to retail, for a small brewer, bottles offer one clear advantage: bottling lines are cheaper to set up. “You can set up a very simple counterpressure system for bottling which will allow any brewery, even a home brewer, to bottle quite competently,” says Darren Fenton, co-founder of mobile packaging experts Bevcraft.
Toast, a sustainable business aiming to find uses for discarded bread, launched its beers with its eye on supermarket sales. Their brewing partner, Hackney, had a bottling line, so this is what they used, explains co-founder Louisa Ziane.
But once you’re set up, costs can start to bite, particularly with the advent of Extended Producer Responsibility, which adds to the cost of using bottles.

Store in a dark place
Cans have one key advantage: they will prevent light striking the packaged beer. “A bottle, even a brown or green bottle, can allow UV light in which will affect the beer,” says Fenton. Toast’s Ziane agrees, noting this was part of the reason for the company to seek to add cans to its offering.

Dissolved oxygen
Bevcraft’s Fenton highlights another risk: dissolved oxygen. This has a particular impact on pale, hoppy beers. “We ran an internal review with a brewery partner,” Fenton recalls. “They had a counterpressure bottling line. With correct seaming procedures, we were able to beat the bottling process by about 100 parts per billion of dissolved oxygen. Cans, if done properly, will result in a better quality product.”

Move more with less
Cans are a much more efficient means of packaging. Not only does each can use less material, but their shape means that more beer can be fit on a pallet. “You’ll fit 70% more product on a pallet in cans versus bottles,” says Fenton. “That’s just down to the size and weight and the bulkiness of a bottle.”

Mouthfeel
The way in which your beer will be enjoyed may also impact your packaging choices. At home, or in a craft beer pub, many drinkers will decant their beer into a glass. But at a picnic or formal event, bottles may have the edge over cans.
Felix James is co-founder of Small Beer. His career has seen him work with some of the biggest names in brewing, across the UK and Europe. The quality of experience is different when drinking from a can versus a bottle, he says. “People generally enjoy drinking out of a bottle more than they do out of a can, right? The feeling of glass on your lips, even if you’re pouring it into a glass, it just all feels like a much more premium experience.”
And at many events, organisers will prefer bottles on tables than cans. Toast does good business at events, and Ziane says organisers prefer bottles. “We are in quite a lot of higher end restaurants. And we also do a lot of events. They often choose bottles.”

Consider demographics
Toast, with sustainability at the core of its brand, has seen good business from Waitrose: the employee-owned, values-focussed chain is popular among middle aged, middle class shoppers prepared to pay a bit more for products they see as higher quality or in line with their beliefs.
“It’s a slightly older, slightly more affluent audience,” says Ziane, “It wasn’t traditional to drink beer out of a can, unless it was those very high strength lagers that didn’t have the best reputation.”

Champagnes of beer
Bottles can add a feeling of luxury and tradition to some beers, particularly those given as gifts. Bevcraft’s Fenton says, “With winter releases and bottle-aged beers, there’s something about a cork and cage that people still really enjoy at special occasions.”

A special touch
Once, cans felt like metal, and bottles felt like glass. Some bottled brands, with large runs, could distinguish themselves with distinctive mouldings: think Grolsch, or certain Picpoul de Pinet wines. But modern techniques for converting raw materials into cans and printing them, give cans new ways of standing out.
Michael Comiskey is marketing manager for Bevcraft. “A drawback versus bottles is that cans are not very tactile,” he explains. “They might look really good, but they all feel the same. With digital print and traditional print, you can achieve matte and gloss finish as a starting point.  And now some energy drinks have a raised bevel. That’s usually done by either a spot print, or by something in the can manufacturing process itself.
“But that generally requires higher minimum order quantities, because the can plants need to justify the changeover of tooling.”

Space for branding
More and more space on package labels is taken up by required materials, such as ingredient lists and recycling marks: “Just from a branding standpoint. you have way more coverage on a can in terms of what you’re able to brand,” says Comiskey “You have 360 coverage on it. Whereas normally with a bottle you’re printing a small label to cover a small area at the base of the bottle.”
Small Beer sells beer in both cans and bottles. James agrees that cans offer more space for branding: “On a can, there’s a large flat surface area for marketing. On a bottle there’s a little bit less flat surface area.”
The brewer has selected an uncommon, stubby bottle to make its brand stand out. This has a feature, James says, that aids clear labelling: “We have a recessed label panel. The foot of the bottle and the shoulder of the bottle are a little bit higher than the rest of the bottle. When the bottles move against each other in a pack, the labels aren’t scratching against each other.” That keeps the labels looking good, but does still limit space.