Apparently last year, Budweiser UK, ran a contest where the big prize was a vintage 1965 Ford Mustang. Jack Kirby, an art and design student, wanted to win what was essentially his dream car, but figured the odds were not in his favor. So instead he used 5,000 Budweiser beer cans to create his own replica of a Mustang. That about 834 six-packs. Who said college drinking can’t have an upside?

The family and I are in Toronto, Canada for a combination mini-vacation and to attend a friend and colleague’s wedding reception, so posts will be lighter for a few days. Doing some image searching lately, I’ve come across quite a few beer houses of one type or another. Sensing a theme, here are some of the things I found.

First, there was this house that looks like a wooden keg, somewhere in Asia by the looks of it.

This is more of a beer facade, I suppose, but it struck as me as mildly funny, though perhaps the apartment-dwellers not in 6F were not as amused.

In the Summer 2004 edition of the newsletter, Recycling Rag, featured a new technique for siding a house with squashed aluminum cans developed by an architect in Silver Spring, Maryland, Richard Van Os Keuls. So far it’s pretty low-tech, but apparently he’s working on a commercial application once he figures out a machine to uniformly squash the cans.

There’s much more information about Van Os Keuls’ house in the newsletter.

In early 2007, I wrote an article exploring the world of beer geeks for Beer Advocate magazine. In researching the piece, I came across the Houston Beer Can House, of which I had only been vaguely aware of before that time. But I’d never visited it, so after I attended the Craft Brewers Conference in Austin, the family and I headed to Houston to take my son Porter to the Space Center. But we found time to stop by the Beer Can House, which is now owned by a local arts foundation, The Orange House Center For Visionary Art. They recently renovated it, inside and out, and now it’s open to the public. When we were there, it still wasn’t open, so we could only see it from the sidewalk, but even from there we could see quite a bit. I took a ton of photos, which I finally posted in the photo gallery.

The Beer Can House, in Houston, Texas.

For many more photos of the Beer Can House in Houston, Texas, visit the photo gallery.
 

Efes Pilsen is the most popular beer in Turkey. First brewed in 1969, it quickly established itself as a local favorite. The Efes Beverage Group is one of the largest beverage companies in the region, and also contract brews Beck’s, Foster’s, Miller Genuine Draft, Sol, Warsteiner and even Coca-Cola.

Below are some of the entries in the Efes Beer Can Art Competition:

Next month is the 21st anniversary of the Toronado and last night they hosted the release party for the new cans from 21st Amendment Brewery & Restaurant.

21st Amendment’s Chief Hop Head Shaun O’Sullivan and Chief Watermelon Officer Nico Freccia show off their cans.

In 21 years, this was the first tome the Toronado ever sold beer from a can.

“Big Daddy” Dave Keene enjoying a can of Hell or High Watermelon.

Shaun O’Sullivan, Dave Keene and Nico Freccia.

You’ve no doubt heard the news that 21st Amendment has redesigned their cans and is having them brewed at the Cold Springs Brewery in Cold Springs, Minnesota. The two styles that are being canned — Live Free or Die IPA and Hell or High Watermelon Wheat — should be available throughout San Francisco and Bay Area BevMo stores the third week of July. Here is some video of the new cans being manufactured and then being filled for the first time.

The Ball Manufacturing plant in Milwaukee making the 21st Amendment cans, where they produced over a quarter million of our new Brew Free or Die IPA and Hell or High Watermelon cans.

First production day running the cans at Cold Springs Brewing in Minnesota:

Shaun O’Sullivan showing off the new Brew Free or Die IPA can.
 

A colleague forwarded me this press release (thanks, Tom) correctly concluding it was ripe for blog fodder. It comes from an unusual source, it’s a press release from the Avery Dennison Graphics & Reflective Products Division. You probably know Avery from their labels that work so seamlessly with Microsoft Word. Dave Leach, who loves in Chicago, has a odd hobby — yes, that’s me saying that — he collects “world’s largest items,” that is the biggest one of a particular thing. I imagine he’s got got one helluva big rec. room. Apparently not content to just find the biggest things, this time he commissioned one: A G. Heileman Old Style beer can. Leach hired Road Rage Designs, a wide format graphics provider. They, in turn, went with Avery for the wrap.

From the press release:

The Avery Graphics MPI 1007 EZ RS was printed with 1970’s Old Style Beer® graphics. Leach chose the Old Style Beer Graphics as a tribute to his father, whose favorite beer is the vintage brew originally manufactured by The G. Heileman Brewing Company, now owned by the Pabst Brewing Company.

“We chose Avery Graphics MPI 1007 EZ RS vinyl for this unique opportunity because it is easy to work with and the overlaminate really made the colors in the graphics pop on such a large scale application,” says Kris Harris, vice president of Road Rage Designs.

Here’s some photos of the new can.

Putting on the beer label.

Leaving Ohio for Chicago.

On the road.

 
But if he’s really going for the world’s largest can, what about these?

This six-pack of Old Style Beer cans certainly look bigger. They’re at the old G. Heileman brewery in La Crosse, Wisconsin, which is now the City Brewery. First created around 1970, they were painted over in 2000, only to be recreated three years later, in 2003, but as the new brewery’s biggest seller, LaCrosse Lager cans.

They’re 54 feet tall, and look much thicker, too. It’s especially noticeable in the photo above, where you can see the size compared to the van parked in front of them. For Leach, perhaps the La Crosse cans aren’t really cans, but storage tanks, and so they don’t count. His can, on the other hand, looks to be a thin aluminum and very much resembles a beer can from top to bottom.
 

Like most people, my first truly micro-canned beer was Dale’s Pale Ale from Oskar Blues. Before that I’d had beer in cans from Portland Brewing (MacTarnahan’s Amber Ale) and Big Rock Brewery in Canada, not to mention all those 16-oz. widget cans from Great Britain and Ireland. Those weren’t bad, but Oskar Blues showed (and continues to show) that big, flavorful beer can taste great in a can, too. I was also quite impressed when I visited the Ball canning plant in Fairfield, California to watch the 21st Amendment beer cans being manufactured. Prior to that, I shared the anti-can bias of most of my peers. I probably even helped to spread it because I vividly remember drinking a lot of beers with metal turbidity problems when I was a teenager. But as I learned, the problems with metal leeching in the cans that altered their flavor had largely been solved using newly developed organic polymers that coated the inside of the cans. And the true test — taste — proved it once and for all. I have now done several side by side taste tests with draft beer and the same beer from a can, and you can not tell the difference between the two. Between that and the many advantages to beer in a can, I am firmly in the flavorful-beer-in-cans-are-a-positive-development-for-the-industry camp. With New Belgium Brewing entering the market with canned Fat Tire I’d say the future of canned beer is safe.

Collecting beer cans is probably one of the most popular hobbies within all breweriana. People have been collecting cans since 1935, when the first ones appeared. It probably peaked in the 1970s, when many savvy breweries created not only special commemorative cans but entire series of them to cater to collectors and, not incidentally, increase sales. But by 1980 less than fifty breweries remained to feed collectors. Over the past five or so years, the number of new breweries beginning to can their beer has increased dramatically. A year ago when I wrote a feature story on canned beer for Beer Advocate magazine there were around two dozen micro-canneries using Cask systems or a similar set-up. Today there are over forty, with several more contracting canned beer or hand-canning. The Queen City Chapter, a breweriana club in Cincinnati, Ohio, has set out to document all of the new cans and they have an impressive website that chronicles this second wave of canned beer. For most examples, they have a photo of the can. They have, as far as I know, the most comprehensive online collection of new beer cans and it’s a great place to follow along with who’s started canning now, because it seems to change fairly often as new breweries join the ranks of beer can breweries.

This is my fifth pick for “Website of the Month,” which I started featuring on the right sidebar four months ago, because I get so many link requests, and because I have so many in my blogroll, I wanted to highlight the best ones I come across.

With any luck, the new 21st Amendment canned beer will be available by the 4th of July weekend. Initially, they’ll be test marketing the cans in all Beverages & more stores, but will also continue to be available at the brewpub. After a three-month test, assuming all goes according to plan, then they’ll be rolled out in all area stores.

 
The 21st Amendment IPA, now renamed Live Free or Die IPA.

And the Watermelon Wheat, now renamed Hell or High Watermelon.

After the announcement of New Belgium cans, I e-mailed their P.R. person, Alicia, and they hadn’t yet gotten around to taking photos of the new cans yet. She just got the photo today and now we can all see what the new Fat Tire cans will look like.