I also tend to agree with the masses that beer always tastes better out of a glass, but I think this seems to hold true regardless of whether it’s poured from a can or bottle. And I have to admit, I don’t know too much about the whole UV ray issue, but I’m easily impressed/convinced by dorky charts such as the one in James’ final post.

I enjoyed reading through the entire chain, and thought I’d reproduce it here.

Here’s James’ first post, “Black Cheese, Green Meat, and Beer in a Can”:

From high school I recall some amateur-psychology experiment about the power of sensory incongruities. If you were offered a piece of cheese that was colored black, or a slice of meat that was green, you would think, Yucckkk!, even if its taste was perfectly fine.

I’m not going to get into whether this behavior is learned, innate, evolutionarily sensible, or whatever. I’ll just say that I have the same reaction to beer in a can. If it is coming from a metal housing — like the one at the right, which I saw all too often in my long-lost years in Texas — then I (snobbishly) assume it is not going to be very good. Or, even worse, the one at the left, popular during an era in American history I don’t even tell my children about.

Imagine then my confusion at encountering the beer below in a local store. It’s is called Dale’s Pale Ale, and it looks like it comes from the same schlock brewing tradition as Texas Pride. I would have instinctively shied even from getting close to it on the rack, let alone buying or drinking it — were it not for a reader’s note saying: Never mind that it’s in a can, it’s good.

And it is! Here it is, shown on this sunny February afternoon in DC.

Historians of the American craft-brew wars are presumably well familiar, as I was not, with Dale’s Pale Ale and the Oskar Blues brewery in Colorado that produces it. The brewer who came up with the formula tells the Creation Story of the beer, and the brewery has an official-description pagethat tells more about its pedigree, awards, and so on. The brewery also includes this claim to restoring the dignity of canned beers as a whole:

America’s first hand-canned craft beer is a voluminously hopped mutha that delivers a hoppy nose, assertive-but-balanced flavors of pale malts and hops from start to finish. First canned in 2002, Dale’s Pale Ale is a hearty (6.5% and 65 IBUs), critically acclaimed trailblazer that has changed the way craft beer fiends perceive canned beer.

I’ll say: it’s a start. Try it for yourself. And if you’re tempted to send me a lecture about not judging things on appearance, I’ll say: Yeah, yeah, tell me about it when you’re eating green meat.

Here’s the second post, “It Appears That I Was Very, Very Wrong About Canned Beer”:

A week ago I confessed my bias against beer that came out of cans, rather than from a tap or one of the brown glass bottles that have come to be associated with America’s craft-brew renaissance. Reminder, on the counting-our-blessings principle: for us Yanks this truly is the Golden Age of Beer.

I have the additional blessing of being able to rely on the reading public to set me straight. In case you shared my confusion on this topic, the sampling of messages below may be useful to you as well. Visual aid at right: a can of Surly Furious, one of the fine products of Surly Brewingcompany of Minnesota, which many readers touted.

From a reader in Pennsylvania:

Snob! Throwback! Don’t you read Consumer Reports? Cans are much superior to bottles in protecting beer from light, its worst enemy. All the classy European beers come in cans. If you’ve ever ordered beer on an airplane, it was in a can because a canned beer weighs only 2/3 as much as a bottled one. It also doesn’t shatter if dropped. The idea that the beer tastes of aluminum is an urban legend. After all, draft beer comes in a big can.

Many people wrote to hammer home the point made in that last sentence. As someone in Colorado put it, “New Belgium Brewing in Ft. Collins has their flagship brew “Fat Tire” available in cans as well as their “Ranger IPA” [JF: I have had this, and it's great] and “Sunshine Wheat”.  Great for traveling.  And don’t forget, ALL draft beer is packaged in aluminum kegs.”

Similarly:

I remember a brewer telling me once that cans are just as good as bottles for storing beer — in fact maybe better since they don’t let light in.

The problem, he said, is that your sense of taste comes partly through your nose, by way of smell.  When you drink beer from a can, your nose is buried in the aluminum can.  When you drink from a bottle, you’re not smelling aluminum.  When you pour a beer in a glass, your nose is in the glass, and you can smell the beer as well as taste it.  He held that preference for tap beer is largely rooted in this fact.

So pour your Dale’s Pale Ale in a glass, and see how it stacks up.  I’m not sure a glass can help your Texas Pride, however.  The theory has its limits.

Yes, I agree. Except in conditions of duress, I drink my beer out of a glass, not a bottle or can. Seeing it is part of the enjoyment! Except perhaps for Texas Pride. Also:

Aluminum canning has a ton of advantages over bottling. First, it’s lighter and stronger than bottles, which means easier transportation. Weight also means that cans are supposedly more environmentally friendly than bottles (this Slate article explores the issue). Second, aluminum blocks light and glass doesn’t. Even though amber glass does a reasonably good job, you can still see the liquid, right? Ultraviolet light exposure is probably the worst thing that can happen to your brew. Lastly, cans are just easier to handle on the consumer end. Lightweight, less breakable, easy to recycle, just a lot nicer on that end.

So why don’t more craft brewers can beers? According to my friends, it’s because it costs a hell of a lot of money to set up a canning operation. Filling bottles is relatively easy by comparison (obviously, filling kegs is even easier). That’s basically the long and short of it, as far as I can tell.

After the jump, one more omnibus in-praise-of-canned-beer message. This is just a small fraction of what came in, but for now I say: Uncle! Thanks! And I’m looking for Surly.

From another reader in Colorado, which is one of several states contending for the title of America’s current craft-brew-nirvana:

Whoa, I sort of assumed you already knew about Dale’s Pale Ale*.  You probably then don’t know about Upslope Brewing, or Avery either or the myriad other craft cans (a quick google search yielded this somewhat informative site: http://craftcans.com/ )…

Canned craft beers are BOOMING here in Colorado and the reason is not just that CO is one of the epicenters of US craft brewing, more importantly CO is also the foremost state (or 2nd) for outdoor recreation/outdoor lifestyle.  And for that set of people, cans have always been far preferable because:
-they are more durable
-always openable
-if damaged are not dangerous
-if damaged you may be able to salvage the bulk of the contents
-easier to clean up the debris if damaged
-once finished are superiorly packable and light (pack it in, pack it out!)
-have compact regular shapes that are easy to pocket/pack (or load a cooler)
-are somewhat softer if you crash with one in a pocket (still hurts like a mother though)
-chill faster
-fit in a koozie** better
etc…

Before Oskar Blues, most outdoorsy people packed whatever canned beer they preferred (I’m a Hamm’s drinker myself but recognize it is an acquired taste!) for the above reasons even if they really would have preferred a “good” bottled beer.

And finally, science comes to the rescue in the final (?) post, “Science Speaks on the Crucial Canned Beer Question!”:

In response to previous installments one and two, an Actual Scientist writes to set us straight about what really happens to precious droplets of beer when they are housed in amber-colored glass bottles as opposed to metal cans:

Sure, cans will keep out light better than bottles. But I want to correct something one of your readers wrote regarding ultraviolet light getting through amber bottles. The reason for the amber coloration is that it allows longer-wavelength, low-energy light to pass through, but blocks the high-energy photons including virtually all of the UV. Here’s one spectrum I could find online, here. (My students would look at me funny if I walked into the lab with empty beer bottles to take their spectra.)

Amber glass transmits some visible light, so yes you can still see the beer–and since beer has some color, it does absorb some visible light and in principle this can trigger some reactions. But it’s UV light that does some serious photochemistry, and if your beer is in an amber bottle,you don’t need to worry about UV. (You can neglect that tiny hump around 340 nm.) I would expect that the difference between amber glass and aluminum cans is minimal as far as photodegradation is concerned.

So there. Granted, this chart is from a company that makes protective glass, but at face value it suggests that no UV light at all makes its way through amber glass. I will turn to my bottles of Lagunitas or Victory or Sierra Nevada or [name your brown-bottle-using brewery] with hope and trust restored.

Further on the trail of error, a veteran of the beer industry writes to chastise not me but one of the readers I quoted.

Your post admitting a wrong opinion of beer cans contained the following quote from a reader:

>>As someone in Colorado put it, “New Belgium Brewing in Ft. Collins has their flagship brew “Fat Tire” available in cans as well as their “Ranger IPA” [JF: I have had this, and it's great] and “Sunshine Wheat”.  Great for traveling.  And don’t forget, ALL draft beer is packaged in aluminum kegs.” <<

I work for a beer distributor and can assure you that beer kegs are not aluminum. The industry standard is steel, although some craft breweries have turned to plastic to cut costs.  I’m not aware of any beer kegs made of aluminum. Steel is used for its durability. Most kegs remain in circulation for many, many years.

Now, back to self-criticism as it applies to me. I mentioned yesterday that can-protected Dale’s Pale Ale, of Colorado, had been in the “top ten” of a NYT tasting panel, rather than “winning” it, as a loyalist reader in Colorado had claimed. And in the most recent testing I was talking about, from 2010, that was indeed true. But the reader has come back to point out that in an earlier taste-test, in 2005, DPA had been the NYT’s winner. So we’re all right. And just as we still address George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter as “Mister President,” even though someone else later got more votes than they did, so too can we refer to Dale’s Pale Ale as a “national champion” beer, as at least once in its career it has been.

Bonus international comment after the jump.

A reader who has tried beers around the world reports:

Back in the 80′s when I first tried hand-drawn British pub ales, I considered those to be the standard against which all other beers and ales should be measured. (These were quite a revelation after I had come of age thinking of beer as an industrial product that was sold on the basis of being refreshing, not tasting good – Miller Lite’s almost tongue-in-cheek claim notwithstanding.)

Shortly thereafter, the American microbrew revolution took hold, and my tastes migrated to the American versions of those British ales, such as Mirror Pond Ale, Boont ESB and Firestone-Walker DBA. [JF: enthusiastic +1 on all of these!!] But along the way I discovered a canned British ale – Boddingtons – that is widely available in U.S. supermarkets and is a near-perfect rendition of the ale I have drunk in British pubs.

If you’d like to support the project, click here. You can pre-order the EP, buy a ticket to the release party, get the band to cook dinner for you, get a private show, and more.

Also, here’s ‘Warm’ from our show at Sally O’Brien’s last December:

January 26, 2012

Paul Artiuch and Sam Kornstein are graduate students at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Throughout the month of January they are in India researching market-oriented approaches to reducing agricultural food waste. They will be sharing their project scope and some of their findings in this blog series.

Until now, we’ve spent the majority of our time exploring upstream agricultural supply chains – learning about what happens to food between farms and markets, before it reaches end consumers. Unlike many western countries, Indian consumers waste remarkably little food, as a use is found for nearly all left-overs and food scraps. However, this doesn’t mean that there’s no waste, and Pune, a four million person city three hours southeast of Mumbai, is implementing an innovative initiative to change that.

The other day we spent our morning with Santosh Gondhalekar, an engineer, energy expert, and founder of a bio-energy start-up company, Gangotree Eco Technologies. We had coffee with Mr. Gondhalekar in a garden outside his office, while he enthusiastically described how Pune is on its way to being India’s first waste-free city.

Each day, Pune generates about 1,400 tons of waste – 800 tons of organic waste and 600 tons of dry waste (e.g., paper, plastic, glass, and metals). In addition to the city’s municipal waste collection agency, Pune also has a sizable waste-picking community, with over 2,000 individuals who work full time as part of a cooperative to collect and sort the city’s waste. Nearly all of the dry waste has value so it gets sorted out by the waste pickers before being sold to recycling companies. The organic waste remains, and historically has been placed in a municipal dump.

Just a few years ago, the Pune Municipal Corporation engaged in a number of public-private partnerships to extract value from this organic waste. Here’s how it works: the city puts up the required capital to build bio-digestion facilities that can convert organic waste to electricity. Private companies then operate the facilities, selling the electricity back to the city to be used to power street lights. Excluding the upfront capital costs, the operation is profitable for the private firms. And for the time being, the city is willing to invest the capital, essentially subsidizing the projects, as they reduce the city’s waste burden, lowering the cost of maintaining municipal dump sites.

Currently 10 of these bio-digestion plants are operational, each converting five tons of organic waste to electricity every day. Mr. Gondhalekar took us to one of the sites, where we got to see exactly how the process works.

Each morning, city trucks pick up organic waste, primarily from the city’s hotels, and deliver it to the bio-digestion facilities. The hotels are required by law to pay a fee for this service, which generally covers the transportation costs. Once the waste arrives on site, waste pickers sort it to ensure that it’s 100% organic as other inputs could disrupt the bio-digestion process. The waste, or feedstock, is then chopped up and put into the bio-digester, where bacteria converts it to methane and compost. At the end of the day, the gas is scrubbed to convert it to 99% methane, and then burned in a generator that creates electricity. The compost is given to local farmers.

So far the initiative has been very successful, and there are plans to have 20 additional plants operational by the end of 2012. Pune has 144 city wards, and if each ward had its own bio-digester, the city would be able to extract electricity from all of its organic waste.

Mr. Gondhalekar has been involved with the planning and execution of these projects, and showed his enthusiasm for the initiative’s success. However, his company, Gangotree Eco Technologies, is working a new project he finds even more promising. His plan is to convert municipal organic waste to what he calls green coal.

Green coal has been around for quite some time, and is essentially compressed bio mass that can be burned in place of coal in furnaces and power generators. It’s an effective substitute for coal, and large companies including Cadbury and Coca-Cola have recently converted furnaces in some of their Indian plants to now use 100% green coal. Historically, it’s been made from farm waste – inedible husks and stalks that are left over after harvests.

Gangotree Enterpises has developed a proprietary technology to make green coal from municipal organic waste, the same inputs used in the city’s bio-digesters. This feedstock is easier to acquire than farm waste, and transportation costs are lower since cities are geographically concentrated. And the economics are compelling: the upfront capital costs are half those of a bio-digester, and the green coal pellets can be sold for three times the value of methane. This means that green coal plants should be profitable, even without any capital investment subsidies from the city.

Mr. Gondhalekar told us that his firm’s pilot plant is nearly finished, and Gangotree Eco Technologies is planning to license the technology, using a franchising model, to businesses in the region. Between the bio-digester expansion and Gangotree’s green coal initiative, Mr. Gondhalekar is optimistic that Pune can be a nearly waste-free city, and believes this model could work in many other parts of India as well.

It’s clear, however, that while these types of projects offer promising methods to reduce waste in countries like India, the economics would not work in developed countries. The reason is simple: both the bio-digestion and green coal models rely on cheap labor to collect, sort, and process the organic waste. In developed countries, labor can cost twenty times as much as in India, which would prevent similar initiatives from being economically viable. For now, however, Gangotree Eco Technologies has plenty of work to do in India.

Large bricks of green coal:

Mr. Gondhalekar holds a green coal pellet:

One of Pune’s five ton bio-digestors:

This generators runs on the methane created by the plant:

Sam and Paul stand with Mr. Gondhalekar in front of the methane tank: