First we said goodbye to the beloved stubby, and now, Canadians are increasingly giving a send-off toast to long-necked glass beer bottles, too.
This week, Moosehead Breweries, the largest exclusively Canadian-owned brewery in the country, announced it will stop selling beer in bottles entirely early next year.
“We’re following the lead set by Canadians that cans are their preferred way of enjoying not just our beer — but every beer across the industry,” it said in an Instagram post.
The news was met, by some, with anything but good cheer.
“You still have time to delete this,” one person wrote in response. That was followed by messages from others who seemed to agree:
“It tastes better in a bottle though.”
“I can’t stand canned beer. This decision needs to be strongly reconsidered.”
And simply: “Boooooo.”
So why ditch the bottle?
“We do understand and respect that consumers have a preference, and for those who enjoy drinking beer out of a bottle, we know this news is upsetting,” Moosehead Breweries president and CEO Andrew Oland said in an email to CBC News.
Long identified with the Moosehead brand, the green bottle and the bottling itself are being discontinued in favour of the cans that now dominate the brewing industry.
The thing is, Moosehead appears to have a point. More and more Canadians are buying beer in cans.
According to Beer Canada, a national trade association representing Canadian brewers of all sizes and regions, sales of cans have far eclipsed bottles, going from 53 per cent of the sales in 2015 to 77 per cent in 2024.
But is that because cans are what Canadian beer drinkers want — or is it because more breweries are favouring cans?
Bottles beat cans, beer sommelier says
“I don’t believe it’s consumer driven,” said master beer sommelier Roger Mittag. “We buy what is available to us.”
The Ontario-based beer educator who advises breweries and restaurants and created the Prud’homme Beer Certification — a beer sommelier program — agrees with those who say beer in bottles just tastes better.
“Bottles provide a truer experience based on what a brewmaster would want to experience because the bottle keeps everything really nice and clean.”
A big part of that has to do with the carbonation. There’s a bit less of it in canned beer, Mittag says, because of the ways cans are packaged compared to bottles.
“You can eliminate most of the oxygen in a bottle and keep most of this CO2 in,” he said. “But sometimes with cans, it takes a little bit longer to put the seal on, and therefore, CO2 gets out and oxygen gets in. So for me, I think you get a cleaner taste out of a bottle than you do out of a can.”
But Mittag says the average drinker may not notice a difference.
Plus, cans are easier for retailers to move, stack and shelve, he says, and they don’t break, so there’s less mess for stores to clean up. Cans also provide more opportunity for creative packaging and are cheaper for both brewers and sellers.
“You can pack a can probably two to three times as fast as you can do bottles,” Mittag said. “And it requires less people, so it’s a much more cost-effective efficient way of packaging beer.”
It also does better on the shelf, according to Moosehead’s Oland.
“Cans do offer superior quality when it comes to protection from light and oxygen — two elements that negatively impact the taste of beer,” he said.
Environmental consideration
But what about the environmental cost?
While reusable glass bottles are typically refilled 12-15 times before being recycled, aluminum cans are recycled after just one use.
Some environmentalists say it’s important to consider the entire life cycle of the product.
A research centre based in Quebec called CIRAIG did a life-cycle analysis, comparing bottles to cans and found that bottles become more environmentally friendly than a single-use container after only six uses, according to Julie-Christine Denoncourt, a source reduction analyst at Montreal-based Équiterre.
“And we know that bottles are reused an average of 15 times.”
She says you need to take into account the energy and resources it takes to recycle a can, including transporting the cans to a recycling facility, which often means travelling long distances by truck.
Besides hops, malt, and yeast, the thing craft beer makers depend on most to get their product to market is aluminum cans. In N.L., local breweries like Landwash and Iron Rock fear that U.S. tariffs on aluminum could cause beer sales to go flat.
Tariff pain
And there’s another looming dent in the can business — tariffs.
In June, U.S. President Donald Trump doubled tariffs on steel and aluminium to 50 per cent.
“This is the biggest economic pressure point that is about to overwhelm Canadian brewers if the current trade distortions are not addressed very quickly,” said CJ Hélie, president of Beer Canada.
Canada is a major aluminum producer. But for aluminum to become a beer can in Canada, it must be shipped to the U.S. where rolling mills turn it into the thin, flat sheets that are then sent back to can manufacturers here.
According to Hélie, the tariff and the resulting uncertainty have driven up the base cost of aluminum by about 200 per cent.
“It’s a little bit like a fear response,” he said. “People are afraid of that uncertainty around where that 50 per cent import tariff may go into the future.”
Inventory stockpiles mean consumers haven’t seen much of a price increase trickle down to their beer yet, Hélie says.
“But the first wave of can cost increases, we started to see in the marketplace in August,” he said. “And then if that 200 per cent cost increase sustains itself for an extended period, well, eventually that’s going to flow into the market.”
Bottles likely won’t entirely disappear
Hélie is hopeful that won’t happen. But he doesn’t think bottled beer will disappear entirely from Canadian shelves either.
“The Canadian beer industry back in the day was really founded on the concept and the advantages of the refillable beer bottle,” he said.
With the advent of cool graphics on cans, though — which consumers favour — and the freedom cans give to brewers in terms of design and efficiency, he does think the can is here to stay.
Mittag, the beer sommelier, says he’ll be sad to see Moosehead’s iconic green bottle go.
“It is a part of the fabric of being Canada and understanding what Moosehead is,” he said.
“I understand why, but I almost feel like we’ve lost a small portion of the fabric that makes up this beer industry.”
