It seems as if there’s a parodic ‘national holiday’ for just about everything these days.
There’s National Talk like a Pirate Day on Sep. 28, National Wear Two Colored Shoes Day on May 3, and even National Sneak Some Zucchini onto Your Neighbor’s Porch Day on Aug. 8. Yes, it’s a real thing.
Funny enough, Jan. 24 happens to be National Beer Can Appreciation Day. Now that’s a holiday First Coast Brews can get behind.
The National Day Calendar states that Beer Can Appreciation Day recognizes the day in 1935 when beer was first sold in cans. According to them, the first canned brew came out of Krueger Brewing Company in Richmond, Virginia. It was made from steel and had to be opened with a church key. Bet that made the beer taste great.
Fast forward to 2019 and beer in a can is making a huge revival. Once looked upon as a cheap alternative to glass bottles, craft in a can is having its moment in the sun. It’s almost as if America woke up one day with the realization, “Yes it’s cheaper, but it tastes great. What’s so bad about that?”
Emerging craft breweries almost always tend to opt for cans over bottles, both for economic purposes and logistical ones. Cans are vastly easier to fill, transport to retailers and most importantly, easier for the customer to carry out of the store.
It was this idea, the beer-to-go movement, that helped put Jacksonville on the map.
In a great piece written by our media partners The Florida Times-Union, Sandy Strickland details how Jacksonville may have been the first city to come up with the idea of selling multiple beers at once.
“No matter what you call it, Jax Brewing Co. may have come up with the idea of selling more than one beer at a time and packaging it in standard sizes, albeit plastic rings had yet to be invented.
During the 1940s the company went to Towers Hardware, bought 100,000 durable burlap bags, emblazoned Jax Beer on them and sold beer six to a sack for $1.29, Florida Times-Union columnist Bill Foley reported in 1996.”
If you’re doing the math, that means that canned beer had already been around for nearly five or more years before Jax Brewing Co. came up with the idea of the ‘six sack’. And oddly enough, the six-sack they sold came in bottles, not cans.
So what gives? If the canned beer had already gone mainstream why resort to selling six-sacks of bottled beer? As they say, timing is everything.
World War II was just ending and the entire nation faced a shortage of metal. Aluminum to be more exact. Jax Brewery was looking for a way to cut costs and likely resorted to selling bottles (not cans) in easily transportable packages of beer.
Boom. The six sack was born.
So next time you’re shopping around for beer and pick up a six-pack of cans, remember it was Jacksonville who first created the concept that led to the emergence of the modern day six pack.
Here's hoping you're pouring up a cold one right now to celebrate National Can Day.
Cheers!
