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i’m just back from vacation, and still recovering from two weeks more-or-less off the grid. (apparently there were horrific tornadoes all over the plains, and by the way, hillary clinton said what about RFK??!) blissfully ignorant of the ongoing end-of-the-world proceedings, i just happened to be in fort collins, colorado last week in time to see the first wave of Fat Tire cans roll off the line…

 i’ll admit it. the beer snob in me still squirms a little at the notion of beer in cans. the whole thing has had an unfortunate whiff of hipster slumming and consumable machismo about it, in light of the recent boho craze for ‘blue collar’ brews – which is to say, flavorless domestic piss embraced either for cheap irony value, as an all-too-sincere display of class pretension, or one as a screen for the other. “fuck yeah,” canned beer seems to say, “you want PBR with a retro pulltab, ’cause you don’t give a shit about their bourgeois hedonist yuppie microbrew values, braw.” it seems to be wearing a custom-distressed trucker hat and a Grain Belt t-shirt as it says this, and in the background there’s a TV playing the Hardee’s commercial about how only faggots bake biscuits.

but that’s unfair. in all truth, i can’t think of any reason why you couldn’t put perfectly good beer in cans if you did it right, apart from a little increased sensitivity to storage conditions. and there are very strong points to be made for canning over bottling in terms of energy consumption and green business practices. the downside, they told us at new belgium the other day, is that it’s a laborious process: they can only fill 55 cans per minute, as opposed to 300 bottles, which translates to higher production costs and a more expensive product. hopefully that changes, though, as their operation scales up and beer people warm up to the idea of cans.

for my part, i like most of new belgium’s offerings pretty well, though i’ve had mixed feelings about NB as a brewing institution, particularly with regard to its newfound ubiquity. living in colorado a couple of years ago, it was a little eerie how virtually every single bar and restaurant in the region had their stuff on tap — if you had hot water and cold water, you probably also had Fat Tire. and it was astonishing how quickly NB products saturated iowa’s beer market when the floodgates opened this year. can-related snobbery aside, a company growing this fast is always inherently suspicious. is this another flying dog we have on our hands, ripe for acquisition and pimping out by the coorses and annheuser-busches of the world? or another sierra nevada, respectable but lacking ambition, content to coast on historic pedigree and an otherwise worthy status as a reliable go-to beer?

that’s yet to be seen, but after doing the brewery tour in fort collins i actually have a pretty favorable view of the corporate culture there. yes, there’s a touch of cockeyed hippie optimism and hive-mind that vaguely recalls the dharma initiative, but they seem to know what they’re doing and their hearts are in the right place. it’s an employee-owned company, running a surprisingly small-scale facility. they talk a good environmental and labor game, and they seem to be serious about two-wheel advocacy. they were incredibly generous in the level of access to the brewery they extend to tours, and in serving up copious samples — both free, incidentally. all of which is a longwinded way of saying that if new belgium wants to pioneer the canning of quality beers, i wish them success.