My fellow beer drinkers, there is a disturbing new trend rearing it’s ugly head in craft brewing. Beer in cans. Once relegated to gross watery college party beer, several breweries have lately been attempting to embrace the trend of putting good beer in cans. The claim is that they are safer, more beach friendly, and don’t oxidize as fast. Sure, I’ll give you that. But let’s talk about cans for a minute.

Aluminum is not inert. Glass is. That’s why you see chemistry experiments being done in glass beakers. This would seemingly be a problem for canners. In order to keep beverages from tasting like the containers they come in, can manufacturers are forced to line the insides of cans with epoxy resins. The most famous of these resins is one you may have heard of: BPA (bisphenol-A). In case you haven’t heard, there is a growing concern that BPA has negative health effects. Thats why everywhere you look these days from baby bottles to water bottles, you see “BPA-Free!” labels. People are concerned, and manufacturers have taken note. Well most of them anyway.

You see, on a recent trip to Hawaii, I noticed that Maui Brewing Company was only selling its beer in cans. Knowing that craft brewers are pretty picky about beer quality, I decided to ask them whether or not their cans had BPA in them. Not knowing the answer, they forwarded the question on their rep at the can company. And this was their response:

“Almost all aluminum and steel beverage and food cans use epoxy-based coatings inside cans as a barrier between the metal and the products in the can. Epoxy-based coatings may contain BPA.”

Know, I don’t know for sure how dangerous BPA is. But I know that anything that has a disclaimer like this: “…regulatory agencies have stated that human exposure to BPA from epoxy can coatings is well below safe exposure limits set by government bodies worldwide” (also from the email) is worthy of avoiding. If you can have a drink container that you don’t need to be concerned about “exposure limits” with, then wouldn’t you want to use it?

Which brings me back to cans. If you are buying a 48 jumbo pack of rice infused water-beer to drink with your buddies on the hood of the pickup, thats one thing. But when you are crafting a beer whose taste is important to its success, and whose audience cares about things like quality, I would hope that you would avoid drinking anything that has chemical toxins in it.