Craft brewing spent years associating cans with mass-market products and then switched to them almost completely. The reasons are technical, and they matter most for exactly the styles craft brewers make.
Light destroys hop compounds
Certain hop-derived compounds break down under light and recombine into a substance with a strong skunky aroma, detectable at very low concentrations.
The reaction takes minutes in direct sunlight and proceeds slowly under ordinary indoor lighting.
Green and clear glass offer almost no protection, brown glass offers partial protection, and a can offers complete protection because no light reaches the beer at all.
Oxygen is the other enemy
Oxygen entering during packaging or through the seal oxidises the beer, producing stale cardboard notes and flattening hop aroma.
A can seam is a mechanical seal that admits almost nothing, while a crown cap on a bottle relies on a liner that allows a small ingress over months.
For a hop-forward beer intended to be drunk fresh, that difference shows up within the product's normal shelf life.
Freight and storage economics favour cans
Cans weigh less than bottles and pack without wasted space between them, so more beer fits in the same pallet and the same vehicle.
They also chill faster and survive handling that would break glass, which matters for outdoor venues and events where glass is prohibited.
Empty cans stack far more densely than empty bottles, which reduces the storage a small brewery has to surrender to packaging materials.
Small-scale canning became available
The historical barrier was capital, since canning lines were built for volumes far beyond a small brewery's output.
Compact canning machines and mobile canning services changed that, allowing a brewery to package in cans without owning a line.
Digitally printed shrink sleeves removed the other obstacle, which was the large minimum order required for printed cans.
The lining is what makes it work
Beer is acidic and would react with bare aluminium, so every can carries a thin polymer lining between the metal and the liquid.
That lining is why modern canned beer carries no metallic character, and why the taste complaint attached to cans is a holdover from packaging long out of use.
What the switch cost
Bottle conditioning, where a secondary fermentation happens in the package, is harder to manage in cans because the yeast sediment is not visible when pouring.
Styles built for long ageing therefore still appear in bottles, and the split now runs along shelf life rather than along brewery size.
Large-format bottles also remain the norm for sharing and gifting, where the package is part of the presentation rather than only a container.