UNCONTAINED: Beer has a way of coming back on you

By Pan Demetrakakes

The Wall St. Journal recently ran an interesting article about how beer can collecting is dying off as a hobby. It’s pretty comprehensive, like most WSJ articles, so I won’t attempt to give a full summary here. One interesting thing: Some of the most valuable old beer cans are “cone-tops”—cans with sloping tops that look more like metal bottles. The online version of the article is illustrated with such a can, made for Cuban brewer Hatuey in the 1950s. It’s a crude precursor to the reclosable metal bottle now widely used as a premium/novelty beer package. Everything old really is new again.