Collecting Beer Cans Is A Dying Art

12/09/09 - Kids collect a lot of things these days: Transformers action figures, American Girl dolls, baseball cards. Then there's 10-year-old Randy Langenbach. He collects beer cans.

"I just like how they look," Randy says of the 200 cans that line the walls of his bedroom here. And, no, "he doesn't drink the beer," his father says.

The problem for the once-thriving hobby of beer-can collecting is that Randy is a rarity: a collector under the age of 30.

As the beer can nears its 75th birthday in January, many hobbyists are crying in their brew over their inability to lure young people to a pastime that hooked many of them when they were youngsters in the 1970s.

Now, the country's dwindling number of beer-can enthusiasts fear the hobby is past its sell-by date, unable to compete with videogames and iPods. Unless hobbyists can revive interest among kids -- or even among 35-year-old beer drinkers -- they fret that nobody will be around to look after their "flat tops" and "cone tops" and the cultural history they represent. Some also worry that their collections will lose their dollar value.

Can collectors hand out free beer cans to kids at shows, ship them boxes of cans by mail and regale them with stories of discovering rare cans.

"They try to keep me into it," says young Mr. Langenbach, who also collects beer trays and bottle caps. But the blue-eyed fourth-grader says not one of his classmates collects cans, despite his efforts to entice them. "The boys are mostly interested in sports, and the girls are interested in girl stuff."

The Brewery Collectibles Club of America, the largest of several groups representing can collectors, is mounting an effort to arrest membership declines.

The group is planning an essay contest that will award free memberships to youngsters who best describe why they like hoarding cans or other brewery relics, says John Fatura, its 66-year-old president. The group's local chapters also are reaching out to microbreweries, where they drop off fliers and display vintage cans in hopes of wooing some of the younger customers.

The club has been losing its fizz for a long time. Membership has slipped to 3,570 from a peak of 11,954 in 1978. Just 19 of the current members are under the age of 30, and the members' average age has climbed to 59. An annual membership costs $38.

The first beer can -- the Krueger's brand from the now-defunct G. Krueger Brewing Co. of Newark, N.J. -- was sold at a store in Richmond, Va., in January 1935. The BCCA and other collectibles groups will commemorate the occasion in February at the annual Blue & Gray show in Fredericksburg, Va.

Breweries embraced cans because they could be transported more cheaply than bottles. By 1950, cans accounted for about 19% of beer sales in the U.S., compared with 52% for refillable bottles, according to the Beer Institute, a trade group in Washington. Today, cans represent 49% of all sales volume, bottles 41%.

Can collecting soared in popularity in the 1970s, fueled by brewers' publicity and the creation of formal collecting clubs. Collectors scooped up cans along the side of roads, and even took to digging up old dumps and outhouses to find buried treasure.

To boost beer sales, breweries catered to hobbyists, churning out scores of special editions. There were numerous versions of orange-and-blue cans of "Billy Beer," an homage to President Jimmy Carter's brother, Billy, a peanut farmer and celebrated beer drinker. So many of the cans were produced that today they're just about worthless.

The proliferation of beer cans diminished their cachet as collectibles. In the 1990s, eBay sparked a modest revival of the pastime by providing an easier outlet for selling cans and establishing prices. The BCCA's membership inched up to 4,073 in 2000 from 3,987 the year before.

Cans worth the most -- $1,000 and up -- are hard-to-find brands from the 1930s and 1940s, in styles such as the "cone top," a bottle-like steel can with a short neck. Two years ago, Breweriana.com, a seller of beer cans, sold a Royal Finest Lager Beer cone top, made by the Rainier Brewing Co. in the 1930s, for $37,501, says Dan Morean, the Web site's founder.

Now, hobbyists struggle to coax anybody to take up the pastime. Among the problems: The rarest cans have soared in value, making the hobby expensive.

And many parents don't want their children anywhere near a beer can, even an empty.

"Alcohol is not as acceptable as it was 30 years ago," says hobbyist Gary Zimmerman, 49, of Rochester, Ill. He says his two teenage sons show no interest in collecting.