| Introduction:
---- Collectors: With the early 1935 introduction of the first U.S. beer can by the Krueger Brewing Co., that was generally available to the public, there were a number of persons who had fun collecting the "new" beer cans with often colorful labels printed on the metal container rather than having an attached paper label.
Ernie Oest, BCCA#108 and the first BCCA Hall of Fame member, who had been collecting beer labels since 1930 and lived in the Ocean Hill section of Brooklyn, was one of the earliest, verifiable collectors. While there were many other early collectors around the country, information has been easily available on only a few of them. For one state, California, there is confirmation for at least three early collectors: a collector whose widow later lived in Clovis started in 1935 and Marvin Schantz who worked on the road crew of US Rt 50 across the Sierra Nevada - both have been written up in the BCCA Magazine. Also starting in the summer of 1936 at a Sierra Nevada mountain town was a high school-age collector who in the next 15 years accumulated a broad, organized collection of over 250 cans by picking up clean ones he saw in trash; emptied beer cans given to him, and later ones he bought.
---- Cans: This website is only about beer cans that are thought to have been filled with beer and actually sold to the general public for drinking enjoyment. The hobby maybe is still waiting for someone to count specifically all the brands of beer in cans that were actually filled and sold to the public. Some of these brands are well documented but many others, even well known cans, have little or no brewery information about them that remains for easy access.
With the lack of information on many brands, and for old cans with no one around who can say they drank its beer or photographs of drinking beer from cans/cans in stores, etc., about the best alternative as to whether a can actually held beer are ones found in dumps and many collectors focus on these "authentic" beer cans. Out of the usually large number of cans (at least thousands) originally produced for most brands, the still-existing examples saved in collections are often hard to know. For some of the rarest brands, with not many examples around, approximate estimates might be tried.
The cans in most collections could be grouped by condition into three broad categories:
--"inside" - well protected or "on grade" cans.
--"under-the-house" or "too-long-in-the-cooler" type cans that still have some characteristics of an "inside" can.
--"outside", or dumper examples that were left to the vagaries of the weather, etc. and end up in varying conditions.
---- Goal is for information that can be verifiable: For this website the goal is to offer information that is largely based upon information from now-living collectors and confirming sources. Other scattered items of information on specific "cans and collectors" could be fictionalized into possibly good "stories", but that approach hasn't been taken, which enviably has left information "gaps" and some of the known uncertainties are noted with (?) . As time goes on, maybe more information on "cans and collectors" will be found to fill in gaps.
---- Sources: The information in this website reflects input from a number of collectors who generously offered some of the direct information they know, or have heard about, such as Will Anderson, Gene DiCicco, Dick Caughey, Tom Leo, Ken Ostrow, Ed Scoglietti, Dan Scoglietti, Bill Lester, Clay Tichelar, Tom Waggoner, Marcia Butterbaugh, Matt Menke, Keith Belcher, Adolph Grenke, Wally Gilbert, Ted Larsen, Rich Bentley, Rawley Douglas, Dan Morean, Dave Lang, and Bob Myers, among others, and occasional past letters/information from deceased collectors such as a 1976 letter from Ernie Oest. Input from other collectors is welcomed.
In conclusion, as with most historical accounts, this "beer can history" is considered a "work-in-progress" awaiting corrected and more information that might appear.
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