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Concentrated Beer. Impressed by the success of the flip-top cap, brewers are searching for other package improvements. Schlitz last week introduced an improved flip-top whose blunt edges are guaranteed not to slice hands, as earlier models often did. Anheuser-Busch also announced that it is shifting to aluminum cans from tin-plate, even though brewers admit privately that any kind of can is a poor container for retaining beer flavor. Because 50% of all beer is now sold in supermarkets, beer companies are designing packages that will stand out on store shelves, catch the eye of housewives who do the beer-buying for their husbands.
Back at the brewery, other changes are under way. Some beermen are testing small aluminum kegs that provide draught beer for home refrigerators and could revive the draught-beer market, which has slumped from 75% to 18% of total consumption. After much delay, Carling last month started a continuous brewing plant at Fort Worth that makes beer by assembly-line process instead of in single vats; other beer executives are watching to see if the process accounts for sizable labor saving. Coors Co. of Colorado is developing a vertical process in which it grows its own grain, makes its own cans and adds the beer on a fast production line. Another new possibility being studied: concentrated beer. Concentrates could be brewed in a central plant, shipped at much lower transportation cost to branches for reconstitution with water.
In the new competition, even the beer itself is changing. Once, as the industry saying goes, brewmasters worked with "one hand on the vat and one hand on God," gave little thought to customer tastes. Now many customers want lighter beers like the "champagne of bottled beer" pioneered by Miller of Milwaukee, and brewmasters (who prefer heavier beer) are changing the proportion of malt, hops, rice and corn grits to provide it. One holdout is New York's F. & M. Schaefer Brewing Co. "We're willing to forsake all those people who drink a can of beer once every two weeks," says Market Development Manager Edmund E. Kelly. Schaefer still brews for the 20% who drink 75% of the suds and enjoy it, the brewers suspect, for lustier reasons than lightness.