Economics
Beer Can Rigs Are Rescuing America’s Craftiest Brews
Mobile canners help small brewers thrive while fueling a beer-drinking renaissance.
A worker mans a mobile canning operation at Other Half Brewing Co. in Brooklyn, New York.
Photographer: Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg
Coffee-black and unctuous, Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal would make for a dismal Coors Light commercial. There are no mountains poking the sky, just the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. And the water doesn’t babble and bubble; it’s a mirthless, chemical soak.
Yet, the place has become almost sacred to the growing congregation of beer worshippers. In a cramped warehouse hard by the canal’s western bank, wedged between a McDonald’s and an oil depot, sits Other Half Brewing Co., which makes some of the hottest beer around.