Almost exactly 80 years since its debut, the beer can remains a wildly popular vessel for America's favorite alcoholic beverage. According to the Beer Institute, cans accounted for (XLS) 53.2 percent of the beer market in 2012 (the latest year for numbers), versus 36.5 percent for bottles and 10 percent for draft. And the can's market share has been inching up—as recently as 2004, just 48 percent of beer came in cans.
But here's the thing: Like most other commercially available cans, beer cans are lined with epoxy that contains bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical that keeps foods from reacting to aluminum, but that has also become associated with a range of ailments, including cancer, reproductive trouble, and irregular brain development in kids. BPA is well established as an endocrine-disrupting chemical, meaning that it likely causes hormonal damage at extremely low levels. The question is whether we get enough of it in beer (and other canned goods) to cause harm.
For me, this isn't an academic question. Sure, massive conglomerates like Miller SAB and AB InBev (maker of Budweiser) use BPA-lined cans. But so do my beloved craft beer makers—the small and midsize brewers that have popped up nationwide over the past quarter century to challenge the hegemony of corporate swill. Ever since pulling the ring off my first Dale's Pale Ale—made by the excellent Colorado brewer Oskar Blues—several years ago, I've been enamored of canned beers and their throwback charm.
I'm hardly alone. According to the website Craftcans.com, Oskar Blues launched the canned-craft craze in 2002. Today, nearly 500 craft breweries, a least one in every state, offer canned product. In my current hometown of Austin, several excellent local brewers are retailed only in cans. Colorful canned six-packs dominate the coolers of top local beer emporia. In 2013, Whole Foods reported a 30 percent nationwide increase in canned-beer sales. A decade ago, cans accounted for precisely zero percent of my beer consumption; today, that number hovers above 50 percent, or about the national average for all beers. Is my turn to cans harming me?
The Food and Drug Administration, after a lengthy review process, has opted to give BPA a tentative thumbs-up. In 2012, the FDA banned BPA from baby bottles and sippy cups, and added containers for infant formula to the list the following year. But last year, citing its most recent safety assessment (PDF), the FDA pronounced BPA "safe at the current levels occurring in foods." The European Food Safety Authority recently ended its own BPA reassessment with the same conclusion, though the French government vehemently disagrees and has instituted a ban.
But the FDA's sort-of embrace of the can industry's favorite liner is highly controversial among a swath of scientists, as my colleague Mariah Blake showed last year. Blake reports that "roughly 1,000 published studies have found that low-level exposure to BPA—a synthetic estrogen that is also used in cash register receipts and the lining of tin cans—can lead to serious health problems, from cancer and insulin-resistant diabetes to obesity and attention-deficit disorder."