The ready to drink market has gone almost entirely to aluminium. Most of it is hard seltzer under 5%, but there are hundreds of canned cocktails now, from Marks & Spencer down, and people have got used to buying a drink and binning the tin.
We thought about it for a long time. We are staying with glass. Here is why, and if you disagree we would like to hear it: write to us.
The sustainability argument is not what it looks like
The best figures we can find say glass takes about a tenth of the energy of virgin aluminium to produce, and about double that of recycled aluminium. So recycled aluminium wins, comfortably. The catch is that there is very little of it, and what exists is bought by companies the size of Nestlé and Unilever. Read the websites of the canned drinks brands, White Claw, Served, Whitebox, Sipsmith, Fever Tree, M&S, and you will find a great deal about sustainability and not one claim to be using recycled aluminium. We think that is a sleight of hand. On the evidence, a can is not a more sustainable object than our bottle.
One exception we know of: our friends at Sustainaholics use 100% recycled aluminium. All power to them.
And then there is the taste, which is what actually decided it
We have never canned our own drinks, so we cannot test it directly. But we drink other people's constantly. The best canned cocktail we have had is Whitebox's Pocket Negroni, and we can still taste the can. We love Sipsmith gin, we love Fever Tree tonic, and we have made that drink at home a hundred times. Buy the same two things in a can and it is not the same drink. It is not as good.
We do not fully understand why, and we are not going to pretend we do. But it is consistent, and it is enough. We are not going to spend weeks ageing a drink and then hand it to a can.
Still worth reading: the Center for Environmental Health on the aluminium can.
