I guess we're gonna try to cover every facet of drinking culture in this blog, not just how beer tastes. If that's the case, then let's talk about crushing beer cans.
This is a story of frugality. In many states, including PA, you are able to trade in empty aluminum cans for money. It's a pittance, but it's something—at least, some people feel that way. My grandpop was one of those people. When I was growing up, we used "crush beer cans" for grandpop, any day after my parents had people over.
Basically, my grandpop's five children and their families would all save their cans (sometimes soda, mostly beer), and grandpop would drive around and collect them. He would then trade those cans in at the scrapyard for money, which he would use for his own beer purchases. Seems simple.
Now, the "crushing" part comes in because it's easier to transport X amount of beer cans when they are more compact. They are going to weigh the same whether they are intact or stomped into a flat disk, so you might as well crush them so you can fit them all in the trunk of your car, is the logic. And not being privy to either the money or the trading or the drinking of beer, crushing the cans was the only part of the process I got to take part in.
It was pretty simple. You take an empty beer can out of the recycling bin or trash bag, ignore the awful stale beer stench that invades your ten-year-old nostrils, place it on the ground with the lip facing the sky, and stomp on it as hard and as straight as you can with the heel of your sneaker. The goal is the crush the can straight down. I've never been that coordinated, so a lot of the time the can would go careening off across the yard, half-crushed, and I would then have to crush it a second time, attempting to flatten it out long-ways instead, which still did the trick, but less elegantly so.
It couldn't have been that often that me and my dad would perform this chore (my parents are K***s, and thus drink a lot, but not that much), but I remember doing it often, probably because time has a way of compressing as you get older, like your childhood is a can and growing older is the boot.
I got older by a few years, and grandpop was done drinking as much, and so he wasn't collecting beer cans with the old vigor, but beer can crushing stayed in my life. While I was in the Boy Scouts, we were scheduled to go on a "high adventure" hiking trip in New Mexico. This was a special trip, not one that we partook in other than this one time, since it was a little pricey (I wasn't privy to the exact price, being fifteen years old at the time). But it was pricey enough for all our middle-class parents that we had to raise money for the trip. Somehow, the fundraiser became trading cans in for cash.
It's a fucking shame that we weren't old enough to actively participate in the emptying of beer cans, because me and my old scout buddies (i.e. still my best friends today) can do some fucking damage on some beers these days (or could, a few years ago—there's that boot of time again). We instead collected cans from the community. People brought their Saturday night's damage to Sunday morning mass in large trash bags. We asked friends and family for help (grandpop, I'm sure, did his part). We filled up the whole spiderwebbed basement of the old Scout house with mountains of bags of empty cans, and spent long afternoons crushing them.
Bottom line, we all able to go to Philmont for our high adventure trip. Good times. I've always wondered, though... were these efforts worth it, financially? What percentage of the trip was paid from collecting cans? How long would it take my grandpop to purchase one cheap case of beer? Let's figure it out.
Let's first acknowledge that metal trade-in prices have changed a little bit since I was young up until now. This chart (page 1) has 1998 price of aluminum at around 68 cents. With inflation, that's about $1 in 2020 money. Current prices for aluminum put it at about 81 cents per pound. That's a big difference, with the more cans you collect. But let's try to answer this question first: How many cans would I need to collect to buy a case of Hamm's Special Light, which costs $14.03?
Sources state that it takes about 31 empty cans to make a pound. $14.03 divided by $0.81 means that we need 17.32 pounds of cans to buy a case of Hamm's, which is 536 empty cans. Which is a lot.
I have no idea how to calculate how many crushed beer cans could fit in a standard trash bag, but it would probably take two full trash bags of crush cans to trade for $14.03, I guess?
Let's say that we filled an entire basement with beer cans. Say there's 10,000 beer cans down there. Cocktail napkin math says that that's around $275. Split between twelve guys is like $22 each. Which is hilarious. If each person costs $1500 to go to New Mexico, then it would've taken 654,000 cans to pay for the trip in total. We... did not collect that many cans.
I guess the main point is that there's no fucking away our efforts were worth it for the big trip, but I could see where grandpop was coming from, in terms of his individual efforts. 536 cans is doable if you have a big family and many friends in your/their orbit. 700K cans is not doable, even with the entire Cheltenham neighborhood contributing.
Final question: how much would I have earned if I kept every can that I personally drank out of this year? I did a rough run-through of some of the 198 previous blog posts so far, and counted the pictures of cans that I found. Extrapolating from the fact that I had 50 cans in the past 88 days, I can estimate that it's been about 113 cans. Divide by 30 (instead of 31, since many of these cans were pounders or bigger), and you get 3.76 pounds, which is... $3.05.
It would've taken a herculean effort to save all the cans from the past seven months, and I would've been able to buy a single cheap craft beer can for my efforts. I think it's great that people collect cans for money, but I cannot imagine ever collecting them myself. It just doesn't seem worth it for the profit accrued from the efforts.
Now this being a blog post about Alhambra Especial, a nice little European-style lager (which is basically an American-style lager, for the most part), I should probably connect the idea of can crushing to this particular beer, right? I have no idea how to do this except for creating this gif:
Look at that form! Grandpop would be proud.
NOTES
BEER: Alhambra Especial
STYLE: European Lager
ABV: 5.0%
BREWED BY: Grupo Cervezas Alhambra, SL
LOCATION: Granada, Spain
PURCHASED AT: IGA
PAIRED WITH: fish tacos (clearly a good pairing)
GRADE: 2.5 pukes out of 5
BEER COUNT: 268
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