We are pretty happy to share some news that we've been anticipating/dreaming about for quite some time. A few confirmed sources have made it clear that Sierra Nevada Brewing Company will indeed begin canning as early as this fall and that you should begin to see cans of their iconic Pale Ale by the end of the year. A beer that we've been saying should be canned for quite some time now.

The folks at Beernews.org, a great source for all news related to beer, broke this story earlier and referenced a post on DRAFT magazine's site. After checking that out it seems that Sierra Nevada's founder, Ken Grossman, gave a presentation during Arizona Beer Week and officially announced that cans were coming.

A little more information, again thanks to Beernews.org for the reference, came out on BeerAdvocate with a post from Sierra Nevada's Brewing Communications Coordinator, Bill Manley, who wrote,

"Our canning line should be in the building near July 4. It will be a couple of moths to get it up and running, but should start seeing Pale Ale in cans in late 2011.

We’re on the fence about what other beers to release, but I think we’ll have a couple of different brews available.

Cans will only be a small part of our output, but we’re excited to see how they’re received.

There are so many places where you can’t or won’t bring glass…up here in the foothills it just doesn’t make a lot of sense to bring a bunch of bottles with you in your backpack! This is really the reason we’re going for this.

Right now we’re thinking can-conditioned. All of our bottle Pale Ale is bottle conditioned so it makes sense. We need to do some serious QA trails of all available options before saying anything for sure.

No chance of bottled Pale Ale going anywhere. Cans are in addition to, not in place of."

We'll continue to follow this story and see if we can learn anymore about which of their other brands will possibly join Sierra Nevada's Pale Ale in cans. It's certainly getting hard to keep up with all the news related to canning craft beer these days and now that Sierra Nevada has made this announcement I'm thinking some other breweries are really going to take notice. 

a mock-up of a can of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale (NOT REAL)