Bottles or Cans?

Coors Beer Bottles & Cans

I've been drinking beer this summer. You can get it in cans or bottles, though you don't always get a choice. Sometimes the store only has your favorite brand in one or the other so unless you are persnickety and are willing to travel to another store, you take what they have.

But which one is better? Cans are lighter, they chill faster, and are more likely to be recycled. Sure bottles can be dumped in the recycling bin, but do they actually get recycled? Last I heard the recycling folks had accumulated a big pile of glass but nobody wanted it, so they eventually gave up and sent it to the landfill. 

Aluminum has a higher intrinsic value than glass so even in states that don't have bottle deposit laws, you seldom see cans by the side of the road. Scrappers are out there picking them up and hauling them to the scrap metal dealers to get cash money they can use to buy more beer.

The lighter weight of cans means the delivery trucks can be a little more efficient so they burn less fuel for the amount of beer they deliver, though I suspect the amount of fuel saved only makes a difference when aggregated over a nationwide fleet of trucks.

Bottles are easier to drain. To get the last little sip of beer out of a can you have to tilt your head back so far you are in danger of falling over backwards. I don't have that problem with bottles.

I could pour the beer out of the can into a glass, but now I have to wash the glass. I have a dishwashing machine (the term dishwasher is ambiguous. Is it a person or a machine?) so that is not an onerous task, but it does use energy to run the machine and heat the water. It is a new fangled machine that takes like three hours to wash a load of dishes, but it is supposed to be energy efficient.

Glass containers, bottle or glass, hold more heat (or cold) than aluminum does, so the beer doesn't warm up as fast, but that's not really a problem for me because I finish that first beer in a matter of minutes and the second one doesn't take much longer. After that, well, you need to factor in things like ambient air temperature, relative humidity and how entertaining or tedious your fellows are.

Being as I am lazy, I prefer bottles. No washing glasses, no straining my neck, no fooling with beer koozzies, no chasing empty cans that the wind has blown off the table. Unless it's hurricane season but I don't drink outside when we get hurricane force winds.