In January of 1935, the first canned beer—Kreuger’s—rolled off a factory line in New Jersey. It had a smiling cartoon waiter on the front, his body a giant, stylized letter “K.”
Twenty-eight years later, Denver M. Wright, Jr. of Kirkwood set 12 cans of beer along the back bar in what he called Ye Olde Den. By 1969, he had more than the proverbial 99 cans of beer on his wall; the St. Louis Globe-Democrat came calling, and wrote a profile. Six men in St. Louis (including Wright’s younger brother by two decades, Larry), read it and realized they were not alone in their hobby. In 1970, they met in Denver Wright’s living room, and founded the Beer Can Collectors Club of America.
Even then, it was clear beer collectors were perhaps of a different temperament than those who chased after coins and stamps. In his typewritten, mimeographed 1972 beer newsletter, Ye Olde Foundation Herald, Wright posed with his wife, Lois, in front of wall-to-wall display cabinets built to hold 1,320 cans. He noted he was the steward of “the largest collection of full cans of beer,” a description meant not to brag, but entice other collectors to visit. “Collecting is fun,” Wright wrote. “However, the friendships, personalities, men and women: it is the people, individualists, that really make it worthwhile.”
BCCA’s membership rolls peaked at about 13,000 in 1980, when beer-can collecting was a fad among teenage boys. As they left for college, or got more interested in cars or girls, membership underwent a precipitous decline until it hit its present, stable number of about 3,500.
Things have changed since 1970: The first half of the acronym now stands for “Brewery Collectibles,” because the hobby grew to include what’s known as breweriana: bottles, bottle openers, advertising schwag, signage, and paper ephemera. No one collects full cans anymore. (Herb Schwartz, BCCA’s president in 1981, says he drained all of his cans years ago, after discovering the beer had eaten through the plastic lining and started to leave sticky rings on the shelving.). BCCA no longer crowns a “Miss Beer Can.” Puttying, sanding, painting or otherwise cosmetically enhancing cans is frowned upon. “Foreign,” cans are now “international.” And the average member’s age is about 60.
The club has chapters all over the world, including 36 in the United States. BCCA President Bill Boyles lives near Kansas City, but the rest of the board members reside outside of Missouri. BCCA holds a convention—or CANventions, as they’re called—in a different city every year.
But BCCA’s main office is still in St. Louis, on a quiet strip in a Fenton industrial park. It’s impeccably tidy, with white walls and pristine Berber carpet, and a stained-glass BCCA logo hanging in the front window. There are shelves filled with beer reference books, beer bottles, and a collection of specially issued cans for the CAN-ventions; in back, a warehouse filled with BCCA supplies, including flats of the club’s patented beer totes (cardboard suitcases with snug compartments for 12-ounce cans), plastic protective “can wraps,” and BCCA publications. The club also maintains an extensive lending library with titles like Obscure Beer Cans, Vol. 2; The Live Wire Collection of Prohibition Drinking Songs; and Cooking With Beer, all available by U.S. mail (postage paid by borrower).
If you visit in person, you are greeted at the door by a friendly, bearded guy named Kevin Kious, collector of Southern Illinois breweriana and co-author, with Donald Roussin and the late Henry Herbst, of St. Louis Brews: 200 Years of Brewing in St. Louis, 1809–2009.
“Not very often, sometimes a member will come by to buy supplies or pay their dues, but it’s usually pretty quiet except for the mailman and the UPS man,” Kious says.
Until about two years ago, he worked in the horseracing industry, and so has a special fondness for what he calls “horse pieces.” And then, as he explains with some amusement, “My hobby became my job.” He’s been in BCCA since 1992, and his wife, Patty, is also a BCCA member (she’s even served on the board). “My collection takes up my whole basement, which I’ve probably got 500 cans, 1,000 bottles, signs, you name it,” he says. “The basement is full. I should probably get rid of about a third of what I’ve got.” His favorite piece is a gift from Patty: a ceramic, beer-shaped wall hanging from Highland Brewing Company with a thermometer in it, circa the late ’30s.
He considers himself lucky that he and Patty are able to share the hobby. “There are other people whose wives, and we’ve got female members actually, and a lot of guys’ wives are into it, but a lot of them hate the club,” he says. “If they are going to have people over, they leave.”
And then you have the other extreme: couples like Ed and Kay Papin, who married in June of 1975, and spent their three-week honeymoon driving across the country to go “dumping,” or digging for old beer cans in abandoned resorts and campgrounds. The prize find was steel flat-top cans made between the 1930s and ’50s (especially the earliest ones, which had instructions on the side for using a church key).
“We brought back 12, 000 or 15,000 cans,” Kay says. “It was an 8,000 mile trip,” Ed adds. “We mailed boxes cans from Seattle. We’ve been out in the woods looking for cans in every state but Alaska.”
“And Hawaii,” she corrects. “I packed—he dug.” She also navigated, and through the years, alphabetized his collection, including at their old house, when Ed built mounted shelves to the ceiling to accommodate 8,000 cans.
His collection’s shrunk—it’s at about 5,000 now. He’s been out of the hobby for 25 years. Back in the ’70s and ’80s, he and Kay wouldn’t think twice about driving 1,000 miles over a weekend to go to a show (back then, Kay says, people only trade, never bought, cans). He stepped on a rattlesnake in California, was towed over a mountain during a snowstorm in a van hooked up to a Jeep with nothing but jumper cables, and once, he threw a can over his shoulder while digging and hit Kay in the face, breaking the bridge of her glasses and splitting her brow open. That was back when he’d buy oxalic acid in 100-pound bags, mixing it with scalding water to bleach and soak the rust off cans, back when he and Kay were part of a chapter at large called the Big Beer Brotherhood, and knew beer can collectors in every other major city in the U.S. Then Kay gave birth to two girls, and they left the club to raise their new family.
The Papins rejoined BCCA about a year and a half ago. They’re going to Springfield, Mass. this month for their first CANvention in 25 years. Long ago, Ed traded cans to get the pieces he really wanted, like the coveted Black Dallas can, so now it’s more of a social thing. Though it was always kind of a social thing.
“It was a big party,” Ed says says of earlier CANventions. “You’d go to the convention and you’d be trading cans all night long, from room to room. People would just leave their doors open, and it would go on till 3 or 4 in the morning.” They were also drinking free beer, often donated by the big breweries. Papin doesn’t drink beer (“If I bought a can, I’d just dump the beer out”), and carried a half-gallon orange juice container of premixed Whiskey Sours. “They called me the Kool-Aid kid,” he chuckles. “But he was never inebriated,” Kay says. “And sometimes he was actually only drinking Kool-Aid.” Ed grins. “You could make any kind of trade at 2 a.m. with all the beer that flowed at these things!”
Back in the early ’70s, before meeting Kay, Ed went on dumping trips with Herb Schwartz and three other guys. In fact, there’s a now legendary story about a dumping trip to Virginia, where someone in the van needed to get out and take a leak, then noticed the edge of a can poking out of the snow. The men started to dig, and found things, including a super-rare St. Louis ABC Brewery can, that have never been found anywhere else.
Herb and Gerry Schwartz’s basement is also filled with cans—also bottles, crates, church keys, steins, signs, coasters, Gerry’s beer glasses, and Herb’s Alf collection. It’s also sometimes filled with as many as 60 BCCA people. Herb likes talking about the stuff in his collection—Griesedieck’s Christmas series, with cans the colors of 1950s tree baubles; .007 James Bond Beer; LSU Tiger beer; a beer marketed just for women with orchids on the label—“And that there was kind of a failed beer, Hoppin’ Gator,” he says, pointing to a can with a cartoon alligator on it, “because it was lime-flavored, but now you’ve got Margarita Bud Lite. It was just ahead of the time.” After 40 years, though, a can is a can. The Schwartzes joined BCCA 1973 and never left; Herb has held every office, and won every award. “Our closest friends are from the club,” Gerry says. When they travel to conventions, they look up other members in the BCCA roster, and stay with them. And when club members come in from other cities, they often stay with the Schwartzes. Herb still organizes the general setup for the CANventions, hosting what’s known as a “watering hole,” in his room, and always agreeing to serve poor orphaned Bud Light. It’s always the last beer to run out, he says. “But I have all the ladies in my room!”
“When you think about digging a dump, what that evokes in people’s minds is dirty Pampers and chicken bones,” says John Kotteman, who prefers dumping to shows or websites like eBay. “But the dumps we’re looking for are 50 years old, way back in the woods, dumped by resort owners, people at campgrounds, fishing camps…it’s all picnic stuff. Cans and bottles, nothing but glass and metal and leaf litter.”
Kotteman goes dumping with his three brothers, Rick, Steve, and Kevin, though he says he was the first to start collecting, back in the early 1970s. “I used to hunt, and shoot rabbits and squirrels. I stopped doing that a long time ago,” he says. “The thing I like about looking for old beer cans in the woods, I get to go out and hike around, and I can harvest something without having to kill it, and in a way, we’re cleaning up the messes.”
The Kotteman brothers use U.S. Geological Survey topographical maps, preferably ones published in the 1930s, to locate old cabins and resorts; one of their favorite hunting spots is Lake of the Ozarks, though they’ve also made finds near Rolla, Steelville and Roaring River township.
“When me and my three brothers get together,” he says, “And we find a good pile of cans in the woods, and we’re digging together on a sunny, crisp winter day, there’s almost this euphoric thing.”
The most glorious find, he says, was in 2004. He and his brothers had been dumping all day in the Black River Valley, down near Lesterville. It was almost dusk. They passed a broken-down filling station that looked like it had been closed for years. Kevin said he just had a feeling, and wanted to go dig around it; when they asked permission of the old woman who lived in the house next door told them it had belonged to her grandfather, that’s how old it was.
“We found oil cans first, and fairly common beer cans. Then all of sudden, I turned up a red can. I didn’t know what it was at first, but I rubbed the dirt off on the front, and there was a goat staring at me. I looked at that goat for a minute, and I said, I can’t believe what this is….”
It was a Budweiser Bock, which was only canned during the spring of 1951—one recently sold for $2,810.
“The brothers all looked at me, and they said, ‘Noooo.’ I showed it to them, and I said, ‘Yeah!’ So we dug furiously for the next hour, and we found five of them, in very good condition for outdoor cans. In the thousands of dumps we’ve searched over the years, and the tens of thousands of cans we either took home or flung over our shoulders, we could never seem to find Budweiser Bock.” Now they each had one, with one left over. And they haven’t found one since.
Kotterman recently remarried, in March. His wife, Marion, doesn’t collect but is supportive. BCCA members were among the guests at the wedding; the BCCA’s Gateway Chapter newsletter, the Can-o-Gram, published a picture. “When you marry a collector, you marry the collection,” she says, laughing. His cans went from his house, to her house, and now out to the couple’s new house in Eureka; luckily, she drives an Explorer.
Talk to anyone in the BCCA, and they will ask you: “Have you been to Don Roussin’s house? It’s like a museum.” Don Roussin himself will tell you: “There are a couple of things, if you want to see them on planet earth, you have to come here.” That includes a large glass sign from the Cardinal brewery in Washington, Mo.; an oil portrait of “Papa” Joe Griesedieck; midcentury portraits of all of Falstaff’s plants, salvaged from its corporate museum after it closed; and a giant Falstaff can that’s a robot, with a speaker and an antenna, used for publicity in malls and the ballpark back in the 1960s. “The brewery would take this to opening day at Busch stadium, they’d put the baseball right here,” he taps the top, “And it would rumble out and the pitcher would pick it up.”
There were only two made, and both of them are in the Roussins’ basement, along with more than 8,000 beer cans lithographs, calendars, taps, barrels, and other breweriana, much of it in cases, grouped geographically. Asked about something that looks like a giant emory board, Roussin explains it’s a “beer comb,” used to scrape foam off the top of a pitcher of beer. “The bartender would wipe it off underneath his armpit, so we’ve been told. I’ve never found documentation, but apparently the federal government outlawed them in the ’50s for sanitation reasons.” (Another interesting piece of trivia Roussin throws out: the name “growler,” dates back to the era when kids were sent down to the corner tavern to fetch a bucket of beer. When the bartender schemed to foam up a huge head—thus cheating the patron out of their full bucket of beer—the customer would open the lid and growl.)
Roussin collects all the local breweries, including Falstaff, Greisedeick Brothers, Gast, Hornsby, Hyde Park, and even ones further away, like Old Appleton Brewing Co., in Cape Girardeau, home of Mule Beer, and its mascot, Dan the beer-drinking mule, who was trained to drink the company’s beer and turn up his snout at A-B products. (Dan liked to sit in chairs and look at scenery; Benny McGovern, the mobster and former boxer who owned Old Appleton, built him a little trailer to ride on, which resulted in his untimely death—decapitation at the mouth of a freeway tunnel.)
The other thing BCCA guys will tell you: if there’s an obscure bit of beer history that you’re not sure about, ask Don. Urban Chestnut is building a beer garden out behind the complex; the brewery contacted Roussin for advice on how to construct it in pre-Prohibition fashion, so he sent them a few of his files on the subject. “When you’re kind of a pseudo beer historian, you get involved in all kinds of neat things,” he says. A few years ago, Homeland Security contacted him about possible natural caves underneath the Defense Mapping Agency building, since the breweries made such heavy use of them back in the day. “They were worried about bad guys getting underneath there. And I said, no, you had Cherokee Brewery and it went like this, and Carter and it went like this’…but I’d never heard any tales about caves running under that building.”
Roussin and Kious write history articles for the Can-o-Gram, as well as all three major breweriana club magazines: BCCA’s Beer Cans and Brewery Collectibles, ABA’s American Breweriana, and NABA’s The Breweriana Collector.
Mary Ellen Roussin collects cookbooks, not breweriana. But she likes the club for its social aspect, including the house tours BCCA organizes every April, where members get to view each others’ collections. (This year, one of the hosts had a collection of cans featuring nothing but mountains.) It is very much in the spirit of Denver Wright, Jr., and hard to imagine sports memorabilia collectors doing the same. Beer people, she says, are just good people.
When Patty Kious’ daughter headed off to med school, Mary Ellen says, “she made a couple phone calls in the roster, and these people found the daughter from St. Louis a place to live, and just basically fostered her while she was away from home at med school.” She pauses. “It’s a tighter connection than you can imagine.”
St. Louis used to have five BCCA chapters, including a McDonnell-Douglas chapter. Now there’s just one, Gateway. Its big yearly beer can show, Swap-a-Rama, has been held at the Knights Of Columbus Grounds in Florissant for the last 34 years. On a hot Saturday afternoon in June, the picnic tables are covered with totes of beer cans, tappers, and signage; the smell of food drifts from the outdoor kitchen, and collectors pick through a “can dump,” on the side of the shelter.
Gateway president Al Kell made his first run here Wednesday night. “He’s Kansas City, so he’s not that far,” Kell says, nodding his head towards BCCA president Bill Boyles. “But we also have Chicago, Wisconsin, Arizona. We had right around 150 people, which is a pretty good show. And considering there are two other shows around the country this week, getting the normal 150 or so is not bad.”
Kell, who started collecting cans from the woods as a kid in the early ’70s, specializes in Busch Bavarian breweriana. “I’ve got everything—matchboxes, tie clips, sewing kits…though it’s getting harder and harder to find stuff I want.” He’s recently started collecting “cabottles,” aluminum bottles used by Anheuser-Busch and the microbreweries.
He says there are people here who haven’t collected anything in years, but come to every show. Herb and Gerry Schwartz sit at a picnic table, kibitzing with Tobi Hicks (who joined in 1972), who drove here from Arizona. “She’s the only person to be a past president, who was married to one too,” Gerry laughs. Don Roussin’s here, too, in his usual beer delivery cap and shirt.
“I’ll tell you, God sure has a sense of humor about the second weekend in June,” he says, sitting at the edge of a picnic table, nursing a bock (he is, he says, in a bock phase). “Last year, we had monsoon rains that swept through here—everyone was OK with it, I guess, except the band, who were playing electrified instruments.” (The band, in fact, was made up of the four Kotteman brothers.)
The old flat-tops are so expensive, Kell says, that younger people are prohibited from joining the hobby, which is why everyone here is so gray. However, he notes that microbreweries started canning their beer a few years ago—Schlafly’s first run was in 2011. Things have come full circle. Just like the products of the old 1930s breweries, craft beers are regional. They have weird names. The labels use bright colors and interesting graphics, which means they’re fun to collect. Plus, the beer—which, ultimately, isn’t the point—isn’t half bad, either.
“There’s a separate group that’s started to grow,” Kottemann says, noting that BCCA set up at the craft beer–can convention recently to look for new members. “All of a sudden, there is reason for hope.”
For more information on the Brewery Collectibles Club of America, or to buy a copy of St. Louis Brews ($40) visit bcca.com.
