When I first interviewed Ron Popma and Pat Hartman of Mobile Canning, their business was a few months fresh off the ground. We grabbed a pint during ski-ball night at Oskar Blues in Longmont, Colorado, and we delved into the topic of the mobile canning business. They had recently canned their first run of Eclipse, a black IPA brewed by Crabtree Brewing in Greeley, Colorado. That beer would go down as the first American craft beer to be commercially filled by a mobile canning outfit, as the Brewers Association puts it.
Eclipse made a sublime impact on the country’s craft beer industry—not just as the first mobile-canned microbrew, but also as a style of beer that formerly couldn’t be found in a can. It’s a bold, bitter IPA fermented with Belgian yeast that weighs in at 7.7 percent ABV, and it’s canned in 16-ounce cans, to boot.
Less than four years later, Popma and Hartman have canned beers for fifteen Colorado breweries, including Renegade Brewing (Denver) and Big Choice Brewing (Broomfield). They’ve expanded to include eleven affiliate facilities across the country that serve fifty-seven craft breweries, and counting. Their business model allows nanobreweries and microbreweries who couldn’t otherwise afford the space or resources the ability to can their beers. It also allows larger companies to transition into their own canning lines. Boulder Beer Company, for example, began canning with Mobile Canning before they bought their own canning line. Last month, Boulder Beer put their first house-canned Mojo IPA and Buffalo Gold on the shelves.