Why punch the top of a beer can

Chicago, IL — Miller Lite is giving its cans a second tab for a smoother pour, and inviting beer drinkers to have fun opening it. The Punch Top Can increases airflow, reducing glug and resulting in an improved, smoother pour that highlights the great pilsner taste of Miller Lite. The second tab on the Punch Top Can can be opened with a wide array of objects such as a house key, golf tee or even a dollar bill, for those who are especially clever.

Simply set the can on a solid surface, place your chosen opener against the edge of the can and use leverage to open the second tab. To support the Punch Top Can, the brand is launching new television commercials this week, which will run through mid-August on network and cable sports programming, as well as on cable entertainment.

The product launch is also supported by print, radio, out-of-home and digital advertising, retail point-of-sale and public relations. Both the flat-top can and the cone-top persisted into the s and '60s.

But in an engineer named Ermal Fraze was on a family picnic and forgot to bring a church key. Fraze was forced to open his beer cans using his car bumper, like some kind of alcoholic MacGyver. He subsequently invented the pull-tab:. Fraze patented it in the s and sold the rights to Alcoa, and it became the standard can aperture. As convenient as the pull-tab was, it became a bit of a public nuisance and a hazard. Some folks ripped the tab off and threw it on the ground, creating litter; others simply dropped the tab inside the can, betting that it wouldn't work its way back out.

As you can imagine, emergency rooms started seeing people who had accidentally swallowed these tabs. Seeking a way to not have a loose tab, in the s Coors experimented with this cockamamie "push tab" can:. The smaller hole was for drainage, the larger hole was for drinking out of. But the problem with this design is that folks would often cut their fingers on the sharp edges of the apertures while trying to open them. Coors doesn't taste great to begin with and it tastes even worse when mixed with blood.

Finally, in inventor Daniel F. Cudzik created the pop-top can we all know today:. This "Sta-tab," as it was originally called, created no waste. But again there was, of course, a downside. For chrissakes why is drinking beer so hard?!?

It's like the gods are against us. The aperture was relatively small…. While it creates an amusing glug-glug-glug noise, that loses its charm pretty quickly. In the s can manufacturers finally began widening the mouth…. For the new can, Miller did some research and found that beer drinkers don't like glug. That's right, glug. Sometimes known as glug, glug, glug, it's the way beer comes out of a can as air fights its way into the same hole where the beer is exiting.

Maybe I'm too easy to please, but I have not spent a single second bothered by glug during my lifetime of drinking from cans. Then again, I never minded rolling down my windows by hand until I bought a car with power buttons. We're talking about first-world problems here. Even so, Miller has fixed it. He didn't particularly like when I called the innovation a more respectable form of shotgunning. That's the party practice of punching a hole in the side of a beer can, holding the hole up to your mouth and then popping the top.

YouTube is full of binge buddies gulping beers in a few seconds this way. State attorneys general, however, may not be so happy about it. Usually, when alcohol companies develop new products specifically designed to get consumers drunker quicker, they swing into action with new restrictions on sales. That happened in , when Four Loko —a giant can of caffeinated alcohol—was all but banned in several states.

The Beer Institute also has advertising guidelines for this sort of thing which beer companies frequently flout.

Those rules say:. Although beer advertising and marketing materials may show beer being consumed where permitted by media standards , advertising and marketing materials should not depict situations where beer is being consumed rapidly, excessively, involuntarily, as part of a drinking game, or as a result of a dare. For you. World globe An icon of the world globe, indicating different international options.