Why canned beer is better than bottled counterparts

Canned beers are always better than bottled ones especially when you are outdoors - be it camping or on a hike.

When Durango, Colorado-based craft beer company Ska Brewing first chose to favor canning instead of bottling their beer, it was all about practicality-glass bottles simply didn't mesh with the founders' outdoorsy lifestyle.

Ska's Dave Welz told Business Insider that bottles are no good for river trips, and said that they are always better when one goes for a hike.

Canning innovation is on the rise. And why not? It's cheaper to produce and better for the environment, Welz said.

Welz said that they realized canning has all other advantages.

First, canned beer weighs less. Less packaging means you can move the same amount of product in fewer trips, reducing a firm's expenses and carbon footprint at the same time.

As of 2012, cans constituted 53.2 percent of the beer market while bottles had a 36.5 percent share - a fairly significant gap.

By contrast, in 2006, the two packagings were much closer in popularity - cans accounted for 48.3 percent of the market and bottles 41.9 percent. (Draft beer largely accounts for the rest of brew sales.)

To everyone's delight, canning is also better for a beer's quality, according to Welz. Cans don't let light in, plain and simple.

He said that light is destructive to the organic compound in beer that make the flavors everyone is so crazy about.

Welz also suspects that cans, with a "double-crimped" seal, are better than bottles at preventing air from getting in-air being one of the main enemies of a delicious brew.

All that is true, but Ska Brewing thinks the mounting consumer preference for canned beer has less to do with quality and more to do with convenience.

Biking to the store? Grab cans over bottles. Tired of glass breaking in the cooler on your road trip? Cans are safer. Own a grocery store (or a refrigerator)? Cans are more stackable.

Canned beer also chills better, and collective hysteria over BPA poisoning-a chemical in the lining of aluminum and plastic products-has gone out of vogue.