Yes we can

Although it's been available for more than eighty years, having first been sold in the mid-thirties in the post-Prohibition United States, canned beer has always had a bit of a cheapo image compared to draught, or even bottled, beer, and long been associated with globally-brewed, mass-market lagers.

The last canned beer I drank was probably a widgeted can of nitroflow Guinness at a sports event or in a hotel bar. Although I knew that some microbreweries had begun producing so-called "craft cans", the only pubs I'd seen them on sale in were Wetherspoons, where the draught choice is usually good enough not to bother with anything else, and at home I normally drink bottled beer, but an email from online retailer EeBria tempted me to pick up some from Macclesfield brewery RedWillow.

I've drunk cask versions of a fair few RedWillow beers (all of which have a -less suffix: Feckless, Wreckless etc.) on draught in the pub, and a couple of their bottled equivalents here and there too, so I was interested to see how they'd survive the transition to can. The first one I cracked open, Smokeless, is a beer right up my street: a 5.7% abv smoked porter, albeit one infused with chipotle.

I was expecting lots of fizz and a thin head, but as you can see from the photo there was a decent amount of foam and the beer beneath was softly carbonated: if I'd been asked to, I think I'd have had a hard time distinguishing it from the cask version, although the chipotle flavour was a little bit more pronounced I thought. I'm looking forward to seeing how their hop-forward and fruity pale ales stand up in cans.

There are apparently some can-conditioned beers, including a few German wheat beers, which still have live yeast in the container and would therefore be acceptable to CAMRA in the same way that bottle-conditioned ones are.