Canned Beer Gets Way Bigger Than Just A Tallboy. What Are The Largest Sizes?
Typically, a "normal" beer can is about 12 ounces in size, and you see them everywhere. They're featured in six-packs of domestic beers and plenty of non-alcoholic sodas as well. Sometimes, while you're perusing the beer aisle, you'll also see larger individual cans which are about 16 ounces in size, colloquially known as tallboys. Craft breweries love selling their beer in tallboys because it makes their beers stand out on the shelf. Increasingly, however, tallboys are coming up short for breweries. Your typical beer can is getting bigger.
There are a few larger sizes, each with common nicknames in the brewing industry. Past tallboys, you can also find 19.2-ounce cans called "stovepipes" which are an increasingly common way for craft breweries to sell their wares in convenience stores and local delis. Then you've got 24-ounce cans called "silo" cans, although you might recognize them as White Claw cans, because you can frequently buy cans of hard seltzer packaged in silos. The largest of all is a whopping 32-ounce can called the "crowler," which is most often seen as a to-go option when you're visiting the tap room of a local brewery. A crowler gets its name from the beer growler, which is a ceramic or glass jug which can be resealed with a lid; the crowler's name is a portmanteau of "can growler."
The rise of bigger beer cans
Many of these larger cans are fairly recent inventions. They coincide with the boom in craft breweries around the U.S. and beyond which started way back in the 1960s and 1970s, but really exploded in popularity around the early 2000s, when microbreweries became more common. The crowler in particular was invented around 2013 by the company Oskar Blues, which wanted a more unique way to sell its popular Dale's Pale Ale. Crowlers are new enough that currently, the breweries which sell them need to buy Oskar Blues' special machinery to seal the cans onsite, but they're much sturdier and more portable than a fragile glass growler.
As for the smallest beer cans, the typical 12-ounce can you see for domestic beers and sodas isn't as tiny as you can go. Some breweries like to sell smaller pours of especially strong beers (strong either in flavor or alcohol content) in eight-ounce cans which are sometimes nicknamed "nip cans" or "stubbies." The stubbies haven't quite taken off yet to the point that they're household names, and for the types of easily drinkable beers you'd find in chilled glasses in bars, you're more likely to see them in the usual 12 ounce, tallboy, or even a silo. But keep an eye out; the next big can could be just over the horizon.