Screw Off!

When I was a kid we had these handy little punched-out steel devices euphemized as "church keys".

This euphemism was clearly ironic because these little tools were designed mostly to give you access to beer, the oldest form of alcoholic beverage, the kind of ungodly substance that church-related "blue laws" still prohibit the sales of on Sundays in many towns across this great open-minded yet thoroughly Puritanical country called "America" even today.

One end had a little pry tab designed to provide just the right leverage to pop off a "crown" bottle cap. Of course these could also used for sodas, but I doubt they got the nickname "church key" for that application.

On the other end the steel came to a triangular point, and it was designed to give leverage to punch a triangle-shaped hole in the metal flat-top beverage cans of the day before "pop-tops" were invented.

Time went by and beverage manufacturers and "bottlers" figured out that people would probably drink more if it was easier to get the containers open, so they created "pop top" metal cans. For the first few years, you pulled the tab right off, and people made decorative chains with them but mostly threw them on the ground, which not only made a mess but presented a hazard to different animals that would ingest them with gruesome results.

Under pressure, we got the pop-tops of today, where the thirsty patron simply pulls a metal tab up which forces a metal lever down to push the tab open, but keep it attached to the inside of the can. So then cans were easy to open without a "church key", and didn't pose any particular environmental threat apart from throwing the cans themselves down. But animals can't eat those, so they weren't such a threat.

A few years went by and some packaging genius actually realized that the conventional crown-top bottle cap could be combined with a simple twist-off screw top mechanism, and make it so you could now open beverage bottles without a tool as well.

Finally! Full beverage liberation! You could buy beer (or pop) in cans, or bottles, go somewhere, and drink them without need of any kind of tool. For awhile resourceful people had figured out different ways to pop the caps off bottles, some risking their teeth, some prying with a belt-buckle or key, some actually carrying small openers on their keychains (which I always took as a sign of somebody way too focused on drinking), and I even saw a guy pull off the tops with his EYE socket! Now THAT'S the kind of bar trick worth risking your vision on!

But as more years have gone by, massive breweries have been met with small, custom outfits called "microbreweries". These purveyors along with other brands of smaller volume, "specialty" production beers, decided that it was somehow more "fitting" to reinforce the impression of "old-timey goodness" (as if most beer was at one time uniformly delicious) of their product by bottling it in a threadless, old-style crown bottle caps that require a tool to remove.

If you're not careful and you've gotten used to twisting off beer bottle caps with your hand (soda had long since gone to screw top plastic bottles) and you encountered one of these old "non-screwtop" bottles and tried to twist the cap off with your hand, well, some level of pain would generally ensue as your tightened grip tried to turn the sharp-edged crown tops off that wouldn't twist at all. That can really hurt, like grabbing a woodworker's sharpened rasp tool and just twisting your skin against it to see how bad it would hurt.

But the thing that pisses me off enough to write this is that now it's commonly used as a marketing gimmick meant to communicate, "quality, low-volume beer." But it's being used by huge breweries just to give that impression, so now I have to jump back four decades or so and make sure I have a tool to open these bottles just because some marketing genius thought it was "cool". People can buy cold beer, go someplace nice to drink it, and not be able to get the stupid bottles open, just for "marketing" purposes.

There is no good, practical reason not to make every single beer bottle cap twist off--none. But they still force people to reflexively try to twist, go "ouch!", and then rattle around in a drawer looking for what should be a completely obsolete tool. Just because they think we're such suckers that we'll believe any swill with a non-twist off cap will automatically taste good, just because they use an inconvenient and obsolete closure on the bottle.

So I write this mostly in vain, hoping that somehow it will cause a spell to be cast over every marketing manager who decides to make my life a hassle by making this arbitrary decision, and cause them immediate death for their sin, or at least, severely gouged hands.

Translation: Beer-bottlers, stop using non-twist off bottle caps, you're not fooling anybody!