Beer cans circa 1985
Former employee Roger Clarke says the DB cans pictured in Sideswipe were from about 1985. "They included the very new DB motif that includes a barley ear between the D and B, but the release of the can was before the brief tenure of an Aussie CEO who decided to change DB's name from Dominion Breweries to DB Breweries — the tautology didn't seem at all incongruous to this Aussie. An interesting fact about this new 'aluminium' can was that, although the barrel of the can was aluminium, the ends were still pressed steel. Some advice: Unlike wine, which generally improves with age, beer is at its best when it is young. As it ages, it takes on a wet-cardboard flavour which becomes more noticeable after six months or so until it becomes quite unpleasant. It would not be wise to drink this 30-plus-year-old beer — apart from being unpalatable, it has probably been seriously contaminated by the old-style packaging."
Crushing reality
"I noticed your DB beer cans," writes Darryl from Waiatarua. "Men of a certain age saw beer cans being crushed with ease in US movies like Animal House and in prehistoric times NZ beer cans were steel. But still we used to crush them in our hands. Best we could go was pinch them together in the middle. The crushability of alloy cans was a revelation."
