Beer travels badly, and it travels badly in ways that have nothing to do with the beer. A bottle that rides for two hours over washboard gravel loses its head, a growler filled at a highway brewery and set on a warm dashboard arrives oxidized, and a case left in a parked car in a BC January comes back as slush. The reason to think about packing before you buy is that every one of those failures is avoidable with a bag, a cooler and a bit of discipline, and none of them can be undone once the bottle is open.
The Rule About Leaks Is About Vibration
A leak in a beer bottle is almost never a hole in the glass. It is carbon dioxide coming out of solution under agitation, finding the smallest weakness at the cap, and pushing a thin line of foam down the outside. Rough roads, a truck bed, a boat, a bad ferry crossing and a long staircase all shake a bottle hard enough to release dissolved gas, and a screw cap or a cork-and-cage closure is a far better seal than a cheap plastic ring for exactly this reason. If you are buying beer to carry on gravel, buy bottles with real caps.
Cans are the opposite answer, and they are the right one. A can has no closure to leak, it will not break if you drop it, and it is light enough that carrying two dozen of them up a trail or a set of stairs is a chore you will notice. The cost of a can is temperature, since a thin aluminium wall comes up to temperature in your hand fast, but a can that has been lying in a cooler with a cold pack for an hour is the most reliable container for a rough drive that exists. If the drive home is the hard part, buy cans. If the serving matters more than the road, buy capped bottles and pack them upright.
How To Pack A Cooler That Works
Most cooler failures are packing failures rather than equipment failures. A cooler packed solid with liquid keeps its temperature far longer than one packed with air, because liquid conducts heat out of the remaining bottles and the mass takes a long time to warm, so fill empty space with a block of ice, a bag of frozen water, or the cans themselves if you have enough of them. Put the coldest items at the bottom and against the walls, keep the lid closed as long as you possibly can, and open it only when you are pouring. A full cooler in the shade holds cold for most of a day, and the same cooler packed loosely in the sun does not hold it for three hours.
Beyond the cooler, a plain insulated bag is enough for a four-hour round trip, and for a backcountry day where you are carrying weight on your back, a soft bag with a cold pack is lighter and more reliable than any hard cooler you would regret at the end of a trail. Wherever the beer goes, keep it in the passenger compartment if you can, out of direct sun, and off the floor of the vehicle where it is coldest. The one thing you should never do is leave a growler or a case in a parked car, for the reason that parked cars in BC winter go well below the freezing point of the beer inside them.
What A Growler Does On The Drive Home
A growler is a short-life container by design, so a two-hour drive is the worst possible way to treat one. It was filled without knowing when it would be poured, it holds a large volume of beer that has just been agitated, and the seal was never tested against a rough road. If you fill one and drive straight home in cool weather and open it the same evening, you will usually be fine. If you fill one, stop for a long lunch, leave it in a warm car and then drive two hours, you are pouring oxidized, foaming beer, and the carbonation that has come out of solution is not going back in. For a drive home, bottles and cans are simply the better container.
Coming Home From The United States
If your beer comes from a trip across the border, the amount you can bring back without paying duty and tax is set by the Canada Border Services Agency and depends on how long you were away and on your age, and the current figures are on the CBSA's page on bringing personal goods back into Canada. Two practical points are safe to state. The exemption is for your own personal use, not for resale or for handing around to a group of friends, and the amounts differ depending on whether you were outside Canada for 48 hours or more or for less than 48 hours, which changes the rate at which tax applies rather than removing it. The official guidance is the right place to check before you pack the car, and the links below will give you the current numbers rather than the ones written here.
There is also a limit on the container size of beer you can bring back duty free, so a single very large growler-style jug is a different proposition from a case of standard bottles, and anyone buying large formats on a US trip should check that limit rather than assume it scales. Declare what you have when you arrive, keep the receipts, and if you are over the exemption, expect to pay the duty and provincial levies on the excess rather than hoping it is not noticed. Nobody is interested in a bottle of beer, but the arithmetic is not worth the argument at the border.
A Practical Checklist For The Road
- Decide between cans and capped bottles before you buy, because the road decides it, not the beer.
- Fill the cooler completely with liquid and cold rather than air and ice cubes, and keep the lid shut until you pour.
- Carry beer in the passenger compartment and out of the sun, never loose in a truck bed across washboard.
- Treat any beer that has frozen as a different drink and drink it early rather than saving it for later.
- Skip the growler for anything involving a drive, a ferry or a long walk, and buy the volume in bottles or cans instead.
- If you are crossing the border, check the current CBSA personal exemption for alcohol and the container size rule before you buy.
The Cold Is Your Ally On The Way Home
The thing most people get wrong about bringing beer home is treating the cold as an obstacle rather than as free refrigeration. A BC winter road is cold enough to keep beer at its ideal serving temperature for the entire drive with no ice at all, so the rule in summer is to protect the beer from heat and the rule in winter is simply to keep it from freezing and from being shaken. Get the load in a cooler, keep it closed, drive home, and open it in a room rather than in the parking lot, and the beer that arrives will be better than the beer you bought.
