Keg Brand Beer 16 Oz Tab Top Can

Keg Brand Half Quart Tab Top Can

The Can

This 16-ounce straight steel tab top can represents the half-quart tallboy format of Keg Brand Beer, packaged by General Brewing Company out of Los Angeles, California. The can design prominently showcases the stylized brand name above an illustration of a wooden barrel bearing the slogan "NATURAL FLAVOR" across a central badge. A notable feature of this specific catalog variant is the placement of the volume statement, "NET CONTENTS ONE PINT," situated along the bottom rim beneath the large "HALF QUART" banner, accompanied by the Los Angeles 90012 ZIP code on the seam margin.

The Brand

Originally launched as a budget-friendly regional label by the Maier Brewing Company during the 1960s, Keg Brand Beer was created to cater to value-conscious consumers across the West Coast. When General Brewing assumed control of Maier's brewing assets in the early 1970s, the label was retained and continued in distribution. Its visual identity, centered on traditional cooperage imagery and bold typography, presented a no-nonsense image tailored to everyday beer drinkers.

The Brewery

The Los Angeles facility where this can originated traced its heritage back to the nineteenth-century Philadelphia Brewery, which subsequently grew into the prominent Maier Brewing Company on Aliso Street. The brewery survived Prohibition and flourished for decades through high-volume production and contract packaging. In 1971, financier Paul Kalmanovitz acquired Maier and folded its operations into General Brewing, which also operated facilities in San Francisco and Vancouver, Washington. The downtown Los Angeles plant brewed and canned regional brands for a few more years before closing permanently in 1974.

Collecting Context

Sixteen-ounce pint cans from the tab top era occupy an appealing niche in breweriana collecting. For California and West Coast beer historians, this can is especially valued as an artifact documenting the final transition years of Los Angeles's historic Aliso Street brewery under the General Brewing umbrella.