I'm with you, Mr. Leonard. Speaking only for myself, I prefer using an opener on my beers. It gives one that anticipatory, masculine frisson. If you can twist off the cap, it might as well be a cream soda. But who am I. I have been known to get up and change DVDs with my bare hands, and I even leave my car in the driveway if I'm going somewhere less than two miles away.

In addition to inconvenience, the thing we Americans hate most is preparedness. We can't stand thinking ahead, for example having a beer opener around or remembering to take one with us to the beach / park / drive-in. These are two big lessons we need to learn as a culture: A little inconvenience is no big deal, and thinking ahead can save you a lot of inconvenience later.

Though I am not an eco-greenie, pro-environmentalist wonk, it does strike me as an anachronism that beer is in glass bottles.

How many millions of gallons of petroleum/diesel could be saved each year (via lower shipping weight/cost) by using lightweight plastic beer bottles instead of glass?

To take Sierra Nevada's logic to the next step, if pry-off bottles are bad for the beer, plastic bottles must be much worse. But then again for most American beers, you probably wouldn't be able to taste the difference.

Alas, I've pared down my Belgian and English beer consumption because I've come to a personal conclusion that it's lame of me to drink beer shipped 4,000+ miles.

Think globally, drink locally. I guess.

Right on my desk, right in front of me! An old fashioned church key bottle opener. I keep it here in case my son brings me a beer but forgets to open it for me. Yay!

I also have a church key in the garage on the shelf with my screwdrivers, and one in the dining room on the bookshelf, and one, of course, in the utensil drawer in the kitch. Right in the front.

There isn't one in my bedroom yet, but give me time. Soon enough. . . soon enough. . .

Choices for convenience usually come out of a web of choices. Your offhand comment about cycling and getting wet is a great one. Having spent a number of years bicycle commuting, I came to learn that my limit was about 5 miles each way. I was limited by time to travel, number of hours of daylight, and adequacy of bicycle lights, and tolerance for being cold and wet especially in October and November here in New England. Cycling also has an upper age limit. at 50, I'd think twice about biking more than 8 miles/day (i. e. a 30 min ride) because of an increased injury rate.

But a few mile limit means a major lifestyle change. either you need to have enough employers within your tolerance for biking range, must be willing to put up with unpleasant work environments or be willing to move every time you change a job. Only one of these supports community connection because being connected to your community takes energy and time. An alternative view is that employers have factory towns within larger cities and move their employees into factory owned apartments. This obviously has a different effect on communities and local governments as well as people's relationship to a local community.

It's all connected. Cars gave us freedom from employers and allowed us to build communities. It's our own fault that we let employers dominate our lives and reduce if not eliminate our ability to participate in local community issues.

And do not, do not get me started on light bulbs. Especially LED lightbulbs with their near ultraviolet blue light which triggers migraines in both my wife and myself.

Let's face it Seira Nevada Pale Ale doesn't have market saturation that bud or Miller has, let alone the quality beer emporer Sam Adams. So what's little marginalized SNPA to do?

How about get all counterculteral and retro with a pryoff cap?

Most foreign beers still use pry off caps, and foreign equals better in theminds of consumers, ergo, if we just draw attention to the fact that we have crazy old school bottle caps, people will think that our beer is better than it is.

Sort of like Grolsh still using the mason jar stoppers in some of their line.

If we want to talk beer quality preservation and environmental freindliness let's talk cans. Or hey how about plastic bottles of beer? Both preserve taste and resources better than glass bottles. But neither actually sells as rarified and fancy, which is what SNPA is trying to do.

As to the convenience issue, any real drinker has a bottle opener on his keychain (for just such an emergency) so I don't see the call for rebellion in this.

Maybe it's a Portland beer geek thing. With a bottle opener on the key chain I'm always ready. Hooray for Sierra Nevada protecting their beer from oxygen! As soon as I get home I'll open a '02 Bigfoot and raise a toast to them.

Another motivation that they won't mention in press releases: Sierra Nevada probably did some market research that showed that consumers identify twist-off caps with "macro" brews, that are in turn identified with lower quality beer. I drink pretty much only stuff from smaller local breweries (our local beer economy is producing some damn fine beer, I always try to buy local when all else is equal, and where freshness is concerned 1000 miles can never compete with 10) and they almost always have pry-off bottles. I didn't know that Sierra Nevada ever had twist-offs, I just automatically use the opener. If moving to a cheaper technology actually increases consumers' perceptions of quality, real or not, so much the better.

That's why you don't find the fancier spirits in plastic bottles. Plastic would be just as good but consumers won't pay more than $20 for something in plastic.

Beer goes into the bottle hot which makes plastic bottles a challenge they only figured out pretty recently. Plus, plastic is somewhat gas permeable so beer in plastic goes flat very fast. That's why you pretty much only find beer that way in places with such high turnover that freshness doesn't matter or where the customer has no choice in the matter (sporting events, concerts, nightclubs, etc).