Beer cans are nothing new, but for various reasons - notably the cost of setting up and running a canning line - they have become a shorthand for mass-market or industrial beers. Craft brewers are associated instead with bottles, which can even be hand-filled for the lowest possible capital cost. Now all that is changing. The advent of small-scale canning technology is enabling even quite small brewers to take it up, with several microcanning lines in operation around the UK and Ireland.