By Duane St. Clair

To the untrained eye, a beer can might just look like a beer can.

But for Westerville resident Doug Blegen, it might be a collector’s dream come true.

The 57-year-old traffic engineer collects beer memorabilia and painstakingly displays it in several parts of his Westerville home. The hobby that began while in college in the 1970s, he says, and was spurred on by a collection of beer cans stacked in pyramid in a friend’s home.

Since then, the hobby has taken him to garage sales, flea markets and shows staged by fellow beer memorabilia enthusiasts to trade a seemingly unending range of items. While he has several hundred collectibles – he doesn’t count or catalogue them – they’re displayed in orderly fashion in three rooms and a basement tavern.

The walls of one second floor room have shelves of neatly stacked and grouped cans, plus some framed paper memorabilia from brewers. Several cardboard and wood beer cases from one-time Columbus brewers are also stacked there.

A number of cans are steel with flat tops, some printed with instructions on how to open them (included on cans in their early days). One section has Hamm’s cans, a root of his collection because he was born in Minnesota, the beer’s home state. He has a group of cans with capped, cone-shaped tops that were designed to be filled on brewers’ bottling lines when companies sought to use metal rather than glass for their beers. The steel cans were precursors of flat-topped, stackable cans.

All his cans are empty, as most collectors’ are. Belgen says the beer would corrode the cans’ seams over time. They’re emptied by punching holes in the bottom.

In another room, the Ohio State University civil engineering graduate has a display of Buckeye memorabilia, including Buckeye Beer bottles.

His collection includes can and bottle openers, signs, wall plaques, trays, so-called chalk-statues (advertising displays made of plaster-like material) and other fun items for taverns, such as a mock scoreboard on which baseball scores were posted. Several of the “chalk” pieces favored by his wife Yvonne are in a lighted China closet in the living room. She appreciates “their color, and sometimes their whimsy,” he says.

Blegen dedicates less time to his collection than in the past, although it is still going strong.

“I used to spend more time with it than I do now,” he says. “I go to three or four trade shows every year.” Usually, Yvonne does not accompany him.

“She’s kind of thrilled when I can trade several cans for one that’s rarer. She doesn’t like to see a lot volume coming in the door,’’ he says of his trade show forays.

Though much of Blegen’s collection comes from trade show events, he has also located items in less than ordinary places. He once found two cans in perfect condition buried in hay in an old barn. He tells of buying a case of Iron City beer in Pennsylvania, where that’s the only way it’s sold, to get a special commemorative can with a sports theme.

Once in his early years, while looking through a beer cooler for cans he hadn’t yet acquired, another shopper noted Blegen’s search and asked if he was a collector. The shopper told Blegen of the Brewery Collectibles Club of America, a national organization of about 4,000 members. That discovery led to more sources and became an educational avenue, too, through a bi-monthly magazine it publishes. He’s also affiliated with two other national organizations that center on beer-related things.

The collectibles club has annual trade shows Blegen sometimes attends, depending upon their location. He won’t drive cross-country: his car is always full when he hauls his tradable items to a trade show and brings back any acquisitions. The most recent show was last year in Springfield, Mo., which he visited en route from a vacation trip to Minnesota. His wife was with him on that trip.

“It’s a lot of fun,” he says. “You walk room to room looking at (collectors’ offerings).”
He indicated he keeps the hobby going because he is president of the organization’s Gambrinus Chapter of the Brewery Collectibles Club of America in Columbus and “I have to be involved.” The chapter is named after a beer and a brewery, once prominent in the city. Once a year, the chapter hosts a trade show with 40 to 50 collectors at an exhibit hall in Hilliard.

Blegen tries to find things with Central Ohio ties, which he seems to prefer or appreciate most in his collection.

“I always keep an eye open for (historic) stuff from Columbus,” he says. “There once were a lot of breweries in Columbus.” He has photographs, advertising paraphernalia, an occasional label, openers, business papers or letters and the like. Those breweries didn’t use cans, but Blegen has opted not to collect bottles for many reasons and because labels usually come off and most bottles are not unique.

“I’ve got to focus or it gets out of hand,” he says.

Generally, the hobby’s not expensive. Blegen says the items he buys usually cost only a few dollars. He has heard of a can selling for $10,000. Blegen once paid $500 for a Columbus can, one of his larger purchases.

“(It was) the only one I had ever seen. I was questioning my sanity,” he says.

Eventually, he received an offer he couldn’t refuse for the Columbus can and used the proceeds to start a fund to finish his basement, now truly a beer memorabilia collectors’ haven. It houses a variety of international items, such as miniature beer cans from Japan, a rack of “9 2/3” cans from England (so-named because that was their size in fluid ounces) and several Scottish “Tennant Girl” cans bearing pictures of aspiring models. Beside the small bar, there’s a beer cooler with a glass door in which he keeps porters and stouts, dark beers not for collection, but for personal consumption on occasion.

Some rare items come from the production process of beer cans. Blegen shows visitors a small rectangle of olive drab steel, which was a blank that was to be shaped into a beer can and distributed to soldiers during World War II. He has a couple of those cans. He also has a round piece of aluminum the size of a can – it’s an example of a “slug” meant to be expanded into a can.

While he steers clear of glass bottles, Blegen has a small collection of “cabottles” atop the cooler. Those are aluminum containers shaped like glass bottles, marketed by American brewers such as Anheuser-Busch to commemorate an event, holiday or sports team. Collectors came up with the moniker because “they couldn’t decide if they are a bottle or a can,” Blegen says.

Otherwise, “I don’t keep up with brand name stuff,” he adds.

Duane St. Clair is a contributing editor for Westerville Magazine.