BEER ALERT!!! Behold the Beer Can, Its Beauty Faded in the Eyes of the Young!

HUBERTUS, Wis. -- Kids collect a lot of things these days: Transformers action figures, American Girl dolls, baseball cards. Then there's 10-year-old Randy Langenbach. He collects beer cans.
"I just like how they look," Randy says of the 200 cans that line the walls of his bedroom here. And, no, "he doesn't drink the beer," his father says.

The problem for the once-thriving hobby of beer-can collecting is that Randy is a rarity: a collector under the age of 30.

As the beer can nears its 75th birthday in January, many hobbyists are crying in their brew over their inability to lure young people to a pastime that hooked many of them when they were youngsters in the 1970s.

"We'd ride bikes to each other's houses and start trading cans," says Dan Baker, 47, an Illinois collector who started when he was 10. "That's what all the kids did back then."

Now, the country's dwindling number of beer-can enthusiasts fear the hobby is past its sell-by date, unable to compete with videogames and iPods. Unless hobbyists can revive interest among kids -- or even among 35-year-old beer drinkers -- they fret that nobody will be around to look after their "flat tops" and "cone tops" and the cultural history they represent. Some also worry that their collections will lose their dollar value.

"A lot of the older members are dying off, and it's really tough to get new members," says Mark Sanders, 47. A hobbyist since his youth, Mr. Sanders sported a Blatz T-shirt and a bracelet of Blatz bottle caps at a recent brewery-collectibles show in Belleville, Ill.

Can collectors hand out free beer cans to kids at shows, ship them boxes of cans by mail and regale them with stories of discovering rare cans.

"They try to keep me into it," says young Mr. Langenbach, who also collects beer trays and bottle caps. But the blue-eyed fourth-grader says not one of his classmates collects cans, despite his efforts to entice them. "The boys are mostly interested in sports, and the girls are interested in girl stuff."


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