How Many Canned Beers Are In Those Infamous Tallboy Cans?

You might have stopped into a liquor store or gone to a baseball game and noticed that the standard beer can is no longer the only option for purchase. Rather, bigger, taller cans, known appropriately as "tallboys" are now widely available at most stadiums and places you can purchase beer. In its simplest form, it's just a larger beer can. Tallboys hold a full pint of beer, or 16 ounces, which is four ounces more than a standard 12-ounce can.

Of course, anyone who likes to drink the occasional cold beer knows there is one major drawback to the now-famous tallboy: Its size means you have to drink it quickly. Otherwise, you risk the beer getting too warm — and nobody wants a warm beer. However, for events such as concerts and baseball games, the tallboy is a great way to enjoy a longer-lasting beer and ensure you won't have to get out of your seat to replace it too often.

If a standard beer can holds 12 ounces and a tallboy can adds an extra ⅓ of a standard-sized can into the mix, that means the tallboy holds 1⅓ traditional beer cans. A little goes a long way here, and the tallboy is noticeably larger than a regular can. In most cases, you can buy a singular tall boy at an event or a four-pack at a store.

Tallboy cans have become popular among all beer types, but for a while, they were a way for craft breweries to distinguish their product as higher-end than, say, a Miller Light or Bud Light can. Canadian brewer Haydon Dewes told CBC Canada in 2022 that the size is good for marketing. "It's us saying: We are craft beer, we're not a macro beer," he stated. "We don't put our beer into short cans and put it into a box of 36. This is a premium product that comes in a four-pack."

Gone are the days of the tallboy only representing small-batch craft beer, though. Rather, major brewing companies, such as Molson Coors and Anheuser Busch, have also jumped on the tallboy bandwagon. And these days, tallboys aren't even limited to packs of four. Most liquor stores sell them as single beers in the refrigerator section, making them an easy "grab and go" option when you don't want to commit to buying an entire case of the same beer.

Single beer sizes have expanded even beyond the 16-ounce, too. Nowadays, the beverage app Drizly offers order options for single cans as large as 25 ounces for certain beers. And new 19.2-ounce cans, known as stovepipes, are also becoming more popular among brewers. Consumers will likely only find the latter can option among brewers with a larger budget, given that it's a less common (and newer) size choice. But in the meantime, you can still opt for a larger size option in the handy tallboy.