What’s brewing
With about 100,000 beer cans and counting, North Canterbury man Stu Reed has one of the world’s biggest collections of beer cans and breweriana. Metropol deputy editor Tamata Pitelen went along for a look.
“I’m a busy relaxer; I can’t sit still although I’ve got to because my body is buggered. Collecting beer cans kept my sanity after my motorcycle accident.”
The proud owner of a 20-metre by 12-metre warehouse packed floor to ceiling with 100,000 beer cans – not one of which is the same – North Canterbury man Stu Reed is explaining to me why he’s spent the last 40 years amassing one of the world’s biggest collections of breweriana, or beer memorabilia.
Stu is a passionate connoisseur of all things related to beer – from drinking it (Tui is his drop of choice) to collecting historic mementoes such as vintage pub wax match holders used in 19th- and early 20th-century public houses. He is especially fond, though, of collecting beer cans.
Metropol editor Nina Tucker and I have made the hour’s drive from Christchurch deep into rural North Canterbury on a frosty winter’s morning in August to see this spectacle for ourselves, which is how we find ourselves stood in a beer can labyrinth. Surrounded on all sides by walls lined with floor-to-ceiling shelves of colourful and carefully placed beer cans from every corner of the world, we are agog. Nina is snapping photos and we’re both walking around in awe at the size and scale of the endeavour. Stu is leading us through the maze, reeling off facts and figures about the history of beer (it first got put in cans in the 1930s, the pull tab was introduced in the 1960s…).
BEER NECESSITIES
To get fancy about it, Stu is both a laberophilist and a tegestologist, which respectively means a collector of beer bottle labels and a collector of beer mats and coasters. There is no one word for collectors of beer cans, so this aspect of his efforts comes under the general term of breweriana collector.
It started off innocently enough. At the age of 18, Stu found himself admiring the row of beer cans he’d lined up on the windowsill in his bedroom and thought to himself, ‘They look good, I think I’ll start a collection…’
Forty years and a warehouse full of cans later, Stu has well and truly executed that plan. He still has the can it all started with, a now-faded DB Draught (pictured in his hand, left).
However, he says, it probably wouldn’t have got to its current global scale were it not for a serious motorcycle accident in 2004 that left him with life-changing injuries at the age of 35.
“I was already collecting but not in a big way. That accident put me in hospital, out of action for a year, and stuck in a wheelchair. I went from working 14 to 16 hours a day to nothing. I needed something to do.”
BEER WITH ME
Collecting cans, says Stu, gave him a purpose and a distraction while he was recovering from the trauma of the accident. While bound to his wheelchair, he immersed himself in the world of breweriana, joining collectors’ groups and swapping sets with can connoisseurs all over the world, in particular the United States, Japan, and Germany.
The collection grew and soon it was too big for the four-bedroom home he shared with his partner Annie in Belfast.
“As well as filling the house, I had four trucks full of cans sat in our driveway. Annie said to me one day, ‘We’re getting a bit carried away Stu, we need to do something’. I said, ‘well, I’m not getting rid of my beer cans so we’re moving.’ That’s when we came out here,” he says.
The couple bought a 10-acre lifestyle block and Stu got to work building warehouses for his collections. As well as beer memorabilia, he also has warehouses full of his other passions, trucks and motorbikes. On top of that, he hired a builder who used to create film sets in Hollywood to build him his own wild west town complete with a working saloon for having friends over. But wait, there’s more. Inside the house he shares with Annie, is the Guinness room. Featuring a working bar and snooker table, this room is chock-full of Guinness beer memorabilia. Ironically, Stu doesn’t like the taste of Guinness, but he loves the brand and its history. The Guinness room has been the setting of many a good night, Stu tells us. Only on special occasions, though, he and Annie have a ‘no drinking beer in the house’ rule most of the time.
At the end of our visit, Nina and I chat with Stu over a cup of tea by his fireplace. “Do I have a problem?” he jokes. No, Stu, you don’t have a problem. You’ve filled your life with things you love. Long may that continue.
Fun facts about breweriana
1. The word ‘tegestology’, which is the collection of beer mats and coasters, was coined in 1960 by the founder of the British Beermat Collectors Society, Chris Walsh, to give a formal, academic-sounding name to a rapidly growing pub-based hobby.
2. The crown for the world’s largest collection of beer cans is American Jeff Lebo. Recognised by the Brewery Collectibles Club of America, Jeff has more than 100,000 vintage cans alongside massive amounts of general breweriana at his Brewhouse Mountain property in Pennsylvania. cansmartbeercans.com
3. The world record for the rarest and most expensive beer can belongs to a 1950s Chief Oshkosh Crowntainer, which sold for US$111,150 at auction in America in April 2025. It is widely considered by collectors to be the only known surviving example of its kind in near-perfect condition. guinnessworldrecords.com
