If you grew up in East Helena, Montana, as I did, two things would strike you at some point. First, adults drank a lot of beer. Second, they called can and bottle openers “church keys.” After drinking a few beers of my own, I understood why everyone was drinking them. But the church key moniker mystified me until I did some research.
The first generation of beer cans
didn’t have tabs of any sort for opening. They came sealed with flat tops of
steel—soup-can style—and you needed a tool to access the good stuff inside. The
tool was simple: a pointed piece of metal meant to pierce the lid. It resembled
a key, and in the joking vernacular of the 1930s and ’40s, someone dubbed it a church
key.
It was ironic, of course. The long,
heavy iron keys of Europe once unlocked cathedral doors. This little steel
gadget, by contrast, opened something altogether different—a fresh, cold brew.
Yet the name stuck, and it spread from can openers to bottle openers. To hold
one was to hold the key to daily salvation. And remember what Ben Franklin
said: “Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.”
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