Today’s Wall Street Journal has an interesting article about the art of collecting beer cans, and how recent trends have pushed the number of collectors down. Way down. This doesn’t worry a 10-year-old boy in Wisconsin, though.

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.

The article says that keeping collector numbers high is hard these days since many older collectors are dying off, and getting new kids hooked into collecting is even harder when iPods and video games are more exciting than pieces of motionless metal. Almost 12,000 people were members of the The Brewery Collectibles Club of America in 1978. Now only 3,500 people pay the yearly fee of $38.

I’ve always thought collecting cans was a neat, beer-related hobby, and I’ve collected a number of beer bottles over the past few years. But I like keeping the bottles as more of a timeline of my drinking, as well as for the aesthetic value of the bottles, rather than finding rarities and collecting used cans and bottles just to have and hold.

Anyone else have a beer-related collection? I know the Blackfoot River Brewery has a nice collection of cans lining its ceiling, and a bar called Ashley’s in Ann Arbor, MI has an enormous stock on the rafters. Miles and Steffen are big growler collectors, but I don’t know anyone with a can collection, so maybe it is the end of an era.

There’s a video below, and here’s the link to the photo gallery with the article–some great photos in it. The article’s worth the read, especially when you get some great quotes from Randy Langenbach like:

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.”

(Via The Wall Street Journal)