TaZa Pop-the-Top Beer Bottle Opener (Black): Automatic Bottle Opener, No Damage to Cap | Fun Bartender Tool | Push Down Decapitator Bottle Cap Opener by

Product Information

Using a bottle opener is simple and straightforward. For church key types, simply place the flat end underneath the bottle cap and press down to pull it off.

In 1795, during the French Revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte, troubled by his troops’ spoiling rations, offered a 12,000-franc prize to anyone who might advance food preservation. Fifteen years later, French chef Nicolas Appert finally won Napoleon’s prize by inventing the first hermetically sealed glass container; that same year, 1810, English inventor Peter Durand patented the first tin-coated iron cans.

Multi-tool openers will vary slightly depending on model, but the basic premise is to insert the end of the opener into the container and twist until you hear a “pop” or feel it give way. There are a few different types of bottle openers, each designed for its own specific purpose. The most common is the classic “church key” opener, which has a flat end that can be used to pry off metal caps from bottles and cans. When using a winged opener, firmly grip the bottle and slide the serrated portion under the lip of the cap. Then, press down on one side of the opener until you hear a “pop” sound as it releases from the bottle. Thanks to the ingenuity of Ermal “Ernie” C. Fraze, we now find ourselves, ice-cold can in hand, listening to the sound of summer: “Pshhh!” “Tsssk!” “Fwshawww!”

A church key is a small, double-edged metal tool found in many kitchen drawers—one side is triangular-tipped for piercing metal cans, the other rounded for opening bottles. (The bottle-opener side resembles the handle of an old-fashioned church key; hence, the name.) In the 1950s, when opening a beer, drinkers punctured a triangular hole in either side of the top of the can—one hole for drinking, the other for airflow. I personally did not invent the easy-open can end,” Fraze told the New York Times in July 1963. “People have been working on that since 1800. What I did was develop a method of attaching a tab on the can top.” The pop-top may seem like a simple invention. But by the time Fraze came around, the gadget was 150 years in the making. On cans and can openers Had Fraze remembered his church key at that 1959 picnic—had he never been forced to wield his car fin as a can opener—we might not have the modern pop-top. But the owner of Dayton Reliable Tool Company, a machine tool business, did forget his church key, and while the episode maddened him at the time, it had him uttering that age-old inventors’ creed: “There must be a better way.” It’s important to keep your bottle opener clean and free from dirt, dust and grime. To do so, simply wipe down your opener with a damp cloth after each use. If the opener is especially dirty, you can also use some mild soap and water to clean it thoroughly.From the early 1960s to the early ’70s, the zip-top was the world’s go-to tab. “Fraze was riding the wave of aluminum,” says Liebhold. “Cans were historically made of steel. But steelworkers, these big, bruising people, were more focused on railroads and bridges, not lightweight cans. This allowed the aluminum industry to compete, to take over the can industry. And, curiously, it’s easier to make a pop-top out of aluminum than steel. It was a bizarre alignment of forces.” As the commodity caught on in the mid-19th century, American inventor Ezra J. Warner, spotting a need, designed the first can opener: a blade that sawed a circle around the lid’s rim, leaving a sharp metal edge in its wake. Patented on January 5, 1858, Warner’s invention aided Yankee troops during the Civil War. Sixty-eight years later, on May 20, 1926, Charles A. Bunker patented the modern can opener.