church key

My family was not a beer drinking family so I was 40 years old before I learned a beer opener was called a church key and today I got to wondering why It was so named. so I looked it up.

There is sparse, and often contradictory, documentation as to the origin of the term "church key", though most agree the phrase is a sarcastic euphemism, as the opener was obviously designed to access beer, and not churches.

One explanation for the term "church key" lends its origin an almost mythic significance; in Medieval Europe, monks and nobility were the only brewers. Lagering cellars in the monasteries were locked, as the monks guarded the secrets to their craft. The monks carried keys to these lagering cellars on their cinch, or belt. It may have been this key from which the "Church Key" opener got its name.

Another motive for assigning the device such an ironic name could have been the fact that beer was first canned (for test marketing) in 1933^[8] — the same year Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Cullen-Harrison Bill.^[9] This act, which predated Repeal of Prohibition, amended the Volstead Act, making 3.2 beer legal. Some experts have posited the term "church key" was a way to "stick it to" the religious organizations who had effected Prohibition in the first place.^[10]

Another possible reason for calling the device a "church key" is that in some rural areas, churches were not locked, so no key was needed. Because the can opener is designed so anyone one could use it, the ubiquity of access was compared to the ability to get into a church at any time.