AbstractControl of earing behaviour at the hot band stage is a critical requirement for successful manufacture of aluminium alloy sheet for beverage cans. The present study has combined production scale experiments with laboratory examinations to investigate the effect of various material and process parameters on microstructure, texture, and earing of the resulting products. It is shown that optimisation of the product is strongly dependent on (i) iron content of the alloy, (ii) ingot homogenisation temperature, (iii) finish hot rolling temperature, and (iv) heating rate during hot band annealing. Earing level after annealing is shown to depend on the balance between cube (+ Goss) texture intensity and the volume of material having almost randomly spread orientations. Pronounced 0/90°earing tendency is usually associated with coarse and elongated grain structures. A model is shown which represents the microstructure–texture evolution as a competition between cube/Goss grains, which nucleate systematically within transition bands, and randomly oriented grains, which nucleate in the vicinity of coarse second phase particles.MST/1032