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Craft Brew—Can Filling

One story heard time and time again from craft brewers is that when aluminum cans all of a sudden became a must-have format, the canning equipment they first installed to meet the sudden demand quickly proved inadequate.

4 Elysian Krones

“What we installed was enough to dip our toes in the water,” is a common refrain—but it wasn’t enough to keep up with how quickly the demand for cans grew.

What to do in such circumstances? At both Seattle-based Elysian Brewing Co. and at Lake Travis Brewing in Texas, the answer was to install a Krones Craftmate C filler. A 24-valve volumetric filler combined with a 4-head seamer from Ferrum, the Craftmate is specifically designed for the low-output range of 1,200 cans/hr.

Elysian’s CEO Joe Bisacca says that a few years ago the firm had just invested in a new bottling line capable of 400 bottles/min when all of a sudden, as he puts it, “Canning sort of flipped the switch. It got to where you couldn’t get access to stadiums because they weren’t taking glass bottles anymore. And they wanted a 19.2-oz format, not the traditional 12-oz bottle. So we started with an in-line intermittent-motion canning system, but before long we were limping along with it and not nearly reaching the volumes we needed to reach. With the Craftmate, on the other hand, I can not only reach the necessary volumes, I can do multiple SKUs, like 12-oz cans or 12-oz skinnies as well as 16- and 19.2-oz cans.”

Feeding the Krones/Ferrum equipment is a used depalletizer and a feed chute conveyor that takes cans down to the filler. Mounted on this conveyor is a Videojet ink-jet coder that puts lot and date code on can bottoms. As for graphics, the vast majority of the cans filled at Elysian come preprinted. But for a few limited-volume beers, cans are decorated with shrink sleeve labels by the can supplier.

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