CRAFT BREWPACKAGING & PROCESSING INNOVATION PRESENTS MARCH 2020 CRAFTCRAFT BREWING–BREWING– from cartons to conveyors to centrifugesfrom cartons to conveyors to centrifuges CraftBrewCover_0320.indd 1CraftBrewCover_0320.indd 12/20/20 10:55 AM2/20/20 10:55 AMseweurodrive.com | 864-439-7537 Designated Driver Beverage companies worldwide need drivers… Lots of them… Everywhere! So, they designate SEW gearmotors and electronics to drive their mixing tanks, bottling equipment, pumps, and conveyors. Why? Because they know that SEW on the conduit box means reliability, longevity, and quality. With 5 assembly centers and hundreds of distributors in the USA, we won’t let your brew turn into a brouhaha! Untitled-13 1Untitled-13 12/20/20 9:30 AM2/20/20 9:30 AMEFFORT.LESS. Continental ExtremeFlex™ beverage hose with EZ Clean cover takes the hard work out of keeping your facility looking its shiny best. Just hose its patented cover down with water. 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Untitled-13 1Untitled-13 12/20/20 9:23 AM2/20/20 9:23 AMCRAFT BREW INNOVATION MARCH 2020 2 PMMI Media Group 401 North Michigan Ave., Suite 300, Chicago, IL 60611 Phone: 312/222-1010 • Fax: 312/222-1310 E-Mail: info@packworld.com • Web: www.packworld.com PMMI The Association for Packaging and Processing Technologies 12930 Worldgate Dr., Suite 200, Herndon VA, 20170 Phone: 571/612-3200 • Fax: 703/243-8556 • Web: www.pmmi.org Staff at PMMI Media Group can be contacted at info@pmmimediagroup.com 4 Texas Brewer Upgrades Bottling and Adds Cans Installation of a canning line became a top priority as Altstadt Brewery opened new markets in Houston and Dallas. Also getting some serious upgrades was an existing bottling line. 12 ‘Quality Conscious’ Canning This Portland, Maine, brewery decided to “dip our toes in the can market” by installing a small filler/seamer. It quickly became clear that a 300 cans/minute line was going to be required. 16 Speeding Up the Brewing Process Rhinegeist Brewery upgraded to a vertical disk stack centrifuge that speeds up its brewing process while enhancing product quality and consistency. 24 Revolution Brewing is All In on Cans Though glass bottles were once a part of the mix at this well-known Chicago craft brewer, recently it’s been all about aluminum cans in three sizes. 28 Craft Brewing— Quick Hits 2020 The steadily growing popularity of aluminum cans in the craft brewing segment has some brewers mothballing their glass bottling lines altogether. 36 Advertiser Index Contents A supplement to Packaging World Contents_CB0320.indd 2Contents_CB0320.indd 22/24/20 12:17 PM2/24/20 12:17 PMCRAFT BREW INNOVATION MARCH 2020 2 PMMI Media Group 401 North Michigan Ave., Suite 300, Chicago, IL 60611 Phone: 312/222-1010 • Fax: 312/222-1310 E-Mail: info@packworld.com • Web: www.packworld.com PMMI The Association for Packaging and Processing Technologies 12930 Worldgate Dr., Suite 200, Herndon VA, 20170 Phone: 571/612-3200 • Fax: 703/243-8556 • Web: www.pmmi.org Staff at PMMI Media Group can be contacted at info@pmmimediagroup.com Contents_CB0320.indd 3Contents_CB0320.indd 32/25/20 11:35 AM2/25/20 11:35 AMCRAFT BREW INNOVATION MARCH 2020 4 In the historic German settlement town of Fredericksburg, amid the rolling hill country of Texas, sits Altstadt Brewery, a three-story German Tudor brewery, restaurant, and entertainment center that occupies some 58,000 sq ft. Co- founded by William Scripps Jr., part of the Cincinnati-based E.W. Scripps media empire, Altstadt produces German style beers that are guided by the German beer purity laws of 1516 and are brewed using only four ingredients: hops, barley, yeast, and artesian spring water. When the brewery opened in 2018, its only packaging format was glass bottles. But when the HEB super- market chain suggested that sales of Altstadt’s beer in its stores would triple if cans were available, plans for a can line were boosted from the back burner to “let’s do it right now.” In charge of making it happen was Brien Harper, Senior Consultant at J.S. Held LLC. Altstadt management brought on J.S. Held to assist in building and oper- ationalizing the ambitious expansion. “A can line was always in the plans,” says Harper. “It just happened about two and a half years sooner than Alstadt originally anticipated.” He notes that in addition to the increased Near the end of the new canning line sits a tray packer that receives six-count cartons from an upstream cartoner and packs them into corrugated trays four per tray. By Pat Reynolds, VP Editor Emeritus Texas Brewer Upgrades Bottling and Adds Cans Installation of a canning line became a top priority as Altstadt Brewery opened new markets in Houston and Dallas. Also getting some serious upgrades was an existing bottling line. Altstadt.indd 4Altstadt.indd 42/21/20 8:39 AM2/21/20 8:39 AMLooking to make a few changes around the brewery to enhance your brand and automate your craft beer labeling process? Weber can help. When you label your products, you are telling your story to the world and setting your brand apart from the crowd. The best way to do this is with an eye-catching label that excites the shopper and gets their attention. Weber can print your labels on a wide range of label materials including clear fi lms, prismatic metallic papers and just about any other type of facestock you need topping them off with durable, water-resistant varnishes or laminates. And to apply your new labels, Weber has a label applicator to fi t any size brewery operation from micros to megas. Our easy-to-use Pack Leader USA PL-501 is a wrap-around label applicator that can apply up to 131 feet of labels per minute with incredible accuracy and dependability. The PL-501 job pre-sets let you quickly adjust to various-sized cans or bottles ensuring fast changeovers. Add on a Weber Markoprint X1 Jet thermal ink jet systems to print date or lot code information as the product is labeled and you have a complete craft beer labeling solution. Let our experts help you show you how you can improve your labeling eff orts by sourcing labels and automated labeling equipment from Weber. Visit our website to get a closer look at our labels and labeling solutions. Or call us at 1.800.843.4242. With labels & label applicators from Weber Improve Your Craft Beer Labeling www.weberpackaging.com Locations Worldwide 35+ Flexographic and digital label presses. 1000’s Combinations of label materials and adhesives to fi t any labeling application. 20+ Diff erent label applicator systems to choose from. With labels & label applicators from Weber Craft Beer Labeling Altstadt.indd 5Altstadt.indd 52/21/20 8:40 AM2/21/20 8:40 AMCRAFT BREW INNOVATION MARCH 2020 6 production capacity needed to meet HEB’s requirements, there were also plans to open up new markets for cans in Dallas and Houston. That’s why Altstadt, unlike other craft breweries that might opt for modest canning capabilities at first just to get their feet wet with a new packaging format, invested in a canning line capable of 245 cans/min. To make things even more interesting, it wasn’t just the canning line that got fast-tracked. Also implemented at about the same time were some serious automation upgrades to the bottling line. But let’s begin with a look at the canning line. Predictably enough, it begins with a depalletizer. Supplied by Uni-Pak, it handles both cans and bottles, so the brewery runs one container format or the other but never both formats at once. A short distance downstream from the depalletizer is a fork in the conveyor connection—down one fork go the bottles and down the other go the cans. All cans are undecorated bright stock. Full-body shrink-sleeve labels supplied by Resource Label are applied by an Aurora labeler Compact * Wrapping * Value TOPTIER IS THE #1 SELLING CRAFT BEER PALLETIZER Simple by Design 503 353-7388 sales.team@toptier.com Portland OR www.toptier.com See our low & high infeed palletizers online, in our showroom, and at the Craft Brewers Conference, April 19-22, 2020 San Antonio TX, Booth 10142 Big color touchscreen. Easy to program. Easy to use. Simple by Design™. The nation’s #1 selling line of palletizers! • Every product type • Highest possible safety rating • Error-free jam-free operation • Concurrent stretch wrapping • Automatic recovery from stretch wrap fi lm break • Conventional and robotic solutions • and much more… Contact TopTier for complimentary show passes in automated palletizing with: TopTier continues to set new benchmarks CRAFT BREWERS CONFERENCE Full-body shrink-sleeve labels are applied by a mandrel style machine that uses servo motion control and a fiber optic sensor to read film registration marks. Altstadt.indd 6Altstadt.indd 62/21/20 8:43 AM2/21/20 8:43 AM7 from Axon. The mandrel-style machine uses servo motion control from Rockwell to deliver consistent, repeatable performance. A fiber optic sensor reads film registration marks so the PLC can calculate cut lengths to assure sleeve length accuracy. The labeler also features industry- standard PackML programming and HMI interfaces to deliver consistent terminology, consistent screen displays, and standardized program structures, thus delivering ease of operation and maintenance. The labels are immediately shrunk tight in an Axon steam tunnel. From there the cans pass through an air ionizer that pre-sanitizes the insides before the cans reach an ionized air rinser and a Domino ink-jet coder that prints the bottom of each can with lot and date code information. Filling is done on a 21-valve KHS Innofil integrated with a six-head Ferrum seamer. Exiting the seamer, cans go through a water-shower rinse, a Filtec fill level and lid detec- tor, and an air blower from Paxton Products that blows off moisture. Following an accumulation table, multipacking in paperboard cartons is next, and it’s done on a Brewpack 200 intermittent-motion cartoner from Switchback that features Rockwell Kinetix servo drives for controlling product load, flight chains, and carton erector. As cans are mass conveyed into the Brewpack 200, there are only three infeed lanes to receive them. But there’s no chance for back pressure to build thanks to the clever addition of a recirculation conveyor. Should there be a build- up of too many cans, the excess cans smoothly slide off into this recirculation conveyor and return to the cartoner infeed lanes. The Brewpack 200 cartoner picks flat blanks from a magazine feed and erects them while also collating cans into six-count groups that can be pushed into the cartons. Flaps are automatically tucked and closed with hot melt applied by a Nordson adhesive dispensing system. The paperboard cartons get a date code from a Domino ink-jet system. At this point the six-count cartons of 12-oz beer cans enter another Switchback machine, the TP-15 Traypacker. It erects 2-in. tall corrugated trays from flat blanks, pushes four six-count cartons into them, and closes up the flaps with hot melt glue applied, again, by a Nordson unit. Harper points out, however, that when Alstadt is run- ning 16- or 19.2-oz cans, the Brewpack cartoner is bypassed You craft beer. We craft conveyors . Single File and Hand-Pack SolutionsSingle File and Hand Pack Solutions Stability, Sanitary, Safety Accumulate, Pre-Case Pack Hand-Pack, Semi-Auto and Automated Solutions . Let’s chat. Case and Carrier TransportCaCasese aandnd CCararririerer TTraransnspoportrt Multi-Conve yor is a s upplie r me mbe r of the Craft Bre we rs As s ociation. Booth #7099 S an Antonio www.multi-conveyor.com Multi-Conveyor LLC Your best...conveyed better. 1-800-236-7960 Altstadt.indd 7Altstadt.indd 72/21/20 8:45 AM2/21/20 8:45 AMNext >