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Recyclable PET beer keg locks in quality

Heineken USA launches a one-way recyclable PET beer keg for on-premise sales that offers consistent carbonation, 100% evacuation, a smaller footprint, and less expense.

FULLY RECYCLABLE. Consisting of two PET bottles—one inner and one outer—the 20-L BrewLock is fully recyclable and is 25% lighter than a steel keg.
FULLY RECYCLABLE. Consisting of two PET bottles—one inner and one outer—the 20-L BrewLock is fully recyclable and is 25% lighter than a steel keg.

Steel keg systems for on-premise beer sales have long been the norm in the industry. The systems deliver very good quality—if maintained properly. When they are not, inconsistent beer quality results. Steel keg systems also come with other drawbacks: the cost of returning the kegs, the expense of the gas and regulator systems needed to deliver the beer to the tap, and the inability to evacuate all of the product from the keg.

Says Joe Pagliaro, Director of Innovation and Packaging at Heineken USA, “The issues have been known for a long time in the industry, but no brewer has ever put the resources behind it to find a solution.” Last year, in response to these challenges, Heineken introduced a new keg system to solve these issues, foremost among them ensuring the quality of its beer once it leaves its facility.

“As a brewer, the way beer is served at any retail location is largely out of our hands,” Pagliaro says. “At Heineken, we are obsessed with quality and will never settle for our beers not being served the way our beermasters intended.”

Introduced nationally in May 2014, the BrewLock PET keg system eliminates many potential fail points of current draught systems, Pagliaro explains. “So long as retailers continue to clean their draught lines, and serve the beer cold and in clean glasses, BrewLock does the rest to ensure the beer the customer is drinking in the U.S. tastes as good as if they are drinking from the filling line at the brewery.”

Brewery-fresh beer
In engineering the BrewLock, Heineken’s primary objective was to create a system that could deliver brewery-fresh beer, safely. “Our goal was to ensure to the best of our ability that the beer hitting the consumer’s lips tastes the exact same way every time, and that at the end of the keg, we didn’t have a pressurized plastic balloon that could potentially harm someone,” Pagliaro explains.

The BrewLock is not the first plastic keg. But Heineken felt each competitive system had elements that could be improved upon in its own design. The result is a multi-component system that comprises two 20-L PET bottles; a valve made from polybutylene terephthalate (PBT)/nylon/nitrile rubber (NBR)/steel; a PET collar; and a polypropylene protective cap. “Each component is engineered to extremely strict tolerances to ensure every keg works perfectly, every time,” says Pagliaro.

The main components are the two PET bottles. These are designed with one inside of the other. The outer bottle is clear PET; the inner—a less rigid, collapsible structure—is silver and contains additives to offer the best protection to the beer, including pigments to protect from a full spectrum of light waves and oxygen scavengers to prevent oxidation, for example. These additives enable up to a six-month shelf life for the beer. The bottles are currently injection stretch blow molded off-site. Several suppliers have lent their technical support, but Heineken chooses not to name them. In the coming months, Heineken plans to commission in-line bottle blowing to increase flexibility and efficiency. The keg system also comes with a proprietary air compressor.

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