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New can line hits speed sweet spot

Some breweries tend toward speed and volume, others toward small-batch and flexibility. Heavy Seas needed both, so it pioneered a system capable of doing so.

Printed cans are depalletized and run through a twist rinser prior to filling and seaming.
Printed cans are depalletized and run through a twist rinser prior to filling and seaming.

Heavy Seas Beer, a 23-year-old brewery based in Baltimore, is relatively mature compared to its upstart craft brew peers. It has already gone through all of the typical growing pains that craft brewers go through to get to a place of stability. They’ve already outgrown a few facilities, and six years ago, they did an overhaul on their existing space to install a heavily automated bottling line from KHS, plus new kegging lines. So they have a well-equipped draft and brown-bottle packaged beer business. Heavy Seas enjoys distribution throughout the East Coast out to Ohio, plus a niche market among cruise lines and in Caribbean locales backed by its swashbuckling pirate theme.

“We’re best known for one of the original East Coast IPAs, which is Loose Cannon IPA. We’re very focused on that brand and what we call the Cannon Crew brands, including Loose Cannon IPAs, TropiCannon citrus IPA, Double Cannon double IPA, and AmeriCannon, which is a double dry-hopped American pale ale,” says Dan Kopman, CEO. “Those four beers constitute about 80 percent of our production. And the brewery was built basically on the backs of sales of kegs of draft beer to wholesalers and 12-ounce bottles in retail, with about a 45 percent to 55 percent split, respectively.”

But about three years ago, things began to shift in the craft brew market that made Heavy Seas reevaluate its course. At the local level, Maryland, a state that had once outlawed taprooms in breweries, began to allow them. And nationally, cans became the emergent growth container, while bottles plateaued.

“What happened in 2016 and going into 2017 is the number of breweries in the United States really started to explode,” Kopman says. “Previously, there had been a lot of pressure on what I call the traditional, on-premise bar-and-restaurant business. New breweries that operate just through their taproom via a direct-to-consumer model don’t participate in the three-tier [brewer, distributor, retailer] part of the business that we do. They may sell some kegs and a little bit of packaged beer locally, but they rely on their over-the-bar business to keep them going.”

So in March 2017, he was recruited to Heavy Seas by its founder, Hugh Sission, from venerable St. Louis craft brewer Schlafly, which Kopman had co-founded. In Kopman’s role as Heavy Seas CEO, he was charged with reinventing the brand and reengineering parts of the brewery to cope with what was going on in the market. This meant adding a taproom, thus adding the direct-to-consumer business Heavy Seas had lacked. He also spearheaded a pilot brewery to improve the company’s innovation program, bring more new products to the market faster, and test those products in the taproom before going into full-scale distribution. He would be looking at what was going on in the market and deciding what needed to be done from a branding standpoint, from a product portfolio standpoint, and from a packaging standpoint. Even though the company was built on kegs and bottles, it was obvious to Kopman that growth was in cans.

“The brewery’s volume has been flat since 2015. We’ve been at a 600,000-case-per-year equivalency for the past three years,” Kopman says. “But in order to stay flat, we’ve had to work really hard. And part of that was an additional investment last year of a canning line that allowed us to meet wholesalers’, retailers’, and consumers’ demand for cans.”

Filling and seaming speed gap
According to Kopman, the biggest challenge with adding a canning line was getting the versatility needed to do both volume and small-batch canning. Heavy Seas has some higher-volume beers that could keep an expensive 250 can/min rotary filler fed, but such a machine would be wasted on the short runs, seasonal brews, and new items stemming from the pilot brewery. Inversely, most common in-line canners can’t get much faster than 40 cans/min, so they’d be a bottleneck for the higher-volume can runs. Kopman sensed a soft spot in the industry’s filler and seamer offerings.

Of course, two in-line fillers could run in tandem to double the speed, but according to Kopman, such fillers are designed for local brewers making beers destined to be distributed locally. The speed and precision of a fill and seam affects oxygen pickup and sterility attributes, and getting those incorrect could hurt shelf life. That’s not a problem for a local brewer, but Heavy Seas distributes much more broadly than the corner taproom, including the cruise line business in tropical environments.

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