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Capable Filling and Seaming System Anchors Self-Styled Farmhouse Canning Line

When adding canning capability, MacKinnon Brothers Brewing needed flexible filling and seaming operations that would reduce labor, improve precision, and speed throughput—all the while integrating into a home-built, highly customized line.

Can design for Philomena Pilsner celebrates the brothers’ grandmother Philomena, who used beer to bake her bread.
Can design for Philomena Pilsner celebrates the brothers’ grandmother Philomena, who used beer to bake her bread.

Founded in 2013 by brothers Ivan and Dan, MacKinnon Brothers Brewing Company is a farm-based operation, sourcing its fresh ingredients from its own farm and other local farms to produce unique beers. The facility is ideally located on a beautiful bicentennial family farm surrounded by fields of hops, barley, wheat, and corn in rural Ontario, Canada, just outside of the city of Kingston. Two of the company’s canned products are made entirely from ingredients grown on its farm.

MacKinnon Brothers is a true local brewery in the sense that it sells 80 to 85% of its products within a 50-km (30-mile) radius of its facility. Product is also sold directly from the farm when it hosts concerts, music festivals, weddings, and other events. A QR code on the cans of its Harvest Ale variety educates consumers on the growing season, the malt from that season, and how those factors affect the flavor of the beer. But before guests even get to a taste what they’re learning about, the beautifully decorated cans make a farm-fresh impression.

Stand-out can designs inspired by the farm

The brewery began in a keg format, but as MacKinnon’s business grew, it expanded into cans. A 473-mL (16-oz) can format gave the brewery the chance to make a visual impression on customers, and it did so in spades.

At the outset of its pivot into cans, the MacKinnons enlisted design and branding agency RedRhino, Inc. in nearby London, Ontario. At that point, the company was only making two beers—8 Man English Pale Ale and Crosscut Traditional Canadian Ale. Seasonal brews, like this Wild Peppermint Stout, use digitally printed cans with practically no MOQ. MacKinnon prefers the look and feel of digitally printed cans to the shrink sleeve alternative.Seasonal brews, like this Wild Peppermint Stout, use digitally printed cans with practically no MOQ. MacKinnon prefers the look and feel of digitally printed cans to the shrink sleeve alternative.

“We didn’t want a can that was really busy, with 500 awards and logos stamped on it,” Dan MacKinnon, co-owner and head brewer says. “We wanted something a bit simpler and something we could keep consistent across all of our offerings.”

With that opening salvo of direction, RedRhino sat down with the brothers to find out what each beer made them think about. Even though the two young men were worldly and educated—Ivan is a mechanical engineer, and Dan had both brewed beer and played rugby in England—their roots, like the roots of the beers, are firmly planted on the Ontario farm. And the ideation session bore that out.

“We know what beers people want to drink around here, and what kind of beers we wanted to drink,” MacKinnon says. “The folks at RedRhino asked us, ‘Well, when would you drink a beer like Crosscut?’ And we answered, “If you’re out cutting wood someday, you might drink that beer.’ And 8 Man was the kind of beer I used to drink when I played rugby in England. We would drink that after the games. It’s a style of beer that wasn’t very well-represented in Canada, so we wanted to help introduce it.”

The pencil sketch-drawing design pattern that resulted is indeed simple but sophisticated. A single, centrally located signifier or totem—a cross-section of a tree, or a vintage take on a rugby player, respectively—communicates how the brothers felt about each of the beers and locates them in the MacKinnon’s life experiences.

Since then, the brewery has expanded to six mainstay or higher volume varieties, and those offerings’ respective can designs follow the same initial design template that was forged with Crosscut and 8 Man. Philomena, for instance, depicts the brothers’ grandmother who they remember used pilsner beer in her bread baking. Naturally, the eponymous Philomena variety is a pilsner. Even more recently—and like a lot of brewery-related duties on the farm, we’ll find out—design has been taken in-house, and a team-member is now using the original template to create a can design for each new beer.

Today, the company buys printed cans from Crown for its primary six beers, but there are a few lower volume or seasonal exceptions that might not meet an MOQ for a printed can order. One example is the seasonal Wild Peppermint Stout.

“We use a company called Hart Print out of Quebec, they digitally print right on the can so they can do small runs. It’s more expensive per can, but it’s worth it.” MacKinnon says. “There are restrictions on shrink sleeves related to the recycling system. And I much prefer the printed can. I think it has a more premium feel. The shrink sleeves have come a long way, but from an environmental point of view and a quality-feel point of view, I still prefer the printed can.

“They are able to do low volumes, too, way less than we’re ordering,” he adds. “If we only want only one or two pallets of cans or even half a pallet—say for a batch from a 40-hL fermenter—then it makes sense to get them from the digital printing.”

Counter-pressure integrated canning line provides precise filling

When turning to cans to augment what started as a largely keg-based operations, filling and seaming equipment was needed. To facilitate this, MacKinnon Brothers began bringing in mobile canning in 2015, however, as sales grew, this proved to be cost prohibitive. A few years down the road, the company opened a new production facility with an eye on purchasing its own reliable canning line to increase production, and save costs and time wasted on manual canning. After exploring its options, the company decided on a counter-pressure unit with low dissolved oxygen from Pneumatic Scale Angelus (PSA), a BW Packaging Systems Co. A wide view of the canning line, with cans being conveyed from depalletizer in the upper left to a canner and seaming station in the upper middle. A can dryer and checkweigher are on the right, and cans enter accumulation in the foreground before tray packing downstream.A wide view of the canning line, with cans being conveyed from depalletizer in the upper left to a canner and seaming station in the upper middle. A can dryer and checkweigher are on the right, and cans enter accumulation in the foreground before tray packing downstream.

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