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Victory Brewing taps into cans

Consumers have made it abundantly clear that when it comes to craft beer, they’d like to see it available in cans as well as bottles. Victory Brewing got the message.

INK-JET CODING. Cans are inverted on a twist rail so that an ink-jet date code can be imprinted on the bottoms.
INK-JET CODING. Cans are inverted on a twist rail so that an ink-jet date code can be imprinted on the bottoms.

Like other craft brewers in the U.S., Victory Brewing of Downingtown, PA, heard the call for cans a few years back and responded by installing a brand new canning line in its Parkesburg, PA, plant.

“We’ve been talking about it off and on for about the past three years, watching to see what it was that consumers want,” says Scott Dietrich, VP Brewing Operations at Victory. “Portable and non-breakable is what they wanted, and it was pretty clear that an aluminum can was the format they were gravitating toward. So then we went back and forth a bit on the question of how fast a line we should be looking for. We decided in the end for a line that does 150 cans/min. It gives us an opportunity to get into this part of the market and see, realistically, how much beer we’re going to sell in cans. We’ve been running it now since April.”

So far only 12-oz cans, supplied by Ball, are in production. Depalletizing, rinsing, and filling/seaming equipment all comes from Italy’s Comac. It was also Comac that led to the brewery’s secondary packaging equipment supplier, Econocorp.

“Comac is represented by Eurosource out of Dallas,” says Dietrich. “We got very good feedback from a number of their customers. And what Eurosource was showing us was so much more cost-effective than some of the other options we looked at. We wanted to be pragmatic about this new container category, and didn’t need nor could we afford a high-speed line. The equipment Eurosource was showing us nicely filled the niche just below the really high-speed options. Comac builds high-quality machines with a great reputation for minimizing oxygen pickup. And they’ve really stood behind their product.”

Dietrich adds that the same could be said about Econocorp. “Their niche is in that range of 30 to 40 cartons a minute,” says Dietrich. “We have two of their machines on the line.”

One is the Spartan Cartoner, which erects paperboard cartons and inserts either four, six, 12, or 24 cans and then uses Econocorp’s system of glue daubers to glue the cartons shut. Also from Econocorp is a Spartan Wraparound Traypacker that pushes either two 12-packs or four six-packs or six four-packs onto a corrugated tray and then folds the tray around the cartons. It uses a Nordson (www.nordson.com) hot-melt adhesive system to seal the corrugated tray around the cartons.

When the Spartan Cartoner is putting 24 cans in a carton, the carton simply bypasses the Wraparound Traypacker.

Depal is first
At the head of the line is an overhead depalletizer that Dietrich describes as “a really interesting piece of equipment built just right for this kind of line. When you think of automated depalletizing, it’s usually expensive, complex, and very robust. This one is quite different. It does everything we need, yet simply and cost effectively. The operator places a pallet of cans on the infeed conveyor and then manually removes the top frame before pushing the pallet into the machine. From there it’s all automated, including removal of slip sheets between layers and discharge of pallets once they’re empty. For our purposes it’s just the right balance of capital investment and labor-reducing automation. Every 25 minutes or so an operator puts in a new pallet and then walks away. It really works well.”

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