Stepping up to canning is key to moving to widespread distribution. But this is a precise technology, with much that can go wrong. Will North spoke to experts across the sector to understand what brewers get wrong when they move to canning, and how to avoid these mistakes.

Think about the future
For a business thinking about taking a major step up in its production and distribution, it can be tempting to start conservatively. But, as Andy Pegman, division director at Vigo, warns, this can mean more cost down the line.

“Often, when people come to us, they’re thinking about the now,” Pegman says. “A lot of people don’t factor in the speed of growth. We’ll always ask, where do you want to be in three years? Where do you want to be in five years?”

Pegman warns that lead times can be as long as six weeks for some components, and installation can take weeks more. That could mean missing out on new opportunities, or having to install a new canning line early, negating any savings made by sizing a line conservatively.

Make space for the full process
The canning line itself is just one part of the canning process. Darren Fenton is COO and co-founder of Bevcraft, which provides mobile canning and wholesale packaging sales to the craft beer industry. It’s easy, he says, to forget you need more space than that taken up by the canning line itself.

“You have to consider all elements of the process as well,” he says. “A simple canning process is filling and seeming, but there’s an upstream point to that which is the in-feed, be it a depalletizer or an in-feed table or whatever, and the downstream side.”

You need space for empty cans as they arrive, and downstream you’ll need space for labelling, packing off, assembling cartons. Without a plan for where these will fit, you’ll run into issues, “You might you might buy a line out of the box that says it’s 2,000 or 3,000 cans per hour,” Fenton explains,  “But if you can’t feed it to that speed or if you can’t offload to that speed, it’s just a nominal number.”

Consider integration
It’s easy to break a canning line down into its core components, like the filler and seamer, and seek the cheapest option for each. But this approach risks missing how cans will move through the line, and the risks of misaligned components.

Warren Stanley is CEO of Microcan. “People try to source different pieces of equipment from multiple manufacturers. The transfers of cans get really clunky, and that can lead to a massive amount of wastage.”

The answer, Stanley believes, is to turn to a supplier that offers all the components needed, like Microcan, and can ensure that all these transfers are made smoothly.

Skip semi-auto
Another example of shortsighted conservatism is to make your first move into canning with a semi-automated set up. In a set up like this, opened cans are moved by hand from the filler to the seamer.

This might be OK for ciders, where dissolved oxygen is less of a threat. But in beer, dissolved oxygen can mean a shorter shelf life, degraded beer, and reputational damage with drinkers and stockists.

Pegman recommends moving directly to fully automated lines, where open cans move from filler to seamer under a CO2 shroud. This can be achieved even on a relatively slow, 300 can per hour, line. If you don’t need this speed, and have customers for bottles, Pegman recommends sticking with glass: the smaller aperture of a bottle means oxygen is less of a threat.

Measure twice, cut once (in two hundred)
Seaming is vital to the canning process. “The most integral part of the can is the seam, it’s what’s holding it all together,”says Pegman. “A tiny misalignment in a seam might not be detectable right away. Without the correct measuring device or devices, you’ll never really truly be able to test that.”

And that can mean losing an entire canning run. “We’ve had people at the end of a run detect a leaking can, then realise that all of the cans have been canned under the same scenario.”

The threat of a bad seam is highest on a manual canning system, where drift on rollers is more likely. But whatever type of canning system you are using, Pegman recommends taking out one can in two hundred, measuring the seam, and cutting it open for proper checks.

Invest in quality assurance
The risks posed by dissolved oxygen highlight another mistake: not investing in the equipment you need to perform proper quality assurance.  Bevcraft’s Fenton says, “It really underscores the importance of not only investing in the packaging equipment, but in the quality assurance and the equipment that goes with it.”

At the top of Fenton’s list is a dissolved oxygen meter, which should be used to provide certainty on beer quality. But he also recommends—at a minimum—basic gauges to use in seam testing. “It might cost a couple of thousand pounds, but it’s something everyone should invest in, along with ensuring operators are trained and using them properly.”

The right person for the job
Brewing and canning are distinct skills. One is closer to cooking and chemistry, the other to mechanical engineering. That means the people a small craft brewing operation has on its staff probably aren’t canning experts.

Michael Comiskey, marketing manager at Bevcraft, says, “Many medium-sized breweries might get a machine for a canning or bottling line and not realize they don’t have the infrastructure in place to operate it. They don’t see labor as something that needs to be considered.”

Vigo’s Pegman says the company offers training on the line it installs. But there’s only so much you can learn in two or three days. “The lines we hear about the least in terms of issues are ones with good packaging managers; the one we hear from the most don’t have that experience on the line.”

A good packaging manager, Pegman says, can often spot issues before they become critical. And where a fault does occur, they may be able to fix them themselves, cutting the costs of downtime while you wait for an engineer.