Chris Butcher is brewery manager at Shiny Brewing. In the last of our series on beer packaging, he spoke to Will North about contract canning, and controlling what you can at a large small brewery with a diverse range.

Like many in the brewing industry, Chris Butcher didn’t enter the industry as his first job. “I’m a musician who couldn’t make enough money,” he laughs, “So I had to have a proper job.” Alongside making music, he worked in a foundry. But while he wasn’t brewing for a living, he had a professional’s attention to detail.

“I home brewed from my university days,” he recalls.  “So by the time I came to Shiny, I was one of those annoying homebrewers with a keg bar at home, with a microscope at home, doing captures and cultures and sharing yeast in internet forums and everything. At that time that wasn’t that common for homebrewers.”

A move into professional brewing, although it meant a pay cut from his day job, gave him a chance to combine a creative passion with a practical approach and the expertise he had gained in production planning.

Shiny Brewing had got its start in 2012 in the back of the Furnace Inn in Derby, with a five barrel set up. The original goal was to add a bit of an experience to the pub, and to offer some cool, funky and fresh beer on the bar. After a couple of years, Butcher says, demand had got so strong that the brewery needed its own space, and moved to a large, ten barrel site in Little Eaton, just outside Derby. At the same time, Shiny established a beer wholesaler for the East Midlands, Beer Metropolis.

Butcher joined a few months later. “Up until COVID-19 we were predominantly a cask beer brewery. We did a bit of keg and we did a little bit of canning. We chose to use contract packaging because the scale of what we did was so small it didn’t really justify the capital investment and the space of a full-size canning line.”

Shiny is still driven by a passion for pub sales and variety. “What we produce is not the cheapest of products, they’re not really tailored to a mass market,” Butcher says, “It’s for people that want something that’s been brewed with intentionality.”

Post-pandemic the business now brews around 70% for keg, and around 30% for cask. Retail is an additional revenue stream, but the aim is largely to go direct to customers. “We’ve got no supermarket or or even smaller retailers really,” Butcher says, “It’s primarily direct retail, with some bars, bottle shops, restaurants, and our own venues.” An impressive website, beers that are conceptually interesting, and strikingly packaged cans all help drive that direct retail.

Working with BevCraft has allowed Butcher to keep brewing with intentionality, and that same passion for the detail of brewing that he developed at home. “I’ve always tried to resist buying our own canning line. It would provoke us to want to run it 24-7 in order to maximize return on investment,” he says. “Once you start doing that, there’s only so many places in the country that will take that much beer, and they will have their own set of demands.”

Instead of becoming a cog in the supermarket retail machine, Butcher wants to focus on brewing. “Premium quality, freshness, high end ingredients,” are all important to him, he says. “Weird, wacky and diverse products that aren’t for everybody but that some people love. They don’t tend to work for the big players, who want products everyone can tolerate at a certain price point.”

BevCraft now turn up a couple of times a month to can what Butcher and the team have brewed. “It’s a fairly well worn groove now,” he says, “We get the beer within specifications. They bring in the equipment and get set up. We support them with the packing and the loadout, they can, and clean up, and away they go.”

Each run may see a handful of product lines canned. “A small run might be less than a hundred pieces, a big run maybe two hundred,” he says. “Not huge volumes in the grand scheme of things, but that’s not really the market we occupy.”

Contract canning allows Shiny to avoid the costs—and the pressure for return on investment—needed to support its own canning line. “That cost is split among lots of other breweries,” he says. “It makes it cost effective for everyone.”

As well as managing the canning process, BevCraft also supplies the cans themselves. “We get the artwork done and printed, but they do the majority of the labelling for us.” The exception is where the beer will need to be pasteurised. Here, the labelling must be done once the can is pasteurised.

“We’ll either get them run through the labeller at the pasteuriser, or we’ll do that ourselves.” It’s a chance for the whole team to muck in. “We get some tunes on, and the team crack on. We just get them out, it goes surprisingly quick.”

In Little Eaton, Shiny has plenty of space for the canning process—Butcher calls Shiny a ‘large small brewery’. But that’s not the case for everyone. “The hopers and dreamers in garages with little kits, they don’t have much space. But the guys we work with at BevCraft, they set up in a very small footprint, they know what they’re doing, they get in and out very easily.”

The key to making a success of working with a contract canning provider is to talk early. “You’ll probably be able to talk to the guys that will actually do the job” Butcher advises. “They’re going to want the job to go well, and so they’re going to want to go through any headaches with you.”

And your beer needs to be ready for the run. “You need to pack a carbonated product under pressure. You’ve got to have quite tight temperature controls,” Butcher emphasises. “Finger in the air for carbonation is not a recipe for success. It quickly gets really old to have flat cans or cans that gush.”

By controlling what he can, and accepting what he can’t, Butcher is able to offer drinkers something unique. “There are variables I must control. There are variables I would love to control. And every one of them has a price tag attached,” he says. “At the moment, controlling canning in house is not within my grasp. Bevcraft take a big burden off me. And there are more fun things to spend money on.”

And there’s a lot of fun to come. As this article comes out, BevCraft will be getting ready to brew Shiny’s latest. ”It’s called Pandan Express,” says Butcher. “It’s got jasmine rice, kaffir lime, pandan leaf, mango puree, passion fruit puree, coconut, and vanilla. We’re billing it as a dessert pale.”