Tweet
Considered America’s oldest brewery, D.G. Yuengling & Son, Inc. produces lagers, beer, porter, ale and Black & Tan (a unique combination of beer and porter) in bottles and in kegs for more than 175 years. Yuengling generates 1.6 million barrels of beer annually and has experienced double-digit growth over the past five years. That growth has prompted Yuengling to find ways to improve productivity in relation to its keg operations. As a result, Yuengling started searching for container weighing technology that could handle the heavy weight beer kegs at production line speed.
In February 2007, Mettler Toledo Hi-Speed installed CS3600 Caseweigher with XE Control to weigh kegs coming off the filling line at brewery’s Mill Creek facility in Pottsville. Able to weigh containers in configurations up to 30” wide that weigh 44 to 250 lb, the system delivers accurate, repeatable weights within +/-0.35 to +/-1.5 oz, depending on the application. In the Mill Creek facility, the in-motion weigher sits on a filling line equipped with a KHS-Till filler with five individual lanes that outputs 66kegs/hr/lane, for a total of 330 kegs/hr. The line is built to handle two keg sizes – a quarter barrel and a half barrel – with only brief stoppages for changeovers.
“In the brewing industry, if your technology isn’t reliable, your competition will swallow you up. Our old checkweigher could accurately weigh the kegs, but it couldn’t transfer them onto and off the scale without stopping to weigh each keg. And it shook horribly. A roller conveyor (operating with it) occasionally would bend because it couldn’t withstand the impact on the transfer. The wear and tear created a maintenance nightmare and the product waste began to hurt our bottom line.” explained Joe Frinzi, manager of quality and operations at Yuengling.
The rugged built of the caseweigher with stainless-steel frame and Intralox 400-series plastic belt conveyor allows the weigher to withstand the constant impact of heavy containers and move them from scale to transfer belt smoothly, a heavy-duty rejector handles any non-conforming product. The willingness of Hi-Speed to customize a standard machine to fit into such a small space (2’ long and 18” wide) immediately impressed Mr Frinzi. “It was heavier than we expected, totally accurate and very stable. The keg transfer is so smooth that you hardly notice it. Some potential vendors took one look at the space and our environment, and said that they either couldn’t do it or that they needed to build an entirely new machine, reinforced to handle all of the pounding. But Mettler Toledo Hi-Speed had no trouble customizing their standard machine.”
Designed to handle tough industrial environments like Yuengling’s, the Hi-Speed CS3600 Caseweigher with XE control features open design offering convenient side access to major electrical and mechanical components simplifying inspection, cleaning and maintenance. The caseweigher comes with hermetically sealed, stainless-steel load cells to tackle conditions that commonly occur in food and beverage environments. The XE controller provides operator access to scale functions through an intuitive, multilingual, menu-driven colour touch screen display with 100 product memory that facilitates quick setup and changeovers with minimum training.
“We only have two line operators. The entire line is automated. The user interface allows the operators to see what the weigher is doing from almost anywhere on the floor. We can easily generate a report and identify and fix a filling problem quickly.” said Mr Frinzi.
Mr Frinzi thinks the caseweigher will pay for itself in about a year. “Downtime is expensive. That’s why we like the quality and reliability of this unit. We don’t have to worry about it. It works perfectly.” adds Mr Frinzi.
To learn more about Mettler-Toledo Safeline, please visit www.mt.com/hi-speed
To contact Mettler Toledo, please visit www.mt.com/contact
In February 2007, Mettler Toledo Hi-Speed installed CS3600 Caseweigher with XE Control to weigh kegs coming off the filling line at brewery’s Mill Creek facility in Pottsville. Able to weigh containers in configurations up to 30” wide that weigh 44 to 250 lb, the system delivers accurate, repeatable weights within +/-0.35 to +/-1.5 oz, depending on the application. In the Mill Creek facility, the in-motion weigher sits on a filling line equipped with a KHS-Till filler with five individual lanes that outputs 66kegs/hr/lane, for a total of 330 kegs/hr. The line is built to handle two keg sizes – a quarter barrel and a half barrel – with only brief stoppages for changeovers.
“In the brewing industry, if your technology isn’t reliable, your competition will swallow you up. Our old checkweigher could accurately weigh the kegs, but it couldn’t transfer them onto and off the scale without stopping to weigh each keg. And it shook horribly. A roller conveyor (operating with it) occasionally would bend because it couldn’t withstand the impact on the transfer. The wear and tear created a maintenance nightmare and the product waste began to hurt our bottom line.” explained Joe Frinzi, manager of quality and operations at Yuengling.
The rugged built of the caseweigher with stainless-steel frame and Intralox 400-series plastic belt conveyor allows the weigher to withstand the constant impact of heavy containers and move them from scale to transfer belt smoothly, a heavy-duty rejector handles any non-conforming product. The willingness of Hi-Speed to customize a standard machine to fit into such a small space (2’ long and 18” wide) immediately impressed Mr Frinzi. “It was heavier than we expected, totally accurate and very stable. The keg transfer is so smooth that you hardly notice it. Some potential vendors took one look at the space and our environment, and said that they either couldn’t do it or that they needed to build an entirely new machine, reinforced to handle all of the pounding. But Mettler Toledo Hi-Speed had no trouble customizing their standard machine.”
Designed to handle tough industrial environments like Yuengling’s, the Hi-Speed CS3600 Caseweigher with XE control features open design offering convenient side access to major electrical and mechanical components simplifying inspection, cleaning and maintenance. The caseweigher comes with hermetically sealed, stainless-steel load cells to tackle conditions that commonly occur in food and beverage environments. The XE controller provides operator access to scale functions through an intuitive, multilingual, menu-driven colour touch screen display with 100 product memory that facilitates quick setup and changeovers with minimum training.
“We only have two line operators. The entire line is automated. The user interface allows the operators to see what the weigher is doing from almost anywhere on the floor. We can easily generate a report and identify and fix a filling problem quickly.” said Mr Frinzi.
Mr Frinzi thinks the caseweigher will pay for itself in about a year. “Downtime is expensive. That’s why we like the quality and reliability of this unit. We don’t have to worry about it. It works perfectly.” adds Mr Frinzi.
To learn more about Mettler-Toledo Safeline, please visit www.mt.com/hi-speed
To contact Mettler Toledo, please visit www.mt.com/contact