Canning Discussion For Nano and Brewpubs- 2019/2020

[Crosley]

We just started filling cans with an Xpress Filler 2 weeks ago and we have ours dialled in pretty well. Call me at 403-315-eighteen thirty three if you want some help.

Have you tried it out of kegs? Any luck??

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[SpectrumAle]

For those of you using the XpressFill 2 head open can filler, what is your typical 12oz or 16oz can liquid fill time? We're in the process of setting up our filler to package from serving tanks sitting in our cold room and I'm playing around with the line length trying to reduce foaming and keep a reasonable fill time.

We just started filling cans with an Xpress Filler 2 weeks ago and we have ours dialled in pretty well. Call me at 403-315-eighteen thirty three if you want some help.

[Crosley]

For those of you using the XpressFill 2 head open can filler, what is your typical 12oz or 16oz can liquid fill time? We're in the process of setting up our filler to package from serving tanks sitting in our cold room and I'm playing around with the line length trying to reduce foaming and keep a reasonable fill time.

I don't know fill time off the top of my head but here's our setup.

We have a sample valve hooked up to our Brite tank with around 25' of 1/4" tubing going to the filler. When we are canning our filler is close enough to the Brite than we can coil the tubing up and put it in an ice water bath (not positive if this helps but we keep doing it). Our co2 is set to around 10 (this changes every session depending on how the filling is going).

We did increase the purge time for the co2 can purge.

One thing we have found is that since there's a single line splitting and feeding 2 fill heads the flow rates decrease if you are running both. We have a sort of alternating system based on flow rate, foam, and fill weights.

It's not a bad machine once you get it dialed in and get used to it.

Give me a call if you have any questions

Andy
720-402-6513

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[PassBeer]

For those of you using the XpressFill 2 head open can filler, what is your typical 12oz or 16oz can liquid fill time? We're in the process of setting up our filler to package from serving tanks sitting in our cold room and I'm playing around with the line length trying to reduce foaming and keep a reasonable fill time.

[Chestnut_Bill]

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[Chestnut_Bill]

That’s our setup as well. Three people, last person labeling and packaging.


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[Crosley]

Others are probably more knowledgeable on and can explain exactly how to do this, but my suggestion would be to adjust lengths of line to see if that helps. The restriction of the line is what controls the flow and foaming of the beer. you can calculate, based on formulas for balancing a draft system, length of line (depending on type and dia).

Im a little disheartened to hear this, as we were going to start canning from kegs just so we dont have to sit on them. If I figure anything out that'd be helpful, I'll be sure to post back here.

BTW, on monday and tuesday this week, given about 9 hours worth of work, we canned 1248 cans of beer with this canner. 2.3 cans per minute. Not spectacular, but you know what, we have a bunch of canned beer right now. Which in this day and age, is keeping us afloat.

Good luck yall.

Thanks Bill. I've been thinking about having a spliced section I can add for when we try to can off of kegs.

Now that I've gotten some time on the filler it's definitely not super fast but we can crank pretty well. Seems like when we are moving good we can get about 200/hour. That's labeled and cased with 3 people.

If you have any luck with kegs please let me know as it would help me out tremendously.

Cheers,
Andy

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[Chestnut_Bill]

Others are probably more knowledgeable on and can explain exactly how to do this, but my suggestion would be to adjust lengths of line to see if that helps. The restriction of the line is what controls the flow and foaming of the beer. you can calculate, based on formulas for balancing a draft system, length of line (depending on type and dia).

Im a little disheartened to hear this, as we were going to start canning from kegs just so we dont have to sit on them. If I figure anything out that'd be helpful, I'll be sure to post back here.

BTW, on monday and tuesday this week, given about 9 hours worth of work, we canned 1248 cans of beer with this canner. 2.3 cans per minute. Not spectacular, but you know what, we have a bunch of canned beer right now. Which in this day and age, is keeping us afloat.

Good luck yall.

[BlackLocustHops]

Push all your kegs back into the bright under pressure?
Let it sit for a day and try again?
Stupid I know, but what else to do with a bunch of kegs?

[Crosley]

So I just received my xpressfill xf2200 for open can filling. I ran a test on a beer we had in the brite tank, changing variables (line length and head pressure) until I minimized foaming and got the cans to the right fill level based on weight of can.

The trick with this piece of equipment is balancing your system best you can while keeping the beer as cold as possible.

Coming from the bottom of a 14bbl brite tank, I needed about 30 ft of 5/16" vinyl tubing and a head pressure of 5-6 PSI. A lower head pressure will cause the beer to "break out" and bubble in the tubing. Higher head pressure caused the beer to move just a little to fast and foam more in the can. Once i established that 5-6 PSI was the pressure needed to avoid "break out", i tested different lengths of tubing, adding 10ft at a time with splicers. 30ft seemed to do it. Beer was about 34F. Gonna try to get it colder when we run our first canning run. Needed to run about six cans to cool down the system and get consistently full cans.

I will also say, I felt that the 3 seconds of CO2 purge time wasn't sufficient. I gave Xpressfill a call and got to speak to a person right away. He helped me adjust the CO2 purge time (it was super easy) and was very friendly and helpful when I was discussing the equipment with him.

Hope this helps anyone who is trying to dial in this piece of equipment.

Cheers,
Bill

Bill,
Thanks so much for all of the help in this. Your system sounds pretty spot on to ours now that we've got it dialed in.

We are finally able to crank through beers straight out of the brite. My tank sits between 31 and 34. I'm running 35ft of 1/4" line. My head pressure is at 10. Everything is working out just perfect, until this crisis hit and we need to sell more to go beer than we expected.

We have been selling through all our cans so we are needing to can from kegs. This has been a disaster so far. We've tried it two ways: move the keg into the brewery and run the tubing through ice or keep the keg in the cooler 10ft away. Weve had 1 success story but 10 failures.

This seems to be the weirdest thing to me and it's making my brain hurt. We hook it up and slowly increase the pressure until we get rid of the breakout in the line (this is normally 13 in this instance). If we just let the canner run we get clear beer coming out but then quick spurts of foamy beer. This will just keep happening and happening forever. I cannot figure out the difference in brite vs keg and I cannot figure out where this intermittent foaming is coming from.


Please please please if anyone has any suggestions I'm open to anything!!!!!

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[Blu Dragonfly]

So I just received my xpressfill xf2200 for open can filling. I ran a test on a beer we had in the brite tank, changing variables (line length and head pressure) until I minimized foaming and got the cans to the right fill level based on weight of can.

The trick with this piece of equipment is balancing your system best you can while keeping the beer as cold as possible.

Coming from the bottom of a 14bbl brite tank, I needed about 30 ft of 5/16" vinyl tubing and a head pressure of 5-6 PSI. A lower head pressure will cause the beer to "break out" and bubble in the tubing. Higher head pressure caused the beer to move just a little to fast and foam more in the can. Once i established that 5-6 PSI was the pressure needed to avoid "break out", i tested different lengths of tubing, adding 10ft at a time with splicers. 30ft seemed to do it. Beer was about 34F. Gonna try to get it colder when we run our first canning run. Needed to run about six cans to cool down the system and get consistently full cans.

I will also say, I felt that the 3 seconds of CO2 purge time wasn't sufficient. I gave Xpressfill a call and got to speak to a person right away. He helped me adjust the CO2 purge time (it was super easy) and was very friendly and helpful when I was discussing the equipment with him.

Hope this helps anyone who is trying to dial in this piece of equipment.

Cheers,
Bill

Very good info Bill! Thank you for sharing. Different elevations will change the foaming dynamic, so your numbers might not work for everyone but they will get people into the ballpark. For canning from kegs, I'm going to put my kegs in a bucket with ice and rock salt to try and keep it as close to 30 as possible to help keep breakout down as well and keep my volumes of CO2 up. I always found when I used a beer gun to bottle with in my garage that chilling bottles first by putting ice in the sanitizer sink kept foaming at a reasonable level. Seems like going into a cold can wouldn't be a bad idea either.

Cheers!

[Crosley]

I am surprised someone does not make a simple robot for under $10k that is able to reliably can 1 can a minute without issues, 20 cases in an 8 hour shift... 20 years ago, kids were having robots stack blocks to spell words... surely we have advanced some since then...

I agree that we should have advanced a bit more by how but 1 can a minute???? Selling for $32 a six pack???

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[CDC]

I am surprised someone does not make a simple robot for under $10k that is able to reliably can 1 can a minute without issues, 20 cases in an 8 hour shift... 20 years ago, kids were having robots stack blocks to spell words... surely we have advanced some since then...

[Chestnut_Bill]

So I just received my xpressfill xf2200 for open can filling. I ran a test on a beer we had in the brite tank, changing variables (line length and head pressure) until I minimized foaming and got the cans to the right fill level based on weight of can.

The trick with this piece of equipment is balancing your system best you can while keeping the beer as cold as possible.

Coming from the bottom of a 14bbl brite tank, I needed about 30 ft of 5/16" vinyl tubing and a head pressure of 5-6 PSI. A lower head pressure will cause the beer to "break out" and bubble in the tubing. Higher head pressure caused the beer to move just a little to fast and foam more in the can. Once i established that 5-6 PSI was the pressure needed to avoid "break out", i tested different lengths of tubing, adding 10ft at a time with splicers. 30ft seemed to do it. Beer was about 34F. Gonna try to get it colder when we run our first canning run. Needed to run about six cans to cool down the system and get consistently full cans.

I will also say, I felt that the 3 seconds of CO2 purge time wasn't sufficient. I gave Xpressfill a call and got to speak to a person right away. He helped me adjust the CO2 purge time (it was super easy) and was very friendly and helpful when I was discussing the equipment with him.

Hope this helps anyone who is trying to dial in this piece of equipment.

Cheers,
Bill

[jebzter]

XpressFill endeavors to provide the best technical support possible to its customers. When dealing with issues that are not typical with our equipment, we often find that existing customers may be better able to relate to and identify specific in-field conditions that we may not be aware of. We will continue to work with any customer who is not 100% satisfied with our equipment.

Don't want to ruffle too many feathers, however this is a cop-out. If you're going to build, market, and sell equipment like this, you better damn well know everything there is to know about the dynamics of filling. There are a few variables that come into play with filling, you should know them all and their effect, and you should also know them all enough so that you can have them take measurements and pictures to give you all the details so that you can figure out what is happening. You should also be cataloging every issue, its solution, as well as getting feedback from the units in use so that you can find out "best practices" for your equipment.

If I had purchased from you and your response to service request was we don't know, ask someone else who uses it, I'd tell you to come pick your shit up and send back my money. You sell a product, stand by it and support it.

End of rant