Who is canning out there?

[BooneValleyBrew]

Has anyone ran the numbers on canning yet? What are they being sold to distributors for? What are common types of packaging? Is anyone looking into this presently?

[celticbrew]

Check out Cask.com

[SRB]

Ive studied up on cask..sure looks nice to me! someday

[Mike Hall]

Been there done that. If you like oxidized beer thats the way I'd go. You will never get low DO levels. 2 month shelf life max. On the other hand they look cool and can go more places. I as far as price to distributor I'v see prices from $20-$30 a case of 12 oz cans depending on the beer.
Hope this helps, Mike

[gitchegumee]

Oxidized beer?

Cask makes a big deal about lower oxygen pickup with cans by eliminating counter-pressure filling. I'd have linked the page, but it takes too long to download their site. Besides, you folks know how to surf. How is placing a lid on foam different from placing a crown on foam? I could just as easily recommend against glass bottles by saying "if you like light-struck beer that's the way I'd go..." (or minimally recycled, or heavy, or breakable, or expensive, or subject to a separate label and application machine, or bulky, or difficult to cool) We package a very light beer in cans (read: subject to any minor imperfection), and our shelf life is 3 months. This due to micro issues, not oxygen. We merely rough filter our beers and will tolerate less-than-perfectly-sterile beer to be packaged. If we sterile-filtered, I'm sure we could extend our shelf life. We also manage our customers' inventories so that the beer is sold by expiration date. That said, any beer that isn't purchased by the sell date is happily consumed by us brewery guys. And we're pretty critical about the taste. Now we don't run a Zahm for oxygen (like we should--anybody have one for sale?), but I have a good threshold for cardboard. We don't have a problem with it. Anybody canning with a Cask manual canner run a Zahm on their product? I'd like to know what this oxygen pickup is all about.

[nohandslance]

We have a local brewery canning in 16oz units.: Buckbeanbeer.com
Doug is one of the owners, Great person, he should be able to answer any of your questions.
Good luck!

[Mike Hall]

New Belgium Brewing Company has a wealth of knowledge on the subject and they are great people who love to help smaller brewers. I would ask them what they found in can DO levels on top of can conditioning their beer. they have spent an extream amount of time on this subject and have posted about it on the BA forum.

[gitchegumee]

AH, but bottle (or can) conditioning eliminates the very oxygen pickup we're discussing. At least for the most part and to the best of my knowledge. Without that all-important oxygen scavenging from the minute fermentation that goes on in package-conditioned beer, what are typical O2 pickup levels from canning with a Cask manual canning system running near optimum? That's my particular question for those that are canning their non-packaged-conditioned beers.

[Rob Creighton]

I have installed and run traditional can lines and I have paid a fair amount of attention to the development of the Cask line along with a couple of others.

If the process is simplified to filling and seaming, filling seams to be the limiting factor. The open fill means product specs (temp and CO2) are critical and open (though all canning leaves long periods of open product). The CO2 purge step and long tube fill combined with very slow speed makes for an air reading you can't hope to achieve at 800 cpm+. The seamer stability has really been beefed up in recent years though the can positioning via a half-moon shaped pusher on a cylinder is still somewhat unpredictable.

Most of the breweries here are using the 16oz/473 ml can and many are reporting very good air results (not all measure). I would highly recommend adding a timed sanitizer to the foam sweep bar on the outlet of the filler. Overall, this machine fits the same category as the Meheen. It provides commercially acceptable product at workable speeds for small producers and also at an entry level price. In that they have 5 new machines being commissioned in the last couple of months here, I am assumming they are doing all right. The addition of CCS to Ball as can suppliers has made the price and volume flexibility better as well.