When the gang starts singing "100 bottles of beer on the wall, 100 bottles of beer," kettlehouse brewery takes them down and passes them around its local tap room, as well as in retail stores throughout western montana. Its home market is the college town of missoula, but the company&39s chief story teller, a.k.a. Founder and president tim o&39leary, says its core customers are montana lovers of the outdoors who want a quality beer they can take with them.
Kettlehouse&39s annual retail production is capped at 10,000 barrels of beer through agreements with its distributors and retail partners, so the company, which originated as a brewonpremise enterprise in 1995, can continue to sell beer in its tap room. "as long as we&39re producing less than 10,000 barrels a year, we can sell up to three pints per person per day in our tap rooms. If we go above that, we have to give it away," o&39leary says. "i took one business class in my life. The rest i learned by hard knocks.
One of the lessons i learned right away was&mdashyou can&39t make any money by giving your product away." even with a cap on production, demand for kettlehouse beer has been high. "i haven&39t been able to get out of the brewery since we started canning because the demand has far exceeded our volume ever since," o&39leary says. The company started packaging for retail sales in 2006 and outgrew its first hand canner from cask brewing systemsalmost immediately. In 2009, it relocated to a larger facility and invested in the cask automated canning system acs it is using now, an indexing filler with co2 prepurge.
At that time, kettlehouse was selling 4packs in rings that were put together by hand so cans could be oriented to face out for a good look on shelf. That effort, o&39leary, says helped drive sales from the start but had an unintended outcome. "that manual labor was costly and leading to some repetitive stress injuries," o&39leary says. So he invested in a new cartoner&mdasha model e2000 from econocorp&mdashthat eliminates the hand labor and helps the brand maintain crucial shelf visibility.
"the cartoner will pay for itself in two or three years. It&39s already paid for itself in terms of ease of use for us," o&39leary says. "and the quality look that we developed with the new package has taken it to a higher level in terms of marketing appeal." the multipack cartons launched in may 2011 and sell in the missoula market for 8.49 for the 4pack and about 17.00 for an 8pack of 16oz cans. The little packaging room that could montana may be known for its wide open majestic spaces it&39s called big sky for good reason, but there&39s little room inside the kettlehouse operation. The packaging room is just 600 sq ft, down the hall from the brewery, which has about 10,000 sq ft of production space.
Fermenting is done in the cellar and a 30ft run of insulated pipes keeps the product cold from the tank to the filler. The onepint 16 oz aluminum cans from crown, cork & seal arrive in pallet tiers. Unloading is done on a platform about 10ft up, where a layer is manually swept off onto a vibrating table for feeding to the line. Cans are singlefiled, then inverted for rinsing and sanitizing before being uprighted again for entry into the filler after a 90deg turn in the line.
Just prior to filling, an a series inkjet coder from domino adds a "canned on" date below the lip of the can. Kettlehouse used to put a "best by" date, but found that its beer had a longer shelf life and switched to the new phrase in the fall of 2010. O&39leary wants customers to enjoy the freshest beer possible so they have a positive experience and come back for more.
Cans are indexed into the cask acs filler see a video of the system atwww.packagingdigest.comcaskfiller, which o&39leary says he chose for three reasons 1. It was low cost&mdash"cask was so crucial to this craft beer movement. They designed an affordable machine for us small guys," o&39leary says. 2. It runs at the right speed about 20 cansmin for kettlehouse but able to reach 30 cansmin. 3. It has a small footprint just over 10 x 2 ft. At the inline filler, 10 heads come down at once the first five are the co2 prepurge to provide a blanket of protection from oxygen 1520 ppb the next five dispense the beer bottomup to minimize foaming.
Cans continue to the seamer, where they receive an injection of co2in the headspace before lids are placed. An airknife from republic sales & manufacturing dries cans for subsequent multipacking. At this point, the line turns right again and splits into four lanes for entry into the cartoner. All lanes are used when running the 8pack in a 2 x 4 configuration. To create 4packs 2 x 2, kettlehouse sets up blocks on two lanes and diverts cans to the other open ones. Changeover for this takes about 30 to 40 min. Like the cask system, the econocorp cartoner was chosen for its compact size 78 x 32 in. And low speed. "the beauty of the econocorp packager is the small footprint," o&39leary says. "and its speed wasn&39t too fast...or too slow. We can triple our canning speed if we had a faster canner and this machine would keep up." kettlehouse is first to use this cartoning system for beer. "there aren&39t many choices for craft brewers running small volumes," o&39leary says. "so many machines are meant to do 60 cases per minute or 100 or 200 cases per minute. We&39re doing less than one case per minute." to keep its footprint small, the e2000 uses its vertical space for the loading and gluing operations.
Collated cans are raised about the height of the 16oz can before being pushed into opened carton blanks, which are printed and supplied by sonderen packaging who, o&39leary tells us, helped kettlehouse find the econocorp system. This machine design allows the next group to be gathered below rather than beside, saving horizontal space. Cartons are sealed with hot melt glue and a jig raises the finished pack up and out of the way while the adhesive sets.
Again, this opens up space below rather than beside for the next carton to be sealed. Sealed cartons are pushed out and slide down a chute to get back to waist level so a worker can reach them easily for manual tray packing. To get to their final packing station, cartons ride a conveyor from safe conveyor inc., chosen for its small size and variable speed capability so kettlehouse can "slow it down to our speed," o&39leary says. Along the way, cartons pass another domino inkjet system, which prints the same "canned on" date near the top edge of cartons.
A smallfootprint tray former from southern packaging machinery corp. Erects trays across the room, and a worker brings them to the packing area. The same size tray holds six 4packs and three 8packs. Loaded trays are manually placed onto wood pallets. Before installing the cartoner, kettlehouse had up to five people manually packing and sealing cartons and loading multipack rings. But now the entire packaging operation is handled by two people.
"if the line is running well and the beer is pouring well and not too foamy, someone can take a break for 45 minutes and one person can watch the line," o&39leary says, adding, "it&39s packaging. We&39ll get a goof in the line&mdasha box won&39t open all the way or it&39ll crush a canand we&39ll have to stop the machine and start all over.
We&39ve had a learning curve and made a few adjustments. But we can now go hours without a glitch." they run one shift, which starts about 7 a.m. And ends as late as 6 p.m., about four days a week. "we could run it day and night," o&39leary says, "but with the 10,000barrel cap and the size of our brewery, we don&39t have the need.
" growing pains because demand is so strong for kettlehouse beer, though, o&39leary is at a crucial point in deciding whether to sit tight and pay off his investments or take on more debt to grow to the next stage expanding the brewery and packaging operations. "that&39s what i&39m trying to figure out and why i&39ve pulled ou the remaining few hairs i have.. We have had such demand that we&39ve been telling distributors that we&39re going to have to allocate to them," o&39leary explains. "the billings mt market has been crying for our beer and we can&39t send it over to them because then we would end up shorting our home market in missoula." whatever he decides, the new cartoner, which is running at just 25 percent of its capacity, will be able to keep up. "we&39ve had the canner for three or four years and it&39s been great," o&39leary says. "we&39re thinking we might buy another one that size and run them in tandem." beyond the productioncap agreement, there&39s another reason why this is a tough decision. "we&39re changing our business model if we do that.
We&39re going from a smalldistribution, neighborhood brewery to one that needs to now expand our distribution network out of state. I&39d love to do that someday, but i want to do it without jeopardizing what we&39ve already built." an unbreakable commitment to cans kettlehouse was one of the first 10 companies in the u.s. To package craft beer in cans and the first in montana to do so. Quality factored into the decision light and oxygen are detrimental to beer, and aluminum is a good barrier for both, especially since kettlehouse uses co2 to evacuate residual air during packaging. But the environment played a big role in two ways.
