Mobile Canning For Beer (And Wine)

A very good article in the SFGate this morning on a mobile canning service serving Northern California: Meet the pandemic-era women helping to keep California's craft beer industry afloat

H/T to Ken Zinns who already has posted this in the Cellar Rats forum. He has first hand experience of this service on the wine side.

Seems to be echoing what I have been seeing around NY. As someone who has run millions of cans througha Wild Goose (machine in pic) for years at a brewery, cans are pretty much the only option at this time, crowlers and prefilled new growlers the others if you have nothing but cooperage lying around. If you have a capable company canning, DO/TPO can be managed well assuming beer in brite is processed correctly. The big guys on the east coast are Iron Heart and run a tight ship. They also do cold brew, nitro, wine/cider. Obviously, our taproom like everyone else’s is closed so we are pushing everything in cans. I think I’ve put 5 bbls into kegs in the last 3 months.

We used a mobile bottler for years and switched to cans early last year. Given our growing volumes, we may look at getting our own canning system, though space and money are both constraints over the short run. We’ve only had one bad experience when the crew running the canning machine just didn’t seem to care. Lately we’ve been getting the “A” team and it has been fantastic - less than two cases of low fills out of 600 cases canned and DOs in the teens to low twenties (parts per billion).

Rick - Those numbers are what you should expect from someone who knows what they are doing and can repeat day after day.

So now there’s a can shortage. Hopefully we’ll make it through the year without any hiccups, but who knows? We’ve been selling more kegs lately, but we still can 90+% of our beer.

You still seeing can shortages out your way? Our lead times have gone from 3wks to about 7wks but given we order each of our brands by the tractor trailer load (25 pallets) we are able to work within the lead times.

We’re a lot smaller than that. I have one brand that we’ve thought about having cans printed, and it would still take us over a year to use them all. I know pFreim has difficulty getting cans, and my mobile canner is no longer selling cans to small brewers with their own canning machines. If can supplies are getting better, then that’s one less thing we need to worry about.