A new option is available to Ohio breweries who want to package their product, but don’t want to invest in very expensive bottling or canning systems. Buckeye Canning, a division of Mobile Canning Systems, will begin operation in a few weeks, offering breweries a portable canning line that they can utilize when they are ready to package.
I emailed Dan Blatt, owner of Buckeye Canning, to find out more.
How does the mobile canning process work?
Our equipment is brought to the brewery in our truck and rolls out into the brewery to set up close to the finishing tanks. We hook directly up to the bright tank, and the beer is fed into our fill-heads on our canning line. Cans are sanitized, purged with C02, filled, seamed, rinsed, and ready for final packaging and distribution. Initial capacity planned to be 32-40 cans per minute, processing 1 BBL every 14 minutes.
Where is your business based, and when will you begin operation?
We are based in Amherst, Ohio, and will begin canning for Elevator Brewing and Maumee Bay Brewing at the end of August. We pick up our canning line on August 19th.
What are the benefits to breweries who are outsourcing canning to you?
While craft beer canning has become an enormously popular trend, many small to midsize microbreweries—and even some larger microbreweries—are unable to either afford the equipment or spare the space in their facility to package their beer for consumption beyond their tap room, other than through keg sales and growler fills. In fact, many operations have latent brewing capacity because they just don’t have a way to get more beer out their door if they produce it.Utilizing the MobileCanningSystems solution, breweries and brewpubs can focus on making great craft beer, preserve their precious capital, space and management resources, while a MobileCanningSystems Affiliate delivers the canning process, the machinery, the operational labor, and all the measures essential to maintaining fast, reliable production canning that expands market opportunity.
Are the breweries you are talking with bottle-inclined-and-can-adverse, or is canning fairly accepted packaging at this point?
Canning is king! The can has sold itself, everybody understands the benefits of it and want to can their beer. As a matter of fact, my two biggest clients will both can and bottle because they see the importance of offering their beer in a can.
Which Ohio breweries have committed to using your service?
Elevator Brewing Company, Maumee Bay Brewing Company, Yellow Springs Brewing, Portside Brewing and The Dayton Beer Company. We have had lots of meetings with several other breweries that are very interested.
Why did you decide to expand to Ohio?
I was born in raised in Colorado, so experienced the craft beer explosion there in the early 90’s and wanted to be involved in the industry. After meeting my wife, who is from Ohio, and having kids we moved here with a dream of opening a brewery in Ohio. Long story short, that did not happen and I was able to hook up with Mobile Canning Colorado to talk about their business and how it was going. They were just about to launch an affiliate program when we spoke, and the rest is history. I felt that Ohio was a market that could benefit from breweries canning their product, and I was right. We struck a deal with Mobile Canning Systems and now are their affiliate covering all of Ohio, Western Pennsylvania, and parts of Indiana.
