Local craft beer now comes in cans, moving it from tap room glasses and backyard bottles to a versatile new tough and tumble-proof on-the-go format. Packaging World recently covered the inside scoop on how Victory Brewing cracked open its first can production this spring with an automated packaging line in its Parkesburg plant.

The call of craft beer drinkers’ demand for cans has risen in recent years, and Victory’s new production line answers that call.

“Portable and non-breakable is what they wanted, and it was pretty clear that an aluminum can was the format they were gravitating toward,” Vice President of Brewing Operations Scott Dietrich said in the Packaging World article. “So then we went back and forth a bit on the question of how fast a line we should be looking for. We decided in the end for a line that does 150 cans per minute. It gives us an opportunity to get into this part of the market and see, realistically, how much beer we’re going to sell in cans. We’ve been running it now since April.”

And the equipment picked for the job has been a smashing success, from a machine that unloads a pallet full of empty 12-ounce cans to machines that rinse them with ionized air, fill them with craft beer, seal them, warm them to reduce condensation, print codes on them and build cartons around packs of four, six, 12 or 24 cans.

What comes out is not only reliable but attractive.

“The Econocorp option for secondary packaging is appealing to a lot of craft breweries these days as they look for ways to bring more high-impact graphics into their can packaging,” said Frederic Petit of equipment supplier Eurosource. “If you think about Victory’s six-pack presentation in a carton compared to six cans in a ring carrier, it’s pretty clear which format has the better shelf impact. And it’s all automated, including the insertion of cartons into corrugated trays.

Victory’s partners also delivered an affordable setup that maximized the plant’s limited space.

“What Eurosource was showing us was so much more cost-effective than some of the other options we looked at,” Dietrich said. “We wanted to be pragmatic about this new container category and didn’t need nor could we afford a high-speed line. The equipment Eurosource was showing us nicely filled the niche just below the really high-speed options. … Both Econocorp and Comac did a great job of giving us reliable, dependable output and top quality, not to mention a small footprint. We shoehorned this line into space that’s allocated for tanks in the future. The bottom line is that we now have an opportunity to get into a new market.”

Read much more about the specifics of the equipment brought in for Victory Brewing’s new can production setup in Packaging World here.