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CRAFT BREW INNOVATION MARCH 2022 on lid. MacKinnon says these are rare, but better to have a system in place to catch these un-lidded, but full cans of beer before they enter the can dryer with its dual blowers. Not catching them would make for a mess within the enclosed dryer space, and likely downtime. “We got the dryer from China on Alibaba because the
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price was right, and it’s works amazing. The conveyor goes right through it,” MacKinnon says. “We knew the height of the conveyor that we had, so they custom-made the air dryer. We went with this rather than just using two air knives with one big blower and no shroud, that we would’ve just attached to the side of the conveyor, I found when I went to visit other breweries, that format was super noisy.” Dried cans then undergo a QC check on an Anritsu checkweigher, a retread from another customized local manufacturing plant and purchased from Abbey Equipment in Canada. With can weights checked, they then enter an accumulation table that acts as an upstream buffer from an automated tray former and tray packer. Oddly enough, the tray former was originally built for bottles, and had served another brewery well in its first life. That other brewery switched from bottles to cans and decided to sell the bottle tray packer. MacKinnon, who also runs cans, purchased the equipment, and retrofitted it for use as a can tray packer. “It’s actually a really great unit and a really good value for the money,” MacKinnon says. “Repurposing it actually wasn’t that much work. We changed some stuff in the programming, took some stuff out we added a suction head from Millibar to pick up the cans. The cans are a little bit different size than the bottles, so we needed to resize the lanes, but it was mostly stuff that, with a piece of stainless steel and a zip disc, and a little bit of welding and some programming here, we can make.” This farm-oriented re-use and re-purpose attitude might make some massive, ultra-fast line operators cringe, but it works well for MacKinnon Brothers Brewing. Palletizing is done by hand, another hallmark of the hard work ethic at the brewery. “For 50 cans a minute I mean, if I can’t keep up and stack those up, that’s on me,” MacKinnon says. ●
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