Pouring It On!
By ANDREW JOSEPH, FEATURES EDITOR
Automation Creemore Springs BreweryNew filling line puts Ontario craft brewer on solid footing for future market growth
“We brew good-tasting beer that we know will find an audience,” says Fuller, noting that it is critically important for any aspiring beermaker not to take its audience for granted by tinkering too much with the original recipes—especially for a well-respected brand like the Creemore Springs Premium Lager.
“We only use four ingredients to make it,” proclaims Fuller.
“Malted barley, hops, yeast and clean, fresh spring water—and it helps that we have our own local source of spring water,” says Fuller, adding that the flagship beer brand—direct fire-brewed in small batches—is today distributd through The Beer Store and LCBO outlets across Ontario, as well as to countless pubs, bars and restaurants throughout Ontario, Quebec and Alberta.
While the Creemore brewery has annual capacity to produce about 75,000 hectoliters of beer—a hectoliter being an equivalent of just over a dozen 24-bottle cases—it currently sells about 55,000 to 57,000 hectoliters a year, says Fuller.
“We’ve got some latitude to grow our volumes,” Fuller remarks, “but we know that we need to have all the right equipment in place to make it all come together.”
According to Fuller, the brewer began focusing on this spare capacity in earnest in 2006 by starting to package some of its Creemore Springs Premium Lager output in 473-ml aluminum cans supplied by Vaughan, Ont.-based Crown Metal Packaging.
Retailing the canned product in eight-packs proved to be a successful marketing move for Creemore, which until then only sold the brand in six- and 12-bottle packs, but it soon became apparent that the company’s existing canning capabilities would not be able to keep pace with market demand, Fuller recalls.
“When we first began producing our beer in cans, we used an old inline canning line capable of only 25 cans per minute,” relates Fuller. “By 2008, it became very apparent that it was not going to be able to keep up with our rising production demands, so we began looking for something bigger and faster—something that could handle our anticipated growth.”
After evaluating several filling machines and technologies out in the marketplace, Creemore ultimately selected the model Volumetic VOC-C 30030 can filler manufactured by the German beverage processing and packaging machinery group Krones AG, which serves the Canadian market out of its Krones Machinery Co. Ltd. subsidiary in Brampton, Ont.
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