There are a huge range of beer bottle styles available, one for every occasion, market and price point. Cans simply don’t offer anywhere near that flexibility or appeal. Because of the barriers to entry, once a brewer has decided to opt for canning, then realistically they are wedded to that medium, so we, both as a company and the glass industry, have to be clear with our messaging,” explains Tim Croxson, managing director of glass bottling supplier Croxsons, and as a result, a fierce advocate of bottling to the industry.
“The capital expenditure required to install a bottling or canning line is a big barrier to entry, and the skill set to operate efficiently is very different from brewing. As a result, if brewers are going to opt for canning over bottles and in my experience, it will often be at the very early stages of growth,” he adds.
“We are fortunate that we have not had customers looking to move away from bottling, and we put that down to many of our customers being established players, it is more challenger brands that are opting for canning, as they attempt to disrupt the norm and create a name for themselves.”
Flexible Packaging
For Craig Wilson, who is the UK managing at Enterprise Tondelli, a company that has been supplying bottling and canning lines to be brewery sector since 1976, much has changed in recent years.
“In that time we have seen package trends come and go. Typically our projects have been for the larger producers with high sped packaging lines from 600 to 1200 containers per minute for both the UK and the International markets. Recent orders have tended to be for complete lines or single machines with the occasional part lines,” he says.
Wilson explains: “However for the last few years there has been strong interest in small beer bottling lines especially for craft breweries. Installing their own bottling line gives them greater flexibility of packaging times allowing them to meet their customers needs more closely. We have some reports that our customer are sometimes bottling to order rather than stock.
“They also also express a desire to take control of the entire process from brewing to packaging so that the quality is much more consistent and allows them to monitor quality in-house. Customers of Enterprise Tondelli who have recently installed their own bottling lines include Buxton Brewery, Tempest Brewery and Knops Brewery.”
For Wilson, another recent development has been the setting up by Camerons Brewery of Hartlepool with an Enterprise Tondelli bottling line to offer a medium sized contract bottling services for both glass and PET bottles.
