Still youthful after 80 years
Still popular after 80 years, always on the move, and stylish as ever. It’s also omnipresent at every festival, and by now it’s presumably clear that I’m not talking about my granny.
Instead, we’re remembering the birthday of something that’s perhaps not popular with everyone, but without a doubt is ubiquitously familiar:
The can. Or to be more precise, the beer can.
It was in 1935, i.e. precisely 80 years ago, that the first beer can appeared on the American market: filled by the German emigrants Gottfried Krueger and John Laible, and was not yet quite so practical as it is nowadays. This first can, you see, was about ten (!) times as heavy and not half as easy to open as the beer cans we know today.
Perhaps that’s why it took quite a long time before the can then conquered the German market. But during the course of the 1950s, this indeed came to pass: thanks not least to the rising influence of America, beverage cans became increasingly popular in Germany, and gradually designers worked on making them easier to open as well. And meanwhile it’s impossible to imagine supermarket shelves, festival bags and university cafeterias without any beverage cans.
In parallel to the history of the beverage can, of course, the filling technology involved has been design-enhanced as well. And now, to coincide neatly with the round-number birthday, there’s a new can filler in Krones’ product portfolio.
The Craftmate has (as its name indicates) been specifically developed craft breweries . and can handle small production quantities at speeds of between 6,000 and 18,000 containers per hour. So it’s ideal for craft brewers, who don’t produce as much as their industrial-scale counterparts, but in terms of technology nevertheless want to mix it with the big guys.
How is this possible? It’s because the Craftmate has been designed for saving costs wherever this is possible without compromising on quality. With a standardised layout, for example, and with manual height adjustment of the carousel. And transportation costs are reduced as well: the Craftmate, you see, fits inside a sea container, which means dispatch is quite uncomplicated
Otherwise, it’s just as flexible as its “big brothers”: the Craftmate can handle beer, of course, but also other carbonated beverages – and that in different can sizes and formats. If that’s not a meet and fitting present for an eightieth birthday!
