The craft brewers’ new friend

In recent years, the number of craft breweries worldwide has soared. In North America, this segment is booming. Some of these new breweries are meanwhile also investing in bottling and canning lines of their own, with beer in cans playing a major role here. These developments are the reason for expanding Krones’ portfolio of fillers to include a craft beer can filler for the low output range.

The Craftmate scores highly in terms of high flexibility for its users. The filler has been designed for filling cans in the standard 211/202 format, but can also be optionally equipped to handle the 204/202 to 300/209 formats. Depending on the can volume and product parameters involved, the machine’s output lies between 6,000 and 18,000 cans per hour.

Thanks to its innovative engineering, a filler can now for the first time be operated without a lifting cam, thus reducing the number of components and facilitating access to the machine. The filler is in open design and thus easy to clean as well. The cleaning media run down the sloping table-top into a defined drain and thus cannot collect in puddles.

In order to minimise the transportation costs, the development people at Krones have also made sure that the Craftmate, together with the seamer, can be shipped in a sea container. The user thus receives a machine that is “out of the box” for first-time brewers.

(Video is in German)