Aluminium can caravans driving business for American craft brewers

More and more beer drinkers in America are shifting to aluminium can from bottles because of its portability and convenience. Aluminium beer cans have slowly created a space among drinkers. Over and above providing ease of use, aluminium cans keep out suds-spoiling light. Aluminium cans help a brewer or distributor to push out almost twice the amount of beer than they can with bottles.  Cans don’t have necks and are much lighter than glass making chilling and carrying much easier.

Mobile beer canners in America are helping small brewers thrive while fuelling a beer-drinking revolution.  Iron Heart, a beer canner has 22 trucks giving service to some 250 brewers. Working at maximum capacity, they can fill about 563,000 cans per day. That makes about 642,000 barrels of beer annually and forms 3% of all U.S. craft beer production.

There are about 30 other mobile canning rigs dotting the country, offering  craft canning  and bottling services in Oregon to River City Cannery in Washington and Mobile Canning Systems, a loose affiliation of smaller independently owned and run businesses. Kelleher, the distributor launched a side project known as Black Diamond Canning after buying a mobile system.

If clients draw a wider following and brew more beer, they end up buying their own canning machinery for craft beer.

“We’re really allowing breweries to do more volume and get a much faster market penetration than they would have otherwise,” said one of the mobile beer canners. “In markets that we’re not in, you don’t see near the level of cans on the shelf or near the level of breweries,” he added.

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“Unless it’s a super exclusive release with unicorn dust in it, no one wants a large-format bottle anymore,” said Michael Kelleher, sales manager at Atlantic Beverage Distributors. “They want cans and they want them year-round,” he concluded.

Such growing demand for aluminium cans in the craft beer industry and improving local logistics would also drive demand for aluminium cans and can sheet in America, creating business opportunities for domestic can manufacturers.