Craft brewery improves filling efficiency by up to 40%

Tiny Rebel, a British craft brewery from Newport in South Wales, has used KHS filling machinery to increase the efficiency and capacity of its canning operations thanks to KHS Innofill Can C can filler being installed.

According to the brewery, the new machine fills the same amount of beverage in an hour as the prior machine would have filled in a whole day. The team at Tiny Rebel now produce up to 15,000 330 mL cans an hour. The machine also lets the brewer control the level of oxygen in the beers, through its CO₂ purging process that provides a high level of precision for filling operations.

“Oxygen control is the key to good beer. The special CO₂ purging process on the Innofill Can C can cut oxygen pick-up by up to 90%. We attach great value to appropriate product quality, especially with our ales. With KHS, we can perfectly meet this requirement,” said Mark Gammons, head of operations at Tiny Rebel.

The machinery has a compact design with good hygiene performance, which allows for smaller batches of different beer styles and container sizes to be produced without reducing product quality. Tiny Rebel produces a large range of products so this is an advantage as the machine can prevent contamination and flavour carryover on the frequent product changeovers.

“The help the KHS team gave us with this project was magnificent. From ordering through planning to commissioning, everything went really smoothly,” Gammons said.

For beverage producers with a higher output, KHS recently upped the performance of the Innofill Can C to be able to manage up to 60,000 containers every 60 minutes. Thanks to this new series, the machine can now be integrated into lines with higher capacities more effectively and supplemented by an Innopro Paramix C blending system or a KHS flash pasteuriser, for example. Furthermore, the hot filling option increases flexibility when it comes to producing juices, iced teas and other beverages.