GOING LIVE; OUR NEW CANNING LINE

Canned beer has come a long way since the days of middling supermarket bitter and anonymous Eurolagers. The gaudy era of widgets has been and gone; the hissing plastic wasps consigned to the history books. We love modern canned craft beer because it focuses solely on two specific things – the high-tech, space-age canning plants that are now available – and the fact that the beer being put through this machinery and into aluminium is far, far better than that reached for by your Dad, watching Saturday afternoon wrestling on ITV.

So this week, we are starting the first runs from our newly-installed futuristic canning line, here at our Ellon HQ. As you know, we’re not one to do things by halves, that’s why we’ve connected up the largest craft canning line in Europe, featuring a German-engineered 40-head filler. In order to ensure no oxygen infiltrates (it being the enemy of beer), our Swiss seamer employs a state of the art ‘bubble breaker’, removing and replacing the pillow of CO2 on top of the beer microseconds before the cap is sealed.

In short, our canning line is freaking amazing.

Putting beer in cans has so many advantages – cans effectively keep out light reaching the beer and they also keep out oxygen. Cans obviously weigh less and are therefore easier to transport for ourselves and our customers; they are easier to chill on hot days.

We’re hugely excited to be bringing canning capability back in-house, so we can control it fully and ensure the very best beer gets to you in the best shape possible. At the moment we brew our canned beer at our Ellon HQ then ship it to England where it is canned for us, but this does not give us the control or growth potential we need.

In terms of numbers, our new canning line is the fastest in Europe that packages non-pasteurised, non-sterile filtered beer. Running at maximum speed, we can fill 34,000 cans of full-flavoured craft beer an hour.

Speaking of which, we are planning to release the following from the start; Punk IPA, This. Is. Lager, Dead Pony Pale Ale and Jack Hammer (!) in 330ml cans, and Punk IPA in 500ml cans. Don’t discount any others following, though – if there’s a BrewDog beer you very definitely would love to see encased in a welcoming metal sleeve, then let us know in the comments below! BrewDog and cans – made for each other; and now, made right here.