Right now, distribution for craft breweries is more important than ever. With the country pretty much on lockdown, the only way for most breweries to make money is food and packaged beer. Focusing on the latter, an affordable and flexible packaging setup seems super essential right now. Well, let me introduce you to the coolly named Cimarron, an expandable canning machine from the equally excellently titled experts at Twin Monkeys.
This canning system can expand from one to 10 fill heads and fill and seam 10 to 100+ cans per minute. Slims, sleeks and standards, the Cimarron handles them all. You can customize your unit for redundancy, to feed cans with an infeed funnel and to be single lane or dual lane (with no change in footprint!), but that’s just the beginning…
Expandability and dual-lane: Like Twin Monkey’s Roaring Fork unit, the Cimarron has two lanes. A customer can order anything from 1 to 10 fill heads (at throughput of about 10 to 90 cans/minute, respectively) to start with and can always add fill heads later. If the customer has one to five fill heads, they will have only fill heads and a seamer for one lane. If they need six to 10 fill heads, they will need to put on another set of parts for the second lane, including another lid dispenser, seamer and controls. NOTE: The customer can add fill heads fairly easily later on, but if they go from a single-lane system to a dual-lane, Twin Monkeys will need to do the work necessary to add the second lane.
Dual-lane redundancy: When the Cimarron has two operational lanes on it (six to 10 fill heads), the operator can turn off one lane if they need to (perhaps if it is needed maintenance) and the other lane can continue to run.
Size: The system is compact and great for small operations or mobile operations.
Infeed: We have options to feed cans that use an infeed funnel or can connect to depalletizers of any size.
Can sizes: Change out between different can diameters is a breeze. Built with operator ease of use in mind, the Cimarron makes everything easy.
Reject: The reject is standard on the Cimarron and can reject cans that took too long between filling and seaming because the system stopped, cans that didn’t seam completely when an operator hit the emergency stop switch, cans that are missing lids and cans that are underweight (if they have the optional weighing system).
Weigh: This option will weigh each can and flag underweight cans for reject and also will tune the fill heads to shut off at the correct point for the ideal fill level.
Servo filler raise: This option allows the machine to automatically tune the timing AND the speed of the filler raise to ensure the fill heads shut off at the ideal height while they are still barely under the top of the liquid in the cans. Far too often customers don’t pay attention to the timing and speed of their fill raise and the quality of their canning suffers because of it.
Eco-friendly: The Cimarron will shut off rinse water, CO2 for purging and for lid application, compressed air drying and even some of the motors when there is no active need to have them on. This ensures the customer is saving their money and resources and not consuming more than they need.
Rinse water reuse: Taking a page from the big breweries, we have an option to rinse the inside of the cans with pristine rinse water, then we reuse that water for the final rinse on the outside of the cans at the other end of the canning line. The canner therefore only needs half as much rinse water before it goes into the drain.
Liquid nitrogen dosing: All Twin Monkeys canners can have optional built-in LN2 dosing. The only difference on the Cimarron is that there is a custom 2-head doser that can independently dose onto both canning lanes.
Fobbing jet: In Twin Monkeys’ Mancos Tech Pack, there is a fobbing jet. The Cimarron can also be ordered with fobbing jets. These jets take beer (or water) and shoot a tiny stream into the can to create additional foam for better protection of the headspace of the can from air. A customer will not use fobbing and LN2 dosing at the same time but can go back and forth between the two.
Pre-fill rinsing: As of the time of this writing, Twin Monkeys only has a twist rinse option for rinsing the cans prior to fill, BUT the company is developing a rinser that will flip and rinse cans that should be available sometime in Q2 of 2020.
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