How Allagash Brewing stepped up its canning line in 2019

Allagash Brewing Co. will roll out cans of its flagship beer Allagash White, as well as year-round sessionable River Trip, throughout the remainder of its distribution footprint in the first quarter of 2020. Additionally, the brewery will launch 12-packs of Allagash White in select East Coast markets beginning in February 2020.

“We love that cans create a wide variety of new opportunities for people to enjoy our beer,” said Rob Tod, founder of Allagash. “Earlier this year, we successfully launched cans in states close to home. Now we’re excited to get Allagash cans into the hands of even more beer lovers.”

This is all possible because Allagash installed a state-of-the-art canning line from KHS this year. They began canning Allagash White and River Trip in early 2019.

“The demand for our beer in cans has impressed us,” added Jason Perkins, brewmaster and VP of brewing operations at Allagash. “Our recently increased production capacity means we can deliver two of our most sought-after beers in a new, exciting way — while continuing to meet our high quality standards.”

Five cool facts about Allagash’s canning line

1. It can fill up to 315 12-oz cans per minute. That’s one beer every .19 seconds. Its old line could fill ~30 cans per minute.
2. The brewery can fill 65,000 cans in a single seven-hour run
3. Its depalletizer is made by Ska Fab (which wrote this create article for us on depalletizers this year). It was the largest they had made to that point, a custom job, so its serial number is “1.”
4. By cleaning empty cans out with ionized air, Allagash reports they save tens of thousands of gallons of water per year.
5. They have four different sensors inspecting the cans: a sensor that can inspect individual fill heads (there are 27 total heads), a seam inspector, an X-ray after the can is seamed and another X-ray after the cans are in cartons.

Where to find the new cans

Four-packs of 16-oz Allagash White and River Trip cans will be available starting in January in the following markets: California, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Delaware, Maryland and Pennsylvania come February. Twelve-packs of 12-oz. Allagash White cans will be available within the majority of the brewery’s East Coast distribution network (Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Virginia and Washington, D.C.) starting in February.