Although we try and use local suppliers where we can, when we decided to go back to bottling our own beer we then had to find a way of doing it in our very small brewery.
That meant getting a piece of kit from New Zealand, and we were the first in the UK to get one.
It’s a small single bottle filler and takes beer from the keg and fills it under pressure using carbon dioxide, so no oxygen gets to the beer at all during the process and we end up with slight carbonation in the bottled beer.
Using this kit means we can turn a 30 litre keg into 60 500ml bottles in around 2 hours when we account for cleaning the machine before and after, as well as cleaning all the bottles and caps. The filled bottles are put into crates and washed down to get rid of any excess beer on the bottles and then labelled. It’s a labour intensive process but works for us as we don’t have a huge amount of storage space.
Increasingly our customers are buying our bag in box beer. Again the mechanism prevents oxygen getting into the beer so it will keep for several weeks depending on how it’s stored - we recommend a cool place ideally 5 to10 degrees.
We now have a special printer to produce our own labels as required, again supporting our business sustainability drive.