As I walked through the loading doors at Eagle Rock Brewery (Los Angeles, California) one recent autumn morning, the din of beer-making was even louder than usual. I’ve observed many packaging runs at the small brewery over the past few years, but on that day the brewery’s trusty Maheen four-head bottle filler was tucked away. Instead, the steady thrumming of an air compressor mixed with the clicking and whirring of a canning line.
Eagle Rock Brewery has increasingly embraced cans as a packaging method as the marketplace in Southern California has cooled on the 22 oz bottle format. But Eagle Rock couldn’t have transitioned many of their special release and year-round brews to 16 oz cans without the service offered by Beer Monks mobile canners. The Beer Monks—Greg Kinne and Mike Nalick—launched their business in late 2013, and they now package beer (as well as cider and wine) for more than two-dozen breweries and other businesses in Southern California. At the center of their operation is a Wild Goose 250M mobile canning line.
The impressively engineered machine can fill and seal almost forty cans per minute, cruising through a 15-bbl brite tank of beer in just a few hours. Equally impressive is the efficiency with which Kinne and Nalick operate the system. It takes the team only about an hour to load the 700 lb, 90" (2.3 m) long machine into a brewery, run a clean-in-place routine, and hook up to a brite tank full of beer. At the end of a canning run, the partners can have the machine cleaned and packed back onto their truck in just about 90 minutes. Many fast-growing Los Angeles breweries who looked for a way to package their beer without the large capital expense of purchasing their own packaging line have embraced the flexibility of Beer Monks’ service.