The New Normal: To-Go Packaging Makes the Difference in Keeping Small Breweries Open

In the middle of March, growing concern over the COVID-19 pandemic pushed hospitality businesses into a particularly difficult corner, as states issued orders closing taprooms. Overnight, breweries that counted on selling beer over the bar to loyal patrons were left to figure out how to continue to operate, or to make the hard choice to lay off staff and shut down. Many states liberalized restrictions on sales, removing caps on amounts of beer that customers could purchase to-go, allowing online orders with curbside pickup, and eliminating restrictions on remote ordering and delivery. The only problem: Many breweries that sold draft beer exclusively were ill-equipped to start packaging.

For much of craft beer’s history, growlers (typically, 64-oz glass jugs) were the primary mode of taking beer home from a small brewery or brewpub. However, sanitizing growlers returned by customers was and is a constant source of headaches for brewery owners. In today’s COVID-19 no-contact era, the idea of taking a customer’s vessel into the brewery’s sanitized environment to fill it seems antithetical to public health directives. Still, few small breweries could afford the six-figure-plus investment in a semi-automated packaging line.

Oktober Can Seamers Answers the Call

Enter the small-scale, manual can seamer. Uniquely positioned to help breweries fill the need to get beer to customers, the manual seamer offers a low cost of entry for seaming one-way, recyclable packaging—packaging that can be sanitized before filling and purged with carbon dioxide to ensure quality. Leading the charge for accessibly priced manual can seamers is Oktober Can Seamers, based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Founded by precision machine designer Dennis Grumm—who previously worked in the tight machining requirements of the aerospace industry—Oktober’s goal has been to reduce complexity and cost in manual seaming while maintaining the highest standards of quality. Grumm started small, with a single test machine installed at a local brewery (where that machine is still running today). As the brewery used the initial prototype, word got out about the precision of the seams and the low maintenance requirements. (Some breweries using competing seamers at the time developed standard operating procedures that required full cleaning after as few as 50 cans). Business grew. One seamer sold in a month turned into one seamer sold per week then one per day. They were off to the races.

“We realized many smaller businesses just don't need all the automation, de-palletizing, filling systems, etcetera, that a full canning line includes,” says Grumm (pictured above). “They just need to seal the cans."

Grumm designed the Oktober seamer from the start with flexibility in mind, as past experience with craft beer showed just how quickly trends in packaging sizes can change. Sixteen-ounce cans were all but dead in 2014, but by 2016 they were all the rage with consumers who associated them with quality at a small scale. Grumm knew that to future-proof his seamers and provide the greatest value to brewery customers, he had to design them to handle the variety of packaging formats that breweries may want to use—everything from 8-oz stubby cans to sleek cans to 19.2-oz stovepipes and 32-oz crowlers.

Today, Oktober has taken that a few steps further, and brewery customers can purchase tooling sets that allow any of their Model 7 seamers to seam lids (in industry parlance, “ends”) of different diameters. One machine with the various tooling sets can seam 16oz cans before the business opens that morning, then swap the tooling over to fill 32-oz crowlers on demand throughout the day. Or, if packaging supplies of 32-oz crowlers are constrained due to spikes in demand, breweries can swap tooling and fill more readily available 16-oz cans instead.

“One of the fundamental questions we had when we started was, ‘Where do you get an unsealed can?’” Grumm says. “We knew right away that being able to supply the blank cans would be an important piece of the puzzle. We did the legwork and slowly put together the supply chain. Now, depending on the size of the customer and what their needs are, we either sell direct to them, or connect them with a local source that can sell them a pallet or two of cans or crowlers at a time. Or when our customers are in a pinch, we love being there with supplies in-stock to keep them going. We’re more than an equipment vendor, we’re a partner that helps brewers solve problems.”

Oktober is also committed to user-serviceability, in order to reduce downtime for repairs. While other, more complex machines in the marketplace require shipping back to the manufacturer for service—costing the brewery days or weeks with no packaging—Grumm and the Oktober team have designed their seamer to allow brewers of moderate technical skill to replace worn parts on the machine using kits they sell while guided by their Youtube service instructions. For the price of repairing a competing machine, most breweries could buy a brand new Oktober seamer.

“I try to generally design things the way I’d like them to be,” Grumm says. “In this case, I would prefer to design it so simply that with a little bit of instruction, anybody could fix any part of the machine that would need to be adjusted or repaired. That solves a lot of problems, like not having to ship a heavy machine back and forth for repairs, or not having to pay for an expensive repair professional to make a service call. The machines themselves are genuinely that simple, so there really isn’t a need for complex servicing.

“The very first machines we built are still running, and that’s because we’ve pared down the machine to just exactly what it needs. There is nothing else there that doesn’t need to be there. No extra parts to service, nothing else that can go wrong and impact the machine. That’s why it’s common for our customers to seal 100,000 cans with only basic cleaning and maintenance. With just a bit of cleaning and lubrication, they will keep running for many years.”

In the past, some breweries have avoided manual seamers out of a fear that they’re difficult to set up and operate. To help ease the transition, Oktober tests every machine before it ships, and guarantees that it’s ready to start working right out of the box. Brewers can go from zero to seaming in minutes. For small breweries worrying about keeping the lights on through these challenging times, the last thing they need to worry about is their seamer going down. With Oktober’s price point at just under half that of competitors, small breweries could even purchase redundant units to ensure a constant supply of beer to customers.

Small craft brewers across the United States and around the world have embraced the focus on lowering the bar to ownership, and today Oktober Can Seamers is quickly ramping up to meet the influx of new orders for seamers. Breweries everywhere need to get beer into the hands of customers, and filling growlers isn’t an attractive option for breweries who care about the health and wellbeing of their own employees. But ramping up assembly of Oktober can seamers has been no small feat, as the company’s order volume has skyrocketed.

To meet the demand, they’ve enlisted friends of Oktober in all sorts of capacities, and local bartenders and servers put out of work by closures have helped pack boxes and ship units to waiting customers. The core team of a dozen staff have been putting in long hours, as the company moved to multiple shifts in order to reduce contact between staff. Some staff have set up stations at their homes to build parts which are then ferried back and assembled at their main facility. Others volunteered to work the graveyard shift. While Grumm has made the workplace flexible so that employees can manage the challenges of their own lives through the shutdown, staff members know that every machine they ship will help breweries get beer to customers, and they’re burning the midnight oil to get machines out the door.

That’s challenging in an environment where suppliers have shut down or slowed production. The logistics team has had to get creative in sourcing, but they’ve been able to solve supply-chain challenges and ramp up production immensely. Now, they’re producing 400 percent more units per week than they normally would. It’s a challenging pace to maintain, but it’s one the entire team is committed to—not just for the benefit to the company, but to help so many desperate small breweries remain viable businesses and keep their doors open. Under normal conditions, the company has always promised an aggressive two-week lead time. Despite the incredible rise in demand, they’ve been able to keep lead time to only three weeks. With as many as 200 packages going out the door at a time, their shipping provider UPS now has to send extra trucks to pick up all of the outgoing machines. That one-per-day sales rate of Year One is closer to one-per-hour today.

“Our crew is epic,” Grumm says. “That the biggest part of the story. They are stoked to be helping places keep some amount of revenue coming in the door. Everyone understands how important this is, in the big picture. It’s an important mission to help struggling craft beer businesses get through this tough time. On a personal level, this is super important.”

The Future of Small-Scale Canning

While the long-term effects of COVID-19 shutdowns on breweries remains to be seen, one effect of the expansion of brewery takeout and delivery is changing consumer expectations around service. Structuring small breweries to stay nimble while meeting changing consumer demands can be difficult, making small investments like a manual can seamer more attractive than very large investments like automated canning lines. Regardless, brands such as Oktober that service brewery customers small and large are aligned now more than ever to help breweries, beer bars, and beer retailers through this difficult time.

“I love craft beer, we’re a part of this craft beer community, and we’re all in the same boat,’ says Grumm. “We’re in this crazy position where we are able to help.”