Brewery consulting case (upstate New York)

Tom's first big consulting job. Used to illustrate co-location of can lines with bottling plants because air cannot be transported far.

My first big consulting job was at a brewery in New York, and they were filling bottles and cans at 20 a second. One of the problems with this industry is you have to build that can line, or the bottle line if you're making glass bottles, right next to the facility that's putting the beer in or the Coca-Cola in. Because you can't transport all that air very far. Typically you can transport it about a couple hundred yards. So typically the can companies will build right next to the bottling companies. You might spend $10 million on can line presses and tooling. It's pretty impressive to see. I saw a full-size can line at Alcan Research once — not an operational can line, but they had a full-size thing, and it was a two-story-high bay about half the size of a football field. Not all of you probably could have fit it into one-fifth the size of a football field, they had other stuff around it, but it's a big piece of equipment. And another interesting thing is the paint line to put the label on. You have to also be painting these things at a couple of cases a second, and that's another trick, but we won't get into that.

Tom's first big consulting job, used as the setup for bottling-line throughput numbers (~one case per second per line, ~10 cases/second plant-wide; 9.5 million barrels/year). Anchors the discussion of beer-can ironing as a deformation process.

My first big consulting job in 1976 or '77 was a failure of a beer keg in the second largest brewery in the United States. I got to tour this brewery in New York State. It's closed now, but at the time it was the second largest. The largest is in fact Coors in Golden, Colorado — I think it still is. They make like 10 or 12 million barrels of beer a year. This one was only making about 9 and a half million barrels. Their bottling — they had about 15 or 16 lines that were capable of bottling about one case a second. They weren't all running at the same time, but that plant was probably doing about 10 cases a second of bottles or cans. Bottles took a little longer than cans, because you had a smaller opening to go through, the glass, than you do through the can before you put the top on.