Brewery filling line consulting project

Thirty-year-old observation of bottling-line throughput (20 bottles/sec, 24 cans/sec), the foam-rejection dumpster, beer cost of 16 cents/gallon. Used to motivate why label adhesives have to be low viscosity.

Now we get to something critical: putting the labels on beer bottles. You have to have a very low viscosity liquid to be able to put the label on a beer bottle in the time you have available. How much time do you have available to slap that label on a beer bottle? They're going through at about a case a second through the bottling lines. Some are only 20 bottles a second, but typically the bottles are about 20 a second, the cans about 24 a second. They're on a great big wheel almost the diameter of this room. It takes more than 1/24th of a second to fill the liquid into that can or bottle. They're actually under the filling spout for about a third or a half of a revolution. So it's taking a third of a second just to shoot that liquid in there. They've got a person sitting there, and when the beer bottle isn't completely full — it's got a lot of foam — they pull it off the conveyor line and throw it over their shoulder into a dumpster. You look at the dumpster, they have a 3/4 inch hole and the beer is just draining out about halfway into a drain pipe on the floor. That's what happens to the beer. When I went through these plants — which was thirty years ago — beer at that time cost 16 cents a gallon to brew. Today maybe it's 32 cents a gallon. Beer is cheap.