Canning Line Transition

Tyler took this picture today and I think it's pretty cool. And, I've never really gone through the canning process so as we're (hopefully) embarking on a new canning line, I might as well reflect on one of the last times we'll use our first-born:

What's shown on the table makes up about one row of a pallet (seen in the background). The total height of each pallet we make is 9 rows.
(I'm about to go really in depth in our canning process. Some might appreciate it, others, not so much)
Each one of the cans is manually dunked in a bucket of sanitizing solution and hand/placed up a fill/co2 extension. A button is pressed to begin a process of co2 purge, followed by a fill, which takes about 12 seconds. It's then removed back down the extension, pulled out, and set on a table.

The next person in line takes a lid out of a small sanitizer-filled bin. The lid is placed on the top of the can, and set onto a piston. You then press a button with your other hand, and the piston raises the can into a fast-spinning chuck, pressing the lid down, and spinning. Two air-powered pieces then move in independently and seam the lid to the edge of the can. The piston lowers, and you take the can off (about 10 fall-offs per session dent cans, our friends like that). You then dunk the can in clean water and set it on a steel "drying" table. They can't be too wet or they'll soak the case pack, and fall apart within the pallet.

The third person has the easiest job. Their main function is to take the cans on the table (we don't usually let them accumulate like the pic, but Matt was talking to the electrician), shake any excess water off, put them into the case which you just folded up, put a "keep refrigerated" sticker (new) on, snap on the 4-pack holders, slap on the expiration with a gun, and stack the case on the pallet. Their secondary job is to de-palletize the huge stacks of cans we get. That involves a huge plastic bag and a ladder.  All the while they keep the canners stocked with supplies like cans, lids, water, sanitizer, massage for back knots, whatever. You don't really get to rest much, but it's slower paced than the mad rush of canning. We rotate after each row, which is about a 25 minute session.

A whole pallet takes about 4 hours if worked straight. And when I say straight, I mean the third, "packaging" person will take the last few cans out of the can bag, put them in the sanitizer bucket, and replace it with a new bag so the canning people don't skip a beat. As you can tell, we want to minimize time spent canning, it's not the most fun part of the job. In a given day, we'll do between 1.3 and 2.5 pallets per session, so with the 2 hours for set-up, clean-up, and screw up, we're typically at it for 6-12 hours.

Our distributors then come pick these pallets up, along with pallets of kegs, take them to their warehouse, then they're off to the store/bar. Our highest volume distributor goes through almost 130 cases/week nowadays. We currently have 5 active distributors. Needless to say we're REALLY, REALLY, REALLY anticipating the new canning line getting up and running. You can only put so many hours on what's essentially an assembly line without getting antsy for change. Our electritian is coming tomorrow to hopefully power us up, and if everything goes perfectly (odds approx 0.012%), tomorrow could be our last super-manual canning session.

To celebrate (although we'd be doing it anyways), we'll be slow-cooking some meats in the smoker all day, so hopefully we'll cap everything off with some smoked ribs, chicken, or brisket marinated/basted in some Cran.

We'll try to take pictures along the way, but there's only so many times you can instagram a 12 head seaming mechanism before it becomes an unhealthy obsession. To many, I'm sure that number hovers around 0. It definitely get our juices flowing though. Getting the first can off an automated line has been something of a white whale since Downeast's inception. I'll be satisfying beyond the obvious ease of packaging.

Making Moves

Before I get into anything about cider, let me say a quick word on the marathon bombings. Everyone here is okay, as are our friends and family. We're fortunate to have come out of this clean, as many people weren't so lucky. To those people, we wish you the best in moving past this terrible thing to have happened to our city. Nothing we do or say can change anything that's happened, nor will our insight really add anything or help anyone, which is why we've been silent throughout this mess. Boston is a tough city, and doesn't need our validation.

On a related note, as someone who typically has nothing great to say to about the police (particularly state troopers hassling me at the car pick-up area at Logan), I have great respect for the way they took care of business. Very impressive. Shut down the city, catch the bad guys. It's a trying time for Boston, and as the public image of Boston over those few days rested on the police, first responders, and volunteers, they delivered in a huge way, and made everyone around here proud to be from Boston.

and now, back to cider...

If you haven't heard much from us lately, it's because we've been doing a lot of prep work for our upcoming expansion. Upgrades include bigger, better and badder tanks, support systems (glycol chiller, air compressor, boilers, etc), CIP, and the pièce de résistance, our new, automated canning line. It's a very exciting time, but all that excitement leads to frustration after frustration over the lack of speed. Everything happens so fast in our minds, and slowly in real life, it can be difficult to deal with. In my head, we've got all these new toys, and we're ready to ramp up and take over the world. But in real life, everything is still being built, shipped, or ignored (cough...contractors...cough), and we're running the same old operation, which has lost a lot of its luster now that I've mentally replaced everything. The good news is that our new canning line has arrived in Boston, and is only a few days away from arriving on our loading dock. 

Due to our disposition regarding the spending of unnecessary money, we opted out of having the manufacturer send an engineer to install the thing. No worries though, if my math is correct, it took me 4 days to put together my $99 grill from Home Depot, so with the three of us working consecutive 20 hour shifts, we're looking at no more than a year or two before the canning line is operational.

As soon as that bad boy's installed, this is a rough interpretation of what's going to become of the old one.*

That's all I've got for today. I'll leave everyone with something that amused us a couple weeks ago. Say "beer can" in a British accent and it sounds like "bacon" in a Jamaican accent. Simple pleasures for simple minds I suppose.

*Definitely not going to smash it. Despite its inadequacies, our current canning "line" is not only worth about 100 times the amount of money in my personal bank account, it serves a very useful function for small canning operations

A Hawk's Tale (Kind of Gross)

At about 10 this morning, we had our doors open to let some of that nice April breeze inside, and in the blink of an eye, there was absolute mayhem. As we saw a giant bird fly in, I either bellowed in a deep growl "HAWK, how majestic!" or I kinda screamed in a high pitch voice, "holy shit, an owl", depending on your perspective (I'm still pretty sure it was the former, although others attest to the latter).

So the hawk came in and dropped something on the ground, then flew up to the ceiling, where it proceeded to make an absolute scene, crashing into all the pipes and not being nearly as smart as we expected of a bird of prey. I glance over at the ground, and there's something going kinda nuts. I notice it's a pigeon, bleeding. The hawk had eaten part of its breast, before it decided to come finish its meal inside.

Keep in mind, at this point we're only a few seconds into the hawk's entrance. Out of nowhere, big crash. I look back over to our office, where our black lab Morty is tied up to our table, and Morty is bolting for the pigeon. He snapped the leg off our table, knocking over all of our computers, speakers, router, papers, etc. He then snagged the pigeon, and unfortunately, didn't kill it (it was suffering) but just played with it. Neadless to say, there was a lot of yelling and feathers. Fast forward to a couple hours later, the hawk is still glaring at us from its perch near our ceiling (about 30' up), flying around like a lunatic every few minutes, and just being a general menace.

About 3 hours, just as swift as it came, the hawk was gone. The pigeon was put out of its misery, and order has been restored to Winterfell, I mean Downeast. So today we pour one out for our fallen homie, the brave pigeon that fought tooth and nail in the great hawk battle of 2013. You defended us bravely, Pigeon, it was an honor to serve with you sir, and may you strut around for eternity picking up breadcrumbs off the pearly, trash-ridden sidewalks that lie above. Rest in Peace.

**Side note. For those concerned, none of this happened near any product, or cans, or anything like that, not that it could, because everything is a closed system.**