Before canned beer from the Prairie Sun Brewery appears on shelves, it goes through a unique canning process through a mobile machine.
The brewery has contracted West Coast Canning, a company based in British Columbia, to bring their mobile canning line from Calgary to Saskatoon around once a month.
The canning process usually takes one to two days. During that time, they’ll package about 9,000 cans of beer – all of which is pre-sold to stores across the province. West Coast Canning brings the cans, labels and tables to work on.
“We’ll come in, (set up), and we’ll fill four beers at a time,” said Bobby Lipsett, front-end operator for West Coast Canning. “We hook right to the tanks of beers and basically we run them about anywhere from 30 to 45 cans per minute.”
Once the cans are filled, they’re hand-labeled, packaged into four-packs, and shipped.
“We usually have about seven, eight staff to get going,” CEO of Prairie Sun Brewery Heather Williams said. “We touch each can at least once, but probably more like three or four times.”
Williams said the mobile canning machine not only saves space in the brewery, but is also cost-effective. She said buying their own canning machine would cost a minimum of $150,000.
Williams said she has been saving to move the brewery into a new building on Broadway Avenue, on the lot of the old Farnam Block building.
According to Williams, the canning process is a lot of fun for the staff, and is part of the reason why they continue canning their different kinds of beer.
“It gets us all from the front – the retailers to work in the back, and then the brewers get to work all together,” she said. “It’s a really quick, fast-paced day, but we’re able to tell stories and hang out and it’s kind of like team building.”
