Yuengling Brewery, Pennsylvania, USA

The Yuengling Brewery in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, is one of the oldest breweries in the US, producing a range of beers since 1829. Yuengling has two breweries in Pennsylvania (Pottsville and Port Carbon) and a brewery in Tampa, Florida, collectively producing around 1.7 million barrels of beer per year.

Yuengling produces ales, porters and lagers in bottles, cans, barrels and kegs.

PACKAGING

In 2005, Yuengling installed Nordson ProBlue 10 series hot-melt adhesive melters and also ClassicBlue pneumatic adhesive guns at its Tampa plant.

In June 2007, the company initiated a new rotary case packer from Standard-Knapp. Yuengling has had a long history with Standard-Knapp, having used equipment provided by them since the 1940s.

The equipment is a PakMore continuous motion rotary case packer, which was designed in conjunction with the brewery to increase the line speed and efficiency and to cut down on damage and breakage.

The machine is able to process bottles so as the labels do not get scuffed and damaged when being placed in the boxes. Since installing the PakMore, the brewery has attained a line efficiency of 88% and the continuous motion PakMore equipment has been running at around 98% of its capacity.

OPERATION

The PakMore case packer uses a dual-axis servo grouper that gathers the bottles for the gripper heads, which gently pick up the bottles and place them in the cases. The six-head system can pack 50 cases per minute for groups of six, 12, 18 or 24 bottles (the system also has a mode where it can run at 75 cases a minute).

The packer operates at 45 cases per minute, packing cases of bottled beer (seven different varieties) in the 24-pack format.

The system has been designed to be low maintenance and also uses Standard-Knapp’s custom-designed pressureless Zero-Gap infeed technology, which means that the bottles run through their lanes more smoothly and do not cause jams (there is also an automatic fault recovery system).

The case packer uses Allen Bradley programmable logic controls, which were supplied by Rockwell Automation. Glass bottles are supplied by Owens-Illinois, the closures by Crown Cork and Seal and the corrugated cardboard cases by Inland Container Corporation.