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Requirements for a Bottling Line
What is the best and efficient bottling equipment setup? Cleaning, Filling, Corking, Labeling, Boxing…. etc??? Please Help
Fellow distillers!!! I am in need of some input and wanted advice from you.
1. We are opening a new distillery and will start with around 2000 bottles a month for production.
2. Labor cost is extreme in our area but purchasing a fully automated system is out of the price range.
3. DESIRE to keep the price for the initial production line reasonable.
Thoughts, Ideas and Inputs will land you a drink on the house!
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10 Replies
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We’ve helped a ton of distilleries get a bottling line set up. Usual flow is MiniMax rinser (if rinsing is desired) into Mori Filler. We sell a ROPP Capper, but not a T-Top corker. For those we recommend CCR Engineering. Finally, heat shrink, and label.
Running semi-auto equipment like the above will decrease the required labor, particularly using a multi-head filler like the Mori. However it will still require several people with a certain level of manual dexterity to run efficiently. A “well-oiled machine” operation has a person working at each station (rinsing, filling, corking, capping, labeling). Or doing it in “phases”: rinse/fill + cap in phase one, then capsule & label in a second phase.
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We were in your same position 18 months ago and have just installed our automated line. Here is how we set up our line:
1) Mini-Max for sparging bottles – you can DYI one but I wouldn’t. The mini-max has been an awesome tool. We will continue to use it on our automated line.
2) Mori filler or Xpress Fill – we have both due to the fact we fill 50mm and Mason jars in addition to 375mm and 750mm bottles
3) Hand cork press
4) Harbor Freight heat gun for shrinking caps
5) Bottle-matic II labeler
Avoid neck labels if you can – adds an additional step labor/costs
This line will allow you label 300 – 500 per day with 4 people working the line.
Good luck.
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Bottles or cases? Hope you mean cases because that would be an absurdly slow rate for bottles.
I use a sterile compressed air blower, two bottles at a time. (Balston 3 stage sterile air filter)
Mori 6 spout filler.
Hand apply bartop corks.
Shrink capsule placed by hand, shrunk with heat gun from St. Pats. Yeah St. Pats sucks but there is absolutely no comparison to their professional heat gun, and I haven’t found it anywhere else.
Benchmax labeler.
3 people can do 200 cases 750ml in 6 hours. By myself I can do about 17 cases/hour. This is super easy, and obviously a single person could do your monthly volume without issue. When I started my distillery 12 years ago it took me 4 hours to do 14 cases; there was no one providing advice and I thought I was doing great. You’re welcome.
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Guess you’re not hand writing bottle/batch on your bottles…
Plus I think you much be using a very special Mori gravity fed filler. If it takes 1 minute to load, fill and unload a Mori 6 head filler, then in a perfect world, non-stop, you could fill 30 (12 bottle) cases an hour. That’s doesn’t include sparging the bottles (air or liquid), corking, capping and boxing. I find it hard except that you can personally do 17 complete cases in an hour. Good for you if you can.
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BY MYSELF:
The Mori 6 spout filler fills my 750ml in about 25 seconds. Air sparging 2 bottles at a time and inserting on Mori filler 10 seconds for 6 bottles. Removing 6 bottles from the filler is 8 seconds. Total to fill is 45 seconds for 6 bottles. Keep in mind that the Mori filler is never empty of bottles: for maximum efficiency that is filling while the other tasks (inserting bartop corks, applying and shrinking capsules, labeling, sealing and stacking carton) are done. So when the 12 bottles are in the carton, the filler has 6 full bottles on it. One does not simply add up the total time for all tasks and multiply, this is multitasking for speed and efficiency. You should see how fast I can go when I do my product that has screen printed bottles, so no labeling required. And yes bottling is non stop. Why wouldn’t it be? With my 3 person bottling line we go as fast as the Mori filler can fill. The only additional time is moving pallets of finished cases and empty bottles in and out, unsealing new boxes of bartops, and changing label rolls.
I’ve been doing this for 12 years, I know exactly how to bottle for maximum efficiency with my semi automatic system. Clearly you did not. You were slow in loading and unloading your Mori filler. Your choice of heat gun was woefully inadequate for speed. Your hand cork press was unnecessary for other than wine bottles. Your labeler was second tier (I know because I used the same one for years). If you chose to lollygag around with your bottling, that’s up to you. If you chose to hand write on labels, draw doodles on the caps, kiss each bottle before lovingly placing in the carton, that’s up to you. But quite frankly, F*** your doubting acceptance of my highly efficient system.
The OP asked for the “best and efficient bottling equipment set up” that wasn’t fully automatic, was reasonably priced, and mindful of a high labor cost. I described exactly that in a real world setting, that could literally complete his estimated monthly starting volume in 10 total hours with one person; he could just do it himself and never worry. Your system used 4 people in a slow and inefficient manner. It’s a good thing you upgraded to an automated line.
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Our shrink seal/labeling line is fully automatic, but right now we’re filling with a Mori 6 head from TCW and then a CCR semi-automatic corker. With 3 people working at a decent pace we try to hit 600x 750ml bottles cased and on a pallet per hour. We can do higher numbers if we want, but 600/hr is pretty manageable with the current manual stages.
I should note that we use a larger AODD pump than what came with the Mori as we were able to outpace it.
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FWIW, the estimated throughput of the Mori Filler for 750 ml bottles is 8 BPM on the 4-head and 12 BPM on the 6-head. Of course, these values depend heavily on a number of factors: operator dexterity, viscosity, perhaps even elevation above sea level, since the filler is gravity-based. The speed of a full line will also vary based on many of the same factors, as well as the fact that a bottling line can only ever be as fast as the slowest individual step. I would guess that very few operations have personnel with the focus and manual dexterity to achieve 12 BPM, but I have spoken with some who claim to!
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We’re worked with many start up distilleries with numbers in the 2,000 bottles per month and much more. Our equipment is made only in the US or in Italy – nothing from China. We sell Rinser/Spargers, Fillers, Corkers/Cappers, Labelers, Heat Shrinkers and pumps – everything you will need to construct your own bottling line. We created our company specifically to help the smaller distilleries expand their capabilities without charging a premium. Our products are top quality, professional and made of stainless steel. Our company is small by design, and therefore have very little overhead, which means our prices are lower than anybody we’ve seen.
Please visit us at crusystems.com to see our pricing, watch our videos and to learn more about us. We have an extensive list of satisfied customers that we would be happy to show you.
Thanks!
-Steve
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Just an update on bottling speed with the Mori 6 spout. During last nights bottling run we used a stopwatch and clocked 768 x 750ml bottles filled in 60 minutes, or 12.8 bottles filled per minute.
we did “cheat” a little bit by manually breaking the seals between the bottler and bottle allow them to fill a littler quicker, especially in the last moments of filling when it goes in quicker. It’s an added process but the speed was noticeable to everyone on the line.
We did have a slower start and a couple hiccups during that hour, I’m pretty confident that we could potentially hit 800 filled per hour, but no more. It’s also not realistic at all for humans to sustain the 750-800 per hour speed, but it is achievable for a sprint.
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Ill second that the folks at TCW equipment provide top notch stuff. They have provided equipment for several bottling lines for me and they always worked great.
@NoGoodOutlaw if you need some help selecting the exact parts and pieces drop me a line Distillerynow@gmail.com
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