Craft beer has burst into a popular trend and is still growing. The number of breweries in Indiana has more than doubled in the last five years. But as Logansport resident Luke Brown found out, they've all got the same problem.
What do you do if you want to brew more beer than you can sell on tap?
Brown came up with an answer to that question and turned it into a Logansport company that has thrived since he founded it in late 2013. ICan Solutions LLC is a mobile canning operation — which means Brown's crew brings the equipment and supplies on site to a brewery that wants to package beer or other drinks in a can.
It sounds simple. You take a can, squirt 12 ounces of pale ale or dark lager into it, pop a cap on top and snap it into a four-pack plastic holder. But the equipment to get it done can cost in the neighborhood of $200,000 — not to mention the cost of the cans themselves.
Branded cans usually have to be purchased by the truckload, Brown explained. It can take a brewery years to fill and sell that many cans, he said. In the meantime, most breweries don't have the storage space to keep the empty cans, much less for the equipment to fill them.
That's where ICan Solutions comes in. Literally.
"What if we had a service where we came in, just like construction equipment?" Brown remembered asking himself. Formerly employed at Grand Industrial, a Logansport fabrication company his brother co-owns, Brown had spent plenty of time bringing construction and maintenance equipment to work sites and installing industrial mechanisms in local manufacturing facilities. He figured the same principles that Grand Industrial runs on — bringing the machine to the customer — could apply to canning beer for small breweries.
"You take all the headache out of the packaging for them, they can concentrate on making good beer," Brown said.
Brown started with a single customer, People's Brewing Co. in Lafayette. He's grown to serve 25 customers now and employs eight, based out of a back warehouse area at Grand Industrial. ICan still packages beer for People's Brewing, including the brewery's newest, Boiler Gold.
That American golden ale is currently sold only in Purdue University's Ross-Ade stadium and at the 1869 Tap Room in Purdue's student union, according to People's Brewing co-owner Chris Johnson.
Back at the start, Brown "had talked to us about our interest in canning," Johnson recalled. "We had some, but basically what Luke did for us, he gave us the opportunity to try canning without the capital investment of a canning line."
"It was a good way for us to sort of test the waters and see how it goes for us," Johnson said. Of course, the waters turned out very friendly. "We continue to have more canned products as time goes on and we think we'll eventually move towards being all canned."
Right now, People's Brewing Co. sells a little over half of its packaged beer in bottles, but Johnson prefers cans, he said.
"The can is a much better way to hold the beer, protect the beer," Johnson explained. "Zero light pickup, less oxygen pickup — they also have benefits as far as recycling, cans are extremely recyclable. They're lighter for travel… there are lots of benefits but the biggest one is that it actually keeps the beer better than the bottle does."
People's Brewing Co. is just one among some 127 breweries in Indiana, according to the Brewers Association. Some 40 percent of beer packaged by small breweries like People's is in cans, according to data analysis by the trade group, which represents small and independent craft brewers across the U.S. And though sales of both bottles and cans have increased, can sales are growing faster, the trade group reported this year.
Brewers Association attributed much of the rise to the growth of smaller breweries — noting large craft brewers have likely already invested in bottling equipment, which they purchased in a time when canned craft beer "would have been practically unheard of."
Since larger breweries already manage their own packaging, ICan Solutions works primarily with microbreweries — brewers producing 15,000 barrels or less per year. Instead of canning thousands of cases, ICan might run a few hundred cases' worth through its machinery. ICan uses cans it branded with what's basically a shrink-wrap process, rather than cans that came by the truckload with the branding printed directly on the aluminum.
That way, Brown's company can purchase a truckload of blank cans from Ball Corp.'s beverage packaging plant in Monticello and label just as much or as few as each brewery needs. ICan staff slip the blanks into plastic sleeves, which are printed with branding that the client brewery designed, and a sleeving machine applies heat to shrink the plastic sleeves tightly onto the cans.
ICan Solutions runs two mobile canning lines, which are trucked on site to breweries, on top of the sleeving line, which stays put in Logansport. The company also leases storage space in Indianapolis, where some cans stay until they're used at Indianapolis-area breweries; a machine to clean beer kegs, also housed in Indianapolis; and may add a third mobile canning line which would be parked in the St. Louis area so the other lines don't have to be hauled all the way there, Brown said.
While a cluster of ICan's customers are in St. Louis, most are within about a three-hour drive of Logansport. That and the city's proximity to Ball Corp., the source of the aluminum cans, makes Brown's hometown ideal for the mobile business, he said.
Many of his employees are family, too, and beyond that, the area's familiarity with industrial machinery makes locals uniquely fit to run canning machinery.
"If the machine breaks, you don't just let problems linger. You fix problems ... having that production mentality really helps," Brown said.