E-Malt.com News article: Canada, BC: Barley Station Brew Pub to release five beer brands in cans

Barley Station Brew Pub has announced that its five beer brands - Canoe Creek Pilsner, Talking Dog Wit Beer, Station House Blond Ale, Sam McGuire’s Pale Ale and Bushwacker Brown Ale - are now available in cans for take-home purchase, the Canadian Beer News reported on June 21st.

Officially brewed under the name Shuswap Lake Brewing Company, the beers were previously available on tap and in growlers, but the owner Stu Bradford noted in a press release that they felt there was even more they could do with a canned product.

The release goes on to give more details about the unique solution Bradford found to having to make a large investment in thousands of cans:

The initial drawback to canning was having to print minimum orders of 150,000 cans of each beer style. With 5 of their own house beers that meant committing to 3/4 of a million cans, something most brew pubs don’t need to inventory due to the production size of the brewery. The answer, Bradford thought was to print labels for each style of beer and label the cans before or after filling. A trip to the Craft Beer Conference in San Francisco this year for more information on this process left Bradford realizing that no one had been doing this yet. All of the label producers at the trade show were excited to hear that someone was attempting to go this route but they hadn’t heard of anyone labelling beer cans yet.

Bradford then began researching label applicators and producers before teaming up with Precision Label out of Calgary who produced the labels and was then able to obtain a more reasonable amount of blank cans through Cask Brewing Systems, the supplier of the canning equipment.

Cans of all five house beers are available now at the Brew Pub, where they sell for C$11.99 per six-pack.


01 July, 2011