Manual Labeler

[Martin Bowman]

Can anyone suggest the best hand labeler. There's something over here in the UK called Pro-labeler that seems to be hellish expensive for what it is. From what I can see it's just a series of rotating drums that peel the label off a roll and apply it to the bottle placed on two drums. We want to get it right first time as this our first foray into the wonderful world of bottling. Any suggestions gratefully received.

[South County]

Yes, unfortunately they are expensive for no more than what they are. GW Kent sells a manually operated pressure sensitive labeller for about a $1000. http://breweryparts.com/detail.asp?n=370&market_id=2&category_id=27

The semi automated ones run more like $4500 and at that price your looking at a good start on used an inline labeler.

[ottonut]

I like the race junior labeler. Works easily and can do about 24/min with a practiced individual.

[mic_mac]

I've seen a little hand-cranked thing somewhere in a UK brewery, but I can't remember where, so not much bleedin' use, sorry.

I did recently receive an email from http://www.identscotland.co.uk/ offering "a labelling station designed for the small brewery" but at £6,500 it still seems more than I'd be willing to fork out & not for the average micro dipping a toe into bottling.

I had a quick look at the site & it seems that there might be some simpler manual & semi-auto machines too - http://www.identscotland.co.uk/product1.html

We've been bottling & labelling by hand for a year or 2 & starting to get a bit busier, but after a mammoth session just before a big food fest in the summer, we decided enough was enough & have been contract-bottling instead.

I'm curious as to how you're going to bottle it - we're about to start brewing under our own steam (after a few years of cuckoo-brewing & hand-bottling) we've found such inconsistency with hand-bottling (using this plant - http://tinyurl.com/manual-bottling ) that we've given up on it for now & possibly for ever.

I realise the cost savings to be made by bottling in-house, but I think we currently can't afford a bottling line that will give us the quality & consistency we're after.

For those not aware of the brewing & bottled beer scene in the UK - many micros, especially the smaller ones, bottle by hand (almost exclusively ales, unpasteurised, unfiltered, with no real lab or QC, no pre-evac, by gravity, natural carbonation by bottle-conditioning).

In my experience (drinking, brewing & bottling) the results of this are hugely varied - everything from the pretty consistently OK-to-good, to some totally stunning beers, to completely infected, oxidised, over- or under-carbonated, cloudy, etc, etc.

Other micros & regionals simply tanker beer away to contract-bottlers, or fork out for more expensive bottling plant. Almost all of the bottle-conditioned beers that win CAMRA's CBOB title (Champ Bottled Beer of Britain) are bottled in a more complex way than described above - involving sterile-filtration of the beer before fresh clean yeast is added back.

[Rosie]

Hi Martin,

We have this unit (probably where mic_mac saw it :) )

http://www.greatengineering.com/labelling/manual_labeler_applicator_system-BenchMATE.asp and can highly recommend it. It can be Fedexed from Oz in a couple days. We use it for 33cl and 75cl labels with no problems. It is totally manual, but also totally simple to use and very reliable.

Give me a shout if you need more info.

Cheers,
Jeff

[mic_mac]

Hi Rosie
yep, it must have been at your place, that trip was a bit of a whirlwind run-around.

Did you know your neighbours at Marlowe Bottom now (I think) have a Meheen bottling plant? (http://www.rebellionbeer.co.uk/ - I think they had just put the finishing touches to the bottling plant when we had a look round on that same trip in late 2006).

I don't know of anyone else who has Meheen plant in the UK, but they seem to have a UK agent (though IIRC they're not branding the equipment as Meheen - I did have a link, but I'm buggered if I can find it now!).

Dave Meheen regularly posts here, so he might be able to shed some light?

cheers,
Mike.