Quick hits:
- Site went from groundbreaking to production of salable product in just 364 days.
- The new brewery provides increased capacity to keep up with consumer demand for White Claw in the eastern U.S.
- Krones provided bottle filling lines running 50,000 bottles an hour.
- KHS provided technology solutions for the can packaging lines.
- Industrial Arts Brewing: The Art of Scaling Up a Hazy IPA
- Anheuser-Busch Investing $50 Million in St. Louis Brewery
 | Read the transcript below: |
I’m Joyce Fassl, Senior Executive Editor of ProFood World, with an update on Mark Anthony Brewing, a winner of ProFood World’s annual manufacturing innovation awards.
Columbia, S.C, is the home of Mark Anthony Brewing’s new state of the art facility. The company needed to quickly expand production capacity, as demand continues to grow for White Claw Hard Seltzer, Mike’s Hard Lemonade, Mike’s HARDER, Cayman Jack cocktails, and MXD cocktails.
Mark Anthony brewing is the fourth largest brewery in the US. During the global pandemic, the company made the decision to invest $1.4 million in its three breweries and construct the most technologically advanced brewery, built in the U.S. in the past 28 years. The new 1.3 million sq.-ft. facility was built at a cost of $490 million.
A project of this size would normally take 4 to 6 years to plan and build. But an ambitious timeline saw the site transition from initial groundbreaking to production of the first salable case of product in just 364 days.
At peak production, the facility can produce 6 million barrels of finished product and package 80 million cases per year, with a packaging speed of almost 1,000 barrels per hour.
The new brewery provides the increased capacity to keep up with consumer demand for White Claw in the eastern U.S.
Ziemann Holvrieka oversaw the processing technology and worked in close contact with packaging line suppliers KHS and Krones to coordinate all items on the pipe rack into the building, the location of feeds, and utilities at each pipe required.
Krones provided the bottle filling lines, running 50,000 bottles an hour. The equipment can make single flavor, glass packs for Mike’s hard and Cayman Jack’s products. At the same time on the same line, it can make variety packs, which are four different flavors in the same carton.
The facility contains two Krones Varioline machines which combine up to six machines into one to create cartons and six packs.
KHS provided technology solutions for the facility’s four mono pack lines. These four canning lines will drain at 90 thousand cans per hour each, and at the heart of the system is KHS’s DVD 144 filler.
KHS also supplied two variety pack, can filling lines, that can produce a four or six flavor product into the final packaging.
The facility contains automated tunnels to the warehouse where the E 80 laser guided vehicles bring product to the packaging area as required. The automated warehouse takes finished goods away based on whether it’s a mono product which is a single flavor product, or a variety pack with multi flavors.
Marc Anthony Brewing’s Columbia facility is also committed to sustainability. There is an on-site state of the art, wastewater treatment facility. In addition, the plant is eliminating emissions instead of buying CO2. The ultimate goal is to be 100% self-sufficient by collecting the CO2 produced during fermentation, storing it, and then reusing it at the end of the process, to carbonate the product.
With an integrated packaging system, state of the art processing, and a highly automated process in place, Mark Anthony Brewing is well positioned to continue its streak of pioneering new beverage categories and creating new beverage brands.
