Filling and capping 50 & 200 ml bottles

[Visna1]

I need to fill and screw cap a large number of 50 ml and 200 ml bottles. I am having a terrible time finding the right equipment. What are other members using? (make and model would be much appreciated!)

[nick jones]

Visna,

Could you give a little more detail about the "large number" that you speak of? The 200mls can be bottled on most gravity-fed hand fillers, like the Mori 6 head. You should be able to package nearly 6,000 bottles per 8 hour shift. Given the expense of fully automated lines, I'd tend to have workers (read brand ambassadors) working in shifts around the clock packaging 90,000 bottles per five day work week before thinking about automation... but that's just me.

As for the 50mls, all I'd like to say is that you've got to get creative. You should be able to hit similar numbers to the above with some sort of manual filling, albeit with significantly higher labor costs. If you need to package more than that, you're entering the realm of automation.

More than likely, you'll be looking at two completely separate lines, each with their own depal, rinser, filler, labeler, packer, sealer, coder, etc. They could probably share some QC equipment, but it might make more sense to double up that as well. Perhaps you could work the 200ml line to run your 375ml and 750ml bottles as well, though. Anyway, unless you've got tons of capital at your disposal, and some killer sales and marketing to back it up, you might want to consider co-packing before investing in a plant of your own. You can check brewery, winery, and general beverage trade publications for lists of co-packers who, even if they don't have a DSP or the capability to bottle 50mls, could probably point you in the direction of another co-packer that could help you out.

Shoot me a Private Message if you'd like to chat more about this subject.

Nick

[Panoscape]

For my other business that I own I had to fill 15ml bottles of utra pure liquid in a cleanroom environment. I ended up using a cole parmer masterflex l/s peristaltic driver with a multichannel pump, which allowed four bottles to be filled at once. It works perfect and would work well for ethonal. We have purchased an xpress fill machine for the distillery due to its time based filling so we can do 50 ml to 1.5L with it. All I have to do is build a jig for the small bottles and work out the fill time rate. The gravity fillers are great if you're only doing 375 or 750, but we knew we'd be doing the little guys so we went with the xpress fill. Haven't used it yet on the little guys but will do soon. I'll let ya know how it goes. If it doesn't work well I'll go back to what I used in the cleanroom.

[Natrat]

There is actually a lot of small format equipment on the used market. You could probably pick up a fully automated filler for 50-250 ml bottles in the 10-40k range. Changeover parts for your particular bottle might add another 5-6k. The biggest issue is labeling those small formats, as most labels tend to peel off those tight radii unless you have a pretty prodigious final wipe. I saw a system on line a few months ago for about 12k that would fill about 250 bottles a minute.

Maybe a quick filler, and then a body working 5 days a week to label that by hand?

Fun

Good Luck!