My name is Alex. I'm an Engineering Technologist here at Cask
and I did the programming and the electrical design for the Nano ACS.
The way the market's going people are trying to package in a number of different types of
can styles on the Nano ACS we could do all different can sizes - sleeks, slims
and standard cans - ranging at different heights body sizes. The Nano ACS is actually the smallest
fully automated system that we provide and we've pulled all the the best features from our
automated systems into this small footprint. The biggest task was how can we make it automated in
the sense of moving cans from infeed to outfeed and it almost has to be a swiss army knife it
has to do anything and everything. If you look at past systems it was very manual and we've achieved
a product where you can step away and it it does the job for you. The things that make this system
fully automated is the addition of a conveyor so now you feed in cans on the one end and a fully
canned product comes out on the other end. We have two fill positions that makes it really
easy to operate and keep track of your fills. We also introduced a universal lid
slide so you don't actually have to change the lid slide when you do a can changeover.
One of the cornerstones of Cask fill technology is just the repeatability of it and what that
means for a lot of small breweries is being able to put a consistent product out time and time and
time again. I mean no matter how you fill a can of beer you're going to have foam on the top,
but Cask creates the foam cap first and that's the most important part because it acts like a plunger
and pushes out the oxygen and any other gases shielding the liquid beer from oxygen.
And that's what produces the superior quality. The benefit of shrinking everything down to such
a small footprint is that we can fit almost anywhere in almost any brewery
and we can give them that capacity to really push out cans and get their product out to the market.
With the Nano ACS one of the markets that we really want to try and help out is distilleries
that are getting into the canned cocktail world. One of the biggest challenges that they're having
is being able to package these high carbonated products anything up to 3.2 volumes of carbonation
can be done on that machine so seltzers, RTDs, we have customers doing kombucha,
we have beer obviously, coffee, pretty much anything you can think of can be canned on it.
The cocktail market has expanded very rapidly in the last few years which means there's consumers
that are interested in trying new things we have three different bars in Calgary that have their
own unique canned cocktail and when you're making it for a single bar you can't make it at a volume
that a large scale producer can do so having a smaller unit where you're doing smaller volumes
it's really important for us to experiment and try new things. With the add-on accessories that
cask offers you can actually run it with two operators relatively easily. The size
of the machine and the simplicity of it virtual training is going to be no issue. Tt's going to
be a two-day training session and we're going to be able to get quite deep in it simply because the
machine is so simple and easy to use just the way that it's been designed. It makes it so you don't
have to hold a huge amount of inventory so like if you're doing a canning run you're you have to
produce 100 hecta liters at a time and you're only selling that once every six months versus you're
canning 10 hecta liters at a time and that's maybe a month of product. Bringing canning internally
maybe we're canning more frequently, but we can can these small volumes that allows us
to be so much more flexible when a product is ready. 85% of breweries in North America are
producing less than 1,500 barrels a year so that's a lot of people that are small batch,
they're small business and they're small space. The size of it makes it pretty mobile so if we
have to move it out of the way of something else we can move it away and it works pretty well.
It's definitely a system where you don't need a bunch of extras - you don't need a
twist rinse or a depal or any of that stuff. It's always nice to have. I feel like there's
lots of different configurations to make whatever situation we are working with at the time work.
Every inch on a brewery floor really needs to be optimized and utilized every second of every day
so we built the system to be able to fit in that small footprint
and then be run by regular people - regular people that are working at the brewery. You don't need a
mechanical engineering degree, you don't have to be a technician or a mechanic to run these things.
You could be a front of house server, you could be one of the distillers one of the brewers. We
can teach you and train you on the system and we can we can give you guys the tools that you'll
need to run a simple system like the Nano ACS and ultimately just get it into more people's hands.