We've written plenty over the years about how beer comes to be – the ingredients, processes, innovations – but what about the final package: the can in your hand? What goes into bringing those colourful creations filling bottleshops to life?
In our Beer By Design series, we explore the various stages of the process from conception to the empty vessels waiting to be filled by brewers, as well as the people involved every step of the way. And, embracing our inner Christopher Nolan, we start at the end, visiting Onpack's factory in Dandenong where they operate two mighty impressive, cutting-edge, direct-to-can printing machines.
It’s not even a dozen years since the Australian Brewery become the first small craft brewery in Australia to make the switch to cans. The brewery based in the northwestern Sydney suburb of Rouse Hill started filling slimline cans in early 2013, a few months before Mountain Goat ordered a batch of their Summer Ale in tinnies to test the appetite of crafty consumers on a larger scale.
That there was so much doubt and debate as to the wisdom or longevity of such moves seems odd in 2024, when the decision of a few brewers across the country to put their beer in bottles – often just limited releases too – was novel enough to warrant an article on these pages.
The uptake went from steady to almost total takeover in just a few years, as evidenced by the GABS Hottest 100 infographics we used to produce; in those, among the trends we’d measure was how many beers in the list were available in cans.
While there are still brewers putting core range beer in bottles – sometimes alongside cans – and certain venues that prefer glass over aluminium, it’s rather harder to find independent retailers interested in filling their fridges with anything other than tinnies today too.
While we won’t relitigate the “Glass versus aluminium, which is better for beer?” debate again here – one that’s taken in everything from logistics to environmental benefits – the transition certainly opened up a larger canvas for brewers and their graphic designers and illustrators to decorate.
It’s an opportunity most have grabbed with both hands: bottleshop fridges were never as colourfully eye-catching as they are now. The broader canvas has allowed businesses to tell their stories, or those of individual beers, in greater detail, and attempt to entice new customers who might never had heard of them on the power of design alone.
Over the course of the Beer By Design series, we’ll explore the opportunities and innovations that have been opened up by the beer world’s embrace of tinnies over the past decade, innovations that brought me to an industrial estate in Dandenong South and the newer of the two facilities operated by Onpack.
If the building and location are as nondescript as you’d imagine such a place to be, that merely acts as a stark contrast to what’s taking place inside. This is most obviously manifested by a tall set of shelving on one wall showcasing scores of cans they’ve produced for brewers and other drinks makers – large and small – across the country. That said, the rainbow effect of the end product filling those shelves isn’t the star of the show: that status is bestowed on the pair of machines sat next to them.
In absolute layman’s terms, they’re huge inkjet printers designed to print straight onto cans; the control screen on one side of each of the Hinterkopf digital aluminium can printing machines displays the remaining levels of the various inks, for example. But what they’re capable of is rather more impressive than the Brother printer in the corner of your study – and in ways that go beyond the stats, such as 100 cans per minute per machine, or 200,000 per day at capacity across both.
Where the technology in which they invested millions really impresses is the way the plain cans entering each printer from one side emerge from the other fully formed: colours popping, detail sharp as you like, their new skin set in stone (well, not actual stone, but you get what I mean).
As a can of CoConspirators’ Matriarch made its way along the conveyor belt ready to be stacked, I was wary of picking it up to place it for the photo at the top of this article, lest I smudge artwork that wasn’t there just seconds earlier. However, short of going at it with my car keys, I wasn’t going to cause it any harm: these machines, which only Onpack and East Coast Canning currently operate in Australia, take cans of all shapes and sizes from zero to hero in the blink of an eye.
The decision to invest in the digital direct-to-can printing was, in the grand scheme of things, pretty quick too. Onpack managing director Michael Nankervis says they watched from afar during the early COVID period as such technology started to sweep its way through North America.
“We could see the market in Canada and the US was very quickly moving across,” he says. “We basically looked at the machine online, had one visit from Hinterkopf, and bought sight unseen.
“Hinterkopf was the only company making these sort of machines at that point in time. No one was within five years of them."
After being conceived as a sister company to long-established, family-owned printing business Southern Impact in 2016, and already working with the beverage industry to provide other forms of packaging, in particular self-adhesive labels, Onpack figured someone was going to move to digital on-can printing and cannibalise the market, “so we might as well cannibalise it ourselves.”
The proposal to invest in a first machine was approved by the board in just six weeks; four months after it was up and running in July 2023, they proposed buying a second. That was signed off even faster and was commissioned in October this year.
However you look at it, the market seems to be moving just as fast. Already, Michael says 80 percent of their existing business in this space has moved to the new tech, while it's brought them new customers too. After ordering their first machine in 2022 they visited three businesses using them in the US; one of them, Canworks in Texas, has already grown from one machine to nine.
It makes it easy to view their arrival at Onpack and East Coast Canning, who installed a Hinterkopf at their base on the NSW South Coast in 2022, as the biggest leap forward in packaging since the craft beer world transitioned from glass to aluminium.
Over the past decade, we’ve written about labels featuring AR technology and others with layers that can be peeled away from the can to reveal more about the origins of the liquid inside. We’ve seen mobile canning operators spring up across the country, while the range of canning lines either imported or built locally has expanded to cater to everyone from the smallest craft brewer merely wanting to offer takeaways at their cellar door to bigger indies with machines operating in parallel.
The flexibility promised by on-can printing reminds me of evolution in other parts of the broader drinks industry, in particular a past visit to Voyager Craft Malt.
One key element of the team’s mission there is to provide pretty much any malted product desired by their customers, even if that means visiting seed banks and enlisting the help of local school kids along the way. Another is their offer to premix, for want of a better word, the exact blend of malts required for a specific brew at their home in the Riverina so a brewer only needs to mill it and mash it once they take delivery.
In the case of those operators at the cutting edge of can design, they’re able to offer, as Michael put it: “Unlimited design choice, no limit on colours” plus reduced setup costs, reduced lead times, and the elimination of what are effectively single-use plastics: the shrink sleeves and self-adhesive labels.
The direct-to-can practitioners’ equivalent of the premixed bag of malt sits on a number of pallets awaiting delivery in the Dandenong warehouse. The can designs change every few layers as brewers can now state the order in which they plan to fill their cans on a particular run, and just how many cans they require of each SKU.
It might sound like a small thing, but at a time when businesses are searching for every efficiency possible in order to survive, it’s a neat evolution reminiscent of British sports coach Dave Brailsford’s “marginal gains”.
It’s also another example of how the rise of craft brewing has led to the creation of smaller businesses designed to cater to their particular needs: the merch provider willing to work with smaller minimum orders; the hop grower offering organic hops, for example.
It might cost more per unit to put small batches of beer into good-looking cans without needing to order and store tens of thousands of empties (then hope there’s enough demand to use them all), but it also costs more to buy an XPA featuring new hop products from a small independent than it does a similar beer from a multinational brewer or one of the country’s major retailer homebrands, and there are reasons why people are willing to stump up the difference.
Indeed, if the local beer world has come on in leaps and bounds when it comes to the diversity of ingredients available to brewers, the styles they’re brewing with them, the techniques being explored to make beers ever better or more refined, then it’s fair to say similar progress is taking place within the world of packaging.
Michael sees their “incredible journey” of the past few years as being in its early stages too.
“The direct to can printing market will continue to grow for the small to medium market, but we can also brand cans for major events and promotional purposes, which will have significant growth,” he says, highlighting the imminent arrival of a “premium can range” offering a greater diversity of finishes and textures.
Direct-to-can printing has “opened up so many opportunities for brewers,” he adds, citing the removal of MOQs and the streamlining of the packaging process now there’s no need for a labeller on a brewery’s canning line.
“Raw ingredients have caught up with the craft sector’s needs,” Michael says, “and now packaging has caught up too.”
The Beer By Design series will continue throughout 2025.
James Smith launched The Crafty Pint in 2010, two years after moving to Australia from the UK. He was taken to Mountain Goat within weeks of landing in Melbourne, joined their indoor cricket team, and is still navigating the rabbit hole that is craft beer to this day.
The beers that turned you on to good beer:
- Watching pints of McEwan's 80 Shilling settle when visiting family in Edinburgh.
- Pints of flat Bass from the jug at the Cap & Stocking in Kegworth.
- A first Paulaner Hefeweizen when working in Munich in 1998: “This smells of bananas!”
- Castle Rock Harvest Pale – how could a 3.8 percent ABV beer be so good? (It turns out it was an early example of the three Cs – Cascade, Centennial and Columbus – in an English bitter).
- Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA poured through hops at the Sunset Grill in Cambridge, MA, in the company of a man who turned out to be the Beer Nut (while we were both covering a double murder case at the time).
- Ordering a Mountain Goat Hightail on my first day as an Aussie resident as it was local and I’d never heard of it; “A dark Australian beer; well I never…”
- Murray’s Icon 2IPA at Beer DeLuxe Fed Square, recommended by a guy I’d not long known who's now the main man at Fixation, served by Mik Halse, now head of sales at Hawkers. How could an Australian beer smell as good as that?!?
You've got three beers to turn someone else on to good beer; what are they and why?
- Any really good, fresh and balanced West Coast style IPA. Punchy hop aromatics are the most obvious way to capture someone's attention and these IPAs, done well, present the key components in beer (if you're sticking to just water, malt, hops and yeast) in harmony yet with the volume turned up.
- Saison Dupont. Arguably a selfish choice here as I bloody love the broad saison style and dearly hope it will finally take hold in Australia one day. Given a choice, I'd probably crack one enlivened with Brettanomyces like Molly Rose Matilde for myself but, when it comes to turning on someone new, you've got to go with the classic.
- Rodenbach Caractère Rouge. Because if you don't enjoy or can't appreciate this beer, I'll never win you over. And because Filip, the fruit and wood specialist at Rodenbach that designed it, is a beautiful human.
The last beer you enjoyed:
Fixation IPA at The Incubator.
Three things that represent you:
- The Soft Bulletin by The Flaming Lips
- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
- Golden Plains
NB All articles written by James in the first eight years of the site appear as By Crafty Pint. Today, that's used for collaborative efforts by the wider team.
