Righty, quick technical post. This is mainly to help out a brewing friend, but hopefully some other people might find it helpful.
We have had a nice bottling line for over 3 years now, It works well and we're really pleased with it. Prior to that we hand bottled. To be honest it's really hard work and tedious. However it is a way forward for breweries wanting to have control of thier own product, rather than contract bottling.
We started by applying labels by hand. That really is tedious. Later we borrowed a hand driven machine from Stringers. Nice people, who seemed very happy to continue to let us use their's. However, we got a little fed up of not having the machine right there and handy, so we bought our own, exact same machine.
It is supplied by Vigo. It's OK, but doesn't have great instructions. So I did a video. It's a bit roughly edited, but, you know, time and that.
Hand Labeling Machine from Hardknott Brewery on Vimeo.
