Checkmat label inspectors

Skol is one of the world’s biggest beer brands, and is produced and sold by various brewing conglomerates. In some countries of Africa, the Belgian family firm Unibra owns the brewing and marketing rights. When the demand for beer in Rwanda rose a few years ago, Unibra decided in 2010 to produce the purely malt-based beer locally too – and built a new brewing facility for the purpose: Skol Brewery Ltd. (SBL). And the decision itself, as well as the choice of what until then was an unknown type of beer in this country, turned out to be absolutely right: Skol Malt, the first beer ever on the Rwandan market to be brewed solely with malt, was a big hit, “although back then not a soul in Rwanda was familiar with the Skol brand,” explains Eustache Mpiko, Engineering Manager at SBL.

The Kulmbacher Brewery has a new line for swing-stopper bottles, which is rated at 50,000 containers an hour and thus sets the world speed record for this type of bottle. The line was installed in five erection stages and without interrupting production – a rather special kind of challenge.

Producing lots of different articles within a short timeframe and in small batches has always been a dream for beverage bottlers. For the tradition-steeped Starzinger company in Frankenmarkt, Upper Austria, the dream has now come true: thanks to LineXpress L, article change-overs when filling water and carbonated soft drinks in PET bottles have been very largely automated – and are thus faster than ever before.

Romanians drink beer from PET containers as a matter of course. And this applies primarily for relatively large bottle volumes. For about two years now, however, there has been a trend among consumers towards smaller-size containers, which is why the Romaqua Group Borsec has meanwhile commissioned a second PET line from Krones, so as to be able to fill the 2.5-litre and the 0.5-litre bottles separately in the future.