Century Label Uses HP Indigo Technology to Customize Seasonal Shrink Sleeves for Sun King Brewery’s Tip-Off Ale

Enabled by HP Indigo digital printing technology, Century Label is helping microbreweries produce unique seasonal shrink sleeves that stand out on store shelves. Using three HP Indigo WS6800 Digital Presses and HP SmartStream Mosaic technology, the company is able to produce the vast majority of labels and packaging jobs with customization and proven quality embraced by the world’s leading brands. 

Most recently, Century Label partnered with Sun King Brewery to produce customized shrink sleeves for its Tip-Off Ale, a seasonal craft beer which debuted at the Indiana Pacers’ home opener. Featuring commemorative blue-and-gold basketball-themed graphics, a basketball court cut in the shape of Indiana as well as the Sun King Brewery logo, the label was designed as a tribute to the Pacers and Sun King Brewery’s community’s love of basketball. HP SmartStream Mosaic enabled each individual can to feature a different background design. 

“We have a focus on creating seasonal and unique specialty beers, and part of our legacy is developing creative labels that demand attention,” said Elizabeth Belange, marketing and promotions director, Sun King Brewery. “Our relationship with Century Label and the quality they deliver [with HP Indigo digital printing technology] has enabled us to highlight our partnership with the Pacers and celebrate Hoosiers’ love of basketball.”

Using HP Indigo WS6800 Digital Presses, Century Label produces full-color personalized labels without plates, significantly reducing the cost of short-run printing for seasonal labels and packaging needed by microbreweries. Century Label can also produce the exact quantities needed, when they are needed, helping Sun King Brewery and other microbreweries avoid inventory costs.

“We have a solid infrastructure of equipment and people to keep growing in our core products and services, including shrink sleeves, while expanding into new markets, such as flexible packaging,” said Heidi Chambers, director, Century Label. “With our HP Indigo WS6800 Digital Presses, we are perfectly poised to grow our business and offer exciting new programs, such as Speedy Sleeve, which will provide full-color shrink sleeves to customers within three days.”

Press release from HP.

Article published on: Labels & Labeling, MyInforms.com, Printing Impressions, PrintingNews.com, PrintPlanet.com, Package Printing, TLMI, WhatTheyThink.com, and Flexible Packaging.

Sun King Brewery Scores with Cans & Sleeve Labels

Part 3 of a 3-part series on craft beer packaging.

For those with an eye on the bottom line, sleeve-label cans are about inventory flexibility, adaptability and cost savings.

For Sun King Brewery in Indianapolis, Ind., they’re about all that and being who they want to be–with a passion.

Co-owner Clay Robinson says the adaptability of sleeve-label packaging allows their craft brewery to work with smaller production runs, make more innovative use of graphics and packaging, and allow the company’s artists to “play a little more” at making distinctive labeling that attracts the customer’s eye.

Besides making it easier to create a distinctive Sun King presence on store shelves, it also allowed the brewery to partner with the hometown basketball team, the Indiana Pacers, to create a limited-run brand called “Tip-Off Ale” with which to mark the start of the 2015 NBA basketball season. The German-style “Altbier” debuted on tap and in cans at the Pacers’ first home game of the 2015 season and was available until supplies ran out at all events at the Fieldhouse in which the Pacers play, according to BrewBound.com.

Working with Century Label, Sun King was able to quickly develop and roll out a “new product that was completely unique,” according to co-owner Clay Robinson. As a result, the start of the basketball season had a unique craft brew to go with it.

The Pacers partnership isn’t the only way Sun King uses its labels to stay unique, though. According to Robinson, the company’s artists and designers work across many genres of art to create brand labels unique to each Sun King brand while maintaining the overall Sun King identity, so that when the consumer “sees something that is Sun King, it immediately (stands) out.”

Meanwhile, the flexibility afforded by sleeve-labeling allows the brewery to quickly experiment with new ideas in brewing and, just as importantly, utilize the shape, shine and shelf appeal of the prime label to draw the consumer to those brands.

As co-owner Dave Colt says, that lets the brewery “be whoever we wanted to be, produce what we want to produce–passionately.”

Read Part 1 & Part 2.

Craft Brewers, Wear Your Beer on Your Sleeve!

Part 2 of a 3-part series on craft beer packaging.

Craft beer makers: are you trying to juggle the business realities of small production runs with the need for big inventories? The answer is not magic, but it might be up your sleeve.

If you’re a giant brewery, filling and selling millions of units, it’s not a problem. You’re sending out cans of your product by the trainload, and the people who make pre-printed cans are set up to fill that need. So if you want to order a batch of cans for your product, there’s almost always a minimum order size--say, a semitrailer load of about 150,000 cans—and you can easily meet that minimum.

But you’re not a giant. You are a craft brewer, serving your local area and your coterie of diehard customers and fans who either buy your brew locally or order it online. Your production runs are small in any event, and smaller still if you have, say, a limited run of a special holiday brand. What, then, do you do with all those cans labeled for one of your products? You pay to store and protect them from damage until you fill them.

Or you can do what Great River Brewery, a craft brewer in Davenport, Iowa, did. As detailed in Packaging Digest Magazine, brewery manager and co-owner Paul Krutzfeldt says Great River was the first craft brewer to sleeve-label its cans.

Labels for 5,000 cans arrive in a box about the size of one used to ship “a pair of cowboy boots”, Krutzfeldt told the magazine. Though there are still cans to store, they can be labeled as needed on an automatic label-wrapping line for whatever size of production run the brewer needs, allowing much more flexible use of inventory and storage space. That would allow you to quickly switch labels for a limited, small production run, or even to do contract filling and labeling for a customer with little interference with your own production needs.

We see shrink-wrap sleeve labels on everything from soda bottles to jars to tubs, but hardly ever on beer cans. In many ways, though, sleeve labeling can wrap up many of your inventory and production tangles.

Read Part 1 & Part 3.

A Canned Response: Aluminum Vs. Glass in the Craft Brew World

Part 1 of a 3-part series on craft beer packaging.

Bottles or cans? That’s the battle that brews among craft beer makers and fans over the best way to package and store their beverage of choice.

For some, there’s just no substitute for the long-necked glass bottle with the crimped-on cap–sorry, crown (its sacrilege to say otherwise). An aluminum can, they say, imparts a metallic taste to the beer that destroys the brewer’s artisanship.

Not so, say the can fans. For one thing, the water-based coating sprayed on the inside of an aluminum can protects the beer from the can–and also the can from the beer. Proof lies in the fact that the beer doesn’t eat through the thin aluminum from the inside.

Other advantages of the can over the bottle? Ease and lower cost of filling, packing, storing and shipping, resulting in savings at the consumer end, say the aluminum aficionados.

Perception, however, can be everything, and there are those serious malt mavens who insist they can tell with their tongues whether their brew has been bottled or canned.

Jeff Wharton at DrinkCraftBeer.com decided to put that to the test recently–specifically, the blind taste test. He had a person pour bottled and canned samples of four brands of craft beer into glasses while he wasn’t looking, and tried to tell by taste, looks and smell which was bottled and which was canned. He was correct twice, wrong once and couldn’t even tell once.

The few consistencies Wharton noticed was that the canned samples tended to have a “cleaner” taste and, once poured into the glass, a bigger head of foam–which he figured might have been caused by the beer bubbling out of the pop-top hole in the can. There was also some speculation among commenters that light shining through the bottle glass might have affected the taste of the beer in the bottles.

Other than that, though, Wharton said he could detect no real difference, good or bad, between bottled and canned beers

Add to that the advantages in filling, packing, storing and shipping, and you—the craft brewer thinking about ways to better put your product before the public—might well consider the can.

Read Part 2 & Part 3.