Looking For A Hot New JOb? How About A Migrant Beer-Canning Expert?

By the time he reached his late 30s, Pete Rickert Jr.

was fed up with supervising construction sites. “I got tired of yelling at grown men all day to do their job right,” says Mr. Rickert, who lives in Danville, Pa.

Then he read about the trend toward packaging craft beer in cans rather than bottles or jugs. Because most craft brewers can’t easily afford their own canning lines, a new type of company was popping up: mobile canners. These firms haul their equipment to breweries, spend a few hours filling cans, then move on to the next customer. Over the past three years, about two dozen companies have started offering mobile canning across the U.S.

Mr. Rickert set up his own firm, We Can Mobile Canning, mainly funded from family savings, two years ago, and he now has 10 employees and operates in six states. His beer-can-shaped business card lists him as “Head Six Packer.”

There are plenty of potential customers: The Brewers Association says there are more than 3,000 breweries in the U.S., double the number a decade ago.

Many craft brewers rely on customers who show up at the brewery to buy beer in glass jugs (called growlers) and on nearby taverns that buy kegs. Oskar Blues LLC, a Colorado brewery, shook up these rustic habits a dozen years ago when it began selling Dale’s Pale Ale in cans. Chad Melis, Oskar’s marketing director, says cans provide a better seal than bottles and prevent light from striking the beer, which can make it taste “skunky.”

One hurdle is that many beer snobs associate cans with mass-market beer. Scott Smith, the owner of East End Brewing Co. in Pittsburgh, which plans to start canning soon, says some customers are “squeamish” about the idea. But, he says, as more craft beers are sold in cans, “more and more people are getting over that.”

Cans allow brewers to save money on shipping. Anchor Brewing Co. of San Francisco, which recently started canning its California lager, says a case of cans weighs about a third less than a case of bottles. About 2,000 cases of cans fit into a shipping container, compared with 1,350 cases of bottles. Anchor says it costs roughly $2 a case to ship cans of beer by truck to the East Coast, compared with about $3 for bottles.

As a large craft brewer, Anchor has its own canning equipment. Many smaller brewers lack the space or funds needed to buy the equipment. Much of the mobile canning equipment in use comes from Wild Goose Engineering LLC of Boulder, Colo., whose stainless-steel lines start at around $86,000.

That provided an opening for Pat Hartman. He worked in sales for a technology-services company, and he signed up for a brewing course in California in 2011. While taking the course, he heard about mobile bottling services for small winemakers. Mr. Hartman decided to provide a similar service for brewers. He and a partner used $150,000 in savings to start Mobile Canning LLC of Longmont, Colo.

Around the same time, Lindsey Herrema, Jenn Coyle and classmates at the Presidio Graduate School in San Francisco hit on the same idea. They tapped friends and family in 2011 and came up with about $200,000 to buy canning equipment, a trailer to carry the equipment behind a pickup truck and labeling gear. Now their San Francisco-based firm, Can Van LLC, packages beer for more than a dozen brewers.Dan Blatt, a special education teacher, was surprised a few years ago when he visited a tiny craft brewer in Colorado and was served beer in a can. He set up a company, Buckeye Mobile Canning, in Amherst, Ohio, which began operations in September 2013. Though he is still teaching, the 43-year-old hopes to retire from that within a year or two and focus full time on canning. “We are crazy busy,” he says.

The hard parts of these new ventures include long drives and the unpredictability of brewers’ schedules; beer isn’t always ready when expected. Canners also have the expense of carrying large inventories of cans and other materials and must know how to fix machine malfunctions.

“If anybody’s getting in this business to make a million dollars and have a cushy job, this is not for them,” says Ms. Herrema of Can Van, whose founders sometimes work seven days a week. Mr. Rickert had to fix his machinery after faulty seals caused cans to split open and spew beer on the floor.

One recent morning, a white Ford pickup belonging to Mr. Rickert’s firm, We Can, pulled up alongside Lavery Brewing Co. in Erie, Pa. The canning equipment, which weighs about 500 pounds and takes up as much space as a three-seat sofa, was in a 16-foot trailer. Three of Mr. Rickert’s employees, young men in khaki shorts and black rubber boots, set up the machinery inside the cramped brewery, which occupies a former plumbing-supplies warehouse.

Lavery’s Dulachan ale shot through plastic tubes into bright green cans manually fed into the line. The machinery twisted a top onto each can before sending it on for a rinse and packing. It took about six hours to fill 5,520 cans.

The brewery, founded in 2009 by Jason Lavery and his wife, Nicole, relied for the first few years on selling its beer mainly in kegs and jugs. The Laverys started canning in May 2013, which allowed them to reach more outlets, including supermarkets and beer retailers in several states. Output has doubled in the past year to about 100 barrels a month, and about a third of the beer is now sold in cans.

Mr. Rickert plans to set up a second mobile crew and is going into the business of making mobile-canning equipment. He is working in partnership with his father, Pete Rickert Sr., a retired union official. Until joining We Can, the elder Mr. Rickert says, “I was used to emptying the cans, not filling them.”