Brewery Automation: Coopers to ABB Keg Robots

Brewery automation is older than the industrial robot. Most of the heavy work in a brewery is moving beer around in casks, kegs, bottles and crates, thousands of them a day in a big plant. This post follows that work from the coopers who built wooden casks and the draymen who carried them to the first bottling and keg lines. It then looks at a new high-speed canning line in India, at how ABB robots such as the IRB 6640 already lift kegs at a German brewery, and at where palletizers, mobile robots and cobots could go next in big plants and small craft breweries.

Steel kegs stacked high in the keg hall of the Bernard brewery in Humpolec, Czech Republic, 2009. Photo: Draceane / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How coopers, draymen and bottlers moved the beer

For centuries beer left the brewery in wooden casks, and breweries kept their own coopers to make and repair them. Guinness in Dublin once employed up to 300 coopers. Casks were filled, rolled, lifted and loaded by hand, and a full one is a heavy, awkward load. During the First World War women also worked in British brewery cooperages, cutting out and shaping casks. Brewery wagons drawn by horses then carried the casks through the streets to pubs and hotels, where they were rolled down into cellars.

A woman cutting out casks in the cooperage of a London brewery during the First World War. Photo: Horace Nicholls / Imperial War Museums via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Metal took over from wood in the middle of the twentieth century. Aluminium kegs were introduced in 1946 and slowly replaced wooden barrels, and stainless steel took over from aluminium in the late 1980s. By 1961 Guinness was down to 70 coopers, and its last wooden cask was used in March 1963. Metal kegs could be cleaned and filled by machine, which opened the way to keg lines where washing, filling and capping ran automatically. Bottling went the same way. Rinsers, fillers and crowners took over the hand work, although people still fed bottles into the machines and stacked the crates at the end.

A horse drawn Molson brewery wagon loaded with barrels in Montreal, around 1908. Photo: Wm. Notman & Son via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Robots came in at the ends of those lines, where the lifting was. Palletizing and depalletizing kegs and crates is repetitive, heavy work. At the Rothaus brewery in Germany's Black Forest, founded in 1791, the old keg system handled only 120 kegs an hour and only one keg size, so other kegs had to be palletized by hand. Working with ABB partner Albert Frey, Rothaus replaced its old gantry unit with ABB IRB 6640 robots that unload and load kegs of every type without changing the gripper. A small ABB IRB 140 cuts the safety bands off tied crates.

Workers at the bottling line of the Surinaamse Brouwerij in Paramaribo, Suriname, 1955. Photo: Willem van de Poll / Nationaal Archief via Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Brewery automation in 2026: cans, kegs and crates

Packaging is where breweries spend money now. On 1 September 2026 United Breweries, India's largest beer maker and part of the Heineken company, announced a new canning line at its Ellora Brewery in Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, Maharashtra, worth 110 crore rupees and due to start in September, subject to approvals. It is the brewery's first canning line and one of the fastest in the group, rated at 40,000 cans an hour, and it follows a similar line at the company's Nizam Brewery in Telangana in July 2026. Chief executive Vivek Gupta said consumers are choosing cans for convenience.

The automated bottling plant at the Weihenstephan brewery in Freising, Germany, 2012. Photo: Bernt Rostad / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Lines that fast leave little room for manual handling at either end. Cans arrive on pallets, run through filling and seaming, get packed into trays or cartons and leave on pallets again, and people mostly watch, clear jams and change over formats. Kegs are a different problem because they are heavy, come in several sizes and arrive dirty from bars. At Rothaus each ABB robot grabs a keg, turns it 180 degrees so the valve faces down and sets it on the conveyor. Changes between keg types are handled in software, and the brewery uses ABB's RobotStudio to set up the cell from a computer.

An ABB robot lifts a keg off a pallet on the keg line at the Rothaus brewery in Germany's Black Forest. Photo: ABB (ABB Robotics magazine 1/14)

Most of ABB's brewery work is on that end of the line. Palletizers such as the IRB 460 and IRB 660 stack cases, crates and shrink packs onto pallets, and a larger arm such as the IRB 6700 could take on heavier loads such as full kegs. Where a brewery packs mixed orders for bars and shops, the IRB 360 FlexPicker can pick small items at high speed. Flexley Mover AMRs can carry pallets and crates between the packaging hall and the warehouse without fixed tracks. Cells like these are usually laid out and tested first in RobotStudio, and the order picking side is covered in our post on beverage warehouses.

An ABB IRB 660 palletizer stacking cartons onto pallets at the end of a food packing line. Photo: ABB

Where brewery automation goes next

Big breweries will keep pushing robots further into the line. Keg inspection, valve checks and sorting damaged kegs are still partly manual in many plants, and a robot with a camera could take over more of that as a possibility. Mixed pallets for bars, with kegs, crates and cases on the same pallet, are another target, because every order is different and the picking is hard on people's backs. Any new cell has to fit beside filling machines that run at tens of thousands of containers an hour, and it has to keep up without becoming the new bottleneck.

Beer crates stacked on pallets at a German brewery. Photo: Maximilian Dörrbecker / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0 de)

Craft breweries and home brewers face a different calculation. A small brewery may fill a few hundred kegs a week by hand, and an industrial palletizer makes no sense at that volume. A cobot such as ABB's GoFa CRB 15000, which limits its force so it can work next to people, could in principle lift cans onto a small canning machine or stack cases at the end of a short line. ABB has not announced a craft brewery package, and kegs are too heavy for its smaller cobots, so the most likely home for robots in small breweries is packaging.

Kegs, fermenters and a small filling setup at Bomber Brewing, a craft brewery in Vancouver, 2015. Photo: Ruth Hartnup / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Cost comes up first. A brewery with seasonal demand and many beer styles may struggle to keep a robot cell busy, and kegs, crates and cans all need different grippers. Full kegs are heavy, so a robot cell needs guarding or careful speed limits wherever people work. Many breweries are also run by brewers with no automation engineer on staff, and their programs have to be easy to change when a new keg size or pack format arrives. Rothaus handles this in software, and graphical tools such as ABB's Wizard easy programming aim at the same problem for smaller cells.

An ABB Flexley Mover P603 carrying crates. Photo: ABB

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