Washington, D.C.'s packaging automation market is small, but it's real. Most of what's produced inside city limits today comes out of a handful of working breweries and one all-female-owned distillery; the district otherwise has little heavy manufacturing left. One of the district's breweries was the first modern manufacturing brewery built within city limits, and another became the first D.C. brewery to run two full production locations at once. A women-owned distillery in the same stretch of the city turns out vodka and bourbon from a 7,000-square-foot production facility. Most of that activity sits in Ivy City, one of the only neighborhoods in D.C. still zoned for industrial and production use, home to the bulk of the district's breweries and distilleries.

A one-line distillery and a two-location brewery don't need the same bottling setup. We size the equipment to whichever one you're running. We supply bottling lines, canning equipment, and automatic case packers sized for a brewery or distillery running one or two lines rather than a multi-plant operation. We also fit Mars Series VFFS baggers for the dry-goods or powder packaging a brewery or distillery might run alongside its bottling line. A checkweigher catches an underfilled bottle before it reaches a case, and a case packer keeps a small crew from hand-packing every case that leaves the dock. A small crew still needs speed. For a market where the entire production base fits inside a few blocks of one neighborhood, that's the difference between a bottling run that scales and one that stays capped by manual labor. We've helped a brewery add a second bottling line without adding a second shift of hand-packing, and we work directly with beverage producers in the district and the wider region to spec equipment for exactly that scale.