Hands on Review: Kegland Cannular Can and Bottle Filler!

This review is by Homebrew Finds Contributor Brad Probert.  Brad is an engineer, expert homebrewer and experienced reviewer.  Grab a link to Brad’s website at the end of this review.

Kegland Cannular Can and Bottle Filler

Those of us that have been in the hobby a while, typically keg our beer. It’s much less time consuming than bottling a batch of beer, and you can get your carbonation much more reliably. There is some pretty good gear out there to take your kegs mobile with you, but individual bottles/cans still have their place. Particularly if you’re sharing a batch of beer amongst friends. Bottles can be cleaned and reused multiple times without too much fuss. So even if you keg everything you make, if you’re sharing a batch, you’re probably pulling out the bottles and a bag of caps.

I’ve tried several different tools for bottling my beer. A beer gun kind of worked, but it required a lot of extra hoops to jump through to keep the beer under control enough to not end up with half a bottle of foam. The counterpressure bottle filler resulted in a good bottle of beer, but it could be a little messy at times and take longer than you may want to spend if you’re doing a large number of bottles. Kegland introduced a semi-automated Cannular Can & Bottle Filler, and it notably speeds up the bottling process. It can be used to fill either cans or bottles.

The Kegland Cannular Filler is a smallish unit that you mount to something. It has holes if you want to mount it to a vertical surface like a wall, or horizontal surface like a table. Since it fills your bottle/can hands-free, it needs to be attached to something that can support it while you’re doing something else. It has two ball lock posts- one for the incoming beer from your keg, and one for CO2 to purge the bottle before it starts to fill with beer. There’s a small digital LED screen readout and a couple buttons for you to adjust menu settings and lastly a “GO” button that begins the fill. The final control feature it has is a manual fill button that can be used if any fine-tuning is needed for unique bottle shapes, etc.

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The beer and the CO2 are fed into the can/bottle via separate stainless-steel tubes that snap into the body of the Cannular unit. These can be easily removed for cleaning but are intended to sit in position such that they’re just above the bottom of your bottle during fill. When you push the “Go” button to fill a bottle, it first pushes CO2 into the bottle for a pre-programmed number of seconds. Then it shuts off the CO2 and opens the valve to let your pressurized beer flow in. The beer line is connected to a pressure sensor that can infer the height of the beer fill in your bottle. It continues to let beer flow in until it reaches the programmed fill height, and then the beer line flow is closed off via the automated valve.

Within the control menu, you find things like a calibration setup (to set the beer level vs. the internal pressure reading), and some parameters to detect a fill failure and stop the fill process. There are several presets for standard can and bottle sizes (which you can adjust/customize as you see fit), and a few custom sizes for those odd bottle shapes you might use. The Cannular Filler also has its own Wi-Fi connection ability so you can keep the software updated when new releases come out.

Hands on Trials

The overall build quality of the unit was good. Material quality was good, and parts fit together well. The overall size of the unit was surprisingly compact. I was really interested in the fact it could be mounted. I wanted to figure out how to mount it in a way that positioned it over my sink and any dribbles, drips, or foam overs would be a non-event for cleanup.

To mount it, I had big plans of buying some fancy non-porous plastic stock from McMaster-Carr or Grainger and making a nice base. I have a 2 ft x 2 ft square stainless steel sink in my brewing area, and the idea was to make a sort of tabletop base to sit over the sink. Of course I was eager to get going as soon as possible so I opted for material I had on hand. I had some marine-grade plywood in the garage, some pressure treated 2×4 scrap, and some exterior deck screws. I made a 2 ft x 1ft base that sat just inside the walls of the sink, and then screwed a length of 2×4 at each end to make a lip to overhang the sink and keep the plywood base sitting up at the top of my sink. This went together fast & easy, and was simple to rinse off and air dry. So in all likelihood this will be the way it stays for the foreseeable future.

I ran the calibration process with water, as laid out in the Kegland instruction manual. This was easy and straightforward. I also followed the recommended modification of the ball lock post & disconnect, removing the springs/pins from them.


The manual said this reduces foaming, and anyone that’s done bottle fills knows you want all the odds in your favor! The sink where I had the Cannular Filler sitting was near my keezer, so I cut a long 10-ft run of 4 mm x 8 mm EvaBarrier tubing to go from my keezer to the filler.

I keep my keezer at 35F and pressure set to 10 psi. To minimize foaming, I knew I had to keep that beer cold all the way to the filler.

So I also bought a 6-ft foam rubber pipe insulation wrap from Home Depot to go around the portion of the beer line that sat outside the keezer.

Even though the insulation sized for ¾” pipes was way oversized, it did the trick. I saw a noticeable difference in foaming compared to before I had the insulation.

When I was ready to start filling, I had to run cold beer through the line for a few seconds to chill the line. Otherwise, the beer foamed up as it passed through warm beer line. With the insulation, after that first run of cold beer to cool the tubing, it stayed cold and I didn’t have a foam problem. I was very pleased with how foam was not a fill problem.

There are two things that did not work great for me. One was connecting to Wi-Fi. I had a hard time connecting and then a hard time downloading & installing a software update. But to be honest, the only reason I was trying it out was because I wanted to try out all the features for this review. The controls aren’t that complicated that they seem like they’d need feature updates, and I had zero bug issues during filling.


The other issue I had was how tiny the LED screen was. The readability wasn’t that clear with the thin green text lines, and the font size was small on top of that. Luckily, after you get it set up, you don’t really mess around with much, so the readability isn’t a long-lasting problem.

Now to the big selling feature- the automation. If you only fill a few bottles, automatic purge-fill-stop might seem like overkill. But when I bottle, I’m typically doing at least 24 bottles. And sitting there and holding the counterpressure fill head on for each bottle gets tedious. So the automation made a huge improvement to my bottling process. I’d pull a bottle out of its Star San soaking bucket, put it into the fill position, and push the “go” button.


It then blew pressurized CO2 into the bottle to purge for the calibrated number of seconds, then switched over to filling with beer from the bottom of the bottle, which would take a few seconds, and then as the liquid level was in the neck of the bottle and a bit of foam was coming out of the top, it automatically shut off and sat and waited for me. When I’d remove the bottle past the stainless fill tubing, the foam level would drop a bit. To ensure I was capping on foam, I’d hit the manual fill button briefly to add a fresh shot of beer that created a nice foam crown on the bottle which I could then cap.

The automation cut my bottling time roughly in half. While the Cannular was filling the next bottle, I would rinse and dry the previous bottle and set it aside. This multi-tasking allowed me to be doing two things at the same time that I used to have to do separately. I was able to crank through bottle filling smoothly and quickly. And with the Cannular being mounted on the platform over my sink, it was stress free as bottles foamed or dripped.


Clean-up at the end involved hooking up a keg with some cleaning solution to pump through the line, and then spraying down the unit and the platform I mounted it on. All right over the sink with no scrubbing or shifting about of equipment.

For my trials, I had 3 separate bottling sessions and bottled about 150 bottles of 8 different beers. Everything was fed from the kegs in my keezer, which were at the same 35 F degrees and carbonated to 10 psi of CO2 pressure. I didn’t do any long-term storage trials, but the longest I had something was at 3 weeks.


It still had what seemed like full carbonation with a frothy head and there were no signs of flavor issues. Scientifically, a counterpressure filler probably retains the most carbonation from what you have in your keg, but I had no qualms bottling beers and sharing them with others that I knew might take a few months to finish them off.

Conclusions

You might not realize you needed a semi-automated bottle filler until you’ve used it. I like discovering brew gear that makes the process easier, and this Cannular Bottle Filler definitely checks that box. It worked really well, and it also worked very repeatably with fill level and speed. It made bottling less stressful and significantly faster. Sometimes fancy gear is just shiny bling, but this filler is fancy in a very functional way.

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By Brad Probert.  Check out Brad’s website – beersnobby.com

Special thanks to Kegland for providing the unit used for evaluation in this review.

Make sure the components you use are compatible and rated for your intended application.  Contact manufacturer with questions about suitability or a specific application.  Always read and follow manufacturer directions.

Price, promotions and availability can change quickly. Check the product page for current price, description and availability. tag:lnksfxd review:fillercannular tag:tpr

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