Atmospheric Filling Line

You can, but the machine works against you. A counter-pressure filler opens its valves by equalising bottle pressure with tank pressure, so it needs a gas — normally CO₂ — to operate. On a still product that means either dissolving CO₂ into the spirit or wine, or running a valve cycle built around a pressure that is no longer there, giving inconsistent fills and aeration. An atmospheric line needs no gas, fills at ambient temperature and costs less to run.

Yes to the first part. Juice, tea, functional drinks and flavoured water are all non-carbonated and fill on the same principle. Not every product needs hot filling, but most shelf-stable juice and tea do: the product runs at 85–92 °C into the bottle, is held and inverted so the hot liquid sterilises the cap and headspace, then cooled. The alternative is pasteurising upstream and cold filling into a clean environment.

Still spirits are filled at ambient, normally 15–25 °C. Still wine is usually filled at 12–18 °C, with white and rosé toward the lower end to protect aromatics, and the filler, pipework and bottles are held at the same temperature as the wine to avoid thermal shock. Hot-fill juice and tea run at 85–92 °C. In every case the fill level is set with the product's expansion at storage temperature in mind.

Pickup is removed before the fill rather than corrected afterwards: vacuum or nitrogen pre-purge of the empty bottle, a short and fully closed product path from tank to valve, subsurface filling without splashing, and an optional nitrogen dose into the headspace before capping. On wine the usual specification is to hold the dissolved-oxygen increase during bottling to about 0.2 mg/L for white and 0.5 mg/L for red. Optional measurement at the filler head lets you verify each run.

Aluminium ROPP and plastic screw caps on a torque-controlled capping head, natural or synthetic cork on a vacuum corker, and crown caps for cider and some juice formats. Snap-on caps are available for certain juice bottles. The capper is matched to the neck finish rather than to the bottle, and a cap elevator feeds it automatically. The seal is checked by capping torque or cork insertion depth on every head, plus a vacuum or pressure test on samples at start-up and after each format change.

The standard window is 250–1,000 ml, covering bottles 150–330 mm tall and Φ50–90 mm in diameter, in glass or PET. Miniature formats from 250 ml run on the same heads as 750 ml wine and spirits bottles, with format parts changing the guides rather than the filler. Send your bottle drawing and target output and we will confirm the head count and change parts before quotation.

As a planning figure, a bottle format change takes 30–60 minutes with two operators, and 1–2 hours when the neck finish and closure change as well. Changeover covers the infeed guides, filler level setting, capper head and labeller, then a short run to check fill height and torque. It is a design decision rather than a fixed number — tell us your SKU mix and changeover frequency and we will optimise the line around it.

As a guide at 700–750 ml, a 4-head line runs about 600–1,000 BPH, 8 heads about 1,500–2,000 BPH, 12 heads about 2,500–3,000 BPH and 24 heads up to 6,000 BPH. A distillery bottling a few thousand bottles a week is normally best served by four to eight heads, while a winery should size on its busiest week rather than its annual average. Allow roughly 18–25 m of line length with a 4–5 m aisle, 380 V/50 Hz power at 8–25 kW, and compressed air at 0.6–0.8 MPa. Water use is modest: rinsing and CIP take about 2–4 m³ per cleaning cycle, and there is no CO₂ supply or glycol chiller. We issue a utility schedule and layout drawing before shipment.