Meg Roussos / The BulletinJustin Renoud, left, and Jason Rickley, started Mobile Bottling Solutions to serve the regions growing craft-brewing industry.

The ear-torturing clank of empty bottles is a sweet sound to the owners of Mobile Bottling Solutions, of Bend.

Inside the Atlas Cider Co. on Friday, partners Justin Renoud and Jason Rickley squeezed their portable bottling equipment among the towering steel fermentation tanks and other gear inside the brewery.

The bottling equipment isn’t impressive in terms of its size. It will, however, fill 7,200 22-ounce bottles of hard cider per day, said Dan McCoy, owner of Bend’s Atlas Cider Co., a relatively young enterprise itself. McCoy contracts for bottling services with Renoud and Rickley, who first incorporated and started filling bottles in October.

“We were willing to be one of their first clients,” McCoy said Monday. “One of our first runs with them, they did 10 pallets. That’s a lot to bottle in a day. That was a good sign when they were able to pull that off.”

Business partners just a little while, Renoud and Rickley have been friends since their days at Central Oregon Community College in the 1990s.

Rickley, originally, of Vacaville, California, came to Bend for school. Later, he said, he spent 20 years as an operations manager and draft specialist in the beverage distributing business. Renoud, originally of Sweet Home, returned to Oregon after a stint working in the broadcasting business in San Diego as a cameraman, photographer and editor.

“I worked in news; I worked for PBS,” he said. “I worked for Fox Communications doing sports, San Diego Chargers, San Diego Padres, all that fun stuff.”

Portable bottling lines help craft brewers reduce their expenses by outsourcing the operation and maintenance of a bottling line. The bottler also provides the bottles, Rickley said.

Renoud and Rickley said they hope to carve themselves a niche in the craft brewing scene in Central Oregon, home to 27 breweries. The partners said they expect to give the Portland firm that provides most mobile bottling services in Central Oregon some earnest competition.

“It’s not a service that you talk to somebody and the next day it’s going to be available,” Rickley said. “It’s a process you have to take. You create a relationship with your clients and help them get to the next level, which is distribution.”

Mobile Bottling Solutions has worked with Atlas several times, and Rickley said it has breweries interested in its services. “It’s one of those things, we’re going to let the clients do the talking. We’re kind of behind the scenes and help them get their product out there,” he said.

To get started, the pair complemented their own capital with small business loans, Renoud said. The bottling line alone runs about $60,000, he said. The partners also have a truck — a Hino 268 box truck — and a labeler.

Mobile Bottling Solutions charges a set rate for its services, a number Rickley declined to disclose. However, they calculate their costs before accepting each job to ensure they make a profit, he said.

“It’s just the two of us right now,” he said. “We have plans to grow and get maybe another bottling line or canning line and get some employees on board and get another truck.”

— Reporter: 541-617-7815, jditzler@bendbulletin.com

Q: What plans do you have for the company’s future?

A: Justin Renoud: The next step would be a canning line. We would love to see this up and running and sustainable in a year. Once things are scheduled with clients, it’s a repeat business. It’d be a stretch to do it in a year, but we’ll see. Canning lines are a much bigger investment.

Q: What potential did you see in this operation that would constitute a good investment of your time and capital?

A: Jason Rickley: It’s not something that a lot of people are going to be doing. With the growth in the craft brewing industry, you have a lot of breweries coming up that are doing very well that might need the help to get their product out there. It’s a pretty competitive market.