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Oskar Blues sells 5,000 cases of canned brew each month along Colorado's Front Range, and more goes to the Western Slope, New Mexico, Arizona and Virginia as well as aboard Frontier Airlines flights. With automated canning, the brewery plans to increase its fermentation capacity by 50 percent. The greater output will allow Oskar Blues to sell its beer more broadly throughout southern Colorado and to expand into Georgia, Oregon, Pennsylvania and California, owner Dale Katechis said. "We've actually had the markets there," he said. "They're just waiting for the beer." Katechis, an Alabama native, had long wanted to sell his beer in Georgia, but the state's laws capped beer alcohol content at 6 percent. Dale's Pale has a 6.5 percent alcohol content; Old Chub is 8 percent alcohol. Georgia lifted its cap a couple of years ago, clearing the way for Oskar Blues to sell its beer there. But the brewery still needed to increase its production to enter the state. Now, armed with the new canning system, Oskar Blues also hopes to cut a deal with Atlanta-based Delta Airlines to sell its products in-flight. Since Oskar Blues won attention as the nation's first "micro-canner," Cask Brewing Systems has sold 14 canning systems to U.S. microbreweries, including Idaho Springs' Tommyknocker Brewery, Durango's Ska Brewing Co. and Dillon's Pug Ryan's Steakhouse and Brewery. The trend was featured in the New Brewer magazine. Including Oskar Blues, the company has sold four automated systems to microbreweries, and several others have scheduled visits to talk with Cask at this weekend's Great American Beer Festival in Denver. Jamie Jordan, a Cask Brewing systems representative helping install the Oskar Blues canning machine Tuesday, said Katechis deserves praise as the person who started breaking down the stereotype of canned beer as cheap, low-quality suds. "It's not that canned beer has to be bad, it's just that nobody before had put good beer in a can," Jordan said.