Producing quality cork stoppers

AFS is manufacturing natural cork stoppers in Northern Portugal. Our output is roughly 15 million corks / year.
Our activitiy focusses on all steps of cork stopper manufacturing: preparing, transforming, punching, final treatment, quality control.
At the end of this chain is: an excellent natural cork stopper .

1. Stabilisation. After being harvested, the raw cork planks must stabilise. The selected planks are stacked in piles to be exposed to sun, wind and rain for at least six months.

Visual inspection. Trained workers conduct a visual inspection of every cork stopper - an important quality control check. The stoppers are compared with reference samples agreed upon with our clients.

2. Boiling. After stabilisation, the cork planks are boiled in clean water for one hour. The boiling operation is a standard procedure defined by the International Code of Cork Stopper Manufacturing Practice. It ensures that cork becomes more flexible, homogeneous - and that microflora is significantly reduced.

3. Resting. After boiling, the cork planks are dried and left to rest in our warehouse with controlled humidity and temperature for three weeks. Then we trim the edges to make the planks rectangular.

4. Punching. After the resting period, the trimmed planks are sliced into strips and cork stoppers are punched out. 70% of our corks are manufactured by manual punching. .

5. Polishing. After punching, the ends of each raw cork stopper are cut to the dimensions ordered by our clients and polished.

6. Washing. The cork stoppers then undergo the washing and disinfection process. The cork stoppers are cleaned in a watery solution of hydrogen peroxide.

7. Drying. The next stage is drying the cork stoppers. When the moisture levels are lowered and stabilised, stopper performance is maximised.

Before final treatment, cork stoppers are packed in bags with 5000 to 10000 stoppers.

8. Final treatment. Cork stoppers are coated to become water-tight. The final treatment also improves the gliding, making it easier to insert and extract the stoppers from the bottles, while at the same time improving their sealing capacity.

9. Packing and transport. Finally, our cork stoppers are automatically counted, sanitised with sulphur dioxide gas and sealed in gas-barrier bags. They are now ready to travel to our clients destinations.

>> Quality control

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