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Wooden barrels are What makes the magic happen in your favorite bottle? whiskey. It’s also the source of a long-standing problem in the spirits industry: it leaks. a lot.
in bacardi ltdthe world’s largest privately held spirits company, leaking kegs is a major headache. Consider Dewar’s blended Scotch whiskey brand (just one of dozens it owns). Most of the time, Dewar’s will have more than 100 warehouses full of old whiskey barrels, 25,000 barrels in each one. The casks will mature for between three and 12 years, and according to Angus Holmes, Bacardi’s whiskey category manager, many of these casks will develop a leak at some point in their lives.
That’s not great for business, Holmes says. “How do we make sure that when we come to get that cask, it contains as much whiskey as possible?”
Given the need to find the so-called “leakers” before a decade passed – and take all the whiskey with them – Bacardi turned to… National Institute of Manufacturing Scotland. The problem was presented to NMIS, and it came up with a surprising solution: Why not adopt a robot dog?
Andrew Hamilton, head of the Digital Process Manufacturing Center at NMIS, says the group’s first suggestion was that Dewar might try Boston Dynamics Spot robot Which can roam the warehouse looking for leaking barrels.
But to be a truly effective hunter, a robot dog will need to adopt one of the canine family’s most refined skills: a heightened sense of smell.
Steam trails
There are two types of leaks: liquid spilling or seeping out of the barrel, and liquid loss through vapor evaporation. It is fairly easy to identify liquid leaking into a drum, but if it is losing too much through evaporation, it is difficult to detect.
Evaporation is an expected part of whisky’s maturation, with the “angel’s share” being a well-understood phenomenon and widely considered an essential part of whisky’s development. In Scotland, angels take about 2% of the cask volume each year, and while some bold distillers are trying to disenfranchise angels through experimental techniques such as… Cover the barrels in plastic wrapGenerally speaking, distillers are happy to put a little whiskey back into the universe as a cost of doing business.