Timber casks are instrumental in crafting the allure within your preferred whisky bottle. Nevertheless, they also represent the root cause of a persistent issue within the alcoholic beverage sector: They frequently seep, substantially.
At Bacardi Limited, the globally largest privately-owned alcoholic drinks firm, cask seepage presents a significant challenge. Take, for instance, the firm’s Dewar’s blended Scotch whisky label (merely one among its numerous holdings). Typically, Dewar’s will maintain exceeding a hundred storage facilities brimming with maturing casks of whisky, with 25,000 barrels per facility. These vessels undergo maturation for three to twelve years, and as per Angus Holmes, Bacardi’s director of whisky category, a considerable number of these containers will manifest a leak at some stage of their existence.
Such occurrences are detrimental to commerce, states Holmes. “How do we ensure that upon retrieval, each vessel contains the maximum possible volume of whisky?”
Considering the urgent need to identify these ‘seepers’ prior to a decade passing—and depleting the entire whisky content—Bacardi enlisted the National Manufacturing Institute Scotland. NMIS received the challenge, and devised an unexpected remedy: What if a robotic canine were deployed?
Andrew Hamilton, director of the Digital Process Manufacturing Centre for NMIS, indicates the team’s initial proposition was for Dewar’s to utilize a Boston Dynamics Spot robot, which could traverse the storage facility in search of seeping casks.
However, to be a genuinely proficient tracker, the robotic dog would need to cultivate one of the natural dog family’s most refined abilities: a heightened olfactory perception.
Evaporation Traces
There are two categories of seepage: fluid escaping or oozing from the cask, and fluid depletion via gaseous diffusion. A cask exuding fluid is relatively straightforward to detect, but if it’s experiencing excessive loss via vaporization, that’s more challenging to ascertain.
Vaporization constitutes an anticipated component of whisky aging, with “the angel’s share” being a comprehensively recognized occurrence broadly regarded as a fundamental aspect of whisky’s development. In Scotland, the ‘angels’ claim approximately two percent of a cask’s capacity annually, and while certain innovative distillers have endeavored to withhold the angels’ entitlement through trial methods such as encasing casks in plastic sheeting, on the whole, producers willingly relinquish a small quantity of whisky to the cosmos as an operational expenditure.
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