To meet the rising demand for whiskey, a distiller needed to increase production while improving the facility work environment and overcome global labor shortages. The company wanted to be ahead of the curve in the next generation of distilled spirits while introducing safer work practices.

The whisky distilling company was storing barrels in a manual horizontal post and beam racking several barrels deep. The customer was experiencing an increased demand for whisky over the last 4 years, but current storage methods did not allow for increased production. There were also significant safety concerns with employees pulling samples at elevated positions. There were also concerns with conventional racking and seismic dampening. Conventional maturation and second maturation practices are very labor intensive with high risks of workplace injuries.

The customer’s biggest challenge was deciding whether to optimize the current building (brownfield) or invest in a new building (greenfield). There were also concerns about temporary storage of current inventory and how to phase an installation while maintaining current operations. The final major hurdle would be adapting outdated practices into a modern system of housing, maturation, and sampling barreled spirits for quality assurance.

Muratec proposed a rack-supported building (RSB) with a customized, high dense storage and Goods-to-Person (G2P) station in which operators wait for the barrels to come aside. A unique carriage load handler capable of transporting barrels and storing 2-deep t-cars was added to address safety concerns involved with G2P for additional QA/QC sampling. Cameras were installed to allow for visual inspection of inside racking.

The ASRS also offered the additional benefit of managing barrel distribution throughout the system for environmental changes. ASRS cranes shuffle the barrels within the racking locations, while HVAC was installed in the building to control temperature and humidity, decreasing the vast temperature changes from ground level to upper levels at 30 meters. The system was also designed with seismic dampening (normally capable of withstanding seismic intensity up to 5) on all racking to handle the occasional earthquake experienced in Japan.

The customer has successfully increased storage efficiency by more than 3 times compared to conventional horizontal beam racking, eliminated workplace injuries, increased traceability and inventory management, and implemented more frequent quality sampling.

Muratec provided a solution that enhanced production and streamlined overhead costs, while better control over environmental variables ensured product consistency to the consumer.