Case Study · Alcohol & Ethanol
Wild Turkey Bourbon New Distillation System
Capacity expansion in a new, purpose-built distillation facility.
Project Summary
Wild Turkey needed more plant capacity. Real estate constraints ruled out expanding the existing plant, so the distillery built a completely new facility in a nearby area.
Wild Turkey and BCI worked together to capture every aspect of the production process, protecting consistency in flavor and quality while improving operational efficiency and flexibility.
Challenge
The characteristics of the Wild Turkey brand had to survive the capacity expansion intact. The system needed to improve task automation for safety and worker efficiency while still giving distillers all the access they needed to maintain the production quality of the existing Wild Turkey brands. It also had to stay responsive enough for future development.
Maintenance of the system, and high visibility into it all the way down to instrumentation, were equally high priorities.
The control system that we currently use mirrors the actions that we did in the old facility to a tee. We were able to mirror that entire process that we had in our older facility in this new facility and we are very pleased with the outcome in terms of the distillate we are now producing. We're finding the reliability of this system has been flawless to date.
Solution & Benefits
The new system was built around a set of specific objectives, and several newer technologies went into meeting them:
- Automate as many sequences as practical
- Create system-wide visualization from a single control room for enhanced operator functionality
- Mirror the activities performed in the older facility to ensure taste profile consistency
- Allow flexibility for day-to-day operational modifications and possible facility and product expansion needs
- Ensure parts and technical support, including training, are readily available
- Implement HART technologies to provide visibility into the plant instrumentation
- Implement a system that has a pool of skilled talent readily available to maintain and support it
Results
The new facility reproduces the original process step for step. Wild Turkey reports that the distillate coming out of the new plant matches what the brand's customers expect, and that system reliability has been flawless to date.
Inside the Project
What the Customer Said
Based on their past experience in the industry, Bachelor Controls knew what we wanted. They knew what we were actually about. The control system is a Cadillac it's more at your finger tips – a click of the mouse you can hit start on a sequence and the process will start up it will weigh up your grains, add the water, add backset, dump the grains, cook it ….
I feel like Bachelor did a very good job capturing what we do and making those things work correctly and displaying them on the screen correctly so that we get to know when a process is working correctly and when it is not. I like the way they have designed their screens. Everything seems to flow very well. None of the operators had very much computer experience. We did some minimal training and they have taken off with this and have done very, very well.
Planning a Capacity Expansion?
Tell us what your process has to reproduce, and what it cannot afford to change.