Impacts of automated single barrel bourbon processing on overall product quality and production rate

The global market is experiencing a significant increase in demand for premium single barrel bourbon products. The need for separate manipulation of each barrel’s contents exerts a significant technical strain on all processing operations from barrel emptying to the filling of the bottle. Each of the two blending steps where water is added to the spirit were particularly error prone, occupied large physical footprints, withdrew labor from other critical tasks, and were limiting to the overall single barrel production volume. In this study, we measured the impacts of converting the manual blending operations to an automated process at the Four Roses Warehouse and Bottling Facility from before the changeover in 2019 until the end of 2022. During this time, the use of automated blending enabled a 62% increase in overall production of single barrel cases while the total number of quality holds was reduced by 46%. The daily single barrel processing rate increased by 15% immediately after automation, and the daily production rate was more consistent after automation. This automated approach enabled a significant increase in throughput without additional process footprint.