New filling, disgorging and bottling for The Glenmorangie Company

When The Glenmorangie Company (TGC) was looking for a specialist process design consultancy to help it with its business development plans for its premium brands Ardbeg and Glenmorangie, the company knew from experience that Allen Associates (AA) was the perfect company for the job.

The Project

TGC had decided to move from its existing bottling and cask handling premises at Broxburn to a new purpose built bottling plant in the Alba Business Park, Livingston.  One of the design criteria for Alba was to handle mature spirit from tankers only.  This resulted in cask filling and disgorging operations moving to both Ardbeg and Glenmorangie Distilleries.  AA was appointed the process design engineers for the process works at all three sites.

Key project actions included:

• Design of a new filling store at Ardbeg distillery
• Design of a new filling store at Glenmorangie distillery
• Design of new facility at Alba for receipt, preparation and bottling of mature whisky.
• Both Glenmorangie and Ardbeg Distillery filling stores to have new fillings, cask finish fillings, disgorging and tanker loading
• Design of all required services plant – demin water, compressed air, chilled water system.

In addition to typical whisky preparation processes of chill filtration and reduction, the Alba plant had to have a hygienic design to ensure batch integrity for handling of heavily peated whisky (Ardbeg) together with a lighter whisky (Glenmorangie) to prevent any contamination between the two products.

Results

The project now gives TGC a complete whisky production operation to be proud of. 

Having filling and disgorging at the distilleries may be considered to be a more traditional approach however this gives each distillery complete control over their fillings and maturation giving inherent spirit batch integrity. 

As Alba has been designed to a hygienic standard using mixproof valves etc. and is fully automated then the risk of any contamination between products is minimised if not eliminated.

It is this ability of Allen Associates to use its knowledge of hygienic design as well as spirit processing experience which sets the company apart from other process consultants.