Every bottle of bourbon is a small miracle of consistency. How does a modern craft distillery keep that promise — barrel after barrel, year after year?
How a Whisky Distillery Works takes you inside a complete craft bourbon distillery, one room at a time, and reveals the automation that runs it. From the grain silo to the hand-numbered bottle, you’ll follow the real process — milling, cooking and mashing, fermentation, distillation, the all-important cut, barreling, the long hot-climate aging, and bottling — and meet, in plain language, the control system working quietly behind all of it.
You don’t need an engineering degree. With clear explanations and more than a hundred diagrams, this book connects the copper to the control room:
Follow one batch end to end — grain to glass, with every step explainedUnderstand the control concepts that matter — PID loops, cascade control, split-range heating and cooling, sequences, recipes, and verified clean-in-place (CIP)See real systems in context — an Allen-Bradley CompactLogix controller and an Ignition HMI/SCADA layer, with tags, screens, faceplates, alarms, and the historian that remembers every batchLearn the safety thinking — permissives, interlocks, and defense-in-depth, from the cook house to the still houseGrasp the big idea — automation doesn’t replace the craft; it makes the craft repeatable, and calls a human for the decisions only a human should makeWho it’s for: curious whiskey enthusiasts, new plant technicians, automation and controls engineers moving into food and beverage, distillery operators, and anyone who has ever wondered what all those screens on the wall actually do.
Inside you’ll find: 21 chapters across six parts, four appendices (a full glossary, tag-naming and I/O conventions, a bourbon standards quick reference, and worked solutions), end-of-chapter exercises, and a single batch — Batch 1147 — followed from a silo of grain to a numbered bottle so the whole plant moves at once.
Pour something worth sipping, and come see how it’s really made.
