Have you heard of Vapour? It’s a system that promises to transform spirit production. The idea is that it lets you track the whisky-making process from start to finish on a mobile device. Raw material to cask maturation and beyond is covered. Distilleries can scale and manage their operations in an alternative method to the traditional, typically pen and paper, to record malt intake or mashing and distillation recipes.
I was intrigued by the potential of the brand when I saw testimony from John Campbell, production director at Lochlea Distillery, and legendary former distillery manager at Laphroaig. Here’s what he had to say:
“Having previous experience of the traditional technology used in large volume spirit producers, I was immediately impressed with the Vapour platform from day one with how easy it has been to use and embed into our processes in the distillery. The fact that Vapour is a digital platform means that wherever I am in the world, I can have an instant overview of what’s happening at the distillery across production, maturation, and soon our bottling processes. Our inventory management and traceability have never been as good as they are now. The depth of utility and flexibility offered by Vapour is ideal for us and I’m sure many other spirits businesses.”
If it’s good enough for John… Given the potential of this technology, I thought you dear readers might appreciate a look behind the scenes of whisky production. Stephen Hamilton, the digital expert and Elgin native who co-founded this Scottish start-up in Speyside in 2020, joins us to discuss the latest advancements in whisky technology, how digitisation future-proofs the industry, the unique challenges of spirit production, and why all this matters to you, dear whisky lover.
Stephen Hamilton (left), is the founder of Vapour
Question: Where did the idea for Vapour come from?
Answer: The genesis of Vapour came from a conversation with a cask management company, a subsidiary of Forsyths called Caledonia Casks (Caley Casks). This company would store and manage casks on behalf of others. Due to some pre-existing connections, we undertook a market scan on what was available in terms of existing solutions and realised there was an exciting opportunity to build a digital product which could cater for the industry.
Q: How did you get the company off the ground?
A: As with all startups, it’s been a labour of love. We haven’t taken investment – albeit we’ve had our fair share of interest in that regard – and instead have looked to reinvest income back into the continual development of Vapour. We were lucky that our early versions of Vapour were being road-tested in the wild by Caley Casks and we worked very much in a collaborative, agile manner – allowing us to respond to feedback, adapt and ensure the product was ready for market alignment to real customer needs.
I personally brought a skillset of being able to design and build the platform right from the offset, which meant apart from my own time, there was very little cost involved in establishing the first minimum viable product and the progression from thereon in. As disruptors to the industry, we’ve found that word of mouth has been incredibly powerful – a lot of the early enquiries we received were off the back of a recommendation from someone who had used Vapour and loved what we were doing.
As well as word of mouth, we innovated with functionality to allow cask owners (when not the distilleries themselves) to log in and view their stock. By doing so, we exposed them to Vapour and their positive experience resulted in further enquiries.
Q: Have you encountered any hiccups?
A: It’s not all been plain sailing. One surprising element has been the real lack of support available for start-ups in Scotland. With what we believe is a very innovative technology in Scotland’s main export area, despite trying to engage, we have experienced many roadblocks from business support organisations.
The lack of opportunities when it comes to assistance and funding from support organisations because they won’t countenance providing funding where the party that benefits is the one who also owns and runs the business. It seems like there’s a real gap here – something which could really stifle innovation. You shouldn’t be penalised because you have the skill set to innovate without paying someone else to do it.
Q: I understand you developed Vapour in collaboration with leading industry experts – can you talk about their contribution?
A: We did lots of research up front, talking to operators, managers and other personas to get a sense of what could be enhanced and evolved through technology and we spotted a number of manual processes that could be digitised. Some of these people have over 30 years of experience in the industry.
As we started to get some traction with our maturation capabilities, we also got feedback from people in the industry that they were keen to have an approach for production that was seamlessly linked to maturation. Again, we interviewed and discussed with a number of people, such as John Campbell, and set about our development process.
Q: Who uses Vapour currently?
A: We can mention all businesses which are already in the public domain:
Brewdog Distilling Co, Caley Casks, Duncan Taylor Scotch Whisky, Still Spirit, Scotch Whisky Investments, Feddie Ocean Distillery, Kangaroo Island Distillery.
Q: What is the alternative to Vapour and why do you believe your solution is best?
A: There are various alternatives to Vapour. We’ve seen everything from spreadsheets and handwritten notes (yes, really!), through to software which has been in the market for 50 years – namely DRAMS. There are also others, like Master Distiller, which aim to leverage the power of ERP systems. We think Vapour provides the best, most comprehensive solution because it’s bespoke – written from the ground up as a cloud platform and with the specific industry use case in mind. Vapour fits the industry processes, instead of the industry trying to shoehorn its practices into what a system requires.
We also take a different approach when it comes to what we track. Other solutions track liquid parcels, but Vapour allows you to see all the casks which hold the liquid. This allows you to see all your cask stock, including empty casks. This is important because, over the lifetime of an individual cask, it will experience losses and Vapour allows you to see the losses at that granular level. It also means that you can see a history of what has been in a cask at any given time, as well as any operations that have involved the cask. This level of detail, transparency and insight is truly innovative.
Q: Can you break down the purpose and mechanics of this tech
A: Taking this in parts, “cloud-based” means we run all the software on servers and the solution is delivered over the internet to our customers. In our case, Vapour is web-based, meaning the only barriers to being able to use it is internet connectivity and a modern web browser. “Spirit management system” refers to the functionality within Vapour which allows users to record and manage the processes and operations required within distilling, maturing and bottling spirits.
Q: I understand you adapt and add new functionality to Vapour based on feedback from customers.
A: The feedback is generally very positive and constructive from our clients. They use Vapour every day, and can often spot where minor improvements can enhance productivity, or even suggest additional features for Vapour to enable alternative industry processes.
For example, as a digital product, there are expectations that Vapour should be able to export certain types of data to be consumed by finance tools like Xero. Many of these features are already built into Vapour, but sometimes we get requests to generate this data in a different format for a particular type of report or other system they want to connect Vapour to. We also connect Vapour to operational hardware on the shop floor, such as filling head equipment to streamline data entry and re-keying of data.
The Vapour admin platform is simple to use
Q: You also don’t ask distilleries to do anything different, just record existing activities.
A: One of the biggest challenges is change management – typically anyone who has worked in a certain way for some time can broadly find change difficult. In an industry where in some circumstances the processes have remained mostly untouched for decades, this can be even more difficult. So it’s important to us that what we’re providing isn’t additional work – in most cases, we look to streamline processes and operations by automating calculations and lookups. But what Vapour does, as a result, is provide a firmer framework for users to operate within, capture more data and therefore provide better insights and transparency.
Q: How does digitisation future-proof the industry, and what are the unique challenges of spirit production?
A: One thing we’ve heard plenty of times is that brain drain is an important industry challenge. In an age where life-long careers at one distillery are becoming more and more rare, it’s important to know what’s been done, what worked and what didn’t. That’s a massive over-simplification, but the general point is that if what’s being done on the stillhouse or warehouse floor is recorded and retained in a manner that’s simple to review in future, then you not only create insights into your current working practices and results, you build a history of what’s gone before.
Q: What are the drawbacks of digitising the future and how do you safeguard against taking the wrong path?
A: The key is to listen to our customers. That seems obvious, but we want Vapour to continually evolve and improve – and that can only happen when we understand what our customers need and want. It’s then our job to extract the functionality requirements from that and turn it into features.
And I think the other common pitfall is to chase the most recent technology trend or gimmick. If you look back at things like Augmented Reality, Blockchain, etc, people try to shoehorn these buzzwords into every industry and application. That’s not to say there aren’t sometimes valid and useful applications for cutting-edge technology, but it has to be working backwards from the problem, not finding a problem that technology can solve.
As we see more transformative technologies like AI becoming part of day-to-day life, we expect Vapour to evolve too with AI-enabled features and functions. Looking at how these technologies are adopted ethically and responsibly will be key to ensuring we’re not replacing what the craftspeople of the industry do, but affording augmenting them with better information to enable them to do things in a better, faster, smarter way.
Are platforms like Vapour the future of whisky production?
Q: Why would this tech matter to the average whisky fan?
A: Vapour offers unparalleled insights and transparency throughout the production and maturation process. What that then means is that our customers are able to provide consumers with more information about what went into each individual bottle.
But, further than that, Vapour allows the producers to understand the performance and effects of their processes as they go, meaning the end product can and should be more consistent and of a higher quality.
Lastly, whisky enthusiasts who take the next step and buy a cask with a distillery or cask management business (which operates with Vapour) will have the ability to log in and monitor their cask. In the cask trading/investment market, which can seem somewhat murky at times, this is a step change in transparency and accountability.