Tamdhu Distillery automation and upgrade.

Enthused by the optimism of 1897’s Diamond Jubilee, a consortium of merchants and gentlemen of the whisky trade raised today’s equivalent of £20 million. Driven to produce the finest whisky in the world, they set out to construct the most advanced distillery yet devised. Having first acquired a unique site on the banks of the River Spey, they enlisted the ingenuity of Charles C Doig Esq – the pre-eminent distillery architect and engineer of the day.

What Doig designed and built was nothing less than the most pioneering distillery of the age. A water wheel positioned beneath the floor for optimum performance, kilns redesigned to reduce heat loss and waste extracted by Archimedean Screw, direct to the distillery’s own railway station. Tamdhu lived on through the ups and downs of the 20th Century on the banks of the River Spey, until it was closed in 2010.

Tamdhu was purchased in 2011 by Ian Macleod Distillers Ltd and re-commissioned in 2012.

The new owners set out to return the distillery to its former glory and Muirton Control & Automation Ltd were tasked to upgrade the still house control system.

With staffing levels being a concern at the time the brief was to design and install a simple, intuitive semi-automatic control system for the still house which would free up time to enable the existing operatives to control both the distilling and mashing processes, the distilling being controlled from a double screen operator interface in the mash house.