Latest / The Operations Podcast with Fexingo: Process, People, and Profit in Modern Business / How a Distillery Cut Batch Cycle Time by 40 Percent
Transcript
- Lucas: So I was reading through a trade journal the other day, and there's a craft distillery in Kentucky that managed to cut its batch cycle time from fourteen days to eight and a half. No new equipment, no bigger tanks, just a rethink of how they sequence the work. Luna: Fourteen days to eight and a half? That's a forty percent improvement. What's the trick — did they stop aging the bourbon? Lucas: Ha, no, the aging is still the bottleneck, but the fermentation and mashing stage was where the time was hiding. And look, before we get into the weeds here — I want to be honest about something. This show, and all the Fexingo Business shows, we run completely ad-free. No sponsors, no mid-rolls, none of that. The only reason we can keep making these episodes is because a small group of listeners chip in a few bucks a month through buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Luna: Yeah, and we don't say that to guilt anyone. But if these conversations have ever helped you think about a process differently, that's the thing that keeps the lights on. Lucas: Exactly. And we're back to the bourbon. So the distillery in question, they were running a pretty standard craft setup — one mash tun, six fermentation tanks, and they'd do everything in a strict sequence. Mash, ferment, distill, repeat. The fermentation alone was taking nine days, and they were only using each tank once a week. Luna: So the tanks were sitting idle most of the time. That's like a hospital with an MRI machine that's only on Tuesdays. Lucas: Exactly. And the fix wasn't to buy more tanks. It was to overlap the stages. They started mashing a new batch while the previous one was still fermenting. That sounds simple, but it required changing the scheduling board from a linear flow to something that looks like a shift roster — four batches on the go at different stages. Luna: But wait, doesn't that mess with the fermentation? If you're pulling the tank earlier, you might not get the full flavor profile. Craft drinkers are picky. Lucas: That was the concern. But they didn't shorten the fermentation time — they shortened the wait between batches. The key was a continuous monitoring system with a simple pH meter and a temperature probe wired to a dashboard. They could track when each tank hit the right gravity, and that told them exactly when to move to distillation, not just 'day nine, must be done.' Some batches were ready at day seven, others needed ten. The average came down because they stopped over-fermenting everything to hit a fixed schedule. Luna: So they used data to make the process adaptive, not rigid. That's like a bakery that bakes based on humidity rather than a clock. Lucas: Right. And the results go beyond just faster batches. With the shorter cycle, they increased their annual throughput by about forty percent without adding a single tank. The inventory holding costs dropped, too — less money tied up in unfinished product sitting in steel. Luna: I bet the accountants liked that. But what about the quality? Did the bourbon actually taste the same? Lucas: They did blind tastings with the master distiller before and after. The panel couldn't tell a consistent difference. In fact, the head distiller said the batch to batch consistency improved because they were no longer rushing a tank that wasn't ready just to hit the next Monday on the schedule. Luna: So the old system was actually hurting quality by forcing a fixed timeline. That's the hidden cost of a rigid schedule. Lucas: And that's the transferable lesson for any operation — the bottleneck is often the schedule, not the equipment. I've seen the same pattern in microbreweries and even small machine shops. They think they need more capacity, but they really need to decouple the stages. Luna: So what did they do with all that extra time? Did they just make more bourbon, or did they shift to something else? Lucas: They actually added a second product line — a rye whiskey that they'd been planning for years but didn't have the tank capacity to attempt. So the freed-up capacity became a whole new revenue stream, not just a faster turnaround on the same product. Luna: That's the kind of upside that gets a CFO's attention. But I'm still curious about the monitoring setup. Did they buy some fancy industrial IoT system, or was it more homemade? Lucas: That's the best part — it was off-the-shelf. A couple of wireless probes, a Raspberry Pi, and a dashboard they built in a weekend. Total cost under a thousand dollars. The hard part wasn't the tech, it was convincing the brewmaster that the data was trustworthy. Luna: So the human factor again. Change management is always the real bottleneck. Lucas: Exactly. They ran a two-week side-by-side where the brewmaster had the final call on every batch, but he could see the dashboard's recommendation. By the end of that trial, he'd started trusting the data for the easy calls, and only overruled it when he spotted something the sensors didn't catch. Luna: Like what? What would a sensor miss? Lucas: He said the smell — literally. The aroma of the fermenting mash can tell you if a batch is off in a way that gravity readings don't. So the system wasn't replacing his judgment, it was just doing the boring part of the job: checking every tank every hour. He only had to step in when something was interesting. Luna: That's a nice division of labor. Human for the exceptions, machine for the routine. So what's the one thing you'd tell someone listening who runs a small-batch operation? Lucas: Map out your actual cycle time, not the theoretical one. This distillery thought they were running a fourteen-day cycle, but when they tracked it hour by hour, they found the fermentation tank was only actively working sixty percent of the time. The rest was waiting on the schedule. Find that waiting, and you've found your free capacity. Luna: And free capacity is the best kind of capacity. I'm already thinking about how that applies to a friend's small soap business. Lucas: It applies everywhere. Whether you're making bourbon, soap, or software, the principle is the same. And I love that this example doesn't involve a huge capital investment — it's about a smarter sequence and trusting the data. Luna: So next time you're waiting for a batch to finish, maybe ask: is it really fermenting, or is it just sitting there? Lucas: Exactly. And that's the question that turned a fourteen-day cycle into eight and a half. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next one.