Scottish tech start-up transforming Spirit production and maturation around the world

16/08/2024

Vapour, established in the northeast of Scotland, delivers modern solutions for the comprehensive tracking of a product’s journey from crop to cask, providing distilleries and cask managers with valuable insights into spirit production and maturation.

Attracting attention from an expanding customer base across Europe and Australia, Vapour is transforming the drinks industry with a digital-first approach.

Vapour, an innovative cloud-based spirit management system, is reshaping how distilleries and cask management companies globally manage their production and maturation processes.

Co-founded in Speyside, Scotland by digital expert and Elgin native Stephen Hamilton, Vapour is a state-of-the-art digital platform that offers an innovative digital-first solution to enhance traditional methods used in spirit production and maturation, providing unmatched traceability and transparency from crop to cask.

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The cutting-edge platform, developed alongside industry experts, enables brands like Brewdog Distilling and Lochlea Distillery to track their products’ entire lifecycle using a mobile device, from raw material intake to cask maturation and beyond.

By capturing data at every stage of the production and maturation processes, Vapour creates a comprehensive record of provenance, allowing distilleries to monitor quality, track changes, and gain valuable insights into their spirits’ unique journey.

This traceability is integrated into the platform from the moment it is utilised.

Cask barcodes

Vapour offers a flexible pricing model tailored to businesses of all sizes, making it an accessible and cost-effective solution at a time when value is of utmost importance.

Co-founder and CTO at Vapour, Stephen Hamilton, said: “We have developed Vapour in collaboration with leading industry experts, ensuring that the platform addresses the specific operational challenges of running a distillery or maturing and bottling spirit.

“We’re proud to say that in just a few short years since launching, we now have customers as far afield as Australia using Vapour, and our customer base across Europe has expanded significantly too.

“The nature of the product means it’s extremely quick to set up for customers anywhere in the world and can be done remotely from our base in Scotland.

“It is not just a digital record, we are digitising operations within distilleries and in turn giving them scalable, efficient and detailed support at every stage of production.

“It is fantastic to have clients like Brewdog Distilling, Lochlea Distillery and Scotch Whisky Investments on board who we’ve worked with to enhance and craft the platform to meet the needs of our clients.

“We have also developed important industry partnerships such as Clyde Associated Engineers, a major supplier for fluid handling businesses like our distillery and maturation customers, to automate and digitise data capture on the distillery or warehouse floor.

“We are in the relatively early stages of bringing Vapour to the world, but we feel hugely optimistic about the future.”

Stephen Hamilton

John Campbell, Production Director at Lochlea Distillery, and legendary former distillery manager at Laphroaig stated: “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.”

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