Roe & Co Whiskey Distillery was originally founded in 1757 in close proximity to the Guinness brewery. They were Ireland’s largest whiskey exporter and at one point in the 1880’s considered to be the worlds largest whiskey distillery until it’s demise in 1926. Part of the old distillery St Patricks Tower was incorporated into the brewery. Rejuvenated after nearly 100 years the new distillery honours one of Ireland’s greatest whiskey makers.

 

As of the restoration and re-purposing the iconic Guinness Power House it was decided to reinvigorate whiskey production on the site of the former distillery. Rockbrook’s scope was to provide a distillery automation solution for the new whiskey distillation process. The design brief required the system to be a fully automated system with sequence control.

 

This was a critical path project for the Diageo team and Rockbrook. It was undertaken with a very tight schedule on a brownfield site so although the building was there the distillery systems needed to be built from the ground up. Due to the schedule one of the key requirements was to select a proven control system that was being used in other distilleries to eliminate some project risks. It needed to be a system that was intuitive and easy to support so Siemen’s was a natural choice for the control system.

 

The PCS is based on Siemens WinCC and Profibus DP thus facilitating the complex nature of communicating with remote IO panels. The system controls and supervises over 1000 IO points. Software modules had to be custom developed to match Diageo best practise in terms of wort flow rate/temp control, still condenser water control and still pressure control. The material handling system for malt intake / milling and mashing also fell within our remit.

 

The newly installed system that is intuitive, fully automated and takes control of the entire distillation process from grain in take to tanker out take.