Logichem recently completed the expansion of Distell’s Sedgwick whisky distillery, the home of the award-winning Three Ships whisky product range.

Planning for this expansion started as long ago as August 2007, with final project approval in July 2008.  The project involved the upgrade of virtually every facility on the site, infrastructure as well as production.  Project budget exceeded R150 million.  A high degree of automation was incorporated to ensure consistent quality and enable the upgraded plant to be operated by substantially the same number of personnel.

The major features of the expansion were:

• New maize and malt off-loading and milling plant
• New wort mashing plant
• New Fermentation Cellar
• New Distillation plant featuring thermo-compressor energy saving technology
• Two new 20,000 litre copper pot stills for malt whisky
• New Blending cellar (> 3 million litres)
• Two new 10 t/h boilers
• Upgrade of cooling water system
• New Effluent treatment plant
• New plant-wide PLC/SCADA control system
• New electrical connection, transformers and site-wide reticulation
• Upgrade of existing whisky and gin distillation plants and migration to new PLC/SCADA

The new Mashing and Distillation plants were supplied by Logichem on a turnkey basis, while the balance of the project (excluding civil construction) was executed by Logichem on an EPCM (engineering, procurement & construction management) basis.

The first whisky was produced on the new plant in May 2010, after a very successful start-up.

Contact Logichem for further information.