{"id":307987,"date":"2026-02-20T12:24:11","date_gmt":"2026-02-20T12:24:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/307987\/"},"modified":"2026-02-20T12:24:11","modified_gmt":"2026-02-20T12:24:11","slug":"meet-scotlands-whisky-sniffing-robot-dog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/307987\/","title":{"rendered":"Meet Scotland\u2019s Whisky-Sniffing Robot Dog"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wooden barrels are what make the magic happen in your favorite bottle of whisky<\/a>. They\u2019re also the source of a long-standing problem in the spirits industry: They leak. A lot.<\/p>\n

At Bacardi Limited<\/a>, the world\u2019s largest privately held spirits company, barrel leakage is a massive headache. Consider the company\u2019s Dewar\u2019s blended Scotch whisky brand (just one of the dozens it owns). Most of the time, Dewar\u2019s will have over 100 warehouses full of aging barrels of whisky, 25,000 casks in each one. Barrels will mature for three to 12 years, and according to Angus Holmes, Bacardi\u2019s whisky category director, many of those barrels will develop a leak at some point in their life.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not great for business, says Holmes. \u201cHow do we make sure that when we come to get that cask, it\u2019s got as much whisky in it as possible?\u201d<\/p>\n

Given the imperative to find so-called leakers before a decade has come and gone\u2014and taken all the whisky with it\u2014Bacardi engaged the National Manufacturing Institute Scotland.<\/a> NMIS was presented with the problem, and came up with a surprising solution: Why not adopt a robotic dog?<\/p>\n

Andrew Hamilton, head of the Digital Process Manufacturing Centre for NMIS, says the group\u2019s first suggestion was that Dewar\u2019s might try a Boston Dynamics Spot robot<\/a> which could roam the warehouse on the prowl for leaking barrels.<\/p>\n

But to be a truly effective hunter, the robot dog would need to adopt one of the actual canine family\u2019s most well-honed skills: an elevated sense of smell.<\/p>\n

Vapor Trails\"Image<\/p>\n

Spot on the prowl.<\/p>\n

Photograph: Martin Shields, Bacardi<\/p>\n

There are two kinds of leaks: liquid spilling or seeping out of the barrel, and loss of liquid through vapor evaporation. A barrel leaking liquid is fairly easy to identify, but if it\u2019s losing more than it should through evaporation, that\u2019s harder to suss out.<\/p>\n

Evaporation is an expected part of whisky maturation, \u201cthe angel\u2019s share\u201d being a well-understood phenomenon that is widely considered a key part of a whisky\u2019s evolution. In Scotland, the angels take about 2 percent of a cask\u2019s volume each year, and while some enterprising distillers have attempted to deny the angels their due through experimental techniques like covering barrels in plastic wrap<\/a>, by and large distillers are happy to give a little whisky back to the universe as a cost of doing business.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt makes that horrible, horror-movie, floor-scratching sound as it chases after you.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bacardi’s Angus Holmes<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Wooden barrels are what make the magic happen in your favorite bottle of whisky. They\u2019re also the source…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":307988,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[11313,84624,61,60,7569,36659,80,70648],"class_list":{"0":"post-307987","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-alcohol","9":"tag-boston-dynamics","10":"tag-ie","11":"tag-ireland","12":"tag-robots","13":"tag-sensors","14":"tag-technology","15":"tag-whisky"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307987","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=307987"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307987\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/307988"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=307987"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=307987"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=307987"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}