Building a gin palace

A complex project to transform a listed, but disused, historic paper mill into a world class modern distillery and visitor centre presented substantial project management challenges for Bacardi UK.

The drinks company turned to process industry expert, Alectia to take charge of the project to develop its new Bombay Sapphire distillery at Laverstoke Mill, Hampshire.

With the River Test running through its grounds, the Laverstoke Mill is a site of scientific special interest.

As gin is a flammable product, we had to ensure our designs and final installations provided complied with legislation on explosive atmospheres

Alectia project manager Jon Boughton

The beautiful surroundings and heritage buildings at Laverstoke Mill belie the complex range of processes inside, says Jon Boughton, Alectia project manager.

“Although the site is historic, in a conservation area and all the buildings are listed, we also had to ensure compliance with current building standards throughout.”

From the outset, sustainability and enhancement of the environment were at the heart of the plans for the new distillery, he says.

“Furthermore, as gin is a flammable product, we had to ensure our designs and final installations provided a safe operation and complied with legislation on explosive atmospheres. We also had to build in Safety Instrumented Systems into the automation design and the whole process was risk assessed by HAZOP.”

Boughton says everyone on his team had been involved with major CAPEX projects and extensive renovations before, but none as sensitive as this in terms of conservation and the environment.

“Because we were involved from the very early stages of the project, we were able to do feasibility studies, planning, design work and risk assessments for all the utilities and process engineering before detailed planning permission was sought.

“We worked with Bacardi’s design team to identify the ideal locations for process equipment before submitting planning applications, enabling the more elegant elements to come to the fore, hiding the functional elements and enabling efficient access for plant maintenance.”

One of the first challenges, says Boughton, was to remove the first of the 3,000 litre heritage stills from the Greenall’s distillery in Warrington where Bombay Sapphire had been produced since its launch in 1987 and then re-install it in the new Dakin Still House in the visitor centre.

“At the same time, elsewhere on site, we installed and commissioned two brand-new, 10m high, 12,000 litre stills and designed all the attendant pipework and process engineering. “We removed the heritage still over a weekend. Our team had to carefully extract it from a working building and it was then transported to Italy for a full restoration. Once repaired and ready, we worked with the restorers to install and re-commission it alongside a replica still in the new visitor centre.”

Bacardi UK now continues to produce Bombay Sapphire using the vapour infusion process to a 200-year-old recipe, and the gin is the same high quality as that produced by the other brand new stills on site, he says. Equally complex was the heat recovery and sustainable energy brief, says Boughton.

“Sustainability was high on the agenda in this project. Laverstoke Mill is the first ever refurbishment project in Britain to achieve a BREEAM ‘Outstanding’ rating. It scored 100% of available credits in the Energy and Management category and 90% of credits for water.

“The process heat recovery system and the biomass boiler (that is partly fuelled by the spent botanicals) were incorporated into our design from an early stage and should have a significant impact on the overall energy usage on the site.”