22 minute read
BRIGGS ENG ‘WHAT IF’ APPROACH TO DESIGN
DESIGN & BUILDDESIGN FOR THE FUTURE SPIRIT CONSUMPTION AROUND THE WORLD CONTINUES TO GROW, AND AS IT DOES, CUSTOMERS ARE DEMANDING MORE FROM THE SPIRIT INDUSTRY. GREEN CREDENTIALS AND SUSTAINABILITY PLATFORMS HAVE GROWN IN IMPORTANCE AS MUCH AS QUALITY AND FLAVOUR. BRIGGS OF BURTON’S SCOTT DAVIES TALKS TO RHIAN OWEN ABOUT THE MAJOR ISSUES AND CHALLENGES FACING THE INDUSTRY TODAY
To most consumers and fans, today’s distilling industry seems like it has changed very little in the last threehundred years. But, for one thing, today’s customers and their choices are certainly keeping the industry on its toes. A shift towards a growing interest in holistic wellbeing, health, and the environment, has undoubtedly been changing the landscape. Now, with the rise in fuel and raw material prices, the industry must wonder, will they be able to meet their customers’ demands, while maintaining a healthy bottom line? PARTNERING UP The world’s oldest and number one distilling and brewing design and engineering company, Briggs of Burton, has been aiding distillers reach their and their customers’ goal since 1732. The company has worked with Beam Suntory, Diageo, Pernod Ricard, Jose Cuervo, Loch Lomond and numerous other spirit and beer companies on every continent except for Antarctica. Recent and ongoing major turn-key projects have been in China, Scotland, England, Mexico, and the USA. Briggs of Burton are referred to as a ‘process engineering company’. Scott Davies of Briggs says this means they focus on the end-to-end manufacturing of a product: “It’s a one stop shop for a distillery project whether that’s a copper pot still, tank farm expansion, or new greenfield distillery,” says Davies . The team is made up of process engineers, mechanical and industrial
automation and control and chemical engineers to design and build systems. Recently the Briggs’ team has been busy working on a major tequila distillery in Jalisco, Mexico. “Our involvement has been the design and engineering to take the agave, put in all the steps and processes and control systems to then ensure that agave is processed, whether it be fermented or distilled, and exits that process in a filled bottle ready for shipment,” says Davies. “So, we’re not necessarily interfacing with the farmers nor with the shippers of those glass bottles, but we really sit in bridging that piece from taking a raw material and turning it into a spirit, a whole variety of scales and for a range of spirits around the world. And that’s definitely the excitement of the team; working with a variety of spirit types and the challenge that different geographies present.” THE TEQUILA ASCENSION According to Statista, in 2021, Mexico produced 527 million litres of tequila, the highest volume recorded since 1995. Within two and a half decades, production of this tequila increased by approximately 405 percent, with a difference of 153 million litres between 2020 and 2021. Made from the blue agave plant, tequila has “denomination of origin” protection and can only be legally produced in certain municipalities in Mexico. The main production centre is the town of Tequila, Jalisco, located about 60 kilometres northwest of Guadalajara. Tequila is Mexico’s third biggest agri-food export 44 | AUTUMN 2022 DISTILLERS JOURNAL
The challenge in designing a new distillery is, you are not just designing it for today, but for a lifespan that might be over 100 years
Briggs of Burton is at the forefront of designing large scale tequila distilleries which will be green and sustainable in a desert enviornment.
after beer and avocados. “The scales of these operations are enormous,” says Davies. “Briggs of Burton’s project in Jalisco with one of the world’s leading tequila distillers has been a great privilege. Working on it, you real the scale of operations that they are fulfilling to satisfy the worldwide demand and thirst for tequila, and the requirement to expand and grow to half a million bottles annually.”
Davies says that to meet these demands a seasoned and experienced team is essential. Traditionally, tequila is associated with painstaking production but as the demand soars, distilleries are looking at how they can keep up with demand. Davies says that lots of questions need to be asked: “Will equipmemt fit in? Is it a new site? Is it an existing site? Is there going to be sufficient power to power these motors and other components? Is there room to expand? Is the aspiration of the distillery built today to meet their year’s growth, or for five- and 10-years’ time?”
FUTURE AND TRADITION
Distilleries need to be built for tomorrow’s world. Yet if you drive through Jalisco and past many of the tequila distilleries, to the casual observer, the tourist, it doesn’t look like much has changed in hundreds of years. “Many of these brands thrive on their history and legacy,” says Davies. “To shrug that off, well I think that would be quite sad, because obviously, the evolutions and revolutions you may have gone through – and the 100-year facade that you may see in the old world – it shouldn’t be lost in the audience that to meet some of the scales of operations, the efficiencies and technologies of 100 years ago don’t meet current demand.”
Davies adds that when you visit the distilleries in Jalisco – there’s a lot more going on behind the scenes than meets the eye. “There’s clearly instances where some of it is very much for visitor appeal,” he says. “And I think you just need to be mindful as to what you’ve been shown and maybe the volume that’s been served behind that sometimes. Be aware that it is a visitor centre and an experience, which are incredibly enjoyable in their own right, and quite often behind the scenes there can be a larger production environment, satisfying the needs of the market.”
While there is a healthy and vibrant craft market, the popularity of tequila on the world’s stage cannot be serviced with artisan practices. It’s a difficult balance to strike – one in which distillers want to protect their brand, and the processes that have gone before, but at the same time leveraging new technology to realise volume. “You don’t go to a plant and just duplicate their existing operation,” says Davies. “You modernise, you make it more efficient by both minimising losses such as materials and energy, while increasing production.”
SIZE MATTERS
Davies says working with the distiller in all aspects of the plant and its performance gives Briggs a bird’s eye view of the client’s entire operation. “You really do need a holistic view, you need a site-wide perspective, there’s always heat sources and sinks,” he notes. “So, at certain points, heating something and something needs to be cooled down. So you do have to stand back, work with the customer to sort of push on the equipment that could maybe take heat from one location, introduce it to another, which would save across the plant, and it’s that holistic joining up of the dots of all of the unit operations that you might not get if you were a supplier of a specific piece of equipment, where you live in your silo.”
He adds: “But if you stand back as a process engineering company, or process turnkey engineering project company where we’re responsible for the overall site, it does play into your hands that you get the overview of all the operations, and actually probing and putting into the practices of where we know how to take heating, cooling, from one location or energy and redeploy it elsewhere across the site, really for the benefit of the customer to meet their sustainability objectives.” Tequila producers are keenly aware of the need for sustainable methods and are making great strides in ensuring processes are as ecologically friendly as possible. While there is the start-up farm distilleries, craft distilleries, and large preProhibition distilleries traversing Jalisco, when looking through an engineering lens – which is around water and energy – size is an advantage.
Davies says with scale also comes a budget for larger capital equipment: “And maybe investments towards more premium technologies or technologies that have paybacks that are beyond those smaller scale or a craft scale where actually their focus is on maybe post Covid survival or growth where that money might be invested elsewhere.” He adds: “So just imagine you’re a 24/7 operation, where there’s a whole series of heating and cooling loops, and water systems that because you’re running 24/7, and probably with a level of automation, you can have systems that are managing and taking those heating and cooling areas and put them back into the right parts of the plant at the right time.
“With smaller batch operations, you’ve got this ebb and flow and this start-up shutdown operation. Here, there may be instances, if you had the technology and you’d invested in some heat recovery,
you have captured some hot water from your condensers, and you stored it – but when would that be used? If it was in a 24/7 operation, there is likely to be another user of that hot water, so you’ve recovered and used it. “But at the craft scale, you might have recovered it, but the frequency of your operations often means that you recovered it, but there might not be a time in which you could reintroduce it into that system. So that’s one of the benefits of scale and larger operations is they can almost flat line all of those peaks and troughs for turning things on and off, which is much harder to do at a smaller scale,” he says.
While, from an engineering perspective, larger plants may be more efficient when it comes to their water and energy as they aren’t stopping and starting operations, size doesn’t mean they don’t have to navigate through rough waters.
PREDICTING THE FUTURE
Right now, the distilling industry, and indeed, all industries throughout the world, seem to be getting hit by black swan events – situations that you didn’t see coming nor could predict, such as Covid and now the Ukrainian crisis which is driving up the cost of fuel and raw materials. While you might think of these events as being very unique to us right now, however, when you look at Briggs’ 290year history, there has been a whole flock of black swan events which have affected the distilling industry. Just some of these inclued the American Revolution, the Panic of 1825, the Great Depression, Prohibition, and two world wars.
When it comes to a design perspective – the team at Briggs always ask, “what if?” “You ask a whole series of questions around ‘what if?’ What if that failed? What if that was shut off? What if lightning strikes? What if it flooded? What if the weather temperature outside increased? There are some rigorous tools that you can do, and the Briggs team do as part of a design process where it is baked into the design, it’s just good engineering practice,” Davies explains. Davies says that one of the most important aspects of making sure your distillery is ready for the future, is thinking about energy: “All of our customers are clearly exploring energy, the energy mix, and asking, what’s next? I think part of the challenge you may be seeing here is that we’re in a bit of a state of flux in terms of our current infrastructure, with the sources of our current supply, and clearly an aspiration from our own organisation, society, and the customers we work with, to change, to decarbonise.” Therefore, when it comes to the design of the distillery, you have to think of all the factors you can actually plan for such But one of the things that Briggs is doing to make sure their customers are technology ready is making sure that they see their distillery as “modular”.
“What we mean by this is, we’ll provision for some capacity for plug-and-play elements whereby there are space provisions for additional technologies that might be introduced in the future, when their commercial appropriateness or technology readiness changes. And for things like vapour recompression, there’s sometimes space and height constraints that you build in now and then you can be in a position to later introduce that technology. If you don’t, we can retrofitted the distillery but it does present some challenges.”
You don’t go to a plant and just duplicate their existing operation, you modernise, you make it more efficient” Scott Davies
as the rising cost of energy and that giant concern that affects all of us in business, which is, how can I ensure I’m ahead of the curve? That I’m ready for the “next big thing”?
Davies says that it’s important to act on those “what ifs” and build flexibility into the design of your distillery. But, this can be a challenging thing to do. One of the reasons being is that building flexibility into the distillery, in terms of things going in as a raw material and also fuel types, may be costly. And it isn’t guaranteed that you’ll use the function you’ve added. Davies says that Briggs is currently exploring some of the technologies around different fuel types, along with heating mediums and sources. Again, the challenge of this is trying to figure out future space and plug-in requirments for a distillery being designed today.
If a distillery was just being designed for today, none of this would be a factor. But with Briggs’ long history, the company knows the the lifespan of distilleries can easily go into decades and even 100s of years. “We don’t know all of the things that we might plug-in in the future,” says Davies. “We know now and several years into the future, but we don’t know into the longer term. Having that ability to make provision for the unknown is something that we’re trying to introduce.”
In Jalisco, the agave landscape and ancient distilleries have forged a distinct identity, and they care about their legacy. They’re looking at their tequila distillery 200 years or so down the road, with their great grandchildren involved in the craft. If you want to create a legacy, however, you’ll need it in your design and engineering. You’ll need to future proof yourself, and with distilling being an incredible energy intensive process and with a global rise in energy costs, this is the time to make provisions for the unknown by asking “what if?”
MARKETINGA MARKETING PLAN FOR THE REST OF US ANYONE CAN MAKE AN AVERAGE TASTING GIN, SPICED RUM, VODKA, OR OTHER SPIRITS, BUT NOT EVERYONE CAN SELL IT. AND THE REAL KICK IN THE PANTS IS THIS: YOU MIGHT BE MAKING A SUPERIOR TASTING SPIRIT, BUT YOUR BOTTLES STILL SIT ON A SHELF GATHERING DUST. BUT DON’T GIVE UP. VELO MITROVICH REPORTS
Marketing seems to consist of one of these two strategies. The first is to close our eyes, point our shotgun of ideas into the sky, fire and hope we hit something. Or, we leap from ‘best marketing idea ever’ to ‘best marketing idea ever’ and accomplish nothing but spin our tyres and waste our precious time. We’re led to believe that if we build a better mouse trap, the world will beat a path to our doors, but nothing could be further from the truth. If you’re not somehow marketing that mouse trap, there won’t be a single soul knocking on your door. So, how do you promote your spirit, especially if you’re a small craft distiller? You can hire a PR/marketing firm to represent you – who may or may not do a good job. But if they’re not, by the time you realise this, not only will your wallet be a lot lighter, it could also be too late for your business. Or you try to do it inhouse, which is easier said than done. Chances are, you are probably the one responsible for distilling, bottling, packing, and shipping. So why not add marketing to your list, you no doubt have a bit of free time between three and four in the morning. You turn to Amazon for ideas. Marketing book after marketing book promises you the moon but deliver little. Putting a bottle of your spirit into a customer’s hand can’t be that hard, humans have been trading since the beginning of time, but it does seem like rocket science. Help could be at hand, however, thanks to a newly published book by Philip Allott, entitled Integrated Business to Business Marketing: the complete blueprint. In a nutshell, Allott explains how you – and he means ‘you’, not a team of
Author and marketing expert Philip Allott marketing IT experts – can tie together all the zillion e-marketing methods out there right now to get you sales. The book is divided into 29 chapters with each one ending with a list of key points and actions to take from each chapter. The brilliant thing about this approach is, not only does it give you a quick review, it also allows you to jump around and pick the information that you need to know NOW. ALAN SUGAR COMES KNOCKING Allott has over 40 years’ experience in sales and marketing and over that time, he tells Distillers Journal that he’s learned a few lessons, with one of the first coming from selling a product from Amstrad, a company founded in 1968 by a 21-year-old Alan Sugar. The company Allott worked for was convinced to take 250 units of this new thing called a word processing machine, distillersjournal.info AUTUMN 2022 | 51
The Complete Blueprint
which Sugar assured them that it would revolutionize the entire UK’s typewriter business. Young Allott told his company he thought it was a foolish idea; in the north of England typical sales were no more than 50 typewriters a month. What were they going to do with 250 of these machines that nobody knew anything about? Luckily for the company, the head office overruled Allott and bought Sugar’s machines. Within two weeks they had sold them all. “What was different?” says Allott. “First of all, it was different technology. But secondly and most importantly, they were advertised on television and people walked in and bought the product. I learned very early on it pays to advertise.”
FRAGMENTATION OF MARKETING
In many of our overflowing bookshelves at home are numerous marketing books, in each one the author claiming that his/her book will be the last one you ever need. With a good chunk of them, by the time they made it to print, whatever marketing technology they’re boosting about has been superseded by something else. The question was put to Allott: How will his book be any different? While Allott’s book covers marketing technologies, more importantly he says that it covers the strategy of linking everything together from trade shows to social media to publicity. No matter how technology changes, this strategy is going to remain the same. “Nobody’s really talks much about integrated marketing. That press release you wrote becomes the content for Twitter, which becomes the content for a newsletter, which becomes the content you send to prospects, which becomes the content you put on your website,” says Allott. “The whole idea is that we link things together.” In other words, material you create once, you can easily repackage it and use it again and again, all without having to reinvent the wheel. “What’s happened in the last 2030 years is marketing has become more fragmented. And it’s more and more important that you link all the components together. New technologies will come and go. But if you read this book, you’ll understand how to put the technologies together and make them work,” says Allott, adding that if you are looking at specific technologies such as MailChimp and how to use it, this book is not for you.
FINDING YOUR TARGET
American car manufacturer Henry Ford liked to say that half his marketing budget was wasted. But the problem was, he didn’t know which half. If you can’t figure out exactly who you’re trying to market your spirt to, you’ll be in the same situation. A question Distillers Journal often asks producers is: “Who and where do you see your market?” Too often the answer we hear is: “To everyone in the entire UK.”
According to Allott, at first glance that seems to be the right approach. You want maximum number of sales so why not go after the maximum number of customers. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. If you want to be effective, you need to realise that your target audience is actually small. “The number of wines and spirits shops in the UK are 4,299 – which sounds good – but there’s only 288 that employ more than 10 people,” says Allott. “We can talk about restaurants, there’s 65,000. Again, this sounds good but eliminate those that are dry or only have a few employees and it’s now a lot fewer. “If you want pubs and bars, that’s 40,000. But if I just want to do where I live, which is in the Harrogate area, there’s only 130. “You really need to define, and this is what the book talks about, define who your target is, and then put the strategy around and your marketing plan around that,” he says.
According to Allott, all too often people get an idea in terms of what they want to do as a business and then they just plough money in without really taking the vision to a level where it becomes a strategy and then a plan. “And of course, they’ve not done any research and they waste a lot of money. Down the line, they’ll complain and say: ‘Oh, we did some advertising and it didn’t work.’ “You did some advertising but without any research, therefore you were never going to reach your target audience.”
WHAT TO DO IF SMALL
If you’re a small craft distiller, you’ve probably been advised by many to either put all of marketing efforts into trade shows, or a website, or Facebook, or Twitter, or even Instagram. But with limited time and funds, is there just one thing you can do that will make a difference? Although some marketing people equate websites with dinosaurs, you really need one and you have to keep it up to date. “The truth of it is due to the fragmentation of marketing, there’s no one thing you can do in isolation; what you have to do is to do things in order,” says Allott. “There’s no point in people going to see you at tradeshow if you haven’t got a website. For every one person who engages with you, four times as many people are going to go look you up on the website to see if you for them, before they even do engage with you. If you have no website, you have no real presence, and you’re not seen as a serious player. The first thing is to get the website done and have that properly anchored at the centre of your marketing.”
Does the world need another marketing book, let alone the distilling industry? If you’re one of the big boys with your own marketing team, then no, you’re paying someone to come up with these ideas. But, if you’re small to medium, I’d bet you are your own marketing team, along with being your own distiller, packer, shipper, and bottle washer. This easy to read, easy to navigate in book, will give you solid ideas on how to get your marketing plan going. In addition, if you’re hiring someone to do your marketing, it will give you enough knowledge to make sure that they’re earning the money that you’re paying them. Distillers Journal fully recommends Integrated Business to Business Marketing to you. Easy to read with no fluff, you’ll find this low-priced book to be one of the most important marketing investments you’ll ever make. Why do some press releases get picked up by the media and others are ignored? It’s a question that everyone who sends one off wonders about. There are some key things you can do to get noticed: 1. Have a compelling story. A new head of accounts is not compelling; expanding your distillery is. People are generally interested in people so try to work a person into the story. 2. Don’t worry about word length, three interesting paragraphs work better than 700 words. 3. Have contact details of people who will actually respond to enquiries. 4. For jpegs going to print media, they need to be 1MB to 2MB. A size that works online will not work in print. Supply both vertical and horizontal shots. Think about how the photograph reflects what your brand is.
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