How to Automate Whiskey Systems

Every barrel in the rickhouse is revenue that has not happened yet

A craft distillery makes a product it cannot sell for years, and Whiskey Systems is the record of everything that happens to it in the meantime: the production and compliance platform for American and Canadian distilleries, grain to bottle.

The business is a strange one to keep books for. A brewery sells what it made three weeks ago. A distillery fills a barrel this autumn and finds out in 2032 whether that was a good idea. Until then it sits in a bonded space, taxed by the proof gallon rather than by the case, and the quantity is not stable: liquid soaks into the oak and evaporates through it, and the angel's share is a figure the regulator expects to see accounted for.

So the software holds two things at once: what is in the rickhouse, and what the records say is in the rickhouse.

Proof gallons have to be right before anything else can be

That accounting is not a quarterly event but a running total that almost every action in the building moves.

A batch comes off the still at one proof and goes into a barrel at another. Water is added to cut to bottling proof and the volume changes. A tank is gauged, a barrel is dumped, a transfer moves spirit between accounts. Each of those is a number somebody writes down, and each ends up on a report with a deadline.

Then there is the half that has nothing to do with spirit. A new label sits with the regulator awaiting approval and nobody can say how long it will take. A control state wants price postings filed by a date it published in a PDF. A cooperage quoted sixteen weeks on new barrels, back in February.

None of that shows up in a gauging record.

Whiskey Systems

Label approvals with a date on them Applications tracked on the regulator's own public registry, so a label that has been sitting seven weeks is noticed before a bottling run is booked.

Barrels ordered against the fill plan Cooperage, glass and closure lead times read off supplier accounts and set against a schedule that runs three years out.

The shelf, checked from your desk Which accounts still list your expression and at what price, and what the bulk market is paying for barrels of your age and mash bill.

The report writes itself out of the day's gauging

Whiskey Systems takes most of the first half off the table, and a distillery should have it running properly before spending money anywhere else.

Operations are tracked grain to bottle, so the batching, transfer and gauging records an audit asks for are compiled as the work happens rather than reconstructed afterwards. Native calculators do the arithmetic in place: proof gallons and the water required to cut to proof, worked from temperature with observed wine gallons, tank inches or scale weights, and true proof from a hydrometer or a density meter. TTB reporting is prepared as you go rather than assembled at the end of a period, and a finished report can be viewed at any time and copied across to Pay.gov for filing. Barrel management covers rackhouse capacity, barrel locations and the aging and finishing programs on top of them. Sales orders and inventory for ingredients, packaging and finished goods sit in the same place.

That is the bonded premises, thoroughly covered.

Past the gate it stops. It does not know whether a label came back approved, what a control state's posting deadline is this quarter, or what a cooperage is quoting today.

Labels, listings and cooperage all sit on other people's sites

A barrel sits for years, and every decision made about it in that time depends on a website somebody else owns.

Label approvals tracked on the regulator's own public registry, so an application that has been sitting for seven weeks is a line in a Monday list rather than something you check once a bottling run is scheduled. Control state price postings and listing decisions read where they are published, with the deadline on a calendar instead of in somebody's head.

Cooperage quotes and lead times pulled from the supplier's own account page and set against a fill plan that runs three years out, so barrels are ordered against the schedule rather than a panic. Glass, closures and label stock priced the same way, because a bottle on a twelve-week lead time moves a release date with it.

The market end too. Whether the bottle shops and restaurants you sold to still list your expression, and at what shelf price. What the bulk market pays for barrels of your age and mash bill, the number behind every decision to sell or hold.

Keep the filing human. A federal return is assembled by a machine and submitted by a person.

Waiting on an approval is not a distiller's job

Each of those is somebody opening a website, reading one field and writing it down. Done properly it takes an hour a week, and it is the first hour to disappear when a still needs running.

WebRun is an agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as you. It opens Whiskey Systems, the public label registry, a state's posting page or a cooperage account, reads what is there and gives you the changes with dates attached.

Because it works the browser rather than an API, a state agency page that will never publish an integration is simply another page. It runs on your schedule in your own private environment, you can watch a run and stop it, and anything that files or messages somebody is drafted and waits.

The workflows below are already built, and each one names what it opens.