Copal Tree Distillery

Vapour’s cask management for us was a jump into the future. We went from [manual] cask management to full control, cask-by-cask.

Lorenzo Vergani

Distillery Director/Master Distiller/Master Blender, Copal Tree Distillery

About Copal Tree Distillery

Copal Tree Distillery is a certified carbon-negative rum agricole producer based in Belize, Central America. Rather than using molasses, rum agricole uses fresh sugarcane juice as the fermentable. It’s a different process entirely, and until Vapour, no distillery management platform had ever been built to handle it.

For Copal Tree, traceability is a business requirement. Its carbon-negative certification depends on evidencing the journey from raw sugarcane to finished product: every bottle of rum is -5.5kg CO2. That means every kilogram, every litre, every cask needs a documented record from intake to dispatch.

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The challenge

When Copal Tree first approached Vapour, the problem was straightforward: no software on the market aligned to how they actually worked.

The result was a patchwork of spreadsheets and legacy applications, with manual data entry for cask positions and no shared visibility of operations across the team. For a distillery driven to prove sustainability credentials and efficiency can go hand in hand, that was a challenge.

The solution

Vapour’s approach was to go on-site first. The team travelled to Belize, spent time on the distillery floor with the operators, and mapped the full workflow.

The result was a Vapour configuration built around how Copal Tree actually works: from raw sugarcane intake, through juice extraction and fermentation, into distillation, maturation and bottling. Every action captured, every step recorded, every record traceable — building provenance from the outset.

Onboarding was faster than expected. All existing operational data was migrated within a couple of days of the on-site visit. Existing cask barcodes were retained — with minimal re-tagging required. Single sign-on and Power BI integration were in place rapidly.

For the first time, the team had live data they could respond to immediately.

The results

Operations at Copal Tree are now recorded in real time, from pre-distillation through to bottling. Work orders for finished goods are completed directly within Vapour. Cask locations are tracked without any manual data entry.

For the first time, the whole team shares a single operational truth: operators on the distillery floor, the US-based finance team, and leadership all working from the same reliable data: making confident decisions possible.

Importantly, traceability has been enhanced. Vapour has embedded it in Copal Tree’s day-to-day operations. For a carbon neutral distillery, whose certification depends on documented evidence, that’s a core capability that is now automated.

An additional quality control layer, accessible within the same interface, lets staff monitor and record observations throughout the production process. All data is available for trend analysis — useful for understanding how raw materials, process changes, and environmental conditions affect the final product.

KPIs and operational metrics that previously required manual collation are now live through a Power BI dashboard, fed directly from Vapour data. The finance team — largely remote and US-based — has visibility of material and energy usage without relying on manual updates.