Lochlea Distillery

The system has meaningfully improved how we manage and trust production and maturation data

Darren McCormick

Distillery Manager, Lochlea Distillery

A farm first, a distillery second — and every drop connected.

Every bottle of Lochlea whisky starts in the distillery's own Ayrshire fields. Four years of data in Vapour makes that journey provable from soil to spirit. And, as the stock matures, that very data will help shape what’s distilled, blended, and sold next.

About Lochlea Distillery

Lochlea sits on a working Ayrshire farm that Robert Burns called home. Founded in 2018, with a first release in 2021, the distillery is built on a simple conviction: the land should define the whisky, not the other way round. Barley is grown in the fields, distilled on site, and matured in converted farm buildings.

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The challenge

Lochlea is a distillery that favours flavour, consistency and control over speed or scale. When it started, production records lived in spreadsheets and paper. That worked for the first few batches; however, as output grew, limitations showed. For example, there were no defined warehouse stock locations and it became more difficult to spot trends and see what’s happening in the distillation process. Plus, operations depended on individual knowledge as much as recorded data.

The solution

Lochlea adopted Vapour across Production, Maturation, and Bottling. Every step flows through one platform: raw materials intake, mashing, distillation, spirit transfers, cask filling, warehouse operations, and finished goods. Liquid, cask assets, and finished products all follow a defined, repeatable pathway. Provenance is captured as operators work, not assembled after the fact.

Vapour also built custom workflows for Lochlea’s third-party bottler, tracking liquid as it ships off-site and returns as finished goods, so traceability remains robust even when the product leaves the farm. Integration with Sage handles financials, and a Shopify connection is in development to link order processing directly to operations.

The goal isn't just to record what's happened though. It's to continue to build on an already rich dataset that grows more valuable with every batch: one that will eventually inform blending, forecasting, and product development as Lochlea's stock matures.

The results

Four years on, Lochlea has a complete operational record in Vapour, giving control, visibility and confidence. Specifically —

Production is recorded once, as it happens: no re-keying, no transcription into a second system
Cask data, movements and volumes are consistent across the platform
Dry goods and finished goods inventory sit in the same platform
Staff all use one unified approach
When something needs verification or attention, a quality question, a cask query, an inventory discrepancy, the answer is right there in Vapour
For the production team, less time reconciling records meant more time on operations
For the logistics team, for example, the difference is tangible. Now every pallet is allocated a space and the entire flow, from picking finished foods to paying duty and tracking customer orders, runs through Vapour.

After four years, the result is that every bottle of Lochlea whisky is traceable from field to finished product. Everything’s in one connected system, captured in real time and ready to inform bigger decisions as time goes on. For a distillery whose identity is rooted in its land, that’s the proof behind the promise.

Vapour has streamlined what we have to do in terms of finished goods, sales orders, and duty payments. Rather than filling out two or three spreadsheets … this is all now done within the module.

Craig Scott, Logistics and Customer Services Manager, Lochlea Distillery