31 Bottles and Counting - Spirit Bottling - Loch Lomond Group

Roots in the past, accelerating into the future

Loch Lomond Distillery can trace its roots back over 200 years. Today, it crafts three distinctive whisky styles including its flagship Scotch single malt brand Loch Lomond Whiskies; its single grain whisky, Spearhead made from 100% malted barley and distilled in a copper coffey still; and its latest creation Noble Rebel, a range of blended malt Scotch whiskies that seek to break the norm by combining new ideas with deep-rooted traditions in whisky making. Spirit Bottling will bring this experience in whisky production to a global market.

New Spirit Bottling Line 4

With such a wide range of products Enterprise Tondelli were delighted when they were awarded the contract to supply the heart of line 4 with a new blower/filler/capper and infeed conveyors to provide probably the most flexible medium speed line ever!

Enterprise Tondelli have been working at the bottling plant of Loch Lomond since 2004 and have supplied much of the equipment on site ranging from high speed flask and cylindrical bottle filling to depalletising, shrink wrapping, palletising, conveying and labelling,.
This new project has a bottle filler that can handle from 500 ml PET bottles up to 1.75 litre glass jugs along with square, cylindrical and rectangular bottles all on the same line. Additionally the line can handle 11 different closures that are automatically applied. These include 8 different sizes of “T” shaped corks and 3 different sizes of ROPP caps.

Quick Change Over Bottle Conveyors

Due to the variety of bottles sizes etc to be handled a bulk bottle conveyor mattress table was supplied that can accommodate 2 layers of bottles allowing greater autonomy in the semi-automatic depalletizing process.

Manual bulk glass bottle de-palletising table

Depalletised bottles are single lined by a pressure less combiner which has the capability for many different programmes depending on the bottle. This handles both cylindrical and some of the shaped bottles.

As the area is quite compact, a special disc type bend conveyor were used with quick change over system to accommodate the very differing bottle sizes using quick adjustment levers. No change parts are required thus allow quicker size changes. The conveyors are controlled from the Eurosistemi stainless steel panel which has a touch screen hmi for menu selection.

Flexible adjustable disk bend conveyor for spirit bottles

Adjustable change parts on Spirit Bottling Blower / Filler / Capper

The bottles are fed to a monobloc blower/filler/capper spirit bottling machine which has a number of interesting features. With 31 bottles the traditional change parts would have consisted of at least 11 different components including starwheels, wormscrew etc. However Enterprise supplied an adjustable starwheels system and universal wormscrew that allows most of the bottles to be handled with no bottle handling change parts at all except the rinser grippers.

Fill level on the low vacuum filler is set from the operator panel and each bottle has its own pre-set value for repeatability. A low level cap hopper and flighted belt elevator feeding the dual purpose capping turret ensures safe working for the operators. A pre-set bottle counter allows them to set how many bottles to produce before the filler stops and advises batch complete.

Whiskey and spirit bottling on Low Vacuum Filler

The conveyor layout produced in the UK office of Enterprise Tondelli also meant that one operator was centrally located to monitor several aspects of the line reducing wasted movement.
The spirit bottling machine will fill both brown and white spirits as well as some new ranges of products such as flavoured liquors. To ensure good hygiene CIP cups were also supplied to allowing machine cleaning without medium going to waste or creating a slip hazard on the floor.