In the early days of industrial production of single malt whisky, the initial focus was on measures to help guarantee the consistent quality of the whisky. Then they began to increase the efficiency of whisky production. As in all technical processes, the engineers attached particular importance to the balance between the achievable efficiency (raw material input, energy consumption) and the costs incurred for the improvements. The costs of whisky production can be roughly described as follows:

Energy consumption has also been significantly reduced over the past centuries. Closed mash tuns were the beginning. Improved heating systems using superheated steam instead of direct coal firing followed. Energy recovery is also an integral part of whisky production today. Heat exchangers instead of simple coolers extract the heat from a liquid in order to feed it back into the production process at the right place. Reinforced insulation of the hot pipelines and containers ensure conservation of the expensive energy.

Today, the use of barley and energy is largely optimally solved and no longer represents a competitive advantage over other distilleries. After all major optimisation potentials had been exhausted, new paths such as three-shift operation had to be taken in order to amortise the investments made in the equipment as quickly as possible. Today, all large distilleries work around the clock, 365 days a year. Only for 3 to 6 weeks a year do the distilleries close for a break for maintenance and repairs.

The fermentation, mashing and distilling processes are batch processes. This means that a certain amount of raw material is always processed at once. Unfortunately, wash backs, mash tuns and stills get relatively dirty, so you have to clean them after each batch. This cleaning is labour-intensive, as steam lances have to be used to remove all burnt-in substances from the tank walls. This cleaning has been carried out for many years with the use of chemical cleaning substances. During the cleaning work, employees of the distilleries always had to climb or crawl into the containers in order to be able to clean the hardest-to-reach places.
During the summer break in 1997, fermenting vats and stills of some distilleries were equipped with automatic, central cleaning systems. These spray nozzles are connected to central storage tanks for the cleaning solution. After the passage of a batch, the cleaning liquid only has to be switched on for 5 minutes to free the tank from the adhering remains of the batch.

Fermenting vats (wash backs) have been made from Oregon Pine (Canadian Pine) since early times. This wood could best resist the attack of the yeast fungi. Unfortunately, these fermentation vats had to be protected from fungal attack and bacteria with extreme cleaning agents. The introduction of stainless steel tanks, as they have long been introduced in beer and grain whisky production, also relieved the environment of much of the cleaning substances here.