We delivered an AI operations manager for a craft distillery north of Charleston — one that keeps the TTB production log accurate to the gallon, schedules fermentation and barrel programs against tank availability, runs tasting room inventory so bottles never run dry on a Saturday, and assembles every federal and state report that used to consume the owner's last weekend of the month

He started the distillery five years ago because he loved making bourbon. What nobody told him was that a federal distilled spirits permit comes with a second full-time job: a daily production log the TTB expects accurate to the proof gallon, monthly operational reports filed on their schedule, state excise filings on a different schedule, and a paper trail connecting every drop from grain receipt to bottle sale that an auditor can walk end to end. His log lived in a spiral notebook, then a spreadsheet, then a different spreadsheet when the first one got too complicated. Neither version ever agreed with the gauge readings on the tanks. Meanwhile his actual job — making good whiskey — kept colliding with itself. Three fermenters, two stills, a bottling line shared with the rum program, and forty-seven barrels aging in a warehouse with no climate control meant that every week was a puzzle of what can run, what has to wait, and what's ready. The tasting room added a retail layer on top: weekend crowds buying bottles faster than the production schedule could fill them, and no warning until the shelf was empty. We built him an operations manager that thinks in the units the TTB thinks in — proof gallons, wine gallons, the specific gravity readings off his hydrometer — and keeps the daily log as production actually happens, not reconstructed from memory on Tuesday. When grain arrives, it records the lot. When a fermentation starts, it calculates the expected yield and blocks the fermenter on the schedule. When a still run finishes, the low wines and the hearts each get their own entry at the measured proof, and the feints going back to the next run are tracked so the books never show liquid appearing from nowhere. The barrel program — his real pride, and his real headache — now has every fill date, entry proof, warehouse position, and target age in one place, with alerts when a barrel approaches the window he wants to taste it. The tasting room inventory feeds backward: when weekend sales pull a product below the safety stock, the bottling run moves up on the production schedule automatically, and if that run needs a tank that's currently fermenting, it says so before anyone discovers the conflict on bottling day. And on the last day of every month, the TTB monthly report and the South Carolina excise filing assemble themselves from the daily log — every gallon accounted for, every transfer documented, every loss recorded. His first audit after the system went live took forty minutes. The previous one had taken three days and a call to his accountant. "I went into this to be a distiller," he said. "I'd accidentally become a bookkeeper. Now I'm a distiller again."