Port Blakely Essential Oils — Otago

Gareth Mackay is production manager at Port Blakely NZ Essential Oils, a forestry company that turned sustainable Douglas-fir harvesting into a world-class distillery operation, tucked into 4,000 hectares of hill country near Morrisons, North Otago.

The site needed purpose-built infrastructure for a process nobody had done here before:  steam distilling essential oil from Douglas-fir offcuts on a remote block that experiences snow, hail, and hard nor'wester winds most of the year.

Three separate buildings were required. Each had a different job, but all needed to endure through winter without fail.

Gareth and the Port Blakely team were looking for a strong structure and a proven track record over anything else.

"Being a forestry company, we predominantly want to be focused around wood, and Alpine really ticked the box with their buildings, their very strong structure and a lot of good customer reviews. I've talked to a few people about what they put out as a product, and that's why we opted for them.”

Alpine's willingness to sit down and design around a genuinely unusual brief sealed it.

"For our distillery, it's not just an out-of-the-box sort of setup. We sat down with Alpine [to work through] a few different things."

Built For the Future. The distilling shed is a lean-to pitch,  but designed specially so it can be doubled up to a gable if the operation scales.

"It's been sort of future-proofed, so it's a lean-to at the moment, but we can double it up to gable if we want to double our capacity."

Building Height. The boiler shed has an eight-metre stud to provide clearance for the service gantries around Port Blakely's Hurst biomass boiler.

"How long? How high? Nothing was a drama; they just wanted us to get the best design for our investment. And if we have the option to change as we grow, then that's great."

Nothing Was a Problem. When the imported boilers arrived later than the expected timeline, Alpine reprogrammed the installation around it rather than holding up the project.

"We left half the roof and one wall off the building and then completed the boiler install before sealing it up. Once again, this was no drama for Alpine, and they were happy to accommodate this change to their build process while we waited for the boiler to arrive from the States."

Built to Endure the Weather. Snow, frost, and big nor'wester winds are common at Port Blakely. The buildings were designed to endure this and built to last.

"We get it all up here: rain, hail, sleet, snow. We get big snowfalls on occasion and plenty of wind too. And these buildings, they stand up to everything."

All three buildings are performing year after year, keeping operations running smoothly at Port Blakely even in the depths of winter.

And the build process itself became a highlight of the project. Alpine's Install team of Zachary, Zac, and Jack worked with a level of organisation Gareth hadn't seen before.

"The Alpine guys have really got their processes nailed down. Everything arrived on-site labelled and ready to go. The three guys on the job worked really efficiently and didn't need to run back to base for a single item. Absolutely everything was accounted for from the start. It was pretty amazing to see the buildings come together as they did."

For Gareth, it comes back to trusting the people doing the work.

"When you start a project like this, you know it's going to be a process. You know you're going to have questions and potential challenges, like the site or the weather. You know that whoever you engage to complete the construction, you're going to be working closely with them for a while. So, if that's the case, then you better make sure you're working with a great team who are the experts at what they do. I'm really pleased to say that, for us, Alpine Buildings were those people, one hundred percent of the way."