Wooden barrels are what make the magic happen in your favorite bottle of whisky . They’re also the source of a long-standing problem in the spirits industry: They leak. A lot.

At Bacardi Limited , the world’s largest privately held spirits company, barrel leakage is a massive headache. Consider the company’s Dewar’s blended Scotch whisky brand (just one of the dozens it owns). Most of the time, Dewar’s will have over 100 warehouses full of aging barrels of whisky, 25,000 casks in each one. Barrels will mature for three to 12 years, and according to Angus Holmes, Bacardi’s whisky category director, many of those barrels will develop a leak at some point in their life.

That’s not great for business, says Holmes. “How do we make sure that when we come to get that cask, it’s got as much whisky in it as possible?”

Given the imperative to find so-called leakers before a decade has come and gone—and taken all the whisky with it—Bacardi engaged the National Manufacturing Institute Scotland.…