Unroll a map of Scotland or any other whisky-making nation and it is fascinating to think about why distilleries chose their locations. For some, it will have been proximity to raw materials, such as barley for malting or clean water, while others may have chosen their location for its easy transport links to get their bottles or casks to customers. For a few, location came down to being hidden from the prying eyes of the 18th-century excise men.
Having access to a fuel to heat the stills was another big consideration. In the past, that meant burning wood on a tiny scale for illicit distilling or burning coal to hit the industrial-scale production needed to turn a hobby into a business.
Nowadays, the vast majority of distilleries will heat their stills using steam from a boiler or steam generator, with some opting for steam jackets to warm their stills from the outside, while others prefer steam coils inside their giant copper kettles. Few distilleries will directly fire their stills by lighting a flame underneath.
Over time, coal was replaced by oil and gas to run boilers. If a distillery is near the main gas network then its gas can be delivered through pipes, in the same way as gas-fired boilers run the central heating radiators in urban homes. If a distillery isn’t near the gas network, it could choose to burn liquified petroleum gas (LPG), which is delivered by small road tankers.
A much more common option for rural and island distilleries is to burn fuel oil or kerosene, which again is delivered by tankers. Anyone who has tried to navigate single-track roads and their passing places through the Highlands will recognise the tiny tankers, delivering oil to homes and businesses that for decades have had no other source of heat.
The problem with burning coal, oil, or gas is that they produce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases such as methane, which are contributing to climate change. In order to limit global temperature rises to 1.5ºC above the levels seen before the industrial revolution, countries have agreed to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, which involves not pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and then off-setting any remaining emissions through large-scale tree planting, peat bog restoration, and other natural means, or developing and deploying technology to capture and store carbon dioxide.
Scotland committed to a 2045 deadline, five years ahead of the UK as a whole. The Scotch Whisky Association, the trade body that represents distilleries and the wider industry, went a step further and set a 2040 net-zero goal. But distilling needs significant amounts of heat, and producing that heat requires a lot of fuel, which presents challenges for whisky makers.
“One of the issues with the distilling process is that you have to cycle heat,” explains Gareth Roberts, a distillery consultant and co-founder of Organic Architects, which has helped build a string of distilleries that aim to reduce their impact on the planet, from Ardnamurchan and Benbecula in Scotland to Ahascragh in Ireland. “You heat up to mash, then you need to cool down or you’ll kill the yeast for fermentation, then you have to heat up again for distilling, and then you have to cool down again to condense.
“For most distilleries, this heat cycle involves chucking heat out into the atmosphere — and we don’t see that as crazy at the moment. But, in a few years or decades, we will see wasting heat like this as completely crazy.”
As well as getting the basics right, such as lagging or insulating pipes, some distilleries are already recovering their wasted heat, either using electricity through mechanical vapour recovery (MVR) or using steam through thermal vapour recovery (TVR). TVR can recover about 45 per cent of lost heat, while MVR can reach about 85 per cent. One early adopter was Speyside’s Auchroisk, working with famous brewery engineering firm Briggs of Burton back in 1985, with more recent work being carried out by Briggs at GlenAllachie, also on Speyside, and by Chivas Brothers, Scotland’s second largest distiller and part of French spirits giant Pernod Ricard.
Both MVR and TVR capture waste heat from shell and tube condensers. Any distillery with a worm tub would need to consider how switching to shell and tube might affect the flavour of its spirit. The major consideration for most distilleries, though, is the cost of these systems and the space that is needed to install them.
Ahascragh in Ireland opted for a high-temperature heat pump (HTHP), a souped-up version of the air-source heat pumps being installed in some homes. In a nutshell, a HTHP works like a reverse refrigerator, using a small amount of electricity to run a heat exchanger, producing hot water for fermentation and distillation.
The Irish project was built inside a derelict 200-year-old mill, giving its architects and engineers the chance to design an energy-efficient, low-carbon distillery. It has echoes of Deanston Distillery, north of Stirling, which opened in 1966 in the former Adelphi cotton mill, which was built in 1785. Adelphi had used water to power its electricity turbines since 1949, with Deanston carrying on using the same hydro-electric scheme to power its whisky making.
Struan Mackie and Alex MacDonald, who founded North Point Distillery near Thurso in Caithness in 2020, also made use of what was on their doorstep. They opened their distillery at Forss, a former radio listening station built by the United States Navy in the 1960s and turned into a business and energy park after the Cold War base closed in the 1990s. Forss has six giant wind turbines, which allowed North Point to install electric stills, with electricity used to heat steam jackets.
“We knew choosing electric stills would limit us in terms of overall scale of production, but right now this is the most sustainable method for us,” explains MacDonald. North Point has worked with its still supplier to develop the technology and believes its 2,000-litre wash still is now the largest electric still in the UK.
North Point’s output sits at around 20,000 litres of pure alcohol per year. The company is in the early stages of designing a 400,000-litre distillery on the site, which will need to burn biogas to get the larger stills up to the required temperature before maintaining the heat using electrical steam jackets.
That biogas is likely to come from an anaerobic digestion (AD) plant that is being fine-tuned at Forss. AD involves bacteria consuming natural waste products to make methane, the same gas used in the main network. The waste is coming from several of the distilleries along the Caithness coast, including North Point, Pultney, and 8 Doors.
While Mackie and MacDonald opted to use electricity directly, Iain Stirling and his brothers went in a different direction at their Arbikie Distillery near Arbroath in Angus. The electricity generated by the massive wind turbine on their farm will be used to power an electrolyser, a device that splits water into its constituent oxygen and hydrogen gases, just like the science experiment beloved of so many secondary schools.
Hydrogen can be burned to power a boiler, in the same way as mains gas or LPG. The crucial difference is that the only byproduct from hydrogen is harmless water vapour, rather than the harmful carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases produced when natural gas is burned.
Arbikie already has its wind turbine erected and its hydrogen boiler installed, with the electrolyser expected to be commissioned within the coming weeks. “It will then become a demonstrator project for our other partners within the industry to come and see it, and learn how it works,” explains Stirling.
“It will also allow consumers to learn more about sustainability. The demand is there — I travel the world, and sustainability is a constant conversation with our hotel partners and consumers in retail.”
Arbikie will produce green hydrogen, which is made by using renewable energy to power electrolysis. In contrast, many people within the oil and gas industry are pushing grey or blue hydrogen, which is made by simply ‘cracking’ or separating hydrogen from existing natural gas, leaving the same problem with carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
More broadly, hydrogen isn’t without its critics. Many engineers argue for using renewable electricity directly because it is a more efficient use of energy, rather than adding the intermediate step of producing hydrogen. Yet, from the distiller’s perspective, hydrogen is easier to use because all it requires is a new boiler, with the rest of the whisky production process remaining unchanged, in contrast to the new kit needed for electric stills or HTHPs.
Many distilleries will likely need to consider generating their own electricity on site, using wind turbines or other renewable energy devices. A lack of investment in the electricity grid in the countryside and on islands means expensive upgrades are needed to handle increased demand, often making projects uneconomical.
There are also questions around the production and transportation of hydrogen. While Arbikie can make hydrogen on site, other distilleries are waiting to see whether hydrogen can be generated in a series of regional hubs proposed by the Scottish government and then transported to users aboard road tankers, as happens with kerosene or LPG at present.
In the future, hydrogen may even be used for directly fired stills. Suntory, the spirits giant that owns bourbon brands including Jim Beam, blended labels such as Canadian Club, and Scotch distilleries stretching from Auchentoshan to Laphroaig, recently completed hydrogen trials at its Yamazaki distillery in Japan.
The technique could be brought to Glen Garioch near Aberdeen, which reopened in 2022 after converting its wash still back to direct firing using mains gas. “We had to bring a guy out of retirement to help do it,” laughs Alistair Leckenby, Suntory’s environmental and sustainability manager.
“It’s our belief that direct firing elevates the character of the spirit we’re producing. Steam is around 130oC but when you have a furnace underneath your pot, the interface is about 1,000oC, so you get more intense heat, and you get caramelisation, and really robust character and flavour. Hydrogen can potentially burn even hotter than methane gas.”
Both Arbikie and Suntory received funding for their demonstration projects through the UK government’s Green Distilleries Competition, alongside the Celsius Project, run by the Cornish Geothermal Distillery Company. Matthew Clifford, the company’s founder, is about to close a funding deal that will allow him to build a rum distillery and cask ageing facility at the Eden Project in Cornwall which will utilise energy from its geothermal heating plant.
“This will be an important demonstration project, not just for distilling or the wider food and drink sector, but for all industries,” says Clifford, who was inspired to explore the potential of energy from beneath the Earth’s surface after seeing geothermal power plants in New Zealand during his career as a helicopter pilot.
How to produce the heat needed to run her distillery was also a big question for Annabel Thomas, who founded Nc’nean on her family farm on the Morvern peninsula on Scotland’s west coast. “The site came first — because without this site, I would probably never have started a distillery — but the fuel was a close second,” she says.
Nc’nean burns wood chips in a biomass boiler, which supplies the heat needed for the steam coils inside its stills, with enough left over to heat its offices, too. It makes its own wood chips harvested from trees grown on the surrounding estate as part of commercial forestry, in stark contrast to some of the horror stories about wood pellets made from ancient forests in Canada and the US being shipped to UK biomass power stations.
“If you’ve got trees on site then biomass makes a lot of sense,” adds Thomas, who welcomed visitors from Diageo — Scotland’s largest distiller and owner of brands including Bell’s, J&B, and Johnnie Walker — to her site to see the biomass boiler in action. On a larger scale, Diageo’s revived Brora Distillery in Sutherland also now uses biomass, fuelled by wood chips from the north of Scotland.
In years to come, Roberts from Organic Architects thinks that companies may select sites for their distilleries based on the availability of power, in the same way that iron furnaces opened near the coal pits of the Welsh valleys, or aluminium smelters came to Lochaber to harness its hydroelectricity.
“In places like Campbeltown, where you have an abundance of wind energy, you could see privately owned wind farms and distillers working together,” he says. “Locating distilleries next to wind farms would be a great idea, and I’ve already looked at one place where that could happen.”
Ultimately, location will play a crucial role in whether distilleries opt for electrification or hydrogen. As net zero looms, owners will assess the cost of generating their own electricity or heat against upgrading their network connections to draw power from the national grid.
