How "green" is your distillery?
This question is fast moving towards being the first question that people are asking distillers new and old.
It's an interesting time, we are now seeing established distilleries innovating with energy efficiency but how achievable is it for a new (or craft) distiller to invest so heavily in expensive bolt-on technology?
Is there another way?
The carbon targets for the whisky industry are seriously ambitious, but can the targets be hit by just adapting existing technologies within the process or will it be necessary for a step change in production techniques?
It's not a question that's easy to answer, we're regularly involved with projects from early stages, looking for opportunities for efficiency thought the building design and layout, but there are inescapable (or are they) parts of the process which never change.
Could we see a new style of whisky which uses a small percentage of the current energy required to produce a litre of spirit?
Think of the change in sprit profile when wormtubs were being (mostly) phased out... A change like that won't be driven by the big players with long established brands but maybe the carbon targets will dictate that for them.
There are people much more clever than me figuring this stuff out, I just ask the stupid questions...