Balmenach owners invest £4m in green upgrades at Cromdale distillery
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An ambitious £4 million upgrade at Balmenach has placed the historic distillery by Cromdale amongst the greenest operating in the Scotch whisky industry today.
Owner International Beverage Holdings Ltd has invested in an integrated system of innovative technology at the site which produces nearly three million litres of alcohol per year for the company’s own blends as well as the blended Scotch market.
It is also home to the company’s super-premium well-known Scottish gin, Caorunn.
At the heart of the project is a new Anaerobic/Aerobic Digestion (AD) Plant which uses micro-organisms to break down the liquid co-products of whisky production – pot ale and spent lees – allowing them to be processed on site.
This process produces clean bio-methane gas which feeds a Combined Heat & Power (CHP) Engine to generate power for the distillery and the Grid, integrated with an existing biomass boiler which uses locally-sourced wood pellets to produce zero-carbon steam for the system.
Having paused the development during the Covid pandemic, the site is now fully operational.
IBHL said the investment is having an immediate impact in terms of significantly reducing the distillery’s overall carbon footprint.
Managing director Malcolm Leask commented: ‘The completion of our £4m project at Balmenach leads our ambition to de-carbonise production and achieve industry leading standards of sustainability in the future.
“Sustainability is a long held and central commitment in our business – from the Dow Jones Sustainability Index listing of our parent company ThaiBev to the daily efforts of our distillery teams across Scotland – to respect and care for the local land, lochs and rivers that surround them.
“This is one of the industry’s oldest distilleries and it wasn’t built for efficiency.
“But nearly 200 years on, the improvements we are seeing in terms of energy use, emissions and efficiency show just what is possible in sustainability at such a historic site.”
Balmenach was founded in 1824.
A string of benefits
There will be a string of benefits from the new investment at Balmenach – IBHL’s biggest in sustainable whisky production to date.
These include:
• greater water efficiency – the system cleans and returns 40 per cent of processing waters back to the distillery’s watercourse, the Cromdale Burn, which is a tributary of the River Spey:
• Reducing road transportation – IBHL has said there will be a ‘drastic’ drop in the need for heavy goods vehicle movement at the site. This will equate to removing 12 tankers from roads in Badenoch and Strathspey every week – each with a capacity of 25,000 litres.
• Improved energy efficiency – results to late 2022 report a reduction in the distillery’s energy use from 7.8kWh to 6.8kWh per litre of alcohol produced.
• Reduced Co2 emissions – from 1.5kg to 0.5kg per litre of alcohol produced.
• More efficient use of co-products – the AD plant produces a permeate stream, providing nutrient rich bio-solids for use as fertiliser by local farmers in the strath.
Sean Priestley, the company’s group distillery manager, explained: ‘At IBHL there is a culture of genuine accountability for the environmental impact of our production process, which means we have been striving for cleaner, greener whisky production many years ahead of the current Scotch Whisky Association’s sustainability target of net zero by 2040.
“The system we’ve built at Balmenach has been challenging, but a combination of investment, innovation, partnership working and perseverance are paying off, resulting in the significant reductions we are able to report in emissions and energy use today, which will only increase over time.’.
