Australian Distillers Association

STUART GREGOR, PRESIDENT

THE ADA AND SUSTAINABILITY

2019 might just be the year of the Australian distillery. Membership of the Australian Distillers Association will top 200 this calendar year and we think there will be more than 140 operating distilleries in every state and territory creating some of the world’s best spirits.

Already in 2019 one of our founding members Sullivan’s Cove has been voted the World’s Best Single Malt for the third time, and one of our newest members Never Never Distilling was crowned World’s Best Classic Gin in London, of all places. That’s a pretty good start to the year!

And our industry is one that takes its responsibility seriously; our responsibility to our land, our environment and our customers. Ours is a pretty efficient industry but we can use quite a bit of water and power and almost every Australian distillery we have contacted has told us of their effortsto reduce their footprint. The stories are many and varied, some frankly are sheer inventive genius.

So here’s some highlights of what a few of our great distilleries are planning for 2019: • Almost all of our members are planning to install solar panels as we know we can be an energy hungry industry and we often have pretty large roofs. We anticipate that more than 50% of the power used at around 50% of our distilleries will be solar powered by the end of 2019. • We are treating and re-treating water more efficiently, more regularly and more economically – if water is our most treasured natural resource and great spirits depend on great water, we understand probably better than anyone, how we must protect and nurture our limited water resource. Thus there are dozens of distillers using bore water to heat their stills, not mains water, and re-using as much of that as possible.

In a few cases they are reducing water use and waste by more than 90%. • We feed our spent botanicals and spent grain to cows, goats, pigs and even brewers, picklers and jammakers. Anything to re-purpose and re-use delicious ingredients. • We are minimising our use of plastic – from the packaging of our goods to customers right through to the types of straws we use when we serve a cocktail at our distillery door. • We are sending our dunder (the wash left over from distilling rum) to feed cattle or to be re-purposed - apparently the steers much prefer this to the water running from the taps – we can only wonder why! In fact, it’s such a good story here it is – right from the distiller’s mouth. • “The recently completed Husk Distillery features a dunder waste system that uses gravity to transfer hot dunder to a cooling tank, here it sits and cools overnight before being transferred, again under gravity, to two 4,000 litre cattle troughs. The property runs 30-40 steers who can choose to drink the diluted dunder or fresh water. However, come harvest time when the dunder is flowing the choice seems pretty straightforward for these steers. They get very excited and lap up the nutritious broth. Their coats shine and they’ve been described by many as the best fed cattle in the valley.” • And the list goes on.

We are a progressive, vibrant conscientious and formidable industry, with a great sense of humour and also a great sense of responsibility. It’s going to be a bloody great year.