Our Environmental Story
Introduction
Envy Distilling is strongly motivated by our environmental and sustainability principles. As a small rural distiller, we believe that we have adopted a number of practices and made choices that may be interesting small-scale examples of how our industry can adapt to environmental pressures and expectations. We have also adapted our business around the environmental constraints that we have chosen, which may be instructive to other businesses beyond the behaviour of making capital investments in existing practices.
Distilling is a particularly energy-intensive business. We are keen to support all industry efforts to curb emissions, reduce resource consumption and waste, and support business growth without incurring a penalty to our environment or climate.
The distillery and cellar door reflect our key principles and values, including environmental sustainability and self-sufficiency. We offer tours of the craft-scale facilities, on non-production days, to showcase our approach and practices.
Our core values are:
- Community: Our business builds on the unique characteristics of our community, complementing and expanding the tourism base and depth of engagement.
- Support Local: Our business buys from local winemakers and producers wherever possible, cross-promoting related businesses in the area such as wineries, breweries, dining experiences, accommodation, and food producers.
- Sustainability: Our business adheres to minimising waste, renewable energy, and self-sufficiency.
- Traditional craft: Our business will borrow from the traditions of small-scale craft producers, maintaining emphasis on the craft of distilling.
We are proud of the creative solutions we have implemented and love to talk to visitors, peers and other interested parties about what we’ve done and why.
Sustainability Initiatives
Envy Distilling has established a number of sustainability initiatives, following a core ethos of our business, and we continue to building this out further with new plans for land improvement and footprint minimisation.
Energy
When establishing Envy Distilling, we faced a decision whether to invest in bringing a new power connection onto our rural property, or direct that investment into creating our own off-grid capability. These investments were not equal, but comparable in magnitude. We chose the latter, and as a result, Envy Distilling is 100% off-grid and self-sufficient, powered by solar power (blog). We have 17kW of solar panel capacity, supported by 24kWh of lithium-based battery storage. The below graphic shows the behaviour of a large distilling run on our larger 300L wine still (“Madam”), during the non-ideal conditions of mid-Autumn.
Figure 1: Power usage, generation, and battery support.
This modest energy system also supports our cellar door and sales operations (refrigeration, ice-making, café and entertainment) on non-distilling days, our tiny-house tourism accommodation, and will soon be powering our personal dwelling (in construction).
We have an 8.8kW backup generator installed and set to automatically support any energy shortages. However, this has never been needed or used for distillery operations, and we plan our production days to align with available energy to ensure we remain solar-powered only.
So far, our off-grid renewable power has avoided 6.5T of CO2 emissions for our small distillery’s operations. Our sustainable energy approach constrains our maximum still capacity, currently 300L for our largest 9kW still (IECEx rated), and hence production batch-sizes. It also means that we only choose distilling days that provide sufficient sunshine to power our facility. In our central Victorian location, with ample clear sunny skies, this has presented minimal inconvenience or delays in production. We believe that these constraints are a good representation of business adaptations to sustainable practices, and can scale-up to apply for larger businesses than ours.
Figure 2: CO2 emissions avoided over past 12-months
We are aware of some off-grid distilleries that are powered by CO2-producing combustion (e.g. firewood, natural gas), and others that are carbon-neutral through a combination of carbon offset credits and purchasing contracts with renewable energy producers. However, as far as we have investigated, Envy Distilling is the only distillery in Australia that is both off-grid, and 100% powered by emissions-free solar. This makes us unique, and we advocate this approach to all tourism visitors as a demonstration of sustainable approaches to an energy-intensive business.
Water
Both energy and water are precious resources for Envy Distilling, to be carefully conserved. Our off-grid and self-sufficiency status also applies to water supply. All water used at Envy Distilling is captured rainwater. For the distillery, we rely on one 27kL main rainwater tank, using double-filtration and UV-sterilisation for public consumption safety.
Our distillery uses a closed-loop cooling circuit for our traditional Worm Tub style condensers. This consists of 3,000L sterilised rainwater stored across 3 IBC containers, connected in a stepped cascade fashion. This stepped cascade enforces thermal separation from incoming hot water, to an intermediate warm tank, and final cool tank which is then pumped back into the Worm Tub condenser. This setup has the capacity to absorb the approximately 70-80kWh of heat generated by the distilling runs in our larger 300L wine still (“Madam”), raising the temperature of the “hot” IBC beyond 70ºC, while keeping the “cool” IBC below 22ºC throughout the distilling run. The majority of that captured heat is released into the ambient air overnight, suggesting the potential to run our largest still back-to-back every day. However, in practice we leave a day’s rest in between distillation runs to allow for a complete cool-down, as well as other cleaning and reset procedures. The smaller 100L spirit still (“Lady”) presents no challenges in this setup.
Figure 3: Closed-circuit water cooling with thermal separation
Our choice to implement this cooling design was intentional to avoid large consumption of fresh water, which is frequently unavailable for our (often dry) central Victorian climate, and avoidance of expending additional electrical energy in refrigerated cooling plant.
Recovery & Upcycling of Imperfect Wine
Envy Distilling exists within the well-regarded Heathcote wine region. Many wineries produce wines that do not meet their brand, price or consumer expectations and usually dispose of such wine on-site (e.g. disperse over vineyard or paddocks). Examples of wine received have included (i) inconsistent vintages that depart from taste expectations, (ii) surplus stock that has not sold within storage timeframes, (iii) new wine affected by production issues creating certain undesirable features.
As a distillery also focused on grape-based spirits, and eventual production of regionally-characteristic brandy, Envy Distilling regularly meets with local winemakers to obtain their imperfect wines which would otherwise be disposed. Some of this wine is capable of producing fine spirits such as aged brandy, and other wines may be upcycled into gins, liqueurs, and other flavoured products.
We recognise that some of the imperfect wine will prove to be unusable for spirits production too, and after confirming this, we can then choose to dispose of the wine as originally intended. However, part of our sustainability ethos is to intervene and experiment, to avoid both waste and duplicated production of wine-for-distilling.
Waste Treatment
Envy Distilling has no reticulated sewer service, and as much waste as possible is treated on-site. Liquid wastes from distillery production, such as stillage/vinasse is tested for low alcohol content (<2%) and acidity, and if within or adjusted to acceptable limits, is dispersed across our 20-acre farm. Dispersion is evenly distributed across our vineyard, fruit trees, and other areas to avoid accumulation or concentration of undesirable minerals or toxins. For the very low volumes of such waste produced by our business (<3,000L/year), this is a safe and sustainable approach, as also practiced by majority of nearby wine producers (see 4.3 above).
Some spent gin botanicals are sometimes re-used to produce “botanical marmalade”, infusing the used but still flavourful botanicals through the locally-sourced citrus produced by our neighbours. The remaining spent botanicals are valued as sources of organic matter, and are dispersed throughout our vineyard to help build the carbon content of the clay-rich soil.
Our site’s worm-farm septic system is used for treatment of liquid wastes unrelated to distilling production – such as cleaning-water, toilets and cellar door uses. The system is also capable of composting nitrogen-rich solid food waste, such as our spent botanicals, although this is under-utilised at present.
Envy Distilling has an aim of reducing or avoiding plastic waste whenever possible (blog). In pursuit of this, our business chose paper-based bottle labels and tamper-evident seals, rather than heat-shrink caps and more glamourous glossy/reflective labels. Our shipping materials, including shipping boxes, labels, and bottle wadding, are all paper-based – and Envy Distilling has invested as minor shareholders in the supplier, Heaps Good Packaging. Even our packing tape is a non-plastic cellulose polymer.
Recycling
As a producer of bottled spirits, Envy Distilling was not subject to the recently introduced Victorian Container Deposit Scheme (CDS). However, in response to this we introduced our own container return scheme to both encourage return customers, and to reward customers in bringing back our valuable glass bottles (blog). Our 700ml bottles are premium products, containing approximately 1kg of high-quality glass, at a cost to us of $2.95/unit.
Any customer that brings back an empty Envy Distilling 700ml bottle to our distillery door, in reusable condition, will receive $5 off their purchase of a replacement 700ml bottle of spirits. Customers also receive an extra $2.50 for each additional bottle returned, or if one is returned without making a new purchase. This program has been utilised by a few loyal customers, and offers a greater customer proposition (minimum $2.50/unit) than the CDS ($0.10/unit).
Returned bottles are thoroughly cleaned and sanitised, if in suitable condition, for reuse in new spirit products. Bottles in unsuitable condition for reuse are sent to a partner business specialising in making beautiful gift candles from upcycled spirits bottles, for subsequent resale to visitors at our distillery door.
Figure 4: Upcycled Envy Distilling bottles, now beautiful gift candles
Farming and Land Care
In addition to the many environmental and sustainability initiatives above, Envy Distilling also undertakes a number of farm-related projects to sustain, renew, and support our business and local environment.
The eastward portion of our site contains a seasonal creek under an Environmental Overlay. We have sectioned off approximately 8-acres (40%) of our property from further human development, which will be progressively built out with denser native vegetation and supports our 6 llamas. We chose llamas due to their soft-padded feet minimising impact on soil/grass disturbance, low water/nutrition needs that suit the central Victorian native climate, and low parasitic load as a result their behaviour of using shared midden heaps (toilets) away from their feeding areas. This stockpile of manure is then re-distributed as fertiliser for our vineyard and fruit orchard.
We have established a small 1-acre vineyard and fruit orchard over the past 2 years. At maturity, the citrus and other fruits will be processed as gin botanicals, and the grapes processed into wine as a small-scale source of alcohol for our spirit (brandy) production and/or spirit infusions such as Shiraz Gin.
An owner of Envy Distilling, Nathan is also a registered apiarist maintaining a small number of bee hives. While enjoying some self-produced honey is a definite benefit, these hives were also established as an environmental service to increase pollination rates for the native vegetation, vineyard, and fruit orchard. We are soon establishing a native “bee garden” nearby the hives, to ensure the bees have adequate food at all times of the year.
Figure 5: Bees hard at work at our farm
