Adnams – the road to sustainability

a)    Distribution Centre

b)    Energy Efficient Brewery

c)    Anaerobic Digester – PV array

d)    The Copper House Distillery

The issues around sustainability, energy and resource use for any Distillery broadly fall into the following categories:

-    Energy to power the stills
-    Cooling water to chill the condensers
-    Waste heat in the cooling outflow
-    Stillage – or waste byproduct from stripping and distillation runs

At Adnams we not only found ourselves with a great location for our micro distillery, placed in the centre of the picturesque town of Southwold with its sea views, but also found a unique solution to the heat energy, cooling water and waste heat conundrum that taxes all would be distillers.

Every day at Adnams Sole Bay Brewery, we heat large amounts of clean water to enable us to wash and sterilise our empty beer casks returning from pubs before refilling with fresh beer.

By placing our micro distillery in the loop, we use that same heat to first heat the stills to feed our cask washing machine.

This is a great solution as we now get two uses out of the input heat and water consumption.

The other big issue for distilleries is what to do with the Stillage or waste liquid left once the alcohol has been removed.

At Adnams we put this liquid together with other waste by products from our brewery and pass it all through our Anaerobic Digester to make green methane gas.

Adnams has the first Anaerobic Bio Digester in the UK to put “green methane gas” back into the main grid supply network after supplying its own needs for powering  the Brewery boiler and in time, our Distribution vehicle fleet.

In essence, we make eco gas to supply the steam to power the brewery and the distillery.