People Talk a lot about Climate Change

Most of it’s negative. But I’m actually quite optimistic. I’m going to tell you why, and of course, as this is The Whisky Road, it involves a distillery.

I’ll start with a little background, I’m a chemist. During my studies we’d have all these lectures and learn all these little tidbits. For instance the electrification of the Haber Process. Basically, the Haber process makes artificial fertilizer for farming. It’s one of the world's most energy-intensive and most used processes. In fact, it is 2% of global energy usage. For context, transport is about 20%. So if you think of all the cars driven daily, the use of this process is equivalent to 1/10. If we could electrify the process, it would use 30% of the energy it currently consumes. Imagine if we could get rid of 1.4% of global emissions. Just like that. Small changes CAN make a massive difference. (Should probably say they’re researching this, it just doesn’t ‘work’ so to speak, yet.) Now, in the world of whisky, we don’t do half measures.

Because that would be 12.5 ml and what’s that but a sad evening. This distillery, I assure you, is not doing things by half measure.

Bus Distillery in the Netherlands started from the ground up. Their entire focus is on making every aspect of whisky production as sustainable as possible. And when I said from the ground up, I mean literally. They started with the soil they grow their barley in.

Grown in-house rather than bought from a central distributor gives them control. Firstly, the usual bells and whistles – organic, pesticide / herbicide free. But then they got experimental. Opting for the use of companion crops.

Companion cropping is when you grow a secondary ‘companion’ crop with your cash (main) crop – much farming research is done by Americans - hence ‘cash crop’, because you can’t just call it corn or barley. No no, it’s the cash crop. Anyway, Bus’s companion crop is clovers, which act as a living mulch within the soil, increasing nitration (good), retaining soil moisture (good), supressing weeds (good) and adding biodiversity (also good). Because they’re plants they also capture CO₂. Not whisky-related, but they also cover the edges of their fields in wild flowers to further increase biodiversity. Now we get to talk about tractors.

The tractors run on Blue Diesel. Yeah, I didn’t know about it either. Blue diesel is a hydrated vegetable oil, which is where you science some vegetable oil and it becomes diesel. It’s not carbon neutral because you’re still burning a fuel but it is sustainable and doesn’t suckle on the teat of non-renewable fossil fuels. The oil comes from waste fry oil used in the distillery’s restaurant. Instead of wasting all the fryer oil they run tractors. A far cooler solution because… tractors. I like tractors.

Now you might be thinking, “Wait that’s only two things?”

And you’d be right.

I got excited, this turned into a three-parter. So I’ve teased you. Talked to you sweetly about tractors and I’ll see you again. In Part 2.