E is for Everything.

Although Bakery Hill is still working very hard to get as much spirit in the barrel as possible, our efforts this year have been focused on the “E” words, Environment and Engineering.

Environment. Global warming and climate change has made us all stop and review how we use our resources and what we can do to reduce our global foot print. With a malt whisky distillery with its dependence on energy and water more than ever is it important to look for ways to reduce there consumption.
The two areas that Bakery Hill has chosen this year to tackle has been distillery waste utilisation and condenser water conservation. Here in Melbourne we are experiencing a prolonged drought with dam and reservoir levels dropping to unprecedented lows.
Distillery waste, that is spent grain and pot ale which in the past were just disposed of now are sent to the Yarra Valley and used as stock feed or fertiliser.
The wonderful thing about both of these methods particularly the spent grain is that the waste material remains in the food chain. Both cattle and pigs are the lucky recipients of this wonderful food stuff.
Next year the distillery will look at rainwater harvesting as the distillery has a very large roof area and at the moment huge amounts of water go directly to waste. Solar panels Hmm a little way off perhaps.

Engineering. Bakery Hill completed the installation and commissioning of a 2000L brewery just over 12 months ago to allow us complete control of all steps in the process from milling the grain to bottling the matured whisky. Once this was installed and in operation together with the distillery we had the perfect time and situation to do a complete systems engineering review on all our operations.
For quite a while our operations have been hampered with none standard fittings, pumps not in the perfect location and a myriad of other engineering problems by them selves not large enough to have to stop production to fix.
We “pulled the plug” on production for several weeks just to get it right once and for all.
When the first batch went through after restart start the smiles on the faces all round showed us that it was well worth the down time.
Next year, well maybe the new wash still may yet get installed but there is a heck of lot of whisky to be distilled before then and who knows what the priority will be in 12 months.