As a natural extension of our commitment to “doing the right thing” and to quantify all the steps we have take to reduce our environmental impact, we wanted to become fully carbon neutral. We partnered with Climate Neutral to assess our climate impact from our farmers’ fields to our shops’ shelves and everything in between. In April 2021 we officially became America’s first Climate Neutral certified distillery!

All of the electricity used in our building is provided by our solar array, which we installed in 2012 before the distillery was even completely built.

We have super-insulated all of the heated areas of the distillery to R-36 in the walls and R-90 in the roof.

We installed all double pane windows and doors with low-e coating throughout the distillery, carefully air sealed.

We use separated-combustion space heaters where necessary so we only pull in outside air for the heaters — this is both more healthy, and a whole lot safer. We use these very rarely — the distillery is so well insulated that just the process heat is retained for days.

We use minimum 80% efficiency gas units for steam production for the stills. We use renewable natural gas created from the methane produced by the organic material in farms and landfills.

All of our spent grain and stillage (liquid from the still) are taken to a biodigester to create clean electricity. All of our cleaning and process water is captured, tested, and pH checked to be sure we are not introducing BOD (biochemical oxygen demand, a pollutant) into the waste stream. The result? Our 10,000 square foot industrial distillery puts out less waste than an average residential home.

Distilleries use a great deal of water for chilling; some just use water and run it down the drain (or dump it into a local river). Water conservation is an important part of our sustainability story, and we designed our process to conserve as much as possible. All of our chill water is in a closed loop, housed in highly insulated tanks, and is chilled by a chiller run on electricity from our solar panels… and when Vermont gets chilly, we use a free air chiller to save even more energy.