When we started Kinglake, we had a rather romantic idea that we'd run the entire distillery on solar power. Reality and the laws of physics had other ideas.
410 O'Grady's Road, the 50-acre property where Kinglake Distillery sits, has always been off-grid. We're a long way from the nearest mains power, and the cost of bringing electricity all the way to the distillery simply didn't make sense.
When we first started designing the distillery, we got very excited about the idea of running the whole thing on solar.
Then we did the maths.
Distilling requires an enormous amount of energy. You're essentially spending hours boiling thousands of litres of liquid and doing that directly with electricity would have required an extraordinary solar and battery system. Our romantic vision of a completely solar-powered distillery quickly disappeared.
Initially, we were pretty disappointed and shelved the idea of sustainability being a major part of what we were doing.
But that didn't sit right.
We didn't start Kinglake with some grand environmental mission; we started it because we wanted to make great whisky. But so much of what makes our whisky distinctive comes from where we make it, and it seemed only right that we should try to make it with as little impact on that environment as reasonably possible.
So instead of concentrating on what wasn't possible, we started looking seriously at what was and more than five years ago, we joined the Australian Government-backed Climate Active program and set about having not just the distillery, but the whisky itself, certified carbon neutral.
That turned out to be quite an undertaking.
The process required us to account for essentially every input ever involved in producing Kinglake whisky and calculate the resulting carbon footprint. We then offset that footprint through recognised carbon projects.
But for us, the more important part was what happened next.
Certification wasn't a one-off exercise. We committed to repeating the process, measuring ourselves again and again, and looking for practical ways to reduce the carbon footprint of every bottle we produce.
And that's where it became genuinely useful.
Over the years it has influenced hundreds of little decisions, and some much bigger ones. We've changed where our bottles are manufactured to reduce freight distances, replaced plastic airbag packaging with paper, introduced refill casks into our maturation programme to reduce the number of barrels shipped from the US, and, where possible, schedule energy-intensive production for sunnier parts of the year so we're running from solar rather than burning diesel.
We're certainly not perfect.
We still use LPG to produce the steam that heats our still, and when there isn't enough sun we still need our diesel generator. Long-distance freight remains part of making whisky in Australia.
The difference is that we know what those things contribute.
By measuring our footprint year after year, we can see where the carbon is actually coming from and concentrate our efforts where they'll make a meaningful difference, rather than simply doing the things that sound good in a marketing brochure.
That's really been our approach to sustainability ever since: pragmatic rather than perfect. Understand our impact, be honest about what we can and can't change, and concentrate on the things where we can make a genuine difference.
When we started down this road, Kinglake became the first Australian whisky distillery to have its whisky certified through Climate Active. Perhaps the most surprising part of the story is that, all these years later, we're still the only one.
We'd genuinely rather not be.
Because if our little off-grid distillery in the mountains can measure what it uses, acknowledge the things it can't yet change, and keep finding ways to do a little better each year, we'd love to see a lot more distilleries doing the same.
