In 2022, the federal government added a designation for distilled-spirits plants in its Energy Star program, and the first handful of distilleries achieved certification in 2023.
Few distilleries—and virtually no craft producers—have chosen to pursue certification since then. Yet the program and accompanying guide remain a useful tool for values-driven operations such as Seattle’s Westland Distillery, which received its B Corp certification shortly after its Energy Star certification. It’s also part of Washington state’s EnviroStars program.
“It's one of those initiatives that is very representative of the core of what we do,” Westland master distiller Tyler Pederson says of Energy Star. “We’re very much trying to be a business that has a sense of place with our raw materials, our cultural influences in how we make our whiskey. Being sustainably minded has always been there.”
That mindset reaches back to before Matt Hoffman and Emerson Lamb founded the distillery in 2011. Lamb’s great-grandfather was heavily involved in the logging industry, and his family remained involved in the paper-and-pulp industry.
“They have a … collection of photos from the timber industry,” Pederson says. “And when I first started [at Westland], they had this giant photo printed up of this guy leaning up against a massive old-growth Douglas fir, and behind him it was just hand scrawled, ‘We are the stewards of all that we inherit.’ That was on the wall Day One walking into this facility, and so it's always been the guiding principle.”
That ethos also connects directly with distilling’s relationship to agriculture.
“We work with farmers, and so it’s very important to figure out that the thing that’s coming to you is going to be able to come to you next year and the year after that, and how to make that work,” Pederson says. “If you can be less demanding and less transactional about that approach, and more relationship-oriented and more focused on the meaningful values for everybody involved, then it’s kind of the right way to do it.”
In conjunction with the rollout of the certification for distillers, Energy Star partnered with the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States (DISCUS) to develop a guide for distillers large and small seeking to lower their energy use. Those distilleries that do meet certain benchmarks are eligible for Energy Star certification, a designation often seen on energy-efficient appliances but also applicable to certain types of buildings and production plants. While some programs, such as B Corp, offer certification based on continual improvement, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency awards Energy Star on a per-unit basis, looking at the resources required to produce one proof gallon of whiskey, one widget, or whatever product is being made.
To start the process, Westland brought in engineers and students from the University of Washington to conduct an energy audit, providing the distillery with consumption data and solutions that the distillery could adopt.
For distillers who want to consider an Energy Star certification, Pederson says there’s an opportunity “to look out and [find] local students and engineers [who] are looking to get some more practice. And when you tell them they’re working on a distillery, their ears are going to perk up more than if it’s a laundromat.”
He says there were a lot of moving pieces and things to optimize. While some available technologies require a significant capital-expenditures budget, many items are small things—such as replacing lights with LED bulbs, putting lights in certain areas on motion sensors, turning off computers, looking for leaks or “always-on” equipment that creates an unnecessary energy drain, or insulating steam lines and other HVAC equipment.
Larger projects that the Westland team undertook included optimizing their chiller system, moving it off of city water to recycle more water within the system and reduce pump use. They transitioned from dumping all their spent pot ale and lees down the drain. They also stopped using their brewing hot liquor to preheat the incoming wash—an approach that put extra demand on the hot-liquor system and required extra water to temper their stillage going to the drain—to using a wastewater-treatment tank that preheats the incoming wash, reducing the demand on the HLT and the boiler.
The new system uses more pumps with a smaller hot-liquor tank, and they now use the old hot-liquor tank for cold liquor and water reclamation. The additional pumps led to a slight uptick in energy use but a decreased demand for natural gas.
“Now we’re using a lot less of the boiler demand to heat our water for the mashing to preheat it for the incoming wash runs,” Pederson says. “Nothing really brand new. … It’s just kind of rethinking how we approach some of the basic processes.”
The Energy Star application itself isn’t difficult, he says. It’s largely a process of providing utility bills for recent years and being open about production numbers, which could be a hurdle for a distiller who wants to hold their cards close.
“We did share with them our proof gallons on the things that we’re producing so they could backtrack that and match that to our energy consumption,” he says. “It’s our plant energy-performance indicator, with our production volumes and also the energy source and energy costs associated with that, so that they could graph that out.”
From there, the Energy Star team compares the plant to a low-efficiency plant, a standard plant, and a high-efficiency plant to gauge where an individual distillery falls on the spectrum and the level of certification for which it would qualify.
Westland’s former compliance manager and sustainability officer, Melanie Gourley, spearheaded the initiative. However, Pederson says that Energy Star or any other similar program requires buy-in throughout the organization, in every department, to ensure success.
“You do have to find the champion,” he says. “There’s got to be someone on your team who can lead this and then find and proselytize other champions within the teams because they’re not going to be able to have eyes on everybody. Also, you don’t necessarily want someone being the referee for the entire company.”
That distillery-wide effort means that every team needs to do its part.
“You need to find stakeholders on every team, every level, to get buy-in,” Pederson says. “If the people at the top, if the administrators and the directors of the company aren't really bought in, then everybody else is going to see that. That’s kind of the biggest hurdle. If there isn’t someone at every level modeling that, then it’s going to be really hard to be consistent about not really enforcing it but making it part of the culture.”
The initiative has been a solid success at Westland, Pederson says, and the team is proud of what they’ve accomplished. The distillery’s natural gas usage is down by more than 50 percent, and its water usage is down 58 percent for every proof gallon of whiskey they produce. Meanwhile, yields are up 36 percent because of mash-bill redesign and other adjustments.
On the balance sheet, raw-materials costs are down 18 percent because Pederson is moving away from some of the specialty malts imported from the United Kingdom. He says their blender recently did triangle testing on younger spirit comparing the new grain bill to the old, and they found no statistical difference.
“We’ve made some big swings and big changes,” he says, “and it’s actually turning out to work.”