Diageos Green Touch at Roseisle Distillery

[William]

Diageo, who is investing £40m to develop the distillery at Roseisle in Morayshire, creating 25 jobs and introducing a green touch in the shape of renewable energy as the power source.

Work reached a crucial stage this week with the installation of the traditional distillery signpost - 14 copper stills with their hand crafted tuba style shoulders. A team of coppersmiths at Diageo's Abercrombie workshops spent four months making the 25ft high stills, carefully hammering the rounded shoulders into shape by hand.

They accompanied the stills, each weighing five to six tonnes, to help installation in a stillhouse designed to ease maintenance. "Traditional coppersmith skills have a huge influence on the spirit that is produced," said Brian Higgs, Diageo's malt distilling director.

Diageo has already signalled an increase in green investment with a £65m renewable technology programme at Scotland's biggest distillery, Cameron Bridge in Fife, to reduce carbon emissions by 56,000 tonnes. The facility will recover 98pc of steam and 80% of electrical power at the distillery, reducing water and energy consumption.

Other plants could follow. Diageo has two grain and 27 malt distilleries in Scotland, producing nearly 50m cases of leading brands of Scotch and white spirits and more than 6m cases of ready-to-drink brands. There is capacity to store up to 7m casks of maturing spirit.

Overall, Diageo is investing £100m in Scotland where it employs 4,500 people.

Source: The Telegraph

[islayonspey]

[William]

Hopefully there will be no closures or job losses Rene but only time will tell. If Diageo do not want to keep all these distilleries running i am sure other companies would be able to make them profitable given the worldwide boom in demand for whisky.

If anyone wants to know a bit more about the new Roseisle distillery near Elgin there is a good video you can see on the BBC website:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/7605643.stm

William

[William]

Diageo will start making spirit in January at Roseisle as its new 40 million pound plant seeks to meet the booming global demand for scotch whisky.

The world's biggest whisky maker will fire up the stills at its Roseisle distillery in north-east Scotland early in the new year, moving to full capacity by April which will make it the joint-largest individual malt whisky distillery in Scotland.

"We have seen three to four years of sustained significant growth of the entire whisky category. There is growth going forward, now is the time to go forward in production," Diageo's malt distilling director Brian Higgs said in an interview.

This upturn in growth has come across many regions including developed markets such as the United States and also emerging ones like Brazil, Russia, India and China, and comes after years of more pedestrian growth through much of the 1990's.

Diageo owns the world's best-selling whisky Johnnie Walker which saw sales soar 12 percent last year to top 1 billion pounds for the first time, while its high-priced whiskies have grown 15 percent annually over the last three years.

Now the world's No 1 alcoholic drinks group which generates a third of its profit from scotch is building its 28th malt distillery in Scotland producing whiskies which by 2012 may be included in blends like Johnnie Walker Red, J&B and Bell's.

Set to produce 10 million litres of spirit a year at full production, the new distillery will match the biggest in the industry such as privately-owned Glenfiddich and Pernod Ricard's plan to double the size of its Glenlivet distillery.

Diageo's Higgs stressed there is no reason why the Roseilse malt could not be use in all of Diageo's blends but as it will be need to be aged three years before being called scotch whisky, the first blends will not be available until 2012.

Diageo chose Roseilse, near Elgin on the Moray Firth coast, as it was already the site of one of its four Scottish malting plants, and combining the two plants would create big energy efficiencies.

Project manager Mike Jappy said it was close to reaching its aim of building the new distillery so that the combined distillery and malting plant used no more fossil fuels than the malting plant alone. Hot water from distilling will be re-used in the malting plant while waste barley grains will be burnt in a bio-mass plant to provide energy.

Diageo said the 14 stills at Roseilse will give it the flexibility to produce two types of malt whisky by altering fermentation times and contact time with copper in the stills -- a light Speyside type similar to Diageo's best-selling Cardhu malt and a second heavier Speyside type, similar to Cragganmore.

William

[Pavel_Maslyukov]