When the crowds in seersucker suits, floral prints and fancy hats pack Churchill Downs on Saturday for the 150th running of the Kentucky Derby, the racetrack's managers estimate Derby-goers will down some 120,000 bourbon-based mint juleps.
That's a lot of drinks for a two-minute horse ride.
Kentuckians love their horses, to be sure, but bourbon runs a close second in their hearts. Fun fact: For every person in Kentucky (population 4.5 million) there are nearly three barrels of bourbon aging somewhere in the state at any given moment.
"It is our signature industry," American Whiskey magazine content editor and Louisville resident Maggie Kimberl told Newsweek. Numbers from the Kentucky Distillers Association back her up on that: Bourbon is a nearly $9 billion business in the state, with more than 100 licensed distilleries supporting some 23,000 jobs. "It is one of the biggest economic driving forces in the commonwealth of Kentucky," Kimberl said.
But bourbon puts up some other big numbers that some in the industry are hoping to bring down, and that's the amount of climate pollution from spirits production. Each step of whiskey making, from boiling the mash to bottling the aged bourbon, requires huge amounts of energy. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that, on average, a large distillery consumes as much energy as 7,000 American homes, and most of that has come from fossil fuels.
The Beverage Industry Environmental Roundtable (or BIER—get it?) works with brewers, bottlers and distillers on sustainability and counts some of Kentucky's major bourbon players as members. BIER did a specific assessment of the carbon footprint of whiskey making and found that for each standard-sized bottle of booze produced, about 2,750 grams, or a little more than 6 pounds, of CO2 is released. That's the equivalent of the emissions from driving an average passenger car 7 miles.
Simply put, our Derby party mint juleps and other cocktails are contributing to the climate crisis. That's a problem for bourbon makers who eagerly promote their other sustainability measures such as waste reduction and recycling.
Several distilling companies around the world have started work to lower carbon pollution from their production, and in Kentucky, Bulleit Bourbon has emerged as a leader.
Bulleit, which is owned by international wine and spirits giant Diageo, went with renewable electricity for the facility it built in Lebanon, Kentucky, three years ago. Diageo said the Lebanon facility is the first large-scale whiskey production site in North America to be carbon neutral.
"Our products are contingent on agriculture and clean water, so we have to invest in protecting nature," Jayant Kairam, vice president of society at Diageo North America, told Newsweek.
In March, the U.S. Department of Energy awarded Diageo $75 million to help electrify more of its operations, including another Bulleit distillery in Shelbyville, Kentucky, with the goal of making it carbon neutral by 2026.
The project will help Bulleit and Diageo make progress on ambitious climate goals while demonstrating clean technology from partner company Rondo Energy, an innovative approach that could have widespread application in other industries.
But in a deeply conservative state closely tied to fossil fuels, the distillers could find themselves over a political barrel as they push for more climate-friendly ways to make whiskey.
A Heat Battery for Green Bourbon
Kentucky skies shifted from sunshine to spring showers on a recent afternoon as tourists on Kentucky's "Bourbon Trail" of distillery tours boarded a bus at Bulleit's Shelbyville facility.
"Bulleit is all about sustainability," said the tour leader, who called herself "Claire with the red hair," and evidence of that sustainability is all around. She explained that the bus is powered by propane, a lower-emissions fuel than diesel.
Elsewhere at Bulleit facilities, Diageo is switching to electric vehicles, and Bulleit is home to the first industrial solar array in Kentucky's Shelby County. The company stresses the importance of locally sourced corn and has a tree-planting program to help replace the oaks that go into making the charred bourbon barrels that can only be used once to make bourbon.
Even the rolling grassy fields and woods of the distillery's grounds are much like a nature preserve.
"This is Bulleit Bourbon, but we might see some wild turkeys," the guide said by way of an inside joke; many of the Bourbon Trail travelers also visit the Wild Turkey distillery just to the east.
Inside, visitors snap pictures of the massive vats used to cook the corn, barley and rye, and the fermenting containers where carefully curated strains of yeast do their magic on the mash. Then there is the centerpiece of the operation, a vintage copper still towering upward through several floors of the building.
These crucial parts of distilling require the most energy and, specifically, energy in the form of heat.
"Three-quarters of all the energy that industry uses is not electricity, it's heat," Rondo Energy CEO John O'Donnell told Newsweek in a Zoom interview. Heat might run a refinery, forge steel, pasteurize milk or distill whiskey, and for the most part, it comes from carbon-emitting fossil fuels such as coal or natural gas.
Climate policy experts call these corners of heavy industry the "hard-to-decarbonize" segments because the massive recent growth in clean electricity does not easily match the industry's energy needs.
Rondo is working to fill that gap, O'Donnell explained.
"Replace boilers and furnaces that burn fossil fuel with boilers and furnaces that work just the same way, but they run on intermittent renewable electricity," he said.
Rondo's technology is a renewable energy heat battery, and it is, by design, remarkably simple. O'Donnell said his many years in clean tech taught him a lot of painful lessons.
"One of them was, don't be too innovative," he said. Plainer but proven ideas have a better chance of getting financed, he said, and the simple idea behind the heat battery is brick.
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Rondo builds brick modules with electrical heating elements, not unlike those in a toaster, that are powered by renewable wind or solar. Clean electricity available only when the wind blows or the sun shines then becomes heat available whenever it is needed.
"You can heat it to high temperatures," he said, and a superheated pound of brick will store as much energy as a lithium-ion battery pack of the same size. "It costs a few percent what that battery pack does, because again, it's not trying to do fancy chemistry," O'Donnell said. "It's just heating something."
In the wonky world of clean-energy technology, heat batteries like Rondo's are, well, hot. So much so that MIT Technology Review readers picked thermal batteries as the reader's choice addition to its latest list of breakthrough technologies.
Part of the buzz around hot bricks is the idea that they could be widely applied to those other "hard-to-decarbonize" sectors. That's part of the reason the Department of Energy chose to fund the Bulleit project. A Rondo heat battery, powered by solar panels Diageo plans to install nearby, will not only replace the natural gas the distillery currently uses, but it will also demonstrate the capability to cut climate pollution in a range of industries.
"About 90 percent of world industrial heat use can be provided by the heat batteries that we build," O'Donnell said.
Climate Branding in a Fossil Fuel State
Diageo's Kairam was careful to point out that the company is early in its process of adding the heat battery, and he stressed that the clean-energy approach is a "business-driven decision."
Diageo ranks 78th among companies in the food and beverage sector on Newsweek's list of the World's Most Trustworthy Companies. Another prominent liquor company with bourbon holdings in Kentucky, Louisville-based Brown-Forman, ranks 22nd in the consumer goods sector on Newsweek's list of America's Most Responsible Companies, and boasts a score of 82 out of 100 on environmental concerns.
Both companies have set ambitious climate targets to boost their clean-energy use and cut carbon emissions.
However, distillers and other companies in Kentucky with strong environmental goals must be careful not to run afoul of the state's fossil-fueled power base. Kentucky is one of the country's top five coal producers and has robust oil and gas industries, and many lawmakers are often hostile to competition from clean energy.
Starting this year, people who own electric vehicles in Kentucky must pay an extra tax on top of the usual auto taxes because, as state lawmakers reason, those drivers don't purchase enough gasoline. (Gas taxes support the state's highway fund.)
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The state has joined lawsuits challenging the EPA's power to regulate CO2 emissions from power plants. Kentucky's state treasurer threatened last year to divest state funds from banks that have climate-friendly investment policies, accusing them of trying to "choke off the lifeblood of capital" to the state's fossil fuel industries.
Still, there are signs that bourbon is beginning to cut its fossil energy consumption. When the EPA announced last year the first distilleries to be certified under its Energy Star energy conservation program, more than half were in Kentucky.
Elsewhere, low-carbon distilling has been slowly gaining momentum for several years. Flor de Caña, Nicaragua's rum maker, turns leftover sugar cane into biogas to generate renewable energy. Tattersall Distilling went solar for its facility in Wisconsin making whiskey, rum and liqueurs. Scotland's Ardgowan Distillery plans carbon-negative operations with a combination of clean fuels, heat recovery and CO2 capture.
Two other distilleries in Scotland are planning to convert a craft gin operation so that it uses clean hydrogen as fuel. The Scots call the new venture HySpirits, which hints at how lowering emissions could help raise a distillery brand's profile.
Branding is crucial and carefully considered in the spirits business. Bottles of Bulleit, for example, have a slightly crooked label.
"That's not an accident," Claire the tour guide explained at the Shelbyville visitor center. The idea is that the crooked orange or green label will catch a consumer's eye on shelves crowded with other bourbon brands.
Kimberl of American Whiskey magazine mused that a low-carbon claim on a label could play a similar role.
"Some people go into a store looking for a product that is climate friendly," she said. "Then that kind of brings them into the fold of being a whiskey drinker."
People in Kentucky tend to have strong opinions about bourbon and the drinks mixed with it. You'll need a copper cup for that Kentucky mule, you might hear, and mind how you muddle the cherries in that old fashioned.
At a Derby party in the not-too-distant future, the carbon emissions from your mint julep might become just as important.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
