Ideas brewing of drinks

Take a walk through a distillery and which products do you expect to see being made. Whisky? Gin? Vodka? Maybe a tot of rum these days?

How about medicines? Or biofuels? Or the feedstocks and other raw materials for a 101 different chemical processes?

It’s maybe not as strange an idea as it first sounds.

After all, the chemical process that sits at the heart of both a brewery and a distillery is fermentation – turning the sugars converted from the starch in barley, wheat or other raw materials into a drinkable alcohol called “ethanol”.

But alcohol isn’t the only substance that can be produced through fermentation.

A range of materials needed to make a whole variety of products – from pharmaceuticals to fuels – start their lives during fermentation processes.

Even some of the raw ingredients used to make meat alternatives begin life by being fermented.

During the coronavirus pandemic, dozens of distilleries turned to making hand sanitiser from their alcohol.

Further back, the North British Distillery in Edinburgh – now owned jointly by Famous Grousemaker Edrington and

Johnnie Walker parent Diageo – was reconfigured during the First World War to make acetone, a key ingredient in cordite, an explosive used instead of gunpowder.

The war ended before production began.

As Scotland and the wider UK race to hit their 2045 and 2050 netzero targets by finding alternatives to the raw materials that are currently extracted from oil and gas, could the north’s distilleries be on the verge of diversification to capitalise on fresh business opportunities?

Scott Davies, head of marketing at Briggs of Burton, the famous brewery engineering company that has a base in Forres, Moray, said: “Brewers and distillers were really the pioneers of the first generation of ‘biotechnology’.

“They proved you could control fermentation and micro-organisms like yeasts on an industrial scale to produce consistent products.”

He added: “Making sure the beer in your hand is in fact beer and not acetic acid or some other biochemical is quite a feat of engineering.

“The second generation is then using fermentation to produce biofuels or biopharmaceuticals, or even food.

“Large-scale breweries or distilleries could become biochemical ‘factories’, with greater flexibility in raw materials, and recipes and outputs.

“They could switch from making beer one day and spirits the next to hard seltzer, or food or pharmaceuticals – potentially providing greater resilience to changes in the current and future markets.”

Mr Davies conducted research into biofuels for his doctorate before joining Briggs in 2013, having previously studied biochemistry at HeriotWatt University in Edinburgh.

He added: “In brewing and distilling, your yeast is your workforce.

“That’s why brewers and distillers are experts at keeping yeasts happy through the skill and craft of managing a fermentation. Yeasts are living organisms. If you’re not keeping them fed and happy, don’t be surprised if they revolt or die.

“It’s very different from cracking oil – crude oil doesn’t care how you treat it. If you get all the right equipment and control it, then you can feed sugar to a yeast and control its metabolism to produce alcohol or oils for aviation fuels or antibiotics, or a whole variety of biochemicals.”

Globally, major brewers are already starting to explore diversification.

Anheuser-Busch (AB) InBev – the US brewing giant behind brands including Beck’s, Budweiser, Corona,

and Stella Artois – has entered the precision fermentation market through its ZX Ventures investment arm.

Fermentation firm BioBrew was spun-out from AB InBev in 2019 and signed a research and development agreement with Clara Foods in 2021 to explore “animal-free protein” production.

“In many ways, it’s a bit of a no-brainer,” said Liz Fletcher, director of business engagement and operations at the Industrial Biotechnology Innovation Centre, one of eight innovation centres created by the Scottish Government in 2012 to bring together industry and universities.

She added: “We haven’t had any distilleries coming to us saying they’d like to become fermenters of a different type of product, but it’s not that they don’t have the capabilities.

“They just need to be able to do different types of downstream processing and bring in some skills.

“It’s very viable – it’s just a case of identifying what that high-value fermented product is, aside from ethanol. The technology is there.

“It’s more a case of identifying your market and bringing in the right skills – and we have those in Scotland, because plenty of people know how to do process development and fermentation.”

Gareth Roberts is the founder of Organic

Architects, which has designed distilleries, such as Ardnamurchan, Benbecula, and Woodland on Speyside.

Mr Roberts questioned whether diversifying into other products would appeal to whisky makers.

“If a distillery is doing everything it can to make every drop of spirit that it can, because its product is in such demand, then why should they bother doing anything else?” he said.

“Whisky has got the romance because it’s often tied to a beautiful location. And that’s part of the story for its brand.

“Why would you use all of that capital that you’ve built up in the brand to make something that you could do in a pharmaceuticals plant in the Central Belt?”

While the idea of making other products might appeal more to larger grain distilleries than smaller malt whisky sites, Mr Roberts instead suggested the idea may be of more interest to hardpressed brewers.

He said: “Brewing has its own pressures. It might be interesting for a brewer to be involved in something that, frankly, makes more money.

“There may be opportunities there for brewers to do other things with the same equipment that are higher margin.”

Professor Dawn Maskell, director of the International Centre for Brewing and Distilling at

Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, is encouraging her students to think about whether the yeasts used in brewing and distilling may be put to other uses.

“Brewing is very good at increasing the amount of yeast,” Prof Maskell said, adding: “For each fermentation, you end up with three-to-four times as much yeast as you put in.

“In future, if genetic engineering becomes more acceptable, could you have dormant genes in a yeast that are not active when it is being used to make beer, but are triggered when that yeast gets taken somewhere else to produce other interesting products?”

If you’re not keeping yeasts fed and happy don’t be surprised if they revolt or die

Distillers ventured into making hand sanitiser during the pandemic but Liz Fletcher, left, says they have the capabilities to do more, though Gareth Roberts, above, says they don’t need to.