Western Morning News (Saturday)
Hot toddy: geothermal rum distillery wins funding
THE Cornish company behind plans to build a rum distillery inside a biome heated by geothermal energy has received £75,000 from the Government to kickstart the project.
The Cornish Geothermal Distillery Company’s Celsius project is a 100% sustainable scheme to geothermally mature and distil rum using heat generated by the UK’s first geothermal power plant.
The ambitious scheme has won one of the biggest research and development grants awarded in the Government’s Green Distillery Competition.
The Cornish Geothermal Distillery Company (CGDC) is more than two years into the research and development of its £10million, 30-job Celsius scheme to geothermally distil and mature rum in an ultra high-tech, carbon neutral biome using heat and energy from Geothermal Engineering Limited’s pilot power plant at United Downs in Cornwall’s historic mining heartland.
CGDC founder Matt Clifford said: “As an ambitious, start-up distillery project, aiming to get everything sustainably right from the word go, we are overwhelmed and beyond grateful to be amongst the highest beneficiaries of the Government’s Green Distillery award.”
CGDC’s outline planning application for a rum cask maturation facility and visitor centre await consideration by Cornwall Council planners for land which is a pipeline and cable’s distance from where GEL’s project team has drilled more than 5km into ancient granite to tap the deep geothermal heat.
The initial phase would see ethically produced, Bonsucro accredited rum brought to the site, laid down in oak casks and stored in the maturation biome to enhance the product’s quality and flavour. The biome would incorporate four patent-pending ‘maturation pods’, each holding 800 200L casks which would be tropically matured over a period of five to 10 years.
CGDC’s Celsius team hopes the rum cask maturation facility would be up and running by the late summer of 2022 – and that a demonstrable success of this “catalyst phase” could draw further interest and investment into the creation of a full £30million Cornish geothermal rum distillery.