Founder’s Statement
The Distillation of an Idea
“The only people who never fail are those who never try” Ilka Chase
Train journeys are excellent for ideas, and the Cornish Geothermal Distillery Company came about because I was sat on a train on my way back to Norwich, staring into the middle distance thinking about Rum, trying to solve a problem. Rum has been a passion of mine for years and I had the great fortune to meet Ian Burrell (Global Rum Ambassador). I asked Ian to collaborate with me on creating a bespoke rum and he agreed. We soon had this great idea to source rums from the Caribbean, blending them in Amsterdam with E & A Scheer before shipping the new blend back to the Caribbean to be aged again under the Caribbean sunshine, to then ship it back to the UK to sell. The problem was that the rum would have then crossed the Atlantic four times… surely there had to be a better, more sustainable alternative to tropical ageing.
There, sat on my train I asked myself where I could find a closer hot tropical climate or maybe replicate one. I suddenly thought about the Eden Project… what if we took an Eden style biome and filled it with casks of rum? Would that be the same as maturing rum in the Caribbean? I got pretty excited about this idea! I then started thinking about how we would heat such a large space and grateful for Wi-Fi on trains started Googling for some viable solutions and came across some references to geothermal heat. I didn’t think geothermal energy existed in the UK and was surprised to see that a deep geothermal plant was just about to start drilling at United Downs in Cornwall to make a power plant, drawing heat from 200˚C granite “hot rocks “ 5km below the surface – I couldn’t believe it. Next I looked for a geothermal engineer and came across Tony Bennet of EGS Energy whom I arranged to meet.
Tony explained to me how the geothermal plant worked, and we got talking about turbines that produce the electricity from the geothermally heated steam. Having flown turbine helicopters for years, I asked Tony whether there was a lot of residual heat energy after the turbines, and was surprised by Tony’s answer; “Yes, and they don’t know what to do with it”. I asked Tony how hot the waste heat is, and he said around 80C. I said, “So, Tony, what you’re saying is that there’s an abundant source of waste geothermal heat at 80C, and they don’t know what to do with it?” Tony replied simply, “Yes”.
A few weeks later I picked up the phone to Ryan Law, MD of GEL, the company behind the United Downs Deep Geothermal Project, and asked Ryan what he was doing with all of his waste heat, “we don’t know” Ryan said. “I’ve got an idea”, I said.
A single thought is never enough and now those train daydreams have been fermented, refined and distilled into a viable project that has created a solid foundation for a growing team of experts and advisors. I now find myself as a sailor, former offshore captain and search and rescue helicopter pilot, about to embark on a new odyssey and one day in the not too distant future I’d like to tell you about it over a glass of some seriously good rum.