Deerness Distillery Biogas plant

Aim

To install a biogas plant which has ability to take distillery and kitchen/bar completely off grid.

I’m Gavin May and one of the owners of Deerness Distillery based on beautiful Orkney Scotland. We distill award winning premium craft gins, vodka, rum based coffee liqueur and whisky. We have just expanded and delivered a 50 seater cafe, bar, retail shop, private tasting room and expansion to distillery and started whisky production.

We have gone from employing around 5 staff to over 20 with a real focus on local young staff to give them their first experience into the workplace. 

We are extremely conscious of our environmental footprint and ensure we don’t waste water or any product we use. We grow a lot of our botanicals for our gins on site in our Polly tunnel.

The next phase is to deliver a 60KWH biogas boiler system to take our distillery off grid and use the excess heat to pipe water around polly tunnels to increase our growing season. We will power the biogas by feeding it with our spent grain from whisky production, left over scraps from our commercial kitchen, farmers old bales of hay and much more. The bi product from the boiler will then be used by local farmers as extremely good fertiliser for their land which will help their next crop of barley which will be made into whisky next year - completing the circle.

We would love you to be part of this next journey and for everyone who contributes we can offer a personal tour of our distillery and tasting room.

So this project is truly a win win for keeping waste down and making significant energy savings. 

So if you’d like to be part of our next journey we’d love to have you on board and you can become part of the distillery family whilst seriously helping the environment. 

Funding method

Keep what you raise – this project will receive all pledges made by 1st July 2026 at 4:26pm