Around the world, the food and beverage industry is adapting to Earth’s changing climate. As our planet heats up, supply chains shift, resources decline, and some of our most beloved traditions are in danger of slipping away. We spoke to Supercritical CEO Matt Bird to learn more about their recent foray into decarbonizing the spirit industry.
Climate change now impacts virtually every aspect of our world’s food production. From water access to heat waves, farmers, winemakers, and chefs around the globe are adapting to Earth’s shifting environment.
Most people would be shocked to learn that their favorite drink has a high carbon footprint. A 70 cL bottle of single malt Scotch whisky produces approximately 2.83 kg of carbon dioxide. The Scotch Whisky Association has committed the sector to net zero operations by 2040, introducing the Green Distilleries competition to spark even more change.
One unexpected form this adaptation has taken is with an innovative new way of producing spirits using a surprising ingredient: hydrogen. We spoke to Supercritical CEO Matt Bird about its recent project, WhiskHy, to learn more about how the spirit industry is finding new ways of keeping old traditions alive.
What’s the origin story here? How did the idea come about for a hydrogen-produced spirit?
We founded Supercritical as a purpose-driven company, with a simple mission: decarbonise through a better, cleaner way of producing hydrogen, which we do with our high-pressure electrolyser for hydrogen energy. In late 2020, we applied to the Green Distilleries Competition: We won and locked Suntory in as our partner.
And Suntory didn’t just want to decarbonise. They wanted something back.
For most of its history, Scotch was made over direct fire, coal or peat burning right underneath the copper still. That was phased out through the 1970s and 80s, for obvious environmental reasons, and the industry moved to indirect steam heating: water heated well past boiling and piped through coils inside the still. It gives a beautifully even heating profile and makes a perfectly good spirit, but it lacks the character and depth that comes from naked flame.
What we needed was the fire without the carbon, and hydrogen is the only fuel that offers it: there isn’t a single carbon atom in it. It was a perfect match. The challenge was never just “replace the fuel”. It was “bring back the flame, keep the flavour, lose the emissions”.
Our part was scaling our electrolyser out of the lab for the first time, at a test site in Teesside. It’s an unusual machine: there’s no membrane, which removes the most fragile component in a conventional electrolyser, and the hydrogen comes out already compressed to over 200 times atmospheric pressure.
What was one of the greatest challenges in working with such large amounts of hydrogen?
The plan was to run the firing trial at Glen Garioch, but when we went to buy hydrogen for it, the UK supply chain simply wasn’t there.
Suntory’s solution was to use their pilot distillery at Yamazaki, near Kyoto, which has a direct-fired still, running on Scottish malted barley and UK yeast. So in January 2024, in a rather wonderful piece of circularity, Japanese and Scottish distillers stood together and watched a hydrogen flame fire a copper whisky still for the first time anywhere in the world. Three back-to-back distillations, fired by a fuel with not a single carbon atom.
Then came the verdict that actually mattered. Suntory’s blending team tasted the hydrogen-fired spirit blind against a methane-fired control, and found no meaningful difference.
I won’t pretend hydrogen is entirely consequence-free either. There’s no carbon in the fuel, but a hydrogen flame burns hot enough that the nitrogen in the air itself reacts, creating nitrogen oxides. Left unaddressed, our NOx levels would likely have exceeded what’s permitted. So we didn’t leave it unaddressed: we ran trials with advanced low-NOx burner heads, and proved that with the right burner and the right control, we could operate below the regulated limits for the combustion trial.
Traditional industries shouldn’t have to sacrifice their heritage to go green, and somewhere in a warehouse in Aberdeenshire, two casks are proving it.
When we think about spirit production, carbon emissions don’t usually come to mind. What’s the hidden carbon footprint of traditional production?
Whisky is, at its heart, an exercise in boiling.
You heat huge volumes of water to mash the grain, kiln the malt to dry it, and then boil thousands of litres of liquid not once but twice. The sheer quantity of heat is enormous, and the great majority of a distillery’s energy demand is heat rather than electricity.
Scotland’s roughly 150 distilleries use around 3.7 terawatt-hours of energy a year, more than the annual electricity consumption of a million British homes; distilling accounts for around 1.3 per cent of Scotland’s entire territorial emissions. Essentially, there are a few kilowatt-hours of energy hiding in every bottle of Scotch, almost all of it currently supplied by burning fossil fuels.
Many of the most famous names sit on islands and remote coastlines with no gas grid at all, so their fuel oil and LPG arrives by tanker. Some of the most beautiful places whisky comes from are running on some of the heaviest fuels left in British industry.
Why is utilizing hydrogen in spirit brewing so much more sustainable?
Hydrogen isn’t an energy source; it’s an energy carrier, and today the overwhelming majority of the world’s hydrogen is made from natural gas, which is worse than useless from a climate perspective.
When I talk about green hydrogen, I mean specifically hydrogen split from water using renewable electricity. Get that right and the whole chain, from wind turbine to whisky still, involves no fossil fuel at all.
We designed our electrolyser without a membrane at all, and it uses no iridium, no PFAS, and no rare earth metals.
I’m careful not to call any of this impact-free; nothing industrial is. But a distillery running on hydrogen made on site from renewable power and water is about as close as heavy heat gets to closing the loop: water in, water vapor out, and the spirit unchanged.
Matt BirdAnd there’s one more sustainability benefit that’s easy to miss: the hydrogen is made where it’s used. Distilleries have water and, increasingly, access to renewable power. Make the fuel on site, and you remove the tankers, the trucking emissions and the supply chain fragility in one go. Given what we learned trying to buy hydrogen for the trial, I’d argue on-site production isn’t just greener, it’s the only way this works at all.
I’m careful not to call any of this impact-free; nothing industrial is. But a distillery running on hydrogen made on site from renewable power and water is about as close as heavy heat gets to closing the loop: water in, water vapor out, and the spirit unchanged.
Where can people find WhiskHy? What distribution can we expect and/or when will it be on the market?
Sadly, you can’t buy it, and you probably won’t be able to for a long time.
The spirit we made at Yamazaki is genuinely special, the first whisky spirit ever distilled over a hydrogen flame. It’s resting in oak beside its methane-fired twin, with a sister pair maturing in Japan, and its job for the next decade or more is to be tasted and compared as it ages, not sold. My honest expectation is that it stays in those casks for a very long time.
Why is such an important evolution for alcohol and spirit production? What do you hope comes out of this initiative?
Because whisky was the hardest test we could have picked, and it passed.
For the spirits industry specifically, I hope it changes the shape of the conversation. Distillers have spent years being told that going green means compromise, and this project says the opposite: done right, decarbonization can actually give something back.
And personally? I hope that in ten years, somewhere in Scotland, there’s a distillery quietly running end to end on fuel it made itself from water and wind, and that nobody visiting it thinks that’s remarkable any more.
Can you share impact figures for the project? How many tonnes of carbon emissions will be reduced by switching to hydrogen?
The carbon saved by the trial itself was tiny, and deliberately so.
Our Teesside demonstration rig produces up to three kilograms of hydrogen a day, and the firing trial included three distillations on a pilot still, around 280 litres of spirit. If I claimed a big emissions figure for that, you should be suspicious of everything else I’ve told you.
What the project produced was a set of numbers for what happens at scale, and they’re striking. Every kilogram of green hydrogen burned in place of LPG avoids just over seven kilograms of CO₂. Per litre of whisky, that’s about 615 grams of emissions removed, so every standard bottle of a hydrogen-fired dram carries roughly 430 grams less carbon, about the same as leaving the car at home for a couple of miles.
Even a first pilot plant would fire the equivalent of around 164,000 bottles a year without burning any carbon at all, and a full conversion of the site would abate over 7,000 tonnes of CO₂ every year, from one distillery. That’s roughly the same as taking three or four thousand cars off the road.
Somewhere in that warehouse, the future of the industry is quietly getting better with age.
