A DREAM IS BECOMING A REALITY

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, 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 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 three times… surely there had to be a better, more sustainable alternative to tropical ageing, because if we can solve it, we can bring aged rum to market four times faster without the carbon footprint.

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 started Googling for options and came across some references to geothermal heat. I didn’t think geothermal energy existed in the UK and was amazed to see that deep geothermal energy was being explored in Cornwall, drawing heat from 200˚C granite “hot rocks “ 5km below the surface – I couldn’t believe it. 

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. We are so close now.