Close up of distilling stills

Distillery Water and Wastewater Management

The UK produces some of the world’s finest spirits, such as whiskey and gin. The right water and wastewater operations partner can provide added benefit to your business to enhance your overall operational performance.

Effective and efficient water and wastewater management in distilling is crucial as large volumes of complex wastewater are produced, that need proper treatment prior to discharge. Not only this, but water plays a key role in the development process, for cleaning, heating, cooling, washing, disinfecting and the actual end product.

Your wastewater treatment and sustainability partner

With over three decades experience providing both project-based solutions and outsourced operational management for water and wastewater applications, Alpheus deliver the following benefits.

Compliance assurance

Through our experience across multiple industries and operations, we can help ensure effective treatment processes and ongoing monitoring to ensure safe discharge.

Achieve environmental objectives

Environmental credentials are increasingly influencing consumer choices. Tap into our extensive experience in efficiency improvement, water recycling and energy recovery to help achieve sustainability goals.

Lower operating costs

We review and analyse existing systems and processes to swiftly identify opportunities to improve operational efficiency, such as process changes to make specific tasks simpler, faster, safer, or more cost-effective.

Limit downtime

We employ industry leading on-site optimisation and monitoring practices and processes to prevent issues occurring and to ensure continued operation. We can also support planned downtime and re-start activities, to minimise impact to production.

Enhanced safety

Process safety is of high importance in distilling, so you can rest assured that as part of our commitment to providing industry leading service and safety, our team have been IOSH Process Safety trained.

Partnering with Alpheus will allow you to concentrate to delivering performance in your core business with the knowledge that your water and waste water operations are optimised and running efficiently and economically.

Award Winning Operational Support

In 2020, we took over management of the Anaerobic Digestion based effluent plant at The Glenmorangie Company Distillery in Scotland. Within months of our appointment we were able to deliver significant efficiency and safety improvements, and cost savings, alongside managing a large scale hibernation of the Anaerobic Digestion plant during the COVID lockdown. This hibernation and re-start was an industry first - implemented with 100% compliance. We’re proud to have won Best AD and Biogas Support at the AD & Biogas Industry Awards in 2020.

Read Hibernation Case Study

Resource recovery offers large benefits for the distilling sector

As water, heat and steam are factors in the distilling process, this offers significant opportunity for resource recovery from waste water. This not only delivers environmental benefits, it can reduce operating costs.

Reuse of treated effluent on-site

Our talented engineering team can design and implement bespoke solutions to enable water re-use on site for:

  • Washing work vehicles, floors  and equipment
  • Cooling machinery
  • Boiler feedwater
  • Raw materials processing, for example, maltings operations
  • Non-drinking purposes such as toilet flushing and irrigation.

Heat and energy from waste

Organic wastewater from the distilling process can enable heat and energy to be generated from waste through techniques such as Anaerobic Digestion, where microorganisms break down organic matter to produce biogas in the treatment process. This biogas can be converted to heat and power, thus reducing operating costs.

Combined heat and power: Heat and power created can be reused in the distilling process, as the energy created can be used to power the treatment plant or distillery.

Gas to boilers: Cleaned gas can be supplied to on-site steam boiler. We manage wastewater treatment operations for The Glenmorangie Distillery, and they do just this. The raw biogas created by the Anaerobic Digester is cleaned and fed directly to a steam boiler than runs on the gas to supply a proportion of their energy demand.

Gas to grid: Where it is not possible to reuse the gas on site, cleaned gas can be sold back to the grid to generate income.

Our References

"Delivery of this project on a compact site presented some challenges in terms of design and contractor management, which the team addressed skilfully and with strong CDM management. The project was delivered on time, with high safety standards..."

Portrait photo of Ming Zhu Alpheus Engineering Manager
Ming Zhu
Alpheus Engineering Manager
View case study

"From the start Alpheus has exceeded our best expectations as a partner in running our AD plant...gas production has increased by nearly 5% per month, and they have improved our filtration system..."

Portrait photo of Ed Thom, Glenmorangie Distillery Manager
Ed Thom
Glenmorangie Distillery Manager
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"We have a network of distribution services, and Alpheus offers us both the flexibility and the regional coverage that we need. The services that Alpheus provides means we can serve a broader range of clients and stay cost effective."

Portrait image of Mark Fowles, Director, William Gilder Group
Mark Fowles
Director, William Gilder Group

Our References

"Since starting, Alpheus has exceeded our best expectations as a partner in running our AD plant...gas production has increased by nearly 5% per month, and they have improved our filtration system..."

Portrait photo of Ed Thom, Glenmorangie Distillery Manager
Edward Thom
Glenmorangie Distillery Manager
View case study

"We have a network of distribution services, and Alpheus offers us both the flexibility and the good regional coverage that we need. The services and coverage that Alpheus provides means we can serve a broader range of clients and stay cost effective."

Portrait image of Mark Fowles, Director, William Gilder Group
Mark Fowles
Director, William Gilder Group

"Delivery of this project on a compact site presented some challenges in terms of design and contractor management, which the team addressed skilfully and with strong CDM management. The project was delivered on time, with high safety standards..."

Portrait photo of Ming Zhu Alpheus Engineering Manager
Ming Zhu
Alpheus Engineering Manager
View case study