Maker’s Mark makes a very nice Kentucky bourbon. It’s my preferred bourbon – with just a slice of orange, please.
You will be pleased to know that Maker’s Mark is also a very eco-friendly company. They use local grain, corn and wheat,  from within a 30 mile area of Loretto, Kentucky, their home.
(Their malted barley is imported from Wisconsin and Minnesota because the company says the locally grown grains are not high enough quality.)
The Maker’s Mark distillery sits on 620 acres of land but the company only needs 200 acres, leaving the rest as a nature preserve which includes and Arboretum for native species.

Maker’s Mark has a unique energy production system that recycles the byproducts of distillation. The system was developed by Ecovation, and uses the grain and water mix produced during distillation to generate renewable energy.
“The new system came online this summer,” Master Distiller Kevin Smith said in an email. “What we do is take the

byproduct and squeeze out a good portion of the water. We will take the solids, or wet cake, and sell it on the local market as a grain feed for cattle.

“The water that gets squeezed out is processed through an anaerobic reactor. The bacteria in the reactor naturally break down the organics in the water and convert them to biogas. We then capture the biogas off the reactor and pipe it back to our boilers. The biogas is then used as a fuel for the boilers to help displace some of the natural gas that we currently use. We will save 15-30% on our natural gas consumption,” he wrote. Once the water goes through the anaerobic reactor, it’s sent to a conventional wastewater treatment plant before being discharged into Kentucky’s waterways.

Maker’s Mark is the only distillery in North America with such a facility. The $8 million system is estimated to produce 85 million BTUs a day, and will eventually produce up to 165 million BTUs a day as the distillery more than doubles its production of bourbon over the next 10 years.

Is it green?

“We do many things that are eco-friendly including recycling the majority of our waste, in particular glass, cardboard, paper, plastic, metals, and barrels. Right now we recycle approximately 95% of all our waste. We are looking to go to 0% waste discharge in the next 3 years. Other projects that may not be “unique” include forest stewardship, habitat improvement/sustainability, community outreach, and biodiversity (we do not use any genetically modified grains),” Master Distiller Kevin Smith said in an email.

The environmental moves are “the right thing to do,” Smith said, but they also make good business sense. Maker’s Mark wanted to increase production, and so they needed a better way to process their byproducts. The traditional way to do this is to use a dry house that will evaporate the water, consuming a large amount of natural gas and electricity and releasing emissions.