Our Sustainable Process

We are the first distillery in Aotearoa and one of only a handful world-wide to upcycle bread and bakery waste into premium spirits. We use our electric van to collect bakery product that food rescue service, KiwiHarvest, have been unable to give away. We also source unsaleable product from Goodman Fielder and bread crusts from local sandwich shops and community groups.

Bread is debagged, checked for mould and meat and weighed before charging or loading into the mash kettle. Any material we cannot use goes to green waste and plastic wrap is baled and sent to soft plastic recyclers.

200Kg of rescued bakery product is mashed over several hours in 600L of water along with 10% by weight of Canterbury Malt. Oat husks, a byproduct from Harraways, are added late in the process to serve as a filtering aid. The mash kettle is electrically heated and we use an in-house designed vacuum system to empty the mash kettle into our filters.

Once the starch and carbohydrates in the bread are converted to fermentable sugars, we filter to remove solids and transfer the sugary wort to our fermenters. Filtering bread mash is the most challenging aspect of production. Our unique process has been developed over hundreds of hours of experimentation and careful iteration. The separated Mash solids are collected by our friends at Holy Cow and fed to their small herd of Jersey Cows.

Yeast is added to the sugary wort and over a period of about 5 days converts the wort into an alcoholic wash or 'beer'. Our fermenters are cooled by our specially commissioned 1200L ice-bank that provides closed-loop cooling power to the entire distillery . There is almost no wasted water from fermentation or still cooling.

Once fermentation is complete, our distillers' wash or 'beer' is pumped to Hildegard, our 500L reflux still. The still is jacketed and electrically heated and 94% semi-neutral spirit is carefully distilled from the fermented bread wash. Finally we proof down the distillate with Mount Cargill rainwater and slowly filter it across activated charcoal, sourced from cutover pine forrest. This is called polishing the spirit.

Once polished we flavour using a range of techniques from redistillation to maceration and aging in casks. We use juniper and other botanicals to create our range of gins and flavoured vodka and always source locally where we can. We also hand craft liqueurs using NZ citrus and cask age our very special Whisky.

Last but not least, our finished products are corrected to proof, filtered and bottled. All our bottles are lighter than most spirit bottles and our 700ml bottles are Climate Partner Certifed and made from 70% recycled glass. All our labels and packaging are either produced from recycled material or FSC certified.