up digging six wells, which each run around
300 feet deep. Two production wells pull
up about 100 gallons per minute. The water
runs through under the parking lot and into
a heat exchanger—a donation from Johns
Hopkins that once cooled a supercomputer
in the 1980s—then runs back out through
the other four lines to return into the water
table. The heat exchanger cools a second tank
of specially treated water that’s safe to use
with the company’s equipment. The custom
system cost the company around $100,000,
according to The Baltimore Sun.
“We took a little bit of risk by doing it, but for
comparison, if we were cooling with city water,
the geothermal system is saving us about a
million gallons of water a year—which is a
GET A CLOSER LOOK
Groups can schedule tours
of the distillery to get a
behind-the-scenes view of
the machinery involved in
creating the spirits. Or book
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for your meeting and follow
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lot, and we feel really good about that,” says
Lents. “Had we gone the glycol chiller route,
altimore Spirits Co. is known for the chiller that would achieve the same cooling give away the barrels used to make their
using traditional techniques to create power as our geothermal system would use rye whiskey, which requires a new barrel
its forward-thinking spirits. So when more electricity than we currently use in our for each batch.
the company was embarking on a move into entire space, including the geothermal space. a larger space, in Medfi eld’s Union Collective, “We think that businesses in general should
We’d be using twice the energy.” be looking at opportunities to be more
Sustainable eff orts and intentional reuse sustainable where they can,” he says. “It
are a recurring theme for the distillery. wasn’t a hard decision for us. It’s good for
The company gives its spent mash and everybody—it’s good for our neighbors, it’s
used juniper berries to local farmers to good for the Earth, and it’s also good for us;
use as animal feed, and they also recycle or it saves us energy costs. It’s a no-brainer.” Q
B
it made perfect sense to custom-build an
innovative, state-of-the-art geothermal
cooling system that would be both eff ective
and sustainable. It was simply another
expression of the founders’ viewpoint on
modern distilling.
Cooling is an essential part of distilling
that’s used nearly constantly throughout
the process. At most distilleries, cooling is
achieved either using a city water source,
or with the help of equipment called a
glycol chiller.
Baltimore Spirits Co. wanted to do it using
groundwater. The problem? Baltimore City
sits atop a non-potable water table, making
groundwater unfi t for use anywhere near the
equipment used to create drinkable spirits.
The distillery’s founders, Ian Newton, Eli
Breitburg-Smith and Max Lents, had to design
a workaround—dreaming up a custom concept
to make sure the groundwater never touches
the fi nal drinkable product. After consulting
with geothermal engineers and other
distillery pros, they dug a test well under the
location. “We struck water,” Lents says.
Actually, there was quite a bit of water
under the Union Collective. They ended
This Baltimore-based distillery
decided to take a risk and install
a geothermal cooling system that
uses city groundwater, saving both
energy and water.
B A LT I M O R E . O R G
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