First, vodka. Then, hand sanitizer. Now Dairy Distillery, a tiny Almonte\u002Dbased company, is entering the biofuel business — in Michigan
Inside the bottle is milk permeate, a byproduct of making ultra-filtered milk. It is of little value to milk producers who sell permeate as cheap animal feed, but it is essential to the products in Dairy Distillery’s business model, which is more diverse than the company’s name suggests.The seven-year-old business started by making vodka, or rather, what it calls Vodkow, which could pass for a fine grain-based vodka but for its subtly creamy mouth feel.
Then, about two years ago, the Michigan Milk Producers Association stumbled across the relatively tiny company from the Ottawa Valley on the internet and reached out, expressing an interest in making booze.“Potable spirits is always a hard grind because of the marketing associated with it… and you’re up against Smirnoff and they’ve got large marketing budgets,” says David Geros, Dairy Distillery’s chief scientific officer.
“It’s all the same process, the same liquid that gets produced. Hand sanitizer is 70 per cent ethanol, and what we’re putting into cars is pure ethanol,” says Dairy Distillery founder and CEO McDonald, a 49-year-old serial entrepreneur and University of Ottawa dropout. McDonald, and Geros hope their cross-border collaboration with the MMPA — both are chipping in $5 million for the project — is the first of many.
But converting milk permeate into alcohol is unique to Dairy Distillery. Early on, the company hired uOttawa researchers to help develop the process. It took months for biology student Jessica Gaudet to find the right kind of yeast to process milk sugars, and the result is a smooth, almost caramel-like alcohol.Article content
The carbon footprint of the corn industry is considerable, McDonald says, given the energy needed to make, fertilize and harvest corn. But because milk permeate is a byproduct, it is “essentially carbon-neutral,” he says. “We have what’s known as a very low carbon intensity.” When McDonald hired Geros more than four years ago, he had biofuel in mind. Geros, an expert in fermentation and distillation, started his career working for big breweries, and went on to work at Iogen, the Ottawa-based company whose technology converts agriculture waste into clean fuels.
The Constantine plant qualified for $5 million in U.S. federal support thanks to the Federal Inflation Reduction Act, plus $2.5 million in grants and exemptions from the state of Michigan.
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