Achieving a circular economy in the sake industry with LAST Gin

The Ethical Gin Project is an initiative by The Ethical Spirits & Co. The latter is a distillation venture company that specializes in the manufacturing of gin and whiskey made from sake lees. Their vision is to achieve a circular economy through a distillation platform.

A circular economy encourages the elimination of waste through the reuse of resources. The Ethical Spirits & Co aims to achieve a circular economy with rice farmers and sake breweries in Japan, through LAST Gin, their very first gin product produced for this initiative.

The Ethical Spirits & Co plan to achieve a circular economy through three steps:

1. The Ethical Spirits & Co purchases sake lees, which are essentially the by-products of sake production, from sake breweries;
2. These sake lees are distilled to produce new alcoholic products such as gin and whiskey; and
3. Profits from the sale of these products are used to purchase new rice from rice farmers. These rice are subsequently delivered back to sake breweries to produce sake, and the cycle repeats.

The sake production yields 70 percent of sake and 30 percent of sake lees. Given that the country produces 96,000 tons of sake annually, it also means that there are over 20,000 tons of leftover sake lees every year. In Japan, sake lees were traditionally used to make household dishes such as pickled vegetables and soup. Over time, new uses were discovered and sake lees were used to make chocolates and even cosmetic products. However, despite its multiple uses, the reality is that there is an overall lack of demand for sake lees. A majority of them are eventually disposed of as industrial waste. The Ethical Spirits & Co wants to develop sake lees through this project, as a product that does not lose out to sake.

Beyond sake lees, land abandonment is a growing issue in rural Japan. In the past three decades, the area of uncultivated land has folded thrice from 123,000 ha in 1980 to 423,000 ha in 2015. Abandoned lands are prone to degeneration. The soils are fragile and much likely to erode which would affect farming. They also indicate a poor use of resources.

This is where The Ethical Gin Project is relevant. The workings of the project make up for the loss of harvest. By utilizing the profits made from the sale of new alcoholic products made from sake lees to outsource rice to sake breweries, it fills up the gap of unharvested rice.

The Ethical Spirits & Co goal for the future is to regenerate a hundred percent of abandoned lands in the Tokyo metropolitan area in the next three years. They also hope to establish Japan’s very first ethical distillery.