Distillery Upcycles Spent Coffee Grounds for Liqueur

Murray & Yeatman aims to achieve all it has set out to do on the sustainability front with its new Realizzato liqueur.

Distilled spent coffee grounds are used to create Murray & Yeatman Distillery's Realizzato liqueur.
Distilled spent coffee grounds are used to create Murray & Yeatman Distillery's Realizzato liqueur.
Image courtesy of Murray & Yeatman Distillery

The translation of the Italian word “realizzato” boils down to “a person who is satisfied, having achieved everything he or she needs to have and to do.” It’s for this reason that the U.K.-based Murray & Yeatman Distilleries ultimately chose Realizzato as the name for its liqueur derived from spent coffee grounds—it represents the sustainable achievement the company set out to create.

Murray & Yeatman was co-founded in 2019 by Rob Murray and Jonathan Yeatman as a gin manufacturer during the UK’s gin boom, and it grew to add rums and vodkas to its manufacturing. The company also imports tequila and even spent a stint manufacturing hand sanitizer during the pandemic. However, the research into what would ultimately become Realizzato began after Murray read an article in a scientific journal in 2014, based on experiments from a book originally published in 1651.

The article from the journal shared how scientists were able to ferment spent coffee grounds. To do so, however, they had to add sugar. Murray & Yeatman set out to achieve the same results without the added sugar.

Turning a Negative Into a PositiveRob Murray is the CEO of Murray & Yeatman Distillery.Rob Murray is the CEO of Murray & Yeatman Distillery.Image courtesy of Murray & Yeatman Distillery

Murray & Yeatman recognizes that coffee grounds are a waste product that have a sizeable impact on the environment. One ton of CO2 is produced from each ton of coffee grounds put into landfill. As an example of the scale of the damage to the environment by coffee grounds, the company says, one coffee chain alone disposes of more than 240 tons of coffee grounds in the U.K. each day, equaling the release of 10 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every hour. Given the relatively few uses for spent coffee grounds, being able to make a liqueur out of them would create an environmentally friendly drink.

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