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Comment by IgorPartola | Hacker News Reader

I don’t see how doing something like this increases the global demand for whiskey/hard liquor. Also if one distillery can do it, so can others which is also an overall win.

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It doesn't necessarily change the demand, but it changes the supply curve by making it cheaper per unit to produce whiskey. Previously, you could sell whiskey, and the waste was garbage. Under this hypothetical scheme, now you could make money on the waste, too, reducing the price of production.

Would this be an example of the Jevons paradox?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

I can't really tell. Certainly jevon's paradox adjacent.

Reminds me of Kingsford Charcoal.[1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingsford_(charcoal)

You are assuming that having more supply will mean they need to immediately lower their prices. Glenfiddich is a premium brand. Have you once seen Apple lower prices on their MacBooks because they had too many in stock?

This stunt just got them a huge amount of free advertising.

I haven't thought about Glenfidfish since my Playboy days.

(I took a class on advertising in college. In one assignment, we were told to pick out the sexual imagery in magazine ads. Glenfiddish seemed to have a lot.)

It doesn't increase the demand. What it means is that if Glenfiddich needs more fuel to meet its own fuel demand, it will have to do so by creating more whiskey, even without demand for the additional whisky.

Or they could just buy fuel like everyone else. If their biogas is cheaper than fossil fuels they can buy then they’ve stumbled onto something much bigger than whiskey.

Yes, I expect the only reason it would be cheaper is because it's waste stream that they would otherwise discard. So yeah, it wouldn't make any sense for them to produce more whisky just to produce more fuel - they would want to use as much fuel derived from waste as they can and purchase any deficit or sell any surplus...

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