READ

Carrot vodka? It’s worth a shot

Carrots are a versatile vegetable, perfect with a roast, great in a cake and ideal for sticking into dips. But who knew they could also be made into vodka?
Carrot vodka? It’s worth a shot
Image credit: Kalfresh Vegetables

Winemaker Jason Hannay of Flinders Park Winery in southeast Queensland has produced just that.

Jason was approached by the enterprising farmer’s wives Gen Windley and Alice Gorman to create this new product in celebration of Scenic Rim ‘Eat Local Week’.

Value-adding carrots

Each year, company Kalfresh collaborate on a new product made from carrots that would otherwise go to waste.

Two years ago, CEO Richard Gorman and brewer Wade Curtis came up with Carrot Beer. Next it was carrot bread.

Gen says herself and four other women—all married to farmers and associated with Kalfresh—come together to brainstorm and come up with initiatives.

“We all live on a farm and we grow carrots as one of the major vegetable crops,” she says.

“Some are not perfect—they may be wonky or the wrong size—so we turn them into a value-added product. The main product in this space is our range of cut carrots.”

“For a bit of fun in the lead up to Eat Local Week this year we thought we’d try carrot vodka.”

Image credit: Kalfresh Vegetables
“Some are not perfect—they may be wonky or the wrong size—so we turn them into a value-added product.”

The vodka making process

Jason used 80kg of carrots to make 178 half-litre bottles of carrot vodka.

“It was a bit of learning curve—I’m a wine maker by trade and carrots were a bit outside my thought process,” Jason says.

He knew it wasn’t practical at the time to attempt a carrot wine as carrots’ starchy nature and lack of sugar make them a poor candidate for wine making.

“But we managed to juice 50kg of carrots and turn it into carrot juice, which was then fermented to turn it into alcohol.”

Jason then added a shiraz-based alcohol made on site and re-distilled the mix so it had the base carrot flavour.

“I then did a couple of extra runs, re-distilling the base alcohol from first run and putting extra carrots in the wash to make an infused carrot flavor.”

CRAFTING CARROT cocktails

Although it may not have direct health benefits—the goodness is lost during the distillation process—Jason says the carrot vodka certainly has other benefits.

“Mixologists have a whole new product so they can design new drinks and cocktails,” he says.

“It’s a whole new flavour that hasn’t been done before.”

View Larger

Carrot vodka can be used by mixologists to create new drinks. One example is Bloody Mary.

Image credit: Kalfresh Vegetables / Melanie Lionello
Carrot vodka can be used by mixologists to create new drinks. One example is Bloody Mary.

He says the vodka smells like carrot but the taste has a very earthy tone to it which is essentially carrot.

“It’s come from the ground. It’s a really interesting flavor.”

“I’ve created one drink myself—a basic drink with mineral water, slices of ginger, a slice of orange and an olive, very martini-ish…and it tastes pretty good!”

Jason says the only thing that he can find that comes close to his carrot vodka is a carrot liquor made by Wenneker in Holland.

He says if it goes really well, it could be made commercially available.

As for next year’s creation?

“We’re already scheming but I can’t reveal anything just yet,” Gen says.

Carrot vodka launched at the Winter Harvest Festival as part of the Scenic Rim Eat Local Week in late June. The week is dedicated to promoting food and wine from the Scenic Rim region in South East Queensland.

Teresa Belcher
About the author
Teresa Belcher
Teresa is a science communicator with over 20 years’ experience communicating science and engineering research and projects in Australia and Europe. She's currently working in natural resource management in the rangelands of Western Australia, freelance writing and volunteering on a couple of committees. Teresa loves all things prehistoric (especially dinosaurs), nature and space/sci-fi. She enjoys travel and outdoors activities including rowing, kayaking, sailing, and fishing and also spending time DIY-ing in her garden and house.
View articles
Teresa is a science communicator with over 20 years’ experience communicating science and engineering research and projects in Australia and Europe. She's currently working in natural resource management in the rangelands of Western Australia, freelance writing and volunteering on a couple of committees. Teresa loves all things prehistoric (especially dinosaurs), nature and space/sci-fi. She enjoys travel and outdoors activities including rowing, kayaking, sailing, and fishing and also spending time DIY-ing in her garden and house.
View articles

NEXT ARTICLE

We've got chemistry, let's take it to the next level!

Get the latest WA science news delivered to your inbox, every fortnight.

Republish

Creative Commons Logo

Republishing our content

We want our stories to be shared and seen by as many people as possible.

Therefore, unless it says otherwise, copyright on the stories on Particle belongs to Scitech and they are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

This allows you to republish our articles online or in print for free. You just need to credit us and link to us, and you can’t edit our material or sell it separately.

Using the ‘republish’ button on our website is the easiest way to meet our guidelines.

Guidelines

You cannot edit the article.

When republishing, you have to credit our authors, ideally in the byline. You have to credit Particle with a link back to the original publication on Particle.

If you’re republishing online, you must use our pageview counter, link to us and include links from our story. Our page view counter is a small pixel-ping (invisible to the eye) that allows us to know when our content is republished. It’s a condition of our guidelines that you include our counter. If you use the ‘republish’ then you’ll capture our page counter.

If you’re republishing in print, please email us to let us so we know about it (we get very proud to see our work republished) and you must include the Particle logo next to the credits. Download logo here.

If you wish to republish all our stories, please contact us directly to discuss this opportunity.

Images

Most of the images used on Particle are copyright of the photographer who made them.

It is your responsibility to confirm that you’re licensed to republish images in our articles.

Video

All Particle videos can be accessed through YouTube under the Standard YouTube Licence.

The Standard YouTube licence

  1. This licence is ‘All Rights Reserved’, granting provisions for YouTube to display the content, and YouTube’s visitors to stream the content. This means that the content may be streamed from YouTube but specifically forbids downloading, adaptation, and redistribution, except where otherwise licensed. When uploading your content to YouTube it will automatically use the Standard YouTube licence. You can check this by clicking on Advanced Settings and looking at the dropdown box ‘License and rights ownership’.
  2. When a user is uploading a video he has license options that he can choose from. The first option is “standard YouTube License” which means that you grant the broadcasting rights to YouTube. This essentially means that your video can only be accessed from YouTube for watching purpose and cannot be reproduced or distributed in any other form without your consent.

Contact

For more information about using our content, email us: particle@scitech.org.au

Copy this HTML into your CMS
Press Ctrl+C to copy