Gone Bananas Vodka (500ml)
Gone Bananas Vodka (500ml)
We rescued ‘ugly’ bananas from a growers co-op in WA and made them into something even better than banana bread. Elegant, smooth and clean, it smells and tastes just like traditional vodka - only better. This is banana in name, but not in nature.
41% abv.
Aroma: A perfect balance of clean freshness and subtle vanilla sweetness.
Taste: Notes of vanilla and a creamy texture give hints at its banana origins, but otherwise, it’s deliciously disguised.
Finish: Medium length with a tiny touch of butterscotch and cracked pepper notes.
The Hero Ingredient
Bananas take top points as the most wasted fruit in the world. We wanted to be part of taking them down a peg or two, so we teamed up with The Carnarvon Sweeter Banana Co-Op, a collective of 18 family-run farms on the banks of the Gascoyne River here in WA. Though it was the first place bananas were ever grown in Australia, it’s not exactly an easy climate to deal with. The harsh conditions means Carnarvon bananas take much longer to grow, winding up sweeter and creamier than other bananas (win!) but also occasionally also a little bruised and battered (lose). These ones aren’t wanted by supermarket shelves, and are often wasted, left to go back in to the paddock as fertiliser. We think all lovingly grown spray-free bananas deserve to be used, so we go out and collect the ‘ugly’ ones each week, and put them to good use making a new and improved kind of vodka.
How we made it
You know how when you make banana bread it tastes way better when the bananas are super brown? Turns out, it’s the same with spirits. After we let them get nice and overripe, we puree the bananas with hot water, then add enzymes that are traditional in wine and whisky making. The enzymes get to work eating up all the starches and proteins, separating the puree into sweeter juice and pulp. We then do a quick strain to remove the biggest bits of pulp, before adding yeast to the sweet juice to ferment it, just like a wine or a beer. After 1 week of fermenting, we have a ‘banana wine’ at approximately 10% alcohol. We distil this wine at least twice to increase the alcohol content and strip a lot of the flavours. Finally, we blend with our neutral grape spirit, distill again, charcoal filter it, reduce to bottling strength with reverse osmosis water and leave to rest for a couple of weeks. After all that - voila! It’s good as gold.
The rest of the goods…
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Neutral Grape-Based Spirit
Our neutral spirit is premium stuff - it’s sourced from the Barossa Valley, and is made from the grape skin pulp left over in the winemaking process. This pulp is called pomace, or marc, and has a long history of being used to create a spirit, often used to fortify wines like port or sherry, or drunk on its own (ever heard of Italian grappa?). The grapes have been selected from the best parcels of land in the Barossa, before being distilled up to a very high purity (96%), neutralising flavour to become the base of our tasty spirits.
Waste not want not
Up level your vodka soda with this waste saving
double-whammy of a cocktail.
East 8 Hold Up
- 45ml Gone Bananas Vodka
- 15ml Smashed Apple Aperitivo
- 20ml Pineapple Juice
- 15ml Lime Juice
- 10ml Sugar Syrup (1 part sugar : 1 part water)
- 5ml Passionfruit Syrup
Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker with cubed ice, shake hard for 20 seconds, strain into a tumbler over fresh ice and garnish with a mint sprig and passionfruit.
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