- [Narrator] Ah vodka, always a good choice. (jazzy music)
Strong, smooth, delightfully clear.
Vodka is usually made from potatoes, grapes, or wheat.
One man is doing things differently.
He's making vodka from (sheep calling).
Yes, you heard that right.
Sheep.
(upbeat music)
- We are in Birchs Bay, in Tasmania, Australia.
Sixteen years ago my family and I built
our sheep cheesery from scratch.
You know, I was getting tired of just doing
the sort of cheese things.
And so I came up with the idea of distilling.
- [Narrator] But how?
By using whey.
- So whey is essentially part of cheesemaking.
And in a lot of cases put down the drain and wasted.
I have figured out a way to turn that into a product.
- [Narrator] Making vodka from whey is quite unusual.
There have been a couple successful attempts,
but no one had ever made a sheep's whey vodka.
Until Ryan came along.
It took him about 100 attempts over the course of a year,
but he got there.
- So, step one: we milk the sheep,
and then give it to our cheese factory,
who then makes it into a cheese,
and then the whey is what's leftover.
Step two: I grab that whey-
and then adding enzymes-it ferments into alcohol.
What essentially creates alcohol is a basic sugar.
And my basic sugar is lactose.
Step three: I grab that alcohol
and distill it twice into a finished spirit.
And step four: I age the spirit for four months.
Step five: we actually hand-paint the entire bottle.
So we spray the black on, and then we hand-write,
so that every bottle is unique.
Start to finish, from milking the sheep,
all the way to bottling the product,
it would take at least five months.
(peppy music)
You'll smell a lot of sweetness
coming through from the milk.
And then when you drink it,
it's gonna be really creamy on the palette.
And almost have a little milky sort of finish.
One of the biggest awards that we won
was World's Best Vodka, which was huge for us.
- [Narrator] And vodka is not the end
for Ryan's distilling experiments.
He's also ventured into gin.
And now, to cue us out, how do you drink it?
- So treat it really really similar to a whisky.
Just nice and neat.
Even with no ice.
Yeah, that's great.
- That's really smooth.
- That's really nice.
- Mm, beautiful.
Very nice spirit.
Could drink this, yes definitely.
Beautiful to the palette.