Gold Coast distillery’s mushroom cocktail met with resounding positivity

To honour a key date, a distillery has created a unique cocktail - would you try it?

A Gold Coast distillery has created a weird and apparently wonderful mushroom cocktail.

Mixologist Jimmy Burrell from Six Tricks distillery in Mermaid Waters has created a mushroom and walnut old fashioned in celebration of World Mushroom day on Tuesday.

“We started developing our cocktail menu and we already had a couple of ingredients from other cocktails that seemed to have a common theme of health foods.

“We have a celery one and a beetroot one and I thought it would be really cool to do something with mushrooms,” Mr Burrell said.

Mushroom & walnut old fashioned, Picture: Supplied

Mr Burrell said it took some trial and error to get the cocktail just right.

“I was reading through a fermentation guidebook, discovered that we can use fermentation to extract the flavour of the mushrooms really effectively.

“We used that to develop what we call liquid mushroom, then we had a couple of different trials, decided to use what’s called tonka bean to accentuate all the lovely, savory flavours from the mushroom.

“We make a sauteed mushroom browned butter, infuse that into the whiskey as well as the roasted walnuts and the spirit came out tasting absolutely incredible,” he said.

Mr Burrel said a lot of people had been hesitant to try it but ended up being “blown away”.

“I was a bit unsure whether people would get around it but one of my favourite things is to sit and watch someone that’s maybe a bit apprehensive about trying something quite weird or different, and then have them absolutely blown away.

“It’s been the resounding feedback we’ve got it from this cocktail,” he said.