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.

Originally published as Gold Coast distillery’s mushroom cocktail met with resounding positivity