Carrot beer on offer after Queensland craft brewer teams up with farmer to help promote local produce

Beer and carrots do not usually go hand-in-hand, but an unusual bright orange brew has been successfully blended from produce out of the Scenic Rim, south of Brisbane.

A chance encounter between craft brewer Wade Curtis and a big-thinking carrot farmer Richard Gorman at Kalbar sparked the beginning of the unusual partnership.

Farmer Richard Gorman and craft brewer Wade Curtis on their farm at Kalbar, with some of their carrot beer. (Photo: Courtney Wilson)

Mr Gorman said the brew looked very orange and still tasted like beer.

"They were the only two parameters that we set," Mr Gorman said.

Mr Curtis said the pair had called the beer "the Wabbit Saison".

"A little play on the carrots and the 'wabbit' season - you know from Elmer Fudd?" Mr Curtis said.

The idea to trial carrot beer was born out of a trip Mr Curtis took to an open day at the Kalfresh carrot farm.

"I went out to the processing plant and the fields with my family and just thought 'wow, this place is amazing'," Mr Curtis said.

"I saw the carrots and I thought 'it's a vegetable, it's got sugar, it can be converted to alcohol, wouldn't it be great to pair with beer?'"

It did not take much to convince Mr Gorman, who is part owner of Kalfresh, to try merging his two favourite food groups.

"Not only do we love carrots, we also like a beer every now and again," he said.

"Mixing those two together was just the perfect combination."

Mr Curtis said the carrot beer is made of 16 per cent carrot juice and uses produce that may otherwise be wasted.

"The juicing carrot - a lot of the times - is the carrot they can't sell," he said.

"We take it and we turn it into something else - we use it in our beer and we add value and we add interest."

Mr Gorman said this year they would produce more than 1,000 acres of carrots.

"That's somewhere in the vicinity of 20,000 tonnes," he said.

"That's one of the things that does annoy us as a producer - to go out to the waste bin and have a look at some of the things that are perfectly edible but don't get sold."

Unlikely fruits used for beer

Carrot beer was not the only unusual brew to come out of Scenic Rim produce.

Gavin Croft has crafted a beer from finger limes grown on a farm at Rathdowney.

"I wanted to use finger limes because the lime character was one of my favourites and they're natively grown on the [Tamborine] Mountain and in the surrounding area," he said.

"I contacted a couple of farms and the Lime Caviar company was kind enough to supply me with some limes."

After showcasing the finger lime beer at a festival in Brisbane earlier this year, Mr Croft was asked to brew more.

"I think it's a really cool way to connect beer drinkers to the land," he said.

"I guess because it's something that's grown in their area that's giving a really prominent flavour in this beer.

"I'd never seen [a finger lime] until I went and visited the Lime Caviar company when I got to see them and taste them for the first time."

Both of the unusual brews will be on offer at the Winter Harvest festival in Aratula next month, as part of the Scenic Rim's Eat Local Week.

The carrot beer is already on tap at Four Hearts Brewing Company in Ipswich, west of Brisbane, who is part-owner of the brewery.

"We did a 1,200-litre brew and then we added 200 litres of pasteurised carrot juice, which was absolutely fluoro orange," Mr Curtis said.

Mr Curtis said since the orange beer began flowing, people had been talking about the local farmers and the food produced in the surrounding region.

"It's about promoting the local area," he said.

"We're promoting people to come to Ipswich, come to the Scenic Rim, to try the produce, enjoy themselves, find out where their food comes from and meet the people that make it."

Mr Curtis said whether or not the carrot beer was produced on a bigger scale depended on economic viability and the all-important taste test.

"The first sip is a little bit cautious and then people realise it isn't actually a novelty thing, this actually tastes really good," Mr Curtis said.

"I've had a lot of people saying is this my daily serve of vegetables, which I don't think one schooner is but probably two might be close, who knows?"

Source: ABC News, Courtney Wilson, June 15^th 2015