Mankind has long known and benefitted from the fact that, in a pinch, almost anything containing sugar can ultimately be made into alcohol. This knowledge has occasionally come back to bite us at times when people were desperate to make spirits–experiments such as turning the sugar trapped in wood into alcohol in the 1700s and 1800s resulted in a concoction that was decidedly poisonous in nature, resulting in more than a few deaths. But the fact remains: There are a whole lot of different ways in which you can make liquor, and many different starting points. A neutral spirit such as vodka (or the base of gin), for instance, is frequently made from any number of different grains or plants: Corn, wheat, rye, spelt, triticale, sugar cane and many more. Through distillation, they can all yield a neutral base spirit, with most of the original material’s flavor stripped away.
And indeed, that source of sugars doesn’t even need to be plant-based. Bertha’s Revenge, an “Irish Milk Gin,” has illustrated this quite clearly: Their spirit is actually based on whey alcohol, utilizing the sugars found in the dairy byproduct whey, leftover following the production of cheese. When curds are separated to make cheese, whey is the thin liquid left over. Ireland’s Ballyvolane House Spirits, a grass-to-glass distillery founded in 2015 and based in “an Irish country inn along the Blackwater River,” has taken this whey and fermented it with proprietary yeast, converting the milk sugars into alcohol. From there, it’s a simple matter to distill the product and infuse it with botanicals like any other gin–the long list of botanicals include the following: “Juniper, coriander, orris, licorice, cardamom, angelica, lemon, lime, cinnamon, cumin, cloves, almond, elderflower, alexander seeds, grapefruit, sweet woodruff and sweet and bitter orange.”
What we are ultimately left with, then, is a pretty recognizable London dry gin, albeit from a genuinely oddball source of alcohol. One immediately wonders, how big of an impact will this have on flavor? Is there purpose to the gimmick? We’ll give it a taste and see. Bertha’s Revenge–the name is based on “legendary cow Big Bertha,” who lived to be 48 years old and gave birth to 39 calves in that time–is bottled at 42% ABV (84 proof), with an MSRP of roughly $40. It’s shipping nationally via Flaviar.
So with that said, let’s get to tasting.