Dairy Distillery Founder/CEO Omid McDonald (Photo: Mark Holleron)

By Justin Goulet (Lethbridge News Now)

Dairy-based Vodka

New environmentally friendly “Vodkow” now available in Alberta

Nov 26, 2019 | 7:22 AM

ALMONTE, ON – A new vodka is on shelves across Alberta and it’s promoting an environmentally friendly way to make alcohol.

It’s called Vodkow and comes from Dairy Distillery in the community of Almonte, Ontario.

Distillery founder and CEO Omid McDonald said not only does Vodkow taste great, but it carries many benefits for the environment.

“We’ve created a vodka using a dairy bi-product,” he told Lethbridge News Now on Monday.

“In dairy production, they take the fats away to make the butter [and] the proteins go to make cheese and yogurt and they’re left with all the sugar and milk. The lactose – there’s a huge surplus of that so they dump it (excess waste), which is bad for the environment and bad for farmers. So, we take that and ferment it and turn it into vodka.”

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McDonald said he’s been fascinated with craft distilling for the last decade but never found something he could really sink his teeth into. That was until his cousin told him that crews at his uncle’s dairy farm were dumping excess skim milk. He said a lightbulb went off, and he wondered how waste could be used to produce alcohol, as opposed to just being dumped into the environment.

“We started on this about three years ago. We had to work with our local university – the University of Ottawa – to figure out how to ferment the lactose and this bi-product called milk permeate,” he said.

“It’s technically quite difficult to ferment lactose, so they spent about a year and a half in the lab, they got a result there, which we were happy with, so then we set out and built a distillery here in Almonte, Ontario to put it up to scale [and] we released this to market in the Ottawa area about a year ago.”

As opposed to making other vodkas, McDonald said the sugars used in Vodkow’s production are “totally different”.

“The lactose is actually two sugars combined. It’s glucose, where most of our alcohols are fermented from and galactose, which is a very rare sugar which is almost never fermented,” he explained.

“What we discovered is when that’s fermented, it produces an alcohol that’s very different from a grain or a corn-based vodka. It’s slightly sweet on the nose and has absolutely no burn and that’s what’s really gotten people excited.”

So far, Vodkow has received a positive reaction from consumers in Ontario. McDonald said they were contacted by Alberta’s Wine and Beyond chain to sell it across locations in the prairie province.

Vodkow can now be found on Wine and Beyond shelves as well as at Liquor Depot.

Ontario, Alberta and Nova Scotia are the only provinces carrying the product so far, but McDonald said their hope is to eventually expand nation-wide and one day into the United States, which would help spread their overall message.

“We’re using a waste product. Essentially, milk permeate would normally just be dumped into a pit, which is not good for the environment and, our production process takes half the amount of energy to make Vodkow compared to other vodkas, so our carbon footprint is much lower,” he said, adding the Vodkow bottle weighs half as much as a traditional bottle of vodka.

“It’s one of the greenest vodkas out there, but also with a great taste profile.”

As for the future, McDonald said they’re developing a cream liqueur and he hopes that eventually, more distilleries across Canada start creating products out of waste.

He was recently in Red Deer and Calgary to speak with residents and said getting feedback on location was fantastic, adding that the environmental aspect of Vodkow’s story is something that resonates not only in Ontario but also across Alberta.