The Top Shelf International agave project is well-known, but there’s a farm in Western Australia that is eyeing agave spirit production, according to ABC News.
Harvest Road is a food business owner by Andrew and Nicola Forrest and it in turns owns Brickhouse Station, a cattle station in the Gascoyne region of WA. The farm is two years into an agave project, which has grown from one hectare to three, with plans to increase that to five or six hectares next year.
Business development general manager Richard Kohne that Harvest Road was looking into producing an agave spirit.
“We think there’s a great opportunity for a local tequila-type spirit that’s grown here at Brickhouse and processed by our beverages division and hopefully we’ll market this great region and what’s unique about it,” he said.
Typically agave plants would be five to seven years old before they are used for producing spirits and Richard told the ABC that looking at the plants they currently have he thinks it would be four or five years before they can look at farming and distilling the plants.
“Coming up in this calendar year, we plan to start doing trials on the plants, to see what the sugar levels are, and start to play around a bit with our beverages team to get an understanding of what the flavour is going to be like,” Richard said.
The promising news from the Brickhouse Station is that the terroir in the area is really good for the production of agave, which along with the huge farm that Top Shelf is developing in Queensland shows there are promising signs for long-term production of Australian agave.
