Cows and Cosmopolitans may not appear to have much in common, but at Dairy Distillery, they’re family…almost.

Somewhere tucked away in Ontario, Canada, Neal McCarten is fermenting milk sugar into vodka, bottling it up, and selling his newfound delicacy around the continent. It’s an idea that came to him after realizing this dairy byproduct was being dumped into the local river system, and polluting the environment.

Instead, it could be making him money.

“My family being dairy farmers, I know how hard they work and how much they care about their animals and the land,” McCarten tells Replate. “I always dreamed about doing something with my family and showing off the hard work that they do. And so we had this flash. We could take the sugar and do something useful with it.”

McCarten and his team uncovered a yeast that would eat the milk sugar, then they found a nearby supplier (who conveniently owned a multi-million dollar piece of cloth to separate the sugar from the protein) to source ingredients. From there, the process was relatively simple.

“It's like molasses for a rum distillery,” McCarten explains. “So just sugar and water and minerals, and we can ferment them in a batch in under 36 hours.”

The upcycling doesn’t stop there. Dairy Distillery also produces lactose-free cream liqueurs, and peels surplus or blemished oranges from the grocery store to soak in vodka for the orange cream edition. 

It’s a win-win-win situation for everyone involved. Previously, dairy farmers were paying large fees to dispose of the milk sugar in their waste stream. Now they’re earning revenue from it, primarily from McCarten. 

And business is booming. Dairy Distillery products are available in all 50 states, thanks to a U.S. distributor, and McCarten’s ingenuity suggests more products may be on the way soon.

“For me, it's the really optimistic story that we have this opportunity to go and change things, to make them a little bit better, and not to think that everybody is out to do something only for their own gang,” he observes. “We're all in it together, right?”

To learn more about Dairy Distillery, visit their website.

And find out more about Replate here!