Whole hemp spirits are something you may not have tried, but as Cannabis Botanical Distillery in WA’s Great Southern region garner praise it could become your favourite new drop. 

Co-founder and distiller Matt Beaton says he was “burnt out,” from a career in the offshore oil and gas industry. A return home saw him rekindle a relationship with his “childhood sweetheart,” now wife Chelsea, and put his dream of building a distillery into motion.  

“Chelsea’s mother and father, they’ve always been kind of first movers,” he says. “Pioneers of Australian sandalwood oil and emu oil. Putting sandalwood oil on the map for Australia. They were some of the first people to be granted a license to grow hemp in Western Australia.” 

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While they’re not the first distillery in the cannabis spirits sector, Beaton believes they are plotting a different course to others. Some use hemp seed alone, whereas they use the entire plant.  “We start from scratch, we grow the hemp on the farm, about 25 acres annually,” says Beaton. “It’s rotational across the whole farm as there’s a positive impact on the soils. Then we harvest and literally drive the tractor from the paddock down into the distillery, load it into the vats and start the fermentation process.”

A common question with hemp-related products is whether there’s any high. There’s no CBD or THC coming through so the answer is a no, beyond the effect of the alcohol. What does carry over are terpenes: compounds that account for a plants smell. 

Their vodka showcases “the actual real cannabis flavours coming through,” says Beaton, and seltzers have been a successful transition, winning best hard seltzer in Australia at the 2022 Drink Easy Awards for their Pineapple Passion Seltzer. Beaton says that they follow the natural flavour profile and the terpenes, “bringing them through on our seltzers.” 

A move into the seltzer space from their core spirits offering was driven by the spirits being in “the premium price range,” which is in turn driven by an extensive production process. “It’s a very difficult plant to extract sugars out of,” says Beaton. “It’s not like making whisky, where you get really good output from malted barley, lots of sugar, so you can make lots of alcohol out of that. It’s a stubborn plant, very complex. So, it costs us a lot more to make the spirits. I wanted people to try the seltzer, appreciate the profile and then hopefully lean into it and get more intrigued to buy a bottle of spirit.”

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