Craft brewing and distilling has exploded in popularity over the last decade. It’s an incredibly competitive market and it’s not an easy thing to stand out from the crowd.
Here’s one sure-fire way to make sure your libation gets noticed: infuse it with elephant dung.
It’s not as crazy as it sounds. Elephants love to munch on all kinds of different fruits and flowers, but they can only digest a small portion of what they eat — around 30%. The other 70%, apparently, gets left on the ground waiting for distillers to gather it up.
Husband and wife scientist team Les and Paula Ansley noticed that the animals’ preferred mix of botanicals seemed like a natural fit for gin. The elephants happily took care of the foraging, and that was the hard part. All the Ansleys had to do was figure out the distilling process.
Today, they’ve got it down pat. To make a batch of gin, the Ansleys collect five fairly large bags of dung (they look like they’re around the size of a 25-pound bag of potatoes in the AP’s photo shoot). The dung gets dried, broken apart, and then thoroughly washed to get rid of sand and dirt.
What’s left — the undigested berries, flowers, leaves, and bark — get sterilized and then dried once more. When it’s ready, it’s added to the gin. Each load will infuse between 3,000 and 4,000 bottles of gin.
The result is a “wooded, earthy, and slightly spicy” flavor. It’s never the same, either, because elephants in different areas eat different things — and their diets change with the seasons. The Ansleys mark each batch with the exact coordinates where and when the dung was collected, because that’s what scientists do… even when they’re making booze.
The gin is called Indlovu, which is Zulu for elephant. It sells for about $30 a bottle, but you’ll have to head to South Africa to get your hands on one. At least for now, because there’s got to be an importer somewhere that is willing to roll the dice on bringing dung-infused gin to the States.
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