If you ask someone what qualities they would look for in a vodka, chances are ‘fishy’ won’t be one of them. So how about a vodka that tastes entirely of smoked salmon? This is the brainchild of one Alaskan distillery, which has been producing this piscine spirit for almost two years now.

The unoriginally named Alaska Distillery is far from a novelty enterprise. Its first-ever spirit, Permafrost Vodka, was awarded the ‘superlative’ rating by the US Beverage Tasting Institute, beating better-known brands. The company prides itself on using only locally sourced ingredients, right down to the wheat and potatoes needed to make base spirit – even though this proves a logistical nightmare with the harsh Alaskan winters – and water collected from glaciers at the source.

The distillery has even boosted its green credentials by composting its used potatoes and producing its own biofuel to run the distillery’s generator. So… sensible, responsible and quality-driven – why would such a respectable outfit go and pull a stunt like putting fish in its spirits?

“Well, salmon is a staple for a lot of families here. As a matter of fact the inuits and many others will go and fish during the summer and catch all of their food for the entire winter, and they actually live off it. Smoked salmon in particular is a huge staple for a lot of families – and Toby happens to really love it,” explains Bella Coley, Alaskan Distillery Chief Operating Officer.

Toby is Toby Foster, founder, co-owner and distillery CEO. According to Coley, Foster had been sampling some of his own Permafrost along with a titbit of salmon, was struck by how well they went together, and had an epiphany. One presumably inspired by the effects of the vodka, as well as the gustatory possibilities? “Yeah, probably very much,” Coley concedes. “I don’t know if many people would think of putting fish in vodka.”

Probably not. And it isn’t just the thought that’s off-putting, there are also practical difficulties – despite their initial enthusiasm, Foster and his team found that extracting a palatable salmon extract was no piece of fishcake. “It was such a trial,” Coley admits “As a matter of fact, the first couple of times they did it, they were so violently ill.”

The problem was the excessive oil obtained through the essence extraction process. In fact Foster and his wife, and co-owner, Scotti MacDonald reportedly made close to 50 attempts to perfect a drinkable version of the spirit, before arriving at a not quite top secret process – Coley is a little vague about the finer details, but she explains that the process basically involves smoking, skinning and mashing up the salmon fillets, and then boiling them in a stew of concentrated ethanol to obtain ‘essence of salmon’.

So what’s the best way to consume fish-flavoured vodka? Bizarrely, you drop a piece of raw salmon into the glass, which Coley somewhat unbelievably describes as “the most tasty thing I’ve ever tasted”

That essence is then put through a custom-designed high power filter to remove impurities, before being added to the vodka. Made on a base of triple-distilled grain vodka, the salmon essence is also filtered five times. It makes for a labour intensive production method, with each batch taking seven days to produce. For this reason, the distillery produces “gigantic” batches. The soaring cost of Alaskan salmon in the winter also means that the vast majority of salmon essence is produced in the summer – quite a feat when you think that the distillery is producing 10,000 bottles a month.

Probably the only thing more surprising than the idea that someone would think to put fish in vodka is that the resulting drink has proved a hit, with the distillery describing it as a ‘top-seller’.

So what’s the best way to consume fish-flavoured vodka? Strong in alcohol and strong in flavour, drinking the vodka in straight shots is not necessarily recommended. Unless, bizarrely, you drop a piece of raw salmon into the glass, which Coley somewhat unbelievably describes as “the most tasty thing I’ve ever tasted”.

“The only way I could stomach just a shot of it, is what they call here an ‘Are You Man Enough’ – they take a piece of salmon and put it in with your shot. So you shoot it all together and you chew up the salmon. And surprisingly there’s some type of subtleness to it that’s really good, 
really incredible. For me, that’s the only way I could drink it neat.”

If that sounds too extreme, the vodka is more usually served as an interesting twist on a Bloody Mary, while one Alaskan restaurant has concocted a smoked salmon martini, which has reportedly enjoyed no small success.

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Drinking it meat

Fish vodka isn’t the only meat-flavoured spirit to be enjoying success. Bakon, a brand of bacon-flavoured vodka, launched in 2009, has been making a bit of noise in the US, picking up numerous awards and setting cocktail bars a-sizzling with savoury taste possibilities – suggested mixes include ‘Bakon L‘Orange’ (Bacon-flavoured vodka, Gran Marnier and Frangelico) and the ‘Elvis Presley’ (bacon-flavoured vodka, hazelnut liqueur, banana liqueur and cream).

In fact, mixing meat and alcohol perhaps not as bizarre as it may at first seem – cooking with wine and spirits is a tradition which goes back hundreds of years, while the combination of savoury and sweet flavours is commonplace in gastronomy. And lest anyone think that this represents a new attention-seeking fad, not only have smoked baconey-tasting beers been produced for centuries, but traditional Mezcal recipes require the spirit to be distilled through chicken breast. Nice.

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