Florida CANE Distillery has created a line of spirits made entirely with locally sourced ingredients, including the Plant City Strawberry vodka.
Plant City’s devotion to the strawberry industry has launched it to national fame. The annual Florida Strawberry Festival is one of the largest in the country, the berries grown here are sold in stores across the world and presidential candidates often stop to enjoy some of the local shortcake.
When Lee Nelson decided years ago to transform his homebrew hobby into a flourishing
career, he knew exactly where he wanted to start: local farmers. Now, one of his top-selling Florida CANE vodkas is infused with Plant City strawberries.
“I live in East Hillsborough, out in Sydney and Dover, which I joke is the suburbs of Plant City,” Nelson said. “Every time I drive anywhere I’m passing fields and fields of great produce. Right now it’s strawberries, sometimes it’s eggplants or cucumbers. It’s such a great resource locally. We grow the best strawberries, we grow the best produce. The vision was: let’s highlight this.”
Nelson began brewing beer in his college dorm room when he was still a teenager. Using a pressure cooker, three Miller Lite cans, marbles and Gorilla Glue, Nelson kickstarted a passion that surpassed even the multiple poisonings brought on by his not-so-safe adhesive.
Pat O’Brien, his hockey teammate, recognized Nelson could be on the cusp of a trend he was sure would take the nation by storm. He knew craft brewing was becoming the cultural norm and speculated the same would eventually happen to distilled spirits. After a few years of planning, the duo, along with Nelson’s wife, decided to bring the dream to fruition.
In 2012, the Florida CANE Distillery was officially formed and Nelson and O’Brien began the long journey toward making a high quality, entirely American product. The bottles come from Missouri, the corks from outside of Michigan and everything inside the bottle is 100% Floridian.
The vodka has a sugar cane base, which Nelson said is a perfect background for flavors.
Instead of overshadowing the crispness of the vodka, the sugar cane allows a non-syrupy and genuine flavor to blend with the drink.
After driving by countless strawberry fields, Nelson went to a u-pick farm to buy buckets of the sweet fruit. After experimentation, he found the perfect blend and now comes to local fruit stands every year to buy large quantities of the fruit for his next batch.
Some of the other locally themed drinks include watermelon from Weeki Wachee, pineapple from Palm Beach, Cherry from Okeechobee and the jalapeño flavored Florida Fire Ant vodka.
Outside of his dedication to locally sourced goods, Nelson also uses a unique method to create his highly sought after drinks. The vodka is filtered through a column full of charcoal derived from coconut husks. It slowly drains through the chambers and leaves with a unique taste before the flavor is added to the final batch. The Plant City strawberries soak for three weeks in high alcohol before being filtered several times, combined with sugar and added to the vodka.
Though the distillery in Ybor is a small location, Florida CANE is quickly becoming one of the most recognizable brands in the market.
Disney just made a huge order for the company’s gin. Busch Gardens and SeaWorld are featuring its bourbon, vodka and gin. Walmart Spirits will soon be carrying the company’s Plant City Strawberry vodka, Key West Lemon Lime vodka, Florida Fire Ant vodka and the premium vodka.
The Ybor distillery is open Thursday through Sunday and offers visitors a chance to have a proper tasting, tour the faculty and check out the variety of products, including 109-proof moonshines and whiskey, the company makes. Florida CANE also offers a Distillery After Dark event where a local mixologist is invited to teach attendees how to create their own unique drinks.
Nelson said once you taste the product you’ll never return to a manufactured brand. Every bottle Florida CANE produces tastes a little bit different. With larger brands like Smirnoff or Absolut, the process relies on mass producing the same product.
His company relies entirely on his taste buds, which he admits occasionally leads to “a lot of bad batches.” Never the pessimist, Nelson simply dumps them and starts again. He’s always searching for that perfect flavor that can both astonish customers and support local residents.
“It resonates. When you’re able to spend money locally those dollars stay in the community and amplify. If you buy something overseas that money doesn’t stick around,” Nelson said. “We are continually trying to keep the money here in our community. That’s why everything from the produce for our flavors to the printing and graphic design comes from right here.”
