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Over in Washington State, USA, Venise Cunningham’s chickens aren’t just part of the farm – they’re part of the bar.
It began with “a teeny, tiny chicken coop” and five Rhode Island Reds at Venise’s first house by the river, and her family’s first time trying out chickens. Twelve years on, the flock has evolved. Most recently, her seven year old son decided he wanted to hatch eggs so they borrowed an incubator, sourced fertile eggs from local farmers and tried their luck. “Humidity and temperature is kind of hard here,” she says. “But we got seven to hatch!”
Today, the chickens roam, scratch, fertilise – and the hens lay eggs that find their way into the cocktail shaker of Simple Goodness Sisters drinks business.
Venise is the grower. She cultivates the herbs, edible flowers and fruit that shape the flavours of Simple Goodness Sisters, the business she runs with her sister Belinda. Belinda is the cocktail maker. Before setting up their cocktail syrup business, the sisters worked in downtown Seattle and Bellevue for tech companies, planning large scale events. It was there they spotted the gap.
“There’s a lot of attention on farm to table,” Venise says, “but not a lot of attention goes to the glass.” So they built what she calls “a whole cocktail farm.”
The syrups anchored drinks at their restaurant and at events across the region – including the Northwest Flower & Garden Festival in Seattle (where we met the sisters who also had a booth there) where they were mixing the introductory cocktails for the afternoon speakers.
When Venise is making a blueberry lavender syrup, she’ll use 100 pounds of blueberries bought directly from a neighbouring farm. The juice is pressed and bottled. And this is where the chickens come into play. The hens aren’t a novelty – they’re integrated. Because once 100 pounds of blueberries have given up their juice, Venise is left with skins and flesh still full of value.
“All of the juice comes out of the blueberries, but you still have all the skin and the flesh,” she says. “I’m still pulling a lot of really good ingredients out of the syrup kettle.”
In their book, she and Belinda call the philosophy “whole animal bartending” – the cocktail equivalent of nose-to-tail cooking. Use everything. Waste nothing. Some fruit leftovers become shrubs. Some are dehydrated and ground into sugar rimmers. And when they’ve taken it as far as they can, the rest heads back outside.
“It goes to the farm, and it becomes chicken food… then it goes into my compost, and then it turns into compost, and then I put it in my garden bed – it never goes into the dumpster.”
That circular thinking extends beyond the bar. Watching how thoroughly the chickens scratch through pasture sparked another idea: “Can they weed for me?” Venise built a temporary structure over her raised beds so the flock could claw through weeds before planting season.“In a couple of weeks, all of my beds are weeded,” she says.
And it’s not just weeding – “they’re adding the fertiliser… it’s all really great for the soil.” For Venise, this is the heart of farming. “That’s the part of farming that I love the most – getting really creative.” The Herb Garden Sour cocktail also involves the flock – it uses the egg whites from the flock’s eggs for its foamy and bubbly texture.
Why not give The Simple Goodness Fizz cocktail a go?
Ingredients for 1 cocktail:
50ml Gin, Whiskey, Bourbon, Tequila, Pisco, Sherry
20ml ounce lemon juice, or a mix of lemon and lime juice, fresh squeezed
20ml Simple Syrup
15ml (or about 1 large) egg white or aquafaba (chickpea water) as a vegan/allergen substitute
1 scoop of 3 large cubes ice
Garnish of choice
Directions: In a cocktail shaker, add all ingredients but no ice. Firmly cap the shaker and do a dry shake of all ingredients for 1 minute (it’s a work out!). Gently, so as not to kill the foam, add a big scoop of ice to the shaker and then shake vigorously for another 30 seconds. Strain the drink into a coupe or stemmed wine glass. Some foam will come through and settle to the top. Capture the extra foam that has clung to the sides of the shaker by “rinsing” the shaker with just 25ml of club soda, swirling it to catch the foam and then straining it onto the top of the drink. If done correctly, there will be a solid line of silky foam ½ inch thick at the top of the glass, and a bright, transparent liquid layer of cocktail below. Find the full recipe and more over on the Simple Goodness Sisters website.
From coop to cocktail foam, from spent berries to chicken feed to compost to soil, the system runs in a tight circle.
The farm grows the flavours. The bar shakes the drinks. The chickens keep it moving. And as Venise puts it, nothing “ever goes into the dumpster.” You can find out more about the farm, the cocktails, and the book the sisters have written ‘Drink Your Garden’ on the Simple Goodness Sisters website.
This entry was posted in Chickens