Early morning walks and breakfast out of the way we all walked to the Sarina Sugar Shed for our 9:30am tour. This was a one-hour fully guided tour that started with a welcome and introduction, followed by a short walk outdoors, past the Shed's sugar cane patch and historic machinery. We had a brief history lesson about the pioneering days of the sugar cane farmers in the Mackay region. It was then back indoors, into the mill and distillery area, where our guide took us through the process of extracting juice from fresh sugar cane. Then the tour finished with tastings of their rum and fruit liqueur products (4), chutneys, relishes and sauces (10), non-alcoholic ginger beer (1), and freshly-spun fairy floss. They had some really nice chutneys, sauces etc, and the Lime Cello and Chocolate Turkish Delight Liqueur were the best for Wendy. They also had coconut, and chocolate rum liqueurs, however, they were not to Wendy's palate. Greg did not much like the Lime Cello, whilst Greg's favourite was the Coconut.
We learned that sugar cane is a giant tropical grass related to Bamboo, that you can cut it and it will grow back, it is 75% water, 15% fibre and 15% sugar, there are 180 varieties of sugar cane (this was a bit of a shock to us all). In Australia (like most other cane growing countries), crops were once harvested by hand. An enterprising local chap, Ray Venton, invented a number of machines for collecting (after hand cutting), carting, and eventually, cutting. There are 24 sugar mills in QLD. The local one in Sarina (Plane Creek Mill) crushed 4 000 tonnes of cane in its first year (1896), and 1.3M tonnes last year. The cane fibre, aka bagasse, fuels the mills boilers to generate electricity. They also have an ethanol mill adjacent the sugar mill to process the molasses into ethanol for use as vehicle fuel.
Something we learned was a bit disturbing was that all sugar sold in Australia, from Australian mills, is refined white sugar. All the types of 'brown' sugar, are all refined white sugar, with varying degrees of molasses added. This came about when the food police decided that eating unrefined sugar was a health hazard! And, white sugar is not a health hazard?? 85% of all 'raw' sugar from this mill is exported.
After all that sugar, Noeleene and Wendy went for a coffee at the café we would eventually eat lunch at. It was not worth returning to the vans, so we spent the time chatting. The boys arrived before midday and Bob's friend arrived not long after. We had a table booked so we made ourselves comfortable, ordered, waited, received food, ate, paid and left (B&N stayed with their friend).
We paid a visit to Woolies before heading home. An LLD was had before Greg went for a ride with Bob, whilst Wendy published a MEPS Newsletter. Happy hour was had at the Barb's before a very light dinner, blogging, TV watching, and bed.
Jill, our guide at Sarina Sugar Shed, a real livewire
Learning about the processes required to turn the sugar cane juice into sugar
The tasting room
Fairy floss being made
Fairy floss being eaten
Plane Creek Mill
Some info about Sarina and the Mill
Not quite sure what this is supposed to be
Some more animals in the van park, they look so serene
