Hop on the Sunshine Coast Food Trail

The Sunshine Coast Food Trail includes 400 experiences which can be combined to create your own personal food trail.

Local brewing

There’s much to choose from but I recommend leaving the highway behind you and contemplating your desires over a freshly brewed beer at Maleny’s new $1 million Brouhaha Brewery. Head Brewer Matt Jancauskas earned his beer stripes working for two years in London’s Beavertown Brewery.

The Brouhaha beers include a pale ale, along with a more unusual coffee milk stout or raspberry saison. Ingredients are as local as the passionfruit in the IPA. Don’t go hungry here either with food options including a brewmaster’s platter, brisket tacos or chicken wings lashed with the chef’s secret sauce.

Bees and camels

Further down the road at Crohamhurst near Peachester, Apiarist Paula West, also known as Queen Bee, conducts bee-keeping and kitchen garden workshops. Adopt a hive to preserve diminishing bee numbers and you can name your queen bee and eat your way through 8kg of hand-spun, cold extraction honey harvested annually from the hive.

Maxi and Gracey are two of an unusual bunch of Sunshine Coast locals who enjoy a Glasshouse Mountain view that many would envy. They are part of the camel herd at QCamel, a camel milk dairy owned and run by the Brisbane family. Maddie Shalhoub’s Live It Tours takes guests behind the scenes at QCamel for camel cuddles and tastings of camel milk and canapes. The deliciously mild flavoured camel milk is available at local outlets and direct to customers around Australia.

Food and wine

Pop into Flame Hill Vineyard just outside Montville for breathtaking views of mountains rolling down towards the ocean and taste some of their estate grown wines. I recommend trying their Fiano, preferably with a plate of seared Hervey Bay scallops and cauliflower and truffle panna cotta all topped with pork crackle.

The Cooking School, Noosa allows guest chefs and the team from multi-award-winning Wasabi Restaurant & Bar to share their particular cooking style. When Wasabi chef Zeb Gilbert takes the helm, you’ll be surprised by the deliciousness that the cooking class kitchen produces. Best of all, participants plate and eat their lunch in Wasabi overlooking the Noosa River.

I predict you will enjoy the cooking class food so much that a dinner at Danielle Gjestland’s Wasabi will be next on your must-do list. Recognised by Gourmet Traveller in their Top 100 restaurant list, Wasabi’s food comes straight from the heart, flavoured with Japanese purity.

Noosa Farmers’ Market, held every Sunday morning at Noosaville, brings together the finest and freshest regional produce grown or produced on the Sunshine Coast. Go hungry, ready to eat breakfast and be prepared with bags and cooler packs to take home the wealth of goodies you won’t be able to resist.

Need more inspiration? Watch Peter Kuruvita’s Coastal Kitchen on SBS On Demand and share this popular chef’s food finds. Try his menu infused with local flavours at Noosa Beach House Restaurant & Bar in Hastings Street.

Somewhere to stay

Stay on the trail in the hinterland at boutique resort The Narrows Escape Rainforest Retreat. This resort has six self-contained, secluded cottages nestled in two hectares of rainforest in the Blackall Range, near Lake Baroon, Montville. In Noosa the French luxury of the 176-suite Sofitel Noosa Pacific Resort will put you on Noosa’s famous Hastings Street, right next door to Noosa Beach House Peter Kuruvita.

Find more food trail options at Visit Sunshine Coast.