Alan Aston is more than an imaginative artist. The former scientist with the CSIRO's plant division in Canberra makes liquors that can blow your head off. After years of experimenting with various fruits he decided in 2013 to target the lucrative Chinese export market.

After testing various fruits he settled on lychees, a Chinese feminine symbol of romance and love because of its pretty red exterior. He found the flavour was outstanding.

"I made three varieties on different amounts of alcohol, lychee gold 18, with 18 per cent alcohol, lychee 38 on 38 per cent and lychee gold 88, which has 53.8 per cent alcohol, with a play on the word number eight, a lucky number for Chinese," Mr Alston said. "I also made a cider at 8 per cent alcohol. They were fantastic, the lychee gold 18, the 88 blows the top of your head off, but Chinese like high alcohol drinks."

After securing business partners in China and organising bottling, labelling, sterilising and certification the venture was under way, only to flounder when his overseas contacts turned out to be crooks. He lost $30,000.

"I thought I had developed some expertise so I would look at the domestic market, which I didn't want to do initially. I looked at the 18 per cent liquor, but we don't drink liquors like we used to, with the breathalysers and that sort of thing."

The sculptor collaborates with his wife and fellow artist Julie. Their life-sized Lake George zebras generated a frenzy of interest, survived an attack by vandals before going to Floriade and retiring to Pegasus Riding for the Disabled.

Turning his sights to the Australian market he re-visited the lychee cider he had been making, reduced the alcohol percentage to 4.5 per cent and entered the Sydney Good Food and Wine Show with three ciders; a lychee, lychee and apple and lychee and grape cider.

Lychee on its own was the most popular. "I just needed to tweak it a bit. We released in last May at the Melbourne Good Food and Wine show, we had 10,000 litres of it, bowled down to Melbourne, no outlets at all," Mr Alston said.

"The response at these shows was just amazing. Everyone said this is fantastic, yummy, wow."

The light gold brew is called Lychee Gold Cider and is in 130 bottle shops throughout Melbourne, Canberra, the south coast and Sydney.

The two artists came up with a label of two Chinese characters under a peeled lychee. For some reason women are first to recognise the symbols are a boy and a girl. Boy Lychee and Girl Lychee have their own Facebook page where they are placed as creatively as those four zebras were in 2010, only further afield, in Iceland, London, New York, at prestigious sports events and photobombing royalty.

Two hundred and fifty lychee growers are on farms from Cooktown in Far North Queensland to Coffs Harbour in NSW. The season begins in November and ends in March in NSW. Mr Alston buys his fruit at the Sydney markets and ferments them at at Kyeema Winery, Murrumbateman.

He doesn't add sugar, relying on natural sugars. "' You have to match that sweetness with your flavour too," he said. A 10,000-litre batch is then trucked to Mildura for bottling.

He is now organising distribution in South Australia and will head to Perth and Brisbane.