Whisky from Beer

Whisky education from Whisk(e)y Advent 2025 (2025-12-19). Summary below; full write-up with sources and images: calendar/2025-12-19.qmd.

Whisky begins as an unhopped ‘beer’ (grain wash fermented with yeast) that is distilled and aged. Distiller-brewery collaborations (e.g., hopped whiskies) are increasingly common.

Verbatim source text

Reproduced from calendar/2025-12-19.qmd (Whisk(e)y Advent 2025).

Beer and whisky are pretty closely related; roughly speaking, to make whisky you usually would make “beer” from grain (typically without hops), ferment it with yeast, and then distill the product to get unaged whisky. There’s been a number of collaborations for a while between distillers and craft breweries to create some interesting products. Last year, we had a delightful hopped whisky from Lagunitas. This year, we have one of Iowa’s most reliable breweries represented. I know very little about this whisky (is it hopped? is it not hopped?), and notes are hard to find on the internet, so share your own thoughts here about this uncommon find.