Beer Nut: Recycling beer into whiskey

It’s no secret that the pandemic caused a lot of breweries to waste a lot of beer. Kegged beer that could no longer be distributed to closed bars basically was flushed away. In the U.K. alone, nearly 90 million pints had been tossed as of February.

It’s also no secret that aside from beer, my favorite adult beverage is whiskey. This is true of a lot of beer drinkers – especially ones who I’ve met in my travels talking about beer.

This week’s column combines both those concepts as I write about a new company that has come up with the technology that can turn expired beer into whiskey in a matter of days. (The company also can make whiskey from scratch in the same time period.) Beer and whiskey, of course, are made using similar processes up to a point.

Bespoken Spirits of Menlo Park, California, is a new company that uses science and modern technology to reduce the amount of time it takes to make whiskey from years to mere days. I imagine traditionalists (a group that sort of includes me) might flinch and grimace at the very idea of whiskey that hasn’t been barrel-aged for at least four years, but they might be surprised at the actual product.

I spoke with the company’s co-founder Stu Aaron about the process and did a virtual tasting with him via Zoom.

Aaron said that the idea was partially born out of frustration with how long it takes to make whiskey. The idea that manufacturers have to wait several years to find out if the product is even good seemed incredible. There’s also the scientific fact and wasteful reality of the “angels share,” which is the 20% of the product that evaporates over the aging process.

Aaron further pointed out that today’s younger consumers seem to be favoring spirits over beer or wine. I have to begrudgingly admit this is true. He also noted that younger whiskey drinkers seem to recoil at their parents’ whiskey choices and want something of their own. Enter Bespoken, which seemingly can offer a multitude of choices over a short period of time

Bespoken Spirits was founded in 2018 on the premise that a spirit’s aroma, color, and most importantly taste, could be designed, engineered, and precisely controlled with modern science, technology, and data, and that it could be done sustainably. So rather than putting the spirit in a barrel and waiting passively for nature and time to take its course, Bespoken uses a proprietary “ACTivation” technology to instill the barrel aging process quickly into spirits, actively controlling the process to deliver spirits in days rather than years

The science is a bit much to get into here in a beer column, but it seems to work. The sample we did in our tasting was Bespoken Rye Whiskey. It had a fairly decent nose, with notes of caramel and butterscotch. It was a promising start.

The flavor, of course, was what mattered, and I have to say I was initially impressed by the fact that it wasn’t harsh. I had assumed that the lack of actual barrel aging would render the product a bit “green” and therefore possibly rough. But it was surprisingly smooth. Hints of cherry and pepper dominated for me, while Aaron noted a spearmint note that I later tasted on the back end.

While Bespoken doesn’t use expired beer for their own whiskey, that part of their business model comes from helping other distilleries recycle old beer into spirits. It’s another way that Bespoken looks to help businesses operate more sustainably.

In the end, I’d give the whiskey I tried a solid “B” grade. It’s not going to replace my everyday whiskey and isn’t as good as my higher-end spirit, Green Spot. But on the other hand, Bespoken is just starting their entry into the market, and they have the science to tweak their products more quickly than other distilleries, so I wouldn’t be surprised to taste an “A” product from them in the not-too-distant future.