Belgian Beer Brandy Blond

Belgium is a beer country. What Belgian brewers achieve is impressive, truly impressive. And what we can make from that afterwards is – literally speaking – even more impressive.

Distilling beer, isn’t that the basis of whisky? Yes, but there’s also a big difference.

When we make whisky, we first brew an ‘undrinkable’ beer. The brewing process is similar, but there are also some major differences. It starts with the barley grain and milling. For our beers, we want to filter after mashing, which is why we don’t mill the grain too finely, to achieve a natural filter bed. We don’t do that for our whisky. We mill much finer to maximize yield and bring out more of the malt flavor. We don’t filter that, but distill on the grain. Furthermore, for whisky, we don’t boil or add hops for preservation; we distill that wort relatively quickly anyway. And during mashing, we also don’t consider proteins for foam stability and beer body.

This way, we get a kind of ‘undrinkable’ beer, ready to be distilled into a great single malt whisky.

That’s also the big difference with distilled beers. The base is perfectly drinkable beers that we distill.

We usually start with a strong Tripel of around 8.5% ABV and distill it up to twice in our copper Holstein stills. The resulting spirit is purer, smoother, and more refined, and still links back to the original beer.

This also makes it spicier than what we obtain as new make for whisky.