Levenbank Distillery has reached the next milestone in its innovative beer-to-whisky collaboration with Leeds-based craft brewery Northern Monk, as the spirit from the project has now been distilled and laid down in cask.
The collaboration sees an imperial stout recipe developed jointly by the two teams transformed into three distinct products: the original beer, a cask-aged imperial stout and a single grain Scotch whisky created by distilling the same recipe.
The grain whisky component of the project has now been distilled at Levenbank Distillery and filled into a first fill bourbon cask, ready to mature for several years before release.
Founded by the team behind Loch Lomond Brewery, Levenbank is exploring the relationship between brewing and distilling through a series of collaborations designed to demonstrate how beer recipes and fermentation influence the character of whisky.
Euan MacEachern, head brewer, head distiller and director at Levenbank Distillery, said: “One of the core ideas behind Levenbank is that great whisky starts long before spirit meets wood. By focusing on the brewing stage – the malt bill, the yeast and the fermentation – we can create a wash with real depth and character before it ever reaches the still.”
He continued: “Working with Northern Monk on this project has been incredibly exciting because imperial stout is such a bold, flavourful style of beer. Distilling that recipe allows us to explore how those roasted malts and fermentation characteristics carry through into the new make spirit.”
Northern Monk co-founder and head brewer Brian Dickson added: “From the beginning we were fascinated by how a single recipe could evolve across different formats. Seeing the stout transformed into whisky is a brilliant next step in that journey.”
The whisky will mature in the same first fill bourbon cask used for the barrel-aged stout release, forming part of a three-part collection that explores the transformation of a single recipe through brewing, cask maturation and distillation.
The collaboration marks the first in a planned series of beer-to-whisky exploration projects at Levenbank Distillery, with future experiments expected to explore styles such as barleywines, doppelbocks and sour beers.
