Beer and whiskey, together again

One Saturday afternoon, Michael Anderson and Brian Purcell were kneeling in front of a copper pot still, watching a steady stream of spirits flow into a bucket.

“Wow, that’s interesting,” Purcell said, sniffing and sipping the clear liquid from a tasting glass.

“You can really get the spices, even after distilling,” Anderson said. “It’s almost like a gin.”

Anderson, the co-founder and president of Independent Distilling, and Purcell, the founder and president of Three Taverns Brewery, run their businesses out of neighboring warehouse spaces along East College Avenue in Decatur.

But they recently bridged the few hundred yards between the distillery and the brewery for an experiment that is turning 32 quarter-barrel kegs, or about 240 gallons of beer, into a single, one-of-akind barrel of whiskey.

The beer, Feest Noel, is a strong, Belgian-style quad spiced with cardamom, allspice and cloves that Three Taverns made for the holiday season, but didn’t quite sell through.

“We were sitting on some extra kegs,” Purcell said. “We wondered if these guys would be interested in distilling Feest Noel into whiskey, and they jumped on the idea.”

“‘I’d been wanting to distill some beer,” Anderson said. “This would not have been my first choice because of the spices. That’s a wild card. But when Brian asked, I was ready to try it.”

It turns out, beer and whiskey have been boon companions for a very long time. Many styles of whiskey begin as a mixture of malted barley, water and yeast, called “distiller’s beer” or “wash.” Most beer starts the same way, except it’s flavored with hops, which impart bright and bitter aromas and flavors.

More than that, American

Beer Town