Black Butte Whiskey hits the shelves

Published 1:19 pm Wednesday, May 24, 2017

Bendistillery released the fruit of a first-time collaboration with Deschutes Brewery this week: a 3-year-old whiskey distilled from Black Butte Porter.

In 2013, the Tumalo distillery started turning three, 3,000-gallon batches of the dark beer into Black Butte Whiskey, said CEO Alan Dietrich at an unveiling Wednesday at the Deschutes Brewery & Public House on NW Bond Street. Now, the distillery is producing 4,000-gallon batches every month. They age in charred oak barrels.

More possibilities lie ahead, Dietrich said.

“It’s going to afford us the ability to do any number of future projects of varying ages, barrel finishes,” he said; “really the possibilities are endless on what we might tweak to make different whiskies at the end of the day.”

Bendistillery six months ago started distilling Deschutes’ Abyss, an imperial porter, into another whiskey, Dietrich said.

Black Butte Whiskey is available at the Deschutes pubs in Bend and Portland, the Bendistillery tasting room and in Oregon liquor stores.