From Mikkeller:

What’s it about?

It’s about beer, it’s about spirits, and it’s about bringing the two worlds together with great respect for both.

The story:

It’s no secret that Mikkeller (the brewery) is inspired by the beers and breweries from the U.S. We do a lot of beers with powerful American hops. We do a lot of other stuff as well, we do all styles of beer because we like to explore genres and we like to take genres somewhere else. Mikkeller Spirits is not just taking genres somewhere else, this is beer meeting spirits. The concept is known as micro distilling. We did not invent this; it has been going on for some time. Micro distilling is really blooming in the U.S., as mentioned, we are aware of stuff happening over there.

We are curious by nature; distilling is not the only issue here.

The real issue for Mikkeller and Mikkeller Spirits is the coherence between the two things. That’s what we found to be key for releasing spirits, coherence!

Black is a Mikkeller beer, one of the most famous ones in the Mikkeller repertoire. We wanted to distill this beer, blasphemy some would say – maybe. But we wanted to do this, to try it out.

Mikkeller & Braunstein (We could not do this by ourselves):

Braunstein Distillery in Køge (DK) has been distilling high class spirits for quite a while. We met up, discussed this concept and started distilling Black. And it worked out great, better than we could have hoped for. Distilling a rather hoppy imperial stout is not difficult, but it’s difficult to get aromas and taste beyond the distilling process. It takes time; distilling and dilution must be done slowly to avoid loss of flavors and aromas.

We think the end products of the Black distillation are great. You can still feel and taste the hops, you know when drinking this, that it’s not bourbon, it’s not whisky, it’s something else. We call it beer brandy. The result of this co-work between Braunstein and Mikkeller makes us both proud, we hope you can feel and taste the skill and effort put into these bottles.

We did not stop at distilling Black; we wanted to produce other stuff as well, other spirits with a strong relation to beer. That’s why we dry hop vodka, that’s why we put hops in our gin. We do also play around with other genres, The White Dog for example. An old classic, the smooth white booze with its own criminal history, we thought it would be cool to make a White Dog in Denmark.

Read about all products on the site.

The name?

Because it is a spirit and it’s produced by Mikkeller?

Of course there is the disambiguation, the metaphorical stuff: When taking something and bringing out the essence, in this case the alcohol, it is known as the spirit of things. Is it the spirit in a religious way, meaning something spiritual – yes, no? Is it spirits like the plural of spirit, you decide, we found it to be the perfect name.

This is the spirit of Mikkeller, now we bring that to you.

ENJOY!