Westward Whiskey

Westward Whiskey is the Portland, Oregon American Single Malt producer that grew out of one of the earliest modern craft American whiskey operations on the West Coast — House Spirits Distillery, founded in 2004 by Christian Krogstad on Portland's Distillery Row. Krogstad came to Oregon in 1991 for a craft brewing apprenticeship and a job with McMenamins (the Pacific Northwest brewery and historic-property restoration chain), and his brewing background directly shaped what would become Westward's editorial production identity: brew like a Pacific Northwest pale ale, distill like a Scotch single malt, age like a Kentucky bourbon. The production philosophy is genuinely distinctive in the American whiskey landscape. Westward starts with a pale-ale-style mash bill of 100% Pacific Northwest two-row malted barley, fermented with ale yeast rather than the distiller's yeast that most whiskey producers use — which produces a beer-like wort with fruity ale-fermentation esters that show up in the final spirit. The distilled spirit then ages in new charred American oak barrels (the bourbon-tradition aging vessel rather than the used-cask aging of Scotch tradition) for a minimum of 4 years before bottling. The result drinks like nothing else in the American whiskey field — closer to a craft pale ale's flavor character than to either bourbon or Scotch reference points. In 2018, Distill Ventures — Diageo's craft-spirits accelerator program — made a substantial investment in Westward's pare…