Charbay: Turning Beer into Booze 

A father and son distill gallons of beer into good spirits.

by Brian Yager

Back in 1999, Marko Karakasevic woke up to an overwhelming, dank aroma at his office/home-away-from-home in Mendocino County, Calif. He feared something had caught fire. Humboldt is, after all, the neighbor to the north where hops' illicit cousin is abundant. How would he explain it to his father, Miles Karakasevic, who slept nearby? Fortuitously, the herbaciousness that permeated the air was simply the smell of distilled hops, which he should've expected, since he was in the process of distilling 20,000 gallons of pilsner.

It's a 21/7 process (he sleeps three hours a night), keeping an eye on a copper alembic pot and making cuts to the distillate to ensure only the hearts-the most desirable liquid-and not the heads or tails, remain. Whiskey is a distillate made from "low wash" or "distiller's beer," meaning it contains the same malted grain, water and yeast that all beer has. The difference is that the beer we drink is bittered, usually with hops.

The Karakasevics, though devoted to tradition, aren't big on convention. Given to wearing Hawaiian shirts, shorts and flip-flops, father and son continue the family trade as winemakers and distillers dating back to mid-18th-century Yugoslavia. Miles left the old country nearly 50 years ago and wound up establishing Charbay-making mostly wines and brandys-in 1983 in St. Helena, one of the Napa Valley's idyllic enclaves. The family resides and works on the same 17 acres to this day, where Miles, 69, and Marko, 37, carry on as the 12th and 13th generation, respectively.

While they produce 29 products in all-Marko created a line of Charbay-infused vodkas that account for roughly 90 percent of their sales-it is his innovative whiskeys that are stealing his focus at this moment. They constitute nearly 2 percent of sales. But he's working on that. For full article