SAN DIEGO — Born with a moonshiner’s heart, Wili Fleming has found his home creating the spirits he sings about.
He’s a distiller and musician at ReBru Spirits, a distillery that takes expired beer and re-crafts it into vodka, gin — and his favorite — whiskey.
“Instead of it being wasted, we literally take the spirits out of the beer and put it into a bottle,” Fleming said. “It goes to a better place.”
Fleming said they are building on the principals that began hundreds of years ago.
“Distillers and people who have been making spirits, they always source what’s nearby, especially when they were first starting out,” Fleming said. “So it was like ‘well, what do we have? A bunch of potatoes. OK, we’re going to use that. What do we have? A bunch of rice. OK, we’re going to use that.’ In San Diego, we have a bunch of beer, so we decided to go along in that same vein and use the beer.”
ReBru Founder Dennis O’Connor said there are thousands of gallons of out-of-code beer at their facility, waiting to be turned into something delicious. They take beer from breweries all around Southern California and repurpose it while paying tribute to San Diego craft beer.
“There’s a lot of unsold everything worldwide, so we’re trying to tap into it, literally,” O’Connor said.
Marc Martin is the CEO of Thorn Brewing next door and said having a partner like ReBru helps make those occasional bad batches less painful. He said normally breweries have to pay to dispose of beer properly since just pouring it down the drain can damage wastewater systems. He said being able to run old beer through a still to create something new is a great solution.
“The ability to give something a little bit of a second life and for the public still to be able to go out and have a good time with it, I think that’s a win-win,” Martin said.
For Fleming, being able to combine the art of distilling with a focus on sustainability is a gift.
“Not only are we a part of that huge lineage of distillers and moonshiners and spirit makers, some of that fabric from the very beginning of the USA, but now we’re sort of taking that torch and continuing to progress on those ideas and just keep thinking creatively and see what we can do,” Fleming said.
San Diego County alone has over 150 craft breweries. O’Connor said it’s easy to stay hyperlocal when sourcing their ingredients, which helps make their whole business truly sustainable.