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Most of lighter alcohols can be distilled or concentrated to obtain strong liquors. Wine can be distilled into cognac or brandy, apple cider is concentrated into applejack, Sake distilled into Imo—sake etc.
Is there any liquor produced by concentrating or distilled from beer?
There are a number of distilled spirits that are made from the same grains that are used to make beer, so could be considered to be "distilled beer".
The most obvious one is whisky, which can be made using various grains including including barley, malted barley, rye, malted rye, wheat, buckwheat and corn.[1] Whiskys don't generally include hops though, so you wouldn't use a random beer as a starting point.
Vodka can also be made from grain, but the production process removes most of what you'd consider to be "beer".
Well, technically, single malt (scotch whisky) is a distilled beer, except for not having hops in it. They even call it beer before distilling and the brewing process is pretty much the same (again, except for the hops), although it doesn't go through secondary maturation. Off course, they keep the recipe very simple, on most cases probably using a single type of base malt and nothing else. No special/flavouring malts like beer.
But some people nowadays are doing crazy things like distilling real and well-known beers into whisky.
Look at those guys of Seven Stills, from San Francisco, and Sons of Liberty. They're are making whisky (pretty much single malts if you stop to think) from Imperial IPAs and Chocolate Stouts. Those guys from Germany are distilling their classic Marzen style too. Rogue, a brewery in the first place, distill some of their beers as well.
There are even some well-know craft beers which have already been distilled into whiskys, like Samuel Adams' Boston Lager.
Some people go even further: they distill a barrel-aged beer and age the resultant spirit again in the same barrel which the beer came from. Not to mention that sometimes they age their regular spirits in "beers barrels" as well. Confused? Me too. =)
Interesting time we are living nowadays.
