50 OregonStater.org PHOTOS BY SO-MIN KANG OUR COMMUNITY A WILL AND A WHEY Alumna Emily Darchuk wants to save the world, one cocktail at a time. BY > KATHERINE CUSUMANO, MFA ’24 Let’s start with the whey. If you trace it back to its origins, you arrive in a barn — in California, perhaps, or Wisconsin or Oregon — where you see a cow, her udder swollen with milk. To make cheese, this milk is split into curds, the desired product — and whey, a translucent yellow-white byproduct that is, essentially, waste. And there is so much of it: For every pound of cheese produced, you get nine pounds of whey. In 2023, the United States produced more than 14 billion pounds of cheese. Multiply that by nine, and you get the idea. Now, say you’re a food scientist. You figure out a way to ferment and distill whey to create a spirit: Eighty proof, with notes of buttery diacetyl, vanillin and oak. It’s not really a vodka, not really a gin, not really any kind of existing spirit — but it’s not not those things, either. As much as the question of What is it? you find yourself concerned with the question of Why is it? — which is to say that one of the big challenges is to make potential imbibers understand that the milk- derived spirit is not only good, it’s also good for the planet, in that it takes thousands of gallons of waste and alchemizes it into something new. These are the fundamentals of Wheyward Spirit, the brand founded in 2020 by Emily Darchuk, M.S. ’15. In flavor, Wheyward Spirit resembles nothing so much as a smooth, grassy sake, while its brown-liquor counterpart, Wheysky, is aged in oak barrels like a bourbon and has the peat character of a Scotch. It’s earned Darchuk some notoriety: In 2021, she appeared
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