A Will and a WheyAlumna Emily Darchuk wants to save the world, one cocktail at a time.

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 on the “Grist 50” list of climate fixers; earlier this year, Beverage Information Group named her part of its “40 Under 40.” In 2022, Ben & Jerry’s launched an ice cream collaboration (the flavor is “Dublin Mudslide”); this year, Salt & Straw rang. In the past five years, the company has diverted some five gallons of whey for each bottle it produces — transforming it into what the  industry categorizes as a “specialty spirit,” which is to say one that almost defies category entirely. As a result, Darchuk has had to forge her own path.

Anyone can do things responsibly. It’s just that that conversation hasn’t been had.

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I met Darchuk this summer at a bar in Southeast Portland, where Wheyward was on the menu. The bartender set glasses down in front of us: One drink was translucent green-yellow, comprising Wheyward Spirit, a bergamot liqueur and a local amaro, and embellished with a lime wheel. The other was clear reddish-pink, layering Wheyward Spirit with absinthe and strawberry syrup, and topped with a generous sprig of mint.

“Oh,” she said, “it’s beautiful.”

Darchuk didn’t have much interest in spirits before she began making one. When she came to Oregon State in 2013 to study milk-tanker sanitation as part of a master’s degree in food science, she had five years of industry experience behind her — most of it in developing plant-based dairy products. I asked, as we admired the cocktails, what she used to like drinking.

“Um,” she began. “Beer?”

But she was an ardent upcycler with a lifelong interest in where food comes from — not only nutritionally, but also socially. “Food is really powerful for the ability to talk about more complex things — about water or carbon or waste or agriculture,” she said.

She knew that you could basically ferment anything. (Even Skittles. You could make vodka out of rainbow candy if you really wanted.) And during her research, she saw firsthand how much whey the dairy industry produced. Whey is a problem for producers, who struggle to get rid of it, and for the environment. Farmers pour it on fields, mix it with livestock feed, add it to a biodigester or simply dump it. When it meets waterways, whey can cause algal blooms, killing fish. Even whey protein powder — a booming market due to the national obsession with “protein-maxxing” and appetite-suppressing drugs like Ozempic — only uses a small amount of liquid whey, leaving behind a lactose-rich broth.

After completing her degree and working for a few years, Darchuk returned to Oregon to pursue an MBA at the University of Oregon. The whey problem still nagged at her. Sustainability and innovation, she thought, weren’t mutually exclusive.

“Anyone can do things responsibly,” she told me. “It’s just that that conversation hasn’t been had.”

This commitment had stood out even in her graduate research, according to Lizbeth Goddik, ’89, Ph.D. ’99, Darchuk’s advisor and the head of the Department of Food Science and Technology.

“Our students today are in it because they want to save the world,” said Goddik, who has also researched whey-based alcohol products. “She was one of the first ones to really recognize this.” (Because of Darchuk’s early success, industry experience and interest in sustainability, Goddik recruited her to serve on the department’s advisory committee.)

Though other whey-based spirits exist — TMK Creamery, in Canby (co-owned by Tess Koch, ’97, and Todd Koch, ’98), produces a small-batch vodka called Cowcohol; the Native-owned Copper Crow Distillery makes whey gin, whey vodka and others — Darchuk’s product is distinguished by its nonconformity. There are a whole host of regulations that determine what makes a gin a gin or a vodka a vodka, and Darchuk felt these labels homogenized products and lacked the transparency and ethics that she strove for.

The byzantine, state-by-state rules for distributing liquor — a vestige of Prohibition — also makes it all but impossible to quickly gain a national footprint. “The system’s not set up for small makers, so screw it,” she said. “I was like, let’s just focus on making the best spirit.”

Wheyward Spirit debuted in 2020. Accolades and awards started rolling in: gold medals from the New York and San Francisco World Spirits Competitions, and another from the Good Food Awards.

But Darchuk likes to say that, in this industry, it feels like you have to hit a grand slam to score a single — which is to say that there hasn’t been one big break for the brand. (And there have been challenges; the brand launched into the maw of the pandemic, and earlier this year, a USDA grant was temporarily frozen.)

Instead, Wheyward’s — and Darchuk’s — success has been predicated on grit, determination and a stack of small victories. “There’s this resilient and never-give-up mindset that goes along with her business acumen,” said Rachel Hotchko, M.S. ’15. The two friends met in the OSU food science program 12 years ago; later, Hotchko used Wheyward Spirit as a base for one of her wedding cocktails.

In early September, Wheyward Spirit joined a Kroger-sponsored incubator program and debuted a new two-pack sampler of half-bottles. (The packages bear the same mascot: a fluffy, long-horned highland cow named Magnificent.) The Wheyward Spirit project is an enticing one. It’s about reusing — in the reduce-reuse-recycle sense — but it’s also about reusing as reframing and redefining.

As we finished our drinks, Darchuk spoke of turning a commodity into a premium item; of transforming something perishable into another thing with an infinite shelf life; of the chameleonic characteristics of the spirit itself, which appears to taste different to every drinker.

“At the end of the day,” Darchuk said, “it’s not waste. It’s just something that’s not being utilized.”

Learn how to make Weyward’s Spirited Beaver cocktail (whipped up special for the Oregon Stater).