Deep in the heart of Seattle, where the salt air off Elliott Bay mixes with the smell of fresh-roasted coffee, two old friends just pulled off something that feels like it was thirty-five years in the making. Starting this Black Friday, November 28, 2025, a very limited run of 1,800 bottles of Copperworks Pike Kilt Lifter Whiskey hits the shelves—and once they’re gone, they’re gone for good.
Image credit: Copperworks Distilling Co.
This isn’t some marketing gimmick slapped together by a committee. It’s the real deal, born from a friendship and a shared obsession with making things taste better than they have any right to.
Back in 1989, a guy named Jason Parker was pouring the very first pints at Pike Brewing Company down in Pike Place Market. Craft beer barely existed on the West Coast back then. Most bars still thought “imported” meant Heineken. Parker and the Pike crew helped change all that. One of the beers he worked on was Kilt Lifter, a ruby-colored Scotch ale that became a Northwest classic—big, malty, a little smoky, the kind of beer that makes a rainy Seattle evening feel just right.
Fast-forward a couple decades. Parker teams up with Micah Nutt, another veteran brewer, and they open Copperworks Distilling right down the alley from Pike Brewing on the Seattle waterfront. Their crazy idea? Take great craft beer, leave out the hops, and distill it into whiskey. Not corn mash, not rye, not the usual stuff—just malted barley beer run through traditional Scottish copper stills.
Five years ago, Parker walked back into the old Pike brewhouse on 1st Avenue—the same gravity-fed system he used in the ’90s—and brewed a giant batch of unhopped Kilt Lifter wash, exactly to the original recipe he helped create. That wash went into new American oak barrels and sat there quietly, doing its thing, while Seattle kept growing up around it.
Now, after more than five years in wood, those barrels are finally being bottled.
Jason Parker, who wears two hats these days—president of Copperworks and the guy who poured Pike’s very first keg—puts it plain and simple:
“Copperworks Kilt Lifter Whiskey is more than a collaboration. It’s a story about the roots of Seattle’s craft beverage scene and the people who helped define it.”
And he’s not exaggerating.
Open a bottle and the first thing that hits you is toasted pine and wildflower honey, backed up by toffee and vanilla custard. Take a sip and you’re greeted by warm baking spices, fresh-baked biscuit, steel-cut oats, dark dates, and a drizzle of caramel sauce. There’s a bright flash of lemon oil that keeps everything from getting too heavy. The finish rolls out sweet cinnamon and malt, then coffee cake crumbs, dried mango, stewed apple, and just a faint thread of eucalyptus that lingers like a good memory.
Image credit: Copperworks Distilling Co.
It drinks at 50% ABV—100 proof—so it has the backbone you want in a proper dram, but everything is rounded and integrated after those long years in barrel.
Only 1,800 bottles. 700 ml each. $59.99 before tax. That’s it.
If you want one, you’ve got options starting Friday morning: grab it online through Copperworks’ site (they’ll ship where legal), or walk into either tasting room—one on the waterfront in downtown Seattle, the other up in Kenmore. When they sell out, that’s the end of the story. No more will ever be made from this exact five-year run.
Copperworks isn’t new to turning heads. They were named 2018 Distillery of the Year by the American Distilling Institute, and their American Single Malt Whiskeys regularly pull Double Golds and 94–96 point scores. Everything they make starts with malted barley, everything goes through copper stills custom-built for them in Scotland, and everything is done in small batches by two guys who still get excited talking about fermentation the way other people talk about their kids’ Little League games.
“We brewed the base for this whiskey using the same specifications as Pike does for their beer, and we even brewed it at Pike’s iconic gravity-fed 1st Avenue brewhouse,” Parker said. “By transforming Pike’s Kilt Lifter into whiskey, Copperworks and Pike honor a legacy of innovation, friendship, and craft that spans more than three decades.”
That’s the part that gets you if you’ve been around long enough to remember when “craft” was a dirty word in most bars. Two Seattle institutions that helped put the Northwest on the map decided to reach back, dust off an old recipe, and turn it into something new without losing the soul of the original. No corporate overlords, no focus groups, just a couple of guys who love what they do saying, “Let’s see what happens.”
If you’ve ever cracked open a Pike Kilt Lifter on a fall afternoon, or stood at the Copperworks bar watching the stills gleam under the lights while the ferries glide past the window, this bottle feels like the closing of a circle.
Black Friday is usually about flat-screen TVs and slow-moving checkout lines. This year, a few lucky people will be lining up—online or in person—for something that actually matters a little more: 700 milliliters of Seattle history, one sip at a time.
Better set a reminder. 1,800 bottles won’t last long.
