What would happen if you distilled pre-made beer in a still? Would it end up like whiskey?

I asked my Wines and Beers professor, and he said that you would basically get whiskey. Hop isoalpha acids and aroma compounds would vaporize and would not survive the distillation process. Of course, whiskey gets the majority of its flavor from the aging process after distillation (white dog excepted), so its taste would largely depend on what you did with it afterwards. Right out of the still it would have mainly cereal flavors.

You try to heat the liquid to vaporize the alcohol and leave behind the water. However, heating water results in water vapor. This is why puddles dry up on a sunny day, even though the puddle never actually boils.

And any volatile compounds in the liquid are also going to vaporize and end up in the concentrate. So you don’t get pure alcohol at the other end, you get a lot of water too, just a lot less than what you had when you started. And you could have an even greater concentration of other volatiles. So distillers do things like throw away the first and last bits of the distillation, because the first bit contains a higher proportion undesirable things that are more volatile than alcohol, and the last bit those that are less volatile than alcohol.

Calvados is distilled, not frozen. The frozen stuff is, by all accounts I’ve heard, a challenging drink. Heavy and very strongly flavored. Calvados (and distilled applejack ala Laird’s) are pretty much brandy with different notes.

I read a parody of the Dune books where, instead of spice, the resource everyone was fighting over was beer (made by the Freedmenmen from the wild pretzels that roamed Doon, the Dessert Planet). There was a subplot wherein the Paul Atreides character had accomplished the impossible by creating a beer liqueur, which he called Drambrewski.

edited to add: Found it:

National Lampoon’s Doon

Once I accidently made some of this.

I was working in the West country (In England ) where Scrumpy, a notoriously strong (alcoholic ) cider was available.

I took some home and put it in the fridge, the fridge malfunctioned and instead of keeping it cool froze it.

So making the most of the opportunity I took the ice off, allowed it to thaw and drank it.

I was told by other people that I enjoyed it.