Podcasts about visit barrellbourbon

It’s the 50th Bourbon Community Roundtable! 4.5 years later and we are at a milestone podcast. I won’t get sappy because there is plenty of that towards the end, but we kick off the show talking about the recent news of many secondary groups banning Van Winkle Sales. Then we take a look back at our time together and play a few games of “who said that?”. Show Partners: The University of Louisville has an online Distilled Spirits Business Certificate that focuses on the business side of the spirits industry. Learn more at uofl.me/bourbonpursuit. Penelope Bourbon is a new award-winning four grain bourbon from a unique blend of three bourbon mash bills. Available in select markets and online at PenelopeBourbon.com. Track your tasting notes and connect with other bourbon drinkers. Search for Oak Bottle App on the Apple App Store or visit https://bourbo.nz/oakbottle. You can now buy Barrell Craft Spirits products online and have them shipped right to your door. Visit BarrellBourbon.com and click Buy Now. The Thousand Oaks Barrel Co. has personalized oak barrels and at-home whiskey making kits. Get 10% off everything with code "BP2020" at 1000oaksbarrel.com. Minimize drink dilution without sacrificing chill power with Meltdown, the ultimate ice ball press. Use code "PURSUIT" to receive $100 off. Learn more at MeltdownIce.com. The Duo Glass and Travel Decanter. Innovative products from Aged & Ore to compliment your bourbon. Visit https://bourbo.nz/agedandore. Show Notes: This week’s Above the Char with Fred Minnick talks about Halloween candy.  Secondary groups have banned Pappy Van Winkle sales. What are your thoughts? Do we still feel the same about our top 5 bourbons for beginners? Are we still tired of $100 MGP… now $150 MGP bourbons? Let’s play a game of Who Said That? Support this Podcast on Patreon

Joshua Steeley, Marketing Director for Bourbon at Buffalo Trace, joins the show to cover the Old Charter Oak series. It’s a line extension that focuses on the effect different types of oak have on the bourbon. We’re talking oak harvested from all over the world and some of the oak being hundreds of years old. Show Partners: The University of Louisville has an online Distilled Spirits Business Certificate that focuses on the business side of the spirits industry. Learn more at uofl.me/bourbonpursuit. Penelope Bourbon is a new award-winning four grain bourbon from a unique blend of three bourbon mash bills. Available in select markets and online at PenelopeBourbon.com. Track your tasting notes and connect with other bourbon drinkers. Search for Oak Bottle App on the Apple App Store or visit https://bourbo.nz/oakbottle. You can now buy Barrell Craft Spirits products online and have them shipped right to your door. Visit BarrellBourbon.com and click Buy Now. The Thousand Oaks Barrel Co. has personalized oak barrels and at-home whiskey making kits. Get 10% off everything with code "BP2020" at 1000oaksbarrel.com. Minimize drink dilution without sacrificing chill power with Meltdown, the ultimate ice ball press. Use code "PURSUIT" to receive $100 off. Learn more at MeltdownIce.com. The Duo Glass and Travel Decanter. Innovative products from Aged & Ore to compliment your bourbon. Visit https://bourbo.nz/agedandore. Show Notes: This week’s Above the Char with Fred Minnick talks about decanters. What's the most ridiculous thing someone has tricked you into doing or believing? Tell us about your role at Buffalo Trace. Any brands you are putting more effort behind? Are you going to have a part in Early Times? How did you get into bourbon and end up at Buffalo Trace? Let's talk about Old Charter Oak. How do you decide what bourbon goes into each brand? Tell us about your experimental process. Old Charter Oak Tasting. Where do you source your barrels from? Talk about what went into the packaging design. How hard is it to find this brand? What is the price point? Any failed experiments? Support this Podcast on Patreon

We’re joined by Ted, Christian, and Blake to talk about the family history on the farm that led them to have DSP-IN-31, which is a super super low number when it comes to a distilled spirits producer. We take a few twists, but there is one thing we came away with and that’s how this family never settles with a single recipe, single barrel entry proof, single cooperage, or even a single distiller. These three take turns at the helm steering their bourbon in a new direction. After recording, we went to the warehouse and tasted 12 or 15 different barrels and not one of the two was alike. Make sure you try a single barrel selection from Starlight Distillery and you will know what I’m talking about. Show Partners: The University of Louisville has an online Distilled Spirits Business Certificate that focuses on the business side of the spirits industry. Learn more at uofl.me/bourbonpursuit. Penelope Bourbon is a new award-winning four grain bourbon from a unique blend of three bourbon mash bills. Available in select markets and online at PenelopeBourbon.com. Track your tasting notes and connect with other bourbon drinkers. Search for Oak Bottle App on the Apple App Store or visit https://bourbo.nz/oakbottle. You can now buy Barrell Craft Spirits products online and have them shipped right to your door. Visit BarrellBourbon.com and click Buy Now. The Thousand Oaks Barrel Co. has personalized oak barrels and at-home whiskey making kits. Get 10% off everything with code "BP2020" at 1000oaksbarrel.com. Minimize drink dilution without sacrificing chill power with Meltdown, the ultimate ice ball press. Use code "PURSUIT" to receive $100 off. Learn more at MeltdownIce.com. The Duo Glass and Travel Decanter. Innovative products from Aged & Ore to compliment your bourbon. Visit https://bourbo.nz/agedandore. Show Notes: This week’s Above the Char with Fred Minnick talks about media packages. Would you rather be an astronaut or an olympic gold medalist? Talk about the history of the farm and distillery. What law allowed MGP to operate as a distillery? Talk about your brandy. What were the learning curves when transitioning from brandy to whiskey? Tell us about the bourbon. What's the difference between a brandy still and a whiskey still? Why do you use so many different cooperages? Is there a better time of year to pull barrels? Tell us about your corn varieties. Talk about your latest releases. What is Carl T.? Support this Podcast on Patreon

What is sourced whiskey? It can mean a lot of different things and many of us bourbon geeks feel some do it better than others. There is contract distillation and there is outright buying barrels, but it’s what you are doing with the bourbon that makes the story. We evaluate some of the most iconic brands that built their legacy off of sourcing and then look at today’s market to see who is doing something special versus simply slapping a label on a bottle. Show Partners: The University of Louisville has an online Distilled Spirits Business Certificate that focuses on the business side of the spirits industry. Learn more at uofl.me/bourbonpursuit. Penelope Bourbon is a new award-winning four grain bourbon from a unique blend of three bourbon mash bills. Available in select markets and online at PenelopeBourbon.com. Track your tasting notes and connect with other bourbon drinkers. Search for Oak Bottle App on the Apple App Store or visit https://bourbo.nz/oakbottle. You can now buy Barrell Craft Spirits products online and have them shipped right to your door. Visit BarrellBourbon.com and click Buy Now. The Thousand Oaks Barrel Co. has personalized oak barrels and at-home whiskey making kits. Get 10% off everything with code "BP2020" at 1000oaksbarrel.com. Minimize drink dilution without sacrificing chill power with Meltdown, the ultimate ice ball press. Learn more at MeltdownIce.com. The Duo Glass and Travel Decanter. Innovative products from Aged & Ore to compliment your bourbon. Visit AgedAndOre.com. Show Notes: This week’s Above the Char with Fred Minnick talks about barrel finishes. How do you know when something is sourced? How do you source whiskey? What brands are sourced? What about pricing sourced whiskey? What kind of influence has sourced whiskey had on the industry? What is more respectable, starting a brand sourced and then transitioning to your own distillate or starting with your own distillate? What about contract distilling? What are the primary places to source from? Support this Podcast on Patreon

This week we look at how the size of a distiller will put a focus on their core name brand vs creating extensions. We talk a little bit about what you can and can’t patent in the whiskey business. Next, we examine the new Old Forester 150th anniversary and our thoughts on whether you would rather see single barrel cask strength releases or create a wide release. Lastly, we cover what has gone right and what’s been done wrong with limited edition releases that have happened in person and online. Show Partners: The University of Louisville has an online Distilled Spirits Business Certificate that focuses on the business side of the spirits industry. Learn more at uofl.me/bourbonpursuit. Penelope Bourbon is a new award-winning four grain bourbon from a unique blend of three bourbon mash bills. Available in select markets and online at PenelopeBourbon.com. Track your tasting notes and connect with other bourbon drinkers. Search for Oak Bottle App on the Apple App Store or visit https://bourbo.nz/oakbottle. You can now buy Barrell Craft Spirits products online and have them shipped right to your door. Visit BarrellBourbon.com and click Buy Now. The Thousand Oaks Barrel Co. has personalized oak barrels and at-home whiskey making kits. Get 10% off everything with code "BP2020" at 1000oaksbarrel.com. Minimize drink dilution without sacrificing chill power with Meltdown, the ultimate ice ball press. Learn more at MeltdownIce.com. Show Notes: This week’s Above the Char with Fred Minnick talks about how sometimes ignorance is bliss. Orange juice, pulp or no pulp? Why don't new Distillers/Bottlers differentiate their products more? For instance,  Barrell Bourbon, Barrell Rye, Barrell Rum, Pinhook Rye, Pinhook Bourbon, Pinhook Cask Strength. Whereas Buffalo Trace, Eagle Rare, Sazerac Rye, etc. What can and can't be patented in the whiskey business? Old Forester drops 3 batches of cask strength at $150 per bottle. Before I saw the price, I thought it was going to be a competitor to ECBP or Bookers. Would you rather see wide releases at barrel proof or barrel selections at barrel proof? You can't choose both. Angel's Envy Mizunara Cask, Old Forester Birthday Bourbon, Four Roses LE Releases. What has been done right and what went wrong?

Well, you asked for another episode talking cocktails and that’s what you get. On this episode, we talk to Nic Christiansen who runs the single barrel program at Barrell Craft Spirits, but is also a nationally recognized bartender and cocktail competition champion. She talks about the variety of cocktails and how it’s really about swapping out simple ingredients to create endless possibilities. From a classic Old Fashioned or Mint Julep to creating your own bitters, this episode will have you wanting to create something unique of your own. Show Partners: The University of Louisville has an online Distilled Spirits Business Certificate that focuses on the business side of the spirits industry. Learn more at uofl.me/bourbonpursuit. Penelope Bourbon is a new award-winning four grain bourbon from a unique blend of three bourbon mash bills. Available in select markets and online at PenelopeBourbon.com. Track your tasting notes and connect with other bourbon drinkers. Search for Oak Bottle App on the Apple App Store or visit https://bourbo.nz/oakbottle. You can now buy Barrell Craft Spirits products online and have them shipped right to your door. Visit BarrellBourbon.com and click Buy Now. The Thousand Oaks Barrel Co. has personalized oak barrels and at-home whiskey making kits. Get 10% off everything with code "BP2020" at 1000oaksbarrel.com. Receive $25 off your first order at RackHouse Whiskey Club with code "Pursuit". Visit RackhouseWhiskeyClub.com. Show Notes: This week’s Above the Char with Fred Minnick talks about bourbon heritage month. What was your favorite tv show growing up as a kid? Tell us about your background. What made you decide to get into cocktails? What bad habits did you learn when you first started making cocktails? What is involved with being a beverage director? How do you train bartenders? How did you remember all those cocktails? How do you make bitters? How do you build a cocktail from an economic perspective? What is your Old Fashioned recipe? What is a Brown Derby? What kind of ice do you prefer? What do you think about the growing mixology culture? Do you ever enter competitions? What is your go to vermouth? Rye vs. Bourbon in cocktails? What are your thoughts on Rum cocktails? How frustrated do you get when a place can't make a good cocktail? Do you prefer different cocktails for different seasons? Talk about using a raw egg in a New York Sour. Where did you get the inspiration for your New York Sour? Any upcoming cocktail trends? What do you do on a daily basis? Does your palate differ from Tripp and Joe?

Clay Risen somehow narrowly escaped being a guest on the podcast, but we got him. We talk about some of his past work and his newest book, The Impossible Collection Of Whiskey: The 100 Most Exceptional And Collectible Bottles, that will be coming out in October 2020. So of course, we talk about chasing unicorns and our early bourbon regrets. Show Partners: The University of Louisville has an online Distilled Spirits Business Certificate that focuses on the business side of the spirits industry. Learn more at uofl.me/bourbonpursuit. Penelope Bourbon is a new award-winning four grain bourbon from a unique blend of three bourbon mash bills. Available in select markets and online at PenelopeBourbon.com. Track your tasting notes and connect with other bourbon drinkers. Search for Oak Bottle App on the Apple App Store or visit https://bourbo.nz/oakbottle. You can now buy Barrell Craft Spirits products online and have them shipped right to your door. Visit BarrellBourbon.com and click Buy Now. The Thousand Oaks Barrel Co. has personalized oak barrels and at-home whiskey making kits. Get 10% off everything with code "BP2020" at 1000oaksbarrel.com. Receive $25 off your first order at RackHouse Whiskey Club with code "Pursuit". Visit RackhouseWhiskeyClub.com. Show Notes: This week’s Above the Char with Fred Minnick talks about unity in bourbon. Tell us about your books. If you could be best friends with any celebrity, who would it be? Do you feel like books need to be refreshed constantly? Talk about the different kinds of rye. What are your favorite ryes? How did you become the whiskey guy? What year did you get into whiskey? What is one of your favorite pieces you've wrote? Tell us about your new book. How do you have time to venture out to all different kinds of whiskies? Did you include specific vintages in your new book? What about exports created for the Japanese market? How hard would it be for you to open a rare whiskey? Now that you are covering politics, are you drinking more whiskey? Support this Podcast on Patreon

Old Forester is really starting to win over bourbon lovers. We are joined by our returning guest, Master Taster at Old Forester, Jackie Zykan, to chat about the 2020 Birthday Bourbon, the new barrel proof offering on the single barrel program, the story behind President's Choice, and much more. Have you tried an Old Forester 1915? Well, if you've never heard of it, get ready to start blending. Show Partners: The University of Louisville has an online Distilled Spirits Business Certificate that focuses on the business side of the spirits industry. Learn more at uofl.me/bourbonpursuit. Penelope Bourbon is a new award-winning four grain bourbon from a unique blend of three bourbon mash bills. Available in select markets and online at PenelopeBourbon.com. Track your tasting notes and connect with other bourbon drinkers. Search for Oak Bottle App on the Apple App Store. You can now buy Barrell Craft Spirits products online and have them shipped right to your door. Visit BarrellBourbon.com and click Buy Now. The Thousand Oaks Barrel Co. has personalized oak barrels and at-home whiskey making kits. Get 10% off everything with code "BP2020" at 1000oaksbarrel.com. Receive $25 off your first order at RackHouse Whiskey Club with code "Pursuit". Visit RackhouseWhiskeyClub.com. Show Notes: This week’s Above the Char with Fred Minnick talks about labor strikes. If you had a time machine would you go back in time or to the future? Let's talk about 1915. Tell us about working with Chris Morris and Birthday Bourbon. How hard was it to get the single barrel program to be barrel proof? What age barrels are going into the Whiskey Row Series? How do the barrel picks work? Tell us about President's Choice. Support this Podcast on Patreon

On this 48th edition of the bourbon community roundtable, we talk about 80's movies. Yes, it may have gone on a bit longer than anticipated, but it may have been the glory years of iconic movies. Then we dive into Blanton’s Straight From the Barrel and get into release season. Will the shift of having online releases be the new way forward? Show Partners: The University of Louisville has an online Distilled Spirits Business Certificate that focuses on the business side of the spirits industry. Learn more at uofl.me/bourbonpursuit. Penelope Bourbon is a new award-winning four grain bourbon from a unique blend of three bourbon mash bills. Available in select markets and online at PenelopeBourbon.com. You can now buy Barrell Craft Spirits products online and have them shipped right to your door. Visit BarrellBourbon.com and click Buy Now. The Thousand Oaks Barrel Co. has personalized oak barrels and at-home whiskey making kits. Get 10% off everything with code "BP2020" at 1000oaksbarrel.com. Receive $25 off your first order at RackHouse Whiskey Club with code "Pursuit". Visit RackhouseWhiskeyClub.com. Show Notes: This week’s Above the Char with Fred Minnick talks about bourbon heritage month. 80's movie showdown. Blanton's SFTB now available in the US. $150 is a great price point. However, very limited. So why price this higher than BTAC? Was it Ancient Age that dictated it? The Party Source tried to sell Blanton's Bourbon online, website crashed. Are there any good alternatives in the current climate? Why are distilleries doing special releases on-site/inline only, but not permitting proxies to pick up? Support this Podcast on Patreon

Baker’s is a brand that we’ve discussed previously with Beam’s ambassador Beth Burrows back on episode 95, but this time we go into the whiskey. A Patreon supporter sent 3 blind samples of Baker's: the new single barrel 7 year, the old 7 year small batch with the black wax that is no longer in production, and the most recent limited release of the Baker’s 13 year. Which one will come out on top? Stay tuned to find out. Show Partners: The University of Louisville has an online Distilled Spirits Business Certificate that focuses on the business side of the spirits industry. Learn more at uofl.me/bourbonpursuit. Penelope Bourbon is a new award-winning four grain bourbon from a unique blend of three bourbon mash bills. Available in select markets and online at PenelopeBourbon.com. You can now buy Barrell Craft Spirits products online and have them shipped right to your door. Visit BarrellBourbon.com and click Buy Now. The Thousand Oaks Barrel Co. has personalized oak barrels and at-home whiskey making kits. Get 10% off everything with code "BP2020" at 1000oaksbarrel.com. Receive $25 off your first order at RackHouse Whiskey Club with code "Pursuit". Visit RackhouseWhiskeyClub.com. Show Notes: This week’s Above the Char with Fred Minnick talks about distillery firsts. Baker's Tasting: New Baker's 7 Year Single Barrel, Baker's 13 Year, Old Baker's 7 Year Small Batch Do you drink coffee? Why did Baker's move from a small batch to a single barrel? Why don't distilleries want to promote large batches? Let's discuss special releases. Blind Reveal Fred, what did you see on the shelf back in the early 2000's? Support this Podcast on Patreon

What does it take to put all your money on the line, ignore the experts, fight the law, and spend years experimenting with different mash bills and barrels? That’s what Tim Piersant, CEO, and Grant McCracken, Head Distiller, of Chattanooga Whiskey did. Against all odds, they launched a bourbon that features Tennessee High Malt. We talk about the early successes and challenges of the business and get into the whiskey itself. Show Partners: The University of Louisville has an online Distilled Spirits Business Certificate that focuses on the business side of the spirits industry. Learn more at uofl.me/bourbonpursuit. Penelope Bourbon is a new award-winning four grain bourbon from a unique blend of three bourbon mash bills. Available in select markets and online at PenelopeBourbon.com. You can now buy Barrell Craft Spirits products online and have them shipped right to your door. Visit BarrellBourbon.com and click Buy Now. The Thousand Oaks Barrel Co. has personalized oak barrels and at-home whiskey making kits. Get 10% off everything with code "BP2020" at 1000oaksbarrel.com. Receive $25 off your first order at RackHouse Whiskey Club with code "Pursuit". Visit RackhouseWhiskeyClub.com. Show Notes: This week’s Above the Char with Fred Minnick talks about SRPs. What kind of music do you like? Tell us about your background. How did you get into whiskey? Do you have a favorite kind of beer? When did it become legal to distill in Chattanooga? Tell us about the early days of the business. How did you fund the business? How did you decide what kind of whiskey you wanted to make? Talk about the experimental distillery. Why did you decide to use malt? How did you know it would have future potential? How did you recreate the process to scale up? How did you know when it was ready to be released? Tell us about your entry and distillation proof. Talk about the high proof version. What can we expect to see in the future? Support this Podcast on Patreon

In this podcast, we look to see if there are any distilleries in New York that can take on good old fashioned Kentucky bourbon. Dan Walkski, Manager of Fine Spirits at Midvalley Wine and Liquor in Newburgh, NY shares some of his favorites from the region and we taste them in a blind battle. There’s a few surprises thrown in that cause some major upsets. Tune in to see what state comes out on top. Show Partners: The University of Louisville has an online Distilled Spirits Business Certificate that focuses on the business side of the spirits industry. Learn more at uofl.me/bourbonpursuit. Penelope Bourbon is a new award-winning four grain bourbon from a unique blend of three bourbon mash bills. Available in select markets and online at PenelopeBourbon.com. You can now buy Barrell Craft Spirits products online and have them shipped right to your door. Visit BarrellBourbon.com and click Buy Now. Receive $25 off your first order at RackHouse Whiskey Club with code "Pursuit". Visit RackhouseWhiskeyClub.com. Show Notes: This week’s Above the Char with Fred Minnick talks about age statements. How did you get into bourbon? What is the bourbon scene like in Newburgh, NY? What is the largest growing spirit in your store? Tasting of New York and Kentucky whiskies. Do you get a lot of allocated bourbon? What do encourage your customers to try since you don't get a lot of allocated items? What is a good gateway bourbon? How to you price bottles in the store? Do you put all your bottles for sale online? Have you visited all these NY distilleries? Support this Podcast on Patreon

We look at the recently released results of the Weller CYPB data and ask ourselves if this data matches up to a normal consumer or a bourbon enthusiast. Make sure you check out yourperfectbourbon.com to see how well the site and survey is done. We then examine Basil Hayden and our thoughts behind the brand’s evolving character of having blends, finishes, and high aged expressions. And what’s up with all the toasted barrels recently? Will there be more to come? Lastly, we wrap it up with our favorite bourbon so far in 2020. Show Partners: The University of Louisville has an online Distilled Spirits Business Certificate that focuses on the business side of the spirits industry. Learn more at uofl.me/bourbonpursuit. Penelope Bourbon is a new award-winning four grain bourbon from a unique blend of three bourbon mash bills. Available in select markets and online at PenelopeBourbon.com. You can now buy Barrell Craft Spirits products online and have them shipped right to your door. Visit BarrellBourbon.com and click Buy Now. Receive $25 off your first order at RackHouse Whiskey Club with code "Pursuit". Visit RackhouseWhiskeyClub.com. Show Notes: This week’s Above the Char with Fred Minnick talks about craft distillers. Weller CYPB and the data. Does it add up? Basil Hayden and it's shifting identity. Are Toasted Barrels all the rage now? Old Forester 1910, Michter's, and now Elijah Craig. What's the best bourbon you've tried so far this year? Support this Podcast on Patreon

Nancy Fraley is world-renowned for her expertise on blending… or is it mingling? In this podcast, we talk about the difference between blending and mingling, but also go into barrel sizes, terroir, and the art of barrel finishing. Spoiler alert, here’s another industry veteran who isn’t a fan of small barrels. Show Partners: You can now buy Barrell Craft Spirits products online and have them shipped right to your door. Visit BarrellBourbon.com and click Buy Now. Receive $25 off your first order at RackHouse Whiskey Club with code "Pursuit". Visit RackhouseWhiskeyClub.com. Show Notes: This week’s Above the Char with Fred Minnick talks about hats. Tell us about your background. How did you get on the blending path? What is a french style? What are other styles of blending? Let's talk blending vs. mingling. Talk about blending trends you are seeing internationally and in the US. What is terroir? What characteristics are you looking for when blending? Tell us about the impact of barrel size and climate on the bourbon. How do you decide what kind of cask you want to finish a bourbon in? How do you test a finish? What type of whiskey works better for finishing? How often do you sample? How do you figure out how long you finish a bourbon in a barrel? Are there any tried and true casks? Should the finishing barrel be empty? Support this Podcast on Patreon

Many of us know the basics of distillation, but only a few know the true science. Today, we’re joined by Tripp Stimson of Barrell Bourbon and we ask all the hard questions on distillation that we’ve always wanted to know. This is really for the geeks at heart because it goes into pH levels, yeast strains, malting processes, and so much more. Listen close to the expert because it’s definitely one show where you will learn something new about the distillation process. Show Partners: You can now buy Barrell Craft Spirits products online and have them shipped right to your door. Visit BarrellBourbon.com and click Buy Now. Receive $25 off your first order at RackHouse Whiskey Club with code "Pursuit". Visit RackhouseWhiskeyClub.com. Show Notes: This week’s Above the Char with Fred Minnick talks about bourbon in the movies. What are your goals for the year? Tell us about your background. Let's talk about grains. Does it matter where the grain comes from? What happens after getting the grain? Does the size of the mash tub matter? What is the percentage of mash to water? What's the best way to mix the mash? How long is the process? How do you know the mash is ready? What grain do you add in first? Talk about malted grain. What happens next? What is the consistency of the product when going from the mash tub to the fermentation tank? Let's talk about yeast. What about a mash rest? What is the chemical breakdown during fermentation? Why do some people do closed vs. open fermentation? What determines the number of days for fermentation? Do different grains change the process? What is sour mash? Let's talk about the pH of the water. Is the flavor more consistent in a sour mash process vs. sweet mash? Do you use a bourbon backset in a rye mash? What happens after fermentation? Talk about the shape of stills. After the still where does it go? What happens in the doubler? What are heads, hearts and tails? What are the health risks of the process? What's the difference between the column still and pot still? When do you get the waste out? How do you control the proof coming off the still? What is the argument for a low entry proof? Does it have to be the exact proof listed on the label? How do you get a final proof when using multiple barrels? How do you clean the equipment? Does an older still produce a different flavor? What are you looking for when picking rum? Support this Podcast on Patreon 0:00 Let's give folks a reintroduction of like your background and where you got in to the industry and how are you qualified to teach us about this? 0:09 Let's go ahead like where's your degree here? I was the only one you could get to sit down. 0:14 He's only one answer call. 0:28 This was Episode 263 of bourbon pursuit podcast featuring news reviews and interviews with people making the bourbon whiskey industry happen. Before we start the podcast, here's your weekly bourbon news update. Last week, we revealed the news first on social media that a demolition permit has been submitted to take down the 130 year old national distillers Rick house in Louisville, Kentucky. The building has been deemed unsafe by structural engineers. There's a partial collapse of the roof and the interior support being 1:00 are deteriorating with significant amount of moldy buildup. It's sad to see this historic building be torn down after all the years of neglect since it was never being used. Now on a bourbon release news, the 2020 edition of Yellowstone limited edition Kentucky straight bourbon will be on shelves in September, featuring a seven year old straight bourbon finished in French Armagnac barrels. Approximately 5000 cases of this bourbon are being produced at limestone branch distillery, bottled at 101 proof, it will have a suggested retail price of $99 and 99 cents. In bourbon pursuit news. We're continuing to select more and more barrels for our private bourbon club. This week, we selected two more barrels at four roses and oh ESB and an OB sq. Both 10 and a half years old. This is going to make 22 barrels selected so far this year, and we're not done yet. So if you want to see how you can support this podcast, and get access to some great private barrels, along with 2:00 First access to pursuit series. Join us patreon.com slash bourbon pursuit. This is one podcast. We were super excited to record. Way back on episode 88. We did a back to basics about bourbon. And now we're going deep dive into the distillation process. It's all the hard questions on distillation that we've wanted to know. And we've got Tripp Simpson from barrel bourbon here to go all scientific on us. Listen close to the expert because it's definitely one of those shows, where you're going to learn something new about the distillation process, bourbon pursuits UP FOR A People's Choice Award for podcasts and we need your help. Go to podcast awards, calm and register to vote as a listener. I know registering sucks, but please vote for us and the People's Choice and the arts category. It would be really awesome to win this thing. Now do you want to get some awesome bourbon rye and rums shipped straight to your door? barrel bourbon now has online ordering you can get 3:00 award winning products right now. Go to barrel bourbon calm and click the Buy Now button. With that, enjoy today's episode. Here's Fred Minnick with above the char. 3:12 I'm Fred Minnick. And this is above the char, as I hope this old forester 1897 in my hands, I turned it to the back and I read this quote, The truth is, I prefer whiskey, Laura Howard. And that's from the alienness A TNT show. There's like an engraving on here. Not really entirely sure what the connection between old for certain alienist is. I'm sure it's in a press release or something that was emailed to me that I just didn't read. But 3:48 I will say the bottle got me to thinking about all of the incredible moments bourbon has had in pop culture. Whether you want to talk about Blanton's being 4:00 Everywhere have Pappy Van Winkle being written into the intern's or justified basically pouring more bourbon than most people do in their lifetime on a single episode, or you want to go back to, you know, the 1960s where it was seemingly on every single show with a man smoking a cigarette in a back corner. But I'll tell you my favorite. My favorite connection to Hollywood is the hustler JT s Brown is basically a drink of choice and they talk about bourbon and its qualities that you know you didn't really see a lot of most people when bourbon is in the conversation. It's just part of the conversation. Well here here's a drink tastes so good. You like it. Now let's keep talking about taxes or killing uncle john or whatever. Whereas in like the hustler, they actually did talk about how it was made. They talked about 5:00 You know, eight year old bourbon being the very best, and so forth and so on. And so we get a chance and you want to go down like movie lane and you want to watch an old flick while you're quarantined and bored up to your eyeballs. Go check out the movie, the hustler. And while you're doing it, make sure you're pouring yourself a little JTS Brown. While I may not be the same, it's pretty cool to drink the same thing as Paul Newman. And that's this week's above the char. Hey, if you have an idea for above the char hit me up on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, or whatever. Just look for my name Fred minich. Until next week, cheers 5:43 Welcome back to the episode of bourbon pursuit the official podcast of bourbon, Kinney and Ryan back in our usual recording station with a friend of the show. It's been on here a few times already, but this time, we're taking this kind of the next level because this was a a listener requested show of saying like, Listen like 6:00 We understand we go on the tours, we get the 51% stuff all the time. But like, Where's that we need to answer some hard questions. And, you know, we always go back. And I think it was like February 2018. We did like a back to basics sort of month, way back then. And we kind of got an overview of some of this, but this time, I'm really excited because we're going to be going deep dive into the distillation process. Yeah, it's, uh, you know, we get on these tours all the time. And sometimes I know what they're talking about. And a lot of times I'm just nodding my head. Yes. Like acting like I know what they're talking about. So yeah, I'm super excited love having Tripp on his front of the show, and he's getting to test out his new, you know, equipment he paid for. So we appreciate it. We always appreciate Barrow and being able to help support the podcast, have all this nice new equipment too. So it's, yeah, absolutely. So no, super excited about it. Because, yeah, we're like we've always said, we don't know shit about distilling. So we're glad to have someone here who does so 7:00 There are people that went to school for this so that they do know what they're talking about from time to time. Absolutely. So let's go to introduce our guest today. So today on the show you've heard him before in previous podcast, but we have Tripp stimpson. He is the master distiller and Director of Operations at barrel bourbon. So Tripp welcome back. Thanks for having me guys. Good to be here. Yeah, absolutely. So Joe keeping you busy. Always, never dull moment. So what's you know, we were talking earlier, talking about your goals with some Joe goals for the year. Are you guys coming off that big banner year of 2020, all those metals, large blogging, I guess, lofty, lofty goals. We've got looking at doing the usual probably for bourbon batches. We've got a right three batch. It'll be coming out here soon. We actually brought that with us today. 7:45 We got some infinite releases. We've got dovetail. We've got. We're doing some fun things with finishes. I don't want to shine the light too much on that. Well, we can talk about that another time. But there's some really, really interesting things coming out coming down the line this year. So 8:00 Stay tuned. salutely So before we kind of dive into a lot of this stuff, I think people need to know about, you know, your background and sort of like, you know, we've I think we've talked about it before, but like, let's give folks a reintroduction of like your background and where you got in to the industry and how are you qualified to teach us about this? 8:18 Like, like, Where's your degree here? I was the only one you could get to sit down. 8:23 He's the only one answer call. 8:27 Okay, um, so, my backgrounds in biochemistry, molecular biology, degrees from college, I went straight from college and started work for brown Forman as a research and development scientist. I spent 8:43 10 years 10 years with brown Forman in various roles, analytical chemistry, benchtop chemistry, microbiology, doing a lot of distillery sciences and easting and distillery efficiencies. Left brown foreman, I started a consulting company 9:00 There was really focused on the craft side of the business. At the time, there were people just getting into this glorified distillery business with these great dreams of if you build it, they will come kind of ideas. And I wanted to really bring a level of expertise to these people that show that it wasn't all really a bowl of cherries, you know, this is really what you're going to be doing for whole areas. 9:30 And lay it out there real time and say, you know, this is your investment. This is how long you're going to wait for your return. And this is how hard you're going to work. And really put that into context before people would take the leap. So I did that for a handful of years. And met Joe through that process. We began working together six been six years, six years ago this year. And we've been working together ever since we're very similar view on 10:00 On the approach to everything, and it just works. And he sold you on the dream of distillery. 10:07 We're working diligently. 10:10 We're getting there. still dreaming it up. 10:14 So you know, you're you have this idea of also doing distillery but you know, we really kind of want to go and really kind of really pick your brain here. Because as we start getting into what does the distilling process look like? Like I said, let's kind of let's kind of go a little bit, you know, start from finish. And, you know, I think this is really gonna be focused on a lot of the bourbon nerds and the bourbon geeks out there that really want to dive in, they want to know exactly like, you know, what do you have to do to make sure that there's no contamination, no bacteria, like our pH levels of thing. Or, like, you know, when you're in the fermentation, like, everybody never buys tanks, so special fermentation tanks, that's Ryan's thing. Everybody's got their special fermentation tanks. You know, like, you know, how much gas can really come off there. And that's 11:00 Because you see some that have, you know, clothes, you have some that are open, you have some that are outdoor, you have some that have huge vacuums on them. So I think we'll, we'll tackle some of those things there. But you know, I guess let's start at the very beginning of the distillation process. And I mean, I would imagine it just kind of starts with grains, right? It does. And it's always funny to me, where, you know, we always jump in, and we talk about the distillation process. And to me, I always think of that is starting a movie halfway through, you know, you've left out so much of the important stuff prior to this distillation process that really affects your distillation. So if we go all the way back to, 11:37 to the grains and deciding what your grain bill is going to be, and how we treat the grains, where does it come from? How do you mill your grains? particle size actually plays a big part in this when you're milling your grains, if you go down to say a powder versus like a grist like the beer guys would use the you will get different fermentations out of both of those. Okay, so let's let's hit that point. 12:00 Right there. So, assuming you're using different kinds of machines to get the different, like I said the different variable of like, Is it a powder versus like a, I guess like a grist or whatever it is a grist or grit, grist, grist. Okay, is this is this me being like city slicker? Like I don't really know what Grif means. I don't either. 12:19 But I heard him say grist 12:22 like grist mill. Oh, you've heard grist mill before right? Like I like I like for grits. No, I'm kidding was like say I was like, I like grids and grits are like basically ground up corn. So it was like, Is it is it like that kind of that kind of size right there and smaller than that? Well, I mean, it's, it looks like sand. It could be like thick sand in your hand versus say almost a powder. Okay, and what you what you've done, there's a handful of different Mills, people use roller Mills, hammer Mills. 12:53 You can use the cage Mills, and they're all going to do a little bit different type of grind on your grind. 13:00 Is it kind of like so like when you do coffee like say like an espresso is like a real fine, you know, write it up coffee like real dense. Whereas like a pour over something is like more kind of bigger grained, our guests are sure type of texture. Well, and let's go back to what the whole goal of what we're trying to do here, we're trying to take this grain this will say a kernel of grain, and we're trying to make available as much of that starch as we can before we move into matching. So ideally, you would think the finer we can grind it, the more available the starches. So you take that and you go across all these different ways of milling the different types of Mills, and how they get to that grind. So some mills and throughput are going to create heat, well, you don't really want heat, because then you start to really denature the starches that you can't use in your fermentation to create alcohol. So there's different Mills will require different throughput and there are 14:00 certain ways to use each meal so that you get the right particle size without generating the heat. Well, I'm gonna go even before the grinding, like to the actual grain and the growing of the grain, okay, and like the soil and the regions they come from can witness a distilling podcast. Well, you said you want to go all the way back to the grain. So let's do it. Let's do so because you are distilling like, you know, and removing a lot of things from the original I guess grain itself doesn't matter like which region it comes from, or which type of soil or type of grain it you know, from corn to corn, not saying like corn or wheat or corn butter from different varieties of within that species. Yeah, absolutely. And even go step further and every year, you know, annually. If we have a lot of rain, you're going to get a different grain than you got the year before. And, you know, one test that many distillers will do is they'll look for aflatoxin. So if you have a really rainy season, you're going to get some molds out there and aflatoxin being a bye 15:00 product for mold can show up in the corn that's delivered to your distillery. So aflatoxin actually will fluoresce under a UV light. So if you take a thing of grain and you put a UV light over it, you see specks of 15:15 fluoresce grain aflatoxin, and then if there's any aflatoxin you don't know that you won't accept. Yeah. Do you know that run? You know what aflatoxin was? I didn't but it does sound like a mold or fungus. 15:28 I know. I know the Yeah, I know what fluorescence and like infrared and you know, and normal bacteria is kind of starting to yet inoculate themselves. It's like It's like a fish poster. 15:41 Alright, so at this point we are now we're now milling the the grains and stuff like that. We talked about the size of it, I guess. Let's let's kind of go on to the next portion of this. Okay, so we've got our we've got our grain the size we want. Now we're going to move into mashing, you're going to use no warm water to further break down that grind to make the 16:00 available. So in this process, you're going to either have a malted grain that's going to provide the enzyme, or you're going to add an exogenous enzyme that you've bought from a company who's isolated and concentrated this enzyme that you're going to add same time. Either way you do it, the goal is the same. You want to take these large, long chain carbohydrates and cut them down into small three carbon sugars, anything over a three carbon sugar the East can't do anything with. So these enzymes are going to cleave these long chain molecules into these smaller chain molecules during this process to prepare for, you know, the actual fermentation process. So these these big mash tubs that we usually see when we go through, I know we've seen them at heaven. Hell, we've seen that a few different places. I mean, is there is there a size that these things usually end up being like as a recommended sizes? I mean, can it be as small as like a child swimming pool versus something that's a huge tank. I mean, the the 17:00 The science will remain the same, no matter what size you use, the enzymes are going to work at the same temperatures. But the mash tub is typically size with the size of your process. So you're not going to have a big monster still on a small match stub. And inversely, you're not going to have a huge match to a real small steel. Now with these because they I guess, multiplied like, well, this the East isn't added yet, but right now yeah, we're not we're not there yet. Okay, don't jump back. Don't jump ahead. Because I got another question here. Which is, you know, you said about adding warm water. Now I know when I go to these things, and you touch them like they're pretty they're hot to the hand. Yeah. Like what's the I mean, what's the when you say warm water? It's not like bath warm, right? I mean, you're adding you're adding some I would say some scalding hot water to it or something like that, that or it's heating up like what right what's going on in there. So I say warm water because at this point, you you've likely recycled warm water off of something else. So you've you've taken cold water, probably off of 18:00 Through a condenser or something, taking that heat, you recycle that heat into another process. So in this let's just say it's into the cooker. So you're taking the warm water off something else into the cooker with these grains while adding steam, either your direct injection or your jacketed or maybe you have tubes in your in your cooker either way, you're adding heat somehow, and you're really on your way to almost a boil. And then you're going to add you're going to add these grains at different times for different reasons. And these different enzymes are actually going to work at different temperatures. So you've got to be careful because if you if your enzymes are in and you go above a certain temperature then those enzymes are gonna be nature they're not gonna work. So you're not going to get your conversion. 18:44 So if you have like a like a 500 gallon say whatever magic cooker Is there like a certain percentage of you know, the match to water that you are like, what is that percentage? I guess you you, you know, you run you can run a thin beer. What will 19:00 We call a thin beer or thick beer or anything in between the two. You don't want to go too thick because then your yeast isn't going to work. It's going to be too thick, there's too much pressure that yeast isn't going to isn't going to be active. If you go the other way, and you go real thin, the yeast is going to perform well. But now you've used all this energy up to that point to have a fermentation. But you could have actually had some more grain in there. So you're getting more bang for your buck, let's say. So the trick is to find out how thick Can I go maximize the alcohol from the fermentation without going so thick that it starts to suppress the yeast. Gotcha. So I guess another question with the just the mash tubs in general and the cookers, you know, I think the ones that I've seen usually they meet inside of it looks like a KitchenAid mixer. Yeah, right. They've been having they're sitting there spinning everything around and trying to keep that going like is that is that normal industry standard that that you have that or is there sometimes there's, you know, somebody with a broom and a broom handle they're trying to just like mix it around on a canoe pad. 20:00 Can you pass that's how we mix up our stuff. 20:04 You know, I've I've seen it done about every which way you can imagine, the canoe paddle is definitely a thing it does happen. On your larger scale distilleries, though, you're gonna have a nice agitator. The tubes on the inside or the coils are going to be for your steam, either coils or jacket. You can go either way. But yes, I mean, that's pretty much an industry standard. So how long does a typical process like this usually go when you are when you're trying to mash and you're trying to basically add water to the grain to start basically making them change their molecules. I don't really know if that's the right word I'm looking here for but try and change their properties a little bit. 20:41 It Again, it's going to depend on how much you're trying to do one time. So let's say let's let's operate off say 1000 gallon working capacity. You know, you're gonna you're gonna go and you're going to add your corn, your hot water, you're going to go to a boil, you're going to cook for, you know, 30 minutes 21:00 45 minutes, whatever, wherever you land in your profile, then you're gonna start to cool down, put some rye in there, and you're gonna cool a little more. And then that's where your enzymes start to work. You've got your alpha and your beta amylase, enzymes 21:13 that work at the 155 and the 135 degree ranges. So that's really where you're going to start to get a whole bunch of your conversion is right there where the enzymes are working. And then you can hold it there for another, you know, 20 minutes, 30 minutes. Again, this is going to be a little bit of trial and error, depending on your facility. But you're probably looking at two and a half, three and a half hours, probably for a full mashing, cooking session before you go into your fermenter. And how do you know it's like, ready? Well, you I mean, that's the trial and error part. I mean, you you start with a basic profile. And at the end, you see if there are things left on the table. You take measurements of a different of a bunch of different stuff through your fermentation and we can talk about this later, that actually will measure 22:00 You will actually give you ideas of your starch conversion, your, your the fermentation, how much sugar is left over which there shouldn't be any, right? So if there is you've had problems with yeast or some other variable, you measure all these things and you come up with the most efficient profile. What if you didn't have any instruments like back in the day? And you just said, yeah, exactly dip your finger in it and taste it like as Can you tell from that? I mean is there you can, if you were to take just a basic mash early on, right before you start your fermentation, you tasted it will be sweet. It will have sugar sweet properties to it. At the end of your fermentation when you taste it, it's going to be sour. So once you taste the difference in the two then you know on the front side what you're looking for. So another question that I had about looking at the grains that are going into you know, you had mentioned at first like you add in things a little bit later, like you add in the ride later and it's like so is there is it because corn 23:00 has different property. And that's why you added in first or do you add in my first like, what's the like which grains you choose first because of just the chemical nature of compound of it, the corn traditionally is is the hardest to get to based on its physical structure, the kernel itself, breaking all of that down and actually getting to the available storage is the most difficult in corn. So why you boil the crap out of the corn first, then everything else is at cooler temperatures. So you start you work your way to the top and then back down. 23:32 Right You don't want to eat really don't want to cook right too much. And then the malted barley, the barley is is traditionally just for the enzyme at the low percentage. Now as you increase that percentage, you can actually you can get some good flavoring from it. But malted barley traditionally is for the enzymes. What about any other like multi grains that you put in there like does that affects the time that you come in? Because I know if you melt something beforehand, it's probably gonna affect what you're doing. doing the math 24:00 process. Absolutely. And you can you can malt just about anything you want to. And you're going to get some enzymatic capability out of that multigrain. The enzymes are still going to work in the same temperature range. So even if you decide you want a malt corn, you can't go up and boil that corn. And just because it's multicore come back down, and the enzyme gonna work, you still denature the enzyme once you go above that temperature. So Alright, so I think we've kind of got this part now ready to go to have some yeast? All right, well, I think at this point, well, I mean, it's it usually leaves the cooker right? And you have some sort of vacuum or tubing or something that gets it to a fermentation tank. Correct. That's great. And so kind of talking about, I mean, because you've been in this process before, like what does it look like to build a system that is either like vacuum sucking, whatever it is the pumping moving all this stuff from yet not probably vacuum it's probably good to have a Dyson hooked up. 25:01 Got a water pump, very powerful. Yeah, but kind of talk about some of those, those things that maybe people don't see. So, you know, let's start with the most efficient way on a large scale, you're gonna have some nice stainless steel pipe, you're gonna have a really nice pump. And when it's time to go from the cooker to the fermenter, you're going to push a button on your switchboard and it's going to open a valve your pumps gonna kick on, and you're going to empty the cooker into the from how many gallons per minute we're talking my language is. 25:29 Obviously it depends, you know, there's a, 25:33 there's a piece of your process that this fits into, you know, you've you've cooked for so much time. Now it's gonna take you if you've got a pump that runs 25 gallons a minute, you've got 100 gallon tank, it's gonna go a lot quicker than if you have a 10,000 gallon tank and a 25 gallon a minute bomb, sure. So you size everything so that it takes the right amount of time to move the mash from the cooker to the fermenter and that will change whether you're running 100 gallons or 26:00 thousand gallons. 26:02 So again, that's engineering but you basically work it into your, your process. And then on the other side on the craft side, it can be, it can be anytime it can be pulled out and you know, drain into a bucket, take the bucket, dump it into the fermenter it can be hooked a hose to a smaller pump and run a hose across the floor to a fermenter. Any way that you can with some sort of sanitary good sanitary practice, get the cooked mash from the cooker over to the fermenter. I mean, whatever makes sense. That's I mean, you can do it 100 different ways. So from anybody that's never visited still, you know what these look like? Why, why couldn't you have a cooker and a fermenter do the same exact thing. You can, you can so if you wanted to do one fermentation a week, you could have a cooker, or even even distillation. Let's do the whole thing. You could actually have a pot still that you could cook your grains in 27:00 ferment in and then also distill from. The problem with that is that you've now occupied one space to do all three things. The idea around having typically one cooker and three to four fermenters is that you can set it up so you're doing something every day. No, you're not waiting on it to finish all three. Exactly. Yep. Exactly. I gotcha. I gotcha. So the other kind of question about this is like, when I know that we've had the opportunity to go to distillery and you know, you can put your hands on the mash and everything like that, but give folks that are listening kind of understanding of like, when something is actually going from the cooker, to the fermentation tank, like, you know, is it like, Is it just like water at this point? Or is it basically like water with a few crumbles like, kind of talk about the consistency of what this product is at this point. It's, again, if you're running the thicker, if you're trying to run a thicker beer, it's going to be just a little bit thinner than oatmeal. And if you're running a really thin beard, 28:00 It's it's gonna be cloudy water. And then it'll be it'll look like really muddy water, I guess consistency wise, and you're usually trying to like hit the middle ground with both these spectrums, right here is that kind of what most people are trying to hit? Yeah, it's trying to for your facility trying to maximize the yeast performance as well as the grain throughput, so that you're not sacrificing alcohol so you're not leaving alcohol on a table. Alright, you either want to be a Miller light or a stout. You want to be like 28:33 somewhere in the middle there. Yeah, sorry. So now we got to the point that we've got we've got a product going into the fermentation tank, right? That's right. And we've seen it usually there's there's a pipe that somebody moves and it's draining into there. Sometimes it actually drains sometimes like from bottom up sometimes like it can be can can can be pumped in there. See I said it right pumped in there. Yeah. So So at this point when it starts filling up talking to the process. Well, let's talk about yeast for just a second and then and then 29:00 Well in waiting. 29:02 So there there is a few different ways you can go about using yeast in your fermentation process. The most frequently done most frequently used and easiest to use is going to be a dried yeast. So you you order a dried yeast and known quantities from a manufacturer. They tell you how much you used to use for whatever product you're making. They'll even give you a few little flavor notes that that yeast is going to create. You take that in the recommended quantities and while this fermenter is filling up, you take the yeast and you throw it in. Done. That's it. How many different varieties of yeast are there for say like bourbon production? Oh my goodness, any thousands or Yeah, it could be could be. I mean, it's, again, we're talking about natural species. So you can have one and it can mutate while we're sitting here having this conversation. Not really that quickly, but 29:58 pretty close throw right? 30:00 match. Yeah, it'll take right away. There are there are a lot out there. But oddly enough, there are fewer than you would expect available for folks like you and me who were if we were to buy from somebody, that's why you got some guys in Danville that specialize Exactly. Farm solutions. Yeah. So there's, there's another question, this one came from one of the Patreon communities because we knew going into this that it would be tough to ask a lot of hard questions. So we kind of reached out to them. And so Richard hundred asked, you know, during the mash rest, is there a temperature there that affects the final profile that actually goes into potentially the final product? Or is like basically do you wait for that? That master like come to almost like a like a lukewarm state before you start actually pushing it or pumping it into a fermenter? So it's a good question. Let's, let's assume for a minute that when we talk about him, I'm not exactly sure the context in which he's referring to a match. 31:00 But in my experience, I have done what we'll call a mash wrist in certain types of raw fermentations. And the idea behind that is during that rest period, it actually gives the enzymes time to continue to break down starches. And that's really what that that resin or starches or in rare case, proteins. 31:23 That's really what that rest is allowing time for. And I'm assuming that's what he was asking. And if not, I'm happy to come back and revisit what yeah, 31:33 it's close enough. Yeah. All right. So we're in the fermentation tanks you've added to the yeast at this point, we've got, you know, this is where the magic happens, right? You get the bubble start in the form, you got that crust layer building on top. Now, what is what is the chemical breakdown that's actually happening that we're watching at this point. Basically, what you're looking at is starch molecules being converted into alcohol and co2 on the very 32:00 base level that's that's what's going on. So the alcohol is created the co2 bubbles off. And that's what you see. That's why it looks like it's boiling even though it's not. And then I know that we've been to some distilleries and when you're watching the boil it sometimes there's like, it almost looks like rent almost like like there's blood in the water. Like is that just like fats and oils from corn? Yeah, it's oils from corn. Yeah. And it's like hypnotic, always like that. I'm like, oh, man, something 32:25 that's like, just take your breath away. I don't know and know what to like, if you put your head down. It's like, like, you almost lose your breath sometimes. Yeah, I wouldn't recommend doing that. Because that can be pretty dangerous, especially for mentors that are closed. That's what's wrong. Me. You will find open that door and you get a face full of co2. It can knock you out. Yeah. So kind of talk about the the idea of why somebody would do a closed fermentation versus an open fermentation. And why you see some that have, yeah, you see some that have almost like the submarine doors on them like submarine windows. And then you see some that just have huge vent hoods on top of them do so. 33:00 This is this is the age old argument that, you know will never be solved about why we do open top fermentation versus a closed top fermentation. And, you know, we can get into Cypress and stainless, you know sometime too as well. But when you look at an open top fermentation the idea that people some people have is that it's a sanitation issue. So a lot of people will use a close top fermenter for that reason. So I'll back up and say that if you condition your yeast properly, and this is not necessarily the box yeast but if you condition yeast properly, prior to adding it to your condition, like push ups or 33:42 sprints 33:44 Yes, basically basically it's a yeast training program. fermentation. 33:53 And as funny as that is, it's really what you're doing is you're you're putting the yeast in in the environment, similar to 34:00 What it's going to see in the fermentation. So yeah, it's basically like training for marathons what I like to say, CrossFit for you. Exactly, yeah. So how he said, You know, there's like thousands and thousands, and they're living things like how do you prevent from those thousands and thousands of variables from taking over that particular? Is it like, you have so much of that particular yeast that it's dominant and can outcompete other yeast strains, or how does one bad apple not get in there and start taking over. So up until you start your fermentation, everything is pretty much we'll say, sanitized, you know, you basically boil the grain, everything is clean up until it goes into the fermenter. So at that point, you have basically allowed the environment to interact with your clean mash. So that's when potential bacteria can send in potential molds, that stuff that's in the air that you don't see but that we all know is there. That's when it starts to interact with your mash. Now if you have a strong yeast strain, that is beneficial 35:00 properly, it's going to outcompete any of those naturally occurring micro organisms in the fermentation so that you don't have to worry about something else taking over. Also, as soon as that yeast starts working, if you can time that properly to where you add your yeast as your fermenters, filling up, that yeast is going to start to create co2 and create an anaerobic environment, which is an environment that's lacking oxygen, which means those bacteria and mold spores are not going to grow. Gotcha, that makes sense. Yeah. And so this is where the magic is happening. So this is also you know, when we when we go when you visit these things, and you see these, these fermentation tanks, we'll get into the I think we'll get into steel versus Cypress in a minute. But one question that I've always had is like, sometimes they're like, Oh, we do three or four days. Some people are like, oh, we're six, seven day. what's what's the determining factor there to say like, Oh, it's gonna take this many days or like, Oh, we let it go for 10 like, does that really matter at the end of the day? So yes or no 36:00 A lot of it again is going to be strain. A lot of it's going to be how thick a beer you run how much starch is actually in that how much is available on that fermentation for conversion. If you run a thinner beer, and so you don't temperature control your fermentation, and you go from say a 70 ish setpoint and it skyrockets into the 90s it that yeast is going to roll through every available amount of starch in that fermentation very quickly. So you're, you're gonna get 36:30 a large majority of your alcohol in that first 12 to 24 hours. And then depending on how well your your your enzymes work, you get your secondary fermentation and that's what the additional days are for. If you run a thicker beer, and there's physically more starch in there that's available to convert and you want to control your temperatures in your fermentations through chilled water, no more coils in the fermenter 37:00 Then you can actually take longer to convert all of those starches. And basically what that does is allow you to make up for say weekends or holidays or things like that you control the temperature was drags it out longer and there you run a thicker beer so there's more starch in there. So the process just just physically takes longer. It's not like a barbecue and low and slow isn't necessarily 37:26 not necessarily in this case. So like do different. So like rah rah whiskey versus a bourbon or, you know, American malt or whatever, do they you know, each grain have different fermentation days, I guess required for them. 37:41 Again, it goes back to starch content. Yeah, I mean, the the fermentation times are really going to be determined by you know, thickness or your beer, the type of yeast strain you're using and whether or not you want to control the temperatures are good fermentation. People always talk about like, rather like Oh, it's such a pain. Yes, because it gums up everything's like 38:00 So is it like a thicker beer? Or is it So traditionally rye is gonna have a whole lot of protein By comparison, it has a lot more protein than you're going to see in any of these other grains. And for that reason, you get that the foam I mean, people talk about gumming stuff up and foam and that sports protein. So if you if you eliminate that protein, then you can eliminate the problems with rapper mutations. So when you do fry, are you like, Alright, I get my a, my a list, yeast over there can do the most burpees push ups to take this on, because it's going to be a bit. 38:39 There are yeast strains that are going to perform better in awry than others, okay? But also you still got to take care of that protein. And that's really what's going on is that protein, they, if you if you've ever seen a rat fermentation go awry. See what I did there. 39:00 It will almost balloons out the top in a lot of cases. And what that does that proteins actually holding all that co2 in there. So now you're starting to suppress the the performance of the yeast. And if you do that, it's just going to slowly gradually slow your fermentation till it stops. And when you stopped prematurely, you've left all that converted starch on the type. So now instead of getting, 39:25 say, a seven or 8%, beer 9% beer, you're getting a, you know, one, two to 3% beer, because your fermentation didn't go all the way to completion. So go get that paddle. 39:36 Learn enough or do you have to scrap it? Well, rule of thumb is you never scrap it, you know, you got to figure out a way to make it work. You know, one of the things that that Joe always refers to is, you know, when we first met he asked me what do you do when it goes wrong? And just, I just roll off the cuff. It never goes wrong and 40:00 You know, he probably loved it. And he did. And he still tells that story. And at the time, I didn't really understand why I said what I said, but, but what what I'm saying when I say that is that you have to be ready for these things, you have to understand what's going on, so that when your raw fermentation goes awry, you have something some protocol in place to say, okay, you know, we're sitting here looking, the proteins are thicker, in this particular fermentation than usual, we need to make a corrective action, and just knowing what to do to combat each of those problems that comes along, then it you know, it's expected, you know, it's not when something if something goes wrong is when something goes wrong, right. And if you operate with that mindset, then you're just prepared. Yeah, absolutely. And so we're still in the fermentation process here. And I think we skip this step, because there's one thing that we'll always talk about, and that's the sweet versus sour mash, right. I mean, this is where this all happens in this stage to correct That's right. So kind of give Transcribed by https://otter.ai

For anyone that doesn’t know Peggy from listening to our past episodes, you will get to hear from the first ever woman Master Taster. She has been a remarkable inspiration for anyone in the bourbon industry and her crowning achievement was being inducted into the 2019 Bourbon Hall of Fame. This podcast was recorded at the Kentucky Derby Museum’s Legends Series so make sure you are following their social media handles @derbymuseum to catch the next season. Learn more about Peggy by listening to episodes 204 and 198, which is her session from the 2018 Kentucky Bourbon Affair called “The Stave is the Rave”. Show Partners: You can now buy Barrell Craft Spirits products online and have them shipped right to your door. Visit BarrellBourbon.com and click Buy Now. Receive $25 off your first order at RackHouse Whiskey Club with code "Pursuit". Visit RackhouseWhiskeyClub.com. Show Notes: DISCUS Petition: https://p2a.co/yrfbbV7 Podcast Awards Voting:  https://www.podcastawards.com/ This week’s Above the Char with Fred Minnick talks about Wild Turkey and small barrels. Tell us about being a Noe. What were you like when you were young? What was your dad like? Tell us about your time at the University of Kentucky. What were you drinking back then? Why did you chose these whiskies to taste? What was your first job out of college? How long were you in the hotel business? When did you work at Brown-Forman? What was the coolest event you coordinated? What was the next step? Tell us a good Lincoln story. What challenges have you faced? Do you feel like you always have to prove yourself? Talk about what you've done for women in bourbon. Tell us about Peerless. How many distilleries have you worked on? Tell us about Bakers. Bourbon Women: https://bourbonwomen.org/ Support this Podcast on Patreon

Does the purchase of Early Times by Sazerac signal trouble in the water for Brown-Forman? We look at the motivation behind this and if tariffs could have a future impact as well. If you’re thinking about visiting distilleries and experiencing Kentucky, is now the time to do it or wait until things settle down? And lastly, we ask ourselves what do we do with a bottle that only has 2 or 3 pours left? Finish it or save it? Show Partners: You can now buy Barrell Craft Spirits products online and have them shipped right to your door. Visit BarrellBourbon.com and click Buy Now. Receive $25 off your first order at RackHouse Whiskey Club with code "Pursuit". Visit RackhouseWhiskeyClub.com. Show Notes: This week’s Above the Char with Fred Minnick talks about People Magazine. Sazerac purchased Early Times. What will happen to a recent bourbon entrant that has become a beloved bottom shelfer? Distilleries are slowly starting to open back up. Would you go ahead and take your KY vacation now or wait? Do you look at bottle fill levels and feel the need to finish them off or keep them? Thanks to Blake from bourbonr.com, Jordan from BreakingBourbon.com, and Brian from sippncorn.com for joining. Support this Podcast on Patreon

Do you have a really old bottle of whiskey? What about a unicorn that’s coveted by every bourbon enthusiast out there? We’re joined by Joe Hyman of Skinner Auctioneers to talk about what it’s like to buy and sell high-end bottles at a legit auction. We talk about everything from the bottles they accept, how they process auctions, and how they spot fakes. Every year a whiskey breaks the ceiling for sales, who knows what it will be this year. Show Partners: You can now buy Barrell Craft Spirits products online and have them shipped right to your door. Visit BarrellBourbon.com and click Buy Now. Receive $25 off your first order at RackHouse Whiskey Club with code "Pursuit". Visit RackhouseWhiskeyClub.com. Show Notes: BevAlc Insights: https://bevalcinsights.com/ Dating Old American Whiskey Bottles: https://bourbonveach.com/2020/06/29/dating-old-american-whiskey-bottles/ Whiskey Advocate Article: https://www.whiskyadvocate.com/black-market-bourbon-feature/ This week’s Above the Char with Fred Minnick talks about Bottled-In-Bond. How did you get into spirits and auctions? Did 50 year old scotch ruin you? How do you get these rare bottles? Talk about the legalities of selling and shipping alcohol for an auction house. How do you transport or ship the bottles? What do you define as a rare bottle? How often do you get something in and it's ruined somehow? How do people react when they bring you a bottle that they think is amazing, but you can't sell it? How do you spot fakes? What would happen if you auctioned a counterfeit bottle? Do you research on the secondary market for pricing? How do you gauge value? What do you attribute fluctuations in the market to? Any advice for people wanting to participate in an auction? Do you still get a thrill when finding rare bottles? Are there things you won't sell? What's the record sale? What's your commission rate?  Who is cooler, Scotch or American whiskey buyers? Support this Podcast on Patreon

Wouldn’t it be nice if someone was able to give you the best tips for planning out your bourbon trail experience? Look no further. In this podcast we cover the distilleries, experiences, and some restaurants you can’t miss. It’s impossible to get to every distillery in a short amount of time, but this episode will give you the scoop on how to navigate the areas of Kentucky to make the most of it. Show Partners: You can now buy Barrell Craft Spirits products online and have them shipped right to your door. Visit BarrellBourbon.com and click Buy Now. Receive $25 off your first order at RackHouse Whiskey Club with code "Pursuit". Visit RackhouseWhiskeyClub.com. Show Notes: This week’s Above the Char with Fred Minnick talks about a bourbon that is $22.99. How did you get involved with AirBNBs? What is the difference between AirBNBs and hotels? What's a good number of days to spend on the bourbon trail? When is a good day to take a tour? How do you recommend distilleries to different groups? Tell us about the different pods. Where does Maker's fit in? What distillery would you hide out in during a zombie apocalypse? What is the bourbon chase? What are you thoughts on the bourbon bubble? Ashford Key Properties: https://www.facebook.com/ashfordkey/ Support this Podcast on Patreon

Freddie Johnson is bourbon. You are going to hear that, among many other praises for one of the most well respected people in the industry. He’s a never short on stories and makes any experience together memorable. Of course, Freddie talks about tours and his impact at Buffalo Trace, but then answers questions about bottle flipping and the secondary market. It's great insight into Sazerac's approach on this issue. Make sure you attend the Kentucky Derby Museum's Legends Series next season. Show Partners: You can now buy Barrell Craft Spirits products online and have them shipped right to your door. Visit BarrellBourbon.com and click Buy Now. Receive $25 off your first order at RackHouse Whiskey Club with code "Pursuit". Visit RackhouseWhiskeyClub.com. Show Notes: This week’s Above the Char with Fred Minnick talks about the latest deal between Brown-Forman and Sazerac. Discussion about white dog. Tell us about giving tours 12 years ago. Talk about the promise to your father. How do you customize the tours? What do the people of Buffalo Trace mean to you? Do you have to buy your own bottles? What is your favorite part of a tour? How do you feel about seeing the high aftermarket prices for Buffalo Trace products? Do you ever get challenged about your products on the tours? What do you think about flipping bottles? What was the most special drink you've shared? Support this Podcast on Patreon

Today’s roundtable is a potpourri of bourbon questions. We talk about our favorite 10 year age stated bourbons that are readily available. We look into the high aged Knob Creek releases, including the 15 and 12 year, and what this could mean for the private barrel selection program. Then, we talk about some Father’s Day gift ideas that we would like to have. Lastly, we take a moment to look back in time and ask ourselves what we would have done differently if we got into bourbon earlier. This episode is dedicated to raising funds for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Bourbon Pursuit has pledged $1000 to help bring awareness and equality. Show Partners: You can now buy Barrell Craft Spirits products online and have them shipped right to your door. Visit BarrellBourbon.com and click Buy Now. Receive $25 off your first order at RackHouse Whiskey Club with code "Pursuit". Visit RackhouseWhiskeyClub.com. Show Notes: NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund: https://www.naacpldf.org/ This week’s Above the Char with Fred Minnick talks about aliens. What does your spouse think of your bourbon habit? What's the best age stated 10 year old bourbon? 15 year Knob Creek is being priced at $100+. What happened to the 15 year picks for $45? Father's Day is coming up. If you are buying for the bourbon hobbyist, what's the best possible gift to get? What would *you* want? We all got into this bourbon hobby at different times and learned a lot along the way. If you could go back to the beginning when you got into bourbon, what would you do differently? Aside from buying up every rare bottle on the store shelves. Support this Podcast on Patreon

For today's episode, we traveled to Woodinville, Washington and sat down with Brett Carlile, Co-Founder, Distiller, and Lead Hose Dragger of Woodinville Whiskey Co. Brett gives an inside look at how him and his best friend, Orlin Sorensen, built one on of the most explosive craft brands on the market. It starts with an idea, enlisting late great Dave Pickerell to provide guidance, and good luck. Their whiskey began turning heads and led to an acquisition by Moet Hennessy. Get insights into their production process and their aging facility, which is a few hours away from the distillery and has a Kentucky-like climate. Show Partners: You can now buy Barrell Craft Spirits products online and have them shipped right to your door. Visit BarrellBourbon.com and click Buy Now. Receive $25 off your first order at RackHouse Whiskey Club with code "Pursuit". Visit RackhouseWhiskeyClub.com. Show Notes: Du Nord Benefit Discussion Panel: https://youtu.be/-fuH8aSQVhw Du Nord Fundraiser: https://www.gofundme.com/f/minnesota-poc-business-support?utm_medium=copy_link&utm_source=customer&utm_campaign=p_lico+share-sheet Distilling Research Grants: https://distillingresearch.org/research/ Barrell Craft Spirits Private Release Whiskey: https://www.barrellbourbon.com/privatereleasewhiskey This week’s Above the Char with Fred Minnick talks about how the world needs a drink. How did you get into whiskey? How did you decide to start the distillery? Where did you learn to produce whiskey? Tell us about working with Dave Pickerell. What was your first distillate like? Why Woodinville? Where did you get your mash bill? Was it a success out of the gate or did you run into issues? How long did it take to be successful in Washington? What is the whiskey scene like in Washington?  How long did it take to bottle your product? When did you realize you had good juice? Tell us about the whiskey. Why 90 proof? Talk about your barrels. Where are your warehouses located? Tell us about your rye whiskey. Talk about getting purchased by Moet Hennessy. What has the partnership meant to you all? What markets are you expanding to? What are your plans for distillery expansion? What are you trying to accomplish with the port finish product? How much of the product is lost to evaporation? How do you store the barrels? What do you admire about your partner? Any plans to make an older product? Support this Podcast on Patreon

What does it take to build a bourbon brand from the ground up? In this podcast, you get to hear our story of building Pursuit Spirits. We discuss how we source barrels, design packaging, and navigate the law. Fred interviews Ryan and Kenny on motivation, risks, and how to secure your future with contract distillation. Show Partners: You can now buy Barrell Craft Spirits products online and have them shipped right to your door. Visit BarrellBourbon.com and click Buy Now. Receive $25 off your first order at RackHouse Whiskey Club with code "Pursuit". Visit RackhouseWhiskeyClub.com. Show Notes: This week’s Above the Char with Fred Minnick talks about Rum. How did you all meet? How did you all decide to start the podcast? Talk about starting your own brand. How did you finance the project? Who came up with the idea to call the releases episodes? After creating this brand, do you have more appreciation for distillers being less transparent? What was the most annoying thing about starting the brand? Do you ever get nervous that your model might come crashing down? How have you been able to meet the demand of your audience? Has launching the brand helped you understand the distillers more? How much time went into the packaging? Talk about the cork. Why is there so much variance in TN barrels? How have you reacted to negative criticism? What distilleries have you partnered with? Do all of the episodes sell out? Any thoughts about doing a batching process? Would you consider outside investment? Any plans for contracting distilling? How do you not oversaturate the promotion of Pursuit Series? Favorite episode? What distillery would you want to partner with if you could? If you had to pick between Bourbon Pursuit and Pursuit Series, which would you pick? If you could buy all the bourbon you wanted from OZ Tyler, would you? Where would you want to spend marketing dollars? Support this Podcast on Patreon 0:00 When we can put it into a single bear offering a cash ranked like, this is what we've tried. Like, I guarantee you, you're gonna love this because we're not going to put it sound like a men's wearhouse commercial. But if it did I love the way you look. 0:25 This is Episode 255 of bourbon pursuit. I'm one of your host Kenny, and I hope you've had an enjoyable week in this podcast finds you well. So let's get on to some bourbon news. We missed the deadline for putting this in the podcast last week. So unless you've been staying away from social media, then you probably already know about the new Weller single barrel orange label that will be coming to market soon. The new Weller will be bottled at 97 proof which is a middle point between the traditional Green Label special reserve at 90 and the Red Label antique at 107 will also have a suggested retail price of $50 1:00 You can also check out Fred Minix YouTube channel where he was the first person to review it. So make sure you go subscribe and check that out. There's also a new whiskey coming to market. It's a Tennessee whiskey, and it combines golf, Marion eaves and the Mannings. It's sweetens Cove. The investors behind it have some major name power, including the likes, of course, Peyton Manning, tennis legend Andy Roddick, sports caster gymnasts, singer songwriter drew Holcomb, among others. The story behind sweetens Cove is that it started somewhat off with like an off the grid, nine hole golf course at the end of a gravel road in Tennessee. It was described by some because of its breathtaking views as doffs Field of Dreams. So a group of friends, including some of the previously ones mentioned, bought sweetens Cove back in 2019. With no clubhouse, no plumbing, or really anything else to offer. It has a tradition of a celebratory shot of whiskey for first timers on the first tee. This will be a 13 year old Tennessee bourbon with multiple batches that have been blended by Marion Eve's will continue 2:00 Around 14,000 bottles and have an MSRP of around $200. 2:05 In distillery news, the governor of Kentucky has said that distilleries can reopen for visitors starting on June 8. But please make sure that you put in your phone calls to any distilleries that you plan on visiting because it's up to their discretion on how they're going to reopen. So please make sure that you do that before making any plans to go to visit any. 2:26 Now for today's podcast, many folks have asked us before, what does it take to actually start a bourbon brand. And today, you get to hear our story. We switch things up a little bit. And Fred interviews us on the brand, how we got started our process for selecting barrels for pursuit series and what our future plans entail. We can't say thank you enough to everyone out there who has purchased that bottle of pursuit series and been a steward of the brand because of you are able to help continue and grow this into something even more amazing down the line. We've even got more plans to release something awesome in the fourth quarter of this year. So 3:00 Tune for more details. We've got three barrels that are available today on seal box comm along with less than 65 bottles remaining across specs in the Dallas and Texas and Fort Worth and Austin area so make sure you can go and get all the details on pursuit spirits.com because we have one barrel that is in the Texas market. And if you got a friend or a relative that found bourbon is something that they enjoy while at guarantee, make sure you tell them about the podcast help spread the good word of bourbon and Joe from barrel bourbon wants you to know that it's gotten a whole lot easier to get their unique cash drinks whiskies from around the world, including their rums, malt, and many others. Just visit barrel bourbon calm and click the Buy Now button today. You can get bourbon to your door. Alright, enjoy today's episode. Here's Fred minich with above the char 3:54 I'm Fred MiniK. And this is above the chart. Whoo. It's becoming a little warmer. It's coming soon. 4:00 summertime. I'm seeing the blooms the flowers. Oh, the sun's out more and maybe you can get a little bit of tan I'm grilling every night. It's just Oh, it's so exciting. I can't wait to hang out. Oh wait, yeah, there's that whole damn pandemic thing, man, but you know what the other thing that summertime does for me, rum cocktails. Rum, cocktails rum punches. I'm constantly experimenting with different rums Listen, I know bourbon bourbon, bourbon bourbon. We talk about bourbon all the time is bourbon pursuit. But ROM is my you know it's my it's my second love all the spirits I love rum so much and I it is so much with fruits. So listen, everybody I'm just telling you right now, get on the rum kick this summer and let's start making some rum punches together. Go get go get go to the liquor store or get online at drizzly or go wherever it is you shop right now in the middle of this pandemic, and look for the different rooms. Okay, here 5:00 a shopping list or these are the rums that I'm telling you right now will make you excited as a bourbon fan. Total wine has a brand that's called a doorless. d'Orleans is made only for, for total wine in the United States. It's made by Foursquare, which in my opinion is the best distillery in all of ROM it's in Barbados. And that ROM d'Orleans whether it's the 12 year old or it's the basic one, it is beautiful. Start out making cocktails with that or drink it neat. Go over to Jamaica, get a little Appleton get a little bit that Jamaican funk on up in there and use that for punches. So get you some orange juice, get some limes and lemons and just squeeze them all in together and throw in some, some sugar and maybe like a look sardo stir that thing up and you got yourself punch, head on over to America and get a little bit of privateer out of Boston, the Boston area. That privateer is absolutely fantastic. Now the three thing that all three of these 6:00 rums have in common. They don't add sugar. That's right. A lot of rums actually add sugar after they have 6:08 dumped in so they'll add up to like 50 milligrams per liter in sugar. Now a lot of people like that a lot of people like that, but hey, I'm a straight bourbon guy. I love my bourbon neat. I love it with just a piece of ice sometimes. And if you are like me, then you probably gonna want something that isn't adulterated with a sweetness, and so privateer Appleton and Foursquare or door Lee's made by Foursquare, take a look at those three things and get back to me at Fred MiniK on whichever social media platform you like. And for a moment, let's talk some rum because it's summertime. And that's this week's above the char. Hey, if you have an idea for above the char hit me up on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook And oh, by the way, I got a YouTube channel. Go check it out. We have a membership area where there's a lot of exclusive content 7:00 Until next week, cheers. 7:06 Welcome back to bourbon pursuit. This is going to be a fun episode in which we discuss the pursuit series something that I am not a part of. But Kenny and Ryan of bourbon pursuit are so I get to turn the tables on them a little bit and ask them some questions about how they got where they are. And I kind of want to start this off, gentlemen. Oh, no, I'm sweating. 7:28 Well, given given what you told us told me off air you should be. Okay. Yeah. Well, we'll hit me up on on social media. I'll tell you what, read what this is really about later, feed you all the dirty secrets and that's 7:43 got another nod. So Alex at the party stories this this episode is about. This is about the pursuit series in the building of it. But of course, you cannot talk about the whiskey that you all own together without talking about this podcast. So I want to go over 8:00 From the very beginning, how did you to actually meet your need? Yeah, you know, it's like we're awkward school, Utah. 8:11 So, I had been listening to podcasts, with my current business, my real paying business. I'd listen to podcasts and in my truck a lot and at the time, I was going to start a lawn care business. Well, I've quickly learned that there's not going to be many listeners or follow on your podcast. I don't think we'd have a Patreon community. Yeah, donate. I'll send you some fertilizer or something. I don't know. But uh, anywho I was really into bourbon. And my brother in law kind of said, Why don't you do a podcast about bourbon? And because you know, so many people you're from Bardstown, as always say, and so 8:47 I was like, Yeah, that'd be cool. But I didn't know how to execute it. Kenny and I had become friends. How did you guys become friends? What where was that moment of where you all became friends because we're in target and we were walking 9:00 past the pop tart aisle we locked eyes and I don't remember that now that now our y's are mutual Kenny. Is that how you wanted the meeting to go? Or I mean, you know, you ever you ever look back and you think like, I wish I could do something over? You know, that might be one of those times but yeah, exactly. Yeah, so our wives were mutual friends and I had a derby party every year. And Kenny would come and bring his mid juillet mix and bring several different bottles. And so we kind of started and he actually liked electronic dance music, and I did too. And so we kind of had it similar, similar interest. And so I knew what he did it and his job was a lot of tech and presentations public speaking, which I had no experience in. Still, to this day, I kind of dread to getting in front of microphone people. But uh, so I needed somebody to call Kenny or I emailed him and said, Hey, what do you think about this? And he's like, Yeah, let's do it. But he was like, we gotta need to come come from this angle. And so we met in my basement for the first time. 10:00 One and we had a laptop and a USB microphone and we just kind of sat around and talked about bourbon and whatnot. And while we were doing this and then I think we recorded it and then we listened to her like we got delete that That's terrible. This was bad. And then for really, and then I still have that recording. I don't know. Gosh, I might actually on my old I would love to my old mic. Actually I put that out for like a bond like GarageBand I need to look that up. That's a good that would be cool to me on fun episode to do. Yeah, it's just one of those things where, you know, when you start anything, you fumble your way through it. Yeah. And, you know, we've we've both gotten much better at the podcast execution, interviewing style, everything throughout the years. It's just been a repetition and you just, you know, you start working at something and you you get better at it as the years go along. Yeah, it's it's kind of a testament to like the theory that like, you know, the the 11:00 10,000 hour rule or something like that, if you want to do something like just because you suck at it first, like, you can become good, just got to do it. So don't let like, perfection stop you from doing something because we've had a lot of imperfections along the way. And it's taken us a long journey to get here, but it's been a cool journey and how when, when did it start getting serious for you in the podcasting space? I would say it, I mean, I'll kind of I'll kind of take that one a little bit, you know, for us it was it was one of those things where, you know, Ryan had he's a very good idea person, he's very driven by it and he's, he's very creative when it comes to it. And then it comes to the execution stage and making sure that it stays consistent and it stays on schedule and it stays like that. And so there was there was kind of like a turning within the responsibilities where you know, he really wanted to run with this and go with it and I said, Sure, like all you know, I've got I've got my own work stuff going on like I'm okay like all kind of just be the the extra voice of reason if you need it and he was taking care of all the editing and stuff like that. 12:00 And then, you know, it got to the point where, you know, I kind of took over a little bit the editing, making sure that we had, you know, the right kind of sound quality and all this other kind of stuff over the years. And there was a point as well where, you know, during that process, you know, when I was picking up and doing a lot of this and putting in tons and tons of hours a week into it. I mean, most people don't understand that, what goes into a one hour podcast, there's at least 20 to 40, even sometimes 60 hours of work that just goes into that one hour. Correct. And so when you when you get to that point, you're spending that much time plus you've got your other 40 hours a week day job, you get burnout pretty quickly. And so it got to the point where we I just said, you know, like we're gonna let it lapse a little bit and we let it lapse, and then all of a sudden, you had people on Twitter saying like, Hey, guys, when's the new episode gonna come out? Yeah, I'm like, oh, people listen, yeah, what year was that? I mean, this was probably 2016 timeframe, had been somewhere during that timeframe. And then there was a 13:00 So I think it was like December of like 2016 as well, actually, it's probably 2015 timeframe when that tweets happened. And then it was 2016 when it was a lot of the work that was really going into it. And I was feeling the burnout. I mean, I was really feeling the burnout from it. And I just said, He's like, I don't really know if their ROI is here. Like, I'll have to go ahead and reevaluate, like, what is this really gonna be worth the time? You know, and I put that tweet out there, there was a lot of good positive responses, Mark Gillespie from whiskey cast saying, like, hey, like, I know, a lot of stuff goes into it. Like he said, Keep at it and stuff like that, too. So even even like competitors in the space were like saying, you know, like, the water a lot of just good, you know, patting on the back and stuff like that. And then there was somebody else that said, Hey, like, why don't you all start a Patreon I'd be happy to support you. And I was like, What the hell's Patreon? And so you go in, you start reading about it, and you're like, hell let's, let's run with it. And then from there, it's just been that's been kind of the the growth and medium that we've needed to help support and sustain this place. 14:00 podcast because it's it's one of those things that you know, this is this is a new medium, it's hard to find advertisers in this new medium. Because there's a lot of companies that I mean, mindset it before it's like it's whiskey, it's distillation, you haven't changed anything in 200 years, probably not gonna change a whole lot of things. And it comes to the marketing aspect of it as well. Right? So it's one of those things that we're waiting for them to kind of catch up with it. So it's, you know, we go and we try to sell we try to talk these people but you know, a lot of times that they'd rather buy a billboard or a bus stop, right, whatever it for you magazine ads, yes. And they love magazine ads still, that's just great. But I mean, like I said, this is just one of those things that we saw Patreon as really our catalyst to really support and grow the show. And that's really what it's been now for the past few years. And it's awesome, too, because we, I mean, we have a great partner with barrel but they've been great and, you know, let us be us but we don't have to like answer, you know, we can kind of be us. We're not like on anyone's agenda or anything. So we could just be true to ourselves and we do what the community wants. We really rely on them to kind of give us ideas and 15:00 What the what interests them and feedback from them. It's been great having that support and you know, ideas bouncing off of them and stuff. So it's, and I remember when you all reached out to me for an interview, 15:14 there were a couple different times you all reach out to me, I helped you get into the legend series. And then when it when you all reached out to me to be an interview about about bourbon. I remember, at the time, there were so many podcasts coming on and you know, there are people trying to do stuff. And you guys kind of had a different feel, you know, and it was just, it was like, he was like, I could be friends with these guys. You know, he, even though I think that was, that's the one of the interviews was where the marzipan thing came from. It's like, yeah, you were like what it was. 15:51 I'd never heard of that. I'm sorry. We never had marzipan and gardening. But it was it was very clear early on that there was some spark there and that you guys were 16:00 trying to do something in this space in a in a medium that I think was 16:06 you know, filled with people who really couldn't, you know, contribute to to the community in some way and I you guys came out and you did it and and the one thing that you know obviously I came on last year I guess a year and a half ago now, you know I came on because I respected what you guys built in and then when you all came out with with your own bourbon that that threw me off so I was like I wasn't expecting that as like that's the kind of move that you don't see media people make. Yeah, I remember off to the result too because I remember we were kind of in like negotiations of 16:46 our partnership or whatnot and the ironing out the details and we were at like an old forest or event I think it was like the President's choice or whatever. But we had just kind of like confirmed that we were going to start this brand and I was like what is friggin and think of this because these are 17:00 reviewer you know, is this gonna throw the deal off? we you know, we set you aside and you're like, we need to talk about this and you went about the bourbon but about our deal and then we told you we're like we're starting our own bourbon brand. You know, you don't we don't want to be involved. We know it will let you to be 17:15 out in the sense that we don't want you involved but we don't want to, you know, implicated Okay, anything for your reviews and whatnot. So, and you're like, Yeah, I don't care if it's totally fine. I was like, Whoa, monkey off my back. Yeah, that was gonna be a total deal breaker. But anyways, well, it's there have been some, some history there of like, 17:36 whiskey, whiskey media. You know, starting a brand there. Whiskey magazine actually had had its own label for a bit in Scotland. So it's not unprecedented. It's just not popular. You know, people tend to to frown upon it. Did you all have any concerns that you know, you would, you would piss off like, you know, the distiller. 18:00 That now you're competing with them. Jimmy concerns like that when you guys were thinking about this? No, not really. I mean, when we, when we look at what we're trying to build, and what we're trying to do, it's we're boutique, I mean, we are not going to be kind of kind of person that we're not going to have to to $20 million to dump into a distillery and build one. We're not gonna be one of those people that are trying I mean, it'd be amazing to get bought out by somebody that's not on the radar, it's probably never gonna happen. Because we're not at we're not that kind of level, right? We're not at a level where we're sourcing hundreds and hundreds of barrels and then creating these crazy single barrel programs and then aging stuff and then trying to release to mass market. Like that's really not what we're trying to do. Yeah. And not only that is you know, we took this as an opportunity to kind of divert it in a in two different ways. So first and foremost, yes, we sourced like, that was the kind of the way that it was all built off of. But when we started this, even to how it all even began was the idea that, you know, we talked about a brand on the podcast, and then a few weeks later, I get this phone call from a guy 19:00 He's like, Hey, I helped build that brand. Would you be interested in doing your own? Like, never, never even crossed our mind, right? The time we were doing, we just kind of start doing single barrels for the Patreon community. We're done. And then they were selling out really fast. And so I was just thrilled doing like single barrels for from other distilleries. And I was totally content with that, you know, at the time. And so like, yeah, our broker called us and he got the idea. And Kenny called me and he was like, Are you interested? And I was like, not really. 19:32 You know, and then he's like, Okay, and then like, two weeks later passed, and he's like, well, I'm going to meet that guy that has let you know this. And I was like, Alright, I guess I'll go you know, it's like, Monday night, how we met it like hell or high water and I never been there like, Oh, go check it out. Go get a cocktail. Yeah. And so we we sat with them, and they were, to our surprise, they were like, I thought they were gonna be like two older guys, like, you know, just kind of real sharp, like, businessman like, you know, kind of like 20:00 Don't know, there's intimidating for some, but like we met them, they're really cool. They like had really great ideas. And the whiskey they had was really good. And I was like, You know what, I think we can make this work. And at the time, I think Kenny just thought, you know, we were gonna do like, a barrel picker too with it. And I was like, No, no, no, Kenny, we need to start our own brand. And like, we could make something much more bigger than just one or two barrels from that. So I immediately left that meeting and I could not sleep for like two nights. I was so excited about the opportunity. Like I told my wife I came home and I'm like, this is this is something I've been dreaming of my whole life. This is opportunity. Like you always wanted to own Well, no, I never did but like that. You know, I've grown up around this my whole life. And I've always been enjoyed bourbon and I love being around the community and just even the opportunity to have my own brand like was like, just shocking to me and like I was so excited about it. I couldn't even put into words. I just bet 21:00 All my attention went to for like, four months. And so Kenny and I gone, you know, got on. I was like, I know a designer, let's get call him get a bottle design made up. Let's go. And then the broker sent us some samples, you know, to kind of pick our first barrel to see if we're still interested in tell him about, you know what we did up here? Yeah, I mean it was it was we had three barrel samples. And we all kind of know that it was coming from Tennessee. We knew that and that was one of the things that we thought ourselves. So we had we had we go into it with the same exact mindset that every other whiskey geek goes out there and they're like, I don't drink Tennessee whiskey. Yeah. And basically in like, no way. We're like, we're like we're from Louisville Bardstown. Kentucky is in our blood. Like, why would we ever do this? And so I said, Alright, you know what, like, let's give it a try. I said, Let's take these three barrel samples. I'll grab a bottle of Henry McKenna. And I said, if it's better than hundred McKenna, this was right after you'd like named whiskey. 21:57 When I say better, like better did our palates, right? 22:00 That day at that time, whatever it is, yeah. And so we sat outside or barrel proof versions of it, you know, we're just sitting there and we're drinking of it, and we're drinking it and home behold, like the first barrel that we lost that we liked. I was I, we loved it. We said, this is it. This is the winner. And that ended up being Episode 001 the first barrel release that we ever did. Yeah, so we went down there. 22:23 I think the first one we went on, they rolled out like 10 barrels that and our intentions were to just buy one barrel, and you know, and we get down there and we taste it. They're like, I don't know. 10 or 12 I can't remember exactly. And we found three that were like really good. And I was like, man, we got about three of them and I'm freaking out. Like how much is this gonna cost? How do we ship them? How do we do all this like there's like, you know, all this anxiety but I was excited because I knew the whiskey was good and I thought that people would enjoy it if they would just, you know, drop the stigma of Tennessee but if they open up the bottle and try it I was like I would because we taste 23:00 A lot of good stuff. I mean, not to say that we're gifted or our palates are better, but we, I mean, we're whiskey geeks like everyone else. And we've tasted pretty much anything and everything. And we thought that this was in that realm of really high quality product. And so I was like, Yes, I'm, I'll put my name on it. And let's get it to market. How did you all get the money to start this to just come from your own financing? Yeah, I mean, this is all completely bootstrapped by what we put into it and everything like that, we've got a pretty good deal that we cut out with our distributor, or our distributor, I'm sorry, our broker where our deal is basically says that we and this is this is also kind of the way that we built this as well. pursuit series is nothing like anything else that you can get in the bulk market because we've talked about the bullet market on the podcast before you want to start a brand. You need 50 barrels, here's your check for whatever 80,000 $90,000 maybe even probably $250,000 whatever it is. 24:00 Few trucks show up, your barrels roll off, you get what you get, right? Where to be empty, some can be half full, some could be full and some good taste like hell, some good, you know, it's just you don't know, it's a huge gamble. And so what we get the opportunity to do is actually go to the broker, and during the day two to 5000, barrels and inventory, he'll roll out what he can for us, and we'll sample through and we will select every single barrel we get to choose from, from the broker. So it's unlike everything else where it's actually a true single barrel that we are choosing out of amongst a lot of these. And when we're looking at a lot of the Tennessee stock, we reject about 80% of the barrels that we go through, right, so we're looking for really the best of the best when we go through this, that those guys that we work with, I won't name names, because you don't want to give them right. Well, no, I want to help them any way I can. 24:48 Because he's been instrumental to our success, and we wouldn't be here without him. But yeah, I mean, from the initial meeting, he was like, he's like, I know, you know, we have you 25:00 are not like typical people we sell to, you know, you're going to buy a barrel here, a barrel there. That's not what we typically do typically, like Kenny said they move 500,000 barrels at a time. And so he was very creative and like, how we could finance it, how we could make this work, he was very interested in making us succeed. And so that was one thing that, you know, is really helped us, you know, be able to cash flow this and kind of get to where it is. Otherwise we, I mean, we put up a lot of money upfront initially, but we were able to kind of recoup that pretty fast with the the financing terms He's given us. Yeah, and those financing terms may not last forever, because I know because like I said, we go and we select barrels now like now when we go when we select barrels, like I said, the first time we went we had 12 or 14 to select from. Now when we go it's anywhere between 30 to 60 barrels, and we do it over the span of two days. And we're slapping stickers left and right. And we're taking like, you know, maybe 1010 to 12 barrels when we do this. And he does the bottling too. Yes. Yes. So that's that's the great thing. 26:00 That's kind of like a one stop shop operation for us they'll do bottling they do labeling so we're able to source our glass source our tops, get our labels created, local design agency that we have and everything like that have them shipped down there. Yeah, you need if you're a bourbon brand out there you want some repackaging, or when to start relay design. They're incredible. Yep, here in local relay design as the one who actually helped build our, our label and everything like that. So um, so I was curious. The who came up with the idea of calling, you know, first of all the pursuit series, that makes sense, you know, but who came up with the idea to call each one of them in episode that was me. Really, just a brilliant idea I loved it was like each barrels, you know, a single barrel, so they're all unique, and I was like, we're really trying to 26:49 play off the podcast keys and that's where we were successful. And so I was in, you know, most bourbon bottles when we were doing the packaging and design. Most of bourbon balls are really masculine and they're very light 27:00 Serious, you know, they're dark, they're, you know really kind of like leather manly kind of and I wanted to brighten it up kind of make it fresh and fun and playful and our designer had the same kind of vision too. So he kind of, you know, if you'd look at a bottle, you know, it looks like you know, an iTunes 27:19 podcast player. So there's a play button, you know, there's the show notes and so I kind of came up with the episode and then I think you might have came up with the show notes I can't remember but we just wanted to play off the podcast as much as possible because you can do that with single barrels because they're all unique and they're all individual and they have their own different things that we like about them so I thought it made sense. We also stand on the shoulders of giants at the end of the day, right? I mean, we look at we a lot of this inspiration came from the brands that we already like and we cherish I mean when we look at what you can do from will it family estate, which you get with old forester birthday bourbon, when you look at that we took a lot of those cues and put them into there. You know with Will it family stay 28:00 Having a single barrel offering and knowing that like when that bottle is gone that's it when people are out there and they're like I've got to have barrel c nine D like gotta have it and then you know if that translate to the same thing as somebody says like oh I need Episode Five from you know procedures whatever it is they kind of translate that and we we try to be as transparent as we can on the label like that's one thing that we come from a whiskey background is like as much as we can put out there from you know, the proof the age everything like we want to make sure everything is ha did as much as possible. Not only that, as you know if we can 28:33 divulge the distillery we will we do that again with some of the craft offerings that will do yeah, and with the art labels are paying the s and are the most inefficient thing ever and it's my fault because of the episode and also, I did steal from birthday bourbon when I was looking at bottles on the shelf. I thought I liked how birthday bourbon had a different color of each one. And so when you look at a shelf, and you look at the different colors, you can say oh I have that particular 29:00 year two particular so I wanted that each episode to have their own color. So you look when you have them lined up, you're like you know which episode you have. Yeah, so both of you have been a part of the narrative of trying to get whiskey distillers to be more transparent. Now that you're on the other side a little bit. Do you understand? Do you have a little bit more appreciation for those distillers who may not be as transparent as they should be? Well, I can see in some instances, yes, I can see it because they've worked hard to build that brand recognition build that they, you know, they spent a lot of money to trademark you know, and protect that name so I can understand that they don't want some like piggybacking off that and kind of in particular, like we're talking about someone who may, like source their whiskey out or sell it at like Barton wood or decal, or even in some circumstances at once upon a time brown Forman or for Rosa heaven hills sourced a lot. Yeah, yeah. So I can understand why they don't end there. You know, at a time there were so many 30:00 People source and they still are, but there's so many different brands sourcing so I could see it, you know, just being confusing and 30:08 but at the same time too, it's like, it also helps them because it's like, you know how many like Lux ro s or Brooks seven or you know that you know, it's heaven Hill juice and you're like, Damn, that's good. It just elevates the heaven Hill brand even more in my opinion. But what I find fascinating is when one of them when a when one of them win an award, they're like, Well, you know, whose whiskey that really is? I was like, Yeah, I know. It's brown Forman. Why don't you let the world know? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and that was one of the things that we try to do is we try to take a lot of the things that the whiskey geek would find appreciative, right, and we try to divulge as much information as we can. And at the same exact time, I think that we've had a lot of good success and a lot of good feedback on the show notes portion as well. Because if there's somebody that says 30:54 I don't feel like taking a risk and a gamble on an on a 75 or $115 bottle, like I don't want to do that. Well. 31:00 What we do is we try to put our show notes like we try to find a prominent flavor or a little spin on it, that is a way that you can kind of get an indication of like, this is the flavor that we are getting inside this bottle, right? So you have a little bit of a better estimation of what you're getting yourself into that you're just not blindly throwing money at it as well. Let's go on to take it back to like the starting of the brand. I want to ask both of you this question, what was the most annoying thing at the very beginning about starting a brand? The government like paperwork, the paperwork is so annoying and so slow and so cumbersome? It's, I mean, they they really like they want you to quit, like they don't want you because the amount of paperwork and the waiting and all the stuff you have to fill out the trademarks, all this stuff. It's I mean, it's a lot of legwork and upfront costs just to even like get a label approved. And that that was the most annoying for me. Oh no, I agree with you because 32:00 Even going in navigating the process of figuring out like, okay, like what kind of license can we get? Like, we can't get a DSP because we don't own a distillery. We don't own a warehouse. We don't own these things. What kind of license do you get? And you look around, you're like, Well, I know this company x and this company, why like they don't own a distillery, like, how are they doing this? So there's this whole world of these even navigate to figure out like, Oh, that's what it means. We had to get our wholesalers license, and then we got our wholesalers license, and then we're like, Okay, well, let's go ahead and we'll start navigating this path. And then even trying to like we don't we haven't released anything from GP we have a bottom in GP, but we said, there's some good stuff from a GP, like, let's go ahead and get samples. And we talked to them and they're like, hey, okay, we need your DSP. Like, we don't have a DSP. Here's a wholesale license. They're like, What the hell's a wholesalers list? So it's like, you know, there's this whole world that it's just like, it's It's so confusing, that's underneath the covers, and even the people and they're like, we don't even know what you need sometimes, like, like, you fall with the Kentucky ABC. And they're like, we don't even know what you need. Like, let me try to get my supervisor well. 33:00 call you back in like four months. 33:03 That's a true story. Maybe not four months, but it was at least a few weeks. And yeah, there, we try to get registered with the state of Kentucky when we're trying to trying to least open up distribution in the state. And it was kind of like, well, what papers do you need? Well, I don't know. What do you have? Yeah. And then like you're you're buying and then you're buying whiskey and trying to transfer pause, the government's on shut down and you can't, so then they they're not doing anything. And then they have a backlog. So it takes even longer and you're like, you know, I own several businesses. And it's like, I like to move at a fast pace. I like to get things done. And Kenny's the same way in tech. And it's like when you try to do anything is you have to plan at least eight months in advance because it just takes that much in paperwork, shipping distribution and all this stuff. It's so slow. Wow. Yeah. I mean, our first bottles we were supposed to release of november of 2018. Right now they're supposed to be in September, and 33:57 they didn't Yeah, they didn't release till what December. 34:00 Yeah, late December. Yeah. All right. So you guys, it takes a little while to get some approvals. But you get it you get, you get your look of the bottle and everything ready to go and then you get your first release out. And it's a pretty successful release. It's sold out quickly. Within a within a day. Yeah, I mean, that's, that's who I mean, what new brand can say they sold out their first release in a day. Well, to be fair, it's only it's a single barrel. So it's only 100 fake. You know, that shit, guys, it is. It was surreal. I you know, I thought it I thought it'd be quick, but not that quick. And so it was very, it was very cool. But with that, you know, is new to us and new with our our distributors toolbox. They were just kind of up and running. And so there were a lot of just roadblocks from both ends, like we didn't know how to do customer service or some shippings didn't get, you know, correct, you know, not their fault. Just 35:00 Just things happen, you know, when you're shipping things and you're like, from now on, we got to hold back so many bottles so we can make sure we can cover you know, all the, you know, anything have any things happen because we, we literally need to sell out everything to like recoup our money like so we didn't, you know, keep a bunch of bottles, you know, so we're just like, we need to sell it. And so we definitely learned that aspect. We need to hold back some to 35:24 Yeah, fix any errors. Any you know, on that note, you know, you know, big shout out to Blake. Yeah. What didn't mean what he wasn't trying to talk? No, no, absolutely. But I'm just saying like this. This is only successful because of him so far, right? I mean, yeah, Blake has been a great part. It was it was one of those things when we were I remember being there at our broker. And you know, we had to take a break because there's another person there doing a barrel pick. And we go we're in the break room, and I'm on the phone with Blake because Blake was just like just getting steel blocks off the ground, just like kind of like an idea. And I said like, Alright, man, you got to tell me how this works. 36:00 Because we have a national audience, we're not going to sit there and try to cover the entire US and try to get distribution in all these different states. Like, tell me how it works, right. And so that has been instrumental in being able to get this in the hands of our followers and listeners across the nation. And this is kind of why we are also a big supporter of breaking down the, you know, the Commerce Clause and the opening up shipping between states and everything like that. And, you know, we've we've seen the power of what, not having a distributor can actually give you Yeah, I mean, that's that's really what we've ultimately found at this at the end of the so one of the one of the things that 36:42 what how it's being operated is a threat to the three tier system. And there's so much money behind that and there's so many people out there trying to defend it right now. Do you ever get nervous that this model might come crashing down at any time 37:00 Any minute when we we bring a day. Yeah. And we branched out because that there, there was a time last year. 37:08 In the summer I kind of was like, Alright, we need to kind of diversify how we're going to get this into people's hands. And so we've, we looked at our biggest states and where we have the most listeners or who who have 37:24 followers who's purchased things from us. And so I was like, Alright, let's look at those states. So it was Kentucky, Texas, Georgia. And so I was like, we need to get some distribution, traditional distribution set up in those states, because we want to be able to get just in case something we want to be able to get the product to where we have the most fans. Well, you have you have that's twofold, right? I mean, you have one where you have stores that want their own exclusive single barrels, like they want to be able to have that for their customers. And then second, you can't get away from the eyes that you get just eyeballs Right. I mean, when somebody just goes into a liquor store and they start looking and 38:00 What's on the shelf? What's behind the glass case? Blah, blah, blah, blah. It's a lot easier to get eyeballs on your brand doing that than it is to say, hey, go visit this website. Yeah, right. I was amazed like, when we when our list our audiences found but when you tried it like we did a friends and family barrel where we were like selling just to our friends and family to say thank you for the support, you know, and you know, a lot of my family members are like, like, what do you mean I can't go get on the shelf like I can't go to liquor barn again. I was like, No, you gotta go this website and like ordering like, that sounds like too much work. I was like, really? You'd be on every day. Like while I was gonna say when Bart did they just get internet or 38:38 I've got dollop now, you know, thanks a bit, you got mail. But even just like everyday consumer, you know, people that are whiskey geeks like you tell them they're like, Where can I go get on the shelves. There's still this mindset of in which I like it to like go on the store, talking to people seeing it on the shelf and see what it looks like holding it and so there's definitely that you 39:00 kinda have to like change people's mindset that you can get online order and it'll show up. Yeah. Because there is something about the experience of going to the store. And having that built in audience to it. You want to you want to be able to supply 39:15 you know, meet the demand of this audience, this podcast audience, and how have you all been able to do that aside from silver box? So I mean, that's it's see boxes, it's the main driver, right? I mean, going online was the main driver. And that's only because that is the best mechanism to get it in the most hands across the US. We can't get into everybody's hands because of certain states. But that's why we said traditional distribution. Yeah, I mean, those states and that was one of the things I think I think Ryan had that that lightbulb moment when he had to actually go to Texas for for an event. And he realized Houston alone has more population, the entire state of Kentucky and what just I was in Dallas, but yeah, Dallas has like 7 million people. He says like 11 you're like Kentucky has like 40:00 Three or 4 million people, you know, there's a ton of people here. There's more barrels of bourbon here, then then people as Yeah, like to say so Exactly. We're a small state. But yeah, that's one of the main drivers when we look at population that's and that's one of the things when now we start connecting those dots when we start talking. And you start hearing about other distilleries, and they're like, Oh, I'm sorry, this brand is not going to launch in Kentucky. And people are like, oh, like, you're not gonna launch in your own backyard. And it's like, no, Transcribed by https://otter.ai

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zq-0x6oZRFk&w=560&h=315] What can you say, sitting down with the Noe family is always a treat. Fred Noe, Master Distiller at Jim Beam, and Freddie Noe, 8th Generation Distiller, are about as genuine and real as it comes. This show takes a bunch of turns. We talk about the new Fred B. Noe Distillery where new projects and small batch blends will take place, Legent, Little Book, and... we ask Fred Noe if he’s ready to retire. You’ll love his response. Show Partners: You can now buy Barrell Craft Spirits products online and have them shipped right to your door. Visit BarrellBourbon.com and click Buy Now. Receive $25 off your first order at RackHouse Whiskey Club with code "Pursuit". Visit RackhouseWhiskeyClub.com. Show Notes: This week’s Above the Char with Fred Minnick talks about Weller. Tell us about the property. What are your plans for growth? What are the plans for the Fred B. Noe Distillery? How did you get interested in blended whiskies? What's the hardest part about blending? Fred, what was your past blending experience? What did you learn when creating Legent? How long was the creation process for Legent? Where did you disagree in the process? What kind of ideas do you have for the new distillery? Do you like focusing on consistency or innovating? Will Little Book always be a blended product? Did you always want to be part of the family business? Fred, are you ready to retire? Talk about the ham house. Any hobbies outside of bourbon? Support this Podcast on Patreon   0:00 So if we're going to do any innovation from was putting knob Creek on it, it needs to be in that knob Creek family you can't go off and have a run punch knob Creek. You know, who knows? 0:27 Welcome back everybody it's Episode 254 of bourbon pursuit. I'm one of your hosts Kenny, and let's talk about some new releases. We have touched down in Texas. Yes, our first release of pursuit series is now available in five different specs retailers across the entire state. Episode 26 is a 15 year old Tennessee bourbon, our tasting notes, our brown sugar churros with a chocolate caramel dipping sauce. It's got me thinking about dessert already. So listen up because there's only five stores carrying Episode 26 across Texas and it's only expected Retailers so you've got Dallas at 9500 North Central expressway in Fort Worth at 2750 South keulen Street, Austin, Texas 4970 West highway 920 San Antonio at 5219 does avala and Houston at 2410 Smith Street. Happy Hunting Texans with more pursuit series news Episode 24 and 25 are now available on seal box comm if you're looking to get your hands on another bourbon with a high h demon, Episode 24 is another 15 year old release that can be shipped nationwide. This one it's all chocolate milk. I know many of you are looking for something super unique and we also have a weeded bourbon from Finger Lakes distilling and which is our episode 25. Our last two barrels from Finger Lakes wet quick so we're excited to bring another one to you. So go to seal box comm search for pursuit or you can go to pursuit spirits calm and click the Buy Now button on Our website we also have some other single barrel picks coming in our 17 men to foolproof and to Buffalo Trace barrels will be landing very soon, so heads up to our Patreon community and pay attention to your emails when they start rolling in. And other release news Wild Turkey has announced that they are releasing a 17 year old bottled in bond under the Masters keep label. The Masters keep bottled and bond will be a limited release with approximately 14,400 bottles with a suggested retail price of $175. On the trade of new releases, the TTB has approved over 180,000 products over the last 12 months through April of 2020 which is about an increase of 5.1% over last year, around 8700 labels in beer there are around 42,000 products that were approved in the last 12 months. Wine 120,000 in spirits 17 point 4000 however, the one that has The biggest gainer is actually spirits because in beer, the last three months there was only 10 and a half thousand which is actually 21% less than last year. And wine there were there almost 30,000 over the last three months with is 22% less than last year, and then spirits by about 4.7 thousand over the last three months, which is an 11.3% increase over last year. Now let's talk about some industry news. Earlier this year the Indiana alcohol and tobacco commission denied total wine a liquor license in the state because it does not meet the state's residency minimum requirements. Under current state law, at least 60% of a company's common stock must be owned by people who have lived in Indiana for five years. In true total wine style. The retailer promptly filed lawsuit against the agency and bit based on the Supreme Court opinions on Granholm and total wine versus Tennessee. The district court's decision will grant to the retailer's preliminary injunction prohibiting state from enforcing its residency requirement. This is again one more Domino to fall where we will soon see more interstate commerce law start lifting. And for today's podcast, what can you say? sitting down with the nose, it's always a treat Fred and Freddy note are about as genuine and as real as it comes in the show. It's gonna take a bunch of turns. We talk about the Fred Dino distillery legend, little book blending. And we asked Fred No, catch this one. If he's ready to retire. I think you might be shocked at his answer, and we're not going to give it away. All right, so Joe from barrel bourbon wants you to know that it's gotten a whole lot easier to get their unique cat strength whiskies from around the world. Just visit barrel bourbon, calm today, and click the Buy Now button. Up next we got Fred minich with above the char, so continue to stay safe and enjoy the show. 4:52 I'm Fred Minnick. And this is above the char Oh, I opened my email with excitement when I saw that headline, new welder single barrel. Oh boy have we been waiting on this one? Have we known about it for so long and wanted to see that press release and see the price on and how it would be distributed and where? how we could get it. Oh, I couldn't wait to read about it. It was a few paragraphs long. And you know it said MSRP of 4999. Now, listen, I love weather. I love weather weather is probably I think the most successful product line and all of bourbon you got a special reserve allocated? Well our 107 antique allocated well a 12 year old allocated well our foolproof allocated, William LaRue Weller super allocated and every single one of those over the course of my career has had 90 points or higher from me and they're all typically quite delicious and those that aren't supremely delicious are better than Pretty much just about everything else in their category. So it's it's a great line of whiskey and Buffalo Trace does such an amazing job there whiskies so good. But the fact of the matter is, as soon as that gets into stores, that MSRP of 4999 will be shot all to hell by household retailers who want to mark it up for 100% by flippers who go in and buy a bottle and find somebody on the internet Who will pay two $300 for it. I know there's no easy way to do this. And I know Buffalo Trace really, really does hope that you you the bourbon fan can be that one person who gets it for 4999 and they think that this is the way to keep everybody engaged and hope that that price keeps them coming back for more. But we got to be realistic. These SRP s For whiskey, that's so great. So great. They're just they're just not. They're just not there. I would love to be able to pay $50 for this whiskey, I really would. But the fact of the matter is, I would be willing to pay far more. And I don't know this. I don't know this. And the reason why I say the reason to say I'd be willing to I'd love to buy it at that SRP. Don't get me wrong. But I wonder if if they raise the SRP, just enough to cartel the retailers from increasing it from 4999 to 100. Or if it was just enough to cut into the profit margins of a flipper. I wonder if that would stop some of it. Now, I don't know it's all based on consumer behavior. And right now we're all acting very differently. So maybe this is the one time because of the virus, maybe this is the one time we will actually see a suggested retail price of a Weller be just that on the shelf. And you know, if there's anything good come from a pandemic, which few and far between, maybe that's at least one positive we can take out of it. Now, not even that it's that positive, because still, we're in a friggin pandemic. And that sucks. But I do hope that you can find it on the shelf at your local retailer for 4999. And if you do find one of those, if there's two bottles there, grab both of them. Call me and I'll get the other one from you. And that's this week's above the char. Hey, I've got some great news. I'm so excited about this while the pandemic has taken away 100% of my live events, I mean, bourbon and beyond gone, all these private tastings I've had gone. I now have a way to book me for private tastings. Go to Fred MiniK Topeka dot live. That's Fred MiniK dot Topeka dot live and you You can book me for a private tasting. I've also got a regular Lecture Series setup, called bourbon revealed. The history myths and scams. So if you wanna learn about bourbon scams, go check it out. But that's this week's above the char Until next week, cheers. 9:21 Welcome back to episode of bourbon pursuit, the official podcast of bourbon. Kinney and Ryan headed down to Claremont, Kentucky today, sitting in an office that we've we've been familiar with before, we had an opportunity to sit with this master distiller one previous time on the podcast, but now we got him and his son on here, the next in line, hopefully to take over the throne. But, you know, this is also an opportunity that first time we've had one of these people on the guests or on on the podcast, but you've also had a history with one of our guests as well, too. 9:51 I guess you said yeah, we were. Well, we play football together basketball. went to the same high school. I'm a little older, he's probably more mature than I 10:01 wouldn't say 10:02 but yeah I was good sharing some funny stories about football and stuff so now I'm happy to see Friday It's been a while so I always forget out great the view as to when we come here like I mean when Do y'all ever just walk out you're like damn you know oh amazing but 10:19 sit on the front porch a lot. Yeah, I just want to get away from emails Squadron sit. Yeah, marinate. I see what's going on. Because when the sun shining and it's 10:27 nice. Yeah, so 10:29 super camera row, you'll see a lot of photos or just random sunsets or sunrises here just because you know, sometimes you come in and you just kind of takes your breath because like you say, sometimes you take it for granted even Oh, now you know being here every day. 10:42 Well, yeah, when I grew up here, you drive to 45 Volvo and you like, Don't even think twice about Bernheim forest or anything now I'm like looking at it's like it's this magical place. Go see the 10:51 giants. 10:55 So you've heard their voices now. So today on the show, we have Fred and Freddie no master distiller And the in training, if you will to be taken over there one day of Jim Beam. So fellas again, Fred, welcome back, Freddie. Glad to have you on back. Yeah. So yeah, I kind of want to talk about that view a little bit more too because I think it's something that is kind of wrong. You kind of put it the best way to kind of like takes your breath away a little bit. You know, you probably it's one of those things that it might be in your backyard. You only think about it, you know, even being in Louisville. everybody's like, Oh, we think a slugger museum and like, I've probably been there since I was to grade school. Almost like you just don't think about it when it's in your backyard. But it's it's awesome to finally like come up here and you said probably after that day, you just kind of go out there. Pour soft glass and kick it in the rock or something like that. 11:43 Absolutely. It's perfect spot and I want to set up my office up here. As I 11:48 hit that watering hole, you know, after hours. 11:51 I used to be in the basement with no windows where 11:54 maybe they figured they'd kept me in jail long enough. It was time to turn me loose. 11:58 Yes. Let you see the light When did when did that happen? One of the we're like we're because so anybody that's unfamiliar with the grounds, the visitor centers. 12:07 The caddy corner to this bigger White House that you see over here. Where was the when did the move happen? Well, in 2012, we opened the steel house, and our Chief Marketing Officer at the time, I thought that I should be closer to the visitors because he'd saw my interaction with people just walking around. And he said, we need to get your work closer to the folks that are coming out of season. Why don't we put your office in the beam house, which is kind of ironic. Baker beam, my cousin gave me a picture of me in the same room where I am where my office is, when I was two years old, sitting in my dad's lap with my mom. So it was kind of he said, You're coming home full circle, and I'll come right back to where I was when I was two years old. And actually my dad sits just about where that easy chair was Booker was sitting in and we have here real close and being Baker actually lived here. This house he was the last beam family member and we turned it into offices and conference room upstairs. So in 2012 mobs came from down below the hill to the top of the hill. So 13:11 my vote would have been the knob Creek house, you know, to like get away from everyone get a 13:16 nice view when they when they redid the house up there. Yeah, I saw be my office. I said we'll never find you. 13:24 You're on down. 13:25 That's the point. Yeah, 13:26 well, so I guess I don't really know about the knob Creek house. So where is the knob Creek couser. I'm assuming it's by knob Creek, but 13:32 no, actually, it's on the property here at Claremont. And it's kind of funny how we acquired it. We went into it. It was owned by the everbank family, which owned the Cadillac Dealer in Louisville back when Jim Beam was was still running the distillery and I guess they had signed a some kind of agreement that we could utilize that water source. There's a lake back there. Use that water source when we needed it for distillation purposes and somewhere that had gotten lost and so in the was it early 90s I think is like 92 or 93. We ended up buying this property to gain access to the water. And then through purchasing it we actually found out that we already had right of use of the water. So we didn't nearly need the property after all, but the knob Creek team put up some money to redo the house. The house was kind of falling down, because like I said, we were there for just the water. And now it's kind of turned into kind of a little getaway place. We've got up on the hillside on the other Hill, we're on one Hill. If you go back down to planting up on the other side, 14:33 on Airbnb 14:40 it was the White House on Yeah, they're on. They're on Airbnb. So it's a pretty cool place. It's got a nice Lake there in the back. It's up, as we say kind of up in the holler. So there's not much. Not much going on up there. Dad's kind of got a little funny story about some people that stayed it's kind of good. I want her to hear this. I want her to complaint, you know and the whole time as we let Customers are coming in to purchase barrels or you know just coming to visit the client to stay there it's a three bedroom house and there was a group from New York bar owners and went up and visited them and they got him settled in and live next morning and came to the office as How was it? I don't know man sir. is too dark and too quiet. I 15:22 guess if you come from man had like good like sound machines have their 15:26 sleep in New York they used to yeah horns and he has a discerns and then up there there's no streetlights Yeah, so I mean you know the dark when the sun goes down, it's dark. I said well, we could had a lot of fun with him. We just snuck up burned picked on the wind. It's funny say the banjo in the background or something. 15:46 Really get them scared, 15:47 right? Fair enough as it was it sounded like but 15:50 you know, I'll have to read the review on Airbnb. Great place Lake but to quiet. 15:56 Three and a half, three and a half star 16:00 So the other thing I want to talk about the property alone, I mean, the bourbon boom is still growing. You all are still building warehouses. I mean, I used to drive by here going to Bardstown quite a bit in the past year, and you would be able to see there was you could see the skeleton growing outside of the warehouse. That was you could just see going down towards Bardstown. What are you all seeing right now with the growth in regards of like, are you able to still acquire more property around you? Or is it just kind of like hey, we've just got to make use of what we have right now. 16:29 We're making use of what we have but we're always looking with burn arm fours burner neighbor we're kind of you know, there's no way we're gonna get put warehouses over there but we're looking for joining property we can find any for possible growth in the future 16:45 with promise there's no flat ground here. There really 16:47 isn't a lot of waiting to get young. 16:49 I saw Yeah, I saw the you know, they're knocking out some limestone up there. Does that for another warehouse sir. 16:56 That's actually where the Fred B no craft distillery is gonna go. That call the new distillery is going to be going there we're getting some dirt work moving. But you know his point of Burnham actually they bought some land behind us here as well. So we're kind of surrounded on on two sides by Burnham which I mean you know all their conservation work so it's great for us as for our watershed to be able to have such great neighbors but it does from time to time kinda with no I mean there's just no land really available around us it's all kind of you know, bought up or housing has kind of come around a little bit as well. But luckily we do have a little bit of space at Boston where we can continue to put some new warehouses so all is good for now it beam we'll see how it goes in the future because you know, land is a very valuable commodity if we need to keep expanding warehouses. 17:43 I know it's harder one of the things to actually plan out if somebody was in the land or like Okay, now we're making pay top dollars, right? 17:49 real bad, right? Yeah. 17:51 Oh, yeah. That's running here. We want it Yeah. 17:54 Nobody cared about this stuff. for 20 years now they want the this land. 17:58 Well, it is funny even you know, we talk About the price of land around here and we're like, oh man, but the people in California, New York, they're like, what you pay? You pay? What? For? What? Yeah. 18:08 13,000 an acre. It sounds 18:11 crazy. Yeah, that sounds it sounds too cheap. They're like, yeah, they pay that in a mortgage for one month or something like that was some of the places some, so it kind of talks about about the Fred Urbino distillery, like what's what's the grand plans for it? You know, what's the what's the idea for it? 18:26 Yeah, I guess I'll kind of start on that one. It was an idea that I had had, I guess really, as as I was working on little book, and really getting into kind of product development. I noticed that you know, with blending, there's so many different aspects that you can go into, and drive different flavor through bringing these different streams together. And so as I was actually sharing the first batch of little book, coincidentally at my grandmother's bereavement, actually, our CEO would come down and we just chat and you know, after it was over, and he says anything on your mind. I said, you know, I'd really like to have a small distillery where we could do some experimentation, whether it be through mash bill through operating parameters, different barrel lengths, things like that on a smaller on a smaller scale. And so I let him taste a little book as kind of a teaser there to say, Hey, you know, this is kind of some of the things we could maybe come up with. And so that's kind of how it got going. And it's kind of evolved over time as it's been probably about a four year process of us getting kind of locked into what a where we want it down there at the bottom of the hill now. And then kind of what what it was going to serve its purpose and so we're going to be pulling into Booker's and bakers production. And kind of basically anything that is in our small batch or super premium category will be made in this distillery once we get it up and going, but it's also going to serve as kind of a playground as he said a couple of times for myself and some of our r&d team to really get in there. And, and for me, it's a lot about Learning about our current whisky even, you know, having the opportunity to get in there and put, you know, new probes and things like that, as you expand distilleries, a lot of times your your app or experimentation kind of goes to the wayside. And it's more about production needs, 20:15 and that and consistency, and I think that 20:17 you're exactly right quality and consistency. And so being able to kind of step back, almost kind of start at a smaller scale and be inefficient on purpose to where we can 20:28 actually screw up. Yes, right. And your work, you know, 20:32 you know, and that's kind of how I pitched it as we kind of got into some of the meetings was Hey, you know, I could make some of these adjustments in the distillery today, but when you all get a phone call and see the amount of gallons that I've, you know, made an adjustment just to see what would happen, whether it'd be a good or a bad thing you know, 20:48 know that all right, this 20:48 one thing quite turn out right? We have to scrap it. What 20:51 exactly so given us a good opportunity to be able to explore a lot further as as we try to look to expand the American whiskey agree 21:00 that was actually just kind of answered my next question because I was about to ask like, Why couldn't you just experiment with something else at this? And then you just said it's basically because of the larger production. So if you want to change a different ratio of the corn to the rye or anything like that, then you're not everything. Oh, yeah, you're kind of stuck with it for the next x to the X amount of years. Right? 21:19 You're exactly right. I think a lot of it comes down to having that smaller batch size to be able to do some of those things, whether it's tweaking the grain, or even, you know, we have a lot of unique vessels in our distillation system. We utilize some of them, we take some of them offline for some of our products. But as you say, it is today's time if I want to do a just that, you know, for Booker's, we bypass a retention tank. If I wanted to bypass the retention take in something else, essentially, I haven't been making Booker's it's an experiment. And we're pretty tight on still time. As you know, bourbon is just can't make enough of it. So really, those experiments can can be counterproductive, even if it do you do. Hit on Something good, you know, because you're missing regular production to do these things. Yeah. 22:03 So Fred, what do you think about that? Are you like, I think it's not broke, don't screw it up. 22:08 What are you doing? Either you have to my dad, he was always tinkering with stuff. Yeah, over to Boston plant over there, you know, in the book or no plant. You know, it was funny watching him, you know, Chicago folks would come down, they always visited Claremont. This is where the conference rooms were, this is where the bottling was. So over there and he always kind of called them in Siberia. I can do whatever I want to do. And the people from the house of knowledge as he used to call it, they didn't know what I was doing so he could he could tweak things and do things like Freddie's talking, and they never knew so he could make something and ease it right in and try different things. And nobody you know, ever knew but now everything is so allocated and steel time is so tight because you know, in the 70s they shut the Boston plan down so you know, they didn't really need the Liquid as much as we do today. Every hour is money big time. We need whatever we're making there. Now Freddie can play and do some stuff and that's when he took the ball and ran with it. There's a lot of people been trying to get this craft distillery for several years. But when he brought it up to Matt Shattuck, our former CEO, Matt jumped on it immediately. Then he goes back to as I called it, the house of knowledge and said, we would like to do this and all of a sudden, all this interest became Okay, we're gonna do it. You know, 23:32 Freddie, where did you get the interest for blended whiskies? What was that? What draw drew you to that? 23:38 It's kind of crazy. I've thought about it probably 1000 over 1000 times with like, when I like it came to me. I don't remember talking about it. Now I don't need I was gonna say I was gonna ask you to blend in but 23:52 we won't talk to one 23:58 whatever. You can find it the Time, right? 24:01 No, you know, I guess in reality just through learning in the distillery, you know, I don't recall if it was even before I came to the distillery, but I know as I had an internship, right as I was probably about a year and a half before I was finishing up College, where I went around to each department in the distillery or in the facility, not just the distillery, they're bottling and everything shipping. And it was kind of during that time that the the idea came to me because you know, I had had a beat in my head we use corn, rye and malted barley for Jim Beam. So from a very young kid, I knew those three grains were what made the liquid of Jim Beam. But so as I got into distilling and learning, I just kind of took me to if you took corn, whiskey rye whiskey and malt whiskey, individually and then blended them to those mash bill percentages. My thoughts were at four years old, what it tastes like Jim Beam or what it tastes like something not even close to bourbon, even though you're utilizing the same grains and so we're That's where it kind of started thing. And so at the end of that internship went back to school. I just remember thinking about that and thinking, I'm not gonna ask anybody this question. So I don't feel like a dumb man. Because I didn't know you know, I mean, I was like, is this a stupid question? The hell? I wouldn't know. Right? So I got a chance later to do an internship with our r&d team. And really, really, it was about me getting in there and learning their processes and how they affect our our day to day business. And they kind of pitched to me to come up with a couple of prototype liquids while I was there. One of them I don't really like to talk about, but it's kind of funny. Let's Let's hear it. Okay. I will go on and bring it out. The best part about it listen to these things are things that just no lighter. Yeah, right. So I tell it from time to time, but not too much. But so they said we want you to before you go back to the plant, I want you to kind of act as an r&d product developer, and pitch to us two different prototype liquids. And they gave me a couple of rules. One of them could be a bourbon or a whiskey. And the other one could not be. So I couldn't just do to you know, I couldn't just go get a six year old and a nine year old and say, Oh, this is two new whiskies that aren't out on the market. And then one of them because I had been working with flavoring, you know, we at Pinnacle vodka was very popular at that time. So we were working on a lot of different flavors in that aspect. So a lot of my time was working with them as well learning what they do. So they had pitched it as one of them could be a bourbon, one of them couldn't. And one of them needed to have some type of flavoring to it. So I went to work on which also makes sense because even like the apple and everything like that they're very popular absolute drinks out there for a lot of the consumers. Absolutely. So I, you know, me being me, I guess I wanted to knock out both of those rules on one so I could focus on the other and do exactly what I wanted. 26:50 Fred is this is this, just another shortcut that he's just taken? Is that what this is I get to go 26:58 back a long road versus Short road he's gonna take it which is that's good. It was much like his grandfather. I see a lot of booger in Freddy. It's a It's amazing. So you know, as a kid I liked Hawaiian Punch juicy red juice. Oh, I think everybody loved 27:12 it. Yeah. 27:14 But so i thought you know, we go to the beach every year for vacation, I thought if I could develop a liquid that I could just sip on the rocks or even if you just put it in a cooler and chilled it and just drink it neat. You know, I like fruity cocktails on the beach from time to time. It's nice and nice and warm out. So I thought I'm going to create this. I called it rum punch and it was going to be juicy red juice flavored 27:37 romaine. I thought you're gonna say push up. 27:40 Close, but not quite. It's a Howard's down drink. Yeah. So I went to work on that. And dad was there. This is where it was interesting. So as I'm getting ready, do my presentation. They're like, Oh, we invited your dad and I think even the plant manager to come see your presentation because I was presenting the sounds like great. Not only did I work on Something with flavors and kind of rum. They invited my dad to taste the same thing. But so that one that one wasn't very good. It didn't taste anything like Hawaiian Punch juicy red juice. And I wouldn't I don't know that anybody's even sipped I've still got the sample bottle at home. I don't know if anybody's even tried it since I 28:19 since I made it. What did it turn out to be like? What did it actually taste like? 28:22 It didn't taste it kind of tastes like fruit punch a little bit. Just a boozy fruit. It was kind of a boozy fruit punch 28:32 wasn't before your time like now the ready to drink category is booming right now so maybe it's just a few years too early 28:38 to revisit exactly one of our marketing guys gives me some some shit I guess he'll say you know because he talks about a little bit he's like your next products going to be that that room punch I promise you we're gonna make sure that's the next probably you and i t shirt. Don't give him any more. I got plenty on his own. But so that's kind of I thought, you know, got that one out of the way. I will Walking around up there to the lab and I seen some samples of four year old corn whiskey. Obviously we had four year old rye whiskey. And that's kind of where that thought really sparked in my head was I'm gonna try this blend that I have been thinking about, that hadn't really talked to anybody about. And so that's kind of how it started. I created what I call it was Jim being blended. And it was a four year old corn whiskey blended with a four year old rye whiskey and a four year old malt whiskey blended back to the percentage, the Jim Beam Asheville. It wasn't very good either. It was very corn forward, you know, it's organic, right? In theory that Yeah, early and today I was excited. And, you know, to be dabbling in blending. I already had a good idea, you know, with the mash bill percentages, that I was going to do the certain percentages. So it was a little bit simpler than that. And then some of my blending has become as I've worked on little book, but it really opened my eyes because that one wasn't that great. But I tweaked it a little bit as I was in the lecture. Just to see if there was any differences as you change and that's really what sparked my interest in blending was getting in there and, and traveling something that I had kind of had in my head and was really honestly a little worried to share it because I thought it might be a stupid question, you know, but I kind of come to learn that there's there's not a lot of stupid questions sometimes. The most simple question can lead you to some great things. What's her 30:21 what's kinda like the hardest part about blending that you've really found out? Like, is it just trying something you're like, it's gonna work I'll get a bunch of wasted product like what's what's the hardest part you figured out about blending so far? 30:31 I guess the for me the hardest part is, or I guess the most challenging would be, you know, if you've got four liquids and you put them at 25% each, by doubling up on one or you know, doubling a little bit, not doubling but adding a little bit more say 10% more of another and dropping percentages. It's not as apples to apples as the flavor being closer to the original one stream. As those liquids kind of mingled together. They really take on different For an identity, and I think that's where I thought blending, you know, if if I like this at 20%, if I add 23%, and I'm looking to get a, say a longer finish, and I know the other two liquids I'm using or three liquids I'm using have a shorter finish. You know, sometimes you think by adding more of the one that is giving the attributes, you think it actually throws the whole blend out of balance, and has negative aspects of it. The one good thing is you get to taste a lot of samples. And when you're blending, as I say, with with straight whiskies or straight spirits that that are phenomenal on their own, it's, it's kind of hard to say that it's a bad blend, it's just maybe not the exact direction you want to go. So I get a taste a lot of good samples. But I think the challenging part is, when you have an idea or you're trying to hit on something, whether it be like I said, a longer finish or maybe a little more aroma on the nose. Getting to those places from where you are is a lot more challenging than just maybe adding a couple more drops of this or that and 31:58 go ahead I was gonna say After you come up with the kind of your blend and it's like nail, you're like this is awesome in the tube. But then like, does that always translate to a bigger batch you know, Are there times when they get bigger like this did not turn out like they always tell us every barrel is a little bit different 32:13 it is you know, and I think we do a really good job after I've gotten to a prototype in my my test tube there, we'll go out and get some more samples of different barrels from the same lots that I'll be utilizing for a little book or whatever we're working on, just to make sure that because when we're doing a small blend, you could go get one barrel of each liquid, and you could blend for months because you know, it's just one barrel. So a lot of liquids there and you're only blending in a lot of times, maybe 3753 or 750 ml sizes, so there's a lot of whiskey. So going back and then picking different barrels from that same area or same date that it was distilled, just to make sure it's hitting those profiles. So before I finalize, we make sure that the liquids are going to be variable Similar. And then of course, at the end, if when we're dumping for bottling knock on wood, it hasn't happened yet. But for the first three little books, each of them was was very similar and aligned with the profile that I was looking for. But we'll see how that continues to go because we do keep reserved barrels just think I never tried to use every single barrel because if you want to make a little tweak, and you've already dumped every barrel, you're kind of kind of pigeon holed there. So hopefully, like I said, knock on wood that our process continues to go as it does. But as you said it every barrel is a little bit different No matter if they're side by Saturday and totally different warehouses. So it's, it's that's kind of where the art comes into it a lot, for sure. And so Fred, part of this is, you know, what was your kind of like past blending experience? I mean, is it if you try to recreate something that Freddie's doing here, have you been focused on like, production operation and stuff like that, rather than sitting here and saying, like, okay, let's start blending a lot of different products to see if we can make something new. Well, we you know, we mingled a lot is funny. We don't blend we mingle when Freddie got into the blending has no that was always a curse word in bourbon. Yes. You know until a little book, you know, he really crawls the path that got people thinking about blending in bourbon because, you know, when you say blended in this state, you start thinking about great neutral spirits and colors and flavors, which that's not bourbon. But when we had the Suntory acquisition, I was tasked and it was actually after Freddie had done his first version of little book to work with Cindy the chief Blender from Suntory to bring east and west together. So we actually blended and created the product Legion, which it was essentially was doing the same thing dad did, we're finishing bourbon in secondary barrels and then taking those fluids and putting them together. So that's where we kind of dip my toes in, in the blending but we were tasked For the from the CEO of Suntory. And that's what they wanted us to do to bring the two cultures together. And it was a learning experience for me. First we had to learn to be able to understand each other are 35:15 very, very different. You have a translator between you too, 35:18 like no, we used to, I guess our eyes when we tasted, you can look at each other's eyes and tell he speaks much better English than I do Japanese. 35:29 So mostly it was Cindy trying to figure out what I was saying. And then sometimes when we get on conference calls, I didn't have a clue what it was okay, whatever you say Sanjay and he was sent samples, and we would get together whenever he was here in the States. or whenever I was in Japan, we would sit and just taste, taste, taste, taste, taste, and it was a it was a learning experience for me, but I kind of saw what Freddie did with his little book because the variant just a little bit more of this and a little bit less than that. It can change it dramatically. Also, the mingling in the tank, just because it tastes like this today, it doesn't mean it's gonna taste like that tomorrow because we did sign with Legion we would taste and then the next day we taste it was wait a minute didn't taste the same. So the mingling together after you blended the fluids, so we've got tanks that we built specially for this product down here and it's got a slow row agitation in it. So that mix it up and we don't just mix it, blend it and bottle it we make sure it sits in this tank in the tank never goes dry. Some of the techniques that Cinzia uses in Japan, which over here for four, we fill the tank with liquid, we ran it dry and then we came back and did it again. We never left heels as we called it in there and dumped it on top of them. 36:52 I mean is that the same thing as considering like the selection method, but usually people call it 36:57 in regards to that maybe a little bit but we don't let it go. Lately driving a little bit left and he's dumping on top, so it's as all new and we had to train our operators here at the plant because they weren't used to that kind of technique on production. So it was a learning curve for all of us here in Kentucky and I know it was a learning curve for Cinzia in Japan because he'd never played with Bourbons before, he was amazed the temperature here and the finishing, how quick bourbon will take on the flavor from say, red wine barrel, or Sherry cask. You know, he was thinking maybe two summers after one, we'd already picked up flavors that he was ready for. So kinda. It was like, a big learning curve just like Freddie's learning with he is, we learned a lot for this Legion. And so it's been it's been fun to watch and to get involved even late in my career to get to do a little blending and play with it. And it makes me appreciate more what Fred has been doing, because I understand it's not just dumping things together. A graduated cylinder and saying, well, I want to 20% of the 30% of that. In loans, your numbers add up to 100. And you're good, not. That's not how it works, you know, it's trial and error. And then what strength Do you bottle at? I mean, there's a lot of variables that you can change a lot by just a little bit of water maybe or your finishing times. It was a, it was a great, 38:24 great experience for me. I just realized, I've been saying it wrong the whole entire time. I always said legend, right. So Legion now now and I believe I'm starting to say, I don't 38:32 know if that's a 38:34 word or not. 38:36 It's coming from the Gospel of you right now. So that's what I'm gonna talk about the 38:40 gospel of Fred. 38:43 I sent you down some dark paths. 38:48 So gonna also talk about the time commitment that went into it, because I mean, you just said that there were times when either you know he was coming here. You're going to Japan your mailing and shipping samples back and forth. Like what was the I'm assuming it was a at least had been over a year or two ago. Somebody said, Hey, we're gonna go ahead and do this. But how long did it really take to actually start from concept to finalization? There are more craft distilleries popping up around the country now more than ever before. So how do you find the best stories and the best flavors? Well, rack house whiskey club is a whiskey of the Month Club, and they're on a mission to uncover the best flavors and stories that craft distilleries across the US have to offer rack houses box shipped out every two months to 39 states across the US and rack houses April box there featuring a distillery that mixes Seattle craft, Texas heritage and Scottish know how rack house whiskey club is shipping out to whiskies from two bar spirits located near downtown Seattle, including their straight bourbon, go to a rack house whiskey club calm to check it out and try some for yourself. Use code pursuit for $25 off your first box. Transcribed by https://otter.ai

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKKjlDNUwFk] Today’s podcast featuring the roundtable talks about the controversial relaunch of the OKI brand. We examine the potential motivating factors behind New Riff selling the label and if it’s a pure money grab by the new company that owns it. We then look at the current landscape of craft distillers and if they will survive the COVID-19 conditions as over 43% of all craft distillery workers have now been laid off or furloughed. Lastly, we see an age statement return to Knob Creek. Show Partners: You can now buy Barrell Craft Spirits products online and have them shipped right to your door. Visit BarrellBourbon.com and click Buy Now. Receive $25 off your first order at RackHouse Whiskey Club with code "Pursuit". Visit RackhouseWhiskeyClub.com. Show Notes: This week’s Above the Char with Fred Minnick talks about buying whiskey for cheap during the pandemic. OKI is being relaunched with new ownership. Why would New Riff do this and is it a money grab? 118 craft distillers surveyed recently, 42% said they do not believe they will able to stay in business for more than three months with COVID-19. Is the craft boom going to bust? The return of 12 and 9 year Knob Creek. What does this mean for private barrel selections? Thanks to Blake from bourbonr.com, Nick from BreakingBourbon.com , Brian from sippncorn.com, and Kerry from Subourbia for joining. Support this Podcast on Patreon   0:00 There's two things you can count on on the roundtable. That's I'm gonna be here and that my Internet's gonna go out. 0:17 Welcome back because it's Episode 253 of bourbon pursuit. I'm one of your hosts Kenny. And on our news this week, we selected a barrel of wheat whiskey from old elk. But we're also joined by special guest and master distiller Greg Metz, you might recall back from Episode 154, because he was also the previous master distiller for that big factory in Indiana we call MGP virtual barrel picks, they might be the new normal for a while, so we're looking forward to bringing more of those to you via live streams. So make sure that you are subscribed to our YouTube channel, so you don't miss a single one of them. Now onto the news. Will it distilleries master distiller drew Cole's Veen has been named a finalist for the coveted James Beard award. 1:00 Award for Outstanding wine, beer or spirits producer. The James Beard Foundation awards honor the best in food dining from cookbooks and rising shifts to the best restaurants and of course distilleries in the US. Time magazine even called it the Oscars of the food world. Drew Colvin first joined Willett distillery back in 2003. And overtime, he's developed mash bills that extend the company's bourbon and rye portfolio, which earned him for semi finalists nominations for the James Beard award. However, this is the first year that he's actually been named a finalist. So hats off to drew congratulations and awesome work on the recognition. The winners for the James Beard awards will be announced on September 25. 1:42 The 2020 release of the mixers 10 year old single barrel Kentucky straight bourbon whiskey will go on sale this may of 2020 it is 94.4 proof and it will sell for suggested retail price for around $130 in the US new bottles of larceny barrel proof and alarm 2:00 Craig barrel proof will be coming soon to a shelf near you both bearing the code B five to zero. The letter B means it's the second release of the year. digit five means it was released in the fifth month of the year, which is May. And the last two digits, you guessed it 2020 denote the year. The new batch of Elijah Craig barrel proof will come in at 127.2 which is on the lower end of the spectrum for the line. And the larceny barrel proof is now in its second release when you bottle that 122.2 proof and that's just one point lower than the initial first release, comprised of barrels ranging from six to eight years old. The larceny barrel proof will have a retail price of around $50 whereas the 12 year old Elijah Craig barrel proof will be around $80 you can look for both of these coming to a whiskey quickie in the near future. For those that enjoy the shutter Bock, we're from Texas comes a collaboration with bow Cody's and their new Texas Bach. It is a malt whiskey made from the exact recipe 3:00 shiner Bock beer, utilizing the breweries Nashville and proprietary lager yeast strain, to what they call create that remarkable flavor profile. It was Asian first fill American oak barrels for at least two years and made within Nashville of over 51% malted barley, about conus. Texas Bok will be bottled at 50% ABV and will be priced around $40. It will also be available for sale at the distillery and retailers throughout Texas and Oklahoma for a limited time and keep it on that Texas trailer bourbon. The garrison brothers bourbon distillery out of high Texas is releasing their garrison brothers bowl Maria bourbon. This bourbon is aged for four years in staves that have been dry aged for at least 25 months in the Ozarks. Then the liquid was transferred to a second new American barrel and aged for another year. Of course we all know is re barreling. It is finally bottled for this second release at 115 proof the 2020 bull Maria release 4:00 We'll be around 6000 bottles with a retail price of around $160. Now with more release News, New riff is doing their spring 2020 special release with the new riff back setter bourbon and rye. For this release, new rep really focused on sour mashing process and use the back set from the pizza malted barley in their mashing of their standard bourbon recipe. as they've mentioned, it resulted in a smoking flavor that is hauntingly unique with layers of peat envelopes a creamy spicy bourbon and rye. The back setter to pack will be listed for a total of $99 and 98 cents. And for today's podcast, we're featuring the roundtable it's another yet potentially controversial topic where we talk about the relaunch of the okay AI brand and we examine some of the motivating factors behind it not only just from New Roof but from the new owners as well. We then take a look at the current landscape of craft distilleries and if they will survive the current COVID-19 5:00 conditions. As a personal note, please make sure you're going out there and you're supporting your craft distillers. You're going to hear more about it in the podcast today. And lastly, we also talk about the return of H statements that we're seeing on a brand of knob Creek. We're all excited to see that now as well. Joe from barrel bourbon who wants you to know that it's gotten a whole lot easier to get their unique cash drink whiskies from around the world, just visit barrel bourbon.com and you can click the Buy Now button bourbon to your door. It's as easy as that. Up next is Fred minich with above the char, so continue to stay safe, and we'll see you out there soon. Cheers, everyone. 5:40 I'm Fred medic, and this is above the char. This is not going to be a pleasant above the char if you're someone who is eagerly waiting for the prices to drop because of the pandemic. Some time ago, I was having a conversation with somebody and I saw it also on Facebook and Twitter. This is a considered 6:00 A theme amongst people in the bourbon community talking about how they cannot wait for the bourbon to drop in price to take advantage of the pandemic. I thought to myself at the time, you know, it's it's not a very nice thing to think because if we drop in price, that means people are going to lose their jobs. That means businesses are going to be going bankrupt. That means the bourbon boom that we've known that's kind of helped support this podcast and other cottage industries such as Mint Julep tubers, and r&r limousine Pegasus, 6:38 such as the travel industry that has become Kentucky bourbon trail. That means if all those prices start dropping, and all those wholesale barrels go out on the market for far less than they were, oh boy, yeah, you can maybe get a 160 $5 bourbon for something like 40 bucks, but you know what, and also means somebody can't feed their face. 7:00 Family, that means somebody is going to be out of work that means that the industry that we have known and love that has been thriving and growing is on its way to a major, major decline. But when I first saw that I was just kind of just kind of like ignored it and kind of moved on. And then people like jack rose and silver dollar started putting up their products for sale out of survival. And I was like, wow, 7:29 okay, I get it. We're going to be okay, we're going to be okay. But as many of you know, I am also an active 7:38 an active vintage, you know, buyer and I'm always looking for the market for like, you know, rare gyms. I was having a conversation with somebody 7:48 about a week ago. And I was talking about like, all the lots that are up for sale. And he says, You know what, I'm going to wait just a little bit longer, a little bit longer. When people 8:00 People are much more desperate. 8:03 And I don't know why that bugged me so much, because that is a part of business when you are someone who was looking to buy something you do want to buy when the person is, you know, willing to sell for the least amount. And that just bugged me. And I'm not saying that we should. We should be overpaying for things in the vintage market. But I believe in fair markets, I believe in fair market value. I believe in paying for a rare bottle of dallying bottle and bond. 8:35 I believe paying for what it's actually worth and not waiting for someone to they can't feed their family. I think right now what we have seen in bourbon, to a lesser degree, but what we have seen with this pandemic, we have seen people for who they really are. We have two sides that are constantly bickering and fighting over how we should deal with this and blaming one another all the time. And then you have the 9:00 Majority of America right there in the middle trying to figure out what to do. And it seems we also have those who cannot wait for you to hit rock bottom so they can buy up your collections. So, if that's you, or if you know someone like that, I asked you to please not be that way to change your mind to think of this as like a moment of a human just being human. If somebody comes to you, you know, for you to buy their collection, or to buy a bottle, you know, even if it's out, you know, encourage them to do illegally, of course, but be fair about it. Be fair about it, because you don't know what that money can mean to that person's family. 9:48 And that's this week's above the char. Hey, if you have an idea for above the char during this pandemic, hit me up on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram, just search for my name, Fred MiniK. Cheers. 10:04 Hey everybody and welcome to the 44th recording of the bourbon Community Roundtable. We've got a lot of people joining us live tonight as we discuss a good popery of What's New in bourbon news. And thankfully, we won't have to talk much about COVID because that really hasn't really impacted much in the bourbon world. Everything is just kind of status quo. There's a few hints of releases coming out however, I think it's actually a good thing that hasn't happened because it keeps people away from going out and running and chasing bourbon right now in a time when you shouldn't be probably doing that. So everybody's kind of being a little safe. Ryan has your purchasing habits for bourbon decrease now? Yeah, all my funds have allocated towards to go margaritas swirl Margarita. 10:51 We do those carry out Margarita is like three times a week. It's like when we first started they would just give you the Margarita was in a straw and you're like, Oh well, you know 11:00 I guess I'd have in the car on the way home and then and then then they went to we can't give you a straw and you're like, Okay, so I start bringing out straws. And then they went to you have to order an appetizer when you get it. So now it's a, which is fine. So just get the chips and walk with it. But the swirl Margarita mojitos if you're in mobile, excellent. There you go. So that's what you've been spending your money on. I actually bought my first bottle in a while today I saw I went to my local store to go and buy some things. Oddly enough, I had to get more tequila because we are running low because of margaritas and such and considering we just kind of had, you know, Taco Tuesday and everything like that. And, you know, cinco demayo. So I think the one thing that I did buy was the the makers 101 that new like fancy box. So look for that in a whiskey quickie coming soon at some point when we can Yeah, exactly. So let's go ahead and let's, let's kick it off tonight because we've got a lot of good topics as we start diving into this. And so I'm gonna go with the person that that 12:00 In the middle towards the bottom you start with Brian Harris sipping corn everybody where you blog and then let's start with a fun fun question night indeed believe in ghosts yes I absolutely believe in ghosts and maybe I'll write a there's some whiskey blogs that I might need to do on on ghosts but they're they're true find me at sip and corn mostly on Twitter also Facebook and Instagram and online the the website is sip and corn calm you can also find it at bourbon justice calm. Thanks for having me again guess of course. And let's go to our good friend Carrie over here Carrie. How's it going? Good. Thanks guys for bringing me in tonight. Carrie from suburbia calm. It's up to you our bi a. You can find me on Twitter at bourbon underscore gamer and Instagram at suburbia. And yes, I absolutely believe in ghosts. And sometime when we're off on a tangent, I'll tell you all about the stories growing up in a house in Atlanta, that was definitely haunted. 13:00 Okay, well, I'm sitting on pins and needles can't wait. 13:05 Call me later, right? Yeah. 13:07 All right, Nick, your turn. Hey, everybody. Glad to see everybody tonight. I'm Nick one of three founders of breaking bourbon. Find us online at breaking bourbon calm and check us out on social media. All at breaking bourbon. We're on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Patreon and now, tick tock so throwing up some videos up there too. And you gave in. I'ma be like, yeah, I joined you guys. We joined you guys, but I guess I'll burst the bubble here. I'm not a believer in ghosts myself. I like a good ghost story. But that's about as far as I go. So all right, Blake, you're up, buddy. All right. I'm Blake from burner and toolbox calm. You can find me on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, that's Bo you are Bo n r and then seal boxes. S e lb a CH 14:00 And I'm actually you know, let's see. Where's the vote Ed? I don't know for split but I'm with Nick on this one. Yeah, that can't can't go down that goes throughout. You know, maybe it was too many like, corny tours as a kid through St. Augustine, Florida, which is about 30 minutes from us that that did be in But no, if, you know, they've made 10,000 TLC and discovery show TV shows about it, they still can't track it down it goes, I'm gonna go ahead and say they don't exist. So 14:31 few more of these Bourbons, so and you never Yeah, you're right. It doesn't exist, but I can go to Instagram and see that it does exist. So that's 14:41 20 says the truth is out there. Ryan, did you believe in ghosts? Uh, sure. I don't know. Yes, Ghostbusters. Like one of my favorite like movies. So like, I gotta believe in it. You know, I had the whole you know, backpack and like thing you slide out and catch them. So right yeah. 15:00 I'm all for them. I mean, it just kind of makes me wonder if like bourbon and Ecto cooler would be a good combo then. Hey, I'm all for it. I mean even remember Ecto cooler that was like the the with Slimer. Like that was that flavor back in the day? Oh, shit, I was good. All right, so let's kind of move on to our first topic because I think this is one that is a little polarizing. And so this is something that has recently happened is that okay, I the brand that was originally owned by new roof and kind of what put new roof on the map is really kind of recalls they were putting out anywhere between 10 to I think like 14 or 15 year old 36% higher I MGP towards the end of it. We've had Ken Lewis of new riff on the podcast before telling his story about how he bought those barrels when he was still when he owned the party source up in Northern Kentucky. And then he finally found a way to be able to turn that into another business and then sell those as a way to kind of you know, really got 16:00 To get the launching point going for a new roof now what we found out is that the is that new roof has sold off the brand. And it is now being owned by two people. Then it also started the 16:14 blank. We're just about before we started the what were the brands where they started ramus Yes. 16:21 Yeah. What was the other? I don't know. We just we just totally blanked and we're terrible. I'm terrible hosts that I shot. 16:27 volstad except the one. Well, it was there's the Jordan grants George Freeman. I really want I know of offhand, but exactly the MGP burn. Yeah, MPP bought it from them. They got 16 from them. So let's kind of break this down a little bit because the one thing that that I'm kind of looking at this I look at it in the first aspect and I'll kind of throw this out there is why would new riff want to sell? Okay, I Well, I mean, I think that you know, they've kind of made it clear that they want to be all about the district. 17:00 They waited those four years. Okay, I served this purpose. So why not cash in on it? You know, I don't know what the you know usually go on like a base of 17:11 sales multiples and that kind of thing for a brand. So this is probably a little bit different, but we talked about it a little before of, it's kinda like the black Maple Hill, you know, black Maple Hill was this old brand. That 17:24 I guess was it originally with kbd? Or will it in a, you know, the people out of California bought it and it dropped out of quality? Then it moved to Oregon in. I can't tell you how many people say, Hey, I found a bottle of black Maple Hill and it's like, well, is it in a short squat model? Because you're not going to want to drink it for 100 bucks. Right? But that but that business model works, you know, people they've heard about this brand, it's got a little clout in the community. 17:51 So why don't I go ahead and and, you know, put some more bourbon in it. But I get that i think i think my my question is 18:00 Why would why would new ref and why would Ken Lewis actually want to get rid of something like they had something for so long it was it was successful. There's nothing that said they couldn't revive it years down the road. Why would they just take it and sell it to somebody else like it? That's one part that I'm still trying to figure out how to understand here. So I think they I think originally actually dug up I was looking around at websites actually dug up a website that's that's still out there. And it's new riff I think their old website I'm going to share it up here on on YouTube but it's got a whole kind of page dedicated Okay, I I'm not sure this is supposed to still be up or not on the web. But you know, I almost feel like they've kind of at this point realized their success with new roof is so strong that that idea of ever going back that okay, I brand as part of new roof. Maybe they've just gotten to the point where they said we just we just don't need it. That's not part of the vision anymore. You know, the idea was it was always going to be a short term brand. 19:00 I think but I get it, you kind of hold in your back pocket just in case you know, 10 years 15 years down the road, you may want to reintroduce it. It's almost as if now they're looking saying you know what, we're not going to do anything with it. We still like the brand if we've got people that are interested in taking that brand to a new height, we don't want it go ahead guys. You guys take it and we're doing our thing over here. So I think it's a lot attributed to numerous success that they've had now in the idea that there they probably don't plan on putting any resource into Okay, I or didn't for a long time and they're saying if somebody else is going to so be it, take it we'll take a little money and be done with it. Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, they think about the single barrels that had a lot of success in 2019 and a lot of them were new riff I mean they're they're proud of what they got with good reason. To me you know, think of another example Who else could do this and it's smooth Ambler. It's like smooth Ambler getting rid of old scowl once they have their own distillate. That's that's a bigger scale, I think and that would be really surprising if they ever did that. 20:00 That's the same idea once you're once you're proud of your own distillate and your own product you move toward that and and help keep the lights on by selling a brand did that did okay I ever get distributed outside of Kentucky Ohio and Indiana 20:18 the small that it wasn't much outside was it? I don't think so. I think Yeah, I was like the tri state area was what they had like 50 barrels in total right or it wasn't like there was massive amounts was there dudes a finite number of barrels they started with and that was always the idea was it was just going to fun there next thing you know it's never going to be a brand that continued in it was never going to be a brand new we're going to go try to source more to somehow continue at least that's what the how the story goes. Yeah cuz new is made its way now and it's coming to Georgia. And yeah, I feel I kind of with Brian. On that whole thing. You put your initial investment into that that one company but once you see that you 21:00 your heart and your soul is in the product that you're making and the label that you're proud of. It's like, what's the point of keeping behind? You know, I mean, money speaks at the end of the day, right? So, you know, you make money from selling that label, why not? Yeah. And then the last time we were there, I mean, they got a ton of like, expansion going and building stuff. And it's like, they probably could have used the cash. You know, the capital. I mean, I don't know how lucrative of a deal it was just to sell the brand off. But it might be to to meet some short term cash needs that they need to, you know, keep growing the new roof brand and it's like, Hey, you know, Hell, I can't tell you how many Okay, I bottles I passed on like, just because I was like, I just MGP again, you know, who? Stupid me But uh, yeah, I mean, I don't know. I mean, it probably. I don't know how valuable that brand is really. I mean, it's somewhat noticeable. But I'd say in the grand scheme of thing it's not, you know, that well known of a brand in the grand scheme of things. I mean, we as hobbyists, we know, aka Okay, 22:00 All right, I want to go out and ask 20 people, you know, if they've heard of it, they haven't heard it yet. I can tell you people were like, okay, that, okay, bring it, 22:10 bring it to a big market and see if anyone knows anything about it. And yeah, I don't think they would, I think they're gonna have to put a lot of effort into it to really get the snowball rolling again and take it anywhere from from where it kind of is sitting right now, you know, beyond that, the tightly knit enthusiast market, but I don't think it has that massive, you know, appeal of like other big brands, but it's an easier story to tell of, you know, where it came from, and people kind of, oh, have you heard a new riff and you know, it kind of it. For me, it's just an easier segue for retailers to explain to customers why they're charging $120 per bottle, but yeah, we'll see. And so I kind of want to put a thought in about, you know, the whole sales aspect because I look at this, as let's rewind the clock back like 23:00 I'd say a while ago, you know, when other brands were basically doing mash trading of labels and distilleries to basically stay afloat. And Ryan, you're probably right. Maybe this was something to get a quick cash grab, because who knows in 10 1520 years, if anybody's gonna care about it, but it could also be in 10 2015 years, when people like us for like, holy shit, it's back like, Oh my god, right? Like, we would have like a party about it. This is just kind of like, Oh, this seems a little weird, right? I mean, yeah, it's weird. And it's like, if it's just two guys doing it, and you look at a business venture out of it, like how much do you really think they paid for it? 10,000 20,000 If you really think they paid like $50,000 for this brand. Oh, I was thinking at least 100,000 I was thinking 100 myself too. I was thinking I was I was also thinking New Roof might they might have told this story. You know, these guys might have told a story. This is our plans with it. And that could have been something that the folks at New riff kind of said okay, we're kind of seeing the vision. 24:00 And we're, it's not just about the money, it's about the idea that you're going to do something with this brand that we're never going to do and that we don't want to do, and don't have any plans to do. And that might have been part of it too, because they did talk about kind of retelling that story and, you know, doing some things with this brand to kind of revitalize, which obviously, they need to do. But that may be part of it as well be really interesting to know what was paid for it. Yeah, gosh, I wouldn't think I just couldn't imagine paying more than, like, 25 $30,000 for it, but maybe I'm wrong. I don't know. I just think I think I see. I'm trying to think of like a I'm just trying to think of like percentage of business that limited releases are you know, for for Okay, or anyone and it's not that much and then you're trying to think about the margin you make on that and I'm like, okay, that just doesn't seem like a valuable that much. Like, I wouldn't pay much more than that to to profit off that name, I guess but maybe I don't know. I'm an idiot. So who knows? When they're when the bottles come out and see how expensive they are? Then you'll know how much Yeah, you'll figure it out. Really quick. 25:00 Yeah. And so that kind of like tails and dovetails in the next part because we we look at this from our perspective and our perspective as enthusiasts and also keep this in mind. Nobody gave a shit about Okay, I until the MGP. hype train started. Right, right. I mean, it was around for a while some people were getting some bottles, they were 1213 years old people like that, then all of a sudden the MGP chasers came around, cleared those out, then kept going and moving to the next distillery until every distillery is basically cleared out of this high aged MGP. So one thing that people have to understand is that this will not be the same product as you had before. And if you want it to be that, maybe you should not buy a bottle and wait additional 10 years, and maybe it'll be there because we all know that what's available in the market today that you're going to get from a GP is probably around five years old. If you're lucky, maybe six. And so I guess we we look at this and we think like okay, if you are going to be under new ownership with this, how like what is that price point do you think that you need to be at 26:00 Do you look at this as like a pure speculation of just like, hey, let's just ride the coattails of a brand that was known by a bunch of people in a bourbon community in the tri state area, and then try to make a national brand out of it. But what's that? What's that price point got to be at to be able to do that? And how do you stay competitive against everybody else in the market? Who's pushing MGP? Because you're not you're not you're not unique anymore? Let's keep it to say they're gonna be MGP, though. I mean, oh, you know that? Yes, because it says it in the press release that they are sourcing. 36% high right. MGP to do this brand, they're not steering away from what it was before. Yeah, you gotta be at like $100 or more. I think $40 is a good price point for if you're looking for something that you want to say I want to take it national, I want this to be just about every state or every state. It's somewhat similar to other Bourbons out there, you're going to buy it because the flavor because the label, maybe the story a little bit, but I think $40 is kind of that sweet spot where you're not 27:00 so high that people are just going to ignore it and bite your high enough that they're going to look at it as an elevated brand out there so if they're putting out a $40 bottle and it's hitting everywhere I think with the right marketing behind it and a decent flavor decent age I think they I think they could do it and make it something like like smooth Ambler we're seeing that coming coming back now and that's at that price point. For example, you know if they want to go higher if they want to go into this 70 hundred dollar range they're gonna have to really we've quite a story I mean, think Kentucky owl kind of you know, they're gonna have to source some stuff that we didn't really know was available to source or that was, you know, kind of a surprise to kind of hit those higher numbers or they go above 100 but be interesting to see if they kind of go towards that limited premium side or if they go towards that make it available to everybody side on that lower price. I think you guys underestimate the ridiculousness that people will pay. Yeah, or ridiculousness. Well said I always think of my head. 28:00 Is that heaven store? bourbon. That was that total wine? I think it was like 399 or 499 I'm sure it was sourced from somewhere. Maybe MGP have a bootleg one. Yeah, the one that was like it was like, seven years. It was like 27 years old. No, not that one. It wasn't that old. But it said something like, here's heading included a guitar string from somebody and had a leather bound notebook and and it was 499 and I'm thinking nobody's gonna buy that this is bullshit. And a week later, all three of them were sold out. You know, I think it's, it's, this is the ideal market. If you want to push into you know, marketing bullshit. This is the market for it right now. People are gonna buy what you put out. And all you need to practically do is charge a high price. Yeah. And a fancy bottle. Fancy bottle has got instant prestige and there might not be anything to it. Yet 29:00 Yeah, as the comment is right now just put a horse on the bottle and it's 29:05 that's it. I think this is a mark. It's a perfect mark. Well, you know, Douglas Pendleton put it in the chat. Price dries perception. And that is extremely true in today's market. It's like, well, it's under dollars. It's gotta be better than the bottle. That's $50 Yeah. Why would they only charge 50? If it's worth 100? Yeah, cuz they had to pay $200,000 for the brand, right? 29:30 It just went out and he says the price is double Blake. Yeah, just double. Yeah, I mean, the one thing that I see this and this is just from a pure whiskey perspective, is that we've we've seen this story before. And we've seen and we've tasted this whiskey before. And we know a bunch of different places that are putting out five year MGP 36% high rye, sorry, all it's not ready yet. In my opinion, it's still not there. And I think there's still going to be a lot more time that needs to go into the barrel to actually make this live up to the hype. 30:00 what it was before and so you're gonna have the same exact people that are getting burned by the same products and then it's just gonna be history repeating itself. Yeah. Are y'all ready for the big reveal? It's me and Kenny who bought it? 30:17 totally get it 30:21 opens and it's $1,000 is that is that pursuit release 340 30:27 Yeah, episode 30:29 together. Yeah, we're getting our own boxes that have like hydraulic lifts in it that just like raise it up three inches so you can take it off its pedestal. They're they're holograms of Kenny's tic Tock videos. 30:42 We've got to take the sticker game to the next level, right? We've just had to figure out how to do that to make people really want to know what's what took the sticker game to the next level and is underappreciated is gifted horse. It was a terrible whiskey. But did you know it was Scratch and sniff? Yeah, I don't know if everybody I can't believe you. 31:00 Nobody I can't believe no one else has done that after that because it's such a crazy funny idea to me. I want a bottle just so I can have a scratch and sniff label again, like I don't even care that the whiskey sucks. I want gifted horsetail. man you love orphan barrels, I do like a round table Buffalo Trace for a gifted horse. It's worth $140. 31:23 Get on it, man. Make it happen if you can. Alright, so let's let's kind of move on to the next subject because this one is it's kind of a sore subject. This is definitely dealing with COVID and everything that that's been going on because according to a survey that has been released by the distilled spirits Council of the United States, as well as the American distilling Institute, with a survey of 118 craft distillers they found that two out of three have worried not only about the short term, but also the long term survival of their business. And 42% believe that they will not be able to stay in business for more than three months, and another 21% of worry that they will go out of business for the next three months. And I believe 32:00 We've also said that 43% of all craft distillery workers across the US right now have either been laid off or furloughed. So we look at this right now that we're potentially in the craft boom bust. Now, the the question for you all that I kind of have with this is that in a capitalist sort of mentality and opportunity here, why aren't more big players in this game, trying to swallow up craft distilleries? For dimes on $1 right now? 32:33 Before before y'all Sorry, guys, y'all know a lot about this, but I just have a question do they say? I mean, did they say why? They're struggling because it seems like the spirit tree is booming, right? 32:47 Yeah, local distilleries, they own their yard. So like they really depend on tours and, you know, local events and tourism. You know, I was I was digging into that more to carry because everywhere you're seeing is how 33:00 All sales are up, and you've seen it all over the place, if you're not seeing it on the news, seen it with people, you talk to just your friends and family and so forth. You know, I was looking at that too and started digging around a little bit about that, and kind of found this this whole kind of changing dynamic of this idea that people aren't buying on premise now that they're buying from the online retailers or some of the big brick and mortars you know, for the most part, and that's that hurts. They're basically the these craft distillers or major margin is what they're selling on premise with their bars, the restaurants, the stuff they're selling directly with the bottle, so where they're seeing their profit is basically dried up, even though they might be still selling some of their product. But then a lot of that stuff being bought online is the big name, lower price kind of stuff that people are just, you know, kind of repetitively buying. So all this crap stuffs going to the wayside. And these guys are sitting on a lot of them and insane amounts of debt that they need to service and it's a very short it's really pretty sad. I hope they don't 34:00 Go under to the you know, to the extent that it looks like they could, but it's a very short window for them to either survive this thing or not survive this thing. 34:08 I didn't think about how much is that how much of their revenue is from people coming in and on site? So they make a lot of their profit derivative. Yeah. 30% is a pretty conservative estimate for most craft distilleries have tasting rooms. 34:25 And, you know, they have a bar and that kind of stuff, it could be even higher. And, you know, so all that's just gone out the window. So they're kind of making up with it with hand sanitizer trying to, you know, do what they can into next point. You know, whenever people are buying for a pandemic, they're grabbing, grabbing fodder grabbing. Yeah, I think I think that's a good point. It's like, people are drinking more, but they're not, you know, like one seven fives of like Evan Williams, and that's what they're, you know, that's what most people are grabbing for. They're not going for the higher price craft stuff. And so it's a and do it like 35:00 You know people are buying alcohol but you know, restaurants and bars are like zero. And so they you know, a lot of the tastes like you all said the tasting rooms and visitor centers, you know that these guys depend on or just it's gone from to zero and so and I don't really think they're getting any help either I mean the PPP stuff goes to two employees and a little bit to rent and that's not their expenses I mean they they have a lot of suck sunk and expenses that they're just not really getting anything from the government on here. Yeah, you know, their revenue and they've still got a, you know, fun that Vendome still and their construction costs and everything else there. I mean, it's it's serious. I agree with Matt. Matt's comment there that hand sanitizer production has kind of caught up now. Yeah, yeah. So what do you they don't need to do that anymore, either. Yeah. And they struggle with that, too. A lot of regulations were tricky. A lot of them ended up making it and not even really being able to sell it. 36:00 They just, you know, made it a lot of pro bono. And a lot of cases that really wasn't a moneymaker per se. I think they just got stuck in a place where they didn't really need to produce whiskey and they were trying to help and, you know, trying to keep staff. Yeah, and a lot of these places have a pretty low staff count to, you know, to Brian's point. There's not a lot of people that work in a small craft distillery, usually, a lot of times, it's actually just the owners, maybe that are that are working there. You know, and they're there. A lot of times they have just an incredible amount of debt to service that even in a perfect world when everything's going well. It's a hard business. So you just you just pull out one little piece, you know, it's like a thing of Jenga pull out one piece the whole thing's gonna topple. And it's very, very well could be the piece I'd be curious Blake, what you're seeing on the sealed box side, from the, you know, kind of like the online sales side there and people approaching you from the craft distilleries. I mean, what's kind of been your feel for these folks that you are 37:00 pretty well. Yeah. So a lot of them are, you know, definitely feeling the feeling the effects of it. Most are making it but most are making it we got it. Yeah, no, no, I'm like, What can we send Blake an arrow or something? Like, uh, I think it's I think it's fun for my computer. Oh, 37:20 it's a ghost behind you, Blake. I left the podcast almost two years ago and Blake's internet still stayed the same. 37:30 So true. True. I, you know, I, I would say as much 37:35 as this has been damaging for so many small businesses and restaurants and bars and distilleries, and etc. I kind of feel like maybe we're getting close to good news starting to prevail and hopefully coming out of this thing within a month. I mean, you start to look at at least here in Georgia, we buckled down March 14 is when pretty much everybody 38:00 Went indoors and 38:02 our hospitals are at a very low rate right now. And I'm just hopeful that we can kind of come back out now and support these craft distillers I know that right before everything hit the fan. wilderness trail was distributed here in Georgia. And I kinda was just very curious to see how their sales went. And my local store had bought a couple cases of their they had the weeded the regular bourbon and the the rye. And all of it has to has sold pretty well. He said he's ordered more of it. So hopefully, we can get out of this thing and get back to these craft distillers. This is the one thing that that kind of strikes me a little bit. So I'm sitting here I'm trying to read the chat. And there's some people that are saying like, oh, like, it doesn't matter, like their whiskey sucks. It's too young as to whatever. Like this is the this is the moment this is the movement that we need, unless you want to keep drinking the same whiskey from the same six distilleries for the rest of your life. And I think that 39:00 Blake made a very good point in his presentation that he did at whiskey from home during that that online conference and saying that if you're buying craft whiskey, you're not trying to buy something that is just as good or comparable as the big guys. Instead, what you're doing is you're trying to get something that makes you drink or taste something different, right? Like you're finding either new grains, you're finding new ways that the they you know, they put it like a different age proof or they you know, they did whatever it is different because we all know that if you go to heaven Hill, or you go to a beam, you go to these different places. They've got, you know, like one, two, maybe three or four recipes, and they are cranking out stuff like on that still 24 hours a day. They're not changing. They're not experimenting, right? And so it's it's really hard for you to sit there and try to figure out like, okay, like, I hope your palate or your taste doesn't change over the next 1020 years because that's essentially what we're going to get. And I know it's been a bad rap on a lot of craft distilleries that they get, you know like in this, this, basically 40:00 pigeonholed in this part where they said like, oh, sorry, Your whiskies too young. It's two, three years old. And it's, you know, it doesn't meet my flavor profile. I get it. I'm kind of with you there. But we've got to be able to give them a chance to be able to get to the point here at 5678 910 years old when this whiskey is really going to start being mature and it does taste phenomenal that we've got a lot of options out there as consumers. So yep, yeah. And Transcribed by https://otter.ai

We went on a road trip to check out Old Dominick distillery in Memphis, TN. We’re excited to let Alex Castle, Master Distiller at Old Dominick, share the history behind the brand and how it was resurrected. We learn about her time at Wild Turkey and then dive into their current operations and product lines. If you are in the Memphis area, make Old Dominick one of your must-stops so you can check out their incredible facility. Show Partners: You can now buy Barrell Craft Spirits products online and have them shipped right to your door. Visit BarrellBourbon.com and click Buy Now. Receive $25 off your first order at RackHouse Whiskey Club with code "Pursuit". Visit RackhouseWhiskeyClub.com. Share a sip of pure Memphis with Old Dominick Distillery. Learn more at OldDominick.com. Show Notes: This week’s Above the Char with Fred Minnick talks about Whiskey from Home. Tell us about your background. Did you grow up around bourbon? Talk about your time at UK. What did you love about working at Alltech? What happened after graduating? What was your role at Wild Turkey? How did you end up at Old Dominick? Did Old Dominick have an initial vision? What are honeybells? How was the transition from Kentucky to Tennessee? Tell us about the history of the distillery. How did you decide to launch with the Memphis Toddy? Talk about the design of the facility. What was your vision for the still? What was the inspiration for your recipes? Tell us about your products and mash bills. Talk about the barrels. Why keep the barrel wood regional? Will it be harder to keep the wood regional as you scale? Talk about the rooster. Tell us more about your gin. What hurdles did you have when opening the distillery? How have you been received in Memphis?

Bourbon and ham, is that a pairing you would expect? To be honest, neither did I. I’m a sucker for killing a plate of prosciutto at a dinner party, but thanks to our guest Steve Coomes, we’ve discovered a new love for country ham. When done right, the saltiness of the ham just hits all the right spots. We sit down with Steve as he talks to us about a past life as a pizza judge (yes, a pizza judge!) and then we get into hams. The diet of the pigs, curing processes, and even his professional opinion of those ham legs you see hanging inside rickhouses. I think it will surprise you. Of course, it wouldn’t be complete if we didn’t do a bourbon and ham pairing. Try not to salivate too much. Show Partners: You can now buy Barrell Craft Spirits products online and have them shipped right to your door. Visit BarrellBourbon.com and click Buy Now. Receive $25 off your first order at RackHouse Whiskey Club with code "Pursuit". Visit RackhouseWhiskeyClub.com. Whiskey From Home: WhiskeyFromHome.com Show Notes: Bourbon in a Decanter: Does is go bad? https://advancedmixology.com/blogs/art-of-mixology/does-bourbon-go-bad-in-decanter This week’s Above the Char with Fred Minnick talks about Derby. How did you get into spirits writing? Tell us about your bourbon and ham parings. Talk about your culinary background. How do you judge a pizza? Tell us about the hams you brought today. How do you come up with the pairings? Are the pigs fed a specific diet? What is the difference in the thickness of country ham and prosciutto. Tell us about curing. What sizes do hams come in? What flavors are you looking for when pairing? How much does this ham cost? Where can you buy country ham? What do you think about hams aging in rickhouses? 0:00 That country ham industry is its own worst enemy, many times and understanding what it needs to do to make itself look on par with Italian cured hams. Yeah. My wife it's charcuterie. She's like, Oh 0:11 yeah, you say it's like oh no, no way. It's like 0:28 Welcome to Episode 251 of bourbon pursuit. I hope you all are hanging in there with your quarantine here, because I know right now, mine's looking pretty Shaggy. I'm due for a haircut. But before I get to the news, I want to tell you once again about whiskey from home with the help of some of the best names in bourbon. We're doing a five and a half hour livestream of whiskey soap entertainment on May 2, starting at 12pm Eastern. So right now go to whiskey from home calm and get your free ticket there sessions on bourbon history. The best Bourbons on the shelf right now. Blind flights how to hunt for great bourbon, a virtual food pairing with Peggy no Stevens and a virtual bourbon tasting with our good friend, Fred MiniK. The shopping list for everything that you need to follow along. Is it whiskey from home calm, so go there. Check it out. It's a free event. So come and spend your Saturday afternoon with us. Now, bourbon into decanter doesn't go bad. This is a question that was asked and answered with extensive research from advanced mixology calm. After you buy a bottle of bourbon, how should it be stored? does it stay preserved for years or even decades have left on open? What about the canning of bourbon? Can it go bad then? Well, it all comes down to aeration, and without giving too much of it away. You can read all the answers to these questions to the link from advanced mixologist calm in our show notes. For today's podcast, we talked about bourbon and ham. Is that a pairing that you would expect? Well, to be honest, neither did I I'm a sucker for killing a whole plate of for shoot, I was at a dinner party. But thanks to our guest, Steve Coombs, I found a new love for country ham. When done, right, the saltiness of the ham, it just hits all the right spots. We sit down with Steve, as he talks about his past life as a pizza judge, you heard that right up pizza judge, I mean, talk about a dream job. But then we get into hands, the die to the pigs, curing processes, and even his professional opinion of those hand legs that you see hanging inside of Rick houses. I think it's gonna surprise you. Of course, it wouldn't be complete if we didn't do a bourbon and hand pairing. So try not to salivate too much. All right, don't forget it whiskey from home calm, go register and get your free ticket. If you haven't had a chance yet, go to barrel bourbon.com and you can get cash drink bourbon, whiskey, rye and rum. All delivered direct to your door. Just look for the Buy Now button at the top of the page. All right. Now here we go. Yo, here's Fred minich with above the char. 3:04 I'm Fred MiniK. And this is above the char. I'm a little sad right now. I'm actually really, really sad. We've had to cancel bourbon and beyond. I think many of you all know that. But that's the festival that I co created with Danny Wimmer presents and COVID is forcing a lot of cancellations, especially in the music world. What's gonna happen to the Kentucky Derby? No one really knows. But this Saturday would have been my 13 Kentucky Derby in a row to attend. And I'm just sad because that piece of that that moment is gone. It that it's gone. That piece of culture, that piece of celebration. And it's not necessarily about the horses. It's about the gathering of the people the smoking of cigars, a sipping a bourbon, seeing my wife go through, you know, 15 thousand different hats before she chooses one. So many great moments I've had over the years. I want to share one with you. Now, if you followed me you know that I've, I was a guest of the governor last year and I've been a millionaire's row and I've been around the celebrities and all that. And a lot of people be like, that would be that would be the one that would be like the one memory that you would want to take away when you think about your experiences as the from the derby. I've also been a photographer on the derby. I was on the finishing line in 2008 and got some really beautiful photos of a Belle's before she passed away. And yet, that's not it either. Now, my favorite Derby of all time, was when I was in Peggy know Stephens box with with my wife. We were just pregnant. We're just getting out of that first trimester where we could start telling people you know how it is if you've been pregnant? Well, I've never been pregnant. My wife spent pregnant but I say we as in like, you know, family, and you get out of that first trimester and you're so excited to tell people and we're Catholic. So that first step is always like, Alright, who are going to be the godparents? So it was on Derby Day, like, two, three years ago, that we were in Peggy's box and we asked Peggy, if she would be the godmother to our son, Julian. And she cried, said yes, of course. And it was just a magical moment. It was a wonderful celebration. And then I think I lost a couple hundred bucks on the race. But there's no replace in the derby. We can't replace that. That's just a magical, magical moment. If you've ever been, you know what I'm talking about, but we're doing something that is as good as we possibly can present right now. And that's whiskey from home. It is an amazing lineup of bourbon personalities. And I hope you will join us all day Saturday. As we drink bourbon as we talk bourbon, we're going to be streaming across the interwebs. Unlike any time before, this is the first, this is the first time my knowledge that we've ever seen something like this a virtual conference in the bourbon world. And my hat's off to Kenny Coleman. He's just done such a good job, you know, stepping up and getting this thing going. On the back end. I'm trying to get all the streaming stuff set up. And Ryan's going to be making cocktails and you know what, I'm going to try and make them alongside him. So I cannot wait to see how this goes for everybody. And I hope you will join us. It's this Saturday. I'm sure Kenny's already talked about it, and you're going to hear more about it later on. But it's going to be a great time is it going to replace the derby? Nothing can replace that in our hearts. But what it can do is it can help us get us through the fact that we are missing missing the greatest two minutes in sports. So that's this week's above the char. This one came from the heart. If you have a heartfelt story about the Kentucky Derby, hit me up on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or go to my website Fred medic comm and send me an email. I like reading those kinds of stories. Until next week, cheers 7:23 Welcome back to another episode of bourbon pursuit the official podcast of bourbon, the whole team here today we've got bourbon and we've got ham where we talking pigs and bourbon today so this is this is something that I know Ryan and myself we're big barbecue guys, we got our green eggs, you've got your drum, you've got all kinds of things so terrible, but yes, it's a better omen. Yeah. And you know, for me, I love I love charcuterie boards when I go out to restaurants to can't get enough a ham. And I mean you remember we were talking about going to North Carolina you're talking about the gym. Oh, and ham. Is that what it is? Yep. 7:56 Yeah, the Serrano Hamza Oh, the ham on Hello. Yeah. 8:00 hormone 8:00 that's a source that's your jam on or GMO yeah 8:03 Jay Michael Jackson working there. 8:04 It's the jam the jam and ham. cured meats are like you're talking about love language and I used to raise pigs I used to raise pigs so like this is like ham to me is like it's what I grew up with. We used to raise do rocks and Berkshires and everything's kidding 8:21 yeah I had my Linux I knew you're in the hug business you ever notice had their day their pig in the mud? Did everyone pay the pig you know in the mud? 8:28 Yeah, we made them yeah, we literally like I'd had to clean them all the time because they would get it get really bad and we had some we did have some some hampshire's as well. I had like, like one of these really nice prized hampshire's, and the damn thing died when it touched concrete like it was it was a carrier of what they call a stress gene. And one of my big contributions to the hog community is that I donated him to science instead of eating him 9:00 After he died, you get a tax write off for that or something. I 9:04 don't you know what I think we did, but if they actually they've cured they've bred most of that out there. 9:09 Yeah. And you can't eat them unless you cause its death. Right? If it does that on its own, you gotta 9:15 take there's any rules on 9:19 that to show up live to the budget, 9:22 whatever it sounds delicious. So if 9:24 you hit by a car, I think that seeing well we don't want to know how the sausage made, you know, no pun intended. 9:29 Who knows we might get back into that action today and kind of talking about cured meats as well as we go through here. But you've already heard our guests today. So today is our guests. We've got Steve Coombs. Steve is all over the place. He knows about pigs. He knows about bourbon. He's been a writer for bourbon Plus, he's also an author. He's been a contributing writer for bourbon and banter. So Steve, welcome to the show. 9:49 Thanks for having me. Glad to be here. 9:50 Yeah, so I mean, we kind of talked a little bit there but let's let's kind of talk about some of your your bourbon cred. You know, how did how did you get into actually start writing and kind of Knowing and exploring the spirits world, 10:02 I always call this the confession moment in that I was probably 4748. before somebody got she was the tourism director in Bardstown. And I was down there doing a story for Southern Living magazine, y'all remember Don crystal? Oh, yeah, Don, Don said, we pulled up to heaven Hill. She said, Steve Coombs, you get out of this car right now go inside and do that tasting said you're not going to do an article on my town without tasting some bourbon and believe it or not honest truth, it really clicked that day. It was funny that 92 proof larceny lit my mouth on fire to the point of numbness. And I mean, and now we're drinking barrels, barrel strength, dry, you know, it's no big deal. So I got hooked on it literally just because of the culture. And of course, watching Fred, Fred and I worked many years ago together and seeing what it did for his career and becoming attracted to the characters in the business. My gosh, I mean, I've written about the culinary business for 30 years and never had Have I found such a concentration of friendly characters in one single business? And you especially talking about how rough it was in the wine industry, you know how snobs were in that like you didn't want any more involvement with that the low ego part of this businesses just you know gold for writers don't think yeah, 11:15 I mean the the characters are amazing. I remember that time in your career you You called me I've really how did you get here? How did you do that and all that and I and it for me, this has always been easy because of the of the people and at the time, you were like thinking about, you know, teetering with tequila a little bit. Remember I was and I still love it. But it's a whole country away. 11:38 And here we live in the country of bourbon country, and it's right here and you can drive to barks down to 15 minutes and be interviewing the geniuses in the business or Frankfurt or, you know, Larkspur, 11:49 one of the great things that you've done is that a lot of people come into, into in bourbon and they just, they kind of repeat the same stories. You know, not a lot Have people you know, try to go outside of what's already been done. And you've kind of you've done that. And I've been telling you for a long time that people want to be, you know, learn more about ham and the pairings of it and now you're doing seminars on it and everything. So how did that how did that start? How did you develop this whole new platform that really no one's explored Really? And this ties back to you? Hopefully you remember the answer to this gotta stop this kiss fest over Yeah, 12:27 it is. Yeah, all right 12:30 later, but let me let me say this. he mentored me 15 years ago when we really started he was your supervisor. He said your light just like today? No, I'm kidding. 12:40 I'm totally kidding. 12:41 I was always on time. You were I told him that the company didn't really tolerate that crap and you still ended up military and you just show up on time? 12:47 Yeah, that was that was back when I was still falling a little bit my military code now I'm 10 minutes late to everything cuz I just don't care. Fred. Fred 12:54 called me in July of what was it? 2014. You said that a publisher called Do about doing a book on country ham? That's right. And you said I don't know anything about the subject but I have a feeling I know someone who does. And he called me and he said call the publisher and see if this will work out for you. And I wound up writing that was my is my It was my first book country ham, a southern tradition of hogs salt in smoke, which came out the year after that. And so by then I'd already begun enjoying bourbon and I'm tasting it just like we're gonna taste today. It was late night it was it Believe it or not, sounds so fake, but it's really true is midnight, I was editing the book and sipping it and tasting it with this. Oh my gosh, this works really well together. 13:39 Yeah, it's a match made in heaven. 13:41 Oh, exactly. In and that's really where it kind of clicked. But Jay Denham, who is one of the great cures and Kentucky who's moved back to Cincinnati, had come to me, we're friends. We're talking ham and he said, you know, we should do a big whiskey and hand pairing some time and somehow or another led to the bourbon classic. And we did One with have not had been hell I'm sorry Jim Beam. And it was a hit from then. And ever since I've been doing a lot of these tastings My gosh, we've got six books already this year through March out of town. And it's a lot of fun to spread the gospel of both I mean, pork gets a bad name the United States and this is this is really good stuff that we don't try today. The other other white man and he is really really read me forgot that tagline. Yeah, so horrible. I kinda want to rewind it back to you even a little bit more here. So kind of talk because you were you were a chef previously in your life too, right to kind of talk more about your culinary background. So I my mother was a good Southern cook but never did understand restaurant food until I had to start paying my tuition at St x and my parents said you know, times are a little tight you boys need to get some better jobs if you're gonna keep going to say next pay for it. So I start working and fine dining. And it was the restaurant that really gave Louisville its own restaurant boom was called Casa goes on. It's long since gone. But that was the first place that I tasted really, really good fresh fish, real asparagus, Hollandaise, all these kinds of things. And I realized that was wired for the culinary industry. didn't know what I wanted to do when I graduated college and was stuck watching the chef's and thought that looks interesting. I'll try that. I wanted to be a writer. I've always wanted to be a writer, but I was an absolute terrible manual typewriter typist, mine was the last class at St x in 1982 that use true manual typewriters. And the best I ever did was 32 words a minute. And that wasn't gonna fly at a newspaper. About five or so years later, I got a laptop. It was an IT WAS AN NTC multi sink if anybody remembers it, you guys are toddlers 15:43 weighed 11 and a half 15:44 pounds when that one had like a real floppy like the five and a 15:48 half inch floppy? No, not that 123 and a half no hard drive. And that was the first time that I ever discovered that word processing allows you to correct your mistakes and like well maybe I can do this thing after all. And then so I started writing about the rest Strong industry that was 1991 I still do it not nearly as much because of, you know, publications like yours and, and I'm really digging the spirit scene but to be in it this long and have gotten to travel to really neat places in the world, just writing about food has been a treat and I'm in a food town. So it's been a good career. I let me let me add something to this. He was the editor in chief of pizza today. And then he later was the editor, editor of a website called pizza marketplace. And Steve was a god in pizza around the world. And if you think about pizza, it's like its own sounds delicious. Anyway. 16:44 Steve likes too skinny to be like, doing all this food cookies, but 16:47 he would he would write about these like pizza dough throwing contests and it'd be like Italy versus United States or Canada and that was going on when you're there, man. And it's just it was just it was fun. For me from a career perspective, that was the first time I had ever seen anyone cover a beat very uniquely, and that I've never told you this, but the way that you own pizza gave me a lot of like motivation, you know, to, you know, to discover, you know, in that or in the early times in my career to find what I could like your neck hat, find my niche like you did. And like, he was a god and pizza. If you Google Steve Coombs, you know, we put the quotation marks around it, and then pizza, you'll find a lot of his old stuff and it's beautiful. I kind of want to talk about both. I know 17:41 I kind of talk about pizza just for a second. So kind of talk about like, how do you judge a pizza like in your mind when you were going into judge a pizza like what how does that how does that work? 17:50 there? It's It's the last contest that I did for a long time was in Columbus, that client I was telling you about that I had been up there was the North Custom was a minute American pizza contest can't recall but we judge it on crest quality Christmas. You would look at what you know the rim of the crest which at the time is called the corny God or the cornice. And you'd look for the texture of the dough. You judge it on the the flavor of the sauce how it presents itself well with cheese you don't want to slide off. That's a problem. He looked at the ratio of toppings with sauce and crust. And when you look at the marketability of it is this thing really something that would sell in a in a pizza restaurant or do the guy just make it up on his way in and then do you do thumbs up sideways? Thumbs thumbs down? There wasn't there was there were 38 judges in this contest to manage you know, the volume of pizzas that were coming through. So you really did have to have a rigorous pizza quickies now it's a bookies. Yeah, we could Yeah, yeah. So it was it was pretty rigorous judging, and I'd seen a similar system in Italian I'm sorry in Italy, but uh, it's basically based on what you know, making the Italians win. What's their system What style do you prefer? Like? 19:03 Okay, I really do. 19:04 Yeah, me Neapolitan, New York. Go neck and neck. Yeah. And I like that salt mine like a Pete not pizza. Taco foldable floppy. 19:11 Yeah, there seems to be a trend right now of people bashing Chicago style pizza saying it's not really pizza. It's just like a big like a lasagna. Yeah, it's 19:20 Are you in that? Are you No, not at all. That that's it's a derivative of an Italian version of pizza called torta pasqual Lena which means Easter tart or torte. And it was basically you know, the deep dish and they would put another layer of crust over the top and it was it was like kind of like we will roll out a big lasagna for celebratory event. And and that's the way it was treated. It wasn't the Italians don't see pizza as a slice after slice thing. Like we eat it here. I mean, we're committed. These dudes have had an appetizer, some wine, the little bit of pizza, then, you know something afterward. We look at Pizza as a whole meal sometimes our meal. Yeah, no. So 20:01 kind of goes back to that old saying like, any pizza can be a personal pain if you want to try harder. Yeah. 20:06 Yeah, yeah. So 20:09 they would look at that at a pizza that size and say, Man, that's for 10 people. 12 people, you know, and we look at it sometimes they will you get two friends. Yeah. 20:22 All right pizza pursuit come to you in 2021 Yep. All right. So let's let's kind of head and kind of dive in here with with what we have in front of us. So kind of Tell me Tell us a little bit about like what you brought today and variations and why you chose this. 20:34 So we have a couple of hams before us today. And I like to focus on people who use the very breeds that Fred was talking about having raised years ago. Heritage breed hogs because the quality of the meat is higher. The fat is much more present. It's better marbled, there's a better cap like this area here is called and you get a much better balance of flavor and texture. encoding a lot of the things that we talked about with bourbon but only presented in a solid form. I also when I did the book several years ago, I really got to taste a lot of country ham and these specific cures are the one that I ones that I really like to use in presentations. I have found that their meat tastes best with whiskey out of you know many others, partly because of the fat partly because of the complexity that's gained in aging just like bourbon. 21:26 Yeah, I was about to ask like how what what the rigorous process of testing all that was like to be able to figure out exactly what would pair well 21:33 and what no more rigorous and you guys sitting at the bar, just tasting lots of different things and lugging it somewhere in your memory or Notepad. It's just tasting and tasting, tasting and tasting and think it through. It takes it again like bourbon, a little goes a long way you don't need a ton of country hand three ounces, a country hand would give you your full RTA dose of salt, so you don't need much of it. But I've really gotten to where I'm very fond of this first hand nearest us is from the hammer it in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. This is a guy who his name is Bob woods and he's the one that coined my favorite phrase that he used in presentations and he said, Steve, country ham Ain't nothing but hillbilly prosciutto that's what it is. A traditional ham is cured basalt only a country ham is cured with salt and sugar and various other peppers if you like but that's basically the difference 22:26 now these particular pigs you talked about that are worth or they spent a specific diet or they just like you know, in Italy I've seen you know, the swine are fed like a corns only and like massage Do you know? sure that's the procedure department hawks, but they do like to let him get out and free range and did you guys or did you have to keep them in pens or it varied? 22:49 You know, there were some breeds that we would like kind of roam Chester hogs were ones that we would let roam around. You could kind of trust them and they were diggers. They route the hell out They were real readers. 23:02 Very what's rude or mean? Guys? You gotta understand. 23:05 They stay with their nose. I'm gonna say slay 23:07 their noses into the ground to get at grubs and such. Right, 23:09 right. Yeah. So they and they also like to get a nice cool spot to get underneath there. the Berkshires were runners. And so like, if you let them out, there's a pretty good chance that coyote would get it, you know, because they would go out in the woods or something. And they do rocks for really, they were just kind of lazy. They didn't really want to do anything. So even if you open the pin up, they'd be like, yeah, there's a lot out there and I got this water bucket. We're good. 23:35 I love the accent do rocks. Because here in Kentucky me Derek now. Yeah, same spelling, 23:41 just like him. Oh, and and Jim. Oh, well. 23:44 What's fascinating about that is that we would buy hogs from all over the all over the country. You know, because we were competitive. We were showman we were competitive, you know, trying to win jackpot hog shows and stuff. And you go to you we'd go to Illinois, which Illinois had like For a long time, they had like the best genetics for hampshire's and everybody was trying to get a little bit of Hampshire in their in their breeding processes. And they would you would go there you couldn't even understand and they'd say hag, you know, the different enunciations of the breeds? It's fascinating you can it's one of the few kind of light words where you can tell where someone's from, based on how they pronounce breeds. Yeah. And if you look at all they're all most of the of the breeds come from like some kind of European You 24:33 know, when did when you said free range so like, I'm trying to think like a, you know, a cow, like if you have grass fed beef or versus like corn fed corn fed, like much more fatter, like, more flavorful for me anyways, whereas you get grass fed, it's kind of more grainy, kind of earthy kind of flavors, is that do they do the similar things with pigs or? 24:52 Absolutely, I mean, you can you can tell the difference and it just tastes this against some neutral pork sometimes if you cured it, and you do. If we didn't have that diet to begin with, it's not going to influence the meat 25:05 in a thing to that they do with with all animals in, it's very prevalent amongst swine is that they actively add antibiotics because these things are always getting sick. You know, if one of them gets, you know, some kind of flu or some kind of cold, it could wipe out an entire herd or a farrowing house, which has all the piglets in it and you you lose your entire investment so that a lot of these farmers will actively add antibiotics into the feed. And so like when when you hear someone talking about free gain free range or natural or a lot of that means is that they're getting a feed that is not as you know, doped up if you will, and also like they're able to see 25:52 the mo corn thing for you know, hang their hat on that you know, but does it make a difference in the you know, antibiotics versus not any biotics with the meat flavor. 26:01 I've never heard anybody yeah say whether it just always I think it's a no better than I sure 26:07 I think a lot of that also too when you look at this a lot of like ham and sausages is about the processing. So very few people are actually are actually just getting the you know, getting the getting the meat from the hog, you know slicing it and cooking two of them, you know the same way everyone's doing a sauce or they're doing a special cure. It's very it's not like before you can cut you get two steaks, slap it on there, cook it up, and you can tell you know, it's very it's very different with this because much of the art is in the curing and I'm fascinated to me. I'm very fascinated with the art of curing because we go into warehouses and Kentucky, you know, bourbon warehouses like will it and you can see these little, you know, hams just kind of in the rafters. We won't talk about that. 27:00 Alright, we'll see you later. So 27:01 yeah, I want to talk about Yeah, no, I have my opinion on that. 27:05 Well, let's go ahead we'll come back Let's taste I don't know let's let's definitely taste I kind of want you to kind of talk us through, you know what, what we have and like what we're pairing it with. We already talked about what we what we have and then we went on, despite what your brothers 27:16 told you. So what are we left or so let's go with the front one, the one closest to you. This is from the hammer. This is an 18 to 20 month old hand it's called a tin Shuto. So I'm like Fred. I like to hold it up. I like to see the marbling in it. Oh wow, I've never done a efficient Oh wow. 27:33 Can you imagine being do i mean i don't know if I've ever gone to a restaurant and then like I never seen anyone, 27:38 anybody. I don't do that in a restaurant. They bring a light to this and make me a flashlight. 27:42 That smell I mean, I guess like I'm not using 27:44 this particular ham has huge Parmesan cheese note to me, but it also has that very Porky note that barnyard note that I love Parmesan cheese is definitely there on Yeah, for sure. And it's like to lay it right on my tongue. 27:56 I've also I don't think I've ever gone through and like tried to I mean, dude, I'm assuming since you do this and you judge you try to do the palate tasting and trainings like it's the same way you do with a bourbon you're sitting there you're looking at the color you're looking and you're actually smelling it you're nosing it the same way you would do with a whiskey or something like that. 28:12 Believe it or not the way they judge ham contests you don't see the internal part of the ham it's never cut to look at it is in Italy they typically use a horse's cannon bone and they kind of sharpen it down to a point in they stick it into the near the H bone of the ham to see if the thing is properly cured because you know instantly about that aroma that comes out a stick it in the stick through their nose and say yea or nay. And that's one of the criteria for judging here in Kentucky is is that thing properly cured and so you put it in a couple of parts of it the Beavis and Butthead joke in the butt face of the ham. And so they're checking on aroma. They're checking on appearance, how it's trimmed. Typically a country ham is smoked so that The way that is colored is important they don't want they don't want to just super mahogany like Western Kentucky cares will do that sometimes it's not 29:09 a favorable the typical to use mahogany wood for no or they use all different okay oak is really common 29:15 I'm sorry hickory Hickory, Hickory. Okay. So yeah but it's much more superficial than you would think they'll probably palpate it you know smash around some but it's not nearly as intense as you might think. But taste that with the toasted which is on the left you know it's gonna love This is Lauren when she added this guy's like smacking our lips we're gonna do and 29:36 she's always never do that. 29:39 I sound effects 29:40 is if this didn't have enough brown sugar on its own. It's really bumps it up. Andrea Wilson at makers not talk about when we do these pairings we want to compliment, contrast or elevate when we make a pairing. Compliment means they go well together. Contrast means they make each other interesting. Elevate means each makes the other better. And I think this is a 30:05 pairing appearing that elevates so why go with the the toasted on this one? What was the? What was the significance behind that one just 30:13 it's a simple approachable whiskey. I mean, it's it Who doesn't like toasted? It's not my favorite of the mixtures line but I really really like it. And it just pairs well with food. I've paired with a lot of foods and you think you guys can jump in on this with me, but for some reason, their line the mixtures line pairs better than any and I'm thinking that there are two things that are noticeably different from everything else we've done. And that's low barrier entry proof and low proof in the bottle. And for some reason that seems to result in a really good pairing food. I don't know if you've ever thought that through But 30:51 no, I mean, I guess with alcohol overpower. Yeah, I would say that's probably 30:56 but I think everyone's different to you know, some people have you know, burned their power. What's out they need that barrel proof all the time. I wanted to ask you a question about about like the the the the sliced country ham always feels sticker to me then prosciutto and I when I was in I was in Italy and I was at a price Judo place and they had me go up go behind and cut they they let me cut and I used actually did the bone and when I cut they were like you're too thick Get out of here. So it wasn't that thick it was like this but so why why what's the difference between like you know the standards of the thickness? 31:40 What do you get if you mix Seattle craft, Texas heritage and Scottish know how that's to bar spirits to our spirits traces its roots to a ranch in rural Texas run by the founder, Nathan Kaiser his family for six generations. Nathan grew up on the ranch was stories of relatives bootlegging moonshine, and after moving into Seattle, he wanted to keep the family Traditional life any opened to bar spirits in 2012. They're very traditional distillery making everything from scratch and each day starts by milling 1000 pounds of grain. Their entire product lineup consists of only two whiskies, their moonshine, and the only bourbon made in Seattle. Both bottles are being featured in rack house whiskey clubs. Next box. rack house whiskey club is a whiskey the Month Club, and they're on a mission to uncover the best flavors and stories that craft distilleries across the US have to offer racquel ships out to have the feature distilleries finest bottles, along with some cool merchandise in a box delivered to your door every two months. Go to rack house whiskey club.com to check it out and try some two bar for yourself. Use code pursuit for $25 off your first box. 32:49 What's the difference between like, you know the standards of the thickness In contrast, I think it's a great question 32:57 in the United States and certainly in the south. In United States where country ham is most prevalent people don't eat it and people I say eat it raw No not yet rots cured it is chemically and physically transformed into a shelf stable product so it's cured it's not raw it My mother was one of many who just abused ham country ham and would cook it to you probably had it Ryan in Barcelona baseball leather consistency and intensify the salt it was just overwhelming absolutely no fun but when I did this book I can't tell you how many people how many cures did not like it like this. They they thought that this is kind of like it with a little red add gravy or whatever and like this is the best expression Yeah, this is the barrel proof barrel strength expression of their product 33:50 or essentially throw it in a sandwich with tomato and you know let us in pickles. 33:54 Well done like well yeah done like that. I've enjoyed it too. It Nancy nuisance place I think I posted a photo A couple days ago of it but yeah Fred This is the shark eatery cut that really shows to me respects the the product and its natural best and did you cut it with I not like you're talking about like off the the hammer itself I'd still be doing it to try to get these things done you got to be an expert or an expert to do that I can do it but I'm slow I have a commercial slicer in my house. Oh 34:24 nice and then I know what I'm getting at Costco next commercials 34:29 I'll help you find one on the on the US market will be a lot better go where one out with a ham 34:33 I got a question after you cut yes or no because it's cured do you have to do anything to like seal it to preserve it or how do you preserve it after you've already cut into it? 34:42 Well, before we started you probably saw me taking it out of those vacuum packages that just do that but 34:47 oh you and I'm talking about the actual whole ham. What do you do with that after? 34:52 I like to break it down into as large sections of muscle as I can both to make it easier to slice But to do is you say get it into a vacuum package and and seal it that way so that the more muscle integrity you have the better it's going to be preserved I can keep them in a refrigerator or a freezer for a long long period of time and they're fine 35:13 What size do these typically come in when say you want to go buy like a hammer 35:17 so a country ham depending on the maker or the cure, I should say starts out at about 20 to 23 pounds green weight is Joe recall that to green that seems to be industry and industry time. And what's that? What's that mean though? It means fresh. Yeah, fresh 35:35 jiggling way so it's basically like trying to buy like an eight ounce filet or an eight ounce steak and then you cook it and then it 35:40 but that's been that's probably been dry aged for a little while so that this this thing was only King you know, 48 hours ago. 35:46 All right then. So remember my role and stray from butter dogs. It was just it was raising them. Put them on a truck and say goodbye. Give me the check. Yeah, once they were done, I was don't name them. I did name a couple of 35:59 yeah But But yeah, they'll they'll shrink to about if they start out at 22. There'll be ready it, you know, at about a year at 17 pounds so they lose. That's their Angel share, you know them losing that moisture to intensify the flavors that are inside the ham and to trigger I'm trying to think of the garden it's an enzymatic reaction that that really makes the meat shelf stable. All that works together and it works together because the place we live just like bourbon is so good here because of our climate. The same thing happens to hams that you know that once you hang them outside and let them be subject to the weather. It's amazing. Now there's not that many places in the world that you can do this. 36:44 Well I've never I've always wanted to get into like curing my own ham or something like that. Because I know a few people and a few different bourbon groups and that's like one of their kind of like side projects or side hobbies assisting 36:55 at 89 guy yeah, he's got some good ones going 36:58 yeah. So with the One 37:00 of those in my refrigerator home All right, 37:02 perfect. So I mean, so talk, I mean, because I don't even know like, even the process of how you would even start doing that, hey, you'd have to require the leg, but be like, what, what's that? What's the next step in that process? 37:13 It's it's pretty crude, frankly, it's, you trim the trim away certain parts of the hand to make it look good. And you rub the hell out of it with carrying salt. You know, I mean, you're sticking in every little nook and cranny because you want to get that salt in there to penetrate to the bone and push the way with and push the water out essentially. As cures would say it's a race to the bone if if, if bacteria gets to the bone of the hand first, you've lost your ham if if salt gets there first you've got a cured ham. And what it does, basically is created by getting the water out it starves the bacteria, that's what they need to thrive. And that's all the salt does is pushes it out. And of course flavors it very deal 37:58 to I just did the second premise. I'm sorry I jumped ahead 38:01 I couldn't I did it too oh my god it's perfect oh my god i mean it was it was funny like going into this you know I have a I have a little bit of I don't want to say a criticism but I have a little bit of that that kind of I hold back a little bit be like oh can you really pair like ham and bourbon together holy shit yeah you can 38:20 say that's so fun about this is to see that happen and people you know the scales fall from their eyes they go really 38:27 you can do this well I mean it's in I think it kind of just gives you a little bit more you know a benefit to hear to say like okay, you were able to show me like for me to sit there and say like, I don't even know where I would go and find a different kinds of handy and start experimenting with around here. But if I did, and I came down here my basement I started pulling, you know, Jefferson's reserve, I started pulling Booker's I pulled you know, whatever, you name it across the line and tried to figure out like, how did these pair I don't really know if I'd be able to do that. So I guess when you're doing this, what are some of those new wants his or flavors in a ham or a bourbon that you're trying to pair with a particular Wang Kenny. I wish I could French it up and give you some fascinating answer. But it is mostly trial and error. But But the key 39:14 attribute that I want from the ham to actually from a country ham is fat content to coat the palette and smoke a little bit of smoke in there. Salt is everywhere it doesn't matter the to AI know how to cut the the hand correctly so choose correctly. So really it's it's fat. And one of the virtues of a whiskey that pairs well is that it cleanses the palate. Yeah, and and this this so what we tasted here just a second ago that Fred and Kenny cheated on wisely. was a 24 month old Broadbent country ham. Yeah, broadband done from a Berkshire hog. Yeah, Burke charade. Yeah. And it's just as there's no app That's it. This is one the the the company's won the Kentucky State Fair country ham championship 18 times out of 53 or so. Transcribed by https://otter.ai

The Kentucky Distillers’ Association does more for bourbon in the US than just Kentucky alone. Eric Gregory, the President of the KDA, has been on both sides of the government trying to put the interests of the distillers and consumers first. We talk about his experience with government lobbying and how he revived the organization. What is the future of bourbon? Are distribution laws changing, what will happen with tariffs, and how will the Bourbon Trail maintain growth? Show Partners: You can now buy Barrell Craft Spirits products online and have them shipped right to your door. Visit BarrellBourbon.com and click Buy Now. Receive $25 off your first order at RackHouse Whiskey Club with code "Pursuit". Visit RackhouseWhiskeyClub.com. Show Notes: This week’s Above the Char with Fred Minnick talks about up and coming writers. Tell us about your background. What was it like at the KDA when you first got this job? What was your first lobbying experience at the KDA? Any good horse racing tips? How do you see bourbon growing? What do you think of the tariffs? Tell us about the lobbying process. How do you keep it bipartisan? When you hear rumblings of new taxes what do you all do? Tell us about the steps you have taken from the promotional side of the Kentucky Bourbon Trail and the Kentucky Bourbon Affair? How many trail visitors did you have the first year? Talk about partnerships. What are some of the weirdest requests you've gotten from people? Are there other states that look to your organization for guidance? What is your position on the secondary market? Why do so many people oppose shipping alcohol? What do you think about bourbon tourism growth in Bardstown vs. Louisville? 0:00 How many visitors Did you have at that time? 0:01 The first year we did the passport in 2007. We had 189 people complete the Kentucky bourbon trail 0:10 and send them a pin. 0:23 Hey, it's Episode 250. Another big number mark and we're glad you're still here with us. And well, it's not much has really been going on because of COVID-19. It's putting a stop on pretty much everything except delivery services. And that's where we start this week's news alcohol delivery app drizzly says it has seen sales explode in the last week of March climbing 537% above the company's expectations. What's more is that 42% of those orders came in from new accounts. The company says that new buyers on the platform have jumped 900% year over year. Same goes for minibar, sales are up 143% new buyer is up 547% and quarters are up 100% with an average order size up 22%. If you haven't had the chance yet, go listen to our podcast back on episode 248 when we had drizzly CEO and founder Corey rellis on the show to talk about his business. A recent study by economics at john Dunham and Associates estimates that America's wine and spirit wholesalers can expect to lose up to $921.4 million in uncollectible or difficult to collect receivables, due to on premise accounts such as restaurants, bars and clubs that have been impacted by the shelter in place environment, and Massachusetts craft distillers are urging their governor to allow permission to deliver spirits. The Massachusetts distillers Alliance asked Massachusetts officials to take steps similar to those made in a handful of other states, such as California, New York. Washington, Kentucky and Virginia to eight independent distillers that are struggling during the current crisis. In a quote by the Alliance's board, they wrote we pay over two and a half times the rate of excise tax per proof gallon paid by brewers. Yet during these challenging times greater latitude is being extended to restaurants, breweries and wineries. While our businesses remain bound by the rules and laws that put us at great financial risk. We have a significant struggle ahead for some good news, and you all are the first to hear it because we are putting on a free online bourbon conference called whiskey from home happening on May 2 2020. Starting at 12 o'clock pm eastern This event will be streamed live through multiple properties with speakers from the entire castle the roundtable but also Peggy knows Stevens. It's bourbon night, the bourbon review, dad's drinking bourbon and more will have live seminars, panels, virtual tastings. The list goes on or incorrect credibly excited to bring more of this great content to you all. And if you can, please share it. Spread the word. Let your bourbon friends know, let your bourbon societies know let your friends that aren't into bourbon and want to get into bourbon know about it and family as well. This is a full five and a half hour jam packed event that will be streamed live, and you will get the chance to network with other people in real time and ask questions through chat. Go to whiskey from home comm and register today for your free ticket. Now for today's podcast, I was super excited to interview our guests. The Kentucky distillers Association does more for bourbon in the US than just Kentucky alone. Eric Gregory, the president of the KDA has been on both sides of the government trying to put the interest of the distillers and the consumers First, we talked about his experience with government lobbying and how it led him to reviving an organization that was struggling. He's maneuvered the KDA into a model that other states can follow. So we discuss what the future of bourbon looks like. Where the laws changing with the regulation of distribution? What's gonna happen with the tariffs and how will the bourbon trail maintain its current pace of growth? All right now Don't forget it. Whiskey from home.com go register now to get your free ticket. I also talked to Joe from barrel bourbon this week and he has a special message he wants me to share that will lift your spirits. You can now buy barrel craft spirits products and have them shipped right to your door. Just visit barrel bourbon.com from the comfort of your home and click Buy now. Alright, here's Fred MiniK with above the char 4:37 I'm Fred MiniK. And this is above the char. This week's idea comes from Kyle man or at bourbon numbers on Twitter. He writes nothing better than expanding my whiskey perspective. Are there any up and coming writers in bourbon that deserve the above the char spotlight? Or are there any underrated sites we should add to our family favorites. Thanks. Listen, there's nothing I like more than promoting good writing and a perspective that is different than mine. Listen, I am a big, big fan of the cocktail walk. Now I as you know, I am a big rum head. So I would I would get you to start with the cocktail wonk. That's Matt Patrick. He actually writes for me at bourbon plus, he writes the vintage column and that is a writer, you need to check out he wrote the book, The Tiki minimalist. So that is a great book. He's a great guy. And if you're wanting to learn more about another spirit, rum is the one I would recommend going to of course, I wrote a book called rum curious and Matt edited that for me. So I'm a big fan of Matt and everything that he does for the rum community. After that, I would say if you're not already following him, whiskey jug is a young up and coming writer. He's been at the game for Little bit of Joshua Peters is a. He reminds me a lot of myself about 10 years ago when I was out there kind of investigating and trying to break news in the whiskey circuit. he's a he's a very good, he's a he's a very good no bullshit kind of writer. So I'm a big fan of what Joshua Peters is doing. I think he's got he's got a bright future ahead of him. And I also wanted to ask you to go and check out the classics, the writers who are no longer with us. Gary Reagan wrote the book of bourbon, probably one of the one of my heroes in the, in the bourbon world. He because he kind of came at bourbon in a very similar fashion, as I did, but he was a bit before his time, and he broke into like, he broke away from bourbon a little bit and made his own bitters and kind of got a little bit more into the cocktail movement. And then you have the greatest whiskey writer of all time, in my opinion. Michael Jackson. Michael Jackson, the guy with the glove and the jacket and the weird stuff, I'm talking about Michael Jackson, the beer, the beer critic and whiskey writer. His words just flew off the page. And we're just so beautiful. So check those writers out. I'm a big fan of all of them. And I think they can all add to your perspective. But at the end of the day, it's about whiskey is about an experience for you. While the writers, the bloggers, THE podcasts, were all about bringing the information. We're all about trying to explore this community with you. At the end of the day, it's about you, and what's in your glass what you like, and what conversation Do you like to have around whiskey? So thank you for the question, Kyle man or at bourbon numbers on Twitter. Now that came in on April 4, when I asked people to send me their ideas for above the char. I love getting a good idea. So hit me up on Twitter. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or go to Fred medic comm and send me your idea. But that's this week's above the char until next week. Cheers. 8:15 Welcome back to an episode of bourbon pursuit the official podcast of bourbon. Kinney and Fred on the road today down in Frankfort. The you know, it's always funny. There's always a good joke that says How do you pronounce the capital of Kentucky? Is it Louisville or Lewisville? And they're like, Nope, it's Frankfort. 8:30 Yeah. You know, hopefully our guest today is part of a campaign to move it to Louisville, you know, 8:35 oh, well, I mean, they just got this new place that we're sitting and that is true. 8:38 That is true. Well, so this is where at the headquarters of the Kentucky distillers Association. And you know, 15 years ago, these guys could not get a meeting with a lot of the legislators. Now one of the first calls a new governor makes is to the KDA because bourbon is political capital and I believe that the Kentucky distillers association is the most powerful lobby in Kentucky. And that was confirmed to me by the Senate Majority Leader, David Thayer. I asked him, I was like, hey, how powerful is the KDA? They're like, and there's really not anyone more powerful right now. I mean, 9:15 is it basically coming from all the taxes from? Well, like it's fun and back in the mistake, let's take a look at what bourbon has 9:21 done for the state. It's really one of the only good conversations that people can have when they're talking about Kentucky you got the derby but the horse industry has been falling for for a while. I mean, it's that's a signature industry and it's it's been hurting. Yeah, getting the gambling, you know, they're trying to bring it in, but Ryan keeps getting denied. And the coal industry is turned to us. Sadly, I mean, it's not. If you look at Eastern Kentucky, it's hurting. And bourbon is the one thing that's kind of carrying the state forward. And one of the reasons why is because of the man we have sitting here and what the KDA has done for the last 10 years. In 2009 you know, when there was a new sales tax Taxes coming in. They protested. And they poured whiskey on the state capitol steps in the way of their protests. And they've been every single year, they have been peeling away ridiculous laws county by county and in the state and in town by town. And that's why we're able to like have a sip of bourbon while you visit a distillery a mean people don't realize that it wasn't that long ago that we didn't have tours, these guys created the Kentucky bourbon trail. So that is why everybody who's listening to this should be thankful that we have someone like this who has their interests at heart fighting for them in the bourbon industry. 10:44 In Frankfort. Yeah, there's a there's a lot to go over today. And with all that, I mean, taxes, tariffs, you name it. So we'll we'll get to a little bit of that. But you know, we'll first introduce our guests. So today on the show, we have Eric Gregory Eric is the president of the Kentucky distillers Association better known as the KDA. So Eric, welcome to the show. 11:00 Well, thank you, you, you guys are making me blush here. So thank you for the kind words. And I've got to say, we obviously couldn't do this without strong support from our membership. So let me lead off with that we appreciate and value all of our members. And they say guess before 11:15 we before we kind of dive into the KDA in the membership and really what the key days mission is like, let's kind of talk about you real quick. Like, where's where's your background? Where'd you come from? Did you I mean, were you part of, you know, moonshine and you said you know what, I'm gonna go ahead and make this legal and get off 11:31 get into business. I this I liked where you were moonshiners? 11:33 No, no, no, no, I grew up in the cornfields of Western Kentucky. My parents ran a grocery store. My dad was a huge Maker's Mark fan and my mom like ofits and in the 1970s I mean, I could still you know, see in my mind's eye my dad coming home every day from work, boring him little makers and in a glass with one cue, my mom Love ofits and some sprite or some ginger ale and then go on the back porch and sit and that was their time and they talk about their day and have a drink. And so it was just always surveillant in and in our household. So no, really just, I'm the luckiest sob in the world. I started my career many people know as a reporter, with the Lexington Herald Leader newspaper, spent eight or nine years there, immigrated to Hawaii for a couple of years and worked at the Honolulu advertiser. Oh my God, why would you come back here that everybody asked me, you know, how crazy are you? So have you ever lived in Hawaii? It's a great place to visit but it's really really expensive. And it's pretty far away from family. And, you know, once you get over there and you realize that everything that you love deer in the world, to me was in Kentucky and not only my family, my wife's family, but I'm a huge Cincinnati Reds fan. I love Keeneland I love the horses. I love Berman. I love UK basketball and they just want a championship without me and Kentucky and things and the tug of home really starts kind of, you know, getting pretty strong. So since those 13:14 those you'd be late night tip offs, right, I mean, if you're sitting now I 13:18 will do a six hour time difference. I'm sitting there having lunch, you know, at the local bar. And in watching the games that was kind of kind of crazy. But move back to Kentucky work for the paper again for a couple of years, went into political consulting. After that one of my jobs in the newspaper was covering the state legislature and back then the limit every two years. For 60 days. A happy channel used to say that he wished the legislature met every 60 years for two days instead of every two to two years for 60 days. So I covered them and I kind of had the political bug a little bit so when political consulting and public relations running campaigns in Kentucky, Indiana and Tennessee That led to one of my clients was the electric power cooperatives and doing lobbying and things for them and they ended up hiring me as their GM lovers manager. So I spent almost eight years working here in Frankfurt is their contract lobbyist, and, and September of 2007, I got a call from one of my best friends. He said, your dream job just opened up. And I said, What's that? He said, the president of the Kentucky distillers Association, he said they want somebody with a media background check. They want somebody with public affairs, government affairs background check. And they want somebody with lobbying experience to check and I love their product. So check that check. But in a resume, three and a half month interview process, Oh, wow. And they they offered me the job on December 7. And it's funny because they asked me in my last interview, how long do you think you'd stay at KDA Acid Are you kidding me This is like the best job in the Commonwealth outside of UK basketball coach you know where President a church on downs or something like that you I said I'm here as long as you'll have me You can drag my cold dead people body out of that chair someday but but we haven't slowed down since it since taking over it is been an amazing run so far 15:18 I kind of want to kind of want to give a little bit of a historical perspective here about the KDA. At this juncture Go for it. It was not really an organization that was known for doing anything or getting anything done. And no offense to interior history, but they didn't do anything. You know, other than like some some efforts in the 1800s and the 1950s. They were mostly just kind of a drinking club of the distillers getting together and they just, they just let things be dictated to them. And I'm curious because everything changed when Eric took office. And you know, Bill Samuels, Jr, who's the longtime Maker's Mark Chairman, has told me many, many, many times is that A lot of the growth of bourbon is because of this man and his leadership for the KDA. So I'm curious, you get the job, what are those first 40 days? Like, what are you assessing? And how are you? What are you looking at? 16:13 Well, it's funny, because the job description in those conversations, they were saying things like, you know, we'd like you to, you know, can you promote this bourbon trail thing we've got going on and, and I went into one of the the meetings and the interviews, and the New York Times had just done a front page travel section feature on the Kentucky bourbon trail, and actually held it up at the at the interview and said, What did y'all do to get this? And they literally said, Well, I don't know a reporter just showed up one day and like, you're getting front page travel sections in the New York Times without drying. You know, you don't know what you've got here. This is amazing. So, yeah, that first 40 days was really transitioning. My predecessor, a great man senator, former state senator Daniel out of Springfield have I don't think is enough credit back in the 70s and 80s when he was a state senator, he really worked hard to keep the ad valorem barrel tax issue from just exploding and driving a lot of distillers and those aging warehouses that Sandy out of Kentucky. And really, you know, he was running the KDA out of his law office in Springfield. And most people don't know that Katie went part time in the 1980s Oh wow. Because bourbon you know, had taken it on the chin and most people had written it off as Matt Shapiro said to the great liquor store in this guy and there was not much you're right for the KDA to do so. He You know, he but Ed for saw the the bourbon revolution coming and the Kentucky bourbon trail picking up speed and said you need a full time staff again. And so that's that's where I came in. So yeah, that first 31st 3040 days was really quite frankly kind of relaunching the association from scratch. We had to find an office in in Frankfort. We moved our operations here from here was running it out to get him his law office in Springfield, Washington County, find an office. After three or four months, I was allowed to hire an executive assistant and just got thrown into a legislative session, you know, with no idea. We need to come up with priorities. And you know, just really, like you said, start to get the KDA build an image bank among the legislators that we're here and we're lobbying and we're not asleep at the wheel anymore, 18:28 quite frankly. Can you remember that that first lobbying experience you did for the KDA? 18:33 Oh, yeah. They started talking about tax raising taxes in 2008. And myself and the wholesalers Association, and the retailers all went in and started talking to, to the legislators because they had just raised our taxes in 2005, wholesale taxes went from 9% to 11%. So we went in and say, Look, as you just, you know, raise our taxes a couple years ago. You're Gonna do it again and we fought it back that year and 2008 but then it came, you know crashing down upon us is very mentioned in 2009. But, again, I was doing all this I'm a bourbon geek. First of all, I'm a longtime bourbon geek. I'm one of the people that stood in line and you know, outside of liquor barn waiting for the different wax colored bottles and whenever bill Samuels I was one I am one of the first before I took this job, I was one of the first bourbon ambassadors at Maker's Mark. I worked my way through college at a liquor store right before Keeneland All right, what bottles were you stashing away back? at you know, we hidden makers gold that was really about the height of bourbon back then, but I remember vividly when we got the first bottles of Blanton's in the liquor store, and they were $35 and we were like Who the hell in their right minds gonna pay $35 for about a bourbon you get makers for 10 over here, right you know and Because we were the last liquor store before Keeneland in the airport, Toyota had just opened up and all the Japanese executives would stop at our liquor store and stock up on bourbon that before they got on the plane to take back home, and they fell in love with blends, and they love the bottle and the horse on top of the bottle. And so every Friday night, when they were making their rounds back to the airport to go home, there was a line of camrys waiting at the draft through and I knew I had to have cases in cases of Blanton's there and I would just go out and load them in the back of the car and they hand me over the cash and go so is more and more of the small batch really the bean products, the small batch selections, the you know the the knobs and things like that as those started rolling out. I had to really become more knowledgeable about what was coming out for our customers at the time. And so my friends all kind of, you know, kidding me about them being the bourbon geek and in teaching about that. So that's awesome. It really 20:58 does run through your veins. 21:00 You know and again and I got a lot of great tips track tips you know from the trackers coming in I think between that and you know that kind of kept me in school paid for for 21:12 me people can say that they made their way through college just like having a good few bets here and there right? 21:18 Especially my bets I guess what's your percentage on on betting? 21:23 I do. I don't do it anymore. You know when you've got young children Fred so once you your children start growing up and I've got you know, I'm putting my first into college later this year and then my son who is getting ready to turn 16 I got to get a car for him and everything else. My sister works at Keeneland and so you know there every now and then I'll get her to place a bet for me, but, boy, my bidding has gone down exponentially is a head start. 21:55 And he said a more attention and he's like winning by that by that. 21:58 Yeah, what's the best bet is Keep your money in your pocket, right? Yeah, 22:00 exactly as I'd say, if you do have a good horse racing tip, what would it be? Oh, wow, you are gonna go bet. 22:08 You know, I'd probably have to have a form with me, you know, to answer that question. Again, I really used to study that form. And there was a group of us former reporters who are now lobbyists and in everything up here who would hit kealan all the time. So I'm big on Kentucky born and bred, you know, I do get a lot of great tips from from my sister who sees them come through as yearlings, you know, in the Keeneland sales and stuff like that. But mainly, I look at bloodlines, you know, a when a family coming down the form the first thing I'll do is start circling but bloodline so that know that that'll be a good, you know, and then you get to look at, you know, how long it is. And if they're closer. I mean, there's just, I don't know, 22:54 that's a that's a good one. It's nice. 22:56 The Kentucky way, right. Yeah. 22:58 My dad's tip, he said Always circle, the ones that were the owner and the trainer are the same person because he was like they put a little bit more effort into that that horse. Right. That's a good point. That's, that's that's his little tip. But yeah, I like to go ahead and try to run with it again, you're still gambling at the end of the day. So let's go ahead and kind of want to shift gears a little bit and kind of talk about the growth of bourbon and kind of really, where have you seen it? And kind of, you know, you've been a pretty instrumental part of this. And so a few months ago, there was a press release that came out about now that there are more barrels of spirits aging Kentucky than there are people, twice as many, twice as many barrels twice as many. You're right, twice as many. Yeah. So kind of talk about like, Where, where do you kind of see the evolution of this going? And like, do we expect three x four x now coming here in the next two, three years? 23:44 A short answer? Yes. I'm typically pretty optimistic about that. I guess the biggest challenge that we faced are the tariffs, the retaliatory tariffs that are put on us. Because you know, everybody asks y'all, you know, what's feeling The bourbon revolutionary thing and we all know, you know, the rise, the cocktail culture, the madman effect. I think bourbon tourism has been has played a big part of that maybe a bigger part and most people understand the fact that we're just putting out some of the best juice that the Commonwealth has ever delivered, again is good. But really the opening of the global markets to me has been one of the if not the driving factor in the growth of Kentucky bourbon, because the I don't think it's any coincidence that back in the mid 1990s, when we had NAFTA and the EU treaties, that's when you start to see the spike in production, and the you know, the growing global thirst, but because we're fine, we were finally on a level playing field with our friends in the scotch industry who've had a 600 year head start on us. So, yes, you know, we have seen bourbon growth exponentially in the past five years. We're currently in the middle of a $2.3 billion capital investment spree. And most of that is Pre production for that, for that global market. We've you know, especially to the EU, you know, in the past three to four years, you're looking at 20 to 30%, even I think two years ago was 43% growth every single year to the EU market. And so that's when we got the call 18 months ago that the tariffs were starting to be used as pawns in a trade war that none of us saw coming. My first reaction was damn we made it we're being used as pawns in a trade war, then that was that was oh my god. Now we're really, you know, what are we going to do now? I really do believe that. You're going to continue to see growth and a lot of people ask us after that press release came out, you know, because not only do we have more than 9 million barrels aging right now in Kentucky. We filled 2 million barrels for the first time in the modern era of Kentucky bourbon in 52 years. And you know, we'll we thought the tariffs are hurting wires. Are you feeling that many barrels and begin the blessing and the curse of Kentucky bourbon is you can't make it overnight. So administration's change, you know, you're looking six, eight years out, hopefully this issue would be settled. But, you know, if the EU market which is almost half of all of Kentucky's whiskey exports, if that continues to escalate, as it has with the new tariffs on scotch whiskey, then you know, to me, that's a game changer. You know, it's, it's something that could really have long term effects if we don't get this resolved pretty soon. 26:35 And you're you're pretty knowledgeable person on this particular subject. And there is people that talk about this all the time. But when it talks about tariffs, they talk about exports, and they have this very narrow minded view and they're like, that's fine. More bourbon here in America. kind of tell people maybe they I don't believe that's right, but kind of give your kind of explanation rationale on that. 26:57 Yeah, well 27:00 Well tariffs or taxes First of all, and in we'd like to say there are no winners in a trade war. You know, there's no really good way out of this because what most people don't understand is when bourbon took a nosedive most of the bigger distilleries diversify their portfolio so they own a scotch whiskey distillery or an Irish Whiskey distillery, a Canadian whiskey distillery. Tequila distillery. And so that's when you saw the tariffs, you know, enacted back, you know, it wasn't just you. It was Canada and Mexico, and other places as well. A company like brown Forman or Jim Beam that owns multiple distilleries across the world. They're not only taking a hit on the retaliatory tariffs on Kentucky bourbon. They're also taking a hit now on scotch whiskey and Canadian whiskey and Irish whiskey and things like that. 27:50 So they're getting both ends of it. Yeah, 27:52 you know, and so they're taking five punches through the gut right away. So you know, that's not good from an industry standpoint because You're, you know, that that for destroy a purely business standpoint, it's hurting business, then we have, as an industry have done so much over the last generation to convert scotch drinkers, you know, mainly from a global community over to bourbon drinkers. And that's a lot of investment in that that most people don't understand. And that market helps us, you know, grow here in Kentucky and produce more alcohol. So if you're a scotch drinker, if you're a newly converted scotch drinker, to bourbon and you go into your favorite watering hole now and you see that bourbon is 25%, higher in price, do you go back to what you were drinking, and now we've lost you, potentially for a generation, that that's not good. Then you've got the situation where, if you're a company, you try to absorb that 25% or as much of it as possible as you can Which means less jobs and investment here in Kentucky, which again, hurts the Commonwealth. or going to your point out, you know, hey, I've just invested $50 million and doubled my production and I've got these stills do I keep them running? Well, okay, you do that. And suddenly, in six years, there's a glut of spirits on the market, that's gonna cause a price war, which probably the first casualty is gonna be the craft spirits market, it's going to put people out of business. And that's not good from a global spirit spirits industry, as well. So we don't like door number one, door number two or door number three on all those and that's why we've been lobbying awful hard to get this resolved as quick as possible. 29:47 So talk to me a little bit through about what your processes when you're lobbying against efforts like this, 29:53 bang the drum as loudly as possible. We've met with pretty much anybody who would listen to us And I've got to give a hand to our partners at the Scotch whisky association that still spirits counts the United States the American craft spirits Association, the American just just distilled spirits Association I mean this affects all of us. So one of the things that we did in Fred was actually there a couple years ago we brought the world whisky community to Lowell and had a W nine some of their Nanos so we called the W nine and talked about this you know, what are we all going to do about this because it affects everybody and we met for two days and eventually put out a resolution calling upon the world's leaders to get together and resolve this quickly before the long term consequences you know, send them became real and even planted an oak tree right in front of the Frazier there and got a lot of press and we got a lot of phone calls about it and and we all kind of went back to our corners and, and did what we we've continued to do is is just talk to us. Every Congress person, you name it. Congressman Andy Barr in Kentucky was having a fundraiser with Vice President Pence flying in. He managed to get our major companies in a meeting with Vice President Pence who from Indiana knows exactly what bourbon means to Kentucky. And he took that message back to President Trump. The governor here in Kentucky had Vice President Pence in last year during the derby did the same thing for us to help us. We've got you know, we're on speed dial with Senator McConnell's office checking in consistently with them on what more they can do. We've had meetings recently with commerce, cabinet, finance, cabinet trade, you know, Senator Grassley, his office, all these people just really explained to them how devastating these consequences could be if this goes on much longer. And the answer to them is all you know, we understand, but these decisions are being made itself high levels. That's where the frustration comes in. And, you know, we know that the US does have trade issues with countries and we get that. And we know that the steel and aluminum thing is a real issue because here in Kentucky, we have great steel and aluminum plants because of our historical low energy rates. So, you know, we're not pointing fingers at anybody, we're just, you know, going up and just trying to tell our story on you know, what this could mean to the industry. You know, because it's like, again, it's like just putting the brakes on a freight train, which is trying to sell bourbon at the end of the day, or at least 32:38 get and I want to remind, I want to remind people to who are listening, and we're never we're never really going to get a lot of backlash on this. People are gonna think all this is political. You know, you're you're you're bashing Trump and what he's trying to do. I want to remind people that this is not political. This is this is an industry who speaks to both sides. Absolutely. And talk bipartisan Talk Talk to us about about that about how you how you have to kind of keep your personal politics out of it and how you have to work with both sides. What's that like? 33:11 Well, you know, let me start from a state point here. You alcohol bills in Kentucky are incredibly hard to pass no matter what the subject is. I mean, we've even had people up here that will vote against our social responsibility efforts. Just because the word alcohol it's in the title of the bill. So we have to have Democrats and Republicans supporting alcohol measures or they just won't pass. So yes, we are constantly we say we support our friends and we have friends on both sides of the aisle. And the great thing about our Kentucky General Assembly is they understand that because they know that some of their members because of their constituencies and coming from drag counties just cannot support alcohol yet but without like how he said yeah, 33:54 yeah, 33:56 yeah, TBD drywall wedge, the you know, the The great thing about one of the smartest things that the KDA did, you know, years ago back in 2010, was invite the craft distilleries are coming into Kentucky into the Association. We change our bylaws, because not only is it good for them and our our legacy distilleries have been tremendous mentors to them, but it also spread our political footprint across the state now in 32 counties. And so we've had legislators now who never voted wet, who vote wet because they understand the the economic impact and the tourism impact, especially of that craft distillery in their district. So that's really helped. But we know you look at you know, we have a political action committee, we raise money for that. You look at our donations, they're almost evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, because we have to have support on both sides of the aisle. So we're very fortunate in Kentucky. Yes, we have Senator McConnell, who can be a lightning rod, obviously, if you're, you know, in politics, but we're lucky that we have his leadership up there because he has the President's ear and he is always, you know, carrying our agenda. That's why we have given him awards in the past. We're very fortunate to have john Yarmuth out of level now chairing Ways and Means and so met with him recently and, and he gets it because congressman Yarmuth is a huge rabid fan, and especially in local bourbon city right now, you know, and all the tremendous growth there he sees the tourism impact in the economic impact on a daily basis. Having him in the house carrying that message for us is equally as important. And, you know, he and Congressman Brett Guthrie started the bourbon caucus in DC which which is growing and as more and more states you know, produce America's only native spirit. So we have to be bipartisan and it's funny because as presently Katie, you know, you have to be kind of like a chameleon on my Republican friends think I'm a democrat and I'm a democratic friends think I'm a Republican. And I say well, I must be doing something right. Y'all don't know what I 35:55 guess. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you also have to be careful to with your membership of when you go to bar what you pick? 36:01 I do. And it's funny, obviously, you know, when people ask me, what's your favorite bourbon Kentucky bourbon is always my answer. But in it, what I usually try to do one of two things I'll usually try to drink from the county I'm in. right then. I also tend to favor our chairman or Chairwoman right now, at the time if you know this year is the heaven Hill, year to chair the KDA. And our great friend Jessica pentagrams. For heaven Hill, general counsel is is the new Chairwoman, so you'll probably tend to see me drink more heaven Hill products this year. But then there are some bars I go to and you know this Eric, what do you want and just surprised me, you know, just just mix me a good old fashioned then and I'll go from there. 36:48 Yeah, the his memberships got spies on him. 36:51 Yeah. 36:54 They have to though. Yeah, that's right. 36:55 And so I guess one of the other things I want to talk about a part of the lobbying effort here is, you know, There has to be it's got to be frustrating because we're This is a syntax basically at the end of the day right like it's alcohol and I would imagine that government just look at it like it's an easy target right an easy target attacks. When you won't like your rumblings of anything like is it like Alright, here we go like put the bat signal in the everybody get together. We're going to fly there. We're going to squash this before it ever blows up. 37:22 Well, first of all, yes. That's when you look at the government affairs strategies for your strategy number one is always hold the line on taxes. Everything else is one a one B. And Fred, highlighted our 2009 bourbon Tea Party in which we poured bourbon on the Capitol steps. And if you go to my office on top of the cabinet, I have the empty bottles in there that serve as a daily reminder for me and never forget that you know, yes, right now they're your friend but in thirst or for revenue. The first place they usually look is cigarettes or alcohol or one of the what they We think of as sin industries. But I think we've done a good job, you know, challenge changing the conversation in the culture in Frankfurt, especially from sin to signature. And that 2009 bill was probably the best wake up call for the industry and the association. That is one of the best things that ever happened to us. I mean, I can tell you the dates It was announced, if it's ingrained in my memory is announced on February 6, they pass it on Friday, February 13. That took effect on April Fool's Day. I mean, you couldn't have written a better script for how all this went down. But you had the bourbon industry and not just bourbon the alcohol industry in general because you had the beer truck circling the Capitol. You know, we galvanized they in you, we fought the governor, the Senate president and the Speaker of the House on an issue and came within one vote of killing that in one week. And it brought us together more, more and quicker than anything could have. So it's actually a blessing in disguise. For us, because we held an emergency meeting after that, February 26. See, these are how important these dates were to me and the history. And one of our board members looked at the rest of the board and said, Are we really a signature industry? Or is that a self portrait? And you could see everybody just kind of living, they physically took a step back from the table and went, you're right. Are we really a sanction? We'd like to think we're a signature in se, but are we? And so they said, what do we need to do? And so we said, All right, we need to have an economic impact study that shows what our impact is to the Commonwealth, we need to start talking about bourbon not just as a drink, but as part of the culture and the economy and tourism and things like that. And so once we started doing that, and we did, we came up with the first ever economic impact study and it is such a tool for the industry, you know, to showcase what we mean to Kentucky that we do it every two years now. And it's a no brainer. We just know we do it every two years. To update and so that gives us also the ability to forecast right what jobs are going to do what we think is going to be coming in there and down the line. But once we started talking about bourbon as economic development and tourism in and investment in jobs, it really changed the focus here in Frankfort, that we weren't a sin industry more as as Fred said earlier, because I remember sitting in a meeting in 2010 with Bill Samuels and and senate president or Senator Robert Stivers, who's now senate president and him looking as the saying you are not a signature industry. You're an image industry, but you are not a signature industry. Coal is a signature industry because he's from the coal fields of Eastern Kentucky. And now to hear him stand up and say you may be the only signature industry left in the state because coal is is dying tobacco is dead. You know, horse racing definitely has its challenges. That's, that's been, you know, a 180 turnaround from where we were 10 years ago. But it's a lot of it's been a lot of hard work, educating legislators. And, you know, in all, like all the other tools that a trade association uses, like political action committees and things like that, to make sure that they know that we appreciate their support and changing these laws. Transcribed by https://otter.ai