Podcast appearances and mentions of wade woodard

The Professor, Matt Lozy, and Travis Pennick host a conversation with Wade Woodard, lay bourbon historian, legal guru, humorist, and publisher of http://www.tater-talk.com.  We discuss the evolution of th bourbon craze and tatering. Listen, like, review, and share! Send show ideas or ask to be a guest or guest host to host@thepeoplesproof.com, and join the Facebook Page at tinyurl.com/ThePeoplesProofFB!  

Wade was nice enough to have me over to share a pour and just talk a little about bourbon. Great conversation while we share a few pours and Wade shares some good stuff!

The online community is one of the biggest forces behind bourbon growth. This is where people go to learn more, ask questions, make connections, and find new and interesting bourbons to try. Reddit has been a platform for those conversations for a long long time. The popularity of the /r/bourbon subreddit has now eclipsed over 109,000 members and it’s continually growing. We sit down with T8ke, one of the moderators of the /r/bourbon subreddit, to get a glimpse into a moderator's daily life. We look into the type of content that gets upvotes, how the AMAs work, and how being anonymous plays a role vs Facebook where it’s your actual name and profile. Join the sub https://www.reddit.com/r/bourbon/. Show Partners: Barrell Craft Spirits has won a few medals at some of the most prestigious spirits competitions out there, but don’t take their word for it and find out for yourself. Learn more at BarrellBourbon.com. Receive $25 off your first order at RackHouse Whiskey Club with code "Pursuit". Visit RackhouseWhiskeyClub.com. Distillery 291 is an award winning, small batch whiskey distillery located in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Learn more at Distillery291.com. Show Notes: Whiskey Advocate Top 20: http://whiskyadvocate.com/top20/ This week’s Above the Char with Fred Minnick talks about whiskey marketing. Tell us how you got into bourbon? What led you to discover more? What type of content do you see on Reddit? Is there a newbie factor? Do people really like the reviews? Who is the typical person checking out these reviews? What does AMA stand for? What were the top AMAs? Tell us about the Reddit culture. Talk about the anonymous factor. Are there any issues since it is anonymous? Are there sales in the forums? What kind of growth are you seeing in the forum? What topics are popular? Why do so many people on Reddit hate Fred Minnick? Have bourbon posts ever been on the front page of Reddit? How much time do you spend moderating? How many posts do you get during release season? When people post do you have to approve it? Who has it worse, Facebook or Reddit mods? 0:00 200 episodes in I'd have it you know, it's process down, but 0:03 we'll get it man I still got my shit together so it's fine. 0:08 Sounds good. 0:20 Welcome back everybody it is Episode 230 of bourbon pursuit. I'm Kenny and I hope that you and everyone out there had a great Thanksgiving. And now you're preparing for the holiday rush. I put my visa and my American Express card to work this past week. And I know that there were a lot of bourbon Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals out there too. So I hope you all got something good and you have something to sip on for the rest of the month leading into 2020. Now, let's hit a little bit the news. Whiskey advocate has released their top 20 whiskies of 2019 and I'm pleased to say that five of the top 10 are bourbon, including old Ezra seven Woodford reserves master collection batch proof, the New Heaven Hill bottled and bond seven year for rose a small batch select and topping it off at the number one spot, which is kind of surprising to a lot of people is George Nichols bottled and bond. 1:15 Now we're big fans of dickhole over here but 1:18 it didn't win our whiskey of the year. Nor was it our favorite in the bottle and bond blind we did back on episode 224. We're going to be releasing our results on December 26. For our end of the year podcast, you can get the link to whiskey advocates top 20 within our show notes for gate whiskey company is releasing a new expression in collaboration with Kelvin cooperage called split Steve bourbon. The name comes from three different barrels that Kelvin deconstructed and built new casks. These barrels included number four and number two char barrels in a series of medium toast finishes. They took these barrels and rebuilt the cask and almost like a zebra like pattern. The whiskey however, is a A five and a half year in 12 year Kentucky Bourbons bottled at barrel strength of 115.6 proof with a total of this release with 2700 bottles. They will only be available on shelves in Kentucky and Tennessee. And they have a suggested retail price of $175. And bourbon is all about community and the online community is one of the biggest forces behind its growth. This is where people go to learn more ask questions and make connections and also find out new and interesting Bourbons to try off other people's recommendations and read it has been a platform for those conversations for a long time. The popularity of bourbon subreddit has now eclipsed over 109,000 members, and it's continually growing. On today's episode I sit down with take he's one of the moderators of the bourbon forum on Reddit. And we get a glimpse into a daily life of a bourbon subreddit moderator we look into the type of the content gets a lot of uploads, how ama's or ask me any things work, how being anonymous plays a role versus Facebook where it's your actual name and profile in the mind, plus a few other goodies that are kind of surprises. I'm going to keep in there for you as well. All right, now let's get on with the show. Let's hear from Joe over a barrel bourbon. And then you've got Fred minich, with above the char. 3:23 It's Joe from barrell bourbon. Our Bourbons have won a few medals at some of the most prestigious spirits competitions out there. But don't take their word for it. Find out for yourself. lift your spirits with barrell bourbon. 3:35 I'm Fred MiniK. And this is above the char. I want you to take a moment and think for yourself. What if you are starting a new bourbon? Would you start with the whiskey? Go to distilleries foreign wine across this country? pick out a flavor profile said that's what I want to get. Would you buy barrels? Would you comment? tractus still and sit on them for a few years? Or heck would you try to get a whole bunch of money together? And by someone like I say, I don't know, four roses, not saying they're for sale. But if I had a whole lot of money, I tried to buy four roses. Is that what you do? See? If that's the case, then you're a lot like me, in that you think about the whiskey. You think about the whiskey and what it tastes like how it will mix who you want to drink it with. But that's not how a lot of new players coming into the game. Thank you see, what they do is is they get in a boardroom with all these fancy MBAs and all these marketers who have experience with Porsche or Colgate or who the hell ever, and they say it all depends on packaging. It all depends on the name, the brand and the messaging. Some of these new companies getting into the game of spirits will have 35 conversations before they ever get to the quality or taste of the product, it's phenomenal. These companies will burn a quarter of a million dollars to like $2 million on something like, what it should be called, or what the bottle should look like. And all they do is a fascinated with the one aspect that they can actually can control. And that's the creation and the marketing of it. And that's the beauty of American whiskey is that all these people who are trying to enter the game, never understand that it's not about what the bottle looks like. It's about the quality, the flavor, and whether or not that I want to buy the bottle, not a first time. But the second time. You see marketing and branding is absolutely important. But it only gets you to buy that first bottle of bourbon better be good Get me to buy the second one. And that's this week's above the char pay. Speaking of good Bourbons, I just announced my American whiskey of the year contenders. You can go check them out on my YouTube just search Fred MiniK American whiskey of the year contenders, and I'll be doing a live tasting for those on December 20. So market the new calendar December 20. At 9pm we're going to pick out my favorite whiskey for 2019. Until next week, cheers 6:39 everyone welcome back to another episode of bourbon pursuit the official podcast of bourbon, just Kenny here today but this is going to be an exciting topic as we look into the realm of bourbon culture, and really what it means to be involved in an online community. You know, we've talked about having, you know, different places where you go To find information, there's then for the longest time, if you're an O g in the realm, there were straight bourbon.com. If you're pretty new into the world there is you kind of just figure out these ways of getting into these secret groups that are on Facebook. But there's one form and one board that's been around for a long time. And that's Reddit. And they've had multiple types of different boards. There is our bourbon, they've heard Scott swap back in the day, there's been all kinds of changes that have gone down in the history. And so today, we're going to kind of be looking exactly it. Really, what is the community on Reddit all about? You know, is there is there a sense of, you know, belonging, is there a sense of attacking Is there a lot of anonymous factors that play into it that people don't want to really reveal who they are, but they'll they'll want to say things behind an alias. And so we're going to kind of talk about that today because it's it's always good to really figuring out what's happening inside the bourbon culture and really the people that are in charge of Making sure that these forums don't get out of control. And that's what mods or moderators are there for. So today on the show, we have one of the moderators of the slash are slash bourbon forum of Reddit. He goes by the handle t eight ke or take. So take Welcome to the show. 8:19 Hey, thanks for having me. 8:20 Absolutely very happy to have you today. So anybody that is watching this live or they're not just riding in their car, they'll notice that you're not showing your camera kind of not showing your face. And that's kind of one of the things that is is a little bit different in the, the Reddit world that there's this whole like, anonymous factor to it. And so before we kind of get there, you know, because I always want to kind of start the show and kind of figure out and learn more about our guests. Tell us a little bit about how you started really getting into bourbon. 8:54 Yeah, no problem. So um, so I've been in a bourbon for some time. Now. Unfortunately, I didn't start back and what People would consider the you know, the glory days you know, I didn't swimming pools it's a Weller and stuff like Pappy wasn't $29 at CVS like everyone seems to think it was, you know, 20 years ago, but I came to it as someone in college who didn't love crushin you know, Keystone is or Keystone light out of a washing machine. And I started coincidentally enough without any sponsorship, wild turkey What I wanted was my go to at the time. bourbon was inexpensive bourbon was cheap, you could buy bourbon everywhere bourbon tastes good bourbon tastes good and everything which is exactly what college people like. And that was a time when I thought you know, how am I God? You know, how can people pay $70 for 25 year buena hobbiton, only to realize, you know, 10 years later what what what a what a monstrosity that would be that's the value of the century so bourbon was what kind of got me into you know, enjoying drinks with some friends and it kind of works for everything and you can take it anywhere and you know, have it on a weeknight and have another weekend and that kind of fostered my love of you know, drinking things to taste tastes Things, say, you know, drinking things to wake up two days later and, you know, kind of Hope you pass them exams and stuff. So that's kind of what got me interested in, you know, alcohol that could taste good. 10:09 Yeah. And so kind of talk about, like, What led you into trying to figure out how you wanted to discover more? And and what were those pads of really learning for you? Because podcasts really weren't, weren't around. So, 10:25 no, they were, it was kind of interesting, because, you know, back then a little bit, you know, Reddit was, was one of the biggest resources, if you if you google the bourbon, you'd probably find the manufacturer. And then boom, you'd see this Reddit thing and at the time, and as someone who's always been in it in technology and software, you know, read it's kind of the gold standard for sharing good information. So it was only natural to say, you know, I'm on Reddit all the time because of X, Y, and Z and I like bourbon. So I know there's going to be a bourbon subreddit and no, Looky there, you know, it's right there and it's well moderated. There's good content and kind of is my crews always taken me, I think the best way to learn about something is to think about it and write about it and try and tell other people about it because it kind of helps you gauge your own understanding. And that's the point where I decided that, you know, if I really enjoy drinking bourbon, you know, pretty frequently it's my go to beverage, you know, why shouldn't I try and learn more about the origin and the procedure? And as someone who likes chemistry, you know, why do things taste the way they do, and the best way to, you know, talk to people about that, that I don't necessarily see every day is to write about it. And that's kind of I challenged myself to, to try and write one review a week and I thought, Oh, God, if I keep this up for a couple weeks, you know, I'll be golden. Which, you know, now I try and get one a day which I think is fun. So it's definitely grown from you know, kind of a starting spot to just wanting to know more and hoping that other people would teach me by calling out mistakes in my writing and, and kind of sitting down and just trying to think about, you know, what, what was in the glass. 11:51 You know, so for myself, you know, I started really trying to focus a little bit more on the on the bourbon subreddit over there. Just to See if we have any kind of presence and stuff like that. But the one thing that I noticed when I when I go over there is that the type of information is is exactly what you said, it's a lot of reviews. There's a lot of people that are always kind of like constantly spitting out reviews kind of talk about what that what the content us is what you normally see over there. 12:21 So I would say, you know, our bourbon is part of what we call the whiskey network. And in the whiskey network, we try and have subreddits that are very specific to very specific things because some people might only care about serious bourbon information or some people might only care about horsing around or some people might say, you know, bourbon is, is well, you know, I'm a scotch guy and so is part of the whiskey network. Our bourbon really fits to try and provide concrete, accurate information to people who are seeking information about brands, or you know, reviews from users who've taken the time to sit down and write about a very specific products. That's why things like, like means we kind of put in whiskey porn, which is where We're like, show us your collection or like, you know, give us you know, give us whatever whiskey meme you get. So our bourbon seeks to satisfy kind of the serious bourbon person who's looking for not only concrete information, but reliable information, and that's, that's something we try and uphold. So that's why you see a lot of reviews because people, you know, sit down and say, you know, this is my review, and these are the notes I get, and then hopefully, I can find other people who have similar palates who either agree with things that I like or disagree with things I like, and that really helps to start a lot of conversations. 13:29 Yeah, I think you kind of hit them on there. So when you talk about like the agree and disagree, you know, somebody just writes me because I've been on there like there's people that are going to say like oh, like I'm going to go ahead and write a review on Weller gold vein, and then somebody's like, I'm just gonna do one on Eagle rare. So like, is there is there like a, I want to say like, like a learning curve, but like a, like a newbie factor, like, Is anybody shame for bringing in something that's just like basic everyday stuff? Or like, I mean, how does that work? work. 14:00 I mean, so like, like with everything in life and I see a lot, you know, because I have to kind of sift through the post and I see a lot of people who start and say, like, Man, this is my first review and it's gonna suck. And, you know, they're like, I can't taste anything. And I'm like, you know what, I agree with you, I couldn't taste that much the beginning either. And, like, you know, your palate is like every other skill in life, like some people have strengths and weaknesses. like nobody comes out of the womb, like an Olympic runner, like, you got to do some running to get to Olympic runner status. And, you know, I'm, you know, reviewing is definitely not an Olympic sport, at least not my opinion. Otherwise, that'd be awesome. But, you know, reviewing things and thinking about things really takes time and practice and it's really super fun to see people at different points of their journeys is like, you know, this is review one and oh my god, it tastes like ethanol, like back again tomorrow. Hope it's better. And then some people you know, who after just five or six reviews are like, yo, like, I get it, or like, you know, I think I taste these things. What do you guys think? Like, yeah, you know, those are all things that I would think come out of that as well. So there's really no expectation that like a good review is like, I don't know, like stitz a while or from like the 60s or the 70s, or the 80s. Or it's got to be unattainable and expensive. Because, you know, we can all afford to drink that every day. And honestly, if you find someone who likes the day to day stuff you like, and then you see him, you know, taste gold vein and say, Well, you know, I thought it was good, but I honestly like some other stuff better than you can kind of take it you know, in stride that, you know, if you're going to spend 100 bucks an ounce on something, maybe you want it to be something else. 15:27 And so I guess the you know, when you think about the reviews is that do people like really find that something that they're they're really attracted that they want to go they want to comment they want to upvote or downvote or something like that, because it seems like there's just, you know, if there's a I mean, every day, there's probably what 30 or 40 new ones that get posted something like that. Definitely. 15:48 Yeah, so it's actually the communities both that are bourbon or scotch and especially our bourbon or, as far as I can tell our super welcoming and in fact knowing very rarely do I post review or see other people post reviews. and be like, Man, you wasted your time like, Man, this is garbage. There's tons of people. I mean, we get thousands and thousands of people a day from all over the internet that just come to read. And, and it's kind of interesting to see, you know, for the 10s of thousands of people you might see show up on a weekend day, you know, posts only have like, 15 or 20 upvotes. But the people who upload and take the comment, you know, take the time to comment are actually really kind of on the inner circle of people who come to the subreddit to engage. So we have the vast majority of our, you know, subreddit is probably lurkers and people who just, you know, want to Google, you know, hey, I'm sick of fireball, I want to try this. And then they read a bunch of reviews and either decide to buy it or don't and we never hear from them 16:36 ever. And what would you kind of categorize as the? I mean, I guess it's, it's kind of hard to figure it out. But maybe the typical person that is attracted to reading on Reddit, because it you know, if you can figure out is there an age, age range or demographic, that people would be more inclined to go There versus other forums. 17:02 Surprisingly, we see we see a pretty significant kind of blend in and we don't get that kind of specifics and that's not something we're really even interested in as mods is there's not a lot of at least that Reddit would share with us because Reddit ones add money, we just want to talk about bourbon. But I'm, for sure. I mean, I will admit the female population is a little bit on the low side, at least from self identifying people. As far as I can tell people that are between you know, hey, I want to buy my first bottle to I've been drinking for 40 years and I think most people fall somewhere in the middle of that. And just kind of you know, some people I talked to every single day and you get a feel, which is kind of a cool thing even though you don't know what they look like and you don't know how many kids they are and they don't know what their illnesses, you you know, you get a sense of people of who they are through the bourbon they like and through what they comment and what you comment on their stuff and, and getting a sense for that you kind of meet people individually, but we I'd have to imagine that our key demographic is probably like 27 to 55 and mostly dudes. 17:58 Yeah, I mean, I come from a Tech background. Most of the listeners probably know that and so Reddit is always seems like a place that you go for a lot of stuff, at least in tech where things get posted. People ask a lot of questions. There's the ama's of it. And I guess for for anybody that's not familiar with Reddit, you want to explain what an AMA is? 18:19 Oh, yeah, so an AMA is just short. It's, it's a TLA, or a three letter acronym for asked me anything. And that's usually when we have a person in the industry, or we have a prolific individual, whether they're a writer, author, you know, something like that. And they basically say, Hey, I'm gonna dedicate the next x hours of my life to sit here and answer questions from random people like you on the internet. And then we all we screech internally and we all get really excited. And we ask them all sorts of crazy questions, at least hopefully, you know, Master distillers are super awesome. We've had people like Russell's and, you know, distillers, the master distillers and brand ambassadors from a lot of majors still resolve come up and say, Hey, we'd like to dedicate some time just to talk to you guys. 18:59 Yeah, it's like I know That I think I think Danny Potter did one a little while ago. But I mean, can you recall like some of your like your top one or top two or three that you've had in regards of ama's. 19:11 So, for me, the four roses and wild turkey ones have been awesome. I've really enjoyed also high West was interesting, but I've kind of, you know, as I go through things I identify a little less with the way the high West is doing. But you know, is for as much love as wild turkey gets, they certainly deserve it. Because, you know, they were willing to sit down and just give us huge long responses to really technical questions and just kind of show us that you know, that they care about the people who buy all their Bourbons, not just the expensive ones are, you know, not just the people that buy 10 cases at a time. 19:43 What's the over under on if it was Jimmy or Eddie actually sitting there and typing it or if he was just talking to somebody and having somebody else type it up the answers. 19:51 We got the impression it was Jimmy, he said it was Jimmy so you know knowing Jimmy in the Russell's I'm inclined to believe it was Jimmy. 19:58 That said if it wasn't Came party person, they did a great job of acting like a human being and stepping up. Yeah, yeah, it's got I'm sure. I don't know, it'd be kind of funny. I've never seen Jimmy in front of a computer before. So I don't I don't know how what is kind of like words per minute is that he can crank out to answer because I'm sure that the form was just blasting at that point. Yeah, 20:18 well, the nice thing is the way the way we do ama is because we understand that, you know, Jimmy probably is not a lightning typer. And you know, he's a busy guy. So we like to field questions in advance. And we like to say, you know, for a week, we're going to take questions, and then we compile them in a Google Doc, and we send it to them, and then they get to kind of sit down and think about it and give us, you know, really meaty answers, and then they send it back to us when we post them so that that kind of helps us a lot of forums do it live, which is great for people who love computers and just want to sit and type all day but for master distillers who have 10,001 things to do in a single day. It works really well for us to field questions, then we get to, you know, there's always like, would you rather fight like 100 duck sized horses or a horse sized duck and like, okay, that's fun, but you know, We've got bigger questions. So it kind of helps us give them good information and show respect for their time. And then in turn, they do the same for us. Oh, for sure. 21:07 So, you know, you kind of ask that you kind of put that in there as a typical question, talk more about like, a little bit of the culture, when people ask these type of questions, or when people are giving responses, like, Is it a, you'd mentioned that it's pretty pretty welcoming? And I'm sure you got there's always a few bad apples in the bunch, but kind of talk about the culture and what it is to make sure that you can kind of skirt a little bit of that behavior that that doesn't actually provide any real you know, good meat to the subject. Yeah, so 21:40 the, the Reddit, you know, the Reddit culture is, is probably I like to think of it as a little more serious than Facebook. I think Facebook, you know, no fault of Facebook is a little more casual and people, you know, love to post their jobs and stuff. Reddit really focuses on being kind of a more technical area, and we see that a lot in the kind of people in the posts we get. Because, you know, moderators aren't responsible for making the majority of the content, we just kind of see what goes on. And, and really, as long as people seem to know what they want out of the subreddit, and don't just show up and say, like, recommend me a bourbon, you know, that's not going to get good answers. In fact, you know, I would probably prepare a little snark on the side for that, too. But, you know, the the subreddit itself is really good at you know, saying, hey, person, you know, whether you're here to write a review, whether you're here to ask a well informed question, you know, by the way, here's the search bar, we've probably answered this 100 times. You know, the first time you're asking this is probably the hundred and first time that we're hearing this. So, you know, we go through the work to make really nice posts, like, you know, why don't we just, we'll just nudge over the search bar, and hopefully, you'll find what you want, and if not, then post a question. But the subreddit overall I think, is pretty wholesome. You know, we have our own little flame wars and people getting Spats because, you know, ultimately, bourbon is a hobby of passion. You know, you spend a lot of money on a product that you know, is made by a huge commercial company for the most part, and everyone's got their tastes and you know, after two or three dreams, everyone's fired up. About usually nothing so, but on the whole, in whole, the, you know, the subreddit as a whole is very welcoming and very valuable and I think seeks to really spend a lot of time to make sure that people get good information as long as they put an effort to receive 23:12 it. You know, you hit the topic on the search bar and some stuff. You know, there's, there's a very valuable document that you all have that I tend to share with people a lot, because there's one thing that having this podcast, we get emails all the time and, and I'm sure that anybody is looking and really getting the bourbon, and they're planning the next vacation. The first thing they ask is, what should I do on the bourbon trail? Oh, my God. And I'm sure that you all had so many of those questions that you just said, screw it. We're going to make a sticky we've got a we've got a living Word document and that's what people can point people to. 23:49 Yeah, and it's is it crazy to I got to point out one user, I can always, every time you know, I scroll through new I hit New and I see new posts. It's like we're going to the bourbon trail and I'm like, I know that if I open this up refractions going to have you know, a comment with 100 posts that link to you know, hey people that have been the bourbon trail and also here's a document you know, that's a hugely routine thing again and it is nice being able to have a document that we update to point people to because ultimately you know everyone forgets to stop or two as opinions but you know, here's all the information Google Doc printed out stick on your dashboard and go 24:21 Yeah, I mean, I've I've used that as for people that are asking for recommendations, I'm just like, Listen, I don't have time to sit here write it all out, go check out this document and then ask me any further questions if you need some help narrowing it down because it's it's got a lot of information there about places you know, basically what you can expect to get and every visitor experience you know, just a lot of really good information that was baked into it. 24:44 Oh, good. Well, I'm glad it's useful. Yeah, we it really is a joy to just see posts and be like all right, we got a document we know you're going to love it. We know you probably didn't look at the sidebar because nobody looks at the sidebar. So 24:54 it's so you know, another thing about the you know, as we're touching the culture here, and I mentioned it At the top of the show was the whole, like anonymous factor, it's, it's a little bit different when you go to Facebook and you have to have a profile. Most of the time, people are only allowed into groups when they have been on Facebook for X amount of months or X amount of years. So there's not a whole lot of like, fake profiles in there that are, you know, either spamming or they're trying to trade crap or anything like that. However, it's a little bit different on the on the Reddit side, so kind of talk about the the idea of wanting to continue to stay anonymous and not really be really forthcoming with with who you are in this type of form. 25:43 Oh, sure. So one of the benefits on you know, you know, Reddit is almost completely the opposite of Facebook in that respect you on Facebook, you can find out, you know, where someone went to second grade if you care enough and the person's care was enough and I think that's great for people who want to connect and be friends and You know, you don't care where your information goes and read it on the other side, you know, you're on Facebook, because you want to be on Facebook. And while you're on Facebook, you find things that interest you and read, it's kind of the opposite you go to read it because you want a specific thing, unless you're bored and drunk on a Saturday night, and you go to random and just find random subreddits. But typically, if you're going to read it, and you're not just trying to burn some time, like if I have a question, you know, you know, a Linux question I'm going to go to sent us if I've got a question about cars, I'm going to go to our cars. You know, if I got a question about bourbon, boom, I'm in our bourbon. And so that's kind of our identifying factors that everyone is here at have some interest in bourbon. And we get to bond over that. And people get to, you know, kind of push out things, you know, you can't tell a person's political views and you can't tell you know, where they work or if you dislike the way they look, or if you know, you're tired of seeing, you know, 100 pictures of their kids every day because they have a new toddler and they just can't stop posting photos. You know, read it really cuts out everything that isn't, hey, I'm here because I care about this topic. And that's kind of where we all linked from, and that's something I think is valuable because people Feel for better and for worse and certainly, I think mostly for the better, but certainly for the worst of times that you know, you can be free and open and you can have people in the industry who maybe don't want you to know that they're in the industry but have something really valuable to contribute because they don't have to say, you know, you know, hey, I'm chip Tate, like and everyone's gonna go who you know about down Wayne's World, you know, we're not worthy. You know, you can just be an honest human being and I think that's huge for Reddit, especially since there's all these reviews and, you know, sure, you can have some biagio shell, you know, right and stuff, but people pick up on that really well. And, you know, you can tell that the guy that sat down and written 100 reviews cares about bourbon, if you're going to talk to him, you know, he's going to care about bourbon, I want to talk to you. And that's one of the biggest things I think that we gained from kind of the Reddit anonymity is the fact that, you know, we all show up because we want to talk about bourbon or Oh, you know, I run into this guy in our sandwiches, okay, we like sandwiches in bourbon, you know, you know, stuff like that, but 27:55 there really is a subreddit for anything that isn't there. 27:57 Oh my God every day like I found one it was called critters Cappy buyers and I was like, Oh my God, who knew that was the thing. And sure enough, you know, we got ducks and chickens and stuff like sitting on top of caffee bio. So there's truly is a subreddit and if you can't think of it, The fun thing about Reddit is you get to start your own, you know, my buddy Tex, Tex a sir who's another mod, you know, said, you know, there's, there's a subreddit called shower thoughts, but what about those thoughts you had after you had, you know, a couple extra Bourbons. So he created drunk genius and just like that, you've created a whole area that people can come and find stuff that you have in common with them. So I think that's probably one of reddits greatest assets, especially in terms of anonymity is you know, that whoever showed up wants to show it because they want to talk about the thing that you, you know, you want to talk about and not because you have the same alumni or you know, stuff like that. 28:41 Do you think that it ever plays a role in in kind of being the bad side of being anonymous because whether it's somebody that posts a review, or whether there's a news story, and people can they can be downright cruel, right? It's the internet And so are there times when like, that just doesn't play in the favor of what you're all trying to do. 29:06 Yeah, that's definitely a thing because everyone feels empowered when they're anonymous. And we hope that people feel empowered for the better. But we all have bad days, we all have a little too much to drink sometimes, or some of us are just really nasty people. So it's very simple for people to take advantage of a hugely powerful tool, which is anonymity and just being upright, you know, just be rude about and be mean about it. And I have to commend my film on we do a really good job of staying on top of people like that, and we kind of know over time that, you know, hey, I think this guy's just here to cause trouble or, you know, this thirds gotten that and like, let's we need to shut that down because it is easy to get off topic and people are passionate about a lot of things besides bourbon and bourbon can often connect people who have other mutual likes or dislikes and sometimes they like to duke it out on a thread about, I don't know Buffalo Trace where it makes no sense at all. So there are definitely cases where anonymity serves us for the worst. And that's people who, you know, people who just who just want to tear down anybody's day and they choose our corner of the internet to do it and we don't see it a lot and we get trolls from time to time and we get members from other forums who maybe disagree with the way the sub is run, but for the most part, I'd say you know, 90% of interaction is overwhelmingly positive. 30:18 Mm hmm. And, you know, the one thing that that I do see that happens in the Reddit world that is different than Facebook, is that it's kind of like a like a no bullshit mentality that goes into it. You know, if I if I think of like one of the first forums that I joined back on Facebook, you know, Wade Woodard was the mod for it and it was it was buy sell trade, no discussion, no, nothing like if you messed up like you're booted. And, and so the one thing that we kind of see that happens in a lot of the Facebook forums now is that in most of these are there in the discussion forums. Sometimes they're in the foresail forums. They'll post a picture of a gun next to it. And then everybody just goes eight shit, right? Like, yeah, yeah, in. I mean, do you all have those problems to where people like they post something like that and then all of a sudden it just it's a spew of like a political battle underneath of it? 31:18 Yeah, we get stuff like that pretty frequently, especially in recent times, you know, there was a President Trump's, you know, tariff wars and bourbon is affected, you know, and I get it, you know, it's a political thing. You know, a politician has said, I'm going to weaponize tariffs, and then boom, you know, Bourbons effect and suddenly everybody in their mother is forgotten that we're here because of bourbon and talking about how bad politics are. And we and we get that we understand there's often overlap, but yeah, sometimes spreads like that we get a lot of, you know, appears by DRAM and in the background or 900 guns like okay, you know, maybe some thought should have gone into composing a picture and we do get people that like to show off stuff like that, and that's a prime candidate for whiskey porn, which is kind of a post all you know, maybe not A big discussion and I'm a mod there too. So I get to strike down some of the, you know, people who get really, really angry there as well. But there's definitely a lot of overlap. And we get a lot of posts like that or you know, or even like one of the commenters, you know, Kendrick Pennington has said, you know, people who just want to show up and trade off the the, you know, antique collection they got last year, and we have to kind of, you know, kill that too, because some things we're just not allowed to have on the site. And some of the things we deem don't fit within kind of the spectrum of what the subs trying to do. So, there's there's a lot of objective rules we found, and there's some subjective ones as well, that we as mods kind of to say, you know, I don't think this fits a serious bourbon, you know, subreddit and we have to yank it. 32:38 Yeah. And I guess kind of, kind of expand on that, too, because there was at one point, I believe there were sales that you could do in some of the the forums. I know, somebody talked about scotch swap. I'm sure there was a bourbon swap, but kind of talked about, you know, what crackdown happen if you were around at that time? 32:57 Yeah. So um, so Buying and selling was always a no go. That was always a you can't trade money for alcohol. And that was a Reddit rule. And it was also kind of a, you know, hey, what we do on scotch swap is kind of already in the gray area, right? Like it's not, you know, it's probably wrong. It's probably not right. But it's small scale, and we all trust each other and it's friendly things. So we let it slide and, and that works great. Scott swap was for bourbon, it was for you know, it was for scotch to a lot of people, you know, rums and a GAVI and mezcal and back canara and stuff like that, and you could find some really fun stuff and, you know, we do giveaways and we'd have people sign up for you know, like a round robin like blind Easter thing, right arranged, you know, 300 people would sign up and they'd send a mystery to a partner that didn't know they were getting stuff and it was a super fun thing, but right as Reddit got bought, I want to say it was last April, maybe late March, they decided that it was against their terms of service, and quite frankly, and we're still pretty salty about it, but they they decided that they just had to shut it down and they gave nobody any notice. One day, I remember I was in a meeting because I went from no PMS and I have a smartwatch to getting like, I got like 75 pounds in like 10 minutes. And I was like, Oh my god, and then I logged on to see that Yeah, they just did band scottsbluff. And they said, Hey, guys, you know, we're we don't care to tell you why. And we can't tell you the rules about it. And actually, not not Can't we just won't like we're not going to give you the time of day but it's against the rules now. So we banned it so sorry, you know, screw you get out of here. And then it was kind of obsessed after that to interpret what the rules meant. Like because we sold whiskey inventory would people would post other bottles and people would pm each other. And since then we figured out that Reddit has bots, the crawls through people's inboxes so they are reading your mail. So if you're asking people about swaps privately, you're going to get the hammer and it took me probably eight months until I posted no getting ready to do this here is bourbon, a single barrel at New riff, you know, I actually got banned for three days because he said whoa, you know, we thought your China private, you know, even though I had all the information that said hey, here's a retail They're licensed, here's our distiller their license, you know, we're not handling any sales, we're not handling any swaps we're going to let people buy from an approved retailer. I mean, it took probably a whole week I was offline, just trying to get an admin to talk to me to give me information and say, like, Hey, we jumped through all the hoops you gave us like, why Sue? Can't you do your job. So that was a hugely turbulent time, too, because a lot of people only came to read it to try and you know, trade bottles, and some of them still come back to do that. And we have to say, you know, new, new, new, new, new, new, new new, you know, those are the old days, and we get why they had to do it, you know, you got venture capitalists and you want to make ad money and you want to make money and, you know, adult sending each other booze probably isn't good for you know, whatever brand is trying to give you millions of dollars. So, stuff like that. So it's, it was definitely an interesting time. And it's something that we still real from because, you know, sometimes users just get banned and we have to like figure out why and, you know, I have to poke an admin and be like, Hey, buddy, like, like, can you like at least explain it because like, we got 90,000 people like we just want them to be well informed. I want to give them good information I want to know for myself because last thing I want to do is get banned for trying to help the community by doing, you know, single barrels for you know, subreddits stuff. So that was definitely a there was some lost sleep on that one. Yeah, it 36:12 sounds like it that was lost sleep or do you finally get some sleep because you're like a I got seven days off. 36:17 It was it was weird because I was like, um, you know, and the other thing is once you're banned, right, like, you can't talk to moderators. So I can't be like, Hey, guys, I was banned, but I'm working on it, you know, you're just kind of like gone, which is, you know, for something kind of a bad you know, kind of backfires a little bit when you don't know anything about anybody else. You just know that you like to moderate bourbon together, it makes it hard to kind of keep things together and be like, you know, I wasn't trying to do something illegal. It's just nobody knows why I got banned. So you know, there was some relaxing, it's always good to get away from the internet. I try and take a week or two each year to just you know, know reviews, do some computing on my own, go to a lake drink a couple beers and stuff like that. But yeah, that was an interesting time. 36:57 Yeah, in you. You just mentioned something as well. So Like how big this community is, I'm looking at it right now. It's creeping up on as the date of this recording 93,000 members. We're talking at 5:34pm on a on a Wednesday afternoon and there's 478 people online. So that looks 37:16 that looks right. I see. 92 449 37:18 Yeah, so I mean it's it's it's really getting up there. So what kind of, you know, what, what kind of growth rate have you all been seeing, say like an by month or by year or anything like that? With the careers of master distiller spanning almost 50 years, as well as Kentucky bourbon Hall of Famer and having over 100 million people taste his products. Steve nalli is a legend of bourbon, who for years made Maker's Mark with expertise and precision. 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You know what kind of growth rate have you all been seeing say like an by month or by year or anything like 39:49 that. So just just because everybody needed one more source to tell them Bourbons definitely a hot thing right now. We're seeing bigger growth, especially in the last couple of years. Since hopped on the Help mode. We're growing faster than any other alcohol subreddit right now we're growing faster than our scotch, which was previously were like, Whoa, this the scotch thing, gangbusters. You know, people people really like it. Our bourbon is screaming past that right now. And I think you mentioned it by the time this hits the air, we will be well over 100,000 subscribers. And we've got some fun stuff lined up. I won't talk about it, because it'll already have come to fruition. But, uh, yeah, we get about 100 subs a day right now. 40:28 That's, that's impressive. That's a lot. That's a lot going on for people that are just trying to tune in and, and be a part of it. And I would kind of imagine that there's, it's like any form, there's, there's probably more lurkers than there are people that are actually contributing. So, I mean, what's the it's probably it's probably a smaller percentage. But I guess when we start thinking about let's let's kind of change the topic because we talked about reviews a little bit. What are some of those topics that that sort of come out that really get a lot of upvotes? A lot of comments. stuff like that, that really kind of spark a conversation. 41:04 So I found that there's, there's, there's four posts that really, if you if you see a high karma post, it either fits into one of four categories, I think it's the first category is it as a review of some hyper expensive unicorn or just really super rare product which, which kind of makes sense? like everyone's like, Oh, you know, on the total opposite and you got reviews of like, the absolute worst whiskey that has ever existed and people gotta feel bad taken out, which, which is fun, because, like, you know, do you truly know what the best bourbon is until you've tried some really bad ones? And a lot of people are kind of agree with that. And, you know, we'll try stuff like, you know, like, there was a bacon flavored bourbon that, you know, shouldn't have been called the bourbon, whatever. But you know, bacon flavored whiskey and everyone's like, that is truly terrible, and you've confirmed our suspicions like, here's enough. The third category of posts is like, hey, we've got a lot of dedicated people who love to watch the TTP website. And those people you know whether they follow skew on Twitter or whether they're just kind of trolling through the website and they say hey, here's the post, this new label was just approved and you know, and the label being approved isn't a guarantee that the project will come to fruition but you know that a brand is thinking about that product you know, we get the inclination that brands actually watch our bourbon from time to time and sometimes, you know, if people react well we see those products and people react viciously you know, either we still see those products and then we laugh at them or we don't see those products at all. And you know, we don't know how untangle that is but people love to see you know, what may be coming down the pipe which is super fun too, because, you know, products every day need release new products and we want to know when we can buy them and the first step to buying them as thing that they've been approved. And finally, the fourth post is kind of just discussion posts or people who take a lot of time like, like wild bird one on ones, you know, his or so I remember one one, Wild Turkey, you know, his exhaustive timeline on you know, wild turkey or we have posts from people like koumori or some chemists who like you know, step up to talk about Things like, you know, chemical compositions of bourbon over time, or lead into cancers or people that really show that like, Hey, I think Bourbons cool but like, let's delve into some super niche topic. And I'm going to give you a hugely vetted, well sourced, you know, document about this phase of bourbon and we try and gather a lot of those, whether it's through one of the moderators, you know, posts of the month, or we killed them, or they end up on the sidebar, but those are kind of the four big posts that make up the majority of really popular posts. And in between, we have people who want to know where they can find blends every single day, you know, people who, you know, you know, you see a lot of reviews that are, you know, that aren't poorly received, you know, they don't get a million upvotes but people you know, you'll see that they have 30 or 40 comments where people are just saying you know, Hey, thanks for for reviewing and I like this too. What do you think about this other project now this other product or expression line and then people talk about that? So 43:53 yeah, I mean, I think that we see, we see kind of a difference in the the Facebook and the Reddit world like in the Facebook world. Nobody posts the reviews. And if you do, there's usually as you mentioned earlier, like 5050 chips underneath it, and everybody's just either making fun of them or tell them they don't know crap or whatever, right. So there's, there's definitely like a difference in the culture there were like, reviews and Facebook, like people just don't want to read them there. Whereas in Reddit world, it's very encouraged. And so it's, it's, it's fun to kind of see that however, you know, me just lurking, I always see the ones that have the most karma the most comments or anything like that. Definitely those discussion posts. The ones that really kind of, like, you know, archit somebody or the ama's or something like that, too. Yeah, but there is one thing that I always find what find funny, and I'll ask you, maybe you don't have a good answer, but it seems like a lot of people on Reddit, they really hate Fred MiniK. What's, what's up with that? 44:54 Ah, 44:55 um, it's funny. You mentioned that and I think Fred's a good guy, but um, I think that I can understand why a lot of people dislike him and, and I'll try and give a voice to that. And I understand that I definitely won't embody what most people have an issue with Fred and you know, and people have a lot of different reasons. Maybe some people just don't like his Ascot and I get that some people just aren't asked got people, you know, I'm more of a necktie guy, but, you know, MiniK has done a lot of work for the bourbon world. And I think that, you know, while he deserves a lot of credit for that, I think he also gives himself a little, little extra credit on the side as being you know, hey, I'm the voice of bourbon, you know, bourbon isn't, you know, hey, the voice of millions of people who like this drink, but I am the voice of bourbon and it is it is my bourbon given duty that I should convert everybody that doesn't like bourbon. And if they don't like bourbon, I should tell them about this other project I love called rum because I also want to be the face of rum. And I think that's good. You know, you got to make money and you got to write books. And it's good to have things to write books about the people also, like you know, because if you read a book that people don't care about them, they don't buy the book and you don't have a house. So it's a complex issue because it's a passion and some of us choose, you know, like Mr. That, you know, Bourbons passion, I want to keep it a passion. So, you know, no money, no Patreon, you know, here's all the info for free. And I'll just give it to you how it is. And I think that a lot of people while they respect that, you know, he's an author kind of seemed taken advantage of the landscape a little bit, and I would probably agree with them and whether whether it's founded or not, books take a ton of effort, and I respect people that have the attention span to write books, you know, I write white papers for work all the time. And, you know, that's about as far as I get. That's, you know, that's enough attention for one day. But uh, you know, I think a lot of it comes down to kind of casually using the spirit and just saying, you know, hey, drink what you like, which is great, that's exactly how you should drink it. But these are the brands I think your best. And I think some of these articles kind of trivialize stuff by saying, you know, these are the best experts or these are the, you know, this is now the Pappy of rum, which like good. Yeah, you know, if I hear the Pappy of anything anymore, someone the other day told me this was the Pappy of servers and I just wanted to punch them to like HR was right there. I can understand it because a lot of people spend a lot of time on Reddit saying, if you come to me with an informed question, I will give you an informed answer. And I will respond to every question you have, simply because I love bourbon. And I get that and I feel that and I know that bourbon is always for a lot of people, and it's a career for Fred and so I can kind of understand that the people who like to rip on Fred probably don't align in perspective with what they're trying to accomplish with bourbon, you know, the people who relax with bourbon, it's their passion, probably won't see it with a guy who makes all of his money on bourbon. So that that's kind of my read on why people hate them. And, you know, I won't say they hate them. But, you know, he is an easy target. And I don't know if it's because he's, you know, he's, he's pretty, he's pretty available. You see him on Twitter, you know, you see him on Facebook, you see him, you know, across the Internet, and so, people always attack and easy target and I think that he's an incredibly easy target because he is sort of the face of bourbon, whether we like it or not, and the face of bourbon makes it easy to punch. So it's for better for worse. I think it's kind of a product popularity but I think there's also drawbacks with kind of taking something that can be so complex and boiling it down and saying, hey, these three brands are the pappi of X, Y, and Z because on the backside that threw me some dollars. 48:13 I can't get speak for the dollars part. But you know, I think we always try to tell for it because, you know, he's, he's, he's got his thick skin now he's, he's kind of immune to it. But he, he works on Reddit every single day. So he pays attention to a lot of stuff and, and we always send them things, you know, and, and we always, we always tell them because we'll send them things and we get people bashing them, or making fun of them or something like that. But we always were always like, hey, Fred, you see this? And he's like, thanks, guys. No, I didn't but now I know. I did. Yeah, yeah. But we always tell them like it's a good thing, man. Like that means you made it like if Yeah, really hating what you do. It's because you know, you hustled your ass off, and you're trying to make this happen, right like nobody else. Literally, there's nobody else in bourbon that's doing what you're doing. And it's not like you're a distiller, you can't pump out a product, you got to figure out the ecosystem around it. 49:07 Yep. And honestly, you know, people you know, there's almost seven circles of bourbon hell and I think Fred MiniK exists in one but like, I don't know, like, last spirits guy and course their distillery in garrison brothers and brands like terapy are in total line, they exist in a completely different one. And I think that if you're going to live in a you know, circle of bourbon now, it's better to be in the one that Fred's and then the one that, you know, we would consider like, you know, the lowest of the low and the garbage producers and people who just you know, don't give a shit. So, you know, it's a product of success. And I think that if you can find funding that, you know, that's absolutely what you got to do, otherwise, you're going to be miserable. And, you know, it's not about being miserable. 49:45 Absolutely. I think it also shows a lot of restraint from Fred to actually not get on there and like say anything to anybody because I know I know he's on there versus You know, when somebody ever says anything, it has something about bourbon pursuit. I'm always either respond like Hey, like we tried doing this or blah blah blah like trying to justify my existence there. So the he definitely does a good job resisting that. 50:07 Yeah, I'd agree and just like anything else, you know, you know, once you put a lot of time and then you're going to meet people that like what you do and you're going to meet just as many or more people that hate what you do and honestly if the people that hate what you do make you stop doing what you like to do, then you've only made the people hate what you do happy so 50:23 it's so the the whiskey category in Reddit is is pretty large. And we just mentioned earlier, you know, creeping up right now this 93,000 members with inside of the bourbon subreddit, but you know, there's one thing that if anybody that's kind of like unfamiliar with Reddit like there's, there's this the front page of Reddit like that's where like the top news and everything happens. Has there ever been anything in the whiskey category, even our bourbon that has ever been in like front page of Reddit? 50:53 Honestly, I can't tell you that there's been an hour bourbon post and most of that is because many years ago, it was very easy. Get to the front page of Reddit because Reddit restricted how many upvotes a post could actually get sued, see popular posts on Reddit top out at like 1500 or 2000 or 3000 votes. And since they lifted that restriction, it takes like 30 4050, you know, to hide 25,000 of votes to, to get to the front page of Reddit, that's great for communities that have hundreds of thousands or you know, even millions of subscribers and, and honestly, 92,000 people isn't the biggest separate in the world and the fact that, you know, we constantly don't have content that people are going to post, you know, 1 million people aren't going to post this to Facebook, you know, this link to this, this lady falling out of the bed of a truck because you know, this dog that looks real cute in a stroller. Those things just appeal, you know, and honestly, as a person who loves dogs, like, you know, give me a dog video and I guarantee you know, half the world loves dogs, but only one in every thousand people love bourbon. So it's kind of expected and honestly, we I think that at least Personally, I enjoy that. We get people who want to come to us, you know, or people who find us through other Whiskey subreddits are people who find whiskey people, you know, people who are also into whiskey and say, hey, go check out this place on Reddit. Like I'm telling people all the time at work like, Oh, you live Reddit like, and you love whiskey, like, go check out these subs, but we don't have the kind of reach where something's gonna hit the front page. And then we'll get a, you know, 30,000 subs in a day of people who are just kind of stopping by and I think that actually really helps bring up a lot of value in the subreddit because the people who come and find us are the people who wanted to find us. And that honestly keeps up more riffraff. And so talk about your life as a mod real quick, like the amount of time that you're you're pushing to actually take care of the discussions? Is it is there a fire drill every single day? Or is it like okay, like we can, you know, wait every other week, you know, what's that kind of like? So I'm moderating. I moderate a lot of subreddit. So our Bourbons definitely one of the biggest if not the biggest, so it's kind of hard to break our bourbon out separately. I think I moderate like 2021 subreddit. Some of them are smaller. Some of them nobody care about some of them are mine. That's just like, hey, if you just want to review and no discussion, no bullshit, go to the sub, and you'll just get one review a day, whatever, you know. But like our bourbon is actually pretty passive. I mean, I probably remove five to eight posts a day. I know that other moms probably removed the same and those are always like, like, Look, I found two bottles, the Blanton's $400, you know, which just doesn't fit through all the stuff. So it's got to go or like, Hey, this is you know, this news article was posted seven times today and this, you know, the sixth the first one, they got to go, you know, and that's just a rule thing. And sometimes I get like, Oh my god, that dude is being an asshole. Oh, he's got to go, you know, and get to remove stuff like that. But overall, it's, you know, I probably spend two to three hours a day moderating Reddit, probably, you know, 20 hours a week, it goes up and down, especially when the fall hunter comes. Oh, man, the fall hunt season, you know, takes a couple extra hours, but it's certainly no full time job and it's certainly one that, you know, I'm doing passively. I'm checking my phone, you know, before a meeting starts from in the hallway, I get to my desk and I see like Oh, you know, my toolboxes said, Hey 10 people reported this post once you go take a look at it and stuff like that. So it's, you know, it's certainly, it's a lot of work, but it's work I enjoy doing because I would already be on the subreddit anyways, so I may as well give back and help make it a better place. So that way other people come and find it like, Oh, you know, this is a cool place. I'm going to stick around. 54:18 Alright, so you intrigued me talk about fall like it because I guess I haven't been paying attention to it and fall so what's what's the bad news that happens there? What's the the influx of post like, 54:30 oh, man, so if there was a meme to describe it, it would definitely be that Game of Thrones meme. And it would say that Pepe is coming. And it starts like early August and like, because like, first off like we see the labels, so you know, like, who, who, you know, next round of Pappy it's been approved or the next round of antique collection. And then like early September, everyone and their mother who has a blog that has more than a few followers gets their

This is the final roundtable for 2019 as we head into the new year. And this one packs a few punches. First, we dive into Instagram news where the number of likes are now hidden from your view. How will it impact bourbon Instagram stars? Then we roll into the meat of the podcast talking about Pappy and Sazerac vs The Secondary Market. Lastly, we share what we are thankful for in 2019. I also want to take this opportunity to say thank you to you, the dedicated listeners and viewers of Bourbon Pursuit. We really appreciate the hours you spend with us every week to hear us talk about bourbon. Show Partners: Barrell Craft Spirits works with distilleries from all over the world to source and blend the best ingredients into America’s most curious cask strength whiskies. Learn more at BarrellBourbon.com. Receive $25 off your first order at RackHouse Whiskey Club with code "Pursuit". Visit RackhouseWhiskeyClub.com. Distillery 291 is an award winning, small batch whiskey distillery located in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Learn more at Distillery291.com. Show Notes: Warehouse X: http://www.experimentalwarehouse.com/ Marianne Eaves at TEDxBroadway: https://www.tedxbroadway.com/talks/2019/11/19/making-the-impossible-and-doing-the-unthinkable-marianne-eaves This week’s Above the Char with Fred Minnick talks about vintage whiskey collections. Instagram removes likes. Does this impact bourbon influencers? Do Instagram posts drive people to your content? Will the lack of likes deter people from using influencers? Should Instagram hide the number of followers? Do you think Sazerac is behind the secondary take down? Why make the Van Winkles the face of the blame? Should they raise the SRP of Pappy? Do you think other distilleries are happy they took action on the secondary market? What are you thankful for with bourbon in 2019? Thanks to Blake from bourbonr.com, Nick from BreakingBourbon.com , and Brian from sippncorn.com for joining. 0:00 me think about it if you're like a craft distiller you work your ass off like making it all anyone ever asked like, was it? Did you distill it? Yeah, yeah, we produced it. No Did you distill it? 0:13 Right there the label 0:15 and then and then they then you taste it like oh, that sucks. I'd rather have MGP 0:32 Happy Thanksgiving everybody. It is Episode 229 of bourbon pursuit and I hope you're out there, drinking a little bit of Turkey today and just taking it nice and easy. Now Buffalo Trace just wrapped up its second experiment utilizing its custom made experimental warehouse x. Now this experiment began in 2016 and focus on how temperature affects the aging process. The first experiment ended in 2016. And that one focus on natural like keeping barrels various stages of light for two years. And the second experiment, which just ended a few weeks ago at the end of October, determined how barrel activity correlates with temperature changes, keeping to the four warehouse chambers constant and vary the other two chambers. And throughout the experiment, they track temperature fluctuations from five degrees to 109 degrees Fahrenheit, and monitored the barrel pressures ranging from about negative 2.7 psi to a positive 3.2 psi, in total 9.1 million data points were collected during the second experiment. And now the next experiment will expand on the distilleries temperature experiment by focusing on how temperature and these swings affect whiskey activity in the barrel. And there's gonna be a two year experiment and that's going to begin in late November. Buffalo Trace estimates that it's going to collect more than 70 million data points by the end of this 20 year project. For more information about warehouse texts, you can visit the experimental warehouse.com good friend of the show Marion Eve got it. chance to tell her story on nothing else. But the TED stage. TED talks are a personal favorite of mine. And I feel that she did an absolute amazing job on this. Not only do you get to hear her story of getting into bourbon, working your way up the ranks at Brown Forman, delete for castle and key and her eventual departure from castling key but she really shines a spotlight on bourbon as a whole. It's a 10 minute TED talk that was from TEDx Broadway. And you can watch it with the link in our show notes. This is the final round table for 2019. As we head into the new year, and this one, it packs a few punches, we first dive into the Instagram news where the number of likes are now hidden from your view. And if that's going to impact our bourbon Instagram stars that are out there. Then we roll into the real meat of the podcast talking about Pappy and saceur act versus the secondary market. There's lots of good ideas and theories behind this one. Lastly, we share what we're thankful for in 2019. And I also want to take this opportunity Say thank you to you. We really do appreciate the hours that you spend with us every single week to hear us talk about bourbon. And I hope each and every one of you have a happy Thanksgiving. Now it's time for Joe to tell us a little bit more about barrel bourbon. And then you've got Fred minich with above the char. 3:18 It's Joe from barrell bourbon. We work with distilleries from all over the world to source and blend the best ingredients into America's most curious cask strength whiskies. Find out more at barrell bourbon com. 3:32 I'm Fred MiniK. And this is above the char. This week's idea comes from Ian, that bourbon guy on Twitter. Ans what are the top 10 vintage Bourbons everyone must chase on their whiskey journey. That's a great question and it's one I've actually thought a lot about because I like to collect vintage whiskies. For me it all starts with the distilleries you want to have like a whiskey from every distillery that matters to you or every state. For me, I can't speak for everyone else. But I had to have some Mexican bourbon and some Canadian bourbon in my collection. So when I started my hunts, I captured some of those that so these are historic Bourbons that would have been made in these markets before the 1964 declaration of bourbon being a unique product the United States so those are two right off the bat. And the Mexican bourbon was not so good. The Canadian bourbon actually pretty pretty good. And then I have to always have something from national distillers national distillers was really good parent company that used to operate old Taylor and Old Crow they sold to beam in 1987 and Old Crow turned a shit in thankfully says rack acquired old Taylor from beam which was slowly To shit as well. So I always have to have something from national distillers. And then I like to go for my favorite distillers of all time. And that would be someone like Edwin Fudd, or book or know or Lincoln Henderson or Parker beam, you know something that these great legendary iconic distillers would have touched. So that's not really a brand per se, but you got to do your homework to find out where they worked and what they did and what brands they touched on that and so that is that is one tool that I have always used as well, and you got to get something from the 1800s. I mean, it's kind of a it's a difficult acquisition. But if you can find the old bottle from the 1800s you feel pretty special about it. It's a pretty pretty cool feeling when you hold in your hand something that was created during President Benjamin Harrison's time I also like to always have a bottle from stetzer Weller Wild Turkey, old brown Forman products like old old forester from the 1960s the President's choice, and something I'm very fond of as getting those private labels that they used to make. Back in the day places like Macy's and grocery stores, they would all have private labels a bourbon. You're starting to see a little bit of a comeback of this, but it was really popular back in the day. One thing I like to stay away from though are the decanters, especially the Jim Beam decanters because you really never know how much is left in there. You know, some of them might be like too much lead in there, whatever. But there's a lot of decanters that I will not touch of course, that completely contradicts what I'm about to tell you. And that is the Old Crow chespin piece from the 1960s. It was absolutely it's absolutely the greatest bourbon I have ever tasted. And if you've never had the opportunity to taste it, you can go check out a bottle at the Bardstown bourbon company, the library there I curated. So those are really some of my key points when I'm when I'm looking for vintage whiskeys and they're all very personal you got to remember whiskey is is about your own journey as well as the hunt. So find out what it is you like and what stories means something to you and what people meant something to you and go chase them. So that's this week's above the char thanks a lot T and for that great idea and if you have an idea for above the char make sure you hit me up on Twitter, Instagram, or even YouTube now. Just search my name Fred MiniK. Until next week, cheers 7:39 Welcome everybody. It is the bourbon Community Roundtable number 39 and this is bourbon pursuit the official podcast of bourbon. This is one of the most favorite times of the podcast especially for us because we get to bring on all our good friends with inside of the community here the best bloggers around some of the best lawyers around that know about bourbon as well. And to be held in accountants. I mean, we got two accounts. Yeah. Got it, we're gonna we're going to start creating our own trade business at the end of this. And not only that is you know, we have people from all around the nation that are joining and watching us live and being a part of this conversation as well. Right now we're sitting around 63 concurrent viewers, hopefully gets 100 by the end of this. But with that, let's go ahead because we've got a whole lot of information to talk about, and I want to kind of get into this. So, Ryan, Fred, here we are again, man. You guys look looking forward tonight. 8:31 Yeah, I think this is a very important discussion to have tonight, and maybe it's one we've all wanted to have. 8:39 What are we discussing? 8:42 What happens what happens when you don't do the homework? Yeah. 8:45 I'm super excited to discuss that too. 8:48 Nice. Nice. Alright, so let's go ahead and round in our first one. So Blake from bourbon or how are you? I'm 8:53 doing well doing well. Thanks for having me, guys. Yeah, into my introduction. Yeah, I guess it's just our usual thing is usual Alright, I'm Blake from bourbon or if you're watching this you probably already know this is the, you know, longest standing tradition of making the roundtables, like call me the kin, Kendrick. Ken Griffey, also Cal Ripken of the round table but that's a follow me on all the social medias. Bo you are Bo and r.com as well as seal box calm, only have URLs where you have to spell it out and people are caught on What was that again? So seal boxes. Es el ba ch s. 9:36 And you got a new one right Southern barnburner I have that 9:39 one. I don't know. Is that is that you 9:43 know, is there a southern bourbon or out there? Yeah. 9:47 Yeah. Someone's copying you. 9:49 Talk boy hop on those URLs. Blake. Oh, yeah. 9:53 Go ahead and put that cease and desist out. 9:55 I'll get it together tonight. 9:57 You know, speaking of that, the kind of fakes and stuff that Come out there. Remember Ted Finnick? Remember those articles? Yeah, that 10:04 was whatever happened he had like a solid two month run and then all the sudden 10:08 it happens every now and then someone will come out and try to, you know, impersonate me or do some kind of, you know, fun satirical deal. And that's great. I love it. But what they don't realize is if you're going to try to impersonate me You better try to keep up because I go fast and 10:25 they realize like oh man this this is work now like 10:32 I'll just go back to making fun of him and in a Facebook forum you know and that's good 10:38 all right, Brian, you're up next buddy. 10:40 Yeah, thanks guys for having me again is Brian with sip and corn you can find me on the all the socials as sip and corn and you can also find me at bourbon justice calm. Look forward to a good show tonight. Guest 10:51 fantastic and Nick. 10:53 And I'm Nick with breaking bourbon calm. April 1. Breaking vodka calm that's been known to happen. But only that one day. And I can find us on all this socials at breaking bourbon. And thanks again for me on guys. 11:08 Absolutely. It's always great to have all of you on especially everybody else that's here in the chat. So let's go ahead and kind of start with our first question. If people in the chat they have something that they'd like to say with us as well speak now, we're going to be like to be able to put it out there for you. So the first we're going to talk about is the new change that happened with Instagram. Now, this is something that kind of, you know, maybe impacts the bourbon world a little bit, but more or less, just like the influencer market that's out there. So one of the recent changes that happened was they removed the ability to see the amount of likes that an individual has on a specific kind of post. And this can be for a few different reasons. You know, there's a lot of things that you know, you can buy likes out there, that's, that's not unheard of. You can buy followers as well, but one things you really can't buy or, you know, good comments or engagement and stuff like that. So I guess the one thing I'll kind of hand it over to what sir, who has the The most followers I'm it's either between bourbon or breaking who's got the most followers or aging? Probably. 12:05 Yeah, I'd have to check. I think we're just under 70,000 12:08 Yeah, okay. 12:12 I got 7070 12:16 Yeah, there's there's no thousand after it, 12:18 you'll get it. I mean, you know, I'll say this you know, our, it's all 100% organic we we've never gotten into, you know, anything where you sign up to get followers in some way, we pretty much just post What we want to talk about what we're drinking. We try to keep it light on there as much as possible, of course, will will post new content and that kind of thing. But we've really made that clear with you know, anybody who wants to, you know, be sponsored in some way that you know, really it's about what we want to do so sure, if you want to send us a sample of something, or a bottle That's fantastic, you know, we'll maybe review it maybe do a TNT you know, maybe it'll show up and Instagram but really, we still, you know, maintain and control that you know, from the like personal active, you know, we certainly use it as a gauge as to what, you know what people want to see, you know, what, you know, what times a week or times a day, you know, maybe that the times when more people are going to see those posts, you know, generally speaking, you know, number of likes, you know, you'll you'll gauge that it's kind of the, the, the, you know, that metric outside of kind of next next met metric, which is the interaction. So the number of comments on the post, which is, you know, some posts, we see a huge volume of comments and others, you know, not really much I think, sometimes when we direct people off to the site, we actually lose comments on the Instagram post itself, and people are getting pulled right off to the site to read the review. But that's the intent. You know, the idea is to kind of share that message, let people know there's something new up on this site. You know, what I think is interesting about this whole thing is it's being proposed as, and maybe there's some truth and validity to it, that, you know, it's to help with people's mental well being that kind of thing. But that being said, I think there's a part of That believes at some point, you know, these companies that want this data on, you know, unlikes are going to be able to buy it on the back end, they're going to be able to see that data, you know, through some kind of payment to Instagram, they're going to be able to figure out, you know, who the best engaging influencers are, if that's what you want to call them. And they're going to use that as a metric. Because right now, if you think of these, you know, these companies, if they're looking at, you know, number of followers, and they're looking at number of likes, those are really kind of just surface that just touches the surface of what's going on, you know, as far as the interaction goes, and they really want the interactions, they want people that are interacting with the community and in depth and really, you know, connected with the communities that they're talking to. And those couple of metrics, I'm not really sure, you know, fully, you know, fully show that so I think what we're going to see is I think we're going to see Instagram, really starting to take a bite out of this pie of, you know, these influencers who are making money on this journey, they want their piece and I think that's what's eventually going to come is you know, ways for those companies to kind of engage that data? 15:02 Nick, that's a fantastic answer, by the way. 15:04 next subject. Here we go. 15:07 Do you ever gauge your post between you and Jordan and just to see who has the most likes? 15:12 I think Jordan does that he's keeping track five state. Not really. We have I mean, we have fun with it. We're running scoreboard. 15:22 We do get excited. I will say when there's actually when there's comments is when we really get excited, I think I posted actually was the three of us together, we went to a local store, and he kind of let us in the back or he's got way too much. That's not like generally for sale. But he kind of said, you know, take what you want, you know, what do you want and, you know, we weren't we didn't go over Barba which got three bottles and stuff you just don't see. And you know, we kind of put them arrange them in group. So this is what each of us got, you know, my group, George's group, Eric's group when you just said which, which one would you pick? One, two or three. And we were amazed by how many comments we got. Matt, you know, because it's really interesting to see, you know, that dynamic of what people gravitated towards, you know, with the bundle or the one particular bottle they felt like was the strongest, you know, that kind of thing. So, we get more excited about I think interactions than just just plain old likes at this point. 16:16 Yeah, I kind of the question for you know, between you and Blake, you know, when you look at this, you know, the ultimate goal is that none of us are like making money off Instagram, right? None of us are. I guess the question is, is that what we want to do is want to figure out how do we convert these people that are looking at our stuff on Instagram to actually listening to a podcast or reading one of your articles, like, do you see Instagram as a medium to actually make that happen? Or just are people just excited to just be like, Oh, cool. Nick has a bottle of Pappy 20 all like that. For me. 16:45 I think it's just, you know, it's all part of the big big flywheel. So you know, there's, there's people who come to just see the Instagram and may see a blog post or something like that, and, you know, so it's kind of connecting it all. But I think Instagram is a good discovery tool. 17:02 So 17:04 somebody may not be you just Google searching and find you, but they may see you on Instagram. They're like, Oh, they have a blog they posted a review now I'll look at that. So I think it's it's really good for that just for discovering new new blogs, new new websites, all that kind of stuff. So it's not as big of on the likes, like I didn't think that was that big of a deal, at least in the whiskey industry. You know, I think Mikey putting the comments about, you can still see the inside. So companies want to see your analytics of how many likes and comments you get per post, they could still see all that it's more of like that forward facing just that vanity number of Oh, this post got 1000 likes it is crazy. I think they just took took away that and I mean, that's fine to me. I don't think it really affects anything that us do. Because, you know, like Kenny said, No, no one's really making money off of Instagram. At least I haven't figured out a way yet. So, you know, it kind of removes that removes a little bit of the vanity. 18:09 And so I think it's pretty good thing overall, 18:11 I think this is very important for the consumer. What this does is it kind of, it kind of deflates a trend that we've seen in, in whiskey in that there's been a shit ton of people who bought a bottle of bourbon five weeks ago, and suddenly they're an expert. And so, you know, Instagram seem to be a breeding ground for people coming into the game. And I, as you all know, I will help anybody trying to get into this business at you know, to create interesting content or ideas or videos, whatever. I am all about furthering the education and the conversation. And even if you are a new bourbon consumer, and you're bringing people into that journey, And you're just posting a bottle. There's nothing wrong with that. The the problem that has surfaced from these, you know, some of the what we would call influencers is that they were like, overnight experts, and they would they would post themselves as that I mean, and someone like, you know, Brian and myself has been doing this for more than a decade. You know, he just kind of kind of look at that and scratch your head. But at the same time, I have seen the impact of what the influencer community can do for for events and getting people to show up or even watch something. And I think it's really powerful. There's a guy scotch and time I thought I that what he has done has been really remarkable in that he kind of vetted a lot of influencers that would touch scotch whether they were a cigars or They were car people. And like with it, you know, with a flick of a finger or a reach out through Instagram, he would have all those people talking about an event. And before you know it, you know he touches a million people. And those are real people. And so I think there's an incredible amount of value to it. But we just have to be careful that we don't get ourselves in a situation where we're not providing real information or a real story that matters to somebody 20:32 kind of just the back of what Fred says, I think I love Instagram and I waste countless hours of it. That's why I've mostly delete social media during the week not to waste time on it but with Instagram, it's like you have shallow short and like you know what contents going to grab you at that instant and it's like, everything has to be epic and it makes it like so like dramatic and it's sad that we have to like remove likes because people put So much self worth, like in those that we're trying to fix, you know, people's mental health because they don't realize this is a highlight reel of someone's life or their life like when Blake's, you know, dropping a brisket and it wobbles, and he has to put, you know, juvenile 400 degrees on it. It's not because he's living this epic life. It has kids screaming in the 21:22 room in the background, like everybody's going crazy. That's why I have to put music over every single. 21:32 Like, those celebrities are like, look at me, I'm so epic, because I'm with my boys and we got like 10 bottles and we put like 40 filters on it to make it look like the craziest photo ever. But, you know, that's just my thought on it. 21:45 I will say that when I got when Instagram verified my account, and I got that little blue checkmark. I mean, there's there are a few things that I have celebrated. More than that, that was like in a weird way, it was like, you know for 22:03 let me interrupt few things you've celebrated more than that. 22:07 Well, in terms of like social media, I was about to go down, go down that road, like, I hate social media. But when I first started, like trying to, you know, sell books to publishers, they were like, you need Instagram followers, you need Twitter followers, you need this and now it's fucking YouTube. So you know, you have to have all of these things to be encompassing and so that's why you know, I've worked on that is because it's what the people who you know, put on events and you know, buy books at the publishing level or films or whatever, that's what they want. And at bourbon and beyond, you know, we assess bands based on you know, like a new up and coming band, we can assess a band based on the metrics from YouTube or Instagram, that's real life data. So when I got that like blue checkmark because I know how important that is for like, event planners And that's basically how I make a good chunk of my living is doing events around the world. And when I got that blue checkmark, I was like, I've made it. 23:10 I had no idea I was That's crazy. I mean, I was late to the game didn't get on to my daughter got me on. And it's it's eye opening to 23:18 actually just put a green check after my name. I think it's something similar to that. Blue check. I think it 23:24 will. The green check emoji. Yeah. 23:28 Yeah, it's pretty close. I think it'll pass in some places. So yeah, I mean, like I said, I think that was a really good kind of way to touch on it a little bit. And I guess the last thing that will kind of look in here is, you know, as if you're a company and you're still looking for that engagement, that influencer following I mean, it is this can be a deterrent for you not being able to see that or is it going to be like okay, now we have to get more data out of this person, try to figure out if they're actually a true influencer or not. I think 23:53 it's going to cause the companies to dig deeper 23:56 sites that give you those analytics. I mean, there's sites like You know, don't on it down 24:02 follower by user. 24:03 Yeah, by account. And I think it's I think Instagrams going to use that data, you know, I think they're going to collect more data, I would think that they, at some point are going to try to be in between, because if you think right now, if there's transactions happening between companies in between influencers she got in, it's happening outside of Instagram, but then the post and the activity, the thing that they want is happening inside of Instagram, I gotta believe that, if I'm Instagram, why wouldn't I want a portion of that? Why would I want to be the one to connect those two entities? And if anything, we may see a lot more of that because right now, it's really pretty ad hoc, you know, especially if you're not somebody that's, you know, a huge Instagram personality that's got it figured out, you know, or a big company that's got it figured out you know, you've got smaller companies seeing it seeing like seeing followers thinking, Okay, there's a big audience here. Maybe they don't understand that but they might want to throw some money. They may not know how to connect with quality, the influencers I think we may see a lot more connectivity there, you know, between between these two parties with Instagram actually in the middle taking a portion of it, which to me that's even a little bit more scary you know, because as of right now you got to be cautious about what you're seeing and reading because what's really what's really behind it, you know, and there's certainly some markets out there where just about all the information that's out there is got somebody money behind it is very difficult to find real information, you know, that somebody has put together on their own without the influence from somebody money. 25:33 Okay, last question as we kind of tail off on this. Should Instagram also hide the amount of followers that you have, 25:40 I think that would start to deter even more from people reaching out to you know, influencers and all that kind of stuff. So I think that would hurt their, you know, they can kind of get away with hiding the likes and you know, gets a nice PR push, but if they started hiding followers and all of that. I mean, you know, the whole mental health thing I get, but it's like, if somebody is drawing value in their own life, because of how many Instagram followers, they have Instagrams not gonna be able to solve that problem in their life, you know, it's going to take something more. And, you know, it's a sad thing to say, but it is true. Like, if that's where you're deriving value from with your life, like, you need to take a step back in general. And that's just a small byproduct of I'm sure some deep seated issues. 26:34 So 26:35 kind of a, on a serious note to bring it back. 26:39 No, like, what's the point that I mean, you know, we're all on there to build a bigger following and reach bigger audience. So take it for what it is. It's a tool to talk to more people about whiskey. It's not something that you should be waking up in the middle of the night thinking why don't I have 100,000 26:56 followers every time my posts don't get as much likes his kidneys. I'm liking that. You're in a funk. You know, 27:07 I who cares what they do? I mean, I just all I mean every, every day, they're all changing their algorithms and you know, one day it's all going to go away or be changed and highly regulated. Just, it's not worth worrying about or even thinking about. It's all stupid. 27:24 Yeah, like speaking of stupid, let's go ahead and move on to another stupid topic. So some fun. 27:28 Yes. Alright. 27:30 Cool. So, last week, Blake broke a lot of hearts out there across the nation, as he got rid of you know, he always has to be tech map, but he said this year, and never again, will there ever be another Pappy release map. And so that kind of led into a good blog posts that kind of talked about really the problems that he sees with it. You know, even if you do find a bottle, Pappy. odds are you're not going to be paying retail because I think he said there's about it. Maybe a two to 5% chance that there's that's all the retailers that are left across the nation that are actually selling theirs at suggested retail price. And so this kind of leads into the sort of the next question and it also kind of tails off on a lot of things that we had discussed or kind of took the the brunt end of it. A few weeks ago when we had a counterfeiter on the podcast, and people were talking about, okay, well, you need to go talk to Sandra, you need to pull you need to put them online, they should be responsible for this. Like they need to answer the questions that people we reached out to saceur and PR, and we asked for somebody to come on the show to try it and provide some transparency. And we knew this was going to be a sensitive subject. And we're willing to give all the questions up front just in case they wanted to prepare their answers. However, resizer at the respectfully declined our offer, and they do not wish to answer any of our questions. So we're going to do what we do best and make all sorts of frivolous claims and conspiracy theories. 28:53 Thank you. lations. 28:54 Yes, so everything you hear from this point forward and me button right now. 29:00 Go ahead and throw that Brian's 29:02 way. 29:04 So anything that you hear from here on out is our own opinions. Nothing that is factual or true or anything. This is just something that we're all just kind of talking about as just kind of friends and kind of just putting our ideas out there. So, the first thing we kind of look at here is, of course, we all know that the van winkles were kind of the face of the secondary market take down we talked about it, you know, we recorded it bourbon and beyond. We put it out there the whole world got to hear. However, I kind of want to put it out there for you all. Do you believe that there, you know, there are bigger wheels in motion behind this. And it's actually Sazerac as a whole. And it's really the Van Winkle is just kind of had to be the puppet in this. 29:42 We're not going to fall on the sword with you, Kenny. Let's you're on your own. 29:47 When you look at it, it's kind of like the perfect storm. So the Van Winkle is have the face where everyone knows Pappy and everybody wants to get Pappy and that's you know, that's I'll step out and say that's the majority of what was being sold and traded and everything on the secondary market. It helps when you have a billion dollar company that also hates the secondary behind you and that's that's where azurite came in. So you know where I think Preston said where he fail which was you know, he hated the secondary market and all this stuff but more Julian and everyone else falls I don't know. But you know, to me and I just think it's really misguided Is this the best way I don't want to say it's dumb or stupid because I think they have their reasons but I think they missed out on they're actually targeting their their biggest you know, cheerleaders and their biggest promoters by going after the secondary market in you know, to go after the secondary market and not just put some, you know, anti counterfeiting measures on their bottle. I think that's the biggest thing. And I have a, you know, my prop is in the background of how much I feel like they actually do care about the consumer. And you know, you look at the 2017, Pappy 15 year, they put the wrong foil cap, they put the red cap on the bottle instead of the black cap and just let it go out to market. I mean, I can't think of any other product where they put the wrong cap on it just like who cares? Send it no big deal. And that's to me that was like a bigger slap in the face that actually going after the secondary the fact that you know, these things are how crazy people go. And it wasn't like there was a press announcement meant before it was just like they started popping up and for like, hey, the 15 years got a red cap on it this year. Like oh, bottling mistake, it's good. So, it took us 20,000 31:55 bottles before we realized screw let it go. 31:58 Like I just You know, we send one sticker out wrong and you're going to get a reply automatically you send it out, Hey, sorry, we sit around sticker, whatever. So that to me was just kind of like, what are we really going after here and ultimately, Cedric says or ex defense of the three tier system, which they are strongly embedded in, they believe in the three tier system, they think three tier system should be there no matter what. And they see the secondary market as, you know, a deterrent to the three tier system or you know, impeding the three tier system. And ultimately, it's not about taking down the secondary, it's about making sure that that three tier system is in place, and ongoing forever. 32:44 They were even against like the da Vinci spirits. 32:48 Lucky. So, you know, for me, like that's what the secondary market was was to go and enjoy looking at those beautiful old bottles. That would occasionally pop up from the 50s and 60s, I gave two shits about Pappy. And, you know, but that's what led the conversation in it really, it comes down to it comes down to every single year for that company. They have the hottest Bourbons that everybody wants in every major city in the country and the small ones in every country in the world. How do they get there? How do they get it there? And then in between those these things that happen, they're staffed within their own company. You know, there's small little counterfeiters here and there you got ridiculous hype, you know, driving around it, like from like the from the fortune story about billionaires can't even get a bottle to help us talking about it. I mean, for God's sake, I mean, I've my whole Pappy versus the field thing on YouTube. Was was an experiment for me just at halftime. I'm fine with it, but, but it was like, you know, I'm part of the problem. So I guess, you know, before we kind of jump into some other questions here, does anybody else kind of think that? You know, was it really like why make the van winkles the face of this? 34:18 With the careers of master distiller spanning almost 50 years, as well as Kentucky bourbon Hall of Famer and having over 100 million people taste his products. Steve nalli is a legend of bourbon who for years made Maker's Mark with expertise and precision. 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Like, is anybody else have a kind of theory about behind that? 36:24 Well, I mean, do you think that says rack is making the Van Winkle face? Or do you think the van winkles are recognizing that of their own volition and in you know, driving and as well themselves? 36:36 This is all theory, man. So if you think that, you know, they had the wheels in motion behind this, and they're just like, hey, Preston, we're going to go ahead and let you be the punching bag. This today like what what do you really think that was it or you really think that maybe the vein winkles actually do legitimately care about the secondary market? 36:52 I think they were the face no matter what I mean, if four roses came out and tried to do the same thing, it's like well You know, you the small batch limited edition gets flipped a little bit but and nobody's going to step up from a bottle from 1950 you know, some old still Weller nobody's going to step up and like try to shut it down on their behalf so I think they were just kind of already the face. 37:19 But I don't think anyone else really, I guess could be the face in a sense of, you know, if you think about it is a very family business in a way you know, if you look at if you look at says rack and that company, you know, that that teaming up with the van winkles and partnership was a fantastic move, you know, for their product line. You know, that whatever caused Van Winkle and Pappy Van Winkle, you know, all the things that, you know, you look at the dominoes that fell years ago that just caused the popularity to skyrocket. You know, there's no question that that's overflowed into you know, a lot of says RX product And now we've got this, you know, we've got this this kind of like beast that's feeding itself in a way, because we've got us as, as bourbon enthusiasts, as drinkers who talk about this stuff all the time, who buy this stuff and want this stuff. I mean, I look in my, in my, in my collection here, and I've definitely got like a high percentage of Sazerac type products that I've kind of like stocked up on just based on that, geez, I don't think I'm going to see it again for a while. I better buy a few of them, as opposed to Yeah, I see it all the time. I'll just get one. What do I need three, four, you know, and so then we've got the distributors using it to hold over the retailers as a product to buy more products and is not just sanitary products, but it's stuff they want to move as well, because they're in it to make money. You know, you know, so you've and then you've got the retailers who don't put this stuff on the shelves. So no matter how much they're making, it appears to be a ghost, whatever it might be, even though there might be a lot of it because of a retailer's holding it back and taking you by You know, by the by the shoulder and saying by the arm and saying, Hey, I got something special, you're, you're a good guy like you, you want to, you're suddenly saying, I am special? I do want that. Absolutely. And then it's not even a question about it, you know, so get everybody really believing that all these products are insanely hard to get that's causing people to hoard them, stockpile them, and buy more of them, and then that's what's causing the price to go up. So the secondary in a way, has kind of helped their cause in a sense, you know, at the same time, you know, it's, they're, they're a company, you know, you got to look at say, what are you doing to stop, you know, counterfeit bottles to stop these things from going on to prevent illegal activity? You know, so how much of it is them really wanting to stop it versus just okay, I suppose we really should, you know, apply and make it look like we're doing something over here, 39:46 Nick, I think it's more than just that that helped them. I mean, it's the horse they wrote, it's the it's the reason that those brands are as popular as they are today. And now there's at least 15 turn their back on that secondary market but that's that's what made them and maybe once you make it that big you can turn your back on it and you can try to take this holier than thou attitude toward it, but it got them there and I mean maybe it'll push them back down if they if they push back against, you know Corky Taylor from peerless when I asked him about this you know at bourbon and beyond he he said that he's like this is like it's a mistake, that this whole thing was like punishing the the hardcore consumers that really has brought, you know, bourbon to where it's at right now. But I'm telling you all the van winkles in the 90s every single day they were near closure, you know that that's a company where 40:51 everybody wants to hate on them, but it was they had a long road. Long Road to get here and You know, and they, they get probably far more hate mail hate mail than all of us combined on on a yearly basis, because people can't get bottles and they get all these stories that are connected to them. And so I think a lot of what we caught on that stage in September was frustration, and I don't think saceur i don't think i don't think sads rag put then we close up to this, I think they wanted to do it. And I think Preston on that stage that day wanted to get it off his chest and you know, they, they're angry about it. They're angry about the fact that someone can sell a bottle that that's who's not a licensed retailer, they're also angry about the people who are jacking up prices and liquor stores. And here's the thing as they say they can't do anything about that, that that's true. So the liquor stores who are price gouging, you know, are protected by federal laws that prevent, prevent alcohol companies. From dictating pricing, so, like Mac and these like ambos, they they like fixed their prices and prices and retailers can't, can't do they can't jack the prices up alcohol cannot do that. And that all goes back to the 40s and 50s. And ironically, the Pappy Van Winkle testified in Congress talking about all the price fixing that was going on in the industry. So they are in a hard spot. And I, you know, it, it's, it's a know when to know when if they jack up their prices to kind of like, you know, meet the demand, they're in trouble. You know, they get yelled at, you know, and if they don't do anything, they get yelled at, but, but what it came down to is they made a business decision. And, and they, I think, I don't think they made the best business decision, but they made what they thought was best for their company. 42:53 Fred to piggyback on that, you know, I think that they do internalize what they went through and I think there's got to be a part of them that says, if we raise our prices today, this, you know, we've kind of gotten lucky in a way. I mean, if I were them, I would certainly feel like, man, we really got lucky over the years with how popular our product has become, what if we push it too hard, and we lose what we've gained. And we're back to where we were? Yeah, so I gotta believe it for them. That's got to be going on. I mean, that's a human thing to feel. I would think if any of us in that position would probably be, you know, thinking the same thing. 43:28 You know, and this is this is all kind of coming back around because, you know, Christopher Hart and a few other people with inside the chat, you know, they were saying like, Oh, it's all the vein, winkles. It's not SAS rack. And I'm kind of saying, I'm kind of the opposite. And I'll kind of give you my, my theory on this. Because, you know, when I look at this, I look at, you know, the vein winkles is the face of this and they come out saying that the main argument is behind counterfeiting, and that's a pretty weak excuse, like, actually, it's a shitty excuse my opinion, like because they're not doing anything to prevent it. They're not doing anything to invest in it to make anything happen me Blake made a pretty good example about that even quality control at Sazerac was poor enough to even see that happen. And what was the real point of just going after the secondary market? So if I think about this, and I think a few steps back, and I think a little bit higher up the ladder, I'm like, Okay, well, I want to put these people to faces because the most popular brand out there, and it's something that people are going to recognize. And if it's coming from them, all these bourbon nerds, you know, crazy, they're going to talk about it. And people are talking already on on here that saying, you know, we're doing it like we're giving them the more press that they're already going to get right. So we're giving free marketing. And this is another theory that I kind of heard from somebody else as well, is that sazzle is expanding. I mean, they've got more warehouses coming out, they've got more distilleries coming online. And the goal behind this is to not have so much focus, being on just a few select brands. Instead, what they want to be able to do is they want to be able to try to spread the pie even further. Get these hands and get these bottles in the hands of more people, not the allocated products, but the stuff that's coming online. And you got to be able to get it in such a way that people aren't just talking about the same five bottles all the time. Now, I also kind of look at this in another way is that this is a, this is a very bad thing for bourbon. Because we know Fred talked about a little bit earlier. And, and I think we've all had that same feeling that when we're able to sit there, and we're able to scroll, and we're able to see these cool bottles from the 50s and old Miller antiques from the 70s. And like all these like, you know, old Willett wax tops, and people are just going you know, they're going crazy for it. And they just want to rip it away for why for counterfeiting. Like, that's bullshit. Like it's bullshit, right? There's got to be something that's a little bit little bit higher here to make this a real a real claim and a real excuse and it can't be counterfeiting. So I'm just saying that there's there's some dots in my head that aren't connecting. To make it say that counterfeits are really the real angle 45:56 here when the Attorney General's 46:00 For the country all the states basically issued a joint letter saying that they're going to be cracking down on secondary market that's that the bad week goes guys 46:10 I'm sure Julian has 46:11 some connections but for to get 47 out of the 50 Attorney General's 46:17 and let me tell you, they're all playing on that date the Dominican Republic, minibar stuff and the whole seller world boy they seize that opportunity better than you know it. Yeah, anything since prohibition I mean, my 46:35 god, 46:36 they're like all see, look what happens here when we allow shipping. You can die. You know, you could die from alcohol poisoning and vultures will be eating your guts on the beach. It's just ridiculous. how far they took that? 46:52 I don't think says right really gives a shit as whiskey geeks we think would they care these whiskey brands care about what we think and like These really high end bottles matter that the reality is, those things are like 5% of their business. It's like low on the totem pole. It's more of a pain they asked for them. They're thinking more grander bigger. I just don't think that counterfeiting or the Van Winkle. I mean, yes, they wanted but I just don't think they would put all these resources in it into that when they're just there as on how much fireball how much Buffalo Trace, can we push out there and do it globally? Not that that's what they're focused on, I think. 47:31 Yeah, I think if anything, it's a reaction. I can agree with that to Ryan and the van winkles. It may be more internal, you know, they're invested in it. 47:39 But I think I think the van winkles it's like Fred said, they've got so much sweat equity and all this and, you know, it's their family history and they're just for lack of better term butthurt about it. You know, that people can flip it on the market for 10 x what they you know, because a $300 bottle, they're probably making you know, 9200 bucks on it you know and then and then it's selling for 1518 $2,000 i mean you know that's probably more of it for me but 48:07 but okay here's the thing like they can control that why don't they do it? 48:10 Well they could I guess but for they can just why don't they sell it for two grand but the same amount of hate from the other side saying well you sold out you 48:21 know what Booker's do when they raise the $20 they're like hell fuck the head 48:26 I kind of nonsense 48:28 yeah their perspective you know they I can't imagine the amount you know as Fred said they probably get the amount of hate mail all of us combined on a daily basis you know, it's probably pretty frustrating to get like they think they're doing the right thing by just keeping the prices lower and I'm sure every random you know guys email them saying oh, I used to buy your bottles for $50 a bottle and loved it now I can't get it. And you got a you know, I'm sure it's millennial thrown in there somewhere who's ruining it or like You know a guy in skinny jeans and a flannel shirts probably the reason why they can't live happy anymore. But you know they're probably frustrated with that like I would be too I don't you know i don't blame them but I just think they're taking the wrong approach 49:16 doesn't keeping that bottle at $90 encourage secondary flipping 49:22 you know, but indirectly if they crease it so so say they came out next year and happy 15 was just $500 I guarantee you they'd get even more hate because of that. I think but I could be wrong. I mean, ultimately I you know, I think it like Ryan said this is not a big I think all these limited releases is something they want to get behind them. You know that we Jordan an eye toward heaven Hill, and it was crazy the amount of spirits that were flowing through there and bourbon was, I mean, we saw way more watermelon vodka and flavored rums and all this stuff that we had never seen just, you know, hundreds of thousands of cases moving through their Eliza correct 23rd year was not even on the radar of what was what was important and what was, you know, kind of moving the profit loss statement. So I think it is kind of that necessary evil they want, they want to have it they want that, you know, the history and the heritage and everything else. But at the end of the day, that's not what makes these places profitable for raising prices really, 50:35 I mean, well, it isn't, it's still, you know, flips for double for you know, instantly it 50:40 will, it will it has a little bit because will it that that affects the bottom line and a little bit more, you know, if you double the price of something that is affecting your bottom line by like, point 05 percent, 50:52 you know, it's only one to 2% of their total business like that. They cut almost All their gift shop sales of it because it became such a pain in the ass. They were getting ABC letters from people saying like, or not from people that from the ABC, that people were turning them in, you know, saying like, well, they're just selling to certain people and you know, then they're like, well, the hell with it, we're not even gonna deal with anymore because it's just do this for the, you know, the whiskey and this is turned into a more headache than than it needs to be. 51:23 So I want to bring something up that Kenny said at the very top, and that's like, I want everyone to know, like how hard we work to get a representative from Sazerac to come on and talk about this. And we thought we had someone across the finish line, but we did not say Hey, come on this show. You know, we respected that person's position and his future with with that respective company. And I just want to tell you that anytime we have we've all given a lot we've sung a lot of things haven't hills way. Anytime I have ever written anything. Negative about heaven Hill, they reach out to me and they explain anytime I've ever written anything about Jim Beam, they reach out to me and explain and you know, sometimes they won't talk to me for six months, but they will they will still have a conversation with me. What we're looking at here we are looking at a very, a very closed in organization. Arguably it's the best whiskey that's out there and hungry consumers who want to know more. And if anyone from saceur acts listening, I'm just telling you that the playing it like playing the game of like not talking about this is only hurting you is only hurting you and and you got to come on you got to talk about this because people people are fascinated about it from a business perspective as well. I mean, in addition to Kenny's like, right vein popping up over here when he's got a blood draw tomorrow, you know, I'm getting concerned about him. People are absolutely fascinated with the business. A bourbon. So let's talk about one of the most key issues in our industry. And that is allocation. How do you decide to do allocation? I would love to have that conversation. 53:13 And so there's one other thing I kind of want to also bring up as we were talking about raising prices in this just kind of like just jogged my memory a little bit, you know, when Blake came out with his article, you know, saying that maybe there's like 5% of retailers nationwide that are actually still selling at us, Rp. And let's, let's be, let's be generous. We'll give it the 8020 rule say 20% of retailers nationwide are still selling it SRP 53:34 even if they generally are state run, you've got state run to start with, right. Okay. So then there's all them and then you've got the other ones with a lot of big retailers are doing lotteries 53:44 across the board. Even if they said rk Well, guess what the new SRP for Pappy 15 500 bucks. There's still 80% of the country that's still going to charge more than 500 bucks that's fine. Right in the 20%. That's there. Yeah, sure. little bitch, but whatever. Like, I think most people get over it. And, and not only that is most people, if they have the offer to buy a $500 bottle, most people are going to do it anyway, because that's the only time they're ever gonna get their hands on it. So I don't really see a whole lot of blowback, even if they were to raise the price in the back end. However, I've always been one to always say, you know, kudos to Sazerac and the entire portfolio of actually kind of sticking to their guns and really not raising prices across the board on any any allocated bourbon, you know, so it's, it's one thing that is cool to be the bourbon consumer and just say, like, hey, it's always a good deal. If you can find it a retailer, right? If I could find the owner to leave for $45. Cool, great deal. If it's 150. Maybe it's a pass. So that's just one of the things that, you know, over the over the years, I'm just really surprised that we stuck with him. And kind of like the last question I want to throw as regards to this. You all think other distilleries are happy with sizer x actions here or Van Winkle, his actions whoever it is to actually take down This, this singular, or should I say the big secondary market groups? 55:04 I think that's an even more interesting question, because so far nobody has jumped on board to publicly say, yeah, we're with them. We should, you know, be doing something to combat that. And maybe it is because, you know, if we look at it says rack are the leading products in the majority of that, you know, it's it's dusty bottles, and it's 55:26 sad, it says right products. 55:29 But I do think it's interesting that nobody has really kind of jump in to fight the battle with them. And you know, whether that's because they disagree or whether that's because they want to see how it you know, the consumer is going to react, I don't know, but 55:46 the longer other distilleries stay out of that fight, I think it's better for the consumer. 55:53 Well, I think here in the United States, you know, I think the market is just very, very small, relatively speaking. You know, maybe there's counterfeiting going on and other countries where it's more of a massive problem that we're just not in tune with that we don't know, you know, you see videos pop up on YouTube have these like mass production type situations where people are bottling, you know, something in in a counterfeit nature that it definitely appears to be in a different country, you know, where it's going to be, you know, sold in some black market. But here in the United States, you know, I think it's really resolved mostly to the enthusiast crowd, you know, to the crowd is trying to be istock bars and restaurants and high end places like that, you know, as a percentage of sales. I it's got to be really small. What I would really like to see and I know, you know, I know producers distilleries Listen to this. I would like to see a movement from producers and distilleries, you know, from somewhere to kind of create this market. How do we, you know, people are going to buy and sell, they're going to if this stuff is going to change hands, it's going to happen. You know, the market is going to find a way because somebody has it, somebody else will it plain and simple, that's just how it's going to work. Right? So if it's not this thing, it's going to be the next thing. So I would like to see a movement to get behind that, you know, in a way that doesn't encroach on the new production, the new businesses, stuff that does go through the three tier system, the normal way, there's plenty that doesn't, you know, there's plenty of stuff like Fred mentioned, you know, the older stuff, the stuff people find in their grandparents basements, that somebody else wants, that is of no value to the person who found it, but have tremendous value to maybe somebody else. And in some cases, maybe a lot of other people. You know, as we've seen with these charity auctions, and things of that nature, where these bottles can raise a tremendous amount of money, there's certainly a market for it. And I really believe, you know, the producers, especially the big producers should get behind that kind of, you know, they're behind the culture, if they're, you know, touting the history and those kinds of things. put your money where your mouth is, and make it so that we can have them market that everybody wants and is going to have anyway. 57:56 You know, what's funny is there was a secondary market called classified ads forever. Like, in through my research, I found so many bottles for sale and like small newspapers and people would just, you know, go and buy him but I'll say this like, Christopher Hart brought this up, Ryan and I were on his show. It'll be I think it airs this week as well. But I brought up the fact that I do think that second you know, he brought up two factors like the secondary market is will always survive in these forums in some way, shape or form. And not I do not believe that I am seeing an uptake of federal authorities getting involved with this. I mean, this is a very serious issue. The same people who were involved and taking down Big Tobacco in the 1990s you're starting to see them focus on alcohol while at the same time you have a incredible large movement within the health community try and ban advertising. So the second the all this alcohol stuff falls under kind of like two battles one you have one trying, you know, one side trying to block the lead Sales and you have another side, you know, for whatever reason they're trying to block illegal sales on the other side, you have people who are trying to ban alcohol and social media. So you've got, I mean, right now it's coming at to France. And in some ways, that's why it's kind of mark Browns head has always been a very he's always been very conservative about this. And so if like if you were to put yourself in his shoes of like you're trying to protect what you do protect your company in the best way you think is possible. You know, you may pursue something like this to prevent it. But the fact is, is what no one ever seems to grasp. Is that us, the bourbon fan, the consumer, you know, I just feel like all of these, if anything is, is going to change. It has to come from us. You know, there was a few years ago, New York tried to ban fantasy, fantasy gaming, you know, within five hours every Saturday In New York, I had heard from people in their area that never even considered politics, and they changed it just like that. Now we can all play fantasy football and make money off of it. So if if we are going to save any, you know, semblance of what the secondary market is or what a meant to us, it's got to come from us. And we have to start like, pushing it. We have to, like, you know, write our congressmen and our state senators and say, like, you know, this is an issue that's important to us. And, believe it or not, you know, if Wade Woodard and people like that multiply, I mean, who can handle 20 letters from Wade water today? 1:00:43 And Fred, I go bigger than that. I mean, the three tier system is antiquated. It's rooted in Prohibition era, sentiments and law. I mean, that whole the whole system's got to go and if part of that is a more even more robust vintage Law then we already have that really resembles what the secondary market looks like. So be it, it'll be a safer market. If folks like Sazerac and the other producers, take anti counterfeiting measures, it'll be a safer market. We've got to go to more. I mean, I'm always an open market guy. But here I really am for partly out of self interest, but that's where we've got to go. We've got to go to less regulation and more openness on it. 1:01:26 Yeah. Let's say let's stage a DC protest. Hey, hey, three teams gotta go. I don't know how 1:01:34 to go to DC and drink bourbon. 1:01:37 Next to the 30 other picketers 1:01:40 actually, what would happen is everybody would just end up with jack rose, and no one would go do anything. We pretty much 1:01:47 like that idea. 1:01:48 We need some members of Congress while we're there, though. 1:01:51 Yeah. 1:01:52 What guy with a retail license in DC so we can maybe set something up, I think, Oh, yeah. Let's do it. 1:02:00 Trying to get the RV let's go 1:02:01 gas it up 1:02:02 alright so let's go ahead we'll kind of wrap this up on a little bit higher now because this is this is the Thanksgiving episode so happy Thanksgiving everybody Hope you're if you're driving you're maybe you're just starting to try to fall asleep to some trip the fan little slip or something like that but let's go ahead and kind of go around a little bit and kind of talk about you know what we're thankful for and bourbon in 2019 if there's something that was awesome that happened to you whether it was growing or do anything like that or just laying a cool bottle 1:02:32 we're like in height 1:02:36 Sure, why not in with 1:02:39 I'll jump in. 1:02:41 So, 1:02:42 first I'm going to plug an article that's coming this week. And some bourbon are always do an article about, you

Our final Tales week interview is with the incredible, John Little. John Little and Smooth Ambler has been making waves for years in the bourbon scene. We are joined by Wade Woodard and Todd Grube. We talk about the recent price increase, their rise to fame and just about everything else I have ever wanted to ask the man. Whiskey Neat is a podcast and Radio show on iTunes and ESPN 97.5 FM in Houston and is brought to you every week by the following sponsors. Terlato Distell Artisan Spirits, Leader in premium artisan products like Bunnahabhain, Deanston, Ledaig/ Tobermory, Bains, Black Bottle and Scottish Leader.  You can find the show on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Podcast arena, IHeart Radio, Spotify, YouTube and Facebook. Or follow us at IG @MyWhiskeyNeat   Twitter @MyWhiskeyNeat www.MyWhiskeyNeat.com

The roundtable is back at it again, but this time we are joined by David Jennings of RareBird101 and Wade Woodard of tater-talk to discuss some topics. Learn how you can be a part of Wild Turkey history by supporting RareBird101 on Kickstarter and if you agree or disagree with Wade on barrel finished bourbon classifications. We wrap up talking about limited editions and store picks because that's always a hot button for all. Show Partners: Barrell Craft Spirits is more than just bourbon, they blend rye, whiskey, rum and have a signature infinite barrel project. Find them at your local retailer. Receive $25 off your first order with code "Pursuit" at RackhouseWhiskeyClub.com. Show Notes: The week’s Above the Char with Fred Minnick talks about Joy Perrine, the first female bartender to be inducted into the Kentucky Bourbon Hall of Fame. Wild Turkey Kickstarter with David Jennings of RareBird101 - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rarebird101/wild-turkey-american-spirit News came out this week that the TTB is allowing "specialty whiskey" classifications to adorn the name bourbon on the label. Is this the demise of the bourbon law? Maker’s Mark released another limited edition. From a retail standpoint, isn’t this the easiest money that’s ever been made? When it comes to store picks should retailers care about what’s in the bottle? Taste vs Age, who wins? Will it sell no matter what? Thank you to Blake of bourbonr.com, Brian of sippncorn.com, and Jordan of breakingbourbon.com for joining as usual. Unknown 0:00 Everybody's a lot of chime in whenever they can. Jordan. Unknown 0:05 just lost anyone else. Did you know? All right, I mean, you know when your video wasn't breaking up, you might have saw. Unknown 0:27 Hey everybody, welcome back to Episode 196. of bourbon pursuit. I'm one of your hosts Kendrick Coleman. And this is the Community Roundtable. That means I don't have any news to talk about because all we talk about is the news. On the round table. We get some of the latest gossips and the fun cultural topics that we all love to hit on such as barrel selections, but a little bit news about us. We recorded a live podcast this week with Corky Taylor of peerless distilling company. Make sure that you don't miss out on our live streams and live recordings because we have Unknown 1:00 Another one coming up in May. Make sure you're following us on all our social media channels Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. And you're going to be the first to know when we go live. Are you interested in partnering with bourbon pursuit? We're the most downloaded whiskey podcast across America. Check out how you can get your brand in front of a million bourbon drinkers per year at bourbon pursuit calm and hit the partnership button. Or you can send us an email team at bourbon pursuit calm. Now with that, let's hear a little message from Joe over a barrel bourbon. And then you've got Fred Minnick with the above the jar. Unknown 1:37 Joe from barrel craft spirits here. Barrell Craft Spirits is more than just bourbon, we blend rye, whiskey, rum and we have a signature infinite barrel project. Find us at your local retailer. Unknown 1:50 I'm Fred making this is above the char. If you walked into a low level bar in the 1980s you had a variable Unknown 2:00 little chance of getting a good Manhattan or old fashion or Mint Julep. Most of the bartenders were used to just slinging beer and porn, a little whiskey. Oh, nice or neat. And then came a young woman named joy Perrine. She came from the Caribbean islands where she served as a bartender at St. Croix and made all sorts of daiquiris and various types of from drinks and all kinds of banana frozen concoctions that made the island visitors quite happy. Local had never seen anybody like joy brainy. She stood behind the bar and slung mint juleps like nobody here before. She made Manhattan's and created special syrup that would complement Bourbons, unique to Kentucky. She was so amazing. That Esquire called her the bad girl of bourbon and the reason why she would tell you off if you Unknown 3:00 ordered a bourbon the wrong way in her opinion or if you boasted a little too much about what you thought you knew about purpose Unknown 3:08 because of her accomplishments in life, Joy preening was named in the bourbon Hall of Fame, the only female bartender to be inducted into the bourbon Hall of Fame. When she passed away two weeks ago, I thought about my relationship with a 73 year old. She was quick witted, would always tell you what she thought, but boy that she loved family. She loved her daughter, she loved my family. And I gotta tell you, if you were ever enjoy parade, nice presence and she made you a drink that taste that moment. It would last a lifetime. Unknown 3:47 her longtime employer, Dean corporate, died a few months ago as well. And I like to think that both of them are upstairs right now in the cloud somewhere, sipping on a bourbon Unknown 4:00 hope that I can only add to what Dean and joy did for the local community. And whatever you do in bourbon, whether it's consumer or promoted, I hope we can all live up to the standards that joy Perrine created. Unknown 4:18 And that's this week's above the char. Hey, did you know I got a new magazine out? Go check it out. It's on newsstands now look for bourbon plus and Whole Foods, Kroger, Barnes noble, and a lot of other places where magazines are sold. Hit me up on Twitter or Instagram at Fred Minnick. Until next week. Cheers. Unknown 4:40 Welcome. This is the 31st recording of the bourbon community around table is another favorite of bourbon pursuit because this is the opportunity that not only do we have a variable mix of some of the biggest bloggers and authors in the scene of bourbon here to join us, but we get to talk about Unknown 5:00 recent news and it's also the opportunity for fans for people that are in the bourbon community as well to join and watch this happen live and be a part of the live chat as it goes down so, Kenny Ryan and Fred here from bourbon pursuit team fellas, how you doing tonight? Unknown 5:18 Great. Unknown 5:21 3031 times down we had we had to mess up. Unknown 5:25 question Why do we do with the hardball? Unknown 5:29 Where's the bunnies? I'm trying to count all the towels on the bottom of the screen. I'm like how many people we got Unknown 5:37 is the round table as a bourbon family and I'm here at my cigar family and the lounge, smoking a stogie and just excited to get this going. I'm in my basement, looking at my kids two ways. Unknown 5:52 You know, let's do this pregame. know everybody's got a little bit better atmosphere but this is also the pre game that we're recording this about an hour before the Unknown 6:00 NCAA Men's National Basketball Championship kicks off. For me. I've got to still go with sec. So I'm pulling for Auburn tonight. Ryan, Fred, what about you all Auburn's not playing tonight? Really? Unknown 6:12 Where are you talking about 30 games? Getting? Oh, yeah, you're right. Sorry. Virginia. Virginia. Unknown 6:21 Tech. Yeah, I'm waiting for the one but they found you know, Unknown 6:27 start over from the topic. Unknown 6:31 I'm going I'm going to go actually have Virginia, Virginia. Virginia has had to crazy wins. So, like the probable odds of winning those games are like, not profitable. So probably they're going to win them. Go Texas Tech. Red Raiders. There we go. So we got our first three in. Let's go ahead and kick it off with our Cal Ripken of the Community Roundtable. Blake. Take it away. Yep. Just just continuing the streak all the way through undefeated Unknown 7:00 In the bourbon really count Unknown 7:04 I'm not sure Unknown 7:06 if you play if you throw a pitch and a game you counted as played but no so tonight well I'm Blake from burner burner calm and steel box calm so for tonight's game don't really have a dog in the fight Unknown 7:24 yeah birthday day of being a Florida fam. Ok now go back to back national championships a decade ago but Unknown 7:32 I think it'd be interesting to see Virginia when you know to go from the first number one seed to get knocked off by 16 seed and then go back and win the national championship the next year. That's pretty cool story. Unknown 7:44 Texas Tech and really I just have no connection to other than I'd like that bobby knight coach there for a few years but so my heart would say Virginia but I don't think they are they're going to win. I think Texas Tech actually wins. For going to do a spread. I'm going to say Texas Tech Unknown 8:00 by seven and Unknown 8:03 one up this Yeah. Unknown 8:07 bourbon or pick on that one if anybody wants to me. Oh, nothing's really Unknown 8:14 can I put my mortgage down on it? Unknown 8:17 That's a five star guaranteed. Unknown 8:20 Brian second quarter to go ahead and take it. All right, thanks. Yeah, this is Brian was sipping corn find me at bourbon justice calm or sipping corn calm Unknown 8:29 my team tonight I'm in protest so I'm still rooting for the cats somehow some way but since they can't win since it was robbed from us I'm going Texas Tech tonight the the probability that Ryan was talking about of some of those games that Virginia one and just not being able to put points on the board makes me think this is a Texas Tech kind of night. There we go. Thank you and an honor of one of our topics and one of our guests. I've got a wild turkey 1850 Unknown 9:00 Five the 1.8 proof nice and I've got a drink the rest of it because reminder to people quirks can still break after the initial opening so the rest of this is going down Unknown 9:13 somebody's gonna sleep really well tonight Cheers. Unknown 9:18 Jordan take it away. sure this is Jordan from breaking bourbon calm one of the three guys on the site visits for the Release Calendar. In Depth reviews can also find us on social app breaking bourbon, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Patreon. And for the championship game since Dukes been knocked out. I'm gonna stick with ACC and refer Virginia. Alright, and then we've got two other guests that are joining us tonight and they're always familiar faces to the podcast as well. First I'm going to go with Wade Woodard who is he's keeps the Tater library. He's got Tater talk calm. So welcome back to the show. Hi, good to be here. As you mentioned, I'm a whiskey geek. I have a blog side paid or hyphen talk. com Unknown 10:00 I am the compliance officer of the Texas whiskey Association. And we are within the next month launching a Texas whiskey trail with 14 distilleries on the Texas whiskey trail. Unknown 10:13 Let's see the game tonight. I one time was in Lubbock and I had an Aggie sticker on my car and I went into a restaurant and I came back outside and I had to slash tires Unknown 10:27 know I came here for other writers. I guess I had to go over with Virginia tonight and because it's working, you know, I brought out my Monday evening bottles here so I'm having a little while I'll turn feature of you might spark so here's just a poor Unknown 10:48 just happens to be above his computer as we're recording. Unknown 10:54 All right, and then David Jennings of Robert, welcome back to the show. Hey, glad you had me on. Unknown 11:00 Absolutely and you know, give a plug about you know what you do and that'll kind of lead us into our first topic tonight. Okay, well, I have a blog. It's rare bird one or one.com primarily reviews the wild turkey whiskies. I have some articles from time to time, there's resources there with the timeline and bottle codes and this kind of thing. And more recently, I just finished a first draft of wild turkey book, which I don't know if you want me getting into that or not right now. But anyway, I'm just glad to be on as far as a I'm just guys I'm just not into sports as much as you guys so in my house I'm rooting for wild turkey wins every night. Unknown 11:43 Also, the say is like is there something in your life that like doesn't revolve around wild turkey like at some point is your wife or your kids are just like God, we can just quit it just Unknown 11:54 a little bit, but I try to keep it you know, try to keep it in check. So anyway, it's all it's all fun. Unknown 12:00 And it's my passion. I mean, I really enjoy it. So, you know, it's, Unknown 12:04 it's hard. You know, if you're if you don't love something, you're not going to do it every day. But when you're really passionate about something, it just happens all the time. So that's that's my life on a weekly basis. And I David, I gotta tell you, when you when you reach out to me to read your manuscript, I was really honored and to see where you're going with it is fascinating and starting a Kickstarter campaign that is one of the it's one of the riskiest things you can do as an author to go out there and, and do that because you're putting yourself out there everyone's going to see what the donations are. So take us through that process. Why did you choose to go with the Kickstarter route? Okay, well, you know, Unknown 12:49 well, you know, how difficult it is probably back when you first started to get somebody to pay attention to you and and give you some type of publishing deal and or one that's even worth a flip and Unknown 13:00 I didn't really want to compromise. I was, Unknown 13:03 um, you know, willing to entertain, you know, publishing offers and that type of thing. But ultimately, you know, I, Unknown 13:10 I felt like no matter what I did, if I went that route, it was going to take a long time. And you told me, you know, we're looking at maybe February, the earliest, you know, something worked out, maybe later. And so, I felt like this was the year you know, I wanted to get something out there. This is Jimmy's 65th year coming up in September on September 10. And I would love to have a copy of this in his hands by that day. And I thought, well, I think I have a strong enough fan base to get just enough to make that happen, you know, hire a photographer and, and get some designed to have a nice looking book. You know, it's not going to be probably as nice as some of the other hardcover books out there. But it was enough. You know, I thought I could get enough together to make it something worth buying, you know, and I'll be honest with you, setting up Unknown 14:00 Kickstarter, it wasn't as easy as it was, when I set up my Patreon, there was a lot more verification to it, and you know, there was no guarantee that it would be approved. And so I put everything out there and tried to set it up as best I could and just kind of cross my fingers that they would sign off on it. I did. Unknown 14:18 And now and I did the math, and I'm like, okay, I just want to break even, you know, with this, you know, I don't want to, you know, you know, set myself upside down with rewards in this type of thing. So I sat down and did my math. I watched a lot of YouTube videos on how to run a successful campaign. Unknown 14:33 And so I did my research. And so I came up with 30 $500 Unknown 14:37 is probably enough to get the design photography, all this stuff together to get something out their own. We're a book can be purchased on the on demand basis, which I'm sure you're familiar with Fred, but like with Amazon, you can publish a book on demand. So you send them a PDF file, and they print the book as people buy it. And so I was just trying to cover the cost to get the book there. Okay. Unknown 15:00 And so Unknown 15:02 it alarmed me to find out, you know, within 24 hours. I mean, it was like I had like $1,000 already, you know, and then today I hit goal, like, you know, 10am or 11am or something. And I mean, and now I'm at like 40 $500 Unknown 15:21 or something you know, and the Bergen community. Unknown 15:27 Y'all are some good all of y'all. Well, David, I'll tell you, I'll tell you that Unknown 15:33 we will open up their wallets to turn, you know, like they're they do that to people that like, and you've always come off as a very genuine very fun person. And you get to know you and see if it's even more and then you got that South Carolina accent. You know, where's this all in? Bill Clinton Unknown 15:57 when I was sick Yeah. But yeah Unknown 16:00 Well, you know, guys, Unknown 16:03 it's, it's humbling it really is and I really appreciate it and appreciate you know y'all having me on. I'm going to continue with the Kickstarter is going on for another 5756 days or so. And everything you know, every penny I get above my goal is just going to go right back into the project whether I can make a classier book than I originally set out to. Or I can do some marketing. Like, you know, I've been thinking about some ads or this type of thing where I could at least try to, I'm not gonna be able to compete with the big publishers but I can I can maybe hit a target audience better than they can now. You can whip their ass Unknown 16:41 so let's let's kind of decent here today with 57 days left your auto pays to make $256,500 Unknown 16:53 Yeah. Unknown 16:56 Y'all keep talking like that. David, I will give you I'll give Unknown 17:00 Just some economics behind you know, books like I, you know, I've been writing books for more than 10 years now and my first my first my first whiskey book whiskey women, I had like 500 rejections and you know, if I had the access like Kickstarter or had the notion to do that I would have I probably would have done it but my advanced for that was $2,000 and so they don't like that typewriter manuscript Unknown 17:34 actually do Unknown 17:37 that. So you you actually stand you know for what how you're going about this. You probably actually stand to make you know, legitimate money off of it. You know, from from the book sales. If you're putting it all back and look like that's the goal was just to kind of see if I can, you know, upgrade the product because I would love to have something in my hands that is comparable to what you would find will book stand Unknown 18:00 I'm not cutting any corners with the Amazon print on demand. I mean, it's going to be a full color photo quality, highest grade paper that they have is going to be soft cover, unfortunately, because amazon kindle demand does not do hardcover. But if I continue to raise funds like this, I can have the Amazon Kindle demand for an option. And then I might be able to go to like book baby or Ingram spark or something, and print some hardcover additions. And those might have to be on a limited basis. It just depends, you know, but that's kind of where I would like to go with it. Unknown 18:31 The most important thing to me is that I won't something I want something in Jimmy's hands, that's what I want. If I can just tell his story, and of course, you know, there's a story in there and there's a lot about data in there. But if that is what I really won't, because Jimmy is such a legend, and I feel like it's it's his time to get even, I mean, he's had a lot of accolades. I'm not gonna lie, you know, he's had a lot of people Unknown 19:00 Give him various honors. But I think is there's a story there that a lot of people have not heard yet. And I think that this is the time this is the year his 65th anniversary at the distillery. And I really want to make that happen. And I want to make it happen this year. And it looks like it's going to happen now. Thanks to everybody. And I'm a Patreon supporters and, and everybody that's donated on Kickstarter, people that have tweeted, retweeted, done stories on Instagram, Facebook posts, emails, word of mouth, all this stuff really helps, and I really appreciate it. And I can't say thank you enough, I really can't. Unknown 19:34 Well, you've got more time to go here. You know, you, you hit a goal within three days, which is fantastic. You still got 5050 some odd more days to go here. So I kind of want to let you give, you know, sort of one last plug that are sort of on the edge or like maybe thinking oh, well, he's already got his funding, like why should I even bother to promoted or back is still but give some ideas of why people should still back it because of the stories and some of the content Unknown 20:00 You're going to be delivering inside of there as well. Okay, great. Well, again, I want to take any extra funds raised and increase the quality of the product and promote the product. And the purpose of promoting the product is to make sure that the story of the recipes and the Russell's and of wild turkey distillery in the Lawrenceburg area is put out there. And I think like said, it's a story that needs to be told. And it's the right time with Jimmy's anniversary. And then we had the one to one anniversary last year with Jimmy and Eddie's combined service. And so that is the most important thing to me. If it stays a self published thing where it's promoted on my blog, or my, you know, Twitter feed or my Instagram, it will reach people, it just won't reach as many people and so I need to make sure I can raise enough to get it to the right places, like bourbon plus, or something like an adverb plus would be a really cool thing. And so that is that's my goal. So I just have to raise enough money to do that. And I think the other Unknown 21:00 You know, there's content there that you will enjoy. And there's a whole appreciation section to it's not just history so if like history is not your thing if you're like I just don't really, there's there's gonna be a lot of reviews on there are tasting notes, my impression on different expressions, and I'm doing a lot of photography I'm paying for a lot of photography so the book is going to have a ton of bottle porn in it. It's going to have a lot of like cocktail porn. It's just yeah it's just going to be just loaded with excited just loaded with but just good porn at the end and I've got a good photographer so I it's I'm not it's not you know my stuff. Unknown 21:41 I you know, wait, I don't mind hitting up whiskey advocate either, but they're not on the show tonight. Unknown 21:49 I'm going to talk about bourbon. Unknown 21:51 Know your audience and you you talk porn. So Unknown 21:58 let's change the subject back to that. Unknown 22:00 You know, I'd like to get them in the bc i don't know if that's going to happen or not, I haven't really talked to compile it too much other than I did arrange some. Unknown 22:09 Well, at least I started the process of arranging to have the photographer come in and be able to take photographs, and make sure that there's no you know, questions there. Unknown 22:19 But, you know, it would be nice to get them in in the visitor center. I think it'll probably happen in time maybe after it's done and somebody has something to look at. I'm doing a very limited run this week, I sent a local printer Unknown 22:33 the book without pictures to have a just like a mock up late. So it'll be in the eight, you know, the five by 5.585 or whatever, you know, kind of book format digest format, and, Unknown 22:48 and I'm going to send those out to a few people to do some editing and some review. Might you might get your targeted at date for release. And how can how can your fellow panelists here help you okay. Unknown 23:00 I would like to have it completed in time to give it to Jimmy so that would be September 10. I'd have to have it in his hands so September to at least have a run of the book done by local printer so it would be exactly like what would be on Amazon but I can work with my local printer and have that rushed and done quick so I can do that habit FedEx. So you know I guess sep tember first at the absolute latest would be you know my deadline there but out to the world you know I'll put on their December because I didn't want to kind of overextend myself or make promises I couldn't keep because I don't know what the turnaround time is with Amazon and these things I haven't got into that. You know much research on that side because I'm more focused on just getting things done. But I put December but I'm guessing you know, it'd be more like october november sometime sometime like that were to get there before the holidays. That would probably be the best thing to do because it would make a nice Christmas present. I think you definitely want to time it with that. Unknown 23:57 The stocking stuffers they start emulating yeah Unknown 24:00 I'll request that is so that 50 bourbon stones I have. You know, Unknown 24:05 I just I never imagined how much I mean, you don't think about these things like indexing like, you know, like, Fred, someone does your index for you, you know? Yeah, I'm like, I'm gonna have to do that. And like, I started messing with Microsoft Word and I load Microsoft Word. I mean, it's got a lot of features, but it's just it sucks the creativity out of you do don't don't do indexing. I'll connect you with someone who will do it. He's got a great typewriter. Unknown 24:29 Exactly right. It doesn't say like we're getting out of the bounds of even when I even know. Well, thank you for it. I mean, seriously, because I played with it. And I'm like, Oh, my God, I'm gonna kill myself. Unknown 24:39 It was just not I want to create, you know, on the right. You know, I didn't do a review this week, because I was so focused on getting all this stuff together. And I love writing reviews. So it really hurt, you know, to have to take that hit this week. So if you've got someone that can do that, oh, that would be awesome for you to talk offline about the effect of Bernard stuff. I'm sorry. I'm on you guys. Unknown 25:00 Good, let's go on the rails here. So, Unknown 25:03 so I want to say, you know, David, thank you again for coming on and kind of give us an insight about your book for anybody that's wanting to help back as Kickstarter. And you know, with the Kickstarter, you get an actual copy of the book too. So you can get that link in the show notes for the podcast as well. But I kind of want to move it on to the next subject in this is where it kind of all happened in some sort of like Twitter spiral. Fred had tweeted about cast finished bourbon jumping the shark. Wade had a tweet about the TTP telling him that you could add flavor and color is so called a bourbon. And my head was about to explode and I said, You know what, let's just have both of these guys. Come on in and we'll just put it out there and kind of see who who's kind of feathers we can rafal if we're kind of tailing off the wild turkey thing there. So wait, I kind of want to toss it over to you to kind of talk about where where this conversation spiraled out of well, if you haven't bourbon, or a straight bourbon whiskey Unknown 26:00 You put it in a secondary task it becomes class type 641 whiskey specialties is no longer class type one on one or 141 which is bourbon or straight bourbon. And the team can you be has a chart that what products by class type can have flavorings added to them. And when you become a whiskey specialty, you're also allowed to add up to 2.5% harmless color flavoring event blending materials into a product. Unknown 26:33 So I think that's what Fred was talking about somewhat is that you can add these flavorings into secondary cast finished products and you don't have to disclose the fact and then we had a major producer just came out with a Unknown 26:48 bourbon that had been finished partially in wine cast partially and Sherry cask and they acted like they reinvented bourbon and they were calling the project directly on Unknown 27:00 The bottling they do have that you know what was done to it? bourbon finished and partially finished but we need people people like us because we're transparent talk about the product you're talking about. Unknown 27:11 Okay, Jim being legend. Unknown 27:15 So if you go on Twitter and type in legend, every single post, you'll see me posting the actual cola say no, it's not bourbon, whiskey specialties. Unknown 27:29 And this is something you've been on for a long time I've been I've been a lot more kind of just generally, I kinda I liked the category because I liked a lot of taste of them. But I've never really liked the fact that bourbon and straight bourbon are on these labels. And Unknown 27:49 this year at the San Francisco world spirits competition, I think a lot of people know I'm a judge there, and I had the special barrel finish category on my panel. Unknown 28:00 We're tasting these I mean it was like one was like over Sherry read one was over ported one had one was like three different wine cask finishes and that none of them had any notice what note whatsoever of a bourbon and and that was a moment for me that Unknown 28:22 you know where I realized that we're so far removed away from these things tasting like bourbon as a whole that bourbon should not even be on the labeled for the for a lot of these special barrel finishes. And when we create like a distilled spirits specialty or whiskey specialty that allows them to do a lot of the things that they want to manipulate it to remove it from the the actual flavor profile of the original spirit. I don't think bourbon should be on that label is you're starting to see a lot of these independent battlers. A lot of these craft Unknown 29:00 distillers try to separate themselves in the market. So instead of improving distillate or instead of having a good quality bourbon to begin with, they're trying to what they do and rum, which is add things to compensate for the lack of quality in the original spirit. And I gotta tell you, it, it has to have people like Booker know and Parker been rolling in their graves because this is the sort of thing that American distillers fought against in the late 1800s. Again in the mid 1900s. Every time there's ever been an effort to to mess with bourbon distillers have rose up and fought against it. And today, it's the exact opposite. You're seeing the larger distillers you know, push for more of these allowances within the within the federal government, and it bothers me, but I'm going to kind of take a different side of that. Unknown 30:00 You know, we talked to people all the time, every good every that does all the barrel shrink finishes, you're talking the angel's envy that Joseph Magnus is in the world, everything like that. And they look at it is, this is this is a new territory, this is a new angle, this is how bourbon is going to go to the next level because there's new new realms of experimentation. Whiskey is going to go to the next level in their opinion, but it's not bourbon. You know, we have the path back back 100 years ago in 1909, that basically said we couldn't had these adult all degraded spirits. And now we're getting back to, oh, well, let's add this stuff to bourbon again. So Unknown 30:40 I know what you're saying. I know what you guys are saying when when you support the category from a flavor perspective is very good. It's very exciting. But you know, at some point, we have to protect bourbon. And if we do not then so Unknown 31:00 Suddenly this has got there's going to be an allowance of coloring and flavoring to bourbon. And we have to protect that. And that's all this is about. That's always talking about that's all I'm talking about. I love I love the flavor of the angels a lot of the angel's envy products. I love the flavor of the Magnus products. I'm just coming to a point where you know there were there are people in that category who are taking advantage of it straight up taking advantage of it and adding flavor packets to it, you know, saying oh, well I got a little bit of a this is a pork barrel finish I just happen to have an extra bottle of Port there you know, so that is what people who are getting Unknown 31:41 getting flanked by those who trying to compensate for shitty quality distillate devil's advocate not disagreeing but just playing devil's advocate. So I guess more for waiting and Fred, so they come up with a new category called bourbon, whatever that defines the rules, regulations around how you Unknown 32:00 can finish a bourbon would that be something you're open to are now? Unknown 32:05 I would prefer not to use the word bourbon. Call it whiskey call it American last year called some new name. Well, I'm like read it should be protected bourbon. Yeah, you gotta like bourbon. I think I think what you have is them just not following the laws because I don't have a problem and it sounds like y'all do but personally I don't have a problem if they call it Kentucky bourbon finished in whatever barrels but I just pulled this bottle and it says a truly unique bourbon. That's not abiding by the TTP standards. And now on the bottom it says Kentucky straight bourbon whiskey and then a line below it partially finished in wine and share cast. So with that wording, I would have a problem with it. But I think it's you know, for me, I don't have an issue with it saying, you know, bourbon finished in whatever cast because that's what it is. You know, it's Unknown 32:58 pending that they always do that. Unknown 33:00 That those they start marketing efforts where they're just calling it bourbon and leaving off what was done to it confuses the lines and that's what Jim Beam is doing with this product. But interesting I contacted the TTP specifically about this Jim Beam legend product and as the compliance officer at Texas because I have 14 distillers that look to me the same what can we do own labels what's allowed? Wait, America, America looks to you know, Unknown 33:30 again, I want to make sure that the products they're putting out a fully compliant with all the laws and someone we're making some of these products. And so I sent the TT Did you know, direct question, you know, is this Jim Beam label fully compliant with the TTP laws and they basically came back and said, this label is compliant. So the TTP doesn't seem to have any problem with Jim been calling this product, a unique bourbon. Well, I don't know. I don't think I've never met. Unknown 33:57 Go ahead. Sorry. But no, I was just I was Unknown 34:00 I agree with Blake on the bourbon finished in but my devil's advocate question for Fred is Unknown 34:06 it's it's a subjective question to say when a bourbon finished in whatever kind of barrel no longer has the attributes of bourbon Unknown 34:16 so how do you how do you govern that Unknown 34:19 you know I just a bright line know finished it's finished it can't call a bourbon now again I'm not opposed to finishes and I'm not even really opposed to having you know bourbon necessarily on the label. But is it when is it the one is it the main one it's the main word on the label versus an amplified word. I think that it really where you know where we're getting here's here's the thing with with whiskey distillers really human nature's you give someone an inch, and they're going to take a mile Unknown 34:55 No, and that is where we are. I can't I can't remember who Unknown 35:00 What the brand was when I found out what it was, but it was finished in like three or four different tasks, and it was still in, you know, it's still on the shelf as a bourbon. You know, angel's envy is in one casks, whatever you think of them there in one cask makers 46. It's, it's one style, it's got French oak stays inserted, but we start getting past one barrel. I mean that that that's that is where people will start taking advantage of it. And then you're going to get into Celera. And you're going to get into all these other things that the Steelers are going to try to do to take advantage of it to stand out and to have used their marketing tools. You know, to get a very clickbait headline that will run rampant on something like men's health or gear patrol or Forbes or wherever. And that's that and I'm just telling you from a pure like readability standpoint, that Jim Beam story is all over the place. It is Unknown 36:00 All over the place and like what is what is drawing IR from Wade and a lot of other people is that fact that it continues to be called bourbon and, and being so different and it's getting put in that same kind of like innovation innovation bucket, as Unknown 36:19 you know, something like sweet mash, you know, and no one cares about sweet mashing. But to me that's innovation for bourbon. You know, to me that is real innovation. You know, the barrel finishes I again, I love the category. I love so much of the flavor of it. But we're getting out of hand and I just know in ROM, it's a shit show. You know, they say it's a hilarious system. They're not Celera. Well, I mean, the other thing is, is that when we're talking about these finish, Cass you all are no better than me. But I don't think there's a law or anything that states about how empty a certain cast must be, or how dry or how how age it has to be until days. I mean, Unknown 37:00 Could have six bottles of rum left in there or seller or Porter Sherry, it could have a few drops. There's there's nothing to say. Unknown 37:10 rebuild their barrels and then they refill them to write and that's how. Unknown 37:15 Yeah, exactly. Again, that's also what they doing wrong and and you know there's there's nothing wrong with that for for like creating a whiskey and another thing weight is something that is, is is of growth right now our blends we're seeing a lot of blends of various types of burdens. And you know, and this is this is another area where people can slip in a little bit. You don't see blend of straights, you know, what are you getting? So there's just there's just a lot of things where there's this incredible Unknown 37:51 I feel like taking advantage of an eager populace to drink bourbon. Unknown 38:00 Not to cut you off or but you know, it's funny the whole time we're having this conversation. So I think it's almost like the very front line has already been last a long time ago and where I think we'll take like wild turkey honey or Jam Jam stack or anything like that. So and I talked to a lot of people who don't normally drink whiskey or bourbon, right? Let's say, Oh, I had this really good bourbon was like cherry flavored, or I had this really good honey bourbon. I'm always like, oh, and I start to explain to them and they're like, Uh huh. So do you drink that bourbon? And it just goes right over their head, right. Like, the big distilleries. They won that battle A long time ago, because in their minds, people are reading the label. They're already especially with the brand. Yeah, right. And that's not even bourbon begin with. It's just a blend of the corn inverted right now. You know, they last a long time ago. Well, I think one thing we're seeing you ask how the how these products can be compliant with the TTP. If you exceed 2.5% and these flavorings, you would technically have to call it a flavored whiskey. We don't know how much product is in these cast when they add it in. So actually Unknown 39:00 Lot of these products get measured on time. Typically, they're probably exceeding that 2.5% level that's allowed by law to be added to it. So a lot of these products, especially when you start doing multiple casts, like Fred was talking about, they're probably exceed the 2.5% and probably legally should be called flavored whiskies. Wait, I have a question. Is there a definition for cask? I mean, what's the cask? Does it have to be a certain defined barrel? Or can it just be a wooden box mean? What's a cast? It may change soon. Unknown 39:34 I mean, what's a cask now? legally? There is no legal definition for you go. Matter of fact, in the TTP regulations, they call it an oak container. They never even say barrel or carrel cast, they call it containers, but they're changing that container finished whiskey. Unknown 39:55 Jefferson ocean So wait, wait. I'm curious what your Unknown 40:00 Think of this My belief is that if if, if the buck if it stopped with like something as simple as like angel's envy, I don't think we're having this conversation. And we were, I really respect what angel's envy has done, because they never they always are always very transparent that you know, there they are bourbon finished, bourbon finish rye finished and done but I mean, I don't know. I mean Bourbons bourbon by itself. That's the way and I think English stuff should be whiskey. That's just my opinion. Like, maybe I'm too old school because I grew up around it but why not in something man, just bourbon bourbon. You know, right. If you do that, we'd have to have like a whole spin off show of called like whiskey finished in podcast pursuit. You know? It works. Well. Unknown 40:55 Don't do it. Unknown 41:00 You know, but you know, as as we look at what the future is all right, so it things are taking off, and people are getting more influence, you know, throughout the, throughout the consumer base throughout the, the governance. And you know, what does that look like in 10 years, we've seen what this looks like now after really a 10 year explosion of barrel finishes. If in 10 years, this continues to escalate, Unknown 41:28 it is going to be a shit show and bourbon will be damaged. If we hold the line on what is bourbon. And if they would have stopped with angel's envy, we wouldn't have a problem. If they would have stopped at that style. We wouldn't have a problem but it didn't. Unknown 41:44 So I guess to kind of wrap this segment up if there's a call to action for bourbon consumers out there, Fred Wade, like what is what is that action that somebody should take? Unknown 41:56 Well, my saying is, if it's not straight, you must debate Unknown 42:04 He's been he's been teaching that one of Unknown 42:10 the next t shirts come Unknown 42:13 to bottled in bond because that's not getting messed with that's Unknown 42:18 that's even even more that's straight plus face well shit Brian then you're only going to have like 12 whiskies in your bar Unknown 42:26 you think bottled in bond is not getting mess with I my latest blog posts talks about a bottle and broad product really crossing the line and got over the world. Unknown 42:38 Damn cannot ride a way we reached out the way for pursuit spirits. Unknown 42:45 One more thing on this topic though, if people do like these finish whiskies, I did a little experiment recently of trying to make my own at home by just adding a little port or a little Sherry or a little grandma or gay directly to the bottom. Unknown 43:00 And let them married for 30 days and had a panel of 11 blind tasters taste my version versus the commercial versions and two out of the three my versions one easily hand down. So you can make these products at home by starting with a good straight bourbon base. I get a couple of things. One bottled in bond from a label labeling perspective is starting to be Unknown 43:25 you know, kind of mess with whistle pig has a bottled and barn. So you see, you see something like that that's out there. So we've seen flavored whiskies make it through the TTP as bottled in bond. So bottom the bond is absolutely You know, it can be Unknown 43:45 you know, penetrated and and i look at I always go back to ROM when we talk about this, take a look at the state of affairs ROM ROM is a there's not many really genuine pure producers left Unknown 44:00 So if you want if you want bourbon to turn into that, then let's just, you know, let let this continue to go buy more live legend. Unknown 44:11 Absolutely. Well, I mean, I think we, we definitely came away with some some learnings here. So anybody that's out there, make sure you are you're reading the labels, you know what you're buying, and you make sure you're looking at a lot of these guys blog posts because they go in depth and you'll be smarter because of the Unknown 44:30 bourbon pursuit wouldn't be possible without the support of our Patreon community, and with help of our following partners. Unknown 44:39 You listen to podcast, so you know that there's more craft distilleries popping up around the country now more than ever, but how do you find out the best stories and the best flavors? That's why we've partnered with rock house whiskey club. It's a whiskey of the Month Club who's on a mission to uncover not only just the best flavors, but those stories that you want to hear Unknown 45:00 From craft distilleries across the US, rack houses box ship out every two months to 40 states and rack houses April box there featuring a distillery that was located inside a former North Carolina prison. Whiskey prison, home to Southern grace distilleries. It's the prison you'd want to break into. Rock house whiskey club is shipping out two bottles from Southern grace distilleries including it's double gold award winning conviction small batch bourbon, which is the first bourbon ever to legally be age behind bars, go to rock house whiskey club. com to check it out and try bottle of conviction today. Use code pursuit for $25 off your first box. Unknown 45:43 But next I kind of want to talk about sort of the hype train that continues to build just around limited editions and everything like that. And that was because this past week in Kentucky there was the last edition of the Kentucky Wildcats Maker's Mark limited edition a release and makers Unknown 46:00 Mark does one of these every single year it's it's usually in the Kentucky, Southern Indiana surrounding areas, they'll make somewhere between 12,000 to 20,000 of these bottles. And of course, there's just people lined up around the liquor barns and total wines and other stores and the cost goes, and I look at this and I try to view it from a retail standpoint. And I'm kind of curious and kind of look at you all. Is this thing, the greatest scam that's ever been invented? Because it seems like retailers just make so much money over doing nothing like they can just sell a bottle like that in an instant. Kentucky fans will buy anything Unknown 46:39 goes more than just that. I think makers has this down to a science mean they've been not just Kentucky but they do. They've been doing this for years. It's like all right, what sports in one let's roll out the red white or red wax. Let's roll out the different colored wax. Let's slap it on there and people go gaga for it. Right I mean, including Unknown 46:57 the RNC and the DNC convention. Unknown 47:00 Two years ago Unknown 47:03 I've been doing that for a long time to rock the boat bottles for sure. Unknown 47:07 Yeah, Jordan, art. Yeah, there's a long tradition of that. Right. You know, with all the decanters and everything from years past that the distilleries would put out. Maker's Mark seems to be the only one who continues to keep it a long living tradition and yeah, I mean you know, I guess if you see it on the shelf in your dad kind of like bourbon and there's my sports team on there Okay, I'll buy it you know, it's well but I thought you bring up a good point blank, but those decanters were when bourbon really wasn't selling so people are going more from the higher they are in the bourbon right makers money and people are buying bourbon left and right now but they're still rocking it out but people people love it. I mean, you know and and so like about like to justify bottles, those things just sell out automatically, where now they just they have the market cornered because if Buffalo Trace comes out with a Kentucky Wildcats bottle, everyone's like, hold on a second. Somebody else Unknown 48:00 But you know but it just expects that maker so Unknown 48:05 it would be question that I see is that this these newbies out there thank you these are special edition that there's some kind of special bourbon in the in the glass Unknown 48:17 is Unknown 48:19 it's all 12 year old Maker's Mark everybody Unknown 48:23 know that the over over Maker's Mark Unknown 48:27 This is what overload tastes like it's pretty good Unknown 48:32 10 years could you release this Unknown 48:35 suckers and kept buying them for a while and then I realized that that's the same juices I just started using them as mixers like Unknown 48:44 bars like here you go but i think i mean i think certain brands right so you got makers but Woodford doesn't work there during bottle right? Yeah, we'll go guy off for that. I think each brand has their niche and they Unknown 48:55 who was it Secretary that for? Oh yeah, that was Unknown 49:01 That was that was good Unknown 49:04 that Secretary one Penny Chenery the owner secretary, it out that was that was one of the coolest experiences of my career was pick a whooping with her when she picked up on but these things are you know we can bitch about a lot of different things but this is a little bit to me of the spirit of just having some fun. You know it is what it is they've been doing it for a long time. It brings in outside outsiders interested into to the category. It gets new, you know new fan bases excited. I like it. Most people don't open the bottles you know. Unknown 49:45 You get Unknown 49:47 the last one I tried open was the Astros World Series bottle I had to take a blowtorch to. Unknown 49:56 Pretty sure somebody out here wanted a beam Unknown 50:00 Comes bottle and it came out just to the right Unknown 50:05 there you go. I've worked hard to get Unknown 50:08 I mean they could put just colored water in there and No One Unknown 50:13 No One No one else is saying it's kind of like you know we talked about it on community around table in the past of having a sign bottle. You're like well do I really want to open a book open up a bottle it's been signed it's like now you know I'll just open up something else so all those things just gonna sit on the shelf it's gonna be a cool decoration. I opened my son bottles so do i do yeah, you really are rare bird Unknown 50:43 just said he just sent me up so well. Unknown 50:46 Funny pitch right there. Unknown 50:48 Really is a night which bottle will they be making? Unknown 50:54 UVA Yeah, Texas Tech battle. Who knows? marketing. It's just marketing though. I mean it Unknown 51:00 It's not I mean it none of the juiciest are really being like you know enticed by these it's it's more for the you know the mass public that enjoys makers and beam and it's just I don't see anything wrong with it personally I think it's a smart move on their part makers has always had great marketing as kind of their thing you know cheers with him for doing it you know Unknown 51:23 maker says a really big collector seen as well right i mean there's there's guys who just have you know Brian Brian and Unknown 51:32 there's another guy but they you know they have hundreds of these bottles they buy every single one so you know get feed the audience as well which is pretty cool. Almost spent $200 on the Jaguars Makers Mark bottle one time from the AFC know what they did it for wasn't AFC Championship but but you did that because you were a sports fan? Yeah, no. Unknown 51:53 He did that background. He was playing Unknown 52:00 For now through me a touchdown the light was on the bottle my really about to pay $200 for Makers Mark Unknown 52:08 Alright, so I want to kind of just dovetail this into the the last topic tonight and this is again going to be more across on the retail side because I kind of pitch that one is kind of a build up because I look at it in a way that oh it's going to sell no matter what you know, it's it's limited blah blah blah even if it's not limited with 20,000 bottles in one state and you're only targeting us a sports team. It's still going to sell out no matter what. But then we start looking at some things when it comes to something we all love and talk about which is barrel pics and barrel selections. And there's some some retailers out there that they don't care about what's inside the bottle. They will get a barrel sample or they'll get a phone call and they say hey, we've got three barrels. We've got a nine, nine year nine and a half year and a 10 years ago. I just will take the 10 year old doesn't matter like littles will take it because it's age and that's what sells Unknown 53:00 So when so what do you all kind of think of this? Like, do you think that in this sort of this today's market that Yeah, age is going to sell a product? It doesn't matter what it tastes like or anything like that. You got a four roses. That's 10 years 10 and a half years old, it's going to sell no problem. Unknown 53:20 Yeah. Unknown 53:22 I mean, it just does or sorry, go ahead, Ryan. Oh, no. Well, Unknown 53:26 I won't say where we were and who this was for. But when Kenny and our two barrel cake recently, the master distiller we went through 10 barrels, and he picked why they go, Well, Unknown 53:36 this has gone to such and such store and we're like, that one sucks or something. He was like, well, they won't care. Unknown 53:43 Like along those lines, and so it's like, just always make sure where you're buying stuff. You know, who's taking the barrels, because a lot of times they're out there and they're just like, what's going to who they're not here I send them this one, you know, so that's my just take on it. Well, I think I forget who it Unknown 54:00 Was but they're talking about you know the difference between group pics and store pics is a pretty big thing or just trusting the store that's picking it you know we we had that experience that when we did our VCR Buffalo Trace pick there were a couple barrels and there were like this just isn't very good. And we're like you know how what happens these barrels It was like well somebody is going to eventually get these and you know it's just a store who says yeah, give me whatever it's going to sell out no matter what so it's another one of those things where it gets like hyped up hyped up all you got to get store pics you got to get store pics, and then all of a sudden just garbage starts flowing into store pics as well. Now it's like okay, you gotta trust who's actually picking these because otherwise you're going to end up with something that's worse than just what you would find on the shelf. Unknown 54:48 people our age trap, you know, Unknown 54:52 for for something with a big age on it up. I'll be honest with you like with knob Creek pics. The 1314 year pics are just not my Unknown 55:00 thing. Um, I mean, I like a more around the nine year mark from the ones I've tasted. Maybe that's just a personal preference. Unknown 55:07 But like with Russell's reserve, I recently had a pic from Justin's House of bourbon. And I was like, Unknown 55:13 This is amazing. I mean, the finish was a little short, but the nose and the palette was amazing. And I found that it was just barely cracking eight years and I was like, really, and it was from Camp Nelson F, which it from my experience has been very spicy. A lot of draw spice and heat. And this one was real fruity. It was very kind of almost like four roses, like like OBS or something. And I was like, this is just incredible. And he was like, Yeah, man, it was just it was barely eight years. I was worried you wouldn't like it. I'm like, I love this thing. And so you can't really go I didn't know what the age was going into it. And you can't just assume that because it's got double digits that it's going to be good on that is not true. Um, there are plenty of eight nine year picks out there have a various you know, four roses, Jim Beam, whatever that Unknown 56:00 Excellent so don't go by age but a lot of people fall for the trap 14 year knob Creek, you know gotta get it now you know, it's like I don't know you might want to taste it first you know? Yeah, totally agree. Yes Do they trust you they trust who's doing the pics you fall for the age age and they also fall for the proof a lot to right so you'll see the same thing it's like oh, it's high proof that's just as I'll get the highest proof or short barrel Oh, short barrel God. Exactly. Right. So you know, Unknown 56:24 it goes right back to what Brandi said. We got to know the people picking it. Right and just find a flavor profile of somebody else that has a similar you know, tastes as you do and just trust them. Yeah, so elixir spirits here commented in the chat and said it happens quite often. He had an eight year 11 month old SK he took delivery on over a 12 year OBS f however, the SK took one and a half years to sell versus the 12 year which only took six months. So yeah, I think it really boils down to people have this idea of of age statements when they go in and they don't really care. Unknown 57:00 Even said He even told customers that the sky tasted better too. So that just goes, Yeah, and people still buy it. And I think I think this is sort of the thing that we're starting to see. And and what I'm starting to see with some of the the retailers is that they don't they don't care about going and tasting it. They're just like, sure, just get the highest age put in a bottle, it's going to sell no matter what. Unknown 57:25 You don't see age statements on every other thing. So you're like, I think people get excited when they see like a higher age on something. Because your age statements are gone now. So that might be why Well, I think a little bit of this to you know, you're starting to see this is you know, we're talking about this but there's another coin to this is that the distillers are going to the distributors and saying, if you guys don't take this barrel, you're sending us a clear message. These rate retailers are not necessarily doing this by choice mean Yes, they are. Unknown 58:00 selling it but a lot of the bigger ones, you know, they're trying to keep that they're trying to keep their applications and their guys still go in there and get the sweet honey barrels. But they do take on a load that you know that maybe old forester doesn't want a knob Creek doesn't want, you know, doesn't have like a group coming in and selecting them. So it's not necessarily always the retailer's best interest to say no to these larger distillers who are dictating who is getting barrels right now, right? Yep, everybody's on the chopping block. So you got to just take it take what you can get Unknown 58:36 retailer here in Houston that they liked to have store pics, but not with their particular name on it. So they want some kind of designations. I'm going to stick around the bottle and it was a private barrel pick. But in case it's bad, they don't really want to have their name on the bottom. Unknown 58:55 I guess you aged storks sword because you know then people love it. You don't even get to play Unknown 59:00 It is the greatest thing ever. Yeah, it's when you have some side stickers. Unknown 59:07 Of course I go around that stores and randomly throw a little stickers out on that looks like a private barrel. Unknown 59:15 Just just help them run through Unknown 59:18 a bunch of unicorn stickers you know just Unknown 59:22 a unicorn that's that's probably the next good prank that you could probably pull next year April Fools just go to total wine and just start putting stickers on everything and just see what a few pictures out there and just watch people start running. Unknown 59:39 I bet the retailers would actually like that because like social media traction for them. Unknown 59:45 Absolutely. Yeah, press is good press. Good deal. So that's gonna that's gonna wrap it up for tonight's episode. I want to say thank you everybody for joining us whether you're live watching us through the chat and then also Unknown 1:00:00 Thank you to everybody here on the panel that joined us. So Ryan Fred thank you again I'm kind of want to go around the around the horn one more time to let people give an opportunity to do say where you blog and Yeah, kind of start closing it out. So Blake, we'll start with you, buddy. Yeah, Unknown 1:00:16 I'm Blake from bourbon or calm always great to be on here. Good to be back in the full aspect and not just a quick drop in so you can find me on Instagram Twitter, Facebook, do you are Bo and are also check out? seal box calm. That's s e ll be a CH s. We specialize in craft spirits. So check it out. Yeah, thanks for having me guys. Get all your bourbon delivered right to your door. Whether it's finishing a cask or not, it's still good. Unknown 1:00:46 All kinds of all kinds. Unknown 1:00:49 We can Yeah, whatever you want, you know, a lot of Unknown 1:00:54 new roof. Just a barrel landed last week. So that was that was a big one. It's already gone. So your YouTube like Unknown 1:01:00 You can get some of the other numerous stuff if you'd like. Unknown 1:01:03 Good deal Brian. Go ahead, go next. Alright, thanks. Thanks for having me on again, Brian with sipping corn and you can find the sipping corn calm and bourbon justice comm check it out on Amazon and through the comics website. Unknown 1:01:19 Good deal Jordan. You're up next buddy. This is Jordan one of the three guys from breaking bourbon. You can find us on social media at breaking bourbon along with Patreon. This is the site for our daily updates or at least calor along with our in depth reviews. Unknown 1:01:35 Good deal, and we'll just keep going in order we had before. So Wade, you're up next. Yes. My blog is Tater. hyphen, talk calm. Or for the folks that are listening in Texas. They might want to check out Texas with e.org Unknown 1:01:52 There we go. Big things happening in Texas. All right. Always, always, always big things. Unknown 1:01:58 And David, go ahead. Unknown 1:02:00 All right, well, if you want to read some wild turkey reviews, get a rare bird one or one.com. You can find me on Instagram at rare bird one to one, you can find me on Twitter at our bird, one to one. Unknown 1:02:11 And of course I'm on Patreon patreon.com slash we're bird one on one. And I have a Kickstarter as you probably heard about a book I've written about wild turkey. And I want to thank all my Patreon supporters, and the people that have pledged on Kickstarter and all my followers and readers and last but certainly certainly not least, thank you, Fred. Thank you for talking with me and guide me through this process and being so supportive. Appreciate it and I hope that everyone recognizes that you know, as passionate as I as I am about Wild Turkey, bread is passionate about bourbon, so thank you. Unknown 1:02:45 Good thing you're talking about Fred there because I was about to pull like a Bob Barker like the wheels, the wheels. Unknown 1:02:52 You're Unknown 1:02:54 trying hard for that bourbon plus, Unknown 1:02:57 discount. I gotta get that discount now. Unknown 1:03:00 You have private jet ads in there? Unknown 1:03:04 Absolutely. And so make sure you're following course bourbon pursuit on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. You're also following Fred Minnick at all those different channels and supporting Of course, bourbon plus there as well. Right? Go ahead and close it out for us, buddy. Uber bus now. Thanks, guys for joining us as always, this is the shortest whenever I guess there's something going on tonight or something. Unknown 1:03:28 But no. Unknown 1:03:30 appreciate everyone. I'm a super excited for the rare bird Dave Jennings book. I'm super pumped. So please support that because I think it's going to be a great addition to anyone's bourbon library. But uh, Anyways, thanks, everyone, I guess go Cavs? I don't know. I mean, Unknown 1:03:48 so. I don't know. Yeah. We'll see what happens. Yep. Unknown 1:03:54 Well, with that, thank you, everybody, and we see you all next week. Cheers, bears. Unknown 1:04:00 Good Transcribed by https://otter.ai

This week we sit down with Spencer Whelan and Wade Woodard of the Texas Whiskey Association.  An organization that was recently formed by Eight Texas Distilleries who are making a concerted effort in labeling transparency and in making a real mark of pride in Texas Whiskey.  This is your fresh take on everything that CAN be discussed on the issue for now.... More to come.  Whiskey Neat is a podcast and Radio Show on iTunes and 94.1 FM in Houston. You can find the show on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Podcast arena, YouTube and Facebook. Whiskey Neat is a podcast on iTunes and 94.1 FM in Houston.  Or follow us at IG @MyWhiskeyNeat Twitter @MyWhiskeyNeat  www.MyWhiskeyNeat.com

This week I sit down with the National Director of Sales with Barrell Craft Spirits, Will Schragis and joined by 2 time guest of the show, Wade Woodard. We discuss the idea of a "Merchant Bottler" and the direction Barrell is moving with their spectrum of spirits, we also hit a bit on the regulatory environment here. It wouldn't be an episode with Wade without it. This happens to be one of those episodes in which we drink the full spectrum of spirits from Rum, to Cognac all the way back Whiskey. Whiskey Neat is a podcast on iTunes and 94.1 FM in Houston. You can find the show on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Podcast arena, YouTube and Facebook. Whiskey Neat is a podcast on iTunes and 94.1 FM in Houston. Or follow us at IG @MyWhiskeyNeat Twitter @MyWhiskeyNeat www.MyWhiskeyNeat.com

On this Weeks episode, I Spent the morning talking with an accidental Legend in the Bourbon world. The man responsible for the domino effect that has resulted in many single barrel programs across the US. RANDY BLANK as well as Consumer Advocate and my friend, Wade Woodard. An individual at the forefront of label transparency in the spirit world. Whiskey Neat is a podcast on iTunes and 94.1 FM in Houston. You can find the show on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Podcast arena, YouTube and Facebook. Or follow us at IG @MyWhiskeyNeat Twitter @MyWhiskeyNeat www.MyWhiskeyNeat.com

Please give us a 5-star rate and review! Become a patron of the show at http://www.patreon.com/mybourbonpodcast   Tanner joins Perry this week to talk about how they deal with getting burnt out on bourbon. Their review hits Tanner a little bit stronger than most have before, so strap in!   Perry accidentally said the wrong name of Wade Woodard's blog, so I've linked it here: https://tater-talk.com/   Dorm Streams on Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/dormstreams/videos/all   Check out the shop at http://bourbonshop.threadless.com/   Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mybourbonshop/   Twitter: https://twitter.com/mybourbonshop   Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mybourbonshop/  

Can you name all the distilleries in Lawrenceburg? How is it possible that a straight bourbon is only 70 proof? Wade Woodard, blogger at tater-talk.com and witty comedic relief on Facebook forums, leads us through a series of bourbon brain teasers to see if we really know our stuff. Wade is an advocate for bourbon laws and makes sure that everyone is playing by the rules so he knows them inside and out. Listen to see if we get stumped and see if you can answer the questions before we can. State of Logic Podcast connect the dots on relevant topics with interesting people as their guests. They explore recent books, culture, movies, science, politics and other random thoughts about life. Show Notes: None! Because I want you to listen and try to guess the answers for yourself!

Everyone has a different strategy when it comes to picking barrels and we talk about each of ours. We also touch on the topic of a "group pick" versus a "store pick" when something is selected by the Master Distiller. Crown Royal Bourbon Mash has violated the TTB, but does the TTB even care? Why are consumers still regulating this? And we talk about bourbon FOMO and the ridiculous amount of people around the country that have Blanton's scarcity, where did it all go? But more importantly, who cares? Danner has been making boots for 85 years for the unforgiving Pacific Northwest. Their Stronghold series is inspired by hikers but built for the toughest working conditions. Find your local store at danner.com. We picked our first barrel together. Let's talk about the process a bit more. Everyone has a different strategy Blake can you give your tasting notes on it Video will be posted on perfectpourtv.com in the future Everyone passed on barrel #6 but someone will eventually take that barrel. Or do you think that goes to stores who don't select and ask the Master Distiller to pick on for them? Wade Woodard who has started his new blog at tater-talk.com had an article called Diageo done screwed up. He talked about the Crown Royal Bourbon Mashbill release we discussed in the roundtable. Wade is a consumer advocate and whiskey law sleuth and discovered they are in violation. Can you take any guesses to what this product will be called after the 1 year period is over? Why are consumers still the ones doing all the legal hurdles? Does the TTB not care? Does it really matter at the end of the day since it's not a real crime? OKI announced the end of their line with a bunch of 12 year barrels being dumped soon but people are cleaning out shelves. In addition, the standard Old Scout is being cleared too. Not even store picks. Is there a panic mode being set in right now? People are continually complaining about finding Blanton's. Is it just me or does regular Blanton’s not do it for you all anymore? Is Buffalo Trace manufacturing demand?   Thanks to Blake from bourbonr.com, Nick and Jordan from BreakingBourbon.com, and Brian Harra from Sippncorn.blogspot.com Listen to all the Bourbon Community Roundtables.