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Whiskey Innovation and Craftsmanship Explored at New Riff Distillery with Brian Sprance and Jay Erisman · The Scotchy Bourbon Boys

• 0:58
  Speaker 1: What's up?
• 0:59
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• 1:03
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• 1:48
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• 2:18
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• 2:21
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• 2:42
  Speaker 5: Welcome back to another podcast of the Scotchy Bourbon Boys.
• 2:46
  Speaker 5: Today is a special podcast.
• 2:48
  Speaker 5: We are on location at the New Rift Distillery.
• 2:51
  Speaker 5: We're really excited.
• 2:53
  Speaker 5: We've got CT, We've got Andy and we've got Jamie Barrel head Not the other one that I, you know that one.
• 3:02
  Speaker 5: I'll keep that straight now and then also we're here with master distiller um brian sprint and jay um oh my god, I mean arizona.
• 3:14
  Speaker 5: Sorry, I got you.
• 3:15
  Speaker 5: Do you know what I actually?
• 3:16
  Speaker 5: Said that like 20 times all the way down and then I screwed it up.
• 3:20
  Speaker 4: That's me, that's how it goes.
• 3:21
  Speaker 4: You're just saying somebody by their name, though You're just saying Jay, hi, jay, hi Jay yeah, I'll ask you, just to get into it because we're excited, we're Facebook Live.
• 3:32
  Speaker 3: So see if you'll monitor some comments and if there's any questions.
• 3:35
  Speaker 5: But we're excited because initially, when you guys, when you were building the distillery and just getting up and running and everything when we come down from Ohio all the time we're always stopping in, you know, and then when you right, when you guys started doing all your releases and then you were into Ohio with the releases, that's when, I think, your first release of rye I was not a big rye fan and I tasted it in the.
• 4:02
  Speaker 5: You know, the person who was leading the tasting was like you got to taste it, so I was like one of the first ryes I ever liked.
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: So you know, getting that.
• 4:12
  Speaker 5: Ohio, Kentucky, back and forth.
• 4:13
  Speaker 3: You guys are like perfect.
• 4:15
  Speaker 5: And then you got party source right there in your.
• 4:18
  Speaker 5: So if you know people hunting and everything, you've got to stop in and see Nuref right.
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: Well, we've been praying for you, jeff, come around someday.
• 4:32
  Speaker 3: Oh, that's how this is going to go All right.
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: So me and CT have been on a couple.
• 4:40
  Speaker 5: If you guys want, we'll talk about a little bit about Brian and how you got into this.
• 4:45
  Speaker 5: But we've been on a couple barrel picks and CT's been on more than a couple.
• 4:49
  Speaker 5: You've probably been on two with the Kentucky Bourbon Festival, a lot of them Right.
• 4:54
  Speaker 5: And your barrel pick program is really I think it's very unique the whole way that it's set up.
• 5:01
  Speaker 5: At your other, you know the warehouse where the rickhouse and the bottling is.
• 5:06
  Speaker 5: But overall I mean the experience when you know we've done a lot of barrel picks but you guys kind of have a specific conference room that people go into and it's a really kind of cool experience.
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: Well, we try and do that right.
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: We had so much fun when we were at the party source and retailers, so much fun doing barrel picks, doing bourbon projects, things like that.
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: We wanted to bring that to our customers and our friends and our fans, but to really do it right and treat it right and elevate it, and we think we've accomplished that, you guys have done it.
• 5:44
  Speaker 4: I mean, at the size of what people I think from the outside looking in you know New Riff, they see it, they've had it, they like it.
• 5:51
  Speaker 4: But until you come down and do a barrel pick Now I've been on barrel picks with I can't tell you how many different places super big distilleries to small distilleries, and you still my benchmark is New Ruth.
• 6:05
  Speaker 3: Thank you, and I say that because when I came here for the first time it was an experience of a tour.
• 6:13
  Speaker 4: It was the experience of learning the process that you guys do, but also going through the barrels and enjoying it and trying to say hey we have five to pick from, but three or four of these are really good.
• 6:27
  Speaker 4: We've got to eliminate this, but the process is so great I love.
• 6:31
  Speaker 4: At the end of a barrel pick though.
• 6:33
  Speaker 4: You know Criolla, you've got your barrel.
• 6:36
  Speaker 4: She comes out with some special bottle that you've wanted to taste, that you've never been able to get your hands on, and you get to try that, yeah.
• 6:43
  Speaker 4: But the barrel yeah, barrel that just hey rises up there's no one has that I got to use the clicker yep, and she's my favorite now because I got to do that.
• 6:53
  Speaker 3: But so that is great, but the holding area for the single barrels.
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: How cool is it that, when you?
• 6:59
  Speaker 4: get done picking a barrel out in the the area right outside you're going to go out and on these fingered racks are those barrels and you go right out.
• 7:09
  Speaker 4: You taste it.
• 7:10
  Speaker 4: You get a bottle to take with you, a sample bottle.
• 7:12
  Speaker 4: You get to sign the barrel head.
• 7:14
  Speaker 4: I mean that's like no other, I mean there's very few places that give you that kind of experience, and at a bottle, at this price level?
• 7:22
  Speaker 4: That is just again.
• 7:24
  Speaker 4: It's a benchmark from there.
• 7:25
  Speaker 3: For me it's, is it as good as new riff, or is it not as good as new riff?
• 7:29
  Speaker 4: so I think you guys have hit it out of the park on the single barrel we took a cue from the wine industry.
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: those racks you're describing, ct, that hold our single barrels, that are in the private barrel program, were derived from the wine industry actually, where if you visit a Napa Valley winery they've got the beautiful barrels, are all displayed and things like that.
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: In the bourbon industry, warehouses are typically out of sight.
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: They're out in the country and you don't see them all the time and so there isn't necessarily a beautiful display of barrels associated with bourbon tours, there might be a warehouse associated with that.
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: But we took a cue from Napa Valley and Sonoma wine tasting rooms and things like that to make it look gorgeous.
• 8:18
  Speaker 5: Right, you guys have the warehouse.
• 8:20
  Speaker 5: You have a rick inside a warehouse, right on the river, and it's fantastic.
• 8:25
  Speaker 5: It's the coolest fire system on the planet.
• 8:29
  Speaker 5: You know what I mean?
• 8:30
  Speaker 5: Don't say fire.
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: Suppression yeah, but it was suppression.
• 8:34
  Speaker 5: Suppression, but most places don't have that, so you know I think it would actually work.
• 8:40
  Speaker 5: Let's not test it out, but yes.
• 8:42
  Speaker 2: There's a reason a lot of these's not test it out.
• 8:45
  Speaker 2: But yes, there's a big reason.
• 8:47
  Speaker 2: A lot of these distilleries are out in urban areas.
• 8:48
  Speaker 5: Right, right, I'm sorry.
• 8:50
  Speaker 5: Urban areas.
• 8:51
  Speaker 3: Right, but then for that single barrel program.
• 8:53
  Speaker 5: You bring those single barrels into that so that as soon as you're done you pick, you just go find it and thief.
• 9:05
  Speaker 5: So it's a we.
• 9:05
  Speaker 5: And then once again, I can't stress like, if you, if we miss you on the way down, we don't we get you on the way back I mean, it's just such a perfect location.
• 9:10
  Speaker 5: And you guys kind of knew the location instantly when you have the party source, I mean that whole thing, that's, people going down to Kentucky from Ohio, or you'd have the largest selection of anything.
• 9:21
  Speaker 5: You know that we see up in Ohio and there's always a little bit something else there.
• 9:26
  Speaker 5: You know so.
• 9:27
  Speaker 5: But so, brian, let's get into your new position?
• 9:32
  Speaker 5: Sure, Give us a little history about how you came about, you know.
• 9:37
  Speaker 5: Come to this.
• 9:38
  Speaker 2: Sure, I actually came out of the brewing industry.
• 9:41
  Speaker 2: I was fortunate enough to during the early planning of the distillery Ken Lewis, founder, and Jay Erisman.
• 9:48
  Speaker 2: They were, fortunately for me, looking for somebody with small brewing experience and big brewing experience, so I spent about 15 years in the brewing industry.
• 9:56
  Speaker 2: About nine and a half of that was with a company called the Barrel House Brewing Company.
• 10:00
  Speaker 2: They are now defunct but they were one of the earlier breweries over the Rhine.
• 10:03
  Speaker 2: Love that brewery, I love that place as well.
• 10:06
  Speaker 2: But I learned a lot about kind of the creative side and the artistic side of making beer.
• 10:10
  Speaker 2: We changed ownership and kind of the vibe changed.
• 10:14
  Speaker 2: We actually changed our location as well.
• 10:17
  Speaker 3: At that point.
• 10:17
  Speaker 3: I was kind of getting a little bit burned out and I wanted to go find out what else was out there, but this was early on in the Cincinnati brewing scene there wasn't a ton out there, so what there was was this hulking big brewery right across the street, essentially from the barrel house brewing company called Samuel Adams.
• 10:32
  Speaker 2: So I went there and I worked on a lot of things that a lot of my brewer buddies back in the day made fun of me for it Now they're all learning how to do them, Some before.
• 10:43
  Speaker 2: Now they're all learning how to do them, some of them from me, but I took a job at Boston Beer working on the fermentation side of doing things that went into Twisted Tea.
• 10:47
  Speaker 2: I worked on some of the development of some of the other projects, got to play around with Angry Orchard Ciders Towards the last two years when I was there I moved more into kind of the brewery supervisor position, so that was more of like management of the union.
• 10:59
  Speaker 2: So I really learned how to manage processes and techniques and, honestly, people as well.
• 11:05
  Speaker 2: So I spent about six years there and again I always had kind of like a creative itch and it was burning and I felt like I'd done a lot in the industry.
• 11:13
  Speaker 2: I'd gone through beers, ciders, shelters, the whole thing.
• 11:17
  Speaker 2: I had this pesky little thing called non-compete.
• 11:20
  Speaker 2: And it was for 18 months, and that was kind of a little bit frustrating and intimidating to me.
• 11:28
  Speaker 2: There's a lot of serendipitous stories that come out of New Riff, and one of them was one of my very very, very good friends, Mitch Doherty, Jay and Ken had actually started a brewery in the back of the party source called 8 Ball.
• 11:38
  Speaker 2: They hired him as their head brewer and they started making beer down there and then this project was basically like starting construction but steadily picking up steam.
• 11:49
  Speaker 2: And he called me one day and he said I know you don't drink whiskey, I know you don't know how to make whiskey, but you guys got.
• 11:55
  Speaker 2: You got to come and sit down and talk to Ken, listen to his vision of what he wants to do.
• 11:59
  Speaker 2: You know, this was a distillery that was built from the ground up with a lot of people that had zero experience in manufacturing whiskey.
• 12:05
  Speaker 2: Specifically from my perspective, but when I?
• 12:09
  Speaker 3: sat down with Ken and he said you know, we're going to all learn how to do this together, and we're going to hopefully succeed, but we'll fail as a team.
• 12:17
  Speaker 2: Ken's a pretty inspiring guy and you sit down and you hear kind of what his vision for the future is.
• 13:07
  Speaker 2: I was like this is this is perfect.
• 13:09
  Speaker 2: You know, mitch told me one day.
• 13:12
  Speaker 2: He said this is either going to be you that takes this job or it's going to be one of your friends and you're really going to regret this in the end of the day.
• 13:17
  Speaker 2: So sitting down and listening to somebody as inspiring as Ken, and it made me feel a lot more comfortable about jumping in.
• 13:24
  Speaker 2: So I took the job here.
• 13:26
  Speaker 2: I think it was early November 2013.
• 13:28
  Speaker 2: Obviously, I had no building to start working on whiskey, so I hung out with Jay up in the wine office over at the party source and kind of just started getting into researching.
• 13:37
  Speaker 2: It was nice I was able to be involved in a lot of the things that were like kind of the finishing touches of the distillery.
• 13:43
  Speaker 2: Hey pipes should go here.
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: Cyclasts should go here.
• 13:45
  Speaker 2: I also was able to spend a lot of time with Larry Ebersold, who was my mentor in the whiskey industry.
• 13:50
  Speaker 2: He was basically the construction manager Now Larry comes from.
• 13:55
  Speaker 2: Larry spent, I think, the majority, if not the entirety, of his career at Seagram's, where he was the he retired as the master distiller.
• 14:04
  Speaker 2: So he was there at Seagram's, he was there through LDI, but, yeah, the majority of his experience in the industry was basically running the Lawrenceburg Indiana plant and he had had a relationship with Jay and Ken prior to even meeting me.
• 14:17
  Speaker 2: But, again, serendipitous, fortunate that I was able to get in front of the right people.
• 14:23
  Speaker 2: Honestly, I kind of built that trust and it was just.
• 14:27
  Speaker 2: You don't get a lot of opportunities in this life to really like work and build on something from the ground up, especially with like great people like Ken and Jay just the group that like this really small group that had been assembled throughout the year, like throughout the months leading up to the uh, the actual opening of the distillery.
• 14:40
  Speaker 2: So we hit the ground running and uh, we opened our doors in May 14.
• 14:45
  Speaker 2: Um, we decided to open up a bourbon and rye distillery in the midst of a great barrel shortage, so we actually didn't smash our first batches of whiskey until June 2014.
• 14:55
  Speaker 2: But honestly since then it's been full steam ahead, lots of learning.
• 14:59
  Speaker 2: But yeah, my career long story made short was 15 years in the brewing career and opening to a lip set, a clip set with another five years in the whiskey industry, because I've been here a little over 10 years and I don't know if I would ever.
• 15:11
  Speaker 2: Hopefully they don't send me back there, but I mean whiskey is for me.
• 15:14
  Speaker 2: I love everything about making whiskey.
• 15:16
  Speaker 3: And you like it.
• 15:17
  Speaker 3: Now, love it Once you got into it?
• 15:19
  Speaker 4: how long did you feel comfortable Like going from the brewer's?
• 15:22
  Speaker 4: Side of it to do you feel comfortable.
• 15:24
  Speaker 4: I mean good question.
• 15:26
  Speaker 2: There are so many things that are similar in making beer that there are to whiskey, ie, like you have to like mash grains and you have to ferment and things like that.
• 15:34
  Speaker 2: Yeah, those are all very familiar, but I didn't even understand what a beer still was Like.
• 15:40
  Speaker 2: Honestly, like the first time I ever sat down with Ken, I went home and Googled beer still.
• 15:43
  Speaker 2: I had this vision of like I was going to sit in the party source and like I was going to make a pot still.
• 15:48
  Speaker 2: So a lot of the early books that I was reading were like oh, this is where you make a heads cut or this is where you make tails cut.
• 15:53
  Speaker 2: After you Google beer still, and then you come back for your second interview and he's just kind of pointing at the sky and saying that's where it goes.
• 16:04
  Speaker 2: You're like, so to say that when I was actually comfortable was probably at least three to four months, and that comfort came from Larry's excellent advice to us of guys, make one mash bill for bourbon, one mash bill for rye, figure out the processes, figure out the techniques.
• 16:20
  Speaker 2: A lot of it was learning your equipment, this still started up with essentially zero automation.
• 16:25
  Speaker 2: So now we are able to collectively learn what it should sound like, what it to collectively learn what it should sound like what it should smell like what it should look like.
• 16:30
  Speaker 2: So we are honestly like I know it sounds a little like corny- but we were using all of our senses to learn how to make whiskey, give it three to four months a little more comfortable.
• 16:40
  Speaker 2: You know, and we didn't just open up full bore.
• 16:43
  Speaker 2: You know, we opened up, we were getting a ups truck of barrels.
• 16:45
  Speaker 2: We were getting then likePS truck of barrels.
• 16:46
  Speaker 2: We were getting then like 100 barrels.
• 16:48
  Speaker 2: So thankfully we were able to not necessarily ease into it, but we were getting like a reasonable amount of barrels coming to us so that we could kind of figure out the system.
• 16:57
  Speaker 2: But, really it was a lot of dialing in the stills and everything like that.
• 17:00
  Speaker 3: Three to four months.
• 17:01
  Speaker 2: I think we probably just went off the rails and went December that's when we made our first malt whiskey, our first malted rye whiskey To December that's when we made our first malt whiskey, our first malted rye.
• 17:07
  Speaker 2: Whiskey, first malted rye, to say that I'm comfortable to this day, like 95% on a good day, but there's still things that myself or part of the team still learns every day.
• 17:16
  Speaker 5: I was waiting for that.
• 17:17
  Speaker 5: I don't think most master distillers or distillers don't ever get comfortable, but it's almost like what you're made of.
• 17:24
  Speaker 5: It's like if you got comfortable then you would be complacent.
• 17:28
  Speaker 5: And what you're made of it's like if you got comfortable then you would be complacent.
• 17:30
  Speaker 5: And in this industry everybody knows that the way it works is complacency is least to exist.
• 17:35
  Speaker 5: You know, you don't I mean even Jim Beam has to keep changing and and and seeing what, what you guys are doing, and then respond to that and all you know, it's like they never had a single malt.
• 17:47
  Speaker 2: No, they, yeah I.
• 17:47
  Speaker 2: I mean, that's the great thing about whiskey making.
• 17:49
  Speaker 2: It's a very geographical flavor, I mean open fermentation is basically like controlled chaos.
• 17:53
  Speaker 2: It's the wild west.
• 17:54
  Speaker 2: I mean that.
• 17:55
  Speaker 2: That pushes against.
• 17:56
  Speaker 2: Everything I was trained as a brewer was open fermentation and inviting like kind of like bacteria to come in and influence the flavors and stuff like that.
• 18:03
  Speaker 4: So well, you guys started out like you said, with a bourbon mash bill and a rye mash bill, but now obviously it's evolved into quite a bit more, but I always find the thing that's really unique about New Rip is that you will take different corn variations and you'll not only make a barrel of it, like some places will do, They'll make a mash and they'll oh yeah, we got a barrel or two of that, but you'll actually go to the the.
• 18:27
  Speaker 4: We're making a label of this.
• 18:29
  Speaker 4: It's blue lending, it's whatever it's.
• 18:30
  Speaker 4: We're going to make this a brand and roll with it.
• 18:33
  Speaker 4: What?
• 18:34
  Speaker 4: When did that kind of take place?
• 18:36
  Speaker 4: When did that decision well?
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: there are.
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: There are certain labels we have.
• 18:41
  Speaker 5: An example would be balboa rye yeah, which as soon as I say that facebook is going to blow up and everyone's going to ask when can?
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: can we get more Balboa?
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: And there's more coming.
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: In fact, we are distilling some this very day.
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: That's a good example.
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: We made a batch, and we made another batch, and another batch and realized we could do this.
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: The same applies to malted rye.
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: We're going to taste in a few minutes.
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: We made one batch of that in December of 2014, and by the following summer, we were distilling a batch a month.
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: So we grew into some of these labels and some of these stalwart offerings from New Riff.
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: We grew into that, but we like to make whiskey.
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: The way I describe it is from whole cloth.
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: We're going to finish today with a finished whiskey.
• 19:34
  Speaker 3: See, oh, that's kind of a nice finish with a finish.
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: This is the only barrel-finished, wine-finished whiskey we have done.
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: And everybody and their sister today are making 25 different finishes.
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: And I like some barrel finishes, but often it's gone a little off the rails.
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: They don't always seem to have a real reason for why they did it, and we want to do things with a real reason and most of what we make uh are made from the grain up, sometimes from the crop up.
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: We go to the farmer and say here, here's some seed grow, grow this.
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: We order grains from our past that go into things like our sour mash single malt from Brian's brewing background and things like that.
• 20:17
  Speaker 4: So we make whiskeys from the beginning up.
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: You know, it's not just a matter of what new barrel can we find to make a new product today, we start four years ago yeah, eight years ago, and make them, uh truly from from scratch, and the malted rye is a six year correct.
• 20:34
  Speaker 4: That's correct.
• 20:35
  Speaker 4: So is.
• 20:37
  Speaker 4: I've always wondered this, because a lot of the barrel picks and stuff for four years and so forth what made that get to the six?
• 20:44
  Speaker 4: Year point as opposed to the four-year.
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: Well, it was bloody good at four.
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: Let me tell you.
• 20:50
  Speaker 4: It was really good at three.
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: But we decided to take the malted rye out to six years to kind of be a cherry on top, you know, make it extra good.
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: And furthermore, at the time that it was four years old or five years old, we had other things to release.
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: We had single-barrel rye to get on with making and stuff like that.
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: So we had things to do before that, and if it got all the way out to six, so much the better.
• 21:18
  Speaker 5: Well, that's you know.
• 21:19
  Speaker 5: One.
• 21:20
  Speaker 5: You know you're talking about working for Ken and Jay, right, so they when you get to an ownership, where people in bourbon this is what we love about the podcast People have actually said you know you should think about, you know doing and getting into.
• 21:38
  Speaker 5: Well, if I got into distilling, it's just me.
• 21:41
  Speaker 5: Now, and whoever I'm partnered with, I don't get to go out and meet all the other people, because I find people in bourbon.
• 21:48
  Speaker 5: There's a lot of things in common, there's not too many places and if they are not like whatever, the people are grounded, they have a passion for the distilling and learning and everything you guys learned from the ground up.
• 22:04
  Speaker 5: But also like what you were just saying.
• 22:07
  Speaker 5: Uh, you have a reason for doing things.
• 22:10
  Speaker 5: You're not just making it to put out something that a bunch of people are going to party with and then you're just trying to make as much as you can to supply the parties.
• 22:19
  Speaker 5: You're basically trying to put stuff up now.
• 22:21
  Speaker 5: If someone wants to party with it, you're not going to stop them.
• 22:24
  Speaker 5: But that's like when he was asking the question, for I was like well, they went to six because they had enough on the shelf and they could up until then.
• 22:34
  Speaker 5: Right, you were not able to because the stuff was just.
• 22:37
  Speaker 2: But now, now you can, and I'm sure when you can do a 15 you'll have some for that too, as we keep going down the line right yeah, I mean a lot of, a lot of what's in a bottle of whiskey from new earth is a testament to to ken lewis honestly giving us the creative freedom to chase the things that we thought were going to be good ideas.
• 22:55
  Speaker 2: You know, I remember early on some of the ideas that jay and I were kicking to ken.
• 22:59
  Speaker 2: One time I think he just looked at us and looked behind and was like are you talking?
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: to me like this is your guys's job.
• 23:05
  Speaker 2: He's always allowed us to just kind of chase what we think is going to be best for the whiskey I'm not saying we're going to go out and buy like a plat a barrel made of platinum and gold, but like for sherry barrels or it's not that cost isn't a consideration, but if it's in consideration of trying to make a better whiskey, it was never really a question of something that we necessarily had to prove to them now don't?
• 23:25
  Speaker 2: get me wrong I finances are a very important part of running a business, but we are in the business of trying to make the best whiskey.
• 23:31
  Speaker 2: When you start with the loftier goals of what Ken said, the goal and we don't know how you define it or what the measuring stick is.
• 23:40
  Speaker 2: We want to be considered one of the great small distilleries in the world.
• 23:43
  Speaker 2: You have to spread your wings.
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: I'm not saying 100% of the whiskeys that we made, we're just like nail it again.
• 23:53
  Speaker 3: I mean, we've made some stuff.
• 23:54
  Speaker 2: We're like, yeah, we've moved on from them, but a lot of like a lot of the whiskeys that we have now that have become our core products.
• 24:00
  Speaker 2: They are things like Jay was talking, like they could start from seeding a field to growing it up to.
• 24:06
  Speaker 2: We made a batch of 13 barrels next year.
• 24:09
  Speaker 2: We like to distill it, we're going to double it.
• 24:11
  Speaker 2: We always call it like some of those whiskeys that would like graduate and those are the whiskeys that have kind of like over the years, graduated and kind of what like the core lineup is.
• 24:19
  Speaker 2: But again, like when you have somebody like Ken Lewis, who's you know our mission, he gave us the best tools and he said this is the mission.
• 24:30
  Speaker 4: I mean let us the best tools.
• 24:31
  Speaker 4: And he said this is the mission.
• 24:32
  Speaker 4: I mean let's go.
• 24:32
  Speaker 4: So on that note, we haven't drank one yet, so let's start with barrel the bottle one, not barrel.
• 24:35
  Speaker 4: One bottle one, jay, what, what is it?
• 24:37
  Speaker 4: And let's try it.
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: We're going to kick off as a palate cleanser, oh okay, and and to set a context for, uh, the rest of the afternoon, and especially for the next whiskey with our flagship bourbon.
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: This is new riff bottled and bond bourbon.
• 24:53
  Speaker 1: The mash bill is helpfully printed on the back.
• 24:58
  Speaker 1: We love talking about mash bills.
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: That's good.
• 25:01
  Speaker 1: In our careers as retailers, we we saw so many people keeping it a secret and not talking about it.
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: And then, when a distillery would widely share all the information they did would be really transparent, and we watched as bourbon lovers ate that up and filled their heads with new knowledge about things like that.
• 25:20
  Speaker 1: So we print the mash bill on the bottle.
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: This is 65% corn, 30% rye, 5% malted barley to genuinely, inarguably high rye bourbon.
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: On top of that, it is as it is etched here in the bottle, bottled in bond, without chill filtration, and everything we make even including our gin is bottled without chill filtration.
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: So we preserve all from the barrel all of the aroma, flavor, the color, the texture very important All of that gets all the way to your liver.
• 25:55
  Speaker 4: I mean your glass.
• 25:56
  Speaker 4: Cheers, gentlemen.
• 25:58
  Speaker 4: Cheers to our liver, cheers to our liver, thank you, cheers, cheers.
• 26:02
  Speaker 4: Now New Riff, the new bar which is upstairs while we're tasting.
• 26:10
  Speaker 4: This is called the Aquifer, because you sit on a….
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: Because we sit upon and draw our water from a private well going into an aquifer.
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: Yeah, nice, the first thing we did when Ken Lewis said let's do it, let's build this dist, let's do this idea.
• 26:30
  Speaker 4: You didn't want to get from the Ohio River well in a very elliptical way we sort of do actually CT.
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: We went looking for a better source of water than the municipality we knew we can make perfectly good bourbon on city water, because that's all they do in Louisville, that's all they do in Barnstown, all the big distilleries.
• 26:48
  Speaker 1: You can't run big, huge bourbon factory on the famous Limestone Creek or the what do they call it, the branch you know.
• 26:59
  Speaker 3: That doesn't exist anymore.
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: The myth persists, but they make great bourbon there in Louisville and they all run on city water, so we knew we could do that we could do that.
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: But before we do that, let's just see if there is a water source and blessedly Brian was talking about serendipity, the most serendipitous thing we were sitting on top of a fantastic water source and it's called the Ohio River Alluvial Aquifer.
• 27:24
  Speaker 1: Some of it comes from the river which seeps down through the riverbed over the eons, but most of it actually comes.
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: If you drive south of here, you start to go up a hill and there is a ring of hills here in northern Kentucky.
• 27:37
  Speaker 1: The hills are full of limestone and that limestone shelf, the famous limestone of Kentucky, comes all the way up to northern Kentucky.
• 27:45
  Speaker 1: It stops in those hills and the groundwater goes down into our aquifer.
• 27:51
  Speaker 4: So we were sitting on top of right in the parking lot of a fantastically wonderful bourbon-making water.
• 27:59
  Speaker 1: It also supplies the cooling water most of the cooling water to the distiller, and that means we save untold bajillions of dollars in electricity because we don't have to burn a lot of fossil fuels to chill the warm city water.
• 28:15
  Speaker 1: What happens to your tap water?
• 28:17
  Speaker 1: Right now, in August, here in the Ohio Valley it's warm, so we can run 12 months of the year thanks to our cold Well, it's 58 degrees every day.
• 28:28
  Speaker 2: We pull half a million gallons a day during production wow, but also the same way that we're pulling it out of the aquifer, we're not just sending it down the sanitary sewer.
• 28:36
  Speaker 2: What jay was referring to was non-contact cooling water.
• 28:39
  Speaker 2: However, we cool our fermenters, our cooker, our condensers.
• 28:44
  Speaker 2: Once we're done actually, it's done doing its job, which is heat transfer we actually will slipstream a little bit of municipal city water and it actually goes all the way back to a creek behind the party source and underneath through a culvert, and then it just empties completely 85-degree clean water right back into the Ohio River.
• 29:01
  Speaker 2: So it's a very very, very good whiskey-making water because it's very high in calcium and magnesium.
• 29:07
  Speaker 2: That's good for yeast health.
• 29:08
  Speaker 2: It also just wreaks havoc on all of our piping.
• 29:14
  Speaker 2: It's such hard water that it's literally destroyed every inch of our piping in the distillery over the course of 10 years.
• 29:17
  Speaker 2: So we've had to just replace with, like this crazy german space plastic doesn't leak, but you know we're in canton, our water is extremely hard and all it is.
• 29:26
  Speaker 5: it just, it just corrodes and corrodes.
• 29:30
  Speaker 2: It's like your water heater should last 15, 20, and it lasts six it got to a point where we would be walking on the first floor and just pinhole leaks everywhere.
• 29:39
  Speaker 2: When you have carbon steel pipes and they don't carry water, then you've got to figure it out.
• 29:44
  Speaker 2: We love a well, we can replace carbon steel.
• 29:47
  Speaker 5: It's so much fun to build a distillery and you know we love well, we can replace carbon steel.
• 29:49
  Speaker 5: It's so much fun, right, to build a distillery.
• 29:50
  Speaker 5: And you're doing it and everything's running.
• 29:52
  Speaker 5: And then all of a sudden, as it gets older, all of a sudden you find yourself sometimes I I work in recycling and we use hydraulics to bale cardboard, paper or whatever.
• 30:02
  Speaker 5: But the hydraulics the the bale as it gets older, it we're welding constantly at least, and sometimes you feel like one day you're at a dam where you've got one finger here, one finger here trying to hold it all together.
• 30:13
  Speaker 5: That's the reality of the job.
• 30:16
  Speaker 5: Right it is.
• 30:17
  Speaker 5: It's like running a plant.
• 30:19
  Speaker 2: I don't say the only way, but one of the really big ways that we learned how to run this distillery is by literally breaking everything.
• 30:26
  Speaker 2: When you guys say do you feel you're comfortable?
• 30:29
  Speaker 2: What?
• 30:30
  Speaker 2: What do you still learn?
• 30:31
  Speaker 2: I walk into a fight, not a fire.
• 30:34
  Speaker 2: We walk into problems.
• 30:36
  Speaker 2: Yes all the time and those are the things that like there's, it's it's not whiskey making related problems.
• 30:42
  Speaker 2: It's more like critical thinking and troubleshooting of a lot of things, like the very unsexy parts of making whiskey that are honestly the most important parts, like boilers and you know air compressors and actuated valves.
• 30:55
  Speaker 2: It's all that stuff that we've put in place over the years.
• 30:58
  Speaker 5: Those are the things that the infrastructure is there for us to make whiskey, but it's everything else it's like gotta be figured out Well my favorite is always the fix that gets you through that your run, and you get you through the run and you'll and you'll fix it and you're like, oh, I got through the run so you might do a couple more runs, but eventually fixing the fix.
• 31:19
  Speaker 5: What you actually have to do down the line is then you.
• 31:22
  Speaker 2: That's when you plan shutdown and stuff like that, but then you also have the whole thing of personalities and people which is all part of it too, a lot of times.
• 31:30
  Speaker 2: Making whiskey is the easiest thing we do around here.
• 31:32
  Speaker 2: I agree, and also let me end on that.
• 31:36
  Speaker 2: Thankfully we don't have to go through the quick fixes and limp through because we have such an amazing maintenance team Half the time when people come up to us and they're like, oh, the whiskey is so good, you guys did such a great job.
• 31:48
  Speaker 2: I'm like, guy, we have we run a third shift.
• 31:50
  Speaker 2: We have third shift distillers.
• 31:51
  Speaker 2: Like you're a team, jay and I are not like the faces that like have done everything.
• 31:55
  Speaker 2: I mean it takes a literal army to get this whiskey into a bottle.
• 31:58
  Speaker 2: So I like to give shout outs to the maintenance team and everyone else as much as possible, because, for better or worse, we garner a lot of the attention for what the whiskey is, but it takes so many of us and that's what's so awesome about New Earth.
• 32:10
  Speaker 2: It started as a small team, but we're all still really like.
• 32:12
  Speaker 2: We're all in on the same mission.
• 32:15
  Speaker 5: Family, yeah I mean guys have been together for a long time.
• 32:18
  Speaker 5: All the time we yell at each other we have a great time.
• 32:28
  Speaker 2: It's like, yeah, of kind of like employees that have come in and you know you drink the kool-aid and I don't know.
• 32:31
  Speaker 2: We're firm believers and happy people make happy whiskey and you know, yeah, a good environment does a lot for any industry so if you're in, a good environment.
• 32:40
  Speaker 5: It makes everything having a lot of good whiskey around can lead to some really good environment stuff.
• 32:45
  Speaker 5: Right, it does I mean so jay, what?
• 32:47
  Speaker 4: what's bottle number two?
• 32:49
  Speaker 5: well, I want to say I don't For tasting the brand.
• 32:54
  Speaker 5: This is your core brand.
• 32:55
  Speaker 5: You know your Bobbled and Bond bourbon, knowing that you come from a brewing type thing it definitely there's all different types of bourbon, you can make.
• 33:05
  Speaker 3: But in Kentucky there's always that sweet caramel.
• 33:09
  Speaker 5: I call it like the dessert, some of them, you know.
• 33:11
  Speaker 5: You can get pastilles that have fruity notes and you can have some um different types.
• 33:16
  Speaker 5: Then you can have the stone fruits and that type of thing, but this one has the bourbon, just what I always think is bourbon.
• 33:23
  Speaker 5: It's not not a ton of caramel, it's got.
• 33:26
  Speaker 5: But it also has a little bit of the of the yeast, so it picks up almost like a like, a little bit hint of, like an amp, like a beer for me, and that, that, knowing you have that background, that makes a lot of sense so I think a lot of the I think a portion of kind of the flavor profile of our finished whiskey is derived from fermentation.
• 33:49
  Speaker 2: We work extremely hard to get the most high quality consistent in.
• 33:53
  Speaker 2: Our techniques are pretty much just like they're very tight at this point.
• 33:59
  Speaker 2: But you're not going to put bad whiskey into a barrel and have it become good whiskey.
• 34:03
  Speaker 2: So that's why we just focus on consistency and quality up front.
• 34:07
  Speaker 2: But our fermentation techniques, I think, play a humongous role.
• 34:10
  Speaker 2: When you say like kind of a beer quality to it, I would call that like estuary what we do.
• 34:14
  Speaker 2: I don't know if you guys have ever had like a Saison type beer.
• 34:17
  Speaker 2: Those are higher temperature fermentations and those create a lot more of those esters and that's really what we're going for.
• 34:22
  Speaker 2: So we set them at 68,.
• 34:24
  Speaker 2: We let them free rise to 90.
• 34:25
  Speaker 2: But also on the back end we were given the ability to find the best barrels that we like.
• 34:31
  Speaker 2: We were able to work with different cooperages and again, like I, one of these days I'll find a better way of putting this.
• 34:42
  Speaker 2: But I also tell people a lot of times we are spoiled rats because we've been allowed to just chase quality.
• 34:45
  Speaker 2: Every single facet of what we do has always been like is this the best we can do, and I just think it shows well, it's a good thing you're going down a path that the path that you're chasing quality, and then there's revenue.
• 34:55
  Speaker 5: I mean that's the key.
• 34:56
  Speaker 1: I mean, if you're chasing, if you're just going off on tangents, and it wasn't.
• 35:00
  Speaker 1: I'm sure there'd be, you guys would you know, but at the same time you got.
• 35:04
  Speaker 5: I agree with you, it's, it's what you could.
• 35:07
  Speaker 5: What you've been coming out with is very specific and unique, and you can tell that you know even who your work, how you work with everybody.
• 35:15
  Speaker 5: That it's uh, I mean, I'm just looking forward to even going further down the line the fact of our independent ownership, owned by one family and determined to stay that way means we don't have some bean counter somewhere or
• 35:32
  Speaker 4: a shareholder who says are are you crazy?
• 35:35
  Speaker 1: Why are you selling this for half the age and twice the money?
• 35:38
  Speaker 1: We have a visionary ownership that allows us or even insists that we live up to what it says on the back of the bottle.
• 35:48
  Speaker 1: A new riff on an old tradition.
• 35:50
  Speaker 1: We don't have to answer to someone who's saying you've got to make me more money, that's not the job number one.
• 35:58
  Speaker 5: There's no shareholder saying that you've got that all going Because some of the big guys they've got to deal with that and there's no doubt but you were talking about.
• 36:09
  Speaker 5: You actually have to try to stay independent don't you, because I imagine you've been approached about people wanting this.
• 36:19
  Speaker 5: I mean selling it, buying it, whatever that's like.
• 36:22
  Speaker 5: You have to work at, not just keeping that right.
• 36:27
  Speaker 1: You'd have to be committed to independent ownership, and that has to be your perfectly viable business plan.
• 36:34
  Speaker 1: It's not the fact that you must sell off what you do, you can.
• 36:39
  Speaker 1: There are examples around the world.
• 36:42
  Speaker 1: Run a distillery for generations and keep it in the family.
• 36:46
  Speaker 1: That's one path to this.
• 36:48
  Speaker 1: You do have to be set upon it.
• 36:51
  Speaker 1: If anyone approaches us ever about buying the distillery.
• 36:55
  Speaker 1: I honestly haven't heard of it.
• 36:57
  Speaker 1: I think Ken is like thanks very much.
• 37:00
  Speaker 4: No thanks he doesn't even tell us about it.
• 37:01
  Speaker 4: It comes up as spam on his phone, all right, so what's?
• 37:08
  Speaker 3: next so whiskey.
• 37:09
  Speaker 1: Number two is a very interesting bottle.
• 37:12
  Speaker 1: It's a project we do annually.
• 37:15
  Speaker 1: This is the third release.
• 37:16
  Speaker 1: It's called Silver Grove.
• 37:19
  Speaker 4: And what in the world is that it's a completely different label than normal New Riff items.
• 37:25
  Speaker 1: It says on the back distilled, aged and bottled by New Riff Distilling, but it's a little second brand.
• 37:30
  Speaker 1: This is only sold in our gift shop and I'm showing it to you guys today because you are reasonably local to us in canton and dayton and jamie's here from cincinnati, I grew up down in silver grove, so yeah, so silver grove is a bottling that tells about three stories at once.
• 37:51
  Speaker 1: The back of the bottle says it benefits the silver grove Community Foundation with the proceeds from this release.
• 38:00
  Speaker 1: Silver Grove is a little town over the hill and across the dale and it's down on the Ohio River.
• 38:06
  Speaker 1: It's here in Campbell County, it's about 15, 20 minutes away, and we built a warehouse campus our third campus in Silver Grove and we wanted to do something to commemorate our relationship with Silver Grove, and so we made a label that benefits the Community Foundation.
• 38:23
  Speaker 1: And it was wonderful when we bottled the first one of this and we sold it in 2022.
• 38:29
  Speaker 1: And we handed them a check at the end of it all and said here you go, community Foundation, and you know, we're curious what?
• 38:35
  Speaker 1: do you do with the money?
• 38:36
  Speaker 1: And they said we never had any money so they've unified some parks, they've handed out some scholarships.
• 38:43
  Speaker 1: It's a wonderful relationship we have with Silver Grove.
• 38:46
  Speaker 1: But then the question is what kind of label do we do?
• 38:50
  Speaker 1: How do we do this?
• 38:52
  Speaker 3: And I think it was our CEO Hannahohan, our now.
• 38:54
  Speaker 1: CEO Hannah, who just did a search for for Silver Grove, and she found online this antique bottle, a so called dusty bottle, that said on his Silver Grove, and it was a label that kind of looked a lot like this it was distilled in 1917 and bottled in 1933.
• 39:15
  Speaker 1: And she asked me hey, jay, have you ever seen this bottle before of Silver Grove?
• 39:22
  Speaker 1: Like, maybe I'm a bourbon historian, maybe I saw it.
• 39:25
  Speaker 1: And I told her, hannah, I not only have seen that bottle.
• 39:33
  Speaker 3: Hannah, I own that bottle.
• 39:34
  Speaker 1: And the reason I own this 1933 vintage dusty Silver Grove bottle is that it was distilled in my hometown of Cincinnati.
• 39:41
  Speaker 1: And so in three stories at once in this bottle the local community, the vintage bottle and the fact that it was distilled in Cincinnati in 1917, at a time when Cincinnati was the greatest whiskey city in the nation.
• 39:57
  Speaker 1: That was the center of the American whiskey industry back in those days, pre-prohibition.
• 40:02
  Speaker 1: So Silver Grove comes out every year and it tells all of these stories at once.
• 40:08
  Speaker 4: So this release and every year it's a different juice.
• 40:11
  Speaker 4: And how many years has it been?
• 40:13
  Speaker 1: This is the third release.
• 40:16
  Speaker 5: By different juice?
• 40:17
  Speaker 5: Is it just a different mash pillow, or can it be a bourbon one year, a rye one year?
• 40:23
  Speaker 1: It changes a little bit every year.
• 40:24
  Speaker 1: Tiny.
• 40:24
  Speaker 1: This one is actually comprised of a bourbon and a rye that we released the first silver-growed rye, and for this one our team pulled barrels from the top two floors of the rickhouse the fourth and the fifth floor so it was in a hotter aging environment.
• 40:43
  Speaker 1: It's a little bit stronger.
• 40:45
  Speaker 1: This one is 116.2 proof.
• 40:47
  Speaker 1: It's darker.
• 40:47
  Speaker 4: Yeah, you could tell us immediately.
• 40:49
  Speaker 4: In the glass it was darker.
• 40:51
  Speaker 5: Right, so vanilla and the caramel is fantastic.
• 40:54
  Speaker 1: Vanilla on the caramel is fantastic, yeah it has an elevated amount of wood of oak, which I probably in in the most perfect terms.
• 41:04
  Speaker 1: It's a little imbalanced.
• 41:06
  Speaker 1: I don't care, it's freaking fun man, I love this thing, it's it's such a different aging environment that these barrels went in, versus the bottled and bond that is stored all over the rickhouse.
• 41:21
  Speaker 4: To me, that vanilla note is so strong that it's almost, you could say it almost tastes like it's almost finished, because that vanilla comes out to me and just like is there.
• 41:32
  Speaker 5: do you feel that you guys, at the time that you did this and as you evolved into it because initially, when you first started, right in the 2004, 2013 area, consistency still was a staple in the industry To be able to put out a product that every single time someone bought that product, it meant that you know that's what they want consistency, Because consistency was the hardest thing forever.
• 42:02
  Speaker 5: But then, as we started getting more into automation and modern technology, consistency became a little bit easier to obtain, especially through the big guys and everything.
• 42:11
  Speaker 5: But do you find that it was like a perfect time for you guys to start up?
• 42:15
  Speaker 5: Because, as you were coming on and starting to put on, all of a sudden there was a big, huge group of people that were kind of like not looking for the same old, same old and consistency?
• 42:25
  Speaker 5: That that's why the, in my opinion, the bourbon boom is that consistency no longer became.
• 42:30
  Speaker 5: You know they when?
• 42:31
  Speaker 5: I first got into this, really hard and heavy was 2018, you'd make a post and you'd say something about a finished bourbon and there, when I first got into this, really hard and heavy was 2018.
• 42:37
  Speaker 5: You'd make a post and you'd say something about a finished bourbon and there was like 80, 90 people.
• 42:42
  Speaker 3: And I didn't have very many friends back then.
• 42:44
  Speaker 5: And that would just rip on you, because that's not bourbon, that's finished bourbon.
• 42:48
  Speaker 5: Now people are looking for some finished, they're looking for different things all along.
• 43:01
  Speaker 4: And then we're evolving, similar to when you take Scotland, ireland they've evolved hundreds and hundreds of years.
• 43:03
  Speaker 1: But the reason what in that time period there's other things they've been able to do as distilleries and we're just starting to experiment with that, and so it was kind of a perfect time for you guys, because you guys love to do the experimentation and come up and people really, really accept that now right, they do, but conversely, I would, I would suggest that this evolution of the bourbon consumer, as well as, let's call it, the bourbon scene you know what is going on in the world of bourbon that helped give birth to what we do and, turning it around the other way, in our career as retailers and now what we do here, we helped create that world in a small way.
• 43:44
  Speaker 1: We were just one store, albeit a very large one, but at the Party Source we launched various single barrel iterations and special projects and things like that.
• 43:53
  Speaker 1: So finished whiskeys and things like that, so finished whiskeys.
• 43:56
  Speaker 1: Um uh, stuff like that.
• 43:57
  Speaker 1: So uh, we were, you know part and parcel of it from from really the beginning of the 21st century, when we started to see things like rye come back to life.
• 44:07
  Speaker 1: When I started at the at the party source, we had four ryes period that was In the entire store Four labels.
• 44:16
  Speaker 4: Wow, we had some different sizes.
• 44:17
  Speaker 4: There was a section.
• 44:18
  Speaker 1: Four of them.
• 44:19
  Speaker 1: Now there's four new sections of rye, so we were both inspired by that and part of that.
• 44:28
  Speaker 5: Well, I actually think with rye whiskey bourbon isn't so much, it's of an evolution.
• 44:36
  Speaker 5: You can get bourbons right off the bat when you're just starting in some of the bridge bourbons and that type of stuff, and you're right in, there's a sweetness to it.
• 44:46
  Speaker 5: But rye has that heavy spice that most people, when they're young, are drinking.
• 44:52
  Speaker 5: They come across that they're just trying to do shots and get drunk off of that because they're trying to skip the spice, whereas people go further into their bourbon experience and drink more rye and it's evolved that there's so many, but at first they weren't into it, and as they kept, evolving.
• 45:10
  Speaker 5: Then all of a sudden, they could taste some of the intricacies and the spice wasn't as you know, but and then also I think the distillers eased off some of it being so spicy initially, those those they would be really hot and whatever, and they were.
• 45:26
  Speaker 5: Every single master distiller said rye is great for making a mixed drink, but I would never drink it.
• 45:32
  Speaker 4: But I think in in these first two variations that we've drank, if you call it that like that rye plays into that huge Like you get that spice, you get that little bit of hug on the back and the flavors that come with it.
• 45:48
  Speaker 5: I think if you didn't have that.
• 45:52
  Speaker 5: The first one high rye bourbon.
• 45:54
  Speaker 5: I'm used to that.
• 45:55
  Speaker 5: I still pick up all the stuff and I get the little bit of the what would you say.
• 45:59
  Speaker 5: It's the thing that I like about bourbon, where it's just a bourbon and I don't get a lot of sweetness to it.
• 46:05
  Speaker 5: I know that a lot of that comes from the rye.
• 46:07
  Speaker 5: It tones down the corn, right, but with this one you can taste the rye spice, but it's not overwhelming.
• 46:14
  Speaker 5: This one, you can taste the rye spice, but it's not overwhelming.
• 46:19
  Speaker 2: Yeah, although my palate has evolved, so you know I can drink 140 barrel proof and drink it like it was 80, you know, I've had you yeah, let's enjoy your one and a half grams from my perspective at least we were.
• 46:33
  Speaker 2: You know, we didn't have prior experience in any other distillery.
• 46:37
  Speaker 2: We weren't trained by we didn't make any bourbon.
• 46:41
  Speaker 2: Not only did we not know how to make whiskey, we were also being trained by the godfather of rye whiskey from Indiana, and that's the kind of whiskey that he liked.
• 46:49
  Speaker 2: And why would you question somebody like that?
• 46:51
  Speaker 2: He said you want to make a big spicy whiskey?
• 46:54
  Speaker 2: I mean, he developed the 95-5 recipe Coming from the brewing industry with 0% experience in distilling.
• 47:00
  Speaker 2: Who am I to be like?
• 47:01
  Speaker 2: No, you're wrong.
• 47:02
  Speaker 3: No, If he says something, you go like now you're wrong.
• 47:06
  Speaker 4: No, if he says something, you go and you may pick up something.
• 47:09
  Speaker 2: And also, like you know, when you say like we have all these variations and different styles of whiskey.
• 47:12
  Speaker 2: It's a credit to our independent ownership.
• 47:17
  Speaker 2: We didn't have anyone to tell us no, do you guys still get your rye from Germany?
• 47:22
  Speaker 2: We get all of our malty rye from Weyermann Malting in Germany.
• 47:26
  Speaker 2: The majority of our rye that we use in our standard rye whiskey.
• 47:30
  Speaker 2: That's the 95.5, the majority of that comes from Sweden.
• 47:33
  Speaker 2: Right now Interesting, and again that's Larry and his team at Seagram's were importing rye from Northern Europe and they just said oh wow, it's plumper, the extract was better, the flavor was better.
• 47:47
  Speaker 2: And, honestly, when you have, when you you get the advice from these people that are so seasoned in the industry, like who are you to to say no, you, just you go.
• 47:57
  Speaker 4: I don't think I've had this one.
• 47:58
  Speaker 4: I mean, we've also made whiskeys throughout the years where he says it's not my style, I don't like it but other people do.
• 48:04
  Speaker 2: But again, that fundamental like kind of like groundwork was laid by larry of what he liked in whiskey.
• 48:10
  Speaker 2: Now we like all kinds of different whiskeys, all the way through scotch and stuff like that.
• 48:14
  Speaker 2: But sure we've just been, you know, given the creative licenses to kind of just follow what we want to do so what do you think gives?
• 48:21
  Speaker 4: because these are both same mash, bill these first two real quick, and then we'll move on to the third one.
• 48:25
  Speaker 1: These are the same mash bill uh, same age.
• 48:31
  Speaker 4: Why such a different flavor profile?
• 48:34
  Speaker 1: because I mean, there's definitely a difference in that vanilla.
• 48:37
  Speaker 4: So is it where they're at?
• 48:39
  Speaker 1: it was primarily we, we designed this year's silver grove of bourbon and rye as an exploration of aging environment.
• 48:48
  Speaker 1: So these are, like we said, from the top two floors.
• 48:51
  Speaker 1: It's also barrel-proof.
• 48:53
  Speaker 1: It's 116-proof versus 100-proof.
• 48:55
  Speaker 1: So there is that.
• 48:56
  Speaker 1: But there's undeniably a lot more wood, a lot more powerful, wonderful heat.
• 49:02
  Speaker 1: In a nice way I picked up on a finish.
• 49:05
  Speaker 5: I almost pick up that menthol from the rice.
• 49:08
  Speaker 1: It's like a, so a lot of rice.
• 49:10
  Speaker 5: In my opinion, there there's chocolate, there's mint flavors, and then there's the flavor I don't don't like, which is almost that uh like, uh like a celery, kind of like what you would put.
• 49:21
  Speaker 5: You know, you know it's just for me it's off-putting.
• 49:24
  Speaker 5: But when I get those chocolate or mint rinds and then you talk to the distillers and it's like well, it starts off with that first celery and then it can go to the mint and then the next time you taste it, it's chocolate, and then it can go back to the it's just when you decide to pull it out in what you're tasting from the barrel, right yeah?
• 49:47
  Speaker 2: What you get.
• 49:48
  Speaker 2: A lot of this, specifically silver grove.
• 49:49
  Speaker 2: To go back for a second, throughout the years since we've been releasing whiskey, people are like what are you learning from your different aging environments?
• 49:51
  Speaker 2: And the answer unfortunately, the beginning was nothing, because, as we were a baby in the whiskey industry, we had barrels here oh no, this room's full.
• 49:59
  Speaker 2: We got to go over here oh no, this room's full.
• 50:02
  Speaker 2: Now we got to move these barrels over to a rickhouse oh no, we've run out of space there.
• 50:05
  Speaker 2: So we had barrels everywhere.
• 50:07
  Speaker 2: This is really the first kind of like period that we're entering, where like people are going to.
• 50:11
  Speaker 2: We can kind of definitively start.
• 50:13
  Speaker 2: I don't know if answering is the right word, but we can at least start to explain what we see out of different aging environments.
• 50:19
  Speaker 2: As to where on the fifth floor, yes, it is definitively different than you know, a bonded whiskey which is a blend of 30, 35 barrels.
• 50:26
  Speaker 2: It's cut down to 100 proof so that probably contains barrels from the first floor, the third floor the rickhouse On your bonded.
• 50:32
  Speaker 5: I know it has to be at least four, but do you guys go further than that, or is most of it?
• 50:37
  Speaker 1: four-year-old Funny you should ask.
• 50:40
  Speaker 1: Tiny because whiskey number three we're about to taste is New Riff eight-year-old.
• 50:45
  Speaker 1: Bourbon three we're about to taste is New Riff, eight-year-old bourbon.
• 50:50
  Speaker 3: So we've been holding back all these years about 20 to 30 percent of just about everything we make to become someday older.
• 50:57
  Speaker 1: We didn't know what older necessarily meant.
• 50:59
  Speaker 1: We didn't come into this on day zero and say we're going to make an eight-year-old.
• 51:03
  Speaker 1: We just put it away and let the whiskey tell us when it was ready and, uh, formulated a plan of when do we get out with some older whiskey?
• 51:11
  Speaker 1: And now, at 10 years old this year, cheers to us all we have we have an old bourbon and also eight-year-old rye um we're not going to stop there, there will be older things that have someday.
• 51:24
  Speaker 1: I don't really know or even care at this point what the next age is going to be.
• 51:28
  Speaker 5: It's just what it is.
• 51:30
  Speaker 1: It's a different flavor, whatever We'll get there.
• 51:33
  Speaker 3: We'll get there.
• 51:34
  Speaker 1: We're patient with that, but this is a new revate rule.
• 51:48
  Speaker 5: Well, you don't want to go as far as Crown did, where they had the 25 and then it was so far gone that they had to add apple to it and then triple the price.
• 51:57
  Speaker 3: I mean it's so transparent on that one.
• 51:58
  Speaker 3: It is a nice box.
• 51:59
  Speaker 3: Oh, it is you guys.
• 52:00
  Speaker 5: I mean, everybody knows toppers and boxes right, you can get more expense for that.
• 52:03
  Speaker 4: Hey, which you guys do a heck of a job with your single barrel, all the boxes, every single barrel comes with a box Comes with.
• 52:11
  Speaker 4: Now they etch the back of the glass.
• 52:13
  Speaker 4: I mean again, nobody does that.
• 52:16
  Speaker 4: Like nobody does that.
• 52:17
  Speaker 4: They're like you just got to here it is and you pick it up.
• 52:22
  Speaker 1: You guys do a heck of a job.
• 52:23
  Speaker 1: Like I said, we try and do it right.
• 52:24
  Speaker 1: Yeah, how do you like the 8-year-old?
• 52:25
  Speaker 1: All right, this is fantastic.
• 52:27
  Speaker 2: Fun fact about it is that's actually though it's not labeled bottled and bombed.
• 52:32
  Speaker 2: That is actually a bottled and bombed product.
• 52:34
  Speaker 2: Right now We've had to pick over certain lots and we weren't 100% confident that we were going to be able to find enough barrels within one season because, again, you only hold 30% 20% back.
• 52:45
  Speaker 2: Not only do you have to wait out the time to get the quantity of barrels, but also the quality of barrels.
• 52:50
  Speaker 2: This one just so happened to fall right under the bottle and bond umbrella.
• 52:53
  Speaker 5: But at the same time the next one might not, and then you don't have to go back on it.
• 52:59
  Speaker 5: That's smart, smart marketing.
• 53:00
  Speaker 2: I know the second rye that came out is scattered over a couple of seasons.
• 53:04
  Speaker 4: Is this still available?
• 53:05
  Speaker 1: downstairs.
• 53:05
  Speaker 1: We came out scattered.
• 53:06
  Speaker 1: Is this still available downstairs?
• 53:07
  Speaker 1: We have that and 8-year-old rye in the gift shop as we speak.
• 53:09
  Speaker 1: There is also some progressively getting out to the whole wide world also.
• 53:15
  Speaker 4: Not a lot of it, because sometimes your friends have it and they don't share it with you.
• 53:18
  Speaker 3: Again, we held back 20-30%, but 8 years ago we made this much whiskey.
• 53:23
  Speaker 1: Now we make this much whiskey, so there will be deeper supplies made this much whiskey.
• 53:27
  Speaker 5: Now we make this much whiskey, so there will be deeper supplies of that taste in this one of this old whiskey later so last year when we were at bourbon festival, you tried our pick.
• 53:34
  Speaker 5: Remember for contender I had you try it and you're like that's good I took that bottle home, I decantered it and I think it was gone in nine days.
• 53:42
  Speaker 5: It was just I couldn't.
• 53:44
  Speaker 5: I couldn't stop hitting.
• 53:45
  Speaker 5: I usually don't drink or hit something because when you're doing a podcast twice a week, you're sipping whiskeys two times a week and then you can't If you go more.
• 53:56
  Speaker 5: I try and stay out of trouble.
• 53:58
  Speaker 5: My wife, she's just like hey, but that one, she was on me.
• 54:03
  Speaker 3: She was like what are you doing?
• 54:05
  Speaker 3: I'm like this is so good, but I taste a little bit in your eight-year that we had in that barrel pick.
• 54:11
  Speaker 5: I mean, actually it was so good I remember it.
• 54:13
  Speaker 5: I have ability to remember some.
• 54:16
  Speaker 4: I think it's fun.
• 54:17
  Speaker 4: Last year was the first year of Kentucky Bourbon Festival having the media tent, not just the VIP tent, and we were excited about that, but they also brought in those special single barrels and Jeff and I would retire and I would constantly, when people came in, we would say you've got to try this new red pick, because if you were in that tent you could try whatever you wanted and that was the bottle that and it was gone before any of the other ones, that that bottle was gone.
• 54:44
  Speaker 4: It was so good.
• 54:45
  Speaker 4: So, and that goes to speak for the product and what it is.
• 54:51
  Speaker 4: That was an easy barrel pick because it was easy to pick something oh yeah.
• 54:55
  Speaker 4: That one didn't have to weed out the bad.
• 54:58
  Speaker 5: I mean, it was like there was five people on the pick.
• 55:00
  Speaker 5: Everybody was like we were done within 12 minutes because we tasted, each one tasted through it.
• 55:07
  Speaker 5: We eliminated two.
• 55:07
  Speaker 5: All of a sudden, everybody's like, well, let's blind it.
• 55:10
  Speaker 5: And everybody's like, no, that one is the one.
• 55:14
  Speaker 5: I think Jay's been saying this for years.
• 55:16
  Speaker 2: One of the biggest compliments that we get for the four-year-old whiskey is I can't believe it tastes this good for being four years old, absolutely.
• 55:23
  Speaker 2: And then also Jay, you also said this when we started really getting into the eight-year-old barrels, we were like happy that they were kind of still zesty and lively and they didn't seem tired to us and it kind of makes us very hopeful for the future of what that whiskey can become once it has doubled.
• 55:41
  Speaker 5: A lot of distiller's say the key, that sweet point of a bourbon is eight, nine years.
• 55:44
  Speaker 5: You know, point of a bur of a bourbon is eight, nine years.
• 55:46
  Speaker 1: You know when you start getting.
• 55:47
  Speaker 5: You really have to have a special bottle, uh barrel, to take it to 12 and the 15 it's got to be.
• 55:50
  Speaker 5: You know it's it's got to be pretty neutral and not picking up a lot of wood or some will you know, and you guys know you're doing it.
• 55:58
  Speaker 5: Now, as far as blending batches, it's it's like I've I've had some experience through a couple people, um, especially lately got in.
• 56:07
  Speaker 5: It's such a unique thing that you guys have how many barrels are in each one of your batches.
• 56:15
  Speaker 2: Typically about 30 to 35.
• 56:16
  Speaker 2: So the way that each month's sensory works is and again this goes back to are you comfortable?
• 56:22
  Speaker 2: We are very comfortable overall with the flavor profile of New Roof, but we still pull a sample from every single barrel because we have such a robust single barrel program that we want to make sure that it's at least vetted before it gets up over there.
• 56:34
  Speaker 2: So this month I think we'll pull forward about 250 bourbon samples and maybe a little bit less than 100 barrels of rye.
• 56:42
  Speaker 2: So we'll basically convene a taste panel, go through 12 to 14 of them a day and we'll vote on them and then at the end we'll kind of carve out what's single barrel, what we think would work well.
• 56:55
  Speaker 2: Some of the barrels that were like this isn't so great on its own, but then you combine it with a couple other barrels and that's when you get into the blend.
• 57:02
  Speaker 3: It's really just kind of putting a puzzle together and it's not a very difficult puzzle to put together anymore because we've been so consistent up front.
• 57:09
  Speaker 5: What I was surprised at when I got to do a couple times working with this one blender is that there are some barrels that are super spicy and there are some barrels that are bland land but, like a blender, identifies them and then puts them off to the side and, as your batch is going, if it's a little bit not enough, you can use those barrels to to come to the point where you're going to be.
• 57:37
  Speaker 5: You know, keep that consistency of each batch.
• 57:39
  Speaker 5: And that was something that I was surprised because I thought if it was so spicy or whatever, initially in my head you'd be like kind of moving those out or doing some, trying to do something different with it.
• 57:47
  Speaker 5: But it was so spicy or whatever, initially in my head you'd be like kind of moving those out or trying to do something different with it.
• 57:49
  Speaker 3: But it was kind of cool to see how that goes, and you've evolved.
• 57:53
  Speaker 5: through that I mean when you first were here and you were getting those barrels.
• 57:57
  Speaker 5: You've learned your own stock, right yeah.
• 58:00
  Speaker 3: I mean, we were never very concerned with consistency.
• 58:03
  Speaker 2: We were concerned with quality.
• 58:04
  Speaker 2: Right, I know the batches have kind of gone, not necessarily up and down, but they've changed Like we had you know, we're sweet, that's you know.
• 58:13
  Speaker 4: I have never had a problem.
• 58:14
  Speaker 4: I think that's what makes you want to buy another bottle is if they all taste the same.
• 58:16
  Speaker 4: I mean in a world today where there's so many.
• 58:18
  Speaker 5: Well, you've got that 80% in the bourbon market where the person comes in and they go I want this and this is what I'm drinking and that's a big, huge part of the market, but, yes, that changed.
• 58:32
  Speaker 1: When we bottle a batch of bottled and bond bourbon or rye or anything else, and there's about 30 to 35 barrels in there, we make about 14, maybe 13 barrels per fermenter.
• 58:45
  Speaker 3: So when we bottle this, we don't just go to the warehouse and say, all right, give me the next 30 barrels.
• 58:51
  Speaker 1: No, we take two barrels from this lot, four barrels from this one, three from this one over here, three barrels from that one, two barrels.
• 58:59
  Speaker 1: We very selectively pull those 30-odd barrels out of multiple lots and that gives us multiple batches and that gives us out of multiple lots and that gives us multiple batches and that gives us it sort of collects all of the genetic material, if you will, of New Rift.
• 59:15
  Speaker 1: The DNA of all the flavors that we are capable of get consolidated into that batch.
• 59:17
  Speaker 1: So that's how we find some consistency, however at only 30-odd barrels there are still some opportunities over the years that it can fluctuate a little bit, which is okay.
• 59:30
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, if your focus up front is going to be quality ingredients, sound technique.
• 59:35
  Speaker 2: I often tell people like at the end of the day, we're making this really raw, like corn based distillate, and we're going to put it into a tree.
• 59:43
  Speaker 2: Somebody chopped down and lit on fire and then we're just going to roll it into a corner for four years.
• 59:46
  Speaker 2: And hope it turns out the way we want it Right.
• 59:48
  Speaker 4: I mean, it doesn't work.
• 59:50
  Speaker 5: Spreadsheet picking your barrels from spreadsheets just doesn't work.
• 59:53
  Speaker 3: I mean the spreadsheets don't keep track?
• 59:55
  Speaker 5: Well, they keep track of where it comes, but you can't just like you said you can't just do the I mean barrel pick that I picked where I was on where somebody else were.
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 1: I didn't agree with the pick was here, okay, and it was a guy.
• 1:00:13
  Speaker 5: There was a guy and his wife and they were very specific that they love new riff and they loved your flavor profile.
• 1:00:19
  Speaker 5: So there was, I think, four to choose from and there was one that was right on profile.
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 5: Okay, and then there was this other one, that was this caramel bomb.
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 5: Like it was different, okay, and so I'm going to go with.
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 5: When I'm on a single barrel pick, I like to do the different stuff, but he loves new riff, so I got outv voted on that one.
• 1:00:48
  Speaker 2: It went with the New Riff.
• 1:00:49
  Speaker 5: Now I wasn't upset because, yeah, a single barrel that tastes like New Riff.
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 5: You know, that's not a bad thing.
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 2: We also use three different types of barrels, so you're going to get a different flavor profile over the course of each month's production as well.
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 2: So there's all that you know.
• 1:01:04
  Speaker 2: When we started making whiskey in the beginning, it was very much like being consistent in what you're doing so that we can figure out what our whiskey should taste like.
• 1:01:11
  Speaker 3: That's what it was after we were after we were fairly confident that you know we were making good distillate and putting them into good barrels.
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 2: That's really where we started.
• 1:01:19
  Speaker 2: Like you know, spread our wings again, and that included using different barrels, and then you know, everybody gets the malt whiskey and the malted rye.
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 5: It's all just kind of an extra.
• 1:01:28
  Speaker 5: Everybody gets excited because of that.
• 1:01:30
  Speaker 5: I mean, that's excitement, that's how you get excitement.
• 1:01:32
  Speaker 1: That's how you get the I love distillery releases.
• 1:01:36
  Speaker 5: You know what I mean.
• 1:01:36
  Speaker 5: As a person living in Ohio, I don't get to do them, but when you get to do them, it makes it all special, yep.
• 1:01:42
  Speaker 5: I mean, and that's what?
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 5: Is it anything that?
• 1:01:48
  Speaker 5: That's what you want.
• 1:01:48
  Speaker 5: You want a special bottle.
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 5: Now I would have to say in the past, if you bought this special bottle, you'd want to put it up and you never want to drink it because it was so special but there's so many special bottles now that you can drink your special bottles.
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 2: I've tried multiple times to go to a whiskey collection.
• 1:02:05
  Speaker 5: I have an 800-bottle bourbon rye collection right now and basically probably about 750 of them are all open because that's what.
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 5: I do, Jay Andy and I have one very important question.
• 1:02:19
  Speaker 4: What's that as good as you all are doing with bourbon and rye?
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 4: Is there any chance that we could get a tequila from you?
• 1:02:27
  Speaker 4: No, no, most guys got it.
• 1:02:33
  Speaker 1: I mean you've done everything else.
• 1:02:35
  Speaker 1: Why don't?
• 1:02:35
  Speaker 4: we get a tequila.
• 1:02:36
  Speaker 4: You know, I suppose we could become an importer.
• 1:02:39
  Speaker 1: And there are other spirits we might undertake to make, particularly for our aquifer bar.
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 1: To make particularly for our aquifer bar, as we have relaunched the entire concept of how we run a bar here.
• 1:02:52
  Speaker 1: Maybe there's an opportunity for some different stuff, but I haven't checked lately.
• 1:02:58
  Speaker 1: But can you show me all the agave growing in the Ohio Valley?
• 1:03:03
  Speaker 4: It's yet to be done, but I'm not saying you can't do it.
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 4: You can't even provide.
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 4: What do you have to?
• 1:03:07
  Speaker 5: call it you can't even call it tequila or whatever you have to call it, agave spirits.
• 1:03:12
  Speaker 3: Yeah, sure, no, no, no.
• 1:03:14
  Speaker 5: And I was kidding.
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 5: I will leave that to my friends in next time.
• 1:03:17
  Speaker 5: I was kidding, but I think, jay, you being in the retail part of it, so I'm kind of like in it when it comes to the distilleries where you were, because when you're in retail you're dealing with everything and you come to it to understand a lot of stuff of how different places do things.
• 1:03:38
  Speaker 5: I mean, and that's something you know and you're doing.
• 1:03:41
  Speaker 5: You guys were doing single barrels, but obviously you're doing them from all around kentucky and everything.
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 5: You got to see how everything ran and what people were doing.
• 1:03:48
  Speaker 5: So that that's an expertise that not a lot of people who start distilleries have some there's been some but you guys also, when he mentions tequila, you also know what it was like to deal with tequila distribution and everything.
• 1:04:03
  Speaker 5: So that that has to play a part these days on what you're, what you decide to do and everything.
• 1:04:06
  Speaker 5: So that has to play a part these days on what you decide to do and everything.
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 1: So whiskey number four malted rye, 100% malted rye.
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 1: This is still a rare mash bill in America.
• 1:04:19
  Speaker 1: It is one of the federally delineated styles of whiskey bourbon rye, corn whiskey, wheat whiskey.
• 1:04:27
  Speaker 1: Malted rye is one of those, but there's not very many people who make it.
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 1: For starters, it's hideously expensive as far as the grain is concerned.
• 1:04:36
  Speaker 5: Okay, compared to regular rye.
• 1:04:39
  Speaker 1: About three and a half times what we would pay for regular rye, unmalted rye.
• 1:04:43
  Speaker 1: For regular rye, unmalted rye and that's at the point even where we bring this directly to us from Germany, buy the whole container at a time Wow, and we still.
• 1:04:53
  Speaker 1: It's a very expensive grain, so I can see why, again, how does it show up here In counters and so on?
• 1:04:57
  Speaker 3: So if you look outside?
• 1:05:00
  Speaker 3: Yeah, they're called Super Sacks.
• 1:05:02
  Speaker 3: They're 2,200 pounds they literally come in 18,.
• 1:05:05
  Speaker 2: Come in a shipping container.
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 2: Is it Bomber?
• 1:05:07
  Speaker 2: That's where the Wireman headquarters From Germany.
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:05:12
  Speaker 4: And this is still available out on the market correct.
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 4: Yeah, it's pretty available.
• 1:05:18
  Speaker 4: This is a bottle that is, I guess, would be considered what you guys have you shelf available at?
• 1:05:23
  Speaker 1: most.
• 1:05:23
  Speaker 1: You can find our malted rye in almost all of the markets that we are in.
• 1:05:30
  Speaker 1: We're in 31 states.
• 1:05:31
  Speaker 1: We'll be in Not the Balboa, though Not the Balboa right now, no but the malted rye is out there and, yeah, you can find it.
• 1:05:39
  Speaker 4: Yeah, and this is one that usually if you run into somebody at an event, a party and New Riff has talked about, they're like oh yeah, that six-year malted rye.
• 1:05:51
  Speaker 1: Well, it's so much more, it's so different.
• 1:05:54
  Speaker 1: When we made it I had had in my career one malted rye.
• 1:05:58
  Speaker 1: That's how rare it still is.
• 1:06:01
  Speaker 1: In America it's not very common.
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 1: And I wondered what happens when you malt not barley, but you malt the rye grain, and I thought maybe it makes it even spicier for people like Ty, and it doesn't it?
• 1:06:15
  Speaker 1: Makes it softer, it makes it elegant, sophisticated.
• 1:06:19
  Speaker 5: It's the rye whiskey for people who maybe don't think they like rye whiskey, all that much, but I do you guys so like I't think they like rye whiskey all that much.
• 1:06:27
  Speaker 1: Well, but I do now, especially since you guys.
• 1:06:30
  Speaker 3: So, like I said, the first rye I ever liked was here and now.
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 5: I can't lie.
• 1:06:37
  Speaker 3: There's ryes.
• 1:06:38
  Speaker 5: I want to spit out, but I want to savor this.
• 1:06:45
  Speaker 3: So, is this what's in?
• 1:06:48
  Speaker 4: winter whiskey?
• 1:06:49
  Speaker 4: No no, winter whiskey is.
• 1:06:51
  Speaker 4: Because it had a malted rye in it.
• 1:06:53
  Speaker 3: It has malted oats.
• 1:06:56
  Speaker 1: Oh, it's an oat.
• 1:06:56
  Speaker 1: Okay, I thought it was an oat.
• 1:06:57
  Speaker 1: I don't mind telling the story or answer that question, but winter whiskey.
• 1:07:00
  Speaker 5: Do we have any of that?
• 1:07:01
  Speaker 1: We do not now, no, no, but there will be some out this winter.
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 4: I have some.
• 1:07:05
  Speaker 5: I like whiskey made with oats.
• 1:07:08
  Speaker 5: I do.
• 1:07:08
  Speaker 4: It is Oats is involved, so it was.
• 1:07:10
  Speaker 4: I thought it was a rye, but it is Okay.
• 1:07:13
  Speaker 2: So and forgive me, I can't remember the exact mash bill after like 40 of them, it's corn, obviously more than 50%, and then there is some two row malt.
• 1:07:25
  Speaker 2: There is some two-row malt, there is some malted oats, there's some steel-cut oats and there is chocolate malt in it.
• 1:07:33
  Speaker 2: So basically, like we were kicking around the idea of I forget what you said, hey, oats, or something like that.
• 1:07:40
  Speaker 2: Can we make an oated bourbon and then I thought can we make an oatmeal stout and then smash it into the framework of a bourbon?
• 1:07:47
  Speaker 2: So it's got to be 51% corn.
• 1:07:49
  Speaker 5: Oh God, I've got to taste that.
• 1:07:50
  Speaker 5: Go into a new barrel, et cetera.
• 1:07:52
  Speaker 2: I mean that's one of my favorite beers.
• 1:07:54
  Speaker 2: That is one of the biggest PITAs to make in the history of New Riff Malted oats and oats are just incredibly difficult to work with.
• 1:08:02
  Speaker 5: I mean, do you still cut oats?
• 1:08:03
  Speaker 5: Did you grab some when you?
• 1:08:07
  Speaker 2: were making that and have some oatmeal.
• 1:08:08
  Speaker 2: In the middle we have a stiller, Stephanie Batty, that I had to basically like shoo her away because it was breakfast for every day.
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 1: Again it's like one of those things.
• 1:08:16
  Speaker 2: We love how the distillate tasted, we love how the subsequent whiskey tasted, but to me, like it just destroyed our grain handling system, so I'm like, well, you're not going to win.
• 1:08:26
  Speaker 2: I like it just destroyed our grain handling system, so I'm like well, you're not going to win, I'm going to keep figuring out this and we moved it over here.
• 1:08:31
  Speaker 2: Well, and then it just blew the stills up, because you can imagine like if you've ever had oatmeal or anything like that just it expands, and imagine running it through a still yeah
• 1:08:38
  Speaker 2: yeah, literally yeah, we've had mash go every which way.
• 1:08:41
  Speaker 2: You could possibly do it, even in the microwave for two extra seconds.
• 1:08:44
  Speaker 2: It is all over the microwave, yeah it literally just became one of those challenges that we through the years, have kind of worked out the grounds and the system of making it so like it used to be.
• 1:08:53
  Speaker 2: We're making a couple batches of winter whiskey too.
• 1:08:55
  Speaker 2: I think we finally, after all these years, have cracked the code of just how to like process it through the distillery.
• 1:09:01
  Speaker 2: But yeah that was kind of, the inspiration was kind of figuring out how to stuff an oatmeal stout into the framework of a bourbon Well.
• 1:09:11
  Speaker 5: I'm coming over yeah yeah.
• 1:09:12
  Speaker 4: You can just bring it down.
• 1:09:13
  Speaker 4: You want me to bring it to Kentucky Bourbon?
• 1:09:16
  Speaker 5: Oh, yeah, so we got one more right.
• 1:09:19
  Speaker 5: One more here we go.
• 1:09:23
  Speaker 1: And I should add, by the way, when it comes to things like winter whiskey, the chocolate oil, stout, bourbon, it's not on the market right now.
• 1:09:32
  Speaker 1: It's coming back, but there are bottles of it upstairs at our Aquifer bar At the Aquifer.
• 1:09:36
  Speaker 3: At the.
• 1:09:36
  Speaker 1: Aquifer bar upstairs.
• 1:09:38
  Speaker 1: It's like a whiskey library.
• 1:09:40
  Speaker 1: It's got everything we ever made.
• 1:09:42
  Speaker 1: That bar is amazing and there's certainly some weird whiskey up there right now because the darkness of that when I was up there a couple weeks ago
• 1:09:50
  Speaker 4: when I were there we had the burrito and we were sitting there and I was taking video and I'm looking down the line of bottles, you know, and it's all your stuff in the middle there and I'm like holy crap, this is where we come from.
• 1:10:03
  Speaker 1: Like I remember coming here and there was like only this many, and now, holy cow you get out to 10 years old and and if you and then you just came out with, made some whiskey, you can uh, you can have a whiskey library and you had a special bottle.
• 1:10:16
  Speaker 4: Just come out what a month ago the uh, I did not get it, I wasn't I think what you're referring to is sherry finished malted rye and ct.
• 1:10:26
  Speaker 1: that is what you're referring to is sherry-finished malted rye and CT.
• 1:10:28
  Speaker 1: That is what you're holding in your hand, all right, so?
• 1:10:32
  Speaker 5: Orlo Grosso is a sherry right Correct Form of it, so it's like a cream.
• 1:10:37
  Speaker 3: So this is also a cream sherry too.
• 1:10:39
  Speaker 2: You guys use it or not, it's different.
• 1:10:42
  Speaker 1: So this is sherry-finished malted rye, and we came to this project I'll get to your question in a second Tiny.
• 1:10:49
  Speaker 1: We came to this project from the point of thinking of the malted rye which we just tasted conceiving of this as a malt whiskey first, a whiskey made of a grain that was malted, and a rye whiskey second.
• 1:11:05
  Speaker 1: And then we thought well, if it's a malt whiskey first, how would it behave if we did to it what people around the world do with malt whiskey and age it in some sherry casks?
• 1:11:15
  Speaker 1: And so, using some sherry casks that were also part of our sour mash single malt program, which you'll hear more of in the not-too-distant future, we diverted some of those casks to finishing the malt.
• 1:11:31
  Speaker 1: The sherrys in question are two of them Oloroso sherry and another variety called Pedro Jimenez.
• 1:11:38
  Speaker 3: Oh yeah.
• 1:11:39
  Speaker 4: PX, yes, px, it's darker denser heavier, so I don't like anything finished in beer, so finishing whiskey in wine casks.
• 1:11:52
  Speaker 5: I think there's two forms of finishing, but what I'm always looking for is a balance of still tasting the whiskey but having it influenced by the wine or those sherry or whatnot.
• 1:12:12
  Speaker 3: And then some people nail the living hell out of it and it's got that.
• 1:12:19
  Speaker 5: It actually tastes.
• 1:12:19
  Speaker 5: It's more like wine with a whiskey finish and even though it's, you know whatever.
• 1:12:26
  Speaker 5: But so what do you shoot for?
• 1:12:29
  Speaker 5: I mean because when you're doing wine with a whiskey finish and even though it's, you know whatever, but so what do you shoot for?
• 1:12:32
  Speaker 5: I mean because when you're doing wine with a, I haven't tasted it.
• 1:12:34
  Speaker 5: I'm just like when you do wine with a whiskey finish, you're looking for, like converting those wine drinkers to come over they can taste all that sherry and everything.
• 1:12:40
  Speaker 5: But then when you're doing that balance of it for whiskey, you're just trying to like entice whiskey drinkers to try different stuff.
• 1:12:50
  Speaker 4: So if you've tried anything aged in a Brazilian barrel, throw it away.
• 1:12:57
  Speaker 3: And buy this Stop Don't say those kind of things, you mean French toast, yes, if you've ever had anything that was in a Brazilian barrel throw it away.
• 1:13:07
  Speaker 4: And holy crap, get yourself this.
• 1:13:09
  Speaker 4: This is what I like in a finished.
• 1:13:12
  Speaker 4: This is still very dark and robust, and that sherry is there, but the bourbon is still there, because some Brazilian stuff.
• 1:13:24
  Speaker 4: You can't taste the bourbon whatsoever.
• 1:13:25
  Speaker 4: It's overpowered.
• 1:13:26
  Speaker 4: It's so over whatsoever.
• 1:13:26
  Speaker 4: It's so overpowered, it's like not even close.
• 1:13:29
  Speaker 2: The team that worked on creating this whiskey.
• 1:13:32
  Speaker 2: I think we all really enjoy balance and I think we probably fall more in your camp of you want to taste those things.
• 1:13:39
  Speaker 5: You don't want to just cover the whiskey up and accentuate it.
• 1:13:41
  Speaker 5: Also would absolutely love this.
• 1:13:44
  Speaker 5: I think you lean, but it's a this.
• 1:13:47
  Speaker 5: I think you lean, but it's a balance, Like I was talking.
• 1:13:50
  Speaker 5: It's like one or the other.
• 1:13:51
  Speaker 4: Well, this is both.
• 1:13:52
  Speaker 4: Yeah, Well, this is something that yeah, both anybody would enjoy, that likes the malt of the six year.
• 1:13:59
  Speaker 4: It's going to drink that One of those sifters.
• 1:14:01
  Speaker 4: It's not, like it just totally goes on.
• 1:14:05
  Speaker 4: Another tangent Wine glass.
• 1:14:13
  Speaker 5: It's got a in the bottom.
• 1:14:14
  Speaker 5: Go out by your.
• 1:14:14
  Speaker 5: Yeah, I had after you had amazing people who taught me seven course meal and a lot of it, that's.
• 1:14:17
  Speaker 2: That's what finishes it off.
• 1:14:18
  Speaker 2: Right the notes on it's been translated how we made whiskey here as well, because we want to kind of you can smell the, but you also have all the flavors kind of accentuate each other, but you always want that balance there.
• 1:14:28
  Speaker 5: Right.
• 1:14:29
  Speaker 2: When we use things like chopper malts or other kinds of light-sealed grains like that we just use them in very small proportions to kind of accentuate the whiskey balance.
• 1:14:37
  Speaker 4: Yeah, if a chocolate or any flavor just like a barrel influence if it's too much if it's too oaked, it tastes like crap.
• 1:14:44
  Speaker 2: These are very big flavors that you're buying.
• 1:14:47
  Speaker 2: This is a whiskey.
• 1:14:48
  Speaker 4: You can't walk away from.
• 1:14:49
  Speaker 4: If you don't get that for Rachel before you leave here to go home, I'm just going to tell her right now, rachel.
• 1:14:57
  Speaker 5: Is she?
• 1:14:58
  Speaker 4: actually watching?
• 1:14:59
  Speaker 4: Yes, she was watching.
• 1:15:00
  Speaker 4: Rachel, if he doesn't bring you home this, then I'd consider contacting a guy with a pen and paper and maybe some court time Ouch.
• 1:15:15
  Speaker 2: I know your wife and she will absolutely love that.
• 1:15:18
  Speaker 5: I absolutely love it.
• 1:15:21
  Speaker 5: I can take it home and say why are you telling her about it?
• 1:15:24
  Speaker 4: Because you've got to get it for her, because she will absolutely dig that.
• 1:15:27
  Speaker 3: That is, that's.
• 1:15:28
  Speaker 5: I mean, there's like cloves and cinnamon.
• 1:15:32
  Speaker 4: What's fun is to drink them all Like everybody at home doesn't get to do this.
• 1:15:35
  Speaker 4: It's different because we got to step through them.
• 1:15:39
  Speaker 5: We got to fall whiskey.
• 1:15:40
  Speaker 4: There's no God, but there's so much in there when you can taste it from this, and we didn't even drink single barrels and all that.
• 1:15:48
  Speaker 4: But when you can go through the lineup and get to that point and then you have that dessert, that's at the end you appreciate the process across everything.
• 1:15:58
  Speaker 5: That's great, all right.
• 1:16:01
  Speaker 5: So we went through, we did it.
• 1:16:04
  Speaker 5: We're going to end this part of the podcast right now and then we'll do the other part.
• 1:16:09
  Speaker 5: We'll just keep going, all right.
• 1:16:10
  Speaker 5: So, everybody, uh, thanks for joining us from on facebook and uh.
• 1:16:16
  Speaker 5: Not youtube, but facebook and uh.
• 1:16:18
  Speaker 5: I hope you appreciate it and yeah, remember we're wwwscotchyburbanboyscom.
• 1:16:26
  Speaker 5: For all Scotchie Burbing.
• 1:16:27
  Speaker 3: Boys things.
• 1:16:28
  Speaker 4: I want to say I want to go over the river.
• 1:16:31
  Speaker 5: Go over the river, go over the river and Brian for doing this with us.
• 1:16:37
  Speaker 5: Actually it was, I mean, it took it to another level for me.
• 1:16:42
  Speaker 5: So thank you.
• 1:16:43
  Speaker 5: And then remember remember we're on all social media platforms, in all podcast platforms, and good bourbon and good whiskey equals good friends and good times.
• 1:16:56
  Speaker 5: Drink responsibly, don't drink and drive, and remember to live your life adventurously and little Stevo will take us out.
• 1:17:06
  Speaker 5: Adventurously, it's way better, much better.
• 1:17:11
  Speaker 4: Interesting Did I lose it.
• 1:17:12
  Speaker 4: There we go.
• 1:17:14
  Speaker 4: It's a local guy.
• 1:17:17
  Speaker 4: I was sitting at a place not too long ago and Nash was not here, I was like that song came on so I sent it to.
• 1:17:51
  Speaker 4: Nash I was like you're not going to believe what I'm saying.
• 1:17:56
  Speaker 2: I was like yeah, I don't have 20, some models sitting on the shelf.
• 1:18:02
  Speaker 5: Thanks everybody on Facebook.