100. New Riff Distilling - BiB Bourbon and Rye

Every day, our distillers, they gather around in a circle. We hold hands. We say a prayer for the poor, benighted souls in Kentucky making sweet mash whiskey. We believe in sour mash. We think that is not a better way or the best way to make whiskey, but it's the Kentucky way to make whiskey. One way of looking at it, it is Kentucky's unique contribution to the whiskey making techniques of the world.

Welcome to another trip down the Bourbon Road with your hosts, Jim and Mike. So grab a glass of your favorite bourbon and kick back.

We would like to thank Tommy and Gwen Mitchell from Log Heads Home Center for supporting this episode of the Bourbon Road. Find out more about their fine rustic furniture at logheadshomecenter.com. We would like to thank our friends at Premium Bar Products for sponsoring this episode. If you're ready to step up your game at your home bar, check out premiumbarproducts.com to choose from their wide selection of glassware, all of which can be custom engraved with your personal message or logo. And there's no minimum order. So after the episode, head over to premiumbarproducts.com and check out everything they have to offer. Now let's get on with the show. Hello, everybody. I'm Jim Shannon. And I'm Mike Hyatt. And this is The Bourbon Road. And today, Mike, we are on StreamYard. We've got a special guest with us.

Yep. Who do we have? We got Jay Erisman from New Riff Distillery up in northern Kentucky. He is their chief I guess he would be their chief whiskey man, right? He's the man that kind of does everything there. He's the co-founder of New Riff, used to work at Party Source there in Northern Kentucky and him and the owner of Party Source, somebody came up with the idea, let's make a distillery. And Jim, man, I used to work out at a gym right there, right down the street from there, from that Party Source. And I'd drive by there the other day and I was always like, what's going on there? What are they building? And then they got it built and we walked in there and, They had OKI on the shelf at the time and I bought a bottle of that. I wish I'd have bought about a hundred bottles.

You and I have both been there a few times and we did watch New Riff come up from the ground up and it was an exciting thing to watch. But today we have Jay with us. Jay, welcome to the show.

Hello. Thanks to Bourbon Road for having me. Hello, Jim and Mike.

Good to have you here. Well, you guys have been kind enough to provide us with a couple of whiskeys for today's show. Uh, you provided us with both your, um, your four year bottle and bond straight bourbon whiskey, as well as your four year bottle and bond straight rye. And, uh, we're going to start the show out today with your four year bottle and bond bourbon whiskey. And here at the bourbon row, we'd like to get straight to that first glass. So, and I can see Mike has already got it to his nose. So, why don't you tell us a little bit about this as we begin to nose it and check out this expression?

Sure thing. Well, this is our flagship whiskey, if you will. A flagship bourbon, at least, and its brother is the bottled and bond rye. So, at New Riff, we only make bottled and bond whiskey. With the exception we'll get into later of our single barrel whiskies, which are not bottled and bond because they're barrel proof, but it's all we make. Every time we release a whisky, like our Heirloom Balboa Rye that has come out in the past, or the Backsetters that came out in limited fashion back in the late spring, everything we do is bottled and bond. We went into New Riff knowing we would go at least four years on our whiskey. And if it took five years to be good enough, we would go five. But happily, it happened at four years old. And we didn't sort of decide right away, day one, well, we're only going to do bottle to bottle. It was a very organic process. The solution to what our flagship would be just sort of bubbled up through through the whiskey making and through ourselves and we realized that if we really mean what we say, heart on our sleeve, that quality is number one at New Riff, how can we not make everything we do at New Riff be a bottled and bond whiskey? Because we came to understand the bottled and bond category as not merely that, a category or a marketing thing or a certain set of rules or something. It still is the highest standard in the world for brown spirits, for age spirits. The standards for bottled and bond since 1897, the Bottled and Bond Act, all these years later, they are still higher than the standards in Scotland. higher than the standards in a great spirit like cognac. And so everything we do is adhering to bottled and bond standards. On top of that, as it is embossed in the bottle you see there, it says bottled and bond without chill filtration. And this was a foundational quality precept at New Rift that everything we would make would be unfiltered for maximum flavor, texture, aroma, color, everything we like in a whiskey. So, this is our flagship stuff. We put on the back of the bottle such information as an age statement. We admire age statements. I understand some people don't like them, but we think we should be telling the consumer how old the thing is. My favorite compliment to get at New Riff is when someone is tasting our four-year-old bottle to the bottom, they say, I can't believe it's this good for just four years old. That means we did our job. We also put the mashbill on the bottle. This is a high rye mashbill. It is 30% rye, 65% corn, and 5% malted barley. Genuinely high rye bourbon. We wanted to make potent, powerful, big, mucho gusto tasting whiskey, and so we went for a high rye mashbill on there. So this is our flagship. Tasting it, some people find some sweetness, but I find as often as not it can be drying as well. Sometimes it enters the mouth dry and then turns a little bit sweeter. I love when that happens. There's also plenty of spicy notes from the rye, notes of clove and often some cinnamon, but also there's a minty quality sometimes. Wintergreen comes up sometimes. and various other spicy elements like pink peppercorn or things like that.

Well, Mike, what do you think? You've already dove into the glass, right?

Well, I did before we started, but I did actually wrote some notes down there on it. And Jay, me and you must be thinking alike here, because I said cinnamon with some light oak, the rice coming forward with just a little bit of spice. I get a big red chewing gum. out of this. And I got some floral notes out of it too, that sweetness I can smell on my nose. So I think it's a beautiful smell of bourbon, what I would expect out of a Kentucky bourbon.

Thank you. Thank you. I think that the nose and the palate are joined at the hip. There's no doubt in my mind that there's a strong correlation between the two. It does have this very nice caramel butterscotch nose to it, I think, but that mint is just prevalent on it. That rice spice is dominant, which I think you guys were shooting for that. We were, yes. But the palance is very complimentary, and like I said, they're joined at the hip. There's no discontinuity between the two. I do get just a little bit of cherry or something, a little bit of a cherry to it. But the cinnamon Mike, big red hit that one on the nose. No doubt about it. If you had to pick a chewing gum, that'd be the one I'd pick.

There's often a fruity element in New Rift, not always, but often we get that. That's a common sort of dark fruit. Or sometimes I get something that is like the skin of the fruit, like go and peel a cherry or peel a black cherry and taste what that's like, just to peel. And that comes up sometimes. It's a little more of a sort of phenolic fruitiness, not so much a sweet or jam-like fruitiness. I get that as well often in New Rift. I also want to point out that being that this is an unchill filtered whiskey, folks ask me all the time, how do you like to drink our whiskey or how do you recommend people drink our whiskey? Well, I've been recommending for 20 years that you drink your whiskey any way you want. Just buy it from me. OK, that is that's my my my slogan. However, I like to drink the stuff straight up with no ice but a splash of water. and not a ton of water to make it weak, but just a dollop, if you will, a little slurp of water there in the glass. And I find that because it is an unfiltered whiskey, that more aromas and more rather different aromas and different flavors come out of the glass than come out in the drinking experience. It's very nice straight up. It is a hundred proof, though, and the splash of water sort of takes the heat down a little bit for many people. But moreover, being unfiltered, it opens up additional flavors. That's how I like to drink the stuff. I find it makes a little more dynamic experience in how this glass of whiskey you're enjoying unfolds over the minutes, half an hour, however long it takes. It takes one to drink a glass of whiskey, I suppose. So I like to hit it with a little bit of water. So Jay, is this a sour mash or a sweet mash? My friend, this is sour mash. We treat sour mash like a religion at New Riff. I joke that every day our distillers They gather around in a circle. We hold hands. We say a prayer for the poor, benighted souls in Kentucky making sweet mash whiskey. We believe in sour mash. We think that is not a better way or the best way to make whiskey, but it's the Kentucky way to make whiskey. One way of looking at it, it is Kentucky's unique contribution to the whiskey making techniques of the world. This is not a technique that emerged so much with American rye production. If you go back in history, America's first whiskey was rye whiskey. It predates bourbon. It was made on the East Coast, Pennsylvania, Maryland, up there in the Northeast. Rye was a grain that grew really well up there. It's an older whiskey. And yet, back in those days, that was often not a sour mashed whiskey. It is Kentucky's arrangement of a beer still and a doubler and other efficiencies that really produced what we call a new riff. We describe it as the Kentucky regimen. It's not only sour mash. It is a whole set of whiskey making techniques and precepts, how you go about making whiskey, that we call the Kentucky Regimen. And the addition of sour mash or back set into every ensuing mash from the last distillation, that's a big part of it. But the Kentucky Regimen is something that we want to uphold. We say it is not a the best way to make whiskey in the world, but it's a great way to make whiskey in the world and every bit as good as the way they make it in Scotland and Ireland and Japan and all these other places. We are big believers in sour mash.

Well, I tell you what, as I continue to sip on it, it does develop. Um, it, it, it doesn't have a great sweet presence on the front of the palette. Uh, it does kind of settle in on the mid and the back of the palette and sort of gives you that nice warming effect. It is a little drying, I think, but in a good way. I think it, uh, the absence of the sweetness upfront. Really makes for a good warming backend that rice bites just sort of sits there. That, that cinnamon. I mean, if you like a spicy whiskey, this is right there. And, uh, not too much hug, a little bit of hug, but the finish is, uh, medium to long.

I couldn't agree with you more on that. Just, I had a little bit of dry on that front end, as Jay had said before, that spicy's there. And the reason I asked you about that sour mass, Jay, was because I could feel that Kentucky hug happening. So I knew it was there with that spice. I kind of know that, that feeling you get and stuff. So yeah, I couldn't agree with Jim more. The question I'd have for you, it's super interesting when you talked about it before, was how do you get from just being a giant liquor store, to bus build a distillery right on the banks of the Ohio River.

Right. Yeah. How the heck did it all happen? Great question. Well, As I was describing, maybe what we were doing at the party source in working with Kentucky retail, I mean, being the biggest single store in Kentucky, one of the biggest stores in the nation and probably the world, but we were situated there at the party source in one of the world's great whiskey regions. And so we had a really great opportunity to be very intimately connected to Kentucky's distillers. go into the history and other people's names and distilleries. I try and leave them out of our narrative. But for some people, we launched their private barrel program. We did our own experimental whiskeys at the party source with Kentucky distilleries. We had an opportunity to before bourbon really blew up. This would be about 2006, seven, eight, nine, ten. We had the ten years ago, I suppose we had the opportunity to work with these distilleries very closely. And that kind of work provided the bedrock for how we could go and make our own whiskey. What kind of quality precepts would we adhere to? And that started to get fleshed out in a sort of, admittedly, a dream-like fashion. These things, dream is an overused word, but that's really how it did kind of bubble up at New Riff. We had we had that that to go on, you know, working for Ken Lewis, my boss now since 2001. And my friend, he's a great guy. We had the chance to work. And I know myself and all of all of my colleagues there that have grown up with New RIF. We had the chance to work with a great American entrepreneur. That's what Ken is really, is it is one of those great entrepreneurial spirits that our country seems to produce now and then. And his chosen field at that time was in alcoholic beverage retail, was in running liquor stores of a kind and of a nature and a quality that hadn't been seen before. So Ken was used to building first class organizations. As he says, he hires the right people and the best people, gives them all the tools to do the job and protects them and then gets the hell out of the way. And we also had, however, some pieces of absolute serendipity. You could call it good luck, but the arrangement of these things is more emotional than that, really. For example, the water supply that we have at New Rift, the first question any distiller in any country, Scotland, Ireland, I don't care where you go, for hundreds and centuries of years is, where do I get my water? especially in making a whiskey distillery, that's the first question you answer. Where do we get our water? This is the water of life. That's what the word whiskey means. And the first thing that happens is you ask what water you use, because that becomes not only the water that goes in the whiskey becomes the whiskey, but it becomes your cooling water. There's a lot of heating and cooling processes in whiskey. In bourbon, we have to boil the corn and the mash before it can become bourbon, before we can get the starch out of those grains and turn it into sugar for the yeast to eat and make alcohol. So we need a water supply to cool things down. And we knew we could make good water based on the city of Newport. if we had to, because that's all that they do in most of the other Kentucky distilling places. Lawrenceburg, Kentucky, and Louisville, and Bardstown, all of these large distilleries run on city water, or sometimes they run on a river. They turn river water at Four Roses, they run on the Salt River, they make that into maybe the best bourbon there ever was. great friends of ours and an influence on us, Four Roses, and yet here they are running on what would seem to be a humble water source. So we knew we could get it done with municipal water and we went looking, however, for a better water supply. We found 100 feet in the rock and the gravel underneath the distillery, an aquifer, And we tapped into that with a well. And so this aquifer feeds our distillery with 500 gallons a minute of all the water we need. It becomes the whiskey. It is a traditional Kentucky limestone groundwater and fed by the limestone formations in the hills just to the south of the distillery. So we have an absolutely unique water supply. And when we went looking for it, we found it right under our bloody feet. It was there all along. Who knew? We figured that out and it was like, man, somebody wants this distillery to be built right here. And so we did. The other serendipitous thing is the master distiller that we found to sort of lead us down the path. We needed a consultant. We couldn't do all the technical stuff on our own, although we had a good background. and we found the best master distiller in the business. His name is Larry Ebersold. He's a consultant now, but he was the master distiller for many years at the Seagrams plant in Lawrenceburg, Indiana. He is the inventor of the 95% rye that has caught the whiskey world by its ear and is today one of America's great, great ryes. He mastered that whiskey back in the 1990s and he taught us how to make it. He was our consultant. And when we went looking for a consultant, how serendipitous again that we found the best in the business, living about 20 minutes away, newly retired, this was about 2010, and he was looking for work. And so he consulted on New Riff, he designed so much of our distillery, laid out the processes, there are pipes and valves and very simple little fittings at New Rift that Larry installed and yet every day they are critical to making the quality that we do. We had a teacher, a guide, a sensei, the master to lead us down the path of how to make great whiskey and he was the other absolutely serendipitous thing that helped us be what we are today.

So in the early days, when you guys were first starting up, Larry played a big part in kind of bringing you guys up to speed. But he also played a part in the whiskey that you started with as well, right? I mean, the initial brand that was released was the OKI brand, was it not?

Right. For OKI, I had talked Ken Lewis into buying several hundred, he now wishes he'd bought several thousand, but several hundred barrels of Indiana whiskey. I think we bought that in 2011 when it was five years old. It was about 300 barrels or so only. This was to become some brand that we would make. The point of it was not to become a brand that would be a sustaining whiskey brand. The point of OKI was simply to give us a chance to interface before our own whiskey is ready, to interface with the world over a glass of brown aged delicious whiskey. And not only to have, we make a gin at New Riff. It's called Kentucky Wild Gin. And we're proud of that, but of course we are a whiskey distillery. And we also, back in those days, we're selling the New Make. If you came to our gift shop, you could get New Riff White Dog, or New Make as we call it. We did put that in the bottle, but we wanted something other than just these kind of white spirits to interface with the world, to introduce ourselves. OKI was a placeholder on the store shelf and on the back bar of a bartender's selection. But it was also a standard bearer. It was a chance to say, look, we didn't distill this. And we were completely transparent about where it came from. The back of the bottle said distilled in Indiana, bottled in Kentucky, loved in Ohio. It was Ohio, Kentucky, India. OKI, this is the corner of the world. That is greater Cincinnati and northern Kentucky. It's where we come from. And it's where that stuff was distilled. So it was a placeholder, but also a standard beer to say, we didn't distill this, but this is how we think whiskey should be. It's high rye. It's powerful. It is bottled without chill filtration. And the point of OKI was to make a statement to the world. But then as our own stuff came of age in the summer of 2018, we always planned that OKI would die and would go away. We were not here to do a sort of a switcheroo where you're drinking OKI and it was distilled in Indiana and we build up this brand. But then later we put our own whiskey in it and that was distilled in Kentucky. That was never the point. We wanted OKI to go away. We did a very unique thing, actually, in launching a distillery, which is you build a brand, and you release a whiskey, and it's good, and you get some medals, and you get a little notoriety, and people start honking, honking about the single barrels and all these great things. And then we pulled it. It died. Most people don't do that. That's a silly thing to do if you are trying to build a distillery up and get it bought out by the highest multinational conglomerate bidder. But that is not the goal at New Rift. Our goal at New Rift is to someday be one of the great small distilleries of the world and to do that with Kentucky straight bourbon whiskey that is bottled in bond without chill filtration. OKI was a sort of a pre-brand, a test bed for some of these concepts, but never meant to be a sustaining thing. What we didn't, or at least I didn't really realize at the time when we got into OKI, we got these barrels, was how much we would learn from it. We had the chance at our palette team, myself, our quality control panel, to work with an aged whiskey. Now, when we were six months old, one year old, two years old, we didn't have to wait until we were eight, 10, 12 years old to work with an eight, 10, 12 year old whiskey. We could do it early on. And our bottling crew, we learned how to work with aged whiskey out of the barrel, how to get the char out of that, all of these quotidian techniques that are very important to working a bottling line. And we were able to get some experience with that early in our whiskey making careers, if you will. So OKI was a tremendous test bed and a learning platform for ourselves to enjoy.

your bottle is really unique and your name is really unique. Who came up with the name New Riff?

You know, I'm a guitar player. I'm a rock and roller here. And I wish I could tell you that I came up with the name New Riff, but I did not. It is entirely springing out of the head of Ken Lewis. You know, I don't know if you ever had to name anything. But naming a company and a brand that you hope will go on for generations, that's a real responsibility. It's a hell of a task. Naming was, it was tough. We sat around myself and Ken Lewis and our vice president today, our VP of operations, Hannah Lowen, one of our leaders, sat around in naming meetings and we kicked all these things around. And the very initial names were, one of them got shot down by a copyright thing. Somebody else had enough of a of a hold on that copyright. So we're struggling to come up with this name. And one day Ken comes into our meeting and he says, I had an idea last night. So what if we consider the distiller as a musician? You know, now you have to understand Ken is an old deadhead. When I was born, he was probably, I'm not making this up, literally following around the Grateful Dead in the proverbial Volkswagen bus. He was a deadhead and he's a child of the 60s and of that counterculture time in our nation's history and takes away a lot of that today. It explains a lot about how Ken runs a business in his, you know, considerate capitalism, if you will, his care that he takes for people. is all explained by that dogma and those philosophies back then. But he was a deadhead and he comes in and says, what if we consider the distiller like a musician and he makes his stuff every day and he's good at it, but he does a little change on it now and then. He plays a riff on it and he makes a new riff now and then and Bingo, the name was born. It says on the back of the bottle. I'll hold one up for you guys here. The audience can't see this, but it says a new riff on an old tradition. And so we embrace the old tradition of sour mash Kentucky regimen whiskey making. But we are here to do a new riff on that and to play our own riff, like a guitar riff, like a jazz riff. That's where the name comes from.

Yeah, I can tell you your bottle is absolutely beautiful. I think it's a, it definitely gets great fanfare in the market because of it's a, the way it looks on a shelf. The one thing that I will say is it's unusual in the respect that you can't see the liquid. So you can't see the liquid in it, but it's a beautiful bottle and a great label and an amazing logo. And now with that explanation, love the name.

Right. I semi wish we'd never had this ombre because being an unfiltered whiskey, we retain more color. in our product than other people. There's a famous Kentucky bottled and bond whiskey that is sold at six years old. And our four-year-old bourbon is often darker than our competitor's six-year-old bottled and bond product because ours is bottled without chill filtration. And part of me, the whiskey nerd, wishes that we had this clear glass bottle. You could totally see the color. You know, I kind of wish that. The ombre that we came up with and our design firm, LPK is their name and they have an outlet in greater Cincinnati. They're an international design firm of great renown and they helped us come up with this. It's encapsulating The name really, the slogan, we are a new riff on an old tradition. That means we're new and we're modern and we are urban. We never came to this with some BS story about, well, we've got granddaddy's recipe that we kept under the mattress for 75 years. We didn't have that. We didn't have this personal family history. We are new, but we also are this old tradition. And so we needed a package that embraced the creative and friendly and loving tension between these two elements, the new riff and the old tradition. And so you look at our bottle, there are traditional elements, like it's the shape of a traditional whiskey bottle, but it's also a, it's got these embossings on it. It has a tack strip at the top, and yet it's got this sexy black, matte black ombre, as we call it, that is very much a modern element, really stands out as something new on the shelf. Within the bottle, it is both new and old.

I think that's a beautiful bottle because it goes from, it almost looks like the black part. It's almost that char on the inside of the barrel going to the liquid. So that's what it looks like to me when I see it on a shelf. It's almost like that liquid is pouring into that char. Quite beautiful bottle. I got to congratulate you guys on, on coming up with this. It's definitely beautiful.

Cool. I'm glad you like it. You know, as to the logo, that was created by a company, another design firm very early in our work called BLDG out of Covington. And they embraced the sort of musical theme inherent in our name, New Riff. And they designed this logo to be, it looks like a sine wave. But over the years, it really has evolved. If you look at the logo, you see that there's an N inside the logo. You can see the letter N as in New Riff, as in Newport. There's also an R inside there. It's also a little bit of the river. And some people have noticed a vibrating guitar string, which as a guitar player, again, I wish I'd come up with that. But they see, man, that looks like a vibrating guitar string. And finally, one bourbon club, and this was only a few months ago, said, you know what I see in that? I see an A and an F. So you are New Riff AF. You are Bourbon AF. This is a slogan, sort of internet meme that didn't even exist when we made the logo. And maybe that's the mark of a great logo is that it keeps on giving, that it evolves and new things pop out of the logo as years go by. So we love this little logo that BLDG made for us.

I tell you that if people haven't been up to New Riff, haven't been up to Northern Kentucky, Cincinnati, You guys gotta be the closest distillery to the interstate. You're right off 471 there in Newport or Bellevue, whichever one you want to call it. I guess you're really in Newport because the sign for Bellevue is right after your distillery.

We are in Newport, yes. If you visit New Riff, you'll park in the parking lot and you will have parked in Bellevue, Kentucky. When you step on the sidewalk to get into New Riff, you will be stepping into Newport. We are literally the border at the northeast corner, I suppose, between Newport and Bellevue. And just on the other side of us, literally over the flood wall, you could throw a rock from our distillery onto the highway, if you would, 471. The convenience is extraordinary. But that's the whole genius of the party source installation to begin with. When Ken built the party source in 1992 and 1993, the point was to be the very first liquor store across the border from Ohio. And so it is. And today there's a distillery there as well.

There's other stuff to do up there, right? Right across from you guys, Cincinnati, like I said, but there's also the aquarium.

A whole bunch of things. Yeah. It makes, dare I say, here, my hometown, the metropolitan, greater Cincinnati, a heck of a visit. I mean, you're minutes from, well, we don't go to these things right now, but the baseball stadium, the Natural History Museum, one of the best zoos in the country, right down the road from us in Newport is a hell of a good aquarium. an aquarium there in Newport is really striking. So lots of stuff to do there. Y'all come back now, as we say in Kentucky.

And one of the best breakfast places in America to eat, if you're listening to this and you're going up there to New Riff and they're not open yet, there's a little place called the Pepper Pot. It's like a throwback.

Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right on the main drag in Newport. Yeah. Good greasy spoon.

All right, guys. Well, I'm going to keep sipping on my new riff, bottle and bond bourbon here. Mike, you're finished with yours. I can see several pores into it. We're going to take a short break. And when we come back, you've got you've got another expression for us to try and we'll talk a little bit more about new riff. All right. We would like to thank Tommy and Gwen Mitchell from Loghead's Home Center for supporting this episode of the Bourbon Road. Loghead's Home Center, nestled in the hills of Kentucky, is an industry leader in building handcrafted rustic furniture. Family owned and operated, they take pride in offering only the very best for their customers. The Logheads, and that's what they like to call themselves, are skilled wood crafters who are passionate about creating rustic furniture for people who appreciate the beauty of natural wood. Owners Tommy and Gwen don't just sell the rustic lifestyle, they live it. And you can be sure that Loghead's furniture will always be handcrafted in Kentucky by artisans who embrace the simple way of life. Loghead's rustic furniture is made from northern white cedar, a sustainable wood that's naturally rotten termite resistant. Its beauty and quality will add warmth to your earthy lifestyle for generations to come. Be sure to check out everything they have to offer at LogHeadsHomeCenter.com. And while you're at it, give Tommy and Gwen a shout on Facebook or Instagram at LogHeads Home Center.

Hey, listeners, we're back with Jay Erisman from New Riff Distillery up in northern Kentucky there, Newport, Kentucky, to be exact. Jay, what do you got for us for the second half?

Well, I think we're going to dive into our rye whiskey, our bottled and bond rye. But furthermore, a little bit, maybe talk about our dedication to rye as a signature grain, as a focus at New Riff and what the implications of that are.

So much like what we tasted in the first half, this, this rye is also a bottled and bond.

Yes, sir. So like, uh, like our bourbon whiskey, this is our flagship rye bottle and bond without chill filtration. Again, the only thing we make, uh, is bottled and bond whiskey and barrel proof single barrels, meaning there is no, you know, 90 proof small batch. There is no 80-proof two-year-old or something like that. Everything we make is at the standard of the world's highest quality regulation for a brown spirit bottle and bun. Like the bourbon, there's an age statement on the back. It's aged at least four years. The grain bill is also on the back of the bottle. That's 95% rye, 5% malted rye. So this is a little bit of our new riff, if you will, on the tradition and the recipe that our consulting master distiller, Larry Eversold, had created at Indiana. So the background of Larry's Indiana 95% rye whiskey consists in his company at the time that he worked for, the great company Seagrams. His bosses at Seagrams essentially said, Larry, we need a new rye whiskey. We'd like you to make We'd like you to make the mother of all rye whiskeys is sort of what they said, a very powerful, spicy, intense whiskey that they intended for blending. It wasn't necessarily intended ever to be released as a straight whiskey. And indeed, it never was released as a straight whiskey during Seagram's tenure. In about 2003, Seagrams fell apart. It went out of business. And the parts of Seagrams, the different brands, were sold off to all these different companies. For example, Four Roses Distillery was sold off to Kirin, the wonderful Japanese brewing and distilling company. So anyway, Here is Larry's rye out on the world, and it starts to be picked up by large distillers and small distillers and craft distillers. And today it is one of the great rye whiskies in American history. Rye whiskey is probably the hardest whiskey recipe to make in the world. Rye is a very obstreperous grain. It foams up in the fermenter. It gums up in the stills. The old Kentucky distillers, they hated making rye. It was just such a pain in the neck. And they made as little of it as they could. Well, here Larry is making not just a 51% Kentucky rye grain bill that includes a lot of corn. He was making 95% rye, this ridiculously high content of rye. And Larry was good enough to figure that out and literally master that recipe. He taught The secret arts, the dark magic of making the 95% rye recipe taught us how to do that. And then we went and did a riff on it to include not 5% malted barley, but 5% malted rye. We call that 100% rye. That 5% malted rye adds the magic fairy dust on top of the whole experience. It adds something that was missing from the 5% malted barley. We have made 95% rye, 5% malted barley before. In fact, we've made that for many clients. distillations that we do, some contract distilling that we do at New Riff. But our whiskey is, our rye whiskey is the 95, 5% malted rye. And it is at 100% rye, just about as intense as you can get in a rye whiskey. And so we get flavors here of deep clove and all the things we found in the bourbon but amplified, the clove, the cinnamon, but also Often we get people find a sort of a mintiness and not like a peppermint candy, but like winter green. Sometimes that sort of leans over into something like sassafras, like a sort of a root beer element almost. The spices can include clove and cinnamon, but they can also include sort of more rooty kinds of things. We also get some citrus sometimes and also notions of things like pink peppercorns. Or if you've ever experienced a special spice called the grain of paradise, this is sometimes called an African peppercorn. And it's got its own little, you know, spicy jujitsu that that I find and our head distiller, Brian Sprantz, often finds that because of our background in brewing, sometimes grain of paradise is used in beers like Belgian wit beers and things like that. We find special spices in it like that. So there's just a whole spice cabinet going on here in our rye whiskey.

Yeah, Mike. So I've only hit the nose so far and, uh, it is definitely a, a spicy amped up version of that bourbon, but, uh, getting a little bit more of the mint, a little bit more of the, uh, the rice spice there. I'm getting like, uh, you mentioned sort of that wit beer thing. I'm getting a little bit of that, uh, Oh, what is that? Coriander, a little bit of coriander in it. So that's interesting. I haven't picked that up before.

I actually know, isn't it, man, you can get that right out of there for sure. Um, but if you've ever walked into a flower shop and that aroma you get from a flower shop, that's what this right here, just a deep floral note does have a little sweetness on the nose though. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I got it. Let's drink some of this stuff. We've been talking too long.

Okay.

Let's do it.

That's kind of everywhere at once, isn't it, Mike?

Oh my gosh, that is, it is, the sweetness is there, but it kind of rushes back on your tongue with, I'm not sure what that, like a, like almost like a hot caramel, um, like a hot caramel Sunday, I guess, you know, nice and still floral sweetness is coming out on it. very beautiful rye.

Thank you.

Yeah, it's very good. Syrupy and mouth coating. Um, it presents itself, like I said, everywhere at once. Uh, kind of doesn't work its way back. It just kind of says, here I am. And it hits you in all places at one time.

Right. Um, We are definitely attentive to mouthfeel and the textural element of whiskey that is tremendously aided by the fact that it is bottled without chill filtration. One of the things that gets attenuated when a whiskey distiller chill filters their whiskey is they attenuate some of that texture literally what they are filtering out is some of the fatty acids and the oils and things that are constituent parts of the of the whiskey and yet present a problem when you want to add too much water to whiskey and water it down to 90 proof or 86 or 80 proof like that and so they filter that away and they attenuate that texture and the mouthfeel in new riff is one of the things we're proudest of it's also our belief that this mouth feel begins with the water. Guys, if you can visit New Rift someday, I'll give you a taste of our well water of our aquifer water itself. And the water has got this big character. You drink it and it's like a very it sounds ridiculous to say because water is supposed to be flavorless. But our waters, it's a very watery water. It's like like when you were a kid and you were standing out in the rain and you let the raindrops wet your tongue, it tastes like that. It is a big natural tasting water. And I'm sure that the overall sort of bones of our whiskey is beginning with that water. We don't make this out of tap water. We make it out of a big boned hardy glass of mineral water. And it's got about four times the dissolved solids of the typical tap water of the region, our water does. So that's where that mouth feel all sort of begins.

I'm sure when people drive in at 471 to the distillery there, you'll be able to see the limestone cliffs and stuff where people started construction, like where the Kroger is at or something like that. And you can see how deep that limestone is and you can see how that filtration would happen in that area. And like you said, the hills are just south of you guys.

Exactly. When you come from the south to New Rift, like if you're driving on 471, you say you're going to go down a long, long hill. It's downhill. And those hills are full of limestone. Now, right underneath the distillery, I don't call that limestone because actually, geologically, it is glacial fill. That is what carved the river, and it's what carved that little valley there. But the hills to the south of us have got these sort of fingers of limestone pointing down the hill. That is the primary source of water in our aquifer, actually. While the rock underneath the distillery is not limestone, the water came from limestone formations. It's got tremendously high levels of calcium carbonate, otherwise known as hard water or limestone. And that is the source of the magic in the waters, those hills you drive down. Literally, yes, Mike, you can see the limestone in the walls of the hill as you drive down towards New Rift.

Yeah, it's a beautiful area. The whole Ohio River Valley is a beautiful place. The glaciers played a big part in the formation of that whole area. I think they kind of terminated at the Ohio River, didn't they? They receded back from there. They did, yes. So when you go north of the Ohio River, you have a lot of gravel deposits and things like that, but then you have that untouched limestone of northern Kentucky. It just makes for great water. It absolutely does.

So it's a swamp over there in Ohio, Jim. Swamp right down from right down from the distillery. If you're over there, you're listening to this and you're like, I want to make a trip up there. There's a Snyder sweet shop right down the road to we can stop and pick up some chocolates right there on, I guess, route eight into Bellevue.

Schneider's makes a hell of an opera cream if you like that kind of candy. Also good bourbon balls, actually.

Oh, we love bourbon balls, don't we, Mike?

Heck yeah, who doesn't?

Yeah, I'm really finding my place here with this rye. This for me is, you know, and we've talked about this in many episodes, Mike. I kind of gravitate a little bit more towards the ryes I always have. I love the way that it kind of hits your whole palate at once. and kind of presents itself kind of uniformly around the whole palette. It's a great sipper. I think it's a fall whiskey. You know, we're in fall now, so this kind of fits, I think. Yeah, I would drink it year round, but I think it really fits in fall. It's got that nice big spicy punch to it. And, you know, I'm starting to pick up a little bit of that clove too, Mike, a little bit more of the anise and Not so much the full on licorice, but just a little hint of anise there. And I love it. I think it's really good.

I could get that same thing from it. I think you're right. It's a, it's a fall sipper. Be perfect by the campfire. Matter of fact, we're going to have campfire tonight. I'm going to smoke some chicken legs injected with some bourbon and some barbecue sauce. I'm going to take this thing down by the fire and we'll sip on it while we're eating on them chicken legs by the fire.

Thanks. Thanks Mike. And what time did you say we should be over?

Hey, you're always invited to come down to Jep the bin farm. We started about six 30 tonight.

Well, Jay, tell us a little bit about, you know, kind of, I know you guys have kind of a customer program that you have where you have people who sign up and you send out occasional emails to let them know about releases and other things that are happening on, but what kind of programs do you have for your loyal customers?

Right. Well, you can always join the New Riff Whiskey Club. It's very simple to find, newriffwhiskeyclub.com. And this is a way that we can connect consumers with a release from our gift shop. Of course, we always send some bottles of everything we release to Kentucky liquor stores as well. But for things that we sell in our gift shop, that's a way that a consumer can buy a thing online and come and pick it up. Someday, we will have some limited amount of shipping from that to certain states, but that's a ways down the road. The New Rift Whiskey Club is a great way to keep in touch. And of course, on our social media outlets like Instagram and Twitter and so on. We're, of course, active in all those things. But the other program we do run is quite an extensive program of private barrel selections. The majority of these go to our retail customers at the stores, liquor stores and on-premise restaurants and bars and things like that. But we also do supply through the retail stores. We supply various bourbon clubs and bourbon societies, if you will, all over the country and also to private citizens. We sell a portion of private barrels to, for example, somebody's got a law firm and they need to give presents to their 200 best customers. Well, they might come and pick out a private barrel. And that is the private barrel for their gift giving that year. We do a lot of private work like that with individuals as well. We got into single barrels. And like the bottle and bond discussion, it was not something that we were absolutely settled on from day one. We just held open the question or the notion that maybe we should do single barrels. And as time went by, we realized, well, hold on a minute. Given what we did at the party source with private barrels, these many groundbreaking innovations, how can we not really embrace the fun and the connection and the camaraderie of a private barrel in our own work? And so we did. We hope we do it right. We hope we do that whole process justice. We have a private barrel selection process that involves a visit when possible. It's not always possible right now with this pandemic. to the distillery, to the warehouse, and you get to read some tasting notes for every barrel and pull a sample out of the barrel yourself and that kind of thing. It hopefully is a very engaging and community building kind of experience in our private barrels. Our entire single barrel program has just blown up beyond anything really we dreamed. It's really dynamic and a lot of fun. and actually has a basis in how we go about putting the whiskey in barrels in the first place, our single barrels. I think you guys have in front of you a New Rift single barrel, either a bourbon or a rye. I happen to have a bourbon. So, of course, we all have three different single barrels here. We won't have a common tasting experience. Jim, I think yours, not surprisingly, you are a rye guy, happens to be New Rift single barrel rye. We do that as well, although we don't have any selections, any private selections of single barrel rye. I'm sorry to disappoint your audience that you can't pick out a barrel of rye yet, but someday that will come. So our single barrels are, look, they're unique because every single barrel of whiskey aging in Kentucky, and there are more barrels of whiskey aging in Kentucky than there are Kentucky human beings at this point, Every barrel is unique a little bit, but dare I say ours are a little extra special. And let me explain why. We're a small distillery at New Rifts. If you come and take a tour, we will be careful to point out to you in the barreling room where we actually put the new spirit into the barrel. We have two what we call gauge tanks and these are what holds the white dog or what we call the new make. It holds the new make whiskey before we put it in the barrel. So we distill a fermenter of whiskey and it goes in this tank and we cut the whiskey to 110 proof, which is our barreling proof. It's quite low. We cut it to 110 proof and it goes in the barrel. And we distill the next fermenter and that goes in the tank and that gets cut and that goes in the barrel. We distill another one and that goes in the barrel. So what winds up happening is that each fermenter of whiskey, the mash of whiskey that you see there, the beer that you can dip your finger in when you take a tour of the distillery, that that fermenter gets more or less discreetly barreled from the next one and the prior one. It more or less is a is a barreling of that one fermenter. And that means that we are preserving not only the singular character, obviously, of each barrel, but of each fermentation, because each fermentation develops a little bit different character. This one might be sweeter. That one might be spicier. Maybe this one needs a little more aging. Maybe this one over here is dry. Maybe this one here is really oaky. Every fermenter is unique. And because we are rather small, we didn't even plan it this way. We didn't install a 750 gallon gauge tank for the purpose of making unique fermentation barrelings. It just happened because we're only a small distillery. For better or for worse, at the end of the day, we barrel each fermenter more or less separately. That's counter to the prevailing notion of how to run a bourbon distillery. Most distilleries don't do that. Most distilleries run in a very smart way, and they distill a fermenter and it goes in the tank. They distill another fermenter and that goes in the tank. They distill five or six more fermenters and all of those go in the tank. And by the way, the tank is bigger than your house. Then they cut the whiskey and they put it in the barrel. And what they do is they ameliorate and wash away the differences between each fermenter of whiskey. And that's a fantastic way to run a distillery because it's very consistent. You harmonize all the whiskey, you get rid of the uniqueness of each thing, and you build a lot of consistency into the barreled whiskey from the beginning. For better or for worse, that's not how we run. So we have to build consistency into our bottled and bond product at the back end of the process. We don't just take one fermenter and bottle that or two fermenters. We want to take three or four barrels from six or seven or eight different distillations, different fermenters. and bottle that together. We have to build the consistency into bottled and bond on the back end. But what it means for single barrels is we not only have a distinctiveness from barrel to barrel to barrel, but from batch to batch or lot to lot, fermenter to fermenter. And it makes a tremendous variety of flavor in our single barrel whiskeys. If you taste a New Grif single barrel and you think, man, that's really sweet, go back to the store a month later, get a different lot. it's going to be dry. It's going to be very spicy. It's going to be very oaky. It will be different than the, the, the, than the prior one.

I tell you, I have a bottle of the single barrel bourbon. It's 110.7 proof and it is a spice bomb. It's almost, I don't know, sweet spice bomb. It's very hard to explain it. It almost be like eating a cinnamon candy. It's like a red hot, red hot cool.

Cool. Mike, what is the, uh, I'm just curious for our audience. What is the barrel number on the side of your bottle or on the, on the label?

So barrel number 15 dash three one one four.

Okay. I have, uh, a little bit later bottle than that, about a thousand barrels or 600 barrels later. I have 15 dash four zero one seven.

So I'm guessing that was barreled in 2015. Yes.

Uh, it was, uh, my barrel happened to be distilled. This is just the one I have here at home in front of me, July 7th of 15. And it was bottled seven 29 of 19. Wow.

I think I got the spring of 2015 is what I ended up getting. I have fall of 2015.

So my Rye is 112.2.

It's out of barrel 15-2775. And having just come off the bottle and bond rye and tasting this one, it's totally different. This one is a, well, the proof's higher, but not withstanding the proof, this one is a lot more floral. It's like I've taken a bouquet of, and I'm not a flower guy, but bouquet of flowers. But the palate is buttery. Literally buttery, and it's got a great anise quality to it that I really like. It's pepper, it's black pepper and anise, a little bit of orange, but the nose on it is phenomenal. I mean, I could smell this thing all day long. Thanks, Jim.

Yeah, as you can see, Jay, we both love whiskey just a little bit.

So you mentioned earlier that, you know, things are a little bit different now with COVID and we don't like to spend a lot of time talking about COVID because we all hear it all day long, but you guys continue to operate amidst this pandemic that we're going through. It's obviously had some impact on your business. How are you dealing with it now and what's your vision for exiting this situation we're in?

Right, great question. Man, it's been a hell of a year, right? Hell of a year. Well, New Riff and other distilleries around the country were deemed essential. And in fact, we dare we say we were essential. We made, and we have made in the past, contributions to America's wars and calamities and When the chips were down, the distilleries made spirits for the nation's need. And just like in World War II, when Kentucky's distilleries pivoted to making alcohol for the war effort, a great many of us around the country, and certainly in Kentucky, pivoted to making alcohol for this effort. And we got into making a few batches of hand sanitizer. A tremendous shout out to our distilling team who learned in a matter of about two weeks, you know, 10 days, we figured out how to make a strong enough alcohol, just a sort of a neutral alcohol out of our distillation equipment to provide the basis for a hand sanitizer. We'd never done anything like that. We were trying to make strong and flavorless liquor and alcohol. And here in our past, we'd only tried to make the most flavorful alcohol we could, which is our is our whiskey. And so we figured out in short order how to do that and supplied free of charge. We donated to first responders and fire departments and hospitals and all people around greater Cincinnati like this. the surrounding counties. We made donations of 55 gallon drums of hand sanitizer. And that was a moment. We were a total team effort, all hands on deck to figure out how to do this from a production and a formulation and putting it in the barrel and shipping it out and the regulatory issues. The labeling issues were kind of a FDA approved label. Do you have to stick on that? Just all sorts of things we never had to deal with before. So there was that. However, we also continued in full production all the way through the pandemic to the present hour without abatement. I think we missed a few of those early batches because we were making hand sanitizer, but we perceived that as long as we could keep barrels rolling out the back of the distillery and cases of bottles rolling out the back of the warehouse that we would be okay. We did shut down for a time our on-site access, our public access, our tours, partly due to consist with Kentucky's directions from the governor and for, as we called it everyone at the time, flattening the curve. And that all helped. We are now reopened for tours, but in a limited fashion. So we operate the distillery on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Those are our whiskey making days at New Rift. And so those are the days when our producers are in the distillery, our distillers, our production team, and to protect them and to keep us away from anything bad happening, we are closed to the public on those days. That means we are open for limited tours with full personal protective equipment and CDC guidelines. You've got to wear a mask, etc. On Wednesdays and Saturdays and Sundays. You can find information about this on the New Rift website, newriftdistilling.com. There's a page on there for our tours. We are reopened for tours. Our gift shop is open. When we can, given the pandemic issues, we also operate our bar. We have a tasting bar that used to be in the gift shop, and it's now transitioned to a much bigger and very well-distanced and very airy and open situation. We have a rooftop deck, a roof deck at New Rift that for many years ran weddings and other kinds of events and stuff like that. And now we have transitioned that to being a very open, very broadly distanced sort of bar that we run. It's not every night and it's not even every weekend, but a couple of weekends a month we run that. And that has been very well received as well. We also make cocktails to go. You can pick up curbside delivery of cocktails on the go. And that has been quite successful as well. So we are open again to the public as we can be, but observing always every bit we can of protection in this terrible time. in great part to protect our own facility. It's a heck of a thing to have to shut down a distillery. You don't just walk away and turn out the lights because there is beer fermenting in those fermenters that three or four days from now is going to need to be distilled. And so if we have a situation where all of our distillers had to quarantine, We've got beer sitting here that may go to waste, that may be an issue to dispose of even. So we really, really do not want to have to shut down the distillery because of any situation. And to that end, we are very protective of our people and our plants.

Well, we are certainly proud of our Kentucky distillers. Actually, we're proud of distillers nationwide who stepped up and contributed the best of their ability to the situation that we were in. Kudos to you guys for doing that, and particularly for donating your efforts to local law enforcement and first responders. That's just so awesome. I think that people are ready. People are definitely ready to get back out there and start touring distilleries and bellying up to your cocktail bar. It's definitely time for that now. We're all looking forward to the day when things go back to normal. We're not quite there yet, but we can see the light at the end of the tunnel, I think. and pretty exciting for all of us. So why don't you take a minute and let our listeners know where they can find you guys, both on the web and social media. How can people get in touch with you guys?

Sure, you can find us on all the social media channels, hashtag New Rift Distilling. We are quite active on Instagram as well, and a little bit on Twitter. Of course, we have a Facebook page. Like I said, you can find us at NewRiftWhiskeyClub.com and stay tuned to some of our limited releases. We will be having a few special releases coming up this fall. We'll have another release of our Balboa Rye. which is an heirloom rye grain whiskey. It's made with our same 95% rye mashbill, 5% malted rye, except that it is 95% Balboa rye, which is a 1940s vintage heirloom rye grain that we are privileged to have access to from our farmer. That's coming out in another small release here this year. And we've got some other things that I won't mention the exact nature of yet, but they are sliding down the ways. You can find us all there.

So you can find us at the Bourbon Road on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. We also have a website at the bourbonroad.com. Jim, what can they find on there?

So on our website, you can obviously listen to our episodes. It's a great place to go and just click on an episode and listen to it. You can also read our blogs. We do write a blog on each and every episode that we have. Mike actually writes the blog and it's kind of his take on the episode, you know, kind of not a recap of the episode, but a little bit more like just thoughts that come up in his mind as he's thinking about what we talked about. We also have our glassware on there. Mike, you want to tell the people a little bit about our glassware?

So you can find our glassware from Distillery Products on our website. But if you're a bourbon group out there, you're a large business, you're even a distillery that's listening to this podcast right now. And you want to save thousands of dollars on your glassware, pay them a visit. If you're just a listener and you want to buy something like our glasses and have your bar name on there, have your farm name on there, have your business name on there, check out their other website, premium bar products, and you can order glasses from there. You'll still save lots of money with them. Tell them the bourbon road sent you, we'd appreciate it. while you're listening to this, if you really love this episode, scroll right up to the top, hit that subscribe button. It helps us out. We hope you like it. And if you do like it, scroll all the way down to the bottom, hit that review button. Hopefully give us a five star. If you give us a one star, please leave us some kind of comments and tell us what we can do better so we can make our product better for you. We love doing this for our listeners. You can find me at one big chief.

I'm Jay Shannon 63 and we'll see you down the bourbon road. We do appreciate all of our listeners, and we'd like to thank you for taking time out of your day to hang out with us here on the Bourbon Road. We hope you enjoyed today's show, and if so, we would appreciate it if you'd subscribe and rate us a five star with a review on iTunes. Make sure you follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, at The Bourbon Road. That way you'll be kept in the loop in all the Bourbon Road happenings. You can also visit our website at thebourbonroad.com to read our blog, listen to the show, or reach out to us directly. We always welcome comments or suggestions. And if you have an idea for a particular guest or topic, be sure to let us know. And again, thanks for hanging out with us.