125. Leiper's Fork Bottled in Bond Tennessee Whiskey

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 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 Roaded Today Mike, one of our favorite distilleries on the planet.

has sent us a bottle of whiskey. Yeah. They're still a young distillery. Yeah. I think what makes them one of our favorites though is their team and how their distillery looks. You know, when you can drive up to a dog run cabin and a post and beam construction distillery, it makes you feel like you're stepping back in time.

Absolutely. So these guys are just what? 20 minutes outside of Nashville.

Yeah, I'd say 20 minutes.

20 minutes. So if you're in Nashville, Tennessee. Drive south. Drive south. You want to visit a great little distillery, craft distillery, doing it right, doing it the old fashioned way.

Yeah. They, they got a Cypress, um, fermenting tanks.

Yeah. Cause that's, that's how they used to do it. Right. They didn't have stainless back in the day.

No, they got that big old Cypress tanks they've made or had made for them. And they got a, um, big old pot steel with that swans net coming off of there. Um, and we're talking about Leapers Fork distillery down there in Leapers Fork, Tennessee, right near Franklin, Tennessee. You know, you've been down there. I've been down there.

Yeah, absolutely. Awesome place to visit, right? Absolutely. So we went down for the Southern Whiskey Society meeting down there. Our friends at the podcast have an event down there every year. great event. If you get a chance, I highly recommend you go down there. But Leapers Fork is not very far from there. And like Mike said, they've got an old dog run cabin. They've got it set up with a Cypress tank and they're doing it the old way, the old fashioned way, and they're making some Tennessee whiskey.

Now, Lee Kennedy didn't start out that way. He started out with a still in his garage when he was a teenager, but he's graduated just a little bit. And he's got, I'd say to me, one of the most beautiful distilleries there is still to date. And we've been to a lot of distilleries across America. He's got old Forrest Gump, Matt King down at work for him.

That's what I was going to say. If everybody has ever wondered where Forrest Gump ended up after the movie. He's down working at Leapers Fork Distillery in Leapers Fork, Tennessee.

And then Lee hires bourbon royalty to me, April Weller Cantrell. That middle name or her family name there, Weller, that's pretty special in bourbon lore. So she's got some Weller blood running through her veins. She does. And she is definitely a whiskey woman or bourbon woman. But today they were kind enough to send us a bottle of their brand new bottled and bond Tennessee whiskey. How often do you hear that? Bottled and bond Tennessee whiskey. You don't hear it very often. No. So what is Tennessee whiskey, Jim?

Tennessee whiskey. So Lincoln County process. So this is a process by which they make the white dog, right? They make the whiskey just like everybody else does. It's bourbon, right? It's bourbon mash. It's bourbon white dog. They run it through charcoal filtration before they put it in the barrel. Yes, sir. And this is charcoal made from maple, right? I think it's sugar maple. Sugar maple. Um, and so they filter it before it goes in the barrel. That gives it that nice, smooth kind of takes the bite out of it. I guess they put it in the barrel and then they let it age like any other bourbon does.

Yeah. They made a real famous song about that Tennessee whiskey, um, smooth as Tennessee whiskey.

Yeah.

Lately saying by Chris Stapleton, George Jones originally cut it. Everybody's cut that song. But, uh, yeah, I think, uh, To me, one of the nicest group of guys and gals you're going to meet at a distillery. They'll bring you as a family, but you're spot on on that Tennessee whiskey. Now the big boys down there, Jack Daniels and Dickel, they're doing it big time. These are a true craft distillery though. Sure.

So these guys are doing, you know, they're doing pot still and what do they do? What do they make their fermenters out of? Well, Cypress wood. Cypress wood. Cypress, now those are the trees that kind of grow in the swamps, right? Yep. So they can absorb water and they won't leak as much.

They kind of swell up a little bit, I think. When I went down there and talked to Lee, Matt and April, they explained it away and how hard it is to do that process. But I was super impressed by them. I think they have... four or six of those big fermenter tanks up in there. Um, I don't even know if you'd call them tanks. I don't know what you call that thing, but they sent us this bottle right here. It's 70% corn, pretty high corn, right? Yeah. 15% rye and 15% malted barley.

All right. Well, Leapers Fork, definitely friends of the show. We've had them on before. We love young craft distilleries that sort of think out of the box and try doing things their own way, you know?

Yeah. So it is 100 proof. It's made by the same master distiller down there, same season. I think to me, their label is one of the sexiest labels out there. It's just, it's not basic, but it's very recognizable, just nice and white and red or what would you call that? Maroonish.

Yeah, kind of a runish, but they got a nice picture of that big old swan's neck there on the, on the pastel, right?

Yeah. And I would say this is a dark amber color. We're actually down here in my basement, so there's not a whole lot of lighting down here, but still an amber color to this. Yeah. Nice good color to it. Well, let's, let's know this thing.

All right. Let's check it out. So we, if you hear anything in the background, we've, we're having quite the dinner party tonight.

Well, we got it. We got a audience of one tonight, right? Um, we got Rob Carter, everybody heard him on last week. Uh, he's down over here for dinner party with us. Uh, Vivian, my wife, she, she made some shrimp, um, Alfredo for everybody. And we had a Caesar salad and I think we were five bottles of red wine into this night. Um, so we, us gentlemen, we decided like true Southern gentlemen would come down to the basement.

So we were tired. We don't have cigars in hand, but we've got whiskey glasses in the end and a whiskey dog almost on your lap, Jim. Good old Woodrow. Well, Rob's here with us. Rob was part of the New Year's Eve blind bottle challenge. He actually did pretty good that night. He walked away with the prize. Mike and I couldn't take it home.

Yeah.

So, oh, Rob, he took it home that night.

Well, let's get to this whiskey. What do we got on our nose?

Definitely a sweet caramel. I would say a little bit more of a sugary sweet, less of a caramel sweet. Not buttery, but I would say light and fresh.

And when we first poured this on a glass, to be honest, we let it set there and open up a little bit. It did have that medicinal young whiskey, but as it opens up a little bit and it's set in the glass, we swirled around a little bit. It has opened up and I get a lot of that corn sweetness. Um, what does that corn puff cereal is?

Yeah. Uh, yeah, I know what you're talking about it. I tried to bring that up in a show before and I had trouble cook corn puffs. I mean corn puffs.

I think it's got that sweetness to it. Yeah. Coated in sugar. I get that a little bit. I, I get a little bit of when you're walking around a fairground and you pass that, um, cotton candy stand and you can smell that sugar cooking. Yeah.

I would say that this definitely has a lot of that sugar sweetness on the nose.

Well, 70% corn, that's a lot of corn. And this is a Tennessee whiskey, so it's going to be a little bit different than a bourbon, I think, where they put it through that Lincoln County process. I like this nose because I got that sweet tooth. It's like a fat guy's dream to me. Um, I like it.

Yeah. You know, for me, Mike, I'm typically looking for that spice. Where's that? Where's that zip, that zing, that zang. And for me, you know, the zing and zangs not here, uh, but the sweetness is, and I understand exactly why, you know, for you, this is kind of like, uh, got you, got you perked up just a little bit. It's got candy, cotton candy.

So, we got cotton candy, we got caramel on that, that little bit of sweet molasses maybe, that brown sugar that I crave so much, like on a country ham. I'd buy into that.

Yeah.

So, I think to me, as it's opened up, when we first opened the bottle, it did have that medicinal, but after it's opened up a little bit, One of my favorite noses of all time. Cause you know, I'm a weeded guy. So I'm always looking for that wheat in it, those floral notes.

But I'll tell you what after, after nosing it, I'm ready to take a sip. Let's do it. All right. Definitely sweet up front. It's got a little bit of a bite there on the side of the palate though. On the left and the right, it just kind of gets you a little bit. That pop rocks. Yeah.

A little bit of pop rocks, right? A little bit of pop rocks. That sweetness is coming through. Just a little bit of bite to let it say, hey, I'm a whiskey and I'm going to let you know I'm here. Very light. It's still, I can see that it's four years old. It's not any older than that. I'm wondering how this would be in eight years.

Yeah.

It would be a super beautiful, um, bottle. I still. A good sipping whiskey for sure.

Yeah. Now we know how it goes with bottled and bonds, right? They have to be a hundred proof. They have to be a single distilling season. They have to be produced under a single master distillery. They have to be stored in a bonded warehouse, all those things, but they don't have to be only four years old. They can be five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10. We know that, right? 17 with the wild turkey. That's right. Absolutely. Uh, Henry McKenna bottled and bond 10 years, right? So we definitely look forward to this one aging out a little bit, don't we?

And I could see Lee and them down there doing that, letting it go a while, kind of like wilderness trail, you know, Leapers Fork, they're big friends with them. I could see them letting this go for a couple more years and aging as it goes on and having a bottle bond. Now you can only get this in the distillery or you can get it, I think, shipped now. They're doing that. But these are good friends of ours. They sent us this. We're kind enough to say, hey, a lot of people go to Nashville for business. If you're going to Nashville for business, trust me, you want to drive down there, go to the distillery. And then they got this little special place you can go eat down there called Puckets. You need to go to the Puckets in Leapers Fork or you can go with the one over in Franklin, Tennessee. Listen to some country music down there, some good home cooking and drink some of their whiskey there. Absolutely.

Yeah. So I mean, I'm, I haven't been to Liebers Fort before you've been there. You, uh, you've, you're kind of part of the family down there, aren't you, Mike?

Well, I feel like that. They've actually been up here. They drove all the way up here to Kentucky to see me and they, they, uh, when Vivian had COVID, they came, they came up here after that, but, uh, they actually sent me a care package because they were worried that I didn't have enough bourbon or whiskey to drink.

Cause that's a problem for you, right? Yeah.

I'd be in big trouble if I ran out of whiskey. Um, but they'd sent me some other bottled and bonded rye, which we've had, which is probably one of my top ryes of all time. I'm not a rye guy, but, um, everybody else that drank that bottle said, man, this is some spectacular wire whiskey. Um, this right here, I would say, It's got a medium finish. It's not a long finish for me. It's not setting on a pallet. I still got some sweetness on the tongue, but not a whole lot. Not any Kentucky hug at all.

Yeah. Kind of not much on the hug there. I agree with you on that. The finish is medium to short, but I can see the future in this whiskey. I can taste the future in this whiskey. I think that this stuff is going to round out and fill out and become full bodied. And a lot, there's a lot going on here.

Now, another thing special about this bottle that I could see her magic in it, her witchy woman ways. Who's the witchy woman? Ashley Barnes, our good friend. She is a master blender. She's worked over at Four Roses. She worked at Buffalo Trades for a while. Now she has a spirits group with Monica Wolfe. they're doing great things, but they go in and help distilleries out and not fix their problems, but maybe make their whiskey a little bit better by, by, by choosing and blending barrels that are meant to be together. Yes, sir. She's a, she's got a unique, uh, way about doing that. And when they came up here, that's kind of what they were doing. They all met here at our, at Jeff, the bin farm, a bunch of SUVs roll up. It was like, it was like the president was coming and they flip open that back trunk and they're just whiskey everywhere. Um, and it was good thing to see that. I love seeing, um, people working together and just such great attitudes. Every time we've asked Ashley, uh, for some help for us, she's always helped us out. Um, been a great friend of the podcast. Um, but she told me about this before Leapers Fort told me about it. And then Matt was like, I gotta get you guys a bottle of this to taste and, and give us a true review on, um, I can't wait to see where it goes. I still sip on this bottle.

So if you're, if you're in Tennessee, if you're in Nashville, if you're in Franklin, definitely head out to Leapers fork, visit the distillery, take a tour. I think they're doing tours right now, aren't they Mike?

They are. Um, I think a good thing on this is if you don't like that Kentucky hug, that burn going down your throat, but you like that spice on your tongue, which I like this. Sometimes I get that little bit of ask reflux and you know what I'm talking about. We're all at that age. We're probably sick is our best friend, right?

Yes, sir. So.

I say this is a good whiskey for that. If you don't like that part of the whiskey, this ain't going to give you that hug. You could probably drink this all day long at a hundred proof. Heck, this is a good fire whiskey. Yeah.

I mean, so this is not a huge caramel cherry bomb whiskey. It's not a bacon spice whiskey. This is more of a, a corn forward, a little bit of a medicinal note to it. It's got an interesting spicy note mid-palate to it. It doesn't have a long finish, but it's smooth. It's definitely smooth. And I think that it plays well with, it'd probably be good on a little bit of rocks. What do you think?

Yeah, I could see that opening up and stuff. I don't know. You know, I'm not a big rocks guy, but I could see pulling over in my opening up a little bit. Um, you know, I was always saying, I'd like to see this at cast strength and see what it tastes like. You know, I always, I always want to taste that cast strength.

Hey, Lee hook us up. Well, heck, I gotta say Matt King hook us up.

Did he hook us up? He has hooked us up, man. I, I, You know, I can't say enough about everybody that's out there. That's always been friends in the podcast, but these guys and gals down there, they truly love us. We truly love them. I think there's nothing but good things coming out of there. I think more people need to know about them. You know, I'm always, Hey Jim, Hey Jim, let's talk about some leapers fork. Um, Still, this is what you think about a traditional whiskey bottle, a nice, beautiful label. And I was actually talking to somebody about how you pour a whiskey out of a bottle. Now, and a lot of people don't know this, but when you look at the neck of a weller bottle, have you ever looked at the neck of that thing? It's almost got like a bulb. And we were talking about the short squatty bottles that have a short neck on them and it always pours and run over your label. This one still has that little bitty bulb in it. It does. Yeah. Where it's going to pour good. Yeah. You're not going to spill any, which you don't want to spill your whiskey. Definitely do not want to spill your whiskey. Because then you start having to sing that song, smooth as Tennessee whiskey. I can't sing with a leg heck. What do I know?

All right, Mike. Well, thank you again to our friends at Leapers Fork. We appreciate the bottle. We definitely love drinking your whiskey, fellas. You guys are hitting on all cylinders down there. And every time that you release a new expression, We would love to be first on your list. No doubt about it. Mike, where can people find us on the internet?

So you can find us on YouTube. Not a whole lot of videos on there, but we're about to cut one tonight. Yeah, we are. So you want to look for that video. It's going to be our wise upstairs with Rob Carter's wife, I think, baking a bourbon cake. With bourbon icing, I think on it.

Yeah.

I like bourbon cake. I like any kind of cake, but bourbon cake, especially. Well, I'm trying to stay away from bourbon cake this year. I'm going to try to show people a leaner, meaner big chief in 2021.

Smaller big chief.

I'll still be the big chief. I can't get too small. So you can also find us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. Our Facebook, we have a bourbon group on there.

We do. It's a private bourbon group called the bourbon roadies. And we are a bunch of like-minded people. We're 1300 strong right now and climbing. We won't be long till we'll be at 1400. We absolutely love bourbon. We like to take pictures of it. We like to talk about it. We like to share it. We don't sell it. And we don't give each other any hassle over which, which bourbons we like to drink, do we?

Nah. So three things you gotta do to enter that group. You gotta be 21. You gotta like bourbon, right? Or at least whiskey. Rye is okay. Rye. I'm a rye guy. Scotch, Irish. Yeah. Japanese. I don't care.

We do focus on the bourbon. We just like to take side roads every now and then, right? Yeah.

Sometimes you got to take that little side road to get a new experience. But the third thing is you got to agree to play nice. We don't bash anybody. We really just don't tolerate any. Yeah. I mean, you don't want to be rude to your fellow whiskey drinker. We also like to share our whiskey with each other. We call that an angel delivery. So if you're listening to this and you want to post on there, just say, Hey, I got an angel delivery today, or I'm about to make an angel delivery.

And if you're really wanting somebody to send you something, you call it a prayer. Prayer from angels. You gotta, you definitely want some. Oh, I just praise somebody. You'll see me a little bit.

Or you can be like Rob, just come over here and get some of big cheese whiskey. Um, that's a good way to do it. Right. Absolutely.

Yeah, so we do two shows a week. We do a short show like this one every Monday. And it's usually about 15 minutes in length. And then every Wednesday, we do a full length episode. Usually we have a guest on, but not always. Sometimes it's just Mike and I kind of chit chatting and talking about what's going on in our world. But we'd love to have you tune in twice a week and listen to our shows. We would absolutely love if you joined the Bourbon Roadies and became part of our family. We have a website, Mike, right?

Yeah. So we have our swag on there. If you want to dress in our clothing right now, we have that bourbon bullshitter t-shirt that's it's out there. It's running. We're also about to add a second t-shirt, which is be our bourbon road. A shirt just pure black with some white on the front of it. Classic on the back of the neck. It'll have the bourbon road symbol too. And then we're going to add a third t-shirt. We are adding another t-shirt. It's going to say bourbon makes it better.

Yeah.

It makes it better. It can be anything. Whatever bourbon makes it better for you. But we want to see you wearing those t-shirts. On the back of those t-shirts, you'll see our symbol, the bourbon road. We want to see photos of those shirts out there in the public. I want to walk around and see somebody wearing one of our t-shirts. We have our Glen Carons on there. They say the bourbon road on there. It's the classic whiskey glass. That is the only thing me and Jim drink out of these days is just the Glen Caron. Jim, I was actually watching a movie last night. And I, it was in Scotland and they were drinking off of these glasses.

Absolutely.

I was thinking, man, it'd been nicer to see the bourbon road on one of those.

So, uh, yeah, that's what we got going on.

Um, we got some great episodes up coming up this week, coming up on Wednesday. You'll hear a long format show. It'll be me and Jim's. retrospective retrospective of 2020 and we're going to be drinking an amazing whiskey on that show. A big boy whiskey, Jim, you're going to love it.

Yeah. You dropped a few bills on that one day.

I did. Nobody gave that to us. We, we did that ourselves.

Although I think. I think if you had asked, you'd probably got one.

I don't know about that. You guys are buddies. I don't know about that. So look for that episode. We actually have some special guests coming on here in the next couple of weeks. We're going to have Discovery channels and moonshiners on. Some of the folks from there will be on the show and then we're going to have the lucky sevens going to come on from Chicago land and they'll be on the show too.

So look for those episodes. You can find me at OneBigChief. I'm JayShannon63 and we will 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 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 on 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.