182. Westward Whiskey Distillery - Portland Oregon

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.

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Hey this is Big Chief from the Bourbon Road and I'm coming to you from Oregon, Portland Oregon that is, and we got a pretty special guest on. We are at Westward Whiskey Distillery here in downtown Portland and I got Christian Krogstad on with me. He is the, I would call him the Wicked Wizard of Whiskey of the West, I guess. And folks, you know, sometimes we say we're going to take that different road. Today, we're going to take a little bit different road, not the Bourbon Road. We're going to take a single malt road today. An American single malt, right, Christian? Yep, that's what we do. Well, welcome to the Bourbon Road. Thank you. We appreciate you for having us in here. I actually got my little brother, Mitch, on here. He's actually been a guest on the podcast before, so he's no stranger to this. He's drank a little bit of whiskey in his life. But thanks for having us in. You took us on a tour. You showed us your beautiful facility downtown here. Really close for the public to come in. It's almost like an urban bourbon trail down here, but an urban whiskey trail down here in Portland.

Yeah, we wanted to be accessible to the public. We wanted to be walking distance to downtown. Obviously, we don't store our barrels here. You know, urban environment isn't the best for barrel storage. We keep our rick house out in the country, but this is a great place to set up a distillery to, you know, show people what we're doing and invite them into our house. Well, we usually like to get straight to the whiskey. So, what's the first thing you got for us? You know, before we get to the whiskey, I thought we'd start with the new make. So, this actually is whiskey because we put it into a barrel for an hour just so that it fits the TTB definition of whiskey. Sure. Um, but it's essentially our new make whiskey. So, uh, white dog, whatever you want to call it. Um, this is off the still, um, we're collecting at about, uh, the aggregate is about 142 proof, but we cut it to 90 proof for tastings. Uh, we don't sell it. We just bottle it for, for tasting events.

Man, Jim is going to be upset that he missed this because this is something he really loves. He always says it tastes like buttered popcorn.

You know, and so, every white dog is a little different. The reason we kind of like to show this off is that it really shows the fruit, the great you know, fermentation characteristics from the ale yeast that we use. It shows the great cereal notes from the malted barley, but it's really clean. It's really actually a very pleasant drinkable. I sort of, I jokingly refer to it as barley O2V.

Now, you were talking about grape nut cereal earlier and that's what I kind of get on the nose on this, is if you ever had some warm grape nut cereal with like that little heavy cream in there in the winter time. That's what I get on this right here. I get the fruits, maybe a little bit of dark grape on that.

Yeah. And it'll remind you too of like a Mezcal.

Yeah, a little bit. Or a good silver tequila. Get a little bit of, maybe it's a heavy cream I was talking about, buttery. Well, let's taste, I say cheers.

Oh yeah, cheers. I'm already tasting it.

Very smooth, a little bit of pepper on my tongue there. Not too much, almost like a little sweet spice, like a little bit of any sweet jalapeno jelly.

Yeah, I can see that. I hadn't noticed. I hadn't identified it as that before, but I also get a really neat floral kind of like a jasmine.

I could get that jasmine on. This is very beautiful. Jim, you're missing out, buddy. I wish you were here with me doing this.

Anyway, it's a fun one. Like I said, it's just we put it in the lineup here at the tasting room just to, you know, so you can see the progression from, you know, see what the barrel does, see what age and esterification do.

So, let's get into how did you come up with the idea to found a distillery in Portland, Oregon?

Well, I'm from the Northwest. I'm originally from Seattle and grew up home brewing in the 80s. sort of front row seat for that whole craft brewing renaissance that happened in largely in Seattle, Portland and Denver in the 1980s. And then in 91, I decided to become a brewer and I moved to Portland and knocked on doors because in Portland in 1991, there were more breweries here than anywhere. There were like 14 breweries now. I think there are 80 breweries now in Portland. a city of less than a million people. But it had the highest concentration of breweries so I moved here, got an apprenticeship more or less right away, worked in brewing for the next 13 years, went to brewing school in Chicago during that time. And then in my last brewing job, I managed a brewery outside of Portland called the McMinneman's Edgefield Brewery. I was the brewery manager and my buddy was the distillery manager. They had just brought in a little Holstein still, a little I think it was like a 60 gallon pot but That's how I got involved in making whiskey. I was making the washes down at the brewery and we'd truck them up the hill to the distillery and my buddy would work all week to fill one barrel, this 60 gallon pot. And so, I got to really see the process. I had always loved whiskey from the first time I tasted whiskey when I was a kid. grew up in one of those permissive households where I always got a little wine or beer with dinner and my father would always give me a little tiny thimble full of whatever bourbon or malt whiskey that he was drinking. So, I was exposed from a young age, always loved it and then when I got a chance to see actually how whiskey was made and I realized for malt whiskey, I was already doing the majority of it and making the beer and I saw the rest, helped out with the rest and decided, what the heck, I can do this. And so I left McMenamins and started a little distillery.

So we actually ate at an amendments at Forest Grove.

Oh yeah. Yeah. The Grand Lodge there. Yeah. It's a former Mason's. I think Mason is old folks. Yeah.

It was pretty neat.

Haunted.

Haunted. Yeah. By the Lavender Queen maybe or something like that. Sure. I'm sure there. Yeah. I'm sure there's a good story. Yeah. It was just, it was neat to eat there, hear about that story. So the ties you have to that, it kind of sinks home. We had a pretty good place.

Yeah. They're a great company. They started up, they were maybe the second craft brewery in Oregon in like 1984. And, and Now they have a chain of pubs and breweries and they do some really great work in like historical preservation. They took an old poor farm, that's what the Edgefield was and you know, back before the 1920s, you know, indigent people could go to a farm and you'd be taken care of, but you work and learn a trade and whatnot. But that was closed down. Jerelict was going to get, you know, bulldozed and they bought it and put up a hotel and Winery, brewery, distillery. It's a really cool, cool place.

So why, before we taste our next one, why single malt instead of bourbon or rye?

Yeah, you know, it's almost... It never even occurred to me to make bourbon. We are, we don't grow a lot of corn around here. This is where the Pacific Northwest is where we grow essentially all of the malting barley of the two row malting barley in the country is grown, Washington, Oregon, Western Montana, Idaho and it's also a craft brewing hub. And so, you know, I You know, got into this my whole career was making beer from malted barley, loudering, you know, fermenting off the grain and so, this is all the initial process for making malt whiskey. And also, we didn't have a whiskey tradition in the Northwest. Sure. We had a whiskey drinking tradition, but not a whiskey making tradition. And so there wasn't this sort of incumbency of bourbon here. everything just pointed to malt whiskey. And of course, why did they grow? Why did they make bourbon in Kentucky and Tennessee? It's because they didn't have malts. Those people were coming from Europe. Distillers coming from Europe had been making malt whiskey and they came to the colonies and started making rye whiskey because rye grew better than malt and then they moved across the Appalachian Mountains and they started making bourbon whiskey because corn grew there and You know, so that made sense to make rye whiskey in, you know, Pennsylvania, New York. It made sense to make bourbon in Kentucky, Tennessee and make sense to make malt whiskey in the Pacific Northwest.

Well, it definitely makes sense to me. You know, we spent a week on the coast fishing and when I think of the sea, I kind of do think of malted whiskey, you know, because Scotland and Ireland are both

pretty much sea and ancient- Maritime climate, yeah.

Yeah, so it makes sense here too. Even though you're in Portland, you're about two hours away from the coast. Yeah, about that. But still, driving to the coast, you could see barley, you could see wheat fields for miles and miles and miles, especially here in the valley. Yeah. We saw some hops and then One thing I didn't know was from here was hazelnuts.

Hazelnut trees are everywhere. Yep. This is the top hazelnut growing region in the world.

I didn't even know some of those hazelnuts go to make Nutella chocolate. And I was like, wow, this is neat back here. Straight up neat. Well, let's taste your, what's the first whiskey you got for us?

So the first is our flagship, the original westward American single malt. And we conform to the American Single Malt Whiskey Commission standard of identity. So, it's 100% malted barley. and, you know, distilled to less than 160 proof, aged in, you know, oak containers. We use full-size, you know, 53 gallon new light to medium char, two-char barrels. But it's almost like a I would say it's almost like a hybrid between Scotch and bourbon because we're making a beer like a craft brewery and then we're distilling it, double pot distilling it like they would in Scotland and then we're aging it in new chard oak barrels like a bourbon. So, we sort of take almost like the best of each tradition. And what you're going to really get in here, you're going to get a lot of fruit on the nose. The fruit is from fermentation mostly, you know, we're using an ale yeast rather than the normal distillers yeast that diastaticus that most people use which is more the distillers yeast is more efficient but we just like the flavors, the fruit essences of the ale yeast and what we get from that. So, you get a lot of fruit on the nose. It's very clean. Then on the palate, it's very robust, big like just I would say explosion of flavor. Very mouth coating, creamy almost. You'll kind of see that from what you saw from the white dog which was very creamy, very textural. So, that's really the main kind of what I really like to highlight about our flagship, the westward American single malt is it's got this texture for days.

Yeah, so cheers. Give it a try and see what you think. That's really nice. Definitely different than what I expect out of a single malt because most people would think I'm going to get that smoky scotch or you don't get that with this at all. There's no smokiness to it. There's that almost a very like candy caramel. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. It's, you know, it's, it's an interesting thing. You know, there's, so there's some, Yeah, let's talk about the sort of that breakdown of you know, sort of brood like a craft pale ale distilled like a Scottish single malt age like a bourbon and what that does for you and I'll you end up getting these flavors that are recognizable to everyone. So, a Scotch drinker would taste this and go, well, it doesn't have that peat smoke in it but it's got that nice cereal that I like and a bourbon drinker would taste it and go, well, it doesn't have that sweet corn thing but it's got the barrel like it's got a recognizable flavor from the barrel. And that was something a lesson I learned back early on in the 80s. Sierra Nevada brewery down in Chico is sort of one of my benchmark breweries and what they really brought to the market was this realization that at the beginning of the craft brewing movement, everyone was trying to replicate or copy European beer styles. But it turns out Americans have a different palette than European consumers. So, Americans didn't want warm, relatively flat pale ales, they wanted cold carbonated. And so, they called it American pale ale because it wasn't British pale ale, they really wanted to differentiate it. And so, likewise, you know, creating a single malt whiskey for the American palette. Well, the American palette has been drinking bourbon for all these years. It's accustomed to that bigger sweeter vanilla caramel quality from the barrel. And so, all we did was sort of marry that with this really aromatic nutty textural spirit from the grain. You know, Bob's your uncle.

You got a little bit of that. I've been saying a little bit of peanut brittle on that. I've been saying that lately. I don't know why or kettle corn from this, you know, it doesn't have any corn in it.

It's got definitely got that caramel.

Yeah, that caramel in the floral notes. And this is just straight up amazing. I love it. Let's get a man in trouble, I think.

Yeah, I mean, it's got a really nice finish, really long sort of peppery tingly finish and it's the sort of thing. This is what I always strive for when I was making beer, when I cook a meal, whatever. I want you to when you finish a glass of my beer or our whiskey to immediately want another.

I think that's the goal. Well, that's what a long finish is, right? To me is it sits on your palate and just it's calling for you to say, hey, go ahead and pour yourself another glass because I'm that good. And I don't give this out that much. I don't usually say that this much. But what I would say is this would be perfect beside a fire. Even like last night when we sat down and we we sitting by a campfire, this would be perfect for that.

Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, it's It's not a, you know, I definitely don't ever want one of my whiskeys or beers or whatever to be referred to as an acquired taste.

It's definitely not acquired taste. I think this could be an introduction to people to any kind of American whiskey. It can open that door where you might be a wine drinker, a sweet wine drinker or something, and you want to have that sweet wine. This could definitely open that door. Now, it's a little bit more proof. What's the proof on this? It's 90. That's a perfect for a wine drinker.

Yeah. It's a proof that it's drinkable, it's mixable, it's a whiskey that you can sit down and really analyze and dissect or you can just drink it and not think about it. It doesn't It doesn't require reverence.

It's good for a person that's not, I think, a whiskey drinker. Absolutely. Where they typically don't like those harsh tones. It doesn't have a very big hug on it at all. And I think that's because you guys are tip your own sweet mash. So that doesn't give you such that burn, right? Yeah.

Yeah, and like I said, you don't have to write a dissertation on it, you can enjoy it or you can spend a bunch of time. But that doesn't mean it's light or simple, it's very complex, it's very robust Very rich, but at the same time, very drinkable.

Well, I'd say congratulations on coming up with this yourself. You definitely put something out. I don't say that lightly. When I say it's not an entry level whiskey, it's more of a, hey, I'm going to bring you into the whiskey world and I want to blow your socks off kind of whiskey. That's how good I think this is.

Yeah, and I really hope it brings people into new categories. I love introducing people to new flavors especially people who you know, maybe you know, their first and only exposure to single malt has maybe been a you know, a Lofroy or a Ardbeg or something like that. It is a little bit more of an acquired taste because of the levels of peat and then they're just like, oh no, scotch isn't for me. Whereas, I think that this is, you know, we're trying to make approachable but very flavorful whiskeys.

So, for our last whisky on this half, you actually have something else for us. We've got a couple more things, but... We're going to drink those on the subject. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But the next one. This is our Stout Cask finish and this is really an homage to our brewing heritage and our brewing region. So, this is such a great region for beer. We have, like I said, about 80 breweries in Portland. We have 400 I think in Oregon and everyone in the production staff comes out of brewing for the most part, wine or beer. And so, this came about You know, as so many of these things do, almost by accident, about six, seven, more than that, eight years ago, a brewery here in town called Migration Brewing called up our lead distiller named Miles Monroe. He used to work there. They called him to see if we had any used whiskey barrels for aging their imperial stout. So, we thought, yeah, we just dumped a barrel and bottled it up. Let's give them this barrel. They put their imperial stout in it. We thought that was the end of the story but about a year later, they bottled up their stout and then they called us up and said, what should we do with this barrel? Do you want it back? Should we just get rid of it? We thought, oh, what the hell? Let's try doing a stout cask finish. So, we got the barrel back, put some still aging, I think at that point it was maybe about a three-year whiskey in it, finished it for another year and a half roughly and we just love the results. And so, we don't steam our barrels, so they're really wet with whiskey. There's a couple gallons of whiskey in the staves when the brewery gets them. So, they get a big impact from the whiskey and then when we get them back, we don't maybe just give them a little rinse out. But it's amazing, it's sort of the magic of distilling is there's a lot of science that goes into this, like we understand a lot of fermentation and aging and so forth. But then there's things that we just don't, you know, that nobody knows. And so what happened in that year that the stout was working on the wood, it really changed the nature of the wood. And so where the first the flagship the westward American single malt is very robust, sweet, rich. You put that very same whiskey in a used stout cask for a year or a year and a half, it dries it out, it gives it much more structure, it's almost like a little more elegant and you get a little bit of that, a little bit of the sort of coffee chocolate on the nose, a little bit on the finish but on the palate, it's just much more sort of pecan, toffee. Cheers.

I can get that toffee taste on this. This is a little bit different. I do get a little bit of smokiness on that. I'm not sure if that's from the beer itself. Yeah, maybe a little smoky, a little burnt. Just a little, just a tad bit of spice on this, a little bit more spice to it. I think that spice is sticking with me over the mid palate. I'm about to steal none of that big hug, right? Yeah. And that's from that sweet mash, I think. Yeah.

And this one's 92 proof. Okay. So, we go just a little bit higher on that.

Just like- This would even be better by the campfire because it's got that little bit of smokiness with it. The sweetness would be that toasted marshmallow. Maybe on a graham cracker. That's without the chocolate, not too much chocolate on this, but very complex layered whiskey. Man, you're just blowing me out of the park here. Thank you. Our bourbon drinkers are going to have to definitely grab some of these bottles.

Yeah, it's nice. I mean, I've always found that, you know, whiskey drinkers drink whiskey and they might have a preference for bourbon or for malt or for Canadian or Japanese or whatever but I think they definitely cross categories.

Well, listeners, you hang with us. Like I said, we're here at Westward Whiskey Distillery in Portland, Oregon, Christian. And when we come back, he still has, I'm looking on the table here, four more pours for us. And one of those pours, You guys are going to know that I'm just going to geek out about it. I'm pretty sure it's got a little bit of weed in it. So the Weedy King of Kentucky, they pulled out a special bottle for me. So hang with us. We'll be right back.

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All right, listeners, I'm back here at Westport Whiskey Distillery in Portland, Oregon. I got Christian with me, their founder, the distiller, like I said, the wicked wizard of the West for whiskey. He has poured up some amazing pours so far and hopefully the second half won't disappoint. We are down a different road today. We're taking a trip down a single malt road, American single malt at that. A little bit different than what you would expect coming out of Europe. This is definitely. a way different lane. And if you don't, if you get a chance to come out here to Portland, recommend you stop by here, taste the whiskey, see it in the store, pick it up. Definitely. So Christian, what do you got to start out the second half with?

Well, we're going to try another finished whiskey. I get asked a lot, for instance, why don't we use sherry barrels or pork casks? It's because we're not in Europe and the Scots are already doing that. We're going to let them have that. We got to leave them something. But what we do have in the Northwest, we have this fantastic brewing industry. That's where that stout cask finished westward came from. Also, I think you drove through it on your way out to the coast. We have a fantastic wine industry. We grow Pinot Noir in the Willamette Valley, some of the best in the world. It's really up there with the Burgundy region. So instead of shipping barrels halfway across the world for finishing, we've partnered up with some of our friends in the Oregon Pinot industry and we're getting casks from them for finishing. So again, this is the westward original whiskey that is then finished in a French oak wine barrel, Pinot barrel and typically, these barrels are used for about six years for making wine. Each vintage will get two years in the barrel. they'll typically use a barrel three times before they're done with it and then we get the barrel from them. We rinse it out to get the husk material out there, the little pods and ends. But again, the wine has really had a big impact on the oak. It's a different type of oak. It's the French oak rather than the American white oak. So, we have a combination of tannins here. You'll see that there's nice soft tannins from the pinot casks along with the American white oak tannins. So, it's not a drawing character, but it's a very active on your palate. It's very lively on the palate.

I get a lot of honey in this nose. Yeah.

Yeah. So, the nose is really great. You get some honey. I always get some like dried fruit, like dried citron orange peel, candied orange peel.

I mean, it smells amazing. Hey, I say cheers. Yeah, cheers.

You gotta try it. Once again, you're batting a thousand right now.

Well, thank you.

Yeah, you get, you know, it's really interesting the, you know, the The grapes have been in there, so of course you're gonna get some sort of raisin dried fruit quality, you get some sort of prune, plum, you get a lot of fruit, really neat fruit qualities to it and it kind of finishes a little sweet which I like.

I got a sweet tooth, I gotta admit. You've got a pot still out there. It's got a swan's neck on it.

Yep.

Take it out of that. Then you put them in your original steel. Yeah. How many barrels are you guys doing a day?

We're filling five, five and a half barrels a day.

And you're working five days a week. Yeah. So you're somewhere in that 25.

27, 28 barrels a week. Yeah.

And how long does your standard whiskey age?

About four and a half to five and a half years.

And then how long would you put it and finish it in this? Generally a year to a year and a half. And what about in the beer barrels?

How long? So a year and a half in the Pinot, usually about a year in the stout casks.

Yeah. You'd already said you used 53 gallon barrels, but how far away is your warehouse or your Rick house from here?

It's about 12 miles.

And how many barrels do you guys have in there?

About 5,000.

Are you at capacity right now?

No, no. We've got room in there for close to 10,000 barrels. 10,000 barrels. But you're still a craft distillery, right?

Yeah. I mean... You still live in an American dream, American success story to me it looks like.

Yeah. No, it's funny the question about the... I had this discussion with Jerry Ruho, who is the former chairman of Campari, who is the mastermind of Campari's purchase of the Austin Nichols distillery. He really insists and I agree with him that they're a craft distillery too. They're out there, they're managing their forests and they pay attention to what they're doing.

But yeah, so we are a craft distillery. I wouldn't call you a mom and pop. Definitely not that. But you're still... The green comes in the back door. You've got your staff back there. Your liquid doesn't go out the second back door to go be bottled somewhere else. You've got your folks down back there, bottling themselves that are actually taking and labeling themselves.

Yeah. You're doing it all in house, right? Yeah, exactly. And you can see the whole sweep of the place in a couple of minutes walking around.

Very modern building. I would kind of expected something like this out of Portland really. Very modern, high ceilings. And that's that sound when you get in here with very high ceiling rooms and stuff. But still a working story. You know, you were walking through the story and I could see you're very proud of this place. And I'm sure you must be.

Oh, yeah.

Right? Because you told me what you started with. Yeah. And probably a scary time in your life to invest everything you have.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. And mortgage, you know, second mortgage on the house and eventually credit card debt, you know. That's what you got to do to. You're a married man, right? I am. I am, still.

Married for a long time? We've been together for a little over 30 years. 30. Well, congratulations. Thank you. Not a lot of people in America could say that.

Well, we're a great team.

Now, what was the thought process when you started this?

You mean with my wife? Yeah. Well, this is why it worked and why we were able to do this was she was working the sort of soulless corporate job that provided a regular income and regular salary and medical benefits and I was out there rolling the dice with the family's future trying to build something You know, long-term. Now, does she ever come in here and- Oh yeah, all the time.

Drink the whiskey and stuff? Yeah.

Her business cards say mother of it all.

Mother of, I love it. The mother of it all. So she's been on board like a good marriage would be on board with your dreams and your passion for this whiskey. Oh yeah. And she's passionate about it as well. Yeah. that to me, that's just, you are the American dream. You're the American dream and stuff. Well, hey, a great Finnish bourbon right there. Maybe even more so for those red wine drinkers out there that.

Yeah, it's a neat one. And we're working with some of the icons of the Oregon Pinot Noir industry. We're working with like Josh Bergstrom, with Greg McClellan, some of the great Oregon Pinot producers and it's fun. They get a kick out of seeing what happens with their barrels when they're done with them.

Very dark whiskey. We were walking around, I noticed that your bottle had changed. We were talking about the glass shortage. So you guys changed bottles in the midst of all that. Yeah. It was probably painstaking, right?

It was. We got our first load of glass before things all went haywire and then ever since then, it's just been waiting, sitting on pins and needles waiting for the next load of corks or glass or whatever. The supply chain has been messed up.

I complimented you guys on your app. They were back there labeling bottles and I picked a bottle up and I really do love your bottle. It's a great shape. It's your very own shape.

I haven't seen another bottle author that has this. Yeah, that's a custom mold.

And then your label is very simplified. There's not a lot on there but everything you need to know about the whiskey is on there. There's no secrets. To me, that's very nice. This one even gives how many bottles it was printed on there.

Yeah. If you want more detail, you can always go to our website and there's tons more information. But most people Most people don't want all the details but for the people who do, they can check. We try to be as transparent as possible. We don't have a lot of secrets. We'll tell you what yeast strains we're using. We'll tell you what our grain bill is. We'll tell you where we bought our grain, what yeast strain we're using. We'll tell you what barrels we're using, how long we're aging. and you name it, there's not a lot we won't disclose.

I saw some independent stave barrels back there. There's some Kelvin Coopridge. Yeah. And then your steel comes from Vindome, right down the street from my office. So that's home right there in Kentucky. So, you know, kind of, this is almost a marriage between Bourbon and Scotch.

Yeah. Yeah. This is American single malt.

I mean, I don't know how else to put it. Super, super beautiful from other single months I've had in America that are trying to replicate some of that scotch. You're not trying to replicate it. You're trying to make your own path.

Yeah. I love scotch. I, you know, I drink a lot of scotch, I buy a lot of Scottish malt whiskies, but I just figure, you know, if you want a bottle of Talisker, go buy a bottle of Talisker. It's a fool's errand to try to rip them off. That we have an opportunity, not just an opportunity, but really a mandate to try to do something innovative and new, bring something new to the conversation. If we're just a me too, you know, trying to be Scotch in America, that's just not very interesting. So what's the next whiskey? Next one is a cask strength. So we like to show it off at cask strength as well. So, this will be 125 proof. We have a pretty unique, fantastic climate for raising a world-class whiskey. In the summer, if you've noticed it, it gets warm but it's quite dry. low humidity. So, we lose a little bit of water in the summer and then in the winter, it's very moist but it usually doesn't get below zero or below freezing, zero Celsius. And so, over the course of say five years aging, We have a slight increase in proof. Usually, our barrel proof is about 124, we'll get up to 127, 128 over the course of five years and our angel share over that period is only about 12%. And that's here in the valley. Yeah.

Because it was extremely hot here last week.

Yeah, that's rare. That's really rare. So yes, it did get. And maybe with global climate change, we're going to have a larger angel share and a greater uptake as things get hotter. But we'll see. But again, I like to show this one off as well, just like with showing off the white dog, because you really see how drinkable it is at 125 proof. It doesn't drink like 125. Well, it's a good thing we're taking an Uber. I'll say cheers. Let's taste this thing. Cheers. That's definitely 125 proof. Yeah, you can definitely, you can taste it, but it's also really, you can still drink it.

Buttery, it's got a little bit of spice to it. Just a tad bit of Kentucky hug, but I think that's more of the proof. Maybe a little bit of barrel spice to this. Um, it doesn't bite me though. It's very complex, man. And I love barrel strength whiskeys because you get to true taste what the master of sorrows really going for. You know, um, I always try to say that I like that. What's the way I like whiskey is the way that the distiller meant for it to be. Right. Um, That's just me. I like to drink it neat out of a glass and I like to kind of think, oh man, what was he or she thinking when they decided to make it this way?

Yeah. Yeah. And it's interesting to see, like most people don't ever taste a barrel of strength whiskey. And so, for most people, their experience with Westward is going to be at 90 proof or maybe in a cocktail at a lower proof.

Once again, you're still batting the fouls. You haven't disappointed me yet. Wow. That's good. I could probably find something. No, I even tasted your gin out there and I was like, man, that's actually a lot of aromatics and stuff in it. But this is a super beautiful whiskey. You should be very proud of everything I've drank here so far. Just stunning to me. I can't say enough good things about it. And I'm not saying that because you got us in here. I truly mean that when I'm talking about whiskey and stuff. I did my homework on you. I looked you up. Enough people said so many nice things about you. I was like, I really got to meet this guy and meet what's going on here. And I'm probably going to geek out a little bit here in a minute, folks, because there's a bottle on here and it has the word weed on it. So man, I'm excited. But the barrel strength, if you can come in here, is this the only place that our listeners could get this is in your shop?

No.

So the first three that we tasted are more or less widely distributed. The cask strength, you can get through our website and that's distributed in different states by different, you know, how that works. It's going to be either, you know, maybe Flavia or Caskers or somebody like that fulfilling that.

So you are in a lot of states, maybe like Casper.

Yeah, we directly distribute in just a handful of states, but then, yeah, I think in April, of last year, you know, our sales fell off a cliff as most people's did. We were pre-pandemic, we were highly focused on premise because we, you know, we're sort of old school that way. That's, you know, how brands are built, right? They're built in a bar or in a restaurant where you've got sampling taking place and a bartender, some sort of gatekeeper making recommendations. And so, we had really made a lot of effort to make inroads into that world. But that went away in March of last year. And so we had to pivot really quickly and figure out what we were going to do. And we just embraced e-commerce and made a functioning website and made sure that it was available more broadly available and we're really pleasantly surprised how people have responded to that, so.

I'm not stoked, I'm stoked to see what, so what's this last expression you got for us? We got two actually. Two more, oh man.

Yeah, so there's this another finish which is the Tempranillo. So again, an Oregon Tempranillo, a buddy of mine called me up one day and he said, hey, you know, I've got a I've got a Punchin which is a 500-liter barrel. So large barrel, it's what a 120-gallon something like that that he had used for fermenting and finishing his Tempranillo which Tempranillo is a grape from central Spain. It has some great dark fruit qualities. It's a red grape tempranillo. That's what goes into making like Riojas. But he had a large barrel that had a worked head on it so he couldn't use it anymore. He said, do you want it? I said, sure. Usually, I get myself into trouble a lot but I just I say yes a lot and then I try to figure out how to deal with it. So, we got this barrel in and filled it up with again, some aged westward and finished it. This is actually from the second refill of that barrel, the first filling we only aged it for about seven months, got this intense red color to it even though we cleaned it out and this is the second that we bottled that, this is the second filling which we aged for about a year and a half in that. So, you still get this great like red currants, dried red cherry kind of quality, a lot of sort of red fruit

We used to eat these plums called hog plums in Texas. Remember that hog plum jelly mama made? I get a little bit of that hog plum in there. I get the candied citrus. A little bit of that, like a sweet cherry tobacco.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Like all the pipes in that gorilla. Yeah. A little bit of spice on there. We always say whorehound candy. Well, heck, let's taste this thing. Cheers. You're already sipping away on me.

You're a man that loves his own whiskey. Oh yeah. Oh, you know. So, you know, it's not poison because I drank it first.

Very light on the palate. Lighter than I thought it was going to be. I thought it would have more of a punch to it, right? But no bite at all. I could actually drink this as an after dinner whiskey. Almost a dessert whiskey. I think that'd be very little bit smokey smokiness to it, but very, very beautiful expression.

Thank you.

I'm just thinking about how big that barrel really is. Cause I think it says, it could be wrong right here, but it says 500 liters. Yeah. 500 liters, 120 gallons, 120 gallons. Yeah. A punching. Yeah. That's pretty good size. I've seen some other people use that size of barrels before. Yeah.

That's like the size of the Sherry.

So Sherry butt is, I think, maybe 550 liters or something like that. I've seen some guys at Iron Root and balconies up in their warehouses that they'll have one laying around here or there.

Yeah, they're fun to work with. I mean, that's... you know, we didn't get into this, no one here got into this because they wanted a routine, every day is the same as the next. We do a lot of experiments, we do a lot of development, a lot of innovation and everyone, it's not just it's not a top-down sort of thing. In fact, I sort of refer to it as a distilling commune because everyone kind of does a lot of their own things. There's experiments in the rick house that I don't even know about. Really? And that everyone chips in, everyone gets to kind of play around and have their input. I think it works out pretty well.

Well, now you're going to crack this bottle right here.

Yeah. So, I just opened this Westford American Two Malts Whiskey. So, we are one of the founding members of the American Single Malt Whiskey Commission and we're very much on board with the mission of that, which is to promote American Single Malts and to have We're petitioning the TTB to create a standard of identity to add American single malt to the standards of identity. And so, as such, a single malt has to be 100% malted barley. This is a mash of 70% Northwest two-row pale malt and 30% hard red malted wheat. So, it's almost like it started its life as almost like a Hefeweizen. Again, using our house, the Sierra Nevada Chico Ale Yeast Strain, fermented for six days at about 76 degrees Fahrenheit. double pot distilled, aged in the same, you know, number two char, new American white oak, you know, Kelvin Cooperage barrels. The difference being the malted wheat. Let's get this stuff in the glass.

I don't want to torture you. Well, I know our listeners are probably thinking Big Chief is geeking out right now. Anything with wheat in it. Anything with wheat. The wheat really comes through on this.

I'll pour you a little more because I know you're going to love it.

I was trying to think of a way to sneak that bottle out. But I probably can't get the open one on the airplane now. And I think that's the only one on this distillery. You had asked the, uh, I don't know. I can't tell you how many distillery owners or, uh, or master distillers, somebody they'll tell them, Hey, tell somebody to go get a bottle. And they're like, Oh, we don't have any of that. And I'll be like, I'll be right back. They'll go disappear. They'll come back with a couple of bottles and be like, I got my own secret little stash.

I know where the bodies are buried.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, man. You think it's many? I get the same four notes are coming from that wheat. Very soft.

Yeah, you kind of get a dusty rose, dusty floral.

Yeah, some people said that roses don't have a smell, but roses to me, that old saying, smell the roses is there for a reason.

There's definitely a smell to a rose and I can get that dusty rose on there.

Well, heck, I say let's cheers. Let's just taste this thing. Wow. Super complex. The sweetness is there. A little bit of that barrel spice coming through. Not gonna just blow your socks off with spice. Almost a little bit of sweet, a little tartness there, like a, maybe a sweet tart. Heck, we ate some sweet tarts on the way over here. Just that little bit of bite from that sweet tart. That's what I'm getting, tart cherry or something. Buttery.

Yeah, it's been a little while since I revisited this one. I always get a little sort of white peach nectarine on it as well. I must have like a blind spot to mint because on the original Westford single malt, I probably have 20% of the people who taste it say, you know, come back and say, oh, it's got really has this mint quality to it. I'm like, I don't get it. But so many people say that, that it's like, oh, I guess it's got to be there. Or it's got to be, you know, you're more sensitive to that mint quality that camphor

I just get a really sweet, like almost a Flintstone cereal on this or something. That fruitiness is just, there's all kinds of fruit notes in this. Floral notes, that honeysuckles coming out, that sweetness. I used to get those little bite of honey candies. I get a little bite of honey in there and stuff.

I like those. Are those gone?

No, I think they're still out there. You can get a place like Cracker Barrel or something like that. A very beautiful whiskey came out with, I'm very shocked at the weed, two malt.

Yeah, two malts.

Two malts. But yeah, I was going to ask you, and I kind of know the answer to this, but it's on your label you have Westward. Why Westward?

And the American West, especially the coast is very much the product of the westward expansion and the pioneering spirit and this is the end of actually just miles from here is the end of the Oregon Trail.

Yeah, we saw the sign for it.

Yeah, if you drove by that sign that you were within half mile of our Rick house. Oh really? That's where our Rick house is.

And then I noticed on the arrow going through the W, what's that for? It points to the west. Okay. Well, I see that.

It's a weather vein. And then you got the – these are the Cascade Mountains. Yeah, Cascades. Yeah, here we're situated between the Cascade Mountains and the coast range. The coast range is continental subduction zone. It's uplift from the Pacific running underneath the North American plate and then the Cascade Mountains are formed by the heat, the magma rising from that subduction zone and so there are a lot much – the Cascade Mountains are much more jagged, much rougher, much higher.

Yeah, it's a great. Two active volcanoes right here, Mount Hood and Mount St. Helens.

Well, actually we've got, yeah, right here. And then up along, you know, in Washington, you've got Mount Baker is active or is, you know, semi-active, Mount Rainier as well, Mount Adams. There are all these sort of iconic volcanoes.

Yeah, just a beautiful setting for, and you're right here on the river. Yep. We're on the Willamette River. It's just super beautiful. I can't get over the beauty here in Oregon. I've got to say thanks for having us in. Let me try all your expressions. I super appreciate it. Where can our listeners find you on social media?

Well, we're at Westward Whiskey, hashtag Westward Whiskey. Our website is just westwardwhiskey.com. Our is probably the easiest place to track us down. But Facebook, we're Westward Whiskey.

Instagram, we're Westward Whiskey. And what about you?

Me? Gosh, I don't even know. I think I'm C. Krogstad at Western whiskey. Okay. You know I'm not really good at the social media. I probably need a social media mentor or something.

Yeah. Well, I think you've got a couple of people here that do this stuff.

Yeah, they're so much better at me. I just stand in awe of what they do.

Now, whenever somebody comes in, one of our listeners comes to Portland, they're here on business or they're just here on vacation or traveling. They come to the airport, they might have a layover or something going overseas. What can they expect in tour? What's the tour cost?

Let me see that. Yeah. Thanks for that layup. We do tours now. Oregon's opened up. We're hopefully beating COVID, but we're doing tours again. We do individualized tours. We're moving away from that. sort of cattle call tour and tasting to having more personalized so that you have you make a reservation, you've got someone to take you through and then guide you on a tasting. I think it's $20 for the tour and the tasting through our whiskey lineup. It's a really fun great way to learn what we're doing. It takes about an hour or hour and a quarter to go through that. Also, if you're even just changing planes at PDX at Portland Airport, it was actually the first distillery tasting room in the country. that was in an airport. So, we're out on Concourse C at PDX airport. You can grab a cocktail, you can grab an old-fashioned with Westward, you can taste through a flight. You were past security, so you can pick up a bottle and put it in your carry-on. So, it's pretty convenient. So, there's two options and we have a couple other tasting rooms around town.

Any discounts here for like military or veterans at the end of the story?

You know, I don't know. Well, you're the founder. Well, you know, I don't run the front of the house.

You know, that's a great question. I should find out about that.

And I think we should make that That's probably something that we're going to implement. Because there's a lot of- We're two veterans in here talking to- Yeah, no. If we're not doing it, we're going to, I think.

Well, we would appreciate that, especially for our men and women that serve and stuff. And I'm sure they appreciate that. They get some people, more people in your doors. Yeah. Listeners, you definitely need to stop by here. You see Christian in here walking around. You need to grab him and try to pull some knowledge out of it. He's very passionate about his whiskey. He took me and Mitch all the way through their distillery. We met some of your staff, some bright young people back there. You could tell, we talked to one young lady. Passionate. Oh yes, very passionate. I could tell there was not a person back there that wasn't smiling. And that's something that speaks volumes of your staff and to you that you've hired bright young minds to lead this place into the future. Is there anything in this coming down the pipe for you guys that you're about to release or want to shock the whiskey world with?

You know, really, I think that we have, there's so many people who've never even tried any of our products that, you know, I keep coming back to the original Westward American Single Malt, the blue label that we produce. I really try to just really come back to that because that's the whiskey that I set out to make. There are going to be obviously some new things coming out. For how strictly we control our fermentations, we really went out on a limb and have developed a whiskey line or not a whiskey line but we made several batches of whiskey using a sourdough starter, using a levain from sourdough. And it's going to be part of our regular lineup sometime probably in 2023. So far, it's been selling out every time we released it in our whiskey club. I guess that's something else I would mention. If you're interested in these smaller batch single barrel or experimental batch releases, our whiskey club is actually going national fairly soon. And so, you can find out information about our whiskey club on our website, westeredwhiskey.com. But that's kind of where we do our beta testing for if we're excited about some new, you know, we've got six barrels of something we just put down that we just bottled up that's We want to test it out and it's really like we're excited about it. These are the only, you know, 1500 bottles in the world. And that's, you know, that's how most of it.

And you guys have a single barrel or somebody can come in here and buy a barrel.

Oh, yeah, please. Yeah, no, actually, that's been really surprising how, you know, that last year that was 20% of our sales was liquor stores or individuals or bars coming in and going out to the Rick house and tasting through barrels and selecting one and putting it in. We have these nice now metal bands down here. you know, metal private barrel labels. They're really cool. I'll show you one before you go. But yeah, we do definitely do a lot of that. You know, at first it was a little tricky to get our distributor to understand small, you know, limited run items. But now I think we've got the kinks ironed out and yeah, absolutely the single barrel Offerings are really fun.

Awesome. Once again, thank you so much for having us in. Let me taste through your whiskey. Hopefully we can get some more people in your door now that the pandemic's not over, but it's- It's calming down. Simmering down. So yeah. So listeners, you can find us on all social medias. You can find us on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, heck, I don't know, Twitter, everything out there. You can find us on there. Check us out. We also have a private Facebook group called the Bourbon Roadies. You gotta be 21. You gotta like bourbon. Who doesn't like bourbon? And you gotta agree to play nice, because we don't tolerate any rudeness in there. We just want people to celebrate whiskey and their love for whiskey. You could post up a bottom shelf right there, and we want everybody to celebrate that. We want you to celebrate your birthdays in there. We want to celebrate a person's life, a birth, Anything a retirement, we want you to lift up the whiskey world. So that's what we do inside there. We also have a website, the bourbonroad.com. You can find our swag in there, especially our t-shirts, the bourbon bullshitter t-shirt. You can find our bourbon road t-shirt in there. You can find our whiskey glass from Distillery Products and our hat. Go in there and buy those products. If you're a roadie, you get 10% off for 2021. So make sure you go in there and check it out. We also have my articles that I write in there, blogs and reviews from Adam Boothby. Go in there and check those articles out. They're not necessarily about the episode, but just kind of what I'm thinking about the whiskey world that day. So go there and check that out. The other thing we'd like for you to do is if you're listening to this right now, we want you to scroll on up, hit that subscribe button. That'll let you know that we're releasing a new episode. On Mondays, we do a craft distillery review where we'll take and kind of tear apart a whiskey and review it. Sometimes we'll throw in a big one there, but usually it's a craft distillery. 15, 20 minutes at the most. I'll let you go through there and see if you really do want to buy something or visit that distillery and buy some of their whiskey. Then on Wednesdays, we'll sit down with some fine folks like Westwood Whiskey. We'll do an hour-long show for you. Most people do a 30-minute commute to work anyways, so that'll get you to work and back home. You can hear my beautiful voice on there, Jim's beautiful voice. we want you to subscribe though so subscribe the last thing we'd like you to do is scroll on down scroll on down hit that five star review because you know what happens if you don't hit that five star review my alter ego my wrestling ego comes out the big bad booty daddy of bourbon is going to come i want to bring my bottle Never can tell what's going to happen when I leave your house. I know I'll leave with an empty bottle. So leave us that five-star review. We love it. You can find us on Instagram, like I said. Reach out to us. That's the best place to reach us. Tell us about what you want to hear, places you want us to visit, distilleries. We'll try to get to them. Jim can be found at jshanna63. I'm one big chief, and we'll see you on down.

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