22. Boundary Oak Distillery - Brent Goodin Master Distiller

So, you know, I feel very connected to the military here. Growing up next to Fort Knox, you can't be here without having some kind of sentimental attachment to it, for sure. They got a little bit of gold here too, right? Yeah, a little bit of gold.

I heard something. I'm not sure where. I think it's inside that bottle right there. I think so. I agree. I agree.

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. This week, Mike and I were fortunate enough to be invited over to the Boundary Oak Distillery in Radcliffe, Kentucky. I sat down with Brent Gooden, the master distiller there, and talked about some of the things they have going on and some of the history of the distillery itself and where Brent comes from and his family and a little bit of history about their family's ties to Kentucky. We had a really good time with him, very generous guy, full of knowledge, knows an awful lot about the bourbon world, and has had some pretty big accomplishments in the seven or so years he's been doing this. So I think y'all are going to really enjoy this episode. But before we switch over to the actual interview itself, I'd like to tell everybody we've got a new Facebook group now tied to the bourbon road. It's called the Bourbon Roadies. You can either go to the Bourbon Road Facebook page and you'll see that group mentioned there, or you can simply search on Facebook for the Bourbon Roadies. In order to join, just a few simple questions, nothing you won't know the answer to. And we'll invite you in and that's where we'll chat and talk about the show and interact with our listeners. And if you've got questions for us or we want to make some announcements, that'd be the place to do it. So we look forward to it. And here's the show. Hello everyone. I'm Jim Shannon. And I'm Mike Hyatt. And we are the Bourbon Road. And today we are in Radcliffe, Kentucky. Down here at Boundary Oak Distillery. Brent, great to have you with us. Glad to be here. Like I always say, we don't waste a whole lot of time chit chatting in the beginning. Are you going to let us get into that pour? Let's get right into it. We like to get straight to the whiskey. Absolutely. You guys don't mess around. Yeah. So what'd you bring for us today, Brad?

I brought some of our cast-strength single-barrel Abraham Lincoln. We are in love with cast-strength alcohols here at Boundary Oak. And when you have the 16th president and probably one of the five most famous humans on the planet, you better put your best stuff, which you can get the best stuff in the bottle. So I think we've done really well with Lincoln.

Yeah, that's a fine looking bottle. Now, was this your flagship product? Was this the product you started on?

This was one of them. This is obviously the most high profile other than, of course, our George S. Patton. Patton was pretty super high profile also. But Patton wasn't a bourbon. Patton was kind of his own concoction, his own product. But as far as bourbons, Lincoln was our first big bourbon. And you've already poured us a little bit. I sure have. I knew you guys were coming. All right. Cheers.

Cheers.

With cast-strength alcohols, if you pour them and you allow them to set for a little bit, or if you don't do that, you're really missing out on the essence of good bourbons. The smell that you don't get out of anything that's been cut down, that's lower perf, cast just gives you the real intense flavors, especially even just in the smell before you drank it, that you can't get in any other whiskeys or any other bourbons. And so I think that's why there's some of the best whiskeys coming out of Kentucky and the United States.

I think you hit a home run with this. Well, thank you.

Thank you.

Yes. The nose on this has got a little bit of a floral attribute to it. It does.

A little floral fruity. It does. And when you add water to cast strength, when you add water to bourbon, you bring forward a lot of the ethanol and I think you also kind of dilute a lot of those flavors, those very delicate flavors that it's had time for years for it to kind of acclimate together.

Okay, and we're actually in a room here with a little bit of airflow. And we don't have Glenn Karens today, so it makes the nosing a little bit tougher.

I can still pick it up. Mike, what do you think? Oh, I think I can taste a little bit of that cherry, that cherry that old Abe chopped down back in the day.

Was that, was that Abe that chopped down the cherry? I think, I think that was George Washington, but it's okay. He was the rail splitter. He's on the show next week. Rail splitter. Rail splitter. That's right.

I can definitely taste some of that oak in there. You sure can. And, uh, Ian, When that barrel's had time to set and acclimate, it's pre-prohibition style bourbon. An old forester has done a wonderful, wonderful job at it. We were so jealous of what they did. I knew that when I did Lincoln, I wanted to try to do something very similar to those pre-prohibition style alcohols.

Now, give us the specifics on this.

This is a high rye bourbon. Yeah, it's in 20%, 22% right now. It's very, when we call it the very vanilla of bourbons, it's right in that center spot. There's a lot of 20% whiskeys out there, 20% ryes. And we just feel it's, of all the whiskeys, it's probably at the peak of the most popular when it comes to, you know, mashmells.

Yeah, I'm getting your cherry on the taste there too.

And a little bit of cinnamon.

A little bit of cinnamon, a little pepper on the back there. Yeah, absolutely.

You know, Abraham Lincoln, obviously during his presidency there was a very big time in America where people were very much against alcohol. Lincoln was the only president in American history that we know of that actually had a bar license. So when he was in New Salem, Illinois, he did run a grocery store which had his license with his name on it. So we think that's pretty neat. That's pretty cool.

Now, is there any evidence that Lincoln drank the liquor?

If he did, you know, I don't think anyone spoke of it. You know, it was hard to be anybody from Kentucky that didn't sip it once or twice in his lifetime. But, you know, obviously there's no documentation of that. And I think that would have, in the time he was alive, that would have been very much hush-hush if he had.

He's pretty famous for buying some whiskey, though, and some bourbon for his famous general, right?

Well, I know that during the war, there's a lot of good quotes about him and some of his command staff. So yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, I think the story went, he wanted to find out what US Grant drank. And so he found out, and he said, I'm going to ship a barrel of that to every general out there so they can fight as good as US Grant.

Yes, absolutely. So you've got some deep, deep ties in Kentucky, right? Yeah.

Can you tell us a little bit about your family's heritage here? Sure. You know, I said we all couldn't swim, so that's why we stayed. We couldn't get across the Ohio, so we migrated to America in probably the mid 1700s and found our way up to Kentucky. I think a lot of it was Quaker influence. and settled in, you know, in Nelson County and actually started one of the frontier forts there along the Roland Fork River that held, you know, quite a few of the families, the Severn's family and some of the Cradys. Some of my still are my neighbors today that were some of the very first families to Hardin County on the way. And actually the fort was in Nelson County. So that was in about 1780. So that was Samuel Gooden. That's who my middle son is named after. And so We've been in Kentucky. Kentucky's all we know in America, that's for sure. That's Bargetown now, right? That's Bargetown. That's Nelson County, correct.

So what did they call that area back in the day? It's around New Haven now.

I don't know if it was... It was the frontier for sure. As they were pushing out past Bargetown, it was... you know, uncharted area. And I think a lot of them were looking for free land grants, were looking for places to settle down, those opportunities that weren't in Europe. And I think that they thought that this was the place to be. You could come here, you could distill, and you know, obviously whiskey had more value than money did. And especially if you were training with the Native Americans, you know, whiskey had value even to them. Right.

Now I know if you fought in the Revolutionary War that at the end of your service, at the end of the war, as a soldier who fought in that war, you had the opportunity to take either $300 or Western lands. Right. And some took the money. That's right. And some took Western lands. And those Western lands were the Virginia territory, which in fact was Kentucky, right?

That's correct. We were Virginia at that particular time. Yeah.

Now, Brandon, how did you come up with the idea? I said, I'm sure you didn't start out as a young man. So you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to open up myself a distillery here in the heart of Kentucky. How'd you come up with that idea? Somebody in your family say, hey, we need to bring this back into the family.

Well, you know, I wish I'd have had, you know, I think the story's pretty cool, but, you know, people ask me, you know, everyone always assumes that you do something illegal before you get started. And I kind of wish that we'd had. That gives me a little more flavor. But we were always very, very honest about it when we started. We never distilled anything until we got a license. But the actual, the beginning of it started with my then 12-year-old son. Thomas, who was just enamored with the idea of Kentucky's history and whiskey production and alcohol production. And he just was just insistent that we would look at this opportunity to manufacture something. And I told him, son, it's illegal. We can't do that. It's probably, you know. But he was just so insistent. And I think the nucleus of it came from a tree that's on our farm that our distillery is named after. And the water at the base of that tree just gushes up. And so we collect all that water to distill with. And so he knew then that that water was very important from my grandmother, his great grandmother. And so he felt like that we'd had a seam of gold in that water, and we should take advantage of it. So I said, I'll tell you what we'll do. We will start to see how far we can go in this process and get a license. And we started, and we just never stopped. Wow.

What a great story. So this tree, does it have significance related to Lincoln?

It does not. It's just when this is a boundary tree that is on the farm where we originally started the distillery in this county. And of course, the boundary trees are the ones that they don't cut because they're the ones with the pins in them that the surveyors leave. So this was our boundary tree on the farm. The roots were so large that they broke down through the soft limestone up on these knobs. And the water just gushes out through the top of it and has been since my dad's owned the farm since the 50s. And it's just a great source for water and is a great source for the water that we use here. And so the tree got significance because it was just the place where we use, I mean, all the water from all, everything we distill comes from there. And I knew of a boundary oak tree because of Lincoln's boundary oak tree.

Now, a lot of people don't know what knobs are. Why do they call this area the knobs of central Kentucky?

Well, I am no geologist, but I can tell you the stories that I have been told over the years. A glacier obviously cut Indiana so flat, and that glacier ended here at the Ohio River Basin. We believe a lot of that action of that glacier left a lot of these soft soft limestone knobs. And a knob is basically just to round it off. They all have a solid limestone cap. But the uniqueness of it is the material in that knob is all the same type of rock. There's no iron. There's no any other kind of rock that would normally be in a piece of ground that's been uplifted by the earth. We've always believed that these are just leftover debris fields from this glacier. The water percolates up through almost every one of them like a big Brita filter. That's part of the significance why a lot of us, and before me, as distilleries were here, was because the water was so unique to Kentucky. I think only second to some places in Argentina. you know, Cox's Creek over in Nelson County and the water is obviously the main reason. Some of it came from probably a lot of those knobs.

Now as far as the map goes, we're not that far from Claremont. That's correct. We're not too far from Cox's Creek. Right. And in Bardstown, it's just a, it's a little bit more of a stone's throw, but it is down that way. 20 miles, yeah. 20 miles. So yeah, we're on the western side of the trail. That's correct. Okay.

Are you the western most? Not the most western distillery. I consider myself in the bluegrass region, but I am on the western trail. We've got three distilleries. There's Ozzie Tyler. There's MB Rowland. and Casey Jones Distillery out in the far west part of the Kentucky.

Right, Paducah, near Paducah, right?

Yeah, Hopkinsville, that area there. So, you know, I'm only, I'm just, you know, the next exit past Jim Beam, so it's hard for me to think of myself as western, but we are on the western side of 65, if 65 is the dividing line. Okay.

Can you take us through your process here at the distillery and how you do things here, and why you make the products that you make, and how they stand out? Sure.

We are a pot stiller, like most of us craft distilleries. We have a two-pot style series. It's just a large strip still and a smaller finish still. That tends to be the norm throughout the country. I think that's pretty universal. We bring our water from that tree we talked about. We haul that up here as we distill. We try to use as much local grain. For us, the grind of the grain is more important than the grain right now. So, getting it ground to the proper consistency is important to get good conversions. the water. We distill, we try to go into the barrel around 115, 118, somewhere around there. I think that's important to keep things. We don't want to push that 120. We feel we get a little better whiskey at that time. What makes us different? I think because we can only produce a certain amount of barrels a week, every one of those becomes very, very important to us. We want to make sure each one has the best in it that can be.

Are you still producing roughly at the same scale you were when you started up here?

Well, we had a downtime for about a year. It took a year for us to get our license changed from where we started in the county to here. And so I think we're probably producing more now than what we did then. We hope to increase the size of our still next quarter and hopefully next year have a larger, probably a three times larger strip still than what we have.

So take us back in time a little bit. know you got this little gentle nudge from your boy said let's start a distillery dad can you sort of tell us about what that process is like and you know what kind of pitfalls you run into how hard is that for somebody to do

Well, the process going through the government is, I don't want to say that it was hard. It was harder when I started seven years ago than it is now. In those days, there were not a lot of craft distilleries as opposed to what there is now. So we were still doing things even with paper. I mean, we were sending applications in with paper. So now everything's done via the internet. But in those days, it was paper applications. It took over a year to get a license. That was just waiting and waiting and waiting in the hope you did everything correctly. They were always very easy to deal with. That process went well. We were lucky that we had a piece of property that was already zoned. to be able to do this. And I think probably most people, that's the downfall is getting the property that's zoned commercial that allows for our industrial use or for the product to be made. You can produce alcohol in a dry county. You just can't sell it to the public. in a dry county. So we were the only distillery in Kentucky that was in a dry county when we started. So I think there's some now that are a dry county, but we were the first. And then halfway along that way, we moved up to the city limits of Radcliffe to be able to be on the Bourbon Trail.

So this is a really nice facility you're in here.

So this wasn't your first This is not where we started. No, we started in an old garage and very close to where that tree was, the water is. So yeah, we've kind of upgraded.

We're up on a hill now. Now we're backed up to a pretty famous military installation.

You got ties to the military? My father did serve in Korea. I personally was not in the military. We know we do some military projects. Obviously, we did the Black Horse, the 1901. That was for the 11th ACR, the cavalry. And we're now doing a bottle for the 3rd ID Infantry. And of course, our famous one of all is George Patton, which has been a very, very big seller for us. So, you know, I feel very connected to the military here. Growing up next to Fort Knox, you can't be here without having some kind of sentimental attachment to it, for sure. You got a little bit of gold here, too, right?

Yeah, a little bit of gold I heard somewhere. I'm not sure where. I think it's inside that bottle right there. I think so. I agree.

I agree. So what's a day like for a master distiller here at Boundary Oak?

Oh, Lord, you know, I've never been asked that one before. You know, you have to get up and you get up early and you wouldn't do this business if you didn't just love it. I mean, I was thinking about it today. You know, so many people have to go to work just to do not like what they do. But I so enjoy coming here every day. and getting ready to run. I love to have the peaceful time where I can turn the still on and get things percolating and are cooking the corn. There's a certain smell that you get. It's just a marvelous job to have. I do have the best job in the world, I believe.

So how did you prepare for that? I mean, does your background support being a master distiller? Did you?

No, no. I think what helped me so very, very much was all of our connections in the other distilleries. All of my family worked in all the major distilleries. My grandmother worked at one for almost 40 plus years. And so all of them had all of the the knowledge and the connections that I use. When I did start, I was able to have a lot of help to be able to make sure that we made the best product that we could. I owe it all to them. They were there every single step of the way when I first started.

tasting that first white dog off the scale.

Oh my god. You don't know if it's any good. You think, oh my god, is this the way it's supposed to taste? And I wish I could tell you who did help me. But he was one of the head engineers at one of the very large distilleries for many, many years, 30 plus years. He'd made probably a good 20% or 30% of all the whiskey made in America. And so he was just amazing to me. His help was instrumental. I mean, I owe it all to him, how they showed me.

That's good. So you had a mentor, you had somebody that was side by side with you.

Absolutely. And you almost have to, yeah.

Because I guess, you know, I've heard it said many times, we've done a number of these interviews, but I've heard it said many times, if it's not good coming off the steel, a barrel's not going to fix it.

That's exactly right. And it's simple things like filling the still with the right proper hose that you can't distill out the taste of plastic. We can distill out a lot of things, but plastics you can't. And just simple little things that you would not know where the off flavors come from. But years and years of experience from someone who will save you just so much time. It takes a while to master that craft. Oh my God, it just takes forever. And God knows it took me a long time of messing a lot of stuff up before I felt very, very comfortable with it. But then you do it after a while, you get a little better at it. So if I ask you now what your daily drinker is, I think I know what the answer is.

But if we go back pre boundary oak, what did you like to drink?

I think I'm like a lot of people in America. Woodford Reserve was, I think, a gateway drug for a lot of us. God bless Chris Morris. They just were brilliant there with that. I think that was probably some of the first really good whiskeys that I remember. You know, you can't beat good old Jim Beam down the road, you know, that everything they make is just, you know, and of course, Blanton's, you know, those things. And well, all those things are just wonderful, wonderful. We like everybody's juice. Absolutely. We like them all, you know, and I'm just, I'm just envious of all of them, but I'm also so proud of them in the same time.

Is that was like your first thing as Jim Beam when you were like a teenager or in college?

You know, if you asked anybody about me when I was young, the first thing they would tell you is Brent never drank anything. So I really was not a drinker. I just didn't partake of it for the longest, longest time until I got into my 40s. And then I just started to find a really interest in anything Kentucky. And bourbon really is just liquid Kentucky. I mean, it's a representation of the spring summers and falls that barrels had to go through. So it really is just a bottle of history. And I can see why people are just levitate towards it. You've got some other products here, right, too, that you make? Sure, absolutely. We are producing a new Kentucky brand vodka that's coming out that will be just available in Kentucky. We have My Old Kentucky Home, which will be out here soon. It starts out with two barrels of 12-year-old. Obviously, we did not distill that, but these two barrels were just wonderful gifts to me. We're going to put those into those very first so many barrels of My Old Kentucky Home. We've got our George S. Patton, George Patton, which is not really a bourbon. It's what George drank, so you can't call him on it. It is what it is, and that's what he liked. Is it a straight whiskey? It's not. It's a craft style whiskey. It's a true devil's cut alcohol. And if you go back and you look what real devil's cut alcohol was, during Prohibition, that's exactly what this is. We mimicked that way to try to get it as close to what he drank during the 1940s as we could find. Working with the family, I think they were our best and worst critics with the final product. Okay, so we've got the Kentucky Amber, and of course our original was Boundary Oak, was our first barrel of bourbon that hold the very first record for the most valuable bottle in history.

Let's talk about that for a minute.

I don't want to skip right over that.

Most valuable bottle, what did it sell for?

So the very first bottle of Boundary Oak sold for $25,000 that went to charity. And then on to the first bottle of Abraham Lincoln, which sold just this last February, sold for $25,550. So Lincoln's now the most valuable bottle of any kind of alcohol ever sold in America. Wow.

See, that's right. That's that liquid gold right there. That's liquid gold.

Yeah, this was all charity money. This was all charity money. This all went to the Lincoln Museum. and was bought by an Abraham Lincoln descendant.

Wow, that's amazing. Okay, so we were talking about your other whiskey.

We've got our Kentucky Amber, which is just in limited release. And then, you know, probably one of our most celebrated, the most known is our Sinful, which is a cinnamon liqueur that won best cinnamon liqueur in the world and out in San Francisco last December. Well, it's quite an accomplishment. Yeah, I didn't even know I was even in that one. So that was a real surprise. Sinful is spelled C-I-N-N-F-U-L. That's correct. Sinful. That's correct. And it's a cinnamon liqueur that we worked on almost two years. Our liqueurs, I mean, we really, really work on them because almost inevitably everything you mix to an alcohol will taste like cough syrup if you don't watch it. To be able to find the right combination of flavors, natural or not natural, is hard to do. Cinnamon was something that we worked and worked and worked on. We ended up with a real Madagascar cinnamon in it, and it made all the difference. That's one of the ones you really just have to taste to believe. It's just remarkable.

Well, we're coming up on the break here. So we're going to continue sipping on our Lincoln here. And when we come back, you'll have something else for us to try. I will. Sounds good. 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.

Welcome back. We're here for our second pour segment with Brent here at Boundary Oak Distillery. Brent, why don't you tell us about our second pour here? Sure.

The second pour we have is, we call it George Patton, our Patton Armored Diesel. The reason it's called Armored Diesel is that's actually what George Patton called this. He named it all. He even had a special bar that he made called Patton Armored Diesel, whenever they would go. George, of course, a lot of the American generals had a real love for American whiskey. George had a little too much of a love for American whiskey, and his throat was a little burnt up. So he had gotten hold of some Kentucky Devil's Cut alcohol. Now, for most of us in Kentucky, we realize what Devil's Cut alcohol, but for the rest of the world, Devil's Cut Alcohol, which was very popular from about 1920 to about 1933, and what you would do is take a used whiskey barrel and distill some caned sugar alcohol, and you take a 53-gallon barrel or a 48-gallon barrel at the time, and you would put in five gallons in a large barrel. You would hold that in a warm area like an attic. And then in the summertime, you take it and you roll around in the yard until after a certain amount of time, you would then take it out. And what you picked up was the sweetness of the cane, but you got this overwhelming flavor of oak. Now, for a lot of us in the distilling business, once that barrel was done, we considered it done. But during that time, there was no alcohol being produced. And so this was all that they really had that had a wood taste. And so a lot of people really loved it. And this is exactly what kind of alcohol George Patton drank. And when you drink it, you realize that there's no burn to it. You get all of the flavor of the wood without any burn. And that's because there's no corn in it. There's no corn oils that go down the back of your throat. So he was able to tolerate this and almost just really fell in love with it. So he served it to all of his senior staff as they went across Europe.

All right. Well, let's let's try. Absolutely. Cheers. It's got a very interesting nose on it. Now, what's what what's the I guess this doesn't really have an age, right?

I mean, yeah, it's it's we push it around two years a year and a half. I mean, we wait until it tells us it's ready to come out. OK.

But it's not a specific time.

It's completely odd in the whiskey world and so it's not something that we would normally make here but it was exactly what he drank as close to it as we could approximate and we worked with the family and the family would tell us you know if it were close or not close and this is as close that we could come to it and then again knowing the history of what he did love and we took a stab at it and we think we did a pretty good job. So this is basically an extraction process using cane sugar white dog. That's exactly what it is.

So it's pulling some things out of the wood. I'm telling you, it's definitely woody.

Yeah. It's pulling some things out of the wood that was left behind by the bourbon, right? That's exactly right. So it had, and I think the most unique character of it that Patton loved was it didn't have the burn in the back of his throat so he could tolerate it. You get it all in the middle of your mouth and without having the normal burn that you get with a bourbon down the back.

I don't know. I didn't get no pepper out of that.

That was nice and smooth. Smooth. They would call it almost a Kentucky scotch a lot of times when it was made in people's homes. I was kind of thinking of a Canadian whiskey. It very much is like a Canadian whiskey. It really is.

But you're not putting five gallons in a barrel, right? You're filling the barrels. Oh, no. We put five gallons in the barrel.

We do it exactly the way it was. So we have a lot of barrels with a lot of five gallons in them. And if you put too much, you just get nothing. And so you really get all of that flavor of that barrel. And we try to bring it almost all out during the summer. I mean, that's when we try to bring the most of it out. It's because that barrels had time to seep and get hot and sweat and give you all of that flavor that was just left behind by the whiskey. And also having the barrels that were fairly freshly dumped was important too.

And this is not an easy thing to do. This is a labor intensive process. This is not easy.

Can't be a cheap thing to do. It cannot be cheap. It's not an easy thing to do. Whiskey bourbon is much easier. This, you have to do it correctly. Some barrels don't do very well. Most barrels do, but some of them don't. You have to be able to pick the best of the wood. We're able to get barrels from some of our friends in the business that allows us to be able to extract some really good flavors.

Let's go back for a second. You were talking about Patton when he was out in the field. He was traveling around and stuff. There seems to be a pretty special story about his traveling bar that relates to you guys. Yeah.

The reason it's called Armour Diesel, we did not name it. George Patton named it Armour Diesel. From as close as we could realize, what he would do is he would have this stuff shipped to him to Europe. The barrels were, I guess, at some point being stolen. He was able to get a brand new diesel fuel barrel. At that time, diesel fuel was pretty new. Most things ran on gas in those days. He would slide a 48-gallon barrel inside of that diesel fuel barrel and then ship it to Europe. So, he would know what it was, and his men would know what it was. he would write armored diesel on the side. So people still thought it was diesel fuel, but it was such new they didn't really know what diesel was in those days. But that way he could get his barrel of alcohol without it being confiscated or stolen or lost.

Any man that has a tank named after him should be able to call something armored diesel, right?

Well, that's right. With this product, it really has no nationality as far as type of products. It doesn't fall into any category. But when you're the liberator of Europe, you can drink whatever you want to drink.

Has anyone ever mentioned like a hay note on this?

Yeah, absolutely.

And a little bit of cedar maybe?

Absolutely. It does come across like that. It really does. Wow. It's very easy to drink. And that's why I think he liked it so much. Another general with his whiskey, right? Like U.S. Grant. That's right, a general with his whiskey. You know, they like to say no good meeting or no great piece of legislation was ever held over a glass of water.

So can you tell us a little bit about, I mean, you mentioned it earlier, but can you give us a little more detail on your distilling equipment here and kind of what your setup is?

Yeah. 850-gallon fermenters that are short, fat, and wide. We tend to like those. We have two still processes. They're both pot stills. One's a large 500-gallon strip still. The other is a four-plate reflux still that is 125 gallons. They both complement each other just perfectly. We strip out the alcohol with the bigger still, and then we do the finishing in the little still. It allows us to fine-tune it anywhere along that alcohol-proof chain we want to, because it's final proof sometimes what dictates the product that you produce. This still does a very good job of controlling that. Both of them run together very well, very efficiently. We're very happy with it. and the next year to replace the large strip still with a larger copper pot still, European style, something that we can put up in the front of the building and all the glass to be seen. I just think not only it's a great visual thing for the distillery, but we love the whiskeys that come off of those large fluted Scottish style stills. Yeah, so you like the pot stills and what they produce. We do. It fits us very well here as a family business. I think it's something that we can manage and handle very well and I look forward to having one of those here.

But you guys do some contract work. We do. We do a lot of contract bottling.

We do, we bottle for lots of people who like to put Kentucky on the bottle. I think that's fit us pretty well. We don't do a lot of it, but we've handled some pretty large profile clients. It's always fun to work with those people. The love that they have for Kentucky and the love that they have for Kentucky Bourbon is always just It amazes me. My grandmother would have loved that. We have done some gins for some very high-profile rock bands. We do some vodkas for ourselves. We do some tequilas. We've got an aged tequila back there that's just remarkable and we do a lot of rum. We've aged a lot and we've bottled a lot of rum here lately. Do you make an extra in Yeho? We do. It's a pure agave and it's aged with pepper, cilantro and ginger. We did it for some wonderful clients of ours here in Kentucky. It's a remarkable tequila.

You guys are very creative here. You've got a lot of special projects going on.

I'm blessed to have boys who are really interested in what we do. I think we try to pattern ourselves after the Heaven Hill model and try to do as many different things as they do them all so wonderfully. We hope to be as successful and as good as they have been over the years. It's fun to just see what we can do with other things and it's fun to be creative, that's for sure.

Is there anything special that you got coming out?

Oh, absolutely. We have two really special ones. Of course, we have My Old Kentucky Home, which is a 12-year-old whiskey. We only have two barrels of that. Obviously, we didn't distill that particular product, but this has been gifted to me. We're going to put these two wonderful, wonderful barrels in the first adoration of My Old Kentucky Home, which will be a rye whiskey, but it's 12, 13-year-old stuff. Whether it's going to be cast drinks, I don't know. I don't know how much juice is in the barrel. When they get that all, we don't know how much is left in there. And then, of course, the other product is one that we're just really, really excited about that we'll probably also be just as known for is our lavender bourbon. Lavender and bourbon was something I thought, huh? What?

Man, I bet my wife, she'll just drink that right up.

Yeah, it's just absolutely remarkable. It's one of the biggest lavender farms in the state. It's in the next county to us. And so we were very lucky enough to have some wonderful conversations with them and kind of do some experimentation. The last thing in the world I thought it would blend with was with bourbon. But when you have a drink of it, here on the Bourbon Trail, it's probably the most excited thing that we've had for people. They're all just mesmerized with it. It's just really easy and it's a wonderful thing to make a cocktail with.

When our listeners want to go out and pick up some of your bourbon, what other states are you in besides Kentucky?

Our biggest state is Texas. North Texas has been wonderful for us. We're now in Missouri, the St. Louis area. We hope to be in some of the larger grocery store chains there. Southern Illinois, we've been very successful, obviously, with Lincoln. And of course, Kentucky. Kentucky's been very good. We have now Disney Distributing here that's done well for us. Lipman Brothers in Tennessee, we sell. We also have Georgia and North Carolina.

So is it hard to keep product on the shelves? Is it hard for you to produce for the demand that's out there?

It is. It's been one of our biggest challenges. When you're a small guy and you only produce X amount, you have to. Especially like a product like Lincoln that's just so hard to keep up with, that has done so well. And Patton also. Patton's a little easier, but Lincoln's been a little tough to keep up with. It's definitely one of the challenges that we have to deal with.

So you guys are first and foremost a distiller. Correct. You're making your own juice. But in addition to that, you are strategically sourcing some liquids to make special releases and things like that.

Absolutely. And some blending maybe? Sure, blending. You have to. When you start selling in multiple states and you're a craft distiller, you can only produce so much. And then when you get one that really starts to take off, you have to source it. And the unique thing about Abraham Lincoln, we do source that particular one, the first ones we didn't, that right now we do, is that we get, because it is cast strength, we get to pick the best of the cast drinks. And I think in itself, it showcases a lot of the whiskies that you normally would not get to taste that were right out of the barrel. So that's the exciting thing about Lincoln. And then for special releases, we hope to supplement it with our pot-stealed whiskies when they come of age.

This is a true family operation. Your boys are helping you make some of this stuff up, right?

Every single day, you know, all three of my boys and also two, we call them two adopted sons that have been friends with my boys since they were in grade school. So they help keep me running every day and they're all fine boys. And they're not boys, they're young men now. But to me, you know, they're always boys.

I'd say that's the American dream right there.

Yeah, you know, I think sometimes I see it that way, but I don't know if they see it that way every day, but they do a very good job.

So if someone is running around the Bourbon Trail and they're at the Jim Beam Distillery, they're literally next exit up from you, right? That's correct.

Just down the road.

Just down the road. And then you're about 10 minutes off the Interstate 65 heading West. Heading west. Heading west. What can a visitor expect on a distillery tour here?

Oh, you know, this building is just remarkable. We're very blessed to have this big 12,000 square foot building. It's laid out. It was designed for tourism. And I think other than, you know, having a normal tasting like you would in any distillery, we're one of the very few distilleries if not the only one that has a movie theater. So when you come in, you can partake of our seven minute movie that we have and it's all stadium themed. So that's uniquely different about us. And then it's important. I feel it's important to me for as much as I possibly can to try to interact with every person who's taking the time to come here. and show that they can have that little extra story to take back with them wherever they come from. It's not that we think that we're all that important. It's just that everybody likes to have a story to tell. And if they can meet the guy who's working back there every day to make that bottle for them, then I think it adds a little more interest to them and to anybody else they tell about it.

Well, Brent, I got some friends. They came over here and saw you. They're Coast Guard guys in the military. They had nothing but great things to say about you. They said that you really took care of them down here, and you catered to them. To them, it seemed like you really did care. For a business owner, that's what you want your customers to see.

Oh, it is. And, you know, the greatest thing you can ever do, and I try to tell the boys this, the greatest thing that you can ever do is make a good memory for somebody. It's not about money. It's when they leave and, you know, life is just a collection of memories. And if we can be one of those really star moments to them, I don't think you could ask for any better job in the world.

Do you guys also do custom bottling? You mentioned that earlier. Do you also do barrel selections?

Absolutely, we do. Illinois is one of those states that loves to be able to depict, so we'll send samples to the distributor and allow them to be able to pick the barrel of Lincoln that they want. We do do that quite often with Lincoln. Lincoln's the only one we do that with now. Yeah, because all of us who drank whiskey and drank bourbon, we all know that every barrel is completely different than the next one. Depending on where that barrel came from, how long it matured, if it was near the outside wall, if it was up in the top, it was down the bottom. It just determines the overall flavor of that. And so we allow them to come in and pick that flavor because it is cast strength.

You know, there's a lot more for them there to taste. So something special will be provided for us today as a third party. Usually we only have two, but you gave us a little something special today.

We're here to please. That's right. So, you know, most people in this region know us for our cinnamon liqueur, which is called cinnamon, a sinful spelled with a C. This was highly popular. It's all handmade here at the distillery. It's a pain in the butt to make, I'll tell you that right now. But the results of it has just been remarkable. It's been very, very popular here, popular in Texas, very popular in Tennessee and other parts of the country. We use Madagascar cinnamon when we make it. It's blended, like I said, 50 gallons at a time. The boys take a really good pride in producing the best of this product that they can. We think it showcases good craft spirits, for sure.

You said this is award-winning.

This is award-winning, that's right. This one out in San Francisco, the best cinnamon liqueur in class, if not the best in the world, it was said. Wow.

Congratulations. Well, thank you. I'm glad we saved this for last. I wouldn't have been much used to me drinking a bourbon after this. Oh, no.

Yeah, you don't taste anything else but cinnamon after you drink this, yeah. It's really good to cook with. It's really good to, you know, one of the Favorite things that most people do is take pineapple and pour this into a Ziploc bag with pineapple and let it sit overnight and then put it on their grill. Man, that sounds good. It's just amazing. It is. Well, I can see why that's popular.

Yeah. Absolutely. Cheers. Cheers. Yeah, that is packed full of flavor, isn't it?

It's like big red chewing gum to me. It's like big red chewing gum. That could be dangerous.

It is. My oldest son, Miles, receives all the credit for this. He really worked on this and worked on this for many, many years. All my boys basically work on and off part-time. They're in and out, in and out all the day. They say they work for free, which probably is true, but they're in school. So, you know, they're in college. But he worked on this when he was back home from Western and just really, really worked on it for the longest time and very critical of everything he does himself. And so he just did an amazing job with it. He really did. chemistry degree, or? No, no, he just, he, you know, all these, these, these kids of mine, you know, they're 21, 23, and 25, 25, you, they're really not kids, you know, I call them kids, but they, they don't drink. So they, I think they have a palate that's kind of very, you know, universal, so to speak. They're not, you know, like a wine drinker that's been drinking for many years, it has a, you know, a palate that's, you know, it's, quite, you know, extensive. But I think it lends itself well to making drinks that just have this wonderful, easy to drink, you know, almost candyish kind of flavor. Right.

Well, Brent, we really appreciate you being on the show today. But before we go, we'd like to give you an opportunity to let everybody know how to find you, how to find you on the trail, how to find you on the web. Social media, anything you'd like to shout out to let people reach out to you?

Sure, and I have to think on this one because this isn't what, you know, we grew up in a time when there was not any of this, but boundaryoakdistillery.com is our website. That's the big one. That's the big one, boundaryoakdistillery.com. We are on the Kentucky Craft Bourbon Trail. So either one of those, if you Google that, you can find us on that. We're posted all over the internet.

I know you guys are on Instagram because that's how I reached out to you in the first place. Sure.

On Instagram, I think one of them is Sinful, at Sinful69, I think it is 69 proof. And also Boundary Oak Distillery on Instagram too. Great.

Again, it's a pleasure to have you on here. I hope we can get back down again someday. You're always welcome.

Especially when you get these new releases out. Sure. Absolutely. You're always welcome. We really appreciate it.

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.