27. Inside Kentucky Peerless with Master Distiller Caleb Kilburn

but nothing compared to what we're gonna taste here in Miami. All right, I'm ready.

Let's do it. I'm gonna call it the empty glass. The empty glass.

You need a little more? I'm good, I'm good. Okay, so the next one that we have is called the Vintage Manhattan.

This Vintage Manhattan almost cost another podcast to have a fight the other night. Oh really? They were arguing about what it was called and it was quite comical.

It was comical. Yeah. One of them was saying it was called the Manhattan. The other said, no, it's old fashioned.

Well, okay. Okay. So we have had a single barrel named after the old fashioned. We actually had several. Um, I think there was the smoke old fashioned.

Okay.

I think that there was the sage old fashioned, but this one is called the vintage Manhattan.

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. Hello, everyone. I'm Jim Shannon. And I'm Mike Hyatt. And we are The Bourbon Road. And today we are in Louisville, Kentucky at Peerless Distilling Company. And we've got as a guest today Caleb Kilburn. Caleb, welcome to the show. It's good to have you. Hey, thanks for having me, guys. We don't normally spend a whole lot of time chit-chatting in the beginning. We like to get right to the whiskey. So why don't you tell us what we have today for the first pour?

So our first pour is our small batch bourbon. So we'll get into Peerless's story here in a minute, but this is the first bourbon that Peerless has released in 102 years. So it's been a long time coming. Everything we do here is at barrel strength. So this will be around 109 proof. I believe it's a few ticks higher than that. The reason I say I'm kind of general with that is every single batch we do is going to be unique because it's relying on the barrels for the proof. Do we just go ahead and taste?

Well, I do have a question for you. As you pull barrels and time elapses and you pull the next batch, does the proof tend to climb each time a little bit?

In general, for our barrels, we have seen them climbing in proof as they become older and older. But that's just very much a generalization. If I were to take 100 barrels and average them. I'd say we're getting around 109 to 110 average. Okay. But if you were to take just single barrels and we'll get into that in the second half of the segment. Some of those you'll get below our entry proof of 107. So we've had a barrel as low as 106.2. We've had as high as almost 112. Okay.

Well, yeah, let's get into it. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers. That has a wonderful nose. A little bit of caramel and almost a toffee on the nose. Wow, that is such a explosion of flavor. Yes. So good.

So when I'm going through and picking the barrels for these batches, it's not a pick one barrel off the rake and use that as a generalization and a leader for determining the quality of the rest of them. We grade every single barrel. And when we find out kind of what the barrel's thumb print is as far as where it's strong on the flavor wheel or whether it has a great nose or maybe it needs a little help in the finish, it really is a jigsaw puzzle. Because the batch is a summation of the individual strengths of the barrels that go into it. So you want to find barrels like you were talking about a nice toffee in the nose. That was because I found a barrel that had a really nice toffee nose. When you get into the different flavors within there. I find that it has a really nice earthy balance, like tobacco and leather, burnt oak, things like that are going to show up. And that's because we were able to find barrels that had those characteristics. So when we're putting together these small batches, it really is the assembly of these individual strengths, these individual barrels that overlay one another.

So is it always an additive thing when you're putting barrels together?

Yes, generally, if you're talking as far as barrels, if it's a little bit muted or not, very outrageous as far as flavor. Yeah, you can take another barrel with it and help amp that portion of the overall flavor up. But that additive effect also happens if you have one that maybe tastes green or has an off note or something isn't ready or something's immature. It's going to add that note to the batch. And that actually will, in my opinion, ruin a batch.

So let's, let's talk about Caleb a little bit. We'll get back to that bourbon for a minute.

Oh really? I know a little bit more about the bourbon than I know about myself.

That's nothing wrong with that. So you're quite a young man still. Are you originally from Kentucky?

Yeah. So I'm from about two hours east of the distillery, a little town called Saltlick. It's a rural community. I grew up on a dairy farm there.

That's pretty close to the river there, right?

Oh yeah. The Licking River or which, which river are you talking? I guess the Licking River. Yeah. It's the Licking River. Yeah. It's near Cave Run Lake. If you were to go just due east on I-64 in between the towns of Mount Sterling and Moorhead, there'll be a little community. It's got two exits, Owingsville and Salt Lick. I'm on, I'm on Salt Lick one. All right. That's where I'm from. That's where my family lives and that'll always be home.

Now that, that dairy farm, how's that, how was it growing up as a boy on a dairy farm?

Well, generally when you think of agricultural communities and families, you think of, okay, you got two parents and about seven kids and all these responsibilities are doled out. I was an only child. So I was always underfoot even from an early age, hand me, grab me, fetch me, repairing equipment and getting up cows and cleaning holding pins and just everything associated with farm life. Because generally, We were a small farm. I mean, we were milking 60 head. So it wasn't a scenario where we had tons of excess capital or a budget to be able to hire mechanical contractors or mechanics to come in and fix things. Generally, if something broke, you're on a timetable, especially when you're talking about dairy cattle, because if you don't get them milked very soon, they'll go back dry. They'll turn out, and you've lost your production. So it was just an environment of, there are no vacations, there are no just floating responsibilities, you can't phone anything in. 365 days a year, except for when you have leap year, you are on the clock 24 hours a day to milk the cattle twice a day, feed them two or three times a day, medical, everything in between, you're forming for that. So it's just, it was an amazing way to grow up that I didn't realize how high of a bar it was setting as far as what my threshold for mechanical achievement or for work ethic or all these other things that are helping me so much now, I didn't realize that that wasn't the norm. Heck, when I started here and I had a weekend off, I was like, Oh my goodness, what, what is this?

So your, so your gold meter is set a little higher than most people is where when they're eight, the eight hour day, like a farmer, they don't have an eight hour day. They just keep going and going and going. And I'm assuming that you learn that work ethic on that dairy farm.

Oh yeah, I credit that to mom and dad and my grandfather who also helped work that farm.

So when you were a young boy, I mean, you worked a lot, but you also had to have a little fun here and there. What did you do for fun? Do you play sports or?

Well, I mean, I did play sports. I did the little league. I went through coach pitch, kid pitch. I played football from second grade through senior year of high school and I enjoyed those. But okay, so you're on a dairy farm, right? It isn't a neighborhood where you have tons of kids in there. Generally, I was around family, I was around animals, I was around the shop. And the shop became my favorite thing because whereas most kids in their free time, they'll ride their bike or they'll go play catch or go do this. Obviously, I'm not that familiar with it because I can't describe it very well even. But because I grew up in that work, work, work, work, work environment and picked up all these technical skills, in between that work, work, work, work, work, when I was little, I couldn't speak right. And so instead of saying inventing, I'd say de-venting. And so I de-vented a lot of things. So yeah, the speech impediment when I was little was a whole fun thing that I got over. I had trouble with my odds and my doubles. But anyway, so I would. different little cannons or guns or shooters or I would just come up with different things. And usually boys with toys, it was something that shot something or flung something or this catapult or it was just kind of a running theme of what can I make that's cool? And it actually came back to really help me here at Peerless because For instance, I went through a phase where I was trying to make different little pneumatic cannons. And I was the dynamo. I knew every pipe fitting that Lowe's had to offer. And I was actually in there so much that people would come up and ask for help. And I was too polite to tell them I don't work here. I'd just go ahead and help them anyway. Where's this CPVC fitting? I was like, oh, well, we actually need an adapter to go over to this. And yeah, it was just... It was cool, but fast forward to when I'm actually starting here at Peerless and I'm observing all of these mechanical contractors coming in and they're asking questions that no one else on the job site can answer. Thanks to my upbringing, thanks to that dairy farm, thanks to playing with pipe, I was able to talk shop and have the pipe literacy to be able to talk to these engineers. Came in handy. It did. Yeah, that's great. So yeah, a lot of time I was diventing.

So at some point you said, I want to leave the dairy farm and go to college, correct? Yeah.

Yeah, and that was something that was kind of always understood. I worked very hard in school. I was very proud of the academic achievement and it was always gonna be going toward either, my front runners when I entered college was I was either gonna be a veterinarian, an engineer, and maybe something with chemistry, probably blowing something up, just to be perfectly honest.

Never a master distiller.

Not yet. But when I started in the college, I was taking, basically I was laying the groundwork to where I could either go toward physics, biology, or chemistry. And I was foolishly, in hindsight, foolish. I really enjoyed it. I was taking the groundwork for all of them at the same time, because there is a lot of overlay when you talk about the math, the biology, the physics classes, the chemistry classes. You have to have a overlay of all of them to go into any of them. Right. but I wound up burning through a bunch of elective courses instead of going and learning to play guitar or having a PE class or something that I would have, who knows, made a few female friends. It didn't leave much time to get in trouble, did it? No, no time to get in trouble. I was doing statistics and DC circuitry and just classes that I had a lot of fun with, but just not a typical elective class for a college student.

So no drinking bourbon in college?

Well, actually, no. No, and that's a unique thing. So to circle back around to your line of questioning, I got introduced to the topic of the ceiling. Me and my family went on a tour. The Moonshiner show was big on TV. It seemed to be something that was so simple because you saw these personalities doing it. And I was like, well, if they can do it, I can do it. I can learn. So I started reading about it. I started learning. And of course, you do a few distillations during college with your different organic chemistry classes, things like that. It was unique because every time I would go to learn about it, I'd start building this foundation, this understanding, and then I'd just hit a pitfall where I'd realize that everything I'd learned was way oversimplified, and there's a whole other layer of depth to it, and start to build things up again. And right as I'd get up, I'd find a whole different philosophy that'd trash everything I just learned, and I just kept tearing down and rebuilding this understanding, this philosophy of the process. And I just fell in love with how complex and how unique this process, this industry is. Because what started off as just a scientific fascination turned into a historical fascination and a socioeconomic fascination and the business that everything that goes on within it. I love it. So At this point, I still didn't like to drink. I was a goody two shoes. I wasn't sneaking drinks before 21. It wasn't even until after that, that I was like, okay, I'm going to have to learn this. I had actually made the decision that I wanted to be a distiller. I wanted to track this path. before I ever started drinking. So I came about it in a really, really backwards manner if you're looking at the typical master distiller story. Generally, there's some birthright associated, some last name that gives you a leg up, or you're a veteran of the industry who's a sale to company after years of being the second in command. I was a no-name out of Eastern Kentucky who was blessed enough to find some people who believed in my ability to basically problem solve and get things going. It was just, I'm blessed. At the end of the day, I'm blessed. That's as simple as you can put it.

I mean, you're self-drive. I mean, you worked for it. I mean, your self-drive puts you one or two steps ahead of anything you might learn in an undergraduate program. Yeah. So you were kind of taking the own role there in teaching yourself distilling. I imagine when you had a distilling class or you had some class where you're doing some distillation, it kind of felt like it was a bit basic for your knowledge, right?

Any principles you learn can be applied. It's not something where you can go through a course. Anything you learn is going to either reinforce what you know or challenge what you know. And when you do that, it doesn't matter whether it's accurate, right, wrong, basic, mundane, or the highest level in the world. It's going to improve your understanding one way or another. So if you're talking about the basic part of the chemistry class where it's like, this is distillation, this is a means of separation. Yeah, that was something that was a little bit basic. But say when you cross over disciplines, maybe you're over in the physics class. One of my favorite revelations I've experienced here was the use of Bernoulli's principle in distillation. And for background listeners and everyone else, Bernoulli's principle is basically that there's less pressure in moving certain fluid. It's a reason that birds can fly or that airplane wings have lift because the lower pressure above the wing as opposed to the higher pressure below the wing helps give the plane lift. Well, when you're talking about distillation of alcohol, something that's very sensitive to whether boiling point shifts up or down, which is tied to pressure, the flow rate, how fast you're boiling that liquid is going to lower the pressure and change the system. So everything is in equilibrium until you change it. And when you change it, you have to understand how you are manipulating the process. One of my favorite things I've tried to say all the time is that distillation is really an art built on science. It's something that it's absolutely an art form. It's amazing. You have to have a talent and a knack for it. but to be able to manipulate it, to change it, to really bend the wheel of this process to what you're hoping to create. it takes a pretty scientific understanding. Sure, sure. It's complex. And even if it's not a traditionally taught scientific perspective, like mine was a good hybrid of, yeah, I went out and I shadowed this industry veterans. And also, yeah, I went to college. I have my chemistry bachelor's degree. But even the ones who are just, I learned from my great granddaddy and he did it this way. Even though it's not a, book-fed scientific understanding, it's still empirically scientific as far as how they're manipulating the process. So it's not a college degree that earns this, it's just an understanding of the process.

Sure. So how'd you end up here at Peerless? How'd you get here?

So when I was still in college, as I mentioned, I started going out, I started shadowing, I started learning basically by going on tours and at the end asking, hey, can I come back and shadow someone? I guess it would have been in between. So I had to take one extra semester to graduate. So it would have been my junior year summer. I was able to convince my grandparents and parents to help chip in, to help me pay my way through a five-day distilled course here in town at the Distilled Spirits Epicenter, or creatively named Moonshine University. Right. So I came in, I took the course, and at this point I was already eat up with it. I'd already been learning, I'd already been researching. I was able to talk on a slightly different level than other students in the course. And keep in mind, the majority of these students aren't STEM track college kids. This is primarily, I've retired, I'm ready to start a distillery or money guys or people who were looking at it from a, I want to make a lot of money perspective where I was in there saying, I want to make a really good whiskey perspective. And I was also the only one who wasn't associated with the distillery. So I was kind of the free agent in the room. But when I was talking with the different engineers and different manufacturers and basically these people who are making distilleries work, I was able to talk on their level or much closer to the level. I'm not going to claim to be on their level because of that upbringing, that mechanical understanding and all the... I was an equipment junkie. When I was trying to research and learn, it was every YouTube instructional video that was like 1970s fabulous of oil refinery distillation or different Vindome articles or different philosophy papers that were just put out as far as how people made good product. I wore out the internet trying to turn over every stone I could. But I was able to befriend them. And after the course, they had actually offered to allow me to come back and shadow them when they would work or do this or have this cool project. And I was blessed to kind of work my way into several informal apprenticeships. The following summer, like I said, I still had six more months at that point, so we're talking May of 2014 and I graduated in December 2014. I'd reached out to my mentors again and was like, hey, I need a summer job. I want to get some experience. I'm hoping to get into this industry. And at this point, I didn't know where I was actually going to land within the industry. I never really dreamed that I'd be able to become a master distiller on any kind of timetable because I feared I didn't have the name, I didn't have the pedigree, I didn't have... basically a very clear yellow brick road to this dream. I expected to land in one of the support industries, engineering, new equipment, or helping install or consult plants, something like that. Dreams are dreams. I didn't expect it to actually come together. So I asked them to help me find a an opportunity to learn. And so they introduced me to Carson Corky here at Kentucky Peerless when it was still in the late stages of demolition as we're beginning to rebuild the facility. I like to say there are people who get on the ground floor of a business. I was there when we poured that concrete. I was here in the mud and the gravel before there was ever a ground floor.

Well, I tell you what, I've been continuing to nose and taste on this bourbon while you talked. You know, it's got a really kind of a real peppery finish on it. I think it kind of stands out in that way.

I really like the fact that on this, it's going to start sweet and then it takes some really earthy dark turns. I get a little bit of leather, I get a little bit of tobacco, like a dried orange zest, things like that. But like you said, that pepper, I get some cinnamon. And it's not that those are overwhelming notes that are just drowning everything else out. Like you're still getting that sweetness, you're still getting a little bit of sweet oak, a little bit of savory smoke, things like that that are balanced. And balance is really hopefully the hallmark of any peerless product. Cheers. Cheers.

I already drank all mine.

Oh, you already drank all yours.

Well, actually, you know, I think we'd like to try, in this first half, I think we'd like to try and taste both your small batch products if we could.

So let's get to it. Let's do it. So the next one is gonna be the small batch rye. And we actually just recently updated the age on this. So one thing that Perlis is really proud about, we don't source any of our products. Everything you ever get from us was made in this building. But with that, we're not gonna be able to fabricate a 10 year old whiskey and only been running for four and a half years. So it's been a little bit of a growing pain as far as kind of re-educating people that you can't make 10-year-old whiskey in four years. Although many try. Many try. So we started out with our two-year-old Kentucky Street Rye. And we released it in 2017. meant for a humble reception into the industry. And then the good folks at Whiskey Advocate got a hold of it and they submitted into their 2017 Whiskeys of the Year, so global awards. And they had us as the top ranked rye on the list, Whiskey of the Year. Number 15 overall, and the little side accolades that I personally really enjoy. It was the youngest product to ever make that list, and I was the youngest distiller to ever make that list.

Quite good accolades, no doubt.

Oh, yes. So the following year, we were able to take that rye and we were able to push it up to a three year. That product was able to get us, I think, the number four American Whiskey of the Year with Forbes in an article written by Fred Minnick. And it also was able to turn the eyes of the people over at Whiskey Magazine, who at that point submitted us on a peer-reviewed award that our peers thought a lot of us apparently, and named us the North American Craft Distillery of the Year. And that submitted us to a global award for this year, 2019. That, again, was peer-based. And this past March, I had to go and receive, I had to go accept an award at a banquet in London, England, naming us the Global Craft Producer of the Year for 2019. And that was with three-year-old. So quietly, not too long ago, because it is in short supply, we updated our age to a four-year-old ride. And with every step, you've kind of seen how we've been able to harness a little bit more quality with each year of age, this is the new four-year-old Kentucky Peerless Small Batch Ride.

So now, so you've always had like 24 months, 36 months, this is not 48 months, this is four-year.

This is four-year plus. Plus. Yes. And after your whiskey is four and up, generally what you do is you're going to pull the age statement off of the bottle because it's going to allow you to have a lot more flexibility as far as what goes into it.

As long as anything that goes into it is over four.

Absolutely. Right. So this time next year, I expect to have a good mingling of five-year-old barrels as well as ones that are four that are just phenomenal as far as quality. And that's the thing. It's almost like you're looking at college football fans, any either of you. So, you know, when you're looking at a team, what actually gets fielded, yeah, it's going to be predominantly upperclassmen, but there's going to be a few awesome, amazing, amazing athletes that are a little bit younger. Instead of me having to stratify out and only collect students from one class by taking the age statement off and having access to different ages of barrels, I can really build a better team that's going to be more diverse as flavor. And like I said earlier in the, in the cast, Our hope here is to build strengths from different barrels. When I have more barrels to choose from, it's only gonna make for better product.

Well, I kind of interrupted you earlier when I asked for the next pour. I think Mike and I were both ready for the next one, right? I'm always ready for the next pour.

You're parched.

But you were kind of telling us about kind of your entry into peerless here. Yeah, yeah. And I know we're going back on the way back machine here again after we've been talking about recent accolades. But I think it's interesting to hear how, you know, You arrived at Peerless and you kind of worked yourself through the ranks to be where you are today. It's not like you came in the door as master distiller.

Oh, no. So I believe I left off right as I was talking about coming in, meeting Carson and Corky, late stages of demo. Well, at that point, Carson and Corky agreed to let me come into Peerless. No promises, no guarantees. Basically, we're just understanding like, hey, come in, work general construction. sawing boards, stacking lumber, shoveling gravel, just grunt labor, $12.50 an hour, nothing glamorous. And at the end of this, if things go well, there might be a position somewhere in our organization. It wasn't a, hey, do this and you've ascended the throne. No, it's pretty straightforward. Look, these guys who are helping us out with some engineering vouch for you, hang around, see it come together. We'll see how this works. So I came on board and like I said, I came off of the dairy farm. So just work, just working five days a week was awesome. I had a place to stay here in town. I had weekends, man. I was doing good. So I came on board and I think I did that for the first two months. And that would have been on the second story of a black tar roof warehouse with concrete dust in the air, no ventilation, very modest facilities. We had a porta potty out back. And- Live in the dream. Live in the dream. I mean, it's nothing like a good old black tar roof warehouse in downtown Louisville in the middle of summer. And it got pretty warm. After sawing and sacking lumber for several weeks, I got to go downstairs and shovel gravel. And that was actually a massive, massive promotion because it was about 10 degrees cooler on the first floor than up here. But it's about that time that we had different mechanical contractors start coming in, different engineers trying to start laying out some of the mechanical piping, the boilers, the chillers, the process. And like I said, I was the only guy on the job site who had an idea of how it all needed to run, who was able to kind of innovate as far as how to put it together. And I was the only guy who was literate in the media. I could talk about the different pipe fittings, the different pieces of equipment, what they're supposed to accomplish. I was able to really put my fingerprints on just about every pipe within this facility. So I started out with just modest things like communicating how we need to lay out some steam lines or chill water lines. And before it was over, that turned into laying out boiler chiller. That turned into the fermenters, the cooker, all the pipe connections between them and the process piping. And it was right as I was going back to school that Carson Corky had approached me about like, hey, would you be interested in going ahead finishing this out? We know you've got to go to school, but we'd be interested in you coming back and being a distiller for us. But just we want to keep you on, keep you managing this as far as the way the process is coming together. So I was able to juggle some classes around and get to where I only had to go to school for that last semester, Monday through Thursday. On Fridays, I would drive to Louisville and I'd be here for, well, actually I'd drive on Thursday night and I'd be here early on Friday. I'd go through the whole day of construction, giving out orders and marching orders, seeing what had been accomplished and what we needed to do over the next week. And if I needed to actually get a little bit ahead of things, I'd come back down on Saturday.

Now, when they posed that question to you, that must have created a little bit of emotion.

Oh, a lot of excitement. Yeah. Because again, I had always been on the farm. There was never an outside job. I'd never went through that process before. I didn't have a strong resume or anything other than just some spoken word from some people who liked me. It was exciting.

It was kind of your dream coming to realization though. I mean, yeah.

Well, even then it didn't even register at that point. It was always so short-term focus about like, what do I need to do to achieve this task? I wasn't even looking at big picture things at that point.

Well, hopefully the pay went up from then. I'm still thinking that 1250. I'm like, that's pretty tough wage to live in downtown Louisville.

Well, I wasn't paying rent and I was staying with someone. So it was all right. All right. And it was more than farm was given. Oh yeah. Because again, family farm, I had three hots and a cot. I didn't want for anything, but it wasn't like I had free cash either.

We were still kind of a paid intern though.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hey, I hear you. I grew up on a ranch in Texas, so I know all about that farm life. So you're working here at the distillery. You're making it work. And you said at some point you had to learn how to drink some whiskey, right?

Oh, yeah. So to go back to the Moonshine U class, that was when I like, I'll be honest, I had to have a dang good poker face going through that class because I'd be like, OK, this is Yep. It's good. It's real good. It didn't actually, uh, and I will say of all this, that might be one of the most serendipitous things is that I actually did have the palette to back up the passion. Uh, cause it took me a little while to develop it. It, uh, it didn't taste good at first. I'll get that. But once I got acclimated to alcohol in general, because again, I didn't drink. I grew up in a pretty much alcohol-free household. There wasn't sips here or there or dad was drinking beer. It was just, I wasn't around it. So it started tasting good. I was so self-conscious about like, am I going to get the notes? Is it just going to taste like whiskey or am I going to be able to pick out these obscure notes that all these specialists are talking about? And if I don't get those, am I actually going to have a good palate? Is the product going to be good? And there's a lot of insecurities with that. I was blessed that the light bulb went off and the flavors started coming and rolling and I had a good enough vocabulary to capture it and describe it. Now, did you work at all with a sensory kit or was this just all you? Well, I can't say it was all me. I was learning from different people in the industry who were kind and patient with me. As far as on the sensory side, as far as finished product in particular, Chris Aberowski with Westport Wine & Whiskey super nice guy. And I think something that was unique when he came in to do his barrel selection, instead of him getting lean on a distiller, I was leaning on him. I was asking questions like, what are you getting or how are you sensing this? And it wasn't something when he came in for that first single barrel selection, it was actually probably six or 12 months ahead of that when I was trying to really develop the pal a little bit further, see how the whiskey was coming. He opened up his notebook and showed me how he does his tasting notes and how he'd pick things out. Another one who was awesome for me was Peggy No-Stevens. master sensory specialist. And if you haven't figured out, one of the consistent themes here is I've been blessed by people who are patient and kind and just willing to share what they know.

Right. Well, we've had Chris on the show and he does have a great palate and he picks some great barrels. I mean, he really does. We'd love to get Peggy on it sometime, but yeah, we understand that both those guys are wonderful mentors to have in the world of tasting.

Oh, absolutely. Chris and Peggy are two of the more public figures. Some of the other ones, I kind of spoke vaguely of them earlier, people who have been amazing to me as far as on the technical side. Pete Kammer, who's a retired distillery engineer out of, well, he worked with the Seagrams for a while, but he was with Barton for his long stint. He's now doing distillery consultation. I met him through the Moon U course. Rob Sherman, who's the president of Indom Copper and Brass Works. Amazing guy, one of the smartest guys I know, and he's just a savant at how equipment works, how it needs to come together. He's just a great guy. And then Randy Allender, who's another one, he was head of maintenance, which means he was Mr. fix it, make it work at the Jim Beam Booker No Plant, another fellow who's a consultant now. And so every one of them have different lessons, different philosophies. And yes, sometimes they clash, but like I was saying earlier, when you come into contact with any piece of information, whether it reinforces or collapses what you already know, either way, you're going to walk away with a better understanding. Right. So all those people, amazing to me.

So you guys are a little bit different than most distilleries because you're using a sweet mash, right? Yes. How's that? How'd you guys come about? Hey, we're not going to use sour mash and we're going to use a sweet mash.

Really, when we sat down, we started trying to see what we wanted to do for the brand, what we wanted to produce. It was basically, I don't want to say a pros and cons list, but we were just weighing our options. When you're talking about a massive deciliter that's going to be running 24 hours a day, that's really trying to figure out how they can handle utilities as best they can, manage a waste stream as best they can, make as consistent a product for that scale, basically build in a lot of resistance to boo-boos. Sweet, or I'm sorry, Sweet Mash just doesn't fit for them. But for us, Sairamash wasn't a fit. Reason being, when you are running incremental runs. So we're running right now 12 hours a day, five days a week. So we're not going to have that constant stream of hot stillage. And as soon as stillage comes out of the still, it is going to spoil very quickly. The only reason beer doesn't spoil is because of the higher alcohol content. Alcohol, Easter are funny. They're really interesting creatures. They almost function like penicillin because they're going to produce something that they have a very high tolerance to relative to anything else that could come in and mold or eat or fungus around that beer. So it's similar to penicillin because penicillia produces penicillin that nothing else is going to mess with. It's basically a way of claiming an area or claiming a plot of resources that no one else is going to invade. As soon as that alcohol is gone, it's very vulnerable. So yeah, if you have stillage and you just set it out, give it a little time to cool and it'll turn green as a gourd fast.

So one of the key benefits of doing a sour mash method is that you get that heat carryover, right? Yes. So it's an energy savings kind of thing. Oh yeah.

Well, I mean, if you're going through the process of siremashing, what you're going to end up doing is you're going to take a piece from the prior fermentation, in this case, stillage, out of the bottom of the still. You're going to strain a few of the solids out. But you're talking about 200 plus degree liquid that you're just going to throw straight in the cooker. And you don't have to pay for water. You get to save on the water that you put in. And you get to save on steam that you don't have to use to heat that up. Right. So it's going to be of a big benefit.

And then the other benefit then would be the actual effect on the pH, right?

Yes, yes, yes. It's going to provide some acidity that is going to help favor the yeast over bacteria. If you just set yeast up and let them go in a sweet mash, they are going to build to that acidic level. It's not going to be intrinsic. It's not going to happen right off the bat. The key things for why people select Siremash over Sweetmash, one is going to be brand continuity. A lot of these distilleries have been around since Siremash was pretty much the only feasible way of doing it. Believe it or not, microbiology has come a little bit since Civil War era, or even when you come out of prohibition trying to make that same product in the 1930s. We've learned a few things back then. I don't believe that sweet mashing would have been effective or even feasible. But now that we understand the sanitation, the process, we have stable, clean streams of yeast. We understand how to steam sterilize vessels and pipe work and kind of build in a few other than the city, other than the heat, some other benefits that are going to help select the yeast over the bacteria. Omission's the key. Just have a clean facility, engineer your process to where you're not going to have a lot of dead legs, a lot of contamination hazards. Really just stay clean helps a lot.

So is each one of your mash bills the same?

So the right now at Kentucky Peerless, we are running a bourbon Not sure if I'm supposed to mention this, but hey, why not? Let's do it. Somewhere down the line, there may or may not be a high rye bourbon in the works. And then we have our rye whiskey. The high rye bourbon mash bill didn't come around for a few years, and I don't expect it to be out anytime soon, but somewhere down the line.

Somewhere down the line. Great tidbit of information there.

Yeah. I'm not allowed to give out specific numbers as far as the mash bill, just because we want to keep our recipes ours. We don't want other people making peerless, so we're not going to share specific numbers, but I think you all are the first people I've told about the high rye bourbon.

Breaking news on the bourbon road? There you go.

Breaking news on the bourbon road. Well, we have been talking and talking and talking. We haven't really talked much about your rye here.

I didn't even finish the story about getting to this point with Peerless, but I think we've got a second half of the show, too, don't we?

Yeah, well, we're going to talk more about Peerless in the second half and about the company and the facility and everything, so we'll get to it then. Yeah, a good deal. So this match bill does have corn in it.

Yes, absolutely.

So this is what they would call a Kentucky rye. Yes.

So when you're talking about rye whiskey, most everyone is familiar with the 95.5. So it's going to be ultra high rye, very peppery. It's going to be bold, but sometimes bold to the point of being overpowering or off-putting. Our selection to put corn into the Mashable was really more about balance than anything else. When you look at a bourbon, in my opinion, the reason so many people love bourbon that's kind of became a mainstay is whiskey is the fact that it does have balance. You were describing our product a few minutes ago. You had sweet on the palate and you had some pepper, you had some spice, you had some florals. You're able to really just work your way around the flavor wheel and there's representation all over. So when we were setting down, figuring out what mash we were able to make for the rye, I wanted to replicate that type of balance, but in a rye whiskey. It's not any lesser rye, but when you go through and you taste it, that corn is going to produce some sweetness, some softness, as well as really lend itself toward capturing some florals. So I'm really happy with the balance that we have in this product.

Yeah, it's very good. And you know, on the nose on this product, and I have to say that I've been nosing this more than I've been tasting it because the nose on this is really good. I'm a big Rye fan, so.

And it's changing. Yes, and it does change as we sit here. I would say since we started this podcast, you've probably picked it up and you're like, oh, spicy. And then a minute later, it's like, tobacco? Another man is, okay, that's cedar. And it just, it's kind of like the, uh, the whore, uh, wizard of Oz again. It's kind of like the horse and wizard of Oz. Every time you look at it, it's a different color, a different aroma coming off.

Right. Yeah. I definitely get the cedar Mike. He gives me a hard time. There's a whole joke about the cedar.

Fill me in.

I don't know. I, I've got a little, probably maybe a Jimmy Russell kind of simple way about me, you know, just, um, I wouldn't say that. I wouldn't say a cedar. I do get the leather, tobacco. I get some floral in there too.

I get a little bit of spearmint and some tea and just a hint of citrus, but very small amount. But you're right, there's a lot going on in here. But as time goes on, I think I've lost the citrus.

I just always picture him just chewing on big old cedar trees.

So when I was little, I used to go to this big horse show with my family. I used to show Tennessee walking horses. And you'd sit in the stands. And one of the things that all the old men would do is they'd have them a cedar stick, and they'd whittle. And even though I was probably four or five, I had me a pocket knife bigger in my hand, and I was whittling. The older I got, the smaller the knife got, because you had little sharper blades. inevitably you'd end up with a big piece that looked like a toothpick and you'd just gnaw on it. And sometimes when you're talking about him gnawing on cedar, that's where my mind goes.

Yeah. So, I mean, flavors evoke memories, right?

Yeah. It's one of the strongest connections. So, When I'm actually writing tasting notes, if I'm doing a initial round of grading where I don't necessarily have to be polished as far as anyone else reading it, the tasting notes get pretty flavorful, pretty wild. And it's often tied to a memory. So if I come across something that, like you mentioned, floral, but maybe it's not like a garden center floral. Maybe it's something that's fresh and it's dollar store.

I was thinking honeysuckle, but that's two different things.

Well, I'm just saying, I'm just giving you an example. Or I'll come across one that it has kind of a velvety, it's musty, it's floral, it has a little bit of faint smoke. I think of my Granny Sturdivans house because she really liked whiskey and cigarettes. Well, Cato, we're coming up on the break here.

We're going to continue to sip on this and take a little break here. And when we come back, I think we would like to take sort of a deep dive into kind of the distillery operation a little bit and talk about what you do here on a daily basis and some of the equipment you have. And while we do that, we're going to taste a couple of your single barrels, I think.

Twist my arm.

Sounds good. All right. Thank you. 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 hand-crafted 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 woodcrafters 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 rot and 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 LogHeadsHomeCenter. And we're back. And we are back. So, Caleb, what do you have for us here on our second pour? Well, actually, this is our third pour and the first pour in our second half. How's that?

OK, so in the second half, I've got two different single barrels that are available here at Kentucky Peerless in our gift shop. We we try to tend to focus on our single barrel program outside of this building, working with different retailers, different stores, different whether it's grocery change or even into on-premise markets, different bar groups or bars or basically anybody who wants to offer a unique expression of Kentucky Peerless, they get first priority on our barrels. But with that being said, we still do offer a few single barrels here at the distillery. So these are actually two that are downstairs in the gift shop. The one that you're on right now is, we always give things a kitschy or creative name, either on an experience or a note within it. This one had a very nice citrus and cedar quality, so we named the barrel citrus and cedar. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers. Notice how in the palette it has a very dry, like orange spice character to it. and the cedar really shows through more on the fresh-pour nose. This one's been setting for a good while. It's really, really opened up and it's almost coming through with a little bit of like a sweet, savory smoke at this point.

Yeah, I'm getting a little bit of smoke. So is that true a lot of times for the kind of the conifer note on the nose to disappear early after a pour?

Not necessarily.

No, just on this one or?

I don't even know if it's like gone gone. I'm just saying what's more prevalent out of the glass to me right now.

Okay. It's definitely got a nice sweet and floral attribute to it. But I do get kind of a T note in your rise.

I can definitely see that. It really crosses that line between it's a little bit fruity, it's a little bit floral, it's a little bit herbaceous. There's a lot of complexity. We've already talked about this, but it comes through in a very pleasing way. It's nothing where two notes are butting heads. They're almost always complimentary.

Yeah. So I don't know if I mentioned this, but we had an episode prior to this one. And I don't know exactly what order this is going to release in, but we had an episode earlier on where we, um, where we had one of your rise in a shootout and it was all cast-strength rise. We had five of them there. Okay. And, uh, you'll be happy. I won't go into the detail, but you'll happy to know, to know that Spiced Tea took the cake.

Sweet.

Won the prize.

And you went up against some, some big boys.

Uh, any big names or? Okay.

You had old Carter in there and will it. And, uh, old Carter wasn't in there.

You had, uh, and you had, uh, uh, Kentucky out the batch one.

Yep.

Yep. And we had, um, you are, you are throwing some big names are asking Sagamore cast strict. And, uh, what was the, oh, it was a Jay Mattingly fickle mistress. Thank you. Yes. Good job. Yeah. That's a, that's a wonderful ride. So, um, Can you talk a little bit about the equipment you use here and maybe how you decided on that equipment and what are you using to distill with?

In the first half, I mentioned Rob Sherman who, close mentor but also a savant when it comes to setting up distillery equipment. He helped spec and helped design our equipment around our building. And we also kind of helped tailor the building around the equipment. It was really kind of that fusion because we were trying to obviously make the best whiskey we can and you can't make the best whiskey without the best equipment. So we're very proud to work with Vindham Copper and Brassworks. And it was actually just serendipity that the

You're welcome.

basically North America's premier distillation equipment manufacturer is 11 blocks east of our distillery. So that was a blessing. They were very hands-on, very patient. I'd be willing to bet that I had their engineers redraw our P&ID or plumbing and instrumentation diagram, no less than probably about 10 to 15 times. Cause I'd always go down there and I'd say like, well, what if we did this? Or what if we reverse that? and I'd always come up with some different iteration and I've got notebooks of different drawings and sketches of ideas and some of them didn't go anywhere. A lot of them are welded up downstairs and fingers crossed so far they're working. So, column still, pot still. Okay, okay, okay. So, we have a 2,500 gallon cooker. That's going to feed one of six 1800 gallon fermenters. From there, we're going to transfer the beer into our 3,600 gallon beer well, which basically just serves as a hopper, a feed vessel. It's going to keep the beer consistent on its way to our 26 foot tall column. At that point, we're going to strip the alcohol away from the beer. The waste product from that is called stillage. The alcohol is going to go out into our doubler, where we're going to do our final distillation. At this point, it's going to be full of flavor. It's going to be robust. And it's going to be on a distillers palette to be able to taste it, judge it, and figure out how we can make it better. Throughout the day, we're also going to be looking to see how we can further improve it. We're going to make sure that the weather it's coming in isn't going to screw things up. We're going to make sure that the time of day, the way that atmospheric temperature, the way our different utilities are stacking up, we want to make sure that we stay out ahead and be proactive to disturbances rather than reactive. It's a whole lot easier. It's the ounce of prevention, pound of cure method.

Sure, so you're identifying issues sometimes in tasting of the white dung. Yes. And you get something that's a little off. What's the process to identify the cause and how does that work? Is it usually like a grain issue or is it sometimes a plant issue?

Well, generally for us, knock on wood, pretty much any time we've used that, let's divert things over, it hasn't been from a contamination issue or a grain issue or anything related to the beer or the process itself. But instead, it's either due to time of day or circumstances outside of our control. So one example of this would be every morning and every evening when we start up and shut down respectively. When you first start at the seal, things aren't going to be balanced. It's not going to have the right flavors, the right proof. So anything that's produced during that time, we actually divert into a side vessel that's going to serve as kind of a recycling tank. Anything that isn't quite right, we put in there. Have you ever heard the expression, one bad apple ruins the bushel? Well, there's a few bad apples, but the rest of the bushel is still good. So what we're going to do is we're going to put it in there, and then we're going to actually pump that back into the beer well to start the process over so we can get those bad apples out and actually keep what's good. At the end of the day, same situation. You're low on beer. It's warm. It's very liquidy. It's not going to be real consistent on its way to the column. At that point of the day, we'll go ahead and divert to that recycling tank again. That way we don't let any of the compromising agents that may be in there impact our main run or main batch. So when we are actually on proof, it's being collected in the correct tank. We're still tasting it. We're still judging it. We're still looking at it. But to my knowledge, really the only big occurrences where we've had to scramble the jets middle of the day, put product into the recycling tank is generally when we have a power outage.

Okay. All right.

So if we hit that as a circumstance, that's not anything that we can't recover from. But at that exact moment, it's not going to be making what we want it to make.

So the reason I asked that question is because a lot of people have said, and I've heard, that sweet mash is a risky business. And so I would imagine that you've got to be on point watching for those occurrences to take place.

Yes. But in general, you're going to see that well before it ever makes it to the steel.

So you're going to see that in the fermenter.

Yes. Got it. So we're going to be checking pH and bricks. So we're going to be checking how fast sugar is being consumed. And we're also going to see basically what the acid load is in the fermenter. When you talk about sweet mash, it is difficult to execute in that you have to be clean. You have to have clean grains. You have to basically design a fluid pathway that doesn't have any spots for coons to hide in the line. I'm not going to drop it. I'm going to keep coming back to that.

So how many, how many barrels are you guys producing a day?

Generally on a day we can produce It's right around 10, 11, depending on the mash bill.

And are all those being stored here on site?

No, they are not. So when we first started up, we had barrel slots for around 2,000 barrels here. And that was supposed to last us a year and a half. And I was real ambitious. And I filled it up. like the first 10 or 11 months that we were running. So we were a little bit behind Nate Ball. So we actually were able to work out with some different partner distilleries, some people who were really kind to us, let us select where we're going to store barrels, which floor or which location. We rented some barrel warehouse spots, but since then we've actually built our own barrel warehouse out in Henry County and we've transferred barrels to there.

And that's a one story building, is that correct?

Basically, we try to engineer it to replicate some of those philosophies that we believe in regarding barrel warehouse storage. High air flow, we don't want a stagnant hot air rick house where it's just baking open to the whiskey. Some people like the high, high story barrels and rick houses that have just been subjected to ungodly heat. I think that's going to drive a little bit too much oak into your product and not really give the whiskey time to develop when you talk about the different organic acids that have become esters.

So you're not going to see as much variation between barrels as say a nine story rick house would see.

If you're talking about strictly the environmental factors as far as barrels on the first floor are 60 degrees, barrels on the top floor are 110, I wouldn't expect floor to floor inconsistencies.

But due to the oak and the characteristics of the barrel.

Two barrels out of the same batch that are set side by side out of the same tree aren't going to taste the same. I think this is a living, breathing process. Short of identical twins in the human world, you don't see a whole lot of similarities, species and gender, species and gender, species and gender. It's just everything is going to be unique. And even within those identical twins, they're not going to have the same biology, the same sugar content, same weight. And when you look at trees, even if they're near identical side by side, same sunlight, same water, everything else, one may be topped and may have a tighter growth pattern. Maybe one was fast growth and it has a lot of sugar and it can actually breathe really well with outside world. Every barrel is going to be different. Every batch of whiskey that goes into every barrel is going to be different. Granted, we use a single story to try to make things as consistent as possible. But even then, not every barrel is going to encounter exactly the same atmosphere, same temperatures.

I would imagine the barrels up in Henry County are going to taste a little bit different than what's here downtown Louisville.

More than likely. I hope, I hope not. Cause what we're getting down here is how I really like. Um, but I would expect there'd be a few differences. Yeah.

So your warehouse here in downtown Louisville is, uh, is, is not temperature controlled. It's open to the elements. Well, not the rain, but the, the, the humidity and temperature.

Well, it is a 120 year old tobacco warehouse. Depending on where you're at in the building, you're still accessible to rain.

It comes right through that roof. But Louisville does exist as kind of a heat island with all the concrete and the buildings and everything. So it's going to be on average five to 10 degrees warmer here in the summertime than

Well, the only thing there is you got to look where we are at in relation to the rest of Louisville. If you're talking about Bartstown Road area, 100% would buy it. But functionally, we are in the northwest portion of Louisville. I mean, we are next to the flood wall and there's water. If I walked 50 yards that way, I'm wet. Got it. With that in mind, the majority of our wind, the majority of our climate is coming out of the Northwest. So we are really the first land of that nice airflow.

That fresh Indiana air, right?

That fresh Indiana air before it actually has that opportunity to climb that five degrees. I'm not going to say it's cooler than it is or any different than it is out in Henry County, but I don't think it's quite as massive a heat island effect as one would believe.

Now for our listeners, tell us where Henry County is. Not everybody might know where Henry is.

Okay, okay. If you are in Louisville and you go north towards Cincinnati on I-71, get about a third to a quarter, between a quarter and a third of the way there and you're in Campbellsburg. And that is, that's Henry County.

And how many Rick houses are you going to put out there on that site? as many as we can fit.

If the bourbon industry holds up, I'd expect us to probably get... I'm hoping to get about four, 5,000 barrel warehouses out there. But we actually have plans for potentially six. We just got to see how they lay. Because at the end of the day, it's about making good whiskey. If we can orient four barrel warehouses to make better whiskey than we could put in six that are so-so orientation, we're going to do what's going to make the better whiskey. But it's a beautiful piece of ground. The way it lays, it's up high on a ridge. So we're going to have excellent airflow. they're actually arranged so that we're getting broadside wind to them. Uh, because you can take advantage of a lot of environmental factors to ensure that you have good airflow, good circulation. Do you don't have a lot of humidity that could cause mold or mildew? Um, basically not just the process here, but even as simple as land selection out there, we're trying to make the best product.

Right. And your, your neighbors out there, were they pretty receptive to Yas building Rick houses out there?

Oh, yeah. Love the tax dollars.

So Caleb, with the recent demand on your products, and we know that your releases have come with great fanfare. So I mean, your releases, particularly here at the distillery, have basically been sell-outs.

Yeah, it was weird. Yeah? So probably the most notable would be when we released the bourbon that you got to try earlier. We planned on releasing on June 22nd. And the night before, it was just torrential downpour, thunder, lightning, miserable. It was bad enough to actually woke up in the middle of the night and I could sleep through a tornado. So it is pretty rough. And it was raining and dreary into that morning. And I was thinking, okay, well, few people show up. Nobody's going to come in because of this kind of thing. I know we think a lot of our brand, but you have no idea what the general public thinks or who's actually going to show up, especially when it's raining and dreary and kind of miserable. So when I pull up to Peerless, generally what I'll do is I'll get off the 9th Street exit here and I pull up to 10th Street, just where you can barely peek over and you can see down to our distillery's front door. And then I go around to the back. So when I get up to that peak of the door, I'm thinking like, OK, well, I want to see if there's a few people here. And I'm trying to look down toward the front door and people are in my way. And then I realize those people who are in my way were lined up to see us. And that line didn't wasn't just at the front door and up a little bit. It came from our front door all the way up to Main Street. And then it went halfway down to down to 11th Street. I mean, we had essentially a block and a half worth of people lined up and I just got so excited. I went in, I went to the front, I'm peeking out the windows. What time is it? When we open the doors? Can we open them early? What can we do different? And I just, I said, I'm gonna go shake their hand. So I went out the front door and it was me and Carson Taylor, the fifth generation owner. And we went through when we shook everyone's hand and it was probably about 250 to 300 people. were in line and the person who was number one, he got there at 2 45 a.m.

So when you were waking up in the middle of the night with a storm, he was standing here, huh?

Yeah, he's had his little lawn chair. He's just chilling out front.

I'll tell you this, you did do that. Me and my wife came here that morning. I had to talk her into coming down here. And Jim, I don't remember what you had going on that morning, something with a charity. And Jim was like, hey, if you're going to go down there, could you get me a bottle too? And I said, yeah, man, I'm going to hook you up. Good friend. That's what good friends do, right, Jim? That's right. Thank you so much. So we come down here, and we saw the line. My wife's like, I am not going to stand out there. And I said, come on. We've got umbrellas. We'll be all right. So by the time we walked, down here there's a loading dock out front and we got inside that that loading dock area covered And we, we didn't stand there that long, but I remember, I remember you guys walked, you walking down the line and you came inside that loading dock area and shook everybody's hand. And I said, y'all were the smart ones. Oh yeah. Yeah. But my wife was like, man, that is super impressive that, that, that company, they sent somebody out here. And I said, Hey, I think that's, I think I'm pretty positive. He's the master seller and NASA owner son. I said, I'm pretty positive. Yep. And uh, We got, we got your juice. We got it home and we were pretty excited about it. We were like, man, we're going to taste this tonight. And we did. And I loved it.

You know, Oh, I was so excited. And at that point I'd actually, um, In this industry, you make friends. People are kind to you, and you don't forget it. So when I started out the door, it was raining. It wasn't drizzling. It was raining. And so I was like, oh, heck with them, bro. I'm just going to go. I'm just going to shake hands. And by the time I make it halfway up the street, I'm getting pretty wet. And one of the guys who was there, who's actually been in here two or three different times, kind of a gruffy fellow, real reserved, doesn't jump out as far as, he's just reserved as far as his personality, until you know him and then he's just a big teddy bear. And his name's Omar Marshall and he was there with his wife and he's like, son, take the umbrella. I was like, no, no, I'm fine. He said, I'll be fine. Just go. And that meant the world to me. I mean, he, uh, he, he didn't have to do that. He, he wound up just going and getting in his truck and sitting and he, he took the, uh, the raindrop for me. And, uh, that really meant a lot to me.

That's great. That's a good story. I like that.

I'm glad you guys had an opening like that and you released it like you did.

And we sold out. Yeah. I was expecting, because when we started that week, I had, we'd laid in like 2000 bottles and we had a kind of a little family night where a few people got to come in on Wednesday night, but nothing big, not a lot of people. We barely even had any one man in the registers. And then we had an event where people were allowed to reserve bottles on Friday. And we didn't have a, I actually shut down the reservation process because I had to make sure that I had enough bottles to make it through Saturday. And so we wound up selling, we had people lined up that evening. But again, it was very limited. We didn't let a lot of people get this product. And so, okay, I've still got a good inventory. There's no way we're gonna go through all this. We're gonna have product for days or a week or so. and you all had different plans for us. You all lined up, you all came out in support and it was everything from industry partners to just people who were interested. We had a bunch of bottle flippers in line and that's their business, nothing I can do about it. I appreciate the support. And we sold out just before the end of the day. Luckily we had enough to make it through the rush, but yeah, we sold our last bottle before five o'clock and it was, everybody's looking around saying, Wow.

Well, everybody that braved the weather got a bottle, so that's good. Oh, yes.

That's good. I'll tell you this. One of those bottles that I got that day, you and Corky signed them. And one of those bottles I got, I gave a bottle to Jim. I had a bottle for myself. I actually traded a bottle for another bottle of bourbon I wanted. And it took me a while to get through the bottle I had. And I was like, I had another bottle and I was like, A great charity was coming up and I was like, I'll donate this to charity and it actually made some money for a great program called Arch Bridge here in, or Bridge Art is Arch Bridge.

Arch Bridge, yeah. So they redirect at-risk youth into the art program so that, you know, to sort of help them out, you know, kids that are struggling with

That's an absolutely amazing use of whiskey. It's not all bad. It can be used for good.

That's right.

And thank you for using it for that. I really appreciate that.

To us, that was a good deal. I'm sure whoever bought that that day, it meant a lot to them to get that bottle. They probably couldn't either get here or they didn't get a bottle because you got sold out and they wanted it.

Yeah, we've participated in several whiskey auctions. Generally, you get into a lot of legalities where it has to be purchased from a private party, not us, but we are tickled to death to see our product used in those measures.

Right. Well, Caleb, you have another single barrel selection for us here. Now, the one we're finishing now, what was the name on it again? Citrus and Cedar. Citrus and Cedar.

Like I said, it had a lot of tea. But even as it's opened up now, it has a little bit of a dark sweetness to it.

It does.

But nothing compared to what we're going to taste here tomorrow. All right, I'm ready.

Let's do it. I'm going to call it the empty glass. The empty glass.

Do you need a little more? I'm good. I'm good. Okay. So the next one that we have is called the Vintage Manhattan.

This Vintage Manhattan almost cost another podcast to have a fight the other night. Oh really? They were arguing about what it was called and it was quite comical.

It was comical. Yeah. One of them was saying it was called the Manhattan. The other said, no, it's old fashioned.

Well, okay. Okay. So we have had a single barrel named after the old fashioned. We've actually had several, um, I think there was the smoked old fashioned.

Okay.

I think that there was the sage old fashioned, but this one is called the vintage Manhattan or someone was cute because it does have a little bit of that whiny drive or move character to it. They put vent hyphen aged like it's vent, like a vineyard.

Right. Got it. Wow. This is different. This is definitely different.

No, yes.

This is sweet.

It's floral. It's aromatic right, right into your nose.

Definitely. No, I'm still getting the, I'm still getting a little bit of the cedar note to it, but the oak is prevalent on it.

Go ahead and sip it.

Yeah.

I'm not a rag ass, but it's still a very drinkable whiskey to me. It's not too high to where it's burning me or anything.

Wow, that's definitely sweet and everywhere all at once. It kind of coats your tongue. It's very viscous. Of course they all are, but this one carries that flavor along with it.

That really highlights the fact that we don't add water after our maturation. Basically, the proof that it comes out of the barrel is the proof it's going to go into the bottle. If it's a single, it's one to one. If it's a batch, you're going to take upwards of five, six barrels and mingle it together. And did you say the proof of this? I did not. OK. I don't remember it off the top of my head, if you want me to be perfectly honest.

But they're in the range of about?

Around 110. OK.

Yeah, I think we did have, we had your Spiced Tea the other day and I think it was 110.5 or somewhere in that range.

And that's really where it's getting that depth of flavor because you're not diluting any of the flavors you have. But of the selection that we've tasted today, this is my personal favorite. When you talk about what is just textbook quality, I don't know that it can compete with the small batches because the small batches, I've been able to build the strengths of six different barrels together and show off some range, some different notes, some different depths. But the comparison I always use, if you were able to take on six different people in a fist fight, even if you lost, you would be a bad man. You'd just be real bad, Mike. So, I mean, isn't that fair?

That's fair.

So if it's even a conversation, this vintage Manhattan versus that small batch, this is a bad barrel.

It is, it is.

So when it comes to single barrels, that's what kind of excites me. That's what's interested in me. A lot of people ask, what do you drink? I mean, as a distiller, as someone who's a whiskey connoisseur or whatnot, you end up trying a lot of different flagship products. And once you've tried, you like weeded. Once you've tried Makers, I'll be willing to bet that you don't go back to it with the same, well, what's it going to be every single time you try Makers?

It's that old standard that you're used to, that you love, that you look forward to at the end of a hard working day.

It's a house poor, it's something that's reliable, something you know is there. But if you're talking about something that's exciting, a maker single, it may not be as high quality, it may not even be close, but it's something that's going to be different, it's going to be unique, and it's going to show off a different portion or different complexion to the maker's profile. So that's what excites me. And what's in particularly really cool and really rewarding personally is when you go into an account and you try their single barrels. So for instance, I went to Hardwater out in San Francisco and it was one of the only sales calls, the fellow there, Michael Desar, one of the only sales calls that he had encountered where the person comes in not to sell him a specific single barrel or to sell him a specific product, but instead just a genuine curiosity. What do you like? What single barrel can I try up yours? And that just flipped the script for him. And all of a sudden he's pulling down bottles and he's excited and he's trying to show off these different notes. And based on that, I was able to see basically what things to see Keon, what does he like, what are the things that he's passionate about seeing in whiskey. And so he showed me a Russell's Reserve. And generally Russell's Reserve, it's going to be dry, it's going to be kind of a subtle smoky sweetness, it's going to have some higher level oak peppers. Generally, Russell's is a very bourbon drinkers bourbon. It's in your face. It's in your face. It's gruff. And don't get me wrong. I love that. But the one that he selected was soft. It was sweet. It had caramel. It had a little honeysuckle. We used honeysuckle earlier. It showed off some complective notes that are almost exactly on the opposite side of what Russell's typically offers. So next time I was around him, I was like, okay, I've got a bottle. I want you to try this. And it was when he was here visiting the still around the single world. So like, she's like, you remembered.

So you talked earlier about you guys winning awards and stuff and other distillers picking you guys as a, as the craft distiller of the year. Have you built any relationship with any distiller such as, you know, like Jimmy Russell and Freddie Noah, they built that relationship. Have you started building relationships with other distillers?

I have on certain occasions, I still haven't really tapped into kind of the old guard. Generally the ones that I'm probably the closest to are people like Pat and Shane over at Wilderness Trail. We got in the industry at a similar time, we kind of leaned on each other for different knowledge. And there was a day where they came and they stayed with me from about 6 a.m. to about 2 p.m. just wanting to see how we started up, different things that would change, sizing, things like that. Or there's when Kevin Curtis was laying out Angel's Envy. He came down here with a set of blueprints and we scribbled all over it as far as different things that we could do and change. I've become closer with kind of the new guard, uh, as opposed to kind of the old, uh, the old powerhouses. And it doesn't mean I haven't learned from them and don't like them or haven't talked to them, but the, uh, I'd say that I've been closer to, do you remember Pam Hyman and, uh, mickters, uh, she's awesome.

Yeah.

Yeah. She's, uh, recently retired. recently retired, but still one of the most talented master distillers ever. You don't even have to put an asterisk next to it because obviously it was very historic for her role as a woman, but take the modifier off there. She's, she's awesome.

Yeah. So, so your day here, let's start through your day as a master distiller.

There, there's no continuity or no consistency.

So what time do you start every day?

It really depends on what needs to be done. If you talk about today, I was able to come in and I got here probably about 8.30. We've been selecting barrels, we've been planning production, fixing a few errors, doing a little bit of marketing, as far as figuring out what future products are going to be. Basically, I get to be kind of that link between grain to bottle on production side, but also from that bottle to what do we need? What yield numbers? What type of product can we market as this? It's a very diverse job. So that was today. But if you look at, say, Tuesday, I was here, I got here about 9 a.m., but I was here distilling with our evening distiller Tommy Edwards until about 9.30 at night. It just, that day was more of a in production day where it was strictly, what do we need to do to get things done? Uh, last week I was loading barrels tomorrow morning. Uh, at nine o'clock we have a truckload showing up to receive, uh, let's see, what is it about 32,000 pounds worth of barrels and I'll be loading them.

There you go. So, so you recently got engaged. Is that correct?

Yes. I've been blessed to kind of skate through life and find the one.

Now, how do you think marriage is going to change you or change your daily operations as a master stiller in your hours and stuff? Do you think that's going to change you?

Well, I don't think it's going to change the necessities of what needs to happen. I may grumble a little bit more, but I really don't even see that being an issue. You have a job. You have a to-do list. There are responsibilities that you have. There is no phone it in. There is no just kind of take the day off on both fronts. And that's going to go true for the marriage also. A lot of people come up to me and they say, like, man, like, what's next? You've accomplished so much. Like, it's so cool. Like, what's next for Caleb Kilbritton? And I'm pretty blunt with them. I mean, don't get me wrong, professionally, I've been extraordinarily blessed. Long before I was dreaming about being a distiller, I was dreaming about being a dad, about being a family man, about raising a family. And even though, yes, with my career, I've been extraordinarily blessed with success, I'm really excited to put in that same work and hopefully achieve those same successes on the personal front.

I'd tell you, me and Jim both are dads, and you can do all kinds of things in your life. You can become a millionaire, but probably the greatest thing ever to be is a dad, right, Jim?

That's going to be the dream job.

Yeah.

And yeah, I'm just, I'm so excited for it. And Hannah Stavisky is my fiance. I've mistakenly introduced her as the girlfriend probably no less than 10 times since we got engaged right around a week and a half ago. I've been corrected every time.

So is Hannah, is she a whiskey drinker? No.

No? No, she actually grew up in a very similar household to me, not a whole lot of alcohol. Her family's was a little bit more religious based where mine was just, Dairy Farm, you don't have time to drink.

Yeah.

You can't have a bad morning. So yeah, she's actually from where I'm from. She's back two hours east of here is where her family is. She went to the same undergrad as me. And she's currently in Evansville, Indiana, achieving her doctorate in physical therapy. She's a brain. She's busy. Oh yeah.

There's just a couple of hospitals here in Louisville to work at.

I think there might be one or two, I don't know.

Well, Caleb, I'd like to look to the future here a little bit and ask a couple of questions. You know, we've got a few minutes here as we wrap up, but I'm kind of interested to know, you know, we talked earlier about the demand on your product. It's extraordinary.

Thank you.

But, you know, at the same time, you have to consider the opportunity for aging stocks. So are you able to meet demands and still still look towards, you know, aging your stocks to higher ages?

The beneficial thing to having a really high standard, a very high filter for what's going to actually make it into peerless, that's really the threshold for how we're able to get older product. Right now, if you're looking at a bourbon, I'm going to guess that I'm probably rejecting around 8% of the barrels I taste. Not because they're bad, just not because I just don't think they're perfect yet. I don't think they're there yet. And I do say yet. Much to our analogy earlier when we're talking about sports teams, when you look at a lot of these players, a lot of these barrels, more a little bit more maturity a little bit more time the opportunity to grow is really going to benefit and help it get to where I want it to be.

So you would expect that your stocks aging stocks will come to maturity certainly within the six year to eight year range.

One of the most freeing statements I get to make, and I love saying this, Lucy's going to tell me. Everybody says, how much pressure do you feel to get more product out? That was a hot one that came right after we sold out so much and it was none. The barrels are going to be ready. I'll come out with it. The barrels aren't ready. We'll be waiting. And then when you look at older age products, if I'm on annual basis holding back a bunch, just not because it fits what I want the whiskey to be, inevitably we are going to have much older spirits. And we've made true, we've made good on these promises with our rye. We came out with a two-year-old, we satisfied market. We came out with a three-year-old, we satisfied market. Four-year-old, it's getting a little tight, but I'll find it, I'll get there. And this is the first time that we have pulled four-year-old product. Once I get to next year where I'm able to pull an overlay of four-year and five-year, I'll have more barrels to pick from and we'll be able to catch that shortfall.

And certainly to project a future need, you have the ability to expand your operation both in terms of number of stills as well as the hours that you run your stills.

As far as number of stills, probably the first place we'd look would be to expand hours, either by expanding the days that we run or we do have the opportunity to expand our fermentation capacity and then we could go over to a 24-hour operation. Got it. Right now, it's stepwise. We have the capabilities of doing all those things, but you don't want to outkeep your coverage. You don't want to grow beyond your means of quality. Before we ever look to expand the amount that we're producing, I'd have to make sure that the infrastructure, both mechanical and from a personnel perspective, would have to be there to support it.

Are you willing to talk about how much aging stock you have? How many barrels?

I also need to update my figure. Last I checked, we're around 5,500. Okay.

All right.

It's a good number of barrels for a small distillery. We fit in this really awkward place within the industry because if you're talking about craft distilleries, we're pretty big. But when you put us in context of, say, Jim Beam, they've made more in the past two days than I have made since we've been in operation four and a half years. And it's just the reality of it.

So what states are you guys currently distributed in? Is it pretty much nationwide? Are you limited to just a few states?

I believe that we are currently distributed in 46 states.

So you're almost there. Yes.

Wow. We have a few holdouts. some of the more conservative markets, where it's a state control board, where there's a lot of bureaucratic red tape serving as a barrier to getting alcohol in. Yeah, we're having a little bit of trouble there, but the vast majority of the markets that we've called on or wanted to see if they're interested, there's a wait list actually. as far as getting products. We've been blessed with good demand. A lot of people such as yourselves helping to tell our story. And at the end of the day, it's a testament to the team that Corky Taylor has been able to build and the contributions and dedication of every member of that team. Did you get the wine note on the vintage Manhattan? There's just a little bit of dark fruit.

Yeah, I'm getting a fruit, kind of a plum raisin. Yeah, yeah.

It's some dark stone fruit, but it's not like fresh. It's not like popping a grape in your mouth. It's something that's darker. And I would say it's somewhere between like a really like dark, sweet, musty wine. And like, are you familiar with like Luxardo cherries? Yes. Like that cherry syrup.

So you guys are not really, you're on Whiskey Row, but you're down from Whiskey Row, right?

No, this is still Whiskey Row.

So you'd be considered on Whiskey Row. Yes. Down from, from McDers a little bit. So folks, if you're, you're downtown Louisville, make sure you walk underneath the, I guess the overpass it would be there.

We're the gateway to Portland.

The gateway to Portland. I like that. Come on down here.

The easiest landmark to give people is the Big Bat. When you talk about the Louisville Slugger Museum, just go ahead and come a block and a half west and we're on the north side of the street. It's 10th Street. You'll see us right down here.

And how's your tours run?

So we give tours on the half hour. So they start at 10 30, then the next one will be 11 30, 12 30. Last one of the day going into the winter hours are going to be at three 30.

What can our listeners expect in a tour?

So we do a full grain to glass experience complete with family history and a sensory experience at the end. Rather than just turning you loose with a few different samples, we have one of our sensory specialists help explain not only what you're tasting, but actually how to taste. It's a fun interactive experience and they're awesome as far as being able to raise the experience for the aficionados. and work it down to a very basic level for those who are looking to learn. And something that's actually really unique, because we offer these single barrels that really play up individual notes to such a large degree, it actually serves as a great palate trainer. So say that you have trouble with cedar. Some people, after they taste citrus and cedar, can then pull out that note that's much more prominent than citrus and cedar in the small batch. Sure. Yeah, we often have encounters where people who are coming through, particularly on Saturdays, get to meet and talk with Corky Taylor. Generally, one of the personalities is around the sign of bottle. And it's just, I think people, when they come here, they expect me to be passionate, or they expect Carson and Corky to be passionate. But when you go through here, it doesn't matter who you're talking to, everyone approaches their job with the same level of passion. When you go downstairs and you talk with a tour guide, they are going to pour their heart and soul into making sure that you have an amazing experience throughout the entire distillery tour. When you talk to the person at the counter, they're going to make sure that you want to have the proper recommendation or they want to help you find the perfect gift. When you go through the tour, when you see the person on the bottling line pushing corks under the corking machine, they've got a smile on their face and they're happy to show off what they're doing for you.

Now, do you guys have a barrel selection program here?

Oh yeah. Uh, for that, you're going to be contacting John Waddle. I do not remember his phone number off the top of my head. I believe it's just John at Kentuckypearls.com. Uh, but the most reliable thing to do would just be to call the front desk and ask for him. If he's not available, he'll call you back.

And for the visitors who come to the distillery for a tour, there's always a special bottle on the shelf for them to pick up and take home. Always a pick of yours or something available.

Yeah, because of the large demand that we have, the large following, we have a sleeper community of people who actually will come in and before they come in, even people who work in your all's industry. They will just run straight in before they talk to anybody at the register or anything else. They'll run straight to the cage and see what new single barrels do we have out. Now again, I'll tell you, my first priority, my first recommendation is for you to check your local independent stores, heck even the non-independent stores, the multi-chains, because they're going to have just as good a quality and often a slightly better price. But we are going to have a different variety that's always going to be available here.

So Caleb, should our listeners want to reach out to Peerless or reach out to you personally? Can you share social media contacts, website, all the things that go along with that?

I think my Instagram handle is at Caleb under store Kilburn. I hope that works. Otherwise I've just misled a bunch of people.

Well, the search feature is pretty, pretty powerful. So I'm sure they can find you.

Caleb Kilburn, C-A-L-E-B K-I-L-B-U-R-N. Hopefully I'll be there with my fiance. Yep. There you go. Hey, Anna. Outside of that, yeah, feel free to reach out. I mean, we're not carved into a side of a mountain or we're not gods. We're just normal, everyday people. If you see me at the grocery store, talk to me.

Is it kentuckypeerless.com?

Yes. Kentuckypeerless.com. You're welcome to check us out there. I don't remember the exact handle on Kentucky Peerless' social media. I need to get that.

Peerless Distilling, I think.

That sounds right. I think it is. Maybe at the end of this, you can go back and dub it in or something. We will do that. Thank you.

I think your guys' future here looks super bright within the bourbon industry, but within the whiskey industry too. You know, you got a young distiller here that obviously knows his craft by us tasting his whiskey today. I tell you, it's pretty good juice, wasn't it Jim? It's delicious.

Caleb, thank you so much for this opportunity. We really appreciate the hospitality and the opportunity to sit and talk with you and taste your whiskeys.

Thank you so much for having me on. I really appreciate some of the personal takes here. I don't get to take walks down Memmer Road very often, but thanks for letting me relive a little bit of that farm life, sharing it and a little bit of my journey.

Great story. Thanks again. Thanks.

Thank you. And thank you all for listening. Couldn't do it without you all.

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.