289. Four Gate Whiskey Company

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.

Hey this is Big Chief and you're listening to The Bourbon Road. You know what I love to pour in my old fashions? Is a little maple syrup. It can't be just any maple syrup. It has to be from seldom seen farms up in Ohio. He takes bourbon barrels. pours his syrup in there and ages it for six to nine months, making for some delicious, just some delicious syrup that you could pour on pancakes. You can pour it on waffles, chicken waffles like this fat guy likes. But seriously, you want to make a delicious cocktail with some maple syrup and not that old simple syrup. Check out seldom see maple dot com. Pick up some stuff from there today. We'd appreciate it.

Hello everybody, I'm Jim Shannon. And I'm Mike Hyatt. And this is the Bourbon Road. And today, Mike, we're out on the road. We are. We've loaded up the, what do you call that vehicle of yours? The Red Chariot. The Red Chariot. We loaded up the Red Chariot with all the gear and we've driven, we set the compass towards whiskey. The word to bring us.

That's where that truck goes is whiskey, right? Yeah, we headed west and we ended up at Fourgate Whiskey Company. East headquarters, I guess you'd call this. Okay. And we're with Mr. Bill Straub here. We've been trying to do this interview for, man, it feels like two years now.

Yeah, definitely does.

Yeah. Well, Bill, welcome to the bourbon road, man.

Well, thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it. Pleasure to be here. Yeah.

We're glad you invited us here and we're looking forward. This ain't our first rodeo with some, some foregate whiskey though. We both experienced it. Wonderful. Numerous times, numerous bottles. We got plenty of listeners that are super fans, I think. Yeah. So one of your relatives too.

Yeah. You're probably talking about the Ritter. Oh, Ritter. Yeah.

Yeah. He's a good friend of the show and we get to run into him every now and then. It's always fun. We've got a lot of whiskey on the table today. From what I understand, these are some bottles that have not been released yet.

They'll be out any day at a couple of our online retailers and probably within the next week and most brick and mortar stores.

Okay, so listening in as we go through these days, these are things that are going to become available very soon and you'll want to take your notes and pick out your batch number. And that's a glorious wall of whiskey you have behind you, by the way. Thank you. That's something else. Well, you never want for a bottle of whiskey, do you?

Not really, no. I'm out of space for whiskey. I've got boxes everywhere and there's a storage room full of boxes too.

We kind of like to get straight to the whiskey, so what do we have in a glass first?

Well, first thing you guys have is it's going to be our batch 22. We're going a little out of order. So the ones we have here are 21 through 24. But batch 22 is called Indiana Foundation. And we're starting with that one because it's an unfinished whiskey. So we'll start you out with the straight stuff. So it's a 10-year-old Indiana whiskey. It's the lower rye mash bill from Indiana, 21% rye. But it's a small batch. It's going to be released in four states. So this one is Kentucky, Indiana, Louisiana, and Illinois, and then our online retailers. There were under 1,200 bottles of this batch, but it's about 109 proof. Just a really nice, sweet, easy to drink whiskey. It gets dangerous. You open those bottles, they disappear quick.

Yeah, I bet they do. I just see 10 years old. That's what I was focused on.

Well, you might notice they're also in new bottles. This is a little bit of a change for us with the supply chain shortage. Our old, tall, skinny bottles called the Holley bottles that come out of Poland. As you can guess, anything coming out of that part of the world right now is very backlogged. We had to switch bottles simply because we couldn't get any out of Eastern Europe. Then as soon as we got these bottles, a shipping container full showed up for us of the old bottles. We're going to have two different ones over the next couple of years, and we're going to have a couple of different lines that we'll utilize each bottle. But these are, we really like them. They're a little bit shorter, a little bit wider, and we've been a big fan of them.

Now, what do they call this neck style on this?

This is called the Gettysburg.

The Gettysburg. Yeah. And this has the kind of sexy, curvy neck on it that aids in the pour, doesn't it?

I think so. I think so. I like the way it looks on a shelf because it's a little wider than the old Holley bottle, so the label just looks bigger.

Yeah, it looks nice. It looks like, well, Mike, what do you say we check out this batch 22? Let's do it. Cheers. Cheers. Oh man, that raisin cinnamon toast.

Is that what you get? Yeah. I was going to say Skittles. Skittles.

It does have a sweet candy nose. I'll give you that.

Yeah. A lot of citrus in there to me. A lot of like a mandarin orange or some tangerines or something like that.

Yeah. I always get everything that comes out of that distillery. I always get a lot of kind of a citrus zest, kind of candied orange lemon.

Same thing on the palette that you hit the nail on the head of the zest, you know, um, sweetness, maybe some of those, uh, those orange candies, um, like they're big and they got that sugar coated on her. Yeah, that's what I'm getting on this right here.

I've used that as a tasting note on so many things we've done from, from the Indiana juice and that those exact candies, I never know what they're called.

Orange spice candies, I think is what they're called.

Yeah. They're kind of gummy.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I don't know why my nose always sort of goes towards the baking cabinet. Yeah. I guess a little bit of orange marmalade on that cinnamon raisin toast.

Yeah. Very, very beautiful whiskey that you guys have gotten here. Why call it Indiana Foundation?

Well, we had an original foundation. We released batches three and five. And we kind of, from the start, we always wanted to primarily be a barrel finishing business. That's just our niche that we were going for. But occasionally, we knew we would come across whiskey that we liked so much, we wanted to release it as is. And we've always said that, as a company, The foundation of our product is always going to be great whiskey. We don't try to take something really young or harsh and try to cover it up with something else. That's not the point of foregate. So, when we find stuff that we just think is so good and we want to release it as it is, we do and we call it foundation because it's the foundation of our business. So, our first one was just called foundation. Our Tennessee distributor didn't get much of that at all because it was such a small release. So they asked us shortly after to do a batch for them. So we found some Tennessee bourbon and released it as Tennessee Foundation. And this was distilled in Dearborn County, Indiana. So we called it the Indiana Foundation.

Oh, cool. So cool. So tell us a little bit about how the idea of Fourgate kind of blossomed. I mean, obviously it's you and others.

There's two of us. Yeah. So I was a blogger. I owned modernthirst.com and ran that for seven or eight years. We're pretty successful. We haven't been in the right place at the right time, I like to say. So I started to get hired to do barrel picks when barrel picks were still new and stores didn't really know what they were doing. And through that, I was hired by some of the national brands to help consult and launch new labels. And I always, always disagreed with what they were doing. They always knew what they wanted to do beforehand and they wanted to come in and tell the brass that they were doing the right thing and they were always doing the wrong thing. It drove me nuts. I'd met my business partner, Bobby D'Antoni. He wanted to introduce me to Kelvin Coopridge here in Louisville. I went out and wrote a story on Kelvin Coopridge. About a year later, I had this idea of pinging around in my brain that could have a lot of fun if you kept your batches relatively small and you got Kelvin Coopers to be on board with you and just be a partner. They don't own the business, but they partner with us on pretty much everything we do. You could have so much fun and do so many unique things with American whiskey that people weren't doing at the time. Occasionally, people would put out a finished whiskey. It was usually their youngest stuff. It was usually their, I don't want to say bad, but kind of their harshest stuff, their harshest whiskey. Then they would cover it up by over finishing it in a sherry barrel. That was kind of the extent of most people's barrel finishing at the time. I called up Bobby one night and I said, Bobby, I want to start a business company. Do you think Kelvin would be interested? He said, I'll ask him. I said, Bobby, I need a business partner. Do you want to do this with me? I don't think I got the question on my mouth and he shut down his business and started doing this full time. He's been a fantastic partner for us. He does so much for this company. It's been a great partnership and we've had a lot of fun since then.

How was it sourcing barrels in the beginning?

We really leaned heavily on Calvin Cooper. They've been generations doing what they do. They know everybody in the business. They gave Bobby a name and one name. Bobby networked his way through that to everyone in the business. I think he knows everybody now. He was very fortunate. We had not collected a dime from our investors yet and he called me and said he had found some almost 12-year-old Kentucky bourbon. We went to that for our first batch and I had to pull the car over. I was on the interstate. I was going through Shelbyville. I had to pull the car over to talk to him about it on the phone.

The heart was pounded.

A little bit, a little bit. Yeah. So I think that night we called all our investors and said, we need those checks now. Let's go buy this whiskey. So we've been very fortunate. He's continued to network and he continues to find us great whiskey. And we have around, I want to say we have about 3,000 barrels right now.

Wow. That's a lot. So in the beginning, the first batch was how many barrels?

It was, I want to say it was, gosh, I forget now. I want to say 12, 12 barrels.

So that was the total barrels purchased and then you bottled?

No, I think we bought about 50 the first time. And then we chose about 12 or 14 of them, if I remember correctly.

So a little bit of Providence, also a little bit of knowledge and experience in the industry too, right?

Yeah, Bobby never worked in this industry directly. He had done some, he did cost controls and pricing. consulting for companies and he had worked with Kelvin Cooperage, but he had never really worked directly in the industry. He's just, uh, he's just one of these personalities who you meet Bobby, you're going to be his best buddy. And he's, he works so hard all the time, just countless hours every day doing this. And it just paid, it paid off.

Where did the name foregate come from?

We threw, you know, before we'd even gone out and asked anyone if they wanted to be a part of this, we threw a bunch of names in the hat. And the one thing we didn't want to do is name it after one of our kids. Cause you know, I don't want to call it Molly's reserve. And then someday have to sell the company or shut the company down and say, I can't get rid of my daughters. So, he threw four gate in a hat and I didn't know what it meant. I said, what's this four gate? He wanted to call it four gate fence. He said, that's a slang term for the four rail fence that's around all the horse farms in central Kentucky. If you're in the horse farm, in the horse industry, the thoroughbred industry, you usually call it a four gate fence. I said, oh, that's interesting. Let's drop the fence and call it four gate. He said, all right, let's do it.

That's pretty cool. That's a great story. I don't think I'd heard that until now. I'm not sure how I didn't hear that. Yeah, I knew it.

I knew what it was. But on your neck, I guess it would be your tack strip really, what would have been the tack strip. You can kind of see the four gate fence on there.

And it's behind the style and the label. It actually, there's a little watermark of it behind where it says whatever the style of the whiskey is. And if you turn, rotate the bottle, there should be one on the back of the exact same level as well. We're very, very particular about the labeling and the bottling. We want everything within a thousandth of an inch so that that lines up and everything looks great. We're kind of anal about that.

So you get it within a thousand inch. So it's done by machinery. Yeah. Okay. I was going to say, I can't imagine trying to do that by hand. Might be a lot of hand labeling.

We, uh, we use, we, we try to find, because we knew going into this that, that the way that we buy our whiskey and we blend our whiskey and when you, when you rebarrel it and refinish it, cost of fortune. We knew that we weren't going to be able to come out with this at 50 bucks or 100 bucks retail. We figured the packaging is a small part of the price of the bottle. We might as well go as high end as possible with that. We did. These labels, the moment that touches glass, they're pretty much permanent. There's no hand labeling going on.

Well, it's a stellar looking bottle. And, uh, I even liked the consistency between your two bottle designs. I hadn't noticed it until you said something about it, actually. Is that common to people? Yeah. They don't even realize it's happened until you bring it to their attention.

That's like the first thing I noticed going around. He brought the bottles and I was like, what's going on? He's got some home bottles here is what I was thinking. I was like, he's got some, these are all sample bottles. These guys. And I knew, we knew all about the glass issue for almost everybody out there. But I was like, well, some people, you can go to their house or you go to their shop and they'll have some sample bottles out that are different or, you know.

We have a few of those or some of them sitting around. You got bottles all over the place. Come on.

This place is a wreck. You know, you and Bob start the company, was that first push, was it difficult for you?

You know, There was a lot more work than I thought that went into it. And again, Bobby, the fact that he took the hit the ground running and doing this full time made this a lot smoother than it could have been or would have been. But I think we had a good reception just because at the time I did. At that point, podcasts were just becoming popular. YouTube had just started in the bourbon industry. Maybe not much at all. There weren't a whole lot of reviewers on YouTube. So it was still the blogs. And I knew all the bloggers at the time. I knew them all. We had shared samples. We'd talked many times. So I did share samples with all these folks beforehand, and they were ready for it. So we had a pretty good presence in social media on the Bourbon side when we came out. Since then, pretty much everything has moved to podcast and YouTube video type of stuff and Instagram, if you like the pictures, the photos, I guess.

It's pretty quick to get the word out, but your whiskey still needs to be something to talk about, right? And I don't think Four Gates had that problem since day one.

No, we again, we were very particular about what whiskey will use. If we don't like it before we barrel finish it, we will not put it in a bottle. We just won't. We'll let it age. We'll sell it, whatever we have to do. We don't want to. We're not trying to cover up a bad whiskey with a barrel finish. We're trying to give you great whiskey and just kind of round it out a little bit, give you a little extra flavors with it. So we try to never overfinish anything. We want you to taste the underlying whiskey first and then the hints of be it sherry or port or rum or something else that's on there as well.

So we're in the low twenties for batch numbers. You have obviously gotten into your groove. Have you noticed a significant pickup in the business and the adoption of your product across the market?

Yeah, I think what we really notice is our distributor, we work with Republic National for every state except Tennessee. We're Lippman Brothers in Tennessee. They really have pushed us to expand within their footprint. They're in, I think, 39 states. So, they've really kind of helped us, let us know what, you know, we need a new high-end bourbon to go into Texas or Louisiana or something along those lines. Can you guys fill that? So that's kind of where we see it is when the distributors come to us and say, we love your product. We want to take you here. That's just one of the biggest compliments we can get.

Oh, that is pretty cool. So in a batch, like how many, how many barrels are in this batch right here?

Um, that one is probably, uh, 10, I think it was somewhere around there. Cause we get around 140 bottles per barrel and there were about 1300, maybe 1200 in that. So maybe a little less than probably eight.

So does certain States get more than other States?

Yeah. So obviously Texas, I mean, I honestly think we could just sell them everything we make and they would probably just suck it in and sell it. You know, people in Texas love bourbon and there's a lot of people in Texas, a lot of big chains out there.

They can drink some whiskey in Texas. I know this big dude from Texas that can drink some, just a little bit of whiskey.

Yeah. So yeah, so they are, and this is really the first time these batches, I had to have notes out here because they are split between, some of them are very small batches, are small even for us. So we couldn't, it doesn't really do us any good to send 100 bottles to Indiana, as opposed to sending 40 cases to a different state. So some of these batches will go to certain states and some to others, and a couple of them go to all of our states, all eight. Well, yeah, eight.

Can we recap the states on batch 22 one more time?

Yep. It is Kentucky, Indiana, Louisiana, and Illinois.

Some lucky people out there in those states. 12, 1300 bottles, 1300 bottles across those states.

1130 bottles. You don't want to dilly-dally when it hits a shelf. That's right. It'll also be on sealbox.com, bourbonoutfitter.com, and then Caskers as well. Oh, cool. So if you're not in those states, you can still try to order it if you're allowed to ship alcohol to you. Cool. If they're allowed to ship alcohol to you. So there's bottles there. And they should be hitting, by the time this podcast goes live, these will have already been out on the websites. Cool. And hopefully in brick and mortar by then too.

So, Bill, what did you pour for us next? You got all these bottles on here.

Yeah. Well, we're going to go back to chronological order now. So, the last one was batch 22. This one's batch 21. It's called Port Perry Perry, and we named it after two gentlemen named Perry who were very instrumental to our company when we started. One of them was the very first name that My partner Bobby got from Kelvin that helped us navigate our way through this industry and into the industry. But this is an eight-year-old straight rye whiskey, and it's finished in Australian tawny port barrels. If you were familiar with our ruby rye springs that came out earlier, this was going to kind of hit in the same part of your palate, and that was an insanely popular batch for us. So I love this one. It's an eight-year-old Indiana rye finished in those tawny port barrels. This one comes, there's about 2,150 right around that 2,148 bottles of this one. And it came in at 112 proof. Cool. Always, always barrel proof.

We never had water, minimal filtering. You remember what I thought Tawny meant? Tawny, like Toddy. Oh, I thought it was like a dirty woman who's a Toddy.

Todry. Is it Todry? I think, no, I can't remember exactly how it's said. I think it's Todry.

Todry. Yeah. So this one's going to be in all the states, all the states that we're distributing. So that's Kentucky, Indiana, Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, Texas, Louisiana, Illinois, and then the online sites as well.

Wow. Cool. And those online sites service another 20 or so states probably, right? Or maybe more?

I think more. Between the two of them, I think it's over 40 total.

Wow. OK. So you can pretty much get this anywhere. Pretty close.

There's a couple of states where, there's a couple of big states, I think, where you can't. I get emails constantly through our website and social media asking about that.

This has got a candy, a little bit of a candy nose to it. Doesn't it? Well, I'm picking a more on this one than I did the last one.

I'm actually getting a little bit of like strawberry taffy on this.

You mean like I pulled taffy? Yeah. Yeah.

Maybe a little bit of that salt air for some reason, some salt air and maybe that's coming out of that tawny port barrel. very beautiful nose on it.

Now, what does a tawny port do differently to a whiskey finish than a ruby port would do?

A ruby port's a little bit sweeter and brighter in flavor and tawny port is a little bit more towards the dark red fruits. Just typically, I think now I'm not a, I'm not a port wine aficionado, but I think Ruby port tends to be on the less expensive end of the spectrum. And Tawny port is getting into probably the middle of the road.

Extra age ports, right? A little bit more, uh, less sugar, more savory. Yeah. Well, it's got definitely got a deep rich nose to it. It's, it is candy like though. And so I'm really looking forward to tasting it. Mike, did you already tip it up? Oh yeah.

All right. That's got that candied spice to it too. Um, a little sugar sweet with a kick for the spice that almost a black pepper bite on your tongue.

Yeah. Um, you know, we mentioned those little, um, those little root beer barrel candies. Yeah. Like a real spicy one of those. That's a great right whiskey. And it's not like anything I've had before. Very different.

Well, that's kind of what you want in a foregate whiskey, right? You want something. Is it nice to hear people talk about your whiskey like that and give you notes?

We want to give you something different. You know, there's one thing that Bobby and I said starting out is I don't want to just you know, go source whiskey, put it in a bottle and send it. I don't want that to be our business model. We'll do it when we find something we think is really good. Uh, but if I want to do that, I can just go buy someone else's whiskey and I can buy it a lot, a lot less expensively than my own.

Well, not speaking about foregating specifically, but let's talk about your palate and what you like. What really gets you excited out there when you try somebody else's whiskey?

I like spicy bourbons, so I like a high rye bourbon for the most part. I like barrel-proof. I don't want it to be overly tannic and overly aged, so I think the sweet spot, depending on where it's been aged, is anywhere from 7 to 12 to 14 years at most. It just kind of depends. But typically, I like a straight bourbon on the spicy side.

Awesome. And your partner?

He's a rye guy. Okay. Loves a rye.

So both of you like the spicy whiskeys. Awesome.

Now I appreciate a weeded whiskey or, you know, on the sweeter side as well, but typically I like the spice.

Well, this has got a great warming effect, Mike. It really sticks with you. I would definitely say this thing has a long finish.

Yeah. Wow. I mean, that's, If I drink a four gate whiskey and I didn't get all that, um, then I would probably be a little upset. I'd be like, man, I'd feel cheated almost because, uh, I think your, your consumers have come to expect the best out of a four gate whiskey. Um, I hope so. All of them want that same, you know, same, bam, this is something new. I haven't tasted before. Yeah.

And I'm sure it varies from market to market, but in general, for those listeners who don't have experience with Horgate, what can they expect to see as a price tag on these bottles?

They should retail around $199. Okay.

All right. So this is something that you definitely want to open up. You don't want to buy it and keep it because it's an amazing pour when you get it. You want to enjoy it, but I'm sure you've got your collectors out there.

There are, there are folks who like to have the, you know, every bottle we put out and we've got, we've got a number of them that come and see us a lot and have assigned bottles and all that fun stuff. But I, I'd make whiskey to drink. Yeah. And I drink it and it'll collect.

So I guess if you're going to collect, buy two, drink one. I agree. I agree totally.

Maybe two cases of each.

Hey, there you go. Well, it's kind of hard to, to point yourself a couple of cases, I would imagine, right? It depends. It depends.

I mean, if you find a retailer who's got it out there, not many people are going to say no to selling six bottles at once.

Yeah. So how often do the batches release? Is it on a cadence?

Uh, we were doing about every, about four a year, we were doing four to five a year and about every, you know, three to two and a half to three months between batches. But in this case, and what's happened to us a lot lately, as we, as we've expanded to additional States, our batches just aren't big enough. We don't have enough of these, some of these finished barrels and we still tend to buy a lot of small batches of whiskey. Um, so we have some smaller batches and we'll release several at once, just like in this case, all four of these will be released at the same time.

Do you spend a lot of time blending?

We know not really because we kind of know, um, We kind of know what we're going for. If we're, you know, we, we have lots of whiskey that we have blend blended together many times. And I, for some reason, my partner and I, he caught me saying Blint. So now I can't stop saying Blint. So we have Blint whiskey. Um, we've, we've done some of these batches so many times, we kind of know how it's, how it turns out. And if we want something spicy, we know from what we have, what can kind of make a good spicy whiskey.

So you can taste the barrels, take your notes and then from that put together a batch.

Pretty well. Yeah. In some ways. Yeah. It depends on what we're blending. If we're, if we have a new lot of whiskey, obviously there's a little more experimentation in that.

Yeah. Now do you do all your tasting at barrel proof? Yeah. So no. So a lot of, a lot of people, you know, when they do palette proofing of whiskey, tasting a whiskey, they'll, they'll proof it down in order to try and, you know, get it under the microscope.

Yeah.

But you've a custom yourself to drinking it full proof. So.

Yeah. I just, I just never drink whiskey with water. So I don't, I don't really blend that way.

All right. Well, we've, we've, we've talked about that before. He do drink it with water and some people won't use distilled water. They'll use just tap water. It could give your whiskey off putting taste too.

We're lucky here in Louisville. We have great water. The municipal water in Louisville is some of the best in the world, actually. Ours has very little iron, if any content, basically none in Louisville. Iron is really what is going to screw up the flavor of whiskey. It turns it darker and black over time. So if you happen to be lucky enough to live in Louisville and have Louisville Water Company water, you're pretty much okay unless you got really bad pipes going into your own house. And they even have, it's probably the only water company in the world that has a section about bourbon at the water company website. I don't know if you know that.

I didn't know that. That's pretty cool.

Did you read that, Mike? Yeah, I have a, somebody else was talking about that, about their ice and how ice is made from that and it won't tarnish your whiskey when you put it in it. So they're very, the Louisville Water Company is very proud of that.

I'm not, I'm not sure a lot of people put, put that together. You know, the, the fact that, you know, an ice cube is local water, right? I mean, so you've got to be kind of careful there.

Yeah. If you had a well at your house or something and you didn't have a good water table and you had a lot of iron in there, it could give your whiskey off putting taste. And people, people are like, Oh, that's a bad whiskey, but I, but I put ice cubes in it. Yeah. It might not be the whiskey. It might not, yeah.

You're always safest with distilled water. You can buy a lot of bottled water if it's not spring water. You never know with spring water, but a lot of bottled water is so filtered that it's good too. But yeah, if you want to be on the safe side, use distilled water. No question about it.

All right, Michael, that was a fantastic rye whiskey. I think for me, that was a little bit more on my profile. I liked that a lot. I think you liked them both. I could see it in your face.

Yeah, I liked that. You know, that candy taste to me, that sugar sweetness and stuff. That would be, if you're a weeded bourbon drinker, this would probably be more in your palette line. If I could compare it to a weeded bourbon, something like Makers Marks 46 Cast Strength that has that spice to it, these would pair right up against those because of that spice. But it still has that sugary sweetness that I'm looking for. Yeah, perfect whiskeys and stuff. Something to savor. I know a lot of people are probably saying, okay, this is way out of my price point. But if you were going to buy a whiskey, a really nice bottle of whiskey, this is something you want to buy right here.

Yeah, I think a bottle like that bottle of rye we just tried would be something that would last on my bar for a while because I would visit it. I'd visit it and I'd invite friends over and we would visit that bottle and it would tend to go down a little bit slower than others, I think, but only because it's got that special flavor profile. It's kind of unique. It's not something you get every day. I wouldn't pound it down, put it that way. I definitely enjoy it. Now, as a manufacturer or producer, you like to hear people making your bottles go empty. I killed a bottle last night.

Great. Great.

That just means they're going to buy another bottle to consume too. I, you know, some people that say, Hey, that's too expensive of a bottle for me. It's funny because some people go out there and try to spend four or $500 on a bottle of Blanton's. But they'll say this is too expensive. You know, you go chase those secondary bottles that are only 90 proof when they could get this right here and it's barrel proof. It's got that punch to it, right? Yep. So I'm going to tell you, you're going to get way more in a whiskey like this. and something you're buying at that secondary market, which Jim, you know, I'm not a big fan of. Yeah. You and me both. Yeah. Spend your money on something like this.

Especially if you like that 90 proof bourbon, just take one of ours, add about 30% of water to it every time. It'll last you a lot longer. It's like getting a bottle and a third every time.

Yeah.

I mean, that's a good point. All right. Well, we're up against a break. We're going to sit here and finish off what we've poured. And when we come back, we got a couple more whiskeys, maybe even three if we're lucky.

Maybe I have a little surprise for you here.

Awesome Man Jim, you know what? I've really been enjoying lately. Oh, you're gonna tell me some of that seldom seen farms maple syrup that's been aged in bourbon barrels. It is absolutely delicious. Not only in a cocktail, but you can cook with it, right?

You can. You absolutely can. Now Mike, Kevin just sent me a new shipment. So I got a little bit more and I've been making some beef jerky lately. Really? Yeah. Now I know you're the meat master, but I tried my hand at it. I said, you know, I want to make some beef jerky and I've got a pretty decent beef jerky recipe and it's got a little bit of soy sauce, a little bit of Worcestershire, a little bit of, you know, onion powder, garlic powder, those kinds of things. But I always put brown sugar in it. Well, this time Kevin sent me a bottle of his granulated maple sugar. Wow. And I decided that I was going to substitute the maple sugar for the brown sugar. Oh, game changer. Let me tell you. Total game changer. Total game changer. Some of the best beef jerky you've ever had. So I'm going to make another batch here in about a week and I'll be sure to get you some.

Man, that sounds delicious. Vivian took and we just got an air fryer like most people got these days, right? And she took and soaked fresh pineapple in that maple syrup and then put it in the air fryer and it kind of crisp up a little bit. Sounds good. It was just magically delicious. And people probably wonder why we love it so much. Kevin competed in the Maple Festival last year, 2021, and he was named grand champion. That's saying something.

So Statham Seam Farms. grand champion of the 2021 Maple Syrup Festival.

Yeah. Wow. That's saying something. Yeah. You're going up against some heavy hitters in Maple Syrup. And I know we're talking about just the syrup, but that's something to be proud of. Hats off to you, Kevin, for winning that. Kevin's also competing in a couple of other competitions. Make sure you check out his website. Check out his social media on Instagram and Facebook. You won't be disappointed. If you want to buy something, from him. Where can they go, Jim?

You can go to seldomseenmaple.com and Kevin and his crew, they've got a great website, very easy to navigate. They've got all their products on there. You can buy their maple syrup by the bottle. You can buy it by the case. You can buy that sugar. Oh my goodness, Mike, that stuff is so good. And they've got some other gift sets there too, so you definitely want to check it out.

Well, he's also going to be in some distilleries pretty shortly here. Some distilleries that I love and I know you love. He's going to be down Leapers Fork. You could find a syrup down there aged in their barrels. Trudy Oak down in Dripping Springs, Texas. I was just out there. His syrup's going to be there. Awesome. And at Garrison Brothers in Texas, if you think you love some maple syrup, make sure you go to Garrison Brothers and pick up a bottle from them also. Kevin appreciated. I know he loves people. You're supporting a local farmer, a local product, a small family. This is no factory place that's putting out maple syrup, right Jim? This is a good man doing good work. Yeah. Gotta love it. Well, make sure you check out his site. Like Jim said, seldom seen maple.com. Pick up a lot. Alright listeners, we're back. We're still here at Fourgate Whiskey Company with Mr. Bill Straub. He's filled our glass up with something new here. Pretty excited about it. Bill, what's in this glass?

We're moving on to batch 23. This is called Barossa Creek. You may have seen us do recently a couple of different times. We call it a bri-b-r-r-y-e, so it's our blend of bourbon and rye. This is a blend of six- and seven-year-old Kentucky straight bourbon and an eight-year-old Indiana straight rye. They're all high rye recipes, so both of the six and seven years are 21% rye, and then it's 95.5 Indiana rye for the other portion. And then these are finished in Australian tawny pork casks, very similar to our pork peri-peri, although this one is a rye instead of a rye.

So brie. Yeah, so I guess boo rye was already taken.

Trademarked. Yeah, we could use it.

Trademarked, yeah. But that, you know, it's not unique. I mean, it's being done a little bit here and there now. People are finding the benefit of marrying those two whiskies together.

You know, the reason we did it the first time, a little secret. We were trying to make a very spicy whiskey for our batch 17, the split state by Kelvin. We were using French oak casks for it already. And I was doing that because as I mentioned, I love spicy whiskey. So I was trying to make the spiciest whiskey that I could basically. And we really didn't have enough bourbon barrels at the time. Bobby suggested we try a burai. And we started blending around and figuring out the percentages. And we found something we really liked. And it was so well received, we did it again. And now this is our third iteration of it. And we'll probably take a break from them for a while, just because I feel like we don't want to inundate people with the same blend over and over. But yeah, this one's fun. If you like spices, this one has it.

Now this one's up in a proof a little bit too. It's 121.3. 121.3. Yeah. So it's going to have a little kick to it. Now why Barossa Creek?

You have to ask Bobby on this one. He named it. And I think Barossa Creek, I don't want, I don't want to say, I think it has something to do with the region from Australia, where these came from. I'll have to ask Bobby for, to be sure on that.

So another Tony Port finished very spicy whiskey. And the nose is very creamy, caramelly kind of... You're going to get a lot.

This is very different flavor-wise than the Port Peri Peri, just because the bourbon notes on this really bring out that kind of caramel vanilla that you don't get at all in the Port Peri Peri. Yeah.

Vanilla cream, caramel, a little bit of butterscotch.

As a matter of fact, despite the fact that we just tasted two Tawny Port finishes in a row, these really have nothing in common on the palette.

You getting any fruit notes there, Mike?

No, I'm actually getting this Heath candy bar from this.

I've heard chocolate and caramel before on this. Things a little butterscotchish. Yeah.

I want you to taste it. Cheers.

There should be some fruit notes on the palette on the back end of it. Some people have mistaken this for a rum finish.

Oh my goodness. That is a flavor explosion.

We really do like this blend. This is really, really good. We really like this bri blended and we'll use it again. Uh, but we're going to take a little bit of a break for a few batches before we do.

Oh my goodness. I've never had anything like that. That's pretty good. Yeah. Yeah. That's a, that's winter, winter chicken dinner right there.

So this one's 121 proof and there were, uh, 1,280 bottles of it, just under 1,300. And then this one's going to be distributed in Kentucky, Georgia, Tennessee, Florida, Texas, and Louisiana, and then online.

OK. Well, folks, they're all good. But this one's a little extra special. Of course, we haven't had the others yet. So there's still more in front of us. But wow. We're not done yet. This is pretty impressive.

Very complex whiskey, layer after layer after layer on this. You just keep going and you probably have a book full of tasting notes on this if you really wanted to.

We could. Yeah, I have them. And in fact, I've got some sheets here because I have to refer to them to figure out what states are all distributed in because they're all different. But I always put tasting notes on the sheets because they help the distributors sell the bottles. Essentially, they have to go to store owners who can't always drop what they're doing to taste whiskey. to decide what to buy. But I hate giving tasting notes to consumers. I'd rather you taste it and tell me what you taste. I hate because when someone gives me a tasting note, immediately when I try something, that's where I go in my head. And if I taste it with them not telling me, I have my own opinions and my own ideas. But I will on request. I just tend to prefer not to. So they're on our website. Anything we're allowed to legally put about the whiskey, we put on the website.

So this is the third time that you've made a bourbon rye combination batch. Were they all Tawny finished?

No, the first one was a split stave. So it was a, we have, Calvin makes these barrels exclusively for us where they make a series of toasted barrels, a series of charred and they break them down before use and they put them back together and it alternates between toasted and charred staves. Looks like a zebra inside it. So the first one was, was just pure French. That was French oak as opposed to American oak. So it was just a, a brie whiskey and that still qualifies as a straight whiskey cause it's new oak. So no, this is the only Tawny Port finish we've done.

Oh. Yeah, this is phenomenal. I don't know that I've had one of the... Yeah, I probably did. Did you have the others here during your... Was that a New Year's Eve?

We did Christmas party.

Christmas party, yeah. You did have those out?

Yeah, I think we did, yeah, because that's our Christmas batch. It's the red label.

I was having a good time that night. I don't remember the whiskey too much, but it's good people, good fun.

Our last one was, the other one that we did was our Kelvin Collaboration 4 this year, which is kind of our signature line. And that was the brie blend finished in Oloroso sherry and dark rum casks. So, dual finish.

So, can we, one more time, can we recap the stats on this, the components that go into it?

It's a six and seven-year-old Kentucky straight bourbon and an eight-year-old Indiana rye. And that's 75% corn, 21% rye, 4% malted barley on the bourbon, and then 95.5% on the rye. 121 proof, 121.3 to be exact, 1,280 bottles.

How long did it sit in the Tawny Port barrels?

We try to keep everything between 30 and 50 days. We don't want to overpower the whiskey.

Okay. So just a light finish on those barrels.

We try to always do light finishes. A few of them, we've got some coming up, we've let go a little longer. In fact, I think the Port Perry Perry went a little longer because I just wanted to really pop that Tawny Port.

Yeah. I mean the depth of flavor on this is just tremendous. It's really good. This was number 23. Yeah. Make a note folks.

And that is Kentucky, Georgia, Tennessee, Florida, Texas, Louisiana, and then go to sealbox.com, bourbonoutfitter.com and caskers.com.

Awesome.

Let's see if you can grab that one.

Your glasses are pretty nice too. I noticed the engraving on there is super deep.

That's, uh, I think sterling cut glass does those form a deep etch is where you got to go on these. You can do the sandblasting and they look great for a little while. They're not as, uh, they're not as pronounced, but they'll wash off if you use the, put them in a dishwasher.

So do these, do these break easier because of that? I've never broken a gland in my entire life.

Wow. Mike, you break them all the time. Well, you take enough photos, you're going to break glass or two.

Somehow I say that, and you know, I'm going to break 10 of them in the next month, but I've never actually broken a Glencairn of any kind.

Well, cheers to starting to cut glass. I think that that's a fine, um, has got a really deep profile and you can buy these on your guys's website.

No, we don't sell any merchandise on the website. Well, you can buy shirts and hats and stuff through the website, but that's a kind of a print order type thing. OK. We don't carry any. We don't want to mess with taxes and sales taxes and all that stuff on things like that. But we do order them in bulk, and we tend to give them away pretty often. As a matter of fact, we could probably do that today, send out one of these deep edge glasses.

Yeah, they're super nice. I mean, I'd like them.

And you guys are welcome to keep one.

Oh, well, thank you very much. I'll take you up on that. I wish we had some of ours with us. I'd return the favor. Not a problem.

I might, we might have to go to this glass gym. I mean, I like that. That's super nice. Not that it makes the whiskey taste any different.

I mean, um, there's just something about holding a glass that you really like with a good whiskey inside it. You know, I like to have something with a little heft, which is why I like the Glen Karen over some other ones. Cause that the base gives you a little weight to it.

I wish that they'd make a, just a giant Glen Karen for me.

Um, and those Canadian ones, but they're not quite the same.

Yeah. Yeah. I need a bigger glass sometimes, but that's what rock glasses are for.

Yeah. I like it. I like a rocks glass with a big heavy base on it. Yeah. I want to feel that heft.

So let's talk a little bit about the future of Fourgate and what's coming down the pike. You guys are obviously on batch 24 now, which we'll try here in a few minutes, but 24 batches since 2019. Man, that's quite a record.

They tend to be small, but we are growing. We are virtually doubling in size every year, pretty much. We've got a lot of neat stuff coming down the pipe. As we expand into these different states, one thing that our distributor has asked for is they call it a consistent SKU, which is that barcode on the back. It's hard to go, you have to resell yourself from scratch every time you go into a new state because your batches are always different. They can't have tasted your back batches and know what's coming forward. So, we took kind of a look at our portfolio to see what can we do that is kind of able to be replicated pretty consistently. We've secured a lot of barrels of about seven-year-old Kentucky straight bourbon. It's really good whiskey from Heritage Distillery. And we can obviously have Calvin Cooper's make those split stave barrels. pretty much whenever we need them, as long as they have capacity. So, we're going to have a slightly lower price in the $175 range, I think. We'll have a split-stave bourbon available year-round. And we'll probably follow that up within about six months with a split-stave rye. And then we also have a line on some Oloroso sherry rum casks. So, we may do for a year or two an available year-round. We had one called Andalusia key. a while back, it'll be real similar to that. It'll be available kind of year round. And those are really just, it gives us a flagship as we expand and go into new geographical areas to have something we can take to them every time.

Do you think there's ever a day where you'll maybe contract to still some liquid and

I would say yes. We have talked to a couple of folks. There's a backlog on that right now. So, we're kind of on a list, hopefully for 2025. But we did just buy about 2,000 barrels ranging from two years to seven years old. So, we have a – again, we have about 3,000 barrels and we don't use anywhere close to that in a given year. So, we're pretty well set up for the next five or six years, even with growth.

So, having 3,000 barrels is just like having a really good bank account.

Looks good on a balance sheet. It really does. Yeah. We've been very fortunate. Again, Bobby worked, worked, works really hard at that. And he secured these from a, one of the big distilleries. Everyone knows them and everyone likes them, I think, I hope. But it's really good whiskey.

Now, most of the time, where the whiskey is sourced from specifically, you keep that to yourselves.

We have non-disclosure agreements with pretty much everyone except the Indiana distillery, obviously is MGP. Everyone knows that and they didn't, they've never made a sign in India.

Yeah. So do you think there'll be any wheat, weeded finished bourbons coming out?

Um, I, you know, I've always said that I would really love to get a wheat whiskey and a weeded finished bourbon just to have one and have a nice soft sherry finish or something on that. But as, as it stands, because of the popularity of certain labels that we all know that are weeded, um, you just can't find it. You just can't find it. So we don't have any, um, I would like, I would like to, if I, if I, if Bobby can ever run across any, if I ever run across any, we'll probably jump on it, but. Whiskey is getting insanely expensive these days, too, by the barrel.

Sure. We as consumers know that. Certainly, those who are sourcing barrels know it as well. But, you know, weeded bourbons can find themselves in the spicy category, and surprisingly so. Do you have any background on that, why you think that is?

A lot of it's the barrel. Most of the flavor is coming from the barrel anyway. So it depends on how the barrel has been prepared. If it's a heavier char, you're going to get a little bit more spice out of it. If they toast it before they char it, you're going to get a lot of that toasted marshmallow, which can have a spicy cinnamon characteristic to it, too. And Kelvin Cooperidge always does that as a rule. They toast and then char. So a lot of folks use Kelvin. They're not the biggest. Cooperage out there, so they're not going to be able to supply these huge brands or white label Jim Beam, for example. But there's a lot of folks that use some of the barrels here and there or some of their smaller runs. And you can definitely taste a difference.

And they're true craftsmen. I mean, they're really craftsmen. The guys who are making the barrels know a lot more about whiskey than you might think.

They are phenomenal. We run pretty much everything we do past them. want their input on it. They've been doing this for generations and nobody knows more what a barrel does to whiskey than the guys who have been supplying and the ladies who've been supplying these barrels for 70 years plus. They're just phenomenal. They'll tell you a couple of times we've gone to them with an idea and they just say, no, it doesn't work. It's been tried before. Don't do it.

Yeah. I mean, there's, there's two industries, I think in particular that, that just have this huge cache of information on whiskey making. And one of them is obviously the Cooperages and the other is like Vindome. You know, they know so much about making whiskey yet they don't make whiskey themselves. Just amazing.

Well, they're a big part of it, though, you know, a steel and a barrel without those two things.

It's it's really interesting when you see people in both those companies are great. Both those, you know, Kelvin and and Vendome are great examples because they want they want to taste the afterproduct as well, because they want to they can tell like Vendome and tell you, well, if you're getting this, it means that this is set incorrectly on your still or you're doing this at the wrong time or the wrong temperature. They've been doing it for so long. They want that knowledge. They want to be involved. before and after so they know if they're doing their job right. Sure. And that type of relationship is just invaluable. If you take advantage of it with your Cooperage, if you're in a situation like us, I just urge you take advantage of their knowledge. Whichever Cooperage you're working with, I guarantee you they know all about it.

And they're probably happy to help.

Our – Kelvin has been thrilled to work with us, I think, I hope. Phenomenal – can't speak highly enough of them, but they love to be able to share their knowledge. I mean, that's – they have a passion for it. They really do. They love what they do and they're great at it. So – and you can't be that successful at something like that for two generations plus unless you have a passion for it.

Sure, sure. So you just poured us another glass, Bill. This bottle right here, before we, it's some dark whiskey right here. That is some dark whiskey. That's like chocolate in a glass.

This is – so I love this one because this one's right up my alley. Now, this is another Indiana bourbon barrel finish. Surprisingly, we really don't use that much Indiana stuff. It's just the last few batches have had a lot of it in it because they're really hitting my palate right now, I think, and Bobby's too. So, this is a high rye bourbon whiskey. So, this is the higher recipe from our friends in Indiana. So, it's 60% corn, 36% rye, and then 4% malted barley. So, it's six and a half years old, roughly, maybe a little bit older than that by the time we actually got it out of the barrel. And we aged it in Australia in a parish area casks. And that's kind of their version of Oloroso. It's the Australian version of Oloroso. They wanted their own name for it. Comes off a little bit sweeter than Oloroso from Europe would generally taste.

So 36% rye. This is the high-ray match bill for MoonGP. That's a substantial amount of rye.

It is. It's 116.6 proof. So this one's got a little bit of heat to it. Of course, anytime you finish something in a sherry barrel, it's going to, it's going to sweeten it up and take, add a little nuttiness to it. But it takes a little bit of the edge off too.

A little bit of butter on that nose, buttery nuts. Really?

Yeah. I'm getting a little bit of a floral notes on this one, like deep red floral notes, like roses and stuff. I do a little burnt toffee on this.

Yeah. I think that's the toffee note is that buttery toffee kind of.

2178 bottles of this one. So this went to, I think all the states, Kentucky, Florida, Texas, Indiana, Louisiana, Illinois, and Tennessee, and then online.

Now it says bourbon down under. Yep. What's up with that?

Well, the Down Under, we had a ride down under earlier this year and they're Australian casks. So that's where the Down Under came from. And then Bobby, he's kind of the label whisperer, I think, on a batch name. So he wanted to do the under upside down.

Now, are the Australians getting any of this?

Hell no. Why not? Because we're not, we don't export.

I know a couple Australians that would love to get a bottle of this though.

Yeah, I think they're going to need to come visit. They're going to have to come visit. Yeah. James out there, buddy.

You're just going to have to come visit us.

We appreciate you sending the sherry can.

You're going to have to come here to drink it. His suitcase might already be full. He's going to have to ship back a shipping container full of whiskey for himself.

Well, we have had several of them, our Tawny Portcaster Australian as well, and so are these, a pair of Sherry. We found a, through Kelvin, there's a place out in Australia, obviously, that has tons of these barrels to export, and we brought in, I think, a shipping container full of them. We love them. Love them. So we've used them a lot. We use them in conjunction with dark rum barrels as well, and played around. We had our Bluegrass Trilogy use these and rum barrel, and we blended all three together at one point.

Wow. This is, uh, this is pretty good. This is, uh, like, like a dark plum, but a chocolatey dark plum little bit. You getting chocolate on it, Mike? I just knew you were going to say stewed fruits. I was going to say stewed fruits, but I've been, I've been holding off on that just a little bit.

Yeah, I do get that jerk dark chocolate, more of a baker's chocolate to, uh, Kind of the unsweetened. Not bittery, but it's not super sweet stuff. You know, you get those big bricks and I remember when I was a little kid, I was like, found that chocolate in my mom's cupboard. And I was like, I'm going to eat some of that. And I bit into it and I was like, what is this? This is horrible. It's like kids worst candy bar out there.

Yeah.

What's the proof on this again? It's a 116.6, almost 117.

Yeah, this is a great, I would say more like an after-dinner whiskey, maybe.

This would go really good with a cigar, I think. If you're a cigar smoker and you enjoy that, I think this would pair good with that after dinner. Like Jim's saying, you go out on your back porch on a fall day after dinner, hanging with the buds. Or if you went and did a round of golf, this would be perfect for that right there.

Yep. Oh, the note I was trying to come up with is Aperol. It's got a little bit of an Aperol note to it. That's interesting. Black Manhattan. This will go great at Black Manhattan.

There you go.

That's an expensive Manhattan.

That's an expensive Manhattan. A lot of people make cocktails out of our stuff. We won't be doing that. There's a few.

Hey, you're whiskey your way, you're bourbon your way, you drink it how you want. If you got bottles of this, I'm sure Bill don't care how you drink it.

You buy it, you drink it how you want to.

You know, if you live in West Virginia and you drink it with Mountain Dew.

Please don't send me a picture of that. That's all I ask. Drink it how you like to.

You heard him here. Send him a picture today. Hashtag foregate whiskey with your Mountain Dew and your whiskey. I mean, what if they had 10 bottles of it?

You're killing me. Killing me.

Yeah. You know, you hear the other guys all say, Hey, you drink it how you want to drink. That's right.

Tubing down the river with your bottle of foregate. Yeah. See it now.

Go for it. Just begin to know about it.

Yeah, this is a phenomenal whiskey as well. And again, they're all so very different from each other, but they're at the same time different from anything else out there that you can get. So if you're looking for an experience, if your whiskey journey is about trying things that you haven't had on your palate before, Okay. It's got the ticket.

Yeah. The finish on this right here, it just sitting on my palate. The sweetness right there, that chocolate, it is like I ate one of a candy bar with that soft caramel inside of it. You know, it's kind of oozed out and stuff, but it, it just, the texture on it is amazing.

I get a long, if it was wine, you would kind of call it the tannic finish where it kind of says prickle on your tongue. I get that. And I've always attributed it to the high rye mashbill. Every time I've had that in any format, I get that long.

We call that pop rocks, don't we?

Yeah, it's similar to pop rocks. That's a good way to say it.

Yeah, those Pop Rocks are hard to find. They're allocated these days. And Neko's are hard to find too, but you found me some. I did find you some Neko candies the other day. I saw them and I was like, I got to buy those.

We got to quit with these tasting notes of candies that you can't hardly find, right?

It shows our age, I think. The blantons of candy these days.

That's a wonderful, wonderful whiskey.

I guess I should have mentioned we're talking about what we have coming out in the future. Our second round of single barrels will be coming out here in the next month or so. So we have a lot of those. I think there are 40 barrels this year. We had 20 last year.

So how long do the stocks last for that stuff? It's pretty quick to go?

Well, I couldn't tell you. I couldn't tell you how quick they leave stores. I know that they tend to sell out. But we didn't have any trouble selling the barrels. That's all I know. And all of ours, we do 30 days in a toasted cask.

after we, uh, so that adds a significant level of sweetness to it.

Little kind of, uh, uh, roasted marshmallow, creme brulee and stuff like that. Yeah.

Yeah.

Wow.

We thought about doing just straight, straight whiskey. And then we kind of decided that wasn't us. Uh, we wanted it to represent us as a, as a company a little better on the single barrel programs.

The last sip of this right here was it had a saltiness to it, like salted caramel. Like it, it just, I said, you could come out note after note after note with this right here. It just, it really opened up in a glass. It seemed like it.

Yeah. Yeah. Great whiskey. Now you poured something for us that, um, we're just going to call the bonus.

Yeah. So this one, this one is kind of special to us. We bought three barrels of this and it yielded under 120 bottles total. It's 14 years old. This is an Indiana foundation. We already had the 10 year one. This is a 14 year one. So, we have less than – around 100 maybe total to sell. So, they're all going to be released in one day, one place, I think. For the most part, there might be a case or two on one of the online places. But it's a 14-year Indiana bourbon, straight bourbon. It's 144 proof. I've never seen one that high before. It is just a phenomenal whiskey. Insanely expensive. The barrels were crazy expensive and then the yield levels were so low. We didn't really have any choice of what else to do with it. We just had to put them in bottles.

Now, this is a little bit outside that age range. It's your target range, but you're stepping out of the box once in a while to create something.

If you have to taste it, you can't just reject it because it's 14 years old or 15 or 16. Sometimes there's phenomenal barrels of that. In this case, these were great barrels. When we tasted it, we loved it. We wanted to put it out there for you.

Very unique nose on this. Yeah.

And this one will retail significantly higher just because of the very low yields around 450, I think. for this one. This is really for the collectors.

So do they need to watch your website? Do they need to watch your Instagram? How do they know?

Follow us on social media, 4Gate. And then we have a Facebook group of 4Gate Whiskey company community, I think it's called, or 4Gate Whiskey community. That's the first place I'll announce the time and place.

Wow. So how big is that group?

Is it huge? No, it's probably, I want to say there's 400 people in it. Okay. All right. So it's free to join, except be on Facebook. Join it.

I'm one of those guys. I'll watch you. It seems like, you know, in a whiskey game, especially if you're in a social media game, podcaster, blogger, or if you're a writer, you almost have to belong to every group to kind of... You don't want to miss something. You don't want to miss something, but man, sometimes it can be super overwhelming.

It can. There's just a million, you know, you'll have a million cross posts, I guess you would call it, where there's the same information in six different places and 18 people post the same thing in the same site.

Yeah, it's because all your whiskey companies, you know, a lot of people don't know this, but like Jim and I, we both get emails from, let's say, you guys or from Jim Beam or any whiskey company out there, but they, everybody gets the same email and then everybody kind of floods the market with it and stuff. And I'm, I'm sure some listeners and some consumers out there are like, Hey, it just seems overwhelming and stuff. And you know, it's just part of the business. It is part of business. Some days we, we don't release that stuff all the time. Cause everybody else is releasing it. Or we don't review stuff when everybody else is reviewing. We might wait a little bit and Um, or sometimes we're the first. It's nice to be the first sometimes.

Yeah. It all depends on the situation. We're, we're kind of careful about what we do. 144.3 proof. It's hazmat hazmat. Does that add any complexity to the whole distribution of it or anything, or is that just a fable?

No, it's really a fable. I mean, no one flies these things anyway. They all go on trucks. It's not a big deal. And in our case, we're not really distributing it. It's going basically to... There'll be, just because Kentucky ABC doesn't love you to sell everything at one location, when it's spread, there'll be a couple cases are going to go to online places. There will be probably two or three other cases spread around other places. That's it.

Will this be at both Justins or just the little? Just the little.

They might send some to the other Justins. That's up to them.

That's good that this thing's only released in Kentucky. I'm going to tell you what, it's got a little bit of a Kentucky wildcat in the glass.

What's funny because it was distilled in Indiana, but it's a little bit of bite to it. It's got a little bite to it. This is a, you know, back in the day you used to be able to get some of the limited release stuff from other companies that was old and very high proof hazmat. And it has this, when you get up in that level, it has this ability when it hits your tongue, it feels like it's just evaporating. And I love that. Absolutely love it.

And this has that as the first thing we've ever, I probably would have called this cat scratch fever.

I mean, it's amazing though when you nose this that the ethanol is not overwhelming on your nose. I mean, hardly at all.

Well, that bottle's half empty or maybe a little more than half. So it's had some time to open up and air out a little bit too. But it does have that quality where it hits your palate and you can just feel the ethanol kind of leave and evaporate. And it just leaves you with the concentrated sweetness of the whiskey that spent 14 years in those barrels. Those barrels were on their last leg too when you got them.

Otherwise, this would have been a terrible barrel. Little, little bit. Yeah. It's like, uh, some cherry soaked in everclear kind of, I don't know about that. I was not a big everclear fan, but I'm trying to, I'm trying to think of how do you, how do you talk about a cherry that smoke cherry cobbler is what I was thinking.

I love this bottle. I wish I only have one. Well, I have one and a half, but I'm going to buy, buy a case of it. I think when it's released, we did ask them to hold a case for each of us.

Yeah, it's, it's amazing that, uh, at that proof and at that age that the cherry note has survived. That's really something.

It's really good. Yeah. What a, what a great whiskey. All these whiskies have been amazing bill. Um, I just, I can't, I can't say enough about every one of them and stuff. We drank a little bit of whiskey on the show today.

Yeah, we did. We did. And you know, there's nothing better than hanging out and drinking whiskey with a fellow like yourself. We've had a great time today. We've really enjoyed. Your whiskies, we've really enjoyed this peek into four gate and the whole story of four gate. And I think Mike and are both extremely excited to see what comes down the road for you guys. What's next? I definitely think I need to join that group and get the announcements as things happen because I kind of want to be there at Justin's when that releases.

Bobby and I will be there for a good chunk of the day. If you want to come by a bottle, we'll sign it for you. If you want to kill all the value, we'll sign it. Well, I'll drink it.

I'll drink it. But it's nice to have a signed bottle. I appreciate it.

I mean, I got to say, Bill has been very nice to the Bourbon Road. You've always invited us to all your events, which I can't. We're very grateful. The last event you guys had, a big event, was at the Watch Yo Proper.

Yep, yep, yep.

We got to invite that.

Jim, you weren't able to go to that one. No, I wasn't able to.

Next time. We went to the Christmas party, right? Yep, I did.

Yeah. That was our three year anniversary from our first batch, I think.

What a great event it was.

That was fun. That, that watch your proper is a fantastic location. Really is.

Yeah, folks, you know, we're not sponsored by watch your proper, but I tell you, if you're coming to Louisville, Kentucky, um, it's right, really right outside of Louisville in the Norton commons area.

It's in the city limits, but it's Northeast well, well out on the, on the Northeast end of town.

take an Uber, take a ride out there. Uh, probably one of the swankiest whiskey bars in Kentucky. They got a good chef, right?

They have a great chef. Uh, food's fantastic. The staff is as knowledgeable as you'll find anywhere. Um, they're helpful. They're there. If you don't know what you want, trust me, they'll, they'll help you find something. They got every whiskey there is. And it's, I think it's three, two and a half stories of whiskey wall. I mean, I pity whoever has to go up on that ladder.

Well, the guys our size don't go up on that ladder.

If I'm anywhere near it.

The thing about it is, is they only have American whiskeys there. There's nothing else. There's no Scotch. There's no, uh, it's all American wines from what I understand. I believe so.

Yeah.

Yeah. Uh, which is to me is pretty amazing. They're sticking to that.

They may have some scotches for the, by the poor, but they're not part of the big whiskey wall. I think I saw him a call McAllen there or something. I might be wrong with that. They probably said that and I'm going to get a call from them saying, we don't have any of that crap.

It's not there. We don't have it.

But no, it's a, it's a, if they don't have it, it probably hasn't been made.

Well, Bill, we're, we're, can our listeners find you guys on like social media? You named off a couple of places.

Yeah, we're on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, um, I guess that's it. I don't really think there's a whole lot else out there.

You have a website.

We do have a website, forgatewiskey.com. You can email me at Bill at forgatewiskey.com, but please don't ask me if I know where you can find a bottle of batch three or something like that.

I don't. Like Bill said, you could go on Facebook, join their foregate whiskey company community. 365 members strong. Join us today. I'm sure you got a couple of rules in there.

Yeah, it's just, you know, don't spam us with outside business stuff and don't buy or sell bottles, please.

Don't, don't sell bottles on there.

Yeah. It's not, it's not a trading and buying site. Take it offline if you're going to do something like that.

Well, Bill, you said something about doing a giveaway a little bit earlier. I'm sure you perked some ears up. They're like, well, he's about to say it right now.

Um, but what do you got from one of these finely etched, uh, four gate whiskey company, uh, uh, Glen Karen's, um, we've got some, uh, collectors, collectors, coins. I'll send one or two of those. Um, And I think we got some bar mats that we just got in, so I'll send one of those out too.

Oh, that's cool. That's cool. Some lucky listener out there, what you got to do the day of this release on Wednesday in the morning until nine o'clock at night, like we always do. You got to be 21. You got to reside in the United States. I'm sure Bill don't want to pay for shipping.

Please don't make me ship something to Germany.

Germany or something like that. But you got to reside in the United States. You got to obviously follow Four Gate Whiskey. Follow us. And then in the comments below, tag three people and hashtag Four Gates Whiskey to win that. I'll pick the winner at nine o'clock that night. Not 10. Not 10 o'clock. You know, us old guys, we got to get in bed.

What time zone are we talking about here? Eastern. Eastern time zone, right?

Yeah.

I got to get in bed early. That's right.

Real early. So yeah. So you West Coast people, you need to be getting your comments in by 6 p.m. Just do it first thing in the morning when it comes out, and we'll be done. Yeah, you don't have to be first on the list. The last person on the list could win just as easy as the first person. That's right.

Well, we've had the last person win before. It's all the randomizer. It just depends on enter a thousand times, tag a thousand people. We don't care. We want more people to buy foregate whiskey. This is what this giveaway is all about. We want to introduce you to this brand right here. Bill, man, we can't thank you enough for being on the Bourbon Road, obviously sharing whiskey with us, because Jim and I love a little bit of whiskey.

A little bit.

Just a little bit. Yeah.

Yeah, so this has been a nice edition, a nice high-proof Sunday edition for us. I know this episode comes out on Wednesdays, but we are drinking whiskey on Sunday today. It's been a whiskey weekend, Jim. It has been a whiskey weekend. We appreciate you inviting us into your company here. We appreciate you sharing your whiskey with us. We feel already like you're a good friend and we look forward to many opportunities to sit down and share more with you in the future.

Thank you guys so much for having me on. It's been a blast.

The only thing I regret Bill is that we didn't get you to pick up guitar.

No, you don't regret that. Trust me. It gets you to sing in. You would regret it if I sang and you would definitely regret it if I tried to play guitar. Oh man. Oh man.

All right, Michael, where can people find us on the internet? We're all over the place. You can find us on YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook. Our main place is our private Facebook group, The Bourbon Roadies. You can go in there and join. You got to be 21 to join. You got to love bourbon. Hell, who doesn't like bourbon? and you gotta agree to play nice. Whether you drink from the very bottom of the shelf, some old tin high or very top of the shelf like Jim likes to drink, some old George T. Staggers, some Fort Gate whiskey. Yeah, there you go. Yeah. Seriously, come in there and enjoy yourself. Feel No pain in there. Nobody's going to hassle you. You want to celebrate life. You want to celebrate a birthday, celebrate anything you want. Hell, Jim, somebody in there the other day posted a bottle of 10 high and some old crow. Well, good for them.

Yeah. Good for them. I was probably Ritter. No, no.

Come on now. He ain't posting none of that stuff.

I'm glad to hear that, you know, in the words of Planet Fitness, it's a no judgment zone. So you can come into the bourbon roadies and you can drink and share knowledge of the whiskeys that you particularly like. And if it's from the bottom of the shelf. Maybe that's what you can afford. You know, people need to just leave you alone.

I do have one request that if it's Fourgate and Mountain Dew, don't put a picture on there. If you do, don't tag us.

Well, Jim, how many shows we got a week? Well, we got two shows every single week. Every Monday we do a craft distillery episode where we highlight a single expression from a craft distillery that's, uh, doing it right, stepping outside the box. We like to shine a little bit of light on them. Uh, we'll let you know once a week when we're drinking that, whether it's something you should add to your bar or not. Now that's just Mike and I, right? We're just, we know what we like and, uh, we're sharing our opinion on it. Um, every Wednesday, every Wednesday, we do a full-length episode like today with foregate, uh, where we'll go into a little bit deeper on the subject. We'll have several expressions on the show. We'll break it up into two halves. We'll get you to work. We'll get you home. We hope you listen to both episodes every single week, and Mike, what can they do to make sure they don't miss a single episode of The Bergen Road?

So listeners, what you want to do is you want to scroll up to the top of that app, hit that check sign, that plus sign, that subscribe sign, whatever your app has. Once you do that, that app's going to tell you, hey, these two jokers got a show that comes out today and you need to listen to it. Then you know what I'm about to say, scroll on down, hit that five star review, those comments. We would love those, but you know what's going to happen if you don't. The big bad booty daddy of bourbon is going to come to your house with old Bill Straub here dragging his foregate whiskey. We're going to drink it all night long. By the end of the night, you're going to leave us that five star review and some comments. But seriously, those comments, those reviews open up doors to the story like four gate and Bill Straub to us. Get them on the show. Give you some great entertainment. It also gets great whiskey in our hands like four gate to review for you and let you know whether you should purchase a bottle or not. So we'd appreciate it.

Now, Mike and I are very approachable. If you see us in town, if you see us at a liquor store at an event, you see us at USA Cares. Make sure you step up, shake our hand, introduce yourself to us. Let us know your whiskey story and why you like to drink Kentucky bourbon or any bourbon for that matter or any rye whiskey. We'd love to hear all about it. You can reach out to us. If you've got an idea for a guest for the show or you've got an idea for a bottle, hop onto our website, thebourbonroad.com. There's a contact us page. Fill it out. We'll get back with you. You can always send us an email though. I'm jim at the bourbonroad.com. He's mike at the bourbonroad.com. But like we always say, probably the best way. Slip into our DMs on Instagram. I'm jshannon63. I'm Big Bourbon Chief. We'll see you down.