293. Freddie Noe 8th Generation Master Distiller

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. Can't be just any maple syrup. It has to be from seldom seen farms up in Ohio. He takes bourbon barrels to horse 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 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.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 are out on the road once again.

Heck yeah. We drove down here to Claremont, Kentucky.

Yeah.

No, what's in Claremont? Well, there's Bernheim Forest, these wooden giants out here.

Yeah.

Our good buddy, Steve Johnson, he lives right across the road from where we're at. He's one of our roadies. He's out here. And I think there's this little tiny craft distillery out here. Yeah, which one's that? The James B. Beam Distilling Company, right? Oh, yeah. So that's where we're at. We're actually setting inside this historic home, the Baker Beam House, which is pretty badass, right? Absolutely. And sitting across from us. is their newest master distiller, Freddie No. Freddie, welcome to the Bourbon Road.

Yeah, thank you guys. Glad to be here today. We're glad you guys are here with me today. Yeah, we're awful glad to be here. With Bourbon Road, you gotta be on the road, right? It would be right for me to come to you all.

Well, we have done that a few times, but it's always nice when we can get out because it just sets the mood for the podcast and it really makes things authentic. Definitely authentic. Very much so. There's not a whole heck of a lot more authentic than being up here on this little hill above the outpost, right between the outpost and the kitchen table restaurant. That's right. We had an opportunity to come here and eat. Mike's been there to eat. It was a great visit for both of us, I think.

Yeah, I got to watch you get named a Master Stealer. I was a little bit disappointed that I had to sit there and listen to the governor talk first. I was like, man, I did not come here to listen to that man talk. I wanted to either hear you or your father talk. Your dad had me tear up. He had me tear up a bit because he let his emotions get to him a little bit. I'm sure it was one of the proudest moments for him working here all his life. I'm sure if your grandfather was here, he would have... Oh, yeah.

He would have definitely been proud. What was pretty cool about that day, Jimmy Russell was here from Wild Turkey. When granddaddy passed away, dad had been in the business a while, but I wouldn't say new to ambassador and out on the road doing education, but really had leaned on granddaddy for information and how do I keep getting better at this. When granddaddy passed, Jimmy had reached out to dad and They had this little thing where dad calls Jimmy his road dad because they'd see each other at festivals or maybe be traveling in the same city if there was things going on. Jimmy stepped in and I'd say he mentored dad quite a bit in those days after granddaddy passed. out on the road and taking care of him. One of the first times dad had traveled without granddaddy, he seen Jimmy sitting across the room there and he said, I kept looking over there and every time I did, he looked like he was writing on the paper, but he didn't have nothing in his hand. Dad said, he thought to himself, why does he keep doing that? What's he doing? So I walked over and he said, Jimmy, what are you doing, Jimmy? I'm taking notes for your dad. Booker's told me to watch you out here on the road. So I'm watching you. And it wasn't too long after that that granddaddy had passed. And so just the connection within the industry, it was very surreal for me to be able to have Jimmy there as well. Again, dad looks up to him highly. I do as well. And he said the same thing. He said, your dad got to do something I got to do, and not a lot of people do. And that's name their son master distiller. Because Eddie and him are co-masters as well. And then he said, your granddad would be very proud of this moment.

So I definitely think he was probably looking down on us that day.

I don't know. Was it as hot today as it was that day? It was, it was pretty hot day. We sat out there in front of the outpost, right? Yeah, right in front of it, right in the sun.

I'll tell you what I did notice that day. Jim and I get to go around the country and go to whiskey festivals and stuff and distilleries and all kinds of events. Most people think a Jim Beam is just the white label, right? That's what they think. There's nothing wrong with them thinking that. But I will tell you, out of all the whiskey events I've been to, Jim, that whiskey event topped them all. I mean, you guys laid it out from food to cocktails to pours of bourbon. You name it. You had it. Um, when I pulled up, they didn't even say, who are you? Hey, Mr. Hyatt, get out. We're going to Valley park your vehicle. Um, I saw new media people here that I knew. And, um, you guys let everybody pour their own bottle, a single barrel, not Creek and put their thumbprint in it. And, took us down to the new distillery that you named after your dad and we got to see that. I'm telling you listeners that if you go to a whiskey event, you haven't been to nothing until you come to Kentucky and come to Jim Beam and you'll find out that they do it right. Don't skip this place right here up on a hill. You'll love it.

Appreciate that. A lot of it as we started talking about building the distillery and wanting to kind of take consumers on a further journey with us through whiskey, maybe even through our family history. It's a very prominent part of American history, my family. They started saying, how do you want to engage with consumers on campus as we open back up with the pandemic? We shut everything down because we were doing construction, so it led us really get a lot of the stuff done in a much more timely manner because we didn't have consumers wandering around. We were initially going to take a phased approach, ended up choosing to go all down and get it all done so that we could have that big grand reveal. It's great to hear you say that's exactly what my vision was as we were starting to lay out We wanted people to A, feel at home. Take the pretentiousness out of whiskey as well, right? I think sometimes when you hand someone a glass of whiskey, especially if you're in the industry, I think people maybe get a little bit uptight about, I'm going to have to like this. I hope he's not asking me for tasting notes, things like that. What we're about here is we make good quality whiskey. That's what my day job is, day in and day out. to share it with the world. To be able to open our doors up, show a little bit more of our process to everyone, but have you all come here and learn a little bit about bourbon. The key is just enjoy yourself. Enjoy our products, enjoy the new restaurant, and hopefully you'll pick up some key elements that, A, make our whiskey important to us. Hopefully, key elements of the foundational learning of what bourbon and American whiskey is all about as well. I'm glad to hear you say that from that event because that was kind of the kickoff right there, right? Set the bar high and I said, we'll just keep raising the bar as we keep going. Hopefully, we can keep doing that.

Even when we come in today, you guys were having an employee event here, and I'm always curious, and I know Jim is too, of how distilleries treat their employees. And you guys had barbecue out there, cocktails and whiskey for them and stuff, and there wasn't a person that didn't have a smile on their face. And I love to see that. Even your security guards over there had smiles on their face.

They didn't frisk you guys down too hard and make sure you weren't coming up here to try to take me away.

She did ask if we had any whiskey with us. She probably just wanted a drink. So you guys have been here in Kentucky or laying down whiskey since 1795.

That's right. That's right.

That's a long time, Jim.

It is a long time. We keep talking about whiskey, but we haven't tasted any yet, Mike.

I just thought I'd say something about it. I usually bring that up myself. I'd go to a seminar and maybe be speaking.

Well, that 1795 leads into what's in our glass, though, right? OK. Very much so.

We'll continue, my friend. Very much so. Jumped the gun a little bit, honestly.

Get on to it. Get to the whiskey. I know the listener's like, what do you guys drink? So what did you pour for us today?

So what I've got is one of our newer releases, the first release, actually, of our newest brand, which is Hardin's Creek. To your reference, 1795. Jacob Beam landed here in Kentucky on Hardin's Creek. which if you're familiar with Kentucky, it's Hardin's Creek is in Manton, which is really the center point between Bartstown and Springfield, Kentucky. So a little little maybe 35 miles away from where we're sitting here in Claremont. You know, and Jacob came. Jacob's dad passed away when he was six. He was born in Pennsylvania. At six years old, they moved to Maryland to his uncle's farm. He was basically a young farmhand there. Due to his uncle being in the Continental Army, they received a land grant to come to Kentucky and grow corn. Some siblings and some cousins, right, because it was from his uncle, but the two families kind of equally split up the 800 acres and Jacob came here really, again, on a promise to grow 100 acres of corn. So he received 100 acres of land there. And, you know, talking with granddaddy, everybody in that time was, if you were a farmer, you were a distiller because if you're growing grain, as you all know, if you grow grain or have grain or any kind of food, right, it goes bad. why everybody was a distiller was because if you were farming, you needed to be able to preserve your grain. And so really whiskey making became a method of preservation. And with that, and we've been at it ever since 1795. So to me, it's one of my favorite stories. When I first started, I asked dad why we had Knob Creek. And he said, well, it's Abraham Lincoln's boyhood home. And I said, but we started making whiskey on Hardinus Creek. Why don't we have a brand named that? And he kind of looked at me like, well, you might have a good point there. So he's like, you need to get back in the distillery. So something I've always wanted to do is honor Jacob. I draw a lot of inspiration from that story because, again, as we've gone through this campus redesign, the question that's probably been asked to me 100 times, what do you think the founder's vision was? And I quickly say, are you talking about Jim Beam or Jacob Beam? Because Jim Beam was kind of the founder of what I would say our modern whiskey. There's prohibition that kind of is the pin between what I'll say the kind of original four distillers, which I'd still say Jacob, David, David M. Beam, and Jim Beam. And then I guess the next four, which would be, I used Jim Beam twice, pre-prohibition and post-prohibition, because he's really a very strong linchpin in our family's history. But so very strong tie back to that and draw a lot of inspiration from Jacob mainly because what was his vision? No one really knows right I would say a lot of it was you know knowing your your dad passed at a young age He was 29 and you know, you're young as well right and coming to Kentucky He probably saw an opportunity to have a little piece of ground of his own start his own farm and Really, in that time, it was about establishing your family. Family is extremely important. To think that a fellow came here just off of the opportunity to have his own space and what it turned into, a few people come here and next thing you know, there's an industry that pops out of what was going on here. A lot of inspiration from that. So what's in our glass, the kind of long-winded version, is Hardin's Creek, Jacob's Well. So there is a well I visited with my granddaddy when I was eight years old, right there on Hardin's Creek, right next to a little root cellar where Jacob made whiskey. Still a little bit of water in that well. Not enough to make whiskey. We thought about doing that, but it wouldn't. wouldn't work. So, in honor of that, we have the release, Jacob's Well, which brings together our traditional family mash bill, the Jim Beam mash bill and Jim Beam liquid. A little older than most people typically see it, sitting a little over 15, right at 184 months. Yeah, we had to do the math. They were like, why did you want to go back to... A lot of times in old history, they used months on whiskey labeling. And I joked, I said, well, I wanted to bring that back so we can make people start doing some math again, so they can see how many years. Too easy to see that age statement and, and no, right? So make you stand in front of the aisle and think about it. Use your hands and toes. The bad thing is right. You don't have 12. So it's hard to kind of count the years if you don't have 12 fingers and toes.

So we did some quick head math and we came out with 15 years, four months.

It's like the price is right.

Yeah, we had a little bit more math thrown in there because we were trying to figure out how old you were when the barrels were laid down. Yeah.

So we had to do a little research. Yeah. Now, I don't know how many people know this, but as I'm researching Hardin's Creek and where it's at, which is Hardin's Creek runs past another Beam Suntorium distillery, Maker's Mark, right? Yep. But you guys had actually released a Hardin's Creek Jacobs Well several, several years ago.

Yeah. So actually that same time frame I was talking about when we visited Jacob's will It wasn't Hardin's Creek. It was just Jacob's will They had planned to maybe launch it as a micro batch micro blended batch very similar Whiskey streams at 84 months versus 184 months so right around seven years old there and It was the same kind of same premise. It was a 50-50 blend of Jim Beam and old granddad. And what's really unique about this one is when you create a new brand, right? I can kind of create the guardrails that go around it. And one of them was, and I say it a lot in meetings for all of our brands, but you know, for Basel, it's always going to be 80 proof. And there's kind of a guardrail that we can't really break. But for this one, and I say it a lot, is we'll let the whiskey do the talking. So we let the whiskey literally tell us the percentages. It came out at about 56, 44, Jim Beam, a little bit higher percent than the old granddad. The old granddad was just over 16 years old, but obviously right at 184 has to go with the younger of the two. Sure. I laughed when they said, well, how come you don't think that one was successful? I said, I thought it was a little bit before its time, right? You're talking about blending back in 1995 in American whiskey. I don't think the level of education or really the level of attention that the industry has was there for that. So I kind of took that same idea and went back to the drawing board and let the whiskey do the talking here. As I said, 184 months Hardin's Creek Jacobs well and 108 proof.

Yeah.

Cheers. Cheers.

It's as good as it was the time we had it before.

We'd said that it had a, it's obviously got lots of char being a 15 year old bourbon right up front. A little bit, bittersweet caramel. A lot of people might not know what that, but there's a little bit of tannic in there and that's probably because of the age of that barrel char. So it gives all the notes that you want. Those old notes like leather and tobacco and oak, a little unsweetened cherry in there. Oh, yeah. We thought.

I'd say a mark in that whiskey that I was looking to try to pull out. When you get to that age, you know, we've got Knob Creek 15, we did a release on tasting through those barrels. That was one thing I picked up on very quickly was in that age range, you're getting a lot of that kind of Kind of, it's like a, to me, almost like a very sweet cherry juice versus an actual cherry, right? Like a, tough to put a name on one, but just, you know, like a very kind of like viscous cherry juice.

We said it had a spice that just coated your mouth. Not some bourbons you get, it's just on the back of your palate, right? But this is everywhere, that kind of nice spice that you want.

It's kind of overwhelming, typically, right? You get a spice, sometimes can be a little bit overwhelming, but what I thought was very unique about this is it's just a very pleasant kind of spice to it.

That spice, mulled spiced tea or something like that, spiced one. We said something about a black walnut, right?

Yeah, that black walnut. I get that black walnut.

Yep.

A lot of people say I did an AMA on Reddit when you asked me anything, and people were asking a lot about the nuttiness in our products. What we've come to learn is that it's most likely attributed to our yeast strain, which is very important to us here at Beam. When you say walnut-iness, a lot of people say peanut butter or peanuts. I haven't ever picked up an actual peanut taste in our whiskey, but The nuttiness analogy, I definitely pick up in walnut as well, so.

Yeah, I think between a walnut and a peanuts, two definitely different tastes.

And even a black walnut's gonna have a little bit more of that dry, bitter kind of finish.

It'll be drying, but it also has a little bit of oil in this too. It's just a more robust kind of a nut, even though a peanut's really a ground, off the ground plant. You know, a walnut is off a tree. You know, Jim, I got, I don't know, hundreds of Walnut trees on our farm. Yep.

So we got one in our backyard. My lawnmower loves me.

It's like bullets flying out.

Kids love them too, right?

They pick them up, throw them around and they look down their stains. So let's since you brought up kids, did you grow up here like running around the distillery with your dad and your grandfather?

It's kind of funny, today you just missed it. So my wife had brought down our son, Booker, and her sister's son, Knox, who is his cousin, she had him today and she's like, I'd like to come eat lunch with you. I've been pretty busy this week. So she come down, they were tumbling off the hillside in front of granddaddy's statue while I sat there and watched them.

So yeah, I think

A lot of people ask, you know, did you grow up around the distillery? And then the next question is always, how does it feel to know what you're going to do and kind of be around what you're going to do your whole life? And I think what's so cool about my family is you let kids grow up and be kids. The distillery is just another place, right? Like grandma's house, really. It's just another grandma's house. Obviously, dad and I are here quite a bit, so anytime someone's coming, I always ask my daughter or son if they want to come down. He's still a little too young, so we kind of make him go wherever we want him to. Growing up around here, it becomes like a second home. That's why I say grandma's house. You start to meet employees who also live in the community we live in and they kind of watch me grow up around here. I did a lot of fishing as a young boy with my granddad and a lot of my more fond memories of this facility were riding down here with him, maybe with my dog at the time. He'd check in on the distillery, me and the dog would run around the parking lot and mess around. pick up sticks and stuff. And it always ended in a fishing trip. He'd be down there making sure the distillery was going. I didn't know what the hell he was doing. But he'd be down there messing around in the distillery, checking in on things. And I'd kind of wander around with the dog there. And then we'd always go fishing. So this place has just always been of great memory, right? Again, like grandma's house. So growing up here, when you get to a point where you start thinking about, what do I want to be when I grow up? And then lucky and unlucky for me, I guess, my granddad passed when I was 16, a Booker. We were very close from the time I was born. He called me Little Book. That's where my product Little Book name came from, was the nickname he gave me basically as soon as I was born. He said, I'm going to be a Little Book. I'm a Little Booker. But coming here with him, having that connection with him, and then when he passed, when you're 16, you're starting to think a little bit about what you want to do. At that time, I still wanted to be a NFL football player. How'd that go?

It went well, right?

I'm sitting here in Claremont with you guys. But it's funny, I thought he went on him on that is, you know, he asked me what I want to be when I grow up and I told him I want to play football. I'll help you get there. I know exactly what you need to do. He said, if you want to play in the NFL, you need to be the kicker. And at the time I was playing quarterback. I was eighth grade quarterback, moving to high school, started playing high school ball. And I'm like, why the hell would I go from quarterback to kicker? And obviously you probably saw the look on my face like, granddaddy, you're a moron right now. But he said, if you learn to kick and you hit every one of your field goals, there's always a job because you watch all them games. It comes down to a kick. Sometimes they hit it, sometimes they don't. So much so he built a little goalpost in our backyard to kind of teach me form of kicking. I would say the best results of that when our lead punter got hurt a couple of times in high school, I went in to be the backup punter.

Yeah. So you're 16, you're getting to be around the distillery, your grandfather and stuff. Did they let you taste bourbon at those times?

No, so he would let me smell. He'd be doing Booker's tastings at the kitchen table and kind of preparing the batches. And he'd do it with anybody. I mean, if you guys stopped by just for an autograph or maybe you'd been on a tour and they said, hey, if you stopped by Booker's, he'd say hello to you. And it's true. He'd still stop in our house today. Dad and I walk out and say hello. You know, he would invite you to come in and smell taste, right? Me being younger, he let me smell. You always say, which one do you like? Usually three or four glasses. Which one do you like best? Which one do you think smells best? Well, I'd just pick one. I didn't know what I was really doing. Well, why'd you pick, you know, sometimes he'd say, well, why'd you pick that one? I don't know if he thought I was onto something good or maybe he thought my palate was going way off in left field. I never asked him why. But obviously I said, well, I just think it smells the most pleasant to me. But again, was he like, gosh damn, this boy's gonna have a tough time if he thinks that one's good. Or was he, you know, looking for complimentary things I was doing. But yeah, no tasting. but just smelling and he'd asked me, like I said, what I thought.

Um, so do you think there was a little bit of, okay, obviously he, he took your passion for football and got behind you a hundred percent. Oh yeah. But do you think deep inside he was kind of wanting you to maybe find your way out?

Yeah, I'd laugh because he was my daughter probably roll her eyes if she's listening to this. Cause I do the same thing a lot to her. He's always wanting to teach somebody something. to never have graduated college, he was the most intelligent man that I've probably encountered. Very curious, that drove a lot of the whiskey that he made, food, things like that. He was just very curious man. So there's a lot of lessons that he was teaching me about maybe money, things like that, that some of the kind of like behind the scenes of, I'm not gonna say that he was trying to teach me things about the distillery, But there were things that he was maybe preparing me for a little bit to, because I'll be walking through and see something or hear somebody say something. I'm like, is that why he was talking about that? But he did a very good job of not making it like he was doing that.

As a parent, you know that's kind of a mistake, right? If you want your kids to do something, the last thing you want to do is let them know you're right.

Tell them not to and they'll do it. Say, no, you don't need to do that. And that'd be the first thing they do. I say to my daughter is, I want to make you a better human than I am. I want to teach you to be a better person than me. Everybody makes mistakes, right? I use the analogy of my granddad didn't finish college. He went for a half a semester at U of K, was on the football team for Bear Bryant, actually, and just decided it's too hot and he was done with it. And he went on a road trip across the country and then called home and said, I need money to get home. He actually was at the Air Force recruiter in Arizona. He was going to join the Air Force because he didn't have any money to eat or shower. They gave him a meal, said, hey, you know, So he was signing up, but then they called home at that time in the Air Force, or I guess in service. They would call your hometown to make sure there was no warrants out for your arrest. So they called back and they said, well, actually his mother's been looking for him. She hadn't heard from him in a couple of weeks. So they get her on the phone, she wires him some money, and he comes back and gets a job for her brother, Jerry, my great-great-uncle here at the distillery.

That could have played out so different.

Definitely, definitely.

Do you think those Air Force recruiters knew who they were really talking to? No, no. They probably saw a...

They probably did drink some Jim Beam before. Yeah, definitely, definitely. They probably saw two... He had a buddy with him who ended up joining the Air Force actually afterwards. He stayed and joined, even after his parents said he'd give him the money, or give him the money. But I'm sure that the recruiter saw these two probably mangy looking younger men come in there, Kentucky license plate, they looked hungry. He probably thought, oh, I got two guys ready to go. We're going to give them a hot meal, give them a shire, and I'll have done my job today.

You know, as you've been telling that story, I've been sipping on this a little bit, but there was a moment there for about, two or three minutes where I didn't touch the whiskey. And, you know, finish on this is just a good Kentucky mile long. I mean, it's really long. And you don't get that a lot anymore. I mean, it seems like you don't get it as often as you'd like to. Even on older whiskeys, you don't get a long finish.

To me, you don't know that age kind of ages that finish out of it almost. But this, you must have had some magic in those fingers when you were blending it and deciding, hey, this is how I'm going to lay this down.

A lot of it is, you know, The best way to develop products is to be in touch with your product. To me, that starts at the grain. For this Jacobs well, as we said, I think it was 18, I think we ended up determining, 17 or 18. Obviously, I was not making whiskey then. I was probably transitioning from being an NFL player to maybe looking for a little dose of reality at that point. When I did come, that was what I looked for was I wanted to learn everything we had going on here because as a master distiller, there's a lot of things that people look to you for that maybe through your training, you might not pick up just as a distiller. But I thought it was very important for me. Again, my first day, I started in the granary at 4.30 a.m. That's when our grain trucks start coming in. The good part is you get done at 2.30, so got off a little bit early. But spent the first week in the granary and then basically moved from, followed that process from grain all the way to shipping where we shipped the cases out at the bottom of the hill. And just seeing how many people touch our process and help make the world's number one bourbon and our small batch brands get out into the world is I knew that there was a great opportunity for me to help usher that along and keep everybody together. There's just so many nuances to how you do your job here may affect how he does his and it may affect how I do mine. Going back to it, we try to treat our employees as much like family. A lot of times I may travel or doing things like this. I'm not actually in the distillery right now. It could be having a hell of a problem. I can't see it because the shutters are closed. But we empower the people that are our employees to make the whiskey, to help us sell the whiskey. And it's just a great honor that so many people can help kind of bring me along even, right? Because a lot of people will credit all the whiskey to me because my name is on the, as the master distiller, you know, your name is kind of the lead of what you're doing. I got a lot of faith in the team that I've kind of helped build around here and even some that I've inherited from dad's team as well, but great team that kind of helps keep things going. So I always got to try to treat our employees like family. And again, right? Cause most of them are touching the process a lot more than I am. I sit in a lot of meetings and we're working on product development. There's a lot of elements to this process that one person here at this facility, it'd be a hell of a job to try to make it from grain to glass without that having some help for sure.

Well, that's a good philosophy. I know as a public facing person, you've got to keep a balance there. You know, you got to make sure that, uh, that the, uh, dues go to those who put in the effort and, and to understand that it is a teamwork and you're doing one part of that job. Very much so.

That's pretty awesome.

Well, Mike, we're kind of up against a break here. What do you say we take a short break when we come back? Drink more whiskey. Drink more whiskey. Yeah. All right.

Let's see if we can find another bottle sitting around. All right. Good deal.

Man, Jim, you know what I've really been enjoying lately? Oh, you're going to 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. Oh, 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 Salem 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 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 can find his 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, appreciate it. 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 see maple.com. Pick up a bottle today. All right, we're back. And as you guessed, we probably have some more Hardin's Creek. But this one, Freddie, is a different one.

Different end of the spectrum, right? Obviously, as I mentioned, Jacob is a strong inspiration for me. I mean, literally, if it wasn't for him taking the opportunity to come to Kentucky, I wouldn't have this opportunity that I have. So I wanted to honor him with something that grabbed people's attention. Another strong inspiration point for me is Jim Beam himself. You know, I listened to my granddad talk about how strong of a linchpin he was in our family's history. And I always thought, you know, I'd watch videos on granddaddy and listen to him talk. I always kind of thought he was the strongest linchpin from my perspective. You know, that's my granddad, right? That's my superhero. As I've gotten older and done a lot more research and understanding, I understand exactly what he was talking about. As I mentioned before, we break it down into the pre-Prohibition Beam family and the post-Prohibition Beam family. The person that's the linchpin of that is Jim Beam. Our family was very prominent in whiskey before Prohibition, moved close to where I live in Bartstown. And then, boom, you got the Great Depression, you got the World War. And the biggest challenge, Prohibition, where we couldn't make whiskey. And coming out of Prohibition, or really kind of going into Prohibition, Jim Beam, he was a very religious man. a very honorable character. I've got some letters from business partners, colleagues, and it kind of comes with the time. If you read an old letter, there's a lot of reflection on the human. It's a great honor to chat with you. The first paragraph of all these letters would be talking about how much of an honor it is to be friends with him. You're a very studious man, so he sold out. He didn't want to be involved in the mobsters and the gangsters and and the illegal whiskey. He did not get a medicinal permit, so he sold our facility there in Bartstown. It's actually very close to the nunnery there, the Nazareth place where the nuns stay. But sold, bought this place very quickly there in Prohibition because there was a rock quarry that was attached to the distillery that had been ran down. So the facility that was on site was the Murphy and Barber distillery. and hadn't been operational for quite a few years going into Prohibition. Rock Quarry was what he was purchasing. Obviously, my granddad said, you know, granddaddy, he was saying granddaddy, saying Jim Beam, always said he still, even to the day he died, that he couldn't believe how long Prohibition lasted. He thought it would be something very quick, right? Like, there's no way you're going to keep this out of people's hands. And I mean, obviously with medicinal whiskey and things like that, it probably gave it a little bit lengthier stay than it would have had. But yeah, 13 years national prohibition was well beyond what they thought. Maybe two, three years, I think, is what he was saying. But to think so, you know, 1935 or 1934 prohibitions were in the 33 repealed 34. You kind of start getting going on it. Jim beam 70 years old. He has a young younger son who I think would have been 12 or 13 when prohibition hit 26, 27 now. And I know where my mind was when I was 12 or 13. and it wasn't in the distillery, right? And then to think that his son grew, I mean, literally grew into an adult doing other things, and cousins, things like that. But for him to start this facility back up in 120 days, coming out of prohibition at 70 years old. Amazing feat. You know, we just did that friend be no distillery. My dad jokes, he's like, you know, I'm not 70 yet, and I didn't do any of the actual work, just a part of the project. And I wondered how we got through it or how, you know, how I continued to be a part of the project as we were going through it. But sort of think at 70, not only do you rebuild a distillery 120 days, but you invigorate and kind of re-inspire the passion for our family in two young or three or four younger fellas that didn't even have a clue what the hell you were talking about, right? They had whiskey. What the hell is that, right? But so him doing that, getting their passion sparked, hey, I think it helped set us on a very good trajectory coming out of prohibition. But definitely another person I draw a lot of inspiration from because there was a lot of hard, you know, I go through hard times, I think, right? I say I think because shit I'm dealing with. It ain't nothing like what Jacob, I mean, Jacob was dealing with coming across treacherous land. Jim Beam was dealing with prohibition and world wars and, you know, a lot of, again, the Great Depression, a lot of tough times. So I thank him, right? I don't know him, but I thank him a lot for keeping that vision, right? He's the one who, when we talk about founder's vision, I think he's the one that I would say has the founder's vision for us because he probably gathered it from his granddad and dad and seen it through prohibition that he knew this is what we deserve to be doing and what we should be doing. got us going. This release, he used the name Colonel James B. Beam. It's actually the first widespread use of James Beam or Jim Beam. on a label. So before Jim Beam, our family's whiskey was Old Tub. This Colonel James B. Beam name was the first kind of transition to Jim Beam, which ended up happening like 1943, 1944. But Colonel James B. Beam was a two-year-old whiskey that Jim released. It also ended up being a place where they had used some overaged whiskey So there was a 16-year-old release, I believe a 10-year-old release as well. But so I thought him coming out of prohibition, I want to grab attention with Jacob with a very extra age release. What's another way? And really, I started working on this before the Jacob's will. This was initially slated to come out during our 225th anniversary a couple of years back. And so I distilled this to specific parameters that I had kind of worked on as being a distiller. But also I chatted a lot with dad about, hey, I got this idea. I think this is how we should maybe look at doing something to see some difference. And he said that granddaddy had told him the same thing. So kind of like locked it in right then. That's what we were going to do. lower distillation proof. So you're picking up more flavor from the beer, the fermented beer, the distillers beer, probably picking up some more flavor from that yeast strain as well. But then when you get to the barrel, right? So two years in the barrel, what I think is unique about this is you get some of those barrel sweet extractives that you maybe don't see till four or five, six years because I think you've got a little lower alcohol content, and it's probably allowing some more of that flavor to interact with some of the other things going on. You said some people really like it. Some people are like, what the hell is two-year-old whiskey about coming out of James B. Beam? My thing is we're here on a journey of American whiskey to learn about the flavor that is available in American whiskey. It was the idea behind Little Book was kind of my kickoff to that and my curiosity. This is just another example of that where a distiller has an idea. He wants to teach the bourbon or really just the whiskey community something about whiskey right and this story is about how and you mentioned it earlier about how young whiskey can be good, right? And how young whiskey can tell a story. It's not to be compared to 16-year-old whiskey, right? It's a different flavor profile. But I think what's unique about this is we developed it to a place where a two-year-old whiskey can command attention in the marketplace, good, bad, or indifferent. Every whiskey you release can't be for everyone. I'm just glad there's conversation being had about two-year-old whiskey, some of the flavor that can be developed there. Who knows, maybe we can use this to do something even younger or differentiate at the same age. But the point is, I made this whiskey, I watched it age, and I thought that at two years old, it had a pretty unique story to tell. And I would like to think a consumer could resonate with that, right?

Yeah, I think so. And, you know, two years isn't just an arbitrary number. There's a reason bourbon could be called straight at two years, right?

Right, exactly. I mean, really, if you look at it too, Jim Beam aged Jim Beam, four years old, twice as long as the law required to be straight whiskey, You look at it back in those days, Jim Beam was probably the high quality, high standard at that time at four years old. It's a good snapshot to take people back in history and say the whiskey industry has come a long way with attention and really people's flavor palette has developed. This is a different palette than what that 16-year-old is. I think if the time is right in whiskey to be doing exploration. And so I'll take the negative comments because I've got a few really, really pleasant ones as well. And again, it's about a journey across whiskey. And if you're a whiskey connoisseur and you don't want to taste a two-year-old whiskey, I don't think you're a whiskey connoisseur, right?

Here's the funny thing is that Whiskey connoisseurs, right? Which Jim and I are not. We're just bourbon bullshitters. it'll be funny how they'll just gush over some, uh, new maker, some moonshine and they'd pay a hundred dollars for a court jar of that. Um, but they'll say two years is too young. So which one is it? Is that whiskey good right off the steel or is it the two years not good? Cause it has a two year old label on it.

I think there's a lot of it right there is, People want to be received, right? So it's easy to say a two-year-old whiskey is no good because historically you would probably say that a two-year-old whiskey isn't comparable to a six, eight, 10-year-old whiskey, right? To me, it's not about comparisons. It's about sitting down like we're doing right here. Sit down, having a glass of whiskey. Do you talk about the whiskey? We talked about distillers getting together. Sometimes we do. Sometimes it doesn't even come up. Same here, right? We're sitting around having a glass of whiskey. We're talking about whiskey, but that's what it's about is sitting around with people you enjoy spending time with and sharing in a glass. whether you're bashing the glass or enjoying it, having conversation with the people you enjoy your time with, I'll just accept that I created something that people sat around with their friends or family and enjoyed, or at least tried, right?

This is super oily. I like that you kept it at 108 proof and you didn't say, okay, I'm gonna take it down to 80 or I'm gonna take it to 90.

It come off the still at 115, straight to the barrel, no water. Kind of took that from granddaddy. So, no water added until post-aging. And with that, you say oily, so you're getting a lot more viscousness. Even off the still, maybe a little more edginess because you're getting some more flavor, maybe some different components that you're not going to see at a little bit higher distillation proof. Yeah, so to me, I was excited when it came off the still. It's funny, one of my lead blenders, he went to the distillery team because I'm a little bit closer with the distillery team. And he said, you know, y'all gonna have to talk to Freddie. He made this whiskey. It's okay coming off the still, but he then told me he wanted to release it at two years old. I think either we need to drug test him or y'all gonna have to talk to him. And I'd never said a word about it. They'd laugh. They're like, yeah, you're going to get drug tested. I said, why? Well, Todd came in here and he told us, you're crazy for wanting to sell two-year-old whiskey. But the day after it turned two years old, we were setting up a tasting. We tasted on its birthday every year. I come in the office here. He was sitting right in that chair, right there. And early in the morning, I thought, oh, shit. We got a defect or something's wrong. He wants to talk about how we want to manage through some of these barrels. I said, what's going on, Todd? What do you got for me today? He said, I got an apology for you. He said, I said something to the distillery team. I don't know if they told you or not, but I thought you needed to be drug tested. I pulled the samples yesterday of the Colonel James B. Beam and I want to apologize because I don't think you need to be drug tested anymore. I think there is a story this whiskey could tell. someone is very close to me, looks out for my well-being, I would say, was looking out for me. So then I got very excited to taste it, right? Knowing somebody that was maybe a little bit of a critic for it was excited to taste it. And so once I did, I knew there was, like I said, there was a story to tell with this two-year-old. And it's all, again, rooted in We're looking at pulling levers, as I call them, in the distillery, whether it's grain, whether it's fermentation, even mashing. We ran a trial that just by the temperature of which you're feeding the beer to the still has an impact on the flavor coming off of it.

You know those corn nuts? Yeah. If they had a honey roasted corn nut, that's what this would be right here.

Yeah. That's a good analogy because you're getting a little bit of the flavor of the barrel in what you're saying there, right? You're getting a little bit of flavor from the grain, a little bit of flavor. You know, what I would say that kind of mingling, right? Kind of mingling of the two processes, right? The aging and the distillation. That's what I love about it is As a distiller, right, I make clear whiskey every day. And then as a blender, I get to work on the end result. But a lot of my distillery team, they only get to see the front end of the process and then I'll take the products to them and taste them with them. But this is something, it's a little bit closer to a distiller's whiskey, right? Because a distiller is making it. And so this is pretty close. I always say Bookers is a true distiller's whiskey because it's never touched by water. He made it right to barrel entry proof, puts it in the barrel, mingles the barrels together. My dad's doing that now to a profile that he likes and then releases it straight at cast strength. So there's no water. It's straight from what he wanted to distill straight to the barrel that way. And there's a lot to be said about that. So I'd say this one kind of plays in that category. Now I wouldn't say that it's It's in the bookers category, right? But a distiller-style whiskey, right?

So when you lower the barrel entry proof on something like this, you're actually adding dollars to your cost, right? Because the barrels can't hold as much of the distiller.

Yeah, that's right. Absolutely.

And so it costs you more to put it up. But at the end of the day, that water plays a crucial role in pulling flavors out of that wood that alcohol can't do.

That's true. Yep, that's very true. You know, another piece of it too, right? The highest we distill to is 135. We don't do anything over that. So you're adding about 10 proof point or 5% water to get to your barrel entry proof. That's the most we'll add is that 5%. We don't do any more than that. Because that's the largest gap from distillation to barrel entry we do. But when you're distilling to a lower proof, You're essentially, what I would say, blowing more water, in all air quotes, because the water is flavor at that point. You've created a beer and you're extracting the alcohol content, right? If you really want to get down to distillation, it's alcohol extraction. But in bourbon, or in our case specifically, it's about everything else with that that comes over, right? That starts to develop some of that flavor. So to lower the distillation proof, you're pulling a little more flavor from your front end process. But there's also less alcohol content, which is also still creating what you were saying there. But it's water that has been processed with grain. So it's not just water. It's flavored water. Correct. Sure. Where if you distill over barrel entry proof, you're just adding straight water. It does have a big impact on the flavor it develops. But this is, again, it's a lever, right? That's a lever of whiskey making that maybe people don't know a lot about. So I'm glad that it come up in our conversation because to me, You can change a lot about the product you're making based off what you're doing right there.

It's got a great texture to it, Mike. I really like the spiciness of it. It's got a little bit of that cinnamon, but it's kind of a buttery cinnamon. Yeah. So it's right there on your top of your tongue, right?

That, that buttery cinnamon.

I really liked that.

I've had a honey butter or, uh, uh, creamed honey that has cinnamon in it and put it in tea. But it's like this, this kind of reminds me of this process that all the stuff we're talking about, the taste of it. Um, we had just drank a really probably one of the best rise of our lives. Uh, not too long ago, uh, old Leopold and my buddy Todd, I would say that, you know, the, I respect the hell out of this for as a two year old. Yeah. I like to see that it's, like I said, 108 proof. Listeners, remember that. I don't think you're going to see a lot of, it might be the only two-year-old whiskey I know that's at that proof.

Yeah, there are some things that are some notes that are prominent in a younger whiskey, in a two-year-old whiskey that disappear later as it spends more time in the barrel.

The barrel kind of filters that stuff out, right? Sure. And some of those things are nice.

Absolutely. Some of them are not so nice, and you hope to see those go away. But some of them are really nice, and you hate to see them go away. Correct. And in this case, I think they've survived alone.

There's another project I'm working on where we're using a singular grain in a very young age, really from distillation. I'd say till four years old, you get a very distinct note that reminds me of some bread that my granddad would make salt rising bread and sourdough bread as a young boy. And he was trying to replicate Jim Beam's wife's salt rising bread recipe. The byproduct of that, he never figured it out. The local baker told him, Booker, there's probably some nostalgia sitting there that you're never going to replicate of sitting at your grandmother's kitchen table eating warm bread, that you're just not going to hit that. You've got a thought in your head that it ain't going to come back to. I think everybody has one of those thoughts, right?

My grandmother made this. It was rice pudding, but you could slice it with a knife and eat it as bread, warm it up. And it wasn't quite bread, but it wasn't rice pudding. But she called it rice pudding. And my wife has tried to make that a hundred times over. And she'll probably try it for the rest of her life. No offense to her, but she's not your grandma, right?

That's a lot of it. Or the pan she was making it in. So many little things.

The old stove that was gas-fired and stuff.

But probably the inconsistency in that had something to do with it as well.

It's cool that your grandfather, though, was trying that right there. Kind of experimenting himself.

Yeah. When I tasted that distillate, it gave me goosebumps because it took me back to, I mean, like a six-year-old me sitting at that kitchen table, him sliding that piece of bread over to me, me putting butter on it, just melting it, and just remembering that smell, really in the aroma, right? That's kind of where I was leading to. And then a little bit of hints in that taste. And up until three years old, it had it. And now we've let it age a little bit past that. And it's diminished quite a bit. So it's kind of like, So you might see that one come out at some point. Definitely won't be the initial release, but eventually you might see a younger version of that because That story, I just, it's still to this day, I just love the story.

I've got some fond memories tasting some white dog that just, oh man, just had that wonderful warm buttery flavor and it just had, you had the butter and you had the toast, a little bit of the toast coming from the grain. Oh yeah. Just like you said, tastes just like buttered toast in the morning or buttered bread. Yeah, to try and recreate that or release something that puts that forward, nobody's doing it. And I would be first in line.

I'm telling you right now. There you go. There's another strike for it coming.

Do you ever see, you know, talking about the future, you know, almost every, Masters still are here has a bourbon named after them. Yep. Right. Do you see anything being named after your dad in the near future?

I do. So there's some whiskey we've created. Really, we kicked off the development of that project about the same time I was working on this Colonel James B. Beam. So we've distilled some stuff. Let's see, maybe Maybe three. I think there's been three years across three different years we've done. Best part of it is it's Fred's legacy. If it's going to have his name on it, I can't tell him when it's ready. Our blending team can't tell him when it's ready. The marketing team wants to tell him when it's ready. But it's not ready yet. And I'll tell you what, I'm super excited about it. Super excited about it.

So in this case, his name's on the bottle, he's gonna give you the thumbs up. That's right. I bring him samples home about every six months.

I will say we've... We've liked it for a while, but it's not where he wants it. And that's more important than liking it, right?

No, where does his palate sort of sit? Does it sit?

So I did an exercise. I'm glad you asked that. For Little Book chapter four, I did an exercise where Little Book, being nicknamed for my granddaddy, A lot of people compare me to him in my curiosity. My wife, my kids, probably my mom, my grandmother as well would probably have said his attitude and short fuse is very similar to Booker's as well. But as we talked about earlier, I was 16 when Booker passed. A lot of little snippets of lessons that he would teach me that I see pick up today. I never had a chance to talk to him about, you know, what's your vision of whiskey? What do you think about where we're going? What do you think about where it should go? So a lot of that comes from my dad, right? Office sits right across the hall from me. He lives closer than our offices are together. A lot of conversation with him about Granddaddy and whiskey, right? Because as I became a distiller, I try things, I taste things, I take them to him. I'm like, what do you think Granddaddy would think about this? Or what do you think, did Granddaddy try this? So Little Book chapter four was an honor to my dad. And it's called Lessons Honored. And what I did was I was taking samples home for him. I take him samples all the time. And I do my wife the same and maybe won't tell them what it is. I just, I like to let people, again, let the whiskey do the talking, right? So I put the glass in front of them. And a lot of times after it's over, I'll tell them, but for this specific project, I just took some, different mash build, different distillation processes off of our stills. Let him taste them. Then once he kind of narrowed a few in, I did a few different ages of them, narrowed it in a little more and really got to a place where he chose a seven-year Knob Creek at cast strength. I'll premise it at that. It was at cast strength. But so tasting through him, and he talks about Knob Creek being one of his favorite brands. He loves the versatility of it at 100 proof. But he also talks about seven to nine, maybe 10 years old, kind of being that sweet spot for him. So after I did that and kind of told him what I was doing, I said, well, at least you haven't been lying to the public all these years. He's like, what do you mean? I said, well, I've just been kind of quizzing your palate a little bit about yourself. And he's kind of looking at me funny. You know, you always said you like Knob Creek. You say seven to nine, maybe 10 years old. I said, I've been tasting you around all these and you chose Knob Creek seven year when we were talking about cast strength. So Knob Creek, I mean, if you're talking cast strength, seven year old Knob Creek is what he really likes.

Wow. Well, that's, uh, that's a good age. No doubt about it.

Well, you get to a place where, you know, at four years old, you're getting to a place where there's a lot of interaction of barrel and grain. And as you get closer to that seven, six to seven, you're going to start seeing more of that probably 55 to maybe six, 60% of the flavor coming from the barrel. Right? So you're getting some of that sweet note, some of those vanillas, the caramels and things. So there's a lot of, a lot of flavor to be had in that age range. So. There's a lot to be said about that.

You have a lot of, yeah, there's sort of breaks in the age there at nine, 12 and 15 as well. And those are key points in the aging of that particular brand, right?

Oh yeah, absolutely. That was one thing when we took the age statement off of Knob Creek, we got to a place where we had to use older whiskey to hit that profile. Everybody's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, you're hitting the profile. But the nine, when we put the nine back on for the age statement, We really put our money where our mouth is because the 12 was a direct product of us batching eight, nine, 10, sometimes a little bit of 11-year-old whiskey to make that profile for Knob Creek. So we put the age statement on. We have this excess stock of older age. We're going back to the age. I said, let's release that 12. I mean, really good, really good whiskey. So it kind of was us putting our money where the mouth is and say, hey, we had to take the age off due to inventory. We batched it to a nine-year profile. Here's an example of how we were doing that. There's the 12-year-old. And then with that, we saved some of that back, gave us opportunity to release 15 thereafter. And they're all very different. Exactly. To me, that 15 hits back, that cherry we were talking about earlier. When we were working on that one, it just kept popping to me. It just kept popping, popping, popping.

And for everybody, it's different, right? For me, the 12 is right in my saddle.

And that's my wife. She likes the 12. She likes older whiskey. So she was thinking when I brought the 15 home, she's like, oh, maybe I like this one better than the 12. But after tasting it, she said, can I try the 12 next to this? Got them both out. She sat there. I think I still like the 12. I said, yeah, there's nothing wrong with that, right? Giving people choices. That's what it's all about.

Again, cause we're all very different humans out here. Exactly. That's the point of it.

I love to hear that your wife loves that 12 year old and stuff.

She's my biggest critic, you know, and well, biggest critic cause it's the only one I have to listen to.

We had a young country music artist on and she's over at the house and she's like perusing through all my bourbon shelves and She picked two bourbons out and we were like, yeah, whatever you want to drink on the show. And then she's still looking and she's like, you got a bunch of Knobbs Creek hit over here. Oh, you got my favorite Knobbs Creek 12 year old. And it was kind of shocking that she picked that out. I was like, wow.

Yeah, that was her. So that ended up being the focal point of her show. So she really focused in on that Knob Creek 12 and she sang a couple of whiskey songs. It was fun. We had a great time.

Yeah. She's got a little great song called Jim, Jack, Johnny and Crow. Oh really?

What's her name? Taylor Hughes. Taylor Hughes. Don't have to look her up.

Yeah. Yeah. She, uh, she said those are the apostles that, that touched her soul. That's good. Well, Freddie, man, what an awesome conversation you shared. I think two amazing whiskeys with us. Thank you. And we have written in our Instagram post and our review of the Jacob's Well that we think this is a great start to your lineage here at James B. Beam Distilling Company. And we are so excited to see what else you do in life. I'm also excited to see who follows in your footsteps, whether it's going to be your daughter or your son.

You know, I'm hoping both of them. That'd be really cool, right? Dad named me master distiller, co-master distiller together, but you haven't seen a sibling link up, right? So maybe get my daughter in here, teach her the ropes, then she can bring my son along and I can step back and watch him, right? Nothing like a sibling rivalry. I think it'd be good for whiskey, right?

I really do. I think it'd bring the whiskey industry forward to see. Yeah, and talk about a proud moment for daddy. Oh yeah, I couldn't even imagine.

I just, again, We did a promotional shoot for Knob Creek the other day and someone said, you know, which kid do you think will come in? And I said, I, again, back to my comment earlier, I just hope they're better humans than I was. And that's what you do as a parent, right? You set them up for success. It would be, I mean, literally a dream, right? To work with them or see them work together. But just to see them succeed in life, that's what it's about. So I'll be happy for them no matter what they're doing as long as they're happy. But I'll keep my fingers crossed that they'll come join me. You're not going to push too hard, right? No, no. I'll push them the other way. That might make them want to do it.

I bet at some point, one of them will be like, you know what? This is pretty damn cool. And this is something I want to do.

My daughter's starting to see some of that now. Family means a lot to her. Her grandparents, her cousins. My wife has two sisters and a brother. She loves being with them. I think she's got the mix already starting to care. That's the first step. You have to care about your family. We've said, how many of my ancestors have I talked about since we've been sitting here? Caring for your family. Number one, caring, right? Then you throw family in there and then that you're kind of overseeing and protecting something. I think she's got it. Now, my son, he's still too young to even catch up on any of those cues. Like I said, he was here earlier, barrel rolling down the hill there and getting dizzy and laughing and flipping and rolling around. He didn't give a shit what was going on around here.

You never know, they become such different people when they hit that age of 16, 18 years old though, right? Oh yeah.

Let's talk about caring for family and caring for Kentucky. A lot of our listeners might have seen, or they might not have seen, cause it's really not covered very well, but Eastern Kentucky has been devastated by, uh, the torrential rain that we've been having in floods. I know all too well about it just because of my day job. But Jim Beam has been helping out sending water out to Eastern Kentucky.

Yeah, I mean, even if you back, right, we're just coming out of pandemic with COVID. We wanted to help the community at that time, right? Shortage of hand sanitizer. We don't make hand sanitizer normally, but we basically set up a little satellite production in our R&D lab to be able to help out with sanitizer and ran that for quite a while. And then, yeah, as you mentioned, with everything going on in Eastern Kentucky, I was actually having a conversation right before lunch about setting up some stuff to do donations for an auction. looking like I'm going to probably donate a private dinner with myself. Probably tag Fred along, I'll make him come with me. At the kitchen table, very intimate, probably intimate dinner. And we'll donate that, maybe a couple bottles as well. But one thing I know from an operational standpoint, there was a need for water. I'm pretty sure very quickly we kind of mobilized and we're looking to send some water, potable water down to the area in a tanker so that they could just have water, right? I mean, the things you take for granted until something like that happens and devastates your area. We had the tornado last year. What I love about Bourbon, what I love about Kentucky is just the community aspect. The family, right? Community becomes family when you live in Kentucky, I feel. There's a lot of ties to family, right? You touched on it there of caring for family. That's not necessarily us caring for our community, that's us caring for our family as Kentuckians. So, anything we can do to step up and help out and use. I say it a lot, I've got a platform here, right? Now as a master distiller, a little bit bigger platform than I had. But as people, we're all from a community, so as people in a community or in a family, you need to use that opportunity to bring awareness to certain things from time to time, right? And to me, it's a great opportunity for us to step in and help our extended community in Eastern Kentucky out.

Let's talk about that for a minute, Jim. It's the Kentucky Bourbon Benefit for Eastern Kentucky Flood Relief. It's presented by, obviously, Fred Minick, one of the

Very inspirational in the tornado as well. Yes, sir.

The Kentucky Distillers Association, Bourbon Crusaders, and Westport Whiskey and Wine. It's an online auction. You can go to their website, KentuckyBenefit.com. The auction is going to run from the 11th of August to the 21st of August. Make sure if you're going to donate something, get with Westport Whiskey & Wine, go to their website. They've got links of how you can donate broadband and stuff.

Donate vintage whiskey. Donate anything from your collection or if you've got a cool opportunity, you know, you've got a bed and breakfast, donate a night to that. I mean, anything and everything would help, right?

If you're going to go ahead and bid on this dinner with Fred and Freddie at the kitchen table here at James B. Bean Distilling Company, Make sure you put those big dollars out there.

That's right, run it up. Yeah, run it up. I'll make it a good time for you. Yeah, you're not trying to get a bargain here. You're trying to help people. Oh, that's right.

We're trying to help people. I promise I'll make it worth your time. That's a pretty awesome thing.

Yeah. I mean, you're kind of, kind of think about it a little bit different, right? You're taking an opportunity, you're turning it into responsibility. So you're saying, you know what, I've got a responsibility here to help my fellow Kentuckians.

But you know, a lot of people say, going back to what's it like to know what you're doing growing up, there's a lot of pressure on you. You got big shoes to fill. and I quickly respond, it's an opportunity. It could be pressure if you want to look at it, but I look at it as an opportunity to carry on my family's legacy, an opportunity to hopefully make a difference in community, opportunity to make a difference in the company I work for. It's about the opportunity, and this is just another example of using my opportunity to hopefully create opportunity for others in this time of need.

Absolutely. So, you know, usually at this time in the show, we like to offer our listeners a giveaway, something that they can get excited about after the show and, you know, kind of share online. Is there something that James B. Bean would be willing to do that.

Let me, let's see here. Um, how about we do a, we'll start with a bottle, right? We got to, we got to do whiskey. We're on a bourbon podcast here. Uh, got to do, got to do a bourbon bottle. So I'm going to say, How about a bottle of basil Hayden toast? How does that sound? And then I like, you gotta have a glass to drink it out of. So how about a nice thermos to go with that? And then maybe some other swag, like a hat, maybe a shirt or, I don't know, we conjure up some things there to throw with it as a little gift basket there. Key one would be that bottle of basil toast and a nice glass of Yeti. Let's go with the Yeti so you can keep it. If you like a nice cold drink, you can keep it cool. We might throw a Glen Caron or something in there as well, but it sounds good. A little bit of a surprise there.

You don't have to give away all the details, right?

A gift basket, right? With the key piece being a bottle of whiskey and a way to enjoy it. Absolutely.

Listeners, to win this giveaway on Instagram, the day of the podcast release, we'll have a post. Make sure you go on there. You want to tag three people. You got to be 21 years old. You got to reside in the United States so we can get this to you. Overseas shipping is just a nightmare for us. Um, but we'd also appreciate if you go ahead and follow Freddie. No on there. I think it's beam, uh, master stiller or beam generation and the number eight and number eight, obviously follow us. We'd appreciate that. Follow beam distilling. Um, you can just type in James B beam distilling company or Jim beam, whatever you want to follow on there, follow them.

I'll tell you what, don't get on there if you're hungry, because a lot of what we post right now is food out of the restaurant. Yeah. And unless you're within close proximity, you'll be salivating, wishing you could come. But yeah, a lot of good stuff coming out on the Instagram.

So do that. Tag those three people on there. Make those a, let's say, hashtag, let's do hashtag Freddie No on there also. And tag those three people in the comments. And then at nine o'clock, cause you know, Jim, I got to go to bed cause I'm old man.

Eastern standard time.

I will, I will choose a winner or it'll be a randomizer. What happens? We'll choose a winner. Um, we'll name that winter stuff. I think that's an amazing giveaway from, from Freddie. We really appreciate you coming onto bourbon road. Um, you told us where we could find you at, right? Social media. Yeah.

We highly encourage all of our listeners to take a visit here at James B. Beam Distilling, come to the American Outpost, have a meal over at the kitchen table, tour the distillery, pick up a few bottles while you're here. This is a great location. It's very convenient from the interstate, and it's right in the heart of urban country.

We often say we're kind of at the, or used to say for sure, we were at the gate of the Bourbon Trail. Now there's distilleries in Louisville. So maybe we've lost that title as to the gate, but it's definitely the gateway to quite a few distilleries down the Bourbon Trail. So glad to host you all, as the guy said, Tag us on Instagram. We'd love to hear feedback from our guests and see people hanging around. So, yeah, look forward to seeing some posts out there.

Well, Mike, where can people find us on the Internet?

Well, you can find us on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, all those places. The main places you find us and interact with us is on our private Facebook group, the Bourbon Roadies. You got to answer three questions to get in there. Are you 21? Do you like Bourbon? Hell, everybody loves Bourbon, don't you? If not, when you listen to us, you're going to love it. And do you agree to play nice? Cause we don't tolerate any rudeness in our group. Whether you drink from the very bottom of the shelf, like I used to drink folk 10 high or very top of the shelf, like this Hardin's Creek, Jacob's will, but we really liked Jim. Absolutely. Um, we want people to just come in there and celebrate bourbon and celebrate whiskey. Um, celebrate life, whether you're having a birthday and anniversary, even if you have a death in your family, we want you to celebrate that life by raising a glass and saying cheers.

All right. Well, we do two shows every week. Every Monday we do a craft distillery episode where we kind of focus in on one expression from a craft distillery doing things right. Actually, just recently we had the Hardin's Creek Jacobs well on, on a craft distillery Monday episode. I hope you enjoyed that one. Every Wednesday we do a full-length episode like today's. We'll have a guest on. We'll have a couple of expressions. We'll deep dive a subject every week, two episodes. Mike, what do they have to do not to miss a single one?

listeners what you want to do is scroll up to the top of that app hit that check sign that plus sign that subscribe sign that app will tell you hey these two jokers have a show that's out today and you need to listen to it then you need to scroll on down hit that five star review leave us some comments because you know what's about to happen if you don't The big bad booty daddy of bourbon is going to come to your house, dragging Freddie No with him with a bottle of this Hardin's Creek. We'll drink it all night long. Just laughing our asses off. By the end of the night, you're going to give us that five star review and some comments. But seriously, those comments, those reviews, they open up doors to distilleries for us. Get great guests on like Freddie No here. Get great whiskey in our hands like this Hardin's Creek. We'd really appreciate it.

So Mike and I are very approachable. If you see us in town, if you see us at a liquor store, you see us at an event, make sure you come up and say hey to us. Shake our hand. We'll have a pour together. We love to hear your bourbon story, what makes whiskey important to you.

Yeah, listeners, we are going to be at the Kentucky Bourbon Festival. That's the 16th through the 18th down in Barstown, Kentucky. Come down there and check us out. Run up to us. I'll probably have that old t-shirt on the bourbon bullshitter t-shirt. Jim will have a bourbon road shirt on. Jim's not as recognizable. He's a little shorter guy than I am, but I will be sticking out of the crowd. No doubt you can find me. You'll hear my big old boob. I'm shorter, but I'm a bigger man. Um, we'll also be at bourbon on the banks on October 1st. You want to come check us out there? We'll have the bourbon roamed lounge. Oh, we got a great whiskey sponsor for that. Um, come into our tent, our roadies. If you're a bourbon roadie on Facebook, we're going to have plenty of bottles from the drink from right, Jim.

Absolutely. It's a great time and we definitely like to see you there. In the meantime, if you need to reach out to Mike and I, if you've got an idea for a guest or a bottle or a distillery for that matter, make sure you reach out to us. You can hit us up on our website or contact us page at TheBurbanRoad.com. You can also send us emails. I'm Jim at TheBurbanRoad.com. He's Mike at TheBurbanRoad.com. Probably the best way, like we always say. Just hit up our DMs on Instagram.

I'm Jay Shannon, 63. I'm Big Burban Chief. And we'll see you down.

You can do it.