307. Bourbon With Seldom Seen Farms

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 and 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. Hey, this is Mike Hyatt, and you're listening to the Bourbon Road. Listeners, we got a pretty special guest on. We've known him for a couple of years now. You've heard about his products on our podcast over and over and over, and we kept promising to have him on, but today we finally got, we locked him in. We got Kevin Holly from Seldom Seen Farms up in Ohio. Kevin, welcome to the Bourbon Road, brother.

Hey, thanks, Mike. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Yeah. So we met you at the Bourbon Festival a couple of years ago, right?

Yeah. Yeah. I think it was a couple of years ago down in, uh, yeah, down in Bartstown there. Yeah.

Yeah. We just finished up the 2022 festival. You weren't there this year, but you had other festivals going on. It's, it's always a busy season for you, right?

Yeah, it is for sure. And everybody, I think, is trying to get that prime weekend for all their shows and everything, and they keep switching them around. So unfortunately, these ones overlapped with a couple other things I had going on. So I was out of town for partial week that week, and then I had a huge show here locally. So I decided to stay there.

Well, if you save on that travel, that surely is understandable. Well, Kevin, let's talk about, you know, everybody knows how we mention stuff. They know about your syrup, but let's tell everybody about seldom seen farms.

Yeah, so seldom seen farm kind of happened by accident the way it's turned out now. We actually started, we bought the farm 15 years ago. It's 60 acres here in Mountainville, Ohio. We had livestock originally. And the reason we bought the farm was for my wife's horse. We had six horses at the time and one of her horses was like terminally ill. And we figured we'd just buy the farm, let the horse kind of live out its life. And when we bought the farm, the horse got better when it came here. So there must have been something at the other property it was at. You know, we treated it right. And he lived for about another eight years after we moved here. And we got the name of the farm because his bar name is Joe, but his registered name with the state is seldom seen. So we bought the farm for him to live out his career. And we just said, hey, let's just stick with seldom seen farm and just keep it going. And then we, you know, we, we were done with horses and then we kind of moved into cattle for a while. That wasn't the best route for us to go. And we ended up doing maple syrup full time.

maple syrup. They're not, not everybody gets into maple syrup, right? That's, that's an oddity. It's kind of a sticky business. It is for sure. Yeah. Well, before we go any further, um, I forgot to mention, I know our listeners are like, man, these guys can drink whiskey on the show. Yeah. We are the podcast that drinks whiskey on our show. So, uh, kind of celebrate and we'll talk about it in a second half, but I am sipping on one of my favorite bottles of all time from new riff. It is their red turkey wheat Kentucky straight bourbon whiskey. For people that don't know what red turkey wheat is, it's one of America's great enduring wheat varieties dating back to the 1870s. It was really common across the country. It is preserved today by artisan bakers and distillers and farmers. who care about flavor. So that's what everybody knows. I love a little bit of wheat. A lot of people might not know this though, that this kind of wheat, red turkey wheat, is really good for making pizza. So if you didn't know this, this has aged at least five years. This has a match bill of 70% corn, 25% red turkey wheat, and 5% malted barley. What you sipping on there, Kevin?

Nice, nice. I picked up a bottle of New Rift single barrel. It's 103 proof barrel number 8202. That's cool. And it is aged at least four years. So I don't know what the actual age statement is on this barrel, but you know, it's four years.

Well, that sounds pretty delicious. Any single barrel, you know, and what's the proof on that one?

That is 103 proof.

Nice. Nice. So this red turkey weed is a hundred proofer. Um, you know, it's a bottled in bond, which is super rare. You don't see a whole lot of weeded bourbons that are bottled in bond out there. So new riff hats off to you and we'll get into some new riff, uh, on the second half where I made a cocktail. with some of your product. But let's keep talking about a seldom seen farm, right? How many maple trees do you have on that place?

So I guess going way back, I started as a hobby. I started with 10 trees, literally cooking on a turkey fryer about 10 years ago. Now we're doing a huge expansion right now and we're adding two sections of woods up the road that we're leasing. We'll have about between 3,500 and 4,000 of our own trees. And then we custom boil for another guy who brings a sap because he doesn't have an evaporator in the whole setup and he has about 2,500 more. So this year we should be in the 5,000-ish range total. So it's a pretty big jump from the past couple of years and it's a lot of syrup to process.

And you, you know, I'm sure when you first started out with just buckets hanging on trees, right?

Oh, yeah. Yeah, for sure. It was all buckets. That's definitely not the way to go. It's kind of a pain. It's very, very labor intensive, but it's a good for a hobby, hobby guy that wants to do it. Now we are on all tubing. So I guess to explain it, it's like plumbing, outdoor plumbing is basically what it is like in your house. It's a huge spider web of miles and miles of tubing. I think I have about between 10 and 11 miles of tubing right now installed, ready to go. And we're going to be adding more in the next few years. So.

Wow. That's just crazy. And does the temperature have to be a certain temperature to get that sap out of the tree?

Yeah, so for the people that aren't familiar with it, our maple season here in northeast Ohio is pretty much the months of February and March and that's about it. We have between a six and eight week window to make all of our syrup and we need freezing nights and warm days. So if it's like 25 degrees at night, 40 degrees during the day, that's ideal for us.

Nice. Now how, so 5,000 trees, how much like, um, it's not sap. What do you call it?

Yeah. When it comes out of the tree, it's sap. Uh, it's like a watery consistency. It's, it looks like water and it's about 2% sugar. So there's a very, very small amount of sugar in that. And we test that just with a hydrometer. Um, pure maple syrup is 67% sugar. So we have to get rid of all that water in between those two numbers.

How much sap do you get out of those 5,000 trees?

So in a typical day, like on a good day, you can get anywhere between three and five gallons of sap per day.

Out of one tree?

out of one tree and well, that's not I guess not per day, but per event. So every time it freezes at night and warms up during the day, you can get up to five gallons of sap per day per event per tree. So you can say it'd be 20 to 25,000 gallons of sap per day.

Good Lord, I didn't think it was a lot of sap.

That's like a milk cow. It is. It's crazy. It's astonishing the numbers and the processing rates and everything. We're trying to be as efficient as possible. So like right now we can process about 2,500 gallons of sap per hour. So even on a good day, we have about 10 hours of processing and boiling. So it's quite the feat.

So you get the sap out of the tree. You got all these tubes running through the forest, like a connectus out there in the middle of the woods. Trees just bubbling crude out of themselves, right? You get the sap, and then it goes to your barn. What do you call your barn? Is that where you boil stuff down, right?

Yeah, we call it the sugar house. We have a timber frame sugar house on our property that we built a few years ago and the cool thing about our sugar house is it's all wood pegged and all the wood came from our property. I logged it all myself. And we raised it, a bunch of us friends raised it like an old fashioned barn raising by hand with no cranes or anything. And we did it on a Saturday. We started at 7 AM and we were done by about noon. We were drinking beer and eating pizza at noon. So it was quite the experience and it's a pretty cool building.

I just, I am so fascinated that you did all that. And I remember growing up as a kid, um, there was these big concrete rock troughs and they would put sap in there and boil it down. Um, and they also did sorghum molasses too, which is almost the same, I guess the same concept, right?

Yeah, it is sorghum. Uh, they do it a lot more down South, uh, because they don't have the maple trees and the consistency. So I think that's just like the alternative sweetener, right? Um,

Or corn, corn syrup too is another way you'll see them take in. It's not actually corn. It's the corn stocks that they crush and the sap runs out of that. And then they boil it down and make a sugar, a syrup. Same thing with sugar cane, right? You know, people might just think, Some sugar comes out of the cane, but that is not the case. They, they cut that down and they put it through this. Uh, I don't know. It squeezes the hell out of it, presses it down and squeezes all the sap out. But nature's doing that for you with these trees though, right? It just overnight it freezes and then it warms up and it releases that sap.

Yeah. Basically what we're doing is, uh, it, the trees are coming out of dormancy in the spring. So all the sap is in the roots of the tree. And when a tree is trying to wake up, it's trying to form its leaves. So what we're doing is we're just stealing just a little bit of that sap from the from the tree. And that's where we get our syrup from. It doesn't harm the tree in any way. We only take about like two and a half percent of the sap needed for the tree to survive and to form its leaves. So it's no different than like somebody going to the doctor and giving blood or just doing like a diabetes check or something. It's just a very, very small amount.

Yeah, but people with diabetes don't need your syrup.

They don't. They definitely do not.

I wouldn't recommend it anyways. So let's, I'm sure the listeners are like, what the hell does this have to do with bourbon? Well, I'm getting there. I'm getting there listeners and I guarantee you, Kevin has something to do with bourbon. So let's talk about that, Kevin. Yep. How does your maple syrup connect to bourbon?

So the bourbon and maple industries are starting to come more and more together. There is such a huge, huge calling now for like finished bourbons. And what we're doing is we're getting a lot of the barrels from different distilleries around the country and we're aging our syrup in them. And then we're giving our barrels back to these distilleries and they're making maple finish bourbon. And the sweetness with the bourbon, I think people are just eating it up. They just absolutely love these maple finish bourbons.

Yeah, I can think of a couple of different ones I've had. Speaking of one of the places you're in, you're actually in New Riff, right? And you're doing a collaboration with them.

Yeah, we are in New Riff. Uh, currently they sell our syrup there every day in the gift shop and we, we source most of our barrels from New Riff. They're, they're fairly close to us here in Ohio. It's about a four hour trip. And, uh, yeah, we, they have great barrels that we source probably monthly from them.

So, so you take in, you're dumping all the, you dump it in the syrup in there, into the barrel. And how long do you like that set in there stew?

So we age our syrup anywhere, depending on what the customer is looking for, anywhere from three to 12 months. So we have like a mini rick house built in a cooler here built on our property that we store everything. We rotate the barrels frequently and we age it depending on what the customer is looking for. Usually the distilleries want something a little stronger or at the bourbon festivals, they want something stronger. So we do a nine to 12 month for them and the local crowd just at craft shows and stuff, they want like a three to four month age.

Yeah, you know, we're like that. Not the old syrup right there. That stuff is delicious. So do you put 56 gallons or 53 gallons into the barrel? What do you do? Yeah, we use all 53 gallon barrels.

We can't get our hands on anything smaller really right now. It's very difficult to get like a 15 or a 30 gallon barrel or 35s I think they use. So 53s are ideal for us. It takes a lot of syrup to fill them, but we have the customers, thank God, that allow us to do it, so.

Yeah, so you let it age for nine months. And I'm sure you're up there thinking, same thing that distilleries think, that's just liquid assets right there for you, right?

It is. It's a tough pill to swallow at first. Getting started was my biggest issue was, okay, how much are people going to want next year? I think that all the distilleries have this issue. It is, what's the forecast look like for the next 12 months to four years? And how much should I put away? Because you can't rush that process. And if you're out, you're out. So we were fortunate enough to take a lot of our profits and just dump it back into syrup, get syrup, get barrels and age a lot. Right now we have anywhere between 30 and 50 barrels always aging. Um, you could do the math on how many gallons that is, but that's a lot of maple syrup. And luckily I was still working full time at my government job when I started aging. So it kind of let me get ahead, which was awesome. Very fortunate for that.

So when you, is there any angel share with that? Or does it, does that syrup like seal up the barrel?

Yeah, the syrup kind of seals up the barrel, but I mean, no matter what, you can't get it all out. When it soaks into the staves, I think we have about a 10 to 15% loss. typically and no matter how much you let these things drain down, you just, you can't get it all out. And some barrels do leak. Uh, so I have to rotate them, but I mean, sometimes I'll walk out into the, into the barn and there'll be, you know, two or three gallons of syrup on the floor. I know it breaks my heart, but there's nothing you can do. You know, you can't constantly monitor them and it is what it is. I guess is how the saying goes.

Yeah. I mean, it kind of is, but that's the angel share. Somebody's got to get that angel share out of there. Um, and that to me, that's still kind of cool that there, there's, uh, some coming out of there. Now, when you get the barrels, is there any bourbon left in those barrels?

Yeah, sometimes there is. If you, uh, like if I get them on like a Friday and don't fill them to a Monday, there's always a little bit of liquid splashing around in there.

What do you do with it?

I dump it out and enjoy it. I put it through the coffee filters. I actually have my own infinity bottle of, honest to God, of bourbon that I've dumped out of barrels. And I put, I put through coffee filters and it's always 125 proof, you know, cause that's what most distilleries put into the barrels 125. So you, uh, you filter that and it's, it's strong. I mean, it'll, it tastes good though. It's a mixture of, of everybody's barrels. So, uh, you know, there's no, I don't know what the, what the mash pills are of them, but it tastes great.

You gotta, you gotta bring some of that, uh, down to bourbon on the bank so we can try that. That sounds good right there. I, you know, you know, me and Jim, we both love a little bit of cast strength. Um, it's always, uh, that's the, to us, that's the best way to drink bourbon right there.

Oh yeah. I definitely took my breath away the first time I did it. It was, uh, it was overwhelming. So no, it's good though.

So, so besides new riff, what's some other distilleries that you've started working with?

Yeah, so we are, we're in quite a few distilleries right now. We're in New Riff, obviously, Mystic Farm and Distillery in Durham, North Carolina. We are in Pine Bluffs Distilling in Pine Bluffs, Wyoming, Leapers Fork, Franklin, Tennessee, and we are shipping actually tomorrow. I just got tomorrow to Tridi Oak Distilling in Dripping Springs, and we are fulfilling an order very, very shortly for our newest One is the Bard Distillery. They are in Western Kentucky and Graham, Graham, Kentucky.

Wow. So you're getting across nations. You mentioned Treaty Oak down in Texas, down in Dripping Spring, Texas. You know, it's no surprise that if we work with a distillery, we love, we absolutely love And they ask us, Hey, do you know any products or do you know anything that we should be doing? And one of the first names that come to mind every time is you, Kevin, I, you know, I'm your, one of your greatest champions when it comes to, to making sure your products out there. Cause I want whiskey drinkers to experience what I'm drinking. And we're actually going to talk about a cocktail I've made because it's, it's fall already, right? Last week was the first day of fall and I made a cocktail just for fall. So. Well, listeners, stay with us. We're going to talk about an event that's coming up this weekend that you still have a chance to drive on down to. You can meet Kevin. You can meet us. You can get a crap ton of his product and take it home with you. You probably get a cocktail there made with his product. We want you to experience that. Heck, we might even have some of that cocktail with us at our tent. So stay with us. We'll be right back.

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. 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 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. Um, you could find a syrup down there aged in their barrels, treaty Oak down in dripping spring, Texas. Um, I was just out there. His syrup is going to be there. Awesome. Um, and a garrison brothers in Texas, if you think, uh, you love some maple syrup, Make sure you go into Garrison Brothers and pick up a bottle from them also. Kevin, I 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, do a 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 from them. All right, listeners, we are back and we still got Kevin Holly with us from Seldom Seen Farm up in Ohio. He is one of our main sponsors, but we love having his product and stuff. So Kevin, for this second half, I made a little cocktail to put your syrup in. This is called a Cozy Maple Pumpkin Bourbon Cocktail with Apple Cider. You know, that just says fall right there, right? Oh yeah, for sure, for sure. So what this has in it, obviously I use the new Riff red turkey wheat Kentucky straight bourbon whiskey, two dashes of orange bitters, some pumpkin puree, which is just pumpkin pie filling out of the store, two ounces of your bourbon barrel aged maple syrup. some two dashes of pumpkin spice and six ounces of apple cider, and then I rim the glass with some cane sugar. I shook that up in a shaker with some ice and then strained it out. I'm going to tell you what, this is absolutely magic right here. So listeners, if you didn't catch all that, I will definitely have that on our post and on our website, that recipe for you. But Hey, Kevin, I know you're stuck there just drinking bourbon still, but cheers. Cheers, man. That's fall in a glass right there all day long.

That probably tastes like fall, right?

Yeah. So once again, it's the cozy maple pumpkin bourbon cocktail with apple cider. I know guys are like that pumpkin's not good. I'm telling you that the pumpkin puree in there, when you stirred it up at first, I was like, I don't know about this, but it's perfect. It is perfect. It looks like a fall drink. You could probably even have this warm and it would taste amazing. Um, But your bourbon barrel, uh, aged maple syrup, just give us that extra kick. I love it. So do you got any other cocktails you have, you have makeup?

So I'm, I just go with the old fashioned, honestly, two ounces of bourbon, half ounce of the syrup, uh, throw an orange peel in there, pour it over ice is, is, is my go-to. I love bourbon neat. And if I'm doing a cocktail, I just, I stick with the old fashioned.

Yeah. Jim swears. He swears by your syrup in an old fashioned. I think that's all he uses. When I go over there, he'll make one for me and that's what he's making it with. He's always, he's always drinking those. Now everybody's probably saying, where is Jim at right now? Where in the world is Jim? Jim is actually up in Brown County, Indiana right now. I will guarantee he's actually sipping on some bourbon from a distillery up there in Brown County. That'll be a future guest. So Jim, I'm hoping you're enjoying yourself sipping on that bourbon. Let's get back to this. So you got some other products out, right Kevin?

We do. We do. We have a couple of new products this year. The newest one is our bourbon barrel aged coffee. So I guess that came about, I don't even know how that really happened, is I had extra barrels on one of my runs. I didn't have enough syrup to fill them. And I know a local coffee maker, barista, I guess they would be called. And, uh, she gave me a bag of beans, 60 pound bag of coffee beans. I threw it in a barrel. It was kind of our, our experiment together that we didn't know how it was going to end up. I know that other people were doing it. Um, and we let it age for, I think six weeks the first time. And it turned out phenomenal. I mean, we have. We have customers raving about it. It really has a, it doesn't have so much as a bourbon flavor, but it's more of the barrel, the char and the oaky flavor to it. Some vanilla has come out in it and it's just phenomenal. It is phenomenal. I think I sent you guys a couple bags of that as well.

I actually drank that this morning. And this is how I drank it. Because I didn't have to work today. So I've been into cold brew lately. So I made some cold brew. I stuck it in the fridge, chilled it down. I added two shots of bourbon cream inside there into my coffee, shook it up. And that's how I had my cold brew this morning. So, bourbon and bourbon together is just a plus.

Yeah, I keep hearing that's the way to have bourbon barrel aged coffee is a cold brew. I mean, I've never even had a cold brew coffee before, so I couldn't tell you, but I love it just black. There's no sweeteners in it. There's no cream or anything. It tastes great to me. Just black.

Yeah, that'd be another way to drink it and stuff. I just needed that little bourbon kick today. Cause I didn't wake up, I didn't wake up listeners. I didn't wake up until it was like almost 11 o'clock today. I'm like a night, night animal right now. So.

Okay. Yeah. I was going to throw out our other product real quick too, is if you don't mind is our, our bourbon barrel aged barbecue sauce. It uses our syrup in it too. Um, I think I sent you guys a couple of bottles of that. It's a super, super sweet barbecue sauce that is extra sticky.

So, yeah, I've had it on ribs. That's a, you know, I usually don't like to smother my ribs or my barbecue in barbecue sauce, but this is a barbecue sauce that has that bourbon flavor to it. Uh, I think you hit it spot on. Um, now are you, are you sending that stuff to distilleries also or?

Yeah, a couple distilleries are taking it on for their retail store. The problem is now we don't have enough supply of the coffee to offer to everybody. So I know the bar distilleries going to have it. I think Fine Bluffs is going to be having it. And we're going to work on a few more, try to up our inventory into 2023. and we will have all these products at Bourbon on the Banks. We will have plenty of products there to sell everybody, so.

Well, since you brought it up and we've talked about it before, so the event that's coming up this weekend is Bourbon on the Banks. It's October 1st in Frankfort, Kentucky. Tickets are still available.

Yeah, the Bourbon on the Banks show I think is probably one of the best shows that I've been to. The crowd and the people is phenomenal. It's absolutely amazing.

So listeners, that website where you can get your tickets is bourbononthebanks.org. You still get those tickets today. There's over 80 distilleries. I don't know how many vendors there are. I'd say 40 or 50 vendors there. There's a beer tent there. There's a winery, a couple wineries there that'll have wine. If you're not a bourbon drinker or if you're bringing somebody that's not a bourbon drinker, there's beer and wine. Plus the Bourbon Road. The Bourbon Road has a lounge there called the Bourbon Road Lounge. So we have two bars inside our tent. We have a bourbon roadies lounge for our private Facebook group, The Bourbon Roadies. And then also we have a sponsor distillery, which is Leapers Fort Distillery out of Leapers Fort, Tennessee. They'll be in there pouring whiskey. You can meet some bourbon royalty inside our lounge. April Weller Cantrell, that middle name Weller, bourbon royalty right there. Plus we're going to have Denny Potter and Jane Bowie who just left Maker's Mark. They will also spend some time inside our lounge so you can chat with them you chat with us we'll have our swag there kevin's gonna be right next to us we'll also have uh smoke your bourbon barrel proof bourbon chips there they're gonna be right there near us we'll have some other people everybody wants to be around that that bourbon road lounge right kevin

They do they do we were actually by accident i guess this is the way they planned out last year. We were two doors down from the bourbon road and let me tell you there were so many people coming in and out of that time it was unbelievable there's a line actually outside of probably twenty or thirty people just waiting to get in it was pretty cool to see i snuck in kinda cut the line a couple times i think i got a few pores but i had to get back to work so that so the people let me. And, uh, it was, it was pretty cool to see. It was pretty cool to see. And conveniently we are right next door again this year. That worked out. I, uh, I think I had to twist Diane's, uh, arm a little bit just to get me there, but, uh, we made it happen. So.

Yeah, Diana is just amazing. She actually just texted me right now. And we had a listener win some tickets and she actually just sent him his tickets and stuff. And I'm just so excited about this festival now. The Kentucky Bourbon Festival was great. It's four days long. Well, me and Jim were worn out from it, but I've been on the banks. That's like being home for us because it's right down the road for us. And we get to see great friends like you. All of our other friends will be there. It's just a party for five straight hours right there on the Kentucky River, right down the road from Buffalo Trace. You could smell the mash cooking up there. It's just a great time. I look forward to sampling your products while we're there. Maybe even wake up and make some pancakes and one morning and pour some of that syrup over them and stuff. It's just a great time. Kevin, so you can just not in distilleries, but you can go online and buy your products, right?

Oh yeah. Yeah, for sure. That's our biggest presence right now. Uh, You know, divide direct is online at seldom seen maple.com. The, the, the support that the community has shown, you know, all the roadies I ship all the time. I actually got an order today, uh, from one of the roadies. They said they actually heard it on the bourbon road podcast the other day. And, uh, I mean, that's no lie there. They, I sent out a couple bottles to them, threw in an extra goodie for them. And, uh, the orders come in all the time. It's just that support from. from everybody who listens to this podcast is overwhelming. It's great to be shipping directly to consumers from another industry, right? It's how these two paths kind of cross and support each other. It's great to see.

Yeah, we love to hear that, that the ads work, that the podcast works for your business, for a small business person. And we talked about that. That's the reason why we picked you. We picked you because you're a small farmer. You really are a craft-made artisan that's making maple syrup. It's not a giant factory out there in the middle of an industrial complex. You actually have a timber frame. sugar house that you built with your hands. You're the ones out there tapping the trees, right?

Yeah, yeah, we do. We do all the work ourselves. It's myself and my wife. My eight-year-old helps. You know how eight-year-old help goes. But he definitely helps out. And yeah, we're doing it. We're doing the work. We're hustling. We're distributing. you know we're doing everything from from start to finish it's not there's there's no huge employees there's no factory lines like you said it's just i mean we just want to put out that quality product every time and even if it doesn't scale to anything bigger i would rather keep the product true to to to the craft you know

Yeah, to me that screams American, it screams patriotism. You know, I knew you were just up in DC kind of lobbying for farmers, talking to senators and talking about the American farmer, talking about that American pride, right?

Yeah, for sure. We spend three or four days in DC every year through the group I'm involved in with Farm Bureau. It's called the President's Trip to DC. And we advocate for farmers. It doesn't matter if you're a grain farmer, you know, you do livestock, you do specialty like maple. We actually sit down with these Congress people for two days. We meet with tons and tons of them and advocate for farmers. You know, it was pretty cool. I met one three weeks ago and then I met one, the same one in DC last week. And he told, you know, his other Congress people a story. of me and how when I got started, the barriers of entry were so hard for young farmers to get in that there's going to be such a decline in farmers in the next 20 years that I don't know what's going to happen with American food. American corn, American beans, just all the grain products that go into these distilleries that these distilleries just use tons and tons and tons of. It seems like the farmers are going away slowly but surely. And we go to DC to advocate for them on their behalf because not everybody can get off the farm and go to DC conveniently and get these appointments. So we kind of do it for them. It's a non-paying job by any means for me. It's all strictly volunteer. So we're just looking out for the industry, for the fellow farmers, and just trying to make America just keep rolling even in these tough times.

Yeah. I mean, I totally get it. It's like that generation. If we don't take care of farmers right now and help them out and advocate for them, we're going to lose that. We're going to lose that bread basket of America. Hopefully you took some of this bourbon barrel, aged maple syrup and put it in their hands and said, Hey, you need to try this, right?

I did actually three weeks ago, I gave a bottle to Senator Sherrod Brown here from Ohio. He's from the eastern part of the state of Ohio and his aides came up to me and actually said when I was in DC that how great that syrup was and it was actually in his refrigerator in his office. So and that's no lie. He enjoys it and they had it actually on the vanilla ice cream, which I recommended. So Awesome.

Awesome, man. Well, Kevin, man, I drank down my cocktail. That was that good.

Nice. I have a little bit left here. I'll finish.

Yeah. So listeners, if you're wondering what I was drinking there, what was my cocktail? If you didn't catch that, it was the cozy maple pumpkin bourbon cocktail with apple cider. Now that's pretty amazing, right? I took some new riff bourbon. I probably put a little bit extra in there, 2.5 ounces, a little bit of orange bitters, some apple cider, some pumpkin puree, some of Kevin's bourbon barrel aged maple syrup, and some pumpkin spice. And then I rimmed my glass with some cane sugar, shook it up in a shaker with some ice, poured it into a rocks glass, and enjoyed the hell out of it. So make sure you go to his website. Kevin, what's that website?

It is seldom seen maple.com.

Go over there. Check out his products. Make sure you purchase items from this farmer right here. American made, American pride right there. You're not going to get any better. You don't just have to eat it on pancakes like this fat guy does. Like I always like to say, we want you to pour it in your cocktail. Use it with your bourbon. Don't use that old nasty sugar water that everybody else is using in their cocktails. Use some of this maple syrup right here. It is absolutely delicious. Jim would guarantee you that. He'll promise you that. Also, if you're at Bourbon on the Banks or if you want to go to Bourbon on the Banks, make sure you stop by Kevin's booth there. Kevin, are you going to have all your products there?

Yeah, we will have all of our products there. We will have plenty. Um, we are bringing a trailer load. So, you know, we, we appreciate the support. We'll have just tons, just look for the huge line at the bourbon road and just look next door and we'll be there.

Are you going to have your cotton candy there?

I, do you know, I got a huge order of cotton candy today and I think I'm going to double down, uh, this Friday and just make an enormous batch and we will have. cotton candy at bourbon on the banks for sure.

Oh man. Folks, if you haven't had this cotton candy, um, it is, it is truly unique. It's made out of this maple syrup, man. It just kind of takes you back to your youth, right? So it does for sure.

For sure. And yeah, before we jump off, Mike, I just want to thank all these listeners. I mean, these, everybody who supports us, It is just overwhelming and I just cannot thank each and every one of you enough.

Let's, let's, let's talk about where that money goes. You actually have a family, right? You got a wife and children.

Yeah, we do. I've been married 15 years. We have an eight year old son named chase and a four year old daughter named Cora. And that money goes obviously right back into our homestead here. It puts shoes on our kids for baseball. It sponsors our local teams. We try to give back as much as we can to the community. And that's where that money goes. We're not making millions. We're not some huge... grocery store or whatever, you know, plastic factory, McDonald's type of thing. We are just investing in ourselves, investing in our family and investing in our community. So that's where the funds go. So it's greatly appreciated. It really, really is.

We love that sweat equity. That's what America was built on right there. So Kevin, where can our listeners find you guys on social media?

On social media, we are at Seldom Seen Farm. We post as much as we can and as much as we have time for, but you know how busy these schedules get. We posted a bunch yesterday, which I forgot to mention, is actually Ohio Liquor Agency was here yesterday. They sent eight camera crews up here, eight people and a camera crew yesterday to do a cover story on how bourbon and maple and agriculture go hand in hand. So they spent about seven hours here yesterday shooting video, doing a cover story. Just discovering everything about maple, our barrels, our industry. So look for that at OHLQ.com or .org I think pretty soon. Next two months I think they're going to have a cover story out on us and they're actually even talking about coming back and doing a part two documentary on maple syrup.

That's just simply, it's amazing. I love to see stuff like that happening for you, Kevin. And we look forward to you. You've been a great sponsor this year. You've actually helped us get down the Bourbon Road. And I can't thank you enough for actually coming on today, but being the sponsor of the Bourbon Road and believing in Jim and I and what we're actually doing to support great products across America. Hats off to you, brother.

Absolutely. Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

So Kevin, I know the listeners are wondering, do we have a giveaway? So what do you got for one lucky listener?

Oh man, I tell you what, we have an awesome giveaway right now with our new products. So we'll give away a gift basket. I don't know if I have a gift basket big enough anymore. I might have to come in just a cardboard box, but what we're going to do is give away a bourbon barrel aged syrup, a bourbon barrel aged coffee, our bourbon barbecue sauce. and i'll throw in a bunch of goodies you mentioned that cotton candy earlier i'll probably throw in three or four cotton candies uh some traditional maple syrup some maple sugar and anything else that we have we have a maple or a bourbon maple candle even made for us uh from somebody locally in kentucky I'll throw one of those in and I'll probably write you a little love letter or something saying thank you so much for the support and we'll ship it out as soon as we get that name.

So listeners, this is the way we're going to do this one right here. Uh, cause we need Kevin to get as much support as possible on Instagram, Facebook, uh, on tech talk. We need, we need people to get everywhere and stuff, but our main place is our roadies. Um, they're the ones that buy the most probably from our podcast. Uh, so we're going to do this giveaway on the bourbon roadies. So listen up, um, roadies. What you got to do is invite three people to the roadies and you got to comment hashtag seldom seen farm hashtag bourbon barrel aged maple syrup. That's two hashtags. But Kevin just gave you an amazing gift basket. We'll choose that listener at 10 o'clock Eastern Standard Time. from the Bourbon Roadies. So if you're on Instagram, make sure you join the Bourbon Roadies. It's simple. It's easy. I'm going to tell you how to do that in a second. But Kevin, man, what a great giveaway. We hope that gets you some more people buying your products. We can't wait to see you at Bourbon on the bank. So once again, thank you for coming on the Bourbon Road.

My pleasure. Thank you, sir.

So listeners, you know what I'm about to say. You can find us on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, all those great places. I brought up the bourbon roadies on Facebook, our private Facebook group. We are almost 3000 strong inside that group. We got three easy rules though. Are you 21? Do you love bourbon? Hell, everybody loves bourbon, right? And do you agree to play nice? Cause we don't tolerate any rudeness in that group. Meaning if you drink from the very bottom of the shelf, that old 10 high, like I used to drink, that stuff is worse than moonshine all the way to the top of the shelf. Like Jim likes to drink from that EH Taylor barrel proof. It's so delicious. Whatever you like to drink. We want you to celebrate life, celebrate weddings, celebrate retirements. births and even deaths. If you have a loved one that passed away, we want you to raise a glass to them and let all the other roadies raise a glass to them too and celebrate that life. I'm serious. We do not let anybody cut anyone off in the knees in that group. They'll find their ways to other groups, not in the bourbon roadies. So check that group out. We'd really appreciate it. We do two shows every week where we review a bourbon on one show. Usually a craft store, but sometimes a big boy will tell you what we think about that bourbon, about that whiskey, whether you should buy it or not, whether you should have it on your shelf. And then we do one long show, an hour long, 30 minutes to work, 30 minutes back. Great guests like Kevin Holly here from Seldom Seen Farm up in Ohio. with great products, great whiskeys. Check out those. The way you can make sure that you're not going to miss a show is you want to scroll on top of that app you're listening to. Hit that check sign, that plus sign, that subscribe sign. That app will let you know, hey, these two jokers have a show that came out today. And then we need you to scroll on down. Hit that five star review. give us some comments we're actually at 200 reviews right now we can always use more but we love those reviews you know what i'm gonna say if you don't though if you don't leave us that five star review of those comments the big bad booty daddy of bourbon will come over to your house with this new riff red turkey wheat You'll bring some of this bourbon barrel aged maple syrup when we'll make some cocktails all night long by the end of the night You'll leave us that five-star review and those comments a guarantee But seriously, like I said those comments those reviews they open up doors to distilleries They get great whiskey in our hand get great guests on our show like Kevin Ali here. We'd really appreciate it Now Jim and I are very approachable. You can always reach out to us at our emails. He is Jim at the Bourbon Road. I'm Mark at the Bourbon Road. Best place to probably reach us though is on our DMs, on Instagram. He's jshen63. I'm Big Bourbon Chief. You can also reach us on our website, thebourbonroad.com. On there, you're going to find our articles. you're going to find our reviews. You're going to find the podcast and you're also going to find our swag on there. Make sure you check out that website. We really appreciate you listening to this episode and giving support to Kevin Holly and seldom seen farm. This is big chief and I'll see you on down the bourbon road.