336. Distillery 291 with Michael Myers

Welcome to another great episode of The Bourbon Road with your host, Jim and Brian, where they talk bourbon and of course, drink bourbon. Grab yourself a pour, kick back, and enjoy another trip down the Bourbon Road.

You know friends, it's never too early to start planning your trip to the Bourbon Trail for 2023. We hope you'll join the Bourbon Road crew as we pull out all the stops this year at Bourbon on the Banks. So mark your calendars for October 6th and 7th and we'll plan on seeing you in Frankfort, Kentucky. Be sure to listen in during the halftime break for all the details on Bourbon on the Banks. Hello and welcome back listeners to another episode of the Bourbon Road Podcast. I'm your host Jim Shannon and in the studio tonight we've got kind of a very special fellow who's been on the show before. It's been a while. But we thought it's pretty important to bring him back because it just seems like recently his name and his product name has been popping up a lot, either in Bourbon Road episodes or in events that we've been at. So I definitely wanted to bring back Michael Myers from 291 Distillery. Michael, welcome back to the Bourbon Road Podcast.

Thank you, Jim. Glad to be back.

Yeah, it's pretty exciting. We did have you on in episode 25. I'm gonna say that was sometime back in early 2018. And I think I've seen you out and about a few times in between and we've chatted, but we haven't had you back on an actual episode. And now we're, I think this one's gonna be something like 335. So it's 310 episodes later. We got all kinds of catching up to do. Emily, was she your director of marketing? Pretty much.

I don't know her exact title. It's changed a couple of times. Emily takes care of all kinds of shit for us. Yeah.

Well, she was great to work with.

She's standing over here.

Well, she's great to work with. She was an absolute pleasure. We worked through a couple of difficult things with shipment to get everything in place. It was really nice to see those whiskeys show up today, and I was quite pleasantly surprised by what she sent and the nice little note she wrote. Awesome. If she doesn't get on camera tonight, make sure you give her a big thank you for me. I appreciate all her help.

I will, and I appreciate all that she does for 291. It's amazing. I have an amazing team.

I'd like to get straight to the whisky here tonight. In our first class, we're going to take one of the four bottles you sent, and we're just going to start logically at the lowest proof, I guess. But all your whiskeys are pretty hefty in proof. So, why don't you tell us a little bit about what's in our glass to start with here?

So, this is Bourbon Single Barrel Barrel Proof. The one you have is 126, you said? Yeah, it's 126.1. The one I have is 136.8. That means it's a little older in the barrel than yours, most likely. The proof changes by age quite a bit here in Colorado. It's a bourbon. It's 80% corn, 19% malt rye, 1% malt barley. It's actually my very first experiment and my very first recipe ever. Actually, it changed by 1%. The 1% malt barley originally wasn't in there. It was 20% malt rye. And I took 1% out and put the malt barley in there early on. But it was the very first mash bill I did. I was going to mash in over the weekend. Mike Bristol, Bristol Brewing Company had given me a bag of corn, went down to the home brew shop. I knew I needed Um, and I wanted to use rye and they had rye malt. So I got enough to do an 80 20 mashed in, um, fermented and then, um, distilled it and turned out really, really pretty. So, um, we make it daily here. Um, we make the rye and the bourbon daily. So.

All right. Well, let's check this out and we'll talk a little bit more about the details after the sip. Cheers. Cheers. One thing for sure, when you're raising a Glencairn with 120 plus proof whiskey in it to your nose, you don't take a deep long breath. You're kind of very gentle with it. And this has a nice sort of a caramel spicy nose to it. It's got a lot of kind of that rye spice boldness. And that's amazing because we're talking about 20% malt rye here. And a lot of times, malted ryes are a little bit softer than their non-malted counterparts, right?

They are they're a little softer, a little sweeter. And but there's my whiskey has a lot of spice. And, you know, when I when I set out to start 291, and I wanted to make a western whiskey, something big, bold and beautiful, like the state of Colorado. And I think both the bourbon and rye do that. Actually, I think almost all my whiskies that I've made have that effect. just really pretty. You know, I love Kentucky bourbon and I love Tennessee whiskey and a lot of the other whiskies now. But I was going to make a western whiskey in Colorado and I wanted it to be different. and I think it is a very different whiskey that is really nice to drink. The different notes come from the yeast we use, the grain we use, the shape of the still that I built, designed and built, and then just the barrels and the dryness here in Colorado.

on the palate. It has that initial real sweet impression, but it doesn't fool you for very long with that sweetness. It gets on the back of your palate and introduces itself with a firm handshake. It's got a lot of spice on it. Definitely rye is in charge, even though it's got a majority of corn content in it. But this is This is definitely a bourbon whiskey. You can taste that caramel sweetness to it. It's a little bit more of a molasses here. This is a dark whiskey too. It's almost a mahogany in color and I'm looking at all your whiskies here and they're all very dark. This is probably the lightest of the three in the big bottles and it's still a pretty good colored whiskey. It's nice and dark.

Thank you, yeah. We use the barrel mill out of Avon, Minnesota and have from day one and their barrels for me put a really nice color in my whiskey and notes as well. But I've been very, very happy with their barrels and what it does for my whiskey.

I want to take another sip here and sort of try to analyze the finish a little bit.

You know, I like a heavy mouthfeel in a whiskey. I'm not a big fan of thin, more refined whiskey. Western whiskey to me should be rugged, refined, rebellious. And I think 291 is very much that type of whiskey.

Yeah, it has a nice viscous mouthfeel to it, a little bit silky. When it hits the back of the palate, it kind of really sticks to the to the back of your tongue and to the sides of your palate on the back. It kind of hangs in there. It's got a nice long finish on it. It's got a wonderful deep peppery rye spice on it. And I'm just surprised. Again, now 20% rye is a lot of rye, folks. I'm not saying that rye doesn't have an opportunity to be a big player in this, just being only 20% because 20% is a high rye bourbon.

It does have a lot of rye and that rye has a lot of character to it compared to corn. And so I think that's what helps it stand up to the corn, the 80% corn.

But you get it back up front in your mouth again, and it's still got that wonderful sweetness. On the back, it seems a little more tannic and dry, but only because when I say tannic and dry, I don't say bitter or in a bad way. This would make a good cigar whiskey. It's got that real nice heavy lay on the back of the palate, a little bit of impression back there, and I just think it would stand up to a lot of things. It would certainly stand up to a cigar. I think it would stand up to a cocktail in an amazing way. It would probably make a great Black Manhattan.

I laugh at that because my drink, if I'm mixing a drink, it's a black Manhattan. But I normally do it with the rye and Averna. It's an amazing cocktail. But one day, I was doing an event or something and somehow just barrel-proof bourbon got shipped. It was a friend's group birthday, 60th birthday, and I was like, oh no, well, let's just try it. And the bourbon in the Averna, okay, it became a sweet, even more sweet cocktail, but as a black Manhattan, the bourbon really stood up and I was very impressed. it made it a different cocktail, not just slightly, but a different cocktail. And I really was impressed with it because I had not tried bourbon in that black Manhattan.

Yeah, no, I think I've had a black Manhattan both ways. I believe I've had it with Aperol and Averna. And personally, I'm going to say that I think with Bourbons, maybe the Averna would be my favorite and maybe with Rye's Aperol. I do enjoy them. I mean, I like a good old-fashioned, but if you drink old-fashions all the time, it's nice to have a Manhattan once in a while, and a black Manhattan is just a real stout drink, and I like it a lot. So Michael, we did have you on the show before and I know a little bit about your story, but I think we've got a lot of listeners today who are maybe new to the show and, or maybe new to 291 whiskey altogether. And we'd like to hear a little bit about kind of how you got started and where the idea came from, how you ended up in Colorado and making whiskey.

Yeah. So, um, yeah, I did, I know the first, um, podcast we did together. I told my story and I enjoy telling my story. It doesn't change too much. There are little things that change or, you know, maybe I leave something out. But I was a fashion and beauty photographer in New York and 9-11 changed my life. I lived three blocks from World Trade Center, was on Greenwich and Dwayne when the first plane hit and with my youngest son on my shoulders. went through that whole day and it was crazy and got to a point where we needed to get out of New York that week. I mean, we couldn't get back in our apartment. So my wife's parents lived in Colorado Springs, my ex-wife. And so we came out here and I started commuting back for photography and put the kids in school and commuted for a while. Got to a point where I was like, okay, I've got to do something different. This isn't good for my family and the travels a lot. So I was flying back from a Vanity Fair shoot, reading the New York Times about the guy that created Hendrick's Gin and Sailor Jerry. and thought I could brand a whiskey and got back to the springs and talk to some people. And somebody said, why don't you try and make it first? You know, and I'm like, I'm from Georgia, they make it in the woods, how hard could it be? And, and that's the truth. And I, so I, I'm totally self taught, YouTube documentary books, and, and decided I needed a still talk to Vendome and they had a 50 gallon still that was $50,000 and I'm like, I don't have that kind of money to start this. And so I decided I could build my own still and needed copper and I had these photogravure plates. So a flat copper plate, you chemically etch an image in, you ink the plate. Put a piece of paper with it run it through a press and you get an inked photograph and took the seven plates drew a design. For the still had the plates water jet cut rolled on through a metal roller to curve home and then took him to the sky and had him take welded together to build a forty five gallon still. And I started in 300 square feet. That still had a thump keg with it. And I had a stripping still that I had built out of a 55-gallon stainless drum. And so all my whiskeys three times pot distilled. I have a 300-gallon finished still now and the thump keg to that is my original 45-gallon still. and started in this 300 square foot space. And like I said, the first, so that very first batch I did went through an amblyx still. And so I stripped it and then ran it through a really small and just got like a few bottles. But that was my, you know, that was the one and only experiment I did. And the next batch was the bourbon again. And I stripped it, bigger batch and ran it through the 45 gallon still and the whiskey came off and was really beautiful and just started making it and knew I was gonna make a rye whiskey as well. And so rye was my favorite. The bourbon just was the first one because of the bag of corn I had. So I got some rye and my rye is 61% malt rye, 39% corn. and ran that one. And that's my second recipe, my second experiment. And it turned out beautiful. Took the white whiskey over to my friend at the bar next door. And he made a white Manhattan with it. That was an incredibly incredible drink. Just screaming with the white dog, Lele, some maraschino, liqueur, and some absinthe. And it just is a really pretty drink. And That white dog, this year, World Whiskey Awards for Whiskey Magazine won Best American New Make or Young Spirit. That's the second time it's won that award. My Fresh, 291 Fresh, which is the bourbon unaged, has won it twice too. So four years in a row, we've won Best American New Make or Young Spirit. And that's been really great. But I could make 60 gallons a month in that space. And then we moved to the space you visited that was 6,500, 7,000 square feet. We moved to that and now we're in 26,000 square feet, what's behind me. And we can make 600 gallons a week. So quite different.

So that's a big jump from what you had. I mean, that's a major increase in production capacity. You feeling like you got a little bit of room to breathe when you move to that bigger still?

Yeah, I did. The stills, the 300-gallon still, I have two stripping stills. Those are what are behind me, 1,500 gallons. And all the equipment I have, or most of the equipment I have manufactured here in the Springs. Some DOD guys I met that have this most amazing machine shop have built are fabricated. The stripping stills for me and the finished still and a couple other things. The fermentation tanks are out of St. Louis. They're oak fooders. They're very nice. And then two of them are here. They're Cypress from Alabama. Those were the first ones I got before I found the fooders. But yeah, the space is It's kind of funny. It's a big space, but you feel like there's not enough room when you start looking at numbers and what you hope to do with the company and get the whiskey to 28 states and things like that. Our glass manufacturer is holding, I think, 85,000 pieces of glass for us right now. And that equals 107 pallets, which is five truckloads. And I looked at my COO when we got that email and I'm like, where are we going to put 107 pallets? know, the 300 square foot space I was in, I had built shelves that could hold one pallet of the bottles I used at the time. And it was great, very efficient, very ship shape. But to think about from that space to now, where I'm talking about 107 pallets, you know, is Crazy.

I guess if you're doing things right, you're kind of always in a constant state of expansion, right? You're always looking for more space. You're always looking for more capacity. And of course you're always looking for more customers. So I think, yeah, if you're doing it right, you should always be kind of be in that mode and hopefully you're able to. I guess hit a plateau, rest for a while, then get going again. You know, eventually you'll be in some crazy, huge facility with stills everywhere and trucks popping in and out three or four times a day. So you probably have quite a few shipments coming in and going out on a regular basis already, but. It can only get better.

And, and, and yes, and we're incredibly tiny. Um, you know, we, we have a big presence and, and you spoke about that, that we're popping up a lot more. Um, we've done very well. My team's done very well in, in keeping us on the front and people knowing who are wanting to learn about who time 291 is. And, um, so that's, that's amazing. But you know, we sold, um, five thousand nine liter cases last year. And that's in the scheme of things that is tiny. And we're looking to grow. We love it. We, you know, all our equipment works really beautiful. And the whiskey is just as you're tasting tonight, as good as it's ever been. And We have some special things that we're going to taste later too. One of them is a new label, which I'm excited about. And then another one is an experimental batch we did. Actually, it's four years, eight months old. So, we did it around that 2018, you know, time period is when we distilled it. So, that you were talking about.

Right. So, I just poured some of the Colorado Whiskey in my glass. This is the 291 single barrel, barrel proof Colorado Whiskey. My bottle in particular is at 129.1 proof. Yeah, we have the same whiskey. Okay, good. Well, first of all, tell our listeners what a Colorado Whiskey is.

big, bold, and beautiful like the state of Colorado. For me, this is my rye mashbill, 61% malt rye, 39% corn. It does not say, it says rye on the label, very small, but it doesn't say the small batch of this recipe says rye on the label says 291 Colorado rye whiskey. I didn't want rye on the label originally. And so this is my whiskey. This is the single barrel barrel proof 291 Colorado whiskey is the whiskey I set out to make. It's a rye like I said. And it's, it's just a really pretty spicy whiskey. If you've been to Colorado, you know how beautiful it is. You know how rugged it is and, and unforgiving in some places sometimes. Um, and, and this is, this rye is very much that.

All right. Let's check it out. Cheers. Yeah. It's a little more floral on the nose than the bourbon was a little less sweet. But it's got a nice candy punch of sweetness up front. But definitely the rye toast and a little bit of a kind of a stone fruit palate to it. It does have a little bit of a kind of an anise, along with a little bit of an earthy kind of note to it. I think the malted rye and I've been on kind of a malted rye only because I got a very good friend who's a big lover of malted ryes and he's had me on this malted rye kick lately and they are kind of catching on. My palate is catching on to them and this is a fine example of a whiskey with a good portion of malted rye in it. And now all your whiskeys say Aspen, Wood, Stave, Finished. Yes. And I actually received from Emily a piece of Aspen wood that was charcoaled. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

So when I started it, I'm not traditional, but I look at tradition and think about it. And, you know, I wanted Aspen on the label because what's synonymous with Colorado is Aspen. And so originally with the fresh 291 fresh, I looked at, charcoal mellowing with aspen charcoal. So that's where that started. And then I moved to aging whiskey in a barrel and I was like, okay, well, why not finish that whiskey some way? And so I thought aspen, you know, charcoal or toasted aspen staves would be a nice finish maybe. And so I did an experiment where I put some in a mason jar with the, you know, whiskey without it, whiskey with it. and did a test for about a couple hours shaking it and tasted it. It's a very slight change to the whiskey. It's a very nice change, but it's very slight. It adds a little spice, a little smoke, and pushes caramel notes a little more to the maple. My distiller, Eric Jutt, has a very broad palate. He's able to taste something and relate it quickly to an experience he's had. He can go in more depth about that. But for me, that's what it originally did. And I kind of like that. And so I went ahead and made it where all our whiskies are finished on Aspen wood, toasted Aspen wood. The fresh is charcoal mellowed. The only whiskey that we have that doesn't have anything done with it with the Aspen is the white dog, 291 Colorado rye whiskey white dog. And that it just kind of slipped through the cracks. I don't know why I didn't do that.

Well, I have to say that there's nothing else on planet Earth like the 291 Colorado Whiskey. It has a flavor profile all of its own. You're not going to find anything like it. It's something if you haven't tried, you really ought to try. I can't explain kind of the flavor layer combination that I'm getting on my palate when I drink it because I think there's a lot going on there. I wish I had a more advanced palate where I could pick it apart. Some people can do that. I'm not that guy. But I can't tell you that I like it. I like it an awful lot. I think I've had it before. In fact, I know if I look on the top shelf behind me, I think. But it's been a minute since I visited that bottle. I think the profile seems a little different to me today than it did before. Maybe you've refined your process a little bit. Maybe just I got a very poor memory, but it just, or maybe my palette has just moved on from where it was before. So I'm loving this. I'm really, really, really liking this one a lot. Not that I didn't like your bourbon. I thought your bourbon was fantastic, but this Colorado whiskey is something special. It really is.

Thank you. Yeah, that's a very high compliment that it doesn't taste like anything else. And I agree with you. It's a really, really nice whiskey, really pretty for a rye. And we like to say it's a bourbon drinker's rye because of the heavy corn content in it. But it's just a nice whiskey.

Yeah, a good whiskey. Yeah, every year we like to finish up the year by naming a kind of a whiskey of the year, craft distillery of the year kind of deal. And then our first episode out of the gate in the next year is usually a blind bottle share. And we had one this last year and one of the guests on the show blinded your bottle of Colorado whiskey into the show and we had some pretty heavy hitters in there, I'll be honest with you. And we scored them on a multi-point basis and by the end of the show, there was only one one individual point separating the winner in 291 Colorado Whiskey. So, it was very, very close. Now, in that particular night, you took second place, but on another night, it could have been first. So, I mean, it was just a fantastic episode. And I mentioned earlier in the show that you're popping up on our radar, right? We're seeing things happen. And And that was definitely one of them that got us to thinking it's about time to talk to Michael again for sure.

Thank you. Yeah, the interesting thing about my whiskey is, or about 291, I call it my whiskey, it's actually my whole team and 291, but is that, you know, more and more now, you know, it's been 11 and a half years, more and more people are tasting different whiskies that aren't just Kentucky bourbon or Tennessee whiskey or Indiana, you know, whiskey. Originally, you know, my whiskey was so different than Kentucky traditional bourbon that people sometimes the first taste they're like, Whoa, I don't know about that, you know, and and it takes them a moment to go back and revisit it. Usually when they revisit it, they go, wow, okay, my palate's grown and I really like this. That's with anything. You look at clothing, somebody tries something new with a suit or something and you're like, I don't know about that. you know, a year later and everybody's wearing that suit that's changed like that. So I think whiskey is very similar to that. And that's the nice thing about the craft movement. Emerging brands like 291 is, you know, shaking things up a little bit and pushing the limits and pushing people to do things that are a little different than what traditionally has always been done. And I think that just makes the whiskey that much better throughout the world.

Absolutely. No doubt about it. Well, Michael, we're kind of up on a break now, folks. We're going to take just a short little break and Michael and I will finish our pour of the 291 Single Barrel Colorado Whiskey when we come back. We've got a couple more bottles to try. Both these next two expressions are whiskies that I haven't had before, so I'm really excited to try them. So stick around. We'll be right back. As we mentioned earlier in the show, we hope you'll join us this fall on October 6th and 7th for Bourbon on the Banks. The festival itself is from 2 to 6 PM on October the 7th, and you can pick those tickets up at bourbononthebanks.org for $65. They also have an early access ticket for $75. It'll get you in an hour early and definitely get you access to some special pores. But if you always like that VIP access this year, they're bringing in the VIP access tickets. We'll give you access to their VIP tent and all the great things that go along with that for $175. Be sure to check out bourbononthebanks.org. They'll get all the details on this year's event. All right, welcome back, folks. First half, we had a couple of really, really good whiskies. I have to say that I'm going to raise my hand and say the Colorado whiskey was my favorite, but. The bourbon was just delightful as well. I think the reason that the Colorado whiskey, the single barrel that you sent to me kind of got my attention is because its flavor profile is just so unique. It's something that you say, you know, I've never had anything like this before and I probably won't find anything like this unless I buy another bottle of 291. So that's the kind of stuff I love. I really like it. Every now and then I'll walk into a bar and the bartender will say, hey, pick something off the bar. You can have whatever you want. That's nice when that happens, but usually I'm not looking for the pappy. I'm not looking for the high allocated bottle. I'm looking for that that bottle that I haven't had before, that expression that didn't make it on my bar yet that I really like to try. And this is one of them. I mean, I've had it before, but it's been so long. But now we've got a new whiskey in our glass. This is one I haven't had, so getting a little bit of goosebumps here. Michael, why don't you tell us what's in our glass?

So, what's in your glasses? The label is 291 All Rye. This is batch one and there's 1303 bottles of it. and it is 100% malt rye. There are two malts in it. One is from Rootshoot here in Colorado, and the other one is Wireman out of Germany. And the reason Wireman is, when I started this and I went to get rye malt, nobody was malting rye in Colorado, so I picked up the German malt. And the notes in that malt are very different than root shoots, Colorado malt. So we haven't shifted our main recipes to Colorado rye malt because of the different flavor profile. But we did do an experiment and originally the first hundred percent rye malt that I did was So we have a label called 291E and that's our experimental batch. It's a big gold E on the label and every batch is totally different. I think we're on batch 11, working on batch 12 right now. But batch 3 was 100% malt rye. I wanted to see what it tastes like and it came off the still. It's really pretty and sweet and it's amazing how sweet malt rye is. Eric and I got talking and I was like, let's do an experiment with the, you know, 100% wire men, 100% root shoot malt and different barrel, still the barrel mill barrels, but not marrying the whiskey together, but aging it in separate barrels. And we did and about a year ago, maybe not a year, six months ago, we were tasting them and we blended them and tasted them and was like, they're really good together, really, really good together. So we decided to do a new label and that's where this All Rye came from. And on the bottom of the bottle, it has a sticker that says, All Rye, All Rye, All Rye.

All Rye, All Rye. Is that Matthew McConaughey kind of?

It's a nod that way. I do own the trademark, which is really nice. But we're really excited about this whiskey. And like you said, it's 132.6 proof. And it's a really good, different, but really good whiskey. And again, with 291, The 291 profile thread goes through all our whiskey. When you taste our whiskey, you know that it's 291, no matter what expression it is.

So when somebody is doing a blind guess the distillery challenge, they probably have a good, pretty good view, right?

Yeah, more and more. I've had a couple of people, journalists that do judging and stuff, and they're like, yeah, it's interesting when people go, oh yeah, that's 291, I guarantee it. And that's a good thing and a bad thing, right? For me, it's a good thing.

All right. Well, cheers. Cheers. Wow. It's got a nice buttery nose on it. Definitely got kind of a, an earthy spicy right note to it. Well, that does not seem like it's over 130 proof.

No, it does not.

Man. That's, that's like cream.

Not sweet orange, but a nice orange note right in the middle of your tongue between your teeth that comes through. and a really nice creaminess to it.

It's almost got this silky smoothness like you're drinking like a heavy liqueur or something, but that's just the texture of it. It's very nice and velvety, silky.

Which is really different usually for a high proof whiskey because of the dryness.

Absolutely, but it doesn't seem super dry to me. Like it doesn't hit the back of my palette and dry me out. It doesn't have that, uh, that sort of, um, yeah, that, that dry feel on the back of the palette. It's very well balanced, very smooth across the palette does not appear at all to be like 132 proof.

Thank you.

It's got a nice all around sweetness to it that is, it's not sugary sweet. It's kind of a grain sweetness. I love it. I really like this a lot. I'm a big rye guy and this right here kind of tips the scales a little bit for me. It's something I haven't had again, so.

Thank you. Yeah. And it's, you know, for a rye, it's not very spicy. You know, I think the bourbon was spicier earlier.

Yeah, this is more balanced and easy. For 132 proof, this is kind of an easy sipper. And that kind of, that shouldn't be that way, right?

It's a little scary. Yeah.

So when you had the two, so this is kind of a blend of two ryes, right? You kind of mentioned you had two different grain bills. Well, they're both ryes, but they're both malted ryes, but they're from different sources.

Right. Different mall houses. Were they vastly different?

The two?

Yes. Yep. They taste vastly different.

So they, they both brought kind of their best assets to the table when they were blended.

They did. Um, they, they really balanced each other out in a really nice way. Um, because there were certain notes that popped up in each of them separately that, that just made them not as, special, I guess. And then when they were blended or married, they just balanced each other out really nicely and filled the valleys and pushed the peaks off a little bit. Yeah, made a really nice whiskey.

Yeah, I'm going to really have a great time introducing a few people to this bottle who visit the Bourbon Road Bar. This is going to be a pretty popular bottle, I'm going to say, amongst my close drinking buddies. So I'm pretty excited to do that. You mentioned that you're in a number of states. Did you say it's close to 25 states? 28, somewhere in there. Am I pushing it to ask you to rattle them off or is that something that they just need to go to the website for?

28 is going to be tough. Yeah. But I can start, you know, I can go Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Louisiana, Arkansas, Kansas. Let's go back. I don't know, Virginia, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Indiana, California, Oregon, Nevada, Emily's trying to give me a little bit of help here. Colorado, that one, right? Yeah. Wyoming a little bit, Kentucky, Kentucky, Kentucky.

Maybe it's worth saying twice.

Yeah. Um, and, and some of these states, we ship pallets to Georgia. I don't know if I said Georgia home state. Um, and some of them were with LibDib distribution and we ship, you know, sell a pallet. I mean, not a pallet, sell a case and ship a case. So, um, You know, it's not like there's a, it's all over the shelves and all these states. Some of them it's on the shelves quite a bit and some of them it's not. And we're growing as fast as we can and as fast as we can make it and you know, bottle it and produce it and get it, get it on a truck.

Now, are you able to sell it out of the distillery and ship it as well?

We cannot ship out of the distillery, but we sell out of the tasting room. Luckily, in Colorado, we're not limited to how much we can sell that way. We do have an online presence on our website in Sealbox. and you can order it, but it has to go through because of three tiered distribution and all that. It has to go. So we sell it to our distributor. They sell it to a liquor store that's able to ship in your area. And that's how it works through our website. And then, uh, seal box is out of DC and they ship out of there and they have a lot of our allocated whiskey or not a lot. They have some of our allocated whiskey on their website. So, And Al-Rai, I think they're picking up Al-Rai. Well, that's fantastic. Al-Rai, I think is going to be sold in Colorado and Texas. I think we're shipping a few 300 and something bottles to Texas. But other than that, most of it's out of Colorado or on the website.

But you'll be able to get it on Sealbox. Yep. Awesome. Well, that's good for a lot of our listeners because I know a lot of our listeners do watch Sealbox to see what they can get their hands on. So very, very good. I would highly recommend if you can get your hands on a bottle of this all right. If you've got even just a little bit of a kind of a palette that likes malted rice, I would say that this one is kind of the kind of at the top of the heap there. It kind of expresses that malted rye as best as anything can. So give it a shot. All right, all right, all right. Or all rye, all rye, all rye. That's it. All right. Well, I'm kind of excited to try this last bottle that you sent. Now this is not a standard 291, 750 mil bottle. This is a sample bottle.

Yeah. So what, what'd you get a three, seven, five.

I got a, uh, four ounce sample bottle. Like a Boston. Yeah.

So this was, this is interesting. Um, whiskey, like I said, this is, um, single malt. Um, we, we distilled it about five years ago, put in barrels. We, um, just wanted to do it. I wanted to do a single malt for a e-batch at some point. And so a couple of years ago, we popped the bungs on them, tasted them and was like, guy, it's good. And we had some wheat whiskey at the time that was good. And we married them or blended them. and made a really nice E out of them. But we had fewer barrels of the wheat than we did of the single malt. So we took the right amount to make a really nice blend and put those in bottles. And we had about eight barrels of the single malt left over. And Eric's like, what are we doing with those? And I don't know, let's sit on them. We'll see. Just put them back somewhere and we'll look at them. We'll taste them in a little while, see what happens to them. And I guess a month, six weeks ago, they were out. Eric brought them out for some reason or talked about them. I said, well, let's pop the bung on them. Let's taste them. And we popped the bong and there was one of them. We were weighing the barrels and one of them was light. And we were like, oh, that must have been a leaky barrel. And so we weighed the other ones and popped the bong and tasted them. And it was just really, really nice whiskey. And I'm like, what's the proof on this whiskey? And Eric got the proof meter and stuck it in the barrel. checked it out and the first one I think was 143 proof. And I'm like, what? And the next barrel is like 142. And we're like, wow. And I said, all right, you got to proof the light barrel. And my thought was it, it didn't leak. It just lost water. So it's lighter because it's alcohol, more alcohol than, than water. And that one proofed it 153 proof. Oh my goodness. I think if you're on our social media, we posted the meter at 153, which was crazy. But so I decided that we would marry the barrels together and make a blend. And what you have is that blend or married Cause it's all the same single malt made in our distillery. But, um, yours is not proofed down. Mine's proofed down to about 130. Um, we wanted to make the best whiskey we can by either leaving it at high proof or proofing it down some. So, I mean, 130 is not low proof, but.

Well, I appreciate you sending me the unproved version at 142.8 and, uh, It's been a, it's been a minute since I had a head Matt has Matt whiskey, but this definitely qualifies.

And especially a single mall. Yeah.

Yeah. Especially a single ball. All right. So let's check it out. Cheers. Cheers. Wow. The nose does not like take you over or anything. It's kind of a light nose on it. I like that. Oh, that's wonderful. That's delightful. It says it's four years and nine months. It tastes like it's 10 to 12 years. It tastes like it's a very well-aged whiskey.

Thank you. Yeah, I took a bottle of this 375 sample bottle to whiskey magazine, American whiskey magazine, American whiskey awards a week ago in Louisville and had Steve Beal and Peggy Ngo and Maggie and a few people taste it and they just were blown away. What you're tasting, the higher proof and it's a, now I wish I hadn't blended those other barrels with the wheat. So I'd have a lot more.

I think it's, I think it's definitely on the verge of magical. It's very, um, refined and delicate, but it's, it's hazmat. I mean, it's 142 proof, but it's just got this wonderful non-oppressive palette to it. It's not blowing you out of the water. It's very nice, kind of soft.

Yeah. What I get from it, um, and yes, all those words you're saying are exactly the same. I feel the same about it. Um, the nose or the, the notes I get is straight up like golden raisin tobacco.

Yeah. Yeah.

Just this really pretty, pretty whiskey.

Yeah, it is. It is a little dry, but, um, I think I want it that way. I think that's how I want this whiskey to be, um, soft and light and, um, yeah, the raisin and the tobacco, but not like deep and dark. It's more, um, It's almost golden. Yeah. Very refined. This could be a very, very, very expensive whiskey. You know what I'm saying? This could be something that would be treasured because it's very, um, for 142 proof, it's something that is just, it's really nice.

Yeah. It's it for me, it's an incredibly unique whiskey. Um, I, um, So this one will probably come out in the fall or late fall. We're going to hold it. We're going to put it in some competitions and release it later in the year. But we just released an E11. that's the bourbon, but we had a boiler breakdown. And so our boiler was red tagged. It was a 25-year-old boiler that had been in the brewery that we moved into. And so it took 30 days to get a new boiler in. and set up running. And so, the whiskey, the bourbon sat in the fermentation for 30 days. And that whiskey is a unique, very good bourbon, very, very unique. And when I taste that, I was like, okay, this is probably the most interesting, beautiful whiskey I've ever tasted. And granted, okay, I'm biased, it's my whiskey. But if somebody handed it to me, I would have been like, the same. I mean, it just, and then like, a month later, we're popping the bung on these single malts and tasting that and it just, it blew me away. This, this whiskey is so special, unique, well balanced. The proof on it is amazing. And so yeah, this whiskey, these two whiskies right now for me are the most interesting, best whiskey I've ever tasted in my life.

Well, I hope you took really, really good notes because we, your customers are demanding that you reproduce this on a see reasonably regular schedule.

That's the problem with the E's is all our E's have won really nice awards. One of them, a wheat, 100% wheat, won world's best wheat from Whiskey Magazine. The 100% malt rye number three, Jim Murray gave 96 points, I believe. one of them got, I think, 96 and a half points. So, yeah, we keep doing these experiments and I do want to do a single mall at one point where it will have its own label. We just it's going to be a little while now because tasting this at almost five years old makes me want to age it for at least that long. Yeah. So, yeah. And when you're bootstrapping a company, it's tough to be able to sit on whiskey for a long time and put a lot of it up and do things like that. But that's a nice thing that we were able to experiment and make amazing whiskeys that people get to taste and hopefully some people sit on some bottles and don't. you know, drink it immediately. So.

Well, I think they'll cherish this. If they manage to get their hands on a bottle of this, they'll definitely cherish it. So I got four ounces. I'm going to want to share it with as many people as I can. And I'm going to look for that bottle to come out when it does and try to get my hands on it. So. Yeah. Awesome. So if, if somebody's coming to your distillery, they're visiting Colorado, they want to come to 291, uh, you know, What can they expect when they show up at the distillery? What's it like to, to visit and take a tour and do a tasting and all those things.

Yeah. So we want you to sign up online so you have a spot, especially if you're doing a tour and a tasting. You can come into the distillery, into the tasting room, and it's a bar. So you can order a cocktail. You can taste some of the whiskey before you order it if you haven't tasted it, but you can't do a full tasting without a reservation or tour without a reservation. It's a western bar. A friend of mine built it for me. The top of the bar is African mahogany, like some of the frames I made for my photographs. And then the front of the bar and the wrap of the bar is restored doors from the restore. And And so they're actually one of them is a mahogany front door, but it looks like, you know, a regular bar. There's no stools around the bar because I want it to be a Western standing bar. And I wanted that to be fluid. When people came in, people leaning on the bar would move around and make it welcoming for people to come in and not feel on the outside. And that's worked really well. And then there's a back room where there's sofas, chairs, tables, and we have music. Music's going to start shortly tonight. Grant Sabin and a friend of his are going to play blues. Grant is also one of our bartenders. He's an amazing musician and an amazing bartender. And then a tour, you know, we're a small facility. And you get a really nice tour from one of those guys. From Emily to Grant to Matty to James, somebody will give you a tour and tasting and get to see how we make it. It's very special. It is not It's not your normal distillery. I'm an artist, so there's a lot of art to it and less mechanical, but really beautiful.

Well, I'm looking forward to getting back out there and visiting your new facility. I was there a number of years back at 2018, I think, and I was at your smaller location, but I'm kind of excited. My son and his wife and my brand new grandson live in Colorado Springs.

Oh, wow.

Wonderful. You got to get here. I have to. They live right over by Bear Creek Park. So when I get over there and visit, I'm going to come up and see you and maybe we'll sit down and have a black Manhattan together and try some of your new whiskeys. That would be awesome. Michael, thank you so much for being on the show. We appreciate it. It's always nice to chat with you. I know I'm going to see you again this fall, possibly in September. You'll be at probably the Kentucky Bourbon Festival or one of the concert series that happens during that time or something. You're usually bouncing around in bourbon country somewhere in the fall. Yes, I am. So we look forward to seeing you then in the meantime, folks, if you get a chance to pop in at the 291 distillery out in Colorado, I highly recommend it. Where can they find you guys on the internet, on Facebook, on Instagram? What's your, what's your location?

So the handles distillery 291, um, the websites, uh, you know, 291 Colorado whiskey or distillery 291.com. Um, and you can Google it, you'll find us. So yeah, and please come visit. You, Jim, come and visit. Everybody that's listening, come see us. I'm here not all the time. The fall, I'm not here a lot, but there are times that you'll be there and I'll be drinking at the bar too. So come see us.

All right, well, thanks again for joining us tonight, Michael. Folks, you can find The Bourbon Road on all social media platforms at The Bourbon Road. You can also visit us on our website, thebourbonroad.com. We also have a private Facebook group called The Bourbon Roadies. Just about 3,500 really good friends that hang out, chit chat, talk about Bourbon, share pictures and stories, life events. It's just good people. We'd love to have you join. Just get on Facebook and search out the Bourbon Road East and answer three questions to come in. We'd love to say hey to you. We get out and we do events too. If you see us in a liquor store, if you see us at an event, make sure you walk up and say hi to us. Always love to meet our listeners, always love to share a pour when we can. We're out at events all the time and we love to pop into liquor stores and walk up and down the aisles with our listeners. So if you see us, make sure you walk up to us. We do a show every single week on Wednesday. Uh, we'll have guests on like Michael here and distillery 291 and, and we'll deep dive a subject. Sometimes we'll have a musician on or a, an author. Sometimes it's a chef. It's always something fun. We're always drinking whiskey. Make sure you check us out every week. Subscribed on your favorite podcast app so you don't miss a show. But until the next time we will see you down the Bourbon road.

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