382. The Lost History of Tennessee Whiskey

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.

We're very excited to have Blanton's bourbon shop.com is a new sponsor for the bourbon road podcast. In fact, this podcast is brought to you by Blanton's bourbon shop. Blanton's bourbon shop.com is the only official merchandiser for Blanton's original single barrel. Looking for a unique gift. Blanton's bourbon shop has got you covered. Blanton's bourbon shop.com is your home for all Blanton's gifts. The Bourbon Road is excited to have pintsandbarrels.com as a sponsor of this episode as well as our official custom apparel provider. Be sure to check out pintsandbarrels.com and browse their ultimate online store for bourbon loggers. Hello listeners and welcome back to another episode of the Bourbon Road podcast. I'm your host, Jim Shannon. And today we are, we're definitely blessed to have a return visitor, a gentleman who came on episode 112. I know it's been quite a while ago, but we're very proud to have Drew Hanisch back on the show. Drew, welcome to the Bourbon Road.

Thank you, Jim. It is great to be back on again and I follow what you guys are doing over there and it's just great to always chat with people who have a good sense of what's going on in the whiskey world.

I appreciate that. It was nice to see you at Bourbon on the Banks this year.

I decided my first pour would actually come out of my Bourbon road glass that I got from you at Bourbon on the Banks. It was good to see you too. Oh, fantastic.

Yeah, it was awful nice to get to bring you a pour over. I think we were both pretty busy at that event, and it's nice to take just a moment and share a pour. Absolutely. Welcome back. You are here today because you've recently put out a new book and a book that I've been reading and enjoying here for the past couple of days, The Lost History of Tennessee Whiskey. And this is your third book, I think, right? Am I correct? This is my third. I started in Kentucky, went to Ireland, and now I'm in Tennessee. And you started this book I would imagine because it's not a small volume. It's almost 500 pages. So definitely an exhaustive study of Tennessee whiskey history. How long did it take you to write this book?

You know, it's funny because it really started with the whiskey lore interviews that I was doing. And I had, during the pandemic, gotten into a position where I couldn't travel overseas. So I was starting to talk to people over here in the States again. And I decided that if I was going to go travel, since I had seen so much of Kentucky, that I should go back to Tennessee, because all I had done was Jack and George and figured, well, I'll try some other distilleries. It was around that time that I learned the story of a shootout in Tennessee, in Nashville, that led to statewide prohibition. And that story fascinated me. Then I heard the story of Nelson's Greenbrier, and they were claiming that they had the biggest distillery in Tennessee in the 19th century. And I'm going, Jack and George, okay, they had a competitor, apparently. And so that kind of piqued my curiosity. Then the Uncle Nearest story came along. And that was the moment when I went, there's something in Tennessee that is not being talked about. And that's when I decided to start digging in and talking to a lot of these different distilleries in Tennessee about what history they had. And what I found fascinating was that when I went to the distilleries across the state, most of them would have a little bit of a story about themselves, but they wouldn't necessarily have any Tennessee whiskey history beyond the Lincoln County process and beyond Jack and George. And I thought there's got to be more going on in Tennessee than just this. And that's when I really started asking a lot of questions. And this was probably about two years ago that in the back of my mind, I said, you know, I could probably write a history book, but When I was a kid, I used to walk into my dad's den and look at all of the books that he had on the shelf. He had a book for every single US president up on his shelf, and they were these fat books. And I would look at them. And that was the first thing that went through my mind. I could never write something that big. I mean, just no way. So when I started this, I was like, ah, you know, I'll probably have 150 pages or so. There's not much to talk about with Tennessee Whiskey. I haven't seen that much. But then I started digging into the archives and going through old newspapers. And I was thinking, this is insane how much stuff is out here. And I had 600 pages worth of notes by the time it came to a point where I was going to start writing something. And I basically was at the company distillery in Thompson's station right near where Leapers Fork is, south of Nashville, talking to Heath Clark. Heath Clark was the H. Clark distillery before it merged with company. And so he's one of the founders of that company as well. But he's also a guy who is instrumental in getting distilling back to a wide portion of Tennessee because he, along with Corsair and Mike Williams, who's Tennessee distilling, all these guys at the same time, we're starting to think about getting into distilling and Heath was an attorney, so that sort of helped. He had that background. Mike was a state representative, so he had that background. They all just kind of merged there together. I wanted to talk to Heath on the podcast at some point to talk about those early days because it's really muddled as to how that all came together. He happened to be there the day I visited. We had a chat and he gave me the whole lowdown. As we're sitting there talking, I said, well, I've been working on an idea for a travel book for Tennessee because I've done one for Ireland and I've done one for Kentucky and there's now 40 plus distilleries in Tennessee, so it would make sense. But I also have been kind of kicking around this idea of doing a Tennessee whiskey history book. And he's like, do the history book. It was just like, didn't take him a second. He's like, we don't have anything like that. We need to know. And from that moment, that was October of last year, I dug in. That's when I said, okay, I have got to get the rest of this information. And I stopped going to distilleries and I started going to county archives and state archives and down to Atlanta to the national archives to just dig through every single document I could find. to try to figure out if I could prove something, not prove something. And my main mission was to stay away from oral tradition as much as possible because what I was learning was that most of the oral tradition that's passed down isn't necessarily wrong, but it's out of time or it's I mean, think of it this way, if you tell somebody something and then it comes back to you after it's gone through three people, it's going to get embellished along the way. And that was the thing that I really wanted to avoid. So, it was interesting going blurry-eyed trying to read through handwriting from the 18th and 19th centuries to try to dig all this up. But that's basically what happened. Then it took from October All the way through until i started writing in june of the last year. And then finished writing in november and really wanted to get out of christmas time so i pushed really hard to get it all finished up.

Wow. I mean, that's really a lot faster than I would have thought it would take to compile all your notes and research into a book. What is it, six months or so? Wow.

About six months to write and rewrite and rewrite, but I'm telling you, I did nothing. I got out of the house a couple of times to make a little side trip here or there, but basically it was Tuesday, go to the post office, get groceries, come back and go back to work. And that's basically what my time was.

Well, we both have a little whiskey in our glass. Yes, we do. I think we're both drinking Tennessee whiskey to start with, are we not? We are, yep.

So what do you have in your glass, Drew? So, in honor of you, in the Bourbon Road Glencairn, I have put some Jack Daniel's 12-year, which I still have left, which is insanely priced. If you can find a bottle of it these days, I think any liquor store that still has it, has it probably at $400, $500, whatever, for a whiskey that I think retailed at around $100 or somewhere in that price range. If I recall, and luckily I had a little sample of it still left over thinking I was going to do this for a special occasion, and so special occasion, that is what I have in my glass.

Well, fantastic. I did get the chance to try that. I don't own a bottle of it, but I did have a pour of that at the Louisville Thoroughbred Society. And it was wonderful. So I'll let you sip on that and I'll tell everybody what I'm having here. I'm having the itsy bitsy teeny weeny baby brother to the one you're drinking. This is actually just the Jack Daniel's Old Number 7, $25 bottle, available in all 50 states and 40 countries around the world. Every cruise ship, everywhere you go, you're going to find a bottle of this. It's definitely available on every college campus in the U.S., that's for sure. But I haven't had it pour Neat in a Glencairn in a while. And I thought, why not? This is a good opportunity to do that. So that's what I'll be sipping on today.

And this is the tricky part about when I was looking through my collection and going, okay, I need to find some Tennessee whiskeys to taste. We go... There's lots of Tennessee Bourbons, but there's not as many Tennessee whiskeys as you would think that there are. And that's because the industry is so new. So with a lot of these new distillers coming online, probably post 2013 and up, we're talking about, you know, they haven't had that much time to be able to let their whiskeys age. Old Dominic just finally came out with theirs. So, It's a challenge at the moment, but it's something that hopefully we'll be seeing more and more of. And of course, Jack Daniels, you can always count on them to have plenty of Tennessee whiskey around.

All right. Well, I'm going to go ahead and take a sip of mine and talk about it. Since my finish is going to be quite shorter than yours, I'll go first and that'll give me plenty of time to follow up. Actually, you know, it's, uh, it's, I'm just going to say it's, it's good. It's not bad, right? It's got, it's got a nice loft of caramel sweetness or a little bit of a nuttiness in there. Some, some banana notes, you know, you always get those banana notes from the, from the standard Jack Daniels. It's sweet, very sweet. It's got a little bit of a bite on the nose. I'm going to take a sip. Yeah, sweet. Nice thin wash across the ballot. I shouldn't say a nice thin wash. an unfortunate thin wash across the palette because it's only 80 proof guys. But it does have a nice bite on the back end. So it kind of comes back and says, I know, I know I'm thin, but I've got a little bit of punch to me. Good, smooth flavor though. Not terrible to have in a Glen Caron, actually quite nice. And it's fine. I mean, I would be okay to drink this neat in a Glen Caron. I mean, there are a lot of things I'd rather have, but for $25, Not bad. Yeah.

Yeah. I actually did a retasting of that. I hadn't had it since, uh, probably, I probably had it in 20 years. And I thought, you know, I should get like a little mini bottle of it and do a tasting of it because I love their other stuff. And I'm thinking how, how bad could it be? And then when I tasted it, I was like, I mean, it's like a really weak version of single barrel or, you know, I mean, it's basically a Jack Daniels whiskey. It's just that there's not enough of it. And so, but it reminds me of when, you know, I think back to when I first started drinking whiskey and I drank Jack Daniels is the first thing I drank. And I thought it was so harsh back then. And I was drinking old number seven. Well, it was actually 86 proof back then. So it was a little bit stronger. when I had it back at that time. But yeah, it's kind of a surprise to me. But that banana nut bread, to me, it's like when I came out of COVID, the first thing I smelled was a Jack Daniel's whiskey because when I smelled it, I went, oh, there's that banana nut. And it came out to me because I had lost my sense of taste and smell for some time. So it's interesting.

Well, you can't complain because it is quality and you can taste the quality of it. It's just It's just a lower end drink. So, you know, take it for what it is.

So this one is interesting to me because normally I tend to with bourbons or Tennessee whiskey or anything that the age is somewhat quickly. I don't tend to like the older. Aged whiskey is if they get to okie at a certain point that i just don't like an over abundance of oak but what i love about this jack daniels twelve year was it was actually less okie to me than the ten year was i don't know what they did to those barrels to do this but it's like it picks up the really nice leather and tobacco notes. It's got this butterscotch that's coming through on it. It doesn't necessarily remind me of a typical Jack Daniel's whiskey, that banana nut bread. isn't really in this as much as it is in their other whiskeys. And on the palate, it's just very diverse. To me, it's like cinnamon molasses, I get a bit of clove in there, some brown sugar notes and that sort of thing. And then this nice earthiness on the end that just comes out of nowhere that That just floors me when I have it. It really probably was one of my favorite whiskeys that I had last year, if not my favorite whiskey that I had last year.

I would think that the banana notes probably age out of their whiskies at some point. It's one of those more youthful notes that you get, right? You're going to get it from the four to six year whiskies that they have, but you're probably not going to get it as you go higher, particularly like an extra aged or well-aged bourbon or Tennessee whiskey like a 12 year. So I don't know. I thoroughly enjoyed it when I tried it. I could have easily Had it not been for the price of the bottle, go out and pick one up, I think. Yeah.

Yeah. I looked for one. That and their American single malt, I was on a hunt for last year, but never could find them at a price point that didn't break the bank. So that's tough.

So let's talk a little bit about the book. You're certainly not a newcomer to writing books about whiskey. You've got two already. One you mentioned is your travel guide to Kentucky. And then you have another one, which is a travel guide to Ireland, the Irish whiskey. And so you've got two books under your belt. You're coming back. You're writing this third one. You're not a beginner at this. How did you take on such a big challenge? What kind of planning goes into beginning that? I know you had a conversation, as you mentioned, and it sort of sparked a fire, and you decided to go down that road. But I mean, you don't just start writing. You got to put together a plan, right? It takes some thinking and some preparation.

It was really interesting because when I thought this was going to be a 150-page book, I put together a rough outline of what I was going to talk about. My initial outline was thinking about, I'll do a chapter on George Dickel and I'll do a chapter on Jack and Nearest. I could probably repurpose some of the stuff from my podcast for Charles Nelson and going into the whole Nelson's Greenbrier story. And so I thought, you know, I've already got those kind of covered and then I can figure out some things about the shootout in Nashville and Prohibition and maybe a little on moonshiners and then the rebirth. And so that was my basic outline when I started it. But it's interesting. I think what makes this book different from other whiskey history books is that I had to fight from writing a history book rather than writing a whiskey history book because Tennessee has such a fascinating history and you can go down rabbit hole after rabbit hole, They had the Watauga Republic was supposedly the first republic in the United States basically because North Carolina had given up on them. It was in North Carolina. It was all part of North Carolina, but far distant over the mountains and not being protected by the rest of the state. And so they constantly were fighting this thing about how do we protect ourselves. And so they went through different iterations. They were the Washington district, then they became the state of Franklin. And then it just kept getting tossed back to the federal government and then back to North Carolina. And so you want to write about all that stuff. And I specifically wanted to write about it because I also wanted to make the point that if we're going to choose who the first distiller in Tennessee whiskey history is, you have to know when Tennessee whiskey or when Tennessee actually started because it was part of North Carolina at one point. And so you could say that Tennessee's early distillers were actually North Carolina distillers rather than Tennessee distillers. Although the guy who gets pegged for it actually thought he was a Virginia distiller rather than being a Tennessee or North Carolina distiller. I had to piece all of that together. I had a very interesting strategy for this. I had word doc after word doc of the chapter outline that I wanted to work with, and I kept adding chapters and adding more chapters. Soon, 10 chapters went to 15, went to 20, went to 25, went to 30. And I said, I can't go past 30, so now I got to start stripping some stories out. I put everything into a timeline. So I have a Word document that actually has every bit of my notes. And that's when I say it's a 600-page document. It is in chronological order of how everything happened. So what I did was when it came time to write each chapter, I could go over and see in order when all of these different things happened and have all my footnote resources and everything that I needed to be able to pull all of this information together. And then once I had all of that, the writing process became, I'm writing 30 whiskey lore stories episodes, basically. And that's how I wanted to write it. I didn't want to write something that was just mundane. Let's plod through the entire history of Tennessee whiskey. I wanted to find bits of history outside, like when I did the story of Elijah Craig on the podcast, I started out by telling the story of Abner Doubleday and this idea of the father of and where does that come from. And so I found myself going outside of Tennessee Whiskey to give context on things like I discovered that there was a guy, John Woodard, who was bottling whiskey two years before old Forrester was. Well, if he was, then I want to know, tell me about bottling and help me understand when bottling became prevalent and when it went from being hand blown glass up to when it became fully automatic machines so that I can have that in my timeline and be able to figure out, is this feasible? Is this not feasible? And what I ended up finding was that it wasn't actually even this guy in Tennessee that started bottling whiskey. I found an ad in New York in pre-Civil War of someone, S.T. Suit, who was a Kentucky distiller at the Salt River Distillery, who was actually the first selling medicinal whiskey in bottles. to New York and other places around the country. It wasn't a distillery that lasted long because along comes civil war and then all of a sudden his distillery is raided and he never opened up again. But it's a lost story and yes, it's Kentucky, but it speaks to whiskey history. And so I wanted to take that wider view and be able to piece it all into what was going on in Tennessee to give context. Many times when I read history books, when I was in Ireland and I was doing research on doing my Irish whiskey episodes that I did, I could tell that writers in Ireland had a very singular view on Irish whiskey. And so, if the Scots were doing something or the Americans were doing something, they weren't as knowledgeable. And so they were tripping up and making some estimates that they were the first to doing this or the first to doing that. And without having that wider view, it really limits the person who's writing and they can make some claims that aren't necessarily true. So I wanted to try to avoid that as much as I could. So knowing history and really understanding what every bit of the industry or the people themselves were doing, I think to me is important in lending context and can help you figure out things that maybe you wouldn't figure out if you just stay isolated in your own state.

So as you're researching to write this story, and it is a story because as I go through your book, Yeah, it's broken down into chapters, which you said relate to episodes, you know, so each one is sort of a little story within a bigger story. They all sort of flow one into the next, and they create this much larger story. By the end of the book, of course, is the entire history of Tennessee whiskey, as told by Drew Hanisch, but certainly as researched by Drew Hanisch. When you're going around and you're researching these facts, because there's a lot of footnotes here, there's a lot of verification that's taking place, and you find out something that doesn't match the lore, all right? It's got to be exciting to uncover something like that, but at the same time, you're kind of You're going to upset somebody along the way, right?

I may upset somebody, or I'll tell you, I upset myself actually at one point. I've been scratching my head for about a month and a half because as I was going through and I was doing the research, I started breaking down some of my own stories that I've done and finding some mistakes that I had made because of limited research. When I first started doing the Whiskey Lore Stories podcast, I was just using the internet books that I was finding. I wasn't digging through old newspapers. And so, while I was doing the research for Tennessee, I was trying to figure out a little bit about the Bottled and Bond Act. And I don't know how I stumbled on this, just a miracle of some form. But I stumbled upon this story about the – well, it wasn't a story, it was the internal revenue at the end of the year would put out a report, and they would sometimes give some ideas of things that they would like to see accomplished in the next year through the whiskey industry or whatever they're over. And so, I find this one story and the story or the guy is basically saying, the Internal Revenue Commissioner is saying, we need to stop the canadians from having so much free rain over the border with their canadian club didn't specifically name them but he said we're losing out in the export trade and so this is in eighteen ninety five he said i would like to see, congress come up with some kind of bill that will allow us to export bottles in bond. And I'm going, Canadian whiskey? Wait a second. I thought this was E.H. Taylor's story. And that's the story that I had written. And I was kicking myself in the head. I'm going, this isn't right. And I have misled people. And it frustrated me. I'm like, this is not what I am aiming to do to have all these people think that, you know, it is this way and I trust you because you're doing the deep research. And I have to say, my first two seasons of Whiskey Lore are not as deeply researched as I would like them to be. And I am actually, I just re-released that fourth episode because I wanted the story of Bottled and Bond to be correct. h Taylor did have influence after the fact, but he had nothing to do with writing that bill as far as I can find. And I actually found on top of that while redoing the episode, a really cool tie into IW Harper as well. And the reason that that the Bernheim distillery was built was also out of what happened with the Baldwin Bond Act. So very fascinating. And so I covered that in the episode and had to fix it, but it's like, now I'm questioning all of my episodes and I'm going, ah, I don't want to keep making these mistakes. But I mean, they're honest mistakes, but it is from what I have learned in terms of doing this research for this book, you have to go deeper. And I have a new mantra, which is, you know, to find the truth, question everything. And that's the only way you're going to get through this and be able to. And I even say in the book towards the end, I said, I know people are going to at some point, maybe find some things that I've said in here that new facts come along and they may not match up. I'm fine with that. This is the beginning of research into Tennessee whiskey. If you guys find something that furthers the story, I want to know what it is because I want to know the real story. I don't necessarily want to keep hearing all the lore. The lore is fun, but there's more meat on the bone when you get the real story.

Absolutely. And were there some interesting discoveries in terms of maybe well-known people who actually were in the whiskey business that you didn't realize were in the whiskey business?

Well, yeah, some surprises. I did know that Andrew Jackson had a distillery. What I found, though, was that most of the history suggested that he built a distillery, had it for about two years, and then it burned down. End of story. That's not what I found. I found and went a little deeper and found that he had started to back up again and found this whole purpose behind why he was making this whiskey and who he was at that time period. That was fun. The other was Davy Crockett. Now, I had learned about, and during the second tasting here, I'll be doing a tasting of whiskey called Gobbler Springs, which comes from Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, not Kentucky. It's a sweet mash whiskey. It's really interesting because I talked to John Hatcher, the owner, way out in the middle of nowhere. This is a distillery that's not on the Tennessee Trail. You have to know it exists to find it, but it is such a cool distillery if you get a chance to figure out where it is and get to it. And so, he told me the story of David Crockett. When I'm sitting here going through my research or trying to research for my episode with him or my interview with him, I was like, what is this David Crockett State Park? Is that Davy Crockett? And then we got into a whole discussion of in that area, people called him David. And when he was younger, he was always David. And so he had a distillery. And so before I actually wrote the book, I said, I need to go down to that state park and see the creek, Shoal Creek, where he had his distillery. the old millstone is still there. The millstone is broken in half and sitting outside still taking the weather. But it was so fun standing there because when you stand there and you start to picture what this was, he had a grist mill, he had the distillery, and then he had a powder mill as well. And When he was told that his distillery was destroyed, he was actually in Murfreesboro where the Capitol was at that time, or where the legislature was meeting. And they told him that his distillery had been blown away. And he thought that the powder mill had blown up, but it was actually a flood that came down and wiped all the buildings away. And that was the great turning point for him. So it was fun reading about that, but it was also fun talking about some of the other aspects of his life in association with whiskey because that's the other thing about this book. I didn't want to just tell stories of distillers. I wanted to tell stories of the taverns and give you an idea of what the tavern culture was like. I wanted to give you an idea about the wholesalers and how they evolved. I wanted to talk a lot about the teetotalers and because Tennessee had a love-hate relationship with alcohol and it makes for a very intriguing content for a book, a lot of great subject matter in there as well. So that was really a mission of mine. And so with Davey, it was fun because, I mean, he had his, what he threw the greatest drunk in Memphis history. I had to find out what that story was about. So.

All right. Well, listen, we're going to take a short break. And when we come back, I do want to hear more about, you know, what life was like in the Tennessee frontier, the tavern life, the people getting western lands following the war. How did that culture come about? And you talk about it in detail in the book, but I think just a few excerpts would be awesome. And we're going to have another pourer after we get back from the second half. Kind of was wanting to get it in the first half, but this is so intriguing that we just got to hang to it. So folks, we're going to take a short break. And when we come back, a lot more from Drew Hanisch. Looking for a unique gift? Blanton's bourbon shop has got you covered. All of their handcrafted wood products are made in their in-house wood shop with authentic bourbon barrels. Specializing in barrel-age potent treats, they use Blanton's barrels to age their own maple syrup, honey, and coffee. Find the most unique gift ideas for your golf lover, cigar connoisseur, avid coffee drinker, and Blanton's fan. Want to win an authentic Blanton's barrel head? Make sure you sign up for the giveaway on the home page of their website. Blanton'sBurbanShop.com is your home for all Blanton's gifts. If you're a bourbon drinker, and I bet you are if you're listening to this podcast, you need to head over to pintsandbarrels.com and check out the ultimate online store for bourbon lovers. Pints and Barrels company was started by bourbon lovers for bourbon lovers. From spices to t-shirts, you'll find the perfect bourbon gift. Pints and Barrels proudly supports the bourbon road and invites you to visit pintsandbarrels.com. You need a custom apparel or swag for your bar, distillery, maybe even your bourbon society. They can do that too. As a matter of fact, they print our apparel. We're so happy with the quality and fast turnaround, pintsandbarrels.com, the ultimate bourbon lovers gift shop and branding specialist. All right, listeners, welcome back. And we're here with Drew Hanisch, Whiskey Lore, also the author of each drink an expression of Jack Daniels. I had the basic release while you had a nice 12 year. It was a great time to listen to you recount kind of your thought process in putting together this book and talk a little bit about your your experience with your other books and your love for whiskey and all of those things. But in this second half, we're both going to pour a different whiskey, and this is where we part ways, just a little bit.

What do you have in your glass this time? So what I have is called Gobbler Springs Sweet Mash Tennessee Whiskey. Now, this is a three-year-old whiskey, so we're getting a bit younger here. It's also aged in a very different way. It is aged with a oak stave that is basically put down into the liquid. And so it ages that way. And actually John Hatcher, who is the distiller, goes out and cuts the trees himself and prepares them and then puts them into the whiskey to sit and age that way. So it's a way that a lot of moonshiners would have aged whiskey, just a different way of handling it rather than putting it into a barrel. And one of the things that I cover in the book is the fact that the barrel, as important as it was in Kentucky, was less important in Tennessee. And thus the reason for charcoal mellowing a whiskey, you were basically doing the job of the barrel, taking out some of those harsher elements by running it through the sugar maple charcoal. And then you didn't really have to necessarily put it into a barrel. Tennesseans, early Tennesseans liked their clear whiskey from all that I could find from those early days. So very interesting. But as I say, this is a three-year whiskey and interesting to note the sweet mash process that is denoted on this whiskey because that's the other thing I had to learn while doing this research. I basically had to reach out to my friend Alan Bishop from Spirits of French Lick to get some scientific background on some things because as I was reading, I'm going, What they're describing is the sour mash process and the sweet mash process in the 19th century is not what we call the sweet and sour mash process today. Completely different thought processes because Lincoln County distillers were adamant that Bourbon distillers were taking shortcuts and making sweet mash whiskey which meant that they were basically adding some kind of additive to speed the fermentation process so whatever they were adding. The lincoln county distiller said that's not sour mash that sweet mash and what is sweet true sour mash is basically. You let it ferment naturally. You put the back set in and then you just let it do its work. It's going to have to take a couple of extra days for it to start cycling and going, but you do not add anything to that whiskey to get it going. So this is using the sweet mash, uh, but this is a different, this is not something that was really defined back in the 19th century. You're just starting basically with fresh grain each time you're going through, you're not using any back set in it. So, uh, got it. Yep. So this is very light on the palette. He actually double mellows this. So. This is something that George Dickel actually did for a while. I found some ads in the 1950s or 1960s where they said, we charcoal mellow on the way in and we charcoal mellow on the way out of the barrel, which the Lincoln County process as it's defined today, is that you only do it on the way in, which is not like chill filtering. With chill filtering, if you mellow it coming out of the barrel, you are probably stripping some flavorful oils out of there where you're doing less of that. You're just trying to get the aggressiveness out of the initial distillate when you're running it through that charcoal before putting it into a barrel. And like I say, the idea there was that they would be able to drink it without even putting it in the barrel, and it should be good. But this is a lighter whiskey. This is probably closer in terms of body to what you would be talking about with the old number seven. Toasty oak, some toffee notes, a little bit of rye spice in there as well. So, but for a three year, not young at all to me. It's right at a good age, I think.

Now that is something that I've not had. Is that something that can be gotten by our listeners?

It can be. You would probably have to go to Tennessee to find it, but if you went to one of the stores in Nashville, say for instance, or Knoxville, you probably could find it there, Memphis. Awesome.

All right. So for me, I'm actually having a bourbon, but I'm having the Dickel bourbon. So this is a Tennessee bourbon and it's their eight year. So this is a bottle that runs about $28 and Dickel's traditionally a Tennessee whiskey, but they do have this bourbon and Dickel does spell whiskey differently than the rest of the folks, at least most of the folks, they don't spell with an E-Y, they spell with just a Y at the end. There's got to be a little story behind that, I'm sure.

There is a story behind that. Actually, at the very beginning of the book, I tell people to not get annoyed by the fact I spell whiskey without an E for the entire 19th century because nobody in Tennessee was spelling whiskey other than Jack Daniels towards the end. Jack Daniels spelled it with an E, but nobody else was. And in fact, there was a little dustup between, it was a friendly dustup, but when Brown Foreman bought Jack Daniels, Gregor Matlow and George Garvin Brown got into a little discussion in front of the press where George Garvin Brown said, you spell whiskey without an E. And Gregor Matlow said, nope, in Tennessee, we spell it with an E. And so Gregor didn't really know his history because if he'd gone back before Prohibition, it was the other way around. But it's so funny because you start to read this stuff. Today, our story is, oh, well, they had a real love for the Scotch whiskey. And I'm going, well, George Dickel is German. Why is he so in love with Scotch whiskey? I'm not getting where this is coming from. What was really interesting, though, was that old Forrester in Kentucky was spelling it without an E, yet most of what I find in the 19th century in Kentucky is more E than no E. So it's Who knows? It's all, you know, talking stories is basically...

It can get a little confusing, right? It can get a little confusing. But today, I mean, with the exception of a few distilleries, most distilleries within the United States use the EY. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. It's a fascinating subject and a lot of it goes down to just how you personally want to spell it in the 19th century for sure.

Well, I'm, I'm nosing this, uh, this George Dickel eight year. This is a bourbon, of course it's a right at 90 proof. And I was, I'm looking for that, that traditional, you know, you know, that it's kind of a mineral note you get on a George Dickel and it's, it's just, just a little bit there. So it's almost like most of it's gone in the bourbon. It's not there in the bourbon. Uh, but. I do get it a little bit. I always say that I could pick George Dickel out blindfolded with two hands behind my back, and I'm pretty sure I could.

But the bourbon, I might have a little trouble because that note is just barely there. Yeah. Well, I think it's the eight years that might do it to that. I wonder if that kind of knocks it down a little bit because that is actually goes through the Tennessee whiskey process. When Nicole Austin did that, I think specifically to kind of say, hey, Tennessee whiskey is bourbon. And I can label it as such. And so she did. Of course, for me, trying to get people to love Tennessee whiskey, it's like, ah, you should just call it Tennessee whiskey. You went through the process. I did have the 12 year, a 12 year single barrel from Dickel.

a couple of shows back, and it was wonderful. It was absolutely wonderful. And you're right, that note kind of starts to dissipate with the age for sure. But this is a good whiskey. This is something that I could drink on a daily basis. Um, it's, it's nice. It's got a, you know, kind of checks all the boxes for a bourbon, but it is very, very smooth. It's got a little bit of a kind of a peppery note on the back end. It's got a little bit of a bite to it, but the finish is just super short on it. It doesn't stick around. It, this would be something you'd have to keep sipping on to keep, you know, you can't just sit and think on it. You got to have another sip.

Yeah. Yeah. That mineral note is interesting because when I was doing some tastings of a whiskey that was made in Scotland, Glen Glassa, they had one that was finished in Tennessee whiskey barrels, but they wouldn't say which barrels that they were aged in. And I got both a banana note and the Flintstone vitamin mineral note as well in the same, so I'm like, they're using both of them. Look at, look, these guys are working together. First time since the, since the 19th century that Jack and George worked together on something. So it's really interesting. Yeah.

So in your, in your book, you kind of, you kind of talk about the kind of the lifestyle at the time. And when you go back. You know, uh, to the late 1700s, early 1800s, life was quite different on the frontier of Tennessee. What was it like back then?

Well, you have to remember, and I cover this extensively through there, I cover the Cherokee experience as well as the experience of the pioneers because there was a lot of tension on the frontier. And we get this idea that, oh, well, the pioneers came out, they settled, they started growing corn, and immediately were making whiskey. But that was far from the case because they were constantly under threat of attack at any point. Most of the time, they were huddled in forts or stations throughout the area and they had to sit there and wait out until the coast was clear for them to be able to actually go out to their land grants and start planting corn. It took some time And it's really interesting to watch that evolution and see that it was around 1794 that Dragon Canoe, who was one of the great Cherokee leaders, who was an instigator of a lot of the violence that was going on on the frontier, had a heart attack while he was celebrating a treaty he had won. And once he had gotten out of the picture, that pretty much took the native population out of making these attacks. And so settlers then all of a sudden in 1794 started making their way out to their land grants. And this is when a lot of Tennessee's distilling really starts to pick up. Prior to that, The reason why we know somebody like an Evan Shelby who was a general who had a fort was one of the early distillers was because he had a fort. He could distill. He had people around the area he was protecting that had crops that they could bring in and be able to trade that. At one point, he had 400 people lodged in his fort that were locals who were just trying to be protected from all of that. It was truly the Wild West at that time. And so it was very difficult, like I say, it was a hard life and not as glamorized as we would like to think that it was in what we hear today. And as it developed out, you know, like Davy Crockett, He wanted to start a grist mill when he went out because grist mills were the way that you started a community. Once the grist mill was established, then all of a sudden, farmers around the area had a place they could go to. It was like the center of the community before government was set up and everything else, and it was a meeting point. So, it gave people a way to communicate with their neighbors through the grist mill. And of course, grist mills would have the ability to grind corn or rye or whatever the grain was so that the people who live there could go back and distill their own whiskey or sometimes they would bring it to the grist mill and it would be distilled at the grist mill as well. So, it's really an interesting life and it's hard to research because nobody back then really was writing down what they were doing. And so you have to kind of go back and this is the place where you're kind of stuck into oral tradition. But there were some people in Tennessee who talked with some of these early pioneers and got their stories and put in what were called the Good Speed books. And these books are so valuable because they did a book on almost every county in Tennessee. And this is how I know when Davy Crockett got to Lincoln County, what Lincoln County was like at the time. And when I talk about Wild West, I talk about this place called Arnold's Grocery, where when people would come in to shop, they would have fights going on inside or outside of the grocery store. And people just saw it as entertainment. They were so used to violence on the frontier that a good, you know, scrum going on in the grocery store was food for discussion and gossip. Clean fight. Exactly. Exactly. You had these taverns all over the place in Lincoln County. That was the first thing really to grow up. After the grist mill, you had the tavern. The tavern was where people could come to visit. They'd sleep two to a cot. The horses were probably better taken care of than the people were in terms of how they were cared for. It's really interesting because going through those books, you could find actually what they were charging for different spirits. And you learn that on the frontier, whiskey wasn't as valuable in terms of trade or barter than rum was. Rum in the early days was the thing. And that was the thing that shocked me about early Tennessee whiskey history is that it wasn't whiskey history. It started before the Revolutionary War when rum was the drink of choice. And so you had these early pioneers who were getting their sugar from sugar maple trees and they were converting that sugar into rum. And so rum became the early favorite. In fact, people would pay taxes in the state of Franklin with loaves of sugar. So that's how valuable it was to that kind of a barter economy. And you, you called, I think in the book that was called colonial rum. Is that correct? Yeah. The continental rum. So you had continental rum or you had a West Indian rum and a West Indian rum would fetch a really high price. Uh, but colonial rum would fetch a higher price than whiskey at that point.

And most of the early settlers into the Tennessee, well, Tennessee and Kentucky, both those states were actually North Carolina before they were formed into states themselves, were originally colonized by people who fought in the Revolutionary War and were granted Western lands. So a lot of soldiers coming out West, people who knew how to use a gun and take care of themselves, rough and tumble people.

Yes. And that's, I mean, I had a lot of fun digging into some of these stories. There's a guy named Thomas Kilgore. He's in his seventies and he walked all the way from the state capital of North Carolina in Hillsboro, all the way out to Robertson County, Tennessee, which is at that point, it was still part of North Carolina. That's a 300 mile walk for a guy who's in his sixties. He ended up living to 110 years old. And the way he died was he was actually on his way to walk 20 miles to, I think he was going to get his shoes repaired or something like that. And he died on the way back at 110. So, I mean, these were people. Yeah, they lived a hard life, but I mean, some of them had some amazing stories in terms of their abilities to survive. And he was a guy that when he first went to that area north of Nashville, he had to basically hide out in creeks and caves and because he never wanted to get caught by any of the Shawnee or Chickasaw that were in the area, so he had to do everything he could do to protect himself. He was growing corn, which was the thing you did. If you wanted to claim land, you just started growing corn, then you had to watch it, and then you had to take some stocks of it back to North Carolina, to the capital, to claim your land. And so that was something else that was fascinating. Then they found out that they, oh, you really don't get that land until they were given a gift by the state at one point where they said, if you were an early settler before this date, we'll give you 640 acres. So that ended up, it worked out for them in the end, but it was precarious there for a short period of time.

So it sounds to me from your description that Lincoln County was a whiskey place before Jack and George came along.

So it was, yes. Yeah, fascinating story, actually. And I got a sense that was the case, even when I would talk to Jack Daniels, because when we would go out and we looked where Jack Daniels' grave was, they would point to Alfred Eaton's grave, which was not too far from his in the same graveyard. And they would say, well, he's the guy that they say might have come up with the Lincoln County process, although You know, there's definitely doubt about that because it's an old technique. And so when I started researching, I wanted to go back as far as I could and find who was really the first. And since Lincoln County, I think was 19 or 1808 was when it was founded. And so the story really starts from there. But there were a list of distillers I found in the Goodspeed books in 1825 and up. The big surprise for me was about the Lincoln County process. I don't like referring to that as the Lincoln County process anymore since I've done my research because in reality, nobody back then ever talked about something called the Lincoln County process. that area was known for old Lincoln. So if you were going to get a whiskey from that area, they would talk about old Lincoln, just like they would talk about old Robertson. Those were the two counties that had the biggest prominence and best reputations. In fact, when the whiskey trust was counterfeiting whiskeys up in Cincinnati and making different flavorings to add to grain neutral spirits, to pass it off as Kentucky bourbon or whatever, they made a Robertson County flavoring. These areas had reputations that went far outside of Tennessee. I really wanted to dive in and be able to figure out what was it that they valued to call something old Lincoln? Because the other thing I found was that Kentucky Peerless was actually purchased at one point, half purchased, by the J.W. Kelly company. And they, for a time in Kentucky, created a Lincoln County, Tennessee whiskey. So if you can imagine that, it's kind of the equivalent of buying Tennessee bourbon today. You're kind of trading off of another state's county name in that particular case. And that opened a can of worms for me because in my previous books, I've always lower cased bourbon. But after researching Lincoln County and Robertson County. I'm like, there's no way I could call these whiskies Robertson and Lincoln and lowercase their letters. That wouldn't work. And since Bourbon is named after Bourbon County, it's kind of disrespectful to lowercase its letter as well. So I changed that as one of the big changes between my previous books to this book is that Bourbon is capitalized through the entire book. As it should be. Thank you very much.

You're welcome. You're welcome. So your book is really broken down into three major parts. Um, and we've kind of talked quite a bit here about, you know, you know, the early times in Tennessee and kind of the birth of Tennessee whiskey and, but the, I guess the 1800s up until prohibition anyway, was kind of, the heyday for making whiskey, right? I mean, people really produced at what we sometimes don't realize astronomical numbers of bottles or barrels of whiskey were being produced in the 1800s. Unreal compared to today, I guess. Have you gotten a sort of a a feel of the quantity that was being produced back then after looking at some of these distilleries and records.

This is an interesting thing to note because I wanted to really root for Tennessee as I was doing my research in the 1880s and 1890s to say, Yes, they held on. They were still really strong at that time. But really, Nelson's was the biggest by far. And then behind that was John Woodard, who was also Robertson County. And then Jack wanted to stay small. And I'd always heard that story that he never wanted to go over 99 bushels because if he went to 100, he'd have to have a second tax man on the property. And yet, What I found as I went back and started doing this research is that it wasn't necessarily that, although that was probably his feeling at the time. Tennessee got out to an early lead. They were well ahead of Kentucky in the 1820s and 1830s. That's because they started first and because there was more access in Tennessee early on because they had already sort of solved some of their issues of being able to plant corn and be settled somewhere. And so, because of that, and Tennessee has a great agricultural economy. So all of this put together, Tennessee got out to a really quick start. But when I mentioned before the difference between sweet mash and sour mash, the big difference became Tennessee never gave up tradition. Even as big as Nelson's Greenbrier got over time, they never went away from that long fermentation. they did the traditional style of distilling they distilled on log stills they did this the sour mash process and then they did the charcoal mellowing and that was going to take some time to do that so what happened with tennessee whiskey is that they stay traditional. while Kentucky industrialized. And Kentucky, this was the idea that Kentucky is taking shortcuts. Well, they were doing things to fit the federal government's regulations. And there were times when the Tennessee whiskey industry, Lincoln County was shut down for four years. There was barely anybody distilling in Lincoln County, Tennessee, including Jack Daniel hadn't even come around yet at that point. because they wanted to stick to tradition, but the federal government said, you can't make your whiskey with those long fermentation times. They were basically saying you're killing sour mash whiskey, and they had to lobby the government to get that changed. So that was a big eye opener for me because we start talking about when did Jack Daniels start distilling whiskey. Well, the records I see are 1875. If he'd have started in 1866, he would have been shut down for a good portion of the time in between anyway, because Lincoln County was under attack by the federal government in terms of the way that they distilled their whiskey. And so rather than giving in, they just shut down and said, we won't distill anything. And you got that also in Robertson County with a lot of the traditional distillers. The only reason that Nelson's Greenbrier got to keep going was because a crafty distiller up there had figured out a way to still do the old process, but yet contain it the way that the federal government wanted it contained that wouldn't cost so much as what the federal government was mandating initially. So it's a really fascinating story. And it's the reason why Tennessee was actually probably seventh or eighth in the country by the 1880s, 1890s, because they did not want to give up that traditional style of making whiskey. They wanted to make it like their ancestors had made it. And there were distillers in Kentucky that did the same thing, but they never really got to be big distillers.

Tennessee kind of, like you said, led the way in whiskey production in this part of the country, but they also kind of led the way in in reaching prohibition kind of before other places as well, right? I mean, the temperance movement kind of took Tennessee by the stranglehold a lot earlier than the rest of the country.

So this is the interesting thing that I found because as I started digging in, I kept hearing the story, Mr. Whiskey-Lore, I'm like, I have to challenge everything. So I'm hearing in Tennessee, well, we went into prohibition 10 years before the rest of the country. And I heard some people saying, you know, we were the first to go into, well, Kansas was already in Prohibition. They went into Prohibition in the 1880s. So Maine went into Prohibition in the 19th century as well. So you had some of these states that went in early. But the South, actually, they were not one of the earliest. North Carolina went into Prohibition before they did by about two years. Alabama, Georgia, all of those states went into Prohibition before Tennessee did. So Tennessee was actually, in terms of the South, kind of behind what these other states were doing in terms of prohibition versus the rest of the country. And this is why I This is why this book will be a shock to a lot of people who have read a lot of history books, is because the history books have mostly been written from Kentucky's standpoint. And so, if Kentucky was opened until a year or two before prohibition started, national prohibition, then that's kind of the story that we think is everybody's story. But in reality, Tennessee going into Prohibition in 1910 created all sorts of interesting scenarios for them, such as all of their distillers had to get their whiskey out of Tennessee into Kentucky in Hopkinsville so they could ship it back across the border into Tennessee because the interstate commerce law said that Tennessee could not shut down the selling of whiskey back into their state. And so, distillers in Tennessee shipped all their whiskey to the other side of the border, and then did mail order to ship the whiskey back in to Tennessee. And this went all the way up until 1915, when the Webb-Kenyon Act came along from the federal government, and they stopped that and said you could not ship across the border into a dry county in another state. And that basically put an end to it. But the side effect of that is that when you started having medicinal licenses put out, Tennessee didn't have a drop of whiskey in a warehouse. They had basically moved it all out of state to take advantage of the mail order. And so there was no whiskey left there for them to be able to put into the medicinal market. So when prohibition hit in 1920, I talk about it at the beginning. I go, here's why nobody was celebrating or taking a last drink in Tennessee, because they'd already had 10 years of prohibition. And unless they knew a moonshiner, they weren't going to get whiskey. And Kentucky had already been under prohibition for about a year and a half by that time too. So you couldn't just go across the border because you couldn't go south. There definitely wasn't any there. And you couldn't go north because Kentucky had shut down. And Virginia had shut down in 1914 or 15, somewhere around that time as well. So yeah, it was a very different experience for them in prohibition.

Well, I guess the Tennessee moonshiners got an early start though, right? They got to start a little bit earlier.

They did. They did. Well, you would have had those people in Nashville and Chattanooga all probably first trying to get those moonshiners to send their stuff into town. And that's really when the bootleggers kicked up. But it's also something I cover in the book of when moonshine went from being something that you made for your neighbors that was high quality to moonshine becoming a dangerous product and something that people were trying to make a lot of money off of. And they kind of let their practices get away from them. And that's where we start getting all the bad stories about moonshine. So Tennessee entered prohibition in 1910, 1909? 1909 was when it was passed and the manufacturer's law said by 1910, they could not make whiskey in Tennessee anymore. And for the entire 20th century, there really was no whiskey produced in Tennessee other than moonshine. Well, you had Jack Daniels. The Jack Daniels fight was insane. He had to fight tooth and nail. Lem Motlow, Jack Daniel's nephew, fought tooth and nail. I go through the whole story of what he had to go through and it amazed me. As I was digging through these newspaper articles, I'm going, You're kidding. I would have given up long before this, but he just trudged along and did what he could. And this is a misnomer. A lot of people will say, oh, well, Tennessee had three counties that were opened during the 20th century. Every one of those counties had to be fought over. When George Dickel came into Coffee County, they had a battle they had to go through as well to be able to get it opened up in Coffee County. And the interesting thing was Lincoln County opened up in 1976 because some phantom distillery from Kentucky, we think, was trying to open up a distillery in Lincoln County. But the referendum failed. And it took three more years before they went through and did another referendum. But by that time, the bourbon depression was on. And so no bourbon distilleries were coming down to see if they could start a Lincoln County distillery. The other interesting thing about that is that in Scotland and in Kentucky, we hear all about the bourbon depression and the scotch depression. Tennessee whiskey was on allocation. George Dickel and Jack Daniels could not keep whiskey in. They could not produce enough to keep up. It was the one time during Tennessee whiskey's history uh, after 1820 when it was probably one of the most prized whiskeys around. And it was basically because Jack Daniels for the longest time could not make enough whiskey to keep up. And that went on for a good 30 years. And so it just built them a reputation that, that went through the roof. They were doing what Buffalo Trace is doing right now, basically.

And a lot of hard work has been put in since, uh, since after the year 2000. Uh, with a lot of distilleries really challenging, uh, the Tennessee government to make sure that they could. you know, start up their new distilleries. And now we have, what would you say, 40 distilleries plus?

There's more than 40 at this point, yeah. And it's continuing to grow. So yeah, and it's interesting because they're making all manner of whiskeys. It was interesting when I wrote my experience in Kentucky bourbon book that at that time, it was very easy to call that book Kentucky bourbon because everybody in Tennessee, I mean, everybody in Kentucky was making bourbon. There were very few that were experimenting outside of James E. Pepper, and they hadn't released anything yet in terms of doing American single malts. Rye was there, but it wasn't the front story for Kentucky distilleries. And Tennessee was making everything. So it's like, I can call this, if I did a travel book, it'd be hard to call it Tennessee whiskey because there's not a lot of places that are making Tennessee whiskey. It's getting there, they're making it, but it's just not out the market yet. So it's very interesting to see that dynamic. And now to see Kentucky is starting to have distilleries that are focusing on other things. beyond just bourbon and they're getting a sizable amount produced of these different types of spirits.

And it's good for all of us. Absolutely. I mean, I love the variety. I love the opportunity. I love the new wave of American single malts that are coming on the market. I love to see high malt Tennessee whiskeys coming out of Chattanooga, that tremendous to see, even a tweak to the old ways, right? It's amazing. And yeah, it's great to go to Tennessee now and to visit some of those distilleries. Tennessee being a very wide and not so tall state, I think you mentioned in the book about it being three separate territories, kind of the East, West, and Middle. And it still is kind of the East, West, and Middle, right? Even today. That if you want to experience the Tennessee Whiskey Trail, It's not an easy task to get from one area to the next.

No, it is a bit of a challenge. In fact, I've done that drive across Tennessee quite a few times. My mile marker when I cross the border is 451 miles to get from North Carolina's border all the way to Memphis. That doesn't even include the drive up to Bristol. It can be a tough nut to crack, but I tell you, you just, you do conquer the regions and you don't have to worry about the third region. Get to Memphis at some point and you'll see the distilleries there, but there's not really many distilleries except right off of I-40 on the way out to Memphis. So once you're in the central part of the state, you can kind of stay there and do the ones in that section. And then when you get to East Tennessee, you can kind of work through that section as well. And then just make your way to old Dominic when you're ready.

Yeah, Alex Castle's doing it right. So, if you get a chance to visit Old Dominic, it's a nice place to go to. They've got some great whiskey.

Yeah, and I have to give a shout out to the Tennessee Distilleries, too, because they were very helpful in this. In some ways, I felt bad because I feel like I'm breaking down some of their stories a bit. what I found was most of them wanted to know this background information, and they're getting a lot more back for their stories than I'm taking away, I think, in terms of that. So... Yeah.

And your book, written the way it is with detail and citations, will give them the tools they need to dig even deeper if they choose to, to find out more. So, I mean, take that as a starting point and go further and see what you can find out. Cause there's a lot of information that you haven't been able to get to, I'm sure. Yeah.

And well, I can tell you even up to the last day I was writing the book, I would discover something and go, Oh, I need to put that in. I'm like, okay, there's gotta be a point where you just say, I got enough in this book. I'll do a follow-up book or I'll put it into something else down the road. So, or I'll do a whiskey or stories episode about it.

Well, this has been a lot of fun, Drew. It's been a great time sitting here and chatting with you and talking about Tennessee whiskey and history. I'm kind of a history nut to start with, so it's always fun. I really look forward to finishing your book. I've got a nice vacation coming up here where I get to relax in a chair in the sun and just read a little bit. So I'm really looking forward to getting to the rest of those chapters I haven't gotten to yet, but I want to give you an opportunity. to let our listeners know where they can find you, your podcast, your website, your book, your social media, all those things. Take a moment and let everybody know where they can find you.

Okay. Well, you can find anything that I'm connected with through my whisky-lor.com website. You can spell it with a knee or without a knee. You'll get there both ways. And then the book is available on Amazon or any online retailer. You can ask your bookstores for it. It is available to them to be able to order. It's going to be in a lot of Tennessee distilleries as well. So if you go down to Tennessee, you might pick up a copy while you're in one of the distilleries there. It's also in audiobook format, so people who love the Whiskey Lore Stories podcast, you can listen to it on audiobook. It's on Spotify and Apple Books, and a few other outlets as well. And then I'm on all the socials, and you can find me at Whiskey Lore, just Facebook, Instagram, Whiskey Lore will get you there. YouTube, I do tastings and some history. I also have a Patreon, so you can check out the Patreon. That's where I do most of my... I try to put everything I do up on Patreon, so that's patreon.com slash whiskylore.

Well, again, Drew, thank you so much for being back on the Bourbon Road. We'll try to make sure it doesn't take 200 episodes to get you back on again, but we always look forward to your next project and always look forward to seeing you around at events and having a pour with you. Cheers, and good luck with everything you're doing.

Thank you so much, Jim. It's great to be on again. And yeah, I look forward to our next discussion. Cheers. All right.

All right. Well, you can find The Bourbon Road on all social media outlets. You can find us on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube. Threads, TikTok even. We do a show every single week. You'll find us on Wednesdays on all your podcast outlets. Any app that you use will be there. To make sure you don't miss a show, scroll up to the top, hit that subscribe button. Make sure that every week you get that notification that a new episode is dropped and there's some great content coming out from the Bourbon Road. We love our listeners. We love our roadies. We've got a private Facebook group called the Bourbon Roadies. We invite you to join and joining the conversation and the fun and the sharing of whiskey and pictures and life in general. It's just a great group of people. We hope you'll check that out. But until the next time, we'll see you down the Bourbon Road.

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