385. Filmland Spirits

Welcome to another great episode of the Bourbon Road with your host, Jim O'Brien, 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'sBurbanShop.com as a new sponsor for the Bourbon Road podcast. In fact, this podcast is brought to you by Blanton's Burban Shop. Blanton'sBurbanShop.com is the only official merchandiser for Blanton's original single barrel. Looking for a unique gift? Blanton's Burban Shop has got you covered. Blanton'sBurbanShop.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 lovers. Oh listeners, so welcome back to another episode of the Bourbon Road podcast. I'm your host, Jim Shannon. And today, today we've got quite a treat for you. Brian and I are in the studio. We have a guest. Our guest is from Filmland Spirits. His name is Troy Balotnik. Welcome to the Bourbon Road.

Thank you. I'm very excited to be here and I appreciate it.

We have had your products on the show before. In fact, you've made an appearance on the show before, but it's been a little bit of time and you've got some new things that have come out. We wanted to make sure and kind of bring our listeners up to date on what's going on with Filmland Spirits. And today is as good a day as any. to sip on a little bit of your whiskey and listen to your story once again and kind of get up to date with the products that you have brought out recently and let our listeners know what they should be sipping on. Sounds great. Awesome. So let's get straight to that whiskey. What do we have in our first class today?

So this is a product called Town at the End of Tomorrow, and it is a Kentucky straight nine-year-old bourbon. We released this. This is the first of what will be many limited releases from us. And we released this at the Kentucky Bourbon Festival in Bardstown this past September in 2023. We only made 600 bottles of this. And it only went to a few of the markets that were in, Kentucky being one of them. And it sold out from, at least, you know, from us to our distributors to the retailers, it sold out right away. There's still a couple of bottles left on shelves in California. And I think somebody just sent me a picture today of one on the shelf in Kentucky.

So they could still be found in the wild, folks. Yes.

Are you going to mention where that one is in Kentucky or should we just leave it alone? You know what? They didn't tell me. They just sent me a picture and maybe they bought it. So I don't know. But we're all over Kentucky. So we're in Total Wine and we're in Cox Evergreens locations and a bunch of Kroger locations and Justin's House at Bourbon and Blind Pig down in Bardstown. So all of those places have been really supportive of us and carry all our products.

Well, fantastic. So, the town at the end of tomorrow, a nine-year-old bourbon, 94 proof, right? Yes. Why don't you lead us through a tasting on this? Brian and I both have it in our glasses. We've got it poured neat in a Glencairn. It's had time to sort of acclimate a little bit.

Great. So, you know, Town at the End of Tomorrow is a very different product for us. The rest of our products, everything we put in a bottle will always be four years old or older. The rest of our products, depending on the batch, are between four and a half and six years old. But this product, we very specifically set out to put out something older. And for your listeners who aren't familiar with the brand, the way that we work is we create an original movie script for every one of our products. And then we create a poster for that script that becomes the label. And the poster is always designed in this very bright, eye-catching colors, mid-20th century artwork style, like pulp art. And the concepts for our movie are always meant to be like an homage to the B movies of the mid-20th century. So robots and monsters, big, over-the-top characters and plots, that sort of thing. And so sometimes we come up with the idea for the script first, and sometimes we find a liquid, because we are a non-distilling producer, so we source. That inspires a story, you know, and sometimes they sort of happen together. So Town at the End of Tomorrow, I had this idea for this story since well before we started the company. And we launched in September of 2022. That's when we first hit the market. We were working on the company for years before then. But I had this idea, I had this title in my mind and this idea for what the story would be. And I always say we've got more concepts for products and ideas and stories than we'll ever get to. But we've got tons. And this was just one that, you know, I'm a big nerd and I love time travel stories and I just wanted to figure out a way to do this. And we knew we needed an aged bourbon to do it with. I didn't know that we were going to be releasing this in the fall until late June because I'd been searching for the right liquid for a long time. Once I found it, we were like, all right, it's a go. We had to move very quickly to put this together. But to give you a sense of our process also, myself and two of my partners, Charlie and Steve, we do all of the blending ourselves. And so we sample every one of the barrels that we purchase and that we own and that we are aging. And then we take notes and we try and sample them every year. And then we have certain things, characteristics, flavor profiles that we're looking for when we do the blending and put that together. But this is a very, very small batch. So this was three barrels. that went into this, we picked out of a large quantity that we have. When I'm doing a tasting, especially with people who know their whiskey, I don't like to lead the witness and tell you what you're going to taste. Now, we do put tasting notes on every one of our bottles for anybody who wants to know what we think it tastes like, but as you know, it's very subjective. Sure. But if you want to go ahead and take your first sip, I always love to hear from people what they taste and then afterwards give you an idea of what we tasted when we blended it.

I'm going to start with a nose and I'm going to say that it doesn't have a real sweet nose. It has more of an oaky dry nose, which is kind of nice. It gives that not a lot of floral characteristics, but more oak, more typical well-aged bourbon notes. So it's gone past that corn sweetness. It's gotten well beyond that four to six-year-old flavor profile. And it kind of settles in. It makes me think from the nose that it's going to be a dry sip, a little bit of drying on the back of the palate, but let's wait and find out. All right. What about you, Brian?

I mean, I agree with everything that you just said. And I did cheat a little bit and I went to the website. So there was something on there and I'm really hoping that that comes out to me at some point because I do love cornbread.

So the tasting notes that are written on the bottle are also on the website. And we try and add a little bit more information on the website as well. So some of our other products where we don't age state on the bottle, we try and age state on the website, especially our extended cut products. If you see something from us that has extended cut on the label, that means cast strength. And so of course, the proof is going to change. And it's different batches. And so we try and update the information on the website for all of that.

Yeah, so on the palette, I kind of think it really matches the nose quite a bit. I am getting that sort of a little bit more of a less sweet, more dry, well-aged, mature bourbon. It definitely has a sort of a nutty characteristic to it, a little bit more like I'm not going to say like a peanut, but like a walnut, but a little bit more like a, like a shell, like, like what you might get from a shell rather than the actual meat of the nut itself. And that, you know, that's typical of a, of a, of a nicely aged bourbon that's been sitting in Oak. It can pick up those nutty, those nutty characters. It does have a little bit of spice to it. It does present itself on the back of the palette with a nice little, uh, I'd say a medium singe. The, uh, the finish on it is great. I mean, I love the flavor on the back end of this. This tells me that, uh, that this, this one would be, this probably would be great with, uh, with a cigar, like a cigar, great with a nice piece of steak or some barbecue or something like that. Something that could really handle that a little bit. I probably wouldn't drink this with Chinese or anything like that, but definitely a good piece of steak and a cigar. This would be fantastic.

Yeah, so the first time that I got to actually have this after we blended it and put it in bottles, We, myself and my team were in Kentucky for the Kentucky Bourbon Festival. And we head up to Louisville and we went to Bourbon's Bistro for dinner where they carry our products. And so we wanted to go in and we knew somehow they had gotten the first bottle of town in the country. Like nobody was supposed to have it yet and they had a bottle. So we went in and the team sat down and we ordered some pours of it. And then I said, come on, we got to do this. So we all ordered old fashions with it. which I personally, I would never take a nine year old bottle. Um, especially one that, you know, it was $110 or a hundred dollars and make an old fashioned with it. But I just thought let's celebrate, you know, and we were sitting down to dinner and we did it and it made a fantastic old fashioned. I'm not recommending anybody go and do that necessarily. Uh, but it was, it turned out to make a fantastic old fashioned and we did have, um, I think steaks and, uh, they have a very famous pork chop they do there and a shrimp and grits bowl. So it went great with all of that.

Yeah, that's one of our favorite spots. We love going to bourbon's bistro and they've got, uh, they have got a great bar there and they've got great food and it's always, uh, it's always a crowd pleaser when we end up at a table there. My, my, my wife loves it as well. And yeah, so I can, I can get that. Brian, what, what about the finish for you?

I definitely get the little bit of spice there on the finish for me. Probably cinnamon, spicy, but I mean, it's a very, very nice finish. Very pleasing. You know, on the palette for me, I was definitely getting some berry, like raspberry, blackberries, something that family probably and then you know on the finish definitely got that spice which is really nice with this.

We taste a lot of the notes that you just called out. We definitely, when we were, I recall when we were blending this, we were getting just a lot of the barrels just had a real strong cinnamon on the tongue and it would finish with like a cinnamon spice. And we really liked that. So we made sure that we got that in there. And then I always, I get a lot of what Jim was saying, I get a lot of smokiness on the nose and then on the tongue I get a lot of tobacco, which to me, You know comes from that time in the barrel i think and then it sort of leads and there's a sweetness but it's not like. You know it to me it's a little bit there some cornbread in there but there's also like i taste cornbread as if somebody spread some blackberry jam on there and i know it's very specific and but but it's what i always get from this when when i'm tasting it.

It pulls out that flavor memory for you. Yes. So one of the things that I wanted to touch base on was kind of your bottle and your label. I mean, these things, these are both striking on all your products. Your packaging is very striking and I just have to, I've always wondered how that translates on the shelf to impulse buying. And I would have to say that you guys have got a great effect on consumers when they see your product on the shelf. Have you gotten a lot of feedback on that?

Yeah, it's actually been fantastic. First of all, thank you. Thank you for the kind words. Yeah. And it's, look, it was by design, but just because we had an intention didn't mean it was going to work, but it so far has. So when I was thinking about starting the company and starting the brand, before we even had the concept or the name or anything like that, I knew that I wanted to do something that stood out on the shelf because I spent, you know, I'm a giant bourbon nerd and I spent a lot of time walking up and down the whiskey island stores and i'm looking at him going the labels are all you know they're brown and they're beige and there's a picture of a dog or a bird right but there when you look at vodka craft beer tequila rum the packaging is bright it's eye-catching it's fun and it's exciting And I thought, why can't we have really serious, really high quality award-winning bourbon and rye in packaging that is fun and exciting and has a story to it? And so we definitely, we set out with the intention of making something that would, that would catch your eye when you're walking through the store. Uh, and it is, it has been exactly that. I mean, people, you know, I do a lot of in-store tastings. I've been at, uh, Justin's and Blind Pig and John O's over in E-Town and a lot of other places in Kentucky and in other states. And I'll stand there and we'll have our products on the table and people will walk in and go, what is that? Oh my gosh, what is that? And there's something about because our labels are They appeal to a wide range of people in terms of age and gender and backgrounds because you have 20-somethings who they want to take our posters and hang them on the wall in their living room because they're Marvel geeks and nerds like me and that kind of thing. And then we have men and women who are in their seventies who were looking at this and it reminds them of the movies they saw when they were younger, right? The kinds of movies, you know, Logan's run and Barbarella and those kinds of movies that were in the theater. And so, and you know, sort of everything in between, but we are really, I want to talk about the packaging and the stories because I love it, but we are really, really serious about the liquid. It's why we set out to do this. I always say to people, look, if what's inside the bottle isn't as amazing as what's on the bottle, then we're not doing what we're supposed to be doing. And so, every product we launch with, we launch with three products back in the fall of 2022. Moonlight Mayhem, Asago Werewolves and Bourbon, Moonlight Mayhem Extended Cut, Cast Strength Bourbon, and Rise of the Robots, Serve the Drink, Save the World, which is a 94 proof rye. All three of those products won gold or double gold at the San Francisco World Spirits Competition. and they won gold medals at other competitions as well. For me, San Francisco is a very respected competition, oldest, biggest, largest, that kind of thing. It validates what we set out to do, which is have award-winning, really high-quality liquid inside a really fun, immersive, story-filled packaging.

Well, let's roll back the clock a little bit. And I've got this picture in my mind of a couple of buddies sitting over a pour saying, why don't we do this? So how did things start for you guys? Sure.

So my buddy Charlie, he and I have known each other almost 30 years at this point. We both, he lives in Atlanta, I live in LA, and we both started getting into bourbon a little over 10 years ago, maybe, kind of separately and together. And so we started meeting once a year, we do our pilgrimage to the motherland and we'd meet once a year, at least in Kentucky. And we started going around to distilleries like crazy people. I mean, we would go to five or six distilleries a day, which is not even back then before they were overly crowded and you had to book week months in advance. That was still hard to do, right?

It took a lot of planning and a lot of scheduling. A lot of times people don't understand that and they plan their vacations to the Bourbon Trail and they think, okay, we're going to do these 10 and then we're going to do these 10. when the reality is three to five is about the max of what you can do.

Yeah. And we were doing, at the time we were probably trying to do about four, four to six a day. And then we're done. We'd go find, you know, we'd Uber over to or take a taxi to a liquor barn and go sit and taste at their bar. Right. Cause they have these great tasting bars where for a reasonable amount, you never know what you're going to get, but they have some really great stuff there. So we just, we fell in love, fell in love with Kentucky, but we fell in love with bourbon, the liquid, the people, the craft, all of it, the art and the science. And on one of those trips, you know, we spent a lot of time zigzagging around the state and between Lexington and Louisville, you know, I'm just staring out the window, watching the grass and the hills and the cows go by. And I just turned to Charlie and go, we got to do our own brand. One day we got to do our own brand. And so flash forward, another buddy of mine here in California, he was helping me get this off the ground. And we were working on the concept and we'd been banging our head against the wall coming up with different concepts and ideas. And he's a podcast host also. So he just started interviewing me, right? Just not recording, the two of us were just sitting there and he started interviewing me and I started talking about writing in the movies. And he stopped me and he said, look, the passion with which you are talking about writing in the movies is the same kind of passion you talk about bourbon. find a way to do them together. And so, Filmland Spirits came right after that. And then, you know, Rise of the Robots concept, all of it just came pouring out after that. That's fantastic.

I mean, combine something you love with something you enjoy and your hobby with your job and your passion for something. And it's amazing that secret sauce comes together and things just happen. If there's any entrepreneurs out there and you're trying to figure out what to work on, start with something you have passion about, right? Start with something that you really believe in and something that really gets you going in the morning.

I always joke that I have a habit of ruining my hobbies by turning them into businesses. Because my last two businesses before this all came out of my passions and my hobbies. But this time, it's sort of gone the other way. I've turned two of my strongest passions and hobbies into my business. and I've never had so much fun and enjoyed anything in my life in terms of work. It's been great. I've been crisscrossing, hopping all over the country, opening up markets and doing demos and tastings and just meeting our customers and meeting the retailers and the people who work in the stores and just having this amazing, amazing experience as I see people discover our product, learn about it, go, oh my gosh, I've never seen anything like that before. And then when they taste it, and they go crazy for it and so i have people come in the store and they taste all five products you know one at one after another and everyone's like oh no this one's my favorite then they taste next oh this one's my favorite it's just you know it's like i'm sitting there like you know just glowing like so excited.

So, when you were putting all this together, I mean, there's a lot to it, right? I mean, there's a lot to building a brand and building a good product and labeling and marketing and all the things. It was just you three? Or did you employ some very special help out there?

Yeah, sure. No, I will tell you. And when I say I'm having a tremendous amount of fun, this is also some of the hardest work I've ever done in my life, right? But I'm enjoying it. Even when I wake up and the day is filled with challenges, I'm still like, I feel so lucky that I'm doing what I'm getting to do. So we have sort of a core team of five of us and various members of the team came on board as we went. So I'm the founder and the CEO. I do a large amount of the creative and the writing and the story and the blending, as I mentioned, as well as raising the money and running the business and doing all that. My partner, Charlie Flint, who I mentioned, he's our VP of Operations. Charlie is also a screenwriter and he and I wrote together many years ago and he is my co-creative on this. So we work on all the stories and the characters and the bottles together. And then Kristin Kilpack is our VP of sales and she's been in the industry over 20 years and she comes from brands like Goslings and Jeffersons and Clodovol. And then we have Daniel Clark is our VP of marketing. And Daniel comes from a lot of different consumer package brands, but he was at Pernod for a long time and so worked on Rabbit Hole and Jefferson's and TX and Smooth Ambler and brands like that. And then we have Steve Canepa. Steve is sort of our head of finance, but Steve so much more than that because he's a giant whiskey guy and cigar guy and a golfer like us. And so he He's on the blending team and he's a member of our board and he's involved in a lot of different decisions that we make as well.

Sounds like you put together the A team, kind of the dream team there. We did. It ended up being that.

Like I said, everybody kind of came on at different places, but it has been a fantastic team. And then we have worked with some outside agencies. We worked with an agency who helped us develop the format of the label. We provided a lot of guidance of what we wanted, and we had all our stories and what our characters to be. I will mock up all of the posters like what we want the poster to be. I'll go into Photoshop and I'll end up probably sometimes doing anywhere from 30 to 50 mock-ups and then I'll bring it to the team and then I get all kinds of feedback from the sales angle and the marketing angle and the creative and you know. all of that, and then I'll work them and work them until we get something that we all really think is the right mix. And then I will bring an artist in to completely redraw it and create it from scratch, because I'm just using found elements and Photoshop and mashing things together to get a concept. But then we'll bring in an artist and I'll guide them and they will direct, sorry, I'll direct them and guide them and they will draw everything from scratch and paint it from scratch by hand. And then that eventually becomes the poster and the label.

I mean, your artist and your team in general, but your artist has really captured that era of movies. I mean, it's like you can almost pinpoint the era, right? I mean, this is definitely that B-movie era and the artwork is fantastic. Thank you. I mean, you've cut no corners here. There's no doubt about it. I mean, these bottles, this packaging, the artwork that goes into it. The theme is just right on point. And somebody that gets into that kind of thing has got to just be like, I'm collecting all this stuff. I'm getting the posters. I'm getting the bottles. When's the movie coming out? Right. Right.

So, so we have, we've got, of course we've got the posters and the t-shirts and everything available on our website. But, um, We have trailers for every one of the movies that you can watch on YouTube or on our website. We have storyboards, script pages, and the movie poster that you can actually download. So all of that content is available on the website.

That's fantastic. And that's a big investment for 600 Bottles.

Yes. So our other products, our core products are meant to always be available. The two Moonlight Mayhem and the two Rise of the Robots. But these limited releases will come and go. And so yes, it is a large investment for only 600 bottles. We're in a lot more markets now than we were just last September. And so the next limited release we do will be more. It'll still be limited though. And we're not trying to limit on purpose. But the older, more special products obviously come with a higher cost. And we're trying to be responsible business people as we do this. But I do a lot of that work. I create the trailers, I write the scripts. Charlie Coco writes a lot of it with me. We write all the copy ourselves. I create the website pages for it and the artwork that's on the website pages I create for it. It's a huge investment in time, but it helps lower some of the hard costs in doing that. It's really important to us that we do that and we have that available to our customers. We like to say that, and people have said this to us, that our bottles are sort of like the cereal box when we were growing up and we were kids, you know, before we all had cell phones and you'd sit there eating your cereal in the morning, reading the back of the cereal box and whatever content they put on there for you. So people sit here and they sip on our whiskey and they're reading the bottle and every time they do, you're finding something new because there are a ton of Easter eggs on the labels as well. And so there's things we've hidden in there that we don't talk about. We don't tell people they are, if people find them and they mentioned to us, great. But it's all kinds of stuff you can keep exploring. And there's little jokes and things within the copy as well. Oh, fantastic.

That's a lot of fun.

I think I'm going to have to do some research because I've watched the trailers and I've spent a lot of time on the website and reading everything. So now I'm going to have to go back and check out these labels and see if I can find some of those. hidden things and the jokes and all the good stuff. Right.

And here's the thing, you can do that, but then if you pick up a bottle next year, the Easter eggs are going to be different and there'll be more of them because every time we do another printing of labels, we will add things, you know, something that came up. So another idea will modify a little thing that's hidden. And so they're always sort of, they're always evolving and changing. So the bottle you have in front of you may have some different Easter eggs on it than the bottle I have in front of me. That's fantastic.

All right, so we're going to take a short break now. We're going to come back here in a few folks and we'll have another expression from Filmland Spirits. We'll talk a little bit more with Troy about that expression and others. We'll dive into what they have going on and we'll talk a little bit about what's down the road for Filmland Spirits. So hang around. We'll be right back. 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'sBourbonShop.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. Pitesandbarrels.com, the ultimate bourbon lovers gift shop and branding specialist. All right, listeners, so we are back. It was a great little break there. We got to sit around and continue to chit chat a little bit and sip on the rest of our town at the end of tomorrow. That was a fantastic pour, fantastic pour. I really enjoyed it. And we're going to get into something a little more, a little more on the proof in the second half.

Well, thank you. I appreciate it. And one thing I wanted to do before we move on to the next product is share the story. of town at the end of tomorrow. So it's called town at the end of tomorrow. The future wants its bourbon. And it takes place about 40 to 50 years from now in Bardstown, Kentucky, home of bourbon. right? And it's a time when aged bourbon has run out. And this has caused riots and violence. And the government has to step in and pass the Unbonded Act, which says all bourbon must be sold when it turns two years old. Can't let it age any more than that. And our heroes are a couple of fifth generation distillers who miss their aged bourbon. And so they turn the distillery into a time machine and travel back to Bardstown in 1820 to borrow the aged bourbon and bring it to the future.

That's awesome. I could imagine the uproar. I could imagine the uproar with that. I mean, no doubt.

I mentioned earlier, I had this time travel story in mind and I thought, how do you connect time travel and bourbon? And I'm like, well, it has to do something with aging. There's all those people out there trying all these science-based rapid aging, but I'm like, well, I've had a time machine. I could age burden with my time machine. There you go.

Fantastic. All right, so we're moving on to another expression now, and can you tell us a little bit about what we have on our glass?

Yeah, absolutely. So this is called Rise of the Robots Extended Cut. And as I mentioned earlier, Extended Cut is our trademark term for cast strength, right? So this is our first release of it. We had released Rise of the Robots, our 94 proof ride back when we launched in September of 2022. We also released this at the Kentucky Bourbon Festival this past year in September of 2023. It's 108 proof. It's a 95.5 mash bill. And this has been just an amazing, wonderful surprise because people love regular rise of the robots in 94 proof. And we thought, all right, well, let, you know, cast-strength rye is not nearly as common as cast-strength bourbon. And so we thought, all right, it's a little bit of a risk for us to do this, but we are huge rye guys, especially Charlie and I, we love our rye and we love very specific types of ryes. And we said, we just, we got to do it. It rounds out our core offering and it belongs as part of the set and we're going to do it. And so we did it and we were really happy with it i mean we loved it and like i mentioned before we do our blends and get everything bottled and we leave kentucky and we don't get a chance to actually get bottles for months ourselves so a lot of time goes by for us. So it was only at the Kentucky Bourbon Festival. I didn't even get to taste it during the day because we were so busy and so many thousands of people coming up and telling them about the product and tasting them on it. We finished. It was like Saturday night. We're exhausted. We go back to the Airbnb we're staying at and we sit down and we brought back a bottle. We had a little bit left in the bottle. So we all sat there and poured it and couldn't stop. I mean, it was just... We were like, oh my gosh, this is so good. And that is the reaction that we get from everybody. There's something about our ryes. People walk up to us and they go, well, you know, I'll taste your bourbon. I'm not really a rye person. And then they taste the rye and go, oh, this is good. I really like this. And that's happened like tenfold with the cast strength version. So it's 108 proof, but it certainly doesn't drink like 108 proof. We get a lot of feedback that it drinks a little smoother and lighter than you would expect something up at a rye, especially up at 108 proof. I was going to say, just like with Talent Inn tomorrow, I'm not going to lead the witness and tell you what you're going to taste. I want to hear what experience you have with it and what you have to say about it.

Well, I'm going to start by saying that I agree with you on the fact that on the nose, it definitely does not come across as something that's 108 proof. It definitely noses a lot lower in the proof range. And it also doesn't come across like a true 95.5. It's a little bit more subtle than a more pine forward or more spicy rye on the nose. This has a nice, and did you say the age on this is about?

This I would have to go check exactly, but I believe this is about five and a half years old when we bottled it.

Yeah, so this one's taking the turn and it's moving away from that sort of bright, fresh rise that you get in a three to four-year-old range. It's starting to move towards that candy aspect of a rye a little bit more. And so it's very nice on the nose. It definitely is very unassuming. It doesn't nose like a 95.5. To me, it has a little bit less of that bright cedar freshness that you might get.

Right. We, we, Charlie and I, I mentioned particularly love rise. We are very partial to minty rise. Like we love mint in our rise. If we, if we could, you know, figure out a way to have it just be pure mint. I mean, there's, there's just something about it that, that is so enjoyable. And we thought our rise of the robots 94 proof was very minty to begin with. This is just a mint bomb. I mean, it, it, it, it, you get it a little bit of on the nose, but you definitely get it on the, on the tongue and then it comes back again on the finish as well. And I don't, you know, for people who aren't that familiar with rye, I don't mean it tastes like toothpaste or mouthwash, that kind of mint. It's got a little bit of a spearmint kind of leaning toward it. Like you said, instead of people expect ryes to be super spicy, but instead of getting ton and ton of spice, you actually get a little bit more of that smooth mint.

Yeah. Looking forward to the taste here. Cheers. Cheers. Oh, that's so good. That is, that is really nice. That has a, uh, sort of a deep wash of, uh, kind of a mini freshness, but at the same time you're getting a little bit of that, uh, clove, a little bit of clove, but just on the back end. I wanted to say a little bit of pepper too. Yeah. A little bit of pepper, not too much, but a nice clove, but sort of a minty clove freshness. I really liked that.

Yeah, I was going to say the same thing. Definitely clove for me, but I love the, I would say refreshing part of the mint. Very good, but the clove definitely jumps out a little bit as well.

The finish on it is very, very lengthy. I really like it. You know, we always talk about finishes having two components, one being the length at which it presents itself. Sticks around and the other being sort of the flavor how pleasing the flavor is and this kind of this is kind of Hits both really well. So you got a nice pleasing pleasing finish that has a good long Sticks around a while. So very nice Excellent.

Thank you. Yeah, we I tend to get on this I don't know why like after a while the finish I start like just getting that feeling like I just had some great sourdough bread like not overly sour, but just that taste that sourdough bread is just, it like has a fullness to it.

This does have a little bit of rye muffin to it though. Like if you're talking about a bready aspect to it, I can see kind of like the, it's kind of a dry rye muffin. a little bit of butter on it. You know, this is not a buttery rye, but it does lead me to kind of lean in that direction a little bit. Once I start talking about the muffin, then I got to have a little bit of butter on it. It's a good solid rye. I like to consider myself a rye guy as well. If I had two bottles in front of me, both equally fantastic, one was a bourbon, one was a rye, I'm going to reach for the rye every time. That's just me. I like my spicy foods. I like things to impress and excite my palate and ryes tend to do that. I love bourbon. Don't get me wrong. The bourbon road is the bourbon road, but I love ryes.

I'm the same way. To me, it just depends what the activity is, what the meal is, what kind of mood I'm in, but I will very often just choose if I'm going to sip something, I will choose to sip rye.

I would hope in the future, maybe you have another time travel theme and you get a little bit older Rye in there, that would be nice. This would be interesting to see at eight or nine years like your bourbon. I think it's definitely heading in that candy direction. I think we'd start to see a little bit more of maybe some citrus come out in it, some hard candy citrus notes. Very nice. So let's talk a little bit about kind of your inventories. You guys have been accumulating barrels for some time now and you've become, well, obviously you're in the whiskey business, you need barrels in reserve, but have you gotten to a point now where you feel like you're in a great space where you've got a lot of inventory to choose from, you can do some very creative things in the future?

Yeah, absolutely. And we do have a significant amount of inventory. And in fact, just a few minutes ago, I was adding to that inventory in some emails, because we've built up a lot of great relationships with different providers. And we get offered things now that are really interesting. And so, yes, some of what we have, we are letting age much further along in tasting that. And then we've got some unique things that actually really don't exist on the market yet that are a couple of years away, but we're working on them now. And then our intention is starting with, we're going to have another limited release in the fall. We haven't said what it is yet. But then come 2025, we'll start doing some kind of special release in the spring and a limited release in the fall is sort of a regular pattern of how we're doing things. That's our intention. And so we have things in different kinds of barrels, finished products now. So we have like extended cut is our cast strength. We have a trademark term for remastered. So when you see something from us remastered, that means it's been finished in some kind of other barrel. We don't have that on the market yet, but that'll be next year, spring of 2025 will be our first remastered product.

Now you mentioned in the first half that you're a non-distilling producer, so you're sourcing all of the whiskeys that you're putting into bottles.

Correct, yes.

But is there any contract distilling that's taking place?

Not yet. something we're considering and we're working on. Right now, it probably won't happen for another year or so, but we've already had the conversations about it.

So your inventories must be extensive enough where you can feel pretty confident that you can maintain your profiles on your standard offerings for quite a while into the future without doing contract distilling.

Yes. And we have, in addition to our inventory, we have very strong, as I mentioned before, relationships with our suppliers. And so we know that we're going to have the ability to add to our inventory when we need to. And we've started, as time goes on, we are acquiring the whiskey when it's younger and younger so that it can sit in our inventory and age in our warehouses.

Now, we hadn't really talked about bottle prices yet, but let's start with these two. But I would like to also talk about your other expressions that are on the market and sort of the prices of those as well. Because I think we're looking at a couple of bottles here that are going to be more on the higher end of your offerings as far as price goes.

Yes, these are our two highest end in terms of pricing. So, we started with our Moonlight Mayhem bourbon. which is a 94 proof bourbon that starts. And again, as the supplier, we don't get to set the prices. The retail store set the prices. All we can do is suggest the prices. So these are our suggested retail prices and what they go for if you purchase through our website, for example. But Moonlight Mayhem is $54.99. Then you go to Rise of the Robots, which is $59.99. Then you go to Moonlight Mayhem Extended Cut, our cast strength, which is $79.99. Then you go to Rise of the Robots Extended Cut, which we were just sipping, which is $84.99. So you'll see a pattern there. Our rise tends to be about $5 more than their equivalent bourbon. And then you get to town at the end of tomorrow, which actually everywhere in the country except Kentucky is 109.99. But in Kentucky, it's 99.99. And we did that because we, you know, our affinity for Kentucky, we wanted to make it as accessible to as many people as possible. And we just thought for Kentucky, let's come in under, you know, $100. Plus, we don't have to ship it nearly as far.

Well, we often get the questions, why are ryes more expensive? And we've kind of dove into that subject in the past on the previous podcast, but they're harder to make. They're more difficult. Ryes tend to foam up a lot in the fermenters, and therefore you can't fill the fermenters as full. Therefore, your batch sizes are smaller. It gets really, really sticky.

Sticky gooey mess, yeah. And especially when you're talking about like a 95-5 or 100% rye when you don't have a lot of the malted barley in there to break down those starches. It really, it's a lot of, you know, smaller distilleries I think struggle with it because, you know, a lot of them are mixing with smaller equipment and you really, you know, you can jam up that equipment because it really takes a lot of horsepower to mix that sort of gooey mash. Right, right.

So now we come to that point in the show where we talk about what's in the works. What have you guys got that we might see? You kind of alluded to the finished products a little bit, but what can we see on the shelves from you guys here in the very near foreseeable future?

Right. So as I mentioned, we have a limited release coming in the fall, which I don't think I'm supposed to talk about yet, but it will be not too dissimilar from something we tasted today. Okay. Just maybe a little older. And then the remastered series that I talked about for 2025. But we also have a single barrel store pick program. And so it's based on our Moonlight Mayhem Extended Cut Cast Strength Bourbon. And so there are a handful of stores in Kentucky, actually, that have as well as other states. But in Kentucky, we have single barrels out there. So what we do, this is a little bit of sort of behind the scenes thing is, but we go and we select I think we picked 12 barrels that we thought were the best of the best and we offered them up to our retail partners and they get to pick from those 12. But what we did is just for behind the scenes, it's not consumer facing, it's not out there on the store, but we named all of the barrels using fun movie names that also describe the tasting notes. And so instead of us talking to our retail partners about barrel number four, nine, five, six, seven, we get to talk about Charlie and the Chocolate Distillery or Honey I Shrunk the Bourbon or every flavor everywhere all at once. So obviously these are trademark names from other people and we're not putting it on the bottle, but it's just a fun way with our retail partners that we get to talk about it. But you'll see these store-picked single barrels on the shelf have a silver metallic trophy plate on the label with the store and who picked it and the proof of that release and the store's logo and everything. So you'll see Blind Pig in Bardstown has one, John O's in E-Town has one, as well as the whole Give 270 organization, they did one as well. And there are a few others out there.

Yeah, I picked up the one from the Blind Pig. So I've got a bottle on my shelf here from the Blind Pig. And yeah, it's great. It's awesome. I love getting a single barrel pick. It's almost like getting a candy store. You know, you get something you know is going to be a little bit different. It's going to be something that's going to surprise you. It's going to be something that you're going to get to enjoy and then it will never be available again. You just need to go find another.

Right. Exactly. So we just came online or are available in stores in Kansas at the end of last year, at the end of 2023. And so there's a large whiskey group in Kansas that just did a single barrel pick with us and that's going to be coming out Soon. And there's another store in Kansas that just did a single barrel pick with us. And in California, we had a group of eight YouTube whiskey reviewers that all gathered together and they're all based in California. and they all gathered together on a group, a Zoom chat with me and I had sent samples to them and we did for an hour and a half, we tasted through everything and then they picked one and we did a single barrel, you know, with their group's name on it and it's available. It's actually now available on our website as well. You can purchase that and have it shipped to you.

Oh, that's so exciting. So I'm going to say that it's in the back of my mind that you guys are going to have a customer-facing experience at some point. Something that's going to be like knock your socks off, kind of buy out an old movie theater and it's got to happen, right? Is it going to happen or is it too early to talk about it?

It's probably too early to talk about, but I will tell you, when I wrote the business plan and I went and started raising money, there were mockups of what you're just describing in there. And we are in some different kinds of conversations, but it's very early. That's fantastic.

I'm just picturing the Palace Theater in Louisville. I'm thinking, oh my goodness, wouldn't that be amazing? venue for your products. Right.

Well, you know, I live in Los Angeles, even though the company is based in LA. We do all our work in Kentucky, but I'm here in LA and my team's all over the country. But here in LA, especially, we have those old Art Deco theaters. that Disney owns a couple of them and they're on Hollywood Boulevard and that kind of thing where they're so ornate and you go inside and they have the starfield ceiling with the comet that shoots across before the show and the proscenium is just so ornate and art deco. That's kind of the inspiration for our bottle. And so, because we look at our labels, like our labels and our liquid are the star of the show, that's the screen, but they are surrounded by our bottle, which is meant to be, it is designed in an Art Deco style and it's meant to evoke various aspects of cinema. So if you look at our closure, it's sort of a combination between a film can and a film reel. And then the bottom of our bottle, the glass element is meant to evoke cells of film and like the original Edison kinetoscope, you know, with the horse running around in a circle, that kind of thing. So lots of little elements on there of those theaters. So I just, you know, that came to mind because you mentioned doing something at a theater and that's definitely always been top of mind for us.

Yeah, it's fantastic. It's just I mean, the brand is just it makes your mind just race about the possibilities. It's just it's such a I don't know, thought-provoking brand. I just love it. I love the labels. I love everything about it. Thank you. I'm often in the liquor stores and I'm walking through and I've seen your bottles many times in the past, but still, every time I come across them on the shelf, I just have to pause for a moment and just take another peek because they're so captivating. They're so eye-catching. I always wondered how well you did on that impulse buy. It's got to be tremendous.

Yeah. I mean, we don't have, all I have is anecdotal. I don't have, you know, actual hard data on this, but I've been in stores and then seen it happen. And I've watched people walk by and sort of do a double-take and go, and then they pick it up and start looking at the label and start reading. And, you know, next thing you know, it's at the register.

Yeah. So, let's talk a little bit about where people can find you. I know you guys have really expanded your distribution. I'm not saying you have to have a list of states in front of you, but what's kind of your

the breadth of your distribution here in the US. Sure. And we are still very young. We've been on the market, like I said, less than a year and a half. And we're being very deliberate and very careful about how we launch and where we launch. And because every market that we go into is a big investment, we want to treat each market with respect and care and give it our all. But we are expanding rapidly. So you can go to our website, filmlinespirits.com. And first, you can order from there and we ship to 43 states. And it lists which states, of course, we can ship to. But then there's also a store locator on there and it'll figure out where you are. You put your zip code in, it'll tell you the closest places where you can pick up our products and which products you can pick up. And we are on store shelves and back bars in California. Arizona, Nevada, Washington, Alaska, Kansas, Kentucky. In, let's see, four days from now, we will be in Colorado. And then there's some stuff happening in Illinois and Florida very soon as well.

Oh, fantastic. Well, did you say Indiana? Not yet. Not yet. Our Colorado listeners will be excited to hear that, uh, that you're going to hit their shelves here real soon. And, and I would definitely give them a, uh, a good recommendation to tell them to run out and, and pick up one of your bottles and just explore your brand because it's, uh, it's really great whiskey. I mean, whether they're a rye person or a bourbon person, They like full strength or they like a proof down Berman's. I think they're going to find something in your offering that they're really going to like. And yeah, that's fantastic. So how many states by mail order? Uh, 43, but 42 plus DC. That's fantastic. So pretty much everybody that's listening to this episode right now can possibly put their hands on it without too much effort.

Right. Yeah. And there's, you know, we, there's other online retailers. So reserve bar, seal backs, they all, they sell our products as well. And that I don't know exactly where they ship, but they have different places they ship to. Oh, fantastic.

Well, I'd love to give you the opportunity to let our listeners know. I think you mentioned your website earlier and you can restate that, but also what social media platforms they can find you on. And maybe if they want to reach out to you on your social media accounts, just share with them what you will. And that way they can find out more about Filmland Spirits after the show.

Yeah, absolutely. So filmlandspirits.com. You can go there, get all the content we talked about. You can order product. You can also join our mailing list and become a Filmlander so you get up-to-date information. We also tend to announce like any coupon codes that we offer for the holidays or specials. That kind of usually ends up coming out through our email list first before it hits social media. We also have an events page. So we're doing a lot of in-person tastings. I try and do as many as I possibly can. So I run all over the country. So I'm there. I sign bottles and I get to meet people and talk to them and get to taste them on the products and hear their feedback directly. So we have that events directory on our website as well. And then we are primarily on Instagram and Facebook at Filmland Spirits. So you can find us there. If you DM us on Instagram, I will see it. If you specifically call out that you'd like me to see it, it will get sent to me if I don't see it directly myself. And then you can always email us on our website. There's a contact us page and you can contact us about anything that you might be interested in from the product itself to PR, to trade, whatever it happens to be.

Well, Troy, it's been a pleasure to have you on the show today. We've had such a great time. Thank you for sharing your whiskeys with us. Thank you for sending us samples. Thank you for taking time out of your day to talk to our listeners and let them know a little bit more about your brand. It's my pleasure. I really appreciate you having me and this has been a lot of fun. Yeah, it's a lot of fun always. Great to make new friends, drink whiskey with them. And we hope to see you out on the road eventually. Maybe again, we saw you at the Kentucky Bourbon Festival this last fall, but maybe we'll see you around more at some liquor stores, at maybe some more events that are taking place this year. We'll definitely check out your calendar to see where you're going to be and see if we can't meet up sometime. Awesome. And I come to Kentucky all the time, so I will see you soon. Absolutely. Well, thanks again.

Thanks, Jim. Thanks, Brian.

All right. Well, you can find The Bourbon Road on all social media outlets. You can find us on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, threads, even TikTok. You can also find us on our Facebook page, The Bourbon Roadies. That's where all our fan listeners hang out. We've got about 3,200 members strong. They love to hang out on there, share pictures of the whiskey, share stories, share bottles. There's no selling, so you can't come on there and sell your products, but you can come on there and share a pour with somebody. So we'd love to see you out there. It's always a lot of fun. It's a great group of people. We hope you'll check out the bourbon roadies on Facebook. Every week we put on an episode on a Wednesday. We'll have a great guest on like Troy. We'll talk about their products, their brand. We'll taste through a couple of whiskies. It's always a blast. We hope you'll join us every single week. And one way you can make sure you don't miss a single episode is to scroll to the top of that app you're on, hit that subscribe button. That way every week you'll get a bell notification letting you know that the Bourbon Road has dropped another episode and you'll get to check it out. But until the next time, we'll see you down the Bourbon Road.

you