412. Whiskey Lore and More

Hello friends and welcome back to another episode of the Bourbon Road podcast. I'm your host, Jim Shannon. And I'm your host, Todd Ritter.

We've got a great show for you today. So grab your favorite pour and join us.

Hey roadies, it's Diane Strong with Bourbon on the Banks Festival. We have got a great event planned for you this year. I can't wait to tell you all about it. Hang out for the half and I'll give you some more details. I hope to see you October 5th on the Banks in Frankfort, Kentucky.

All right, listeners, we're glad to have you back again with us today. Todd and I are sitting down with one of our good old friends and I'll let Todd do the introductions here. We're going to have a great show today. It's going to be a lot of fun. We're going to be drinking all kinds of whiskies, but we've got some great, uh, some great tales to listen to. And, uh, again, it's always fun to sit down with good old friends. Todd, who do we have on the show today?

Well, today we've got Drew Hanisch from Whiskey Lore, a longtime friend of you and mine. He's been on the show a couple of times. He's kind of how I got down to the bourbon road. In my wanting to find out more about bourbon and bourbon history, one of the very first podcasts I started listening to was his Whiskey Lore podcast. I knew he was going to be on an episode of the bourbon road. So that's when I went and checked it out and found out you guys were like literally right down the road. And yeah, so we've come kind of full circle, if you will.

Yeah. Well, Drew definitely thank you for introducing Todd to the bourbon road because it's been a big win on our, on our side to have Todd join the podcast.

It's my pleasure and I mean, it's fun to see how much of a community whiskey really creates and just around the stories and around the experiences. Because I met Todd actually when we went to Barrel House was where we actually met each other in person and doing a tour together. That was fun because I had actually never gone on a tour with somebody else before. I'd always done solo. tours. So it was great to be able to share that and see his love for whiskey and, and, uh, you know, experience it through somebody else's eyes as well.

Well, definitely welcome back once again. I think we all have, uh, a whiskey in our glass. Uh, I don't think any of us are actually drinking the same thing today. We're all kind of, uh, running our own theme here, but, uh, Todd, why don't you start us out and tell us what you, what you've got in your glass.

So I've got Liberty Pole Spirits. This is their Monongahela rye. And this is their full proof version. So it is at 108 proof. It's out of Liberty Pole Spirits, which is in Pennsylvania and fairly, fairly new distillery. And it's one that Drew's become quite familiar with as he just recently talked to those folks. And I'm pretty sure he's got the same exact bottle. If not, he may even have the lower proof. So I do. Yep. So there's been a bit of a revival for the monogahela rye. And this is one of the, one of those, I guess, new standards. It's hopefully going to take that back to the prominence it once had back in history.

And Drew, what do you, what do you have in your glass? I guess we're running on a theme here because, um, I also have a rye whiskey, but my rye whiskey is actually a Michigan straight rye whiskey bottled in bond. And it is actually made with, um, uh, made with. Scottish peated barley. So it is a mix of two of my favorite things, peated whiskey and rye whiskey. So, and this is from Grand Traverse, which is a distillery that I got to see. It's amazing how many distilleries there are in the Traverse City area in Michigan. There are a lot of them. And so it was fun actually getting to go explore them in Grand Traverse. You know, he said, is there a bottle here you would like? And I was like, you know, Pete and Rye, I am all over that. So that's what I'll be sipping.

Well, I've got a Three Cord bourbon here. It's at 91 Proof. This is their blended bourbon whiskey. This actually is a combination of, and even though Three Cord is a Michigan company, their whiskeys hail from, at least this one in particular, is a blend of Tennessee, Kentucky, and Indiana bourbon whiskey. So this is a blended bourbon whiskey. It hails from those three states, but of course, As most people know, three court is a Michigan company. And, uh, yeah, that's what I'm drinking today. 91 proof. So I'm starting out kind of low proof here. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Not 91, 81 proof, 81 proof. I misspoke. So I'm definitely starting out low, low proof here. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers.

So Drew, one of the reasons I wanted to get you on is because, you know, your podcast Whiskey Laura kind of, it kind of started out as looking at some of the myths and the, I guess, forgotten history of not only Kentucky bourbon and other bourbons, but you even dove into Scotch and, you know, Irish whiskey and things like that. And now you've kind of moved into more of almost like a virtual tour guide to certain distilleries. So I was kind of wondering, why the change and what your plan is as you continue down your podcasting road, if you will.

Yeah, well, this is what's been kind of a challenge for me is that I have gone back as I've been doing deeper research. When I wrote my Lost History of Tennessee Whiskey book, my level of research jumped quite a bit. I went a lot more in depth. I found that rather than depending on the internet to get a lot of my details and seeing what I could see out there. I was finding a lot more through courthouses and through news old newspapers and it's a lot of research and it takes some time to get through there and do that and What happened is as i've been doing that research i've been stumbling into things that have made some of my earlier stories. Turn out to not be necessarily true even though it seemed like all the evidence was pointing in that direction and if there is anything that i am it is somebody who wants to get it right and not lead people down the wrong path and so. Not too long ago i was taking my bottom bond episode that i didn't season one fourth episode and i had to basically rewrite it because i had written it from a standpoint of focusing in on the payoff being. Colonel H. Taylor coming up with the Bottled and Bond Act and that he lobbied for it, which is the narrative that we always hear. But as I was doing my research for the Lost History of Tennessee Whiskey Book, come to find out it didn't come about that way. It came about because the Internal Revenue Service was upset that we weren't getting enough revenue in because the Canadians were sending so much whiskey across the border and they had a Bottled Bond Act that would allow them to be able to send whiskey overseas without double taxation where is the way that the excise was set up in the united states was that you basically would have to pay the tax at the distillery before it went out the door. You couldn't bottle it at the distillery or you could bottle it at the distillery, but if you were going to send it overseas, you had to pay a separate excise tax. So basically they were being double taxed for that and Hiram Walker was basically flooding across uh, Canadian club into Detroit and it was trusted and it was, um, it was less expensive because they were able to avoid the double taxation and there was a Kentucky and involved in it, but it wasn't currently H Taylor. Uh, it was a, uh, former head of the IRS, who was commissioner of the IRS, who just so happened to be a House of Representatives member from Kentucky. I forget his first name, but Evans is his last name. And so the Bottled in Bond Act was originally known as the Evans bill. And it was done that way because the internal revenue head at the time New that he could depend on a former head of the internal revenue to be able to push this through congress and. basically, Colonel H. Taylor was busy suing anybody who had the name Taylor and he was busy in all these trials. And so he had really nothing to do with the ramp up to the Bottled and Bond Act, but he had everything to do with its success afterwards because nobody was taking advantage of it except for him early on. In fact, the internal revenue was disappointed in the fact that nobody was really taking advantage of it. except for h taylor so he was more on the backside of it than he was on the front side of it but that ruined the whole episode because it was like well that was what i was pushing towards was to say here's the hero coming in to save whiskey and in reality he didn't have anything to do with it and so. I went into the rewrite on it but then i started thinking about a lot of the other episodes i did and as i start back checking them i was like i'm finding stuff that isn't necessarily right. And so i had a choice to make it was redo the entire series all over again. Or it was to be able to help find myself by putting them into books and so this is what i've started focusing on now in fact this christmas i plan on having a book out call whiskey lore. which will be thirty myths debunked in the way that i do them through the whiskey lower podcast so you'll be able to listen to the audio book or be able to buy the book and read and it will give that same kind of style but i'll have footnotes in it so you're gonna see that these are being researched much much deeper than the original ones were and it's amazing because as i've been starting to work on this book It's going to have 30 different myths that I'm covering. And out of those 30 that I've done, a lot of them are things that I thought I knew going in, what the answers were, and then come out the other end and I'm like, wow, okay, all of these really are much different than even I thought they were because I've gone in and done the deeper research on that. So what that did was it caused me to say, what do I do with the Whiskey Lore podcast? But at the same time, I was having an issue with I couldn't write travel books fast enough. And I've been to over 300 distilleries and I'd love to help people understand how to travel and get to these distilleries. But it takes a long time to put books together. But I have a website where I have a travel guide where I can put all of these distilleries out there and also create some tools because I'm a web developer as well to be able to help people be able to find these distilleries. So the idea of the whiskey lore podcast now is the old stories are still back there. I don't know that I'm a hundred percent trustworthy on the content of all of it, because that's what I'm going to do is be working on putting that stuff into books. Um, but it will remain out there. And the stuff that I'm working on now, um, is going to mainly craft distilleries because, um, uh, in fact, it was kind of validated for me the other day that they mentioned the craft distilleries for the first time in many years. Uh, have actually seen a decline in sales and it probably has a lot to do with the economy. Um, and it's like, I see, and I've traveled to these places and I want people to be able to experience them. And so rather than doing books, I decided to take the profiles that I do in, um, my Kentucky book and my Irish book. and turn those into audio podcasts where I give you all the information that you need to understand how to get there, do the things that you wanna do, things you compare with it in terms of side trips you might wanna do, and get you more of the personality of the place because I'm actually talking to somebody at the distillery and trying to find more background on that distillery. Why would you wanna visit that particular distillery? So that's the long answer, which kind of answers both sides of the shift to books and also the shift in the podcast.

Yeah, I thought it was really great when you did the Castle & Key one recently that you kind of talked about our quick experience of going to the the Frankfort City Museum there. So that was really cool that you touched upon that as being something to kind of check out. I mean, I feel like if it was a little bigger place, maybe they could have a little bigger, you know, Bourbon history area in there. But they do have a nice, nice little, I guess, room full of that kind of stuff. So it was nice that you included them in that.

Yeah, it's, I mean, this is the thing is that, um, when I go to these distilleries, as many as I've gone to, the only real drawback has been that I'm usually going to three distilleries a day. So I don't get a chance to do a lot of these side trips. But what I will tell you is that one of the best things that you could do when you go on one of these journeys is just ask somebody at the distillery, what some other things are due to do in the area or places to go eat, because they're going to have. really good suggestions of places to go. They know the lay of the land. They live there, but in a way I want to kind of give a little, uh, hint to that in these, uh, in these podcast episodes.

Andrew, when you uncover some of these, uh, surprising details that, uh, for example, you mentioned earlier about EH Taylor and how his, his involvement with the bottle and bond act was really on the, on, on the. I don't know if you said backside or frontside, but certainly not in the development of the act, but in the supporting of it following release. When you find those kinds of details, obviously they become part of the story you tell, but do you share those openly with some of the Um, people out there who are maybe lifting up another story that's, that's not in line. Do you share those with other people who are interested in other words, like for example, uh, with Sazerac or Buffalo trace or with Castle and key people who have an interest in, uh, BH Taylor's history.

Yeah, I'm open to doing that. I think part of it is putting the stories out there, kind of gets people talking about it a bit and gets a shift going there. It's an interesting world in that, you know, it's like a lot of these, there's a lot of marketing invested in these narratives. So it's, you know, that's the challenge is, you Will they want it? Will they not want it? So it's kind of like, let me put it out there and let people hear it and see what it is. But you're right. I mean, there is that side of it where I have run into distilleries. I'll give a perfect example. Old Dominic, when I was working on the book for Tennessee Whiskey, I reached out to them, I was a little hesitant at first. I'm like, boy, what I'm coming up with is a lot different from the narrative that I was learning about when I was there. But the brothers were actually very excited to hear the information because for them it was this is actually our family history and so it's much more impactful to hear the real story than it is to maybe go with some of the stuff that has been floating out there that may or may not be necessarily true or a lot of times it's assumptions are made and that's the thing i have to fight against even in my own writing is that you see You know, the ownership of a distillery since 1866 or that the business started in 1866, you assume that that's when the distillery started. Come to find out that's not necessarily the case, but there's more history back there that's fascinating that once you dig into the real story that I know especially the families are interested in. corporations, that's a good question. I don't know whether they're as enthused about it or not, because there's a lot of money sunk into into those stories. But, you know, that can be shortchanging them as well.

And they're kind of perpetuating a story that is more or less a tale. And I can, I guess I can use the word lore there. You know, they're, they're perpetuating a tale that, um, is not altogether fully substantiated. In other words, in a lot of cases, these are passed down stories, these are hearsay, these are other things that have become kind of this tale you tell over the years. And they're not necessarily claiming that it's absolute fact and historical. But they're just telling the story to help represent and give a vision of their brand. So yeah, I would imagine in many cases, they really don't care. They may love the story of it. They may love the details that you're uncovering, but I don't know that it'll cause them to change their tale.

Well, there's two things. One is that you're right, a lot of the stuff gets passed down through oral tradition. And the danger of oral tradition is that, you know, things get out of time. Sometimes names are replaced with other names and you want to rely on those. But I think for the longest time, we've kind of relied on them a little bit too heavy. And so it's not necessarily that they're misrepresenting in any way. It's more that that's just what they heard coming down the line. And that's the story that they're going to tell. I mean, the, the legacy book, the Jack Daniel's legacy book is a perfect example of that. It's filled with a lot of oral tradition and it's an entertaining book. Um, but once you start putting the actual facts in there, it changes a bit. But the question is, if the story is so good, why do you want to mess with it is kind of the thing. And these stories become so embedded in our minds that what happens is, I think, because this happens to me, I'll find myself telling the old tale by mistake because I forget that I had found that that wasn't necessarily true anymore. And so I catch myself going, no, no, no, no. That's not right. Um, hang on. Let me get that, that, uh, straightened out again. Cause there's a lot of it's again, these stories are fun. Uh, and so some of you, you don't want to see go, go. Um, but, um, You know yeah i mean i'm hoping and i love that like for instance when the guys behind the chicken cock brand came to me they said we want to really know the real history and i love that that's i want to see distilleries doing that and saying you know what. if even though that's a really good story, maybe, you know, there's a better story hiding behind the actual story and it's worth doing this. And when we started looking for their history, it's funny because they just wanted to see whether Chicken Cock, the name actually was in relation to cocktails and an old story about that the name came from the stirring of a, of a drink with a rooster's tail. And in the end come to find out, no, actually the guy who founded this distillery was among amongst the earliest distillers in Kentucky bourbon. So, and they did not expect any of that because all of the stories that had been passed down were that that brand started in 1856 and I was finding stuff all the way back to 1838. So that's 20 years worth of history that was kind of shoveled to the side because the story had been told the wrong way for so long that nobody went to look to see the real story. And so a big piece of bourbon history was just lost until you actually go in and start doing the digging.

Yeah, I wonder if sometimes, you know, you don't want to take away from like that bourbon mystique. So like everybody wants to believe that Elijah Craig's barn caught on fire and it only burned the inside of the barrels by some miraculous, you know.

Yeah, I wonder if that has a lot to play into it. But when you hear that story, then it stops you looking in other places. And so it's been to whiskey historians credit that they've looked for people like Jacob Spear, who was actually in Bourbon County, who there's actual records of in 1790 or Again, it goes back to oral tradition because it only shows up in newspapers and it's somebody saying, but what's interesting is that I found that there were two families in Bourbon County in my research for the Bourbon County book, the Shahin family or Shahan in Bourbon County, they say it many different ways, and the Spears, and they both arrived around the same time. They both came from Pennsylvania. And yet, so I was looking at it and I was going, well, maybe the Shawans actually could lay claim to being the first ones before Jacob Spear. But then I found that, one of the family members many years later in the newspaper said that he remembered when Jacob Spear became the first distiller in Bourbon County. And so if the Cheyenne family who was there at the exact same time is going to confirm that it was Jacob Spear, then I'm probably going to lean into the Jacob Spear story much more than I, but that is again, me speculating off of oral tradition. So it's not fact. And it's one of those things that again, you kind of have to say, well, you know, I'll, uh, I'll tell this story, but I also have to say it could change because we might find something else down the road that, that spells that as well. Right.

You came and shared your ride that you're sipping on tonight with us at the Frankfurt Barber Society. I knew you were traveling through. You'd been on a 3,200 mile trip in your car and to get some interviews with some of the folks you wanted to have on your new four minute show. Can you talk about what that trip was about and some of the highlights of that trip?

Yeah, absolutely. Actually, I had no plans on going up there. I'd been doing these as kind of a virtual travel. But I got a message from a researcher and distiller named Ari Sussman. We had chatted back and forth about about Tennessee whiskey history because he'd seen my book, he listens to my podcast, and so we had been in some discussions about certain things about whiskey history. And then he just sent me a message through Instagram and said, hey, you know, we are actually doing this big boat excursion out to South Manitou Island, which is near Traverse City. It's about 17 miles off the coast, and it's an island where they used to grow rose and rye at the turn of the 20th century. And rose and rye was a rye that was used in Pennsylvania. It was used in Kentucky. It was a fairly high in demand rye that just went extinct. And the reason it went extinct was because, of course, after the bootleggers stopped using it during Prohibition, it kind of faded away and didn't come back. And so they had actually found at the National Seed Bank that particular rye again, and they started a project to grow it. And so he said, we're going to go out, we're going to show off the project and let you see and tell you the history and all the rest. Would you like to come up? And, um, this is through mammoth distilling and, um, they're another one of those distilleries that is basically based in Michigan. They, they get out of the state a little bit, but they really focused just on Michigan, kind of like grand Travers and, um, And I had never heard of Mammoth until I started doing these, doing bracketology on Instagram. And all of a sudden it's like, who are all these people that are, I put Mammoth out there, they're asking, you know, to vote on distilleries and they're saying, put Mammoth out there. So I did. And then the number of votes I was getting in there was more than I was getting from Kentucky distilleries, which was blowing my mind. And so I had this thing of, okay, these are, these are interesting distilleries up here. I should learn more about them. And so when he contacted me and asked me if I wanted to come up, I was like, yeah. And actually on top of that, I will tack on a trip. where I actually will sit down with people in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. And then I added Indiana on the way back in and actually do these interviews live and tell people my travel experience of going from place to place. And so I reached out to a bunch of Michigan distilleries. I went to Journeyman distillery. I went to Ironfish distillery. I went to a lot of the ones that were doing well in bracketology. And then from there, ethanology, that was an interesting one because they were distilling mead, which I had never even considered that as a thing, and then tasted it and it was amazing. Drove across the Upper Peninsula, went into Wisconsin and went to some of the big distilleries there too that I was seeing a lot of support for. And it was so fun because it was fun to take the podcast on the road and actually get to uh, tell the tale as if I actually am there instead of me just going from memory of things to do in the area from when I had traveled there long ago and to meet these distillers face to face. And again, it brought back to me this idea that, um, uh, that we need to support these craft distilleries. And because I see that, um, the create so much creativity there, but, um, You know, they, they really have to fight to get their message out. Um, and so, uh, it's fun to be able to support them through doing these podcast interviews and to get people thinking outside the box, because I never want to draw away from Kentucky or Tennessee, but, um, yeah, I mean, it's just really interesting to see all the different areas around the country, uh, where distilling is going on and see their different theories behind distilling.

Yeah, I thought it was great. Uh, you know, the night you came through, we were actually having just kind of a, we, we will have like a, it's called third Monday meetup. And that night happened to be out of state, out of mind was the theme. And it was like, the, the role was if you brought a bottle to share, it had to come from some other state other than Kentucky. So I think we had like 40, 14 different states that were, that we had bottles of stuff to try. It was a lot of fun. And I'm kind of like you, I mean, I think there's a lot of unique stuff out there coming from the small craft distilleries. And I mean, whereas back in the day I was a big craft beer guy, so I would go hunt down, you know, the craft breweries. And I still do some, but I also, you know, I was just recently in Pennsylvania and really wanted to get to Stolen Wolf, but they were closed like the day we were kind of there. So it didn't happen, but it's still on the list to try. But I do try to make an effort to, you know, check out some of the local stuff when I can.

Well, I was going to say the thing that you, uh, you bring up there that I think is important to note is that we get kind of, uh, used to Kentucky distilleries all being open seven days a week. And then you go to try to plan out these distillery trips elsewhere. And it's like, Oh, well, they're only open on Saturday or they're only open on Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

Yep.

Yep.

So you got to be aware of that. Fellas, I think it's a, it's probably a good place for us to break for the half and we'll continue sipping on the three whiskeys we have poured. And when we come back, we got more great stories from Drew and, uh, don't go away. We'll be right back.

Hey roadies, it's Diane Strong again with Bourbon on the Banks Festival. Thanks for waiting to hear the details about our event this year. I'm so excited. I want you to come into Frankfort, Kentucky on October 5th. We're going to celebrate along the banks of the Kentucky River. We've got over 70 distilleries this year. You get your sample glass and you get to go to town. Here's a real quick rundown of the events we've got going on. Thursday we've got Mixology on the River with O.H. Ingram and Heather Wibbles. After that event, you can head out to Whiskey Thief Distilling for our official kickoff party. Friday, you can indulge in a bourbon pairing with no other than Peggy No Stevens. Freddie Johnson's gonna join her for the fun and you're gonna be tasting some Buffalo Trice. Then get dressed up for our VIP reception and bourbon auction, courtesy of Whiskey Thief Distilling. You have a chance to bid on your very own barrel pick experience from both Whiskey Thief and Four Roses Distillery. And don't forget, if you're bringing your family, you need to head downtown on Friday night at about six o'clock because we have got an amazing free family-friendly event brought to you by X-Free Credit Union. We've got fire performers, acrobats, street performers, music, food, tons of free activities for the kids. The main event, of course, is on Saturday, October 5th. This year we've got over 70 distilleries to sample from, which is included in your ticket price. We've got bourbon-themed merchants, live music, delectable food, and the event promises to be unforgettable. I want you to go to bourbononthebanks.org to get all the details for all the events we've got going on. Some are ticketed, some are free, but I guarantee you're going to have a great time here in historic downtown Frankfort, Kentucky. Bourbon on the Banks Festival brought to you by Limestone Farms.

Welcome back to the second part of the Bourbon Road. We are here with our good friend, Drew Hanisch of Whiskey Lore Podcast and Books. Been talking to him about his new format of his podcast and getting ready to dive into a second port with him this day and drew what's in the glass for the second half.

Well, you had sent me some samples actually, or you sent me home with some samples when I stopped in on my trip through. And so I was tasting each one of them and trying to figure out which one that stood out the most to me. And this one stood out to me, but it's also kind of fits the theme of going to craft distilleries and kind of the evolution of craft distilleries and why it's hard to write books. about craft distilleries because things change. So this is the whiskey thief bottled in bond. Okay. And if you look in my Kentucky book, experiencing Kentucky bourbon, you will not find whiskey thief in there, but if you look for three boys, you will find three boys. So this is the plus on a website versus doing a book is that I can just go in and quick type the name change. In fact, um, I had put Lawrenceburg's distillery in, uh, Lord Lawrenceburg, but bourbon company. And thank you for me not putting that in a book because they've already changed the name of that in the story to Larikish or something like that. Yeah. Yeah, Lerkin. So, you know, that's the, that is the challenge. And it's what I tell people. I, you know, if they buy my book now, a lot of those profiles may be a little bit dated, but it's, it's still that first half of the book is teaching you how to do these trips. And then the website works as the supplement rather than what is in the book, because I can update the website. I can't really update the book without coming up with new additions. Yeah.

Jim, what's in your glasses?

Okay. Well, I, I've got a heavy pour here. I kind of got out of control a little bit. For me, we are recording on the weekend, so it's still the weekend folks. I know tomorrow is Monday, but for me, Sunday is still the weekend. And, uh, and I, I'm, I'm still going to heavy pour, but, uh, I'm having a Traverse City single barrel barrel proof. This one is 115.6 proof and, uh, it is six years old. And Todd, I believe you've had this one before.

Yes, that's the champion from our single barrel.

It is. This was a, a private selection by the party source, which is a well-known whiskey store or liquor store in Northern Kentucky, Covington. And although this is not a, this is not a Michigan whiskey. I mean, it's made by a Michigan whiskey company, but this is actually MGP, but it's a fantastic whiskey. It really is good.

It's been a while since I had it.

Yeah. It's been a while since I had it in my glass and I'm glad to have it again. I, I'm second thinking this, the size of this pour though. I think I went a little, little hefty on it.

It was fun seeing that distillery because they've just built a new Kentucky style rick house and it looks a bit like a Bardstown bourbon company's warehouses. It's got the glass window on it. So a little slice of Kentucky in Michigan. Yeah, I really enjoyed those beautiful rick houses.

I really enjoyed the fact that he was like, yeah, we didn't really know what the rules and regulations were for, for building a Rick house like that. So that was pretty interesting. It was like, we were just kind of flying by the seat of our pants, trying to get things approved. So that was really cool. Yeah. So the second half, it's been some time ago, but like I said, Drew and I, when When we get together, we usually swap some pours or, you know, mailed him a few sometimes. And, uh, so one of the ones he sent me a long time ago that really turned me on to this bottle is the Ardbeg Corey Vrecken. And it's a, it's a Smokey Scotch, which is obviously not for everyone, but it is, it's a darling to me. It's, it's so complex. It just ticks all those boxes and makes you think and. Yeah, just, it's all, it's all the sensors and I just love it. So cheers to drew for turning me onto that one.

Cheers. Well, it's always great to, uh, turn somebody onto something that they might not expect that they would enjoy. Uh, it's also very scary in a way. Cause you're like, well, I'd like to give some good samples that they're going to enjoy. But, uh, uh, you know, it's kind of a feeling it out, I guess in a way, but that's what I love about the exchange of, of samples is it does stretch you and give you a chance to get out of your comfort zone a little bit.

Right. Right. And you can always say, yeah, if you're not a big fan of you, you're like, yeah, it was fine. Yeah, there you go. There you go. Absolutely. Not my cup of tea. And you only have like an ounce or two. So it's not damage into the pocket either. So, so absolutely. So I thought maybe we dive into, you know, you've talked about, you've got a couple of books that you've been working diligently on. I know you were here in Kentucky doing some really in-depth research in Paris and other places. And yeah, so you want to talk a little bit about those two books that you got coming?

Yeah, so the big book that I'm working on right now is a book about the lost history of Kentucky Bourbon. So just like I did Lost History in Tennessee Whiskey, when I got done with that book, I felt like I was probably writing in isolation and not really knowing enough about what was going on in Kentucky Bourbon in those early days. Because this is what's fascinating to me about people's focus or understanding of Kentucky bourbon history, there's just kind of like this period between 1790 up to about 1865 that is just mystery zone. Nobody really has dug that deep into it. Henry Krogi did a book back in 1971 that went fairly in depth in that time period. But it wasn't really digging in necessarily to stories as much as it was kind of a factual book. And here's all the different things that he discovered along the way, which is great information. But in a way, he kind of threw off historians by saying, that Bourbon County, they were calling the whiskey going down the Mississippi River as old Bourbon because they were talking about the old Bourbon County when it used to be, you know, where it took up a fifth of the state. Or at that time, it was a fifth of the county of what used to be Kentucky County in Virginia. And so that threw everybody off, I think, and made them go, oh, OK, well, you know, Bourbon County was a big portion of the eastern part of Kentucky. But what I found as I started digging in was that in 1810, the manufacturing census said that there were 122 distilleries in Bourbon County. And at that point, Bourbon County was the size it is now. So that means that there was a lot of distilling going on in Bourbon County at that time. So what I wanted to know was what were they distilling? Who were the distillers? And what happened to them? And how did this all evolve into this name Bourbon? because, um, what I'm trying to prove is that the name bourbon actually did come from bourbon County, that, you know, there are people who, and in fact, in the book I'm working on coming up, uh, I dive into that a little bit and I have a whiskey lore episode, two of them actually, one about the Kentucky theory that it came from bourbon County and the other theory, which says it comes from bourbon street in New Orleans. Right. And so, I just was like, okay, I want to find this out. And really, the more I dug into it, the more I started saying, no, there's no doubt that the name came from Bourbon County. But the stories that we have about that are all kind of glossing over and moving beyond. So I wanted to dig in a lot more and try to do what I did in the Tennessee book and get a feel for um what was it like back then what were the distillers making what were they what were they distilling i was finding a lot of bourbon rye so you hear that and you go what was that a high rye no actually it was rye whiskey coming from bourbon county but they called it bourbon rye because it was Bourbon source. So, um, these are the kinds of things that I'm trying to piece together, but I also want to follow the families and I want to understand the families. And that's what's delaying this book. Cause I really wanted to get it out in time for Christmas. Uh, but it's, it's fairly in depth. So it's going to take some time to dig in and, uh, to chat with people. So I decided to work on a second book, a different book that could be done in time for Christmas. And what that's based off of is it's going to be called whiskey lore. And the reason I want to call it whiskey lore is because it is basically going to be like taking my podcasts and doing a deeper dive into those histories and still crafting them as stories the way that I did for the podcast. but maybe taking some new angles. So I talk about the father of bourbon in here. In this book, I'll have a chapter on the father of bourbon, which I did a podcast episode where I related it to baseball and the idea of the father of baseball and how that evolved. Well, I said, you know what, when I'm going to do this, I'm finding some other, uh, information in this that I think I could write another front story to it, which will give it even more impact than this concept of father of, and where does that come from? And why do we have to look for an origin story out of whiskeys? Uh, and I learned a lot more about Elijah Craig. So I can impart a lot of that additional information into the book. rather than just trying to get in and either delete the whole first part of the Whiskey Lore podcast series and say, let's leave the stories out there. But the books are where you're going to go in and say, okay, These have been refined. Yes, there is some of what is in there that's true, but there's other stuff that under further review we have found isn't necessarily quite accurate. So there'll be a couple that I pull in from the Whiskey Lord podcast. I actually was going to, the book was originally going to be 101 myths dispelled and I was going to do maybe a one or two page for each but I decided after the initial research that I really want to dive in deeper and tell stories because that's what I do rather than just giving a bunch of facts and you know making it a dry book. I want it to be entertaining and so that's going to lend me to doing three different books. Each will have 30 in each of them and I'll just you know, release them as I get them researched and, and out there.

Yeah. You and I have often joked that there's more information on like the pyramids of Egypt than, you know, the, the history of urban in some cases, it's gotta be really frustrating to like, for you to go to say some sort of archives in a small town. Like you said, I know you were in Paris for days on end and you start going down a rabbit hole only to find it just ends at a block, you know, so.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, but it's fun going there and actually doing, and this is part of the reason why I say I have enough information to write a book now, but I feel like there's still more stories to go. And one of the things I did last time I was there was I actually drove out to a bunch of the distillery sites. There's no distillery there now, but kind of to get a feel for what it was like out there. And it's so funny because I was driving through one part of Bourbon County and I had my windows rolled down. It was just a beautiful day. And as I was driving along, I could smell corn. And I was like, oh, wow, very fragrant as I'm driving through here. Uh, and then I drive a little bit further and another scent would come upon me. The one that stuck out to me though, was the, when I passed by the cows and I was like, you know, there's all sorts of smells or this is one of the most, uh, um, fragrant areas I've ever been to, some pleasing, some not pleasing. Um, but it's, it's just interesting to do that and kind of think, uh, that those guys back then, you know, when they were, when they were growing that corn and, uh, they're by a creek and they've got a little still set up there, it's not necessarily a big thing. You know, they talk about how some of these creeks down through there they'd have, you could stumble over a still every a few hundred feet. Um, trying to get a picture of that in my mind and trying to connect to the families that would have lived in that area and that probably still have relatives that live in those areas and don't really even know that they are connected to these old distillers.

So, when you're doing this kind of research into these historical details, what are some of the sources? Like, for example, is it genealogy? Is it business records? Is it county records, the courthouse records? I mean, is it all of that? I mean, where are the treasure troves?

Oh, man. Well, I'll tell you that the beginning is starting just doing an internet search and getting an outline. And once you do an internet search and an outline, then it's about going, okay, now let me test these theories. And the best way to test those theories first is to go to newspapers. And so I jumped back into newspapers, the archives go back into the, I mean, the Kentucky Western Citizen, which is still in existence today, that newspaper, earliest editions that they have available are around 1812. So, and that's Paris, that's Bourbon County in Paris. And in fact, that first notice that we see of the words bourbon and whiskey together come from that newspaper. They're talking about a wholesaler in Maysville. But it's actually the Bourbon County newspaper that is reporting or is that has it in there that says that it's bourbon whiskey. And so so you start digging back through that and you start trying to dispel your own theories and. What I'll find is that I can spend hours just digging through newspapers, doing word searches and trying to find, and you have to learn how to spell whiskey with an F, because back then they used to use something that looked like an F in place of S's. So you got to know to be able to do searches like that. You have to spell it with an E, without an E, throw in a couple of misspellings. If you're looking for a specific Distillers, you know, it gets really hard to do, but sometimes you'll find like an off the cuff. They were at a meeting somewhere and their name got mentioned. And so you kind of catalog all of that and say, okay, you know, they were connected to this. They were connected to that. Then you can go to courthouses and you can start digging through records to verify because I trust newspapers to a certain extent, but I still feel like there's a lot of room for interpretation in those and that they again can use a lot of hearsay. And so I try to find through courthouse records as much as I can. I've used the Library of Congress before. They've been very helpful with trying to find back when I was doing the Tennessee book. Uh, it was funny because I reached out to them and I said, I'm looking to find the retail records for, uh, Evan Shelby's, which was the father of, uh, Isaac Shelby, the first governor of Kentucky. I'm looking for his, uh, any receipts from his store. Um, and I'm specifically looking for one where he had sold something to Daniel Boone. and this was in 1772. And they're like, we love requests like this. And then they went back through and they did the archive search and they found me exactly what I was looking for, which proved that Daniel Boone was bartering rum with Evan Shelby in Tennessee, which was North Carolina at the time in 1772. So making those kinds of connections, sometimes you've got to go to places you may or may not expect. Genealogy records, those are tough also because you can go to a website, a good example, I was trying to dig into a particular family that had traveled from Ireland to Pennsylvania to Bourbon County, and as I was digging through, I found there were two different genealogies for the same person. And they're completely different. And this is through ancestry.com. And so you look at that, and you have to remember that Ancestry is actually just people putting up their own records. And that's run by the Mormon Church. And they basically will accept any information that you want to bring into them. It's kind of like Wikipedia. They're sourcing all this information from many different places. It doesn't mean it's necessarily right. It just means that that is somebody has taken that trail. And so then I on that end have to go, okay, can I find church records? Well then, you know, you start going through churches and you hope that they have accurate records as well. And so it's just kind of this continuous chain and you go through layers. And like I said, that first layer is the internet. Second layer is you can go through books, but I have to say in my research, I trust books about as much as I trust the internet. It's because a lot of these books are written without footnotes. They'll give acknowledgements to other books. But the problem is that if the book that they're acknowledging was incorrect as well, then it doesn't matter that they acknowledge that book because that book wasn't right either. And that is how a lot of these myths and lore continue to roll. it's wanting to go that deeper level. And that's why I say the whiskey lore podcast, uh, my frustration with it is that it was that first level with a little bit of the second level, but it, it, now I want to take it down to where we know as close to the absolute truth as we possibly can. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I've dealt with a little bit of genealogy and it's so true. I mean, you can find a single person who might have, appear in two, three different trees, and they're totally unrelated. And so you have to look at the citations, and you see some people took some liberties with some of their assumptions. So, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Everybody wants to be related to George Washington, or everybody wants to be related to somebody famous. And it's funny because I've joked with this about people. Whenever you hear about people talking about past lives or something, they're always somebody famous. How is that? Why couldn't it just be somebody who worked out in the fields all their life? And it's the same with genealogy. Sometimes there's this desire to connect to a big name and it can kind of lead you into assumptions that put you in trying to make a connection. I have a connection like that in my own family and this is what I learned from my dad. He did our genealogy back to the to Henry Adams coming across from Europe. And of course, the Adams line goes up to John Adams and John Quincy Adams. So he has that proven through our family line that you go down this far, then you come back up. And then he gave me a list of everybody in our genealogy back to Adam. And you go, how does he give me a list all the way back to Adam? Well, the way he does that is he goes and takes the Adam's genealogy, which takes them back to William the Conqueror and Charlemagne. And then from Charlemagne, you can get back to the Bible and then you do all the begots in the Bible. And so that's how he came up with the list. But he told me, he said, there is a thread here where that tie between William the Conqueror and Charlemagne is tied together by the thinnest of threads because there is an illegitimate child. And you didn't claim an illegitimate child at that time. And so this is hearsay. It could be real. It might not be. But it's that little thread that can make what you are hoping to be that connection that gives me the ability to see all the generations back to Adam Uh, not necessarily be true because, um, here we have this, this break. So, uh, where you have to assume and hope that that's actually true.

So there's a big rivalry, you know, Kentucky, Tennessee. So I've got to know, um, the most research who, who wins that does the Tennessee book, did it require more research than the Kentucky or, or still to be determined.

I will tell you this, that Tennessee was easier to research in, and mainly because they have an archive, a county archive for every single county, and they're easy to get into, and they're very helpful, and they give you a lot of information. The state archive, exactly the same. Everything you want, it's all right there. It's a little bit more difficult in Kentucky doing that. And so it's taking a little bit more research to do that. Now, the other thing is, is that I'm only concentrating on the 19th century for Bourbon County. So I am talking about one county, and its history and for only one century. The Tennessee book is 250 years and it's the entire state. And I can tell you that I could write a book about Bourbon County that is as thick as the book that I wrote on the whole state of Tennessee. So that'll give you a little bit of a feeler for it.

But I also kind of heard that Kentucky kind of lost in the whole research thing there, didn't you, Jim? Yeah, probably. Tennessee was easier is what I heard.

Tennessee was easier from that standpoint. The thing is that it's the reason that I really want to stick to because there's going to be a lot of great stories. And of course, I told the stories about New Hope, Kentucky in the podcast, and I love those stories. And at some point, I would love to dig deeper into those because I know there's a lot of great stories coming out of that. But honestly, somebody, if I wanted to write a book the same way I did the lost history of Tennessee whiskey, it would be a volume of about 15 books, I think, for Kentucky to try to do the same level of research because, um, Tennessee really wasn't anywhere close to as big as, as Kentucky was. Uh, they, uh, and their history, a lot of it was a little more centralized, right? Well, the issue was temperance. Temperance was nailing Tennessee constantly. I mean, they really had a hard time. There were also a lot of fruit distilleries, a lot of brandy distilleries in Tennessee. And so it was a mix. And the other thing about Tennessee is that beyond Nelson's Greenbrier and Bell Mead, nobody was really trying to be big. So there wasn't this competition to be industrialized. They really prized doing, you know, smaller fermentations and doing things their traditional way. And so if you're going to talk about the quality of whiskeys, you might find that when you talk about someone like Old Crow, and you talk about how good Old Crow was in comparison to other Kentucky distillers, what I'm finding is that Old Crow was doing things the way they did things in Tennessee. And so it's this, doing longer fermentations, natural fermentations. The thing about Old Crow, which I will write about in one of these books that I'm doing on whiskey lore, is this idea that In the old days, these, the, uh, the old timers would talk about how they liked, uh, scorched whiskey, that it took them back to the early days of Kentucky whiskey, that there was a scorched flavor and they missed it. And the scorched flavor was the fact that they were burning in the pot still at the bottom, the corn, and that they couldn't clean it out completely. And so some of that scorched flavor would come through, but there was kind of this, um, You know, you can learn to love anything, I guess. And it's one of those where they got used to that burnt flavor and it became something they reminisced about. And they probably had that going on in Tennessee as well, although I didn't read much about it. But what made old Crow different was the fact that he babied that still and he would not let that still burn. any of the grain. So he was doing a slower distillation and that slower distillation was creating a much cleaner whiskey in an era when people were distilling and burning their, uh, their grain at the bottom of the, uh, the bottom of the still. And the alternative was to do a log still, which would inject steam instead and would take away the idea of scorching. But according to old Crow or to James C Crow, that wasn't as good a whiskey. as making it in a pot still and so that was really probably the difference one of the main differences in old crow versus anybody else and so i do want to cover him also in the in the bourbon county book because i see some bourbon county distillers also taking that same philosophy in the way that they were making their whiskey as well so i think there's a lot of things between bourbon county Old Crow and Tennessee that actually are very similar to each other.

So Drew, uh, it's been great to have you back on. Um, I think the last time you were on here was episode 309, uh, where you've got to talk about your book, the Tennessee whiskey history book. And, uh, if I'm mistaken, that's the right episode. Correct, Jim?

That is correct. Yes.

So, um, yeah. Um, you want to tell us where folks can find you be it, uh, Facebook, Patreon, and for, you know, even your, uh, obviously your website, which is really gone into the great details. So.

Yeah, some of the best ways to find me. I'm on Instagram. I'm doing a thing called Bracketology right now where we start with 370 distilleries and we're moving down to 64 at this point and letting fans actually vote for their favorite craft distilleries around the globe. That's been a lot of fun. It's actually helped me figure out which distilleries I should be profiling in my a new travel guide that I'm putting on at whisky-laura.com slash travel guide. And if you go there, then you'll see that there are distillery profiles for Michigan, Kentucky, Ireland, Wisconsin, I'm putting up right now, Tennessee. So all these states that I'm doing visits to, South Carolina, Maryland, I'm putting up a list of distilleries there with profiles of each, a map of the state with pinpoints of where all those distilleries are. You can click on the ones you're interested in. When you get in there, you can sign up for a free account and you can actually bookmark those distilleries for yourself. And they'll be kept in a wishlist for you when you log in to whisky-lore.com. And so this is all in an effort to get people to start thinking about distilleries they'd like to go to. If you hear about it while you're listening to the Whiskey Lore podcast, you can just go out to whiskey-lore.com slash flights. There's a list of all the flights I went on to and a link directly to their profile. And then you can just bookmark the profile from there. So this is really an opportunity to, again, get people aware of craft distilleries and the regular distilleries are out there. So the larger distilleries are out there as well. But again, I really want to get people thinking outside the box and maybe learning about some distilleries that they hadn't learned about in the past. So I'm also on Patreon, patreon.com slash whiskey lore. So and Facebook, I'm on there as well. So those are those are the main places that I'm found. And then of course, well, I was gonna say the other place, the other thing is that you can find my books on all on amazon.com, but usually on any online store, you'll be able to find my books as well.

And again, I highly suggest our listeners go back to episode 309 and listen to your podcast episode on the The Lost History of Tennessee Whiskey. It was a fantastic episode. It was very revealing. And what a great time we had. And I think that that book is definitely one they'll want to pick up. And definitely, I guess you can go into Goodreads and Amazon, and you can say, keep an eye on this particular author, because when something new comes out, I want to know about it, right?

Yeah, absolutely. And, um, uh, keep an eye out also cause I'll be putting out an audio book of that lost history of Tennessee whiskey on Amazon very soon.

So, and you're the voice talent on that.

I was going to say, I was my dad, he does the audio. So it's, it's, he has that great, great voice and it's a great listen. I mean, it's, it's got me down many a road of Kentucky firm work and stuff. So. That's awesome. Thank you so much. Fantastic.

Well, thanks again, Drew. It's always a pleasure to have you on the podcast. You're a great friend of the show and we always love sitting down and having a pour with you. And today was no exception. It was really a great time. And thank you again for making yourself available to us and, and telling our listeners about the, the good work that you do and, and how they can find out more about you.

Well, thank you, Jim and Todd. I can't tell you how much I appreciate having a great connection to Kentucky through you guys and always enjoy the conversation.

All right. Well, you can find the Bourbon Road on all social media outlets. You can find us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok threads. All that stuff every week on Wednesdays we'll put on an episode. Uh, sometimes we'll have a guest on like, uh, Drew from whiskey lore. Uh, sometimes it's just Todd and I sit down with a few pores trying to decide what, uh, what we might want to recommend to our listeners. Sometimes we'll have a distillery on or a band or all kinds of stuff, but it's always fun every single week on Wednesday. If you're listening to us today, scroll up to the top of that app you're on, hit that subscribe button. That way, every single week you'll get that notification that Jim and Todd have put out another episode. We hope you don't miss them. They're always fun. We're always having fun, right, Todd? Yes, sir. Always. All right. Well, we loved having you with us today. We really enjoy it and we hope you'll be with us next week when we come out with another episode. But until then, we'll see you down the Bourbon Road.

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