434. Bottled in Bond Day with Drew Hannush

Oh, 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.

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Our good friend Drew Hanisch, he's on a whirlwind tour of Kentucky distilleries, so I pestered him and pestered him and said, hey, what are you doing today? Luckily, he had a little free time and he's joined us today and we've got some really neat pours, I think. Welcome back.

I guess this is your third time on here and first time face-to-face, so it's great.

Yeah, this is fantastic. Glad to have you back again.

Well, actually not first time face-to-face, because the first one was face-to-face.

The first one was out at Big Chief's house. And then we did one on StreamYard, I think, a little while back. That was when his book came out.

Tennessee book. Yep.

Fantastic. Well, it's great to have you back again today. We're actually, uh, we're just three, three buddies sitting down drinking some pours in celebration of, uh, bottle in bond day, which, uh, was this last, last Monday.

Yep. And Drew's got some very interesting, uh, information. He's been doing some deep dives into Kentucky's bourbon history and, uh, He's got some new tales about it, which are really interesting. And then obviously we're going to find out what he's been up to. He's updating his books and just came out with another book. So yeah.

Exciting. I'm ready to dive in. We'll get into all that stuff. We do have a pour in our glass. We've got a couple of pours for the first half here. And we'll just say it up front. We've got two pours for the first half, two pours for the second half, and making air quote in the air here, a potential bonus pour at the end. You can almost hear the groans out there in the podcast.

Will they get to it or not? Yeah.

But that's OK. I mean, we do like to get to that first pour pretty quick. But these are all bonded whiskies today. I think we probably have 10 or 12 bottles here that we chose from. So we picked the ones we thought would make the best show.

Yeah, and there's a lot more out there.

There are. Not a super deal, but yeah, there's quite a few.

But yeah, this first one, we're going to take the time machine and go back a little bit. As you know, you'll hear, E.H. Taylor was kind of the father of the Bottle and Bond Act. But we'll let Drew talk about that a little bit. So this is an old crow. And this is one that came out of my Dusty collection. Jim, I've shared this one with you. We had kind of a fun Dusty event with Brian Hara not too long ago, where we had a bunch of Dustys. And this is one I brought and opened. So this was distilled in 1936 and bottled in 1940, hunter proof. And yeah, it really wowed the crowd that night. So, you know, Drew shared some amazing stuff with me and, you know, he's a history buff. So when he comes in, I try to like, you know, knock all the doors down and bring it, you know, no stops. And let's, let's, you know, I love sharing with Drew, you know, it's like, you know, he shares history. So I share a taste of history sometimes. This is the best way.

We got to taste some old Taylor right over E.H. Taylor's gravesite. So, I mean, how much more authentic we had some old Crow at James Crow's gravesite.

Yes. We need to start that tour again. Yeah, there you go.

That's pretty, I felt pretty fortunate to have this the first time around. So like, this is an extra special blessing to have it twice. Yeah.

It's close to the end. So that's kind of why I've been saving it for something special. Thank you so much. Cheers. Cheers. Oh, wow. I mean, I think the cool thing about this is some Dusty's like the nose can be a little muted, but This one has a big kind of a bright nose. Drew kind of, we've been letting it air for a little bit.

Drew said like a green apple. Yeah. And then boy, that, I mean, what's interesting about this whiskey is that It's kind of spiky on the, you know, it's got some, it's not really even a pepper. I don't know what I would call that, but then all of a sudden it's the weight of the whiskey and it just like opens up to some richer flavors at the end, kind of caramel notes.

It's all kind of magic on the back. Yes, it is. Wow.

It really is.

And it's just amazing that it's held up so well. I mean, like I told you, the day we first cracked it, everyone was like, this tastes like it was bottled yesterday. Yes.

I mean. Well, there's but there's always some interesting notes in these older whiskeys that I can't put my finger on. It's somewhere between I hate to call it like a fuel note, but I mean, it's almost a, it reminds me of the smell of gasoline coming out of the pump. On top of like this, the leathery notes and then It's like they all kind of mold together. And so it's hard to define any one particular thing than that char is there, all kind of working together. And what, because the last one that we, the one we had at Crow's Gravesite was 1970, I think? 72, I think. 72.

And it wasn't bonded, but yeah, I think it may have been a five year or six year.

Yeah, and the thing that I'd loved about that whiskey was, how much the caramel just stood out on the palette on that. The only weakness really with that whiskey, and because it was probably a lower ABV, is that it really thinned out on the end and kind of disappeared off the palette. But this one's not. This one's like a fireworks show after it gets past that little spiky thing at the beginning.

Yeah, I think it gets in the back and it kind of spiky tingly a little bit on the back of my tongue. Makes me drip a little bit on the sides. This is really great. But I do like the green apple note on it. I think that's definitely there. But the nose on it still had that kind of little bit of a dusty nose to it. I think you smell that and you're like, OK, this is a dusty. Yeah.

And we promise you not all these are dusty. There will be some you can find out there in the world. But like I said, When Drew comes in, I just wanted to share this. I've been holding on to this last. That's great. This was a pint bottle I'd been able to procure at not a cheap price, but sometimes you do silly things, and this is what I love. Pay the mortgage this month, get this bottle of Old Crow. No, I mean, decisions have to be made. But I'm so glad to be able to share this. Thank you. Drew, you want to tell the folks why you're back in the area? You live in South Carolina, but you're a traveling man.

I'm starting to feel like I need to live up here as much as I come up in this direction. For the longest time, my experience in Kentucky Bourbon book has been out for five years. When I wrote it in 2019, It was really my first introduction at all to doing distilleries and in tasting bourbon. I had been sitting around with friends tasting bourbon, but we didn't really know what we were talking about, so I came up here to learn. I went to all these different distilleries here really with not much of a palate. in a way, maybe it was a little bit wasted on me in terms of the flavors, but I love the history and the stories and getting the free glassware when you went to all the distilleries and all the stuff that was going on. I wrote the book, Experiencing Kentucky Bourbon, after I had video blogged a whole bunch of stories about each of these places that I went to try to help other people learn how to do the trail. I just released my brand new book called Whiskey Lore, which is 24 whiskey myths that I'm dispelling. And I'd love to say that that's my best-selling book, but it's not. I can't stop selling the Experiencing Kentucky Bourbon book. And so with that, all Christmas, I felt guilty. I'm like, Man, people could keep, they're buying this thing. But I know that, I mean, I mentioned that my second favorite distillery tour is Barton. And I tell people, you gotta go on the estate tour at Barton. Well, Barton shut all their tours down. So, I mean, that advice is no longer any good. Tastings have changed. Sometimes some of these distilleries are still giving stuff away. Other ones are not. The flow, the design of the distillery may be a bit different. I've seen some like Kentucky Artisan that was known for Jeffersons. Now they have their own brand and with Jefferson's building a brand new distillery down in Lebanon, Kentucky, it makes me wonder how long they'll have that. But what I will say is that when I went in there, it was much cleaner than the time I went before where you had to step over hoses and stuff. It's like over the last five years, they figured out how to move stuff out of the way and make a flow and they got a new bottling line. So you get all of that stuff going on and it's added as well, the new distilleries that are in Kentucky. So I just ran up to Six Mile Creek distillery, which is a distillery I've kept my eye on for a long period of time because I saw pictures of it and they had a website and like it's in Pleasureville. And so it's off the beaten path. And so I never really drove out there, but they never really opened for tours. And then I found out that Bob Dylan, who was going to open up the distillery in Nashville, and I took pictures of it and said, okay, there's going to be a distillery here soon. When Six Mile Creek came open, he bought it. So that's where Heaven's Door is going to be made. So since I'm writing this book, but that distillery is not yet It's running, but it's not open for tours yet, but will be this year. It's like, well, if this book is going to be out for the next five years, I need to be able to let people know where it's at and get some behind the scenes information so that I can write about it so that people will be able to understand and be able to plan for it. RD1 Spirits is now opening up in Lexington with a new location. Dark Arts is moving into their old spot. So I want to cover all these in the new book. And so I said, I'm going back to Kentucky and I'm just going to plan out and hit as many distilleries as I can. I've seen most of the ones in Western Kentucky recently, so I'm not revisiting those. But I have at least 34 distilleries I'm visiting over this 11-day period. So it's intense. So how big of a job is the rewrite on this then? It's actually, you know what's funny? I started reading back through it and I said, for a guy whose company is called Whiskey Lore and who's writing books about dispelling history, as soon as I started reading my history, I'm like, this is all lore. Everything was written from, I mean, I thought, well, I'll just update this and I'll update that. It was kind of like when I did my bottled and bond episode for Whiskey Lore. I looked at it and I said, I can't use this because it's so far off. But the hard part about it is that when you go on these tours, you're going to hear some of that lore. And so the purpose of this book has always been to help you learn how to do a distillery plan a trip, understand how to do tastings, figure out which distilleries might fit your personality and all of that stuff, but also to introduce you so you have a baseline knowledge of how whiskey is made and the basic history so that when you go on these tours, you can listen for whatever the special thing that distillery brings to the history of bourbon is. And Yet, if I tell the real story of Bourbon's history, they're going to go to the distilleries and be going, what? That's not what they're saying here. I'm thinking what I'm going to do, I have rewritten it, is write the history of Bourbon, but at the end go, here's some popular lore and really talk about the things that I've shifted.

And how do we all feel about the lore? I mean, personally, I feel like I love the lore. I love the lore of it. I love the stories that have been pieced together from hearsay and to build a brand. And we all know that when you're in marketing, you can always say, for example, Our whiskey is the best. It doesn't have to be accurate. It doesn't have to absolutely be the best. But that's some of the things that you're able to do. And the lore follows along those same lines. You're giving a sort of remembered history of your grandpa said this or whatever it is. And it's way okay. And it's fun. But it's not always accurate. And it's nice to see the two side by side. So I love the idea. What do you think about that, Tyler?

Yeah, it's got that Paul Bunyan feel. That's the kind of way I've taken after I've been a big fan of Drew's and listened and read all his books. It just always amazes me that sometimes the history that he finds, he has to dig really deep and then still there's always going to be questions. I mean, sometimes we know more about like some of the Egyptian pharaohs. That's true. Yeah. But you know, like he's always said and we've said, you know, it was a job back then. They didn't really like take good notes or like

Yeah, or sometimes they were destroyed. I mean, I came out of marketing. I've been in marketing a lot of my life. And I don't want to say that I dislike marketing, but marketing kind of grates on my nerves sometimes a little bit, because the historian side of me is coming out. And I want people to know the true stories. And what I find is that, yes, I I like the lore. I enjoy listening to the lore. The problem with the lore is that the real stories get lost. And when historians start looking for answers, and they're so weighed down by the lore that's there, it's going to cause them to miss things and opportunities. That's been the surprise to me. And what I love about digging through this stuff, and I think people respond to it this way after they read my content, Is that while they enjoy the lore? the real stories have so much more impact because you know, these are real people. You know exactly what happened to them. You can relate them to other things. And there are great stories in reality that, you know, that I think replace the war lore very easily. And I try to keep some of that lore. Like I, in my whiskey lore book, I tell the story of old Crow or James Crow. And I start out that chapter by saying, you know, here is Dr. James C. Crow, and then I go through and I tell the story the way that it's been told for eons, and then I come back in behind that and say, as I researched, here's what I found. Not a doctor, not a scientist, worked in grain distilleries according to James E. Pepper, worked in the brandy industry in France. And now, if we know that James Crowe worked in the brandy industry in France, we go, hmm, well, the first mention of barrels being charred came about 1826. When did James Crow get here? Well, James Crow got here actually at least in 1820, because I found at the Versailles post office, he had mail waiting for him. The Kentucky Gazette used to post when people had mail waiting for them. And so there's James C. Crow. There's a lot of Crows that lived in this area, but James C. Crow is fairly, It's fairly assured that that was probably him that was here in 1820. If they were charring barrels in France for cognac and he knew that and he came here, who's to say it wasn't James Crow that actually this foreigner comes in and he's charring barrels. What is this? That could be new lore. That could be reality. This is where reality gives us room to speculate and create new lore that may be even more interesting. So. All right. Great stuff.

I know. Love it. Love it. Well, I think it's time for us to move on to the next pour. That was amazing, by the way, Todd. Yeah. That was, that's an epic pour. And I hate that. I mean, I may never have that again. It's something that may never cross my lips again because it's gone. It's gone.

But it survived what?

90 years, almost nine. Yeah.

Yeah.

This was, uh, this was put in the bottle before 1940.

This was put in, this was distilled in 36, you said. So this made it into the bot into the. Right. World war one. Yeah. World war two. I'm sorry. Man, I'm terrible. Don't hire me to do any work for you.

That's all right, I'll fact check it.

All right. So next, next on our list, we have a much newer version, but still not available today. So this is something that was available up until let's say late 2018, early 2019 and got replaced. This is the Heaven Hill Bottle and Bond. This is a six-year-old Bottle and Bond. This is probably I believe the bottle and bond that was used mostly to teach bourbon boom people what bottle and bond was. This was the example. This was kind of the one that everybody said, ooh, bonded whiskey. If you're going to get a bonded whiskey, that's the one to get, right? Yeah. And it actually was late 2018. It kind of gotten out that they were going to discontinue it. And there was a run on the stores to buy it. And I was part of that run. And I picked up a couple of cases of it. And I've still got a few bottles. But the good thing about that is I've given quite a few of these away. And this is a great example of a six-year-old bonded Kentucky whiskey that could be had, at the time, around $10 to $12 a bottle. Let's just call it $12 a bottle. That's right. Yeah. Which is a great thing, right? Good, solid whiskey, six years old, $12 a bottle. And this was still kind of in the bubble a little bit, right? It was during the bubble.

Yep. And then the distillery being a distillery decided to up it a year and up it a few bucks too. So now you'll find their seven year Baldwin & Bond out there.

Yeah, this was always just a Kentucky release. So you could only get this in Kentucky. And then they took it off the market for a year. Then they reintroduced it, but nationwide everywhere except Kentucky. That was wild.

That's right. I was in Lake Tahoe and I knew that the six-year had disappeared. While I was there, I was in a casino. I looked over on the bar and they had this bottle, it said, with just black type, 7-year-old. I asked what the bottle was and she said, oh, we're not supposed to have that out here. It was a bottle that was sent to us just to test it.

I'm like, oh, can I try some of that?

But then when I got home, It's like, I can't buy it because it was not only I could go to Kentucky and get that bottle that we're tasting now, but now when that disappeared, uh, I couldn't get in South Carolina. It was in sporadic States that you could get it. And that's what threw me. It's like, well, if you like it and you're in Kentucky and they've stopped making it, but they got a seven year, but they're not going to tell you where it's at. That, that was, uh, that was frustrating actually.

Then everybody switched to that green label six years, which crazy the price on that thing went through the roof.

It was a 90 proofer though, right?

Yeah, it was.

I still have a bottle of that. Actually, I had not cracked my bottle.

I've actually got one of those as well.

That is still Kentucky only, right? I don't think that's available anymore.

Yeah, I heard they were phasing that out too. I think it was discontinued.

I thought around that time period too, actually.

I held that a little bit longer. Probably 2022, that was when I bought my last bottle. But yeah, it did phase out. I was going to say, I've seen it on the shelf within a couple of years ago. Yeah. Shame. I mean, the good stuff disappears. And I did a tasting once on my YouTube channel where I tasted that against the white label, Evan Williams, against Elijah Craig. That's the regular Elijah Craig. They were very similar to each other. I got to a point where I said, you know what, I'm not going to chase that bottle. It would be nicer for me to spend $12 on that bottle instead of spending $27 for Elijah Craig or $20 for the white label leader of the Evan Williams.

Well, plastic screw top, white label, just a great throwback bottle. You just can't get it anymore, but there's still a few holdouts, people like me who have a couple of bottles left and anybody who comes to my bar always gets a chance to either walk away with a bottle or at the very least try it.

And it's like one of those bottle shapes. It's like everybody used. It's like, if you look at someone like the older, you know, bottle releases, but kind of squared.

It's kind of the Jack Daniels bottle.

It is.

I love, on the side it says, Is that classic, is that classic made mash? What does it say at the top? Custom made mash. Custom made. Okay. Well that's good. Cause nobody, everybody uses the same formula apparently, but this one is custom made. Yeah.

This one's, this one is labeled genuine. Yes. It's a, it's got a custom made mash and it's a mellow and smooth. And charcoal filter. And charcoal filter. They ran through some charcoal.

There were a few other brands of Heaven Hills that did that.

Heaven Williams is charcoal filtered. Yeah, some of them. But this is charcoal filtered exiting the barrel. Exactly. And unlike Tennessee Whiskey, which is entering the barrel.

Yeah. So this was the fun I had the other day talking to David Meyer over at Glens Creek because he said, okay, so is it activated charcoal or was it just charcoal? And I'm going, you're talking to a non-scientist here, but I am curious, what's the difference? And he said, well, I don't necessarily know the difference other than activated charcoal will eat out a whole lot more oils than just running it through what Jack Daniel's runs it through, which is basically burnt sugar maple. So there you go.

Wow. What are you guys getting on this one?

This is just classic bourbon to me. I mean, this is, when you, when you know this, this is like, uh, if, if there were tasting notes in the dictionary next to bourbon, this would be, this would be those notes. Just caramel vanilla.

I get a little grain on the end. I was getting like graham cracker. I got a little grain on the nose.

I was like surprised at.

A little graham cracker note in there on the finish. It was never all that it was hyped up to be, but it was always a very solid whiskey, you know?

Yeah. People chase, and I mean, there is something to be said for, I mean, we used to run up to Pennsylvania to buy cases of Yang Ling. I can get Yang Ling anywhere, and it's like, well, Yang Ling, whatever.

We still have to take Yang Ling to Iowa every time we go. Do you really? They can't get it. And I just heard within the last couple of months, it made it into Illinois. So everybody in Iowa now can travel a little bit to get it. There you go. Gotta do some work. Yeah. I think it's a great whiskey. I think it's really good. I, you know, in the seven year is not some improvement over this or anything. I, you know, it's just, I guess they're stocked age the year while they were trying to get to this point.

Yeah. And an extra year, they can go to $45 instead of, or $50 instead of 12. That extra year, man. That weird math. Quite valuable.

Yeah. I know that's, it's crazy to think that was literally $2 a year. Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, cause now like, If you see something at $10 a year that you're doing pretty well.

I mean, think about it. You make the whiskey, you put it into a, probably even then it was a $300 barrel, right? Because barrels are not cheap. You made $200 worth of white dog, put it into a $300 barrel. You got $500 in it already. Now you've got to age it for six years. You've got people counting it and keeping an eye on it and checking it. Evaporation. You put it in a bottle, you label it, you put it in a case, you ship it out, and you charge, at retail, $12 a bottle. How does that work? Economy of scale, right? Because they were doing, I think at this time, they were around 1,300 barrels a day.

Well, you've got to imagine, they probably phased it out too, and kept it just to Kentucky for when they did, because nobody expected this bourbon boom to show up. Now, six years, they probably got some whiskey. everybody's still kind of, uh, you know, there's still allocation problems and so on and so forth.

So, you know, now we didn't bring a bottle of old Taylor. We would let everybody know now there's no old Taylor Taylor, but there's a story about old Taylor, right? Yeah. A little bit about that. So if, if, if we were in jeopardy and someone said, what is it Edmund Haynes Taylor? Edmund Haynes Taylor, and somebody would say, what is the father of Baalden Bond or something like that, right? But that's not necessarily the case.

It's not the case at all. He is the greatest promoter of Baalden Bond, but he was not the inventor. I was on a tour the other day, and I had the tour guide. I have to bite my tongue a lot. The tour guide was saying he actually wrote the bill. Oh, okay. So what I learned, I just stumbled into when I wrote my Lost History of Tennessee Whiskey book. I was not looking for this to dispel. But I was reading through some of the old internal revenue year-end reports. And I was in the 1895 year-end report where the commissioner of the internal revenue said, Hiram Walker has such an advantage over us in Canada. They are shipping all that whiskey across. They pay so much less in terms of taxes to get their whiskey over here that Canadian Club is flooding the market. And so what we need to do is we need to create a bonded act because the problem was the way that the old excise rules were written, you had to pay tax as soon as you moved it out of the distillery's warehouse. Then if you wanted to ship it out of the country, you had to pay another tax. So you were paying double taxation, which was making it non-competitive outside of the United States. And so when all this cheap whiskey started coming across, then all of a sudden, the Internal Revenue Commissioner said, we got to solve this. Who does he reach out to? But a man named Evans, and I'm going to forget his first name. Evans was a Kentucky representative in Congress. And he actually also happened to be the ex-Internal Revenue Commissioner. So they knew each other through that. And so he asked him, would you please go ahead and write a bill? So it was called the Evans Bill initially. Then it was called the Bottling Bill. Isaac Bernheim of IW Harper was one of the few Kentuckians that went to Washington and he was fighting against it because he owned Bernheim Brothers with his brother and he wanted it gone. He's like, I do not want this Baldwin bond act because it is going to ruin my business. And so what happens is a couple of other Kentucky distillers go up to Lobby Ford along with the head of the KDA and they start pushing it, but it's dragging and it's dragging and it's dragging. So, those Kentuckians then started saying, well, this is a quality issue because they were fighting against Bernheim and they wanted to be able to tag him with something to make him lose this argument of his. And so they started talking about rectifying whiskey and that we need also that Canadian whiskey comes across and it's bonded so it's better quality. And so that is where all of a sudden this narrative came in about rectifiers was that they needed something to punch Bernheim because Bernheim was actually starting to get some traction. So two interesting things about this. One is during this whole time, E.H. Taylor is in lawsuits against people who are using the name Taylor in their whiskey. So he's suing a Taylor here and suing a Taylor here and suing a Taylor here. So he's so busy back here in Kentucky suing people that he's not doing anything. I could not find a single statement that said that he was up in Kentucky or in Washington. doing anything to try to get this bill passed. What happens next is that Bernheim starts to see he's losing traction. He finally says right before the final vote, he says, Well, we have a decision to make here. You know, we have William Jennings Bryant running for president and he wants us on the silver standard. And we've got William McKinley and he wants us on the gold standard. Well, gold standard is sound money. So if McKinley wins, I'm going to shut Bernheim, go from doing sourcing of whiskey or from Whiskey Trust and whoever else he was getting it from. And I will build a distillery in the South end of Louisville. And so. All of a sudden, McKinley wins the presidency. Next day, Isaac Bernheim gets the money and finance to go build the Bernheim Distillery. And that is the origin of the Bernheim Distillery, which Out of Prohibition was the first distillery, which I write about in the Whiskey Lore book, the first distillery to start up production in 1929 after the big drought where they couldn't distill anything. And that is why it's DSP. number one, because it was the first distillery to start producing and they were producing Old MacBrayer was the first whiskey that came off the line. Stitzel Weller came in, it was still the Stitzel Brothers distillery at that time, about a week or two later and they started distilling. Then you'll hear Four Roses say, well, we were distilling. They weren't actually, they were distilling at the Stitzel Brothers distillery because they didn't have a distillery to be able to produce out of So that all happened as soon as the Bottled and Bond Act was passed. All of a sudden, Colonel E.H. Taylor's looking around and he's saying, nobody's utilizing this. And actually the people who had lobbied for it were getting frustrated because they're like, nobody is doing anything. There's plenty of whiskey out there that could be classified as bottled in bond, but nobody seems to want to embrace this. And so E.H. Taylor came out and said, you know what? I've got a big order for Chicago and so I'm going to send truckload or a trainload of whiskey up that's bottled in bond to Chicago. And from that point forward, E.H. Taylor, who had always been a proponent of the pot still, saying that the best whiskey was made in 1812 and they've done nothing but ruin it since then, said, okay, you know what? Bottled and Bond, that's it. Master marketer, he found a dog with a new bone and he ran with it. We can thank Taylor for actually being the guy who made Bottled and Bond something that people wanted to do, but he had nothing to do as far as I can see in writing that bill. Wow. Fantastic. That's such a great story.

Sitting here with my mouth. I just love it. The cool thing is you kind of brought it full circle because Heaven Hill obviously owns DSP.

And that's why they're DSP number one. And so what's funny is I'm out of four roses today and they're talking about their number eight. I'm going, well, they fought to get that number eight. The thing is, is that if it was a pre-prohibition number, those were registered distillery numbers, not DSPs. So those were under the Internal Revenue, whereas DSPs were under the Treasury Department. So it's a whole new set of numbers plus Those old numbers were for districts. So if you look on those old bottles, you'll see sixth district or fifth district of Kentucky. And then they had numberings for each district. So that's where the thing with old number seven with Jack Daniels comes from, is the fact that they merge two districts together. His number was number seven for his distillery, but because there was another seven in the fifth district, they had to have him change it to 16. since the fifth district was Nashville and that was one of his markets, he had to put on his barrels that it was old number seven so that they knew that this was still the whiskey from the old distillery.

It's like a who's on first kind of thing.

So, you say this is the thing is that going back to your point before about loving the lore, All of this stuff now ties in together, and there's so many more rich stories that come about when we don't just stop at a... Because lore is a big stop sign, and it basically says, here's as far as you're going to go, enjoy that story. Whereas when I'm doing my research, I'm like, Oh, look at that. Wait, where did this come from? Oh, wow, that's crazy. So then you can write a whole different story that is as entertaining to me and actually has more impact because we know it's real instead of knowing that it's slower.

All right. All right, well, I think this is a good place to take a break. We'll keep sipping on our Heaven Hill six-year bottle to bond from 2018. Let's just call it 2018. And when we come back, folks, we got at least two more pours. Yes. Stick around. Few things pair better together than a fine whiskey and a premium cigar. and Smokey's Lifestyle Cigars are where flavor and craftsmanship meet. Their exclusive collection is meticulously hand-rolled from aged tobacco sourced from the Dominican Republic. Revel in the artistry that only decades of experience can bring. The owner, with over 10 years of cigar mastery, curates blends that capture the essence of family tradition and innovation. Embrace the journey and indulge in a harmonious symphony of Smoky's Lifestyle Cigars, an experience truly beyond compare. Find out more at Smoky's Lifestyle Cigar dot com. When you're traveling the Bourbon Trail, location and comfort is everything. That's why I recommend making the Hill House Bed and Breakfast your home away from home. Located in the heart of Bourbon Country, the Hill House Bed and Breakfast is less than five minutes from the Maker's Mark Distillery in Loretto, Kentucky, giving you easy access to the Bardstown Distilleries and all points of the Bourbon Trail. The owners, Cheryl and Jim, offer four comfortable and cozy rooms along with a gourmet hot-plated breakfast every single morning. And when you return from a long day of fun, it's time to enjoy a bit of the Bourbon Trail nightlife. Relax on the large outdoor patio, complete with a blazing chiminea and solo stove. Or, curl up on the sofa and chairs, put a record on the turntable, and relax with snacks and fruit in front of the gas fireplace. An evening at the Hill House is a perfect time to raise a bourbon glass full of cheer in the company of family and friends. We know you'll enjoy your stay at the Hill House Bed and Breakfast as much as we did. Find out more at TheHillHouseKentucky.com

All right. Welcome back, Roadies. We're on the second half of our Bottled and Bond show with Drew Hanisch. We got lucky and he was in town, so I offered him some old crow and he came in. Came right in. Some old, old crow, if you will. That's the price to pay. That's right. Glad to have you here. We're going to dig into our third pour. It's an Alabama Alabama. That's it. That is it. Bottle and Bind. So this is the Detling, bourbon, Bottle and Bind. And this is actually a single barrel Bottle and Bind, which you actually pointed out. I wasn't aware of that. So that's kind of a unique style of a Bottle and Bind. Yeah. But you've actually been to the distillery, is that correct?

Yes. And it's funny because I mean, I'm building out my website, whiskey-lore.com slash travel. I've got 600 distilleries there where you can plot out your maps and set up and create a wish list of distilleries. Last year, I did a competition trying to source from my Instagram followers what distilleries should I put on this list of distilleries that people might want to put on a wish list. and did bracketology where people were voting on their favorite craft distillery. And Detling actually came in in the 16, in the round of 16. And I was like, man, but the hard part about this is he doesn't do tours. He is, I just got my brand new car. It was spotless driving down. And then I had to go down, you know, Southern Alabama down this big, long, muddy dirt road to get to his home where his distillery is. And it's, I mean, it's not probably a place as I look at it that I would go, yeah, there's really nothing to tour here. But then he and I spent four hours just chatting about whiskey and theories and the rest. And the guy, I mean, when we talk about people like David Meyer up here, Alan Bishop up in Indiana, the guys that really know the science of things. And then I'm sitting here talking to him and he's really interested in barrels and what he can do with barrels. And then that heat of Alabama He's got to figure out, I mean, think about Texas whiskey and what they have to deal with in terms of heat. You don't have a lot of time you can put. So the idea of getting a bottled and bond out of Alabama, southern Alabama, I mean, that's pretty impressive that you could go four years and it's not black.

It does have a probably might be the darkest thing we've had. It's pretty dark. Yeah.

Yeah.

Now, it's gotten 1867. Do you know much when you were talking to him?

I didn't really ask or talk about history at all in terms of where that comes from, but my guess is, I won't guess.

It's unknown. Maybe somebody out there does.

I'm sitting here across the room looking at that bottle. It is very dark, but I'm noticing also that it has this, I can't remember what this is called, the thing on the bottom of the bottle.

Oh, the little dimple.

The wine bottles have. And most whiskey bottles don't have that. You rarely see it. Yeah. That's interesting that they chose to do that on this bottle.

Very cinnamon.

I get a lot of interesting cinnamon.

So this one you can find out there. We've moved away from the past. So this one you can find out there in the world. And it runs about $79.99, it looks like.

Looks a lot like the bottle from Middle West that has the pumpernickel rye in it. A little bit, yeah. Really nice body to that. Has a great nose. Yeah.

I don't think we said cheers the first time, but cheers and slantcha.

Okay. So this is a very, um, reminiscent of, uh, what's that distillery that, uh, down in, uh, Tennessee that, uh, leapers fork reminds me a lot of the leapers fork that spice that, that interesting, um, I get some root beer in it.

Yeah. Like this, like, like, walnut like yeah like this odd nutty maybe hazelnut yeah yeah it's like a little coffee note oh it does have a coffee note for sure yeah like after it's gone yes it's like yeah it just looks like a coffee candy yeah yeah wow that's really interesting but i just noticed that that kind of uh

that I can't remember what we called those things, the little spice drops, the little, you know, the little gummy candies for spice drops. It kind of reminds me of that a little bit, but it does have a coffee note. There's a black tea note actually towards the end. There's a lot going on here.

And that espresso. Yeah. I mean, it's like eating an espresso bean after the second sip. I had heard the coffee thing and that's crazy. Yeah. Oh, wow.

So we don't know the match bill on this, exactly. There's nothing on the bottle, but I mean, we probably could have done some digging. And well, I don't know.

I was just so excited to get with Drew that I didn't take a whole lot of notes because. I will say that while I was down there, and this is becoming a trend, which I like, he uses oats. OK. And so he is a big fan of mouthfeel. And I mean, oats are really hard to work with. Um, where malted barley is used to get the, um, uh, the enzymes, oats are more about trying to get mouthfeel. Yeah. And so it's not necessarily flavor. Yeah. And so in Scotland, or not Scotland, but in Ireland, um, pot still whiskey, um, They're talking about maybe going up to even as much as 30% oats in pot still whiskey, which is amazing because pot still whiskey is already pretty oily on its own. That's why they triple distill it usually, but oats. First time I saw somebody using oats was what is now Minden Mills in Lake Tahoe, but was Bentley Heritage. And they showed how clumpy that stuff gets. And I've heard nightmares of people saying, once that gets into your pipes, it's gums up and it's really hard to work with. But rye is kind of the same also. So I guess if you're used to working with rye, then the oats won't necessarily be that big a job.

I would be surprised if there's not some heavily toasted malt grain in here because it's almost chocolate dark.

I bet he's, because I think I, well, he showed me some of the malt that he worked with and I do remember him saying chocolate malt. So I'm guessing he's probably got some chocolate malt in there. You can taste it. Yeah. That's really unique. Yep.

Now, I think it's at Atmore, Alabama, what's probably the biggest city that's close to for, you know, some of our folks that aren't in Alabama.

Mobile.

Mobile.

It's probably, actually, you know, what was funny was I started kicking myself because I'm like, Driving down that way, I'm south of Montgomery and then all of a sudden I see a sign for the Hank Williams Museum and I went, oh man, I would have liked to have gone to the Hank Williams Museum while I'm down here, but it was early morning and I was trying to get there and to a Mississippi distillery in the same day. I just didn't have time to do it. I think I've been by there.

65 to the end. We've got a few friends that are trying to plan a trip down to the RTJ Robert Jones Golf Trail and they've got several different sections of the trail. One is the southern section and I'm thinking, okay, maybe we could go here.

Yeah, this would be good. Well, it's fun because it's, I mean, just sit there and chat with him. And, you know, it's funny because sometimes I go to a distillery like that and I think, am I keeping you from your work? Because it's him and his wife, you know? They just create some really amazing whiskeys and reputation, it's really a word of mouth thing. He doesn't promote it that big, but people who like it really like it.

What do you think about the future of very local distilleries, places like this that are really focused on their local markets? What do you think the future is there for these guys?

The more I think about where we're at in terms of bourbon, the big guys are going to produce and produce and whiskey is going to get cheaper and cheaper and cheaper from them. For the local guys who are creating experiences, who are getting to know their community, whose community like with Detling, I know people who are very passionate about that whiskey, those are people you're going to hang on to. I equate it to when I went to Germany many, many, many years ago and every town had a brewery. I think the days of starting up a distillery these days and going, I'm going national are kind of fade for a little while. And if you have the idea of being regional or being for your area and creating experiences and creating connections with people, you'll do the yingling thing, which is yingling used to just be in the Northeast and you got people chasing after cases of beer that is good beer, but I don't know now whether I would go chasing after a yingling. But back then, there was something intriguing about it and it was something you could show off to people and say, so I'm hearing a lot more about distilleries like when I went to Michigan, The mammoth distillery, ask people, have you ever heard of mammoth distillery? No, because, well, you probably have because you've seen it on my Instagram. But also, I mean, people in the know who know that they're working with rose and rye and trying to bring back this hundred-year-old grain. you know, that's a story, but they don't care about going outside of the state of Michigan. They're fine being in the state of Michigan. I think that's a great attitude because if you set your sights on trying to conquer the world, I think you're probably about five or six years too late.

Yeah. Yeah. It's a, it's a big, it's a big leap to do that. I can remember, I don't know if you remember back, you remember Ballast Point beer?

Yeah.

Yeah. They had the Manta Ray and there was several other beers. They were, they were killing it.

Great IPAs.

Yes. Great beers. Uh, San Diego de Suri actually more up towards, uh, where, the way they shot Top Gun. Um, what was that? Uh, Coronado. Well, anyway, we'll get back to that. They really conquered the national market. They did a really good job. You could find them just about anywhere you went in the country. And then the founders decided, you know, it's time to The cash out, you know, let's sell. They sold to Constellation Brands for $900 million. And Constellation Brands bought it for $900 million after about five years, because this was where things were changing in the beer market. Things were pulling back to more regional, local kind of thing. They ended up, I think they ended up unloaded it for 400.

Wow. That's still kind of surprising. Yeah. But you know, what's sad to me is that there are people who are just probably working to, you know, they're seeing the door out by selling off to somebody big. I watched one of my favorite distilleries in Tennessee was Nelson's Greenbrier. I love that story. I absolutely love that story. It's what got me really interested in writing The Lost History of Tennessee Whiskey. Then they invited Constellation Brands in because they could get money to build a bigger distillery and really build out and do some things that they hadn't planned before and maybe get some national distribution. Well, they got into all 50 states, but sooner or later, working under that corporate environment, it's like they squeeze the passion out of it. And now Andy and Charlie are both out of it. And it's like, I look at a bottle of Nelson's Greenbrier and go, it's not the same.

It's not the same. Yeah.

So it's that kind of stuff that frustrates me about the way I see some trends going. But I also understand people have made an investment and they need to recoup that investment and maybe they see that exit and maybe that was always their plan in the first place.

Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of that that's going to happen. I think there's, you know, we don't want to get off track here. We're, this is the bottle and bond edition, but I do think that, um, you know, a lot of the younger distilleries, the smaller distilleries, those that have chosen to, um, stay local, I don't know, stay local is probably the right word for that. I think there's, they're solid. They're good. They're going to be fine. It's the ones that stretch themselves to go national. They might run into trouble. They're bootstrapping.

And when you're bootstrapping and you know you're bootstrapping, you're not going to take any unnecessary risks.

I don't know how many more times Constellation is going to come knocking on your door. At least right now, they've learned their lesson a few times, I think, right?

Well, I mean, I think about Katalkin Creek and the fact that they bought it back out of Constellation brands. I mean, that's a boring movie. It's a story I'd like to know more about because there you go with an owner that said, maybe it's not going the direction I want to see it go.

With that said, I think investing in Constellation is still a good move. If you want to buy stock in Constellation, you're probably fine. All right. Well, this is really, this is really a fantastic whiskey. Yeah, it's really unique. I like this one a lot. This one actually reminds me a lot. It's obviously not the pumpernickel rye from, but the bottle reminds me, but the flavors, how deep and rich and varied they are. There's a lot going on in this. It really is. And I could sit and sip on this for a while. Yeah.

Agreed. Yeah. Glad I bought that one. I'd heard a lot of, that's like one of those word of mouth things and, you know, craft. I love craft. I love exploring, you know, there's been some hits and misses. I mean, some misses, but you know, I think. It's some of these places are hitting some great ages on some of this stuff.

It's the uniqueness too. Yeah.

And I think they bring a lot of ingenuity that then the bigger boys tend to copy, which is really cool.

Yeah.

Yeah. But so Drew, you know, You're kind of updating your Kentucky book. How many new distilleries are you adding to your book? And how many are you updating, I guess?

Yeah. It's really interesting that when I did the first book, I didn't go out to Western Kentucky. Because at that time, the only Western Kentucky distillery I could think of, besides Casey Jones and M.B. Rowland, which were near Clarksville, Tennessee, You could do the state line tour and so it was worthwhile for me to go down there and do it. I didn't really pay much attention to Western Kentucky and so Ozzie Tyler it was at the time and now it's Green River. when they changed their name, it's like that got me curious. So I went out to visit it, but I already had written the book. So if you get the book, you're going to find that the current first edition really just has the names and web addresses and street addresses of distilleries like Bard, Dueling Grounds, all distilleries that I went to after the fact, Silent Brigade. There's a bunch of them. What I want to do in the new book is If they offer a tour or experience, I want to give them a two-page profile and basically say, OK, here's three paragraphs on basically what you need to know about this distillery in terms of whether it's a history-based tour, if it's a science-based, the background of the distillery, that sort of thing, and then how to get there and what their prices, general price guide for getting there, what you're going to see while you're on the tour, all of that kind of stuff. In the old book, the way I did it was they were all just alphabetical. You went from Angel's Envy to Woodford Reserve. In this book, I've decided because I learned through my Irish whiskey travel book that people would prefer that I actually show a map of a region and then put some dots on there so you could visually see how close these distilleries were together and then break it up into those regions. If you're going to go to Louisville, then here's the Louisville map. It shows where everything is. Then what I'll do is I'll do the two-page profiles for the distilleries that have tours. but for let's say a distillery that has two locations like Bardstown Bourbon Company. Well, you can do a tour downtown, but I'm going to highlight for Bardstown, the Bardstown Bourbon Company tour there. Then I'm going to give you a little bit of information about here's what's going on at the downtown location. Same with the barrels and billets, I think, Pursuit Spirits, Buzzard's Roost. There's a bunch of those that- Whiskey Thief now. Whiskey Thief.

Whistle Pig.

Yeah.

Whistle Prings rigging something there, which is kind of interesting.

I want to get all of those into the book, but if I haven't been to it, I don't want to do a full write-up on it, but I'll do a smaller one. My goal on this trip that I'm doing is to go to everyone that has a tour so that I'm sure I've covered everyone that has a tour. If it has a second location, then I'm not going to do the tour at the second location because I mean, 11 days, I'm doing 34 plus distilleries. It's a lot. Yeah.

And that's a big deal because Kentucky allows every distillery here to have a second satellite location somewhere and they're all going to do it. Yeah. And so, yeah, I think most of those are location dependent. They're probably not much going on there, but I mean, some of them like the Evan Williams experiences It's good. It's fun. That's a fun thing.

And they make their own exclusive whiskey at the Evan Williams. They do. So that's a reason for me to at least say more about them. But it's funny because in the previous book, this will show you how long ago it was, I had the Jim Beam urban experience, which of course doesn't exist anymore. So I had left that out and I had left the Evan Williams experience out. because there are enough distilleries like Kentucky Peerless and Michter's and that you can go in and hold Forester and do the whole big tour on that.

You can fly into Louisville and just not leave, although you should.

You should go out and venture.

I mean, there's enough down there because I mean, honestly, when you're distillery hopping, It's about four a day you can do maybe. I mean, you could probably squeeze five if you're like walking downtown, but a lot of people plan more than that because they're like, oh, it's a 45 minute tour. We could probably do six or eight. Well, you can't.

You just can't do it. I did five yesterday, but I did not in Louisville, but it was basically Kind of cheating on the fourth one, which was, let's see, I went from, I'll forget now because I got so many distilleries in my head. Basically, I went from wild turkey to larkin. and just walked in and talked to them for a little bit. I sort of said that's a distillery stop, but it's not. And they don't do tours, so it's not like they're going to get a full profile, but I will be mentioning them in the book.

They have a cigar room though.

They do, and that's important. There's only two distilleries I know of in this state that they're doing have a cigar pairing that they're doing with their. So that's pretty cool.

Now you're going to keep that three, like usually in your previous book, you had like the three things that kind of make that distillery kind of stand out. Yeah. From the others. Okay. That's, that's, I love that. That's a really.

So this is what, yeah. And it's funny because I reached out to each distillery. The first time I did this book, I basically bought every ticket for every place that I went. I was like secret chopper. jumping into all these places so that I wouldn't get influenced because I didn't know enough about the bourbon industry at that time. This time, it's funny because I reached out to Heaven Hill and they said, oh man, we got your book and we listen to your podcast and blah, blah, blah. And we'd love to take you on some kind of extended tour. And I'm like, no, I have to do a tour just like everybody else does.

Just leave me on the tour. Someone didn't want the red carpet. I did not want the red carpet treatment.

And it's because, so I reached out to all of them ahead of time this time to set these up. But I told each one of them, just let me enjoy it like everybody else does. Because that's the idea is that, We use the term influencer or people post stuff on Instagram or whatever about their tour experience. That is what this book is. It's not marketing. I want to get away from what they're marketing and I want people who are planning their trip to Kentucky to get somebody who's experienced distillery tours, to be able to give their personality and their opinion on it. And so the three reasons that I give, here's Drew's three reasons why you should visit this particular distillery, that was really just a chance for me to, at the end of the tour, say, wow, what are the three things that if I were talking to a friend, I would say, you need to go to that distillery because they do this, this, and this. That doesn't mean they're the three best things that that distillery does. It just means those are the three things that stuck out to me. And that is to help give you, as somebody who's reading the book, an opportunity to go, oh, oh, that sounds interesting.

Yeah, I might want to try that out. All right, Todd. So what do you think? Shall we move on to number four? Yeah, move on to four if we're going to make that bonus. We're going to make that bonus. Yeah.

All right. So we're going to go to Texas on this. Yay. Ball and bond. Yay. And we're also actually going to go rye. So this is the Still Austin straight rye whiskey, bottled in bond. There's not a lot of rye bottled in bonds out there. Not a lot that I can think of. Yeah.

I'm going to go to Colorado. You'll find if you, yeah. Colorado is good on rye.

But so yeah, nice. This is a curve ball, if you will, for our bottle and bond.

I love rye whiskey. These guys are great. I mean, their standard expressions, their bourbon and rye are just wonderful entry level expressions that are just so well crafted.

I have to tell you as somebody who loves history and I love people who footnote their history books, Andrew Bromberg wrote a book on Texas whiskey that I would recommend. Couldn't tell you the title because it's really long, but just look him up because he's one of the owners of Still Austin and he really digs deep into the early history of Texas whiskey. Give you some background on what they were. Cause a lot of they were sourcing as well at certain points in the early years.

I mean, early, early, early Texas whiskey. I'm thinking, uh, iron root.

Um, yeah. And so we're talking like 1800s.

Oh, you're talking real early. I'm talking early, like this, this century.

Because there's a book that's a red book called Texas Whiskey and Nico Martini, I had him on the podcast and we were talking about the history of Texas Whiskey and he said, well, this book really doesn't cover anything before the modern Garrison Brothers and Balcones as being the origin of Texas Whiskey. He said, I don't think there was much of a history back there. Well, Andrew Bromberg found there was quite a history back there and he doesn't cover it at all, but he's got some really interesting stories from that time period.

So, is this coming off a lot fruitier than I expected?

Well, and it's got kind of a lemony note, which is nice.

Almost orchard fruit.

It's got a nice fresh nose to it. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, for being in Texas for four years, it'd really be interesting to know where they put this barrel. This wasn't hot boxed. They buried it in the backyard somewhere.

Sub basement or something.

Yeah, this was in the champagne cave. Yeah. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers. Very sweet.

It is. It's got a nice little outer pepper. I'm guessing there's some corn in that, probably.

I don't have a mash bill. I'm probably going to dug that up, but I was just so excited. I didn't take good note or bring my good notes.

It's very enjoyable. It's very sweet. Very, um. Again, it ends with a grain note or maybe my brain is just on grain today. Which happens.

It's kind of like a lemon, lemon cream icing kind of, you know, like a,

It's a very mild, it's still got body to it, but it's a very mild finish on it. I guess for people who are, but there's like this pepper, kind of like when you eat some food that has a lot of black pepper and you kind of get that heat on the back of your palate. I'm kind of getting that. That's really nice.

I like that.

Yeah.

I'd be curious to know how much that was toned down to get to 100 proof, too, though. It has pretty good color on it.

Yeah. But we don't have any information on this at all.

Just the rabbit. I always find their artwork very interesting. Yeah.

Yeah, their labels are great. Yeah, it says, for the spring release represented by the rabbit.

OK. There you are. I can see this is a spring whiskey. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Nice brush. of scent and flavor.

Drew, I'm curious, how many tours have you done, including across the seas and in the States? What are you up to now?

Can I count repeat visits? Well, do you know the total without the repeat visits? I honestly don't know the total overall. I would say that if we count repeat visits, I'm closing in on 400. Wow. And if we're counting not repeat visits, we're probably around just over 300. OK. Yeah.

Have you called Guinness about that?

I have not, although they usually like a time constraint of some form. Maybe I could get for most Kentucky distilleries in 11 days. I'm doing 34 distilleries in 11 days.

Yeah, and so they like to observe while the record is being established. True. So they're going to have to come here with their clipboards and follow you around.

But they do math, because this is what I learned about Tauser the cat at the Glen Turret Distillery in Scotland, was that what they did was they came out, observed the cat for a couple of days, counted how many mice that the cat killed over that period of time, and then figured the life of the cat. And, you know, if it had that many kills per day, and that's how that cat got the Guinness Book of World Records for the most mass kills.

The greatest distillery master ever. That's pretty awesome.

Tows of the Cat, 1985. So. This is the fun stuff that I bump into that I just don't really. And that's where lore actually is great because some of these stories, we know that Tauzer probably didn't kill that many because the number was like 20,099. It's like, okay, probably not accurate, but it's still kind of fun to throw it out there.

Does he have to kill and eat or just kill?

I don't know that eating is part of it.

If he's like most cats, he probably brought it to, you know, his favorite person as a present. Put it on the doorstep and here it is. I ate a liver and you get the rest.

It's all a game.

Yeah, there you go. Crazy stuff. Yeah, this is a great, great ride. I really enjoy this. It's a little sweet, but solid, very solid. Yep. All right. Well, that went down real easy for me. I mean, that's sessionable right there.

Great selection of whiskeys today. And you know what's interesting is that this is actually a little softer on the palate than this trip, because if there's one thing that I can tell you is different between the Kentucky bourbon trail of 2019 versus today, it's that rarely now do you taste anything below 100 proof. They're all going to cast strengths throughout a lot of these tours. In fact, Four Roses, which is one of my favorite distilleries to visit, it was like, wow, only one whiskey and that's over 100 and it's 104. That's just not what I'm experiencing.

You're not getting challenged as often with six month whiskeys either.

Right. So this is my favorite part of the craft distillery. Even when I did my deep South tour, it's like all of these distilleries are now getting close to 10 years old. Yeah. And so they've got older whiskeys in the deep South. They're not going to give you their 10 year old whiskey because it probably tastes like wood. Right. You know, but it is fun to go back through and see some of these distilleries and see James E. Pepper is a great example. I went to that distillery and back then they were sourcing everything. And so now I'm actually getting to taste what I saw five years ago being made. I'm getting to taste on the tour. So, I mean, that's That's the fun thing about going in.

After they've learned all their lessons and they've honed their craft a little bit and their whiskeys get to age a little bit longer, you start, wow, they really did have a good mash bill. They really did have a good process. Just too early. Yeah. Wasn't ready yet. Yeah. We've tried some of their stuff. It's really good. I like it a lot. All right, Todd, I'm thinking we're going to the bonus. What do you say?

I'm excited. Just for Drew. Very good. All right. So again, we're going off script kind of. This is Laird's straight apple brandy. This is an older bottle. It's got like an 80s, 90s kind of look to it. It's just something I lucked into. And Laird's, some of you may, your ears perked up if you know about it, it's Apple Brandy. So this is an Apple Brandy bottled in bond.

So there's a lesson in that, right? I mean, bourbon doesn't have to be, it doesn't have to be bourbon or rye. Right. It can be Apple Brandy. It can be anything.

We were talking during the break, and there's bottled and bonned gins, and I think Drew even said he had heard of something about it.

I heard of bottled and bonned vodka, and maybe I dreamed that. I don't know, because what is it going to do? Just clear liquids going to sit in a rick house?

Because vodkas are typically not an age spirit, although gins are not always an age spirit either, but they can be. When I was in Ireland, I actually tasted a

vodka that they aged with seaweed. Oh, wow. It was really, really nice. I said, why don't you sell this in the US? He said, because we can't sell it as vodka in the US. They won't let us because it has flavoring in it. They consider even though it's a natural thing that's been put in it, it has to be sold as spirits or something, some generic category. I'm thinking of all these flavored vodkas.

I was going to say, I'm thinking of vodka has every flavor Like cotton candy and gummy bears.

I'm like, so they couldn't send seaweed. They couldn't send seaweed. Nope. I would buy it. Yes. Well, it was. It was very nice. Very nice. All right. Check it out. Cheers. Cheers.

Oh, I love it. I do love Brandy's. I do really like Brandy's a lot.

Yeah. It's well, definitely an apple flavor in there. Yeah. I'm getting apple. It's just really, it's like, because you get some of the barrel influence on it, definitely the little bit of char and a little bit of oak in there, but the apple definitely stands out front. And I have a modern bottle of this and it's, I think it's 90 proof. Yeah. Or maybe 80 proof actually, I don't know. It's still good. What I love about this, First was I was in Mississippi doing a podcast interview, and Kretenden in Mississippi, all he does is basically take his whiskey, his bourbons, and age them in all sorts of different types of barrels. And people come from all over for his barrels. And he said, I got over here some Laird's barrels. And it kind of went through my ears the first time he said it. And then I was like, Oh, he's aging bourbon in Laird's apple brandy barrels, which probably would be really interesting. And then I had Laird's on the podcast, and we were talking about their history back to George Washington, and George Washington asking them for their recipe. So I love the history behind the spirit that I've never heard of. And for all those distilleries that say, we're the oldest, well, These guys are back in the early 1700s, or well, not early 1700s, but you know, revolutionary work period. It's a New Jersey distillery. It is New Jersey that also has, they distill now in Virginia, but they still own the old site where they used to distill it.

So, I heard you right, this is the oldest operating distillery in the United States. Yes, not continuously running, of course.

But yeah, I mean, this would be, if you were going to say what is the oldest, they made Applejack. which was a, and they described it on the podcast. It's really interesting. It's an Americanized version of brandy where basically they freeze the brandy and then they take the ice and then from the ice, apparently comes the Applejack.

Yeah, I could remember Applejack when I was a kid. Yeah.

So almost kind of like a ice wine type thing, but I guess they take the ice off the wine and leave the, the wine would be more condensed a little bit.

Applejack was a big deal a long time ago, I think.

Well, when I was doing the research into America's native spirit, I ran into articles in the 1970s that labeled Applejack as America's native spirit. The idea being that it was a United States developed product. So in a way, you could say that if we're really going to say America's native spirit, bourbon and Applejack would fit into that.

Fantastic. Wow. Yeah. And Todd, you said this bottle is probably 1980s.

Yeah, 80s, 90s. Just something I lucked into, kind of to bring it full circle.

This is also DSP1, obviously, since, yeah.

DSP1, yeah. For New Jersey, yeah.

Yeah, this is my joke for, you know, Jack Daniels is always going, Tennessee, where are the first original registered distillery? Well, that's a story for Whiskey Lore Volume 2. But to give you a preview on that, I think what's funny is that If you go to Tennessee and you go to George Dickle, they'll say, well, you know, Jack Daniels, it's the biggest distillery around. We don't really have a competition with them. You know, they're so much bigger than us. That's not what they mean because they are owned by Diageo, and Diageo owns Johnny Walker. Johnny Walker was the number one selling whiskey across the globe until Jack Daniels beat it. Don't tell me at George Dickle that you don't have a chip on your shoulder about what's going on over there at Jack Daniels. But Jack Daniels, I'm going to give George Dickle something to one up Jack Daniels on, which is Jack Daniels is being produced at DSP TN number one. This is where they roll with their original. We're the first registered distillery, which is complete BS, but we won't go into that. That's in the next book. What's interesting is that George Dickel left the state of Tennessee when prohibition hit in Tennessee in 1910. They went to Hopkinsville, Kentucky, and they were able to ship their whiskey back into Tennessee because it was interstate commerce and they couldn't stop it until they finally changed that law. Well, Dickel stayed in Tennessee and Cascade Whiskey became a Kentucky bourbon. which was originally produced at the Stitzel brothers distillery. And then what happened after prohibition is that they started distilling it first at the George T. Stag distillery. And then they distilled it at the James E. Pepper distillery before finally Shinley acquired it and took it back down to Tennessee. What's interesting though is there was a brief time right out of prohibition that it was made at the Bernheim Distillery. When it was made at the Bernheim Distillery, it would have been DSPKY number one. Wow. So George Dickel was actually made years before Tennessee got out of prohibition in 1938. So sorry, Jack Daniels, but it's actually George Dickel that would probably have the stronger claim to number one. Wow. Fantastic. Amazing.

Yeah.

Amazing.

Hopefully there's a lot of roadie history buffs out there. I'm just loving this.

I eat this stuff up. And you know, the more we drink, the harder it gets to follow you. Still fun. There's a lot of bottles over there.

That's right.

Well, this has been fantastic. We actually, uh, had four great bottle and bond whiskeys today. And, uh, you know, and we made it through the show without going through all those things that specify what is a bottle.

Exactly.

Because we, we feel like our listeners, it pretty much got it by now, right? I mean, we've, we've rammed it down their throats on many occasions. So, but, um, yeah, it was a blast to do this. A lot of fun. Um, it's a great, it's a great time once a year to sit down with a bunch of bottle and bond whiskeys and understand why. you know, why that act came around in the first place, not necessarily for quality, but at the end, the end result was quality, right?

Right.

So that's great. Yeah. And I love distilleries that take on the challenge of making a bonded whiskey in today's market. So it's great. And we've got some distilleries that do many of them, like Heaven Hill, I don't know how many bonded whiskeys they have, probably 10 or 15, right? But it's always nice to see the younger distilleries, the new distilleries, the, you know, the still Austen's and the... I was going to say Whiskey Thief dropped one not too long ago. Yeah. I mean, it's great. With some of the whiskies that didn't make it on the show today, you know, the Ben Holiday and the old Dominic. And, you know, we had the Heaven Hill Bottled and Bottled on, but we didn't have the Lincoln Pinch. Lincoln Pinch from Dueling Grounds. Anyway, a lot of fun, great time. Drew, thank you so much for coming all this way and joining us.

Absolutely. Well, I was in town, but thank you for letting me join in.

You're still in from South Carolina, so it's still a long haul.

Yeah, it is. It is, but always fun to come up here.

We would like to give you an opportunity to plug your books, plug your website, plug your social media accounts so everybody knows where to follow you. Cause if they've been listening this whole hour to hour and a half, you've piqued their interest. They want to know more about what you do.

The easiest place to find everything I do is at whisky-lore.com. The travel guide is out there. You'll find it. It says travel guide up at the top. You can just sign up for a free account and you can bookmark all of the distilleries you want to see in the future. It's got booking links and everything that you need to be able to plan out your trips in the future, not just to Kentucky, but to everywhere else in the world, actually, because I even have 76 Scottish distilleries in there, 50 Irish distilleries in there. So, all that stuff is in there as well. Social media, I'm mostly on Instagram. So, you'll find me at Instagram slash WhiskeyLore, patreon.com slash WhiskeyLore for extra content. I'm posting photos from my trips through Kentucky right now. And I do extended versions like my Mississippi interview that I did is 30 minutes if you listen on the regular podcast, but it's two hours if you listen to it on the feed. So, you know, bonuses there as well. So those are the main places. And the books you can buy, just look for Drew Hanisch on Amazon or as I say, go to whiskylore.com slash books and you'll find all my books there.

Always fun to hang out with you.

I'm going to recommend that you go to Spotify and get it, the audio version, because he reads it himself. He reads all his books and, you know, he's got this, he used to be in radio and he'll tell you that. And he's got this great voice and yeah, it's. Yeah, it's got me down the road. I tell him this all the time. He gets me down, you know, the vibrant road used to get me down the road too, but his book's new too. He's got a great voice and his stories and his dives into lore is just, it's awesome to listen to. Thank you so much.

Well, thanks again, Drew. And we'll try to make this a regular occurrence from time to time. It's always fun.

Yeah, we need to get him to move up here. He said something about it, so I was hitting at it, yeah.

All right. Well, you can find The Bourbon Road on all social media outlets. You can find us on Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, threads. We do all those things. But every Wednesday we'll put on an episode. Todd and I will sit down with somebody like Drew and we'll chit chat. We're always drinking whiskey. We're always having a good time. You don't want to miss an episode. And the best way not to miss an episode is to scroll up to the top of that app you're on. hit that subscribe button that way every week when we release, you'll get that notification saying that Jim and Todd have dropped another one. And then when you are driving down the road or cutting grass or shoveling snow or sweeping the house or whatever it is that you do with your headset on, we can be a part of your day and we really appreciate that. But until the next time, we'll see you down the Bourbon Road.

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