447. West Fork Whiskey: Bold Spirits from the Heartland

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 four and join us.

Hey roadies, it's Diane Strong with Bourbon on the Banks Festival. We've got another amazing event coming your way this year. Be sure to join us at the half and I'll tell you a little bit more about the event taking place October 4th, 2025.

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We've got Julian Jones from West Fork Whiskey. They are out of Indianapolis, Indiana. They've been kind enough to send us three bottles. We're going to run through it and we're going to hear his story and West Fork's story. So looking forward to this. Welcome to the show, Julian.

Yeah. Thank you. Thank you very much. Excited to be here.

Glad to have you now today. It's a little bit different. We're going to actually go in reverse proof order. Uh, and this is at the recommendation of Julian and that's okay. We haven't done this before, but curve ball curve ball. That's right. Good reason for it. And, uh, but we're going to start with, uh, with the highest proof whiskey of the night. And what do we have in our glass, Julian?

So this is our Old Hamer Cast Strength bourbon. This is a very unique and awesome mash bill made and aged right here in Indiana. 99% corn, 1% malted barley. This particular release comes in at $115.66 and was aged about five years in a four-char space side barrel.

Yeah, that 99.1 is a very unique mash bill.

It is, it is. We are definitely trying to position it very much as an Indiana bourbon and the Indiana bourbon mash bill for us. Honestly, when we got our first samples from, this is made at MGP down in Lawrenceburg in partnership with them. And we're actually on contract for them to make a minimum amount of this recipe for us now. But when we first got the samples of this one, it was one or two years old, this would have been, man, 2016, 2017. They weren't selling it to anybody. They didn't really have a market for it. They were just making unique, different stuff. Just so happened that Indiana grows in our very humble view, the best corn in the world. So we thought it was a crime that we've been shipping it down to Kentucky. We have really delicious hard water here in Indiana as well. So it kind of was a serendipitous marriage and partnership to bring a really cool, unique, and Indiana-centric or Indiana nod type product at the very least to the market.

It's got a really nice nose. There's getting like cherry, baking spices.

Yeah. I usually say a lot of stone fruit in this one. I get a little bit of like bubble gum too, like bazooka bubble gum. It's very light, very sweet. But the way I kind of describe the nose certainly is soft, sweet and approachable. I mean, you still definitely get a little bit of that ethanol there, right? This is a five-year-old product. It's not a 10-year-old product. It's not a 15-year-old product, but it's not off-putting. And it kind of, I think really enhances some of the fruitier characteristics of the pour.

It's interesting. Yeah. It does have kind of that bubble gum nose to it. Yeah.

Bazooka bubble gum is what I said.

Yeah. It's interesting the, uh, the stone fruit note on it, because normally you would expect to get some of that from, from kind of the barley, but you're sitting at 1%. So it's very unlikely that's a contribution of the barley, right?

Yeah, I really think the corn is kind of misunderstood in the, in the bourbon aging dance. And I don't think it gets quite the, quite the accolades that it deserves as far as its contribution to, you know, eat three grain bourbons, four grain bourbons. Um, and especially, and in this case, a 99% corn bourbon, right?

I'm ready to sit up about you, Jim. Yeah, I'm ready. Cheers. Oh, I dove on in. I did get like a, like a rudimentary, um, kind of note of, um, I don't know, kind of like a meaty note to it when I was nosing it. And it kind of comes home on the palate just a little bit. That's really interesting.

Just a little bit of like sweet umami, right?

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yep. And it kind of, it's kind of in between like a barbeque-y sweet umami. And then I also think like a mix between like a creme brulee or like a toasted marshmallow, right? It kind of bounces between those as it falls off into kind of just a very sweet. I think vanilla heavy finish. Um, there's not as much stone fruit in this particular release, but you can pick it out. Yeah. If you think about it, it's definitely more prevalent, I think on the nose than it is on the drink. It's nice caramel going on there too. Oh yeah. The whole time.

One of the things that comes to mind is like nutritional yeast, like that, uh, really umami nutritional yeast. I mean, it's wow.

So Julian, you guys are running the 99 one. on this hammer line. You also have your other line, which is what you're distilling yourself, and that's the West Fork distillate. I actually had some friends come up there a couple of weeks ago and did the bottle your own and had a great time. Oh, awesome. You're going to keep going with two different lines. The hammer line will be You know its own thing and you guys are going to build your own identity through your own distillate as well.

Correct, yeah, so we will continue to partner with MGP. Like I said, we have them on contract now to make the 99% corn, 1% malted barley recipe for us moving forward. We don't have any plans to bring that production in-house. We do have a 12 and 3 quarter inch Vendome continuous distillation system, which we have as of yet not hooked up, unfortunately. We're still trying to figure out a way to make that economical for ourselves, but we do have a 600 gallon still. Everything that I have made for the West Fork line was made on that downtown. We just moved it to our north side facility. It was just north of Indianapolis and Westfield where we're headquartered now. But yeah, that 600 gallon pot still is where I made all of my West Fork branded products and will continue to make my West Fork branded products for the time being. until and if we can figure out how to pay for that very, very beautiful piece of equipment to get fired up and start making some whiskey on our continuous system, which will, again, still be the West Fork brand.

And when you do fire that up, what kind of capacity does a still that size have?

Sure, yeah, so right now we're at, like I said, 600 gallons, right? So I get about 10% yield through the distillation process. So I get maybe a barrel per run on that. So if I'm running that hard twice a day, right, that's two barrels. The 12 and three quarter system that we have can make, I believe, 14 barrels every 24 hours and can obviously run continuously as long as we have fermented mash.

Yeah, you want it to run continuously, right? You don't want the trouble of shutting it down and having to restart it.

Yeah, and you lose a little bit every time you do that too. It's a relatively small system as far as these go, but if we were to flip this on tomorrow and run it six days a week, we would immediately be in the top 10 to 15 bourbon distilleries volume-wise in the country.

This is an interesting match bill that, I mean, this is literally literally corn liquor, right? I mean, this is corn whiskey. Uh, so why the 1%, what does 1% gain you with, uh, with mold?

Yeah, for sure. Uh, so. When we were developing this recipe and this idea, it's named after the old Hamer farm, and Hugh Hamer was the patriarch. So back in the early 1800s, 1825, one of the largest whiskey distilleries in the country was actually in southern Indiana, just south of where all of the co-founders are from, at a place which is now called Spring Mill State Park. But it was a very large farm and he had, unfortunately there's no surviving recipe, but we know he used at least a little bit of malted barley, probably maybe even a couple points higher. But this was just a recipe that spoke to us through how good it tasted even young. And it's an approximation of this recipe that was likely one of the biggest bourbon recipes back in the mid 1800s.

Good deal. And what's MSRP on this bottle?

So this bottle, uh, usually hits the shelf at 49 99. That's a great part. Very, very aggressively priced for a five year cast strength product.

Very nice. And going back to the proof, this is one 15.66. So this is, this is, this is a stout product. This has a, this has some, uh, some oomph behind it.

Little spice on the tail.

And then, yeah, we really like. where these barrels usually sit at this age, too, because MGP has gone on, I believe, 115 or 120 with a lot of their stuff. And it's not hazmat, right? We don't have a high 130, a low 140 bottle here. The 115, because I think if it was that high for a five-year product to be overpowering, right? So I think this is about as high as I like a product to be in this age and price bracket, right?

Now about how big are these batches? I noticed this has its own batch number and I think I'd seen... Another one reviewed somewhere that was a different batch, a little lower.

Yeah, so these bounce around usually between... The 115 is about as low as they go, up to about 120s low sometimes, but usually 115, 118. These are really small batches. You see small batch and very small batch now, and there's no technical definition of these terms. The biggest batch of this, I believe, I've ever done is six or seven barrels. So most of these, some of them are actually single barrels. We just don't market that way. When it makes sense to do that, it's rare, but usually there are two or three barrel batches on average. But honestly, if I'm tasting three barrels and I find three or four that I like, throw them in there.

So how did the three of you get on this kick to start a whiskey company?

Totally backwards. Uh, so I was actually in medical school. Uh, my brother was, um, a banker, uh, getting ready to start working on his MBA off hours. And then our third co-founder, who is a long time family friend. had just finished law school and was working for his brother in Florida, I think, as legal for a whole life services company. And we really didn't enjoy our jobs as much as we thought we would, first of all, but we realized that, you know, this was in the early 20 teens, and it was when a lot of the bottles we all really loved started to get very difficult to find. And we started to do some research and found out that, Hey, you know, Indiana has been sending all of its corn to Kentucky. We have a lot of some hard water. This is, these are the two, you know, this is the base upon which you kind of really build a whiskey brand or company. Um, so we were just young and dumb enough to, uh, cash all our 401ks in and quit our jobs and, uh, start making whiskey. All in. All in. Yeah. And we did it, honestly, we did it nights and weekends to start. We had to actually pay to keep the lights on. So it was part-time for all of us in the beginning for about a year and a half. I was actually our first employee that went full-time. And then Blake and Dave, you were one of them. Correct. Yep. You got to make the whiskey to sell it, right? That's right. Step one. And we actually had a 55-gallon still to start, so very, very small. And again, we were just hustling on the weekends, any weeknight that we could get off. They still kept their jobs in banking. And I worked in medicine for a short period of time until I was able to go full-time at the distillery.

That's a cool story. So you and your brother are pretty close. And so is the third partner your brother's friend or yours?

Both. We grew up together in the same town. I always forget this, but he's either a year or two older than my brother school-wise. So he's a year or two younger than me. So he's kind of in between us. Okay. But we grew up together and then he actually went off to high school to a military academy high school and i really see much of him after that time until we started getting serious about you know starting a whiskey company.

How did that aha moment happen? Would you call him up and say, what's the story here?

It honestly originated with Blake and David. I was in medical school, but I was actually getting ready to start my fourth year. I was almost there, but I knew that I wanted to really do anything else. Luckily, they were really the brains behind, because they're much more the business people anyway, you know, incorporating the company, getting serious about doing all these things. So, it kind of happened slowly over time and then all at once. Once we finally got our licenses and everything and we were going, right, it was a lot of conversations and, you know, early on it was the fact that, you know, hey, they're a business guy and a lawyer by trade. They're not technical people, right? They went to some training courses on how to make bourbon. They realized very quickly it'd probably be best if they found somebody that was more technical minded. I've done a ton of benchmark research too. I've distilled before just never alcohol until I got this job. It was really a marriage of circumstance and opportunity. That's so cool.

That is so awesome. Were there any Were there any mentors or people who helped you along the way to get started? You don't sound like you came from a whiskey background.

No, none of us did. We came from a shoestring budget, so we did not have the ability to hire consultants and other people that really knew what they were doing. Honestly, I just kind of read and bought every book that I could find on distilling. I talked to anybody that would talk to me, which wasn't really many people back then. And we just started throwing stuff against the wall. So we didn't really have any meaningful input until we already had some momentum. And now I'm fairly close with most of the other bourbon distillers in Indiana, but it didn't start out that way.

Yeah, you guys started in 2014. Is that correct?

That was when we were incorporated. I don't believe we didn't start making bourbon until 1515. Yeah. And of course, I'm a roughly 10 year old bourbon distiller. My oldest distill it now is we've had the good fortune and bad fortune of selling everything that we've made. So my oldest stuff is only four years old.

Got it. You know, there are some there's some whiskey out there being made by people who whose only study on making whiskey came from watching popcorn setting videos. So I mean, it's okay. It's okay.

I think there's a, we, we would have hired consultants if we had the budget to do it. We just didn't. So we, we, we had to do it the way that we had to do it. Right. So it was, uh, it was like, Hey, we're going to figure this out or we're going to go broke trying.

Yeah. That is so cool. I love it. Shoestring budget. Just all grit and go for it.

Wow. And I'll tell you a lot of the, a lot of the gray hairs in the industry, um, that I would call from, you know, a motor company or this electronic part or this gas part or whatever told us we couldn't do it that way. It wouldn't work. We don't have enough money. Um, so we did get a lot of blowback from the people that, that thought we had to spend, you know, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars, even on a very small setup. And luckily, I think we proved them at least a little bit wrong.

Yeah. Awesome. That is so cool. So awesome. I'm really enjoying this, but I think it's time for us to move on to the next port. Todd, what do you think? That sounds great.

Joe, you want to tell us about this one? Absolutely. This is one of my favorites. This is our Hue Hammer. So Old Hammer is generally the name that we give to our unfinished or, you know, out of their original casks products, right? So the last one was Old Hammer. This is Hue Hammer. Now, what does Hugh Hamer mean? Hugh Hamer means that we have finished this in something. We have done a bunch of testing with all of the finishes you've probably seen from lots of other big brands, and we really landed on two as the best ones. And honestly, it bounces back and forth, which is my favorite. but this Hugh Hamer that we have here is our rum finish. We do this one at 103 very purposefully to have enough proof to play some fun, fun fruit notes that we'll get into, but not so much that it scares away people who usually like to drink in the 90s. And this product is five years old in its original barrel, and then two years old in a Cruzan barrel. And we really, really like Cruzan barrels for this. We tried about every rum barrel that we could get our hands on, but Cruzan stood out every time and was hands-on. And feet above every single other barrel that we tried. Um, so we exclusively finished in Cruzan for this, uh, for about two years. So a very long finish on this as well. All right. Again, this is our, this is our 99% corn, 1% malted barley recipe.

Cheers. Cheers. I know it was just, yeah, just molasses.

Yeah. I was going to say sweet molasses. Yeah. Blackstrap rum. Right.

It has a, the molasses has a heavy hand on this, just a little bit of a heavy hand.

And you'll see it's not as heavy in the drink. And we think that's because, you know, obviously we finish it a lot of longer than the average finish is on the market. Um, but you'll see how kind of malleable this 99% corn, 1% malted barley recipe is once we, once we jump in here too.

It hit it pretty hard on the color though. We've got a nice amber on this. Yeah. It's beautiful. Just color. Yeah.

Yeah. The only one Hugh Hamer wise that's better color than this usually. And of course is the double oak, right? Uh, to two new barrels will put a lot of really awesome amber color in there. Sure.

Oh, it comes across nice and soft on the pallet. I was really surprised. Wow. Yep. Now we are coming down in proof a little bit. So, I mean, I'm sure we're coming off that one, that one. We're about 12 points. Yeah.

We're about 12, 13 points down in proof, right? But it's really subtle, and we really like what that extended age does to it in that, you know, we were talking earlier about, you know, how much of a Finnish influence there is on this product, right? And I think it's just super well integrated into that kind of 99.1 corn recipe as it is, such that it's just a little bit of an enhancer, right? You get some tropical fruit there. You get some of that blackstrap rum, right? But it doesn't just totally destroy the bourbon flavors that are in there either.

I'm getting just a nice little fresh note off of it. Like, uh, I don't know how you get a little bit of mint on the kind of a little bit of men on the nose there. Yeah, just a little.

Yeah. Now that you say that I can pick that up. I've been incepted, I think.

Yeah. Now, how do you guys go about choosing what you're going to finish such a unique mash build in? Is it just kind of, let's try it and, you know, kind of throw it up against the wall kind of thing?

Yeah. So in the beginning we picked, you know, just what we thought the best barrels were. As we're picking our old hammer cast strength, right, we come across barrels that turn our heads sometimes. And those are the ones that make it into our Q products, which are the primarily the double oak and the rum finish. But over time, I've kind of let the barrels tell me where they want to go, whereas if they're sweet and soft, they're usually pretty good with the rum. And if they're full-bodied and more of a traditional hug, they're usually better with the Double Oak. So there's already a selection step happening for these barrels. We don't just pick random barrels. It's the better barrels that we come by that make it into the Hue products.

I read you guys have a French toast flavored bourbon of some sort. Yes, we do.

I wasn't expecting that. Frenchies. That's actually my distillate. It's kind of a crazy product in that it's just all-natural flavoring, sugar, and 40-year-old aged bourbon. So it actually has, there's not, we don't cut that with light bourbon, we don't add GNS, we don't do a lot of these other things that a lot of the other big-flavored bourbons are doing. It's just four-year-old bourbon, some all-natural flavoring and sugar, and it tastes like French toast. Wow, wow. If you're someone who likes highly-flavored, sweet, deserty bourbons, or if you're someone who likes to put stuff like that in your coffee or whatever, right, that's definitely for you. But it is certainly not your traditional bourbon drinker's bourbon. Right.

And then I saw one other thing I wasn't even sure what it was. Plum, is it jerkum?

Jerkum, yeah. I didn't know what jerkum wine was until we tried that. That was a huge product. You know, I was mentioning that the double oak and the rum are kind of the ones that have risen to the surface, at least as far as what we think the best finishes are. But we've done plum, we've done a bunch of different grape wines, we've done cab, we've done pork, we've done honey, we've done maple, we've done... I know I'm forgetting some. I've done, not with my Hue stuff, but I've done hot sauce finishes now.

I've done Korean barbecue finishes.

We do some crazy cool and interesting stuff, kind of pushing just the limits outside of what you traditionally see in the urban space.

I'm waiting for somebody to do a Japanese barbecue sauce.

Yeah, so we do. We're not far away. I have a Korean barbecue sauce finish, and that's my own distillate. That's West Fork. I only have one barrel of it because I kind of just snuck it by my other partners. I knew they'd probably be like, no, let's not do that. But I have a buddy who makes sauces. He was like, I love his Korean barbecue sauce. I love it. I love Japanese barbecue sauce too. Great sauces, right? That sweet umami balance. It's turning into somewhat of an interesting finish and we're going to let it go as long as we think it's getting better and better. You know, when we first put it in, it just tasted like Korean barbecue sauce, right? But now it actually tastes like whiskey and.

Wow.

So it's just interesting. We're always pushing the envelope.

So you say the barrels speak to you. So that, what does that make you a, a barrel whisper? Yeah.

Whisper.

That's awesome. You just got to listen.

You taste enough of them and you can, I can almost tell as soon as I drill the barrel now, right. The smell coming off, just this falling into whatever I'm tasting out of. It's like ride the bike.

So you guys are on the north side of Indy.

Correct. Yep. We're just about, uh, if you're coming from downtown, we're about a half an hour north. There's like a big bypass around Indianapolis called four 65. We're just on the north side of that.

And Lucas oil stadium is up that way or no Lucas oil stadium is right downtown.

It's right downtown. Okay.

I know you go, I know you go around like the, the highway goes around and then north from there, but.

Yep. So right, there's kind of like downtown and then right off the south, kind of, I guess, west side of downtown is the Lucas oil area because Indianapolis is like a very large little city in that we have a lot of people that live here, but our downtown is not terribly large. And Lucas oil is almost as, that whole complex is almost as big as our main downtown area. So, but it's growing just like a lot of big cities are.

So cool. So cool. Julian, what's the MSRP on this one? This one is $64.99.

So we think, again, very aggressively and certainly appropriately priced for something that is this unique and sophisticated. Every sip of this one, I like the way this one evolves a little bit because I feel like a little more of that sweetness comes out, you know, following that high proofer, right? It maybe took our palates a minute to breathe a little bit, but I think every sip just brings out a little bit more, a little bit less of that kind of black strap, you know, really spicy rum, a little more tropical sweetness.

It does kind of lean tropical a little bit. It kind of reminds me a little bit of that.

Yeah, yeah. I let mine sit for about 10 minutes before the show.

That's really, really enjoyable. I love it. Yeah. I think that does help open it up a little bit too.

Considering it's even aged for two years, sometimes some things I've had that have aged that longer, even shorter can be a little overfinished. But like you said, I think this is a good mesh of the, you know, you still get the bourbon notes and, but then there's that nice backing from the rum barrels.

And a lot of these old Hamer, so another difference between old Hamer and Hugh Hamer, old Hamer ages all over Indiana in lots of warehouses at lots of different levels. and then we bring them in closer to when they're almost ready to pull. Hue, however, obviously has already come in and finishes at our warehouse for a couple years, and our warehouse is not temperature controlled. We do have to keep it at least 47, 50 in the winter because we have water sprinkling. back there, but it doesn't get quite as hot in the summer as it would, say, if we were putting these barrels on rack 10, rack 13, rack 15 of a big 20,000, 75,000, 100,000 barrel warehouse, right? So I think that also is another variable that helps us be able to age it a little longer, kind of like that Makers 46 thing, right? They have that temperature controlled environment. It allows you to be a little more aggressive, I think, with your finishing in that you can let it go longer because you know it's not going to be as harsh or as forward or like you said, over-finished, right? Yeah. Yeah.

All right. Well, I think we ought to continue sipping on this. Take a short break and when we come back, we've got more from Julian Jones and West fork, old Hamer, and we've gotten another expression to try in the last half. So really looking forward to it folks. Make sure you stick around. We will be right back.

Hey roadies, it's Diane Strong with Bourbon on the Banks Festival again. We have another amazing event this year, but we want you to come early because we've got a lot of events leading up to the festival. Starting on Thursday, we've got another mixology with master mixologist Heather Wibbles on the Bourbon Bell and O.H. Ingram. Leading into Friday, we have got Peggy No Stevens. She's back with another bourbon pairing and a lesson called The Stave is the Rage. It's going to be amazing. Limestone Heritage Distilling is going to be bringing in three single barrels. You're going to learn a lot. We've got the VIP coming back and this year we are celebrating women in bourbon. This year, Bourbon on the Banks Festival promises to be even better than ever. We've already got more than 70 distilleries that are going to be there. More than anything, I need to encourage you to get your tickets as soon as possible. They're selling fast. Some of them are already sold out. If you want to come this year, please get your tickets. We don't want to miss you on October 4th in Frankfort, Kentucky on the banks of the amazing Kentucky River.

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All right, folks, welcome back to the second half of the show. We're here with Julian Jones of West Fork Distilling Company, and we've been enjoying his old Hammer series. And the first pour we had was their cast-strength, a little over 115 proof. I think you said it was about a four or five-year-old product on that one. And then we followed that up with the Hugh Hammer rum finish, and man, That one knocked my socks off. That one's really good. But we're getting ready to dive into something really special that I think you guys just released recently, not too long ago, right?

Yeah, this is our newest product. Yeah, so this is our 10-year-old old hammer. This is some of the oldest old hammer recipe that exists. And much like the cast-ranked old hammer, this is done in terribly small batches. Two to three barrels max usually on this one. This one has done it 100 proof. Again, very, very specific reason for that is that we thought this is kind of the best middle road between your 80 and 90 proof bourbon drinkers and your people who really appreciate cast strength. You can get some notes of that ethanol-forward, really heavy-hitting, sophisticated old bourbon from this, but also it's not so proofy that it will turn off your more casual bourbon drinker. Again, this one's aged for... It's actually closer to 11 years than 10 years. These were about, I think, 10 years... This particular batch was about 10 years, 8 or 9 months. So closer to 11, uh, but again, our 99% corn, 1% malted barley recipe in four char, uh, Speyside barrels.

So did you just introduce a new term into the bourbon world? TSP, terribly small batch.

Tiny, tiny batches, right? TTV, tiny, tiny batches. You said terribly small batch. I'm like, wait, that's new.

I hadn't heard that before. Yeah.

It's a very legal term, obviously. It means less than three barrels.

Yeah. Small batch has always been sort of this elusive term that nobody could kind of nail down. And it could be anywhere between two barrels and 200 barrels, depending on who you are. Absolutely. I guess if you're a wild Turkey, it's a 200 barrels.

200 barrels is actually a small batch for wild Turkey.

So yeah, that's true. I think the first thing that pops out on me on this one is like, there's a nice sweet, sweet Oak going on there.

Yeah, it's sweet and soft. This one's really sophisticated. Once you get to the drink, you'll see like it's starting to develop, like you would think like a four green hug in there, but just so much sweet caramel and vanilla. Really. I mean, it's your stereotypic bourbon nose, but so soft and so delicate.

It does bring a little bit of the like darker fruit to it.

Now that I'm getting more and more sniffs on it. I'm ready to sip it. Cheers. Yeah. A little, a little dark cherry, right? A little maybe dark stone fruit, right? Sure.

Yep. Plum for sure. Cheers.

Oh yeah.

You know, interestingly, it does bring in some of the, I mean, it's a 10 year old whiskey is clearly is a well-aged, uh, bourbon. It has that nice mature note to it. A little bit of extra oak and just another degree of sophistication. Yeah, but it does bring it, it does, it did carry over just a little bit of that freshness from the, say the five to seven year old range kind of continued to live in this one. So that's great.

Yeah. And that's really the, the, the corn, you know, the corn forward 99% one, uh, recipe does have kind of this bright characteristic is what I call it. Um, but it's not necessarily off-putting or ethanol, right? It's just, um, It's also somehow softer and sweeter at the same time, right? Especially as you move through the middle of the palette and the finish, right? There's just so much sweetness there and it kind of just fades slowly into obscurity.

And I'm expecting this one runs a little higher than the first two, is that correct?

Yep. So this one actually hits the shelf around $84.99. So still, we think very aggressively priced for a terribly small batch 10-year-old Burpac.

Actually, those are, I mean, considering the market these days, it's kind of all over the place with, you know, kind of used to be able to go by that $10 a year type of thing. And you guys are under that in most cases. That's pretty awesome.

Yeah, we, we try very hard to be, um, uh, we, you know, even though we're craft, we don't think that we need to be selling $200 bottles of seven year old bourbon to make it. Um, and not there's anything wrong with that. Uh, but you know, there are, you, you guys well know, and your listeners well know, right? There's a lot of bourbons out there that are playing at price points that they have no business being in. We try to be on the other end of that, that equation.

Yeah. Todd, I'm getting a little bit of like buttered fig. Buttered fig? I'm not even sure what a buttered fig is, but I like butter and fig.

That's what it is. It's delicious. I definitely get the butter there.

I get the butter there more than the fig for sure. But I also, now that you've incepted me and I also, I made ribs yesterday with a very heavy brown sugar rub. So you've kind of incepted me on that sweet umami thing. And I think this one still has a little bit of that kind of sweet umami.

You being a Japanese barbecue guy that makes so much that makes so much sense It kind of hits you with that nice sweetness and then it kind of like gives a little spice and then it kind of gives you like Yeah, like just a super sweet candy burn end, right?

Yeah. Yep. Definitely for sure. Now I have to qualify that and say, I think it's turkey figs. Turkey. Those are much more common. That's right. This is great. This is really good. This is my profile. This is Jim's profile right here.

No doubt. It's a really easy sipper. It's got enough sophistication and intricacy to be interesting, but it's not one that challenges you. It's not a thinker. Right? Like, you don't have to sit down and parse out what all these flavors are here. It's just enjoyable. It's an easy drinker, but it's got enough of all of that awesome sophistication, just a little bit of that kind of sour mash ballerina funk, right? Ballerina feet funk is what I like to call it. That it's just a great, great pour.

So when folks come visit you at West Fork, what can they expect? I mean, like, I'm sure there's tours and like, what often?

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so you can definitely come and spend a day with us up in Westfield. We have a large full service and family friendly bar. We have a large event center that caters a lot of weddings as well as big business events. And we have a upscale, more of a speakeasy, high touch, very handcrafted cocktail bar, which certainly has one of the best old fashions I've ever had. And a lot of other people agree with me. And then obviously we have the distillery processing, we have aging on site, as well as a tasting and bottle bar, and then an education room. So every Saturday and Sunday, we have educational classes. I run them on Sundays. And then my compatriot, who is also named Julian, strangely enough, runs them on Saturday. So we've got stuff going on all the time. Come and see us. You certainly can spend a day, take a tour, have a meal. Come see us for a blending class. We have blind tastings. We have chocolate pairings. We have all kinds of cool stuff. And bottle your own, right? And bottle your own. Yeah, bottle your own, blend your own. Yeah, one of our most popular classes, in fact, is blend your own. And that's a fun one where I usually, in fact, this last blend your own that I did, I think that you said you might have some friends in. I pulled a single barrel cask of the 10 year for them to blend with. And some of the better blends were with, I always do a wild card. Like I said earlier, we have some experimental things and we've been messing around with amber roasted corn bourbon. which it's really, really awesome. And one of the best blends from that class was a blend of amber roasted bourbon that I made four years ago and the 10 year old straight from the cask.

Wow. So let's talk about availability and accessibility. So everybody's listening to us. We're, we're pawning over your 10 year old hammer here. Now, where can they get it? What's the availability? Is it limited?

Is it, uh, so yeah, luckily the 10 year is actually better stock than, um, I think the, For now we have plenty of the run finish and for now we have plenty of the double look but you know as as finished products those are a little harder to kind of plan out for your demand right especially when we're pushing the finishing barrel out two years on those we have we have pretty solid stock of the tenure we are distributing it actively to indiana. Illinois, Kentucky, and Florida at this point with plans to expand through RMDC to five to seven other states in the next year. However, our online partners have been awesome, and I think we can ship to something like 39 or 40 states directly through our website. So you can go to westforkwhiskey.com and go to the Buy Now port. Of course, we get questions all the time. We can't actually ship to Indiana, the state that we're in, right? We wouldn't be making bourbon if we weren't doing something like Kentucky where you couldn't drink the actual stuff in the places it was made. But we can ship to a lot of states. Directly through our website and that's that's probably if you're outside of those four states that I mentioned If you're in those four states and we're not at your local bourbon, honeyhole You need to yell at them and say they need to carry us. So cool Yeah, this one's great. This is just an easy sipper, especially I think this is a great summer whiskey, right? It's not it's not overpowering. It's not too proofy. It's proofy enough. It's nice and sweet. It's easy sipping and It just says, Hey, come and come have another sip.

I'm kind of wondering how it goes with some ribs.

Oh, amazing. In fact, I'm spoiled in that I can use my bourbon barrel staves in my smoker. You can really tell. You don't even just a stave or two cut up, you can really tell that whiskey influence. Maybe it's just me because I taste this stuff all the time. Barbecue and whiskey, I'm a big fan of both of those things.

When somebody comes to your facility, They, they drive over to the Indianapolis area from Ohio or come up from Kentucky or in Illinois or wherever it might be. What can they expect on a visit?

Yeah. So, uh, you'll walk right in. We have a wonderful hostess, especially during the weekends named Rindy. She's an amazing person. Uh, she'll figure out, uh, what kind of trouble. you are likely to get into for the day and help you kind of guide through whether you want to take a class or a tour or have a meal. But you can expect a lot of energy and a lot of fun energy I had a good time for sure. Our tour guides are awesome. We run tours. I think right now we're doing it every 30 or 45 minutes that we do kind of a quick and dirty tour. So you can always hop right into a tour. We do a cool tasting in the middle of all of our barrels for the tour where you get some of the basics, right? We also have a thieving tour, which is a little more in depth. You get some directly from the barrel. Then again, lots of educational opportunities, everything from blend your own whiskey to chocolate pairings, to building your own whiskey collection, to blind tasting, to how to make whiskey. I would recommend that they take a look at our website if there's someone that gets overwhelmed easily because we certainly have a lot of options as far as things to tickle your fancy when you're in the Bourbon Palace.

So I know there's a lot of breweries in your area. Have you looked at in like barrel finished? You know, that you give them your barrel and they give it back kind of thing.

Yeah. We have done a number of those. I'm not a huge fan of beer barrel finishes. The best one that we've ever done by far and away is with Sun King Brewing. And they're one of the biggest breweries in the state and also just great friends of ours. They were really kind of our first mentors in the game, even though they weren't in Whiskey there in beer. We were very close geographically in our first locations and we had some mutual friends But we've done beer finishes with a ton of craft Indiana breweries And in fact, we usually say hey, you can have the barrel for free Just put our logo on there and say you made it with our barrel The only ones that have made it back to us. I think so far though have been the Sun King finishes that we've done

Sun King, one of my favorite cremails on the planet. That's a banger. I love their cremails. Yeah.

That's just an easy drinking craft beer, right? Oh yeah, definitely. Yeah. And we are great friends with both of the owners, Dave Colt, who's kind of their brains of their operation, is a good, good friend of mine and really has been a mentor to me, just kind of industry-wise. And he being a technical person who has become kind of a business person, right, as you grow up in a business, that kind of happens. because I didn't know anything about business before we started this one. So, yeah, they've been awesome to us. Great brewery, great beer.

Great way to learn business, start one, right?

Exactly, because you don't have a choice. It's either you're going to learn business or you're going to be out of business. Those are your two options.

So you guys have got to have some like irons in the fire. You've got to have some things that are like cooking, uh, things nobody knows about what's coming out soon. What are you guys doing that, uh, is going to just rock the world for some whiskey drinkers.

So obviously, you know, we haven't talked a lot about our West Fork products, but we're quietly aging those up and some, like I hinted to, some very unique and awesome mash bills. And we're trying to be, luckily we have, you know, this partnership with MGP for the old Hamer, Hugh Hamer products that lets us kind of be patient with those projects. But in addition to that, we actually control about, we sit on about six acres where we're at right now, but control about 25. and we are working on big plans to expand with a small outdoor concert venue, a detached rack house, a dog park, and some on-site living where we're going to kind of call it the West Fork District. And there'll be walking paths, retention ponds, really, really awesome, all kind of matchy-matchy and look really cool. In addition to that, We have the oldest of the old Hamer barrels that exists now that we have been kind of sniffing through all of the ones that we didn't already buy. And within the next year, we will have an old Hamer 12. And that old Hamer 12, you think this is a really sexy, sophisticated drink at 10, and those extra two years of, it's amazing what the oxygenation does kind of at the end once you have a lot of really awesome barrel in there and I am super excited because those barrels are phenomenal.

Do you expect to keep those at the 100 proof like you're keeping the tin or?

We are currently talking about that right now. And I think what will happen is we'll get our first allotment of barrels and usually we bring in, you know, 15, 20 barrels for our first allotment to try and get a good idea of the spectrum of where the recipe is going to live. right? I think after 15 or 20 barrels, especially MGP is one of the tightest manufacturers quality wise that exists. Get a really good idea. And then I think we'll probably battle each other for a couple weeks and we'll see who wins the high proof crowd or the 100 proof. We won't do it. I don't think we'll do it at any lower than 100. I really, shooting from the hip and tasting just a couple samples, I like the idea and I've always been a Weller guy, but like Antique 107 was a really, really big one for me, especially when you used to be able to just go buy the store picks, right? I used to collect store picks of 107 and just off the shelf. And so, I would really like for it to live, you know, maybe at least in that low one teens, high one-os range, but again, We'll see, we'll get the barrels in and, uh, we'll taste them and we'll, we'll, uh, we'll have some very, uh, heated discussions, uh, over, uh, many Drams and we'll figure it out.

Sounds good. Well, I've really enjoyed drinking your whiskies today, Julian there. All three of these have been absolutely wonderful. Thank you.

Thank you.

I really appreciate it. Do I have a favorite? Yeah. You know, it's a, it's a tough tug of war between the rum finished and the 10 year. I might lean towards the 10 year. I don't know, Todd, where are you? I'm really enjoying this 10. That rums fantastic.

but this 10 is, yeah, there's some special.

I feel like as I'm drinking this 10 too, that really creamy like cream, banana cream, right, is coming out now. A little bit more of that typical sour mash cream flavor, right?

But I'm kind of like one of those that like thinks that the Jimmy Russell school of eight to 12 is about that sweet spot for, you know, once it gets.

You're not wrong.

Yeah, so. I mean, I'm not saying there's not good whiskey beyond 12, but it's just kind of my sweet spot. My palate enjoys it. Sure.

Well, I think it's certainly the exemption, not the rule at that point. I think most barrels are best. 12, 13 years maybe, but I'm not a big pappy guy, especially those older pappies. The oldest whiskey that I, the oldest American whiskey I've ever really enjoyed was Rittenhouse 23. And woo wee, that's still, I mean, that's like liquid oil almost, right? So it's an experience. It's very different from your typical whiskey or bourbon. And of course that's a rye. Yeah.

Yeah. It's hit or miss in the teens. Oh, absolutely. You never know. You never know. You're going to get either over-oaked or you're going to get something extremely wonderful and you never know what it's going to be. You know, and, uh, it's funny coming from a guy named Julian and you're not, not big on the papi, but that's okay.

The pappies of the late 2000s, early teens were life-changing for me. The ones that I've had recently, I just don't think they've lived up to the hype. It's obviously great whiskey. The prices are insane now. At least if you can. If you don't have those connections or you know whiskey clubs are access right which i don't unfortunately i do taste it on occasion you know when someone that has a relatively good collection is kind enough to share it but, man the buffalo tray stuff of late late two thousand early teens happy and and be tech that's really what changed my life.

Well, Julian, we'd love to give you an opportunity to, uh, let our listeners know where they can find you like a website, social media. Uh, I mean, if you want to give your email address and cell phone number out, that's fine. That's entirely up to you. But I'm sure some of them are going to want to reach out and figure out how they're going to get their hands on this and that from you guys. So why don't you take a minute and let them know.

Yeah, absolutely. So the easiest way to find us and the least complicated way to find us is to go to our website. And there is where to buy, buy now, a tab that should direct you to the easiest way if you are able to get it shipped to your state, lucky enough, or if it is local to you. We have find me close to you maps where we try and keep that information more and more up to date all the time. But honestly, if you're listening to this podcast and you want to email me, my email is super easy. It's julian at westforkwhiskey.com. So I will give that out. I'm not going to give you my cell phone. My wife would probably be very upset with me for that because I take enough business calls as it is. But yeah, our website's the easiest, easiest way. However, if you're lucky enough to live in Indiana, Kentucky, Illinois, or Florida, if your local bourbon honey hole does not have us, they certainly can and should. So please request us. They can order it and should know what distributors to get it from.

Fantastic. Well, it's been a total pleasure to have you on here today. Thank you so much for sharing your whiskey with Todd and I. We appreciate you shipping us bottles and introducing your company to us and, and also to our listeners. They're ready, ready to get in the car and drive. So maybe, uh, maybe they'll end up at your, your location soon and do a tour and buy a few bottles.

I love it. If you're lucky enough to come on a Sunday, you should be able to catch me there. I'm there every Sunday teaching classes. So.

Fantastic. Well, thanks again. Yeah.

Thank you. Really appreciate you guys. Cheers. Cheers. 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, all those things every week. Todd and I, yeah, we get together. We have a great time. We have some laughs. We have some fun. We have some guests on like Julian Jones from West fork, uh, bringing his old hammer line for us to try and enjoy. We hope you'll give it a shot and try it out. It's, uh, it's absolutely delightful that 10 year was, uh, that was a jam, no doubt, right? Well, we hope you'd listen to us every single week. The best way not to miss an episode is scroll to the top of that app. You're on hit that subscribe button. That way you'll get that notification. The Jim and Todd have dropped another episode. We'll get you down the road on that sales call. We'll, uh, we'll help you out when you're cutting grass or sweeping the house or whatever it is that you do with your headphones on. We'd love to be part of your day, but in the meantime, we will see you down the bourbon road.

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