47. Nelson's Greenbrier - The Original Tennessee Whiskey

I've heard Austin's a lot like Nashville, actually, in some ways. It is. They got a music street there just like, you know, just like Nashville. And the whiskey scene there is just exploding.

Yeah.

And I wanted to say that you guys, you called it, you know, us whiskey nerds or guys that talk about whiskey all the time. And they're all over the nation now. We're spreading out and making, we're trying to preach the gospel on whiskey. I don't like to call us whiskey nerds at all. That's kind of shameful because I don't think it's, we're just, we're just,

You make it very clear you're not a sissy.

You're not a nerd. I'm definitely not a nerd. I don't think of us as that. We think that you appreciate a great product. You like to talk about it. We love to talk about it. That's what it's about right there.

Welcome to another trip down the Bourbon Road with your hosts, Jim and Mike. So grab a glass of your favorite bourbon and kick back.

We would like to thank Tommy and Gwen Mitchell from Log Heads Home Center for supporting this episode of the Bourbon Road. Find out more about their fine rustic furniture at logheadshomecenter.com. Hello, everyone. I'm Jim Shannon.

And I'm Mike Hyatt.

And this is The Bourbon Road. And today, Mike, where are we?

We are at Nelson Greenbier Distillery in Nashville, Tennessee. You know, this is one of my favorite places to come in the United States.

Well, it's always good to be in Nashville. Yeah. It's always good to be down here. You and I have a good time here. We brought the wives this time. We're going to hit the honky-tonks tonight.

Yeah, I think Vivian and Mel are probably drinking wine or drinking whiskey somewhere in Nashville right now without us. They're going to be in good shape when we find them. Yeah. It's Valentine's Day. But who do we have with us today? We got Andy Nelson and his brothers, not with us today, but they are the, not founders.

What would you call it? We call ourselves founders or co-refounders, maybe. Reestablishers.

Yeah.

Choose your own title. But you're the owners. Well, Andy, it's a pleasure to have you on the show today. Yeah, likewise. Thanks for having me. So before we sat down with you here, and we're actually in your conference room in the distillery here. Mike and I just took a tour. And you can actually hear the tours going by on the outside. So we might pick up a little bit of that when we're talking here. But hey, guys, understand, this is a working distillery. They've got a lot of tours going on. Really popular place.

Yeah, we had Ben as a tour guide and he very informative, knew the history, the lineage of Nelson Greenbrier all the way from Germany, all the way to Nashville, Tennessee. And I, you know, I love that you're incorporating that history into your tours. It's a great story and I always love a story, right? Yeah.

Well, we don't like to waste a whole lot of time getting to the whiskey, so Andy, we'd like you to introduce what you have for us as the first pour in the first half.

I would be happy to. So this is our newly released, as of just a few months ago, our Nelson's Greenbrier Tennessee Whiskey. So this is the namesake whiskey of the company. And like you said, the history is a big part of what we are. It's the reason that our company exists now. And this brand is kind of the big part of the history. So this is the original label as it once was. And this is the original mash bill as well. Corn, wheat, malted barley. Put it at 91 proof just to honor the year that Charles Nelson passed away, which was 1891. you know, drink up.

Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. So this, this is a Tennessee whiskey. Correct. Yeah.

So it does, it does undergo that Lincoln County process. Tennessee weeded whiskey. Tennessee weeded whiskey.

That's right.

How many other Tennessee weeded whiskies are there? Is there any at all? Not many. I am not a hundred percent sure actually. Um, There's probably got to be, you know, most people know the kind of big two Tennessee whiskeys, but they're probably 40 or so members of the Tennessee Distillers Guild, fairly relatively newly formed in the last few years. But yeah, we're, you know. I'm not quite sure how many other weeded ones there are.

I don't know, but I know this, Tennessee's got it going on because there's a lot happening down here with the new Tennessee Whiskey Trail and all the distilleries that are coming to light.

And it's a long state. So to do that trail is where Kentucky has everything kind of concentrated around Louisville, Kentucky and Lexington. Tennessee spread off all the way from Knoxville, all the way back down to Memphis, right?

Yeah, you can tell. I mean, it's about probably a seven hour drive from east to west borders of the state. So yeah, it's pretty well concentrated, like a whole bunch of distilleries on the trail in the eastern portion of the state, Upper East Tennessee and such, and then a handful of here in Nashville, and then one or two over west of Memphis.

Well, it's got kind of a golden to amber color. I think the nose on it is, it's soft like you'd expect out of a weeded whiskey, but it's got, it's got a nice caramel nose to it. It's got a little bit of a kind of a banana, peanutty nose to it. You get that Mike?

Well, I don't know. I'm already over here drinking, you know what I'm talking about. Put a weaned whiskey in front of me and I'm going to sip on it all day. What I do get in the taste of it though, was we were talking on the tour, is I get peanut butter. Not just nuttiness. I get peanut butter off of this. Maybe that's the oiliness of it or something.

Now what's the proof of this, Andy? 91. 91 proof, that's right. And this is a blend of different aged whiskeys?

It is, yeah. It's different ages and from, you know, column and pot still. It's a blend of whiskeys from, you know, a little bit of two-year-old and then the vast majority of it is four or five years old. Yeah, I think Ben told us it was greater than 75 percent of the older whiskeys, right? That's right. OK. Yeah. And the older stuff is from a pot still here that I'm sitting here looking at right out the window now. And I call that Miss Louisa, named after my triple great grandmother who ran the distillery after Charles, her husband, passed away. My triple great grandfather.

Well, let's get into that story. How how did you find out about your the, the distillery itself.

Well, we grew up knowing a little bit about it, but I mean a very, very little. So we just thought you were some just backwards moonshiners. Basically we, you know, we didn't even, we were so young and didn't even have necessarily a thought that went even that far. It was, what we had heard was this kind of fantastical story of, you know, our ancestor falling off a boat in the Atlantic Ocean with the family fortune and gold kind of attached to him somehow. And then that there was some sort of whiskey thing in Greenbrier, Tennessee. But at that point, we didn't know where Greenbrier, Tennessee was. And we didn't even necessarily believe You know, we'd heard dad tell this story of, you know, what we now know as Charles's father falling off the boat with the gold. But we just thought it was kind of, you know, storytellers embellishment type of thing. And so that's that's kind of the background of what we had known growing up. And so kind of skeptical a bit. And then 2006, I was right out of college, about a year out of college. Charlie still had a semester left. And our dad had gone in with some buddies to buy a full cow worth of meat from this butcher in Greenbrier, Tennessee. So Greenbrier, by the way, is about 30 minutes north of us here in Nashville. And right between us and the Kentucky border. So we go up there to buy, to pick up our quarter of the cow worth of meat from this butcher. And we stopped to get gas right before we get there. And there's this historical marker, which you guys saw on the tour. There's a picture of it up on our, on our wall here in the tasting room. It said Nelson's Greenbrier Distillery on it. And as soon as we saw that, it was just this wild moment. Like, oh my gosh, this is real. Clearly, what we had thought of, maybe he was a moonshiner, maybe we didn't know if the business was legit or anything. Until this moment, we realized they're probably not given historical markers to just ne'er do well moonshiner. That's a big deal. And so it was kind of this immediately surreal moment. And it said, one mile east on Long Branch Road, Charles Nelson opened the Greenbrier Distillery. And it all became real. And it was just this kind of crazy moment. So what could we do but fill up the tank and head over to the butcher's house? And maybe he knew a little bit more. So we filled the tank. We head about a mile east. And we get to the butcher's house. And it's, by the way, just this kind of country butcher. It's his house and then the kind of slaughterhouse a little bit. behind that on his property. So we went and we asked him what he knew about the old distillery and he said, well, I know a good bit, but look across the street there. So, you know, probably 50, 100 yards away, saw this old barrel warehouse that we saw driving up, but we just didn't know what it was. And it was this old barrel warehouse from the old distillery. And we walked in there, saw it, smelled it, smelled like old tobacco because they used it to cure and smoke tobacco after the distillery shut down. Spoiler alert, this distillery gets shut down eventually before we bring it back. So then we went to the original spring house. The spring was still running, went and drank from the spring. And, you know, each again, each moment, each passing step that we took was just a bit more surreal. And it was just you know, almost an out-of-body type feeling. Like, this is crazy.

With fireworks, we're probably just going off in your head at that time, right? A young guy just graduated from college. Yeah, absolutely.

Here's my fortune in the world right here. 100%. And so we go, and it was still kind of like, all right, kind of processing it, you know, in our minds and figuring, what is this all about? Then the butcher said, well, why don't you go to Greenbrier Historical Society just a couple blocks back from where you came. So we went and this old Victorian house kind of dedicated to the history of the town of Greenbrier and different rooms with different sort of themes, if you will. And one of those rooms is about the distillery. So we looked and there's glass cases and things on the wall of old artifacts, old ads and articles and such, some of which you see here in the distillery on our tour. But the thing that really, really kind of brought it home to us was this glass case with these two original bottles of Greenbrier Tennessee Whiskey with our name on it. And it really was just this boom, this moment where we knew this is what we're here to do. And these bottles looked almost exactly the same as the bottle we're drinking from now. So we've taken that, you know, that old label, the actual, the bottle mold, the glass mold, we actually had 3D scanned and recreated that exact mold and made a couple of modifications to make the glass a little bit stronger than, you know, from the, pre-1900s. But yeah, that's what we did. And so trying to recreate it as much as we could. That's awesome.

That's a great story. Well, let's go into the way, way back machine just a little bit. And let's talk about your great, that's three greats, right? Great, great, great grandfather. That's right. So what we were able to gather from the tour and some of the discussions out there is he was a kind of a candle maker, soap maker, and this was in Germany in the early 1800s.

Yeah, yeah, kind of mid 1800s. So Charles, who was my, like you said, triple great grandfather. So his father, my quadruple great grandfather, was John Philip Nelson, and he owned a soap and candle factory in Germany. So Charles was born in 1835, as a matter of fact, on the 4th of July, which I think is kind of a cool thing. In Germany? In Germany. Yep, small town called Hagenau. And so John Philip the father decided that he wanted to move the family to America. So he sold the factory and had all the proceeds from the sale and the rest of the family fortune converted into gold coin and had special clothing made to hold all of the gold on his person, you know, sewn into his clothing for the boat ride over. And so this was 1850. And they got on a boat called the Helena Sloman, set sail to New York from Hamburg. And while they're at sea, big storms, high winds, the boat's damaged and slowly in sinking condition for several days. And another boat comes by to rescue the passengers, kind of transfer them from the Helena Sloman onto the Devonshires, that was called, on these little rescue Dingy's if you will and so everyone's transferred except for the final the final boat holding I want to say 12 or 13 passengers I can't remember the number but John Philip was among them on the very last one and of course remember he had the family fortune and gold sewn into his clothing so So everyone gets there safely, but John Philip's on the last boat. In the transfer from ship to ship, that boat is, I guess, overtaken by a wave and capsizes. Well, everyone on board drowns, including John Philip, of course, probably quicker than the rest of them because he has, you know, God knows how much weight weighing him down with the family fortune and gold. So he's somewhere, as far as I know, still at the bottom of the Atlantic. but the rest of the family ended up making it back to New York safely. But of course, with quite literally nothing but the clothes on their backs. And so it was kind of that world that they landed in. The context that I love to kind of mention is if you've ever seen the movie Gangs of New York, that's the time that they land. I mean, this is 1850, that movie, you know, Bill the Butcher is just dominating New York City in the 1850s. It's a tough time. Oh yeah. Especially for a young fatherless family. Exactly. I mean, Charles was 15 at this point and kind of he and mom were head of the household at that point. So just having watched quite a traumatic ordeal with their father falling off the boat and drowning with every penny that they owned. So that was kind of the end of that chapter and the beginning of the next.

So they get to New York and obviously they've got to start a new life. They don't have all the money that they had received. I guess to book passage on a ship like that, you've got to have a few dollars, right?

Yeah, I mean, I'd imagine so. It's a cool sort of fun fact about that, Helena Sloan. It only took three voyages from Hamburg to New York and back. On the previous two also came a couple other famous German immigrant families, and that was the Heinz family of the Heinz food empire. I guess they settled in Pittsburgh. And then the Steinweg family, which was of course anglicized into Steinway of a particularly well-known piano manufacturer and maker. So kind of a cool thing. And then Charles Nelson and what would eventually become Nelson's Greenbrier Distillery on the third and final voyage. So your third great-grandfather becomes head of the family at 15.

He has to earn wages in order to help support the family.

Yeah, he finds work at a soap and candle factory in New York. It's called the Hazen Schultz firm. Works there for a couple years with his little brother. Probably not earning too much, but then they moved the family up to Cincinnati, Porkopolis as it's known, and becomes a butcher there. Also a much bigger, well, I don't know if it was a bigger German population, but Cincinnati still today is quite well known for its big German population.

You wouldn't know it because in World War II they took and stripped most of the street names off of the streets there in Cincinnati. up near Finley Market is the market there they have in Cincinnati. And all the streets there were named German names, but in World War II, they stripped almost every street name off and renamed everything to American names.

Oh, interesting.

I didn't know that. I didn't know that either.

Good fun fact. I lived up in Cincinnati for four years, and just a little bit about it up there.

Yeah, well, cool. Yeah, I did not know that. Although we did learn that it was called Porkopolis by a Cincinnati resident who came down to Nashville and took a tour here. They let us know about that, and that was kind of cool. And a matter of fact, we learned a lot more about that shipwreck from another guest here who took a tour. It was this guy, Canadian guy, who I don't remember exactly. He talked to Charlie, but he was like somehow involved in the sort of maritime rescue and history of that area. And he said, so he ended up charting the course of the Helena Sloan and showed us approximately where it where it went down. And as it turns out, that was actually really close to where the Titanic went down as well. I hadn't I'd never thought about specifically geographically where the Titanic was, but it was a little bit off the coast of Newfoundland. So this was quite a time before the Titanic. But this was an actual steam vessel, right? That's right. It was the first German steamship to make that transatlantic journey.

So I guess if you're looking to make that journey from Europe to the US or the Americas back then, a steamship could cut your trip in half or a fourth.

I would guess so. I mean, let's see, it was about, I want to say it was about a month or maybe six weeks journey. Cause I know they set sail in October and I can't remember the exact date of 1850 and then it capsized in November.

I'm sure they had to make several stops, especially for a steam ship to pick on coal or more wood to make steam with and stuff. And then it would take, Me and Jim are both sailors. Old sailors, I guess, at this point. Oh, it's salty sailors you. Dirty old salty sailors you've had.

All right. Let's try to pick up where you left off. They're in Cincinnati. What's your great-great-great-grandfather doing for work at this time?

So he becomes a butcher there and kind of as the big, as a butcher, he learns a lot about the sales and the production of whiskey. And the reason for that is he has these relationships with distillers who are sending their spent grain to the animals while they're still alive to feed them. And so he kind of gains that relationship before He of course then butchers the animals. By the way, going even further back to his days in soap and candles, the kind of raw goods that he needs include animal fat to render down and create these ingredients for the soap and candles. So that's likely how he became a butcher, kind of learned about that and said, maybe I'm interested in this, let's do it. And then it just kind of evolved. Anyway, he's a butcher in Cincinnati, learns about that. And then about 1858, he moves down here to Nashville and starts his own grocery business on what is now Second Avenue. But back then, it was known as Market Street. And so really, the foundation of that store was his three best-selling products, which were coffee, meat, and whiskey. Some know it as breakfast, lunch, and dinner. But I'm not judging. This is our business you're supporting here. Thank you very much. Essentially, he was buying whiskey from a distillery up in Greenbrier, Tennessee. Like I said, it was about 30-40 minute drive from here now, so it took a little longer back in those days. But that remained a very common practice. They called it rectifying back then, as they sometimes do now, but not as much. Anyway, so he his whiskey he was buying from that calling it Greenbrier Tennessee whiskey. He was he was kind of a pioneer of advertising and marketing and such as you'll see by some of the ads and articles you'll see again here at the distillery on the walls and whatnot, but he. was also one of the first to put that whiskey into a glass bottle as opposed to selling it by the full barrel or the jug, you know? And so that helped him a lot in gaining a lot of popularity with the everyday consumer as opposed to just like a full, excuse me, I just nailed the mic there. That gained a lot more popularity with the consumer as opposed to selling, say, a full barrel to a tavern or whatever, where they just tap that barrel right on the bar. He was able to sell a lot of product and he realized that his whiskey was becoming his most profitable and best selling. What he decided to do was give His other two vendors, his butcher and his coffee guy, let them take their respective crafts elsewhere and do what they wanted with those products. His butcher was Mr. Hill, who went and started what eventually evolved into what's now known as H.G. Hill Food Stores, which is a Middle Tennessee family-owned grocery chain here. And then his coffee guy was a guy named Joel Cheek. And Joel took that blend of coffee two blocks up the street to what was then the Maxwell House Hotel. So that's actually where Maxwell House Coffee comes from. So they had some great partners. Oh yeah, for sure. It's kind of amazing thinking about the eventual power, like the seeds of power in the brands that he had in that one space at one time.

To me, it's going back to Cincinnati. how fortunate you are today that he chose whiskey over beer, which I think most Germans would pick up beer. And Cincinnati is a big beer city. And how many brewers are there? And he chose whiskey over that. And maybe there's some lineage there to MGP a little bit, maybe? Could be.

Yeah, I bet. You know what's really interesting is the guy who is currently the president or CEO of MGP, Gus Griffin. We know him and we've been customers of MGP for a long time, but we actually knew him before he was at MGP. just kind of on a personal level. And, you know, he kind of helped us a little bit very early on before we really had a business going. But the point is we knew him personally. And when he became president of MGP, he was kind of touring all their facilities that they had across the country, one of which is now, I think, known as Illinois corn processing. And he was just kind of looking through the archives and he texted my brother this picture of a receipt from, I want to say, the 1870s or 1880s. And it was a receipt for what was it, 105 barrels, I think. And it was from, it wasn't called Illinois corn processing back then, but it was a distillery back then. And they sold barrels to Charles Nelson. And he texted Charlie this receipt and he says, it looks like we've been doing business a lot longer than we thought. And that was just the coolest thing ever because You know, part of the reason we started out, you know, using doing Belme bourbon as our product is because we knew that it was a sourced product back then. It was, you know, used in conjunction with a third party distillery, which is exactly what we did. And it's exactly why we did it that way. And it was just such a cool thing to kind of get that like, oh my gosh, this has been happening since, you know, the eighteen hundreds and we just didn't even know it. Wow.

So he builds this brand in Nashville, Tennessee. Now he's sort of divorced from the meat and the grocery and the things and the coffee. And how big does the brand become?

Well, it becomes by, so 1885, it is the largest distillery in the state of Tennessee. Greenbrier Tennessee Whisky is the largest Tennessee whiskey, you know, that in the nation. I mean, it's sold nationwide from coast to coast. It's sold, you know, as far as Europe, Philippines, Russia, from what we can can gather from records and such. So it was a very, very widespread brand. And I think the reason that I mentioned the sort of glass bottle sales is I don't know that he was the first, certainly, but he was he was right there in the beginning of selling by the bottle. And that that's got to help and change the business altogether, I think. For sure. When you're talking about that pre-1900, it's not easy to get worldwide distribution, at least overseas distribution for a spirits product, but he was. We continue to hear all kinds of cool anecdotes and stories about the brand and folks who've lived in Greenbrier their whole lives, just kind of stories passed down. over the years, but yeah, so it becomes really big. And then 1891, Charles dies and leaves the distillery to his wife, Louisa, who is of course my triple great-grandmother. And speaking of our still that I'm looking at right here, we named that Miss Louisa after her. And then you can see her mural up there on the distillery wall, production floor wall. And so she's a big important part of the distillery that whose history really got lost a lot. Um, there's, there's plenty of stuff that we found about Charles, but very little we found about Louisa. And so we wanted to try to kind of, you know, pump up her history and bring that highlight that as much as we could. Cause she was just as big a part as Charles was.

So women really didn't own businesses at that time. They couldn't vote, right? Right. Um, and that was probably a weird thing for a man to leave his entire fortune to, to his wife instead of his oldest son. Right. Yeah. And I'm sure there were some struggles with it, but she kept it running.

Yeah, she for sure did. And that's exactly why we're so proud of this. I mean, you look at, again, at the context of it. She didn't have the right to vote, you know, here in Nashville, the buckle of the Bible belt, so to speak. It was most definitely seen as a very sinful enterprise and not something that many people were proud to be associated with. Louisa most certainly was. I mean, she kept the thing going and grew the business. And with certainly tons of pressure from the outside, whether it be just regular society at large or specific kind of temperance groups, you name it, whatever kind of pressure there was, And so she ran it up until 1909. So 1909 was when statewide prohibition hit Tennessee. Now that's 10 years before federal prohibition and the Volstead Act. So it was kind of unique. Tennessee was one of the first states to enact prohibition on that statewide level. pure speculation here. But in my mind, it's likely that it was almost a relief for Louisa to shut the thing down, almost like, okay, this is just a nice excuse to like, get out of the business. Because now it was, well, forgive the silly word. It's like it was legitimately illegal now. It's something that you know, okay, we can get out of this, get the pressure off us and go into banking. Now, how did they get into banking? As it turns out, Charles, two years before he died in 1889, ended up investing and helping start a bank called Nashville Trust Company. And so they had that, you know, because he was a very well, sort of wealthy businessman in his day before he died. And so he was able to get into that venture. And so the family had something very lucrative to fall back on, fortunately. They didn't have to get into bootlegging or whatever. So it was perhaps an easy decision. I don't want to speak for Louisa, but this is just, again, my speculation. It kind of makes sense. And so that also would go into, you know, we're asked plenty, how in the world did you just have no idea what was going on? Growing up, you didn't know anything about this. And my thinking is that it's In all likelihood, once it shut down, Louisa was not likely telling the kids in the family, hey, hold your heads high. We're still proud distillers. It was like, all right, look, this history is over. This is done. We did well, but we're in banking now. We don't need to be going talking about how proud sinners we are or that kind of thing. And so with every generation, Thereafter, it got talked about less and less, and so each generation knew less and less. Hence, when it got to Charlie and I, and even our dad barely knew anything at all, just because it got swept under the rug over the preceding 100 years.

She did some pretty honorable stuff, though. Her business shuts down. She takes all of her assets, which is liquid assets, and ships it up to Louisville, Kentucky, and still is selling it. But she, Nelson, or green buyer, Tennessee, would probably be dead today if it wasn't for her because she paid her workers, right, for six years?

Yeah, so when the state enacted Prohibition, the distillery shut down, but she still had about 8,000 barrels left in inventory. And so because Kentucky had not yet enacted Prohibition, they sent the barrels up there to Louisville. And they had an office at 100 East Main Street, which is right now kind of the heart of Whiskey Row. I think right now that building is actually a new University of Louisville art department building, if I'm not mistaken. Nice fancy kind of glass building looks cool. But yeah, and that was one of the things, I mean, so this is again, one of the unfortunate things about Louisa and her history is that it kind of got lost. And so there's so many details about these things, you know, treating the workers right and et cetera, things that we found from Charles's obituary. I mean, as a matter of fact, one of my favorite things that I, that's on there is talking about, I don't wanna butcher the quote exactly now, but paraphrasing, it was like, Charles wouldn't just pay people what they would take, he paid them what they were worth. And there's example in his obituary talking about if someone worked who would work for $50 a month, but they were worth 100, he'd pay them that 100, because that's what they're worth. Treating people, with respect and paying them their due, not just what they would take to get by. So that was a really important thing to us. That's an amazing legacy. Yeah, it was really an amazing thing to hear and makes us feel a lot better about, not that we had anything to feel bad about, but makes us feel very good about his legacy and how he kind of treated people and the way he went about things.

That's not the typical tycoon of the day right there. Exactly. A guy that back then, the tycoon of a business would try to squeeze every little penny he could get out of his workers and out of his company. And it sounds like he was more worried about, Hey, if I pay this guy better, he's going to do better work for me. Therefore my company is going to do better. And it sounds like he was him and Louisa were both doing great things. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I tell you what, let's keep sipping on this Tennessee whiskey here, and we're going to take a short break. And when we come back, we'll visit another expression of yours, and we'll talk a little bit more about what you have going on and what's in the future for you guys. Sounds good? All right. Let's do it. All right. We would like to thank Tommy and Gwen Mitchell from Loghead's Home Center for supporting this episode of the Bourbon Road. Loghead's Home Center, nestled in the hills of Kentucky, is an industry leader in building handcrafted rustic furniture. Family-owned and operated, they take pride in offering only the very best for their customers. The Logheads, and that's what they like to call themselves, are skilled woodcrafters who are passionate about creating rustic furniture for people who appreciate the beauty of natural wood. Owners Tommy and Gwen don't just sell the rustic lifestyle, they live it. And you can be sure that Loghead's furniture will always be handcrafted in Kentucky by artisans who embrace the simple way of life. Loghead's rustic furniture is made from northern white cedar, a sustainable wood that's naturally rot and termite resistant. Its beauty and quality will add warmth to your earthy lifestyle for generations to come. Be sure to check out everything they have to offer at LogHeadsHomeCenter.com. And while you're at it, give Tommy and Gwen a shout on Facebook or Instagram at LogHeads Home Center.

Hey, so we're back here at Nelson Greenbrier Distillery. Andy, I got to say, man, that Nelson Greenbrier Tennessee whiskey, for it to be a weeded whiskey, I got to applaud you guys. What do you think, Jim?

I like it. I like it a lot. I think it's actually got a very There's a lot of notes to it. I think you can taste the story they're trying to tell with it. I mean, I picked up a lot of notes. Honestly, I think that you have a little bit of that younger whiskey in there, and I think it brings something to the game. It really does. Obviously, the older four- and five-year-old whiskeys give it the body and the and the breadth that it needs to be a good whiskey. But the notes that you bring in from those younger whiskeys are nice. They're a nice touch. Thank you.

I'm super glad that Michael Veach is the one that introduced us to that. He pulled it out and I'm so glad he introduced it to us. Only thing I'm kicking myself is, is me and Jim were down here, I think the weekend that was released, we actually walked in here and you guys were slam packed. And we were like, our wives were like, no, we are not doing this right now.

There was a lot of people.

There was a lot of people. But I'm kicking myself because we didn't pick up a bottle that day. Yeah. If I'd have known it was weeded whiskey, I'd have grabbed a bottle right there. Oh, yeah.

Well, yeah, I know. I certainly appreciate the feedback. And we're really excited because we knew that there was going to be a little bit of this younger whiskey. But we went through plenty of flavor profile tastings and figuring out what the blend was going to be. And inventory-wise, this is what it had to be for now. about a year or less from now, youngest will be three years old. And then a year from then, youngest will be four. So even having two or three year old whiskey in here will only be a temporary thing as our inventory continues to age. So I'm really excited about that to see. Well, I'm a true believer that a younger whiskey does have things to offer.

A lot of those things will disappear with age, even the good stuff along with it. You know, some of the nice notes that are brought by Younger Whiskey will tend to disappear over time as well. I guess, you know, another company that kind of does that blending with the Younger Whiskeys is Bartstown Bourbon Company. And they've got a couple of expressions that include some Younger Whiskeys and they're very nice, very nice. So hats off to you guys on that. It's a wonderful expression, but let's move on and let's talk about what we have for the second half, Por. What did you bring for us for the second half?

So this is Belmead Reserve. So this is our newest expression of Belmead Bourbon. And this one is 113.6 proof. Each batch is going to be slightly different because it's a variation, a handful of barrels that are selected. We no longer For the time being, we're doing a single barrel program, but we certainly have picked barrels. We'll taste each barrel one by one and make sure to see if it's kind of single barrel worthy or will work better in the blend. And so a lot of these that we use for the reserve are single barrel worthy, meaning they're just kind of outstanding on their own and really need to be highlighted. So that's what we've got in this reserve. so what did you say the proof was get on this this one's 113.6 okay great he definitely kicked it up a little bit yeah so we had the was it the 91 proof uh-huh is that right you're the 91 proof version of this during the tour yeah okay yeah i'm sorry the the bell meat what was the bell meat classic is 90.4 proof 90.4 okay

So yeah, this is a Well, I'll let you guys kind of yeah your thing but little kind of bolder flavors a little more dark more intensity Yeah, definitely dark dark Jerry Now what is the typical age of this? Um, you know, you know, seven to 10, seven to 10, you know, we can go, go older.

Don't usually go younger, but really the, the important thing to us in any kind of blend is not the age or frankly, even the source of the spirit. It's, you know, the flavor profile and the end of it. Cause We've learned over the years that blending and flavor profile kind of creation is really one of the big keys to this. You can be the world's best masher or best fermentation scientist, best distiller, best any of these things. But even if you have really excellent things, you can put them in a blend and they just don't turn out as well as the sum of their parts. So the key is taking something and yielding something that's greater than the sum of its parts. Right. And that's where the art lies. Yeah, exactly.

So this is definitely a darker liquid than your other. And you would expect that from a, this is more or less a cast strength version of a small batch. How many barrels go into a batch of this typically?

As of right now, not usually more than seven. To be honest, a lot of that is driven by the largest physical tank that we have, can't really hold more than that. So that's one thing.

You know, I was going to say that the Bellme brand has become quite respected in the world out there, in the world of, you know, us consumers, nerds, absolutely. You can always expect a great batch from Bell Mead. Bell Mead also has some other expressions and we can talk about those later. But it is something that usually gives an impression of it's going to be a good bourbon. You can trust what's in the bottle there.

Well, good. Thank you. I appreciate that. I mean, we certainly worked very hard to do the best job that we can. And then I think one of the big elements that can sometimes be left out is that kind of the heart and soul that you put in to your product. You know, you can have all the science you want, but If you don't feel the passion for it, that's going to come through in the end result. We have a lot of passion for this and we feel very strongly about it. The hope is that that comes through. Even something as simple as you know, again, going back to kind of treating employees with respect, doing, you know, kind of doing things the right way as human beings, as opposed to just trying to like, certainly not trying to fleece anybody or whatever, but I just, you know, being decent and putting your best foot forward and having a passion for it is really a big key ingredient.

So Bill needs a plantation. It was a plantation at one time. And there was also a Belle Meade racetrack here, right?

Yeah, so Belle Meade Mansion as of now is, you know, is one of the functioning nations leading thoroughbred farms back in those days. And now Belle Meade Mansion is just a, you know, it's a property that has, you know, tours and is a kind of an old historic venue. They have an event space as well. But the horses on the label were studs at Belmead Mansion back in those days. What are those horses' names? I know why you're asking. You know exactly why. For the viewers at home, listeners at home. So the one on the right-hand side of the label is named Bonnie Scotland, who was a famous English racehorse who, after his racing career was over, came to the US as a stud and ended up at Belmead Mansion. And so the original label for Belmead, actually, we have a copy of it in a newspaper ad in the tasting room just on the other side of this wall. And it shows a newspaper from May 1st, 1885, The Daily American, and it shows about a quarter page newspaper ad of you know, Belmead whiskeys, and it shows the original label. So the horse's names were written above them on that original label. So Bonnie Scotland, yeah, he was a founder of the Northern Dancer Bloodline very early on in that line, which, you know, most of the, pretty much all the horses that run in modern day Kentucky derbies can trace their bloodline back to Bonnie Scotland and that Northern Dancer Bloodline. Some of his descendants include War Admiral, Seabiscuit, Secretary, you know, Horses that everybody's heard of whether you're a horse person or not.

Yep.

Yeah. I mean, so yeah, big, big time names, triple crown winners, et cetera. Anyway, so the reason that we took the names off of the label was because the horse on the left goes by the name of Brown Dick. Yeah. So, I hope that makes sense to everybody. We get about a 50-50 blend of people who are like, oh, okay, I get it. And then the other people are like angry that we didn't leave it. Like, oh, yeah, I get that too.

But you know, times do change. And I think the connotation of that word kind of kind of changed in the 1930s, 1940s a little bit.

Yeah. Well, you know, the etymology of that word, it is what it is nowadays. So when we had literally everything that we owned on the line starting this business, it was like, no unnecessary risks, even if people you know, understand there are going to be some people who don't know what that is. And now you're like, Oh, that's weird. He has perfected his story on that.

He had it rolling. So he's got a good comedy routine going on in his tour. Yeah. It's really good. Yeah. We really appreciated him a lot.

He was, he's definitely one of your employees that's worth his money. I'd say. Yeah, for sure. He's a good one.

Okay, so let's now talk a little bit about that aha moment that you and your brother had when you were at the spring and the barrel house out in Greenbrier and sort of take it from there. So you guys decided that this is something you needed to do.

Yep. And so from the, you know, because the fortunate thing was we didn't have families, careers, any, you know, it was just kind of the world was, to quote the late great Tom Petty, the future was wide open. We had, we had nothing to, I mean, I was, we were both philosophy students in college. We weren't like on a particular track for a specific career or anything like that. And it was, we found this passion that we just didn't know was there. And so we had our, our kind of, Oh, I just had something in mind that was going to be funny, but I totally lost it.

I wanted to ask you, as a philosophy student, do you have to drink a lot of whiskey to do that?

You don't have to do anything. You can do whatever you want, and as long as it means something, you're all good.

I think I philosophize quite often when I'm drinking bourbon.

It helps for sure. It definitely helps. So did you drink whiskey or bourbon in college?

Uh, honestly, not a ton. I probably drank more beer, uh, in college, but, uh, shame on you. It may have been good though. Cause I find that even now I don't drink a ton. I just don't drink a ton generally. Um, and part of that is because, you know, if I'm out, I'll, you know, have a cocktail or two or, you know, I like to try a bunch of things. And so I never drink a lot of any one given thing.

And you think of that first drink of whiskey as a kid or growing up.

Honestly, it was, it was probably, uh, oh, yes, I can. I don't hear it. I'm not, I'm not going to talk about it on Mike, but, uh, no, it was fine. It was, uh, gosh, I can't remember the, what was it? It was some, some bourbon or whiskey. Anyway, it was, Whatever. There's no really great story. You steal it from your parents.

Come on now.

No, I think my buddy had some guy outside of the gas station get it for us or something. If you'd have been in Texas, that'd probably been me. I'm assuming the night did not end well. Uh, you know, as a matter of fact, maybe that's why I'm in such, uh, such good whiskey drinking shape. I don't know. I'm not in good whiskey drinking shape. I just, uh, is because that, that night actually only drank a little bit, but it was enough to just get that perfect buzz. And it was like, have that permagrin on me all night. And we were like, You know, of course we were 21 years old. Of course. And so the night ended actually quite well and it was very pleasant. And so that put a very good taste in my mouth, so to speak, for whiskey for the foreseeable future. So that was really good. It's not, you know, because I always hear people talking about, oh, I can't. I can't drink tequila. I had a bad night on that in college or, you know, those kind of classic tales of debauchery. But whiskey for me was actually a really good, pleasant experience at the first and, you know, the beginning.

So, so you get, you, you had that, that explosion of ideas, both you and your brother. Could you see the excitement in your brother's face?

Oh, a hundred percent. In fact, he was probably way more visibly excited than I was. I'm kind of like, I'm accused of that often where of not having any vis, I'm like, even though I know something is really awesome, I just kind of keep a straight face and I can't, I don't know. Yeah, even though I know I'm not, I'm not like trying to be that way, but people just, I'm hard to read, I guess, in an exciting situation. But he's not, he's, oh no, he's much more, cause he's, you know, he's the more outgoing guy. And so I, people will, He'll make a best friend in five minutes out of everybody in the room. And I'm just like, if someone's not coming up to me to introduce themselves, it's not because I hate people, it's just because I'm... naturally a lot more shy.

When we first met you today, I could see you when we shook hands. You gave me that eye up and down like, okay, this is my size, this fella up right here.

My philosophy isn't about me. For sure. I can definitely overanalyze things and just get in my own head a lot.

Well, I think, man, this is a great whiskey to drink.

Yeah, so this is a very rich and bold whiskey. I think this has a lot of flavor to it. It is, and I've had this before. Not this particular batch, but I've had it before. A lot of respect for it. I'm going to be hard. It's going to be hard for me not to carry a bottle out of here today when we leave. I'll be sure to tell you that. We know a guy we can help.

I was going to try to take Andy's coffee cup because I just keep looking at it. Oh yeah, keep Austin weird. He's a Texas guy. I grew up probably 90 miles north of Austin and Austin is definitely weird.

I don't know if I'm ashamed, it just is what it is, but I've never actually been to Austin. I was just in Dallas last week, earlier this week. I've heard Austin's a lot like Nashville, actually, in some ways. It is.

They've got a music street there, just like Nashville. And the whiskey scene there is just exploding.

Yeah.

I wanted to say that you guys, you called it, you know, us whiskey nerds or guys that talk about whiskey all the time and they're all over the nation now. We're spreading out and making, we're trying to preach, preach the gospel on whiskey. I don't like to call us whiskey nerds at all. Like that's kind of shameful because I don't think it's nerd. We're just, we're just, Well, you're bourbon bullshitters.

Well, you make it very clear. You're not a sissy. You're not a nerd.

I'm definitely not a nerd. You know, I don't think of us as that. And I would think that you appreciate a great product. You'd like to talk about it. We love to talk about it. You know, that's what it's about right there.

Yeah, I will. I for sure use the term nerd with great affection because I was, you know, everyone you use the word nerd, you kind of think back to high school and the groups and clicks. And I was, I was maybe not a high school nerd, but I was not a cool kid. That's for sure. And so I appreciated the so-called high school nerds a lot more. I identified with them a lot more. And so I just think of it a different way, you know, with, cause they're, they're sort of, sort of nerds for so many specialty things now. So that's the way I think of it, because I can definitely appreciate it and kind of enjoy it. But I also, for sure, understand. Maybe that's the philosopher in me coming out. There's not necessarily a right or wrong answer. There's pros and cons to both sides.

So you guys decided to go ahead and pull the trigger on this thing. Oh, yeah.

and I mean it's an uphill battle right starting a distillery and it's a big steep hill nobody wanted to open up their wallet to you no not even close so we yeah we started out and and our initial plan was to well if this shows how naive we were we thought that uh raising money was going to be the easy part you know it was kind of as simple as like oh we we know some rich people, we can do this. We got a cool story and let's do it. They'll give, you know, we gave ourselves like three months before we, you know, finished our goal of raising however much it was. And, uh, and so that did not happen at all. I mean, it literally took us two full years before we even got dollar one.

When you think about rich people, they like to make money. Exactly. Yeah.

It's kind of like, there's a, They didn't make their money by giving a bunch of unproven philosophy students a wild amount of money. Let's say you were 22, 24 at that time and you're asking people, a 24 year old give you some money. Yeah. And of course their questions were, well, you know, what's your, what's your sort of pedigree here? Do you, have you ever worked in a distillery? Have you ever run a business? Have you ever run a distillery? Have you, taken a business class even, and the answers to all of those were no. And so it's not an easy thing to hear. But we got this name. Yeah, exactly. And so what we heard over and over and over again was like, well, that's a great story. Good luck. So I'll support you if you guys can get this going. And so one of the things, the very frustrating things, it's hard to understand as an amateur fundraiser is when you first learn the idea that people saying, well, I've got a lot of money and I'm an investor. What's this guy or this gal doing? Are they in? No, but they're on the cusp. I'm like, all right, well, let me know if this person is in. And if they do it, then I'm in. And it's just that domino effect. It was like, but why can't, oh, come on, man, be bold. Like be that first guy, you know, step out on a ledge here. You know, it just took a while. So anyway, we had to kind of change up our business plan, reel things in and say, all right, let's and that at that time around that time is when we discovered what Belmead bourbon itself was. So we were first looking at the Tennessee whiskey because we knew a little bit more about that and we discovered, OK, he also made Belmead bourbon and he made it in such a way that he never actually distilled it himself. Charles didn't. He worked in conjunction with what's called the Sperry Wade and Company, which is on the little gold medallions on the most Belmead labels, SW and Co. And they were kind of instrumental in the founding of Belmead Mansion and that thoroughbred farm. And hence the name Belmead Bourbon. And so they had a distillery as well that they distilled it. And then Charles Nelson helped kind of age it, warehouse it, you know, bottle and sell it. that way. And so we figured, okay, what we can do is work with a third party contract distillery, MGP in this case, or LDI as it was back then, and start a little smaller. So we ended up You know, putting literally everything that we own on the line as collateral to get started working with MGP and, you know, outsourced pretty much everything at first to prove to people that, you know, we can do this. We'll show you that. you know, we don't have experience, but we've got the passion and we're not going to quit, you know, and so that's exactly what we did. It allowed us to, you know, grow some more revenues and then slowly attract more investors, people kind of believing in us. And then so we released Bellamy Bourbon in March 2012 here in Nashville. And then 2014, August 2014 was when we first laid down our first barrel of Tennessee whiskey. We, you know, built out our own distillery here that we're sitting in right now and have been distilling here and doing tours ever since.

So it's a steep learning curve, right? Go from, you know, students to owning and running a distillery.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, we're going from students just to students in a different capacity. I mean, I'm still a student. For sure. But there is nothing that keeps you as engaged as constantly learning and knowing that you've just got to keep this thing afloat and the thing that will keep you afloat is learning. what waters you're treading in now. I mean, just learning and taking it all in and having a bit of humility and knowing that there's no reason to have too big a head. It's like, we knew that we were not gonna be right about everything. We didn't even have enough confidence to be right in so many ways. It's just absorbing the world around us, talking to hundreds of people who had the experience and who Fortunately, gave us the respect to tell us a little bit about the business, the industry, the technicalities of making whiskey, how to set everything up and just, I mean, from dollar one business-wise and from proof gallon one production-wise. You guys worked with Dave Pickle early on, right? That's right, yeah. We worked with him very early on. We were one of his first clients and that was, It was tough because we were one of his first clients who signed up with us, but we also took so long to raise money that he then took on more clients and more clients who then, while they started working with Dave after us, they got product to market well before us. And it was like, what is, people are just passing us like we're going backwards here. But, you know, gradually we kind of got our feet under us, got the funding we needed to get really going as a proper business.

So your Belle Meade Bourbon entered the market, had relatively wide acceptance. It afforded you guys the necessary revenue you needed to build out your distillery. Now your distillery is here. What's the name of this area? Marathon Village. Marathon Village. So this is kind of the kind of a shop center with, for people who are not from Nashville, this is where you would find the Nashville American Pickers is right down from here. Yeah, right down the block.

Antique archaeology, which is the Marathon was a car made in Nashville, right?

Right, yeah. Marathon Motor Works is actually the name of the building at the end of the block. And then because we're in that neighborhood, the business that we actually share a wall with is Marathon Music Works. appropriately named for the kind of honoring the history of this block and neighborhood.

So you're in more or less the west side of downtown Nashville. And this is kind of a trendy area. So there's a lot of tourism here. You get a lot of visitors to your distillery tours here. It's a good spot for you.

It's great. I mean, we got very fortunate to find this space when we did. You know, we were looking at a space across town for a while and just trying to make it work. And for a handful of reasons, it didn't. Then we came across this spot and it was just perfect in every way.

So there's gotta be something inside of you that says, boy, it sure would be nice to be out in Greenbrier, but that's just not gonna work.

Not immediately anyway. I mean, it's still our plan to get something. We would love to build a much bigger facility up in, you know, in Robertson County at the very least. And so that's, we're still working towards that because it would be very helpful to have, to be able to produce on our own more than a 750 gallon batch at a time. Okay.

Well, let's talk a little bit more about some of the other expressions they have. Mike, we, we got to taste some of those today. Um, one of the, one of the things that we tried to, was that the Sherry cask finish?

At first I got, man, your dog here is awesome, man. Oh, thank you, Clyde. Yeah. Clyde. He's a good boy. We've seen, uh, I seem to attract dogs, which is not a bad thing.

I appreciate that. I think that tells you you're a good human.

Yeah. Yeah, that's Sherry. Sherry cask bourbon. Different expression and you guys kind of just leaped into everything and finished bourbons are a thing now. A lot of people are trying it and it seems like you guys have mastered that of blending and finishing a whiskey.

Yeah, we, um, well, yeah, I don't know. I mean, I hesitate to say I'm a master in anything just because I don't know. Call me unsure, but, but I, you know, I definitely have confidence in it and I think we have gotten very good at it. I mean, the Sherry cask finish was the first of the cask. It was a matter of fact, our second skew that we released after Bellmead classic. Um, and the idea was just like, Hey, how can we, for one, learn a little bit more ourselves, but get another product out there and kind of get more recognition for ourselves from the consumer and trade and such. And so the idea also came partially from Scotch whiskey. I mean, a lot of Scotch whiskeys either finish or age in sherry casks, as we said, let's try it. And we did and it worked out quite well. We use Olorosa Sherry casks for that. And as a matter of fact, it's still my favorite cask finish that we do. So we're quite excited about that. But yeah, at that time, there were not many cask finish American whiskeys or bourbons on the market at all. It was, you know, it was a pretty sparse landscape in that respect.

So you guys also have a Madeira cast finish.

I'm trying to think of... Exo Cognac would be the other one.

Exo Cognac, you got a Cognac finish. You also had, I had something recently, which was your Brandy finish, which was quite interesting, very bold, I thought.

Yeah, we'll do, so the Sherry Cognac and Madeira casks are what we call our special cask finish line, and those are certainly available here at the distillery, but then,

And those are readily available on many shelves, so those are something you can find.

Yes, yeah, for the most part. We may be kind of changing strategies with that a little bit. I don't know 100% yet, so I don't want to say too much. They will for sure be available at least here at the distillery if you're looking. But for now, yeah, they're available in most markets that we exist. You also have a liqueur that honors Louisa, right? That's right. Yeah. Louisa's liqueur, which is a very cool thing. I mean, I'll let you guys talk about it if you tasted it, but I love it. It's so good. It's a coffee caramel pecan. flavored liqueur, 40 proof.

A little bit easier drinking a true dessert liqueur. Yeah, absolutely.

I think you think pancakes, you think... Not syrupy, not thick or nothing like that, molasses or anything like that. No milk in it or anything like that.

And it's something that lasts over a year on the shelf. You don't have to refrigerate it after opening it, which a lot of That's when I first seen it, that's what I thought it was, is milk product or something and you had to refrigerate it.

No dairy in it, it's not a cream, it's just a liqueur, but like you said, it's not super thick molasses or syrupy. Not like a bourbon cream. Right. Yeah, the base of it is actually cane spirit. It's not whiskey or grain spirit. We tried those and you could just, with the kind of really nice but bold but still delicate flavors of it, you could get kind of a weird grainy or corny flavor, and it just didn't work. So the cane spirit just really works well with it. So we're very proud of it, very happy with it, and it's been doing great. And another way to kind of honor Louisa's spirit.

It had a great taste, like coffee, pecan, some caramel.

Yeah, it was really good. So you have one other barrel finished expression of the bell meat, which has gained quite a I know where this is going.

That's a very exciting one. We're releasing it again here March 7th, 2020. Very excited about that.

Which is about three weeks from this recording date.

That's right. We couldn't leave with a bottle of that today.

God, I wish I knew a guy who could let you do that. Yeah. If only we knew a guy. Yeah. I mean, the story behind that is very cool because it was honestly just not an accident. I won't say that, but it wasn't something that was our initial idea. So there's a true bee honey, which is a little bit down south of us near Franklin, Tennessee. They do a barrel aged honey. And so they just asked us if we had a, And we said, yeah, sure. So we gave it to them. They aged their honey, dumped it out. And then they asked, do we want it back? And we had not even considered anything until they asked us. And then a light bulb went off in our head as, yeah, of course we want that back. Let's see what we can do with it. you know, the first trick was, so honey has a trait, honey is hygroscopic, meaning it attracts the moisture around it. And so what it does with the barrel, if it's surrounding the inside, the entire inside of a barrel, it's gonna attract the moisture from the wood. And so we get that barrel back and there's a little, you know, some honey kind of still in the staves inside, but that wood is like, It's almost totally dry. So there's a lot of holes in it. And you know, because a barrel is just self-sealing because the wood is swelled with moisture. So we had to rehydrate the barrel from the outside, introduce some water to it. So it'd swell back up and seal itself so that when we put the bourbon back in it, it wouldn't all just drain out immediately. So we just checked it out. Honestly, few days. We don't have to finish it very long in the in the honey cask, fortunately, because we want to make, you know, it depends on a handful of things, but we want to be sure with all of our cask finishes that it's like, there's some subtlety to it, you know, we don't want it to seem like Oh, we just took a bunch of honey and put some bourbon into it. It's for sure a bourbon with a bit of influence from XYZ, you know, whatever cask that's being finished.

So I'm assuming on March the 7th, when you release the honey cask finish, you're going to have a line around the block.

Probably so. We're anticipating that for sure because we've had experience with the honey cask before. Yeah, that'll definitely be the case. So yeah, get your plane tickets now, or wherever you're coming from.

So what's the, you got Honeycask, what is the new expression? You got something down the block, you know?

What's the future? We've got a handful of things that are going to be one-off, just distillery only. Can't say what they're going to be yet, because we don't have label approval just yet. But yeah, some really cool things, honestly, that are very exciting.

So we can't expect something from you guys, yeah? And Andy, where can our listeners, where can they find you at on social media?

So Greenbriardistillery.com. Social media is at NGB Distillery or for Bellmead Bourbon it's Bell at Bellmead BRBN. And how far are you from, like, right downtown Nashville? Oh, maybe a seven-minute, you know, Uber lift.

So they can get an Uber over here, come down here. They can check out the Marathon building, antique archeology, see the TV show people. Absolutely. And they come over here and get a sip of whiskey, right?

And I suggest the Uber because there's some good drinking to be done over here. Yeah, absolutely. Well, Andy, it's been a pleasure having you on the Bourbon Road. We really appreciate you taking time out of your day, giving us a tour, letting us hang out with Ben for a little bit. Sure.

Yeah. Well, thank you all for having me. It's been really nice.

And we're excited about what you guys have going on here, and we look forward to maybe meeting up with you again. Good deal. I appreciate the support.

So you can find us on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, at The Bourbon Road. You can find me on Instagram at OneBigChief.

And I'm jshannon63 and we have a website called thebourbonroad.com and on that website you can read our blogs. We usually write a pretty extensive blog on every interview that we do and you know we give some information that Maybe didn't quite make it into the show, but some extra stuff, some links and things like that. We also have a Facebook group on Facebook, obviously. It's a closed group, but request to join. Go to our Facebook page, request to join. There's a couple of simple questions and we'll get you admitted in there. It's a great place for like-minded people. We have a lot of fun. It's a great time and we share a lot of stories about whiskey. It's just a good time.

We got some great people in there from Whiskey Nerds to Master Distillers. You'd be surprised who's in that group and they can answer if you have a question who can answer it.

Absolutely. Well, again, Andy, thank you very much. We appreciate it. And we're going to move on down the Bourbon Road. Cheers. Cheers. We do appreciate all of our listeners, and we'd like to thank you for taking time out of your day to hang out with us here on the Bourbon Road. We hope you enjoyed today's show, and if so, we would appreciate it if you'd subscribe and rate us a five star with a review on iTunes. Make sure you follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, at The Bourbon Road. That way you'll be kept in the loop on all the Bourbon Road happenings. You can also visit our website at thebourbonroad.com to read our blog, listen to the show, or reach out to us directly. We always welcome comments or suggestions. And if you have an idea for a particular guest or topic, be sure to let us know. And again, thanks for hanging out with us.