492. Old Glory Distilling Co: Clarksville's Grain-to-Glass Story with Devin Puckett

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

And I'm your host, Todd Ritter. We've got a great show for you today. So grab your favorite four and join us.

Hey there, Bourbon 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 give you an update on our ticket availability for the event taking place on October 3rd, 2026.

All right, listeners, welcome back to another episode of the Bourbon Road. Jim and I are, we have a guest tonight and Jim, who do we got?

All right, we got Devin Puckett from Old Glory. Devin, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Jim and Todd. Thank you very much.

No problem. Now, Devin, kind of give us a little background about, I mean, what I like to do is kind of let you give us a little background of how you got into the biz in the first place. And then we'll dive into what Old Glory is about. And we'll definitely dive in this first pore in just a minute, but what kind of got you into the game, I guess.

So my story is actually kind of interesting how this all panned out for me, how I ended up becoming part of the old glory crew. Long story short, I shouldn't say that, it is actually a fairly long story, but I'll sum it up fairly easy for you. I cut my teeth, obviously, somehow, some way you've got to get into alcohol. And that actually happened at the University of Ball State, which You can see that flag behind me if you're watching this live. Went to Ball State University, somehow managed to get a degree while all the partying and fun stuff ensued. And while I was there, I found my niche drink to be whiskey. Cut my teeth on quite a bit of Jim Beam bottles and Maker's Mark and the everyday stuff you can find everywhere. But soon out of college, I actually met the owner of Old Glory very early on in his journey. He's a Clarksville native. His name is Matt Cunningham. It's actually my brother-in-law now. When I say long story short, there's a lot of stuff that happened in the middle, but his wife and my wife were sisters. And so when I met Matt, him and Shannon Cunningham, his wife, the other owner of the distillery here in Clarksville, had just started dating. Old Glory, when it first opened, was not only a distillery, but we did a lot of weddings, hailing farewells with the military here in town. And most of the right hand side of the story, if we weren't distilling, we were hosting events throughout the week, weekends. And Shannon at the time was catering for Mission Barbecue. And Matt, being the owner of Distillery, was helping host all the events. So they got to see each other quite a bit throughout the year. And after seeing each other quite a bit, they started dating. And that's when my sister-in-law Shannon called my wife Haley and said, hey, I think I'm dating this guy that owns a distillery here in Clarksville. And she's like, Devin would love to meet him. I know he likes whiskey. You gotta come down here and see the place and I'll introduce you to him. So we came down here. I'm originally from Indiana, being a Ball State grad, grew up 28 years in Indiana, Northern Indiana, little town called Middlebury. So we drove down, about eight hour trip, hung out with her sister and got to meet Matt, got to see the distillery. I remember shaking his hand and being just like in awe, like, whoa, this guy's 27 years old, 28 years old, maybe at the time he might have about 27. I know he started at 25, 24. I'm like, wow, this is crazy. This guy's young. He's got a distillery. This is, this is cool. And at the time there wasn't a lot of barrels, but he let me try barrel stuff right out of the barrel. You know, I was trying 120 plus proof, two year old, you know, American whiskey and bourbon. And that really set me over the edge because I'd never done that before. That was my first distillery tour. That was, that was it for me. I'd never have ventured any further than the bottle at the grocery store and bringing it home. We got to know each other pretty well. They started dating heavily and, you know, I'd see him on Christmas time and he'd let me try the three year and he'd let me try the experimental stuff and try this mash, but what do you think? What do you think? And I was just gave it to him honestly and as a fan and consumer. And then lo and behold, I actually got married in 2019 at the distillery. I said I do up there in one of the top spots in the distillery and we had our reception down where the restaurant is now. And then in 2020, Matt tied the knot with Shannon there at the distillery. So that was a big event. We had a lot of family come in. I remember signing five or six barrels. They have a five-year barrel put away, a 10-year, 15, a 20, and a 25-year barrel put away just for those two and all the people there at the wedding. So that was cool. And then Post-COVID, I would say about 2022, 2023, they really ramped up production. And we'll get into that here in a little bit, how that whole story happened. But I knew he had a lot of bourbon sitting in that barrel house. The barrel house they put in around 2022 holds about 10,000 barrels. So, I remember coming down and seeing that and being like, holy cow, this is serious. Now, he wasn't just messing around. This isn't, you know, we're craft, but we're not taking it lightly. We're doing a lot of the contract stuff as well with bottling and production. Just like everybody was, if you had the stills and you were running it not only for yourself, you know, post-COVID, you were probably running it for another brand or somebody that didn't have the equipment but wanted to run good white dog off a clean still. And so it was about May of 2023. Wrapping up this, this long story short, long in 2023, he'd text me. I was up in Indiana selling RVs at the time. And I got a text that said, Hey, have you ever thought about selling bourbon? And I'm like, what the heck? Yeah, I can go into a store in Indiana and try to sell it for you if that's what you think." And he said, no, that's not what I'm talking about. So I was like, oh, geez, let me give him a call. And I called him and he said, yeah. He's like, you know, I got a lot of bourbon here. I need somebody to go out and sell it for me. And he said, you've been in sales for a while and we've always enjoyed having you. be a part of the distillery externally. You know, you've gotten married here and being a part of the family, we'd love to have you jump board. That was not a hard sell to my wife. I told her that day when I came home and she's like, so we're moving to Tennessee. And I'm like, we've got a house. We've got, we just had our second child. She was only about a year old at the time. My oldest being maybe two at the time, two or three. And So we sold our house that summer, packed everything up in a U-Haul, you know, everything we had and the biggest U-Haul they had, drove it down, eight hours, two cats, eight hours. And we've been living in Tennessee now for almost three years. And I've been getting the name of Old Glory out from the inside out pretty much. We'd only ever been in Clarksville with the distillate. We're still only in Tennessee unless you go on our website and purchase a bottle and have it shipped to your door, but you can only find some of the really good distillate here in the state of Tennessee right now. We just wrapped up Chattanooga in Knoxville, and we've been in Memphis and Nashville for a while now. That's my kind of journey through this whole process. I've met a lot of awesome people along the way. Distillers, another handful of distilleries here in Tennessee. Being part of the Tennessee Whiskey Trail, we do events all across the state every year. So you get to meet other brand reps, you get to meet distillers, you get to meet just great people in the industry, which ideally is what brought us here tonight with you guys. Travis had mentioned you a while back and he's been a really good supporter of ours and helping me get in front of people that have good knowledge and a good platform to talk about good craft distillate and just the bourbon industry in general. So that's my story. Great story.

Thank you. So cool.

Yeah.

And I'm glad you gave Travis a shout out. A good friend of mine, Travis Robeson, is who kind of put us together. And I think he's probably put you together with you before the show. We were talking some of your other experiences on recording things and another good friend of ours is, as you said, Scott Page, My Bourbon Journey.

Yep. Yep. We actually, Matt Carter and I got on one of his private shows last night. So that was kind of cool. They had a little private team of members. So, yep.

All right. So I think we're ready to dive into this first pour. You want to tell us a little bit about it?

Yeah. Are we jumping into the small batch going lighter proof to higher proof, I assume?

Yeah. We'll go small batch and yeah.

Okay, so the fun thing about small batch and and I'll kind of give you a little bit of the history of where we're at along the way. So from 2017 to 2021, we ran a 500 gallon copper pot still. That copper pot still is still used today. It is what we use for our vodka, our gin. We do make some flavor chines. And then every now and then we'll run a Queen's share barrel through that pot still as well. It's a Vendum copper pot still. This small batch is 90 proof. It is a blend of about, I would say on average 30 to 35 barrels typically. We do not, with our small batch, try to hide anything. I should say that with all of our bottles. Our mash bill is very transparent. It's on the bottles, it's on the back. It is 73 corn, 19 rye, 8% malted barley. We distill everything right there on site. We age everything on site and we bottle and label everything on site. We're a grain to glass distiller. I know that's a pretty heavily used word in the industry when you do it from A to Z. The only thing we don't do is farm, but I'm sure if Matt could get his hands on one, he'd do that too. But we do get all local grains from local farmers. Our rye and barley, we buy that from baby farms in Murfreesboro. And then our corn and wheat that we use, this one being corn, That is from Longview Farms. That's a farm just northwest of us. It's kind of a Kentucky, Tennessee farm in Montgomery County area. And so we get all local grains. We bring those in. We've got about I would say five 2,500 gallon fermentation tanks. If you guys ever get a chance to come visit, I don't think you're too far away. I'd love to have you so you can see that whole process. And then on top of that, we also have a column still. Now what you are currently trying is not pot still. This is what we have a bulk of in our barrel house currently. Post 2021, we made a ton of hand sanitizer off that pot still. We jumped into the hand sanitizer fad, if you will, at the time and sold that all across the country. It was a rough time for everybody, but it ended up being a blessing for us in disguise. We sold that hand sanitizer all over and ended up being able to afford to buy a column still, also a Vendum copper column still. It's about 24 foot tall. 14 inches wide. There's about 15 plates for the mash to fall through and distillate. And after it runs through that column still, it comes off about 110. It'll flip over to a doubler. The doubler gets set up to about 120. And then that's where we proceed to store it in a tank until we fill our barrels, typically about 288 at a time. What you're trying is 90 to 95% column still distilled. So if you like this small batch, it's only about three and a half years old. You're really gonna like what's to come in the coming years because I would say out of the 8,600 barrels that are in that barrel house, about only 400 or less, 500 or less are pot still barrels, which is what you're going to try here in the bonded and the single barrel coming up. But for a younger distillate, this definitely packs a punch. It's got the nose. I think it's got the right flavor for where it's at, at three and a half years old. Some of that pastel stuff that we made early on is creeping up now and it's about to be five. So we actually did try some five-year stuff not too long ago straight from the barrel that was 100% column still. And it was phenomenal. It was like cream cheese. It had the sweetness of like the creme brulee that you typically look for in a little bit of the younger stuff. But that is that small batch right now. 73 corn, 19 rye, 8% malted barley.

Yeah. So it's, it's clean and dry. It's got a, it's got a great sort of neutral bourbon palette. Um, a lot of what you might expect into just a good solid bourbon whiskey. Um, I kind of like the lighter fruit notes that are coming out of it, but I'm also getting a little bit of that, um, apple pie. Is that what it is more appley?

I kind of like this, like, you know, like, uh, the green apple pie kind of thing. Drizzle with a little caramel kind of thing. Yeah.

But I've had a lot of great names for apple, green apple or green apple.

Here's what I get, but it is clean and dry. And I like that. It's, it's, it's a very, uh, the cut was very narrow on this. I think it wasn't a real wide cut on it. So it's a very tasty.

But really rich, rich caramel notes on that pallet too. I like that a lot.

And we're using Char4 Kelvin barrels. You come into our barrel house, everything you see is Kelvin. We've been using Kelvin barrels from day one. 100% palletized. They're not laying on their side in ricks or side bung there. They are palletized. They're about six pallets high. And I would say I did them. I was looking at our whiskey system yesterday. I think we're about 8,650 barrels is what's in that barrel house currently. I was just in there today. I should know that I was picking a barrel pick for our distribution team down in Chattanooga. So I can get that, uh, rolling a little heavier down there. Let that sales team kind of push that a little bit.

Yeah. That's a nice little stash of barrels, 8,600.

Yeah. And it's crazy because like that happened like that. I mean, two, three, four years of running that column still that adds up quick. Very quick.

Yeah. I imagine the increase was dramatic because a 500 gallon pot still is going to give you about a barrel a day. So you're, you're producing about 350 barrels a year if you're running a shift a day.

Yeah.

But on a 14 inch column still, you're probably quadrupling that output.

Yeah, that column still, if you run it two shifts, I think the max we ever hit was about 20 a day. The comfortable spot was about 15 barrels a day off that column still. We don't run anything other than white dog off that. We've never ran our vodka or gin. There's just no need for that, but we'll still run the pop for those things. That column still is a monster when you've got it fired up. You're doing two changeovers, two fermentation changeovers off the 2,500 gallon fermentation tanks, and then feeding that beer well constantly so it can keep running that column. It's an awesome process. It's hot in the summer, boy. Down in here in Tennessee, you know it. That barrel hot, or that distiller, I've seen it get up to about 105 in there on a good day when everything's hot and running.

Now, you mentioned earlier that, you know, we ought to get down there and visit you, but I will tell you, I have been to Old Glory.

Oh.

And we were down doing some barrel picks across your northern border there. Yeah. And we stayed in Clarksville. So we had dinner at Old Glory.

Cool.

And what a great time. That was really nice. When was this? When did you head down that way? What would that have been, Todd? Like last summer? Like late summer, probably? Yeah, probably last August.

Okay, cool. Because that restaurant's actually only been open for about two years now. February 19th of 2024 is when we opened that. It's a big deal.

Yeah, it is a big deal.

You know, for the longest time, it was just, you know, you do a tour and maybe we see again, but we're getting a lot of repeat people. The local people here in town have been awesome. Everybody's really rallied around that restaurant and all the events that we do for the kids. We just did an Easter egg hunt a couple of days ago. We got doing pianos coming up on the 25th. The outside area is great. That's my favorite spot.

I need to come down for another weekend for sure. Yeah. I want, I want to hit a screaming Eagle cigar bar too. So.

Yep. Another hot spot in Clark school. There's a lot of hidden gems here in this town. I've only been here three years. I haven't even cracked them all. We just went fishing at Liberty park for the first time with my two daughters. And you know, I've been here three years now, but we've been working a lot too. So.

So we kind of got your background. So give us a little like history of Oh Glory, like kind of when it got started and yeah, you said Matt's been kind of the mastermind behind it all.

Yeah, yeah. Matt Cunningham, Shannon Cunningham, they're the owners. I believe his brother Wes is still involved. And then his dad helped him start it too, Tom Cunningham. And Matt actually was an Arkansas grad, went to the University of Arkansas, four years, graduated with a degree in accounting. And as soon as he graduated, he realized he made a mistake. He did not want to sit behind a computer and crunch somebody else's numbers all day long. So he said, he told his dad, hey, dad, this is not what I want to do. I actually went in less with the fire department here in town. So Matt ended up being a firefighter here in Clarksville for about four years. And there's about, at the time there was about eight fire stations. I think there's about 12 now because it's grown so much here in Clarksville. At one point in time, if you come to this facility across the interstate, we're right off I-24 coming down to Nashville. Across the interstate is one of the fire stations, and that's one of the fire stations that he had spent a lot of time at. He was very familiar with the area, being a kid that grew up in Clarksville. His grandparents are from Clarksville. His parents met at Austin Peay here in Clarksville. Anyway, when he wasn't fighting fires and he had downtime, he was devising a plan to create Clarksville's very own distillery at the very young age of 24, 25. I was not doing the same thing at that age. I was starting a family. I just had my first kid, but I always admired how young Matt was for doing that. He didn't do it alone. His dad is very helpful in getting him off the ground. He knew a lot of good construction folk around here, some pretty good people that do planning and development. And they bought that land when it was just a cornfield out there. There's a Google plant back behind us. There's a hand-cooked tire. There's a Sam's Club. This was all just farmland. And now there's, I don't know, 20 different, 15 different major businesses back behind the distillery. They opened their doors in 2016. didn't actually put anything in a barrel for an entire year. So Matt said that they had ran through a couple different stills to try to figure out what they wanted to do. They hadn't fully narrowed down what mash bill they wanted to use, what barrels they wanted to use. what proof they were going to run into the barrels. It was all kind of research and development. Also had to hire a distiller, somebody that could actually do the calculations and cook and make sure things were done. Another guy that I would love you to meet sometime is Nick Dykes. He's Clarksville's very first employee, but he's also our head distiller. He was our very first employee. Same thing with him. He was a biology chemistry degree from the University of Tennessee and quickly found out he didn't want to sit into a lab until three in the morning running lab work and things like that. So he saw that there was a job posting at Old Glory in his hometown. And he's like, well, shoot, if I can do all this, I can make alcohol. That sounds a heck of a lot more fun. So brought him in, interviewed him, asked him what he knew. He said, I know surface level stuff about bourbon, but I can make it. And they spent a year together just figuring it out. And our very first barrel went into our very first white dog went into a barrel in February of 2019. So I'm sorry, 2017. So that was like a very big landmark for us was that one year gap between when it opened and to finally having something in a barrel because everybody in town is like, okay, you've got a distillery. Where's the bourbon? Where's the whiskey? Where's the bourbon? And they're like, hey, We're not going to contract. We're not going to buy nothing against doing it. We're just not going to do it that way. We're not going to buy other distillate and try to get that change over in time. So they took the long route. Luckily, the wedding venue that was in there and the event center paid for a lot of the barrels that were put down the very first couple of years. But yeah, that that's when I got to meet them when it was a very small scale. The bottling line was eight feet long and took hours to, you know, hand put labels on hand cork and shrink everything. And then in twenty. 2019, 2020, obviously nobody could prepare for what was going to happen. So they dropped the entire game plan of making this still it and decided to make hand sanitizer because it was a crisis. Luckily, a lot of hands got involved and helped us really jumpstart our business from the amount of hand sanitizer that they sold all over the country. I think if you go to a handful of businesses in town or the university here, there's still jugs of Old Glory hand sanitizer sitting in some of the classrooms at Austin Peay and some of the businesses. I know I've got spray bottles in my garage right now that we've been using for the past six years. I haven't had to buy hand sanitizer in so long. It's crazy. It's quite crazy, honestly. But that's when we ended up installing that column still. Crazy enough, in between all the COVID and all the madness of that, Matt's dad actually passed away in 2019. That was a lot to handle, not only for the business side, but from the family. You can imagine all the stuff he had his hands in here in town from properties. all the business partners they had and things. The family owns a couple different things in town. There's a couple of restaurants downtown that they still own. So he had to take his major step back for that and then also do an entire game plan change for the distillery for those two years. It was wild. I remember talking to him and just being like, what are you guys, what's the plan? He's like, we're just going through it, taking it day by day. And then 2021 comes around, column still is installed. Once you start making 20 barrels a day, you cannot store them in the distillery. You've got to put a barrel house up. You got to find somewhere to put them. So I remember coming in and seeing that barrel house right after it was built. It was awesome. There wasn't a single barrel in there. There was just grains and glass sitting in there. And they slowly started jam-packing the barrels in. When I got to Old Glory, there was about 6,000 barrels in there in 2023 and 2024. They decided to end the event hiatus and the weddings and dealing with Bridezilla's and all that fun stuff that comes with hosting events and converted into a restaurant, which now runs seven days a week, fully operational, 10 to about 11 o'clock at night. You can come in and enjoy some prime rib, egg rolls. You've got brisket sandwiches, brisket tacos. I had chicken quesadilla today for lunch, which is awesome. They're always doing something fun with the menu. Great food. Great food. It's so hard not to eat there every day. It's so hard. I got to watch my figure because all this bourbon and food, it's hot.

So the small batch that we're tasting on now that we've been sipping on for a while, it's on the shelf in Tennessee. They can order it online. What's the price of a bottle?

So you should find this in any store for $39.99. That's the typical MSRP. Every now and then I'll get a store that will do a large case order and they get it down to about $36, $34, but no more than $39.99 for that small batch. I think if you go on our website, it might be a little more. We try to help our liquor stores out and not undercut them or anybody that's on the ground floor trying to sell it by hand. But yeah, that's a $39 retail small batch.

Almost four years old. All right, Todd. So what do you think? You want to, you want to call a half here and we'll get back into it on the second half?

Yeah, that's probably a good idea. We're about 27 minutes. So. All right.

All right, folks, well, we're going to take a short break here. Uh, when we come back, we've got two more expressions from old glory to try, uh, more chit chatting with Devin and learning more about old glory. What's what's happened and what's going on and what's coming in the future. So stick around. We'll be right back.

Hey there, bourbon roadies. It's Diane Strong with Bourbon on the Banks Festival, and I want to give you a quick update on Bourbon on the Banks. General admission is officially sold out. But don't worry, we've still got Twilight tickets, and they're absolutely worth it. You'll catch the final two hours of the festival. The energy is high, the crowd is buzzing, the music's going, and the bourbon is flowing. With over 70 distilleries to sample from, you don't want to miss it. It's all happening October 3rd in Frankfurt. Grab those Twilight tickets before they're gone. I can't wait to see you on the banks.

Hello there, Drew Hanisch, Whiskey Lore, and I am excited to announce that I have a brand new book called Experiencing American Whiskey. If you have checked out my travel guide to Experiencing Kentucky Bourbon, you'll know that I go deep into the details of Kentucky Bourbon. Well, imagine that I've spread this out across the entire United States now, and I'm covering a thousand distilleries, coast to coast, and even Alaska and Hawaii. I have 227 detailed profiles in there from the distilleries that I've had firsthand contact with. I give you all the details that you need to know, like when they have tours, if they do tastings, cocktails, and everything is in a state-by-state format so that you can roll through, find your particular state that you're traveling to, and have all that information at your fingertips. and so on. So it is actually available at whiskylore.org slash shop. That's Whiskey Lore's travel guide to experiencing American whiskey.

All right, listeners, welcome back to the second half of the show. Jim and I are hanging out with Devin Puckett from Old Glory Distilling. He's the brand representative. And in the first half, we tried their very reasonably priced small batch. And it was very bright. I think, like I said, I called it kind of a apple pie, caramel, and started getting some citrus notes there towards the end too. What'd you think, Jim?

Yeah, I thought it was clean and dry. And then when you mentioned a little bit of an apple note, I think I kind of got on that too. There was a little bit of a fruit note there. I think it's got a great grain compliment to it. But for me, it was clean, dry. It was a well-cut distillate. So definitely tasty. And at 40 bucks a bottle, you can't beat it. Yeah.

Well, Devin, what's next on our tasting menu, if you will?

So now we're going to go into something that we're really happy to have. And that is our middle of the road between the single barrel and small batch. We've got a Tennessee bourbon bottled in bond. So most of your folks here listening, I assume know what the bonded means. Always 100 proof. Ours is actually not four years old. This is a five-year Baldwin bond. We tried it at four and we thought, what the hell is one more year gonna hurt? Might as well put it in for five. So it is a five-year Baldwin bond. It gives it a little bit more. You're gonna get those fruit notes typically, but I think they start to get to darker fruits. I start to get more of the cherries. I know I get some of that darker caramel and things too. But you're gonna get darker fruit note. Yeah. I don't think it gets too nutty. But the Char 4 is still there. It is still 73 corn, 19 rye, 8% malt. Now we're blending less barrels. For our small batch, it's about 30 barrels to 35. We do get more picky with this Baldwin Bond. Baldwin Bond is going to be about 15 to 20 barrels. We're going out in the barrel house, we're hand picking these blends and we're sitting it right down beside the previous blend and trying to keep that same flavor profile throughout. Our ball and bond shouldn't change too much, you know, between blends. We don't put batches on our bottles or anything like that. It's always going to look the same. If you grab our bottle off the shelf, you'll notice in the bottom where the little tag is where you'll see small batch, you'll see bottle and bond. Those two labels are fairly similar. And then we get in a single barrel that changes from a gold band to a silver band. But I really like this bottle and bond. It's something cool to be able to say that we do have a bonded product on the shelf. I know some folks, all they drink is bonded. And, you know, there's a reason for that. You know what you're almost getting every time. You just get to try different distilleries, um, flavor profile between the bondage.

Oh yeah. This is different. This is definitely different. Yeah. This is a little darker. Yep. Yep. A little bit darker. And, uh,

really, really hits the baking spice cabinet a lot. Like that brown sugar is going on. It's cool that you guys go an extra year too.

Yeah. There wasn't a big difference at the time between our small batch and our Bonded when we tried the four year and we're like, well, shoot, go a whole nother year. Let's see what happens. Bonded was new for us.

I was going to say, it's like you said, uh, you know, reaching that bottom bond is kind of like, it's almost like a achievement or a badge. You know, it's like, we've made it this far. So.

Yeah.

It feels good. Cause you know, being a distillery. Oh, but it's different. It's definitely different on the palette.

Yeah. Is very different. Like texture.

Oh man. Yeah.

It was one of the first things we released out in the Clarksville market when I started in, uh, 23. So it didn't hit the market until 20, about August, September.

Yeah. This is just baking spices galore. There's like cardamom. Um, there's a nice oak spice to it. Cinnamon, lots of brown sugar.

Yeah. It's, it's got, it's, it's got a baking spice cabinet and spades, but it's also got this faint hint in the back of a bubble gum, a little bit of a bubble gum note in the back. Ooh, I'm not getting that.

So one other thing, I mean, you guys do a Tennessee whiskey too, right? Is that the same mash bill?

Correct. So we run two mash bills. Mash bill number two is 73 corn, 19 wheat, 8% malted barley instead of the 19 rye. So we're only changing one thing there and then it's a char three barrel instead of a char four. That's the big difference. Now that has not hit anywhere outside the Clarksville market. Distillery, Clarksville, and then you can find, we released our very first single barrel of our Tennessee whiskey online, which can be shipped all across the country. It was so good. We felt confident enough to put that single barrel on our website and sell that one all over. That one is a peanut butter ball. It is so good. It's very nutty. It's very peanut butter forward and it lingers. The notes just keep coming on that single barrel that we put on our website maybe about a month ago.

So what was the process I guess in thinking like to differentiate the Tennessee whiskey with the weeded mashbill.

Yeah. So I know, you know, having a label that says Tennessee bourbon is one thing and then having a label that says Tennessee whiskey is a whole nother. We do sugar maple filter everything. We don't have... Our Tennessee whiskey isn't shaped sugar maple filtered and then our Tennessee bourbon isn't. No, it is all 100% ran through a charcoal sugar maple filter. Now, we've had talks here recently about actually just doing a Tennessee weeded bourbon and overchanging that label. Unfortunately, with Tennessee whiskey, when you mention Tennessee whiskey, there's this connotation of, you know, Jack Daniels or George Dickel, or everybody knows Tennessee whiskey for those guys. And so from the research and development side that we've seen, if you put both of our mash bills blindly on a table, they're both a bourbon technically on a table, and you let people try them, I would say maybe four to six people out of that 10 will buy the Tennessee Whiskey, the 19% wheat. But when you put them blindly on a shelf and you ask people to pick one to buy, they buy the bottle that says Tennessee Bourbon instead of the Tennessee Whiskey. So I think from the past three years of looking at that trend and seeing that trend, what we end up doing is when we go outside of the Clarksville market, we end up doing a Tennessee weeded bourbon, more than likely, and keeping that one or two skews on a shelf, something like that. Personally, I drink a lot of this Tennessee bourbon because that's what's out in the market. But when I tried that Tennessee whiskey, that 19% weeded Mash Bill, it is a breath of fresh air. It is good.

It is very good.

I don't know. Did you get to try that while you were there, Jim?

I don't, I don't think I did try it. Um, but I'd love to, I wish I could.

Sounds great. I'll have to send you some bottles and we'll do this again. Try the Tennessee whiskey.

So all Tennessee whiskey is bourbon, but not all bourbon is Tennessee whiskey, right? That's the way, that's the way it works. Yep. Yep.

So that's when people are like, well, I don't like it. I'm like, well, technically our Tennessee whiskey is a bourbon.

Yup. Yup. It's that chicken and egg thing.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. Go ahead, Todd.

I was just going to say, what's the MSRP on the Baldwin bond?

Yeah, so bonded, you shouldn't see it over anywhere. You shouldn't see it over $59.99. So it's just a $20 hike from the small batch. I got a handful of stores that are at that $54 mark, depending on the case deals and things like that. There's a couple large stores down in Nashville. If you travel down in Nashville, Frugal McDougal's is a big one. They've got it priced really, really low. Some cork dorks and even some smaller stores. pick up a handful of cases and let it ride at a better price point, but no more than 59.99. Um, I think in our bottle shop, we sell it for about five bucks more than that inside the distillery, but $20 more for about a year and a half more and a totally different flavor profile.

So is your weeded, uh, Tennessee weeded, uh, bourbon Tennessee weeded whiskey. Is it also somewhere around the four to five year old range?

Yeah, so we were going back and forth between mash bills, actually. When we're talking, we call this one that we're drinking now mash bill number one. We call that one mash bill number two. Reason being, we ran the first mash bill, the 19% rye, pretty heavy for about the first 100 barrels. Then we switched over and we started doing the weeded. If you both come visit, I'll give you a sneak peek in that barrel house. We've got some rye sitting in there, 100% rye. We've got a couple straight wheat barrels sitting in there. We're actually about to launch our very first double oak. If you've seen the Cola submissions recently, that just got approved. So we'll have a double oak hit in the market, well, hit in the distillery here in about three weeks is my guess, four weeks if we get those labels in time. We'd love to have it before doing pianos. We've talked about doing four grain mash bills at some point combining the two. If you can do it right, that'd be fun for a cast strength of some sort. But yeah. Yep.

I love all those things to just do them all. Just do it all. That's right.

Just do it all. Actually, believe it or not, we just did a lemon cello that just hit our distillery for the summer. Yep. First time ever doing a lemon cello. That was, that was great. Selling it in three 75s. We just did one barrel of it. When I say barrel, you know, a 50 gallon drum of it, um, just to see what would happen. First time ever running a lemon cello. I think it's great.

Yeah. Yeah. I've heard of, I've heard of, uh, bourbon and whiskey distilleries making limoncello, uh, making, uh, this, the cherry kind of whiskey and making, uh, cinnamon whiskies. Yeah. Just getting blown away by sales.

It's so approachable. You know, grandma will drink that. My, my brother who doesn't drink alcohol will drink that, or, you know, like, It's very approachable. Like we have a blueberry shine that we've been making since day one. So it's called blueberry lemonade moonshine. And that thing blows us out of the water every year. We can't make enough of it. It's just such a hot thing. Cause it's summertime, it's warm in Tennessee for eight months out of the year and sprite nice is all you need. It's a quick, easy fix to, to a hot day. And yeah, it's crazy. Yeah.

How's your, how's the brewery scene in Clarksville?

There's actually a couple breweries and, and believe it or not, the Cunningham family owns one down in town. Which one is that? It's strawberry alley. If you go down on strawberry alley is the name of the road. Um, it's right downtown. It's one of the old bricked roads and they've had that for God, I think 2018 is when they opened that. We did our, we did our, uh, what do you call that the night before your wedding?

Um, Oh, I can't remember the name of what you call them rehearsal dinner.

We did our rehearsal dinner at the brewery. My dad was tickled to death. He's like, I'm getting beer the first night. It was awesome.

Yeah. My wife, my wife and I like to do, uh, brewery tour road trips where we, and I always try to sneak in a distillery whenever I can, of course, but she's a beer girl. So we definitely do that. So we'll have to come to Clarksville.

I'm right on the same page with you. My wife can't stand to smell whiskey, but she loves a 10% IPA. So we go to breweries most of the time and then I go do the distillery things with the guys and with work. But there's another one downtown called Black Horse. They've been there 40 something years. They have awesome beer. They've got a barnstormer red ale. They got a vanilla porter. It's kind of a Tennessee chain. Black Horse. You can find Black Horse, I think, in Knoxville. Knoxville's got an original location. And then the other one is Clarksville. They probably have some more spots too, like tasting bars.

It might be Knoxville. I've been to, I recall the Black Horse.

Yeah. They're on your way to Knoxville, like go into the Smokies. And then there's another guy in town. He does a, he's a veteran star spangled brewery. He just does local stuff. He's got great beer. There's a winery one exit away from us. So. Alcohol and Clarksville, we've got it. We've got it.

All right, well, I'm ready to dive in the single barrel. Cool. Because, well, I've already previewed it.

Yeah.

So I love it. It's something special.

And this is barrel 271.

271, yeah. Five years, nine months, 121.7. I love it.

And what's the name on the back again? Because we let the folks at the Old Glory pick those barrels. If it's on our shelf or typically out in the market, unless it's a store pick, it's somebody at the distillery, whether it's a bartender, a gift shop manager, a distiller, a bottling line, somebody.

Oh, that's cool. Yeah. I just noticed that. So this is selected by, it looks like Caleb Martin.

Yep, so Caleb is actually our master blender. So a lot of the blends we've tried tonight, he's put together. So this is one of his barrel picks. Actually, fun story. He was one of our very first employees as well. He's from the Arkansas, Memphis area. And he worked with us for a couple of years, was gonna have a kid and get married. So he moved back down there and ended up working at Old Dominic for a couple of years, another distillery here in Tennessee, Memphis. Worked at Old Dominic for two or three years. And then after they had their child, they decided they want to move back to Clarksville. They enjoyed it here. And he's been with Old Glory now just as long as I have. When I started Old Glory, he started again. So he's Old Glory, Old Dominic, Old Glory. And he goes out there and does a lot of barrel inventory. He blends for us. He helps with a lot of the contract production stuff on the bottling line. Full time.

What are you getting on this nose, Jim?

Oh, this one goes a little bit more, um, kind of a, a sweet syrup note, kind of a. I like that.

I was going to, I was going to stay in the dessert category. I get like this blackberry cobbler kind of vibe.

Yeah.

I could go berry with that. Yeah. I love our single barrels. It is so fun to go out there and just thief out of them and say, wow, this one's ready. Or, well, this one, six months from now, this will be ready. Or maybe do something with this. Let's double oak this one or something like that. That is a perk of the job, I can say that.

And you did say this was probably, this was the copper pot?

Yep. Yep, any single barrel you see out there on the market that's under barrel 500 or less, say 450, anything under 450 I think is pot stilled.

And that bonded was pot stilled too, right?

Right. Yeah, that bonded is pot still. Now, that bonded is going to switch over here soon because that column still stuff is creeping up on that five-year mark. So at some point, single barrels will only be pot still. Now, we might splash some pot still in some of those blends every now and then, but there's not a lot of it. So we're trying to conserve a lot of that as well. There's nine-year, eight-year, seven-year pot still that we're trying to conserve. we're starting to run through it pretty quick because we're hitting the market a little harder. So we're really happy that that column still stops catching up with the time, you know, the turning of that corner.

Well, it's hard to match that texture with a column still. Exactly.

Yeah. I was going to ask since you guys first started, I guess you said barreling in 2017, if you had any, I guess they'd be nine years and what a couple months now, right?

Yeah, ironically, the very first barrel was made February 19th of 2017, and the restaurant opened February 19th of 2024. And that was by coincidence. I remember saying, Matt, wasn't the first barrel distilled the same day X amount of years ago? And he goes, yeah, holy crap, you're right. He's like, it was meant to be. But yeah, that That single barrel, our oldest barrel, when you come to the tour, it's the very first barrel you'll see when you go into the barrel house. Um, just over nine months, nine years now, nine years. And what's that? Are we in April? So nine years, two months.

Yep.

We're celebrating a few holes in it. Not a single one. I think there's about two it's it's sitting on its side and it's side bung. So we just pop it open, but I. I have yet to try it. I told Matt, I don't want to try it until you give it the green light and it goes in a bottle. I don't want that rabbit out of the hat. I think him and his brother and his dad were the only ones that would try that one. Maybe the head distiller. That's his baby. That's barrel number one.

I was going to say, that's going to be a special release at some point, right?

Yeah. I mean, from what I've seen in there, it's probably halfway gone. Like it's breathe. It's breathe a lot. You know, we're getting close to that 10 year mark on it and it has the angels have done their damage to that one.

Todd, I'm definitely getting on the, uh, Barry train here, the cobbler train that you mentioned. So yeah, it's, it's a little, but it's a little buttery too. Yeah, that's excellent.

I like every now and then I'll find a barrel that's got like that cherry cola flavor to it as well. I really like finding those ones. Um, that's typically what I find on our ride mash bill. My wheat mash now are these very nutty, you know, I'll get a lot of like a peanut brittle out of them.

Now these single barrels are available on your website too.

Yep. We do not have a, uh, wait, um, Tennessee bourbon. I don't think we've released a single barrel yet on our website. Um, but we have released a Tennessee whiskey, which is a 19% wheat on our website. Now these will retail. I'm at a liquor store for 69.99. You'll have stores that'll put them at like 72, 73, try to get a little extra cash out of them because they are single barrels and they're awesome. But I wouldn't personally pay any more than 69. You can find a store that's going to run you that price. 69 to 74 is a good spot.

Now you guys are picking these in-house, but did you say you're allowing groups to pick these now too?

Yeah, we've been doing some groups. There's some bourbon groups in the Nashville area that picked one recently. The Wilco Bourbon Society out in Lebanon picked one that just got bottled. It's about to get shipped. Kayla down at Parkway, she's got a great following. What KSIPs is what she does. That's her group. They are down in Spring Hill they pick the barrel barrel 420. And then the bourbon legends just pick the barrel that's going to go down to busters and Memphis. There's another store. Oh, I got a guy down in the south shores of Mississippi. He picked a barrel with us. He'd been to the distiller one time, ate, had an awesome time, loved the flight, owned a store down there. And he said, hey, I got your number from somebody in the bottle shop. Can I pick a barrel?

And I said, yeah, I'll send you some samples.

And he set me up with a license, ABC license guy down there, and we were able to get him a barrel pick. So that was kind of cool. I love some barrels across the country.

It's fun.

You know, I don't have any, we don't have any tensions of spreading this too far, too fast across the United States. Um, but I do not mind, you know, letting really good barrels go out to really good people and get stores across the country.

I'm trying to think. I'm trying to remember how far the drive is for us. So, so it's two hours to bowling green for us. So bowling green to use about another hour and a half.

Yeah.

Yep. That sounds about right. So you're about three and a half from, from us here.

Yeah. Cause we're only 45 minutes on a good day, an hour away from Nashville. We come down I-24, we're on exit four. So we're right by the Kentucky line and we do a whiskey, we do a state line whiskey tour as well with Casey Jones and M.B. Rowland right up there on the south side of Kentucky, coming down the interstate. So you can stop at all three of those locations and we'll get to stay in a shot glass.

So that's what I was doing. I was doing picks at Casey Jones and M.B. Rowland when I stayed in Clarksville and came to Old Glory for dinner.

Yep. That's, that's, that's typically the case. Everybody does all three and they eat it all glory and sober up a little bit. Works out for everybody.

It's amazing. It's, it's amazing. You say it was a cornfield cause that whole, it's like a spaghetti junction there of highways and roads all coming together with the exits and, um, it's, it's, it's a busy area now. It's not like cornfields.

Even since I've lived here in 2023, there is housing and neighborhoods going up left and right. There's apartments and townhomes and strip malls and everything going in in Clarksville. It is very busy. I just think that if roads need to expand a little bit to help with the traffic, that corner where you come through is Wilma Rudolph, and that intersects with I-24. And that is one of the longest roads to get down. Heaven forbid we've got to go to Home Depot on that side of town or Lowe's or Chuck E. Cheese with the kids.

It's, it is busy, but Wilma Rudolph, she was a, she was an Olympian, right? Correct. Yeah. She was the first.

I think she was one of the first black sprinters in the Olympics, and she won a handful of gold medals. She's got her name all over the town. If you go down to the museum, there's a lot of stuff about her. Even in the Indianapolis Children's Museum, there's a statue of her. We go up there to see family and go to the museum and there's something with Wilmeruda. So it's cool to have that.

Well, this is an exceptional whiskey. It's worth every penny of $69. Thank you.

Be sure to give Caleb the thumbs up from us. Yes, he chose wise.

He'll love that. Now, Caleb's a musician too. I'm going to put a plug in here. If you like Wangy, banjo picking, Arkansas, Deep Hills music, go on Spotify and find him. Caleb Ryan Martin. He's got a handful of songs. He was an artist when he was real young, like 17, 18 years old. He still plays. He just played at Old Glory this past Saturday at our stage out back. So, um, Give it, drink a bottle with his name on the back and listen to his music and that'll tell you all you need to know.

That's great. Yep. So what can we expect in the future from you guys? You said you're kind of just kind of spreading out in Tennessee a little bit and obviously some single barrels are getting across the border here and there, but what's the future hope for El Glory?

Yeah, we just tackled Chattanooga maybe about a month ago. We have distribution down in that area, kind of hitting some of the country stores on the way up to Knoxville. We are in Knoxville pretty heavy right now, probably about 10, 15 stores that carry us. Nashville is probably our biggest market. If you come down here to travel, like I said, we're only about 45 minutes away from Nashville, but there's a lot of stores that carry Old Glory in Nashville. There's a good amount of stores in Memphis, but we're only Tennessee. You can only find us in Tennessee right now. We plan on doing that for a while. We have no plans of expanding just the way the alcohol industry is. Not saying the bourbon bubble has completely popped, but it is not where it was, we all know, two years ago, three years ago. We're not trying to go too hard, too fast. We've already taken a long road and I think we're going to stay on that road for a while. And then the fun part about being a family owned craft store, we can start doing some experimental stuff. Like I said, we're gonna have our very first double oak hit here pretty soon. We've got a sherry cask that's been sitting back there since I started. I think that's about three years old now and a sherry wine cask. And the goal is at some point to transform this Tennessee whiskey that we have and try to get that out into the market as well. Whether we end up doing a Tennessee weeded bourbon or changing that label up on our bottle, we'd love to have that out in the market. Just to have two mash bills out, we can let people decide, hey, here's $239. Here's $259 mash bills. Pick your favorite. Maybe you don't like rye, but you love wheat. Maybe you don't love wheat, but you like rye. We've got the rye barrels sitting back there in the barrel house right now that haven't even been put out in our own distillery. There's probably only 20, 30 people that have tried the 100% rye that's sitting back in that distillery right now. So, that's to come. So, I wouldn't expect some, you know, I wouldn't expect to see us while you're sitting there on a Super Bowl Sunday or something. See, oh, there's Old Glory on the TV. That's not anytime soon. We're gonna take it slow and low and try to keep it, keep the way we've been doing it. You know, putting the right people in the right place and just keep talking about it and let people try it and see what they think. That's all we can ask.

That's great. So we want to give you a chance to let the folks know how they can find you on all the socials and all that good stuff. So go ahead.

Yep. So you can find us on Instagram, Facebook. We don't do TikTok or anything right now that I know of. And then if you go on our website, it is OldGloryDistillingCo.com. If you go to Old Glory Distilling or you missed the Co part, same with the Instagram and the Facebook, the socials, it'll always be Old Glory Distilling Co is where you can find us. We post a lot about the restaurant. We post about a lot of the things that are going on internally. Whether it's a farmer's market, we do Thursday night farmer's markets every Thursday. We'll do craft fairs. We just did one this past Saturday. There's live music out on the patio every Friday and Saturday night. We'll have somebody performing by the fire pits and stuff. I know in the Halloween time we do some fun stuff for like trunk or treat. We just did an Easter egg hunt. So we'll post a lot about that stuff and then we'll also post about any upcoming releases, whether it's that double oak or hopefully a rye at some point here soon or that cherry cask, fun stuff like that. We'll post about those on our Facebook and our Instagram.

That's great. That's cool that you guys really try to involve the community too. We have a local distillery here that has live music and food trucks. I think that's the way to do it right now. Like you said, the market's a little settling, if you will. Keep your locals happy and have events. That sounds great.

Yeah. They're really all you got. They're like your neighbors. If you're not able to support your local market, it's kind of tough. So being able to give back to the folks that have supported us from day one is really cool, especially the people that have been in Clark school for so long. I know a lot of folks have moved here recently. Being in a military town, we get a lot of people in and out, you know, but there's a lot of people that are lifers here in Clarksville and just be able to see them come in and enjoy themselves. We're bringing their families in. That's cool. I know we spend a lot of time there with the kids. We let them run around in the grass and we enjoy our cocktails and sit and watch live music. It's a good time.

All right. Well, if we come down and visit, remember you told us you got that, that a hundred percent wheat barrel and that rye barrel sitting out there.

So it's not going anywhere. You let me know when, and I will pop it open. I'll get a thief down in there and pour you a glass. All right. Sounds good.

Well, thanks for joining us. We had a great time today drinking your whiskey. Thanks for sharing it with us. Uh, all great pores, all great value. Uh, we certainly encourage our listeners to check out. Oh glory. And, uh, if you get a chance to get to Clarksville, uh, their restaurant there is just fabulous. And I, I didn't get to take a tour wise there, but I'm going to guess your tours are pretty good too.

Yeah. Seven days a week from, uh, 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. every hour. You can get a tour, try a pour of everything and then go sit down at the restaurant. And like I said, sober up a little bit, enjoy a burger, some prime red. There's nothing that you can't find on that menu. I can tell you that it's good stuff. No doubt.

All right. Well, you can find the bourbon road on all social media outlets. You can find us on Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, tech talk, Facebook threads. Yeah, we do all those things every week, Todd and I to get together. We do an episode. We'll sit down with somebody fun. Like Devin, we'll have a couple of cores. We'll enjoy ourselves. It's always fun. We're always laughing. We're always drinking whiskey. Uh, hopefully by the end of the show, we'll introduce you to something you should probably add to your bar. And I think we did today. So, uh, definitely take notes. And, uh, when, when the show is over and you pick those headsets off, uh, go shopping, get yourself some whiskey. Make sure that if you are listening to us on a podcast app, you scroll to the top and hit that subscribe button. That way every week when we release an episode, you'll get that bell notification, letting you know that Jim and Todd have dropped another one and you can put those headsets back on and join us again for a little bit of fun. Uh, when you're not listening to us online, uh, jump onto our website, check out the bourbon road.com up on Facebook, uh, pop into the bourbon roadies. Great group of people, 3,500 and good bourbon loving people. They just like to chit chat and have a good time. But until the next time we'll see you down the bourbon road.

you