52. Previewing Old Forester 2020 Birthday Bourbon with Jackie Zykan

We walked in here today and I actually thought old Forester was getting robbed because we walk in here and Jackie's got, if you can see her, she's decked out in black, like some kind of thief in the night.

This is the second time someone has said that to me. I've been in the warehouse all morning and yes, a lot of our branded stuff is black and it was cold in the warehouse. They were loading barrels in so the door was open the whole time.

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're down here at Old Forrester on Main Street in Louisville, Kentucky. And who do you have with us? Glad you had to ask me that. We got Jackie Zeichen. Did I say it right?

You did. That was pretty good. And he's looking at me like, slowly but surely. Yes, you said it exactly right.

We practice that a little bit. Jackie, it's a pleasure to have you on the show today.

It is so nice to be here with you guys. Thanks for coming all the way down to my home, or one of my homes anyways, to meet and set this up. It's great.

Yeah, it's really cool. Well, we don't spend a lot of time chit-chatting right up front. We like to get straight to the first pour.

Okay.

So what do you have for us today?

You guys have In Your Glass. The 2020 birthday barbain that has not been released.

Oh my gosh.

You're welcome.

Wow.

Mike, I'm already drinking it. I think we're a bit special. I feel special right now. Actually, we had a question prepared for you on this. I know.

I just went ahead and cut you off right there.

Oh my goodness. We might have to dig a little deeper. I don't know. Well, Mike, what do you say we check this out?

I'm already, like I said, checking it out. Oh my gosh. That's good.

How do you like drinking it out of the rocks glass instead of doing a Glencairn glass?

To me, I could drink whiskey out of anything. Out of anything? I don't like to drink it out of a metal cup.

Yes, I can see that.

Like a Yeti cup or something like that, one of those stainless steel cups. I don't like that, but a glass, any glass, it don't matter to me. I do like drinking it neat. This is my opinion and Mike Hyatt's opinion only, but to me, I get to taste the whiskey the way the distiller, the way you meant it to be tasted. I know you don't drink your whiskey straight all the time, though.

No, I don't, actually.

Cocktail drinker.

Sometimes, yeah, sometimes a cocktail drinker. I don't know, it's different when you work in the side of it because drinking it neat is, it's work, right? I mean, as strange as that sounds, like, oh, poor Jackie, she must drink her whiskey neat for work. But you just, you can sort of clock out and not overanalyze it so much when you've got a lot of other things going on, a cushion of a cocktail, if you will. I mean, I don't drink a whole lot when I'm not at work because I drink a lot for work. I'm not, you know, you spit everything and a lot of it is just aroma assessment. But for the most part, you are still going to get residue from tasting things and doing sensory analysis. And yeah, your body's subjected to a lot more alcohol than the average bear. So I don't drink a whole lot off work. And honestly, I kind of drink tequila more than anything because then I can clock out. Yes, exactly. Then I can just not have to overthink about it.

That's not a dirty word in the bourbon world, right?

Tequila is not a dirty word.

Vodka is a dirty word. You know? To some people.

I am not a vodka drinker, but I can appreciate its existence. That's all I'm going to say.

So, Jim, what do you think? Well, I'm having a little bit of trouble with the nose over here. It is wide-mouthed glass, and I've got a fan blowing down on me from right above.

You are in a drafty spot.

But that's okay. I'm getting a little bit of butterscotch. Nose is a little bit dusty.

Now Jackie, I'll tell you, this is my exactly first pour of birthday bourbon ever. Ever? Ever.

Wait a minute, like ever?

Forever. Ever, ever.

None of the other vintages? None?

None. Zero, zilch. I've chased a little bit and I just give up chasing. I was like, well, if I have it one day, I'll have it. I wouldn't say it's unattainable, but I don't have the time in my life right now, I guess, to come stand in line for it.

Right.

It's just, it's not there for me. I can't justify that for me. So I go over to somebody's house when they have it. And I'm almost the guy that I'm ashamed to see somebody's house and say, I want to try that off your shelf.

Don't be. We put so much work into what goes into that bottle. I wish that people would drink it more often than they do instead of just trading it and taking pictures of it on a shelf and posting it on their Instagram page. It's there to be enjoyed. It's there to be shared.

Now, if I had a bottle at my house, that's what would happen. It would not be on a shelf. Jim would tell you, I'd share it with everybody I know. I'd be like, hey, I got this awesome whiskey at my house on a shelf. Let's all drink it together. I want to hear what you think on it. I think that's the best way to drink whiskey, right Jim? Absolutely, absolutely.

Yeah, we have a lot of bottles, but we have a lot of bottles that are open. We don't have a whole lot that aren't open. And yeah, we do share quite a bit. He and I will get the same bottle sometimes. And we'll just talk to each other and say, hey, Jim, I'll say, hey, Mike, mine's already open. Let's drink from this one until it's gone and we'll switch over to yours.

Oh, that's awesome. Yeah. No, that's great. I mean, there's two types of people in this bourbon world that I found and those that that hoard and those that share for sure. And it's just. It's just whiskey at the end of the day. It's just whiskey.

I don't want it to be antique. I don't want my kids, whenever I die, to say, oh, Dad had all this bourbon. We're not bourbon drinkers. Even though my son is, he's a bourbon drinker. And he tries to drink really good bourbon. But it gets drank. I'm proud of him for that. I taught him well.

Well, and also if you've already opened it, you remove that moment of the surprise when you come home and what was not supposed to be opened is already opened. You just got to get that moment out of your life. Remove the opportunity.

Well, Jackie, tell us a little bit about this particular birthday bourbon.

Yeah, so birthday bourbon in general is sort of this yearly, highly sought after release from Old Forrester. And the whole gist behind it is that George Garvin Brown, who's the founder of Old Forrester, founder of Brown Forman in general, his birthday is September 2nd. So of course, on September 2nd, we release birthday bourbon. That's not the same case in every market. So a lot of retailers hold onto it for holiday and special events and stuff like that. But it's supposed to be in September. We get it done by September. And it's one day's production. Whatever's left in those barrels after sitting in a heat-cycled warehouse for anywhere between nine and 14 years is what you're going to end up with. And it's usually about a 10 to 15% yield. So it's barely any anyways. And then you take that. It's not supposed to taste the same every year. It's actually supposed to be celebrated for its differences because it's a vintage dated bourbon. We proof it. Chris and I tasted 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, all the way up to barrel strength, which is somewhere close to about 160 at that point.

Now you said Chris and you.

Yes, Chris Morris and I. Chris Morris. Yes. And then we find the sweet spots and we usually agree and then... There's always like a high point, a higher proof point, and a lower proof point. And I always fight for the lower proof point, and he always fights for the higher proof point. That's just kind of where we land. But this year, we were pretty much on the same page with this one. So what you guys are sipping on is obviously the release for this upcoming September. I can't tell you the proof on it. I can't tell you the barrels on it. I can't tell you how old it is. I literally cannot tell you anything, but I can pour you a glass.

Well, that's good because we can make our own decision on it.

What do you think, Mike? It's good. It's chocolatey raisins inside the nose. Getting a weird fruit on there, like a starfruit.

It's got a lot of tropical fruit to it this year.

Just pops. Just a little bit of pepper on the back end, maybe not a cayenne pepper, obviously white pepper when it's not that spicy. And I definitely make or something.

Yeah. It's definitely not spicy spice. Like there's warmth, right? Um, but I definitely wouldn't call it like the black pepper spice that usually goes on. It's a little bit softer than that, but yeah, I think so.

And when you say white pepper, Mike, I mean, I actually spent some time with some white pepper the other day because you kept bringing it up in your tasting notes. I was like, that's not one of my notes because I've never picked up a white pepper. So I tried. Well, I, I, I tried to, I pulled one out of the spice cabinet because I think that's what you do, right? If you want to be familiar with it, if you want to be familiar with it, And it's very light on the nose, extremely light on the nose, almost indiscernible as far as pepper goes. But yeah, I think you're right.

If you're cooking for somebody and they don't like a heavy spice for their food, I always think white pepper's a good pepper to cook with. And it just gives that just a little bit of zest to the food. And you know, that's kind of how I cook to cook for people whenever they say, oh, I don't like spicy food. Well, I'm going to add some spice to it because everybody needs a little spice in their life.

Well, Mike, I definitely get a little bit of the raisin on it, but you said light fruit.

Tropical fruit. I get chocolate raisins on the nose, but on the taste I get that, and there's a fruit, maybe a papaya or something.

There's definitely that sort of that resinous flavor that mangoes always finish off with. It's almost a piney flavor to it. But yeah, this one, it's such a good year. I mean, they're all good. They're all different. But some of them just resonate with me a little bit more of my personal preference.

So let's talk about Old Forester for a little bit. OK. For our listeners that don't know about Old Forester. And should. And should.

Because everyone should.

So who truly started Old Forester?

George Garvin Brown. And who else? 1870.

Because it's owned by Brown Foreman, truly, right?

It is owned by Brown Foreman. So George Garvin Brown, Brown of Brown Foreman. He did have a business partner, George Foreman.

What was his name?

George Foreman. Not like the grill. Not the boxer. No, not like the lean grill. No. Not at all. But George, actually, he wasn't a distiller. He was a medical salesman. And so, back in the late 1800s, whiskey was sold as medicine. And it's totally different than it was today. You wouldn't go into a store and grab a bottle off of a shelf like we do now. You get your prescription, you go to a pharmacy or an apothecary or wherever, and bring your own vessel and fill it up from a barrel straight behind the counter. The main issue with this is that you can't see inside of a bourbon barrel. You don't really know what's going on inside of there. And you can refill them. You can find a way. So a lot of retailers were certainly stretching products that they could make more profits off of it by adding all kinds of crazy stuff. Tobacco spit was a very common one. Iodine, things like that. This is predating any modern day bourbon rules. So as long as it was brown and had a bite, you could claim it as whiskey. But then you end up with all these patients that are saying, well, I got this medicine from this retailer. I went back and it's different. and I'm blind and I don't know what's going on. So somebody help me here. And you get all these doctors getting complaints from their patients. So even if you didn't adulterate your whiskey whatsoever and you left it as is, every barrel of whiskey is completely different. They're all like snowflakes. And so you're never going to get consistency. So George, as a salesman, is seeing this sort of environment going on and thinks to himself, well, how do I fix this with quality and consistency? How do you fix those two things? So for the consistency issue, Old Forrester was actually a blend of three different distilleries. So Atherton, the room we're sitting in right now is named after Atherton. Melwood and Mattingly were the other distilleries. So it's actually the first bourbon on the market that was a blend of different distilleries together. And then how do you fix the quality thing? Well, you make sure no one can add anything to it. You seal it in a glass bottle. Hence was born the first bottle bourbon. So we tell people that about Old Forrester all the time now. It's the first bottle bourbon. And they're like, what? They're all bottled. Like, who cares? Like, whatever. But this changed the industry. This is predating glass molds. So this is a very expensive endeavor to get into, to have hand-blown glass bottles to ensure your product wasn't going to get tampered with.

I think our listeners care about that, about the history part, at least, that it's the first glass bottle for bourbon to be put in. Now, George Garvin, he came from this pretty famous family in bourbon, though, I think.

You do?

I do think he's a, you know, the brown name is

Well, in modern time, yes. But back then, they weren't in the distilled spirits category whatsoever. The family is originating from Scotland. That's actually why you see old Forrester spelled with, why are you looking at me? He's looking at me with such skepticism.

Wasn't JTS Brown?

They were half brothers. Half brothers, yeah. But prior to that, generation before that, No. Did they get into the industry? Sure. It was the late 1800s, and everyone would set up shop here in Louisville. It was a huge shipping hub. You could make money off of it. It was great. It was great entrepreneurship to get into. I don't think of the Brown family the same way I think of the Beam family, by any means. You don't have that sort of Kentucky I hate to say like backwards, it's not necessarily backwards, but you know what I mean? More of like a rustic Kentucky background. You have a gentleman who was more of an American industrialist who saw an opportunity to do something a little bit differently and change an already existing landscape and did it, you know, with the best principles at heart that we still really do stick to today, which is quality and consistency.

So they worked right up to Prohibition with their bottle. And what happened at Prohibition to Old Forrester?

So Old Forrester was actually able to still sell, you couldn't distill, no one could distill during Prohibition except for distiller's holidays, but was able to sell Old Forrester as medicinal whiskey under Kentucky permit number three during the years of Prohibition. So literally since it started in 1870, not a day has gone by that you have not been able to buy a bottle of Old Forrester. You just had to go to your doctor. Yeah, you just had to fake a cough, you know.

So does that mean it's the only brand that's been able to continuously produce since that period of time?

that's been owned by the same family and the same company. A lot of brands kind of came and went. It was a scary landscape. You're sitting on a product that has to mature, that's going to evaporate. You don't know when prohibition is going to end. A lot of people sold off their stocks right away. But yes, this has always been We survived the 80s, we survived vodka, we survived all kinds of things, we survived wars and prohibitions.

So as those stocks were being bought up in the beginning of Prohibition and sometimes through Prohibition, was the Brown family also buying up other stocks from other places?

Well, what you had is in 1923, they passed the concentrated warehouse law. So the building we're sitting in right now was our technically second office building. The first one is up the street just a little bit, which was a Hubbix design firm. I don't know if it still is. I think I drove by it the other day and they we're doing something to it. So this is technically our second spot, but this is where we set up shop until Prohibition. We did bottling here. We did some warehousing. We did accounting here. The picture behind you is literally this room in 1904 with George Garvin Brown to the right-hand side, just leaning back in the chair. So we are literally in that exact same space. But what happens once you pass Prohibition, you're exactly right. You've got stocks laying around across the country. Government wants to keep an eye on it. So you had to go under the responsibility of warehouses that were run by people with those permits being held. So in 1923, we actually moved from this space to our space where our now corporate campus is located down on Dixie Highway. So the Howard Street facility was where we sequestered everything and kept it all.

Well, Jackie, let's let's turn to focus on you a little bit.

Oh, gosh.

Yeah. So are you are you originally from the Louisville area?

I'm not.

Yeah. So where are you from?

Um, I'm originally from St. Louis, Missouri. I have been in Louisville. August will be my 10 year anniversary in Louisville, but I don't know that they judge it necessarily based on time spent here. I think it's based on whiskey consumption. So I was a Louisville in a very long time ago. Trust me on that. But yeah, it'll be 10 years.

So did you go directly from St. Louis to Louisville?

I did, yes. I moved, I was 24, 25 when I moved here.

What did you do before you came to Louisville?

Well, I was in school and bartending at the same time and working at a hospital at the same time and working at a vet's office at the same time and I don't sit still very well. But I got married and his job took us down here and now I'm in Louisville, right? So hey,

So you're from probably the, to me, probably the greatest beer city in America, right?

Do you think so? You think St. Louis is the greatest beer city?

Milwaukee, St. Louis. I think St. Louis. By far 68 craft distillery or breweries there. You got the king of beers there, Budweiser or Ambev now. It's known for breweries. And then you come to really the bourbon capital of the world. Sorry, Barstown. Oh, we still love you, Barstown. But you come here to the whiskey capital, right? The bourbon capital. Why not beer?

Well, honestly, I didn't seek out whiskey. I didn't grow up thinking, oh, one of these days I'm gonna be a master taster. Like that never crossed my mind whatsoever. I was on a totally different path. I like beer, I drink beer. I do enjoy it, but I honestly came through more of a cocktail side of things than I did the rest of it. Beer to me, and when you grew up in St. Louis, of course, beer is like, if I can go back way back down the timeline, yes, you drink Budweiser, you drink Bud Light, you drink whatever. When you're in college, you drink those things. I should not say this, but I'm going to say this. When you're younger, you grew up on this stuff, right? The first beer I ever tasted was my dad's Bud Light. You know what I mean? My grandpa drank Busch with a little salt sprinkled in the can. That's just like, this is your life in Missouri.

The lineage there in St. Louis is just phenomenal. Exactly. Bevo Meals, you ever been to Bevo Meals? Yes. Anheuser-Busch actually had himself a dining room built. You would think you're in Germany when you walk inside that place. It's just that beautiful. It really did a good job trying to keep it to its original form.

It's such a cool space. I don't know, but the same way. So it was actually quite interesting for me to hear you talk about the King of beers and talk about Anheuser-Busch and like thinking about, oh yeah, that's right. The breweries downtown. Like I remember growing up and going there like on a field trip. I remember going there and thinking like, you never forget the smell. The first time you smell a brewery, you never forget that smell. Um, but it was just like, yeah, we have this brewery downtown, whatever. You know, like you just don't think about it. And I wonder if that's how it feels for a lot of people in Kentucky that are just kind of like they've been surrounded by it their whole life. So they don't think twice about it the way that we do. But, um, I don't know, getting back into the bar industry. Once I moved to Louisville was more of sort of just the way to meet people and just do something that already knew would be easy access for me to do. And then once I realized how much whiskey there was out there, It just became sort of like a challenge to myself. Like I'm going to learn everything about every single one of these back there because in St. Louis, it was like wild turkey beam. Maybe there's makers and that's exotic, you know, like, but for the most part, everyone referred to it all as just whiskey or just bourbon. Like people go into a bar and ask for bourbon and they would get poured like a Dewar's or a Jameson or whatever. It's all just brown and it's all just whatever. I mean, that was 10 years ago, too. Let's remember that. Sure.

You don't have these great groups of people that just get together and, you know, you don't hear a bunch of people getting here. Let's try these seven types of beer. But we do have people, thousands of people, hundreds of thousands of people, let's get together and have a giant party and try these whiskeys.

Yeah. It's a great thing, but I don't know. So answering your original question, I guess I didn't grow up with that passion. I found it when I moved to Kentucky and it wasn't just about the spirit itself. It was about the culture surrounding it and how normalized it was for it to always be there. I thought that was really interesting. So I just, I don't know, I fell in with the right group of people.

So when you were tending bar, Did you consider yourself a mixologist?

I hate the word mixologist. The M word.

Yeah. They're like, no, I'm a bartender.

Right. And here's this bar and I'm tending it. And the idea there is that you have to somehow elevate what you're doing. You're doing the same thing as everyone else is doing. But yeah, some people are more into the craft of it. So I can definitely agree that there's a difference between volume bartending as there was craft bartending, et cetera. I started bartending the day I turned 21. I was just waiting for it. Like I wanted to bartend so badly. And in Missouri you have to wait till you're 21. Oh, cause I had worked in restaurants like all through high school and everything else and the bartender job. Yeah, that's the one you want. That's the one that makes the money. That's the one that has the say. Everyone loves the bartender. You want to be the bartender.

So were you a bartender that talked to people?

Um, I did my best, so I can be a very socially awkward human. I'm a very introverted human. I'm a nerd. Like it's weird. Um, I did not have the opportunity to not talk to people when I was bartending in St. Louis, but I got my start in more of like a sports bar and more volume setting. I learned my speed and I learned. a lot of things going through that side of it. And then I didn't start doing craft bartending until I moved to Louisville, Kentucky. And in that sense, it's a different audience that goes to a sports bar than a craft cocktail bar, right? And I didn't necessarily, I love them all dearly, but it's harder to tolerate different audiences is all I'm going to say. So I stuck to the service well and kept my head down as much as I possibly could.

So you think you can still sling some cocktails? Oh, 100%. And what's your favorite cocktail to make?

Mm, any of them, literally any of them. There's only one that I don't like making and that's a Ramos gin fizz, but it can be fun if you're working with someone else and you're passing a shaker back and forth. Other than that, you're like, seriously, like your arms are killing you. It's you have to shake it for so long. Um, yeah, we do charity stuff every now and then while I'll get behind the bar for the brand.

And you put on a show.

Um, I, it's like riding a bike. It's 100% like riding a bike. You just get right back into it and it's great. It's free.

So do you like to invent new drinks?

Um, I've been leading the old Forester drink strategy for five years now. And, um, yeah, I definitely would say like, that's still a passion of yours. Yeah.

So, so what, what the heck does a master taster do? Tell her, tell her.

Well, as I take a sip of birthday bourbon here. No day is the same. I wish that there was a day or a template or something I could share about it. But for the most part, half my time is spent on the road as a face of a brand and doing trainings and tastings and different media stuff. And then the other half of the time I'm here in Louisville and we have two distilleries now. So the Old Forster Distillery we're in and then we still have the Brown Forman Distillery. Our heat cycled warehouses are down in Shively by the Brown Forman Distillery. So my role is different than the master taster role for Woodford was. It's different than the master taster role for the lady who literally invented the macaroni and cheese for Panera Bread. Or should I say St. Louis Bread Company? Because we all know that's the real name of it. That's what I call it. We all know that's what it is.

You go there and you look for Panera, you're not going to find a Panera Bread.

See, he knows what I'm talking about.

People would visit us and they were like, what's that St. Louis bread? It looks like Panera bread.

Would you guys knock off Panera bread? No, it's ours.

No, that's Panera bread. They just put that name on there, remarketed theirself, rebranded themselves. So you fancy people would buy their bread.

And it's great bread. But, so, I don't know. Some days I'm in the warehouse, some days I'm not. Some days I'm on our corporate campus and meetings literally all day long because my job is an interesting hybrid that's half production and half global marketing. And so, when it comes to deciding, like, The drink strategy that falls under me, of course, are licensed cocktail products. Those are my design. The single barrel program in its entirety falls under myself. And Caitlin Purden, who I have to give credit, is amazing and she keeps everything flowing perfectly. But every time you see a single barrel on the shelf, that liquid has come from a barrel that I have personally drilled and sampled and approved for the program.

And this birthday bourbon.

And this birthday bourbon. So Chris and I share the proofing process for that and the lot selection process for that. And we always knock that out in January for the next year because we have to have it bottled and ready to go and shipped, right? So we get that stuff done in January.

So it takes that long. It takes nine months or eight months.

for TTB approvals, for artwork, for the label design, for hang tags that go on the bottle, to order glass, for all of that. Oh, there's a whole, there is nothing quick turnaround in this industry, let me say that.

So do you have an idea of the size of the batch in January?

Oh yeah, for sure.

She just won't tell us.

Well, I can't. And I would never say anything about the size of the birthday badge, especially because there's never going to be enough birthday bourbon to make everyone happy. It's that one time a year we just assume we're going to get a lot of angry emails and then you move on. But I'm glad you guys got to taste some before it's too late.

Well, you can't control that. You just have to do the best you can and roll with the flow, right?

Exactly. If I was somebody, I wouldn't be sending Jackie an email like that. I'm just telling you. We walked in here today. And I actually thought Oh Forester was getting robbed because we walk in here and Jackie's got, if you can see her, she's decked out in black, like some kind of thief in the night.

This is the second time someone has said that to me. I've been in the warehouse all morning and yes, a lot of our branded stuff is black and it was cold in the warehouse. They were loading barrels into the door was open all the time.

I totally respect what you're wearing and hey, that's, you know, what are the, some people call it the distiller's uniform, I guess. They just don't care.

Yeah. I mean, I'm going to get dirty. I'm covered in char and dirt and spider webs and whiskey and sawdust and everything else. So.

So I noticed you're wearing boots, right?

I am wearing steel toe boots. Yes.

You didn't start out as a master taster here. You didn't. So what I hear you went in there and just kicked the door down and said, Hey, I'm going to be the new master taster here at Old Forester.

Verbally, yes. I verbally kicked down the door. When I first came on board with the brand, this place obviously hadn't even had a groundbreaking ceremony done on it yet. This was the new project for Old Forester. It was to come home and open up this home place in a retail shop, buy a t-shirt, do whatever. And so right before I came along, Marianne was still with us at Brown Foreman and then she moved on to Castle & Key and she was in the master taster role. So she leaves, they make Elizabeth master taster for Woodford and then old Forrester.

So just for people who don't know who we're talking about, it's Marianne. Beavs, Barnes, and then Elizabeth McCall, who's now over at Woodford.

And so Old Forest was just growing so fast, there was definitely going to be a need for it, but I had never intended to end up in a brand ambassador role. And I just, I didn't want to be one of those people that was just spouting out things I memorized. I wanted to actually be involved in the process and learn it just from having it hands on. So I told Campbell, by the time those doors are open, I will be the master taster for Old Forester. And he just kind of looked at me like, who's this chick? Like just walking in here telling me what, but he just like stopped and he went, Oh, okay. All right. And so I started my production training like the next week.

So that takes confidence. You carry yourself a certain way. I see that.

I love that you call it confidence. My mother would call it stubbornness, but you know, we can go with confidence today. That sounds good.

I never tell a woman she's stubborn.

So I'm going to say confidence.

Okay. Thank you.

So, you know, you've, you do some challenging things though in your job. I mean, there's a lot of stuff you do that, you know, can challenge that confidence. Is there anything that kind of puts you on edge a little bit?

Um, so, Being wired the way that I am and being an awkward human as I am, the public speaking element was a hard adjustment for me. And it's not so much that I got used to it and it's not that I don't get nervous anymore with it, so when I have to go and do trainings and tastings and things like that, it's not that. It's almost an out-of-body experience at this point where I just have to leave myself, do it, and then come back in. It depletes all of my energy. I am completely flattened out for the rest of the day. you would never know it. Like I know there's probably, if there's anyone listening that has been to a tasting or presentation or what have you, they're probably like, she's so full of it, whatever. But like, no, like I have to force it because that's my job, right? So you show up to work, you give it your best, and then you can retreat back and hide. But you would just have to balance it out when you're off the clock, I suppose. I hide in the woods a lot. That sounds creepy. I shouldn't say it that way. Like I go and hide in the woods.

But I do.

I need it.

It seems like your motor's always running. You're always going, you got that 100, you're given 110% at all times. I've read some stuff about you and you said that several times that you believe in that. Come in and give 150%, leave everything on the table, what you got, and then you go home at the end of the day, whatever time that is. And really there's not an end to your day, is there? No.

There's never. Not as long as you have cell phone service, there's never an end to your day. I think a lot of people anymore, no matter what job you're in now. Especially when you are doing things on a marketing side, you literally never clock out. Everything you see is inspiration. Everything you see, you're analyzing versus, how are we doing it? How are you doing it? What's happening? It must be very different. I can only hypothesize, but it must be very different for people that work for Brown Foreman in cities outside of Louisville. Because Louisville is every element, and Louisville is touched by Brown Foreman. So you're constantly surrounded by it. So you are literally never off work ever. It's there.

So do you feel like that's starting to be a lost, maybe a generational thing, younger kids coming into the business? Because you've got younger people working here, right?

Yeah. Oh, we've got a lot of younger people working here.

Do they have that same drive as you?

Yeah, I think that I'm kind of a weirdo in it to a certain extent. And I don't know that it's a generational thing. But the Caitlin that works on our single barrel program, she's mid-20s. And I look at her and I see myself made over. And she's just, this is how we're going to do it, because this is the right way to do it. And I don't care what it's going to take to do it, but we're going to do it this way. There's no like, I need reimbursement. I need a reward for it. I needed this. I need acknowledgement. It's just, you do it because it's the right thing to do. I think those people still exist. You just got to comb through and find them.

I think Jim would probably say one of those guys that my motor never stops running.

Yeah, you know, sometimes I think the older you get, the more you think that the younger generation just isn't doing it right. It's just kind of the nature of getting older in years.

Right.

You kind of think you did it right and these guys have no idea what's going on. So we think that the younger generation is entitled. You know, they don't want to put the hours in. They don't work as hard. But there are those few that do. Yeah.

And I mean, maybe more than a few. I don't know.

I mean, what's that word? The cream rises to the top. It does. Yeah. But I think that's, that's true in almost everything is, you know, you didn't just rise the top. You kicked your way to the top and said, Hey, there's so much kicking imagery. You got those boots on. You just, you just, Hey, I'm Jackie's and I'm here.

I'm here to rock it. So Jackie, tell me, you've been here for a while now. What's kind of that one accomplishment so far that you kind of hang your hat on and say, man, I'm really proud of what I did there?

Um, that's hard to choose one. I've been given a lot of independence and a lot of, um, just freedom with the brand after coming on board. Campbell is very trusting. So it's kind of been like, Oh, okay. You think it's a good idea? Go for it. And you know, if it works, awesome. If it doesn't try something else, whatever.

So you feel like you've had an impact on the brand as a whole?

Sure. I also think it's easy to say that because you see my face more often than the other members of the brand team. We have a tiny group of people that are really driving this brand, but we have a massive network of people between our distributors and our salespeople and people across the globe that all level for us. It's honestly the core brand of Brown Foreman, even though it's not the biggest one because it's where it all started. It just has a sentimental hold more than anything. It tastes the best.

So let me ask you a question. When you have family coming in or friends coming into Louisville for the weekend, tell me about the entertaining at your house.

Someone please come to my house and take the whiskey off my hands because there's too many bottles. That sounds so bad to complain about that, but it's true. I don't drink that much when I'm off work, right? If we have work events where there's a featured cocktail, you don't want to be rude and not drink the cocktail, so I drink at those. But off the clock, my liver is just like, please stop, Jackie. Please, it's been enough. It's enough. But you're cooking dinner for them? I cook. I cook a lot. Do you? Yes. And of course, when you're on the road, all you do is eat restaurant food constantly. And that sounds great. You'd never have to make food for yourself. But it's heavy. And it's delicious. And we don't go to shabby places by any means. But after a while, you're like, I just want to go home and eat something out of my own fridge.

What's your comfort food? Mac and cheese.

No, but close, but so close. I mean, technically it's the same thing. I make, and I can't take credit for how I make it. I was taught how to make the absolute most perfect, exquisite carbonara you will ever have in your entire life. It's the right proportion of different things. I can't give away all my secrets, but technically that's adult mac and cheese, right? It's kind of the same thing-ish. Yeah.

Well, I think it's a good point for us to take a little break here, Mike. We're going to keep sipping on this birthday bourbon. Mine's gone. Hey, that's a normal thing for me. But when we come back from the break, Jackie, you'll have another something for us to taste.

We'll find something fun in the cabinet.

I mean, you got a whole bunch of us.

Just whiskey. Whole bunch of whiskey.

We have no shortage of that.

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 hand-crafted 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 rotten 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 LogHeadsHomeCenter.

All right, so we're back.

We're at Old Forester with Jackie Zeichen. And I'll tell you what, it's going to be hard to top that last four years.

Is it?

I think so.

It's a pretty good year for B-Day.

Yeah.

I gotta say so.

Yeah. So, I mean, we're kind of in a very small group of people that's had an opportunity to test that, I would think.

I want to say the only people who have tasted the 2020 birthday so far are myself, Chris Morris, I may have poured a sample for one other person and you guys, so yeah.

You're special, look at you. I feel pretty special, yeah. Well, that was really good and we definitely appreciate it and you know what? I think our listeners are going to be happy to get an advanced look at it, listen to it, whatever you want to call it. They're all going to be waiting for September to come, I'm sure.

For sure.

Yeah, there's not enough bottles but guys still try still try and if you can't get it go get a pour

Exactly. Exactly.

Now, even on that first day, whenever you guys release that birthday bourbon, it seems like you guys put a couple out every so often here.

We do. We appreciate and are very grateful for the bourbon hounds out there that do sort of elevate expressions that way, right? Then they sleep on the sidewalk and they camp out and they do all those things. But that really does rob that surprise element. It won't stay on the shelf, right? Like we all know, like you put it on the shelf, it's going to be gone. But we will sometimes randomly just throw a bottle up there and hope that some random person from Oklahoma is visiting the distillery that day and like, this is their chance. They have this like aha moment. And whether they think to themselves, oh my gosh, I can't believe I got a bottle. Maybe they don't even know what it is, but they got to enjoy it. And that's kind of why we make it.

I bet that is so much fun for your person working in the shop down there. They get to put that bottle out and just watch that expression. That must be so much fun.

It's even better if someone sees it and they're like, what's this? And we're like, oh, it's birthday bourbon. Oh, how much is it? It's X amount of dollars. Oh, that's a lot. But OK, I'll take it. And they don't really know that they found such a gem that you cannot find on a shelf. And that's the most enjoyable.

They get a call and their friend says, dude.

I know. And then it just gets better. It's great.

I don't know if you get that expression from somebody from Oklahoma. My brother lives there and he's always asking me about bourbon. And he's like, ah, bourbon's not really that big here.

I took a random stab at Oklahoma. Sorry, Oklahoma. Anyone from anywhere. We get a lot, you know, we, we do a lot of visitors. Um, people come to Louisville for other things and then discover that, oh yeah, by the way, bourbons here also, you know, people come down for the slugger museum and they're like, oh, there's distilleries in downtown. Okay.

The urban bourbon trail, right? The urban bourbon trail. That's right. So Jackie, what do we have in our glass?

You have something even harder to get than birthday bourbon.

Yeah.

Man. This is a good day for y'all.

Good day for the Bourbon Road.

So this is the Old Forrester President's Choice expression. This is actually something that is only available in Kentucky, primarily in the retail shop for Old Forrester. There is not a specific date of release. The way birthday is always in September. President's Choice is whenever we find the barrels and whenever we can fit it in the bottling schedule. So it's very, very, very random. This one, I believe, is barrel number six. Yeah. So I want to say we've done 13 or 14 since we opened our doors almost two years ago. And the way this works, I go out and I find a lot of barrels that all are great as single barrels. So it's different when you're hunting for things to blend than when you're hunting for things to be on their own. And then hand him over to Campbell Brown and he whittles it down to the ones that he specifically likes as he is the president of Old Forester. And then we bottle them. It's not a new expression. It's actually a vintage label for us. We discontinued it in 1972 and we decided to bring it back when we opened the new distillery as sort of like the thing that you can't get anywhere else. We put out birthday bourbon every now and then, but you can find birthday bourbon even in Oklahoma. But President's Choice is always a single barrel. It's bottled anywhere between 110 and 120 proof. And yeah, the range is, we've had some, like the first two I think were not that old. They were barely seven years old, but from there it goes up anywhere eight to 10 years. And yeah, they are proofed to order. So each one is proofed to where it's going to taste the best at, from my opinion.

And you do that proofing?

Yes, sir.

Okay. And so Campbell Brown's palate leans a certain direction.

Yes, but sometimes he surprises me. Yeah, he can be unpredictable some days. He's all over the place. But he's got just very flagship Old Forrester preference. Sweet on the front end, spicy on the back, and balance. The key is balance always, always, always. It's not super, super dry. It's never overly, overly spicy or overly floral or overly sweet. He's just kind of right there in the middle with it, which makes sense.

Let's check it out.

Yeah.

I have been Mike. See, I watched Mike this time. Mike, Mike always gets in there and starts, uh, he's like, I already have. Yeah. I like to taste the whiskey.

So this expression right here, talk about the finish on it first. Cause it finishes with that spice. It does. Um, and that spice just kind of metals out. Yeah. And that finishes lingers and lingers just saying, please sip some more.

I get that brown sugar. But this one's got a little bit more oak in it for me. But I tell you what, that spice on the back end, it just sits on the back of my palate. It just sits back here and just keeps tangling me. But I like that. I'm that spicy guy.

Oh yeah. I like the sweetness of this. So Jim's a rye guy. I'm a weeder.

Interesting.

A big sissy.

Why is that a sissy?

That's what somebody else called me. And I was like, hey.

Were they from Oklahoma?

You buy me whiskey, and I'll drink it.

No, I don't think it's a sissy. It's actually interesting. So the more tannic and the more spice you crave, generally, generally, I'm not going to offend anyone by saying this, generally, the less taste buds you have. So you might prefer something sweeter. It just means you have more taste buds, meaning you actually have a more refined, sensitive palate. I wouldn't call it sissy.

I mean, I get different notes and I tasted a whiskey this last week and I said, if you put some Twizzlers up on a dash on a hot summer day of a truck, that's what's cherry Twizzler that's hot. That's what I got out of it. And it was a younger guy that I was talking to and he was like, I got the same thing. And he was like, I can't believe you said that. And I was like, yeah, that's what I get out of this. I just get that. Sometimes I get cereals that I've hit, like Honey Smackums or Honey Nut Cheerios or something like that. I just get that different. I think when I'm listening to whiskey reviewers, they stay within that whiskey wheel. of sensory. Oh, this tastes like nutmeg and vanilla and, you know, I think this tastes like a Dairy Queen whipped ice cream, you know, sometimes.

Yeah, I got Necco candies the other day. You know Necco's? I got those the other day and I was like, wow, that's interesting. I've never gotten that before. But it's all about memories, right?

It is. That's exactly where it all comes from. If you've never smelled cinnamon, you're never going to pick up a glass of whiskey and say, I smell cinnamon and everything is 100%. Granted, it might be some person describes as vanilla, you describe as Dairy Queen ice cream cone. You know what I mean? It might be the same thing, but I'm the exact same way with tasting notes. I get a lot of scrutiny about that sometimes because I think there's the expectation that you should write your notes a certain way and you should only use certain descriptors. and people start looking at you like you're giving them some sort of like crazy hallucination and like it's not that's not it at all but you're describing the situation that it brings you back to. That's the best part about drinking whiskey is that there's that emotional connection to memories that you have.

Well that was that I think the whiskey reviews they come from more of the wine world.

Sometimes, yeah. That's a very fair point for that.

That's how they review whiskeys. They grade whiskeys. I don't ever want to say that. Me and Jim say, hey, you can sip on it, or you can share it, or you can mix it. You do what you want. It's your whisky your way, or your bourbon your way. That's just kind of how we feel. I think that's great.

This is definitely a little sweet on the front. Spicy on the bank. But for me, this wins on the back of my palate. This wins on the finish. It's, it's very bold for me.

It is that the P choices tend to be that for sure. That high proof doesn't hurt it at all either. What is this 117.8?

So Jackie, it's well known that you're a mom, right?

I am a mom.

Does your son get to run around the rick houses with you? Does he get to live the distillery life?

He does. And he just thinks of it as normal, which is interesting to me. I bring him to work with me whenever I have to. Some days you just do. There's definitely been weekends where I was behind on something because I was traveling. And I've had to take him to the warehouse. And he loves it. He loves it. He obviously He can't do much in there. I probably shouldn't be bringing him in there anyways. But under a very watchful eye, he has a good time. He likes to put the pegs in the bourbon barrel holes as I'm drilling samples out. That's his little job. But he loves it. And I asked him, do you want to make whiskey when you grow up? Is this what you want to do? And he goes, no, that's boring.

And I'm like, OK. How old is he right now?

He's six.

Now I'll say six year old, six year old probably would think, but as he gets older, he might say that.

I know. And he's going to be the kid in school and all of his friends are going to come over to our house and drink all that whiskey. I just asked everyone to take out in my house like earlier.

So yeah, we got all these sample bottles. Right.

Or I mean the other side, like he might not think anything special of it or just like, what?

This is just, these are just bottles like whatever, you know, and talk to other guys like in other brands like angels, envy, like, talking to Wes, or I'm sure you talked to Eddie Russell, or any of the nos. It was probably just an everyday life to them, and it wasn't that big of a deal to be around whiskey. Your son could end up being one of the future master distillers of the world.

If he wanted to. And if he doesn't, that's cool, too. I don't know, it's different in my situation, I think, especially because, and with those, those are family-led. I think it's different if you ask Campbell about his kids being involved in the company than you would if you asked me about it, because I consider myself this token resource that's carrying the torch for this generation of old forests, but it's not They treat us like family, that's for sure, but it's not necessarily my family lineage that would be passed on with it like it is for some of those other guys. So I don't know, whatever Bennett wants to do. I'm sure there's going to be a day of awakening where he's like, wait a minute. or he's gonna hear it from someone else. That's where it's gonna happen. Like someone from school.

You know who your mom is?

Who your mom? What? He's gonna make my mom, I hate my mom, whatever. Too cool for this.

So take a minute and tell us a little bit about this new, it's still new, the downtown facility here.

It is new. Yeah. It still smells like fresh paint.

Yeah, so I mean, you guys are producing here. We are. But what's going on here every day? I mean, what's going on downtown? You got the big facility down in the Shively area. You got this one up town.

Mm-hmm. Yep. So basically, the fermentation tanks here on Main Street are just take a decimal point off of the size of the ones down in Shively. So those are 44,000 gallon fermenters. And here, we've got 4,000 gallon fermenters. So one fermentation tank here will give us 14 barrels of whiskey off the still. And oh, who knew we can make 14 barrels a day in our coop ridge? And that wasn't an accident. So everything's very much puzzle pieced together here. We are able to make about, you know, like a third of the year supply of old forest are out of this facility alone. So it's definitely not just for show, but we're growing so fast. I don't, there's going to come a day where even this probably is going to be tight, going full capacity here and full capacity on Chivalet. Cause we share space on the still down there with brands like early times with Coopers, things like that.

So love that early times.

It is and we always forget about early times, you know, but it's a great brand. It really is.

So what's the future look like for Old Forester as far as brand? World domination.

Well, I mean, given the size of the brand, sizes in like case volume, like how many bottles a year we sell, we have a lot of expressions. We've done that on purpose so that we can really cater to a whole plethora of different bourbon drinkers that are out there now. We've got spicier expressions, fruitier expressions, sweeter expressions. We've got something for everybody. I don't think you're going to see the same rate of new expression release as you have seen in the past five years with Old Forrester. We've literally put something new out every single year if you think about it. So like the Whiskey Row line isn't going anywhere, but it's complete. You're not going to see like Old Forrester in 1952 come out. That's not going to be a thing. that I know of. So right now we're just trying to build brand awareness. That's our biggest struggle is that people, you might see the bottle, but you just don't know that, you know, there's so many brands on the shelf nowadays that everything kind of gets lost in the wash of the potpourri of bourbon.

I think from the outside looking in, it seems like you guys are really firing on all cylinders.

We are.

From the Whiskey Row series, and then you introduced the Rye, and then now you're retooling your single-barrel selection program. It seems like you've got an ear to the ground kind of.

Well, I think a big part of it is that Brown Foreman, you know, if you guys didn't know, it's our 150th anniversary, obviously, like if we do the math from 1870 to 2020. But you don't survive that long as a company without taking a step and pausing and allowing yourself to sort of break out of your cocoon and shed your skin. And I think It was an interesting choice for them to choose Jackie back five years ago, because I was probably the only person walking around the corporate campus with tattoos everywhere. And I was like, what is that girl doing here? Oh my gosh. But they refreshed themselves as a brand. And a lot of that was driven by Campbell Brown. That's how you stay alive. That's you have to evolve and you have to just carry on through the ages. Old Forester is growing. We do have the benefit of the bourbon category growing, you know, holistically, but it's a quality product. And I think that, you know, as people start getting into brown spirits and it's not just about getting drunk, it's about actually experiencing flavor and understanding the production specs behind it. you start to realize like, Oh, some of these brands are just slapping a label on and calling it a day. And some of them actually have cared for a long time. And there's some respect that comes with that. And I think old foresters finally starting to, to gain that.

Well, you can't just stick up some whiskey in a barrel and tomorrow say it's bourbon, right? It takes, it takes some thought on that. Well, legal definition, you can carry it in a bucket and call it bourbon.

But you've got these new distilleries and it's great and everyone has this pioneering spirit about it where they are making their own thing and they're doing things differently. They might be sourcing stuff up front for their label and then after a while they're going to come into that challenge space of how do we continue this flavor profile but under our production because we want to get shifted over to that side of things or maybe that isn't your goal. Maybe your goal is to always source. There's a lot of brands like that too.

And some people have navigated that successfully and others not so successfully.

Exactly. So what countries are you trying to get into right now? Because you're everywhere in the United States.

We are everywhere in the US. We are in Canada. We are in the UK. We are in Australia.

That's some of our favorite listeners there in Australia. Really? Oh, yeah.

Hi, Australia. I'll see you guys later this year. We're actually releasing our first Old Forster single barrel in Australia in 2020, which is really exciting. Oh, that's awesome.

We should just take Big Chief with you.

Well, it's not just bourbon though, right? I mean, your rye has been madly successful.

Too successful. We did not anticipate how successful that would be. We did. We thought, oh, it's going to be more successful than we've put down, so we'll put down extra an hour, like three times past that.

But isn't that what happened with the 1910 also?

1910, we had no idea that it was going to do as well as it did. So if you think about the lifeline of that whiskey roast series, 1870 came out and everyone was kind of like, why is there a more expensive old Forrester? I don't get it. Whatever. And then the second one came out, 1897. It was like, okay, well, either like one or the other, because one is kind of sweet and one is very black pepper spicy. And then there was always that moment of confusion of like, well, why am I paying extra for a hundred proof old Forrester when they have the old Forrester signature? That's a hundred proof. So what's going on here? Once we released the 1920 as the third part of that set, it was like, oh, it's a series. I get it. They're all different. I want all of them at once. And that's really what took us off. So we based that first year's release amount of 1910 on a year's supply of 1920 sales, which was doing really well and still is. And it was gone in three weeks from our warehouse. It's gone. just there was nothing we could do. Now that 1910 is a finished product, it goes into a secondary barrel for seven to nine months, so we can't just pluck more off a tree, and we can't just keep it rolling all the time. We thought we were done for a year, right? So it took us almost a full year to get it back in stock.

But you made it right.

But we made it right.

You did. So it's out there now. You can go get it.

You can go get it.

And it's readily available on the shelf now. I'd say last year, this time frame is hard to find.

Mike, you and I, we chose this as our Whiskey of the Year 2019.

I think it's because we had it, as I was saying earlier, how many times we had it on the show. And we both own several bottles of it and drank it. And it's just something we kind of

But also, I think it's because you're kind of more of a weeded whiskey guy. You like that sweeter front end on whiskeys, and I like the spicy back end a little bit more. But together, when we had to agree on something, that kind of fit the bill.

I think that Double Oat to me, now Brown Foreman has another Double Oat and another brand and it's near and dear to my heart. And I love that too. That 1910 is pretty special. Now, Old Forester's missing one thing in your lineup.

What are we missing?

A weeded whiskey.

Are we missing that?

Do you have one? Well, Brown Foreman's not missing it, are they? They have a wheat whiskey.

Wheat whiskey, but they don't have a weeded bourbon.

Do they have a weeded bourbon? Okay.

Mike, you do this every time. I know. I try to dig it out of people.

He's a digger. This one.

I just think that, I think being the weeded king of Kentucky. Is that who you are?

Self-titled weeded king of Kentucky. I love it.

that everybody needs to have a weeded bourbon.

Everybody.

Everybody. Everybody. It needs to be out there. People need to know about it. They need to understand it. For those people with better palates than most.

Everybody needs a ride too, so there we go. Let's move on, Mike.

Oh, Lori.

So let's talk a little bit about your barrel selection program. You touched on it a little bit, but you guys have had this barrel selection program for a while now, and it's been pretty successful. I mean, we see your picks out there everywhere, and they're not all the same. There's some pretty interesting bottles out there.

Oh, for sure. The program was selling about 15 barrels a month when I started on with the brand. And now we're up closer, pushing almost 50 a month now. And we're in the UK. And obviously this year we're opening up to Australia as well. So we're in Canada. We're all over the place with it. But yeah, it's interesting because Old Forrester was in and of itself almost anti-single barrel as a brand the way it started, right? It started as a blend. It's just that we really do make such great whiskey. And there are some flavors that just get lost when you start mingling barrels together that are so fun to explore. There's been some weird ones. I'm glad you said Twizzlers earlier, because Twizzlers is a note that I write down quite a bit for Old Forcer as a sweet candy cherry note. I did a lot of single barrel. tasting notes yesterday, and one of them was straight up, do you remember the, and this is so embarrassing, I was in the office, and I said this out loud to two other people that were around me, and I was like, do you guys remember those candy, they were like dots, but they were candy, they were like on a paper strip, and they were blue, yellow, and pink, and they were like candy dots, you mean, Jackie? The dot candies?

You picked them off the wax paper?

Yes, but some of them, you never get it all the way off, you get that thin membrane of paper, and you just, you know, and you have to spit it out later. But yeah, one of those, or not, where you just ate it. Exactly. It's okay. There was a barrel that tasted just, everything about it was 100% just candy dots. And then there's been some that tastes like scratch instead of strawberry stickers. And there's been some that tastes like, I don't know, they're all over the place, but. It's case in point right now between the two of you, you know that you both appreciate probably structurally the same. You appreciate whiskey, but flavor profile is a different story. And so with a single barrel program, we're able to speak to both of you at the same time, right? And allow both of you to find something you really absolutely customize with love. So we have always done it at 90 proof. That decision was made when the program first started years and years and years ago. And it just came to my attention after doing all these barrel selections. One, those who like high-proof whiskey are also very vocal individuals. I know that for a fact now. Really? I would never guess that. And every single selection was like, why don't you guys do barrel strength? Why don't you do barrel strength? And all I could think was that, do you want a barrel strength because you want barrel strength or because you legitimately think this barrel would taste best at barrel strength? Because there's a difference. There's a complete difference. But when you're growing a brand and the brand the size of a Forrester and you still have so much so much more work to do with it, the last thing you ever want is for someone to pick up a bottle off a shelf and it is a single barrel and it doesn't taste as good as it possibly could. And more often than not, a lot of these barrels actually from personal opinion showed that they would express themselves a little bit better at 100 proof and not 90. And the barrel strength offering was something that it didn't It was obviously helped me feel more confident in making the decision to do it by people asking for it all the time. But there is something so, so unique and so amazing about being able to drink whiskey straight from a barrel where you literally just skim the chunks of char out of it. And it is in its pure raw form.

Pick the chunks out and drink it, right?

Pick the chunks out and drink it. And the only way you could do that is to come and, you know, do a barrel selection. And I wanted to be able to open that experience up. So that's why the barrel strength or force or single barrel isn't filtered at all. We go through a screen, a mesh screen, so you can take out all those crude chunks of barrel and pieces of wood and what have you. But after that, that's it.

So your barrel selections were at 90 proof, so that's gone now or will be?

Will be. We got a couple more months to tidy up those loose ends of that program. There was never going to be a good time to switch.

So now a customer, a restaurant, a bottle shop, somebody will come in now and they'll pick a barrel and that barrel will, they'll get to choose whether or not that barrel is bottled at 100 or at barrel proof.

Yes, we prefer them to choose on the front end because some of those barrels, so we don't filter our whiskey, we do a carbon treatment. And the way that that works is in the treatment tank, there's an agitator that spins at the bottom that mixes in this powdered carbon with the actual whiskey itself, and then we filter that out after 12 hours. If you don't have enough volume in your barrel plus the amount of water you're going to need to gauge it with to reach the bottom of that agitator, you can't process that barrel. So super, super low yield barrels cannot be processed with carbon treatment. So in this program, there's a certain amount of barrels that can only be 100 proof and some that can't be 100 proof based on volume.

So coming in, they have to say, we want to pick a full proof barrel.

So we know which samples to send them and so we know what's going on with that. So yeah.

I'm excited for that. And I would say that I'm the kind of guy that appreciates that 90 to 100 proof. And I think people outside the United States would probably be in line with me, what kind of whiskey they drink. Because we have some listeners and they're like, man, you Americans drink some high proof stuff. to where I'm kind of that guy. I could probably have that limit of 110 because I like to drink my whiskey. You know, I want to drink it for a long time for over several hours, not drink two pourers and I'm done for the night.

Now your barrel strengths though are somewhere between 130, 135 typically.

Typically, so this particular program, we didn't register for a label that would accommodate hazmat level, which is 140. So all of the barrel strengths will be below 139. If the barrel in its raw form is above 140 proof, you can only get it at 100 proof. Yes, we won't do it at barrel strength.

Got it. Okay. Well, I think there's a lot of people who are going to be very pleased with this. I'm wondering, did this idea come from you guys kind of listening to what people want?

Like I said, it was more so driven from making sure everything that ends up in that bottle is the best that we can express ourselves at. It was definitely when you're going to make these decisions to convince people in accounting, like we should be doing this, like everybody wants it. It's exactly, it's a little bit easier to sell that in.

Well, Mike and I have, you guys were gracious enough to send us a sample and we've actually already recorded an episode where we reviewed it. And we're gonna try and release that in advance of this episode. So let's move on and talk a little bit about like, you know, what's coming down the pipe for you guys. You said that the Whiskey Row series is kind of complete. You don't see any changes there.

No, they're permanent, but we are done releasing new ones.

But you've got the birthday bourbon coming out in September. You've got a President's Choice coming out again this year?

Probably. I mean, there's no rhyme or reason to the release on those, but... If you do live in Louisville, Kentucky and you find yourself curious about Old Forrester and you get on the Old Forrester website, you will see some links to explore events we have at George's. George's is our bar that we have on site at the distillery. And I'm not going to say too much, but I will say, if you see that there's a George's happy hour ever, you should probably go to it. That's all I'm going to say. George's happy hour. George's happy hour.

So they can go to the website.

Yeah. All of our events are listed there.

Your events are on there. And they're having a Georgia's Happy Hour. They don't want to miss it. You should go.

You don't want to miss the Georgia's Happy Hours. It's not a ticketed thing, but you do have to sign up because there's only a certain amount of people allowed. You don't have to like pay for it. And they do like five dollar cocktails. And there's always a surprise.

All right.

George's happy hour.

Well, you heard it first. There you go.

So yeah, there might be a president's choice. Sometimes we save it and release one around Derby just because you like to have something nice and fancy at Derby time, right? But birthday will be in September. It's our 150th year at Brown Foreman. And so you might see something to celebrate that as well.

That would be awesome.

That would be cool, wouldn't it?

Yeah, it would really be cool. So when somebody's coming downtown here and they want to visit the distillery, what can they expect on a tour? I mean, what's it like?

Well, it's very unique as far as distilleries go. You're going to see the entire process from fermentation forward. The reason for that being is that we mill our grains and we cook everything down at Shively still. We don't have the space. We're trying to fit into our original footprint here and there's not enough space to have grain bins downtown, trust me. So it starts at fermentation and then it goes through. But the most unique thing about it is the Coopridge. It really is. So Brown Forman is the only whiskey supplier that actually makes its own barrels for its American whiskey is everyone else sources from a third party Coopridge. So you can go see Coopridge proper. In my mind, I call it Coopridge proper and Coopridge minor. Coopridge proper being the Brown Forman Coopridge out by the airports. They do offer tours out there now. Or you can just see the whole process here in one place. And char your own barrel right next to a still that's making alcohol. It's not scary. We have insurance. It's okay. But we're the only operational distillery that has a Coopridge inside of it.

So what's kind of special about the urban bourbon trail is you could stay in a hotel down here and you could see several distilleries, stop by here, drink at George's, maybe get something special there.

If they're having a happy hour.

If they're having a happy hour and then walk back to your hotel.

Yep.

That's not, that doesn't happen everywhere on the bourbon trail.

No, it does not. It is quite spread out. Yes.

But here in Louisville, you can see several distilleries at one time.

Yeah. I think it was, I mean, it was a huge missed opportunity for the city of Louisville in general, because people would come in and be like, I'm in Kentucky, where's the bourbon? And you'd be like, we'll get in your car and drive a half an hour that way. Right. And of course you don't want a bunch of people driving up and down 65 and 64, like. tasting bourbon the whole way. Everyone's nodding on this, yes. We're all in agreement. Thank you. I was like, right? But, and we've got like some really awesome groups here. So if you're listening and you're not in Louisville or you're not in Kentucky and you're looking for someone to maybe chart you around, there's a bunch of companies that do it. I know Mint Julep Tours does it and they do a fantastic job if you want to get out in the outskirts. But other than that, you'll get a full bourbon experience just staying in Louisville, like you said.

The Mint Julep has that little, I don't even know what you call that thing, that little,

The van.

Pope car. I don't even know what to call that little thing.

It's great.

They'll take you around on his stuff. So it's great to come down downtown Louisville. It is. And put some money in the pockets down here and support your local Louisville bourbon, right? Cause that's what old foresters know for, I think, is Louisville's bourbon.

For sure, it's the hometown bourbon, if bourbon's hometown.

It's going to be the world's bourbon if Jackie has anything to say about that.

If I have anything to do with it, that's right. World domination, here we come.

Now Jackie, you've kind of made a name for yourself in showing it up and getting the job done. You've kind of worked your way up in Brown Foreman. And I think there's some young ladies out there looking at you and thinking, hey, she's a role model. She's kind of, I'd like to be there someday. What would you have to say to some of the younger generation who may be entering the workforce, graduating college, graduating high school, a few words of advice on how to approach a new job and get the job done?

Sure. I mean, I think the number one selling quality that I've ever had is being tenacious. 100%. I call it stubborn. You call it confident. But I'm not one that necessarily accepts no very readily. It's gotten me in trouble. It's gotten me benefits too at the same time. But I came from the bar side of the industry and I think that there is this long-standing expectation that people that work on that side, granted they're on unorthodox hours most of the time, it's hard to get them to show up on time to things in the morning. And there's this whole joke of like, oh, bartenders hours, meaning if you have something at noon, like they're just waking up. Well, yeah, sure. If you worked until five in the morning, like who's going to blame me for that? But I made it a point to never let that Be something that was associated with me like if I got off work at 5 in the morning I would be at a meeting at 8 a.m. Like you just make it work. You just do it what you know, there's no excuses Just be on time like oh my gosh, I can't explain that enough like there's so many people in this world in general It's not just in whiskey. It's everywhere. Just be punctual. It's respectful just do it and like I said, you know, like just Don't take no because someone throws no at you. Don't be afraid to do things a little bit differently. If you believe in it and you think that it's a good idea, then do it. If it doesn't work, get over it. Do something else.

They don't say you do you, right? That's real.

Yes. Kids these days, they do say that.

Yeah, they do. Well, Jackie, we'd like to give you the opportunity for anybody who, and crazy to think, somebody doesn't know how to get a hold of Old Forrester. But let's say that that is the case and somebody wants to know where to find you or find Old Forrester in social media on the internet. Would you like to take a minute and share?

Sure. Definitely. If you're interested in the brand, oldforester.com, we've got every expression on there. If you want to learn about it, there's cocktail recipes on there. There's links for the distillery. So you can book a tour through there. You can check out George's Happy Hours if you get a chance to come to them. You can find Old Forrester stuff on Instagram and Facebook too. It's just at Old Forrester. You can find me on more Instagram. busy than I am anything else. I try to capture the travels of whiskey in the warehouse times on there. So that's at Jackie's I can and yeah, but we're here. If you're in town, stop by. We'd love to have you come take a tour. Have a sip.

So you can find us at The Bourbon Road on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. On Facebook, we have The Bourbon Roadies. You can come in there, answer three questions. We'll approve you. Come in there and have some great discussion. You can find me at OneBigChief on Instagram. And?

I'm jshannon63. And jump on our website. We do write a blog for every episode that we put out. So Jackie, there'll be a nice write-up on you. And hopefully, we'll do a good job at it.

Oh, I'm sure you will.

But we'll get some pictures on there, too, and people can see a little bit about our visit here at Old Forrester. And Mike, great time here at Old Forrester.

Yeah, Jackie, thank you so much for letting us try these two awesome expressions, the birthday bourbon and the President's Choice. The President's Choice was like, to me, as sorghum and molasses. It was great. I loved it. It's been a blast.

Thank you so much for sharing your whiskey with us.

Thank you.

We'll see you down the bourbon road. 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 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.