56. Spirits of French Lick - Alchemist of Indiana

And they actually had a rule at one point in time, forever how many acres that you were going to claim, if you had a legitimate claim to it, you had to have so many apple trees per acre in order to claim that land as a homestead. So it's very, very deeply rooted in Southern Indiana.

So what you're saying is I should go over to my neighbor's house and plant some trees, some apple trees.

And then you get his land.

Yes.

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. Well, hello, everyone. I'm Jim Shannon. And I'm Mike Hyatt. And this is the Bourbon Road. And today, Mike, well, we're not going to say where we are. We're in four different places, right?

Yeah, two of us are over here in Kentucky. And I'm assuming both of you guys are over in Indiana. And we have spirits of French lick with us today. We have Alan Bishop and Jim. I'm going to let you say Jolie's last name. Yes, Jolie Casper-Zach.

Booyah.

Booyah.

She told it. She told us the trick.

So Julie is the marketing director for Sprint Sprint Slick. And Alan, he doesn't like to be calling master distiller or head distiller. He is the alchemist of Indiana.

Northern Kentucky.

Northern Kentucky, too. It's like a whole little kingdom.

Kentucky, Anna. There you go. Well, both of you welcome to the show. It's good to have you on.

Thank you.

Yeah, thanks for having us. So we don't spend a whole lot of time in the first few minutes to chit chat. We like to get straight to the first pour. So, Joe Lee, what do you have for us?

So I believe that we are drinking the Lee W. Sinclair four grain bourbon today.

Absolutely. We gotta say, hey, thanks for shipping us. You sent us a bottle of that and your, who's your Apple brandy? Yeah. We'll get into what it tastes like.

Good. Good. So it's all about.

That's right.

All right. So Mike, let's hit it. Yeah. So, um, that's, uh, heavy on the corn, right? 60%. I think I read.

Very nice.

Sweet. It kind of reminds me a little bit of like, uh, got a little bit of a little bit of fruit, some spice, but the oak is kind of prevalent on it. But it reminds me of those that, you know, those little blue boxes of cornbread, what's that called? Jiffy? Yeah, like the jiffy cornbread.

Yep. Yep. That goes back to our motto, respect the grain. That's the whole idea to hold on to some of that grain characteristic and not let it be overdriven by everything else that happens. So.

Yeah, I get a bunch of dried fruits in it, but not like light dried fruits, maybe dried peaches and dried apples or something like that. Not something so. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I get a lot of I get a lot of apricot from it. That's that's really where what always stands out to me is that apricot thing. And then some of that creaminess and sweetness from those oats comes through, which is where that Nashville really shines, because it's such an odd four grain, you know, weird proportion thing, 60 corn, 17 wheat, 13 oats and 10 percent caramel malt. So you're dealing with at least two alternative grains plus a very odd mash bill that I don't know of anybody else really using anything too close to that.

So we've definitely seen some four grains across the country. I'm coming out now. I don't know if I've seen that, that proportion or not. Right. I think it's very nice. That's very creamy. Is that the oath that does that?

Yeah.

Yeah, the oats have a lot of very long chain fatty acids, and with pot still distillation, a lot of that stuff comes across. And it generally comes across as two things. You get either what's called a gustatory illusion, which is this kind of perceived sweetness. There's not really any sugar left there. But your brain smells the aroma of sweetness, and you automatically think that you're dealing with something that's a little sweeter. And then it also comes across with that very creamy mouthfeel. Same thing it does with an oat stout beer, that same sort of textural thing that you get from that. You also get out of distillation, at least as long as you're using a pot still.

Well, and Alan, you've said several times that oats distill very similar to the way they cook.

Yes. Yeah, they smell and taste.

It would bring that. Yeah.

Yep. smell and taste a lot like how they cook. They're one of the few grains that actually there's that nice little translation there. And they used to be incredibly popular in bourbon distilling up until the point of industrialization and the introduction of low reflux column stills. So up until about 1870 or so, if you go back into even Kentucky's history in central Kentucky, you'll see a lot of distilleries were using oats or oat malts. And then once column stills get introduced, it kind of goes away because they clog up the column still so bad that it's not really worthwhile for them to run an oak mash and get it through the through the column still because they're going to have a lot of technical problems while they're distilling.

So is there a certain percentage of oak where that starts to really take over and be a problem or if you keep the percentage low enough is it not too bad?

Um, you could probably treat it. I mean, if the big guys were going to run something with oats in it, they could probably treat it a little bit more like they do the rye whiskey. So you basically leave your, um, your specific gravity, your starting gravity a little lower and make not nearly as thick of a beer. It's probably not so much the percentage of oats as it is the actual amount of grain itself and the way that they all interact together. Um, so you could probably get away with it, but you'd have a fairly low yield off of it, um, and have to run a lot more to have any kind of quantity. Of course, there have been some experiments with that. I think Bean actually did some oated stuff a few years ago when they were doing those. I can't remember what that series was called, but they did the one where they did the rice and all that stuff. I think they also had an oat in there as well.

I think Woodford did an oat grain master's collection as well. I think they did. I mean, personally, I wasn't a big fan of it, but I love when the stillers, you know, get out of the box a little bit and try some new stuff like that. I can appreciate it.

Yeah.

The oats are fun for us, especially in a small percentage like here, they're only 13%. And that's fun because it's not an overarching flavor profile. It's more about the contrast between the different flavor profiles you have. So basically what Lisa and Claire really is at heart is it's a modified weeded bourbon. You know, it's it's not terribly far off of the traditional weeded bourbon mash bill. It's just adding those oats in there for a little bit of contrast. And sometimes I can even pull a little bit of and you guys might pick it up a little bit of like snickerdoodle cookie out of it. Little bit of that cinnamon and that sweetness and that roundness comes through like that so.

So so Lee Sinclair, who was he?

So Mr. Sinclair was originally from Washington County, Indiana, from Salem, Indiana. He was a local, very prominent businessman, also involved in a lot of the fraternal orders of the day, the Knights of Pythias and the Freemasons, et cetera, here in the county. But he was the owner of the New Albany and Salem State Banks. He owned several different mills in Salem, Indiana, and really built up a nice little empire. When he got a little older, he decided that he was very interested in opening a hotel over in Orange County, not really opening one, but purchasing one, the old, they used to call it the Mile Lick or the West Baden Hotel. So he purchased that, and I think his daughter was really the one that pushed him into that. And about a year after he bought it, it burned down. And he was going to get out of the business completely. And his daughter talked him into just going head first into the whole thing. So he decided that if he was going to take advantage of this location where we have a lot of sulfur springs, and there's been a long history of people coming there for health and recreation, that he was going to create what was called the Carlsbad of America, which is now the West Baden Dome. And that was sort of going to be a place where people could come and hang out. Relax and get into all the various vices of the day, including gambling, etc. And he went full on into it, opened gaming rooms and really built that up into something very nice where people came from all across the country to come check it out. Any sort of celebrity of the day would have been there and came by. And that continued on into the 1920s. We're on Sinclair Street. I'm from the same town as Mr. Sinclair. The town wouldn't really exist without Sinclair. So it was important to us as spirits of French Lick, it's not just the spirits in the bottle, but the spirits of local place. to pay tribute to him. And also with the, uh, the series it's coming out now, the more historic series, uh, you know, we're paying tribute to all those old local spirits of the place, uh, to kind of keep those legends up and going and those myths rolling.

So, so it was fresh. Like it's kind of like a Gatlinburg or a hot Springs, Arkansas area of Indiana, right?

Yes. Yeah. So the, the, the groundwater and what they call Springs Valley is has got a lot of, um, I apologize guys has got a lot of, uh, Sulfur, a lot of odd mineral content. So it's always been a place for people to go and take advantage of the health effects, etc. Anyway, so there was always an attraction for people for health purposes to come to Springs Valley. And it's kind of an odd area because it's not really close to anything. I mean, if you think about it, where we're really at geographically, we're equidistant between basically St. Louis, Louisville, Kentucky, Cincinnati, and Indianapolis, but there's not really anything. There's no other major hub around us. So it was a nice little getaway for people that were from those towns and cities, you know, and it's not terribly far away from Chicago, which obviously during Prohibition brought down a lot of the more criminal element of the time.

So that was the time when when people that were traveling those kind of distances were doing so by horseback and then later by automobile, but certainly in the beginning by horseback. So you had aristocracy from the big cities traveling probably several days, right?

Yeah, quite a bit. And then also here in southern Indiana, too. So we were we were lucky enough in southern Indiana to have rail transport pretty early on by about 1854 or so. So the train was really a big way that people got here more than anything else. The train tracks themselves actually go right in front of the West Baden Dome. They still make use of they still make use of that, et cetera. But the it was originally the Louisville in New Albany. and in the Monon later on. But they even had classification systems, you know, where you could you could buy a high class ticket on the train and really, you know, dot one and dine and luxury until you got where you're going and then all the way back. So it drew in a lot of interesting characters over the years.

So, Jolie, whenever you do use a person's image like you guys did on this bottle and his name and stuff, as far as marketing goes, does the distillery have to pay somebody to use that imagery? I know that's probably a question some of our listeners out there would like to know.

Yeah, it really depends on if they have any living relatives or not. And so we're really careful to explore that. And Alan has gone into a lot of the research of the old distillers. A lot of our bottled and bond is named after several historic distillers from Indiana, but Lee Sinclair doesn't have any living relatives. And so we were able to use his name and his likeness There are only like three pictures of him, similar to the other historical figures coming out. Some of them there were only one or or no pictures at all and so we have to kind of We're doing artistic renderings for the Bottled and Bond series. But yeah, it really, you have to do your research and you have to make sure that there are no living relatives. And if so, then you need their permission before using the name.

Yeah, that picture that's on the front of the bottle kind of looks like, you know, the dress and the picture of him looks like it's almost Civil War era. Is that about the right timeframe or is it a little bit later?

There'd be a little later that would be probably somewhere around the 1890s when that picture was taken would be my guess. Maybe even a little after that. The other thing too with these historic figures is that typically the way that that works in the United States is if somebody has been dead and gone for over 100 years and there's not a there's not a current claim to their name for some other product. They're pretty much they're kind of considered fair use at that point. Right. But we always try to go out of our way to make sure that we find out if there are any living relatives, try to get some permission from them, etc. And obviously, I do a lot of research on early distillers. So I've made inroads with a lot of family members of some of these different characters. And, you know, these people are usually pretty happy that we're that were running with them. But as Jolie said, there are no living descendants of Mr. Sinclair, not close descendants anyways. He is distantly related to, well, not distantly, he is related to the Sinclairs of Scotland as well, which if you may know some history on them. So, a big Rosicrucian family, etc. So, there's more of that stuff that ties into my weird esoteric leanings anyways. So,

Now you guys do have another in French like is pretty famous for their basketball player, right?

I'm sure a lot of people ask that there are no famous basketball players.

I don't know who that is or who you're talking about.

Right, right. What are you talking about?

Yeah, he no longer I think he sold his see he's no longer there. I don't I think he sold his house now. And so he's he's 100% out of French Lick. And for those of you who don't know who we're talking about, we're talking about Larry Bird. But yeah, who is still involved in the Pacers and still a big Indiana hero.

So he's never come inside the distillery before.

I think he's been in the winery. I don't know that he's been in the distillery. The distillery will be four years old in May. So I believe he's been in the winery several times. The winery is 25 years old this year. So it's got a little bit more, he's had more opportunity to come into the winery than he has the distillery. But I don't know how much more, I don't know how often he makes it down to French Lick now that they've sold his homestead. I don't know. That would be a question for Mr. Bird.

I think his brother still lives in town from what I heard, but I don't I don't know much about it. Like, you know, I would you would think, though, like if we're going to get an Indiana Legends, we should we should hope that it's not just him that walks in. Let's just hope it's him and Johnny Cougar at the same time. Right. Yeah. There's your photo.

I don't think it will be allowed to put him on a bottle, though.

Probably not. Back to bourbon again, I'd like to, I'd like to say something about this. You know, it, it, it finish on this really sticks around for a little while. I was surprised. Uh, this, did you say what the age was on this?

That's two years, right at two.

Yeah. So I'm really surprised that a younger bourbon like this has a finish that lasts as long as it does. Uh, and has, has that amount of oak in it, but I'm, I'm really getting like, as it sticks around, as I continue to finish, as I continue to sip on it, I'm getting like a real nutty attribute to it. I'm not real good at picking nuts out. I'm not a nut guy, but I'm definitely getting that.

There are a couple of attributes there. One of the attributes is we never use any small barrels. We always use 53 gallon barrels, but they're very specific 53 gallon barrels. So we always use air cured staves. We never use kiln staves. They're always at least two years old. I actually prefer older staves than that if I can get them, but they're not always easy to find. So the barrels themselves are medium plus toast, and then they're charred to a number two char. And that number two char. actually gives a lot of lignin and that lignin gives a lot of coconut and toasted hazelnut sort of character and since we make a fruitier style distillate to start with that kind of coconut and hazelnut thing sort of fits in and works out very well with the type of uh of distillate that we're doing uh the other part of that is very very low entry proof so we go in at 105 uh legal maximum is 125 of course nowadays there's several that are going in at low proof and that's the old pre pre-prohibition trick from back when people were just selling barrels to and they wanted them as close to 100 proof as what they could get them because everybody was going to bottle their own at the time. But a few things happened. A, we get more of that lignin content, that higher water content, lower alcohol content actually extracts more from the wood than it would at a higher alcohol. And it also destabilizes the alcohol to some extent to where you get a little bit of micro-oxidization over time, a little quicker than you would at a higher proof. So we don't age any faster than anybody else does. We just age very differently. We also age and what we call that product is in one of the is in the warehouse. It's actually attached to the building, which we call our chai seller. It's very much more like a brandy seller. So not real high temperatures throughout the year, not real low temperatures throughout the year, 30 to 40 degree differential throughout the year, very high humidity, crazy high angel share. there's nothing you'll s that it would probably ge else I wanted to work at. a year versus 3% a year.

leads to that?

I mean, wh huge amount of loss, high humidity and the low proof.

Yeah, because you're that whiskey turning all year round.

It does your so doesn't go dormant. Right. And when you have that, when you have that high humidity and that low barrel entry proof, you're, you're evaporating a lot more water. So we actually come out of the barrel at usually an elevated proof, uh, compared to what we went into. Um, so after about a year, we'll go from one Oh five up to one Oh seven after about two years, anywhere between one Oh seven and one 10. And then we're getting into some, you know, three and a half, four year old stuff. Now it's coming out one 11, one 12 roughly.

Mike, are you getting any mint on that?

Any kind of? We were talking about that before we came on up. I didn't get a little bit on it. Maybe not whorehound mint, but something like that, like a lifesaver's candy mint almost in it.

Yeah, we've heard eucalyptus before too.

Yeah, I could see that. Hazelnut, as soon as you, Alan, as soon as you said hazelnut, I was like, yeah, that is definitely, that's what it is.

That's why I love those number two charred oak barrels. And that's what we use pretty much exclusively for all the bourbons and rices, number two charred oak. It's just such a different profile from what you get elsewhere. And if you're going to really focus on, you know, the motto being respect the grain and you want those grain flavors to kind of be able to balance out with the maturation, you know, if you're going to use a pot still and you want to be all about contention or retention and concentration, it's very important to stay with a little lighter char. A three or four, there's nothing wrong with it. The big guys in Kentucky use them all day long and they make great products. But number two really sets us apart, especially with what we're trying to do from a fermentation and distillation standpoint.

So, Jolie, how long? Oh, go ahead, Jim.

I was just going to ask how he expects the least Sinclair to change with more age. Have you got some older aged stock for the fourth grade?

We do. As a matter of fact, Sillbox.com right now has got a barrel select that's three and a half years old and we are getting ready to roll into our own bottled and bond. We actually just sold through a barrel in Dallas, Fort Worth area through Liquor King that was about three and a half years old. It becomes much more robust. Surprisingly, what happens is as the interaction between the oak, the oat, and the wheat in particular continues down the path, you actually start to get almost a little bit of pepper spice coming into it. You also start to get some sort of dark chocolate notes, a little more earthiness, a little more roundness, certainly a more assertive character than what that two-year-old has. Not as much of the ethanol obviously shines through on the older version of it. It's definitely a little more balanced, a little more matured of a drink. And it surprises me for being an alternative mash bill when we put it in front of people who are, you know, hardcore bourbon drinkers who like bourbons that have, you know, rye in the mash bill. They actually respond very well to that Lee Sinclair, more so than they do to weeded bourbons on their own. So there's some nice little interactions that are happening between those different grains.

Yeah, I think, I mean, I'm definitely getting some pepper on this. Now, Mike, you like to say white pepper. I don't particularly know white pepper. It's not something in my memory, but I'm getting pepper. So I would assume that white pepper is a less peppery pepper. I don't know if that's the way you say it. Yeah.

Yeah, it's a lighter style for sure.

Yeah. I might get more of a cinnamon with it, a light cinnamon taste to it than pepper to me.

You guys both have got some pretty good palates going on. So when we make that blend, there are basically four profiles that are pretty dominant. So one of the profiles that comes out is a very oak forward profile that's very much like Kentucky bourbon. There's another profile that is very floral, almost jasmine in character. There's another profile that's very herbal, which definitely has almost that whorehound or eucalyptus sort of mint sort of profile going on. And then the very last profile and we get very few of these barrels. I don't know where it comes from, but there will be some barrels that have a very heavy cinnamon, almost, I mean, we've had them to the extreme, almost big red chewing gum. Yeah. Sort of characteristic.

And it's all about. Yeah. We, we actually.

Go ahead.

Go ahead. No, you. I was just going to say, I think, so don't tell me what to do, Alan. I'm your boss. You wish. So Fred Minick just did a challenge on this and put it up against a few other craft distillery bourbons and an Evan Williams white label, I think it was.

Bottled and Bond.

Bottled and Bond. And so and he really hit the nail on the head because he did a blind tasting. And then we we knew which one when he because he said in one nostril, he got the oak and the spices at the cinnamon. And then in the other nostril, he got full baking spices. And on the what am I trying to say, Alan?

And one nostril, he got the baking spices and an oak. And then the other nostril, he got the floral characteristics and the fruity characteristics. That's it.

And we hear that all the time. We hear it all the time. It's a dual smell and it's a dual taste. And so it was a dead giveaway for us when he did that.

I mean, that's pretty good when you must be good at whisking tasting when you multitask on your nostrils like that. Right. Right. Right.

Well, and to be the first, the first craft bourbon that Fred Minick said was better than any mainline, you know, any whatever brand he picked at the time, which at this point in time, he used to always say that, you know, when a craft distiller can beat Evan Williams, you know, I think I was just regular black label and then he took it up to bottled and bond and for us to be able to, and obviously price is a little bit different because they got a little more skill than we do, but I'll take that. I'm happy with that. I'm good with that.

But also we love Heaven Hill products and so to be even placed in that same category was a good day for us. A good day.

Well, well done French Lick. That's job well done. Yeah, I'm enjoying it. I'm enjoying it. I can't wait to taste your bottle and bond for four years. I think it's going to be amazing. And I might even jump on to Sealbox and grab a bottle of that if they've got any left. Those guys sell out pretty quick.

They've got just a few bottles and they're actually receiving samples right now. They're going to buy their next barrel of Lee Sinclair to roll with. And then the Texas guys, they're picking up another barrel. So we're getting them out there. We had a few extra barrels that we could come off of before we did bottled and bond. Yep, Big Red Liquors. Unfortunately, the first year we didn't make a whole lot of anything. You know, we made 20 or 30 barrels here and there of various different things trying to find our legs. So at some point in time in the next in the next couple of weeks, there will be a cutoff for Lisa and Claire, you know, single barrel releases for the next year because I won't have any more ready until. you know, next year. So, but at that point, it'll become pretty plentiful for us.

Well, hopefully when all this is over with, we and Jim can come out there and tour the distillery.

Yes, that was the plan for this time, right?

Yeah. Mike and I want to stay at West Bodden and we want to go see air supply at the at the casino there. I'm kidding, Mike, not air supply.

So popular. So many people show up for that concert. It was crazy. Yeah.

It was, it was funny last year, uh, the Kentucky head hunters played over there. And so we went to go see it and there, I saw literally no one from French lick, but I saw like five people from my town.

So we are, we are probably up against the break right now. So we need to go ahead and take a short break. But when we come back, um, Mike, I think we've got to try their apple brandy. You've got a sample of their, actually you've got a bottle of their weeded bourbon?

Yeah, you know, I'm pretty excited about having another bottle of weeded bourbon at my house.

And you guys are going to tell us all about some of the stuff that's coming out here after our sequestering, right? Everybody's working hard. Let's take a short break and when we come back, we'll get at it. 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 rot and termite resistant. Its beauty and quality will add warmth to your earthy lifestyle for generations to come. Be sure to check out everything they have to offer at LogHeadsHomeCenter.com and while you're at it, give Tommy and Gwen a shout on Facebook or Instagram at LogHeadsHomeCenter.

Hey, so we're back with the Spirits of French Lig, Allen and Jolee. And the second thing you guys had sent us was the Hoosier Apple Brandy. Old Clifty, I guess is what it was called. I don't think we've had a brandy on the show yet. So this is a new one. We've not had a brandy.

We are trying to introduce the world to a style of brandy that disappeared before prohibition that people should know about, especially if they're bourbon drinkers.

Yes, especially if they're bourbon drinkers.

That's much more in common with bourbon than it does Calvados or any kind of American brandy that's out there. And it is a traditional spirit style here in southern Indiana that was what made our state famous as distillers. along the same lines as Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Kentucky. You know, it was our category. Who's your Apple brandy? And so we're trying to bring that back.

Did Johnny Appleseed make his way through Indiana?

So he did. He's actually buried in northern Indiana. Now his orchard is the closest one to here. There is one supposed orchard site on the far eastern edge of my county, Washington County, but that would have been the closest he ever got to Orange County. But most of the early settlers that came in the southern Indiana were from the Black Forest of Germany. and they made a lot of brandy there. So the other thing they did is they didn't cultivate necessarily named varieties of apples. They just they saved their seed off of their apple crop every year when they distilled and then they planted those seeds. So every tree was unique and individual and then they just selected for the trees that made the very best possible brandy that they could. So very similar to the aesthetic of Johnny Appleseed at the time. One of the first things you had to do to claim land in southern Indiana was you had to actually plant an apple tree because it showed that you had a long-term interest in farming that land. And they actually had a rule at one point in time, forever how many acres that you were going to claim, if you had a legitimate claim to it, you had to have so many apple trees per acre in order to claim that land as a homestead. So, very, very deeply rooted in southern Indiana.

So what you're saying is I should go over to my neighbor's house and plant some trees, some apple trees.

And then you get his land.

Yes. Before, before. Right.

Right. I was thinking that 310, the Yuma thing about before, before water touches your land, it resides and flows online. And as such, I'll do as I please.

Yeah. Well, I'm completely open to Apple Brandy. I'm looking forward to it. I'm not an Apple Brandy. I have no knowledge. So why don't you why don't you educate me just a little bit on Apple Brandy and what I should be looking for in a good Apple Brandy?

All right. So this is going to be very distinctly, like I said, the Hoosier style of Apple Brandy. And so the Hoosier style of Apple Brandy is very big, it's very robust. We like to say that it's, I don't know if I can say that, it's bourbon's more attractive older sister, there we go. So it's similar to bourbon in a lot of ways. You're gonna get a lot of the same tonality that you get out of bourbon. You're gonna have a lot of familiarity. There's still what they call the Kentucky hug, but it's brandy. There's gonna be a little bit more of that fruitiness on the aroma, not nearly as much on the palate. The idea here is that you're trying to hold on to all the aromatics of what made that apple special in the summertime when it was growing on a tree at the peak of ripeness and be able to taste it and be kind of transported back to that moment. You know, the smell is very closely tied to memory and so the idea is to try to elicit some sort of memory uh you know of childhood or maybe you went to the orchard with your with your grandparents or something at one point in time uh but then again also find some of that oak uh some of those baking spices you might even actually still pull just a little bit of that mint characteristic out of this uh which we did on purpose through a little bit of uh brettanomyces when we were doing fermentation which was done on purpose which is also a traditional methodology here in southern indiana The southern Indiana style of apple brandy was not ever anything like most of the European apple brandies at all. It was definitely much bigger, not nearly as, I guess, petite, not as almost refined in some ways. You know what I mean? It's definitely a frontier drink and that's what it's meant to be.

you know as I as I nose this thing and Mike I'll give you the first opportunity once you once you tell me your first impression on the nose since you've already tasted it why don't you tell me first impression on the nose well I think uh on the nose it's it's got that almost I can taste that fermented apple a little bit and maybe you don't want to get that but that's what I get I still get that that ripe apple super ripe apple in it um sweetness And I can tell it's an Apple brandy. Probably drinking out of the wrong glass. I don't know.

We don't prescribe any style of glass in particular. So that works out really well. Those Glen Carons work great for Apple brandy. And what you're tasting is exactly what you should. We almost always get like a baked or stewed red apple out of it, which is exactly what we want.

Yeah, almost like an Amish baked apple pie. What's an apple cobbler? with that graham cracker cinnamon taste to it.

You guys have Kentucky roots, so you're probably familiar with your family, probably someone in your family at some point made fry cakes way back when. That was an old thing in our family and that's what I get out of it. It tastes like an apple fry cake.

I've never had one. So I'm originally from Ohio. Mike, you're from Tech. We just live in Kentucky now. Fair enough. Fair enough. But I am getting the commonality with bourbon. I'm definitely getting the caramel and the baking spice. I get the same oak that you would get from a bourbon. But what stands on top of all of that is that bright red apple, that fresh apple. I'm getting that. I don't know if it's so much a like a fresh apple cider or if it's more like a just a just a you take a bite out of an apple and then you smell that that area of the apple you just took a bite out of yeah it's like it's like if bourbon had a mistress you know it's just similar enough but just different enough now what kind of apples are you guys using

Unfortunately, in the United States, there's not a whole lot of access to the old distilling apples. In Indiana, those distilling apples were wiped out by fire blight and then prohibition. A lot of farm distillers had to convert over to commodity crops and or if they got caught distilling illicitly, the excise officers would actually destroy their orchards. They'd cut their trees down and burn them. We don't have a lot of access to those style of apples. What we're actually using as a base is coming out of Michigan. It's all commercial culinary apples, just like you'd find at your local grocery store. A mix of about seven different varieties. We unfortunately at this moment don't get to have a lot of say on what varieties go in there. But we do try to push for a higher percentage of Golden Delicious because Golden Delicious actually works fairly well as a brandy apple. If we can get blends that are upwards of 50 plus percent of Golden Delicious, we're pretty happy with them. Some of the apples that you would think would work don't really work. Granny Smith doesn't really work for Brandy very well. Red Delicious is absolutely useless. Honeycrisp is just a ball of water. There's no real flavor in that. Once you ferment it, it doesn't really, it doesn't amount to anything whatsoever. So the goal is we've actually, I've actually set out a who's your Apple brandy standard trying to, you know, bring Apple brandy back in Indiana, just like, you know, New York did Empire Rye, Missouri's doing Missouri Bourbon, you know, some feathers with that one, Bishop. I did. I'm really good at that. I enjoy it. So we I laid out sort of a standard that like within 10 years, the goal would be that, you know, maybe 10 percent of what goes into your who's your Apple brandy would be grown in the state of Indiana. And until that time, As long as you're sourcing your apples from states that are contiguous to the state of Indiana to the best of your ability, then after 20 years, it might go up to 20%, to where maybe 50 years from now, there'll be some orchards as they start to be regrown and interest in agriculture kicks back in, so that maybe eventually there can be some legitimate 50% or 100% true Hoosier apple brandy true to the style. It'll take a long time. If you get back into that history with the Hoosier Apple Brandy, the sixth county region where it was big at what was called the Black Forest of southern Indiana, each one of those counties by the 1850s had upwards of 155,000 apple trees apiece. So, you know, it takes and it takes a lot of apples to make a gallon of brandy. You're looking between one and three bushels of apples to make one gallon of apple brandy. So it takes a serious amount of apples to do.

How many apples in a bushel?

How many apples in a bushel? I have no idea.

Well, why not?

Because I don't. Jolie, what's the answer? Oh my God. Right?

I don't know. Also, I would like to say that Red Delicious is like the grossest apple of all kind. They're like field trip apples, right? Those were the apples you got when you went on the field trip to the Children's Museum or whatever when you were little.

I know exactly. They're gross. Exactly how many apples it takes to fill up a bushel. However many it takes to fill up the bushel. Google says it's 125. 125 apples.

There's a lot of apples. Actually, you know when you Google something sometimes and it comes up with this really beautiful answer with pictures and everything, like Google has already been asked that question so many times that they prepared a special answer for it.

We're tired of people asking us this.

Those bushel questions are weird anyhow. I haven't been a former produce farmer. It's always funny. If you deal with a commercial co-op, they do it by weight. And then if you deal with people who want to buy stuff, they do it by volume. And a bushel by weight and a bushel by volume are two very, very, very, very different things.

Sure. But weight is important to a distiller.

Yeah, yeah. So getting kind of back into that history on the spirits of French lick thing with that with the old Clifty, you know, just so people are familiar, there's a nice picture of the old Clifty mill and distillery on that bottle. That was one of the distilleries in my home county, Washington County, just north of Campbellsburg, Indiana. They were making about 20,000 gallons a year. That's in a place that's now called Cave River Valley State Park. It's owned by the DNR and in conjunction with Spring Mill State Park. A beautiful place, a bunch of caves, home to five distilleries at one point in time. Those guys made, like I said, about 20,000 gallons a year. They didn't make a lot, but that was considered the brand of apple brandy. If you're going to drink Hoosier Apple Brandy, which was actually at one point in time more popular than brandy from all over the world, you wanted that brand because they had been in business for about 70 years, had a very long history, and made consistently high quality products from very special apples that were grown on very thin soil on top of limestone.

That sounds like my farm.

Right.

I can dig about three or four inches and then it's straight to limestone.

Oh, that's how this place is. Yeah. It's crazy.

So when I was talking about the taste of this and how it mimicked a little bit bourbon, the front end, how I got the caramel and the baking spices and the oak, now on the finish, let's talk about the finish a little bit, remember I called out those nuts on the ore grain? Well, they're here, too. They're here, too. Yeah. So I'm pretty amazed that the only difference really, not now, there's a lot of difference between the two.

Let me get that right.

But when you're looking for dissimilarities, the dissimilarity here is the apple flavor. I mean, it's that. Yeah. Yeah. So this is really close to a bourbon. Yeah. And how it differs is that apple in that influence. So yeah. Yeah.

Another beautiful thing about old clifty for us is that that every year it will change just slightly because every year it gets failed into a different type of coverage and that's done very much on purpose it's not a mainline product force it's something we do to help rebuild the heritage of distilling in southern indiana. And so it has some levity that the other products don't. So that first release, it's two years old, that was in 64 gallon once used red wine barrels that I had re-charred to a number two. So same char level as the bourbon. And that nuttiness is coming from that, but it's also coming from that Brettanomyces that we use during our fermentation, which gives that very nutty, oxidative sort of characteristic to it. And probably a little bit of of red wine that was maybe left inside the wood of the cask that didn't come out when it was recharged. You probably get a little bit of that oxidative character too, but there will be a limited run coming up. We haven't really talked about that much either this fall or next fall. It's actually kind of a one-off version that was distilled like a white apple brandy. So no heads, no tails whatsoever left in the distillation. And then we took it and put it into what were once used French wine, red wine barrels that then went to Mexico and had organic agave tequila in them for a year and then we put our apple brandy in there. It's been in there three years now. It's so good. Kind of a straw color and a lot of that tequila tonality pulled into that white fresh apple brandy sort of flavor.

So both of you, Allen and Jolie, I guess we'll start with you, Allen. How long have you been with the distillery and where were you at before that?

So I've been at Spirits of Franchelik now. I got there before they put the equipment and everything in and helped do some of the planning on that. So I've been there since. November of 2015, I believe. So I've been there from the very beginning on the distillery side of things. Previous to that, I was one of the two distillers down at Copper and King's American Brandy Company there in Louisville, Kentucky. I worked there for a couple of years and then really headed up the Absinthe program and the Apple Brandy program there. And then prior to that, my family's been involved in distilling both legal and illicit for generations. So I grew up in a family of distillers, been around it my whole life. I've been doing it to some extent since I was 15, for better or worse. So yeah.

And what about you, Jolie?

I've been with the company for two years now.

So I came in. Go ahead, Alan. Feels like 30 years. Oh my goodness.

This is our working relationship.

For those that do not know us or have not heard us on any other podcast, this is how we show our signs of respect.

We don't have a relationship. We don't have a relationship. You have my phone number and unfortunately work in the same building. That's the relationship. That's what we have.

Right? Because that'll Joey. So you guys are going to go through a rebranding here this year of your Weeder, which I actually have a bottle of right now. The spirits of French Lake with the Weeder. And this this is parts your juice. It was the other part source, correct?

Correct.

But your new stuff is going to be all yours.

Yes. Yep. So go ahead, Alan. You go. it's being rebranded into William Dalton is the is the name and it's so it's still the same recipe. The weeder is 60% ours and then 40% sourced and we're very open and honest about that we try not to hide that at all and it was just to get a product out in the beginning, and then we did not use all of that sourced whiskey. And so we got rid of that last year. And it's the only source whiskey that will ever be in the building.

And what's what's what's the deal behind all Willie? What's who's Willie?

So Mr. Dalton was the distiller at the Daisy Spring Mill Distillery, which is now Spring Mill State Park. Mr. Dalton was the longest that I know of that I can prove. Mr. Dalton was the longest tenured distiller in Indiana history. He was there for 55 years running copper pot stills off of wood, running all of his cooks off of wood, working out of 120 gallon hogshead fermenters, one bucket at a time over to the still doing the whole thing. big part of Indiana's distilling history, a name that's not well known, a name that's not well talked about, a name that, in fact, for a long time didn't even appear in the park's literature in reference to distillery until about two years ago when I started doing my research versus, you know, obviously ownership, etc. The distillery always gets a little attention, but when you're talking about distillery that's been, that was in business, you know, doing things the old way, the very hard way for 55 years, We wanted to give him a little bit of respect and they made a lot of what we would consider weeded bourbon at that distillery. So it was the perfect product to kind of hit that high mark for us in reference to him and in tribute to him and make sure that people who are interested in Indiana Distilling History knew that name and knew who he was.

Old Willie Weeded Bourbon. That's right.

Willie Dalton. That's right. It was funny because Jolie had mentioned that we were, you know, we were working through getting some people to do some drawings of these, of these different characters to kind of interpret them. And I only have one picture of William Dalton. And I took, when I first took it to Jolie, she goes, we can't use this picture. Why can't we use this picture? And she goes, this is the most depressing picture that I've ever seen in my life.

It really is.

It was taken, you know, towards the end of his life and he's worked in this distillery for, you know, 55 years. So, you know, again, bucketing out mash and three gallon wooden buckets from 120 gallons hogshead fermenters into 100 gallon stills for 55 years. I'd look like that too.

Yeah, it'll probably break you down just a little bit.

It's very much like it just looks like a depression era photo. And a lot of these photos are so faded and it's so it's really difficult to even try and find a likeness. You know, so the actual photo, we have like we have an actual photo of Lisa Claire we have an actual photo of old Clifty on our stampers Creek American rum, we have an actual photo of the distillery that's that's there now the building that is there now. But his wife is next to him. And she's just got her hair parted down the middle and in a bun. And she's in the old timey dress. And I mean, it just looks like you watched Grapes of Wrath and took these people right out of the screen. And you're going to slap them onto the bottle. And I was like, this is not sexy. This is not fun. This is not anything that we can do. And so we really had to pivot from there and see how can we put this legend on our bottle and give him the respect that he needs without using this this one and only picture because we got on ancestry.com and we did a lot of research and as far as we could tell, we found some marriage documents and some some census documents but we didn't find any other picture other than this one picture that Alan had found during his research. And so that's when we decided we were going to pivot to drawings. And a very good friend of mine, Jeremiah Peterson, he is the head graphic designer at Tucson Guys in Jasper, Indiana, is a fantastic artist. And so he has done all of the renderings for us for our next few Bottled Up Bonds. Maddie Gladden, there is no photo of her that we've been able to find. And so we were able to kind of use a silhouette picture of a woman of the times to represent her. But yeah, it was it was not a cute picture.

We should also say that the current weeder, we are very proud of it. It's done very well. Whiskey Advocates giving it a great review. There's nothing wrong with sourcing bourbon and a lot of people do that. As a distiller, my preference is not to do that. And we have enough scale that we don't have to do that. You know, but the current product that's out there in the bottle, 60% are two-year-old stuff. Number two, chard oak barrel, basically the old APH stencil recipe, 70 corn, 20 wheat, 10% malt. We switch out regular malt for caramel malt, which gives a little bit more of that sweetness and that roundness. And again, a little more of that nuttiness, along with the low barrel entry proof. And then 40% bourbon sourced from the state of Wyoming. I can't tell you what distillery, but you can pretty well guess there's only like two there. And it was distilled by a very famous distiller. So it's a good product. There's nothing wrong with it. We're extremely proud of it. That 40% that we sourced was seven years old versus our two-year-old stuff. And that obviously gave us some legitimacy when we got out on the market that we had some stuff that was in the bottle that had a little bit of age behind it.

And we were blind tested against your Weller bottle there, and it would win.

Just saying, blind testing in the market. Which weather bottle?

Usually, if I'm out in the market and I'm in an account, because accounts are sometimes hard, especially if they're more corporate. So a lot of times, if I see that they have Weller Special Reserve or even Weller Antique, I'll have them do a blind on both of them versus our weeder. And nine times out of 10, if they do a blind on it, they'll end up picking the weeder because the weeder It has almost a more vibrant nose because it has that pot still whiskey in it. So it deceives you with that sweetness, obviously, and it draws you into it in a way. And that's usually how we get those placements off of that particular product.

I would say it does. That's what I'm drinking right now. It is a little bit sweeter than Weller's. And it actually has a little bit more pepper on the back end than I was expecting. I think Jim would actually like this right here.

It's not too sweet. What is that? What is that, Jolie? You're showing us all the new label for the Williams.

That's a preview of it, of what it's going to look like. I don't know if you can see it.

Well, I can see it. But our listeners who don't have video probably can't see it, but it really looks nice. And I think so. How many new labels do you have coming out here after our sequester?

Too many. No, not four. Well, four not including any single barrels coming out.

Okay, 2020 and 2021 were really the years that we were primed for spirits of French like to get to the next level. Obviously, whatever's going on, it is what it is. And we'll still make it happen. We just have to do it in a very different way. So this year, we're going to roll out the least and clear bottled and bond. We're going to then roll out. Well, first, Matty Gladden, which is our high rye bourbon, 55% corn, 35 rye, uh 10 victory malt, very bottle and bond. Obviousl the William Dalton chang of next year, which is wh old weeded bourbon on ha And then we have a rye whiskey as well that's now four years old, but I'm going to hold on to it until it's five, not because I need to, because it is good as it is right now, but because I didn't want to really say high rye bourbon and a rye bourbon that were both bottled and bought in the same year. And maybe people might get confused by that. And in various, you know, one offs, there was about a two year period there when we first started up, we're like on Wednesdays and Thursdays, there wouldn't be a whole lot going on. So we did a lot of very strange things. So we did like some Grappa, we did some Absent that we aged in a new American Oak barrel, you know, some Blackberry brandy and, and just kind of this odd section of barrels that we're slowly figuring out where these belong and how they fall into, you know, what category and where they need to go. Yeah, big, big, big graffa fan here, by the way.

Big graffa fan.

I got about 75 gallons.

Yeah, and I say too many as a joke because it's just been kind of crazy, right? This whole COVID-19 business and working from home and so trying to continue the uphill that the brand is on, trying to keep that going and staying active. staying active on social media while still trying to do all of the things like new labels and um single barrel sales while working from like a dining room table is it's a whole new a whole new level of normal and it's just it gets kind of crazy so so how many states are you guys in right now right now we are in go ahead allen Go ahead, Allen. Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Texas, and then soon to be Illinois and hopefully Louisiana.

Florida is also on the schedule.

Florida is also on the schedule and we are looking into California, but that really just depends on distribution. That might be more of an e-commerce distribution and working through We've been approached by Oak Bottle to work with them and so we've got a few things that we're trying to figure out how that would work and more just how to get your spirits out to California in a economical way.

And anything overseas?

Not at this time, no.

Not yet. Lots of interest different places. We've had some interest out of Canada. We actually, we have some contacts and interest in South Africa of all places. So there's possibilities for that stuff in the future for sure.

Yeah, because I'm sure we're going to have some listeners in Australia and Spain and ask us, how do I get my hands on that?

Yeah. Yeah, we've been approached by an Australian label company to do our labels, which was fun. But we try and keep a lot of that stuff local and try and employ as many local people as we can. But yeah, nothing is off the table at this point. What do you say, Alan? How many states can we run the capacity of at the size we're at now?

The size we're at now, if we really started to catch fire and do really well, if we weren't going to expand, we could feed 10 states, but those 10 states would include Texas, which might as well be its own countries. We could pretty well do what we need to do and there is capacity to be able to expand the distillery in the future as well. I don't talk about this enough but I always try to stress we're a pot still distillery. We're always going to be a pot still distillery so expansion will always be limited to some extent because it will always be pot stills. We'll We'll never drop in a low recification column still because it's so different from the style that we make that there's no way that we...

Right, you just need more pot stills. You just need more pot stills, bigger pot stills.

We need to be the American McKellen. I need a facility like that with about 28 pot stills and I will be a happy camper. All right, guys.

Well, like yesterday, we always just want to make sure that the quality and the batches are what they are now. We're not opposed to expanding, but it has to be prime primo products, which is what we're putting out.

That totally makes sense. Quality over quantity at any time. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, we would definitely like to give you guys the opportunity to let our listeners know where to find you online, on your website, on social media, how to reach out to you and ask you questions after this if they have any. So take a minute and let them know how they can get with you guys.

Absolutely. We are of our website, SpiritsOfFrenchLick.com. We are on Instagram and Facebook and we're also on Twitter. So you can reach out to us at any of those avenues.

So it's all on all the social medias. It's at SpiritsOfFrenchLick.

Yes. On Twitter, it's at SpiritsOfFL.

Okay. All right, good.

But otherwise, it's at SpiritsOfFrenchLick.

Also the alchemistcabinet.wordpress.com is where you can find all the Indiana distilling research. And then I'm all over social media all the time and people just send me questions and I enjoy that stuff. So although now I do have a personality profile for Facebook because Jolie Casper's act made me get one.

He reached his friend limit on Facebook, which I think is like 5,000. And I would like to get you a public figure page so that we can start pushing out all of the spirits of French lick stuff on your public figure page. And then Alan can take his Facebook page back to being a normal, manageable amount of people.

So famous guy, famous guy.

Right.

Loud and annoying. Mike, you want to take us on out?

Yeah, so you can find us on Facebook, on Instagram, and on Twitter at the bourbonroad.com or bourbonroad. You can go on our website, the bourbonroad.com. You can read our blogs on there. You can read about me and Jim. We still don't have a store up for our listeners. We promise, we promise, we promise, we promise something is coming down the line at some point. We got full-time jobs.

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.