60. Garrison Brothers - A Bold Texas Bourbon Whiskey

Maybe somebody will send Big Chief a bottle of that honeydew. I'd really like a bottle of it. Any Texans should get a bottle of that.

I know a guy who can help you out.

Yeah. Well, Jim, I think this is, what do you think about this bourbon? Yeah.

I mean, I, you know me, I like bold bourbons, right? I like, I like rye whiskies. I like, I like very bold bourbons. I like things that speak to you when you take a sip. And this definitely talks to you. It's, it's, it's got some character, no doubt about it.

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 Mike, where are we today?

Well, we're in social media land, but we got a guy from Texas with us, which, you know, I'm excited about. We got Garrison Brothers founder, owner, Dan Garrison with us, and we're going to drink some of his Texas bourbon today. I'm, you know, damn, I'm excited, Jim.

I could tell the whole time leading up to this show, you couldn't stop talking about it. You're a Texas boy yourself and I'm outnumbered today, but I'm in good company. So that's all right. Dan, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. It's good to have you here. So what's the weather like down there right now? Is it starting to get good and hot?

Absolutely gorgeous day out there. It's about 85 degrees, light wind, but we're supposed to have rain for the next three days. So we should enjoy it while we can.

Is this your rainy season right now?

Usually the spring is our rainy season if you want to call it that. We get about 28 inches a year out here in high Texas, so not a whole lot of rainfall on the ground. capture we can use as water for our facility. We use all the rainwater that we capture through the gutters in our buildings, our barns, all of our rick houses have gutters on them, and all that water goes to storage tanks. So we use that water for proofing our bourbon down.

Got it. So this time of year, you're kind of storing up for the, for the dryer months then.

Yeah. We have about 200,000 gallons of, of, of catchment capacity and tanks to hold the water.

So that's all proofing water then?

It is. We also need to run our restrooms. You know, uh, we use the same water for cleaning, um, just because we don't have that much water coming up out of the ground. We've got a well that runs about 25 gallons per minute, which is pretty weak. Um, so we have to rely on the rainwater for most, most of our practice.

All right. Well, Mike, what do you think? I'm getting that itch.

You know me, Jim, I'm fixing to drink this sucker.

Well, Dan, we've got, and we'll just say you brought a couple of your expressions for us to drink today. And Mike's already dipping his tongue in it, right?

It's pretty dark, isn't it Mike?

It actually is. Ooh, that's got a little bit of spice to it. I was quite surprised. And this is a young younger bourbon too, because Texas, Texas heat, you can guys can produce it just a little bit faster. Is that correct?

Yeah, the heat's our friend here. Heat forces the wood, forces the liquid to enter the wood more effectively and deeper, and it extracts more of the sugars from the sap from the white American oak trees from which those barrels are made. The one I think you drink in our small batch was 94 proof, and that wasn't intentional. Elmer T. Lee was a good friend of mine, and he always said shoot for 94 proof, so we did it.

So that's what you came out with is 94 proof, uh, Texas straight bourbon whiskey. This one we were actually was released in this year. Am I going to say this right?

Down county, down county corn.

Yeah.

So that's probably, I'm guessing that's a 20, is that a 2019 model? I don't know.

That's 2020, 2020. It's, it's got a number one panhandle white.

We've said switch. So we're now using corn growers down in South Texas. So the, the bourbon is going to be different in the future. And I think it's better.

So is this is this this bourbon right here? What's the match bill on that? Do you let us know that?

74% corn, all organic, 100% food grade corn, it's not feed grade. It's 74% corn, 15% soft red winter wheat. We get all the wheat from Texas farms as well. And then it's 11% barley, it's two row barley, and that's coming in from kind of all over the country. We do have some roasters, some roasters here in Texas now that are doing some great malting companies that are doing some great barley. So we're starting to source a lot of the barley from Texas now.

I'll tell you what, that's big boy whiskey right there, Mike. That's good stuff. So you can definitely pick up the malt in that. The malt really shines through.

It's a richer, heavier, oilier bourbon than anything I've ever tasted from Kentucky.

It's definitely got some legs on it in the glass. Jim, what are you getting in that? I'm getting a lot of toasted marshmallows for some reason.

Yeah. So I'm getting a, I'm getting a burnt sugar too. Yeah. I really like it. It's got, it's got the caramel, but it's got a little bit more of that burnt sugar. I'd even go burnt marshmallow. I don't know.

You guys also have a bottle of Balmora over there?

Yes, we do. Yeah. We're going to, we're going to drink that on the second half of the show. Yeah, we got that. I can't wait.

Yeah. I mean, they're sitting side by side here already in my glass and it's, it's a little bit darker, but They're both, I mean, that's a good dark whiskey for, and these are about, I know age is a totally different thing in Texas, but these are about four years old, right?

Minimum of four years old.

Minimum of four years old.

Okay. My goal was always to make straight bourbon. I wasn't going to release it until it was a straight bourbon, so meaning two years in the barrel. And then some young enterprising man up near the Waco area decided he was going to get into the whiskey business about the same time I did, but he was going to release a four week old. And I said, like, hell you are. I've been doing this for two years. There's no way I'm going to let you beat me to market. So we did release our first program. It was just a one-year-old, just to beat him to market.

So you're the first.

We were first in Texas, for sure. There's some debate as to whether it was us or the guys up in New York state. Probably going to name that distillery up there. Super nice guy. I'll think of it here in a minute, but there's a distillery up in New York that started about the same time we did.

So we'd probably have to say the first bourbon whiskey outside of, you know, southern, because St. Louis and Missouri and Indiana makes a lot of bourbon. Sure. They're making it for a long time. So our listeners probably beat us up on that. They'd be like, what about MGP?

I think MGP got off the ground about the exact same time I did, because they weren't that, I think MGP's distillery was one of the old Seagrams plants that was... Seagrams and it was LDI and MGP.

So Dan, what made you start a distillery?

This adventure began for me way back in 1989. I graduated from the University of Texas with a communications degree.

Welcome. Welcome, Horns.

And you might be a redneck if you move to New York City and take your shotguns and your rifles with you and you're walking down Third Avenue with all your guns and your two suitcases in your hands. I didn't know that it was illegal to have a gun in New York City. So I took them with me anyway. Nobody's going to take me from my guns, right? So I moved in there. I got a job with Gray Advertising on Third Avenue. Then I moved to Saatchi & Saatchi Advertising. I was there for about four and a half years when I met my wife, Nancy. She was a Texan as well. She also went to the University of Texas, Hookham. And she calls me up out of the blue and says, hey, I'm in New York a lot. I'm a buyer for a department store. Would you like to go grab a drink sometime? Then I'm thinking to myself, okay, first of all, she's from Texas, so she's probably smoking high. Second of all, she's got the guts to call me up and ask me out on a blind date, sight unseen. And third of all, this is the perfect relationship for a 24-year-old. She flies in, we go out on a date, she flies out, there's no commitment required, right? So we started dating immediately. As soon as I met her, I fell madly in love with her and moved back to Texas about six months later. Got a job with GSD&M Advertising in Austin. Managing coolers like Texas account so i was in package kids there that's why i learned advertising marketing promotion relations and then. In 1995, I moved to the internet economy, if you will. Everybody in Austin, Texas was jumping on the dot-com train at that point in time and worked for a technology company called Extra Price for about five or six years. And then in 2001, I became a very rich man. Extra Price was sold to a company out of California called Commerce One. And Extra Price was sold for $178 million. So I did pretty well on that deal. except that Enron collapsed in January of that year. And Enron was our largest client. So we went belly up. And all of the stock options and all that value that I felt that I was going to be able to take to the bank with me just completely disappeared. So I was flat broke at the age of 40. And I decided to do what any responsible father of two would do in that situation. I went to Kentucky to go get drunk for a week on the Kentucky Bourbon Trial. And I came back with a big idea.

Good idea, right? Turned out that way anyhow.

I got the best job in the world. I get to drink good bourbon with new friends every single day.

That's awesome.

Not many people get to say that.

But you know, it couldn't have been easy because I mean, you were a pioneer in all this. I mean, there wasn't anybody that did the Texas mix, make some whiskey in Texas deal and you had to figure it all out.

My life refers to me frequently as a bull in a China shop. I don't think That I can't do something. I think that I can do it until somebody shows me different. So there were lots of starts. There was lots of stops at the beginning. We almost went bankrupt four times in the early years, waiting for the bourbon to mature, ordering barrels ceaselessly, more barrels coming in, more barrels coming in, building new rick houses, building new rick houses. And I didn't realize at the time that there's a lot easier way to get to market. You just buy source liquid from MGP or another distillery like that, bottle that up, put a fancy Texas label on it and send it out the door. But I wasn't going to do that. If I was going to make a bourbon, I was going to make the best damn bourbon I could possibly make. And we think we've done that today. And a lot of the writers, a lot of the critics out there are coming around and recognizing this ain't such bad juice.

So a lot of people say that Texas bourbon tastes dusty. And I tell you what, I'm a weeded guy. I'm, I'm the professed weedy king of Kentucky. I love weeded bourbon. And so this is a weeded bourbon, right?

We've got, we've got a high ride coming out this summer, but it's literally going to be a couple of hundred bottles. Um, we decided after letting that high rate age for about five years, we didn't like it nearly as much as we like our weeded bourbon. So we're going to, we're not going to be in the raw business.

I mean, this is, this is pretty spicy though. I mean, it gets a lot of spice out of that barrel. Yeah, it does. And I said early on, this is a big boy bourbon. Cause when I took that, when I took that first sip, I was like, wow, that's a, that's a bold bourbon for 94. It really is. Yeah.

And part of it is single distillation. We run a pot still. We have 100 gallon still called the Copper Gal World. And that's the one I bought from Vendome Brass and Copperworks. She used to be the experimental still that Elmer and Harlan used at Buffalo Trace. And then we have two 500 gallon stills called Fat Man and Little Boy. They got their names because they're awesome displays of American might. And then we just got a 2000 gallon pot still in that we call the Big Johnson. And that one runs only at 104. So where we've got four stills in operation at any given time.

So with us being a weeded bourbon, Jim, you were right, it does have some spice in it. What size of barrels are you using to barrel this in?

We started with 10 gallon barrels back in 2004, and then we switched to 15 gallon barrels in 2008. Then we switched to 30 gallon barrels in 2010. And today we're pretty much using exclusively 24, 27 or 30 gallon barrels. And they're all coming from, um, the barrel mill up in Minnesota or from, um, Kelvin Cooper's right there in Louisville.

Maybe that's where the spice comes from. Jim is, uh, from those smaller barrels, you know, you think.

Well, I'm just wondering with the, with the temperature swings in Texas. I mean, that, that liquid was moving in and out of that barrel once a day, right?

Oh, absolutely. It's hot as hell during the day, about 125 degrees in our rec houses in the middle of the summer. So that bourbon is deep in the wood.

So how did you figure all that out in the beginning without losing your shirt? I mean, that, that must've been a tough gamble right there.

Well, I had a lot of help from the experts. Drew Coldstream has always been a big supporter of mine. He's been very helpful. Every time I'm up in Kentucky and get over to see him in Bargetown, it's a great thing. I love his little distillery over there. He's a super neat guy. Elmer T. Lee, as I mentioned, gave me access to Buffalo Trace distillery. And I got to meet guys like Truman Cox before he passed. And they were also helpful. And I would send emails during the day, ask questions about different things. And then at some point I ran into this guy at Maker's Mart and Dave Pickerel. And Dave and I hit it off. I don't know. I don't know how to describe it. We really just got along really well because I love the history of bourbon as much as Dave does. And Dave's done all that work at George Washington's Monticello. I'm not Monticello. George Washington's Mount Vernon distillery. And Dave loved the history of the craft. And he taught me to respect that. And I do. And I've been to Lexington to drink. pre-prohibition bourbons with Dave. So, you know, it's that kind of relationship. He sent me a bottle of George Washington's White Dog early on in the day, and we just got along great. And he quit working at Maker's Mark about the same time that I opened up and started distilling for the very first time. And Dave was kind enough to come down and spend a week with me living out of a travel trailer in the middle of nowhere. We cooked steaks and baked potatoes every single night. We'd tell stories until three o'clock in the morning. We'd get up early at six o'clock, start distilling the next day. So I learned from the best.

I'll tell you what, you'll hear Dave's name in a lot of distilleries and how much influence he has in the bourbon culture. I'd say 50% of the craft distilleries we went to have been to, he's had his fingers in that distillery and you can taste it somewhat in their whiskey. That's a pretty cool thing to see.

Dave was the shit. I was his first client. I was his first, um, consulting client. So that was, uh, I think he realized that there was potential for the consulting gig right then and there. And I don't think he ever looked back on the maker's market.

Well, you were able to tap some really key people there, but, but none of them really knew about like what would happen in a Texas Rick house, right?

Dave didn't know either.

Yeah.

was all experiment. And then he actually, for the first couple of months, I would send, I would do laboratory testing at ETS labs out in California to determine the wood congeners that were in it, to determine the methanol levels. I was scared shitless that I was going to poison somebody. So I'd send lab samples off constantly to the lab and have them analyzed. And then I put a whole bunch of bottles out to the lab in California that were from Kentucky. And I re-bottled it in my own bottle, and I put a maker's mark in there, and I put a Tennessee bourbon, like Jack Daniel's, in another bottle. And I do comparisons of all these different spiral graphs and charts that they had, my bourbon, the codgers that are in there, and the flavor elements, and the oils versus the Kentucky ones. And I was getting this crazy 10X 10X flavor wheel for my bourbon versus Makersmark. And Makersmark was four years old, my bourbon was only two years old when I was testing it. So I was just kind of blown away with the results and I knew I had something special. I think Dave recognized that too.

I'll tell you what, this is something I love about a weeded bourbon. So I did a second pour of this already. You know, they don't call me big chief for nothing, right? I got to have two glasses of whiskey while everybody else has one glass, especially when it's weeded bourbon. But there's some florals and honey coming out there. So maybe a little bit of honeysuckle on the nose.

We'll be releasing in July another bourbon that's my wife's product.

Honey do. I know.

That's been, she's been on my back about that for years and we think it's pretty damn good. Line product with a small batch. So it'll, it'll be another inexpensive suburban that I think bartenders are going to go nuts over once we get our bars back open.

Maybe somebody will send big chief a bottle of that honeydew. I'd really like a bottle of it. Any Texans should get a bottle of that.

Yeah.

Well, Jim, I think this is the, what do you think about this bourbon? Yeah.

I mean, I, you know, me, I like bold bourbons, right? I like, I like rye whiskies. I like, I like very bold bourbons. I like things that, uh, speak to you when you take a sip. And this definitely talks to you. It's, it's, it's got some character, no doubt about it. I mean, did you set out to make a bold, a bold statement with your flavor?

For sure. My, uh, my two benchmarks were W.L. Weller, 12 year old, and, um, blends. Those were, we had to be as good or better than those bourbons before we were going to release it to the public. And then when we came out with our cowboy bourbon over here, which we'll, I'm sure we'll talk about as well, uh, the cowboy bourbon had to be as good or better than, um, than George T. Stagg. So that's, those were the benchmarks that we were using to create a bourbon whiskey back in the day.

Now you guys started out with your own bottle. Have you always been in this bottle right here that you're in?

It has, and it's about to change. We're about to release them. In fact, we just released Balmoray this month and Balmoray is going to come out in a brand new bottle style. It's pretty fancy. We got to a point where we were doing so many bottles. If you look at the back of these bottles, you'll see my signature or my master distiller's signature at the bottom there. That's an actual signature. It's not a signature. It's not a stamp, but we were getting up into the range of about 120,000 140,000 bottles a year that we were releasing with each release. And there was just no way that we could keep up the signature. So in the future bottles are going to have my signature on the front down here. And then whenever we do something special like bomber or cowboy, we will sign the bottles on the back, but we're not going to be signing the everyday bottles of small batch anymore.

It's still going to be the same bottle though, right?

It's a different bottle. It's slightly different. And I can send you, in fact, I'll send you a bottle of Balmorray in the new bottle.

Well, I got, well, hopefully, I don't know if that is the, is that the?

That's the new one. Exactly.

Yeah. I can tell a little bit of difference in them. Not a whole, whole lot of difference and stuff.

It's got a star on the front that's multicolored as opposed to this plain silver star that was on the old bottle.

Yeah. I'd like to talk a little bit about more about the aging process and in Texas, if you don't mind. Cause it kind of, it blows my mind how you were able to get your, you know, get a handle on that with those big temperature swings and, and you're able to sort of, I don't know that you're taming the Texas environment, but you learned how to work with it, right? And, you know, what, what, what are we, what are we looking at in terms of angel share? And, you know, obviously you've had to carefully choose your barrel sizes. And then of course, you know, aging. So, you know, in Kentucky and eight year bourbon is an amazing thing, but in Texas that's hard to achieve, right?

It's impossible. We're about to release our first eight-year-old bourbon, and that is the Laguna Madre, which will come out in August of this year. Yeah, I think it's August of this year. Laguna Madre is aged for four years in the New White American Oak barrel. and then we transfer the liquid to a limousine oak cask from France. And the limousine oak is a very tight fiber wood, so we don't have nearly the angel share losses that we do from the white American oak barrels. White American oak will lose about 13 to 15 percent of the contents of every barrel every single year. So if you're talking about a five-year-old bourbon, you're only going to have 40 percent of the liquid in that barrel five years later. So it's brutal. It's expensive. And that's why Garrison Brothers is so expensive. People ask me, are you using some sort of spectacular grain? And yes, we're using the best grain money can buy. But the reality is that we're losing so much to the angels that we have to charge more for the bourbon.

So your Rick houses, their traditional Rick houses are not climate controlled.

They are not climate controlled. Uh, couldn't afford that the electricity to, to, uh, do that. The scheme to do that. And some of the Buffalo choice, uh, just distilleries just blows my mind. Um, they're not climate controlled. They're just pole barns. We've got three, 5,000 square foot pole barns. We've got one, 2000 square foot pole barn. We have a 12,000 square foot turkey barn and it literally was a turkey barn and released it from one of my neighbors. He used to raise turkeys in there. We had to put new siding on all the sides of the walls because the turkeys were allowed to run free during the day and then come back into the barn at night. And so that barn is just fantastic and it's full. It's completely full of barrels. And walking into it, you're looking at a football field and a half down there and nothing but barrels. It's an awe-inspiring thing to see.

Yeah. And it's a shorter barn, really, isn't it? It's, you know, it's only like eight foot tall.

I think it's 16 foot.

16 foot. Okay. So that's a newer style turkey barn. I had a high school buddy that he grew up on a turkey farm and they had about 20 turkey farms. And I remember just going over there. It stunk pretty bad.

Yeah. It was nasty, nasty stuff. This part is real clean though. We rebuilt it from the ground up basically. So it's a nice operation. This area of the state used to be the largest turkey production area of Texas. There was a processing plant in Fredericksburg, Texas. So all the local farmers raised turkeys and they brought all the birds to be processed in Fredericksburg. And unfortunately, that thing caught fire about 20 years ago and the owners didn't have an insurer. So everybody went out of the turkey business simultaneously.

And there's a highway there called highway 281 that goes into Fredericksburg and goes all the way up to all the way up to Fort Worth and stuff. And some type of people call it the milk road. But if you're driving down that road in the eighties and early nineties, you were definitely stuck behind a Turkey truck.

Yeah. 281 is a beautiful drive. It's how everybody tries to get to Dallas and Fort Worth today because nobody wants to drive on I-35.

Yeah. Hey Mike, I'm getting a little butterscotch now. Are you?

Man, Dan, I gotta say cheers to you, man. You definitely made a great whiskey in this whiskey right here. I salute you for going up against Weller and Makers Mark and the weeded bourbon boys of Kentucky.

We consider it complimenting what's been done really well for a long time.

Anytime you're competing against those guys, you know, you stand up against them. Um, I think that's, that's high praise right there.

Uh, Bill Samuels was another guy that, that, uh, helped take me under his wing back in the day. And he, he, he was amazing. I went to Pat's steakhouse in Louisville with him one night and just sat down and I, I was sitting there and I was bitching and complaining. I was like, you know, Bill, this is so hard. I don't know how I'm going to get this bourbon out of the barrels. I don't even have a bottling line. I'm bitching and complaining. He said, someone, shut up a minute. Do you realize what you're doing? You've opened up the first bourbon distillery outside of Kentucky. That's an accomplishment already." And so he was kind of inspiring. I had the great pleasure of having dinner with him and his wife Nancy at their home a couple of years ago with my wife Nancy as well.

That's awesome. Well-respected man.

Very knowledgeable. He's the best. King in the industry. No doubt about it.

Yeah. Let's take a short break here. And when we come back, uh, we'll try another expression from Garrison brothers and talk a little bit more about what you guys got going on. Sounds good.

Sounds good. Cause I'm jealous. I don't have a blast in my hands. All right. Thanks y'all.

We would like to thank Tommy and Gwen Mitchell from Loghead's Home Center for supporting this episode of the Bourbon Road. Loghead's Home Center, nestled in the hills of Kentucky, is an industry leader in building handcrafted rustic furniture. Family-owned and operated, they take pride in offering only the very best for their customers. The Logheads, and that's what they like to call themselves, are skilled woodcrafters who are passionate about creating rustic furniture for people who appreciate the beauty of natural wood. Owners Tommy and Gwen don't just sell the rustic lifestyle, they live it. And you can be sure that Loghead's furniture will always be handcrafted in Kentucky by artisans who embrace the simple way of life. Loghead's rustic furniture is made from northern white cedar, a sustainable wood that's naturally 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 LogHeads Home Center. All right, everybody, we are back and we are with Dan Garrison of Garrison Brothers and we had an amazing pour in the first half. Mike, what do you think?

Yeah, man, I'll tell you what, I'm so happy that we got them on and then it's a weeded whiskey. We've been, I've been having to go down that riot trail for a while now. So I'm always excited to drink some more weeded whiskey.

But Dan, you've got another one for us here in the second half, and this is something that is just now hitting shelves, right? And can you tell us a little bit about it? And better yet, can you pronounce it for us so we don't get it wrong? I'd be happy to.

This is pretty special. This is called Belmore. It's a combination of three gentlemen's names that started the first irrigation company in West Texas. One guy was named Ball, one guy was named More, one guy was named O'Shea, and they used the San Solomon Springs, which were famous for the Comanche Indians and the Apache Indians. They used to water their horses there. It's out in West Texas near Alpine and near Marathon. And it's an absolutely beautiful spring-fed pool. It's the largest spring-fed pool in North America. And it's kind of a rite of passage here in Texas. You take your kids there to teach them how to swim or teach them how to scuba dive or teach them how to snorkel. And you take your wife there to teach her how to skinny dip because you don't want to jump in and affect her experience. That's Balmarais State Park. And every single time you buy a bottle of Balmarais, we're going to give away $5 toward Texas Parks and Wildlife for the rebuilding and reconstruction of Balmarais State Park. It was built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1935. This bourbon has been highly decorated. It won American Whiskey of the Year and Jim Murray's Whiskey Bible in 2019 and 2020. And then it also won San Francisco Wine and Spirits Competition double gold this year. So we're awfully proud of this little bourbon. And I learned a real interesting thing from Jim Murray. I thought that this bourbon, our Cowboy bourbon, which is our barrel straight cask straight version of our small batch, I thought this was the best bourbon ever made. But then I realized You don't need to pay 142 proof or 137 proof because if you do, it's almost a painful experience drinking at that high of proof. When we brought this one down to 115 proof, we knew we nailed it. We knew we hit the perfect sweet spot for the proof and the flavors that are coming off of it. It's aged for three years in one white American oat barrel, and then we transfer the liquid to a second white American oat barrel where it ages for another year or another two years after that. So this is pretty much a five-year-old bourbon at 115 proof.

115 proofs. So this is definitely a step up in proof from what we had in the first half.

For sure. It's much higher, but boy, it's got layer after layer of flavor coming off of it. And I hope you've got to drain poured cause I think you're going to like this.

Yeah, we got one poured Mike. We'll check it out.

Yeah, man. I'm getting some, uh, some dark, dark dried fruits in it.

I can't afford this shit.

I see that bottle. You need to just crack that bottle open right there.

Yeah. Mike definitely, uh, dates, huh? I'm getting dates, but it's got, it's definitely got a little bit more ethanol on the nose, but I have to blame myself because I didn't clear my glass first, but this is, this has been poured for about, uh, about halfway through the first half. And it definitely has that more fruity nose than the, than the small batch did.

All of our bourbons are weeded bourbons. They're all using the same mash bill, 74% corn, 15% soft white wheat, 11% barley. So if you leave that glass out for a little while, it's going to get really cloudy, just like a Maker's Mark wood or a Pappy wood.

Now does this, this has corn from South Texas though.

I believe so.

I believe what it says on the bottom.

Yeah.

So this was this field and this is really a double, double oat, isn't it?

Correct. This is our 2019 version. What you're drinking is the 2020 version.

So the 2020 version would be, they're all a double oak though, which means it was taken out of a barrel and then it was put back into another fresh barrel. Exactly. And then is that where you eat, it gets that more, it just more rich in a color, a darker chocolate.

And those barrels come from different parts of the country. They come from trees raised in forests in the northeast. And the second barrel that it goes into comes from Kelvin, which is using Ozark Mountain Wood. So the wood properties are completely different. The lignin content in the northeastern barrels versus the Ozark barrels. So you're getting a balance of two different flavor profiles.

What do you think, Jim?

Well, I'll tell you what, I'm going to revise my first statement. It's not dates. It's figs almost like fig Newton's fig fig Newton jam. Yeah. But this is, this is different than anything I've tasted before. And if somebody's looking for like a totally new experience, you know, they really want to step out of the box and they want to try something that's it's delicious, but it's also different from anything they've ever tried before. This hits a spot.

Yeah, we're awfully proud of it. We like that bourbon a lot. Wish we could make more of it, but we can't. So this is about a 7,000 bottle release every single year that we release it.

Now the bottle, how did you guys decide to go with the silver work on this bottle? Cause I wish people could see this thing. It is, is decorated in silver work. The star is silver work. And then you got Texas blue bonnets on that, you know, that's the Texas state flower. If people don't know and you go drive down the roads and the state of Texas have planted blue bonnets all over the place. And this is the time of year for blue bonnets too.

Yeah, they're mostly dying off now. It's starting to get a little bit off right now. They're out there, especially in the northern part of the state. So this is the 2019 version of that bottle before we redesigned it. And the complaints that we often heard was this type was too small to read behind a bar. We wanted it to pop more. We wanted the name to pop more so the type is much bigger on the bottle you're looking at. And that silver band over the Balmaré, makes it pop off the shelf a little bit more. And we're getting some real nice compliments from bartenders.

Well, I'd say it's definitely, it's one of the most beautiful bottles I've seen. And the blue wax sets it off. And you know, that's that color of that spring, Balmorrae Springs down there. When I was a kid, I got taken there and we got to go swimming and stuff. And you're right, it's a rite of passage. But to just the silver work that kind of hearkens to the Texas and the blue bonnets and the Texas star, I'd love it, man.

So there's a real story behind this blue color that you see. It's kind of a custom color. We call it Belmarite blue, of course. And we went to Texas Parks and Wildlife and we said, look, we're going to kick off this new bourbon. It's a double oak bourbon. And we would love to have a the largest swim party in the history of Texas at Balmaray State Park to kick off this bottle. And we will raise $25,000 for you to help restore the park and help rebuild the park from the ground up, to plant new trees, to plant native wildlife, native flowers, everything along there. And they got all excited about it. And then they took that recommendation to their board of directors. And the board director said, no, sorry, no alcohol is allowed in state parks. Wait a minute. I'm a proud Texan here and that part needs help. And if I'm going to be giving away a whole bunch of bourbon to raise a lot of money for that part, we need to change the rules. And sure enough, they did. The parks commissioners changed the rules so that we could have a party in the park next year. So we went out and we bought a couple of thousand Balmorra Blue swim floats and swim towels. And we were going to have, we were going to play Jaws. And everybody's on the raft in the water, watching the big movie screen at night. It was going to be one hell of a shindig. And three weeks before the event was planned, they drained the water out of the park and they discovered the entire pool apron around the diving board area had completely collapsed due to erosion. So our party, we would have probably spent about $250,000 putting that event on. And it would have been money down the drain. So the good Lord was looking out for me that day because we didn't spend all that money. But we came back and we said, you know what, we're going to do something special. We helped raise the funds to the sale of Balmorra for them to fix that, that apron, that concrete apron around the pool and it reopened the park. So next year we're going to have one hell of a party out there.

All right. Good deal. Yeah. So I'd say this, this bourbon right here, I got a pairing for this bourbon right here, Jim. Yeah. I got a name for it too. So Dan, I always name my bourbons after usually a country singer and stuff. So I'm going to, I'm going to name your bourbons here. So that small batch, I would call that small batch, the Willie Nelson, you know, it's, it's a small batch. Willie Nelson was a small guy, but it's still rough and rugged. As Jim had said before, it's bold. Um, and Willie Nelson's definitely had a bold career that the Balmora, um, it's more refined. It's elegant. And I would call that King George or is everybody else knows him George straight to Texas boys for your bourbons there. So there you go.

Mike, you always got good names for these bourbons. Good, good country singers too. So you said something about a pairing too.

This would pair great with some brisket. And I think I'm gonna have to smoke a brisket, have Jim over and drink some of this bourbon together.

I think it would.

Yeah, I think it would too, Mike. You know, this has got, it's kind of layered. So, you know, as we sit here and we sip on it, it keeps revealing itself a little bit more. And I'm getting a little bit of kind of like chocolate now. And I don't know that would go all the way to like a chocolate coffee, maybe, but it definitely chocolate.

Why'd you have to say coffee now? Now I taste that.

I didn't want to say it was coffee flavor, but it might be like, what's that? What's that coffee? I'm not a coffee person. What's that coffee called that has chocolate in it? Mocha. Mocha. Mocha. Yeah. Okay. Mocha. There you go. Yeah. I'm not one of those Fufu coffee drinkers, so I don't, but I definitely taste that. And that wasn't there when I first started sipping on it kind of revealed itself as I continued.

We, uh, you familiar with the Salt Lake Mike over in Driftwood, Texas?

Hell yeah, I am. I love that place. That's like, that's a mecca of barbecue to me. I took my family there. My son graduated from the air force, um, basic training two years ago and I took a bunch of family members down there. I said, we gotta go. I gotta take you to this Salt Lake. And I took them there and my mother-in-law went with me and she was, she's from Germany and she was just a mess. She couldn't believe it. You know, you walk in there and they got that round smoke pit right there with just all the meats hanging and stuff. And she was just amazed. I would say my brisket's right up there with old Salt Lake.

That's pretty impressive. They're about 45 minutes away from us. And whenever I have visitors come to Texas for the first time, I take them over to Salt Lake for barbecue. And they also do a blackberry and peach. Yeah, throw a little vanilla bluebell ice cream on top of that sucker and then drown it in Balmorae and you got yourself on hell with that.

Man, that sounds good. We're gonna have to, Jim, we're gonna have to do that, man. Yeah, yeah. I'm sure a lot of people would love that and stuff. So Dan, so you started up a whiskey distillery and you were in business. When was your first like, When'd you go down that bourbon road?

I've been drinking Jack Daniels since I was in high school. I was always the kid that brought the bottle of Jack to the party where other people brought the six pack of beer or the bottle of tequila. I was a bourbon or a Tennessee whiskey guy for most of my life. In fact, my 35th birthday, my wife and my birthday is right around Christmas time in December and she gave me a giant Christmas stocking. It was filled with nothing but Jack Daniels bottles and diet cokes because I was drinking Jack Daniels. That was one of the best presents she ever gave to me, by the way. But I really started getting into it big time when I turned 40. And I went on the Kentucky bourbon trail and I went into that wonderful liquor store over in Bardstown, a tiny little place that's got wall-to-wall bourbon whiskey in there. Damn, I can't remember the place. Real nice place. And good people there. And I saw all these bottles of bourbon I've never seen before. A lot of the Willet stuff was coming out back then. And Drew Kohlstein and he had probably 12 different brands that I've never seen in Texas. And I started tasting them and tasting them and I'd bring them back. I'd fill my whole suitcase up and I'd bring them back to Texas. And that became my benchmark. I have a little cabin out at the distillery. It's an old hunting cabin. And I built these shelves and I put all the bottles up there. And every night, I would drink a different bottle to try to figure out what it was made from. What was the Nashville in this combination? What kind of spring water are they using here? What kind of water are they using for there? Why is the proof varying and what's that variance in proof? What effect does it have when you drink it down? And I taught myself to drink the bourbon whiskey back in the day. This was back in the day when you could get a bottle of Happy Van Winkle for 60 bucks in Bargetown. So back then, it was before Bergman took off. And it was a little bit of a gamble. You recall at the same time, Wild Turkey was sold. I think Pernod Ricard sold Wild Turkey to Campari about the same time that we got started. And that just blew my mind. Why would Pernod Ricard unload turkey for crying out loud? It was, it was a learning experience. This bourbon was granddaddy's drink and nobody drank bourbon back in those days. And all of a sudden we came out with ours and I started opening over Pappy and the price of Pappy just kept going up and up. And the bourbon revolution started when we had 15% growth for about the next 10 years. And we just happened to be lucky enough to jump right on that and be there when it happened.

Where are you from in Texas? What's your hometown?

So I grew up in Houston. I was a redneck with a capital R, had a big old belt buckle, had a can of Copenhagen in my back pocket. And our highlight was Friday nights, we would drive around in people's cars with a baseball bat, knock the mailboxes off of people's, you know, front doors. Have you all ever seen the movie Dazed and Confused with Matthew McConaughey? Oh, yeah. Yeah. That was my childhood in Houston, Texas. And then my dad got smart and realized I was a troublemaker and I was about to get, you know, he started bailing me out of jail. So he sent me off to a boarding school on the East Coast. If you've ever seen the movie, Robin Williams plays a professor at this school up there on the East Coast. I can't remember, but the school is called St. Andrews. And I was up there at boarding school. That's where my dad went to high school. And that's where my grandfather went to high school as well. And it was a very strict school.

Was that dead poet society?

Yes, sir. After I came back to Texas, after that I went to high school in Dallas because my dad had moved to Dallas. And then I went to college at the University of Texas. So I've kind of grown up all over the state of Texas. Austin is my home now. But I spend five days a week out here in high. So I get the best of both worlds. I get to live in crazy Austin, Texas, where everything's about keeping it weird. And then I get to come out to the hill countries for some rational conservative political thought every once in a while.

Now, Austin is a pretty cool place. And Mike and I have been talking about getting down that way here pretty soon, but they've got kind of a similar vibe to what Nashville, right? I mean, very similar kind of experience.

we do more bachelorette parties than I bet Nashville does nowadays.

Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, Mike and I are definitely looking forward to it. We are the Bourbon road. So we want to, we want to be on the road as much as we can. And, you know, uh, we're all living in alternate reality right now, of course, you know, with the, with the, with the virus. And we don't like to talk about that too much on the show, but you know, when all this is over, you know, and, and we get back to the light and we hope we get back to lives as normal, uh, you know, can you tell our listeners a little bit about, know what it's like what the distillery experience is like there you know what

Yeah. We've just recently formed the Texas Whiskey Association, which is about 14 whiskey makers that make their own juice. You'll see on bottles of garrison that there's this little sticker up in the corner that says certified Texas whiskey. That proves that we did not buy this juice from MGP or another source whiskey supplier. We actually made it ourselves. We actually have an auditor who works for the Texas Whiskey Association. who visits the various distilleries to make sure that they've got silos with corn, wheat, and barley in it to make sure that they're actually fermenting their own mash. So it's proven the Texas Whiskey Association is. There are a whole different range of different types of distilleries down here. There's the big guys TX Whiskey out of Fort Worth is massive with a ton of money behind them. They have an enormous 24-inch copper column still, and then they've got a beautiful 750-gallon deviler there. That place is a museum. It's amazing. The architecture is fantastic. They call it the Whiskey Ranch. That's in Fort Worth, and that's huge. Then we have the smaller guys like us. We're on 68 acres, so it sounds like it's a big operation, but most of the distillery buildings are concentrated at the top of the hill. It's very rustic. You will feel like you are on a small family farm the whole time you're there. And that's intentional. We don't want to have industrial-looking buildings. We don't want you to be able to see all the silos or the augers that auger the grain up into the cookhouse. We want all of that behind closed doors. But when you take a tour through our distillery, you start at our little gift shop area, you ride a trailer up the hill with 25 people who will become your friends throughout the rest of the day. and then we give you a tour of the cook house, we give you a tour of the still house and the distillers themselves and the mash cooks are going to tell you about what they do and they're awfully damn proud of it and sometimes I've got to shut my guys up because I'm about to talk about how they cook mash for 30 minutes and the tour needs to keep moving through. But we're awfully proud of it. We tell stories along the way. We've got a big old steel bowl that's made out of concrete, made out of automobile salvage yard parts called Ferdinand. He's about 16 feet tall and 10 feet wide. It's a long horn steer, of course. It's a neat operation. Everybody feels like family when they come visit us. We can't wait to get them back. We miss everyone.

So, so Dan, are you, uh, are you going to make any long horn bourbon? No, no, nothing with a orange like, like burn orange wax on it or nothing.

So you want to hear the true story behind that?

You've tried.

I am a University of Texas graduate hookahs and I'm also a member of the Alumni Association and I have been working with the Alumni Association for about two and a half years at the University of Texas because I came up with an idea. I wanted to create a Garrison Brothers scholarship program for students to go attend the University of Texas and what we were going to do is we were going to bottle all the bottles and burn orange wax And David Jabbour, who owns the Twin Liquors chain, which is one of the largest liquor store chains in Texas, is also a University of Texas graduate. And I went to David and I showed him the orange wax on the bottles. And he said, I love it. I'll take as many as you can get me. And we'll sell them through all our stores. And I was going to make a $10 contribution to the scholarship fund for every burner in a bottle that was sold. And David was going to match that $10. And then all of a sudden I got a call from the executive director of the Texas Exes one day and he said, you know what, we've got to put this project on hold. And I said, why don't we have the project on hold? He said, well, I can't talk details, but there's this famous Texas actor who's in association with this famous Kentucky bourbon company called Turkey, and they're introducing a new bourbon Across the country with Matthew McConaughey as their spokesperson and so suddenly they wanted to it was an exclusive arrangement with Turkey and We got forced out so we never got to do that and all he was donated to the athletics department as he works in Texas and We were shoved out.

So I'm still pissed off about that So you don't think that'll something be something down in the down the road in the future that you might attempt again?

I hope so, but I think I need a little enough period, right? Yeah, it's, it's a hard one.

Somebody rubs you the wrong way to go back and, you know, and say, Hey, I want to try this again.

It'd be one thing if, if they were making the financial contribution that we were to the university, but they're not, it's all in the sports programs. They can get along the branch in their bars.

Well, Dan, we'd like to give you the opportunity to let our listeners know how they can reach out to you guys and see what you have going on, your website, social media accounts.

We've got a pretty cool website. We tell a lot of the stories. We use that website to convey the stories of the distillery, the history of the distillery. It's www.garrisonbros.com. You cannot order bourbon from us on the website because Texas is a control state and a three tier state and you can't ship bourbon in or out of the great state of Texas unfortunately. We're working on that by the way but we're not making a whole lot of progress. Kentucky just change that legislation. And so that's become the model for everybody across the country. We're all trying to be like Kentucky is as far as direct-to-consumer shipments go. But on our website, you can make a reservation for a tour of our distillery. Our tentative reopening date after the COVID bullshit is May 29. We plan that's our tentative date for opening up our gift shop and our tasting room again. Obviously, we want everybody to be safe, so we're going to be real cautious and real careful. There are bottles of hand sanitizer everywhere. and we even make our own hand sanitizer using the white dog from from Garrison Brothers. It's called wash your damn hands sanitizer.

I like that.

This is also a lot of fun because we've got restaurants all across the state are reopening at the same time we are. And they've all requested bottles of this hand sanitizer put on their on their tables in the restaurant. So it's been a great experience. We've been giving this away to frontline folks that are waging this war on the pandemic and a great pleasure.

So those, those listeners we have who are not in Texas and not in Kentucky, uh, what other States can they expect to find your product in?

Sure. We're selling bourbon about 30 States across America today. Uh, we hit stay away from the control States pretty much because it's very difficult to, to promote your product in a state where they don't allow you to come in and do an in-store tasting. How are you supposed to get your liquid to lips in a state like that? So we stay away from the control States. We're in California. all the way east, we're in Connecticut, New York, Florida, most of the major states across the country, and we've had a really good reception wherever we've entered. And it's been fun to watch it grow. I mean, I can now go to New York City, and I can walk into Del Frisco's Steakhouse right there at Times Square, but Rockefeller Center, and I can sit down and order a glass of Daris Bros at the bar, and I know that they're going to have it behind the bar. So it feels really good. It's a mission accomplished type situation for me. I'm the luckiest man in the world.

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