69. Balcones Distilling - Texas Whiskey

Those are the tallest pot steels in the world, right? I'm not completely sure, but if they're the biggest in America, I'm not surprised. And they're bigger than the Glenmorangie ones, which I know are the biggest in Scotland. Tallest, not biggest volume, but tallest, yeah. They're pretty tall. And when I asked them why they made them that tall, they said, well, that's how much room you had. So they just made really big ones because we got a four-story building, and they figured they'd take advantage of it, I guess.

They look pretty badass sitting there.

Yeah, they're cool. That's a pretty cool thing. And they lowered them in through the roof. Man, that was nerve wracking. We sat on the roof in folding chairs and a cooler full of beer and all these rigging guys. And they're all on, you know, headphones talking to each other. And there's guys on down downstairs. There's guys on the roof. There's a guy out there with a truck. He can't even see what he's doing. He's just taking instructions. You know, man, that's nerve wracking when you've got like a half million dollar piece of equipment being loaded in on straps.

They would have done one of them. Would that change how the whiskey would have tasted? They just put a big dent in there.

I'm not an insurance guy, but I'm assuming somebody along that chain of delivery would have been responsible for making that good.

Could you imagine being that thing guy and they were like, you're fired.

He didn't seem to care at all.

He was like, he was like eating a sandwich and moving a joystick. He didn't care. So you're saying if it got dented, you would have said, hey, we're going to go ahead and return this.

I bet the Forsyth guys, because they were there, the welders, I mean, they have guys that come and show up during installation. I'm guessing they would have been able to fix it.

I don't know. I mean, what do you do with one of those things? Do you put it in the scratch of denial at the, uh, at the steel? I think it ends up at where it ends up at Marshall's, right? Yeah.

Just in the bin on the side, 50% off.

Goodwill got a 40 foot dent in this thing. Yeah.

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.

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Hey, this is Big G from the Bourbon Road, and I'm here in Waco, Texas at Balcony's Distillery. And I got Alex, and then I got the master distiller, Jared himself, American badass, master distiller of the year with me.

And we're going to sip on a little bit of whiskey.

How you guys doing today?

Yeah, it's not often you're in the presence of a master. Yeah.

He told me that he's the head distiller, right?

So we'll call him the head distiller, Jared. I'm getting gray, but I feel like I got to have a good bit more before that title could stick.

See, I got that gray goatee going on. That's... Salt and pepper. Silver Fox. That's what I like to call it. I've heard that before. I don't say that around my wife though.

It doesn't go off too good.

So I'm here at Balcony's. How long you guys been here for?

We started distilling in 09 at our other location. We've been in this building since January, 2016, producing here. We were already storing barrels here before that. We bought the building in 2012 or 2013, I think, but we just had barrels in it up until four years ago.

And what's your DSP number?

We actually have two. Our first one was 15018 at our original location and we were operating both for a brief period. And so we got a second one for this one, which is 20062. So we have, we still have both.

That's a lot of distilleries have that today, right? They have a couple. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

You got a permit for. For everything. Yeah.

So we're here in your tasting room, beautiful distillery, walked around, took a tour. And I got to say you guys are doing it right here in Texas. We've talked about this in the past couple of episodes to our listeners that there's some something magical happening in Texas right now. I'm not sure what it is. It might be that you can age whiskey so much faster here in Texas where maybe in Scotland it would take 50 years to get something you takes you guys four or five years to get something magical out of that barrel and You know going through your entire you took an old I guess it's fireproof storage company Warehouse you didn't change it a whole lot right we change as little as we could I mean obviously for tasting room and offices and stuff some walls had to go up, but yeah the upper floors are pretty much exactly like they were the walls are about two foot thick and

concrete and steel Yeah, it's pretty great. We were talking about earlier. We're up on that fourth floor You know and get pretty warm people live in other states just to put it in perspective the fourth floor can get you know upwards 130 degrees in the summer so Pretty untraditional for a rick house in the winter in the winter here I've told people that it still gets cold as hell here.

Yeah, everybody thinks it's just hot here all the time, but I

It doesn't last long, but those three weeks where every night the low is, you know, 28, 26, like, yeah, it's, it's pretty chilly.

There's nothing, no trees or nothing to block the cold. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. There's not, there's not really any buildings either. There's trains though.

I hear that train rolling by. It doesn't really affect the maturation of the train.

It makes the whiskey taste better. It just gives that image of Johnny Cash in my mind and I'm ready to drink some whiskey.

We're doing this really cool project where we're aging whiskey with train noise, you know, and it really agitates the molecules.

A little bit of vibration from the train and the noise of the train going by. You know, a lot of people are doing that today. They're doing all kinds of weird stuff with whiskey, trying to age it faster and the maturation and stuff. the liquid into the wood and so you know hey to each his own as long as the whiskey it comes out of that barrel into the bottle and it tastes good to me i don't care how you made it as long as it's good so jared what's your background um and where'd you come from before here um before whiskey i mean i really thought uh was gonna be a brewer that was my that was kind of my drive when i was younger um tried a couple times to get a brew pub or brewery open and it never really happened and um

Yeah, over the years of chasing the brewing thing. Yeah, at some point in there, I just really fell in love with single malt specifically. That was kind of my first first love whiskey wise and once I had whiskey before, you know, someone's always got something, but no offense to anybody who drinks bourbon on the rocks, but that's usually what it's usually some pretty bottom shelf handle stuff. And they're either putting it on Coke or on the rocks, you know, college or something. And I was always like, I don't really get it. And it was much later. I was probably in my early thirties before I had a whiskey that was like, Oh, now I get it. And then from then on, it was like, I got to try everything that's on the shelf, which of course, 12, 14 years ago in Waco, Texas, it didn't take long to go through everything that was on the shelf. But I think a lot of the guys here, myself included, there's just this desire to get your hands dirty into hobbies, things you enjoy and appreciate. Whether it's my production manager got really into baking bread and he's like really good at it, but he wasn't going to play around. If he got into making bread, he was going to research, he's going to buy a bunch of books, he's going to try all these techniques. Alex does a lot of woodworking. You know, I used to do a lot of bike mechanic stuff. So just with the kind of folks we have, I think waking up and going, man, I really like whiskey. I never thought once that it was weird that your next step is to say, well, I'm going to start trying my hand at it. To me, it seems like a kind of a no brainer. Like, yeah, get in there and see. Even if it's just to learn more about it and be able to appreciate it more. I know guys have done it with coffee too, you know, kind of, oh, turns out I don't roast very good coffee, but I wanted to mess with it because I love coffee so much. I wanted to know more. So it's kind of was that. And then here we are, you know, kind of it didn't seem when we were talking about it in the early days, it didn't ever seem like we were super serious until one day it was like, the permit application is off and we bought a really cheap building down a few blocks away. And I guess we probably all had to leave our other jobs and make time for this. Cause I guess we're doing it, you know?

So you did it 12 years later.

Yeah, it's nuts man.

Pushing bourbon around.

Nobody. I don't think anybody, all the, a lot of the small guys that got started on a similar, similar time, like the Tuthletown guys or, you know, straight hands was a little bit ahead of that curve. Garrison, you know, we all got, it was all right around the same time. And it's fun to talk to those guys and be like, man, We get asked sometimes for, you know, press or, you know, podcast or something where, did you ever see, you know, did you foresee like, no, no. Everybody was doing it because they loved it. Nobody had any, if you had told us back then that where we probably even that Sazerac guys, if you told them where we'd be right now, I don't think they would have believed it in 2008. Nobody saw this coming, just this ridiculous explosion of excitement, enthusiasm around whiskey.

If they had seen it coming, they would have distilled more whiskey. They wouldn't have been expanding.

Five years ago, they would have been expanding a decade ago.

I think for a lot of us newer folks, I'm one of the the longer tenured folks. Obviously, I fall more into the sales side of the world. I've been here almost four years, obviously Jared here the whole time, 12 years. That level of kind of artistry, approachability, and just human interaction is what I think is drawn in a lot of us to to the distillery, to the whiskey. So I knew about the whiskey a long, well before I ever started working here. And it was because folks were sharing it with me, which is I think something that's kind of just woven in the connected tissue of a lot of the folks that work here, but then a lot of the folks that really like our whiskey and that there's this sense of sharing true craft, artistry. I actually went to school for drawing and painting. So it's just kind of like this level of, artistry that just kind of transcends all things, but we're right now focusing on whiskey. So a lot of times we end up talking about music and maybe art and never ever talking about whiskey. Just because this happens to be what the focus is and it's a fantastic focus and it's exploding, right? We're all strapped to this rocket and we're so excited to be a part of it and sharing single malt in a category that's exploding, like the American single malt whiskey category is really fantastic.

Well, I know our listeners are like, what is going on with Big Chief? Because usually we get straight to the whiskey. So I tell you what, you guys set this Texas pot still bourbon in front of me and let's go ahead and dive into this sucker and nose it and taste it and tell the listeners what you got here.

Yeah, I'll give the quick bullet points, and then we'll try to draw out some of the interesting color from Jared. Yeah, so this is a Texas Potsil bourbon made with four grains. So it is a true four-grain mashbill. It is, of course, aged in new American oak, new chart American oak. It is a straight bourbon, so it is a minimum two years. I think for us, what's more important about that is the fact that it's non-chill filtered, no additives, no sweeteners, no coloring at all whatsoever. I always say we're too lazy to do that anyways, but we think that that just detracts from the overall grain. If we're going to have really high quality Texas grown and roasted blue corn. If we're going to have Scottish golden promise malted barley, why would you want to chill filter out all of those, you know, delicious oils? Why would you then want to add fake artificial sweeteners to it? So this is the newest product that we released. Was it a little over a year ago?

About a year and a half.

Yeah, and of course, it's skyrocketed to our number one, I believe, seller. As far as overall mix of products sold, it is at an incredibly approachable price point as well. And Jared's got a little more interesting story about part of that process. It really is an amalgamation of all things balconies because it's made with the same rye that we use in our 100 proof rye. It's made with the same, again, Scottish grown Golden Promise multi-barley, same blue corn, and then some Texas wheat. I think it's pretty drinkable. I think there's some familiarity that you could see from some other four grains, but big punchy oily quality to it that it's a really fun drink.

When he says four grain too, we're doing, it's actually four different mash bills that all get laid down. So we've got four different bourbon recipes. And then at blending time, you got a mix of ages on those. You got a mix of the recipes. So there's two of them right here. Yeah, two of the components are on the table.

So you're taking that and putting it into your Texas pot steel bourbon is what you're doing. Right.

So we've got 100% blue corn recipe. We've got a weeded recipe. We've got a high rye recipe. And then we have a fourth one that we've never even bottled even for a one off, which is our high malt. So it's 55% corn, 45% malt. And all those get blended at the blending time to make to make this product The main thing about this one was well a couple things we started making bourbon in I guess late 2014 just kind of some one-offs here and there I never had before and We didn't really have too much of a plan, which is a common thing around here. We lay stuff down because we're interested in trying our hand at it and coming to understand it better. Having never made a bourbon and loving bourbons, it was like, man, we've got to finally get around to getting our hands dirty and failing and learning and failing and learning and asking questions and see what it would look like and see if we can make something that we're really excited about. So years later, we've got all this stuff that's aged and we're not selling. Only thing at the time we ever sold was the blue corn version. We actually had a really hard, in some ways it was one of the sadder meetings I think I've ever had, but we had this kind of heart to heart meeting at the end of 2013, no, sorry, 2017, 18. And now that we actually have salespeople on the ground, somebody posed the question of, Hey, if somebody's not into our stuff or somebody doesn't drink it, some bar doesn't carry it, what do y'all hear? What are the reasons? That's not a super fun conversation to hear as the person who makes it, but the feedback from guys like Alex was super interesting and something a lot of it I'd never really thought about. Being someone who chases all the special releases, has a big collection, tries stuff all the time, I don't really get offended by proof. I don't really get cared less about age statement or even class type. I'll try whiskey of just about any variety. But there are people out there that drink bourbon and bourbon only. And to hear stories about someone's at a whiskey show and they come to the table and they want to try your bourbon. And these poor guys have to say, well, actually, we don't make bourbon. But before you can even say the next words, they're gone. They're gone. Yeah. So we didn't have anything playing in that space. Proof was another thing that came back. All y'all stuff's like 100 proof or more. It's all hot. You know, it's hard to like, oh yeah, not everybody drinks it like that. Right. And then the last one for any craft brand was price, which is not a surprise. Right. So we sat there and brainstormed. Can we try to come up with something next year that can check all those boxes at once? I know people that set out from day one to make like a luxury brand. But our prices have never, it was never meant to be like, no, this is just for people as a bunch of money. It's just expensive to make when you're small and the ingredients are expensive and the barrels are expensive and all that stuff. So we kind of decided, you know, kind of screw all that. We need something that fits that spot. We need something that's affordable for regular folks in a category regular folks are used to. And since we're not chill filtering, we can't go lower than 46 without it getting hazy. So we already knew that was kind of the bottom limit on proof. So I mocked up a few blends without really telling anybody. And Gabe, I think you, a few other people. I had people sit down and do a blind. I didn't even tell them what we were doing. I said, here's five or six bourbons. I need you to just take some notes and rank them and stuff. And everybody but me picked the blend I had mocked up of ours over no need to poop on anyone's brand and name. Who else was in the lineup? I picked Weller 12 over it, but everybody else had picked it over everything else I had in the lineup. And that was when I knew, okay, this is something we can at least look at. And another story that goes along with that. And I told the story at that meeting. I have a friend, when we have big special events, you know, we'll have five, 600 people out there in music and a special release or something. I've got a buddy who is a social worker here in town. And I was over at his house for, I think it was either a baby shower or a birthday party or something. And there was a whole bunch of our bottles and I was pretty excited. Man, you got a whole bunch of our stuff open. But he always volunteers when we have big events and we give all the volunteers take a bottle home. And a social worker salary is not big, but. at that birthday party or whatever it was. At some point he said, yeah, those are all the ones I've gotten from volunteering. I've never actually bought one. And like, yeah, of course on your salary, you're not going out and spending 80 bucks, 70 bucks on a bottle of whiskey very often. but it just kind of broke my heart. It's like, man, when your friends and your family and your neighbors, they know you do it and they don't mind you giving them a free one on their birthday, but to find out they don't go buy it often and it's just because of price, it's kind of like, man, that's not what we were trying to do here. That's not why we got into this. So in a lot of ways, this product was about Yes, it was about making use of all these bourbon recipes we laid down that we didn't really know what we were going to do with anyway. But to me, the bigger part of it is that relational part. And if there's barriers from keeping people from getting into this hobby and enjoying, it doesn't all have to be fancy. You should be able to sit down and have a bourbon. The next thing you know, you and your buddy and the bottle's half gone. And not always taking notes and like, you know, about drinking whiskey.

Yeah, it's just about telling stories.

Yeah, it's a it's and it's it's fun to sit down and like really focus and pay attention on what's in there. And we all do stuff like that. But it is nice for. Sometimes it's just along for the ride, you know, you're doing whatever you're doing and it just happens to be part of the picture and I still haven't got into this whiskey.

So I'm nosing on it a little bit and I'm smelling some, uh, some, some kind of floral there. I'm not sure what that floral note is I'm getting.

Do you have, do you feel like you have any, uh, I'm also getting black licorice. Oh, cool. And then most people kind of have areas of, you know, like a flavor wheel that they're better at and not so much others. I suck at floral. Maybe I was wondering around enough hand soap or perfume girl growing up or something, but I can't.

Well, I usually say, cause I, you know, grew up on a farm or ranch and I always say honeysuckle a lot. I don't know why I say that all the time, but I do maybe get that little bit of honeysuckle or honey note in there, but I'm definitely getting some black licorice. Um, I get the, some vanilla is coming through. I'm not that typical, uh, whiskey wheel guy. I'm more of a Skittles or a baby brew candy bar, something like that. Not, I don't know. I just, or some kind of cereal like honey smackums or something like that. That's, that's my memories. I don't have a memory of, dried oak or something like that. Maybe from wood shop when I was a kid, but I never sat there and chewed on a oak stick. So, you know, I don't know, but I dang sure ate some honey smack them cereal a lot.

Yeah, I think there's, again, I'm mostly out in front of folks by way of sales. And I think it's interesting when a lot of, whether they're new drinkers or extremely experienced drinkers, and they're like, I just don't know how to describe this. There's kind of this mysticism of being able to kind of pull up that wheel you know, hologram floating in the air and being able to like, ding, ding, ding, you know, pick out those things. And we, we really, I think one of the things we were pretty good at is, is trying to just pull out associations. Like you said, you're like, oh, farm, honeysuckle ranch. That right there, that is beautiful. That's fun. That's cool. Because there's an association versus just making this such a sterile dissection of it. And so I think that's where, if you're like, man, this reminds me of that time I got a box of good and plenty. And I was a kid. And I used to love that candy. You're like, oh, OK. So that's probably because it's a little bit of that black licorice. And just being able to tell a story through the glass that way, I think, is so much more profound than being able to dissect a flavor or even a color wheel.

Now, I took a sip of that, and it's been set in a glass for a couple seconds or a couple minutes. And you ever had a prickly pear before, like fruit off a cactus? I get a little bit of that, that tanginess out of it too, but sweetness and stuff. And that floral note, if you've ever smelled one of those flowers off one of those, it just smells beautiful and stuff. And I know some people might think that's weird to smell a prickly pear, but you know that when we were kids, We grew up out in the country and if your mom was making prickly pear jelly, that's what you were gonna eat. If you wanted to eat, I mean. That's what's on the table. So that's what I get out of here a little bit is prickly pear and that fruit to me is, that's just what native Texans had to, they wanted to make some jelly or a hog plum or something like that. You get that a little bit of tartness on there.

Yeah, I think most of our whiskeys end up With the exception of maybe Baby Blue, most of our whiskeys end up falling towards more of a savory category, which to me is really fun because the vast majority, and I do enjoy, I just picked up a couple bottles of Ardbeg the other day, so I do purchase and drink other whiskeys. But I love how much these tend to lean towards more savory dishes than kind of like cloyingly sweet dishes. And I think that to a certain degree, it's kind of where you're going with that because you could have said maybe cherry, but you said prickly pear.

Yeah, I think the other thing about four grains is a lot of people are taking it back because they don't understand a four grain where they're used to drinking just a traditional rye bourbon. It's three grains. There's nothing extra there and stuff and then they go to a four grain They're like, oh there's something's wrong with that. I don't think there's nothing wrong with four grain I think it's just a different style whiskey altogether, even though it's a still bourbon because that corn is the 51% right it's still I think it's a good whiskey and the surprising thing is you said

little over two years old, maybe three years old. It's a little bit over two. Yeah.

Yeah. That's still good whiskey for, for that age and stuff in the, in Texas is what we talked about the heat. Really? Is that really a four or five or six? Really? If you, if you, I wish they'd come up with some kind of wheel for that to figure out how old is the maturation?

Well, I know, I know a few years ago we had a, it's kind of odd to say, but we had an intern. Um, and they did a kind of a, a mapping of temperature swings, daily temperature swings across, and I know for research anyways, you all have been working on it, but those variables between specifically Waco, Kentucky, and then the UK.

Well, yeah, if you look at how many days a year in Texas we've got, 30 degree swing in one day and every day like that for weeks. We kind of just came out of it. It's not getting quite as cool at night, but just last week it was 63, 64 in the morning, 93, 94 by the evening. And it had been that way for like two, three weeks, right? In the UK, there's not one day a year. There's not 30 degrees difference all year, from the coldest moment to the hottest moment. Just that flat rate, right? You know John Little from Smooth Ambler? We were pouring together. I can't remember if it was in New York or in London, but we were together sharing a table. And he had pulled out. They hadn't quite released it yet. They were about to release their, what product was it? They had a, I want to say it was maybe a Hi-Rai. I can't remember what it was, but he had like a five-year-old.

And it was like, you know,

duct tape on it with Sharpie. Like it wasn't, he just kind of brought it along to like pour for certain people if they wanted to try it and it wasn't quite ready yet. And I'm sitting there pouring a bunch of stuff that's, you know, between two and three years and like easily twice as dark. He was so mad. He's like, I'm going to send you barrels down, I'm going to send some barrels down to Texas just to get the color I need. Cause it's just like, it's never going to happen over here. Or it takes a long time. But like we were talking about earlier, the easiest thing to do in Texas is get color and all the stuff that comes out of wood. That's easy. A lot of places in the country, especially craft distiller struggle with that. They'd like to get it out and it doesn't look quite right and no one's going to buy it because it looks really pale. But it doesn't mean it's easier here. We have a whole other layer of difficulty because that's easy to do. You can leave it in too long here. And we've, you know, Texas, whether I don't know if it's us and Dan's fault, I don't know whose fault it is or if it's just the climate's fault. But there's become this perception of Texas whiskey as all just being pretty, pretty big wood bombs. And while I don't necessarily think that's a problem from a distillers perspective, from a balance perspective, that just created a whole other layer of tricks and things we've had to, we've spent most of our 12 years trying to figure out, okay, that's easy. how do we make something that when it's got enough wood on it, all the other aspects of maturation have kept pace with it. So you end up with something that maybe is more woody than Kentucky, definitely more than the UK, but that's still developed and it's still interesting and aromatic and there's balance to it and it progresses in a way that makes sense and is pleasing. I mean, Stag, obviously, back in the day within the antique collection, if you like wood bombs, Stag was the one out of that lineup that you wanted. Right. So it's not like people don't like wood bombs, but it creatively does present some challenges of like, OK, how do we how do we work with that to make something that's still awesome and not just a one trick pony? You know, so sure. It seems awesome for other people, but it's actually kind of a trick. It's kind of a road bump and a hurdle that you got to work that Rubik's Cube and try to figure out how to work with it.

It's kind of the magic of, I guess, Texas whiskey. But speaking of one trick pony, let's not let that bourbon be the one trick pony. So what do you got for us next?

So this is the weeded recipe. We have only sold it at the distillery. Most of it goes into the pot still. So we sold some and 18 and 19, two years in a row, we sold some just out of here. So. but you know is that 19 this is 19 yeah so that was technically a this is a single barrel it's also cast rank but you know your your show's not called whiskey road it's bourbon road so we'd figure we'd pull out some bourbons for you we will drink anything on it we'll get we'll get to some other stuff we got time just because you know we make a lot of different things but

And I think to your point about kind of time and evaporation, I was just working on, I help oversee the single barrel program. So I was looking at some casks that we, that Charlie and the Drammers selected. And one of them only yielded 14 cases. So you're looking at 80, about 80 bottles for that barrel when we're using larger format casks that can hold up to 200, 220 bottle yield. The evaporation over those 40 years, because that was a four-year-old single barrel, is quite in quite intense. So that constant interaction with the wood sugars, you're going to see some really big punchy flavors that we feel are quite fantastic. And that's why maybe some folks end up seeing this like, wow, how in the world? So this has got to be a 15-year-old whiskey. Actually, I think this is two to four years old.

So we stepped up from 92 proof, right? Was the Texas pot still? Yeah. And we're going to step it up to, I could be wrong on my math here, but I think this is 132.6. Sounds about right. So this is your Texas weeded bourbon.

Yeah, this is our weeded. It doesn't ever really go out to distribution or anything. We've sold a little bit here. This was actually last year. We had a single barrel of this.

Highly coveted. Jared, I don't know if you knew this about me, but I'm a self-proclaimed weeded king of Kentucky. My goal is to have as much weeded bourbon in the world as I can possibly have.

I mean, yeah, with the proliferation of the small producers, there's a lot more than there was. But 10 years ago, there wasn't much. Even to get references for me to put what we make into context, even for the guys, there's not a lot to go by that you can put side by side with your reader and be like, yeah, here's readers historically.

Pretty much back in the day, there was only makers and that's what you had and pappies. Whoever can get a hold of that anymore. But now, you know, so many people have a Weeder, you know, Heaven Hill, they had old fits and now they got larceny out there and larceny barrel proof. This right here, I tell everybody is a beautiful, the color of it's super beautiful and stuff. And the nose on this is just, and I'm getting the caramel and butterscotch in there, that, that typical whiskey wheel stuff right there. Some Oaks coming through, which I would expect from a Texas whiskey.

Yeah. I think one of the things that we, at least I say a lot, I'll, I won't say all of us cause depending on how people feel about this, but I say that especially in America, we don't play with our whiskey enough. And so there's a, there's some fantastic things that happen with, um, probably a lot of whiskeys, but specifically our whiskeys, especially since they're non-chill filtered, that the longer you let them sit in the glass and evaporate, and then begin maybe, especially a cast-string product like this, and all of our special releases are cast-string, start adding a little bit of water, start opening up some of the more nuanced flavor profile, and especially in something like this, the more it's just mouth-coding and just delicious, and you'll start pulling out some of those, those associations with, I think some, some other similar weeded bourbons as well.

Yeah. Some, uh, some, some pecan praline in that little bit.

Yeah. There's a very dessert quality. Again, this is, this is the creme brulee kind of like an over-torched creme brulee and you know, grandma's ramekin, just a nice, just, I don't know, a nice, just like slightly, slightly over, uh, caramelized creme brulee.

Yeah, we like the weeder a lot. Every time we're blending the pot still, we're always so bummed that we have to use so much of it in that product and that we don't really have a place for that to go. But we have held some back. We're kind of playing around with it. We may not be bottling Bond not because We have a bunch of stuff that's going to be four years soon, but every time we proof it to a hundred, I'm like, man, I just like it at cask. You know?

So, so this is, this has got that barrel spice from it though, which is surprising from a weeder because if you drank well, or if you drink makers, it doesn't have that. that rye pop to it. Where this is not a rye pop, it's more of that barrel spice that's coming out of that wood. So it's drawn out that sugar and then it maybe went all that. I'm not good with that science part of the wood and stuff, but it's drawn out some kind of spice out of that wood.

Yeah, I mean, a barrel can give you a lot of, depending on how it's toasted and charred, you can get easy. You can. It's super easy to get things like cinnamon and clove, which of course leads into people having, you know, people are associating it with, you know, a cobbler or a pie or something, or, you know, snickerdoodle, stuff like that. It's pretty easy to get that out of there. I can pour this over some cobbler for damn sure.

Some Brahms vanilla ice cream.

Texas Brahms, vanilla ice cream. I'm a big old fat guy. So these days I got to drink or eat rebel ice cream, which is lower calories. Oh, okay. Less sugar. Made out of oats or something. I don't know. Is it coconut oil?

They make a vanilla bean one.

I will guarantee you, you put that on top of some peach cobbler and then pour a little bit of whiskey over that and let it set for just a little bit. It's delicious. And hey, this is an excellent drinker. It definitely drinks to the proof of it, I think. It's exactly where I'd think it is. It's right there with that larceny barrel proof, which I think is a great weeded bourbon, great expression and stuff.

I got a beef with larceny because the, not because of what's in it, but when the old fits bonded, was it bonded or just a hundred proof? But that went away because they were using all the stocks for larceny. And I used to love buying that old fits expression that I think is back even. But when that, when my liquor store guy said, yeah, they're not gonna be sending us that anymore. But we got this new thing and I was like,

Sometimes you start messing around with your product sometimes and they say they're doing it because of the consumer and they did so much marketing studies and stuff. I listened to a couple other podcasts and they were talking about that, about marketing and how they've studied the consumer and what label is going to pop to them and what their tastes are like and stuff. But you're worried about the new consumer when you're not concerned about your older consumers that still want to buy that standard bourbon, like Heaven Hill Bottle and Bond. A lot of people are upset about that, that six year going away and then a seven year, and then they didn't release it in Kentucky. And that was almost sacrilegious. How dare you release it in its home state?

Well, I think in some ways, that's a good indicator of kind of what Alex was saying earlier. These things, I think that one of the things that keeps me up at night and that I encourage everybody in our organization to really think about, if this is just about making whiskey, then I don't get it. It's got to be about something that's broader than that. There's got to be something about why we do this, how we do this, the things we care about, the things we put into it. If that didn't apply to life in a much broader way, then we're just making alcohol. We're just making a drink. Now, you got a whiskey library up top up there, right?

And you were telling me that you let everybody, you want them to sample that because you don't want to burn out on their product. But I think that's awesome. I heard a story from, there's a place called Hattie B's Chicken in Nashville, Tennessee, right? And the way they come about with their Hattie B's is they kept going out and buy other people's Spicy chicken and taste it taste it taste something. They would taste theirs and try to get theirs to the right Yeah, so the right temperature right everything I was at Hattie B's once and You got you got to go if you're close, you know, if you're even close, yeah, goodbye so Went by

We eat a lot of spicy food in Texas. It's not like we don't eat spicy food. And it was pretty late and I said, well, you know, I get like a four piece or whatever it was and it's going to come with white bread and not much to it. So I get me a Shiner. I think it was a long neck, maybe a tall boy. I don't remember. Give me a beer. Sit down and do this. What spice level do you want? I was like, I think they do like one to four, one to five. I was like, just like one. There doesn't need to be crazy. I just want to get an idea of what this is about. And Tommy, who's our distillery manager, was with me. And he got something else. And I muscled through that. And to this day, I hope they gave me something way higher than one. And they just messed up my order. By accident? Because I barely could. I mean, I was sweating, crying. I don't really eat bread. I went through every piece of bread, got more, had a second beer. And I'm just like, four little tenders. And Tommy's like, you don't have to finish that. I'm like, no, I'm going to finish this. Man, I hope that was a four instead of a one.

Because if there's anything hotter than that, I don't really want to know. So if our listeners don't know what Hattie B's is, it's a fried chicken joint in Nashville, Tennessee. And Nashville hot chicken is extremely spicy. And I do not recommend that. If you're going to go to Nashville and you plan to go down to Broadway and listen to music all night, I do not recommend you go listen to music down on Broadway after you eat that spicy chicken. You know, you better have a iron gut stomach. Take some times with you or something. So to just kind of finish up on that Texas weeded bourbon and stuff, I think that's a great expression. I'm so happy that you guys had sent me a bottle and I'll cherish that thing. I'd say if you're in Waco and they're doing their release, come by here and make sure you pick up a bottle of that. If you're a weeder guy, if you can get your hands on a bottle, it's definitely delicious and I can see why. There's some toffee in there. I get the chocolates coming out and stuff. Some people that are not whiskey drinkers don't get that, but not a whole lot of oak in that, which I'm surprised by. I get more sweetness and stuff, not no dryness. Coats the mouth on the back end. Finishes kind of medium, but a great expression of a weeded bourbon. You poured me a new expression here. What do we got?

Yeah, and Jared talked about it earlier. This was the first bourbon that we had released. And in true Balcona's fashion, we weren't going to release something that was incredibly familiar to folks. So this is actually 100% blue corn. So the same blue corn that we use for Baby Blue, True Blue 100, True Blue Cask.

So, so blue corn can be different, really a different color than just blue, right? It could be different redder.

Uh, I mean, there's a ton of varieties of heirloom corns out there that are different colors. The blue is going to be blue. I mean, if you've ever had tortilla chips or something like that made with blue corn, it's, it's, uh, it's blue. Ironically, the fermentation looks kind of purple and pink.

So a couple of years ago, whenever there was a yellow corn shortage and they were going to for tortilla chips, um, and they were going more white corn and blue corn, was it harder for you guys to buy the corn for this or did that affect you at all?

No, not really. I don't think them, probably the blue corn market.

I don't know how big, I have no idea how big of a market it is, but we've got deals.

We have to contract with farmers. We've got people that are designated, that are growing it for us. We have to give them, you know, projections for the year and they grow that much for us.

Blue corn truly is an American corn, right? It was developed by the Hopi and Pueblo Indians in New Mexico area around Albuquerque.

Ours has grown out in West Texas, so right. People farmers are so funny because he had no idea he grows it right on the border. And at some point, this is probably about three years ago, four years ago. And he said, It's grown on both sides of the border. Would it matter to you all if you were getting the Texas stuff or a mix? It's like, well, yeah, if you're growing it right on, if you've got farms that are straddling both sides, we'd prefer, you know, send us the stuff that's grown here. And then he went back and checked his records. He's like, oh, I've been sending you that for years. I was like, I've been telling people this stuff's coming from New Mexico for like five years and it was being grown here. So, yeah, it's grown out west. A lot of the stuff, a lot of the Texas-grown grain we've got, the barley that we started doing, if we get around to the High Plains, which is Texas-grown barley, that was grown out there too. The French oak is pretty specific. For a lot of people who haven't had French oak, especially virgin French oak, It's tight. It's kind of floral. It's it's it's kind of mineral the heads on it are just evaporative The solventy parts are just get a different get a different flavor to them and French oak has about triple the tannin that American oak does so The oakiness just has a different vibe to it.

It's a tighter grain, right? The oak itself.

It's not we do it. We do use extra fine grain. So yeah, it's real real tight. Yeah, I

Yeah, I think that this, this tends to be a bit punchier than the weeded. The weeded is a bit softer.

This, this is definitely spicy and the nose on it. It's more of that. I think this is more of a traditional rye bourbon that tastes like that anyways. Got that spice, like you said, a little bit of sweetness there though. Yeah.

Yeah, and again, it's 100% blue corn. So there's no other grain to kind of round out any of those edges. It's just the same blue corn that we saw out by the silos on the ground.

Yeah. Yeah.

This is a yearly release, usually around September, October. So every once in a while you can still find this on shelves, but it's a Cast Strength special release. It's the only thing that gets the blue wax seal. I don't know if I've ever even asked you, how did that end up with... That's the only... The corn's blue on it.

Yeah, but true blue and baby... Yeah. Special, special. Special. Well, it tastes good, that's for sure. As a bourbon drinker, you got to love great expressions. And once again, it's got that, I almost say a Texas color of bourbon. I don't know if I should say that or not, but they're all, I'm looking at six different bottles here and they almost all, Have that same color except for the pot still a little bit lighter in color, but that's pretty fun Yeah, that all just that beautiful that beautiful dark rich. I don't even want color to talk chocolatey color, baby And beautiful take a deep amber. Yeah, so balconies. What's Before we take a break here. What's the balconies? How did you get balconies?

I Like I said, the reason we started distilling in our first level is always single malt. And there's some cultural differences for whatever reason that for some reason, a lot of these American whiskeys, brands, distilleries, there's a lot of reference to family. You know, I've made the joke before, it's they're almost always named after some old dead white guy. Right. For whatever reason. And which is great. The idea of like family tree, the idea of relationships and offspring. I mean, I love I love that idea. And for some reason, there's just cultural difference. The single malt tradition tends to reference place and location and geography. And there's something about that that was always really beautiful and attractive to us. So Balcones is the name of the fault line, the escarpment that we're on. I-35 in Texas pretty much sits right on top of it. It's the most dormant fault line in North America. If it ever decides to move, I-35 is going to be in pretty bad shape, along with the 80 million people that are driving on it right now. It's already in bad shape, I'd say. Yeah, it's the roller coaster ride out there right now. Yeah. So yeah, Dan mentioned this on your episode with Dan Garrison. Distilling whiskey in Texas was the biggest question mark. None of us had any idea what it was going to be like. We had no idea how it was going to turn out. But we knew that being here, and honestly, I mean, the climate, the microclimate we've got here versus even what he's got versus what the guys in San Antonio got versus the Gulf Coast guys. It's not the same. Texas might as well be 12 different states if you want to talk about specific areas of soil, weather, rainfall, humidity, all that stuff.

I tell people that all the time. They'll say, oh, it's just a Texas to me, it's a dry desert. And I'm like, man, you got the Gulf Coast, the beaches, you got swamps, you have East Texas pine. Red River area, you got big mountains. You got the hill country Texas, which to me is the most it's kind of sacred to my heart the hill country And you got the northern plains and yeah, it's just you got high desert You got a little bit of everything in Texas.

Yeah big place a lot of variety but because of that I think the idea that Where we are is really gonna matter and we're gonna spend who knows how long probably rest of our lives trying to figure out and how this place plays with whiskey and what does it want to do? And how do we treat it like a partner? How do we collaborate with this area? Because it really is a major contributor to how the whiskey gets made. And I've heard Alex say this before, but to some degree, he's not wrong. This, because we have open fermentation, so we're getting wild bacteria and yeast from the air. Different times of year, that changes depending on what's blooming, blah, blah, blah. You add that to the maturation climate. Could you make this somewhere else? And the answer is probably no.

It'd be different. I think I've said that before. First off, I don't think that Wild Turkey or Jim Beam or any of the Buffalo Trace products started out the most famous bourbon of all. They had to start somewhere and they got better over time and it turned out great. So we'll finish up this blue corn. We'll take a break and we'll come back for the second half. How about that?

We would like to thank Tommy and Gwen Mitchell from Loghead's Home Center for supporting this episode of the Bourbon Road. Loghead's Home Center, nestled in the hills of Kentucky, is an industry leader in building handcrafted rustic furniture. Family-owned and operated, they take pride in offering only the very best for their customers. The Logheads, and that's what they like to call themselves, are skilled woodcrafters who are passionate about creating rustic furniture for people who appreciate the beauty of natural wood. Owners Tommy and Gwen don't just sell the rustic lifestyle, they live it. And you can be sure that Loghead's furniture will always be handcrafted in Kentucky by artisans who embrace the simple way of life. Loghead's rustic furniture is made from northern white cedar, a sustainable wood that's naturally rot and termite resistant. Its beauty and quality will add warmth to your earthy lifestyle for generations to come. Be sure to check out everything they have to offer at LogHeadsHomeCenter.com. And while you're at it, give Tommy and Gwen a shout on Facebook or Instagram at LogHeadsHomeCenter.

Hey, this is Big Chief and we're back for the second half of our tour of Balcony's distillery. And I'm still sitting here with Alex and Jared. I actually got my little brother sitting here with us too. He's just sipping on whiskey and smiling. So we're going to start the second half drinking some Texas single malt whiskey. And this is kind of what I'm familiar with seeing on the Kentucky shelves up there in Indiana, I guess. Not in Tennessee, but in Kentucky mostly. If you go into, I think, Total Wine and Liquor Barn, you'll see this expression in there.

Yep. Yeah. And actually last year with Total Wine, Liquor Barn, and Kroger, they all selected a handful of single malt single barrels around Kentucky. I assume

Most of them are probably maybe sold out but if anybody were to see those, you know Look for the gold wax seal on top and we did sell some single barrels to those guys We have the paddocks the total wines at the paddocks by Norton Browns burro is Where I saw there's several cases of it sitting there the last time I was in there might all be gone by now and maybe those guys that are looking for that single malt. So this is a little bit different, not a bourbon. Tell me about a single malt.

Yeah, so this is 100% malted barley. Like I said, for a lot of us at work here, our first love was kind of our entry into whiskey, even though we were drinking mezcal or drinking brandy, whatever, that for a lot of people, their foot in the door was scotch, single malt. So from day one, we knew we wanted to do that here in Texas. And so a lot of our equipment was designed around that principle. So we've got four size stills, we've got Scottish stills, not Vindome, like a lot of people have, we've got no column here, it's all pot. Those are the tallest pot steels in the world, right? I'm not completely sure, but if they're the biggest in America, I'm not surprised. And they're bigger than the Glenmorengy ones, which I know are the biggest in Scotland. Tallest, not biggest volume, but tallest, yeah. They're pretty tall. And when I asked them why they made them that tall, they said, well, that's how much room you had. So they just made really big ones because we've got a four story building and they figured they'd take advantage of it, I guess.

They look pretty badass sitting there.

Yeah, they're cool. That's a pretty cool thing. They lowered them in through the roof. Man, that was nerve wracking. We sat on the roof in folding chairs and a cooler full of beer and all these rigging guys. And they're all on, you know, headphones talking to each other. And there's guys on down downstairs. There's guys on the roof. There's a guy out there with a truck. He can't even see what he's doing. He's just taking instructions. You know, man, that's nerve wracking when you've got like a half million dollar piece of equipment being loaded in on straps.

They would have done one of them. Would that change how that whiskey would have tasted? They just put a big dent in there. I'm not an insurance guy, but I'm assuming somebody along that chain of delivery would have been responsible for making that good. Could you imagine being that thing guy and they were like, you're fired.

He didn't seem to care at all.

He was like, he was like eating a sandwich and moving a joystick. He didn't care. So you're saying if it got dented, you would have said, hey, we're going to go ahead and return this.

I bet the Forsyth guys, because they were there, the welders, I mean, they have guys that come and show up during installation. I'm guessing they would have been able to fix it. I don't know.

I mean, what do you do with one of those things? Do you put it in the scratch of denial at the steel? I think it ends up at Marshalls. It ends up at Marshalls, right? Yeah.

Just in the bin on the side, 50% off Goodwill.

Got a 40-foot dent in this thing. Yeah. It's got a big scratch in it. Yeah.

But yeah, they picked up the roof. They picked up the plates. So they had the roof panels open.

Yeah. So they had to drop it in from the top. It was pretty crazy. It was nuts. It's like a new, new dad, right? That you're just like, Oh my gosh, look at this. Well, I've, I've only owned one new car in my life and it's kind of the same. If I buy a guitar or a bicycle, I'm always kind of like, man, somebody, I just need to go and get this thing dirty, scratch it something so you can stop worrying about it. So yeah, watching those things go in when they're worth about half a million dollars each, you're just like,

oh god like we just need to get this thing dinged up and dirty anyway so let's just go ahead and do it but now you guys are doing a sweet mash we talked about that on our tour not a sour mash and a little bit more expensive but a cleaner method um get a different taste to it now the thing i was noticing about this single mott it's it's got a different nose on it

The reason I threw this in for a couple of reasons. One, single malt is, we make a million different things, but single malt is really what we started out to make. It's the whole reason we were here. If you gun to the head, to the distillers and the blenders, you can only make one thing the rest of your life, it'd be single malt. But what we've always tried to do with our flagship, especially single malt, is this is Scottish still, Scottish yeast, Scottish barley. But we're aging at New Oak, so it does kind of have a foot in both traditions. It's in the Scotch tradition and the American whiskey tradition. And it's been fun. We're talking about this off mic earlier. It's been fun over the years to watch guys are like, yeah, I'm not a Scotch guy. Well, it's not a Scotch. It's single American whiskey, though. And watch them go, oh. Well, yeah, there's a ton of wood on here. That's all familiar. You know, I actually kind of dig this, and I mostly drink bourbon. So yeah, the wood part of it is very familiar. And it's a great educational exposure tool, too, for people who drink a lot of bourbon and rye American whiskeys who think they don't like single malts. And everybody loves to talk about how much of it's the barrel, and is it 60%, 80%, whatever. Whatever percentage of the final product is oak. And when you throw a different liquid in on top of new oak, Now you can see what's the oak and what's the liquid. I don't know what I'm picking up on this nose right here. Do you drink a lot of single malt? I don't.

But I have seen it on the shelf plenty of times. I guess I just never pick it up. And I'm also wondering, maybe like roasted peanuts is what I'm getting off that, something like that. But the color on this thing is just, it could be the label because the label is black, but it's super dark. And I'm wondering how long would it take to make a single malt in Scotland that's this dark?

Is it Sherry aged or not? I mean, yeah. If you've got something that's aged in Sherry, you're going to get some color from the wine barrel. But if it was just an ex bourbon barrel, that'd have to probably be 25, 30 years old, probably.

It'd especially get that dark, yeah.

Yeah, if you're a Scotch drinker out there and you listen to our podcast and you're one of our listeners and you want a rich single malt, Man, this is where it's at.

Yeah, to me, I get kind of banana bread, some kind of slight waxy honey qualities to this, some really just really fun grain qualities that really jump out. It's still very much surrounded by some of those sweeter notes that you would get from the barrel exposure, but they're still really rich, overwhelming palette. I haven't had this whiskey in a while, I'll be totally honest. I was most recently drinking High Plains, which I know we'll jump into here shortly, but I haven't had this in a while and it's our most decorated whiskey. We've won close to 100 different golds, double golds, best in class with this, which is really fun. But at the end of the day, it just tastes really good, especially for 106 proof. I feel like there's a nice sweet spot at this level that's still, it's very overwhelming, but I think in a very refreshing way. It doesn't fall flat on the palate. It's just long lingering oily quality that's just, I love this whiskey.

You mentioned, today and in other episodes about what's happening in Texas and use the word magic. It's such a young new thing. And I think some of our buddies in that are part of the association with us, there's a lot of people doing really good work. And it's really pretty diverse. I mean, if you look at what Dan's doing, what we're doing, Iron Root, Ranger Creek, Tridio, I mean, everybody, Andalusia, Gold Coast, like there's just a huge Diversity of climates here. There's a huge diversity of interest from the distillers themselves what they're interested in what they're pursuing We just got such a long way to go but for Scotch lovers to try and figure out what does that look like if we do that here and usually people are familiar with New or oak in America. Let's let's how do those things even gonna play the answer is it's never been done, so It it feels like a very honest nod to both the thing, the whiskeys that we first fell in love with and also still reverently respecting and utilizing being here and what those things can do when you combine them, you know? And it's a combination that's never been done. At the same time, Texas whiskey was exploding, what we, what a lot of people call world single malt. So it's basically single malt that's not made in the UK or Japan. We've got Taiwan, India, Australia, New Zealand, US. There's all these places where single malt's been taking off also in the last 10 years. So in some ways the story, part of the Balcony story is these two really cool movements that are semi brand new, which is Texas whiskey, which absolutely didn't exist. And then World Single Malt, which kind of existed, but has really been on the rise. And it's not, often, not even necessarily in a lifetime, that a new category or region of whiskey goes from not existing to existing. And I feel really fortunate in my career, my years as a distiller to have been a part of two of some of the most exciting emerging things at the same time, which is Texas whiskey and American single malt. So I've sat on this a little bit more.

And what soft drink is Waco famous for? Dr. Pepper invented here. DP.

I actually get a little bit of Dr. Pepper in a single malt. Those secret 23 flavors, you know? I don't know why I do. I was sitting there thinking about it. We've actually done a couple of really cool events with them because It was invented here in the other museums just a few blocks away. And, uh, we did an event here where they brought some of the syrup, you know, like not the soda, but the condensed stuff. And, um, but there's some, yeah, some cocktails. Yeah. Andrew made our bar manager made some really cool cocktails using the Dr. Pepper syrup.

So have you, no, go ahead. I'm just going to go ahead and shoot this out there. Have you ever thought about doing a collaboration with them and doing some kind of Dr. Pepper whiskey, a Dr. Pepper, um,

We have talked about something like that. Unfortunately, it wouldn't be, it couldn't be a whiskey at that point because it would have stuff in it that's not grained. It's all kind of flavor though, right? Yeah, it'd be a flavored whiskey, I guess, if you did something like that.

I got a second follow on question about another one too.

Yeah, we've talked about either barrel aging some maybe. Oh, you, you're bad. You're showing me a picture of Big Red. Big Red Soda was made in Texas too. Yeah. We don't have any collaborations planned that involve Big Red. No, no, but Dr. Pepper might be down the road. It could be. I don't know. Yeah. If we, it does have so much cool like herbal bark, you know, bitters kind of notes to it that it would make a lot of sense. And it did when we did these cocktails, he did like a coffee, there was cream and the Dr. Pepper syrup. It was awesome. But, It would either be a flavored whiskey or we have to maybe finish it. Like if we barrel aged some Dr. Pepper syrup and then emptied it and I don't know, we could, we could come up with something.

But if you took a barrel, right. Right. And just put Dr. Pepper in it in a bourbon barrel. We could, yeah, we could just put the whiskey back in there. Right. Yeah.

It'd be like the honey barrels and the maple barrels and stuff. We could do something like that.

Big chief gets the number one bottle.

Right. Saw some stuff recently about Mountain Dew. Mountain Dew was made to be mixed with originally, the original recipe was made to be mixed with.

Oh really? It was. Supposedly that was made as a cocktail drink, but in Kentucky we say LA1 is the, you drink whiskey with LA1, that's what you drink it with, is a ginger ale. Yeah. Okay, it's it's pretty damn good. Yeah, but I've never had whiskey with dr. Pepper. I'm gonna try it now Yeah, I think I'm gonna definitely have to try that so hey if you're a single malt drinker And a bourbon drinker and you want to try in a single malt I think this is a good entry level even though it's it's a little higher proof, right? Yeah, it's the text Texas one is 53% or 106 proof So I think that would be a good entry-level single malt for people if they're bourbon drinkers. Bridge is the gap. Yeah. And maybe you're right. You made a new category of whiskey here. You know, is Texas whiskey, is that its own category? Would Texas legislation say, hey, this is the way you got to make Texas whiskey? I don't know.

No, not currently. Yeah, that's kind of one of the sidebars with the Texas Whiskey Association. I think most people who make anything, the danger of having too much regulation around something is not super exciting. We all like the idea of both with American Single Mall and with Texas Whiskey preserving as much creativity for the producers as they have currently. But like you mentioned, there's not a whole lot going to stop you from taking whiskey from just about anywhere in the world and throwing a cowboy hat or a belt buckle on it or some spurs and selling it to Texans and it's just going to fly off the shelf. Sure. I could tell you how many times even like the Texas crown, like when people realize that that's not from here and they go, what? But it's a big state. A lot of whiskey gets drank here. A lot of money is being spent on whiskey. And anybody who makes it from the ground up, I think, and even most whiskey consumers, I think would appreciate the fact that if that's on there, it actually means something. The Texas Whiskey Association currently, we're not doing a lot of lobbying. We don't have the budget for that. But we did kind of want to set aside the people that make whiskey legitimately from grain to the bottle. and highlight their stories, tell that story, share with people this magical thing that is happening that they may or may not be aware of, and make sure, too, that if people want to buy something that's in a Texas-inspired bottle that's got all the bells and whistles that says, Texas, Texas, Texas, but it's actually from Indiana, there's nothing wrong with doing that. Support that if you want, but you should know what's in there, right? Sure. When you find out you go out of your way and you spend the extra five, 10 bucks because this is a small brand and you think when you spend that money that you worked hard for that it's going to support a farmer somewhere out in Amarillo or whatever. When you find out it's money that's going to Kentucky, Indiana, wherever it can be pretty disheartening, you know? So I think yours, yours says certified Texas whiskey on the back. Yeah. Certified Texas whiskey means it was fermented, you know, mashed, milled, fermented, distilled, bottled in Texas. Yeah.

And the Texas, Texas whiskey association, is that the same as the Texas whiskey trail? Is that two different separate entities or the trail is run by the association.

Yeah.

So if you're, uh, do always doing your pilgrimage to Kentucky and you're going to that Kentucky bourbon trail, you know, and you're, you've been to a couple of times, you want to go to a different whiskey trail, come to Texas and how many distilleries you guys have here?

I think we currently have 16 members on the trail. We just added, uh, we just added one, I think last week. I haven't even had a chance to make to all of them. That's a big state. That's, that's the other funny thing is we've kind of got it broken up into regions because just doing the central Texas, you know, six or seven that are in that area, that'd be more similar to doing the Kentucky trail because you can knock it out. But I mean man if we get we got people all the way down the coast all the way up to Dennis Sure, you can't do that long drive. You can't do that and Very easily Jared who's the president of that Texas Association? I'm hesitant because if someone's you know had a bad experience or someone's got a beef with with the association or the trail never know I'm the president currently. I'm serving my second year and when that rolls off I'll I'll go back to being a layman for a while, but I Yeah, I mean, I haven't had to do a whole lot. Spencer Whelan, who's our executive director, really drives that train. I think, if anything, the main thing I was able to bring to the table is that I knew most everybody. And so I feel like to a large degree, once my job was almost done, once I really just could get everybody at the table, a lot of them who didn't know each other, And let's just get the conversation going about what does it mean to highlight to join forces? Let's tell the story together. Everyone's not fighting the same battle on their own. And maybe someday it does turn into some legislative stuff. Obviously, there's things we would love to see be different. Any industry is going to have that. So we'll see. I didn't tear up, but I did get a little excited. It went from four or five people driving a whiskey and dreaming about what if we could get united and have a united front and tell the story to a few years later, we were at one of our, we don't always get to meet with all the members that often because we're all over the state and there's a lot of them, but we were sitting down at Treaty Oak. And I mean, they're probably, there had to be 50, 60 people in the room. I just, I mean, I didn't even really know what to say. It's just like, For me, this was about community. This is about what we make and telling that story and to watch it go from literally like this many people to a room half of which I don't even know how these people are. Like we've grown that much in that time. And it's got so much excitement and momentum. And I said it then and I'll say it now. Really, all we have to do is not screw it up. We kind of need to just be good stewards of this thing that has a lot of momentum, has a magical thing going on. And really, we probably just be thankful we're along for the ride because it's a Like I said, man, how often, how many people are going to get to be a part of something that literally did not exist? That's a once in a lifetime thing. That's a rare thing.

So it's kind of that bourbon culture, whiskey culture and stuff where people want to be part of something great and drink great whiskey and make sure that the whiskey is successful in that area. Definitely so far so good today, right? We're kind of going to work on our fifth whiskey here.

Which I think is kind of a perfect segue to talking about High Plains.

So the High Plains is a release we did in 2018, I believe. No, 2019. Summer 2019. Barley is not grown everywhere. Obviously, Texas, we got corn for days. We got plenty of wheat. We got plenty of rye. So A&M was working with a friend of ours out of Pflugerville, Blacklands Malt, and he's got a small malting facility there. And they'd been trying to work on a barley variety that could handle both our heat and the dryness. So a drought resistant and heat resistant strain of barley that could grow in Texas. You just built a wall for me.

You spilled the wall. You said Texas A&M. Oh, yeah. I was like, he'll come for us.

We got guns out. We got sick of bears. I don't know. I'm just messing with you. Yeah. But yeah, so they finally got something that would grow out in the High Plains area. And we bought as much as we could of the first year they had a successful harvest. This is just a four-barrel blend. We've laid down a lot more. We've actually got some that we've been checking out right now that's getting close to three years old that's really, really nice. So everything else about the process was exactly the same as how we make our regular single malt with Scottish barley, the difference being this is Texas grown, malted, still fermented, barrel matured, bottled everything in Texas. So I kind of included that a little bit for novelty, but don't have a whole lot of bottles, a lot left, but

Yeah, that didn't leave the distillery. So that was distillery only. We had an event here. A couple hundred folks showed up for that and could purchase a bottle. But I do think it's quite a big difference in the nose and in the palate. This tends, for me, instead of being such a, if you're looking at kind of putting something in a box, right? Texas one single malt to me is definitely more fruit. I get a lot more like apricot. This right here, I think is like sourdough bread. I love High Plains. We don't drink it often because we really don't have much. I could get that.

It's kind of got that like a, I'm gonna say a wheat bread, but.

Yeah, just more bready. I think the grain just really shines through. And of course, at the end of the day, the way that they blended it, Jared and Gabe and team, the way that they blended this, I think is just, this is such a fun whiskey that I feel like a lot of times we oftentimes forget because it didn't leave the distillery. So it's hard for us to kind of carry that message outside of just the special events that are here. So it's always, it's a pleasure to be able to kind of retell that story. on the podcast about this because it's Texas.

Part of the reason I pulled it out is I think I'm sure you see this everywhere you go and talk to folks. Whiskey is so dependent on agriculture. And for us, it was another first. I keep going back to the same idea, but me and Dan sat in Louisville. I can't remember what hotel we were at drinking stag when it was easy and cheap to find. There was just no idea at the time. Nobody knew what was going to happen with aging whiskey here. And I feel like it's been over a decade of like, and then what, and then what, and then what. And this is another first. It's like, man, single malt's been our jam. Oh man, we're right on the cusp of having barley that can actually grow here. That's beverage grade, malting grade.

But you didn't tie yourself to one thing. You haven't tied yourself to single malt or bourbon. You've got some rum here. You've got some other expressions, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, we've got some rye whiskey. You haven't tied yourself down to saying, hey, we're just this one trick pony.

I think we're too curious and we're too interested in all of the all the facets of what it means to be a distiller. And so every time we find out there's another option of something that can be tried and it's played around with, it's like, well, yeah, I could tell there's signs of very curious guys up there in that blending room.

Very happy, curious guys. It was like he had them locked away in their little dungeon and they're just sipping on their little glasses of whiskey, but there's, there's a blender's bottles all the way around the room on the tables. Uh, you know, you got the, uh, almost a Snow White in the seven little drawers up in there, blending whiskey, right? So I think that's all that you guys are trying to make.

Am I Snow White in that analogy? You are. You are Snow White. You ever, do you have kids? Oh, yeah. OK. You know the whole thing where, like, I spy something, whatever? Yeah. So our old house, the paint was white. We had this little terrier mud that was white. And I'm sitting there with my daughter. She's almost 10 now, but she was probably like four at the time. And we're sitting there getting close to bedtime. And she goes, I spot something white. And I'm like, is it the house? No. I was like, is it the dog? Is it Ollie? No. Kept going around it. And she's like, dad, it's your beard. And it was like, man. Anyway, that made you feel good, didn't it? You hit like peak dad right there. I actually thought when I was younger, every once in a while you see someone who's gone full white kind of early and they look awesome. And I was like, man. If I, if I go gray early, that'd be, that'd be pretty cool. Big old, you know, long white hair and a big old white beard. That'd be pretty cool to be like that white and like 34, you know?

Well, I tell you this, you got a, you got a nice beard. And I told Alex this earlier. You guys could be ZZ Top together.

I'm telling you. He's actually musical. I'm not. I like music. You're not musical? No, I'm not. No, no.

But it's just a bass guitar. You look like a bass guitar from ZZ Top.

No, no, no. You could be a bassist. You could play bass in a band. That's it. Oh, OK. OK.

So you could play. You play the bass?

No, no. Tommy used to play the bass. Sure. Distillery manager. No. No.

That's high praise though, saying you look like one of the members of ZZ.

No, that's why I will not accept nor deny that claim.

You got the little cowboy hat. That's not little.

You got the rocker rings on. Hey man, embrace it. No, I will. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah.

So we got a friend up in Leapers Fork, Tennessee, Matt King. He's their PR guy. I'm going to have to get you to reach out to him. And I told him he looked like Forrest Gump after that run. So he did. But he just shaved his beard. Now he's a pretty boy. So hey, once again with this Texas High Plains single malt whiskey. I think, man, just it's pretty amazing that you could get a single malt. And I've had some single malts in my life and I was like, I don't know if they're a little bit light. You know, the thing about bourbon and older bourbon, it's dark, it's rich, it's complex. And that's what this is. It's definitely got so much character to it. And I'm just wondering how long would that take to make?

That was about 27 months old, I think. I mean, we've all seen pictures of like, you know, McAllen comes out like a 40 year old and it's really dark, but I don't have a whole lot of scotch that's that dark unless it's shared. So we're going to move on to the last thing we got out. Here's the box. Yeah.

You know, Texas is famous for Shiner Bach beer, I think. I think it's pretty legendary. The label is legendary. It's got the ram on there. And so you guys collaborated with them. What did you guys do?

So yeah, the receptionist calls in and says that the master brewer from Shiner is on the phone. His name is Tom. And I thought at first somebody was messing with me. I thought it was somebody kind of, I assumed it was a friend or whatever. I was playing it cool. He never knew that I spent the first minute or two being like, uh-huh, uh-huh, sure. But it really was Tom. And so they called us down. We went down to San Antonio to their head office and sat down with some of them. They had the marketing team there and stuff and the head brewery. Were you pretty excited because you were a beer brewer before?

Oh, yeah.

Sure. Absolutely. I mean, in Texas, like you said, I mean, I mean, that's just like, that's an iconic brand and they make great product when they they've got loggered down for sure. I've been there.

I've gotten emails or texts from somebody in the middle of the night and I'm like, is this really this personal? Why are they talking to me? I'm like, you gotta be kidding me. How lucky am I?

Yeah, that's a funny thing. So they were right off the bat that we want to do something. We don't really know what. Let's brainstorm some stuff. So there have been two beer releases that they've aged their beers in our barrels. And we just gave them about 90 more barrels a few weeks back. So there's something else that they've got cooking for later in the year, probably a winter release that they're going to barrel age. And the funny thing was, I just threw out there. It's like, that's what everybody does. When there's a collaboration between a brewery and a distillery, it's putting a beer in a whiskey barrel, which is cool. And it's delicious. But as, from my end, that's just me sending, shipping you some barrels. That's not super exciting. Can we do more than that? And what if we were to take y'all's recipe, your yeast, everything, and see what that would look like if that beer turned into whiskey? And they didn't even seem to care. They're like, yeah, that's fine. If you want to do that, that's fine. Okay. And we walked away and it was just kind of word of mouth. We shook hands. There wasn't any, no, we didn't sign anything or anything.

And, uh, we, we, we left their office and started heading back up here.

And I was like, man, I don't know how they feel about it from my perspective. Like, I feel like we totally won that deal. Well, we get to make Scheiner Bach into whiskey. Are you kidding me? And so the day we were mashing in, we were going to start the fermentation. They came up, you know, obviously they took a lot of pictures and stuff. It was kind of a big deal. They sent us all that. They sent us ingredients. We had big stainless drums that they brought their logger yeast, which I'd never used a logger yeast for a whiskey before. We were super excited. And it was a little bit over two years. There's another one that was probably about 27 months or so by the time we bottled it. But It was, it was a complete handshake. We have an NDA because obviously they were going to, we were going to get, we were going to be privy to their recipe. So I know how it's made. I can never say I'll lose fingers or I don't know what will happen to me if I ever make me shave my beard. Um, little known fact before quarantine, I didn't even have a beard. Just kidding. It's, it's been a lot. I was like, I don't know what you're putting in this whiskey. If you didn't have a beard before quarantine, you'd grown that thing.

You might want to sell this as haircare.

Yeah.

This is what we sold to LeBron.

He's a Spurs fan, so that's why he said that.

But yeah, it was a super cool project. We laid down a bunch and even when we started kicking artwork back and there was a bunch of other ideas and I was like, I really just want to use Y'all's official colors, I want to use the RAM. And when the email came back after I kicked in the artwork, because I do our label artwork, I sent it to them. And I was just waiting, waiting. They sent it back. And they're like, yeah, that's fine. And I was like, print. Are you OK? We basically just get to throw the Scheinerbach label on a whiskey bottle like, OK. which I still have yet to, I threw trademarked graphics on the bottle and I don't even have legal permission to do so, other than email chain. But we're trying to get it solidified because we would obviously love to keep this relationship going and do more of this. So- Because we like the whiskey, it's not just about the- Yeah, it turned out really fun. It actually has a lot of things about it that kind of remind me, me and Gabe, when we were doing the blending, we're thinking a lot about wheaters and stuff. And yeah, there's some PGA for cut stuff. There's a little bit of the cherry. And it was tough. I wanted to do it a little bit lower proof. And then we talked about doing it higher. And we're trying to figure out. We've never had to deal with this before, but we're trying to put something out there that balcony drinkers are going to buy. But also knowing a bunch of people who buy Shiner that maybe aren't really normally whiskey drinkers are going to buy and trying to find a sweet spot, both with price and the proof where it's approachable, but not watered down and boring. So. We're really happy with it. We worked on it for quite a while. I'm pretty excited to keep getting to play with it and see what we can come up with in the future.

Well, I'd have to give a shout out to Waco Bourbon from Instagram. He actually got me a bottle of this and I knew it had sold like hotcakes, right? It flew off the shelf.

Yeah, we only had about 900 cases, which to us still sometimes sounds like a lot, but obviously to some distilleries is just a drop in the bucket. And we launched it in Texas and then a little bit in Oklahoma, which for Shiner is their two biggest states. And it, I mean, in about, I mean, definitely less than a week it sold out. I mean, we had, some really cool programs in place with a lot of a lot of the stores and you know they might have gotten seven eight cases and they would they would sell out in a couple hours so it went fast and furious which we weren't really surprised by but i still think we maybe were surprised by just kind of the just the ripple effect that it had as far as good and bad just communication of just, Oh man, I'm so bummed. I didn't get this or I didn't think to grab that bottle. Like, are you going to bring some more things?

I think maybe people that aren't on the, on the production side of the whiskey phenomenon don't realize how it's so difficult. Every time you do something, that's really cool. If it's too, if it's small enough, you don't really have a whole lot of people coming back and saying, man, high five. You knocked that out of the park. 90% of the comments and questions you field are angry people who didn't get it. And it's got, I'm glad I don't answer those emails or phone calls, but there's way more grumpiness about who didn't get it and who didn't get as much as you wanted. Then there is people going, I'm glad I got it.

Thanks. That was really cool. I really dig it. I was one of those guys that, you know, threw up an Instagram post and next to a shot, I might've been the first one. I might've beat everybody to the punch. As soon as I got that bottle, I grabbed a shot and broke a block out of the fridge and took a photo and I actually drank both of them side by side.

I was going to say that was, that was a thing I didn't. I didn't think through that at all. How many people were doing Boilermakers and doing side-by-sides and like, oh, I can see the Shiner in here. I thought that was pretty cool. I don't know why I didn't think through that. If it hadn't come out during quarantine COVID situation, it would have been really fun to do a lot more collaborative. Let's go out in the market. Let's have events at a bar where there's going to be the barrel-aged beers and regular shiner and the whiskey and like, let's do some flights and all that kind of stuff. But maybe someday the world opens back up and we can get out there and do some more fun interactive stuff with the public around these releases.

So you said you're a basketball guy, right? Yeah. I'll kind of end it on this right here. Sure. And I actually talked to this about Alex and in Kentucky, Maker's Mark does all kinds of University of Kentucky branded stuff. Yeah. Why no Baylor Bear color?

What did we do?

For the rye, we did the gold wax seal. So it's green and gold. Green and gold is there.

And of course, the big joke is all the ryes are green, which of course they're not, but in our mind, everyone thinks, well, why are all the ryes green? So when we started working on our ryes, same thing about five years ago, I was like, we can't do green. And then Zach, Pilgrim, Tom, all these people started like, no, we have to, we have to, because that's the joke.

And so we ended up doing it. I got outvoted a little bit.

I was like, we can't do a green rye. Everyone thinks that's the thing. So yeah, that's the closest to a green and gold. Every once in a while on game days, they would run a special up here because that's the one label that's green and gold on game day.

But it's like for legal reasons. We can't. I mean, you can't sell alcohol. Oh, to do a Baylor thing? Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Is that just a Texas thing? Because the UK doesn't. Other colleges do it.

So yeah. Oh, I mean, Baylor's a dry, you know, they don't, that's not really their jam.

Because they're more of a Methodist college, right? It's Baptist. Yeah.

So even the, yeah. I guess it's pretty common for a lot of college stadiums. But no, there is a bar in the stadium, but it's not open on game days.

I bet you go up and there's something in private suites up there. There's plenty of, there's plenty of alcohol in the private suite. Common people like us, we just have to suffer until we get back. Common people have it in their boot. Yes. In their boot. Yeah. But you guys sell something for that here at the distillery.

We don't have our own package, like three, seven, five flask type bottles, but like some people have done that, which is pretty smart.

Well guys, Hey, you know, I, um, I'm glad you guys brought me in here and let me sit down with you guys. You guys always have a second job as a stand in ZZ type guys. I'll tell you that. And if the whiskey doesn't work out, you know, your head of hair, Alex, man, it's beautiful. I'm glad I got to see that under your cowl hat. I don't know if it's whiskey that's making it grow that much, but if it is, just keep drinking it.

We'll have to ask them if we can do that. Got a nice thick beard, too. You just rub it in there. Yeah, the whiskey. Yes. I would bathe in it.

See, that's a good commercial for you guys right there. Just have him like coming up out of a pond and flipping his hair back. He's the face of the brand. It should be him, not me. And pouring it on his head and rubbing it in or something.

I don't know.

So where can we find our listeners? How many states are you guys in?

So actually, as of yesterday, we were in, I believe it's 37 states. We just opened up or reopened, I guess, Georgia yesterday. So that's pretty cool. You can also find us in the UK, even across Europe and Australia as well. So we are rapidly growing. There's only a handful of states in the Midwest that you really can't find us in. But I mean, the standard states that you're thinking of, we're probably in there. We've got quite a bit of distribution.

And your military bases in Texas and Virginia, you had said.

Yeah, I believe so. Yeah, I believe so. That kind of runs.

And you're hoping to be in more.

Oh yeah, we're always, I mean, one of the things that, again, it kind of goes back to the beginning of the conversation is at the end of the day, we love sharing the story about Coney's and sharing this whiskey. So the more folks that are interested, we're always open to opportunities in and out of military, traditional markets, domestic. We've got some opportunities in Canada as well to share the whiskey.

And where can our listeners find you on social media?

Um, we're on Instagram, Twitter. I mean, all the standard places, uh, Facebook, I think we have a YouTube as well. Um, balcony is distilling is kind of the easiest thing. Um, Jared is the head of all social media. Just kidding. Jared doesn't really do social media, but we're on the traditional, um, traditional, you know, channels for social media.

All right. Well, like I said, guys, I appreciate you. Absolutely. Having us here at the distillery today. Sending me some whiskey to drink and stuff. And I might have to grab all these bottles, just take them with me and drink even more.

Did you guys drive or fly?

I drove, man.

All right, well, throw them in a box. Yeah, this is a whiskey mule right here. He knows.

We are on the bourbon road. We get on a road. I left. It's not the bourbon skies. That's negatory. We're not those guys that'll call you up and want to do an interview. I want to come get face to face with you and have that human interaction. So I left at Shreveport this morning. Got to see my new grandbaby. Oh yeah, got to see it. Got to see it. And 3.30 this morning drove over here, had breakfast with my baby brother and my mom and sister, and come over here and drink some whiskey with you guys. So once again, I say thanks to you guys. Yeah. So the Bourbon Road, we can be found on Instagram, on Facebook, on Twitter, and we have a YouTube channel, The Bourbon Road. You can look at our website, thebourbonroad.com. You can order our Glen Caron glasses on there with our name etched on there. It won't wash off. Those come from one of our sponsors, the distillery products. And if you'd like to buy some other glasses with your stuff etched on there, if you don't want wholesale, you can actually reach out to them and go to premium bar products. and they've got all kinds of bar accessories, glasses. You can get your own bar's name put on your glasses for you and stuff. Just a great team over there in Montana. They will hook you up. You can find me at One Big Chief. You can find my co-host, Jim, that's back in Kentucky right now, jshen63 on Instagram. Going to Facebook, we had a private group in there, the Bourbon Roadies. We've got master distillers in there. We've got distillery owners. We've got master blenders. We've got all kinds of folks in there. The queen of bourbon, Peggy Nell Stevens. You name it, they're in there. They'll talk to you. They'll discuss whiskey with you. That's what they want to talk about. And another great thing is they share whiskey with each other. Great part about the bourbon culture. You never can tell what you'll get in the mail from a fellow whiskey friend. Other thing they do in there is we do giveaways all the time, so pay attention to those. If you liked our episodes, you're listening, give us a review. Hopefully it's a five star. I'll take whatever you give me really. If you like my deep voice, I think it deserves five. So six. Six. So I'll see you on down to Bourbon Road. Cheers.

We do appreciate all of our listeners and we'd like to thank you for taking time out of your day to hang out with us here on the Bourbon Road. We hope you enjoyed today's show and if so, we would appreciate 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.