Timber Creek Distillery

Drew (00:00):
Catch a deeper conversation with Cam and Aaron from Timber Creek Distillery as a member of the whiskey lore speakeasy. Just head to patreon.com/whiskey lore and look for the Timber Creek Complete interview. Welcome to Whiskey Lord's Whiskey Flights, the weekly home for discovering great craft distillery experiences around the globe. I'm your travel guide Drew Hanish, the Amazon bestselling author of Whiskey LO's Travel Guide to Experiencing American Whiskey. And today we are going to be returning to our virtual whiskey flights making our way to the panhandle of Florida. It's an area bookended by the state capital of Tallahassee and out to the west, Pensacola, Florida. And of course there are plenty of beaches, Panama City and Destin being the two best known. What you might not realize though, if you've never been down to this part of the Gulf, is that there are plenty of white sand beaches around and those emerald colored waters that you would expect out of a Caribbean scene.

(01:07):
So it's kind a way to get a little mini Caribbean feel without necessarily having to leave the mainland. Now, as a year ago that I drove across the panhandle, I did not have time to stop. I was doing my deep south great 48 tour drive and so silly me, I said, well, I'm going to go from New Orleans to St. Augustine in a day, and that drive is about 10 hours long. So I did not have time to stop. I knew there were distilleries along the way. Well, last summer while I was doing my research for the Experiencing American Whiskey book, I received an unsolicited email from Cam Ford who is the president and co-founder of Timber Creek Distillery, which is a distillery that is along that drive of I 10. It is off of exit 56 if you're coming from the west. If you're coming from the east, it is off of exit 70.

(02:04):
It's a little ways off the highway. It's about 50 miles north of Destin and Fort Walton Beach. And the email was really interesting because he basically laid out all of the creative things that he's doing at that distillery. And so as I looked at it, I thought, well, I, he'd be a great guest to have on. And obviously he's passionate about what he's doing there because he's just unsolicited reached out to me and told me, Hey, here's what I'm doing at this distillery. So since my goal in 2026 is less about completing a number of states, but instead kind of pointing out some of the most unique experiences and techniques being used by independent craft distillers here in the states, I figured it was time to get Cam and his co-founder, Aaron Barnes, who is the distiller onto the podcast. And so I want to start off our conversation by finding out some backstory and learning how Cam got into this world of distilling and starting a distillery.

Cam (03:08):
I used to work out in Silicon Valley, I'm an electrical engineer by trade, and I worked for Intel and Seagate and Hewlett Packard and a bunch of different startups. And my neighbor in California was also a startup guy. And when we were looking to move back here to Florida, my wife grew up here in Fort Walton and I used to work at the Navy base there in Panama City. So we loved the area and we'd always planned to move back. I was looking for some kind of a job to start because there's really not much tech stuff going on here outside of the military bases. And I could work in tech, but I'd be on a plane all the time. So I was looking at evaluating a couple different business ideas, and my neighbor in California sent me an article in popular Mechanics of all things on craft distilling.

(03:52):
And it talked about Tito's and St. George spirits and some of the really early guys in craft distilling. And he's like, Hey, cam, check this out. You'd be really good at this. So what do you do in tech sales? You take customers out to lunch, you take them out to dinner and you drink a lot. So I was always taking the opportunity to use corporate money to build my whiskey palette and would try this and try that and try everything I could. And after he sent me that article, I was like, that's really interesting, because when I was in California, that's when the craft beer craze had taken off. And I was just south of Palo Alto where we had Pete's Wicked Ale, which was one of the early craft guys, and they were fantastic, but they went out of business. So I did a lot of homework on the brewery side on which breweries made it, why did they make it, what size were they?

(04:46):
How big do you have to be to pay the rent and pay the bills? So we looked at scaling. So I did about a year and a half of research on craft breweries, craft distilleries, the distilling industry. And then I'm like, okay, I think the timing's good because one of the things you learn in Silicon Valley is you can be too early to market and you burn all your cash, which the last startup I was with did exactly that. And the timing looked good. It certainly looked like a lot more fun than IT equipment. And I was working as an IT consultant at the time. The one big mistake that I made, I hadn't been living here in the panhandle long enough to understand that the Panhandle of Florida is five to 10 years behind all of the major cities in any trend. So I'm in Detroit, I'm in Atlanta, I'm in Tampa, I'm in Dallas, I'm in Houston.

(05:35):
I'm visiting all these restaurants. I'm drinking craft liquor, craft gin, craft, vodka, craft, whiskey, craft, craft, craft, right? I'm like, this is going to be great. So anyways, I started playing around. I'm like, Hey, I think I can make a go of this. This looks like a lot of fun. It looks really interesting. And I said, but before I go invest a bunch of money, I want to know if I can actually make booze. So I started doing a little moon shining in my backyard and practicing, and Aaron was my next door neighbor. He was a real estate broker, so he worked from home. So he was my main taste tester. So every day I'm bringing a mason jar, I'm like, here, try this. I did this here, try this. I did that. And when I got to starting to cook grains, I'm like, Hey, I can't strain these grains. They're hot all the time. He's like, oh, you need a mash cooler. You needed this, you needed that. So he's a home brewer. So he had the equipment and he actually knew a lot more about the process than I did. So he started getting interested in it. We started talking about it and working together on it and started making a little whiskey and threw a little bit in a barrel. And after three or four months, it actually tasted like whiskey. And I'm like, Hey, I think we can do this, right?

Drew (06:46):
Yeah.

Cam (06:47):
So that's where we got started.

Drew (06:50):
Some of the things we're going to talk about I didn't understand initially I'm like, why are they doing things this particular way? But understanding that Aaron is coming from a brewing background changes the whole equation. If you go to Kentucky, there's not a lot of people lautering or using a pot still to do their distillation. So Aaron, how did this kind of evolve? First of all, it sounds like you built your own pot still.

Aaron (07:18):
No, we bought the pot still off the shelf.

Drew (07:20):
Oh, you did? Okay.

Aaron (07:21):
Yeah. So we don't know how to work copper. We

Cam (07:23):
Designed

Aaron (07:24):
It.

Drew (07:24):
Okay.

Cam (07:25):
We basically sourced all of our brewery equipment. So my background was really, I started drinking scotch. I was much more of a scotch drinker. And then of course, Aaron's the brewer. So he understood the lautering process. And the very first stuff we made was he actually built a little recirculating immersion mash system, which is a brewery system, and he started making beer, and then we distilled the beer into whiskey, and that was kind of our first barrel of whiskey and it was really good. But we decided we wanted to kind of follow the scotch model given his brewery background and my scotch proclivity, and we basically sourced brewery equipment from China. So we went on Alibaba and started talking all those guys, and we bought a standard mash ton, lauder ton hot liquor tank and boil kettle. And basically the boil kettle is the same process except we put a still head on top of our boil kettle. And there's actually a local guy up in Dothan, Alabama who started building stills after he retired out of as a mechanical engineer working at the nuclear plant up there for 30 years. And his name was Paul Caldwell, and he started a little business called Confederate Stills of Alabama.

(08:40):
He built himself a still, and he used to do carpentry and cabinet making, and he wrapped it in some nice cypress wood and all his friends were like, wow, that's awesome. Can you make me one? So we reached out to him and I'm like, Hey, Paul, we need a still head. You're making some copper stuff here and there. Can you make a steelhead for us? So he built the first still head with a 12 inch flange on it to go on top of our boil cattle. And he built our condenser tank is actually a Cypress wood tank and it leaks and drips and a big copper coil, traditional Scottish style worm condenser with a little parrot on it. So he built all of that for us up out of Dothan and did a nice job for us. I think we paid 18 grand for all of the copper, and we bought our boil kettle for about seven grand out China. And our entire brew system out of China was about 50 grand compared to what you would pay from anybody like spec. They wanted 300 grand for all that stuff. And we started with a couple of traditional beer fermentors and away we went.

Drew (09:48):
So kind of describe this concept because I know some people, especially American whiskey fans who have probably toured distilleries in the US and they're hearing this term lauder ton, mashed ton. They may be more familiar with cooker they may be more familiar with, but describe what a Lauder ton does and what advantage it gives you.

Aaron (10:12):
So the Lauder ton basically allows me to separate out the solids and liquids so I can separate out the wart from the leftover grains. And what that does is it gets the liquid off the tannins in the woody husk of the grains. So I'm carrying less of that into the fermenters and then into distillation where most US distilleries, they grind the woody husk into a flower, and then you're fermenting and distilling on that flower, and that's releasing a lot of tannins into your mash, which will be released to carry through the distillate.

Drew (10:41):
And so your lauder ton, is it basically straining, it's got kind of a graded bottom to it? Is that the way that it's doing that and then you're kind of sparing it and getting the extra liquid out, or what's your process for doing that?

Aaron (10:58):
So yes, pretty much it's just a slatted floor, a stainless steel slatted floor, and the slurry goes in on top, the liquids flow below, and then the grains come out the front. They go to a dump truck, dump trailer, pig farm, cow farm, depending on who I'm giving the grain to that day.

Drew (11:13):
We'll talk a little bit about the grain sources that you're using, because this is another thing that I find fascinating about Florida distillers. If you go to Kentucky, everybody's going to tell you that you can't grow barley, you can't grow rye, you can't grow. They have to go north to get all of this stuff. And now here I am down in Florida and you guys make a rye whiskey and some other distilleries are making rye whiskey from Florida grain. So how did you find a farm that is growing awry? Was that already available or is that something you had to work with somebody to do?

Cam (11:50):
When we first started, we started looking to source grains, and we already knew that we grew corn down here, right? Everybody grows corn, you got to feed the cows in something. We also learned that it's pretty common to grow wheat around here, although the wheat production has been declining. And then I was searching for where do I buy rye? And when you go back into the history of rye in the us, it started out with the Italian renza bru rye coming over on the boats to New England and starting to plant rye. And obviously that propagated down into the Pennsylvania, Maryland area for the rye, but it was all renza bru heirloom rye back then, and it kept propagating south because guess what? Italy's hot and it grows better in the south. And it came all the way down. And I found some stories about people growing Renzi rye in Georgia, and I started looking for sources of it, and all of a sudden I popped up a source of a guy who was making and selling rye in Florida, but it was called Florida 4 0 1 Rye.

(12:52):
So I dug into that and found out that there was a guy at the University of Florida back in the eighties who had cross bred a variety of the renza bru rye to grow in our crappy hot sandy soil down here. And we found out that farmers grow it and they plant it as windbreaks for the field, and then it's a great forage crop in the wintertime. So I found a couple sources of rye down in central Florida, and we started buying truckloads of rye. And it's interesting because the price is market price and the market price is usually set out of Texas and Oklahoma for the rye, but these guys, the yield they get down here is awful.

(13:36):
If you're growing some kind of a GMO irrigated corn, you're getting two to 300 bushels per acre of corn, whereas these guys planting the rye down here in Florida, they're only getting 10 to 12 bushels an acre of rye. So it's a hard business, and the farmer we were buying from had a really wet year and he couldn't harvest one of his fields and it went bad, and we had to keep looking for more sources. So we found some other guys. But yeah, it was amazing that we found rye that we didn't have to transport from Texas, Oklahoma, or Canada.

Drew (14:12):
Yeah. Well, it's interesting that you mentioned, I mean, we think, okay, well you got rye now in Florida, it's working, but you still have to deal with the change in seasons and bad winters and bad summers and the rest. Yeah, absolutely. Well, let's talk about how you decided that you wanted to distill, because I think that's really creative. It's something that I have really only bumped into in Canada. Canada has a similar system of let's distill everything separately. So how did you come about this idea?

Cam (14:49):
It really early started with us just trying to practice with our equipment. So we have all this equipment, we set it up, we got it operating, now we need something to cook. We started out with a small single roller mill, and for that you have to set it up for one size if you're cracking corn and a different size if you're cracking rye and a different size if you're cracking wheat. So we would buy some corn and then we started practicing with corn. We had to learn how to use our milk, learn how to use our mash ton, learn how to use our lauder tongue and get all that stuff working. So by just sort of the nature of getting up and running, we started doing these things individually and then we started looking at, well, how do we figure out what Nashville that we do?

(15:35):
And at the time, we actually started just after you mentioned St. Augustine, so we know those guys over there, and we started right about the same time, but maybe six months behind them, and I read all about how they were working with Maker's Mark, master distiller, Dave Picker, they were working with Dave. He came in to helped them design their distillery, and they started off with the whole maker's Mark, like, we don't want to do that. So we started thinking about it and out in Silicon Valley, the mantra out there, one of the things that I'm really glad that my kids were able to learn is that failure in Silicon Valley is embraced, right? Everybody fails, but out there they embrace it, they encourage it, and they want you to fail fast, right? Because everybody fails, but you want to get to that fail as quick as you can so you can adjust and try again.

(16:26):
So when we looked at this process, we're like, how do we fail as fast as possible? How do we figure out what our whiskey's going to taste like as quick as we can? So we did a lot of homework into barrel aging, important part of this process, and we really got down to being the engineer. I like to break everything down. So we looked at barrels and there's the four things that happen. Number one, you get your barrel flavoring, your caramel, your vanilla, your oak. Number two, you get oxygenation. Number three, you get your esterification, and number four, you get your evaporation. Those are your big four things that happen. So how do we accelerate that as much as possible to try to figure out what our whiskey's going to taste like? So we started out with the little 15 gallon barrels. We knew that would give us extra oak and quickly so we could figure out what our whiskey would taste like with some barrel flavoring to it. We actually started recirculating our distillate before we barreled it to make sure that we could accelerate the oxygenation, and then we put it in these small barrels. We don't want to wait three or four years and find out what that whiskey tastes like, and if it's bad, what do we do with it?

(17:36):
And just by nature, we distilled the corn first, so we put that in barrels. Then we distilled some rye, and we put that into barrels, and then we found some wheat and we put that into barrels and we found some barley and put that into barrels. My original plan was, Hey, everybody in Kentucky mixes these mashes together, and that's what you call bourbon, right? So my plan was that we go ahead and we stick 'em in these barrels. We figure out what our whiskey's going to taste like, and then we come back and we'll blend 'em together to figure out what our mash bill was going to be, and then after we figure out the mash bill, we'll go back and we'll just start making that mash bill ahead of time like everybody else, and doing it as a single pass. So we did the single barrel stuff.

(18:16):
We waited about 12 months. The whiskey started tasting nice. So we started blending and I started out with a wheat bourbon. It was easy, and we blended up some corn and we added a little wheat, and we got it to where it tasted really good, and we added in some barley, got it where it tasted really good, and that was our mash bill. Then at about 16 months after we drank and sold that first batch, we came back and made the second batch, and I'm like, all right, I already know my mash bill. So I blended it up that way and it kind of tasted like crap. I'm like, okay, what's going on? Did I get a bad barrel? Is there something going on? So then I just took another barrel of corn and I doubled up on my corn and I started adding my wheat again, and I got it tasting just like the previous batch, and I added the barley, got it tasting just like the previous batch, got it tasting really good, but I ended up with 12% wheat and 10% barley. I'm like, well, that's kind of strange. Then we came back at about 20 months, same thing, ended up with about 10% wheat, 8% barley. So we're like, well, that's really interesting. Our conclusion to that was that while everybody knows that the grain flavors fade over time based on how we're processing and distilling that our grains are fading at different rates.

(19:37):
I think at the end of the day, that's probably a pretty common thing given the fact that the character of the whiskey, even when they create a single mash bill, changes as the whiskey ages and the balance points change over time.

Drew (19:52):
Talk about your Florida whiskey and your Southern Reserve. What did you come up with in terms of not your mash bill, but your blending bill

Cam (20:01):
At the time? This was in the early days of Pappy blowing up and getting crazy. So we started playing around with different blends, different, and the big thing we wanted to do was we wanted to keep the whiskey familiar enough that people could recognize it, but different enough that we are a unique product. So we didn't want to go straight into a low rye bourbon that everybody has because everybody has it. So we wanted to go into the wheat bourbon side just to do something a little bit different. So we blended up our wheat bourbon and we called that our Florida whiskey. That's sort of our flagship product. And then we love the rye. So we did want to do a rye bourbon, but being a scotch guy and loving the rye that we had, we wanted to really jack that rye up. The more rye we added, it got very sweet, and we knew that the wheat gave us some dryness, so we added the wheat into that.

(20:57):
So I came up with a four grain Nashville that's actually very, very high on the rye. It's about 30% rye and ends up being about 10% wheat and just two or 3% barley. And that gives us the most complexity because it's got all four grains in it. We put the proof a little bit higher on that one to be more of a premium style whiskey. So we came out at the a hundred proof. But the interesting part is when you drink wine, you think about the most expensive, most complex, most flavorful wines as being dry wines, right? Not sweet wines. There are some very expensive dessert wines and things, but for the most part, your palate is going to be able to discern the complexity of the products if they're not covered up with sugar. So we really wanted to dry out the flavor in that four grain so you could actually get that complexity. We sell a lot more of the Florida whiskey than we do the reserve, but the reserve has a ton of flavor and a lot of complexity, and it's a really, really nice whiskey in our opinion.

Drew (22:03):
Well, you have all of these single grain distilled spirits. Do any of them make it into a bottle just on their own?

Cam (22:13):
Yes. So again, I'm a scotch guy, so we bottle up our single malt as a hundred percent barley whiskey. We put that at about 90 proof, which is pretty typical for your average scotch products, single malt products. We also came out with a rye. We love that rye flavor, so we wanted to do a hundred percent rye again, is another differentiator when you get a lot of your Kentucky rye. The grains are coming from Canada, and what we've really noticed, things like corn, we don't really get a whole lot of terroir differentiators out of the southern corn. Northern corn corn's kind of corn. We played with some different corn. We did some heirloom corn from some local guys. We really can't tell the difference much on corn, corn, but the rye, the Florida rye versus that Canadian rye, it's really a big difference in flavor. And the Canadian rye tend to be a little more peppery and a little drier compared to our Southern where the pepper's a little more muted, a lot more baking spices and a little bit of a honey finish on the back end. So we wanted to bottle that expression as its own. So we do a hundred percent rye. We call it our Florida black Rye in paying homage to the name of the cereal grain, the Florida 4 0 1 Black rye grain that we use.

Drew (23:29):
Okay. One of the things that you guys have that I think is inspired, I talked to Fray Ranch about this a couple years ago because he's been distilling things individually and kind of playing with that, but he only kind of does them as release kinds of things, was this idea of why don't you let people blend their own spirit, figure out what their combination is? So talk about your blending kits.

Cam (24:00):
What we quickly realized is, look, my palette is irrelevant. I like what I like Aaron likes what he likes, but in the end of the day, if customers don't like it, it's irrelevant. It doesn't matter. So what we wanted to do was we wanted to get customers to come in and tell us what they like. So we invited some friends to come in and help us blend some of our batches, and we had some friends down from Tallahassee and they came down and they really liked Wheat Bourbon. They were big Pappy fans, and they were just tickled to death to help us blend up a batch of our wheat bourbon, and we completely let them taste it and tell us when it was right. And they were so tickled. They bought a couple cases and took it back and told all their friends, this was the whiskey that they made. They blended it up. They said, it would be awesome if I could do this at home. So that was kind of our impetus and we're like, Hey, let's figure out how to do this. So we put together this bourbon blending kit. So we were kind of trying to figure out what's the real audience for this and what's the real interest for people to actually dive into whiskey to that level where they can actually figure out their own pallets and their own flavor profiles. And to tell you the truth, it was really slow going on the sales until we hit COVID.

(25:22):
And then I was contacted by SunTrust Bank and they're like, Hey, can you do virtual whiskey tastings? We want to do some virtual events with our customers. And I said, I can do one better. I can do virtual bourbon blending. And they're like, well, what's that? And I said, guess here's how bourbon's made, and here's how we can teach your people to make their own bourbon. They're like, that's super cool. Let's do it. It's definitely been picking up a lot. Do a bourbon blending distillery tour at the distillery where we walk people through our process, we tell 'em how we're different than Kentucky. We tell them the story we told you about how we came to these ideas, and we walk them through the process and we sit down and we blend with them. And when we do that, the light bulbs go on and they're like, wow, this is amazing. If I want to get more of this, how do I do it? They're like, call me up. We'll take care of you. Right.

Drew (26:13):
Yeah, yeah. Well talk about the experiences there, because as I saw something about Axe throwing, so there's a little bit more going on there than just what days are you open for extracurriculars and for your tours and all of that.

Cam (26:28):
We were very well aware that the younger generations are very much into experiences

(26:34):
As opposed to brands. So we've been working for years trying to find ways to turn liquor into experiences. So our bourbon blending is a great example of an experience that you can come and do at our distillery. We've also moved into the wine space, so we do a wine and chocolate pairing, which there's another experience we added in, just like we do with blending our whiskeys. When you go buy a cigar from a cigar shop and you don't know what the blend is, and you don't know if you're going to like it until you try it. So we wanted to kind of do the same thing and get rid of some of those myths around cigars and start telling people what's in the cigar, what leafs are in there, why it matters, and how it contributes to the flavor. So we do a cigar rolling and whiskey tasting experience, and then we wanted to add in some other fun stuff.

(27:25):
So we added in some axe throwing a few years ago that was super popular, and it's now kind of an add-on. We added in a brick pizza oven. We do brick pizza on Saturdays. So basically the way we operate right now is every Saturday 10 to four, we're open to the public. You can come by anytime. We do brick oven pizzas, we do axe throwing. You can do distillery tours, you can do tastings. We have cocktails, we have our experiences, bourbon blending, wine tasting, cigar rolling. You could do any of those. And then during the week, the whole company's just me and Aaron, right? We have some friends that come and help out, but it's just the two of us. We build everything. We make everything. He breaks stuff, I fix stuff. But we will take tours and experiences by appointment, so during the week, you can always book. If you book online and we know you're coming at two o'clock on Tuesday, we'll drop stuff and one of us will give you a tour and take care of you, and it's all great. We just need to know you're coming.

Drew (28:20):
Yeah. Awesome. Cam Aaron, thank you so much for being a part of the podcast and giving people a sense of what you're doing down there and for sending me an email cam, because I was just outreaching to everybody for the new book. And it's like, wow, okay. He gave me a lot of information. And you always can kind of tell that a distillery has a passion around something when they want to tell their story, where you don't even ask for the story, you get the story. And so that always piques my interest and gets me much more motivated to get somebody on the podcast. So it's great to meet you, and next time I'm going down I 10, I'm not going to just cruise on by. We'll stop on in because you're not far off the highway.

Cam (29:06):
Stop by anytime.

Drew (29:07):
Thank you so much. Cheers. Thanks. Well, I hope you enjoyed this flight to Timber Creek Distillery in the Florida panhandle. If I peaked your interest in traveling to the distillery, make sure to pick up a copy of my Amazon bestselling book, whiskey Lores Travel Guide to Experiencing American Whiskey, the Ultimate Field Guide to exploring all the great distillery tastings, tours, and experiences across all 50 states. It's on sale now on Amazon, and soon we'll be available at distilleries nationwide as we're prepare to leave Timber Creek Distillery and make our way to our next destination. If you're on the fence about a visit to Timber Creek, let me give you my three reasons why I think you should be putting a check mark by this distillery in your copy of experiencing American whiskey. First, if you've ever been interested in the idea of blending whiskey, not only will you be able to walk through the process with Cam and Aaron, you also have a chance to take home a blending kit featuring four grain whiskeys so you can perfect a spirit that's right for you.

(30:11):
Second, if you were surprised to hear how many types of grains they're growing in Florida, well, this is the distillery where you get a chance to experience some of the sunshine state's terroir during your visit. And third, if you're into distilleries with experiences, temper Creek has plenty of them, including chocolate pairings, blending, and some wild special events like Axe throwing or blacksmithing, or enjoy a Saturday tour or call ahead on a weekday to stroll through the distillery with Cam Aaron. Well, it's time to make my way home. I've got a story episode that I'm working on, and I've gone to the origins of Irish whiskey and scotch whiskey. So why not dive into the myths and reality of the origins of American whiskey? Make sure you don't miss that episode by being subscribed to the Whiskey Lore Podcast. I'm your travel guide, drew Hanish. And until next time, cheers and transcripts and travel information, including maps, distillery planning information, and more to whiskey lore.org/flights. Whiskey lore is a production of Travel Fuels Life, LLC.