Copper Mule Distillery

Drew | Whiskey Lore (00:06.897)
All right. Well, um, let's start off first of all, talking about the town of Hermannn because I had the pleasure back in 2001, was driving across the country and I decided to head through Missouri and I was taking back roads. don't know why I decided to take back roads, but I ended up going through what was and is Missouri wine country, beautiful.

area through there. And I think what surprised me was that there was such a thing called Missouri wine country, but you, it's actually something that, has quite a legacy behind it. So I understand.

Donald D Gosen Jr (00:50.348)
Yeah. So Hermann really has a rich history prior to Prohibition of, of not just wine, but spirits, beer. it was, you know, really vibrant community being the second largest wine producing town in the entire United States. of course Prohibition came along and changed all of that. you know, really put the town out of business, but I think it's a lot of small town USA's had to do. They had to recreate themselves.

Hermann, you know, we had a upscale shoe factory here for Florsham Shoes, which was, you know, a nice shoe brand. We had a toy factory. Employment was good. The town was doing very well with all the perimeter farms. But I think we were starting to face the small town USA decline. And, you know, and I can remember this as a kid where

Drew | Whiskey Lore (01:45.393)
Mm.

Donald D Gosen Jr (01:49.262)
You know, the shoe factory was flooding every year and they're wondering whether to keep it open. My mom, you know, worked at the shoe factory. There were just all these signs that maybe we were suffering that fate of Main Street decay. And then the Held family fired Stonehill Winery back up again, which again, before prohibition, the town was producing 3 million gallons of wine every year. So the Helds brought that. And I think that

really was the beginning of where Hermann is today. You know, I give that family credit because they reinvented us before most towns knew they were going to need to be reinvented. And I don't think they did it to reinvent the town. I think they saw this gem, this old winery, and Jim Held was a home winemaker, as most people around here are, and took it to the next level and got Hermann going down a whole new path again.

are returning to its roots really I should say.

Drew | Whiskey Lore (02:50.126)
Yeah. So fun driving through there because last time I came through, think it was 2011. I was going through, cause I was doing a baseball trip across the Midwest and I decided to stop back in to Hermann and I was trying to get into wine at the time, but I just really, I mean, I was definitely a novice. had no idea what I was tasting. And then I came back there just a couple of years ago and stayed in Hermann again. Cause it's beautiful.

beautiful town right on the Missouri River. And while I was there, I went up to the winery and after getting into whiskey, suddenly it was like I was tasting stuff in the wine I had never tasted before. So it was a lot of fun to see that. And there was a distillery in town. And I think that was actually when I was here may have been prior to when you guys kicked up and started doing the, the distillery.

Give me a little background on the distillery itself and when it got started.

Donald D Gosen Jr (03:52.27)
Well, my wife and I started a brewery here in town back in 2001. And we took on a partner in 2006 and he ended up buying us out of that in 2016. And so then I got bored very quickly. And that was kind of the beginning. I went to something called Moonshine University at Louisville, Kentucky. And I had a chance to meet Bill Samuels, whose mom and dad started Makers Mark and kind of got hooked.

As soon as I got back in 2017, we started building buildings. We opened to the public early 2019 though, strictly as a urban distillery. We were in a small building and it was just going to be more of a hobby. But then COVID hit and which was actually a boon for us because Missouri's rules during COVID were a little more lax in say Illinois to our East.

And so a lot of the folks from Illinois were flocking over here for things to do, not just on the weekends, but every day. So we saw this boom in business because every day was like a Saturday with nobody going to work. And my wife and I, we kind of had a sit down, you know, and said, well, what do we do? Do we just stay as a hobby or do we grow? You know, and there's not really an in-between in the distilling business. You're either small or you're big.

Drew | Whiskey Lore (05:01.936)
No, I have.

Donald D Gosen Jr (05:18.295)
because of the equipment, the method of production, the method and just the investment required. And so we said, well, let's go big. And that's where we are today. We went from just doing a barrel a week to now we can do 100 barrels a week. So quite an expansion. Now we're not at that capacity right now, but we just finished our expansion. So we're on old fashioned.

Bourbon distillery, the big barrels, no shortcuts. We do everything the old fashioned way, which we're very proud of that.

Drew | Whiskey Lore (05:51.237)
Yeah, it's interesting you took the bourbon route. You have a brewery, a brewing background. Talk a little bit about that brewing background and how that assisted you in moving into the world of distilling.

Donald D Gosen Jr (06:06.509)
Well, my brewing background probably started when I was about eight years old collecting beer cans. I had an uncle who was a beer can collector and he got me collecting. so it started my interest in breweries. I I would write letters to breweries all across the country wanting labels and cans for my collection. But I started working at Stone Hill as early as 14 years old, know, picking grapes.

working on their bottling line, which everybody in Hermann at some point you worked at the wineries. And it was really then that I generated this affinity for the craft beverage industry, know, the alcoholic beverage industry. And as I got into college, started to fall more, you know, I wasn't a wine drinker in college. I was a beer drinker. And so I started dabbling with home brewing with friends and,

Then my wife and I moved upstate New York where home brewing and the craft beer business, this was back around 91, was just hitting. The Sam Adams, the places like that around the country were just taking off. so I went into that industry back when the industry was brand new. My first craft brewers conference, I think there were like 300 of us there. The last one there were like,

14,000 there, you so it's been quite a journey. But we started the brewery. My wife and I actually bought the Sacramento Brewing Company. went to Funked. I started my brewing education, became a certified brewmaster. And I still love my beer. My best buddy and I just took a trip to Germany for two weeks just to backpack around the country and drink beer. So I haven't lost that. But beer's a lot of work and you got a quick shelf life.

Drew | Whiskey Lore (07:30.031)
Wow.

Drew | Whiskey Lore (07:52.111)
Wow.

Donald D Gosen Jr (07:57.038)
And as you get older, you kind of lose that. don't want to have to do a batch of beer every three days and check shelf life. can pack a hundred barrels in the rack house and take a couple of months off, you know, because the products with bourbon, it's only going to get better with beer. It's going to lose its quality. So the whole nature of the production is what really took me towards the bourbon as I was older, wasn't a spring chicken anymore. And I'm like, Hey, I like this whole.

bourbon idea, know, of being patient. So that's really where I got, I went from the beer to the bourbon.

Drew | Whiskey Lore (08:34.948)
Now, how much did you know about the Hermann Distilling Company's history in that town back pre-prohibition?

Donald D Gosen Jr (08:42.637)
Well, that's a, that's an interesting, it's a good question because when we began the distillery, we knew nothing about it. You know, I'd like to say, oh, we had dug into my wife's great grandfather's history and we wanted to duplicate it. We were sitting at the dinner table one night and I was reading a newspaper in Hermann and it said 125 years ago today, uh, that, uh, um,

Drew | Whiskey Lore (08:51.376)
Hmm

Donald D Gosen Jr (09:11.009)
Gustav Wolt, my wife's great grandfather started Hermann Distilling Company with his brother. And I asked my wife that and she goes, I don't know anything about that. And so we asked her dad and he's like, yeah, my wife's grandpa was a non-drinker. He was a teetotaler. And so the family never talked about great grandpa's distilling history because that was bad. And so it never got passed down. Well, then we started digging and we started turning up, you know, within the family, every...

Drew | Whiskey Lore (09:18.576)
Ha ha ha!

Drew | Whiskey Lore (09:32.24)
Mmm.

Donald D Gosen Jr (09:39.99)
everybody started sending us old burp whiskey jugs. you know, it was like everybody was closet historians because I didn't want to make grandpa mad by talking about alcohol. And so we found out and since then we've continued to dig and research and it's just been amazing because it's added to our passion for our business by digging up this great family history about it.

Drew | Whiskey Lore (09:47.664)
Hahaha

Drew | Whiskey Lore (10:07.684)
So of course I always do newspaper searches as soon as I get a distillery that I know there's some history behind. And so it's funny because I sent you one of the articles and you said you had seen that before. And this interesting tie between you and your wife, historically, tell that story.

Donald D Gosen Jr (10:30.285)
Oh, I'm sorry. What was that again? I I

Drew | Whiskey Lore (10:32.586)
where we were talking about in this article that I sent you, that you and your wife actually have some historical ties. Your families do with the, with the distillery.

Donald D Gosen Jr (10:42.817)
Yeah, absolutely. So my wife and I went to high school together. We were class apart. My dad and her dad went to high school together. We're friends. We're a class apart. Our grandpas went to high school together. And now we don't know about our great-grandpas, but then again, as we started digging to the background, we found that

Our great grandfathers were served on the Missouri River transportation board together that they did business dealings, you know, between the distillery. One of my great grandpas had the milling company in town, so it would have milled most of the grain for the distillery. You know, yeah, our family ties. So we know everybody knew each other probably 170 years. Now we don't know if they liked each other, but we think they probably did as small business people, you kind of stuck together.

Drew | Whiskey Lore (11:29.712)
Ha ha ha.

Donald D Gosen Jr (11:35.607)
So yeah, again, it's been a wonderful ride because it's, we moved out of Hermann for a few years and it's brought us back to our hometown and not just brought us back, but put us in the thick of it and just rediscovering our family history and how our family roots were also a big part of Hermann as it began.

Drew | Whiskey Lore (11:57.349)
Yeah, well, we're both of your family's German heritage. Okay.

Donald D Gosen Jr (12:00.833)
Yes, we've done the Ancestry DNA test and if you ever do those, they give you like a center point of where your families are from and ours actually overlap each other over in Germany. know, interesting enough right next to the Tutteberg Forest, which is where Hermann, the German chief dinnerer who, you know,

Drew | Whiskey Lore (12:14.945)
wow.

Donald D Gosen Jr (12:26.681)
defeated the Romans there, know, so our town's namesake, came probably from the same area that Hermannn himself, Hermannn the German was from, which is just another interesting tidbit we dug up in all our historical travels and findings.

Drew | Whiskey Lore (12:40.388)
Yeah. What I find with German families, I see this a lot, like in Nashville, with the Nelson family and the Dickel families that they were, that was a very tight knit community. Once the Germans came into an area, they went to church together. They really built a community and sort of had their own little protective community from, from everybody else. was like they stuck together.

Donald D Gosen Jr (13:07.499)
Yeah, and there's even that today for us to come back to Hermann and, know, when we started the brewery in this business, I have to admit it's easier being local, being from here versus if I was an outsider that came here to do the same thing, because you get buy-in from, you know, mean, the plumbers, the builders, the other people in town. I went to high school with them, you you've known them all your life. And, you know, we built our main

building, is quite a large building, timber frame building, complicated construction in the heart of COVID. And from when we broke ground until when we opened to the public was eight months. And that's because we had people out here seven days a week. know, Sunday after church, I had people out here laying stone and putting hardwood floors in. And again, these were all my classmates. so,

You know, I was able to do things and I've been able to do things in developing this business that maybe I wouldn't be able to do in a, you know, if I was in another town or if I had gone to Tennessee or Kentucky to start a distillery.

Drew | Whiskey Lore (14:14.628)
Yeah. Well, talk about the farm that you're on, because is the farm supplying the grain to your distillery?

Donald D Gosen Jr (14:22.605)
Okay, so the farm that we're on is my wife's family purchased back in 1908. And it was, they raised cattle and mules on the property. We're in what's called the Ozark Highlands in most of Missouri. So a lot of the ground is not real. The bottom lands are great for corn, know, in Northern Missouri. But Southern Missouri, we get into a limestone layer of rock that

makes our soil not so good for growing corn. so this farm really, they grew some oats, but they did not grow corn on this farm itself. Now in today's age with better fertilizers and all, you probably could do it. But back then it was strictly they grazed cattle and mules out here. The mules, at one time there were 200 mules on this farm. They sold mules to the US Army during World War I and World War II.

And that's really what the farm was. It was a mule and a cattle farm. Now this is the first year we've not had any cattle on the property in 117 years. But you mentioned the corn for our product. That does come from my family's century farm, which is over across the river that my great-great-grandpa bought in 1893, or I'm sorry, 1853. So we've just celebrated our 172nd year.

of farming that particular property.

Drew | Whiskey Lore (15:54.051)
Okay, very nice. mean, interesting to note the connections between these, these farms. Century Farm. So I noticed that name, pops from, through a couple of different farms that I've seen. Is Century Farm in relation to the fact that it's a historic farm?

Donald D Gosen Jr (16:15.173)
Yeah, so in Missouri to be a Century Farm, it has to be the same lineage. In other words, a direct descendant of the person that bought it and you have to continue farming activity on that farm to get the label as a Century Farm. I need to take a break real quick. I'm sorry. That's why was trying to do this for breaking the stick. I'm sorry.

Drew | Whiskey Lore (16:30.625)
Okay.

Drew | Whiskey Lore (16:34.64)
okay. No problem.

Donald D Gosen Jr (16:48.951)
we've run, I'm sorry, we're open now, so we're actually not. People are coming in, and so I apologize for that. That's why I was hearing all this background and everything going on.

Drew | Whiskey Lore (16:52.787)
okay. That was...

Drew | Whiskey Lore (17:00.208)
That's okay. had to cough anyway, so it was good timing.

Donald D Gosen Jr (17:05.901)
We can pick back up and again, I'm sorry about breaking that so we're talking about the description of the century farm and You want me to start over and do the description of it again or you okay with that or?

Drew | Whiskey Lore (17:15.1)
no, I think, I think I'll be able to figure out how to sort of tie into that. and so this is where the name copper, so the name copper mule is then related to your farm. Or, mean, I'm sorry, the name copper mules related to the farm that you're currently on.

Donald D Gosen Jr (17:35.438)
Correct. So this was, like I say, was a mule farm. You know, they raised, trained, breeded everything with mules here on the property. And we wanted in the name of the distillery, wanted to honor that history of the farm. And so we did that. We put mule in the name and then we're figuring, well, what do we put with mule? And we thought, well, copper is an important part of the...

Distillation process and that it removes the impurities from the spirit during distillation. So we thought copper mule it had a nice ring to it People do get confused they come in and they think Moscow mule and a copper mug and they kind of get that tied in but hey It gets people confused on Google searches too and they come across our distillery. So it's a good thing

Drew | Whiskey Lore (18:22.508)
Yeah. So 1893 is the name of your weeded bourbon. So that date 1893, what does that relate to?

Donald D Gosen Jr (18:35.469)
So that is when my wife's great grandfather, Gustav Wolti and his brother August and a friend of theirs started Hermann Distilling Company in town here. And they did bourbon and they did rye whiskeys. They shipped it up now. They were both also, my wife's great grandfather and his brother were riverboat captains. And so they owned the Hermann.

ferry and packet company and so they not only haul things like grain but they hauled their own bourbon up and down the rivers. We've got old correspondence from their business, know, from the letterhead from Hermann Distilling Company where people were wondering where their bottle of bourbon was. It was supposed to be dropped off Tuesday, you know. You know, the river boats back in the 1800s weren't these grandiose things that had paddle wheels. Sometimes they were like what you'd imagine.

Lewis and Clark on and they may send some deliveries just up on little flat boats up the river and but But so that was the significance of the year. That's when they started her selling

Drew | Whiskey Lore (19:30.896)
Mmm.

Drew | Whiskey Lore (19:40.438)
Okay. I saw they made great brandy as well, which seems logical that you've got wineries all around.

Donald D Gosen Jr (19:47.886)
Yeah, so that was part of the reason, you know, when the Germans got here, why they got into stilling because over in Germany, they made a lot of brandies, especially a lot of unaged brandies over in Germany. You know, it's kind of a typical thing when you go to a restaurant, the owner will bring you out, you know, some, whether it's shops or unaged brandies, and that would be a after drink cordial or a drink and after dinner. And so

We had our winemakers here and they had all this wine and they had all these grapes. And so, yeah, it was a natural thing for them to make brandy as well. However, the grapes were in big demand for the wineries. So a lot of the small winemakers around here decided, well, we're going to skip the wine. We got all the corn we want and we're going to make bourbon and whiskeys. And so that was kind of the reason the Germans obviously didn't make bourbon and whiskey in Germany because they

didn't have the hardwood supply, didn't have the corn supply. So that was something kind of a learned thing. They loved to make their spirits, their beer, their wine. And so the bourbon was new for them, but they were very good at it. And that was a passion farm.

Drew | Whiskey Lore (21:04.536)
Must have been a decent sized distillery because it was very interesting to see that they were requesting in one newspaper article, bring in your corn, we'll give you whiskey.

Donald D Gosen Jr (21:15.169)
Yeah, well, and they did that. they would whatever back then there was a lot of bartering going on and they would even do it for for jugs, know, you return your jug you get a refill it, you know, you get a discount on your next bottle because they didn't want to make it have to make another I guess, ramp the ceramic or whatever the crockware was made of back then. So

Drew | Whiskey Lore (21:16.367)
Ha

Donald D Gosen Jr (21:41.262)
There was a lot of that. I know my great grandfather who owned the milling company in town at that time, they did a lot of that as well where people would bring their goods there and they would barter with their employees. And it was kind of a three-way barter. The people would give my great grandfather goods and he would pay the employees and those goods. I don't know if they did it to keep the government out of everything, but there just was a lot of that that went on back in the day.

Drew | Whiskey Lore (22:11.566)
Yeah. Now, one of the things about your whiskey is that you do a weeded bourbon. So what was behind the idea of going into doing a weeded bourbon?

Donald D Gosen Jr (22:21.707)
Well, I liked weeded bourbons. You know, some of the more famous ones would be like Weller by Buffalo Trace. Makers Mark is a weeded bourbon. And of course, what most people have heard of Pappy Van Winkle, know, Pappy is a weeded bourbon. I just like the weeded bourbons. Grains kind of add to bourbon what they add to a loaf of bread. So when you think of eating cornbread, you think of a sweeter bread.

Well, corn bourbon is going to be sweeter, where you have like say up to 99 % corn. Weeded bourbons or rye bourbons, know, heavy rye bourbon, even rye whiskeys tend to be spicier. Just kind of like a rye bread where a weeded bourbon just tends to kind of be a mix between that. It's kind of a somewhere in between, but it generally is a little smoother. Just like a wheat bread is a little smoother than a rye bread. And it just.

It complements the sweetness of the corn. I'm not a big corn bourbon drinker where if there's too much corn, it gets too sweet for me. there's kind of a mix. And we do use a little bit of rye in our bourbon recipe, just very little bit though. And we do that just because there's something in the back of your head that picks up on all those little nuances that maybe we don't know, but it's there. And so that's why we do the little bit of rye, just a small percentage.

Drew | Whiskey Lore (23:47.236)
Was there a certain varietal of wheat that you decided to go with?

Donald D Gosen Jr (23:53.1)
No, we, you know, the standard in the industry is a soft red winter wheat. Most of that comes from the Northern States. It just makes a little better for mashing for the cooking process. Just like the barley, most of our barley comes, we do get some of our malted barley from Germany and the U.S. barley all comes from Minnesota. We can grow barley in Missouri, but it's not of the quality and of the

composition that we need for what we needed for. Same thing with brewing. When you're brewing beer, you tend to use the barley that come from up north versus southern.

Drew | Whiskey Lore (24:32.048)
You figure you're coming from a state that's kind of in between the Ozarks where the moonshine was going on. And then you've got the corn that's all growing in the other part of the state. And, um, I think what amazed me when I first started reaching out and trying to find out where distilleries and how many distilleries there were in Missouri, how many there are, there's, there's quite a few and, that

Missouri's kind of been forgotten in terms of its whiskey heritage. mean, how deep does this history go?

Donald D Gosen Jr (25:09.089)
Well, all goes way back into the 1800s. Of course, everyone knows Missouri's brewing heritage with Anheuser-Busch, Falstaff, Griesedick Brothers. There were hundreds and hundreds of breweries in St. Louis alone, St. Louis, St. Charles area. And that's when it's kind of an offshoot. You've got the equipment. You're mashing, well, hey, let's buy a still and make a little spirit on the side.

It really came right with the brewing industry and the winemakers. A lot of the winemakers were competing for the grapes available. know, can, grapes are not grown everywhere and you need a particular climates, particular temperatures, humidities. It's already tough to grow a grape in Missouri with the heat and humidity. And so if you don't have the perfect soil conditions and slopes and everything on your land, it's even more difficult. So there was a battle.

Drew | Whiskey Lore (25:47.129)
Mm.

Donald D Gosen Jr (26:09.325)
as there still is today to get your hands on Missouri grapes. And so a lot of people turned that, you know, maybe the distilleries were making brandy said, well, hey, we can get corn all we want. Let's move into the whiskey market. And yeah, there, I believe there were about before prohibition, as many as 90 bourbon whiskey distilleries in Missouri. So there were, you know, twice as many, well, twice as many today active as there was back then. So we're still, we're nowhere near.

reaching our pre-prohibition levels on wineries, breweries, art distillers.

Drew | Whiskey Lore (26:43.534)
Yeah. Well, you have the other advantage of you don't have to go far to get the wood for your barrels.

Donald D Gosen Jr (26:49.631)
Absolutely. Yeah, as I mentioned earlier, we're in what's called the Ozark Highlands. It's known for the Ozark Highlands, the Ozarks, Branson, Missouri. They're known for terrible soil. But what that does is gives you a great oak tree because the tree grows very, very slow. And so you get a denser wood, a sweeter wood, makes an awesome barrel. And yeah, probably a distillery in Missouri, you know, we're able to buy our corn, buy our barrels.

have everything we need right here in the state. Matter of fact, the laws for Missouri bourbon are stricter than, you know, there's Empire State, Rye in New York, there's Texas whiskeys, there's Kentucky bourbon, they all have rules what qualifies and ours are by far the most rigid just because we do have all the raw materials we need and so we can do everything right here. Now, the exception would be the malted barley.

you know that that's as little as one percent of a recipe so the majority are raw materials it's a great Missouri product.

Drew | Whiskey Lore (27:55.205)
Yeah. You have something else at the distillery when people come to visit. They may not expect to be seeing when they come to a whiskey distillery is a moonshine still collection. How, how did this happen?

Donald D Gosen Jr (28:10.337)
Well, we had a guy here in Hermann, his name was Whiskey Jack, and he collected moonshine stills back in the 50s, 60s, 70s. Had quite a nice little museum here in town. And when he passed away, he left those stills to a classmate of mine, Thomas Held, one of the Stonehill Winery family members. And Thomas actually had a museum for them set up down in Branson, Missouri.

and he got out of the winery business and really didn't have a place to go with the stills so he and I got talking and well lo and behold the stills ended up here. There's right just over a hundred moonshine stills and of course to make moonshine I mean to make bourbon you kind of make moonshine to begin with in a way so it all ties in together but it's a wonderful collection to see how

people and most of these were built pre-prohibition and during prohibition what people would use everything from you know the first electric washing machine made by the easy company in 1908 that well they were great for stills because you didn't have to have a fire you just plug them in cook your mash to do your distillation they used everything from bug sprayers to teapots you know just

Drew | Whiskey Lore (29:32.493)
Donald D Gosen Jr (29:32.589)
It's one of the neat things about the collection. You just get a chance to see what people did to make a still back then so they can keep drinking their spirits.

Drew | Whiskey Lore (29:42.102)
Have you done any experiments where you've tried to maybe resurrect one and see?

Donald D Gosen Jr (29:46.702)
did with one and surprisingly it worked out well. mean you know it it turned out good product. Now this particular moonshine still did have what in the day they called either a doubler or a thumper keg where it was like a double distillation but yeah you know you can make good product with that and then the neat thing is moonshine is a little tougher than bourbon. Bourbon if you get yourself a really good barrel

You can take your So So Moonshine, put it in a really good barrel, and that barrel will turn it into something great. So it's almost like a crutch we have as bourbon makers. If we're willing to spend the money to get the best barrel out there, that's big part of making really good bourbon because 60 % of the flavor of bourbon is from the barrel. So if you want to know how to make your best bourbon, you got to have the best barrel. There's no other way around it. like, you you...

you don't make the best taste of birthday cake by having pretty candles on it. You have the best cake. You start out with the best cake. Same thing with bourbon. You've got to the best barrel. And then all the other things like recipe and all those things fall into place behind that.

Drew | Whiskey Lore (30:45.476)
Yeah, yeah.

Drew | Whiskey Lore (30:57.488)
So I'm thinking for all the people who have probably done the Kentucky Bourbon Trail and done a decent amount of it. And maybe they're like, should I go back to the Kentucky Bourbon Trail again and revisit some distilleries? interesting to note that Missouri has its own distillery trail and lots of distilleries and perks for doing that as well. Describe, the trail that Missouri has.

Donald D Gosen Jr (31:23.309)
So yeah, it's been about four years ago now. Several of the initial members of our craft distilleries guild here in Missouri spearheaded what we call the Missouri Spirits Expedition. And because we wanted to bring in all the different distilleries, not just suburban, we wanted to bring the gin, the vodka, the different type. We've got unaged brandies, we've got brandies, we've got liqueurs.

We wanted to bring them all into the fold on this trail or this expedition, what we call it, kind of tying it to the Lewis and Clark expedition. know, Lewis and Clark traveled across Missouri. And so we're asking you to travel across Missouri, trying our different distilleries. It's a great program. You know, we've had the way it works is it's all on app. Now you download the app and every time you visit the distillery, no purchase required, you, check in and you stamp your passport.

Drew | Whiskey Lore (31:59.409)
Mm.

Donald D Gosen Jr (32:20.877)
Just like any travel, you got a passport. And we used to have a paper book you stamp. We stamped for you, but now it's you stamp that electronically on your phone. And when you complete it, the prize is when you visit all the distilleries right now, there's 35 distilleries that are part of it. You get a bottle of bourbon from our infinity barrel. So our infinity barrel is a barrel that I believe it's down. still 630 in St. Louis right now.

Drew | Whiskey Lore (32:42.713)
Mm.

Donald D Gosen Jr (32:49.599)
And it's a barrel of bourbon that after every bottling, everybody will bring a couple of jugs of good, at least four year old bourbon and we'll dump into there and let it keep aging. So we call it infinity barrel because it never goes empty. When we take some out, we just put more back in. Probably the biggest challenge with that was just working it through the TTV up in Washington, D.C. because they want to get taxes on everything.

Drew | Whiskey Lore (33:04.015)
Nah.

Drew | Whiskey Lore (33:11.248)
Ha ha ha.

Donald D Gosen Jr (33:15.265)
We start dumping jugs in. So we had to measure that all out and we have to be very prudent on how we do that. As a matter of fact, one of the people over at the Kentucky Bourbon Trail, when they heard about that, they called us and like, how do you get that through the TTB? You how do you do the paperwork for that? So we kind of had to explain, and it's spearheaded by one distillery. So it's a great program though. People enjoy it. It's nicer than getting a t-shirt or something, you you

Drew | Whiskey Lore (33:19.45)
Wow.

Drew | Whiskey Lore (33:30.446)
Hahaha

Donald D Gosen Jr (33:44.44)
to get a bottle and it's really good bourbon. It's surprising, know, with some things you just can't mix together. Like you can't take five different wineries and put your wine together and think, you know, maybe you could come up with a decent blend, but with bourbon, it just works out great. I remember the first bottling, I think I ended up when we bottled the first batch of those special bottles, I believe I had my wife drive home that night. I was having to take a few samples to how it was tasting.

Drew | Whiskey Lore (34:09.081)
Ha ha ha.

Drew | Whiskey Lore (34:13.264)
Yeah. It's a great idea. It really is. Because like I say, nowadays it's, uh, it gets challenging because there's a lot of distilleries to go through, but to get something that, that is that unique and is definitely a taste of Missouri because it's got all of Missouri in it. So it's brilliant. So, um, if somebody is coming to the distillery, uh, talk through kind of your, your tour experience, what will somebody experience when they go on a tour there at copper mule?

Donald D Gosen Jr (34:42.497)
Well, like I said, we just did a big expansion and the most difficult thing I had in this expansion was learning to use a Vendome continuous column still. All the big guys have them, everybody has them, but I couldn't find anybody that really knew that still inside now until I ended up at Wilderness Trail down in Danville, Kentucky. The owners down there, Shane and Pat, are like the rocket scientists of the distilling industry. So I found

Drew | Whiskey Lore (34:54.319)
Mm.

Donald D Gosen Jr (35:11.981)
two guys that were able to teach that to me. So one thing I tout, when I do all the tours or my wife will help with them, I usually take over on the technical part, is you're gonna get a, you know, I'm not gonna take you through 100 year old rack houses, but you're gonna get a real technical fill of making bourbon. I mean, cause you're gonna talk to, I wouldn't call myself an expert distiller yet, but I'm definitely an expert.

heard it mashing and fermenting. I've been doing that professionally for over 25 years with brewing. you know, I like to think people are really going to learn it. You're not going to have, you know, some person that does it part-time on the side that reads a script and takes you through it. You're going to know exactly the workings of everything. You're going to learn how bend-own continuous column still works. Perhaps the only distillery tour in the country where you're going to actually get to learn.

Drew | Whiskey Lore (36:04.688)
Heh.

Donald D Gosen Jr (36:09.537)
how we get rid of the heads and the tails off of a bent-nose still. But it's a great tour. do have a rack house. It's only four or two years old. And we have part of our still collection there. Then we go into our production facility. We do a tasting, a chocolate pairing with our tasting, and then of course finish up with the tour of the production facility. And it's a hands-on tour.

We're very proud of our new expansion. It turned out great. And it takes about an hour and 20 minutes. It cost $25. But like I said, I think it's a really good value. And most people that take the tour, I think, agree with that.

Drew | Whiskey Lore (36:51.77)
That's great. It's great to know a science focused tour for those people who really want to dive in. And, I should have known right off the bat that you would be science focused because the first thing that you asked me when I called you and talked to you initially was, do you know how they get the heads off of the column still? And it's like, what was funny about that was that I said, yes. And you went, okay, how? And I said, well,

Donald D Gosen Jr (36:56.205)
you

Drew | Whiskey Lore (37:19.0)
I had Shane and Pat, well I didn't have Shane and Pat, just had Pat show me. You're like, okay, yeah, you know.

Donald D Gosen Jr (37:26.093)
And that's one of the great things about this industry where, and during my expansion, I was texting Pat down there all the time. Hey, what about this? What about this? I I bought my boilers based on Pat's recommendation. You know, I, my fermenters, I had one of the presidents of product development at Brown Forman help me. mean, here's this mega company helping this, who's you're out in Missouri, you know.

Drew | Whiskey Lore (37:56.122)
Ha

Donald D Gosen Jr (37:56.288)
It was a mansion and, but with no qualms, no worries that, we're helping our competition. mean, it's one of those things where all ships rise with the tide, you know, and they understand a lot of the big distilleries. And I love the big distilleries. mean, I go on the Kentucky bourbon trail at least once every two years. I love going there and drinking great bourbon. But I want people to come and enjoy Missouri's good bourbon too.

But one of the things is that everybody's helping each other succeed in that. We're not running into different, we're not seeing cases where a distillery doesn't wanna help us. It's everybody's pulling for each other. And even when about four years ago, the Kraft distilleries got a major tax deduction through the federal government, it was huge.

to the tune of about $500 savings per barrel. So if I dump four or five barrels a month, I save, you know, a couple thousand dollars a month. And the big distilleries helped us on that. You know, they were right there with us. And so, and I started to say, they realized that this whole idea, you know, 20 years ago, single barrel bourbons weren't a big deal. But the craft guys,

Drew | Whiskey Lore (38:59.662)
Wow.

Donald D Gosen Jr (39:22.273)
got going on that part about a necessity. I sometimes I only have one barrel I need to dump. So it's going to, we do a lot of single barrels, a lot of small batches and the big guys of course embrace that and realize that's what the consumers are wanting. So it's kind of been a synergistic type thing. We've helped them, they've helped us and overall it's been a boom. Now things leveled off, we're back down to earth now. We were flying high in the stratosphere for a while.

Things have come back down to the ground, but I think most of us have built a really solid base to take us into the future.

Drew | Whiskey Lore (39:58.789)
Yeah. Well, the flexibility of craft distilleries and being able to create new trends is a huge advantage for the large distilleries because they, they get to have you guys kind of test out the market and see what what's going to fly. So, when somebody's coming to the area and they maybe want to pair something along with a trip to the distillery, what, kind of things, obviously we have the Missouri wine country that people can take advantage of, but.

What kinds of things around Hermann might somebody get involved in?

Donald D Gosen Jr (40:32.781)
Well, and if you plan a two day trip to Hermann, you're going to run out of time. It's almost like you have to plan your first trip is one weekend where you can just kind of dabble. You know, you can't spend a whole day here there because, you know, we've got five wineries, four distilleries, two breweries. And so there are, there's a lot there, but there's a lot historically too. have a state historical site.

the Deutschheim Museum, is an amazing old home, what it was like when the Germans settled here, how they set their homes up, how they survived. The Town Museum here in Hermannn is amazing. I love to go there. Our grandkids go there all the time because they get to see a lot of stuff that their great-grandpa's and great-great-grandpa's built. There's a lot of family history in museum, but I think you'd be surprised at the quality of the Hermannn Museum.

And it celebrates our riverboat history. If you look at pictures of Hermann's riverfront back in 1900, there may be 10 riverboats, the big ones with the paddle wheels docked out on the riverbank. So, you know, it was a river town history and there were a lot of towns on the Missouri River that had that history. Unfortunately, a lot of them didn't survive to celebrate that history. A lot of the river towns have gone by the wayside.

Drew | Whiskey Lore (41:38.0)
Mmm.

Donald D Gosen Jr (41:56.383)
Some have done well, some have focused, you know, just on other areas. But I looked down the river to St. Louis and up the river to Kansas City, and I would have to say we probably have been the most successful river town on celebrating our heritage, our history, you know, in the early days of settling in Missouri.

Drew | Whiskey Lore (42:15.876)
Fantastic. Well, thank you, Don, so much for taking me through your history, your family's history, your wife's family's history, the history of the town for a history fan. There's definitely a lot of stuff to get involved in, but if you are into spirits and wine and the rest, boy, talk about a perfect spot to kind of settle yourself in and, your distillery, a great place to start the whole thing off. I appreciate you being on.

Donald D Gosen Jr (42:39.213)
And we do have a great transportation system in town, a trolley system, a shuttle system, so you don't have to drink and drive. People will bring the train into town. They can go all over town all weekend long without ever having to sit behind a wheel.

Drew | Whiskey Lore (42:57.582)
Well, and I can tell you that I walk, I walked through that town and, it's not San Francisco, but boy, when you're out there trying to climb the hill over to, Stonehill winery and it's hot and you're, you're like, sweating quite a bit. It's, it's much nicer to have some alternate transportation. Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Don. I appreciate it. And, I look forward to chatting with you again sometime.

Donald D Gosen Jr (43:25.901)
Well, thank you. enjoyed sharing a little bit about our family, our business, and more importantly, the town of Hermann. It's the town I grew up in, I live in, built businesses in, love to be here, love to be part of the community.

Drew | Whiskey Lore (43:38.938)
Cheers.

Donald D Gosen Jr (43:40.545)
Thank you.