134 - JERRY DANIELS: 7 People Who SHOULD be in the Kentucky Bourbon Hall of Fame

Transcript

Drew H (00:00:14):
Welcome to Whiskey Lore the Interviews. I'm your host, Drew Hannush, bestselling author of Whiskey Lore's Travel Guide to Experiencing American Whiskey: Experiencing Kentucky Bourbon in the book that busts 24 of Whiskey's Biggest Myths Whiskey Lore Volume One. And today I am reunited with my partner in historical rankings. Jerry Daniels from Stone Fences Tours. Jerry, welcome to the podcast.

Jerry D (00:00:37):
Oh, thank you, Drew. I don't know how many times we've done this now. I know it's been a few.

Drew H (00:00:41):
Yeah, I'd say this is probably our fourth, maybe fifth. Yeah. And they've always been interesting. They get me to think. So we kind of let everybody in on what the secret here is. We got into a discussion not too long ago about the Kentucky Bourbon Hall of Fame and who is in it and who isn't in it. And there were some pretty big names that I would've just assumed by default they would be in the Kentucky Bourbon Hall of Fame. And Jerry said, "No, they aren't in the Hall of Fame." And I'm going, "Wait a second."

Jerry D (00:01:14):
Got my list right here.

Drew H (00:01:16):
You got your list? Okay. So mine is not on paper, so I can't quite show it to you. But what we decided to do, I mean, we could run down a list of some of the names just off the top of our head that are in there, just so to give people sort of a baseline of what we're up against here. But some of the names that I came up with, it's probably because maybe the Hall of Fame just doesn't know these people and I'm kind of uncovering some of these people, so I get that. Some of them they should know, but there are some big names. Again, as I said, these people are not in the Hall of Fame. And you go, "Do we need to do like they do with baseball where they have a veterans committee that comes in because the youngsters are all going to be voting for everybody who's in the industry right now?" It seems like in the early days, because I saw it ranked from, or it was going year by year and saying who was inducted in.

(00:02:15):
And it seemed like they started off on a path of like George Garvin Brown and Jimmy Russell, big guys, you're going, "Yeah, they really should be in there."

Jerry D (00:02:24):
Yeah. Like the Baseball Hall of Fame when you started out with Babe Rube, Ty Cobb and all them. Yeah.

Drew H (00:02:28):
Yeah. But then all of a sudden it started turning into some administrative people, which is great. I mean, I'm glad that they're being recognized, but when you hear some of the names that we're going to go through today and realize that they're not in the Hall of Fame, it may cause a bit of a surprise. So I was going to have us kind of guess at a couple of, or mention a couple that we were astonished by, but that would be giving our lists away. Okay. Name a couple of Hall of Fame members that you do know.

Jerry D (00:03:00):
That I do know? Yeah. There's 11 beams in there.

Drew H (00:03:04):
Okay. Which makes sense. What'd they say? The seven of the first nine, I think Kentucky Bourbon Trail members, seven of them had beams working for them.

Jerry D (00:03:14):
They did. They did. So they're all in there. All the Shapiro brothers are in there that started heaven hell. There are some women. I'm wearing one that was just inducted last year, probably my favorite woman in whiskey, Ms. Mary Dowling. Ms. Mary Dowling, she was inducted last year. So not as many that go farther back. I mean, you do have George Garvin Brown, you have Stag, George T. Stagg.

Drew H (00:03:40):
Yeah. Buffalo Trace seemed to get very well covered in that to a point. Yeah. To a point,

Jerry D (00:03:46):
Yes. But I mean, there is a lot of ... You do have the Jimmy Russells, the Freddie Johnsons.

Drew H (00:03:53):
Freddy Johnson, yeah.

Jerry D (00:03:55):
Yeah. Freddie Johnson, Parker. Well, one of the beams, Parker Beam, Jerry Dalton also from Beam.

Drew H (00:04:06):
Craig

Jerry D (00:04:06):
Beam made it last year. He made it last year. Yeah. Okay. I mean, that's a pretty good list that first year when you talk about Parker Beam, Lincoln Henderson, Woofer Reserves, first master steeler. Almer T. Lee, Fred McMillan, Booker No, Jimmy Russell, Jim Rutledge, Bill Samuels Jr. That's like the who's who of Bourbon that first year. And then the second year looks like it was a large amount. I guess you have all the Shapiro brothers, but that's when you have Jim Beam and George Garvin Brown and Julian Van Winkle, Pappy.

Drew H (00:04:37):
Yeah.

Jerry D (00:04:37):
So that was a big year. Now it's limited to five. Okay. They can do five plus one lifetime achievement award per year now.

Drew H (00:04:45):
Okay. Well-

Jerry D (00:04:47):
So there is a limit to it.

Drew H (00:04:48):
So we do need to get a veterans committee in. Hopefully the Kentucky Bourbon Hall of Fame watches this and goes, they're making a good point about some of these people. Maybe we should put them in. Who knows? See if we have that way. Since you're now a member of the Kentucky Distillers Association, I can-

Jerry D (00:05:05):
I can email a few people.

Drew H (00:05:07):
I can get you to lobby. So yeah. Yeah. This is fun. So what we decide to do is we're going to do this like we've done our other ones. We're going to kind of do a snake round thing where just start with your number seven. I'll do my number seven and six, and then you'll do your six and five, and we'll just take it down that way. So two to time each. All

Jerry D (00:05:26):
Right. This was tough. I told you this was tough. So number seven, we talked about how there's a lot of modern ones. Well, let's just say this is a duo. So I took a little liberty. This duo actually went to school together at UK, actually played in a band together at UK, a metal band, and then went their separate ways and then got back together and started this little lab.

Drew H (00:05:54):
Oh, I know what you're talking about. Oh yeah. Called

Jerry D (00:05:56):
Firm Solutions. That little lab, they were doing stuff for the ethanol industry. They were making yeast. Then they decided they were solving all these problems. They started working with distillery solving problems and they're like, "Well, let's just start a teaching distillery." And this one nondescript building in downtown Danville. That was around 2012, I think is when that was when they started. And after a little while, they released their first whiskey and they got pretty good reviews when it came out and they're like, "Maybe we should further this. " And they built a new distillery, bought a farm, this large farm, and built a new distillery out there at this farm, and all of it was paid for by the lab. The lab was their sugar daddy. Two years later, they went through another expansion. So they started from ... So in 2015, they're making one barrel a day.

(00:06:53):
Today, they're making about 240.

Drew H (00:06:55):
Wow.

Jerry D (00:06:57):
Great product. So my number seven is Pat Heist and Shane Baker. Pat Heist is probably like the madman of science. I mean, he's 606 like me, so he's got that 606 in him. He's funny, but the minute he turns on that science bring, you're like, okay, there's something different about him. And like I said, I love their product. I think they make great product. They're great people. Everybody at that distillery-

Drew H (00:07:24):
Wilderness trail. ...

Jerry D (00:07:25):
Is nice, friendly, very welcoming. So yeah, my number seven is Pat Heist and Shane Baker.

Drew H (00:07:33):
I knew I could have left it to you to come up with somebody. I was sitting there knocking my head against the wall going, who's modern? I should look and see if I can put somebody modern in here. I have to say most of my list is 19th centuries. So yeah, I mean, I was like, okay, who? And then you just started saying all you had to do was say yeast and you had me because it was the second distillery I visited ever. And yeah, it was all science. And I had the pleasure of actually hanging out with Pat and talking yeast and whiskey making. And it was just a fascinating conversation. And just, I mean, I wish I had a 10th of what he has in his head in terms of information. It's amazing.

Jerry D (00:08:20):
And they're one of four distilleries that do sweet mash

Drew H (00:08:22):
Because

Jerry D (00:08:23):
Of that lab. They can do that. It's a cool place. If you've never been there, definitely check it out. But the lab has financed everything and they were sold. Part of it was sold 70% of it.

Drew H (00:08:35):
Gampari, I think.

Jerry D (00:08:37):
Gampari,

Drew H (00:08:37):
Yeah.

Jerry D (00:08:38):
But they still run it every day to day. They did not sell their lab.

Drew H (00:08:42):
Yeah.

Jerry D (00:08:44):
They're sugar daddy. So I think it's a great story. I think it's what everybody wanted. The people that came in later wanted to happen to their distillery and they got in the game too late and you didn't have a pat high star

Drew H (00:08:58):
Shame. You did. Exactly. Yeah.

Jerry D (00:09:01):
All

Drew H (00:09:01):
Right.That's

Jerry D (00:09:02):
My number seven.

Drew H (00:09:03):
Number seven. All right. So my number seven, I told you I'm going back to the 19th century a lot in this. And when I started ranking these, I thought, well, this is the most logical one to start the whole countdown with. Since we're talking about the Kentucky Distillers Association, why not its first president, TJ McGibbon. So McGibbon's an interesting person because I ran into his name when I was doing my research on the Lost History of Tennessee whiskey because Memphis did not have much of a distilling history to speak of. And what was interesting is that I found that these two brothers, one of the brothers, James, had come down to run a wholesale business and they were bringing whiskey from Cynthiana, Kentucky and calling it Memphis Whiskey when they brought it down to Memphis. And so Memphis, if you read anything about 1870s Memphis whiskey, it was the good stuff versus what they said would scare the snakes out of Ireland, if there were any, because Memphis had a horrible reputation for whiskey, but these guys came down there, ran it for a while.

(00:10:15):
They didn't run it for a big long period of time. But then when I started researching Bourbon County, well, Bourbon County's sister county is Harrison County. Harrison was named after the first sheriff of Bourbon County. So there's a lot of ties between those two, including the family. So when I was starting to research some of the families in the early days, well, two things happened. One is I ran into the Shawn family and they're from northern near the border of Harrison County and Bourbon County and turns out that TJ McGibbon got his start working for John Sean at his distillery. And then he worked there for a while until he worked himself up to a point where he became the chief distiller. And then after that, he ended up buying a distillery that in 1866. Then he and his brother actually built a distillery called the Excelsior Distillery.

(00:11:13):
And all these distilleries, Edgewater was another one. They were all really close to the Bourbon County border, but not quite in Bourbon County, so in the southern part of Harrison County. And by the middle or to late part of his career, because he died young, he died at 56, he owned six distilleries, at least owned parts of six distilleries. He had two outright, and then he owned four other distilleries. So he was a man that was pretty big in the distilling industry. So it makes sense that he would've been the first Kentucky Distillers Association president. He took that over in 1880 to about 1884, but he was also a horse breeder. And he got into thoroughbreds in the 1870s, and that was his other passion. And he became very well known for both raising horses and making whiskey, which in Kentucky, I mean, you can't get more Kentucky than that.

(00:12:13):
So to me, he fit as a great person to kind of kick this all off. He's not a name that a lot of people are going to know, but boy, if you were around in the 1870s and 1880s, you would've known who TJ McGibbon was because his name was on a lot of stuff.

Jerry D (00:12:33):
You're making Barry Brenner very happy.

Drew H (00:12:36):
Yeah. Okay.

Jerry D (00:12:37):
He's a big TJ McGibbon fan. And you know T.J. McGibbon actually was part owner of the Ashland Distillery with William Tarr.

Drew H (00:12:46):
Okay.

Jerry D (00:12:47):
Yeah.

Drew H (00:12:48):
He was also part owner of the Paris Distillery. And there's still remnants of that Paris Distillery because we drove by there. I think you and I went by there, didn't we? Yeah. And so it was like just a little bit of the warehouse is still there, but yeah, really interesting to bump into his name. And so it seemed fitting. I'm going to stay in that same time period and I'm going to do my number six. Number six, you may think is in here for one reason, and he's not in here for that reason. His name is John G. Carlisle, John Griffith Carlisle. He was a late edition for me. I really didn't have him in mind until I really started thinking about his influence on bourbon history. Again, when I was researching my lost history of Tennessee whiskey book, I bumped into his name even there.

(00:13:46):
So this guy was really involved in the whiskey industry, not just in Kentucky. He was from the Sixth District of Kentucky as a representative in Congress. So he was from the bluegrass region of Lexington. But the thing that he did when he was in, it was in 1910, Tennessee had just gone into prohibition. There was a distillery called E.E. Guz that was in Bristol, and they were the ones that were fighting the constitutionality of the manufacturer's law in Tennessee, which was to say that you can't distill whiskey in the state of Tennessee. So basically Gouge decided to distill, and then the people who backed him up legally, one was John G. Carlisle, came down to fight as his lawyer to try to get that law overturned. Unfortunately, he didn't. But the thing people most know him for, it's so funny because when I did my Bottled and Bond episode, I put into three different AI models who wrote the Bottled and Bond Act, and two out of the three told me John G.

(00:14:58):
Carlisle did it, yet he had nothing to do with writing the Bottled and Bond Act. What's funny about it is that people look at a bottled in bond. If they get an old bottle from 1897 and they see the tax stamp on it, John G. Carlisle's face is on it and his signature. Well, the reason is his face and his signature is on it was because he was the secretary of the treasury at the time, not because he had anything to do with writing that bill or working with E.H. Taylor to do it or any of that stuff. But what I found was really an important thing that he did besides what he was trying to do in Tennessee was in 1894, he came up with something called the Carlisle Allowance. And what the Carlisle allowance was, and this was kind of confusing for me, I had to kind of read it a little deeper because in 1868, the Internal Revenue Act of 1868 said that you could keep your whiskey stored for a year and you wouldn't have to pay taxes on it.

(00:16:07):
And then that increased, I think, in 1880 to three years. And then by the time the Carlisle allowance came out, that was 1894, and it was now eight years. But what I didn't understand about what the Carlisle allowance was, what I had been told it was, was that it was actually allowing people to defer their taxes for those eight years. That's not what it was about. What it was about was all of those years for bonding all the way up until the Carlisle allowance, they taxed you on how much whiskey you put in the barrel. So if you had angel share, that was just a loss. You just took that loss and you paid the tax on what you lost. The Carlisle allowance came in and said, "Okay, we're going to actually tax you on what comes out of the barrel at the end rather than what you put in the barrel at the beginning." So it was something that really helped, again, get us longer aged whiskeys.

(00:17:13):
And there was a benefit now, even more so than there was just in having that bonded period and delaying taxes. But I had read somewhere that the Carlisle allowance had come about due to a card game between John G. Carlisle and President Grover Cleveland. I went looking for any kind of evidence of that, but I mean, that's one of those things that's probably lore. Somebody made it up somewhere along the line because it was just too interesting not to toss it out there. So really interesting, had nothing to do with the Bottled and Bond Act, but other than putting his name on the bottles and his picture on those early bottles. But somebody that, again, time sort of forgets or they, in his case, kind of misrepresents what he was, but he did have an impact on whiskey. So that's my number six.

Jerry D (00:18:10):
Okay. I guess I'm doing number six now. Okay. I have to do something that's close to my heart. I'm number six. So I'm going back to the mid 1800s with Judge William Harris and McBrayer.

Drew H (00:18:24):
Nice. I

Jerry D (00:18:24):
Knew I had to pick somebody from Lawrenceburg. I mean, he was kind of the OG. He was the mentor to all these distillers in Lawrenceburg, to the TV Rippies, to the WB Saffles. And he's a politician. He was a county judge. He worked in the Kentucky legislature. If you look at that mid to late 1800s, Cedarbrook was like the Bourbons. I'd put it up there with Old Crow in popularity because Colonel H. Taylor was buying whiskey from him.

Drew H (00:18:57):
And

Jerry D (00:18:58):
Like I said, he mentored, he helped TB Rippy get his first distillery in Cliff Springs. He actually helped Charles Deadman get the land to start Kentucky Owl.

Drew H (00:19:07):
Oh, okay.

Jerry D (00:19:09):
Yeah.

Drew H (00:19:09):
Wow.

Jerry D (00:19:10):
He was like his godson and he helped him start there. So the legacy went away. It was funny when he passed away, his son-in-law, D.L. Moore, his wife inherited the distillery, but D.L. Moore was the one running the distillery. And his will, because he was very religious too, in his will after three years, his name was to be stricken from everything to do with the distillery and brand. And D.L. Moore took this to court because brand is everything.

Drew H (00:19:44):
Oh yeah. And this was his name that he wanted to have stricken after he died.

Jerry D (00:19:50):
He did.

Drew H (00:19:51):
Okay.

Jerry D (00:19:51):
He did. And D.L. Moore went to court, his son-in-law and actually won. Wow.

Drew H (00:19:58):
He was

Jerry D (00:19:58):
Able to keep the name.

Drew H (00:20:00):
Okay.

Jerry D (00:20:00):
Otherwise, today we have the McBrayers descendants bringing this brand back.

Drew H (00:20:07):
It's

Jerry D (00:20:07):
Cool. They have the original mash bill that the judge was using at the time. If D.L. Would have lost, his name may not be used today.

Drew H (00:20:17):
Yeah.

Jerry D (00:20:18):
So the McBrayer's descendants may not even be able to use his name today. He was instrumental in the railroad coming to Lawrenceburg. He had it placed where it come right through his distillery.

Drew H (00:20:30):
Of course.

Jerry D (00:20:31):
Yeah.

Drew H (00:20:31):
Why

Jerry D (00:20:32):
Not? There were a lot of distilleries that moved their railroad. It's actually behind Wild Turkey. Some of the Rick houses now on that right side of the road there. So a lot of the distilleries that were down in Tyrone and that area built their rick houses up on the hill by the railroad to be able to get their product out easily with the railroad. So he was instrumental in having the railroad ran through Lawrenceburg. And you're talking about a little city that people have no idea what it is now. They may know Wild Turkey and Four Roses, but before Prohibition, there was many, there's 20 some distilleries there.

Drew H (00:21:10):
Wow.

Jerry D (00:21:10):
And all these families, a lot of these families, very much distilling families. If you drive down Main Street in Lawrenceburg, if you see a big house, it was built with bourbon money in the late 1800s because there were a lot of families and we're excited that they're being brought back now. We're doing a little something, me and Bo Cumberland doing a little something to hopefully bring back some of those names that the people are starting to see again, especially like Mary Dowling. But I could not leave him off. I knew I had to go with somebody in Lawrenceburg, but I think he was just the mentor, produced great whiskey, won all kinds of awards all over the country and outside the country. And like I said, that's my number six, Judge William Harrison McBrayer.

Drew H (00:21:56):
Well, it's interesting because when you say it, I think your thought process in choosing these is somewhat similar to mine, I think, in terms of trying to find the root person, not necessarily who is kind of that bridge to all, because I was thinking, yeah, you could put TB Rippy in there because he's got a legacy that comes after him, but you're tying into somebody who helped even TV Rippy get established. So that's great. And it's funny because again, you're coming up with names that it's like, yes, they should definitely be in the Hall of Fame, but I didn't think of them off the top of my head.

Jerry D (00:22:36):
I didn't think of McGibbon and I

Drew H (00:22:38):
Know

Jerry D (00:22:38):
McGibbon story.

Drew H (00:22:39):
Yeah.

Jerry D (00:22:40):
Yeah. Yeah, I did not

Drew H (00:22:41):
Think

Jerry D (00:22:41):
Of him. So number five, interestingly, is a politician that came out of Kentucky and became Secretary of the Treasury in the 1890s under Grover Cleveland.

Drew H (00:22:52):
Wow. Okay. We did hit one together.

Jerry D (00:22:54):
Yeah. John G. Carlisle was my

Drew H (00:22:56):
Number

Jerry D (00:22:57):
Five. Just for the reason you talked about. I mean, what he did for the industry around that time with the taxes and allowing maybe hold off on those taxes a little bit, I think really helped the industry around that time. So I think for the reasons that you said, you already stated, yeah, he is my number five, John G. Carlisle.

Drew H (00:23:20):
Very nice. Guess what century I'm going to be in?

Jerry D (00:23:24):
19th.

Drew H (00:23:28):
Yeah. You can tell I love the foundational stories of Bourbon. I mean, that's-

Jerry D (00:23:33):
There's so many of them that are not in the Bourbon Hall of Fame from that era.

Drew H (00:23:37):
Yeah, absolutely.

Jerry D (00:23:38):
And we wouldn't have bourbon today if it wasn't for these people.

Drew H (00:23:40):
What kills me about this next guy is that I saw ... I was actually clued into him first by walking down Whiskey Row and there was a big sign for him. And since I've been down Whiskey Row since then, they've taken the sign down. You know those signs that they have up that are kind of yellowish and they have a little sketch drawing and then they have the story. There's one for Evan Williams. There's one for probably Old Forrester, a good number of them that you walk down through there and you can read those and get a whole big education on what was in this building and what was in that building.

Jerry D (00:24:19):
Evan Williams is actually in the Bourbon Hall of Fame, which is interesting.

Drew H (00:24:22):
Yes. I was going to say, I was going to say, and maybe we'll hit this now, since I'm going to be in Louisville for this particular person, there were a couple of people that I thought should ... I would want to replace in the Bourbon Hall of Fame. And Evan Williams is one of those. And the reason I would love to do that is not because I dislike Evan Williams. I mean, I know he has an interesting story, but I think the only thing we really know about the whiskey he made was that the people that he took it to for free in his meetings that he was going to didn't like it. So this is all we know about Evan Williams' whiskey is that people were like, "Oh, don't bring that stuff anymore." And then that he was dumping his slop or something outside.

(00:25:11):
He got fined for dumping his slop outside of his distillery. So this is all we know about Evan Williams. He was definitely not the first Kentucky distiller because he was in Virginia at the time that was Jefferson County, Virginia back then. And there were plenty of distillers before that as I will ... Well, I don't know if I'm going to point to any before them, but well, maybe. We'll see. Anyway, my number five as I go way off the rails is a guy who people will probably not know unless they've seen that sign as they walk down Whiskey Row, which is Joseph Monks. Have you ever heard the name Joseph Monks before?

Jerry D (00:25:53):
I have not. This is interesting. Fill me with knowledge.

Drew H (00:25:57):
Okay. So Joseph Monks was born in England in 1811, moved to the United States for 1818, went through Baltimore, got to Lexington, lived there until about 1830. Then he moved to Louisville, and this is where he gets into the whiskey business. He initially worked for Etalmage and Company, which was on Wall Street. I'm not exactly sure where Wall Street is in Louisville, but it was a grocer, liquor store, wines, cigars. They used to spell cigars with an S back then, which I always find interesting. And basically the only liquors that they mentioned were like honey and peach brandy. By the 1830s, bourbon really wasn't being mentioned in anything very much. However, I found as I was doing this research on this particular wholesaler, Jay Monks, that his name was coming up with bourbon whiskey a lot. In 1842, I had him with monks and Walker.

(00:26:53):
They were selling old bourbon whiskey. This is right when they moved to Main Street, so Main Street being Whiskey Row. 1846, Jay Monk is now by himself and he's selling old Kentuck and old bourbon. And so I thought that was interesting that basically back then he was promoting bourbon, but he was also promoting something called Kantuck. So these things always make me try to figure out what was the time period like and what were people talking about with these whiskeys? Why would they call one Kentuck and one bourbon? Well, as I go further, 1848, it's now Monks and Zanon. He's selling old bourbon and old rye. And then he starts mentioning specific distillers names. And as I'm doing my research into bourbon county whiskey, this is where I start going, wait a second, these names are showing up in the newspapers, but they're showing up in Louisville.

(00:27:49):
So Ewalt was a particular name that was an early Bourbon County distiller. And in his ad, he says, "Bourbon whiskey, Ewalt brand, ruddles mill Bourbon County." So he's specifically naming where in Bourbon County this particular distiller is at and he continues this. So in 1858, he was selling whiskey by the county. So he was selling Nelson County whiskey, he was selling Washington County whiskey. And with Bourbon County, he was naming Talbot, Hughes, Pew, Solomon, and Abraham Keller. So I mean, he's giving you the names, and then it gets even better. In 1860, he's now telling you what they're making the whiskey out of. So he's saying he has 300 beer barrels of genuine bourbon county whiskey made by the best copper stills in the country made of corn, wheat, and rye combined. So no malted barley. They're using corn, wheat, and rye. The best whiskey in the world at three and four years old.

Jerry D (00:28:52):
I don't know which one they were malting.

Drew H (00:28:55):
That's a good question. Maybe they were malting. I mean, you can malt rye and you could malt- You can. I guess you can malt wheat. I've heard corn is hard to malt, but I think you can malt corn. 1857, there's a big ad in here. And I just wanted to read this because I thought the audience would find this interesting. It says, "Pure Bourbon County whiskey is the title. Corn, wheat, and rye." So again, it's kind of giving us what bourbon county whiskey was. Copper still's one, two, and three years old. And then he says, "It's well known there are thousands of barrels sold of bourbon whiskey, which never saw bourbon county. If persons desiring to purchase will call and examine my stock, they will be convinced of the great superiority of genuine bourbon whiskey over all others and having contracted for this whiskey long before it was made, I'm enabled to sell it as low as it can be bought in Bourbon County." So basically, this is the kind of stuff that I keep bumping into where I go, anybody who tells me that Bourbon County isn't what Where the name Bourbon came from, obviously by the 1840s and 1850s.

(00:30:06):
And even in those early ads on the Mississippi River in the 1820s, they call it Bourbon County whiskey. But Jay Monks, I think more than anybody that I could see was a huge promoter of Bourbon County whiskey. He wanted people to know where the whiskey came from and he wanted to name who the distillers were. And it's like a who's who. It's been great in my research because it's helped me track down some names that I probably wouldn't have found otherwise. And then eventually he and his sons opened up two distilleries in St. Louis in 1880. And the way they described these two distilleries is one makes fine old handmade sour mashed whiskey, which would be in the crow tradition. And the other makes a high grade of sweet mash fire copper distilled bourbon whiskey, which makes me go, "Is he giving us the formula for bourbon whiskey or is this just hopium on my part?" But anyway, he ended up dying in 1889.

(00:31:14):
He had an estate worth half a million dollars. He was known as a man of strict integrity. He was embarrassed whenever somebody caught him actually giving to a charity. Just seemed like a genuinely good person. But on top of that, the fact that he was so interested in promoting bourbon, county, whiskey, and calling it genuine, to me, I look for who are those people who built the early reputation of bourbon that made people want to copy it because it was in the 1850s when they started putting recipes out for mimicking what bourbon was. For me, that's just a really interesting character. And as I say, who knows Jay Monks? Nobody's going to know that name. But it was amazing to me that what got me onto him initially was that he did have a info sign. So somebody with whoever was putting those historical signs up, somebody knew who he was.

Jerry D (00:32:11):
Okay, cool.

Drew H (00:32:12):
So that is my number five. Number four,

(00:32:17):
We're actually going to the 18th century. I'm going even further back. Actually, he goes into the 19th century. Staying with Bourbon County, it's where my research has been, but I think number four should be Captain Jacob Spears. Gotcha. And the reason is not because this whole thing about him being the first maker of bourbon, I think the origin of that comes from about the 1880s when there was a representative from Kentucky and Washington who gave this big long speech and he was talking about how he's from the Bourbon County area and Jacob Spear was the first person to make bourbon whiskey. And so somehow that just caught on and that's where kind of the story has gone. It's not so much that he was the inventor of bourbon for me because he wasn't. It was much more that he was like the first person to really kind of be a star in the world of making whiskey out of Bourbon County.

(00:33:22):
Not only did he have a successful run from 18 or 1790 all the way up to when he died in 1826, but it was his sons, Abraham, Solomon and Noah. Thank

Jerry D (00:33:40):
You, Rick. He ran the Bible.

Drew H (00:33:43):
I think it was in his family too, because his brother was Solomon as well. So

(00:33:49):
Abraham ran Spears Talbot & Company. Solomon ran Spears and Williams at Sunnyside Farms. Noah distilled for a while. And even their grandson, E.F. Spears, was part of Woodford Spears and Clay. So it was a legacy that lasted all the way up until almost the end of Bourbon County's time of making whiskey. And when I was first looking to see about this and try to say, now I know that Bourbon County had tavern records with whiskey sales as far back as 1785, and he would be 1790, so that's five years later. So that's why I say I don't think he's the first. Although the other family that was prominent in that area early on was the Sean family. And there was a Uncle Joe Sean that actually knew Jacob Spear and he lived till he was 90 years old. I think he got bucked off a horse or something, and that's what ended up killing him.

(00:34:50):
But he told the story of Jacob Spears and said Jacob Spear was the first distiller in Bourbon County. So he's another source of somebody. So that would say, if he's willing to give up his family legacy over to the Spears being the first ones to make, then I would say he was distilling before the Sean family started. If you go to Bourbon County, the malt house is still there. That's the stone structure that is right down one of the little back roads. The house is across the street, but the only thing that remains of the original distillery is that stone malthouse that's across the street. So interesting. And the guy who actually took over that farm for him, Major William Henry Thomas, he also ended up W.H. Thomas having a pretty long career in distilling whiskey. So a lot of tentacles come off of the Jacob Spears story.

(00:35:48):
So for me, I put him at number four.

Jerry D (00:35:51):
Okay. Well, you're number four. It's kind of similar to my number four. Mine's a father-son duo. So you're talking about Bourbon County. I'm talking about Woodford County.

Drew H (00:36:03):
Ah.

Jerry D (00:36:04):
So there were three generations of this family. The first generation came here to Wooford County in the 1790s and set up a small distillery behind where the Wooford County Courthouse is today. There's a big spring there, set it up with his brother-in-law, John O'Bannon. So that would've been Elijah. He's not the one I'm talking about in the hall of fame, but he would've been distilling in Virginia around the 1780s and then brought that knowledge with him. But where it kind of grows is Elijah actually takes this distillery from behind the courthouse, moves it seven miles down from the spring, same water, builds a cabin up on the hillside in 1812 and runs just a small farm distillery. Nothing major, nothing even like spears or anything like that. But he passes away early in the 1830s and his 21 year old son, Oscar Pepper, takes that small little farm distillery and built something there in the 1830s that still stands today.

(00:37:03):
He did a couple of big things. He built that distillery that still stands today. And he hired this gentleman that had a little bit of knowledge with making whiskey, Mr. James E. Crow. Crow took old Oscar Pepper and Oak Crow as some of the best whiskeys out there. Oscar was, I mean, he was a wealthy guy. He was the largest landowner in Woodford County.

(00:37:26):
So he wasn't a distiller, which you don't have to be in the Bourbon Hall of Fame. There's a lot in the Bourbon and Hall of Fame that aren't actual distillers. Jim Bean wasn't a distiller, but you hire the right people to distill your product. And he did that. He passed away too young. He was like 56 when he passed away. His son at the time was too young to take over. He was only 15, but he never even got left in the will. If you look at Oscar Pepper's will,

Drew H (00:37:53):
James

Jerry D (00:37:54):
Never got the distillery, even though he was the oldest son. The youngest child got the distillery property.

Drew H (00:38:00):
What was his name? Start with a P, didn't it? Presley.

Jerry D (00:38:03):
Presley O'Bannon. He was seven.

Drew H (00:38:06):
Yeah.

Jerry D (00:38:07):
Which means-

Drew H (00:38:09):
Can't drink, but you can run a distillery.

Jerry D (00:38:12):
Yeah. So Mrs. Pepper, I believe it was nanny was Oscar's wife. So really it was left to her. And she kind of leased the property out. The funny thing about it is with the encouragement of a Colonel E. H. Taylor, James sued his mom after he got a little older to regain control of the distillery. But she leased it out to like W.A. Gaines and Company at that time. But he did eventually gain control of it. He went in debt, which a lot of people did back at the time, but he was improving the distillery, taking his father's distillery and making him bigger. But like Colonel Taylor, he got a little far over his head and eventually lost the family distillery. But that didn't stop him though. Two years later, he built this huge, nice distillery in Lexington with the help of his wife. Ella was his wife.

(00:39:07):
And it's funny, she came from a very wealthy family in the horse industry.

Drew H (00:39:11):
So

Jerry D (00:39:11):
James got drawn into the horse industry. They were very big in the horse industry as well as bourbon. Where else in Kentucky? But his distillery in Lexington became one of the biggest known. He was a great marketer. Was it James Johnson? I'm trying to think of the fighter back in the early 1900s that promoted James E. Pepper whiskey at all his fights. Oh,

Drew H (00:39:30):
Wow. Okay.

Jerry D (00:39:32):
But it was in the early 1900s. Old Pepper, James E. Pepper was promoted. You see like big signs. You see him in the ring and behind him is a big sign of James E. Pepper. James hung out with all the hobnobs, big wigs of New York. He spent a lot of time at the Waldorf. So he hung out with Rockefeller and all them. Spent a lot of time in Louisville at the Pandentis Club.

Drew H (00:39:59):
What was the drink that they came up with at the pandemic? The

Jerry D (00:40:02):
Old fashioned. The old

Drew H (00:40:03):
Fashioned. Okay. The

Jerry D (00:40:05):
Old fashioned. And he was one kind of that took it to New York because he wanted it made there when he would go to the Walter Forstoria. But I mean, you think about that distillery still stands today. Part of that distillery from 1838 still stands today when you go to Wolford Reserve.

Drew H (00:40:26):
And this is not taking anything away from Lincoln Henderson, but the fact that Oscar Pepper, the guy who built that distillery and had such a success with it, isn't in the Kentucky Bourbon Hall of Fame. You got to go,

Jerry D (00:40:42):
"What?" Yep. And I mean, James, he took his James E. Pepper distillery was very well known, very big. I mean, like I said, he was a promoter just like Shayler.

Drew H (00:40:53):
Yeah.

Jerry D (00:40:53):
So I think as a father-son duo, I don't understand why neither one of them are in there. So that's my number four.

Drew H (00:41:01):
Okay.

Jerry D (00:41:02):
So my number three, there's 11 beams in the Bourbon Hall of Fame.

Drew H (00:41:07):
And you're going to add another. I want to add

Jerry D (00:41:09):
One.

Drew H (00:41:10):
You want a dozen? I

Jerry D (00:41:11):
Want to add one I think was more important than his brother.

Drew H (00:41:20):
I want to say a big thank you to everybody for the last five years of Whiskey Lore. You've made it something special and I want to give you more of what you're looking for. So I've decided to make a more consistent podcast by having two episodes a week. I'm going to do history on Mondays, travel and process on Thursdays. And as I've done from the beginning, I'm going to continue to dig deeper into these stories, question what we think we know about them, and always be pushing for a better understanding of both whiskey's past and present. All of that has helped create an amazing audience of curious whiskey fans and industry people. And I know all of you love going beyond the label. And soon I'm going to be feeding that appetite even further with Whiskey Lore Stories continuing, the interviews expanding, more whiskey flights on the way.

(00:42:16):
And soon I have two new series coming about that I think you're really going to enjoy. One is called The Legends of Whiskey Lore. And in that, we're going to honor the greats who've come before the modern whiskey industry. And if you enjoyed my series on the history of Irish whiskey, I'll soon be starting a never before told epic story of the birth of bourbon. Stay tuned. And with all of that in place, I am now also opening the door to a small number of partners who feel like they would be a natural fit for the fans of Whiskey Lore. That's not a step I take lightly. My goal here is not to interrupt your experience. I want to enhance it by introducing things that improve your whiskey experience, your travel planning, and for the distillers who listen to the podcast, finding tools and services to help you move forward.

(00:43:10):
And for the right partners, it's a great opportunity to be associated with a trusted environment where listeners are engaged, learning, and actively exploring whiskey in a much deeper way. So if you have a product, service, or brand that genuinely fits this world, something that supports whiskey enthusiasts or the industry in a meaningful way, I would love to hear from you. You can reach out to me through an Instagram DM or email me directly at drew@whiskey-lore.com. We'll talk and figure out where you might fit in the Whiskey Lore podcast family where you can connect with an audience that's always looking to learn and grow.

Jerry D (00:44:00):
So my number three, there's 11 beams in the Bourbon Hall of Fame.

Drew H (00:44:05):
And you're going to add one.

Jerry D (00:44:07):
I want to add one.

Drew H (00:44:08):
You want a dozen? I

Jerry D (00:44:09):
Want to add one I think was more important than his brother. Let's talk about William Parker Park Beam.

Drew H (00:44:17):
Okay.

Jerry D (00:44:18):
You've probably heard that name before. So we talk about how there's some people that oversee the operations like Jim did, and there's some people that are actually making the product. And that's what his brother did. So he was David M's son. He was older than Jim. He actually ran production in the 1890s at the Old Tub Distillery or Clear Springs Distillery. So he was the one making the product for Jim Beam and his dad, David M., In the 1890s. And then prohibition hit. And of course, like Jim, he was done, but he came back and actually helped Jim build the distillery that stands today. But it was funny because they had to take on a bunch of investors to get that distillery built and he got pushed out.

Drew H (00:45:10):
Wow.

Jerry D (00:45:11):
So it was funny. He left kind of, went to the Sean distillery that became eventually Waterfield and Frazier.

Drew H (00:45:18):
Okay.

Jerry D (00:45:19):
So he became distiller there, but he worked with his two sons. Well, one stayed at Beam for the rest of his time. One actually left and went to another distillery. His son, Carl Beam, stayed at Jim Beam. I mean, he was pretty much the master distiller there after Park left. His other son, Earl, went to another big distillery and was master distillery there for quite a while, and that would've been Heaven Hill.

Drew H (00:45:47):
Okay.

Jerry D (00:45:48):
So Joseph Al started that. His son took over after that, and then Earl Beam ran it for a long time. After that, Park Beam's grandson, who we know as Parker Beam. So all this distillery heritage through the pretty much ... You're talking about going from old tub to the new Jim Beam distillery and passing that down to Carl and Earl, and you're talking about mid 1900s, all this information running distilling at the Jim Beam distillery and the heaven hill distillery,

Drew H (00:46:26):
Which

Jerry D (00:46:26):
Today are the two biggest distilleries in the country for bourbon. So I think he gets kind of left out. I mean, Jim did great. He was the promotion side, the business side. He did great, but I just think it's Park ran production. David M. Beam, third generation, and his grandson was Parker Beam. So you're getting down to six, seventh generations there that he had an effect on in the Beam family. So yeah, there's a lot of beams in there. I think he's one that is very much overlooked.

Drew H (00:47:00):
Yeah. That's really interesting. I didn't know all of those connections. I mean, you walk into the distillery. I don't know whether they still have this at Claremont or not, but at one time I went in there and they had the entire tree built out and it's just overwhelming to look at. It's

Jerry D (00:47:18):
Like, okay. Yeah. And it's funny, that tree that you're seeing is pretty much the straight line tree. I mean, it does have Jim Beam and Heaven Hill across that straight line, but you don't get the other two lines of that in that distillery. I mean, you

Drew H (00:47:35):
Got

Jerry D (00:47:36):
Jack who started early times, he's in the Bourbon Hall of Fame, and then you got Joseph L's side, Joseph Beam's side were like his son and grandsons, they were all ... I mean, Joseph Al, all these ones at Charles Beam at Four Roses, Steven Beam at Limestone.

Drew H (00:47:56):
So

Jerry D (00:47:56):
That side of the family tree gets left out and that side of the family tree has produced a lot of bourbon.

Drew H (00:48:02):
Interesting. Yeah, that's a new one to add to my list because I just wasn't aware of all that he had been involved in. And those bridge distillers are really interesting. The ones that were around before prohibition and came back after, because you think how much did they adjust as the industry was changing? Because I found a picture of the old Jack Daniels distillery where they were using a pot still and then all of a sudden after prohibition, they're building with a big column still, but it's the same distiller. I think it was Lem Tolley was the distiller and he carried all the way through from one side to the other. But you would think he's got to have to learn the trade again, some aspects of it dealing with the column still versus doing ... Or maybe they started with a pot still and they moved the pot still out after he left.

(00:48:55):
I don't know. I mean, unfortunately there's not enough records, but it is kind of that ... I mean, you think about a Pappy Van Winkle and how his distiller really wanted to hold on to the old ways of doing things. And so they did. And there was a success there in terms of the quality of the whiskey that they were making that kind of got lost over time as everybody moved on to the column stills and forgot how to make it on pot stills. So very interesting. So number three for me, I just did an episode about this guy actually, and I probably wouldn't have put him on this list until I did my Bottled and Bond episode. And that is where I realized this guy really is way underappreciated in terms of whiskey history, as well as bourbon history. He's a Kentuckian. He is basically the man behind the Bottled and Bond Act, Representative Walter Evans.

(00:50:01):
Walter Evans is a fascinating character because he was the head of the internal revenue. And as the head of the internal revenue in the early 1890s, late 1880s, he handed the reigns over to Joseph Miller. Joseph Miller takes the reins and in 1895, he writes in the Internal Revenue Commissioner's report that Canadian club is kicking our tail in the export market and we need to have some kind of bottling bonded act to be able to compete with the Canadians because they're making us ship everything over in their specific size barrels. And so we have to move everything over and it becomes a big hassle and then they just turn it down so we can't get whiskey in there. And then they're shipping these bottles over, bonded with stamps on them where they're sealed. So this whiskey is outselling us because people know what they're getting when they buy a bottle of Canadian club.

(00:51:04):
So Walter Evans comes along. He actually ran for governor of ... He'd been in the state legislature for a long time, ran for governor, failed, but then got into the House, I think he was out of ... Was he out of Louisville? I think so, or one of the surrounding districts. I want to say seventh district, but I'm not sure if that's correct or not. But anyway, he basically created the framework for what the Bottled and Bond Act is, and then he ushered it all the way through the process. And what's interesting about it is you bring up Colonel Pepper, I thought about bringing him in on my list because he was the only one of the Kentucky distillers besides Thomas Shirley that actually went up to fight for the Bottled and Bond Act when all of this was going on when Walter Evans was kind of fighting this on his own.

(00:52:02):
And one of the guys I'd like to sort of maybe consider taking out of the Hall of Fame is Isaac W. Bernheim because Bernheim was the guy who basically, he and the rectifiers, what was making the distillers so angry at that time was the fact that Bernheim was coming along and saying, and the other rectifiers or wholesalers, they wanted in on this. So they wanted to be able to bring whiskey in, not have to hold onto it for a long period of time, and then they could sell it in bottles and bond it. So they wanted to take the eight years that I was talking about before with John G. Carlisle and make it one year. So in other words, the Bottled and Bond Act would be a one year in that barrel before it could be put into a bottle sealed and be part of the Bottled and Bond Act.

(00:52:52):
Now, if you are a distiller and you have come up with this thing where you're storing your whiskey for eight years because you want a tax break on it, and you got these rectifiers and wholesalers coming along saying, "Well, no, let's go ahead and amend this law so it's down to a year, you're going to have a lot of whiskey to sell," which would have flooded the market, which it would have been a horrible time to do that because already the KDA was telling distillers to take a holiday and not distill for a year because they had too much whiskey out in the market. So it would have been disastrous. But coming out of that, again, Walter Evans stuck with that all the way through the entire process. And at the end, it was scary because they didn't know whether they were going to get it passed or not because the Senate kept trying to add amendments onto it and they were worried that if we're getting to the end of the legislative season, if this thing doesn't get through on this attempt within the next couple of days, appropriations are going to take precedence and we're not going to get this bill through after a year of fighting for it.

(00:53:57):
Well, they got it through and Walter Evans actually walked the bill from the Capitol building over to the White House to get Kroger Cleveland's signature on it. Unfortunately, he did not get the signature on it that day, but he did get it on the last day of Grover Cleveland's administration. So Walter Evans, as you were talking about Hall of Fame members, you've got people who made whiskey, you got marketers, you got administrators, you got people who built distilleries, but this guy really is somebody who helped elevate the character of whiskey overall and gave people like E.H. Taylor something to sell and something to show that Kentucky Bourbon in that form was a pure product and that it was made in Kentucky. It wasn't made because that was one of the big arguments that Colonel Pepper had was that there's too much whiskey out there with Kentucky's name on it that never saw the inside of a Kentucky distillery.

(00:55:03):
And so this was what they wanted to change. And what's interesting is that Bernheim did actually, when he saw the writing on the wall, decided to go invest in his own distillery, and that's where I. W. Harper comes from. And that's where Evan Hill makes their whiskey these days. So that's the Bernheim distillery. So a lot of little connections there. But Walter Evans, I mean, E.H. Taylor was a marketer. Sometimes the guys who do all the work, as you say, there are people who are working behind the scenes that just don't get the spotlight and they really deserve it. So he's one of them. I was going to have him as my number one guy, but I found two people that pushed him out of the way. So there you go. Am I doing two? I got another one, right?

Jerry D (00:55:49):
You got two. Yep.

Drew H (00:55:50):
Okay. I am drinking the namesake of this. You knew this one was going to be on the list. Can you guess which one it is?

Jerry D (00:55:57):
Are you leaving one of the two that we kind of mentioned out?

Drew H (00:56:00):
Yeah, probably. Yeah. Yeah.

Jerry D (00:56:02):
Okay. How can you not ... I don't know. If you're drinking cheap.

Drew H (00:56:09):
If I'm drinking cheap.

Jerry D (00:56:11):
Unless you have something owed. Oh, chicken cock. Okay.

Drew H (00:56:16):
Yeah. Okay. So- I mean, I've just grown a fascination with this guy and I'm going to read the article that I came across that cemented my interest in this guy, James A. Miller. Miller. James Alexander Miller started distilling probably in the mid 1830s. If you read the chicken cock bottles, they haven't changed this yet yet. They still lay on that 1856 date. 1856 is the year that James A. Miller got so big that he had to build a large scale distillery. Kept buying up property and buying up property in Paris, Kentucky, and he finally got enough funds put together and enough land put together to build a very large distillery. And when he started advertising for wheat and rye, which is interesting because he advertised for wheat and rye. And again, we saw those recipes for Bourbon County whiskeys where they said corn, wheat, and rye, this is what he was wanting to make.

(00:57:22):
And so his ads said, James A. Miller, Bourbon Distillery. So he was calling himself the bourbon distillery. Now what's interesting about James A. Miller is that you can go all the way back around maybe three or four years after Old Crow first starts showing up in newspapers. And you'll start seeing Miller's Bourbon rye showing up in places like Charleston, South Carolina and Baltimore, Maryland. And so I think Crow and Miller, Crow was a little ahead, but Miller was actually ... The newspaper article I found from the Louisville Courier in 1858 said, our friend James A. Miller is going down to New Orleans for his 19th annual trip to take his whiskey to New Orleans. So this shows, again, as far back as 1838, he was taking whiskey down to New Orleans, as long as that wasn't a tall tale, which it could have been. There's

Jerry D (00:58:24):
None of those in bourbon.

Drew H (00:58:25):
There is none of those in bourbon. Well, and this is the thing too, you fall in love enough with a character. Sometimes you become very gullible and start believing things you shouldn't believe. But I'll let this article from the Louisville Courier Journal speak for me. It says, quote, "Old bourbon, everybody young and old, little and big, white and black is heard of old bourbon, and there are few that do not appreciate it, but they have not all heard of James A. Miller of Millersburg in the Bourbon Nation and the King of Old Bourbon." We were honored with a call on Saturday by the king and he brought with him a jug of his 12 year old, some of our friends, and they are judges, pronounce it preferable to any wine they ever drank. If people will drink, let them by all means resort to Miller's 12-year-old, Martin and Company in this city, in New Orleans and New York agent for Mr. Miller.

(00:59:32):
So it was an advertisement, kind of dressed up like it was an article, but to call him the king of old bourbon, this is 1858.

(00:59:43):
So a bourbon hasn't gotten out really big time in terms of a name elsewhere. Crow never really used the name bourbon. And that was part of the reason why when I was thinking about him, I was going, "Do I put him on a bourbon list?" But then, well, yeah, because you've Got all these other people who are not necessarily selling something called bourbon. They just had influence on the bourbon industry. But he's just a really interesting character. And 1867, I got a newspaper that shows that they said the best bourbon whiskey was Keller's, Miller's and Crow's rye whiskey.

Jerry D (01:00:21):
Keller's. Okay.

Drew H (01:00:24):
Not Kesslers. Yeah. Nope. Kellers. So this was Abraham Keller who was basically just north of Paris. They called it the Peacock Distillery, I think. Okay. Yeah. It later became known as the Peacock Distillery. And then you had Miller and then you had Crowe. And they called it Bourbon Whiskey, the best of bourbon whiskey, but they said it was rye whiskey. So I don't know. I feel like the more of this I uncover, the more I start to think that our tales of what bourbon really was is much more about place than it was about what kind of whiskey that they were making at that time. So that is my number two, James A. Miller.

Jerry D (01:01:10):
That's a pretty good one. So my number two pretty much matches the exact same time you're number two.

Drew H (01:01:18):
Okay.

Jerry D (01:01:19):
And you mentioned him already four or five times. This young gentleman that came from Scotland, they call him Dr. James Crow, but the doctor is very debatable at the time. But in the early 1800s, it didn't take much to be a doctor. You didn't really go to doctor school to be a doctor. You could actually just work with a doctor as an apprentice and become a doctor.

Drew H (01:01:45):
You can go to Kentucky and become a colonel and have never been in the army.

Jerry D (01:01:49):
Ask Taylor and Pepper.

Drew H (01:01:52):
Exactly.

Jerry D (01:01:53):
But yeah, James Seakrow was my number two. I mean, he never ever called his stuff bourbon. It was sour mass whiskey, which he thought was a better product than bourbon. It actually sold for more back then. Never invented a thing. I mean, he worked at some small distilleries. Some of the distilleries he worked at was Griers Creek and the Stig Distillery. And these were down on Griers Creek where it's close to Glen's Creek. He worked part-time for Old Oscar Pepper early on. He never worked there full-time. He was not hired until the mid 1830s by Oscar. But what he brought with him, like I said, he never invented a thing. But I think he was really like the first person that put everything together with sour mash, with actually cleanliness. He took the animals out of the distillery. Back in the day, these animals were all around the distillery.

(01:02:47):
I mean, his whole thing was cleaning us. He really used hydrometers, sacrimeters to get all his readings correct. It's funny, he never owned a house.

Drew H (01:02:56):
Right.

Jerry D (01:02:57):
He always lived at the distillery. He worked with his proteges like William Mitchell and all them, kind of passed this down. But you got to think by the mid 1800s through the mid 1900s, what was the best whiskey in the country?

Drew H (01:03:16):
Old Crow, yeah.

Jerry D (01:03:17):
It was Old Crow. And it was because it was still made the way that he started it. I mean, to me, it's like the earliest thing that we could consider bourbon today. I know you think you're a Miller, you're a Miller guy. I understand that. Yeah.

Drew H (01:03:30):
Yeah. Yeah.

Jerry D (01:03:31):
I'm kind of a Crow guy in the 1830s. It's kind of sad when you go to the graveyard in Versailles and you see his tombstone, which is just a little small. It's not even probably like an 18 inch, not more than two foot tombstone that you

Drew H (01:03:46):
Can

Jerry D (01:03:46):
Barely make out his name. For somebody that started a legacy of making the best bourbon in the nation probably for a century.

Drew H (01:03:58):
Yeah.

Jerry D (01:04:00):
But I think it's funny, he never called it bourbon.

Drew H (01:04:04):
Well, and W.A. Gaines never called it bourbon either, at least not up until towards the end. I think right before Prohibition, I think it was the first time they ever threw bourbon on as a name. Yeah.

Jerry D (01:04:18):
And W.A. Gaines & Company built a distillery in his honor after he passed away, which is still there today.

Drew H (01:04:24):
Yeah.

Jerry D (01:04:24):
Yeah. When it was built, it was up to, I know you're looking at 1860s. I know David says 1870s, but it's beautiful no matter when it was built. If you go there and see the property. His legacy to me, coming over here, immigrating from Scotland, I think he landed in Pennsylvania first. I think it was in Philly.

Drew H (01:04:44):
Some say he went to Philadelphia and some say he went to New York and maybe he went to New York and then Philadelphia, which would work.

Jerry D (01:04:52):
Yeah.

Drew H (01:04:53):
But

Jerry D (01:04:53):
He somehow found his way into the small little hamlet there of Greers Creek, Glean's Creek area. He had to know about Oscar Pepper. I mean, he had to maybe have some knowledge of who he was.

Drew H (01:05:07):
Or at least Elijah.

Jerry D (01:05:09):
At least, yes. Yes. And the product had to be pretty decent. I mean, from what I understand though, Oscar built that distillery, which we see today when you go on a Woofer Reserve tour, I think he built it for him. I think he built it for him. So yeah, my number two is Dr. James Seakrow.

Drew H (01:05:28):
Well, it makes me happy for Dr. Crow's legacy that they have pot stills in there because that's just fitting that there are some foresight Scottish pot still sitting in the distillery he used to work in. Looked very different during his age. I'm quite sure. I'm sure.

Jerry D (01:05:46):
Yes.

Drew H (01:05:47):
And

Jerry D (01:05:47):
The sad thing about it is what Crowe is today and what people think of Oak Crow today since Jim Bean bought it and put it on the bottom shelf. It's not probably the closest thing made to Oak Crow today. You have to go out to the Oak Crow Distillery, which is today

Drew H (01:06:01):
Glen's

Jerry D (01:06:02):
Creek Distillery. And David Myers is producing what was called Corvito Vivo until they got a cease and desist. And it's called Flipping the Bird Now.

Drew H (01:06:14):
And not by Beam. It was by Jose Cuervo.

Jerry D (01:06:17):
Jose Cuervo.

Drew H (01:06:18):
Yes.

Jerry D (01:06:20):
So it's called Flipping the Bird Now. So all they did was turn the bird upside down, which is apropos for Glen's Creek and David.

Drew H (01:06:28):
Perfect.

Jerry D (01:06:29):
To me, that is the closest thing that you'll find to O'Crow the way it was made. And I mean, their production manager from Old Crow is working with them on that. So it's just like, I wish Jim Bean would do something with it, maybe have a special release to kind of honor his legacy. But yeah, that's my number two.

Drew H (01:06:51):
It's my understanding, and I don't know whether this is lore or not, but there was a flipping the bird advertising campaign or give them the bird. That's what it was. Wild Turkey had done it and then Jim Beam had done it and then they got into an argument. Maybe it's still, maybe the next generation will come in and things will change and that taste will be out of their mouth and they'll be able to do something with Old Crow because it is a great brand. And I'm so glad you put it in there because I was banking on you putting it in there because I did not put it on my list and that was hard, but I was like, "God, there's names I really want people to know about. " So I figured you're going to do that one. I'll get to tell some of my other ones.

Jerry D (01:07:40):
Yeah.

Drew H (01:07:40):
All right.

Jerry D (01:07:40):
Yeah. You dig a lot deeper than I do. Maybe call me a Homer on some things, but like I said, I think Champion Crow, there's no way he should not be in the Bourbon Hall of Fame. And then are we going to number one now?

Drew H (01:07:53):
And you're out of your number one. Yeah.

Jerry D (01:07:56):
Did you want to

Drew H (01:07:56):
Do

Jerry D (01:07:56):
Honorable mention now or did you want to

Drew H (01:07:58):
Wake up? Yeah, let's do honorable mention. I kind of listed off the ones that I wanted out and one of my honorable mentions was James Crow. I'm afraid to give my next one because maybe it's your number one. I don't know. So I don't know if I should give my next one. Okay.

Jerry D (01:08:19):
Well, probably the top of my honorable mention. It's funny, there's George Garvin Brown. Everybody knows George Garvin Brown.

Drew H (01:08:28):
Yeah.

Jerry D (01:08:29):
But he started that with a half brother, John Thompson Street Brown, who is not in the Bourbon Hall of Fame, which I cannot understand that.

Drew H (01:08:39):
Yeah.

Jerry D (01:08:39):
I mean, between him and his sons, they were so influential on so many distilleries, old Prentice. Even though he started out as a wholesaler and all that, that's probably my honorable mention there, how he's not in there.

Drew H (01:08:56):
I do have two. One is Paul Jones.

Jerry D (01:09:00):
Okay. Paul-

Drew H (01:09:01):
I think he's in there. Is he in there? I believe so. Yeah,

Jerry D (01:09:04):
I think he

Drew H (01:09:05):
Is. I look through the list. I didn't think I saw him, but okay.

Jerry D (01:09:08):
I think he is, but I'm trying to figure out how you put him in there and not like somebody like JTS Brown.

Drew H (01:09:15):
Yeah.

Jerry D (01:09:15):
Yeah. I'm trying to think what year. These are listed in alphabetical order on these, but I do think I saw him in there and I was wondering ...

Drew H (01:09:24):
I think whoever the architect is that designed the Four Roses Distillery needs to be in the Hall of Fame. And I don't know if we'll have a ... That's probably-

Jerry D (01:09:32):
I think that's actually the Brown children. I think it was JTS Brown, Davis Brown, Crill Brown, and all them that actually did that from what I understand. Yeah.

Drew H (01:09:43):
Joseph and Joseph was the architectural firm.

Jerry D (01:09:46):
They were, yes.

Drew H (01:09:46):
They did

Jerry D (01:09:47):
It. And that's actually, if you want to go into something like that, how many distilleries have they built?

Drew H (01:09:52):
Joseph and Joseph. I mean, they should be, as a company, they should be in the Kentucky Burbank Hall of Fame. Absolutely. Yeah.

Jerry D (01:09:58):
Yeah. Yeah. Paul Jones Jr. Was in 2003, so he was early on. He was early.

Drew H (01:10:03):
Okay. Allright. He was early on. The other one is Joseph Washington Dant. Dant. Because I mean, the Dant family tied in with ... It's the fun thing of going to Limestone Branch and looking at their tree and seeing where it sometimes, as Wally Dance says, it doesn't always fork. It doesn't. No,

Jerry D (01:10:28):
I was there today. I was there today

Drew H (01:10:30):
Looking at that.

Jerry D (01:10:31):
Yes. Looking

Drew H (01:10:31):
At that.

Jerry D (01:10:33):
That one totally slipped my mind. Yeah. I mean, the dance legacy, it's so long. I mean, so many generations. And it's just cool what Wally and Charles and Lynn have done down there to kind of bring back that legacy. And even the Beams, Steven Beam and are also bringing about that. They're half dance pretty much. So it's cool to- Well,

Drew H (01:10:55):
And that's the thing too, is that I looked a lot at one particular section of the state. And I start thinking about when I was doing my research on New Hope and all the distilleries that were there and like Bella Nelson and E.L. Miles. And these were all ... And then you go back to Pottinger and we could go into Basil Hayden and we can go into all of those original distillers that came through that community. And I mean, Nelson County on its own-

Jerry D (01:11:29):
Wasn't Henry McKenna's in Nelson County also? Wasn't his distillery there also?

Drew H (01:11:33):
I don't think he was ... He was in, what's the town- Is it not Nelson? ... where Athertonville is. Isn't it close to there? I think so. I thought those two distilleries were kind of in the same area, but I'm not 100% sure. Yeah. And then I thought about Green River and I forget about ... Or Monarch. There's some names like that I could probably pull out that ... I just need to investigate them more. I don't know enough about their histories to do them, but I mean, there was Henry Craver. He's another person that you could probably look at. Carless.

Jerry D (01:12:05):
Yeah.

Drew H (01:12:06):
Yeah? Yeah.

Jerry D (01:12:07):
One I kind of looked at, being from Eastern Kentucky was Maggie Bailey. I don't know

Drew H (01:12:13):
If you've ever

Jerry D (01:12:14):
Heard that name. So if you ever heard of Popcorn Sutton, you should know Maggie Bailey. She was in Harlan. It's not my number one. She was an honorable mention. She was in Harlan, started moonshining at the age of 17 in Harlan. She moonshine. She made moonshine until she was 95.

Drew H (01:12:37):
Wow.

Jerry D (01:12:38):
In Harlan. So if you ever watch Justified, a lot of it takes place in Harlan. So Meg Bailey is kind of that character.

Drew H (01:12:50):
Oh, okay. She

Jerry D (01:12:51):
Was never like Meg. She was never that mean because actually the community loved her. She made White Dog. It was a corn whiskey.

Drew H (01:13:01):
It

Jerry D (01:13:01):
Was not aged at all, but you got to think she made moonshine for 80 years.

Drew H (01:13:07):
Wow.

Jerry D (01:13:08):
She was very influential in the county. She was charged 30 sometimes.

Drew H (01:13:13):
Wow.

Jerry D (01:13:14):
She was only convicted once because she did so much to help that community. Anybody that was in need, she would help them. So none of the juries would convict her. And you think about this, she lived to around a hundred, but she was still selling moonshine illegally

Drew H (01:13:35):
At the

Jerry D (01:13:35):
Age of 95.

Drew H (01:13:36):
In the 2000s. Okay. So she was distilling all the way back to the early 1900s.

Jerry D (01:13:41):
Yes.

Drew H (01:13:42):
Wow.

Jerry D (01:13:43):
Yeah. So yeah, if you ever was justified, Meg Bailey is kind of portrayed off her, but she was never that violent

Drew H (01:13:49):
To a

Jerry D (01:13:49):
Person. But it's just a cool story. I know she wasn't making bourbon or anything aged, but it was whiskey. It was corn whiskey.

Drew H (01:14:00):
Okay. There were violent female moonshiners. There's somebody named Molly, I forget what her last name was, that took over for her father when he was killed in a raid and they lived in Polk County, Tennessee, and she was not somebody you wanted to trifle with. She wasn't afraid he was a gun.

Jerry D (01:14:20):
Yeah. I'm sure she probably got her way on stuff being in Harlan. But yeah, that was very cool to kind of uncover her. I found information on her quite a while back just studying moonshining in Eastern Kentucky. But my number one, you know my number one.

Drew H (01:14:42):
I'm guessing, and that's the reason why I didn't want to do him as my honorable mention, because I have a feeling he has two initials to start his name.

Jerry D (01:14:49):
He does. If it's Edmund Haines, yeah.

Drew H (01:14:52):
Yeah.

Jerry D (01:14:52):
I mean, and it's not so much ... He was all about producing good whiskey everywhere he was. Got him into problems in a lot of places. He lost some distilleries because of taking out these loans to improve the distillery so much to make good whiskey. Him and Stag did not get along. One was a businessman. One was a whiskey maker. I know you talked about the bottle and bond. He wasn't really necessarily ... He wanted good whiskey, but he wanted his whiskey to be sold.

Drew H (01:15:26):
Yeah. And he was on the backside of it. He was all about the Bottled and Bond Act. Yeah. Yeah.

Jerry D (01:15:35):
So he was all about pure whiskey. You got to think, I mean, he ran and owned OFC Carlisle, Old Taylor, which was his last one, Hermitage. He helped James with old Oscar Pepper. He actually was part owner of a distillery out in Mount Sterling, New Market,

Drew H (01:15:55):
Which

Jerry D (01:15:56):
The McBrayers were involved in J.H. McBrayer. So

(01:16:00):
Judge's cousin was involved in that distillery. He was part of W.A. Gaines & Company. He was the company, but he was really the one that really did the work. The rest of them were just money men. Like I said, he loved ... If you go to Buffalo Trace today, you see in the Bourbon Pompeii, those copper fermenters that he was using at the time. So he really did. I mean, he went to Europe and toured Europe. And all you got to do is go to Casson Key today, Old Taylor. The reason I would put him at number one is not necessarily ... He made great stuff, but who built the distillery in the 1880s with bourbon tourism in mind?

Drew H (01:16:41):
That was the hardest thing for me because that almost cemented him on my list, but I still didn't put him on.

Jerry D (01:16:48):
I mean, who built the distillery in 1880s with ... Had the tracks ran down, not for just supplies, but to bring people to his distillery. Had a station named after him that they would get off and to have parties, business parties, all this stuff. I mean, he was proud of his distillery. His bottling room was ... Everybody had dressing white, and people on the train could see that as they're coming. So he's all about appearance sakes.

Drew H (01:17:21):
Yeah.

Jerry D (01:17:21):
But I mean, that's the whole thing is like bourbon tourism started 140 years ago, but it was a hundred years in between him and when it actually took off. So just for that reason alone, let alone all the distilleries and all the people he influenced in the industry. I mean, he was so far ahead of his time on that.

Drew H (01:17:44):
He casts a massive shadow on Kentucky bourbon history. Yeah, I know. And he's not on my list. And I can't necessarily justify that other than the fact because he was in consideration. And honestly, my number one is the reason why he's not on the list, but he was going to end up being number seven just so I could sneak him on the list. The person I have at number one wasn't even ... I was hedging whether I was even going to put them on the list. And then as I started thinking about it, I said, no, they're number one because without them, what we're drinking today as bourbon would not be the same. And to say that you've had that much impact on a spirit, to me, makes you number one. And it's a person who I bet you 98% of my audience has never heard of.

(01:18:44):
Well, I say that, but I did do a podcast with this person involved in it. So

Jerry D (01:18:50):
They're modern

Drew H (01:18:51):
Then. We are in the 20th century for the first time.

Jerry D (01:18:56):
Are we even into the 21st century

Drew H (01:18:58):
Or? No.

Jerry D (01:18:59):
Just the 20th. Okay.

Drew H (01:19:00):
No. So think about this. This person, if not for this person, what I have in my glass right now may have been very different. So I'm going to read you this AP report from January 22nd, 1936. So this is just after prohibition. The article is entitled Regulate Aging of Straight Whiskey. It says, "Two year aging will be required of straight whiskey after July 1st, 1937. Two year aging in wood for all straight whiskeys was projected today in the standards for the distilled spirits industry made public by the acting alcohol administrator. One year's aging will be required of all straight whiskey bottled after July 1st, 1936, and the age requirement will gradually increase to the two-year rule when that's put in force on July 1st, 1937. The administration originally had proposed that an age requirement for straight whiskey be enforced at once." And this is a quote from the administrator, "As a result of testimony produced at the hearing relative to the quantities of aged whiskey now in possession of the various members of the industry, the dates upon which the various requirements become effective have been advanced." I love that paragraph because it sounds like a bureaucrat.

(01:20:23):
It means almost nothing to me, but the next part is so important. Age in quotes. The administrator defined is "The period during which the whiskey has been kept in new oak containers charred if used for whiskey other than corn whiskey." Rye, bourbon, wheat, corn, malt, rye malt whiskeys are all recognized by a new standard. They are defined as made from fermented bashes of grain containing no less than 51% of the grain mentioned in the title. Although the FAA, which was the name of the Federal Alcohol Administration was the agency, originally had proposed standards requiring that, "All alcohol and neutral spirits used in blended whiskeys be restricted to grain alcohol or grain neutral spirits." The distinction was dropped in the standard. So the person that did this, it's just a fascinating story. And I was digging and I was going through all the old straight bourbon blog stuff where Chuck Cowdry and Michael Veach and others are all kind of debating things.

(01:21:32):
And I was just trying to find out what the answer was to when did single use barrels come about? When did we get to a point? Because the Scotts would talk about it. Every distillery I went to in Scotland, they would say, "Oh, there was this big Coopers Union and they got all the laws changed so that they had to use single use barrels." And so I was looking for the answer to that. And what I ended up bumping into was the story of how at the end of 1935, the guy who was the head of the Federal Alcohol Administration just threw his hands up in the air. He's like, "I'm done with this. Everybody's arguing with me and I don't know what to do. " So Roosevelt decides to put the assistant secretary of the treasury in charge of the FAA for 30 days.

(01:22:17):
And during that 30 days, Ms. Josephine Roche, who was from Colorado, Ms. Josephine Roche had this document on her desk that had the rules and she looked at it and she said, "Well, that sounds good." And so she put it out. And today we go by, we know what bourbon is. We know it's defined by 51% corn. Thank you, Josephine. And we also know what straight whiskey is. We know that it has to be age two years in new charred oak barrels. So the Scotts thanked Josephine as well, because without her, we wouldn't have had single use barrels necessarily. Maybe it would've come along at some point, but there was a lot of arguments over that. So it just was an arbitrary decision by somebody who had snuck into the job for 30 days. And at the end of 30 days, she didn't have to enforce it.

(01:23:10):
She just left the office and in comes the next head of the Federal Alcohol Administration. And so thank you, Josephine Roche for doing the work that Taft couldn't do. I mean, he said he couldn't define what straight whiskey was because we all knew what it was, so we didn't necessarily have to have it told to us. But she defined it.

Jerry D (01:23:33):
No, he's in the Bourbon Hall of Fame.

Drew H (01:23:35):
And he is in the Bourbon Hall of Fame, and he's another one that's right on the edge for me, because again, he's kind of taking credit for what somebody else in the end codified. So straight whiskey, when you have one, raise a glass to Josephine Roche. And when you're drinking your bourbon, know that prior to that decision by her, bourbon was anything. I mean, it didn't have to be 51% corn. So when we read in history, the name bourbon, and then you see this old stuff with Miller and Crow having bourbon rye, you're like, "What is that? " There was no 51% rule until Josephine came along. So how can she not be in the Hall of Fame? She's the one that actually has defined what we're drinking today.

Jerry D (01:24:26):
Yeah, that's awesome. I mean, it's funny, most people, they state that 1964 legislation, but a lot of these rules were already in effect before that.

Drew H (01:24:37):
And really all they were doing in 1964 was saying that it was the national spirit. I won't call it America's Native Spirit because they didn't necessarily call it that, but they were saying nobody else can use the word bourbon. It's ours and it could be made anywhere in the United States, but bourbon is our name. So all that Juarez bourbon that was coming up from the old- It's Mary

Jerry D (01:25:00):
Dowling.

Drew H (01:25:01):
Mary Dowling distillery. Yeah. Wasn't going to fly anymore. So yeah. So interesting, but-

Jerry D (01:25:09):
I can't believe you left Taylor off completely.

Drew H (01:25:12):
Shock me. Well, I left Crowe out too, and I've always been a big proponent of promoting Crow because he is so important. But I will say it's nice knowing what I love is that we gave them ... We only had one repeat between us.

Jerry D (01:25:27):
And it was a politician.

Drew H (01:25:28):
And it was a politician. It was kind of what I wanted to see. I mean, we gave people 13 really good people who should be in the Bourbon Hall of Fame. And I mean, I have no arguments with any of the ones that you stated. So I mean, maybe it's time to get in touch with those folks over and get that veterans committee up and rolling.

Jerry D (01:25:51):
Yes. And I think all of ours was pretty much the veterans committee. Did you have anybody in the 21st century?

Drew H (01:25:58):
I had nobody in the 21st century. Nobody. I

Jerry D (01:26:00):
Didn't think

Drew H (01:26:00):
So. Yeah.

Jerry D (01:26:01):
So really just Pat Heist and Shane at ...

Drew H (01:26:04):
Yeah.

Jerry D (01:26:04):
Like I said, I don't see how you ... I love Cave, Wes and all them, but it's great to have them in there, but how do you not have Pat and Shane in there for what they've done?

Drew H (01:26:15):
Yeah. And I totally agree with that. Yeah. I look at it and I go, who would I put in there? And is Steve Beames in there?

Jerry D (01:26:24):
I don't think so, no.

Drew H (01:26:26):
Okay.

Jerry D (01:26:26):
Do not think so. No, Craig was kind of the latest one that was put in.

Drew H (01:26:31):
Okay.

Jerry D (01:26:32):
Yeah. I don't think Steve, that's another good one. I mean, with Limestone,

Drew H (01:26:35):
What

Jerry D (01:26:36):
They're doing with Yellowstone and all that. Yeah,

Drew H (01:26:38):
Exactly.

Jerry D (01:26:39):
He's not one of the 11 beams in there.

Drew H (01:26:42):
Yeah. No, I know there's a lot of modern people that will easily be picked, and I think that was part of the reason too, but also because there's so much of this legacy that we can learn from, and unless we know who those names are and kind of know the real stories behind them and what their impact was, because this bourbon thing didn't just drop out of the heavens, even though some people may think it did, it took some time to develop and there were a lot of bodies in motion creating something that was memorable for people. So it's good to recognize those

Jerry D (01:27:16):
Forgotten people. And it's funny, you know I'm a huge TV Rippy fan. He owned parts of six distilleries in Lawrenceburg at one time and his son, E.W. Rippey Sr., Started Rippery Brothers Distillery that eventually became Wild Turkey. But the only Rippy in there is the E.W. Rippey Jr. Who ran it pretty much after they had sold it and he was the one that hired Jimmy Russell. So that's the only Rippy in there.

Drew H (01:27:41):
Wow. And probably because he hired Jimmy Russell, which was a good move.

Jerry D (01:27:45):
It was, yes. It was. It was. But yeah, that's kind of interesting. But yeah, I mean, there's a lot, like I said, it seems like they don't really go back into the 1800s that much. I'm looking at this list about who was in the 1800s. There's not a lot that were from that era. They were the foundations that a lot of these ones that are in the Bourbon Hall of Fame came from.

Drew H (01:28:16):
You know who surprised me that wasn't in the Bourbon Hall of Fame that I thought would've snuck in there since Evan Williams is in there?

Jerry D (01:28:23):
Elijah Craig?

Drew H (01:28:25):
Yeah. I see more reason for Elijah Craig to be in there though than probably ... I mean, because Elijah at least just didn't pay his taxes versus making bad whiskey. So he's still got some representations.

Jerry D (01:28:45):
He built a town.

Drew H (01:28:46):
Yeah. Yeah.

Jerry D (01:28:48):
What is Georgetown today? And a college, which is Georgetown College today. I mean, he pretty much is responsible for both of those,

Drew H (01:28:57):
Even

Jerry D (01:28:58):
Though he was a Baptist minister making whiskey.

Drew H (01:29:03):
I have forgotten his name now, but I actually did. When I thought of Elijah Craig, I was thinking of the guy who did the play at Georgetown College that got this myth going on Elijah Craig because he was doing his little one man Elijah Craig performances, and that's where this toasted or this charred barrel myth seems to have evolved out of.

Jerry D (01:29:29):
Well, I don't think it helped though either when ... Was it the late 1800s when somebody in Congress established or said that he was ... It was probably somebody from Kentucky.

Drew H (01:29:42):
Yeah.

Jerry D (01:29:42):
He was the father of Modern Bourbon at the time.

Drew H (01:29:45):
Yeah. But I even saw in the 1950s that they were talking about James Crow is the father of bourbon.

Jerry D (01:29:55):
He called it sour mesh.

Drew H (01:29:56):
Yeah. Well, I don't know how many moonshine capital of the world I've been to, but I've been to a few, so I guess you can have more than one at works.

Jerry D (01:30:08):
Which I love the debate. That's the fun part of it, is the debate. I don't think anybody will ever prove who was the first. I mean, it's going to be tough, but it's fun. It's fun to argue about it. I mean, I know you're really attached to Bourbon County. I'm attached to Woofford County, so we'll always probably have the argument, but it's- It's a fun art. I appreciate it. I mean, I think Jacobs Beers should be on that list also. I just do. But yeah, this has been fun. It has. Hopefully people will come up with their own list.

Drew H (01:30:46):
Yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean, I'll post this on YouTube as well. So anybody that wants to post some names down there, it's more helpful than the podcast. On the podcast, nobody can really sign anything or make a comment on a poll or anything. So I'll put it out on YouTube and then people can leave their names out there because I'm sure there are other names.

Jerry D (01:31:11):
Oh, definitely.

Drew H (01:31:12):
Well, Jerry, thanks so much. And anything ... I mean, you got summer seasons coming for you, so you're going to be getting a little busy at the beginning, I'm guessing.

Jerry D (01:31:21):
Head into the Derby. So it's pretty much get through this weekend, the next two weekends, and we're home free then. So it's the time of year where you wish that's where you make your money, but then when you're in it, you're like, "Oh, can it be over?" But it's fun. We have a good time.

Drew H (01:31:40):
So how can people find your services?

Jerry D (01:31:43):
They can usually contact us. My phone number is 606-548-2181 or stonefences tours@yahoo. They can get in touch with us. Maybe we can debate some of these stories if you want to.

Drew H (01:31:57):
Yeah, there you

Jerry D (01:31:57):
Go. Bring me your own list. Bring me your own list.

Drew H (01:32:01):
There you go.

Jerry D (01:32:01):
That's the fun part of it.

Drew H (01:32:03):
Yeah, absolutely. All right, Jerry. Well, thanks so much, and it's been great. And until next time. Cheers.

Jerry D (01:32:12):
Thank you.

Drew H (01:32:13):
Well, hope you enjoyed our countdown of the seven people who've been left out of the Kentucky Bourbon Hall of Fame. Want to make your own suggestions? Well, just head out to Instagram.com/whiskeylore or patreon.com/whiskeylore. Find our post about this episode and go ahead and leave your suggestions. And if you're not following Whiskey Lore on Patreon, make sure you do because I'm going to be introducing my brand new series called Legends of Whiskey Lore, and I'll be giving you the opportunity to nominate legends in this industry that you want to have people vote on and for me to do episodes around. It's kind of like my own version of the Whiskey Hall of Fame. And coming up this Thursday, I'm going to be heading out to California for a visit with a Scottish distiller who has found a brand new home in Southern California, making smokey whiskeys that might just remind you of Viola.

(01:33:08):
Make sure you subscribe to the Whiskey Lore podcast so you don't miss a moment. I'm your host, Drew Hanish, and until next time, Cheers and Sloan Java. For show notes and transcripts, head to whiskeylore.org/interviews. Whiskey Lore is a production of Travel Fuels Life, LLC.