Ep. 125 - Diving Into the History of the Latest Whiskey Boom

Transcript

Drew (00:00:09):
Welcome to Whiskey Lore, the interviews. I'm your host, Drew Hannush, the bestselling author of Whiskey Lore's Travel Guide to Experience in Kentucky Bourbon second edition, the Lost History of Tennessee Whiskey, and the book that bust 24 of Whiskey's biggest myths, whiskey lore Volume one. And recently I had a chance to chat with another author who is big into both whiskey history and travel. That is Noah Rothbaum, who has spent over 25 years researching, writing, podcasting about and tasting whiskey and other spirits, and learning about cocktails. His upcoming book, the Whiskey Bible, A Complete Guide to the World's Greatest Spirit is set for release on September 9th, and it is a 600 plus page exploration of the world of whiskey with each country's history, production, culture, and even some cocktail recipes thrown in there. It is a fascinating hour we're about to jump into, and this is really a chance for me to dive in and get a bird's eye view of the last 25 years of the whiskey industry and how it grew into what it is now.

(00:01:15):
I am still a relative newbie starting my whiskey journey in about 2018, and here we're going to get to see how everything grew up from those early days of the 21st century through Noah's eyes. And I have to say that from the moment that we got our video feed up and running, you couldn't stop us talking about all sorts of stuff. So why don't we go ahead and join this conversation from its very beginning as we're both getting acquainted with each other. Got through your book. I didn't get through all of it. I got through, I spent a Sunday just digging through, and there were parts of the book where I was like, oh, I got to ask where he got that information from. Well, one of my books is called Whiskey Lore Volume One, and in it I dispel 24 different whiskey myths. And one of the things that I go into is the concept of straight bourbon or straight whiskey and talking about the history of the barrel and how we got the single use barrels. And I have a particular story that I tell on that from my own research, but as I was reading yours, I was like, wow, he's got some more stuff that I, it's all in what you find in terms of documentation as to how your story's going to come out.

Noah (00:02:31):
100%. I mean, I think the hardest part about what we do is that tomorrow you could find another book or another document or another article that nobody's ever seen before and it upends everything that we thought that we knew about this. And I would've sworn on a stack of Bibles was correct. Of course, it turns out not to be correct, which is what makes it exciting and cool. I mean what you're talking about. Yeah, I mean, I had discovered in a article that was not about whiskey or about drinks or cocktails or booze, but really about what was going on in Washington in the halls of Congress. And this fight right after prohibition was repealed where the federal government then called the FA, the Federal Alcohol Administration, is creating definitions for spear categories and also basically enable them to collect taxes, which is most important objective for them.

(00:03:35):
But essentially, this fight happens between bourbon producers and rye producers over whether or not they'll be able to use a new barrel or whether they have to use a new barrel or can they use a used barrel. And through this series of this fight that plays out on the halls of Congress are all of these articles where both sides are making their case, which again blew my mind because if you ask people in our industry, when did American whiskey start using new barrels? You get a variety of answers and time periods starting with, oh, that's how my family's always done it going back hundreds of years to the 1960s when Congress codifies what bourbon is and makes it only a product of the us. But in reality, it's right in the 1930s when essentially bourbon rye go toe to toe creating these standards. And now we see bourbon and rye is old friends who get along so well and

Speaker 3 (00:04:43):
So

Noah (00:04:43):
Many distillers and drinkers, which back and forth between bourbon and rye. But in reality, you were either a bourbon drinker or you were a rye drinker and you either made bourbon or you made rye, and if you made the other, you didn't really talk about it. And here was a way for the bourbon producers as one of the articles said like bourbon tastes great after it's been aged in a new barrel, but rye tastes like turpentine in a new barrel. So it was up until that moment when I found that article, I would've assumed it was either much later or much earlier, and it blew my mind.

Drew (00:05:24):
Well, what was interesting and what got me looking for it was when I would travel over to Scotland on Scottish distillery tours, they would say, oh, there was this Cooper's Union that came along and they are the ones that fought for single use barrels. And I'm like, I have been on so many tours through Kentucky and the US and I have never heard anybody bring that up. And so as I started to dig into it, an interesting name that you might want to look into is Josephine Roush. Josephine Roush was the assistant Secretary of the Treasury when the head of the FAA had resigned at the end of the year, she was placed by Roosevelt there for 30 days. It was during her 30 days that she picked up a piece of paper that was sitting on her desk that talked about the regulations for codifying the rules for straight and basically defining what aged meant. And it's this document that she just approved. She said, oh, this looks good. Let's just go ahead and run this through. My whole chapter is about how the Coopers, it wasn't Cooper's Union, but in Memphis, the Coopers Association was trying to beat down the beer bill that was going to force the use of metal and glass. And they're like, we got to stop this. But no matter how hard they tried to stop, it ends up being this freak chance and luck that gets it to pass through.

Noah (00:06:53):
I mean, you're right. I mean, it's kind of one of these things where, I mean, obviously you can't make whiskey without first making beer, and the two drinks are obviously innately connected. But here what drives the Coopers is that they've already lost the beer folks, so they would've gone essentially out of business. They've already lost beer to steel kegs. Right. And if whiskey could be aged in used barrels, then the number of Coopers required would've gone down drastically. And what's interesting is that a lot of the Coopers and a lot of the forests are in Kentucky or near Kentucky. So it's similar politicians representing these different interests together. So it makes a lot of sense. And if you go down to Stitzel, Weller and Shively in Louisville, one of the original buildings that's saved is the Cooper's building. And they have a giant cartoon that either came from the Louisville Courier or they reproduced addressing this issue about how whiskey shouldn't be aged in a used barrel, which I thought was incredible. Most people would have no idea what this cartoon was about, but clearly it meant so much to the Coopers working there that it hangs prominently on the wall. And they clearly believe that because they knew that their jobs were on the line if American whiskey could be aged in a used barrel.

Drew (00:08:20):
Yeah. Well, let's just jump right into the, since we're already kind of in, just keep on talking. How about that? So go back a little bit and talk about what got you interested in whiskey because you got started in this industry at a time period where whiskey was really only starting to get any kind of attention. I mean, the Kentucky Bourbon Trail started in the last year of the 20th century, really is when it was formed. So there was no real distillery travel. There was not necessarily this focus on whiskey at that time. So what drew you in?

Noah (00:09:02):
That's a great question. And I think that people, now, it's hard to even understand what the world of whiskey and cocktails was like in the late nineties or the early two thousands, right? I mean, there was no whiskey trail even for folks like us. A lot of distilleries were just closed to visitors. They didn't even want people in the trade in industry, bartenders, writers, they didn't want anybody in there. I mean, it really was very different. If you asked for or r Manhattan, you'd get a drink made with Canadian Club, you had crazy martini menus where there was no classic martini, but a cocktail in a martini glass with chocolate syrup and caramel and God knows what else. And that was considered Martin Dean. So I did an internship in 1999 at Food and Wine under Pete Wells, who later became the New York Times restaurant critic and food editor.

(00:10:03):
But Pete had just come over, he'd been the original timeout, New York drinks writer, timeout. New York had launched just a few years earlier, and Lady Teague was there who writes the wine column for the Wall Street Journal now, and Kate Crater, who runs Bloomberg's Pursuits like the food coverage. So it was incredible time to be there, and thanks to Pete introduced me to folks like Dale DeGraw who was still working after the Rainbow Room at a restaurant Blackbird that was in Midtown that was open for about two years. And I started to taste and meet all these folks. I realized, wow, this is such an incredible world. Nobody really knows about the wine world. I mean, I think it's funny because the Whiskey Bible is the sister book to Karen McNeil's wine Bible, which is a massive hit in bestseller and giant shoes to try to fill.

(00:10:57):
And I remember when it came out in 2000, looking at the wine Bible and trying to write a few stories, my copy from and is still full of post-it notes and thinking to myself, wow, how did Karen do this? There's so much information. The wine world is so vast. How could anybody wrap their head around this? I never want to be a wine writer. There's so much, I love wine. I love where you wine. I don't really want to cover wine. It's just too big. There's just too much to know. And it's funny because 25 years ago, you could really taste all of the bourbons that were available. You could taste all the single malt Scots, the blends that were available. I mean, it'd be pretty easy. There was no rye. I mean, it was very, very hard to find rye whiskey, even single malts.

(00:11:49):
The number of single malts from Scotland were very small compared to now. I mean, to find American single malt was incredibly hard. So the world was a lot smaller then, and it kind of appealed to me because I liked cocktails and spirits, but these were things that I had never had before, and they blew my mind. I remember Dale DeGraff making me cocktails at his bar, and I was like, this is incredible. Or I met the owner of Napole Castle at Whiskey Fest in I guess maybe oh one or oh two, Mark Andrews, and they had a, I think it was a 50-year-old Irish whiskey at the time from his family's state in Ireland. He's American. And it was like $600, which I thought was insane, right? Oh my God, can you imagine? I just taste a $600 whiskey. And it was just one of these things where I could feel like things starting to percolate and some excitement.

(00:12:51):
You had folks like John Glazer starting Compass Box around then Booker know on sort of the frontier of promoting American whiskey and bringing it back, and Jimmy Russell and all these folks talking about why we should make rye whiskey again. And the time rye was made one day a year by the handful of distillers that made it, and that was more than enough supply for the few people who wanted it, which is insane. I mean, even now, it's only made by most people one day a month, right? Compared to bourbon, which is made 24 7 through 65 basically. So it's a completely different world, but as a writer and a journalist and somebody who's curious about the world, there's so many good stories. There's so much to learn, there's so much drama. And I think that using spears and cocktails in particular whiskey as a lens to look at history is so wonderful. Suddenly I find myself excited about congressional notes and documents and lawsuits and

(00:14:00):
Bio reports and fermentation and chemistry. I was the world's worst chemistry student, and maybe not the world's worst bio student, but close. And now I find myself obviously so excited about that side of whiskey production that I've had to learn about. And yeah, I mean, it was sort of that perfect way in to look at the world that combined history, drama, and of course cocktails and spirits. So I mean, in some ways it didn't seem like working, right, that you're able to go out to bars and meet all these cool people who were bartenders or master distillers or blenders, and it just seemed like I had somehow found some secret door into this incredible Society of drinks people.

Drew (00:14:50):
So back then, would you have imagined that you would've, and this is a very text heavy book, that there would've been that much of a volume that you could put together on this?

Noah (00:14:59):
Absolutely not. No. No, it's a great point. I mean, my first book, the Business Spears came out in September of 2007. So it's interesting that the 18 years later, this book comes out. And the Business Spirits was one of these things that, again, I'd wanted to write a book about drinks. It was incredibly hard at the time, if you went to any bookstore, they would have maybe three books, like Books by Gary and Marty Regan, Anthony Ds Blue, maybe a Paul Hackel book, and that was it. And then a book that was like 10,000 cocktails, everybody should know. In fact, I don't know what was in that, right? There aren't that many cocktails in reality or distinct cocktails. But yeah, I mean, you go in and publishers didn't really want books about cocktails and spirits or whiskey. Now of course, you go and there are shelves and shelves and shelves of books about every possible type of whiskey.

(00:15:53):
So it's almost a different problem trying to find something to write that hasn't been covered before. But then it was very hard to sell a book. And I randomly met a book agent who had sold a book to Kaplan, the test prep people. They had just bought Dearborn, which was a business book imprint out of Chicago. And he said, well, Kaplan might be interested in a book about the business. The book that he sold was about the business of the NFL. And he thought, well, maybe they'll want interested of the one interest of the business of Spirits. And I was like, okay, this is either going to be the first of many or the last of few of these capital business books. And it was the last of few. And I think it's hilarious that it contained an ad for test prep books. And I kind of feel like I got my money back for all the P-S-A-T-S-A-T courses I took at Kaplan. So it always seemed right, but I put everything I knew in that book, and it's maybe 150, 200 pages. And I remember I had a list of bars to visit, and there were three or four in New York, and I thought, it can't get better than this. We have,

(00:17:02):
There are five bars in New York that serve craft cocktails. This is incredible. And of course, in some ways, the world that we live in is just exploded. I would never have believed that people would be this interested in cocktails and spirits or whiskey or the types of things that people want to talk about during events that I host or book events. The level of knowledge that people have is incredible. I mean, they would've literally been the smartest person in the room 25 years ago. I mean, the knowledge that a bar back at any of the top bars has literally would've made them the smartest person in tales of the cocktail 20 years ago. And we take so much for that for granted. I mean, some of these people have never lived in a world where rye whiskey was hard to come by or that you had to convince people that single malts were good to drink or that you could make whiskey outside of Scotland, Ireland, America and Canada, or convince them that Canadian whiskey could be delicious and rich and wonderful.

(00:18:13):
I mean, there was all of these miss legends and misconceptions, not just about whiskey, but about all spirits. I mean, at the time, if you said tequila, somebody would say inevitably, oh, the stuff with the warm in it. And I haven't heard that in years, but that was so commonplace then. And now, drinkers, bartenders, bar owners have never lived in a world where super premium tequila hasn't existed. So we've come so far. I mean, you're right. I would never have believed the millions of people that visit the Bourbon Trail in Kentucky or the one in Scotland, or there would be this many distilleries around the world. I mean, it's just sort of mind bog going concerning where we came from.

Drew (00:19:03):
This was fun about having this conversation just because you've been through this evolution, and a lot of times I'll be on distillery tours and I'll hear, oh, well, this all started with Mad Men when Mad Men came out, everybody wanted to drink whiskey. But I've talked to Alan Katz with New York Distilling, and he was talking about the cocktail culture that was going on in New York in the early two thousands. And so as you watched it, what do you think was the thing that really made this happen? Did it just all, it's funny that you brought up Alan.

Noah (00:19:38):
I mean, Alan's one of my closest friends, and I've known him almost the whole time that I've been doing this. And I have to admit, the first time didn't, the first time we met, I didn't like Alan, right? I thought we got into a fight and the fight was about rye whiskey because he had, at the time, he was the head of the board of Slow Food, USA, and he had organized a drink summit at the then French Culinary Institute in New York, and Alan did a talk about rye whiskey being America's native spirit. And I thought, this guy is out of his mind rye. I mean barely holding onto bourbon. Bourbon was on life support. And I am like, this guy's talking about he even, what is R? Why is he care so much about rye? Let's focus on what we have. And Alan and I was like, after the talk, I remember being just so frustrated and confused, and Alan was equally like, what's wrong with you, dude?

(00:20:38):
And of course, Alan was right. Ry was incredibly important across the same, but he was one of those people in the early two thousands who was pushing our industry for the return to classic recipes, the return to classic ingredients, trying to find these things. And if they couldn't find it, then make it themselves. I mean, that's why Gary Regan and his ex-wife, Marty Hagan, Regan made their orange bitters because they couldn't buy Orange Bitters, right? I mean, now you go to a store, they're probably 1,001 types of bidders. By the time you couldn't even get orange bitters. So they made it, to your point, Madden definitely helped 100% sex in the city. 100% helped. Everybody always talks about the Cosmo being in sex in the city, but really the Manhattan, they're also drinking Manhattans. They're drinking whiskey on the rocks. Then Mad Men comes along.

(00:21:31):
I mean, I think in 2008, I remember talking to the owners of employees only in New York, which is one of the first craft cocktail bars, and they sort of cracked the code at serving old school cocktails, but high volume, so you didn't have to wait for an hour and a half. And D, Sean Zark, the owner, the co-founder, said One person a year asked for an old fashioned, this is 2008. He said, I don't even want to charge them. I'm so happy that they want an old fashioned, and now I feel like you go to any bar restaurant now anywhere in the country, and they have not one but multiple old fashioned right on their menu. Everybody knows an Old Fashioned, which is crazy. I mean, that's in 17 years time, it went from basically, if you ask for an old fashioned, people have no idea what you're talking about to

(00:22:19):
Now everybody knowing what old fashions are, which is wonderful. But I mean, I think that's really due to the fact thanks to Mad Men, because there's John Ham in many, many episodes is shrinking old fashioned. One of my favorite scenes in the show is he teaches Conrad Hilton, who's the real, Conrad Hilton is Paris Hilton's grandfather, but he teaches Conrad Hilton how to Make an Old Fashioned, which for our industry was wonderful because it's a great drink. I mean, it's obviously whiskey, sugar, bitters, and a little bit of water or club soda, and if you like it with fruit or not, that's a whole other debate. But I mean, it's a great drink to drink, but also one that anybody can make at their house. It requires no special tools or exotic ingredients. So I mean, that definitely helped push old fashioned, I think, whiskey culture to a new level, but it was already percolating.

(00:23:20):
I mean, you have things like the movie Swingers comes out, and I referenced that in the Whiskey Bible. There's that fabulous scene where they go to Vegas and John fau wants to look like a big time player, and he orders, he tries to order single malt scotch, and he says, I'll take any of the Glens, there's no blends. And then of course, in one hand he loses all of his money and the server finally finds him at a $2 table or whatever it is, and says, I walked around with this stupid whiskey order for an hour, and he says, I didn't even want it. I just wanted to sound fancy. I mean, I think that definitely helped. And things like even the TV show, the Wire with McNulty is always drinking Jameson and Bushmills, so it starts to percolate. I mean, Americans, we love the rebirth of things.

(00:24:15):
We love a rebound story, but for that to happen, things have to almost go away. And whiskey, by the turn of the century, 99, 2000 whiskey had almost completely gone away. I mean, there were relatively few distilleries left in Kentucky. There were only three distilleries, I mean two major ones in one upstart in Ireland, Scotland, you had essentially a few blends and a few single mall brands trying to get market share. That crash in the eighties, seventies, eighties was still trying to get out of that. By the time the turn of the century at that point, what your parents drink is not cool, but your grandparents or great grandparents, it was definitely cool. So you had that effect where perhaps people's parents were drinking the hipping, trendy, imported vodka and all types of vodka cocktails so that around the turn of the century, folks like Alan Katz are rediscovering the joys of the Rat Pack and bossanova and old timey hats and suits, and obviously whiskey was part of that.

Drew (00:25:24):
Yeah. Well, it's funny because I remember when I was younger, I would go to Vegas for conventions and I would do nothing in Vegas, but I got in around 2010, 2011, I started getting interested in Las Vegas and learning how to play Buck Rock. I was really getting into the James Bond series, but I remember the fun thing about going to Vegas was actually the fact that they would come over and they would bring you free drinks. And so I would order scotches because that just seemed like the appropriate thing and just gets you in that whole mood. So you're right, it's something that all of a sudden it sort of takes over the culture and gets you, I mean,

Noah (00:26:07):
I love that too. I would order scotch on the rocks or whiskey soda, and it would come in a plastic cup with a red straw, and as you're playing bakar or a blackjack for myself drink. And you felt so cool. And it's funny, one of the last times I was in Vegas, I went to the Venetian at the time, the famous bartender, Sam Ross, was working with the Venetia and the Palazzo, and instead of plastic cups with red stirs of whiskey soda, they're serving versions of his penicillin and his other craft cocktails. And I thought, I mean, what a David versus Goliath's story. If you had told me 25 years ago that we would win the craft cocktail movement that is, and that even in Vegas and one of the largest casinos that they would be serving craft cocktails and not crappy drinks would, I mean, talking about long odds, those are going to be the longest odds that Vegas has ever issued. I would never have thought that that bet would've come in. I mean, I was blown away, which is kind of funny. And people they don't know, they accepted it. I thought I was stunned. And everybody else was like, what's the big deal? They're great cocktail. What's wrong with you? It's like,

(00:27:31):
I'm going to need a minute. I'm not crying at all. No, no, not at all.

Drew (00:27:36):
So it's funny that you talk about not really being a science person, not either, but now I've been to almost 400 distilleries, and I absolutely love going to these distilleries and learning just the subtle nuances from one to the next. What was the first distillery that you went to and what kind of drove you to go to it?

Noah (00:27:58):
Well, I had a feeling you might ask that, and it's funny, I was thinking about that the last few days, and it's one of these things where it was really so hard to visit distilleries up until fairly recently. There weren't craft distilleries in every town and city across the country or even around the world, and tourism wasn't their main focus. So I think probably around oh five or oh six, I went down to Louisville with Dr. Bill Lumsden from Glen Morang you, because he did a project where he wanted oak trees that grew on the shady side of hills so that the grain would be tighter than the trees that grew on the sunny side, which was hugely expensive because those trees obviously had to be selected, tagged through the Cooperage process. And then Brown Foreman, I think, filled them with one of their whiskeys. And again, the barrels had to be tracked and then ultimately sent to Scotland. So we went down and we went to the Ozarks, I think in Missouri to see the trees and to see it fell. And I love those types of trips and events in New York because I would literally park myself next to people like Bill Lumsden and ask thousands of questions for hours. Just everything that came to mind. And all the PR people knew if they threw a dinner or a lunch or event that I wanted to sit next to the distiller.

(00:29:36):
And they were like, we're so happy that you want to do this. And I was like, why? Everybody want to sit next to 'em? They were like, no, no. A lot of people just want to go and have a nice dinner and taste a whiskey and talk with their friends. And I was like, oh, no. I wanted those things too. But I was like, this is such a great opportunity. I just remember riding with Bill and a van sitting there asking him all these questions. And then at the end of the trip, a few of us talked our way into Brown Foreman's Shively Distillery, which I think is still not open to the public. And at the time, Connor o Driscoll, now the master distiller at Heaven Hill was running that distillery

Speaker 3 (00:30:20):
And

Noah (00:30:20):
They were making a ton of different whiskeys there. And I imagine, I don't think it's dedicated to one brand these days. I could be wrong. It's not open to the public now, and it wasn't open to the public then, but we're able to get Connor to show us around. And I remember being like, okay, this is really cool. And then after that, for the Business of Spirits, I was in Scotland visiting a whole bunch of distilleries like Macallan and Glen Fiig and Veni and maybe a few others there. So between those trips and then things started to start to open up a little bit, but even places like Jim Beam, I remember passing by and they were like, yeah, we're not allowed to bring in people who don't work here.

(00:31:09):
And I just remember passing by very, very sadly every time I was in Louisville. Then finally, they created a tour, and obviously now there's a giant store and a restaurant and all types of tasting rooms. I've been to distilleries up at Bushmills in Northern Ireland several times, and you have to watch a safety video and take a quiz and wear steel toe boots or the steel toe things over your boots and a hair net and a beard net and a high his jacket. And I'm always like, wow, this is intent. But a lot of the facilities, I mean, look, they're giant factories and there can be incredibly dangerous places. So mean, I get it, but it's just funny sometimes it really brings home the fact that few people get to do what we do and see what we've seen. Because again, and even some of the distillers, I mean especially I remember the master distiller from Oen was a guy named Kenny, I don't remember his last name.

(00:32:19):
I'd met him in Scotland, and then I remember seeing him at Whiskey Fest in the early two thousands. They were giving him a big award and he looked so confused why people would care. He was like, I run a plant in Scotland. Why do these people know who I am? It was so incredulous that the world cared, or I love going to distilleries around the world and realizing that every single drop of that brand, which is known from New York to LA to London, to where it all came from, this one incredibly rural spot. And the distillers are often, or blenders are very incredulous that people all over the world know their work. And it's like, this is famous. Every bar has this whiskey, every store stocks this. And they're like, really? Yeah. What do you think happened to all those millions of leaders of whiskey?

(00:33:18):
But it's just funny. It's their perception is just such a focus on production and making the product that they, I think sometimes kind of forget that for you. And I like people who write books. It's sort of the same way you're sewing you a groove, writing your books and doing podcasts that you kind of sometimes forget that at the end of the day, it goes into the world that other people are going to. If you're lucky, other people will read it and enjoy those things and get them to think about things. It always sort of shocked me when people be like, when I did my podcast Life Behind Bars with Dave Ridge to people say, oh, I love listening to the podcast when I run, or in the shower or all these very personal moments that always make me feel like, oh my God, or they feel like they've spent a lot of time with you because they have, but it's one of these one-sided relationships. But

Drew (00:34:13):
I think what you have just pointed out about the modern master distiller, maybe those prior to the current generation who has grown up now in a place where their distillery trails and the rest that generation before speaks to the idea of why it's so hard for us to find historical information and documentation on distilleries because these people were just doing a job. They didn't really think that people in the future would want to know.

Noah (00:34:44):
I mean, it is one of these things that there whiskey, like historian scholarship didn't exist. They were doing something, why would they need to keep records? Who cares? You know what I mean? And to be fair, things got so bad in the seventies and eighties. I mean, these people were just literally trying to hold on for dear life to keep their distilleries open, their brands open. I mean, I think that's when we see the Booker knows and the Jimmy Russells their kids kind of question whether or not they even want to follow in the family business, which sounds ludicrous now, but at the time was totally legitimate. This is a dying industry. Should I really have my kid follow in my footsteps or maybe they should do something else. And both Fred, no, and Eddie Russell definitely did other things and thought about doing other things.

(00:35:39):
That's how bad things got. But Fred no considered and worked other jobs because there might not be a future in whiskey. So you're right. And I think also, even looking back in better times, so much of what we know about whiskey was created by marketing departments. I love that The first whiskey to come in a bottle in America is Old Forrester in 1870. And it was marketed to, doctors wanted prescribed it because alcohol was still prescribed to cure a whole range of maladies, and they could never be sure if the whiskey was pure or not because of the way the whiskey was made in the 18 hundreds. So this was the first whiskey to come bottled from the distillery, and doctors could then prescribe it and feel totally rest assured that they were going to do more help than hurt their patients. But I love about old Forster is that they didn't just call it Forster, they called it Old Forster. I mean, it's like the first whiskey to come in a bottle. There's this constant need to kind of harken back to an earlier period where it's already the marketing is shaping our perception of whiskey. And I think even some of these things where some of the dates on bottles or packages when you look into them, nobody knows why they're on the bottle or the package. The distillery has either existed way longer or way shorter than that date.

(00:37:15):
And my colleague Dave Wa, who he was the editor in Chief Lock or companion to Pearson Cocktails, and I was associate, Dave always likes to say somebody finally in the late 18 hundreds putting together some kind of marketing or box or label and says to the old Bob like, Hey, Bob, when did we open? I don't know, 1782,

Drew (00:37:41):
I think.

Noah (00:37:41):
Right. Okay. It sounds good. And it's like

Drew (00:37:44):
You're absolutely right though, because I have done some research into the Chicken Cock brand and where that came from, and a lot of the history that we know now about, it was written in 1888 or 1884 I think it was, when somebody came by and was writing up stories about whiskey in that county for that time period. And they just asked the owner or somebody at the distillery, so who built this distillery? And when did it start? And this person was just throwing information out off the top of their head apparently, because none of it checks out by if you go through the courthouse records and look. But I mean, when I look at a book, because you referenced it also, the book Jack Daniel's legacy, it's all oral tradition. And so when you start digging into those courthouse records and figuring out, wait, where's the documentation of where this distillery started and where is all of a sudden you're like, oh, it's all truth, but it's kind of out of whack.

Noah (00:38:52):
Well, and also sometimes even interviewing people over the years as people's memories change or fate, I mean, I don't mean nefariously, but just that's life, right? Yeah, exactly. And sometimes their stories about how a certain cocktail has when they created it or what was going on or who hired them sometimes changed slightly. So I mean, it is one of these things we're looking back over the history of spears. It's amazing that we have anything, and some of the documents that have been most helpful in some of the kind of studies that the government has undertaken or things like the Royal Commission on Potable Spirits that was done in the UK around the turn of the century where you have sworn testimony from different whiskey makers talking about issues of the time. And that's incredibly helpful because you have the key people talking about stuff, and the questions are often focused, but sometimes I'll find oral history projects, which are wonderful, and sometimes you're just waiting for the person, the interviewer to ask the question that you're dying.

Speaker 3 (00:40:09):
You're

Noah (00:40:10):
Dying to be answered, and they never ask. And it's so maddening where you're just like, oh my God, how could this person not ask about the mash bill?

(00:40:20):
Obviously, who knows their interest was somewhere else. And I mean, the other thing that I think we have to think about is people have been making whiskey for a very long time, for centuries, but it's only really been popular over the last couple of hundred years, especially in Scotland, in Ireland, people have been making whiskey for hundreds and hundreds of years, but it's really like thanks to RA that destroys cognac, pork cherry vines, wine vines across Europe, that people really take a minute and look at whiskey and say, huh, Scotland, they make whiskey up there. I wonder if it's good. And that's where we get Alfred Barnard's incredible book where essentially he was writing articles and he goes up to Scotland and he visits and Ireland visits all these distilleries, and it's incredibly detailed sketches of his visits, very few of them. Does he describe the actual whiskey, how it tastes, which is again, frustrating for our needs,

(00:41:31):
But it just shows that, I mean, that book comes out in the late 18 hundreds, the fact that how little people in London even knew about scotch and that you see in even medical journals, which I think is fascinating. Again, things that I never thought I'd be reading windage medical journals from the 19th century, but this change from the medical community prescribing brandy and cognac as medicine to basically switching to whiskey because that's what was available, but seriously looking at whiskey and saying like, yes, this is a legitimate cure and can fulfill what we need because we can't get cognac. So you have all of these medical journals in the UK following the Royal Commission on potable spirits to kind of figure out what kind of alcohol they should be prescribing. So again, it's similar thing. I mean, it's really the 18 hundreds where whiskey, I kind of feel like it's Lou Gehrig coming off the bench for the Yankees because the guy who replaced wanted to take a day off, and then Lou Gehrig played crazy streak of games in a row, and the guy who he replaced nobody's ever heard of again, and he never got another chance.

(00:42:53):
I kind of feel like it's the same way where while Cognac and Port and Sherry were kind of trying to rebuild their stock and get back in the game, it's like, okay, whiskey Europe, you got a shot. And we've never looked back, in fact, that nobody thinks about cognac as a cocktail ingredient anymore, even though that's how it started, and it just, whiskey just took the opportunity and ran with it. But again, not that long ago, I mean, we consider it a much older spirit, but it's not been popular for centuries and centuries and centuries, even though it was made for centuries and centuries.

Drew (00:43:35):
I think the real challenge in doing historical writing is putting yourself back into the shoes of the people back then and what they had access to and how they, because just, and this is what I love about talking with other people who've done this kind of research, is that suddenly two minds work together. I hear what you're saying, and I go, you know what? I had that same question about Alfred Barnard, but I think that probably the reason he didn't describe those whiskeys was because of transportation and the fact that if you go to Scotland now, I remember I told somebody I was in Inverness and that I was going to drive all the way up to WIC for the day, and they come back. They couldn't fathom driving that much in the car. And we think of Scotland and Ireland not being that big, but back then, you're going to have to do things either by rail or by horseback. So your chance to be in London and actually taste something coming out of it's true wic. It's true.

Noah (00:44:39):
Yeah. I mean, I think it's really in America only after the Civil War that we have even time zones or the invention of PR and marketing agencies and national brands that allow spirits and cocktails to go kind of national. And in Scotland the same thing. I mean, you have the Giants Causeway, which is truly incredible. If you've not been, I would encourage your listeners to go, right, I mean the Led Zeppelin cover, but it's really this incredible, I think they're what hexagonal rock outcropping in Northern Ireland, and it's really down the road from Bush Mill. So fortunately, people were up in Northern Ireland for the Giants Causeway, and they got the taste whiskey from Bushmills or the town of Bushmills for hundreds of years. So the train and tourism definitely drove a lot of that. But you're right, I mean, again, so much of my book, so many reports of distillery owners, local politicians pushing for railways to be built or spurs, which really allow distilleries in all these rural places, whether it's America or Scotland, to get the ingredients that they need, and then to transport out all the finished product. I mean, we never really talk about that, this sort of twin development of the railway systems and the rise of whiskey, because obviously those two things go hand in hand. And I mean, it's not, maybe the sexiest topic without the railways whiskey would not have developed and turned into the international bestseller that it became,

Drew (00:46:25):
Well, even if you look at the history of Kentucky distilling and the fact that Log Still Distillery now is built on a spot where there was a distillery and a train rail that went through that had nine distilleries in this little town of New Hope.

Noah (00:46:41):
And you're right, I think first that the rivers were the first highways that was for distilleries. Boats were going up and down the rivers. That was, we see all these distilleries built along rivers in Kentucky because obviously that was the way that the mode of transportation and then railways replace the rivers. And it's the same thing that happens again and again. And suddenly you have these tiny towns where they become giant centers for distilling because of things like access to a waterway or that's where the grist mill was, and everybody brought their grain to be ground by this one person, and sometimes that person was paid in a percentage of the grain that they ground. And then of course, those people then turn the ground grain. I mean, how much bread could they make? They turned that into alcohol. So it was a way to vertically integrated business.

(00:47:43):
And you see that all over North America in America, but also in Canada too, where some of the regional whiskey baron started out as people who were millers mean, which again, I mean it's all these, we could spend this whole episode waxing very poetically and romantically about whiskey and the traditions and the lore, obviously. But in reality, I think what really shapes whiskey production and drinking are very prosaic things. I always say people make alcohol from whatever they could get, what's available, whether that's grain or that's fruit, or that's potatoes or old shoes, whatever it is, they're going to turn it to alcohol. And a lot of these things now seem like people had a conscious decision like, oh, I'm going to get the tallest stills in Scotland, like Glen Ang or the smallest like Mikel, but it's probably, everybody bought all their stuff secondhand anyway, all just, it'd be crazy to commission to still buy one from somebody who's selling one.

(00:48:57):
And your barn is so big. So that's how big the still is, right? All you. But again, I mean that over time develops into a house style and something that the marketing department then turns into a selling point. But originally, a lot of these things why people did what they did, it's often in Ireland, they're being taxed by how much malted barley. So they start using unmalted and malted barley to shrink their tax bill, which then later becomes the signature of or hallmark of Irish whiskey flavor. And it had nothing to do with flavor, but people trying to stay in business, I mean, the original distillers were farmers, and now it's very, companies like to brag about how they're sustainable and zero waste and being on a farm that was like whether or not you survive the winter, right? I mean, you can't throw anything out.

(00:49:55):
And whiskey was a way to, was part of a system where it preserved the grain longer. It added value. The leftovers from the distilling process could be fed to cattle. I mean, a lot of distillers, their real business was farming and the feedlot and the cattle, the distilling was just a means essentially to make better feed because in America we always distill with all the grain and the distill, and that turns out to be better for fattening cattle, they can't really handle very rich food. So again, a lot of the stuff that we did, now we only think about it in terms of flavor or trying to distinguish themselves from their neighborhood, but in reality, it had to do with fat and cows and a feed lot.

Drew (00:50:48):
Well, let's transition. One of the things I like about the way that you've set up your book is you give kind of a general history first of whiskey, but then you break the book up into different countries and basically give us kind a feel of the histories from each. And then also you discuss and have histories on the individual brands as they've gone along, which is great. You also talk about some of your own experiences. So you talked in there about your first trip to St. Andrew's in Scotland and what you were shocked by in terms of what they were drinking there, going to Scotland, what were you anticipating and what did you actually see?

Noah (00:51:34):
Yeah, I mean, in the late nineties, I went to college in the Hudson Valley and I thought, okay, I want to do junior year abroad. Unfortunately, I have a terrible aptitude for foreign languages or even English, but that's a different conversation. So I thought, okay, Scotland sounds amazing. And some kids who had gone from my college, my home college to America had gone to Scotland, and every year one would go to University of Edinburgh or Aberdeen or St. Andrew's. And I know at the time, nobody really knew anything about St. Andrew's before. The Royals were there several years, right? I mean, it's the oldest university in Scotland. It looked beautiful. It's the home of golf. I think there were eight golf courses at the time, maybe there are nine now. There are three rais and 35 pubs. And I was like, okay, this sounds like heaven.

(00:52:44):
I'm not a very good golfer, but I do like to play. So I was like, okay, this is incredible. The old course is there. So the spring semester of my junior year, I go to St. Andrew's with one other person from my school here, and we show up, and I only have to take two classes for two honors level classes. And I got full credit at my school at home that counted as a full workload. Usually I would take at least four classes, so I had a lot of free time. I mean, they only met twice. So definitely exploring the town and around. And a lot of it was the pub culture and the bar culture, and it's going around St. Andrew's. But to be honest, it was one of these things where most at the time was beer or really badly mixed cocktails, red Bull and vodka things added to a half beer, half cider concoction with a shot of Blackberry La Cure, if I remember the snake bite, all types of weird stuff. I felt compelled since I was there to drink scotch. How could we not, right?

Speaker 3 (00:54:05):
But

Noah (00:54:06):
It was just funny. I mean, even there, this was again, the scotch industry had crashed not that many years before, and you could find the Glen Fis of the world or Glen Levi, and each pub had maybe 3, 4, 5 whiskeys, definitely some blended scotch, some single mals, but nobody really would order it. I mean, maybe it just wasn't part of drinking culture at the time. And there was very little American whiskey. I remember there was Wild Turkey, which was sort of treated at the time, like a novelty and kind of like a joke because of its high proof and just the iconographic of Wild Turkey. And I would order it. I learned not to order it on the rocks since their ice very small. It would melt immediately.

Speaker 3 (00:55:01):
But

Noah (00:55:02):
It was one of these crazy things. I mean, most of the fancy order at the time wasn't whiskey, but it was Budweiser, right? Because the kids who wanted to show off in the pub, I mean Budweiser was imported. It was more expensive. It did not taste any better than the Buck Watch. And it just shocked me, of course. But it just reminded me that so much of what we drink and why we drink it has nothing to do with flavor or the actual beverage, but more to do with all types of, I don't know, motivations and marketing. I mean, it was a little, and I didn't go, I was on sky. We didn't really go to Tusker. I doubt that it was, I don't know if it was open at the time, even to the public. It's just one of these things where it just was not, I mean, now I'm sure kids students at say probably go to a lot of the distillers.

(00:56:05):
That's probably part of it. And it's like there's a giant Johnny Walker tasting room showroom in Edinburgh, and a lot of that just was not really, you could get whiskey, but it just wasn't a huge part of the culture. Even then. And you look at train spotting or the other movies, it's like whiskey doesn't really play into the culture at the time, beer drinking certainly, and other stuff. But yeah, I mean, I look back now especially and realize what a lost opportunity. I mean, I've certainly made up for that. There's plenty of scotch distillers, but at the time, oh, it have been cool to go to one of these distilleries or go, I kind of feel like the story of Japanese whiskey where the founder, the co-founder of Suntory, and later, if Nika shows up in Scotland and doesn't know anybody, and he has to talk his way into all of these distilleries, and I wish I had borrowed a page from Maso Taaka s Playbook and worked up the courage to show up at Esker or gone to one of these and tried to see if there was somebody who would take me around or give us a tour.

(00:57:46):
You

Drew (00:57:46):
Probably would've found that. They would've been like, sure, come on in. Nobody ever comes here. Sure. I show you.

Noah (00:57:54):
I remember there was an incredible butcher shop in St. Andrew's that had, every morning they'd get fresh deliveries of all types of meat and trays and trays of haggis. People really do eat haggis. Our dorm served haggis probably once a month. I never had it at our dorm, but you could. And I remember my friend was visiting from America, and she was a photographer, and half of the butcher shop was a giant freezer, but they had it, it was like one storefront was the freezer, and it had a giant glass window, so you could see all these different cuts of meat and carcasses hanging there. And she wanted to take photos of some of the meat because it was so impressive. And we went in and I remember being like, we have kind of a strange question. And they were like, okay, well, can we help you with, we're like, it's so impressive, your meat luck, or can we take some photos?

(00:58:54):
So cool. And there's a second. They were like, are we going to get thrown out on the street or are they going to like this? And they thought it was the most amazing thing that anybody have, right? Because clearly they were very proud of their meat selection. They were like, oh my God, really? We're like, yeah, it's so cool. This is incredible. And we don't see this in America. I mean, maybe I saw it on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx, some of the old school butchers still in New York, but for the most part, you go to supermarket and shrink wrapped and there's the meat. And they were so happy that we recognized. So you're right. If I had worked up the courage or had gotten an idea that, Hey, let's go to a distillery, I had to think that we would've found somebody who would've shown us around. And I would've been blown away,

Drew (00:59:45):
Silly me. I was in Manitoba a couple years ago and I was looking, and I was like, oh, crown Royal is in Ley. And I thought, why don't I roll up there? Well, I roll up there on a Saturday, and this place is nothing but a factory. I mean, I'm looking, I'm knocking on the door, nobody's answering. I'm like, okay. I mean, have you ever had any of those kind of disappointments while you've been trying to go visit or, yeah,

Noah (01:00:19):
Sometimes. Now it's sort of the opposite, where you have certain distilleries that are show distilleries, but the product is now made somewhere else, which is one of these funny things. I guess that's a good sign that we've gotten so big. That was something that was sort of commonplace in the wine world where you'd roll up in a vineyard, you see all their grape vines, and they wouldn't use any of the vines. They were getting grapes from across the country, from California, or they're buying their wine. And now I kind of feel like it's the same thing where you roll up and you see these, it's those very impressive distilleries. And then if you ask certain questions or during their talk, you realize, oh, right, nothing is actually being made here. Either you're buying it from somebody like MGP or somebody else. You have a 12-year-old whiskey, but Distillery's only been open for five years. Like, oh, okay,

(01:01:20):
Where you realize that this is for tourists, right? Which this is to teach people about the brand, but it's not actually where the whiskey is being made or bottled or warehouse. So yeah, I think we've definitely gotten to that point. Or sometimes I think, I dunno if I've ever gone to anywhere. I mean, definitely in the wine world, that happens a lot where I think winemakers are a lot more flaky where they'll be like, yeah, yeah, show up. And then nobody's there. And you're like, where did everyone like, oh, we had to leave. But in the whiskey world, generally, I've had pretty good luck and arranging visits with folks, and I mean, most people are so proud to show their distilleries and how they make their whiskey. And the devil is really in the details. I mean, there are only four ingredients. I mean, water, yeast, and grain.

(01:02:25):
I count the barrel as the fourth ingredient, sort of a secret ingredient that nobody talks about. And the box is pretty small, right? I mean, that's it. You can't really add anything else. I mean, maybe speared caramel in certain countries, but very small, but yet every whiskey tastes differently, right? So it's just incredible. I mean, it still boggles my mind to think about that. Just these slight differences during each step of fermentation and distillation, maturation makes such a big difference. And for so long as an industry, we didn't really care about those differences because we wanted consistency. It's still the gold standard, but nobody wanted barrels that tasted differently. There was no mechanism to sell them or bottle them even. And distributors didn't want them. Consumers didn't want them bartenders, so they would either be blended out or they'd be drunk by the distillery workers. Fred no always likes to say that. Booker would say, how do you know what the best barrels are in a warehouse? And he'd say how? It's like, well, they're shiny. What do you mean they're shiny? He'd say, well, yeah, because the workers, they would knock the dust off of the barrels with their stomachs as they were taking samples out because they knew what the best of whiskey was, and that was okay then, because at the time it didn't really matter.

(01:03:54):
You just be blended with everything else. Yeah, I mean, I think the scale sometimes is mind boggling. Where you go up to Corby up in Windsor, the High Room Walker Distillery, which is right across the river from Detroit, and the size of Dr. Don Livermore's facility is incredible. And you realize, I think sometimes as an industry, we have this idea maybe because of farmer's markets or buying butter or meat, that to make a craft product, you have to have a small farm and you have to do things on a small scale. Where in whiskey, I think you can make wonderful whiskey, egg giant distilleries, you can make horrible whiskey. It's small distilleries. It's more about the people, the ingredients, and the individual distillery than the size of the distillery that's going to dictate. I mean, that's the bad news, right?

Drew (01:05:01):
Yeah.

Noah (01:05:02):
There's no shortcuts.

Drew (01:05:05):
So as I look around the landscape, I mean, I've now been introduced to whiskeys from South Africa, from Tasmania. Of course we have Taiwan. Where is a place we're sleeping on? Is there a place that you've been to or that you've experienced the whiskey from that you're like, more people need to know about the whiskey from X place.

Noah (01:05:34):
That's the kind of conversation I feel like a few years ago where you and I would be at a cocktail party or at somebody's house for dinner, we'd bring a bottle and it would blow their mind that whiskey was being made in Taiwan, or whiskey was being made in Scandinavia. And they were like, what do you mean? It must be horrible, right? They would assume that. It's like, no, it's actually really good. And now I feel like people come up to me and they're like, oh, have you had this whiskey from fill in the blank country? And I'm like, what? There's a distillery there. You know what I mean? It's gone so global so quickly. I mean, even for us, I feel like sometimes it's hard to keep up. There's so many distilleries all over the world who are making whiskey. But I mean, I think some of the best whiskey, Scandinavia has really so many wonderful distilleries there, and we'll see more of that.

(01:06:34):
I think India will continue to see more. China has several distilleries that Diageo and Pau have tried to build, but we're still a few years out before tasting their spirits or their whiskey. Yeah, I mean, that's kind of the exciting part now is that if you had told me incredible whiskey would be made in Tasmania, I mean it sounds like a joke, right? There's no way, or in Australia all, I mean outside of the main whiskey regions probability of that coming out well was so low, but yet they've so superseded any of our expectations. And I think that we will see, I mean that's the interesting about the Whiskey Bible is that there's the end, one of the last chapters is about global whiskey regions that places that aren't Japan or Canada or America or Ireland or Scotland, where their industries are currently growing now, and I mean, knock on wood feature editions of the whiskey Bible, some of those places may need their own

(01:07:49):
Chapters. I mean, you look at a place like France where after the us, the French drink, the most amount of scotch anywhere in the world, which is kind of mind blowing, and they used to drink even more than Americans. So you have all of these distilleries opening up in France and other places. I mean, who knows? I mean, if we have this conversation again in five or 10 years, hopefully, I mean, you and I could be talking about, I can't believe that you didn't include S such and S such in your book when it first came out. It's like, well, you know what? Everybody in 2025, that country region, they were just getting started in my book, the Business of Spirits in oh eight, that came out in oh seven. I talked about some of the spirits that might break it big, and I think there's one on tequila and mis cal, right?

(01:08:47):
And that's like, yeah, I called that one. But there are also some other spirits in there. We're still waiting for Pisco and KSA to catch on in America in a way that everybody always hopes it will, but it never quite gets there. But maybe one day, I mean, that's the same thing with whiskey. I mean literally mean in the second or third edition, if there is one of the whiskey Bible, hopefully there is. It'll be very exciting to figure out who needs more coverage. And no doubt there will be countries and areas that certainly will deserve that as their own chapter that right now we're kind of just building up and are poised to become major players.

Drew (01:09:35):
Well, Noah, thank you so much. We could probably talk and talk and talk, especially on the history subject that travel as well, a great book. You have done a lot of research and a lot of writing in there, some very interesting history in there that we started talking about at the very beginning. Some things that add to the stories that I've been searching on as well. And so just adds to everybody's whiskey knowledge. It's great for the beginner because it'll give you a really good overview of, and you can pick and choose what chapters you want to start with and go one whiskey to the next, or one country to the next. But excellent book comes out September, September 9th. Yeah, September 9th, all over. It'll be available,

Noah (01:10:20):
Yeah, anywhere that they sell books, online bookstores, wherever you like to buy books, they should be able to get you a copy of the Whiskey Bible. Thank you so much for having me on. Longtime Listener, so it's nice to be on the show. Fantastic. Cheers. Cheers.

Drew (01:10:37):
Well, I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Noah Rothbaum, the author of the Whiskey Bible, and coming up next week, we are going back to the great 48 Tour. It's been on hiatus for a while, and we're going to do it up a big way with a big Western swing. I have 10 states to go visit. We're going to start out in Colorado, head out to California, head up to Washington State, out to Montana. It is going to be big, so I hope you'll join me. Make sure you subscribed to the Whiskey Lore podcast so you don't miss the adventure. I'm your host, drew Hanish. Enjoy your week and until next time, cheers Atva. For show notes and transcripts, head to whiskey lore.org/interviews. Whiskey lores of production of Travel Fuels Life, LC.