Ep. 128 - Developing Character Through Grain, Wood, and the Art of the Blend

Transcript

Drew (00:00:19):
Welcome to Whiskey Lore the Interviews. I'm your host, Drew Hannush, the bestselling author of Whiskey Lore's Travel Guide to Experiencing American Whiskey, Experiencing Kentucky Bourbon, and the book The Bust 24 of Whiskey's Biggest Myths, Whiskey Lore Volume One. And today I am excited to introduce to you a whiskey maker who has worn many hats in his life, both inside and outside the whiskey industry. And a man that I finally got to meet about two years ago when he invited me up to be a part of Mammoth Distillery and Michigan State University's excursion out to South Manitou Island, which was a lot of fun, learning about the historic grain rose and rye. And today we'll talk about that. But we're also going to talk about his main focus these days, which is stretching the limits of the whiskey blend for Whiskey Gypsy, a brand that was started by Raj Alva and singer-songwriter, Eric Church.

(00:01:15):
Ari, thank you for joining me today. It's great to chat with you finally on screen now, so others can hear. I know.

Ari (00:01:23):
Thank you so much for having me. Thank you for having us. As you said, a couple years ago, we got to hang out on a deserted island basically for a bunch of hours. We took a ferry out there. We hopped in the back of a trailer that was attached to a tractor, drove all around a deserted island, and we had a great talk. And so you're one of the few people, and maybe it's the same thing. We're usually in this industry, you know people by Zoom, but we've actually hung out in real life, and now is really our first time connecting by the screen.

Drew (00:01:53):
Absolutely. Walk the fields.

Ari (00:01:56):
That's right.

Drew (00:01:57):
Yeah. So we're going to circle back around to more details on Whiskey Gypsy, but give me an idea of how did this project come together?

Ari (00:02:08):
It's really wild. You mentioned the two co-founders, Raj Alva and Eric Church. Sort of different walks of life. Raj was born in India, immigrated to Michigan when he was a kid, went to the University of Michigan, Harvard Business School, Wall Street business, sort of took that route, has always been passionate about food and drink and whiskey in particular. He was paired on a golf tournament randomly paired, fatefully paired, we should say, with Eric Church, who's a recording artist, performing musician, composer, kind of country music, rock and roll superstar, who also really loves whiskey in a way that for me was actually really unique. I'll talk about it in a second because Eric's approach to whiskey kind of blew my mind. But Raj and Eric were partnered together during the golf tournament and very quickly discovered a shared love of whiskey, all things whiskey, international whiskey, travel, the ability for whiskey to communicate narratives, stories and values.

(00:03:12):
They understood all of this, whiskey just like food or art or anything really. And at the time, Eric actually had a deal with Jack Daniels, which is a little whiskey company, Tennessee. He had his name on a bottle of Jack Daniels. He was the second person ever to have his name on a bottle of Jack Daniels. The first was Frank Sinatra.

(00:03:36):
Eric was number two. That would've been enough, I think, for most people, certainly most people with celebrity credentials. I'll get paid every time a bottle sells. Eric's a little different. He loved that experience so much, but he wanted a little bit more creative control than Brown Forman was perhaps willing to let him have. And so he and Raj developed, hatched this plan to start a whiskey company that would give them creative control, allow them to look at whiskeys from around the world and really participate in an industry that they had a lot of fondness for.

Drew (00:04:11):
That's nice. Yeah. I mean, I imagine that when you go to Jack Daniels and you say, "I would like to have a whiskey with my name on it, " or they offer it to you. They don't go, "Okay, let's figure out what mash bill you want.

Ari (00:04:23):
" Yeah, I think it's something like that. And it's definitely, they go to the artist and say, "Hey, you've wrapped up an addressable market here and we'd like to mainline our product directly to them if possible." And that said, the Jack Daniels Eric Church product is really good. Eric had a really good product with Jack Daniels. He just didn't have the creative control

Drew (00:04:43):
That he

Ari (00:04:44):
Wanted. And he saw the parallels between songwriting and telling stories and communication in song. Just as Raj understood that this is what brands do as well. Brands communicate values, brands. You have to develop trust with an audience. You have to mean something to the audience. And then there was a little bit of a gap. Look, a lot of whiskey companies, the last thing the world needs probably is another whiskey company. But there was this gap where a lot of whiskey companies weren't really reflecting that idea, that spirit can communicate and transmit values, narratives, stories like that. So they set out to do just that. Raj and Eric started headhunting, talked to all the usual suspects. And I was fortunate enough to get a call first from Raj and then from Eric. We talked a little bit about their backgrounds and my background and their approach to food and art and my approach to whiskey making.

(00:05:35):
And we found some really great synergies and it felt right. And ultimately you just have to go with those feelings. And so that was about four years ago. Since then, we've released six or seven products and

Drew (00:05:45):
We have

Ari (00:05:45):
A bunch more in the bin that have been developed or in the process of being developed. We're building this product plan going out. And we think Taken as a whole, the product family that we've created has something to say and has a reason to exist in this very crowded market.

Drew (00:06:01):
Nice. Well, let's take a step back and let's look at how you've evolved over time to get here, to be at this point where you're able to do what you're doing now, which is creating a diversity of flavor from a number of sources. As I read through and I started seeing some of the things that you've done through your life, you remind me of me in a lot of ways that ... My dad was a policeman for 25 years and he would say to me, why are you changing jobs again? It's like you start doing one career and then all of a sudden, six months later, you're doing something completely different. And I would always say to him that, Dad, for me, it's like I love to learn. So it's like each step I go, I love to learn. And then after a while, it's like the career comes together and I sort of feel like you're in that same boat.

(00:06:55):
So where did you get started in the days before you got into Whiskey Blending?

Ari (00:07:03):
Good question. I didn't know your dad was a police officer.That's fascinating. And both my parents were teachers.

Drew (00:07:10):
And

Ari (00:07:11):
So it was a similar situation where they went to school for it and then they started doing it and then they did it till they retired. And I never really had that clear focus or drive in that way, like you said. For me, curiosity has been a great asset and the ability to hopefully communicate and work hard have been great assets. But for me, I think it really started with a large Jewish family in Southeastern Michigan, big extended family where we got together for meals all the time. Food was a big part of it. Both sides of my family, my mom's side of the family and my dad's side of the family have cookbook authors.

(00:07:52):
Food was, from the very beginning, every holiday had its own requisite dishes and meals that conveyed some part of the narrative that we were telling. We didn't farm as a family, but many of us gardened and growing our own food and incorporating those foods into meal. It was just part of our life with my immediate family, but also uncles, aunts, grandparents, cousins, all of that. And so very early on, I understood that there's this connection between what we put into our body and the stories that we try to share. Fast forward a bunch of years, I thought I wanted to work in politics. Had a job at the state capital as a policy analyst after studying policy and realized very quickly that that wasn't for me, didn't feel right. I was conflicted because I felt like I had invested heavily in terms of time, money, but also my identity in doing this thing.

(00:08:42):
It was an interest of mine. And then I found out I was really not particularly happy doing it, and that was a bit surprising. Around the same time, a friend of mine, a very good friend's grandmother who lived in France, had a bed and breakfast in France. She broke her leg. I was very unhappy working at the state capitol in Lansing, Michigan.

(00:09:01):
My friend's grandmother broke her leg. She ran bed and breakfast in France and he said, "Do you want to go and help her?" And so I quit my job and I got a one-way ticket to France and got a job at her bed and breakfast in Southwestern France. And because I didn't have a ton of money, I got a job at the winery at the bottom of the road. And my job was to prune vines with migrant workers

Drew (00:09:22):
From

Ari (00:09:23):
Eastern Europe, from Morocco. And I would wake up very early in the morning, ruin vines in Southwestern France, and I was very happy doing that. I really loved that. And then I got into when it was time for the harvest, we began that, when it was time for the crush, I got involved with that, making the wine. And then of course at the end of the season, you have a fet, you have a massive party and everyone comes out and you party very hard. Then I would go home. And I fell in love with wine making. I was there for

Drew (00:09:53):
Four months.

Ari (00:09:54):
Absolutely fell in love with every aspect of it, from hard work, but beautiful work and the passion of people behind it. And I just wanted to learn more about wine and couldn't afford all the expensive wines that I wanted to try. So I got a job at a wine bar and started to learn about wines that way. And then went back to France the following summer and then ended up bartending around the world. So I'd go to France for three or four months during the summer, and then I'd bartend in Michigan, New York, Hawaii, London, a couple of other places in between. And that's how I built up my knowledge about wine and then eventually cocktails. And cocktails is how I started thinking more about spirits, but from a winemaker's perspective, because that had been my foundation.

Drew (00:10:39):
That's really interesting. I mean, when you go back and you think of that evolution, you're really kind of developing your palate and your senses along the way as well, starting with food, moving into wine, and now moving into spirits. I mean, did you start to see connections between them and did it help spur this creative juice in you to explore something a little deeper in terms of doing blends? Did you ever blend wines? Did you ever try to see if you could take two bottles of wine and make something interesting out of them?

Ari (00:11:17):
That's a fantastic question. I've never been asked the question about blending wines before. And absolutely. Yeah, we blended wines

Drew (00:11:23):
100%.

Ari (00:11:25):
It's a super fun thing to do. Almost every winery that I've ever been in at some point has a table in the back where they are blending different wines. "Hey, we produce this. We're not in control. "With wine, you're not in complete control. You're responding to the environment, you're responding to the season, you have to respond to what nature gives you. And that means there's going to be a lot of variation sometimes because the wine gods are feeling benevolent, the wine is good. Sometimes it's pretty good, but it's lacking in some component, and that's where blending of wine comes in, where you can make something that's greater than the sum of its parts by bringing together inputs that have some really nice characteristics, but might be lacking in others. So the same tool that the wine blender uses is in many ways the same tool that the bartender uses, which is the same tool that the whiskey blender uses and it's the graduated cylinder.

Drew (00:12:21):
Oh,

Ari (00:12:21):
Okay.This is the tool of the blender. It doesn't matter what you're blending. If it's liquid and you need to do multiple iterations, the 50 milliliter graduated cylinder, which I give to bartenders almost every time I go to a bar, I carry these around because every bartender should have one. This allows you to, on a small level, create multiple prototypes that can then scale up infinitely if you want them to.

(00:12:46):
So the graduated cylinder became a fixture behind the bars that I worked at and happy hour wasn't blending wine, but for me, I liked it when the happy hour was we would put a graduated cylinder in front of you and for $10, you could blend any whiskeys that were behind the bar. And in general, what that meant is that folks would want to blend different scotches because even though Scotland's very small, you have this large spectrum of character in the whiskey from the smokey to the ethereal and the viscous to the lighter and the honeyed. And that's like a set of crans or a set of paints. You can do all kinds of cool mixtures. You can be your own John Glazer from Compass Box by mixing all these different scotches.

(00:13:32):
When folks would blend American whiskeys, the result was a little different. It was oftentimes quite muddled because there's not the variation in American whiskey that you get in places like Scotland. And so even just blending a couple together with a scotch whiskey, you could go in all kinds of directions and choose which characteristics to highlight. But with the American whiskey, it generally wasn't so. The more you kind of blended, the more to the middle it came. And that has everything to do with the last 90 years of American whiskey production and consolidation, not just consolidation of businesses, but the homogenization of thought and the homogenization of expectation from the consumer. And by blending different whiskeys from all over the world, as we do it at Whiskey Gypsy, we kind of take some of our favorite parts of American whiskey, but then we blend them with whiskeys from other places in the world because we're not particularly fastidious about political boundaries.

(00:14:31):
We care more of who's making the whiskey. What does it taste like? Does it play well with others?

Drew (00:14:36):
Does

Ari (00:14:36):
It contribute to this blend? And so the notion of whiskey blending came very much out of that wine blending tradition. And then later this playfulness at the bar, which is you've got a graduated cylinder, you have a bunch of finished products. What if you choose to not approach those bottles as finished products, but as ingredients, as components?

Drew (00:14:57):
And

Ari (00:14:58):
Then the onus is on the person sitting at the bar, visiting the bar to be creative with the bartender. And what was really great is as a bartender, it got to work through hundreds and hundreds of cross-category whiskey blends with consumers that kind of built the playbook of what has turned into the Whiskey Gypsy legacy series.

Drew (00:15:20):
That's fun. So you're kind of recalling some of your firsthand conversations with people and seeing where they're lighting up versus maybe ... It's funny because I went to a speakeasy in California, and while I was there, the mixologist was making up a cocktail for someone, and he had a bottle of Woodford Reserve, and he had a bottle of LaFreug and he was making a cocktail out of this. And I was going, " What the heck is this that you would be making with these two things? "And he said," Well, nobody would want to drink this Woodford Reserve like it is because I've got kind of a black tea infusion in with the ... "And so to see, we just see a bottle of whiskey on the shelf in a bar and we think somebody's just going to pour it and eat for you or a very simple cocktail.

(00:16:18):
It's going to be the other ingredients, not necessarily the blending of whiskeys as well in the background that people don't probably think of that. And yet that's a real tool for being able to expand a cocktail, I would imagine.

Ari (00:16:37):
Yeah. So there's the blend, which are what the distillates, the mature distillates, in most cases, the mature distillates that you can put together that you can compose in any kind of ratio you want based on that ratio, the resulting distillate can go in many different directions. With the tea that you were talking about, and tea is fantastic, I think tea and whiskey go together very well teen cocktails go together very well, incredibly complimentary, particularly in liquors, but also in high proof, unsweetened whiskeys. But I consider those augmentations. So there's the blend, and then there's the augmentation, and individual components can be augmented before being blended, or a blend can be augmented after the distillate has figured out where it wants to live. And the augmentations is everything from tea, secondary barrel aging, dave, aging, anything that's going to change or modify the character of that distillate or that blend is I consider an augmentation.

(00:17:42):
And that is one, just like blending is one of the avenues that we're looking at at Whiskey Gypsy. Augmentation is an entire product family that we have.

Drew (00:17:53):
Okay. You mentioned, and it's interesting because I just did a episode of Whiskey Lore around the difference between what's going on now in the whiskey industry versus what was going on in the 1980s when everybody was talking whiskey depression. And we look back at that time period where whiskey was in a real lull in the market. But what's interesting about that, to your point, if you were a bartender trying to mix or blend with an American whiskey all the way up until probably about 2010, for the longest time, it was really up to four big corporations that were handling it. You were either getting something from Hiram Walker, you were getting something from Shinley turns with Diageo through the '70s, Seagrams, and those were distillery or companies, whiskey companies that were based in New York or in Canada. And you didn't have this look at a deeper look at whiskey in terms of flavor because they're trying to please shareholders versus now we're at a time where we have distilleries all over the place and a lot of farm distilleries that are now starting to work with terroir and trying to bring back heritage grains.

(00:19:22):
So are you finding now that your opinion is changing as to American whiskey and that diversity of flavor and thinking of rye is another thing that really has come back into the market as well as a style of whiskey.

Ari (00:19:41):
So there's a lot in there.

(00:19:45):
In my opinion, I think you're right to identify that consolidation, homogenization, which is all about shareholder value and scale. Can you scale consistent products? And sometimes that means blending, but in the context of North America, oftentimes blending means incorporating neutral spirit into flavorful spirit, which is a dilution of character. And that's what blending has come to be understood as. But that's one kind of blending. You can blend, that's blending to extend a volume or to reduce the character so that it's more palatable to more people. That's one type of blending, but there's this other type of blending that's kind of the equivalent of added malts in Scotland, which is if you blend different straight whiskey products or different foliaged, not blending to extend a really good flavorful component, but blending to complement different characteristics together to create a distillate that has more character than any one of them by themselves, which is a different approach to blending.

(00:20:55):
It is one of the ways that whiskey makers who are not bound by single source distillate, a distillate from a single source can bring new characteristics, new blends into the market that are very different. You can achieve complexity and depth in a blend that's very difficult to achieve in a single source distillery just because when you have multiple different products working together in the right ratios, you've got levels that you couldn't from any one of them by themselves. So I think the mindset is coming around that blending is a tool that whiskey makers can use to express. And obviously folks like John Glaser and Nancy Fraley and many other folks who have worked at multiple distilleries and have in some cases blended whiskeys from different distilleries have kind of paved this road, which was very difficult to convince people for a long time because in the United States and North America, people thought that whiskey comes from a single distillery.

(00:21:56):
And isn't that ... Well, sure, but that is a historical reason for that. And it's not just market-based, has as much to do with politics as anything else. But you're also right when you think about flavor and after so long of just let's make a lot of consistent whiskey that kind of meets in the mainstream middle, that consumers, certain clusters of consumers are looking for the new flavors, new expressions, new types of whiskey. "Can we pull the best practices from certain styles of whiskey in Scotland, apply them here in America? Can we use different types of grains? "You mentioned rye, you mentioned grains,

(00:22:38):
Which now, because earlier we mentioned blends and then we mentioned augmentation. Grain, I see grain and its impact on distillate, the choices that whiskey makers make in terms of grain and its impact on making that raw distillate that will then be matured. Grain is one of the really three big decisions that a whiskey maker has to make. What is this distillate going to be? And I'll include yeast and fermentation condition of that. But what is the distillate in the substrate that the specific grain varietal is part of that? Not making a decision about grain varietal is also a decision. So if a company defaults to inexpensive commodity grain that might have been sitting in a massive silo on the side of the highway for five years and they want to use that as the main substrate in their product, that's a choice. It's not a choice to optimize for character, it's to optimize for low cost and consistency, which is kind of the way the industry's been going for a very long time.

(00:23:37):
But whiskey makers have the ability to select grain. That's the first choice. And then second, after that distillate is mature, how it is augmented, secondary aging, whatnot. And then the third leg of that whiskey maker stool is blending. Once you've chosen the distillate, once you've chosen how to mature it or augment it, how are you choosing to blend it? And those are the three legs of the stool. Those are the three sort of approaches that Whiskey Gypsy is interested in exploring.

Drew (00:24:08):
And

Ari (00:24:08):
So when Raj and Eric and I have our early conversations about what can a whiskey brand add to a very crowded category, it was we can tell really honest, true, compelling, credible, authentic stories about grain, about augmentation and about blending in such a way that hopefully it not only is really interesting to enthusiasts and bartenders and gatekeepers at the distributorship and the liquor stores, but also maybe helps the whiskey enthusiast look at other brands in terms of some of the decisions that were made in terms of the decisions about, was this brand optimized for quality? Was this brand optimized for a consumer experience or was it optimized for efficiency at the expense potentially of flavor?

Drew (00:25:00):
Yeah. It's interesting. I do sometimes wonder if people are confused when we talk about blends, when you hear the word blend, the first thing you might think of is a scotch blend. I don't know that people understand the art of blending in terms of how the scots do it versus how the Canadians do it versus how Americans do it, because we all do it differently depending on what it is that we're trying to achieve. If you're in Scotland and you're making a blend, you're usually taking a base of grain neutral spirits and you're flavoring it with a single malt or a bunch of single malts that you want to try to develop a flavor out of to create a milder whiskey in most cases traditionally, but we're getting a little Compass Box is a great addition. And I think Compass Box uses more of what we're talking about with an American kind of tradition where you're actually not using grain neutral spirits, but you are blending one for ones or a bunch of different, what we'd call straight whiskeys over here.

(00:26:05):
The idea, do you sense that the customer doesn't really necessarily understand what a bourbon blend is and the fact that this is not apples for apples, what the Scotts are doing with a blended whiskey, although we use the same term.

Ari (00:26:26):
Well, what makes it really difficult or I think difficult to understand because it's convoluted in Scotland, correct me if I'm wrong, the grain spirit has been aged for a minimum of three years and used gooper. So it has a certain character. It's not purely neutral grain spirit. Whereas in the United States, a blended bourbon can be blended with neutral grain spirit, literally vodka to dilute the character.

(00:26:56):
But vodka does not have to see oak for any amount of time. It is simply alcohol flavor, vodka. It's flavorless, colorless, aromalist, characterless vodka used to extend a flavorful straight bourbon component. And that has been traditionally blended bourbon. It's the reason why in America blended bourbons have a bad name is because traditionally it's take a really good straight bourbon product and extend it with neutral grain spirit that has never seen wood. It is a pure dilution of character, and then you hit it with caramel coloring to make it look older.That's an inferior product. What we're talking about is a little bit more like a vaded malt where you're taking ... And this is where on the label, blended bourbon whiskey generally means neutral green spirit has been added to it as well as caramel coloring and a blend of straight bourbons, which sounds the same to 99% of the people, means something very different.

(00:27:56):
It means only straight bourbons were involved in this blend, which is not about extension, which is the blending opponent. And so yeah, it's confusing for the American consumer because very similar words are being used to describe vastly different products at different points of quality.

Drew (00:28:15):
Yeah. Well, let's take a step back again and jump into your evolution next in once you got into bartending and you ended up back in East Lansing again at the Michigan State Program and talk about how that happened. And we're going to talk a little bit about Chris Berglund because he's somebody that I'm fascinated with and I wish that I had learned about him and had a chance to actually talk to him before and do an interview with him before he passed, but such an incredible person in terms of the development of craft distilleries across the country that we don't hear his name very often. So talk about how you got involved in Michigan State and working with him.

Ari (00:29:10):
Yeah. Oh, and thank you for bringing up Dr. Berdlund, who was a mentor to myself, as well as many other people who were fortunate enough to learn from him in the time that he was supporting the craft spirits world. So I was bartending wine bars, getting really into cocktails, and I had a concept of bringing back into market a number of liqueurs that had been used prior to prohibition, because read about them in old cocktail books, but had disappeared. And I thought myself and my bartender friends would like these older spirits to be recreated so we can experiment with them, so we can make new cocktails using old ingredients or maybe elevated versions of those cocktails, modern versions of them. So I had a list, about 10 different liquors that I wanted to make, and I started looking around to see where I could learn.

(00:30:04):
I knew how to make wine, I knew how to make cocktails, but I did not know how to distill. And so I looked at Harriet Watt in Scotland, and I looked at the University of Cognac and thought to myself, there was no Jim Beam Center

Drew (00:30:19):
In

Ari (00:30:19):
Lexington at UK at this point. And so I started Googling, how can I learn how to distill? And then through Google, I found that Michigan State University of all places, because serendipity seems to be the name of the game here, had started the nation's first distilling program of any university in North America. It seems strange and arbitrary. However, Michigan State University was the nation's first agricultural university. Spirits are value-added agriculture. It actually makes sense that Michigan State would look at an acre of land and figure out how you could extract the most value from it and determine that it's through distillation. It's

(00:31:01):
Not through bread or cow food or whatever. It's through distillation. So online, and it's still there, the first textbook that I got on distillation was Chris Berglund's Companion to Distillers, which he put on. Dr. Chris Bergen, who founded the MSU program, put online a free textbook. It didn't cost anything. It was about 120 pages long, extremely technical. I did not understand most of the words in it. And the reason it turns out he put it online for free is because he wrote it and he pulled from a lot of sources and he didn't necessarily cite all of them and he didn't necessarily ... He just wanted this textbook out there. And myself and a lot of other folks 15 or so years ago were downloading this textbook, printing it, writing all sorts of copious notes, had a dictionary on one side to try to figure out what he was talking about.

(00:32:04):
What does rectification mean? What are these different coefficients that he's talking about in terms of what happens on the inside of the still? It's a vapor.

(00:32:16):
So that was my initial crash course. And then I started emailing this guy, Dr. Berglund. So I had it. I said, listen, I downloaded your book. Don't really understand it. I realized there's a lot going on there. I'd love to talk to you about it because I have this concept of these spirits. No response, no response. Eventually, he just forwarded one of my emails to one of his students who responded to me. And that student was Johnny Jeffrey, a fantastic distiller, blender consultant who's been all over the industry. Johnny Jeffrey responded to that email, said, why don't you come up and we'll have a conversation? And that's what got it started. So Berglund sort of punted me to this underling, who's an incredibly talented human being, kind human being, who invited me up. And then we just hit it off. The three of us had lunch.

(00:33:13):
I talked about what I was doing. Johnny Jeffrey was at Michigan State getting a master's degree in barrel maturation, and his master's degree is available online. He wrote a really amazing paper about aging distillate in different size barrels and how the impact of surface area and volume ratio changes the extraction rates of different compounds of those barrels and how a spirit might be nurtured to maturity faster. That was the idea behind his paper.

(00:33:44):
I had no interest in publishing a paper. I wanted to develop products. It was entrepreneurial. And so at that lunch, Johnny Jeffrey and Dr. Berglund and myself decided that Johnny was going to run point on the analytical side along with Justin Aden, who's currently at Stranahan's, so three-man team. And because I had a history of customer service working with people, I understood the industry, I was going to handle a little bit more of the customer service, project development and ideation. And during that time, they hired me and hundreds of brands, literally hundreds of entrepreneurs came to Michigan State for weekend workshops or to have their entire portfolio of products developed. There was a time there where we were really the only, that I'm aware of, the only accelerator, incubator and accelerator in the craft spirit space where we had a full-on production scale distillery,

(00:34:45):
And we didn't have our own products. Folks would come in, we sold our expertise. And if you want a vodka that tastes like this vodka, this is how you might do it. If you love this whiskey, this is how you might use this yeaststrain this fermentation technique, this distillation technique, and here are your standard operating procedures. And if you want to start a distillery, we're training up all of these undergraduates and some graduate students who might be able to help you set up your distillery or they can be your first hires. So it was a really incredible pipeline through which graph distilleries, as well as breweries and wineries have been seeded with students from Michigan State University who have studied under Berglund. And now whether it's a wine conference or a spirits conference or a beer get together, there's oftentimes dozens of students that have been impacted by Dr. Berglund.

(00:35:42):
So his impact is felt across the entire industry, not just spirits.

Drew (00:35:47):
Being from Michigan, I got really interested to see if there was any kind of distilling history there at all. And there really wasn't. I mean, there was industrial alcohol being made in Detroit, but most of the stuff was going on across the river in Windsor. But then I got curious and I'm like, well, why the heck would he get started with this in Michigan? Why was Michigan the place that this would start? But it all went back to what, 1996 or so, I think it was, that I found a newspaper article about it where it was basically, as you said, it's an agricultural thing. Michigan is a great agricultural state, and there was a need for doing something with leftover apples. And the reason why there were no distilleries was because the license was extremely expensive and that in 1996 they changed the law and made a $3,000 license or something.

(00:36:51):
It just greatly reduced the price, which opened it up to everybody, which got him interested in maybe doing something with it. It's just amazing to see because such a humble beginning for somebody who, again, it seems like he stayed humble because we know Dave Pickrell's name. We hear his name all the time. And I would say that Chris Berglund had as much, it was more people come to him instead of him going to them, but that he's kind of been lost in all the stories because the distillers go off and do what they do rather than if you go to Jay Reger, you'll see out in Kansas City, you'll see they have a Dave Picarrell room. It's like he was there, so his spirit is still in the building.

Ari (00:37:48):
It is. And we worked at Michigan State, we worked very closely with Pickerel on a number of projects. And having the opportunity to sit in a room with Dr. Berglund and with Dave Pickrell and to hear them go back and forth with Project Ideation, I wish I had recorded it because it really was two of the greats. Now you mentioned that there was a need for it because of the apple glut. My perspective, my approach to describing it would be just slightly different, which is Dr. Berglund was a force of nature who would not take no for an answer. He didn't necessarily see a need to distill the glut of apples. He saw an opportunity to create a program that would synthesize two things that he was passionate about, food science and chemical engineering. And Dr. Berglund, who's from Sweden, a proud Swede,

(00:38:45):
Really loved all kinds of Northern European Odevie and niche distillates, and he could speak about them at length and passionately. And so I think he just really loved the process of spirit making. He saw Michigan, which is a distiller's paradise. This is going to sound silly, but Michigan, which sits at the 45th parallel, which means you have four seasons, Michigan, which has three growth zones, a major agricultural university, a fruit belt, grain can grow in three different soil types and three different growth zones. The entire Ohio River Valley is essentially one growth zone, which is why the spirit from Indiana and Ohio and Kentucky and Tennessee is oftentimes undifferentiated because it's the same water source essentially, very similar maturation conditions, the same grain. But Michigan, a ton of fruit, all kinds of different grains, fantastic agricultural school, and of course it's two peninsulas that shut out into the largest reservoir of freshwater on earth.

(00:39:52):
All of the makings

Drew (00:39:53):
Of

Ari (00:39:53):
What you would want for a distiller because you have fruit and you have grain. I love the University of Kentucky, not to timestamp this, but they're beam conferences next week and we're

(00:40:03):
Speaking at it as Michigan State to go down there and talk about bourbon production, but the Beam Conference in the University of Kentucky, Kentucky is rightfully focused on bourbon, whereas the Michigan State Distilled Spirits program was about agriculture. So other folks were coming in with cherries, apples, pears, plums, quinoa, millet, storgum, rice, cornwheat, barley, rye, we have stills and expertise, potatoes, sweet potatoes. It goes on and on. Any substrate that someone would bring, we would figure out how to turn into a product. So it was a little bit different than City University of Kentucky, which because of its location in Kentucky is focused on bourbon, the industry there.

(00:40:52):
So yeah, Berglund saw an opportunity. Michigan State, it was the right place because he could tell the story that this agricultural school was absolutely right, but he had a desire to do this. I feel like if Michigan State hadn't gone along with it, he would've ended up doing it at Cornell or UC Davis or some of the other universities where he was doing weekend workshops and teaching folks about distillation. It just so happened that Michigan State was able to pull the trigger and support him in his vision and his timing could not have been bitter. Oh, and you mentioned that law, he wrote that law. Oh,

Drew (00:41:29):
Okay. It wasn't

Ari (00:41:30):
Something that just happened. He was out in front of that because it was his vision. He was able to work with legislators and lobbyists to change the law, and then he raised money from private and public sources to build the distillery. And it was really Dr. Berglund's vision and his grit and his ability to keep on going after more powerful people than him told him to stop,

Drew (00:41:58):
Which

Ari (00:41:59):
Happened repeatedly, almost I would say annually. But he provided the vision and the gas and the tank, and he also had the smarts to figure out how to make it happen politically on the legislature side, as well as politically at the university side.

Drew (00:42:17):
Yeah. Well, you were there when the craft brewing scene was going crazy. I mean, Michigan, Grand Rapids especially. And so my initial feeling was that it was probably craft brewing that had opened the door to distilling, but that's with me not knowing what was going on at Michigan State.

Ari (00:42:39):
Yeah. And the distillery at Michigan State benefited from the craft brewing scene, which had been very successful, created a ton of jobs, a lot of tax revenue. And at the same time, the winemaking industry, particularly in Northern Michigan, was taking off, winning all kinds of accolades. There was a lot of investment from all over the country into the vineyards of Northern Michigan. So it made sense to do this added value added agricultural step of distillation, which could be seen as a bolt-on to both distilling and winemaking.

Drew (00:43:10):
Yeah. So how did you get into the Rosen Rye world? How did this evolve? Because Michigan State is involved. Mammoth distilling is involved in that as well. How did that-

Ari (00:43:24):
Yeah. Rosen rye was, again, one of these serendipitous things that just kind of felt like it happened. Because of my background as a winemaker, because I understood as a bartender that if I wanted to connect with a customer on the other side of the bar, it helped if I could speak of the varietal of the wine. It helped if I could say it came from this soil and it was made by these people and it's been made for this long. There are all these true narratives and these points of differentiation in the wine world that we don't have in the spirits world.

(00:43:57):
And I had long thought that it would be nice for a spirit to be able to identify the varietal because we'd seen what that does, again, not just for wine, but also in beer with IPAs, it's made with this sort of hop versus this sort of hop. Oh, I'll have one of each and I'll taste them next to each other. There's a point of differentiation that's an entry for someone that wants to learn more of it. And the big distilleries weren't offering anything remotely like, "Hey, we use superior inputs here." Obviously, if you go to a restaurant, there's a difference between a tomato, an heirloom tomato on your salad at peak season that's full of flavor. That's a very different tomato than what McDonald's is offering on their hamburger in the middle of winter. They're both tomatoes, but they're vastly different. So we know that there's this difference in character between different varietals and when it's grown and where it's grown.

(00:44:53):
And every time I went down to, say, Kentucky, I'd see the same yellow dent number two, which is a modern marvel, which has fed a lot of people, but in general, a chef wouldn't select that for its flavor. A whiskey maker wouldn't even necessarily select yellow debt number two for its flavor. It's a cheap source of starch

(00:45:12):
And it's consistent and it can sit in a silo for five years without going rancid because the oil has been bred out of it and the oil is where the flavor is. So if you breed the oil out, now the grain's not going rancid, now it can sit there and five years later you can feed it to livestock. But that's not what you would do if you were selecting for whiskey. You would try to identify what are the grains that produce the best flavor. And the idea for rye started, again, from a trip to a distillery in Kentucky where they said tour, we use 80% corn because that's where we get the alcohol, and then we use 16% rye because that's where the flavor is. It's called the flavoring grain.

Drew (00:45:55):
And

Ari (00:45:56):
I was like, stop right there. I just want the flavoring grain. I just want the ... I'd like rye whiskey, please. So it became clear that within the context of American storytelling, and that's not to say that corn doesn't have flavor. There are a lot of corns with flavor. We're going to get into that. A lot of corns with vastly different flavor. But in the American distilling scene as of today, rye is considered the flavoring grain. I do believe that rye is probably the most flavorful of all the grains. And so putting together two theses, you want more flavor, and there's got to be varietals. There has to be differentiation in different types of grains that have different sensory attributes.

(00:46:36):
Started looking at old grain manuals, old advertisements for rye whiskeys, and just putting those two theses together and understanding that at some point before the accountants took over procurement, maybe the marketing teams were talking about grain, maybe the distillers were talking about grain varietal. And it became apparent very quickly that there was absolutely a Cabernet of American whiskey grains and it was rose and rye. And it wasn't from one or two or three sources. It was ubiquitous. Hundreds of newspaper articles from all over the country, talking about rose and rye being used in bootleg liquor, being used by large companies. It was used in marketing materials by Michter's, by Schenley.

(00:47:30):
It was used in internal grain manuals by beam and seagrams. It was ubiquitous. It was everywhere, and distillers often said it tastes different than other grains. And rose and rye is the preferred grains for American whiskey. And so the first layer of it is we discovered, wow, it is well documented that there was a preferred flavor and grain in American whiskey making. The second question is, where did it come from and how do we get it? And that's when it got really interesting. I was doing this research in the basement of Michigan State University because there's a catalog of all these old grain manuals from all over the country because it's an old agricultural school. And I learned in the Seagram's grain manual from 1942 that it came from Michigan State University.

Drew (00:48:27):
Wow.

Ari (00:48:27):
Actually, that was the Schenley advertisement from the Christmas issue of vanity fair from 1934 the year after the Christmas edition immediately following the repeal of prohibition had a full page advertisement for Schenley bottled and bond rye, and it says in the copy, "Only Michigan rye was used in this luxurious blend. Michigan rye is the most flavorful and compact kernel that Mother Earth produces."

Drew (00:48:55):
Nice.

Ari (00:48:55):
I'm paraphrasing, but only slightly.

Drew (00:48:57):
Yeah.

Ari (00:48:58):
Yeah. The most flavorful kernel of rye comes from Michigan that was used in this luxurious brand. Here's the largest American whiskey company in the year after prohibition selling a bottled in bond rye made with rose and rye, which means it was produced in the middle of prohibition.

(00:49:14):
So this is how whiskey companies were approaching whiskey making during prohibition using this grain. So we learned that a lot of folks were using this grain. We learned that it came from Michigan. We're sitting in the basement of Michigan State University, about 300 yards from the old agricultural college. And we looked back at an old circular before the internet, all of the land grant colleges in the United States would put these annual publications together, very thick books with all of the research that they did every year in the University of Kansas and Purdue, and basically a lot of the university that turned into the Big 10, which began as agricultural schools.

(00:50:02):
Every year would publish these circulars, which would tell everyone else what they were doing. They would build on each other's research. And there is a ton of grain research in those books, a ton of it. And we learned the entire history of rosen rye by looking at those circulars because it was documented by the people who actually created it by Dr. Frank Spragg, who was the first agronomist hired at a university in North America in 1903. He was hired by Michigan State. He was actually born out in Montana and ends up at Michigan State University as the first agronomist hired by a university. He quickly discovered that Michigan could produce rye really well because of our climate and because of our soil pipes, very sandy

(00:50:52):
And acidic. Rye grows better than other grains and sandy acidic soil. The Frank Spragg identified Michigan as a potential rye state. A couple years later, three years later, the student shows up from Russia who had been exiled by the czar, who had escaped a gulag, who had traversed through Europe, ended up in the United States. And like any agronomy student, he was studying at the University of Moscow, this fellow named Joseph Rosen, and he was thrown in the Gulag for anti-Zarist activities for being a student protestor. He escaped the gulag, he works his way to the United States. And like any good agronomy student 120 years ago ended up in East Lansing, Michigan. It's where you'd want to be.

(00:51:36):
And Dr. Frank Spragg that here's a student from Russia. I bet he has access to this pedigreed rye that Russia and Poland has been growing in Germany has been growing for about the past 50 years. And so Frank's brag had the wherewithal to ask this immigrant student to have his father send rye to East Lansing so he could grow it. What we discovered is by the time that rye arrived in East Lansing, Joseph Rosen had already moved on. He was now getting his PhD in Wisconsin when that grain arrives. And Dr. Frank Sprague gets a packet of grain from Joseph Rosen's father and says, we're going to call this Rosen rye. And I'm sure it had another name before that. Some of our work with genetics has indicated what that might've been. But in Michigan State, at Michigan State at the various

(00:52:33):
Experimental stations, this rose and rye vastly outperformed all of the native varietals of rye and within a very short time made Michigan the largest rye producing state in the country, selling rye to Kentucky distillers at the beginning of prohibition, rose and rye itself won every international competition that you could imagine for rye quality became the sweetheart of the agricultural world, but because it cross-pollinated, they figured out the professors at Michigan State figured out that you could not keep a seed stock on the mainland because it would diminish in quality as it cross-pollinated just because of wind. They had to figure out a way of keeping a pure seed stock far away from any potential contamination. And to do that, they just piggybacked on what Dutch farmers had been doing with tulips, which is you grow them on islands. And so as search began for looking for an island, South Manitou Island in the middle of Lake Michigan was determined the right island.

(00:53:36):
The farmers on South Manitou who were subsistence farmers ascented to growing rose and rye. They in fact formed a compact that if any of the farmers grew any rye other than rosen rye, they would be drowned. And those farmers and

(00:53:51):
Those farmers cultivated the seed stock for rosen rye to be grown on the mainland in Michigan and then all over the country. And for 30 years, rosen rye was probably the number one grown rye in the United States with all of its seed coming from this little island in Lake Michigan, which is a remarkable story that had been sitting under our noses and nobody knew it. Nobody knew this connection. Our friends in Pennsylvania understood the importance, the historic importance of rose and rye in Pennsylvania whiskey. They figured that out, I think a couple years before us. Independently, we figured out, and then we learned about this Michigan connection,

(00:54:36):
And it became a story that really took off. And we found that the consumer and the media and the storytellers and the amplifiers of messages in our industry today understood that that was a real authentic, credible story. Now, mammoth distilling, Chad Munger, the entire team that goes and camps on the island for weeks at a time or for a week at a time in order to plant and then to harvest, was able to determine that rosen rye is in fact really fantastic at making distillate. And the spirit that comes off the still has a ton of flavor, really beautiful flavors, nothing off, it's preferable. So Mammoth makes rose and rye, other distilleries like Stolen Wolf in Pennsylvania, our friends at far north and Minnesota are now making rosen rye, and we're seeing this particular varietal that has a really unique story, wonderful Michigan ties. We're seeing it become, again, the preferred flavor and grain or whiskey grain of northern distilleries that are able to grow rye because rye, of course, needs to vertalize.

(00:55:41):
It needs to freeze if it's to grow properly. And so you can't really grow rye very well and consistently in places like Kentucky. It's really northern Michigan, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Wisconsin. These are the places that rye really thrives.

Drew (00:55:57):
Yeah. What do you think it is that made it die out? I mean, of course, rye whiskey kind of faded into the background in the late 70s, 80s, and so maybe not so much of a demand for it from that standpoint, but still it's a flavoring grain. So you would think maybe somebody would still be hanging onto it, but did Michigan just kind of give up on it or ...

Ari (00:56:20):
I think two things happened. The first was the farmers that were living on the island cultivating 100% of the certified seed, rosen rye seed, got old and their kids didn't want to farm on an island anymore.

Drew (00:56:33):
So

Ari (00:56:33):
That was one aspect. The other aspect, well, there's three. So that was one. Then there was corn and soybean subsidies were enacted in the United States, totally changing. Michigan went from the number one rye producing state in general to didn't make very much rye anymore

Drew (00:56:49):
Because

Ari (00:56:50):
The political incentives, the financial incentives weren't there. And at the same time, Eastern Europe, especially Ukraine, as well as Germany and Poland started instituting federal subsidies on rye production, and the US became a net importer of rye. And the American whiskey, bourbon, the distinctive American beverage began to rely on European grain as an input as opposed to American grain.

Drew (00:57:22):
Okay. When you're now starting to work in and doing these blends and seeing ... I mean, again, we talked about just a little bit earlier about the fact that it was much more of a commodity. It's now turning now into the smaller distilleries are doing a lot more work with trying to find grains that have not necessarily yield, but more flavor. So you have to go scour for what you are creating in terms of these blends, different sources of whiskey. And are you finding yourself gravitating towards and learning about different types of heritage grains that you were completely unaware of before you started this journey?

Ari (00:58:16):
Absolutely. So I've been focused mostly on northern grains, different varietals of rye in particular, but it became clear that corn has as much genetic variation as rye does and the ability to create all these different characteristics. We're seeing bloody butcher in Jimmy Red and Hopi Blue and all of these various corns make really beautiful whiskeys. And so I talked about how at Whiskey Gypsy, we talked about the three legs of the whiskey making stool and how we can improve each of those legs, grain, wood and blend, augmentation, we can call wood. So for tribute, this is tribute. This is our four-year-old straight bourbon whiskey, 86-proof. It's about 40 bucks on the shelf,

(00:59:05):
And it is made because this is our story of grain, it's made with Cherokee White Eagle corn. So it's made with a corn that was cultivated by the Cherokee Nation in North Carolina, where Eric happens to be from North Carolina, which has a really special tradition of whiskey making in American history. So the Cherokee developed Cherokee White Eaglecorn over centuries and took it along with them, preserved it when they were expelled during the Trail of Tears. They kept this sacred grain alive. They took it with them to Oklahoma. They didn't let this variety die out.

(00:59:43):
It was a preferred grain by distillers. We know this because of the work of David Shields, a really wonderful American grain historian. He writes fairly extensively about Cherokee white eagle corn. We also know that it was the progenitor varietal of other types of grains, corns That were used in American whiskey making. So this is the granddaddy. So we were able to work with a farmer in Pennsylvania, the great Robert McDonald dancing goat farm, who is Dancing Star Farm, who was able to grow some of this grain. And we are able to make an everyday sipper that incorporates this Cherokee white eagle corn, which you can identify on the nose, the viscosity's different. We talked about the oil earlier,

Drew (01:00:32):
The

Ari (01:00:32):
Finish is different. Now, what I will say about heirloom grains having developed a number of products featuring them is sometimes it's too much to go a hundred percent heirloom. Sometimes that character is out of the range of what is considered normal. So I often tell distillers, try it at 10% of the mash bill, try it at 15%. See where the right amount is because it's probably not 100%. That might be a little bit off spec in terms of someone's assumption. But you can elevate a familiar characteristic by just incorporating 10 or 15% heirloom grain into the mash. It will hopefully intensify the aroma. It will change the mouthfeel. It will make it more expansive and viscous. It should lengthen the finish because you're going to have all of the characteristics that you're used to, plus some added dimensions of flavor. And so that's why tribute is our ... It's one of the reasons why it's four years old.

(01:01:32):
When a whiskey gets a lot older, the wood begins to obscure the grain. Four years old is a really good balance if you want some of that grain character to come out, but to be framed really nicely by the oat character. Four, five years old is where you want to be if you want to taste the grain.

(01:01:48):
So that's why this product exists. We can tell that story.

Drew (01:01:53):
Interesting that I am hearing, and this is something that's traditional in Irish whiskey in making Irish potstell whiskey, they would use oats because it give you a nice, really nice mouthfeel to it. Well, we don't think about in terms of American whiskey production, because I do hear some distillers talking about using oats now and they'll say, or they'll use wheat. And it's creating a creamy mouthfeel or giving you more of an oily experience. But we forget that you could get it from corn as well, that it doesn't necessarily have to be another grain outside. It's just that we are so used to using generic corn for our distilling. So do you work with a particular distillery to make this, or did you source this from somewhere that was already using it?

Ari (01:02:47):
Great question. The answer is both.

Drew (01:02:49):
Okay.

Ari (01:02:50):
So we were able to source some in the near term and then we also ... So Whiskey Gypsy does not own a distillery,

(01:02:58):
But we work very closely with a number of distilleries. So our whiskeys come from MGP, from Bardstown, from Whiskey House, from Tennessee Distilling. We're able to source really nice lots. And at Whiskey House in particular, but other distilleries as well, we are able to supply grains and collaborate on yeast strain and fermentation protocols and distillation techniques. And we're involved in Cooperage selection. So one of the really wonderful things about the past couple years is there are a number of distilleries that are managed by incredibly capable, very intelligent humans, distillers who do custom production. It's different than contract production contract. It's different than a venture capital fund or a private equity fund coming in and buying a hundred thousand barrels of commodity whiskey without a plan of what to do with it. No, we want this specific product to be produced in this way. And it's amazing to be able to work with these incredibly smart people and from farmers all the way to distillers.

(01:04:08):
I should say that tribute is also, in addition to having this grain character, we do double barrel it for three months

Drew (01:04:15):
Prior to

Ari (01:04:15):
Bottling. We proof it down. You talked about a smokey characteristic. This has a little bit of a smoky characteristic because we harvest the barrels, we proof it down to about 87 proof, and then we rebarrel it because oftentimes at lower proof whiskeys, water is just added immediately prior to distillation, or water is added just prior to bottling, and that just dilutes the character. But if you dilute the product and then barrel age it, it essentially barrel ages the proofing water. And because it's lower proof, it pulls out a lot more sugar from the barrel. Sugar is more soluble in water than it is in ethanol. So just having that three months in a barrel adeloproof prior to bottling changes this enormously. So there's a grain character here, which is the center part of the story, but then we also support it with a little bit more oak because we wanted the most flavorful 86 proof spirit out there.

Drew (01:05:15):
There's a little minerally note in this as well. It's funny because whenever we talk about George Dickel, we talk about the Flintstone vitamin note, and I sort of get a little bit of that minerally note on this as well. I mean, again, mouthfeel is definitely really strong on this. And then that little rye bite comes through, not aggressive, but it's just like it sort of dries out the palette just a little bit as it's coming through.

Ari (01:05:48):
Yeah. And I mean, that's one of the things that we love about cocktails is the incorporation of bitters, but also a sweet adjunct because there's this interplay between drying out your mouth or even wines, the balance between tannin and sugar. That interplay is a lot of fun and it allows a little bit more of that viscosity and sweetness from the corn to come through.

Drew (01:06:12):
Yeah. Having that bartending background and now you're making whiskeys, I always hear ... I think of it this way, I've never worked as a bartender before. I've really not made cocktails in my life other than a very simple martini kind of thing. But kind of getting this philosophy down of when you want to take something that has a really nice mouthfeel like it to this, and I think putting it in a cocktail, it's kind of working against the idea of that one feature of this particular whiskey. So when you are making a whiskey, are you thinking more for cocktails? Are you thinking more for that experience of mouthfeel or does that mouthfeel actually translate through to the cocktail?

Ari (01:07:06):
I think that's a great question. And I think it's the challenge of the bartender to figure out how to use the best ingredient for whatever, either to use the best ingredients for whatever cocktail they're thinking of

Drew (01:07:16):
Or

Ari (01:07:16):
To make the best cocktail from whatever ingredients they're thinking of. That's the challenge. They can go in either direction. My inclination is to always think about the bartenders. Not only what is the cocktail going to be, but when someone comes and sits across from them at the bar and says, "What should I drink?" Bartenders generally want to seem smart and well-educated. And if we can give them two or three or four points, hooks, we call them, to describe the spirit that we're offering relative to the competitive set, the other spirits that are sitting next to it, then we've done a really important thing. We've given the bartender the tools to connect with their customer in a way that's authentic and credible. That's one of the reasons why we're doing this. And then they can choose whether, "Hey, try a little bit of this neat and then let me make you a cocktail with it and let's see which one you like because there's no right and wrong.

(01:08:14):
There's preference and preference in my experience is not static.

Drew (01:08:19):
Preference

Ari (01:08:20):
Is influenced by a number of factors, some of which we understand, some of which we don't." And so giving the bartender the opportunity of saying, "Taste this neat, understand the characteristics, and here's what I do to it. Here's how I incorporate into a cocktail because of the history, because of the double wood, because of the Cherokee story, the bartenders can be able to make it their own however they see fit." So

Drew (01:08:43):
You say double wood. Are you using two different types of wood?

Ari (01:08:46):
Both American oak and this one. Okay.

(01:08:48):
Yeah. So it's a double barreled. That's right. Yeah, it's double barreled. The double wood we'll get into in a minute. But yeah, so tribute is really about the grain and we wanted bartenders and liquor store workers and enthusiasts to be able to say, no, varietal does exist in whiskey in the same way that exists in wine. And if your favorite whiskey or your favorite whiskey maker is not talking about it, that's a choice they're making. It's fine. But what I can tell you is that almost all of the big distilleries are actively working on varietal trials right now. So what started craft distilling is absolutely moving into the very large commodity producers who realize that going forward, they're going to need a couple hooks that they haven't needed in the past.

Drew (01:09:37):
They're

Ari (01:09:38):
Going to need to be able to tell the story of this grain or this wood or why they chose this thing, how it's different than the other million barrels of commodity whiskey that's out there. And it's a great point of differentiation, particularly if you're only using 10% in your mash bill, you can keep all of your other production methods identical and still have a differentiated elevated premium product.

Drew (01:10:02):
This is a way where craft distilling is kind of following in the footsteps of craft brewing in that the big guys start catching on and they're now looking ... Now the question is, once the big guys take it over, do they again slowly work to a point where it becomes an element, but either they go, okay, wait a second, we're not making the yields off of this that we want to and maybe we back off or cheapen it somehow and only- Truly,

Ari (01:10:34):
You sound cynical. You sound like the big companies would start with a virtuous idea and somehow it would end up like-

Drew (01:10:41):
I tell you this.

Ari (01:10:42):
Over time.

Drew (01:10:42):
I tell you this because on both sides of the Atlantic, I'm standing out in Ireland and I'm talking to a man who farms his own barley, brought back a heritage grain of barley. And I'm talking to him and he's saying, "This has been gone for a hundred years. And why has it been gone for a hundred years? Because a large distillery isn't necessarily going to care because there also wasn't a lot of competition." So when you have a couple of big players, there's no push for you to have to compete with coming up with something unique. You can just come up with something fairly generic and people will buy it because in Ireland's case, they only had one distillery after a while or one company, so they can do whatever they want to do.

Ari (01:11:26):
Yeah, that's funny. And my take on it is, from my perspective, people like you need to be thanked because the people who have a platform and are sharing this idea of how can we improve whiskey for future generations by using better ingredients, folks that are helping tell that story, which makes so much just intuitive sense to

Drew (01:11:50):
The

Ari (01:11:50):
Consumer because they've seen it in every other industry, every restaurant that they've ever gone to, that message wouldn't by itself come from the big corporations. They would need to be compelled to go in that direction by reading a ton of articles and having the chief marketing officer talk to the ops person, say, "Well, what are we doing?" Or the CEO's talking to the procurement officer and saying, "What are we putting in our product with procurements? I don't know. We buy it by the size, not by the flavor." We're not looking at flavor, we're looking at starch content and tariffs, what is the landed cost? And I think it's folks like you who are out there saying, "No, we can make decisions according to flavor. We can make whiskey making decisions that put the consumer first

Drew (01:12:39):
Or

Ari (01:12:40):
Put the narrative or put the history first in a way that commodity whiskey just doesn't because it's about scale and consistency." And then again, if they understand that we're talking five, 10, 15% of the mash bill can improve a spirit that they're already making very consistently and they can charge a couple bucks more for, then they start investing in that R&D, and I think that's a great direction.

Drew (01:13:03):
So the next thing that we're going to taste here is explore. So kind of give me a little bit of an idea of how this differentiates from your strategy with tribute.

Ari (01:13:15):
Absolutely. So we said that Eric and Raj, who are 100% of the investment team in this brand, there's no one outside. They invested their own money in this because they wanted to tell these stories about whiskey. And the three stories we chose to tell were grain, wood, and blend. So tribute is our story about grain and how whiskey makers can choose to elevate the grain selection, and it makes a distinctive product. And you can even do that at the $40 price point. The second whiskey making choice that we wanted to discuss was wood or the augmentation, and that's what Explorer is about. Explore is older, so we've gone from four-year-old to six-year-old, higher proof. We've gone from 86 proof to 103 proof, and we have gone from 10% rye up to about 30% rye. So this is a mid-rye whiskey. It's a blend of a low rye and a high rye.

(01:14:14):
So we end up at about 30% rye, which is a really nice place to be because it has a lot of the attributes of a high rye in terms of complexity and spice and sort of dryness, but it brings more of that sweetness that you would get with a low rye, but it's not like cloying. It's a good balance between the two.

(01:14:30):
I've always loved mid-rise, and I've always loved blending low and high rise together and finding that sweet spot and using a graduated cylinder, making seven or 10 iterations and figuring out where that particular blend wants to live.

Drew (01:14:45):
I was going to say, do you have a spot where is there one more dominant than the other then in terms of- It

Ari (01:14:50):
Depends. Every batch is a little ... We try to keep the batches very consistent, but they're all different because if we're harvesting bourbon in the winter versus in the summer, it's going to have a little bit of a different extraction profile. So each blend is slightly different, a percentage or three different, not crazy different, but that 3% can be substantial.

(01:15:16):
So we start with a blend because we're blenders, and that's how you start. And then we get into wood augmentation. So in our extensive internal tasting panels that we did of the entire industry prior to starting this brand, where Raj and Eric and myself and the team just kind of sat around, bought a lot of bottles, tried to figure out exactly what it was that we enjoyed. There were a lot of French and American oak blends that we thought were really great. We thought this American oak was great with this French oak. And as we made this particular whiskey blend, this mid-rye blend, we thought it would be fun to accentuate the sweetness of the corn with an American oak and to accentuate the spiciness of the high rye with a French oak. But there's about five forests that you can get oak from in North America.

(01:16:11):
And it's about nine forests in France. And the winemakers in France know that the nine forests provide different characteristic of Cooperage, and it's used for different types of wine. So limousine oak is used in one, but another forest might be used in another. I'm a big fan of Bordeaux. Eric and Raj both love Bordeaux. Bordeau's a big wine. And so we were really interested to try oak from the Tronse forest, which is where the majority of the oak that goes into Bordeaux comes from. It has a really unique structure that wine or that oak is also used in the cooperage of cognac. So it has a lot of distinctive character. And after spending about 18 months doing extraction profiles of staves from different forests around France and the United States, we decided that the American oak from Appalachia, from West Virginia in particular, and the French oak from the Tronsef forest worked together really well to give us what we thought was an elevated American French oak situation in terms of character.

(01:17:16):
So it's like other 103 proof, but I feel we feel like the American oak from West Virginia, the French oak from the Tronsef forest, again, just having that specificity and slightly different character gives this a number of unique hooks that people can really grab onto. It gives folks authentic, credible things to talk about. And then if folks want to learn about either one of these two places, you find that the Tronce Forest

(01:17:47):
Was originally created by the Duke of Burbone, the

Drew (01:17:51):
Duke

Ari (01:17:51):
Of Bourbon in order to grow wood for the warships. But

Drew (01:17:59):
When the

Ari (01:17:59):
Warships moved from being oak to other materials, the metal, had to do something else with that oak. So it became this prized coopridge. Now, the trance forest is also one of these places more to our brand story where 700 years ago, the Troubadour tradition started in France. Troubadour is a French word. And the Troubadour is this poet that roves around and writes their own music with a loot or with a guitar and sings about the heart and sings about the life, which was a new form of art. That Troubadour tradition ultimately works its way to the new world around Appalachia, kind of morphs into country music is one of the things that it does. And Eric Church, our co-founder is one of the torchbearers of that tradition. So in addition to just checking the box of we looked at all of the oaks that we could possibly find and we selected this, there's also this great bourbon connection because the dupilure bone,

Drew (01:18:58):
There's

Ari (01:18:58):
This sort of navel connection, which is kind of cool. But then there's this artistic connection, which is what you're bringing into your body here is compounds that come from the soil of the place where this new art form was created and this new art form is one of the reasons why this brand exists in the first place. So again, that's a lot of lifting for a ... It's a lot of conceptual lifting for a whiskey to do, but there's all these connections, right? There's all these connections, and they're kind of cool to check out.

Drew (01:19:30):
We talk about how you had kind of progressed through from food to wine into the whiskey world. And what's interesting for me is that as I have kind of bounced from, for a while, I was in the paint business and I was blending colors, and then I got into web design, and of course I'm working with colors again. And then I saw a flavor wheel, and I went, "Oh, interesting." In color, you take the colors on the opposite side and they can dilute and tame down. If you got too much red, then you put in a little bit of green and it kind of grays it out because it's an ops. And I started thinking, "Gee, I wonder whether whiskey and the flavor wheel works the same." And I was so disappointed to find out that it didn't. However, I'm also very much into, I write music and produce music and you listen, and there are certain things with any art that seem to speak to other, it's like you bring the creativity from one art and all of a sudden you start seeing and crossing patterns into the other.

(01:20:38):
Do you ever get in conversations with Eric about how maybe he sees something in the whiskey world and he goes, "Ah, it's kind of like something we do in the music business or the way we would think about writing music or

Ari (01:20:57):
Inspirations." You're spot on and legacy, the next product that we're going to try actually comes out of that conversation. So if triviut is about the grain and explorers about the wood, legacy is about the blend and it's sort of our highest, it's highest proof, it's caste strength. It's also sort of our most conceptual in that our legacy series, we release one product a year, they're different every year, and it's cross category international blended whiskey.

(01:21:29):
And when we originally came up with this idea, I was unfamiliar with Eric's ... It was at the very beginning when we came up with this idea. I was unfamiliar with Eric's music. I had kind of known of him, but I didn't know any of his songs and I'd never done a deep dive into his music. After having a conversation with Whiskey, first I got to know the guy as a guy and as a whiskey lover, and then I got to know him as a platinum selling artist later. I sat down after the phone conversation with him, put on my headphones, listened to his entire catalog, and was blown away, not only by his poetic ability, the guy's awardsmith, emotive voice, all the things that you look for in a singer-songwriter. I was also kind of blown away by the way he was able, in even just his music, to weave together these different musical traditions where I heard certainly classic Appalachian roots country music, but I also heard Arena Rock and Bob Seeger and Elements of Hip Hop and Sam Cook.

(01:22:35):
And actually, I just saw Eric in concert a week or two ago.

(01:22:43):
He currently is on tour. There are 24 people on the stage with him at most times, including a four-person brass section, horn section, a four-person string ensemble, eight singers, sort of gospel singers, and his entire band.

Drew (01:23:02):
Wow.

Ari (01:23:03):
What I noticed in listening to his entire music, and he's still doing it on tour, is that Eric is sort of a master of weaving together these different musical traditions. He takes these musical traditions from all over the place, somehow makes them in the style of country music, but it made me think, what would be a whiskey that would weave together different musical traditions? Kind of in the form of American whiskey, but really incorporating and highlighting these different styles. That's what I heard in Eric's music. Again, not that the whiskey needs to be influenced by the music, the music he created, but it was.

Drew (01:23:38):
Yeah.

Ari (01:23:39):
It was actually, it was like, okay, he's pulling together these different musical traditions. That reminds me of what we did as a bartender with a graduated cylinder with the different whiskey traditions. Let's take that concept because now there's a reason for that concept to exist in the Whiskey Gypsy brand universe. It is kind of tied into this notion of we're incorporating traditions, we're bringing them in, we're mixing them up in new ways, just like Eric's music. And then what you find when you start getting into whiskey blending is there's not a ton of literature about creative whiskey blending or expressive whiskey blending. So you can learn how to blend for consistency and blend back to the middle. But what you were talking about in terms of blending paint, it's a great concept or even how to season food. It's sometimes when you're blending paint, a little bit of black goes a long way to create.

(01:24:34):
Same thing with if you're painting a picture. Little black can create a lot of depth. And in our previous legacy, which was a blend of Tennessee whiskey, 12-year-old Tennessee whiskey, 20-year-old Canadian rye and 10-year-old Indian single malt. That Indian single malt was very interesting, kind of functioned like you only needed a little bit of it and it functioned like a shadow making if you were making a painting because it created a lot of depth

Drew (01:25:07):
At

Ari (01:25:07):
Just four or 5% of the blend. It can greatly change the entire perspective of the blend. So yeah, legacy is our international blend. This year we just released a new one that we're incredibly excited about where because of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, which is upon us now, we thought it would be fun to think about how whiskeys were made during colonial times, what types of whiskeys were making and who was making them. And very quickly we learned that bourbon wasn't a thing during colonial times. Bourbon doesn't come along until later. In many cases, or if you supported the crown, you drink rum and rum was a very common drink. Oftentimes patriots would drink rye whiskey because rye whiskey was a sort of indigenously North American thing. Of course, immigrants brought rye with them, but they started making this American style rye whiskey.

(01:26:06):
One of the folks during early statehood or the early part of the country that was making a lot of rye whiskey was George Washington who left the presidency, started a distillery at Mount Vernon and made, I think, what would be considered a precursor to Maryland style rye. So Maryland style rye, which would develop a little bit later, would have 60-ish percent corn or 60-ish percent rye, 30-ish percent corn for sweetness, and then 10% malted barley, the inversion of the explorer mash bill

(01:26:41):
Where with rye and then corn and then malt, George Washington made a very similar mash bill to that at Mount Vernon. And of course, his whiskey was, I think, almost all unaged, so it'd almost be like the raw distillate.

(01:26:58):
We thought it'd be fun to take that mash bill and use it as a jumping off point for making a creative blend. So we took that Maryland style rye and we knew that we wanted to essentially do a 60% rye, 30% corn, 10% malted barley blend. We knew the proportions, what we didn't know is the inputs. We didn't know the spirits that would go into it. And that's the fun with legacy. Oftentimes we'll start with a mash bill, and then we'll prototype, we'll source spirits from all over, and we'll build prototypes, and we'll figure out which of them is the most compelling. Ultimately, at the end of a very long time of a joyous process, a fun process of prototyping different blends in the style of Maryland style rye and early American whiskey style. We ended up on a whiskey that was 60% 14-year-old, I should say, sorry, eight to 12-year-old rye

(01:27:58):
From MGP, a blend of rye that has both the grain character of the rye as well as the sort of depth that you get. I love this kind of eight to 12-year-old blend in ryes and bourbons. I think if you're not too worried about the highest possible age statement, you can create depth by having a vertical, a blend of the same whiskey at different ages. And winemakers have been doing this for a long time. You take wine from the same field, you blend different years together, it gives you a more complex product. So that's what we did with the rye component here. The corn component is 20 to 25-year-old Canadian corn whiskey that we then put in new American oak barrels for two years in Tennessee in a very hot metal structure, and it pulled out a lot of character, and it turned this 20 to 25-year-old corn whiskey to a beautiful component.

(01:28:53):
Either one of these could have been bottled by themselves. They would've been the rye or the corn. And then the final component, which actually took us a while to find, because we worked with a lot of different components in our prototypes, is an eight and a half-year-old American single malt from Virginia.

Drew (01:29:09):
So

Ari (01:29:09):
Here we have a blend of rye whiskey, straight rye whiskey, Canadian corn whiskey, and American single malt, three different styles, two different countries blended together in the style of a Maryland style rye. And when we shared this with our friends at Mount Vernon, because we said, "Hey, we're inspired by George Washington here." This is a version of what he made. We're not historic reenactors.

Drew (01:29:35):
That's

Ari (01:29:35):
Not what we're doing. We're inspired by the past and we use it as jumping off point. We shared it with them and they enjoyed it so much, thankfully, that they offered to share with us their freshly harvested apple brandy casks,

(01:29:51):
And they said, "Would you like to finish your whiskey in these freshly harvested apple brandy casks from George Washington's distillery at Mount Vernon?" To which our response was- Yes. Yes, we would. That would be lovely. Thank you very much. So we had the honor, I mean, complete honor, and we couldn't have planned it this way. Where we had a whiskey that started as a sort of homage to colonial era, early American whiskey making, particularly George Washington, and ended up being essentially a collaboration with George Washington's distillery, which that's what we're into. We're into this kind of combination of old meets new, tradition meets innovation. The future meets the past. Anytime we can create those overlaps or those points, if we can make a whiskey that inspires people to think about those types of things, while also being good in and of itself, being

Drew (01:30:43):
A

Ari (01:30:43):
Compelling blend in and of itself, that's the space that we want to live. That's the space where we feel other brands aren't working to get there. The space that demonstrates that these whiskeys can tell authentic stories of grain, of wood selection from very special places, of the intersection of culture and agriculture, of history and innovation, of old school styles of whiskey making and wine making, and how they can be applied to a fresh perspective of whiskey making. That's where this brand lives, that's why it exists. So these kinds of collaborations, which again, some of which you can't plan for,

(01:31:29):
Some of which just happen, but this brand invites those kinds of collaborations through an innovative approach to whiskey making, and it's been really exciting. So each of these products works by itself, but it also works as a family. And hopefully, if nothing else, people understand that this is an expression of love of whiskey making and why we're in this industry in the first place is so that we can tell these stories and share really great whiskeys and talk about them. But that these whiskeys touch other stories, stories of American history, whether it's the good, the bad, and the ugly, whether it's the Trail of Tears leading, which is an awful story, leading to the preservation of a grain, which is used not only by us, but by James Beard Award-winning chefs, the story of wood selection and how that ties into the history of the Navy and the history of artistic traditions like the Troubadour tradition.

(01:32:26):
And then international whiskey blending. Oftentimes when we try to submit legacy to competitions, there's no category for international cross-category blends. That's a good thing. We're happy living in the space in which there is no award for it yet.

(01:32:46):
That means you're doing something right. And if it's good and you can't even be recognized with it on the typical platforms, that's where we want to be. That's the innovative space. That's the place where creativity is way out in front of customer expectation and all of that. And we're happy to be among the companies leading the pack.

Drew (01:33:08):
So it's interesting, out of all the history and other things that you would think I would probably touch on, the one thing that stands out to me, and this comes from having talked to a Scottish distiller not too long ago, is what you did with the corn whiskey because you got a 20 plus year corn whiskey that'd been sitting in a barrel in Canada in the cool climate for so long. And your instinct when you brought it down to Tennessee was to age it in a new barrel. And it was interesting because I was tasting ... I've tasted 35, 30-year-old scotches before, and they become very muted over time. And what this distiller did, and I was tasting a 43-year-old whiskey, and in tasting it, I said, wow, I mean, this has a lot of ... All the flavors are popping out. This does not really strike me as something that has been muted.

(01:34:05):
And he said, "Well, it's because we put it into a new American oak or into a fresh American oak barrel for a year before we release it to wake it up." And because those flavors will lay dormant for a while. And so it seems that instinctively you kind of said, "This is a good quality, long, aged corn whiskey, but maybe." Was that kind of your thought process or were you looking to impart flavor, a different flavor on it?

Ari (01:34:37):
I was looking to impart a different flavor, and I love cool climate aged whiskeys. One of the things that can happen, it doesn't always happen, but it can happen, is colder liquids can hold a lot more dissolved oxygen, right? 50% more dissolved oxygen if the temperature is right. And if the temperature is correct where it's not so cold that no maturation can happen, not freezing, but it's not so hot that you get heavy extraction of lignin character from active oak. It's kind of in that sweet spot of, let's just say, 45 to 65 degrees most of the time, and

(01:35:17):
That's kind of cold and drives a lot of dissolved oxygen. And for a long period of time, alcohol and oxygen can interact and create esters. And the more oxygen exists in the liquid, the deeper the development of certain aromatic compounds basically. So you could take the same spirit, put in the same barrel, put it in a warm climate and a cold climate. The warm climate would generally have more wood extractive and the cold climate would have more of these other kind of fruity aromas that develop over time in the presence of oxygen. The oxygen's there because of the cool

Drew (01:35:53):
Climate.

Ari (01:35:53):
So we wanted to start with a 20 to 25-year-old blend of corn whiskeys that had that ester, that had apple and fruit character already built into it, and we wanted to support it with additional oak. So we wanted on that to put oak for enough time to impart vanilla caramel kind of flavors that are really complimentary to that kind of lighter ethereal, but not so much oak that it would obscure those aromas. And then the apple brandy casts further accentuate those aromas. So it all works together very well. But again, it's an example of that 20 to 25-year-old, which was 18 to 23-year-old when we started the secondary wooding, would've been really good and distinctive in and of itself, but it was a little light. It needed a little bit more weight. It needed to be framed a little bit.

Drew (01:36:46):
And

Ari (01:36:46):
So that's why we chose it. And thankfully, we're in a company and have ownership and funding structures that allow us to do these sort of extensive, extended secondary barrel aging where other companies might not be in

Drew (01:37:00):
That position. Yeah. Well, I have to tell you, here's my music to whiskey analogy that I'll come up with because it hit me with this legacy. When I knows it, to me, the first thing that strikes me is this baked apple note that comes through. And I get cinnamon notes and kind of floral. But the thing that it was doing was it was taking me back to when I was a kid in Michigan, and we used to have an apple tree in the backyard, and we would make cider out of it. We would make applesauce out of it, and you had your baked apple. So I was around, you would think I'd be sick of apples having grown up with, but they bring back memories, just like when you hear a song, you can hear it. And if you haven't heard it for years, it will take you back to that place that you were when you heard it the last time.

(01:37:55):
And to me, whiskey really has that ability, and that's really what I got out of this. It kind of transported me back, even though there are no Michigan elements in this, it was enough of a cross-breeding. And I wonder whether some of that from your background is something that might draw you to end up creating something that has the influences of your youth, or that you're drawn to those particular scents and flavors.

Ari (01:38:26):
I love apples and cherries and pears and plums and all of the things that grow here.

(01:38:32):
The apple characteristic here really came ... I mean, it is really highlighted by the influence of George Washington's distillery at Mount Vernon, the apple brandycast that they gave, as well as that 30% Canadian corn whiskey component that had that nice kind of fruity aromatic. Yeah, that is where it came from. And it just so happens it's a flavor that I love, really aligned with. In fact, I think we talk about blending different categories of whiskey. It becomes even more interesting when you blend different categories of spirit, including rye whiskey with apple brandy and things like that, where you can really play with characteristics and disregard boundaries. Anytime you can disregard boundaries, that's pretty good.

Drew (01:39:20):
We'll

Ari (01:39:21):
Take

Drew (01:39:21):
It. Nice warmth on the palette too when it's done. This is something ... It's a bad time of year. I should have had this at Christmastime. It's

Ari (01:39:31):
Really great then. And then of course, we've got a couple months leading up to the 4th of July, which is the real 250th anniversary. But no, this is a really fun one. It's at a fairly high strength, 115.74 proof. We actually landed on that. We kind of messed with the proof a little bit because while we all know that the Declaration of Independence, July 4th, 1776, there was kind of a predecessor called The Little Camden Declaration from Camden, New Jersey, which was from November 5th, 1774. So our proof point here is a little Easter egg timestamp to something that came right before. And we were just having fun as we were looking at the different available proof points for the prototypes that we have, we're like, oh, this one has a little Easter egg included in that, which we're always happy to do. And little nuances that give people things to talk about that are real and not BS.

Drew (01:40:33):
So how do people get ahold of a bottle of anything that you make? Are you available nationwide or through websites or how can they get a bottle?

Ari (01:40:43):
Yeah. Well, definitely go to whiskeygypsy.com.

(01:40:49):
There's a store tracker, so you can see if it's in your market, if it's not in your market, you can order it online, have it shipped to you. There's a ton of information and really great content on the webpage. This is a narrative driven brand and having those stories available and accessible on the website is really important. And the team's done a remarkable job putting them out there. And yeah, if you go to the store that's on the website, you'll even see our three legacy releases next to each other as a pack. That's a pretty cool pack. They're all very different. They have different ingredients, different proofs, different stories. And yeah, that's the best place to find it. And then if your local store doesn't have it, feel free to ask for it. We're going into more and more markets. Initially, we wanted to stay kind of small, but the demand has been overwhelming, and we're in far more states than we had assumed we were going to be at this point.

Drew (01:41:45):
Fantastic. Well, I'm going to see you in a week because I'm going to the Beam Institute also.

Ari (01:41:49):
Fantastic.

Drew (01:41:52):
It'll be my first one. So it will be fun to see everybody there. A lot of people who I've not met face-to-face, but with you, we have. So it'll be times two.

Ari (01:42:06):
Wonderful. I

Drew (01:42:07):
Look

Ari (01:42:07):
Forward to seeing you in person and I've had a great time chatting with you.

Drew (01:42:11):
Yeah, same here.

Ari (01:42:12):
And look forward to many future conversations.

Drew (01:42:15):
Cheers.

Ari (01:42:16):
Cheers to you. Thank you.

Drew (01:42:18):
Well, I hope you enjoyed this installment of Whiskey Lore The Interviews and my conversation with Ari Sussman of Whiskey Gypsy. Next week, Whiskey Lore Stories is back with a somewhat unusual episode as I delve into the world of speculation and talking about a grain that sometimes could drive people mad. Make sure you subscribe to the Whiskey Lore podcast so you don't miss a minute. I'm your host, Drew Hanish. Enjoy your week and until next time, Cheers and Slongeva. For show notes and transcripts, head to whiskeylore.org/interviews. Whiskey Lore's a production of Travel Fuels Life, LLC.