Ep. 35 - J.K. Williams Distillery's Andy Faris and Jeff Murphy

Transcript

Drew (00:00:14):
Welcome to Whiskey Lore, the interviews. I'm your host, drew Hamish, the Amazon bestselling author of Whiskey Lores Travel Guide to Experience in Kentucky Bourbon. And through the magic of a podcast, I'm about to take you to a distillery that's in the city that was once known as the whiskey capital of the world. And if you think that this place would be in Kentucky or Tennessee or Scotland, you would be mistaken. In fact, the town I'm referring to is more likely known for land moving equipment than it is whiskey. But previous to Prohibition, there were no fewer than 73 named distilleries in the area. The town I'm talking about is Peoria, Illinois, and the distillery I'm talking about is JK Williams. And when I first heard about JK Williams, I heard that there was a story about grandfather who was a bootlegger and he was making some really good whiskey, and he had drawn some unwanted attention from some mafia crime families, including one in Chicago and one in Peoria.

Drew (00:01:29):
And that these two brothers in 2013 had discovered these stories and decided to open up a distillery and named it in honor of their grandfather. And they actually have the recipe for the whiskey that their grandfather made. Well, sooner later, they ended up having to sell the distillery. And so my guest today is the man that came in from Dallas, Texas, moved into Peoria, and he, along with his wife, took over the distillery. And I'm speaking of Andy Ferris. And Andy and I are going to talk a lot about the history of Peoria. We'll talk about the whiskey trust and this status as the whiskey capital of the world. And then later on, Jeff Murphy is going to join us. He is the master distiller at JK Williams. So we got a lot of stuff to cover in this episode, and I want you to know if you want to watch this interview, you can actually watch it out at youtube.com/whiskey. And there's going to be a couple of spoilers in here for episode two of the whiskey lore series on the whiskey Trust. So just wanted to prepare you for that. Nothing earth shattering, but a couple of those stories we're going to share here in this episode. So if you really want to hold off and listen to all that coming up on Monday, then listen to this on Tuesday. That might be your best bet. All right, let's get into our conversation with Andy Ferris from JK Williams, Andy to the show.

Andy (00:03:00):
Hi, good morning, drew.

Drew (00:03:01):
Good to talk to you. And I really wanted to come out to Peoria to check out the whiskey capital of the world, but it just so happens that schedules weren't working, and I didn't know when I was going to get up that way. So here we are through the magic of the internet and we'll get a chance to talk a little bit of whiskey history and your journey to owning a whiskey distillery.

Andy (00:03:29):
Outstanding.

Drew (00:03:30):
So give me a little background. You are c e o, is that your official title?

Andy (00:03:36):
President, ceo, Jack of all trades.

Drew (00:03:39):
Okay.

Andy (00:03:40):
Traveling salesman the last three days, so

Drew (00:03:42):
I dunno.

Andy (00:03:45):
But yeah, I worked for a British computer, a networking equipment distributor. I ran the US division for 15 years and developed a nice taste for single malt whiskey in my trips over to the UK and Ireland and Scotland and Irish whiskey. And that developed over time into I really like bourbon. And I was on the board of directors of a craft brewery in Fort Worth, Texas. And I love beer. I love the beer business. But I started to get really intrigued about the distilling business and started kicking around the idea of starting one, being an aficionado and not an expert. Those are two different things that I learned very quickly.

Andy (00:04:43):
And I attended several conferences on craft distilling and what does it take and how much capital you need. And then this was in about 2015, I got contacted in 2017 about, Hey, there's a distillery available for sale, would that be of interest to you? And I was thinking to myself, well, that's a nice shortcut. Rather than having to learn this all, there's already an operating distillery and that kind of this. And then I said, where? And it came Peoria, Peoria, Illinois. And so we started talking about it. The deal went on and off, and at the end of 2018, it started up again in earnest and they said he is still interested. And we really came together on this to try to make a deal. And we acquired it in April of 2019 and moved here and I exited the network, the computer networking business for good.

Drew (00:05:47):
Yeah. And so your fiance, she's also in the business?

Andy (00:05:50):
My wife now? Yes. She's

Drew (00:05:51):
My now. Okay, okay. Yes. And she's an attorney.

Andy (00:05:55):
That's correct.

Drew (00:05:55):
So is what's curious to me is that the more interviews I do, the more I find that X it people and attorneys or attorneys seem to go into the whiskey business, and so I'm trying to figure out how that works out. Yes.

Andy (00:06:10):
No, it's really funny because we both were, I would call it a little burned out on what we were doing. And that's it. I mean, we both have embraced this business, but I think you just hit on something really funny here because one of my initial iterations of my business plan, which I hadn't done one for 25 years, I think I sent to a friend of mine in Boston and he said, all I see here is a sales guy and an attorney.

Drew (00:06:41):
You

Andy (00:06:41):
Must see the expertise you need to actually execute on anything. And I said, you know what? You're absolutely correct. And I knew we really needed to bring that additional talent onto the team. And when we found Jeff Murphy, that was really the puzzle that started to fit together. And I did. I realized I didn't know much of anything Really. Yeah,

Andy (00:07:10):
I knew it, I thought was cool. I knew I had my favorite whiskey brands, and I could describe them relatively well, but in terms of the bureaucracy and the legalese behind and the regulatory stuff with the TTB and the State Department of Revenue, I'd said no idea of any of that. So it is, it's not for the faint of heart. If my hair wasn't gray before, it certainly is turning gray. And so Jeff came on board with his many, many years of distilling experience. We were fortuitous. And also having a gentleman named Nick Nelson, who was with Brown former for 23 years, including a stint as national brand manager for Woodford Reserve, join our board of directors. And he's, he's helped strategize, he's helped lay out from a marketing standpoint where we need to go. And so this has all been instrumental along the way. I've learned a lot

Drew (00:08:13):
Since

Andy (00:08:14):
April of 2019. I am much more knowledgeable than I was, and honestly, I thought I was pretty knowledgeable, but there's so much to it. But I think one of the things that we were talking about before we got recording was about Peoria, because I'd never been down here. I'd never been in Peoria, and I went to school at University of Wisconsin, so it's only three hours away from here, but I just had never, I'd been to Chicago, but I'd never really been to Peoria. And it's very much worth peeling the layers back of the history. And I think the librarian at the Peoria Public Library thought I was a stalker because I came back about eight times with a stack of history books on Peoria. So I wanted to do a deep dive. And I'm clearly not from here. I'm a transplant. But I thought if I talk about this town, I want to be able to talk about it with some authority that I've researched it. And I'm not even partially way done because as you mentioned before we got on the recording, there is a lot of information there. You can abridged version of what the history is, and then there's such a deep dive that you really need to do to dig into the great Giled age characters.

Drew (00:09:37):
So your first impressions of it, are there a lot of the historic buildings still around, or does it seem like it's modernizing, or what kind of impressions do you get?

Andy (00:09:50):
It's a town that I can tell did what my hometown of Minneapolis did a lot of urban renewal, probably a lot of why do we need these old buildings? It was before that historical landmark push. So things from the early 19 hundreds were getting demolished. Yeah, there's still some really cool old buildings downtown, but a number of the historic liquor Baron homes are still there. Okay. What's interesting to me, you've got a really, Bradley University, the Bradley University Moss Avenue area reminds me very much of St. Paul, Minnesota, which beautiful homes on each side. It's that sort of thing that you've got these old kind of gilded mansions from those days that are still there, and they've been many restored just beautifully. So

Drew (00:10:48):
Can you actually go in, Joseph Greenhut was the one that was the president of the trust. Is that a house that you can go into or,

Andy (00:10:57):
Unfortunately, no, because it's an apartment building, it was chopped up into apartment buildings. Most of the gilding and all the beautiful is all gone on that. Oh, wow. But there are others that have been restored that are beautiful. The, there's the Pettengill Mansion. I wanted to use Pettengill as the name of our gin and have the house as the backdrop and the Peoria Historical Society. They own the house. They've said Absolutely not.

Drew (00:11:30):
And I said,

Andy (00:11:32):
On what grounds? Well, he was a teetotaler and a prohibitionist and was not involved in the liquor business. And so I thought that was pretty funny. Yeah.

Drew (00:11:43):
So Jeff has joined us. Jeff. Yeah. Good morning.

Jeff (00:11:45):
Are you Sorry about that. I missed the eastern part on that nine 30, I saw nine 30 yesterday.

Drew (00:11:50):
This is always the great challenge between trying to get Eastern time to central time. I lived in central time for some years, so I I'm used to that. Yeah,

Jeff (00:12:00):
Thanks for having us on. Sorry I'm late. Yeah.

Drew (00:12:02):
Oh

Andy (00:12:02):
No, I haven't gotten used to that. Right. I just drove out east a few weeks ago and go over the Illinois, Indiana border, and you've lost an hour. And I go,

Drew (00:12:13):
Well, Jeff, you came from the opposite direction. You came from the south rather than from the North. North.

Jeff (00:12:20):
Yeah.

Drew (00:12:21):
And so your start was, I, I've heard that you were overseas doing beer at one time.

Jeff (00:12:28):
Yeah, I went to the, got in the industry professionally in Singapore. I was making craft beer over there in Singapore for Asia Pacific breweries, which is the Budweiser of Asia, so to speak. I was in our craft brew arm. And then we came back to Texas and I got into distilling and was making whiskey and vodka in Texas. And then I went to do a year of rum in Massachusetts at Privateer. And then the last eight years before coming here, I was running a rum distillery in Louisiana called Louisiana, Louisiana Spirits.

Drew (00:13:01):
We'll jump in a little bit more into what you guys are doing now in terms of the distillery, and I understand there's growth going on, so we'll get through that as well, talking about the whiskey capital of the world, Peoria. So were either of you aware before you got there?

Jeff (00:13:22):
No.

Andy (00:13:22):
Yes. Because it was mentioned to me by the Williams brothers the

Drew (00:13:30):
Nice, it's a selling point.

Andy (00:13:32):
Yeah. I said, I've never heard that before. And then again, and Jeff and I have talked about this. Yeah, we don't know. I have no idea. I've never heard that before in my life. Then you get here and you go, that's legit. That's exactly what happened.

Drew (00:13:45):
It's got to be interesting taking over a brand that is a legacy brand from a family that just brought the name back because they only had gotten into the distilling business or back into it around 2013. So when you were doing this purchasing of the brand, did they have all sorts of research and stuff that they had done or family photos or, because we're talking about a man who was a bootlegger, but he also apparently worked at distilleries previous to that

Andy (00:14:18):
We, we've, we've gotten kind of cursory information, but the story is a true one and a legitimate story. It doesn't come along with a lot of detail on what distillery did he work for originally when prohibition hit, where did he conduct his lagging operation? But he did bootleg and he did feel the need to flee in the middle of the night with his family when the criminal elements were closing in on trying to take a share of his profits. And so that is the real story. The recipe, the mash bill, at least on the bourbon is his original one. I can't say that the yeast strain that we're using is the same, right? Yeah. But just the basic mash bill is the same. And so it's a namesake, it's not a made up character. I think it's a cool story. And I think there are a number of, we'll call them just brands, that it's a fictionalized character that doesn't have any historical factual information attached to it.

Drew (00:15:31):
Yeah, it's a weeded bourbon it looks like.

Andy (00:15:33):
Correct. It's 10%. Jeff can talk a little bit about the,

Jeff (00:15:37):
Yeah, it's 80% corn, 10% wheat, 10% barley. So although it's a minor amount, it's still considered a weeded bourbon. So fry.

Drew (00:15:45):
And you think it was mostly because, I mean, in that area, would you find equal amounts of rye and wheat?

Jeff (00:15:54):
Not normally. It's a little bit too warm. I think you got to go a little bit farther north to find wheat and rye. Corn was prevalent, so it might have just been what he could get ahold of at the time. Someone I had talked to yesterday or yesterday, Tuesday, Tuesday, said that there is wheat around here somewhere. He knows, because he used to work for the grain elevators and they had wheat available. So there is some wheat around here somewhere. We just have to track it down.

Drew (00:16:19):
The thing is, when you're talking about a bootlegger and not a brand, that does make for a little bit of chaos in trying to trace this stuff back because records wouldn't have been kept.

Jeff (00:16:33):
Yeah. And like you said, there was probably a good chance that he was just fermenting whatever to get his hands on at the time and not necessarily kept in this recipe the entire time. He

Drew (00:16:42):
Had some big names after him, didn't he?

Jeff (00:16:44):
Yeah, Al Capone and the O'Neill Brothers,

Andy (00:16:46):
The O'Neill Brothers, they were the Peoria gangsters. They were the gangsters of note, but the Capone ran, a lot of his liquor came out of Peoria during prohibition.

Drew (00:16:57):
It makes you wonder about these towns like this, a town that was known for making whiskey at that point. And then you have these, I don't know how many distilleries were left when prohibition hit, but going from such a massive whiskey industry to all of a sudden not being able to make any at all.

Andy (00:17:18):
As I recall, none of the Peoria distilleries continued with the special permit to make medicinal whiskey. They were all Kentucky or elsewhere, but none in Peoria. So

Drew (00:17:32):
How long ago was it before Illinois finally came out of Prohibition allowing distilling? Again?

Jeff (00:17:39):
Same year,

Drew (00:17:41):
Same year. As

Jeff (00:17:42):
Soon as Prohibition was over, let's see, one two opened right back up. 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 7 more opened back up in the year after.

Drew (00:17:56):
And then what happened? Because it really, again, it's died out before now starting to come back again. So it was just kind of a slow fade. I

Andy (00:18:05):
Don't know what year. No, but I mean it really, with taste changing and away from brown spirits, I think that also had a lot to do with this Hira Walker. This was a successful brand. I mean, HIRA Walker was the largest whiskey distillery on the planet here. And so they closed in 1982 as tastes changed, and for whatever reason, they decided to pull out of this market. But the craft really, I don't know when, I think it was around 2010, 2009, that you can trace back the first craft distilleries coming back here. And I think we've got maybe 15 in the Illinois Craft Distillers Association. There may be a couple more that I'm not aware of, but there's some recognizable names out there, whiskey Acres, Coval, Chicago, distilling Farm Brothers. We're just trying to reestablish our ourselves as a recognized quality producer.

Drew (00:19:11):
You actually, there's more than one distillery in town now as I, there's

Andy (00:19:15):
Another one that's just started up a black band distilling downtown in the warehouse district.

Drew (00:19:21):
Yeah. So how does that, because I hear these names, warehouse district and Distillery Row and all of that. Is there any semblance of that still there? Are these just names that kind of got attached to sections of town?

Andy (00:19:33):
No. I mean, that was there. There's an apartment building called the Cooper Bridge that used to be exactly that. There are steel plants down there that fabricate steel for various distilleries, but by and large, the only one two that are left that have really a tie back to the area are the ADM plant, which is the former site of the Great Western Distillery, and then subsequently the Hiam Walker Plant. So that's still an operation making ethanol. And then the Lye Brewery is on the north side of town, just over the 74 bridge. And that is PMP Fermentation products. So that those two are really the last standing. Now, I'm not sure, down in Pekin, there were some distilleries as well, but I don't know if there's anything standing there any longer.

Drew (00:20:30):
Yeah, it seemed that from my reading, that it basically was distilleries all the way down to Pekin, right? Yeah. It was just when you have as many distilleries, how many distilleries did you just say our count was of name distilleries during that period?

Andy (00:20:47):
Well, there was 73 distilleries, but it was not all at once. From the start of distilleries here till the end, it was 73 distilleries.

Drew (00:21:02):
And it was a big brewing town too. Right. 24.

Andy (00:21:04):
24 breweries

Drew (00:21:07):
And saloons.

Andy (00:21:08):
Lot of saloons. A lot of saloons.

Drew (00:21:11):
How many saloons do you have in town now versus

Andy (00:21:15):
Not that many. I

Drew (00:21:16):
Think

Andy (00:21:17):
They lined up, from my reading, from my research, it was very much the Wild West. It was saloons, gambling, brothels. This was quite the swing in town, I guess at one time.

Drew (00:21:32):
It's so close. I mean, you're about two and a half hours from Chicago, right?

Andy (00:21:36):
Yeah. I mean really from us, yes. Two hours and 20 minutes to Michigan Avenue from here.

Drew (00:21:40):
Okay. Yeah. So everything, you wonder, everything that's going on in Chicago is Peoria, just a little Chicago basically. At that point.

Andy (00:21:50):
It really was. And if you look at some of the manufacturing around here, and Caterpillar being the most notable, but again, I think this had the potential to be the next Chicago if had had it been a little more diversified maybe, or a mini Chicago. But it ended up when the distilling industry by and large went away here, it became a cat town that this is what drove pretty much everything here, which

Drew (00:22:23):
Is, I think the impression that we all get. We don't think of it as a whiskey place because it hasn't been for so long. It has been more farm equipment and really buying into that. So as I was doing my research on the Whiskey Trust, what have you learned? What has fascinated you about the whiskey trust?

Andy (00:22:45):
The whiskey trust to me is just the group of these guys, perhaps not the nicest people on the planet. I don't know. We don't know them personally, but I, I'm sensing like many of these, what they call oligarchs today, I guess. But these barrens were pretty ruthless at times. And if you were part of the whiskey trust, you would get a share. Theoretically, you'd get a share of the profits, but you might very well get your distillery shut down. And I know at least one distillery in Chicago, the sch felt hh sch felt distillery was dynamite for not acquiescing to the offer that you can't offer that you can't refuse. And then your plant gets blown up and you decide, I think I'll sign now.

Drew (00:23:39):
Yeah, it was interesting to read about that because there's actually, if you dig online, you can find old newspapers from back then talking about the whiskey trust and saying in great detail how the Secretary of the Whiskey Trust had been arrested and how they had basically ensnared him by, what he had done was he had given a gauger some, a device that was a pistol that he was supposed to drop into a vat. And the idea of what was going to happen was that it was going to then give him two to three to four hours to get away. And then the thing was going to pop inside there, create a spark and blow up the distillery, and there was some fluid or something that was inside of it. And he said, you just have to add this fluid to it. Well, to Ensnare the guy, what they did was they said, he got back with him and said, you need to send me some more fluid, because the fluid that you gave me is, I think it's deteriorating. And so when he came back to visit town, he had a briefcase with the fluid in it, and they arrested him as he was going into the hotel where he was going to be staying. And come to find out, when they tested it, they realized that that thing was going to blow up immediately. It was not going to blow up in three to four hours. So it was basically to get rid of any witnesses, the guy

Andy (00:25:09):
Who was

Drew (00:25:10):
Known the plot. Yeah, the gauger was going to get blown up. The

Andy (00:25:13):
Gauger was going to get blown up at the same time.

Drew (00:25:16):
So when you talk about ruthless, and that was actually the second attempt because they actually had bombed it like a year before. So yeah, these guys were hardcore when it came to We, we've,

Andy (00:25:29):
We've been thinking about these whiskey barons, the whiskey trust, and Green Hut was certainly one of the wealthiest guys from that era and controlled it. But there's some other really interesting characters and our gin that we're releasing pretty soon pictures, one of the old mansions of the backgrounds, Edward Easton, he was primarily a grain trader, but he had his fingers in the distilling business as well. And it's been totally restored. It's a marketing agency now, still has the pocket doors. There's a portrait of Edward Easton. It's been repaired now, but it's been slashed right down his face.

Drew (00:26:13):
Oh man.

Andy (00:26:14):
Took a knife to, so again, you kind of start piecing together these little tidbits of information that maybe these guys weren't the most scrupulous, and maybe they weren't the nicest people, but it did. It built the town. There'd be no town, there wouldn't be the cultural institutions. They built great churches, they grew built opera houses, but every other city fire was a major problem. These great places, many of them burned down. The Opera House was gorgeous, burned down, or it was torn down in the name of Urban renewal that we need to put up this modern thing. And those buildings, at least as I relate it to Minneapolis, those buildings are being torn down now as being not significant to anybody.

Drew (00:27:00):
The sad part, as you lose some of that history when you are walking around downtown Peoria, it'd be interesting to go see where the whiskey trusts old building was and get that kind of history.

Andy (00:27:12):
In my research, I found there are a number of maps that actually show you exactly where each distillery was.

Drew (00:27:22):
Okay, that's

Andy (00:27:22):
Really interesting to find. And I don't have it in front of me today. And it shows all the way from the 74 bridge that splits kind of downtown Peoria and then East Peoria, but it just shows dot on the dots where exactly all these distilleries were all the way to Pekin. Wow. It's really fascinating to see that. And how many, and we've seen pictures at the Historical Society, and they're black and white. It was pretty grim industrial. I mean, not, you don't see many people. You see smoke stacks. You see,

Drew (00:27:59):
It was an industrial town,

Andy (00:28:00):
Really industrial it

Drew (00:28:02):
Super being distilleries, it was still very high output.

Drew (00:28:07):
So this is what scares me is when I start looking at these numbers in one year, the whiskey trust alone, and that's not including the independent distillers that were in Peoria, but as a whole, and this wouldn't be all out of Peoria in the year 1892, they had 45 million gallons worth of spirits that they created between gin, rectified whiskey and the rest. And if you think about that, as I was reading on it, it said they basically owned every distillery that was an active operation north of the Ohio River, and that's pretty big area and produced 95% of the distilled high wine spirits and alcohol produced in the entire United States.

Andy (00:29:01):
God, I think that's accurate. And then the other one I saw, I can't remember what year it was from. There was a number that Peoria, and I think this was related to whiskey and not anything else, but that Peoria produced 18 million barrels of whiskey, and Kentucky did 15. So even at its peak, we were well ahead of Kentucky and obviously overtaken not too far after that. But yeah, this was the whiskey capital for sure.

Drew (00:29:36):
But the thing about the whiskey trust was that they would go in and they would basically buy a distillery, and then in most cases they would shut it down because I think they were only running about 10 to 12 distilleries total. And they were getting that output out of that few distilleries, but they were basically robbing the distilleries. They were shutting down for parts and then fixing up the ones that they had in making them larger. So yeah, it's an incredible output. But if you think about it for Peoria, you have this large organization that's all spread across the US and their hub is in Peoria. That puts a lot of focus on that town. There had to be a lot of money in that town in that day.

Andy (00:30:24):
And I think some of it went after prohibition. Some of it moved on into banking. Some of these fortunes were still there, it just got transferred and then handed down and people scattered. And so it's still some remnants of the old fortunes in town here. There's still some of the grand old houses, both in Peoria Heights where the country club is, and then on Moss Avenue and that surrounding area. And it's fascinating just to drive through there because you get a feel for a little bit of the past.

Drew (00:31:06):
So when we're talking about independence around there, the one name that stands out to me is Clark's, because Clark's Pure Rye was actually a very successful brand. And you said that you actually had recently seen a collection of some memorabilia that was pretty cool.

Andy (00:31:27):
We can't mention his name. Yeah,

Drew (00:31:29):
Yeah. It's

Andy (00:31:30):
Such an extensive collection, but Jeff can maybe tell a little bit more about

Jeff (00:31:35):
It. Yeah, this gentleman actually came in to our tasting room one day, and he is like, well, I just dropped my wife off at the chiropractor, and they said it'd be about an hour, and this is a better waiting room than the chiropractor's office. So he came in, he just started talking with us, and he goes, I have a really in-depth collection, and oh, we'd love to see it. And just trying to get the time to go to his house and everything else and how things were going to work out. And then one day he came back in, he just kind of brought us this book on distilling imp Peoria. That's where I was quoting all these numbers for the distillers that were open at the time. And I tried so hard to have the time to copy the book so we could have the information so I could get it back to him. And I'm just taking photos of the pages. But we finally made it to his house. And he has over a hundred shot glasses of all of the distilleries and post-prohibition as well. He's got two four inch binders that have letters, ledgers, certificates, advertisements.

Andy (00:32:36):
What I found most fascinating is there's correspondence from the president of Clarks to, was it someone on the West Coast anyway, just you get a handle that there's still, there's some business that people don't know about in the public going on where maybe some West Coast interests were investing in this. You just, it's really interesting to see personal correspondence like that in an archive. And then what else did he have?

Jeff (00:33:09):
He had all kinds of knickknacks that they used for marketing. He had a two pewter cigar punches from Clark. And then in the binder we actually found the advertisement that went with it. And then they had lighters, lighters branded beauty marks for womens. They put the little dot on their face for the beauty. They had all kinds of bottle openers from the eras and everything else. It was really fascinating. We only had about an hour there, but I could probably spend a month there just going through everything.

Drew (00:33:45):
He's got a museum in his house

Jeff (00:33:48):
And he said he'd been collecting since the seventies and just hitting the state sales and flea markets and stuff like that. And we talk to 'em frequently. And

Andy (00:33:59):
I was most amazed probably by when you came out with that, holding up that big piece of metal. Yes. In the hell's that, and you turned it around, hire em, Walker and Son's original sign that was on the gates entering the distillery. Wow.

Jeff (00:34:16):
Yeah, he's got that. So

Drew (00:34:18):
That's

Andy (00:34:19):
One of those things. Who has that? I mean, yeah.

Drew (00:34:21):
Yeah.

Jeff (00:34:22):
There was a rye bottle there that I love the name of it, so I'm not going to say it cause someone else will go out and use it before I can research it, but I want to see if I can find that name, because the name of it and the bottle shape was really cool. So I think

Andy (00:34:36):
We may revive that name

Jeff (00:34:37):
Exactly. If we can find enough information, it'd be cool to revive something like that and keep it going. Again, some

Andy (00:34:43):
Of these brands, I think were absorbed. I actually saw Imperial Whiskey, and I want to say it's a brown foreman brand, but it's still out there. It's bottom shelf. Yeah,

Drew (00:34:54):
For sure.

Andy (00:34:56):
But there was a Hru Walker brand. So some of these brands have been absorbed into Kentucky brands,

Drew (00:35:05):
And you got to watch it because a lot of the distilling companies will buy up these names and not use them. They just hang onto them. Right, right. Yeah. So it's hard to know. But I, I saw a list of 12 names of independent distillers that were, well, they weren't all independent. Some Monarch, and I think it was a Manhattan distillery also in town there that they were owned by the trust. And in fact, I think both of them caught fire at one point or another. And the reason was suspect that just after what had happened in Chicago, all of a sudden now here is a distillery where they were doing experiments to try to speed up the process of making whiskey, and now all of a sudden that distillery gets burned down a

Andy (00:35:56):
String of suspect fires. Yes,

Drew (00:36:00):
Absolutely.

Jeff (00:36:01):
And this is something that we never knew was made here too. Well, so there was one from a Allen company called Jersey, which was a whiskey, and then also they had absent,

Drew (00:36:11):
Oh,

Jeff (00:36:12):
These are original bottles from the area. So just really, really cool collection that he has of all these things.

Drew (00:36:20):
Well, if you think about it, I mean they're, when you're distilling, you can distill all manner of things. And the distillery they were trying to bomb up in Chicago was actually making Holland gin.

Andy (00:36:35):
Right.

Drew (00:36:35):
So they were interested in, and Kalamu was another distillery that they acquired at the same time, because that's the thing is they bombed it. They somehow had the judge throw out the second case, probably less than a year later, they ended up selling to the Trust. So after two very suspect, and really the evidence was there. I remember reading it's speed.

Andy (00:37:03):
It's the offer you can't refuse.

Drew (00:37:05):
Yeah, exactly. So that talks about being above the law, but then you think how much revenue the Internal Revenue Service is getting from 90 cents per gallon from somebody who's making 45 million gallons worth of whiskey a year. Do they really want to shut those guys down? Right.

Jeff (00:37:26):
I they say that Peoria paid for the Civil War of all the taxes that were coming out of at the time it was, and then they didn't start income tax until prohibition because all the money was gone from the distilleries.

Andy (00:37:42):
Well, I guess Jeff and I have really appreciated since we've been here are people like that gentleman stopping in and sharing what he has, and we have become a repository bottles, and people have said, I really want you to have this. And I said, well, we'll display it. Yeah. So I've got some Hi Walker bottles here. Yeah, that are pretty cool if you want to see those. Yeah,

Drew (00:38:04):
If pop those up there.

Andy (00:38:06):
I'll start with the, this is, again, you can still find this on the shelf, but these are sealed, so it'll be interesting to see what that tax code date relates to. But my guess is this is probably from the seventies or sixties. I had a lady in town here gave me some of her liquor. Her father was an attorney with Hiram Walker, and I've got Canadian Club, I've got a Valentine's. These are all sealed

Drew (00:38:41):
From

Andy (00:38:42):
The, it says 1966. So here's one, this is really interesting to me. This is the one that is the special bottle they gave out. This was for the 8000000th barrel. It was a commemorate gold bottle given to employees. So this was distilled in 1970 or 1965 and given out in 1973 Walker's Deluxe. And here's, here's how Walker's Deluxe sold. Here's their decanter style. This is still sealed.

Drew (00:39:16):
Yeah, you showed me the price on that. How much for that? Yep. How much you want to sell me that bottle for

Andy (00:39:21):
Five 19

Drew (00:39:23):
Deal.

Andy (00:39:25):
And then I've got one in back that's sealed. This one apparently is not sealed. So Jeff and I are going to drink this one. Nice. This Walker's deluxe again. Yeah. I have no idea what the year is on this, but Oh wow. We'll drink that one anyway. Well,

Drew (00:39:39):
Whiskey's meant to be consumed. It wasn't not supposed to be a display. I have a bottle that's a hundred years old and it's like I'm going to taste it. There's just no way. I couldn't do that. I

Andy (00:39:50):
Did had, in Minnesota, we were digging through the attic at my late father-in-law's house and found IW Harper for medicinal purposes only.

Drew (00:40:05):
Yes.

Andy (00:40:05):
Distilled 1918 bottled whenever. And it said for medicinal purposes only, right on the side of

Drew (00:40:12):
Box,

Andy (00:40:13):
I drank it. Sorry.

Drew (00:40:14):
Nice. Yeah, it wasn't

Andy (00:40:15):
Bad.

Drew (00:40:17):
So I looked it up. And Imperial is cak. And so the reason why I looked it up was because when I was in Pittsburgh, I was in the Pittsburgh airport and somebody said, if you're in Pittsburgh, you have an iPeer, and an iPeer is a shot of Imperial whiskey with an Iron City beer.

Andy (00:40:42):
He's got a bigger following than I might think.

Drew (00:40:44):
Yeah, well, at least in Pittsburgh it does. Yeah. Right. Yeah. It's fun to see all these old bottles. Are there any other brands that you've heard of that you came out of that Hru Walker era? Was it mostly bourbons they were making in Peoria?

Andy (00:41:06):
Jeff, what else did we see out there? I was trying to think of this archive that we looked at. It was, he was heavy on Clark's. Yeah. Clark Ride. But there were some other brands. I can't remember some of the other names.

Jeff (00:41:20):
Looks like, let's see, this looks like Mars. Yeah, he had a lot of Clarks.

Drew (00:41:30):
Yeah. And I think that was what, what's interesting about Clarks is that they actually joined the trust, but somehow they got away because Oh, really? Yeah, they were part of it initially because they got talked into it and said, oh, here's all the great profits you'll get. They dismantled their distillery, then they got out of their contract somehow and then opened up their own new distillery and stayed a competitor for a while. I guess you can't really call 'em a competitor when they're that much smaller than this behemoth. You

Andy (00:42:04):
Wonder, you know what? It'd be so interesting to dig through the archives and get the real story on that. How did they get away? Yeah. How did that contract bust up and how did they remain independent long term?

Drew (00:42:19):
Absolutely.

Andy (00:42:19):
I'm sure. I'm sure it's a very interesting and intriguing

Drew (00:42:23):
Story.

Andy (00:42:24):
Possibly a little Boardwalk Empire

Drew (00:42:26):
Esque. Yeah, it may be. Possibly.

Jeff (00:42:28):
There's

Drew (00:42:28):
Going to be a movie about it one of these days. Yeah. So Jeff, you came to the business, as you said, you had worked in Texas and also in Louisiana. You're originally from Louisiana, correct?

Jeff (00:42:42):
No, I'm originally from Arizona.

Drew (00:42:43):
Oh, are you? Okay. Yeah.

Jeff (00:42:44):
Yeah.

Drew (00:42:45):
That's the Arizona Cardinal's shirt.

Jeff (00:42:47):
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. No, I grew up in a small mining town called Baghdad and Aaron. Wow. Yeah, no H.

Drew (00:42:55):
Okay.

Jeff (00:42:56):
And then joined the Navy to see the world met. My wife got married, so we were both, I'll tell you my iris trifecta story real quick. So I was a medic in hospital corpsman in the Navy. I was a police officer in Maryland for six years. And then I've been brewing into stealing now for 15 years or so. If I tell people I went from treating drunks to arresting drunks, to getting people drunk. So

Drew (00:43:18):
That's my nice last

Jeff (00:43:20):
Name, Murphy. That's my Irish trifecta. Yeah.

Drew (00:43:22):
Yeah. How did you guys get started here? Because you're actually, as I understand it, you've been expanding a bit. Are you working off the equipment that you got from JK Williams originally? Or are you upgrading and slowly replacing?

Jeff (00:43:40):
Yeah, so what we originally had from JK Williams is they did everything off of a 60 gallon stainless steel pot, still basically with a copper head on it. And then they had 120 gallon still that they never commissioned. So we got those both up and running. So right now, and they're doing all small barrel formats, they're doing 23 and 30 gallon barrels before, so they're doing about a barrel a week roughly, is what they were doing. So now I'm getting a barrel about every seven to 10 days, depending on how fast I turn over the system. But it's usually about, it's only 240 gallon. So now about every two weeks I can fill a barrel, and that's what we're working on now. And then our new system is a thousand gallon system. So where we only have one fermentor here, which is actually we're using the mash 10 as the fermentor, cause it has the only cooling jacket on it. We'll have four 1000 gallon from enters with the new system, and I'll be doing 10 to 12 barrels a week instead.

Drew (00:44:39):
Big difference. Yeah,

Jeff (00:44:40):
Big difference. So

Drew (00:44:42):
Helps supply. And so when you're growing out into Wisconsin, which is where I hear you're going to be next, that extra supply will help.

Jeff (00:44:51):
And we still have some barrels, we'll have some bourbon for a while. The rise is going to get a little bit slim here after a while. But then that's why we have our bridge series. I don't know if Andy's talked about that yet, but a lot of places that start up, they source to start. While our stuff is aging, we already have stuff. We'll be doing a sourcing program because we need to bridge that gap between the stocks that we have and the four years it's going to take for the new stocks to age. So it's the bridge series, and it's along the same lines of, say, the Discovery Series from Bardstown is how we're going to play it, where we're going out and sourcing the best stuff we can find and doing blends, and we're a hundred percent open with everything that we do. We're not trying to hide from people that it's a blend. We're not trying to do any of that. We're actually kind of happy and we just want to make sure that people understand that when it has, they're buying a bottle with their name on it, that the quality's going to be there. It's not just something that they threw in a bottle that we actually took the time and the legwork to go out and do this. So yeah, we're going to run it in that kind of mentality as well, and be

Andy (00:46:01):
Just completely transparent as to what it is. I think there are several 100% sourced, four gates done a tremendous job of sourcing and blending and secondary finishes, and they're getting a premium at $175 a bottle. So companies like that have proven that you don't necessarily need to be the distiller if you are a master blender and perhaps adding some innovations with secondary finishes.

Drew (00:46:39):
And I think that's one of the things that when we talk about the whiskey trust and the fact that they really weren't producing straight bourbon, they were more about rectifier. They were supplying rectifier and doing a lot of blending themselves with neutral grain spirits. So you're in the tradition of Yeah. Yeah. What happened in that town for so many years? Would you pay homage to the trust with a name at some point?

Andy (00:47:11):
We've talked about it. There's a gentleman we talked about collaborating with in Chicago. He's got the rights to the shoe felt name. He's also got the rights to the Greenhut name. I think he's going to do that on his own. We were going to collaborate with him on it. It never really was put, but we are using Easton. You've got the Walner Brothers, Adolph and Sam Walner, you've got John Francis. There is series

Drew (00:47:41):
There, some names there.

Andy (00:47:42):
Characters, yeah. That are always pop up. And so does anybody remember the green hot name? No. Does anybody remember the Eastern name? No. Yeah. But still, I think if I can describe anything that we do, it's very much with a nod to the past and a respect to the JK Williams name and also to Peoria and the river, how this town was built. And when we can show an historic home or the story of one of the characters there, that's really organically natural for us. That's what we should do that and remind people. There were some characters, perhaps not again, the greatest people in the world, but who built this town, and that's what made this place.

Drew (00:48:28):
Yeah. Well, I think the fun part about using these old names is it gets people to ask questions. And if you think about it, how many people know that Colonel Lee h Taylor is the man behind the Bottled in Bond Act? But you start seeing bottles of Colonel eh Taylor, and you're like Colonel. And so you start asking questions. The more you ask questions, the more you learn. And I think it adds an extra mystique to the bottle as well.

Jeff (00:48:58):
And beyond that too, they had the Octoberfest this past weekend that we went down to, and we were in the German history tent and actually Green Huts in there, but he was a military colonel or something along those lines as well. So he mean he was an army guy and he came back in and became one of these whiskey guys as well. So yeah, it's very, very interesting. And it causes people, you're right, it peaks interest and says, well, what else is around here?

Drew (00:49:29):
His history goes, actually, he was at Gettysburg. He was at Fort Donaldson. He was at a lot of the big, he was at Chattanooga. He saw a lot of action and actually had been wounded and was out for a while and went back. Yeah, I mean, for all the stuff he did with the trust that kind of probably tore his name down prior to that, he was a Civil War hero. So yeah, lot of stuff you can dig in. And again, we wouldn't know that stuff if we didn't hear his name first and then go, okay, who is this guy and what's he all about? So definitely a lot of room for that. But

Andy (00:50:10):
Obviously the Bradley name is one of the most prominent. Tobias Bradley was one of the whiskey barons. His widow, Lydia Moss Bradley founded Bradley University, used the liquor money, I won't call them. Ill-gotten games, but I mean use the liquor money and that fortune to found this great university. So the philanthropy that came out of this business historically has been phenomenal in town here.

Drew (00:50:44):
Yeah. Well, it is hard to say. Ill got in gains. They changed the law to try to get 'em to stop doing what they were doing, because the antitrust thing was not in existence when they started up as a trust. But it was kind of a reaction. It's just where it gets a little bit shady is when they decided to get the board of directors together and say, or board of trustees together and say, well, they're passing this antitrust legislation. Why don't we just turn this into a company and keep doing the same thing? So that's where it starts getting a little shady. And like I say, then dynamite your competition to try to get them to sell themselves to you. Yeah, A little rough. Well talk about the whiskeys that you have currently and kind of an idea. I saw American Single Malt, which always captures my attention when somebody mentions that they'll be coming out with something like that. So what do you have now and what are you working on for that time down the road?

Jeff (00:51:52):
So we have three expressions out right now. We have our Gold Zephyr Bourbon, which I dunno if Annie said, just took in, stayed in the Heartland competition through the American Craft Skirt Association. So we're very proud of that. And then we also have our Stormy River Rye, which is in short supply, but that's a 90% rye mash bill, 10% wheat. They're both at 90 proof, and they are, they're very well received in the area, so we're really happy with those. And then our newest one is the American Wheat Whiskey, actually. And it's the Bridge Series. Okay.

Drew (00:52:31):
And is it the wheat whiskey or is it a weed whiskey?

Jeff (00:52:34):
It's a wheat whiskey.

Drew (00:52:35):
It is a wheat whiskey. Okay.

Jeff (00:52:36):
Yeah, it is a wheat whiskey. Yeah, it's 73%, 95% wheat whiskey, and then 27% our weed bourbon that's distilled up a little bit higher, so it's a little bit cleaner and a lot sweeter. So we blended those two together to create an American wheat whiskey out of it. And then

Andy (00:53:01):
Just smooth and terrific. Yeah, we're really proud of this one.

Jeff (00:53:04):
I tell people, if you're not big into bourbon and not big into rises, well a lot of people aren't because there's kind of spicy or whatnot. I say it drinks more almost like a Canadian whiskey than, or a Irish whiskey than it does a bourbon or awry. So it's a nice entry product in my mind. And then the bourbon and the rye recipes will remain the same for those two. But then of course going to be, once the big system gets here, the small system becomes my playpen, so to speak, and I get to play around with rusty formulation and make other products and go from there. So single malts, I was basically making a single malt at Rebecca Creek is what I was doing down there. And I really do single malts, mainly Highland. I'm not actually the Iowa kind of guy,

Jeff (00:53:51):
But I'll definitely be playing with some single malts. And the industry's trying to get an American single malt category into the ttb. So that'll be nice if we can get that done. And then it's just going to be varieties maybe if we can get some heroine varieties in, or there's a lot of local farmers that said they'd help, they'll grow some stuff for us if they wanted us to put something in. We just got to figure out what we want and what we need. And with my rum background, I'll obviously be doing some rums on the side as well. So yeah, a lot of fun.

Drew (00:54:24):
You won't be fighting the challenge of aging probably as much as you did in Texas, I'm guessing.

Jeff (00:54:30):
Yeah, yeah. Texas and Louisiana both are pretty rough on aging, so it definitely speeds it up, but it can go south really fast. So if you're not careful,

Drew (00:54:40):
Well, it can help you get it to market it a little bit faster, but then it's those rough edges that can sometimes be the,

Jeff (00:54:46):
Yeah, that's why that's, you need the extra time in the barrel to get those rough edges out, but if you're over extracting, then you're kind of too late. So

Andy (00:54:55):
I don't want to say it's temperate. I'm from Minnesota, so it's temperate compared to Minnesota. And then Jeff's on the opposite side saying, you've seen nothing in humidity till you live in Louisiana.

Drew (00:55:08):
So

Andy (00:55:09):
I think we're closer to Louis, Louisville and Kentucky. Yeah. Yeah. And we're a little more on that Indianapolis kind of temperate, so it's much warmer than my previous life in Minnesota where it's literally, it's typically 15 degrees in the winter warmer here. And so we get some really nice fluctuations, but probably colder than a Louisville for sure. We get more snow than they do, but yeah, certainly the water with the limestone, the San Kodi aquifer that supplies water here is rated very highly. Yeah, I know the Ians say we've got the best limestone and filtered water in the world. I don't know. We've got one hell of an aquifer underneath Peoria that could be called equally great.

Drew (00:56:04):
So that's interesting to hear because we assume, and I've never really looked at the map to see where the limestone plate is, but I know it runs through Tennessee and Kentucky, and that is a given because the industry does a great job of promoting that, but we don't think of that being anywhere outside of those two states. They've

Andy (00:56:28):
Done a tremendous job of telling everybody how great their line stuff is.

Drew (00:56:31):
Yeah, yeah.

Andy (00:56:33):
No, it's true. I don't know that this is any greater than theirs or vice versa, but obviously it makes for great, it makes for great filtered water. It's fantastic. Yeah, that's what, this is what we draw on.

Drew (00:56:45):
Do you drink straight from the tap or do you run through a filter when you drink it yourself?

Jeff (00:56:49):
I, I'd go where I'm at now in Peoria, I go straight from the tap

Drew (00:56:53):
You. Yeah. Yeah. That's the true challenge. Whenever I go to Kentucky or to Tennessee, it's the only time when I really don't worry about taking a water bottle with me or any, I just drink straight from the tap and I'm good. Right. Yeah. Says a lot. So if somebody's coming to, well, first of all, let's talk about where you're available. So right now you're available in central Illinois, basically in the whole state of home. Whole state, okay. Okay. Yeah,

Andy (00:57:21):
We've launched, we've got distribution coverage in the whole state. Ben Ees, who's the largest retail outlet, spirit for spirits and beer and wine in the state has added on an additional, I think it's 14 stores in the Chicago area with us. And again, so Benny's Fryer, tuck are the big brands, but we're in a number of smaller on-premise and retail outlets now. And we had a very busy summer opening up our tasting room and all that, and now we're trying to get out in the field and promote the brands. And then we've got Wisconsin right up straight on the heels of that. So I think that's it for this year. We need to strategize as we get towards the end of the year. What is the next natural state? It could be Iowa, Iowa's a control state, so May, it could be Indiana. We need to think that one through as to where we might want to go next. But yeah, clearly we would like to add two to three states in 2022, and also some e-commerce that solutions that have been working

Drew (00:58:34):
As well. No, no whiskey trust strategy. You're not going to go in and start buying up distillery, shutting 'em down and selling out of their dynami

Andy (00:58:43):
Suspect fires in a stream of distilleries across the,

Drew (00:58:45):
Yeah, yeah, no. So if somebody comes to Peoria, is there any kind of experience, the best way to experience your whiskey in Peoria?

Andy (00:58:55):
Come and visit us at our tasting room. It really is the best time. And you'll find Jeff's here, he says seven days a week, and I believe him. He honestly is here, and we are too. You'll catch one or both of us here many times on the weekends. We've got a great tasting room manager who will mix up a great cocktail. We've got three full flights. You can do each of the whiskeys, either neat or in a cocktail. Then if one of us is around, you can take a little tour and you can see what we have today, and then you can envision

Drew (00:59:31):
What it's going to be, the

Andy (00:59:31):
Skills and the new equipment. But it is, it's been transformed. It was a giant empty warehouse and now it's, we're filling it up and with a little bit of vision, you can see where things are going and what the new, once we get our new equipment, it's all on order. We're hoping to have it by the end of the year, very early next. Nice. And it will completely transform the operation.

Drew (00:59:57):
That's when Jeff's a kid in the candy store. Yeah. Putting all that together. Yeah, absolutely.

Jeff (01:00:02):
Looking forward to it.

Drew (01:00:04):
Very good. Well, I appreciate you guys coming on and talking about what you're doing, and it's going to be fun watching you grow, and I look forward to a day when I can actually walk around Peoria and see if I can envision all those smoke stacks around me and see what it looks like today in comparison.

Andy (01:00:20):
We'll do it. No, we'll do it together, and we'll go down to the archive at Bradley if we can get in there. That will be super fun. They've got quite a historical photo archive. It would be fun to go in there and see if it'll give us access to all that. You can see what I was talking about with some of these old pictures. But yeah, it would be fun to walk around town and I'll definitely guarantee we'll do it with you when you come.

Drew (01:00:43):
Awesome. Awesome. Well, Andy, Jeff, thank you. I appreciate it and really

Andy (01:00:48):
Appreciate your time,

Drew (01:00:49):
Man. Thanks. Much success to you. Yep, yep.

Jeff (01:00:51):
Thank you.

Drew (01:00:52):
If you want to learn more about JK Williams, just head to jk williams distilling.com and for whiskey lore, show notes, transcripts, hoodies, tasting kits, or links to whiskey lore social media, head to whiskey lore.com. And if you're intrigued by the story of the Whiskey Trust, make sure to check out the epic miniseries that's going on right now on the Whiskey Lore Podcast. You can buy Whiskey lore on your favorite podcast app. I'm your host, drew Hamish. Have a great week, and until next time, cheers and slung Ofk Whiskey Lores a production of Travel Fuel's Life, L L C.