Dread River Distilling Co.

Drew H (00:01):
More interviews, less commercials, sorry. My past life is a DJ coming out in full force. If you are interested in hearing an extended version of this interview, you can do so by heading to patreon.com/whiskey. And as a member of the speakeasy, you get access to all of our extended interviews without commercials. And if you're not a member now, we can check it all out with a seven day free trial. That's patreon.com/whiskey lore. Welcome to Whiskey Lores Whiskey Flights, your weekly home for discovering great craft distillery experiences around the globe. I'm your travel guide Drew Hannush, the bestselling author of Experiencing Kentucky Bourbon and experiencing Irish whiskey, along with a new book that busts 24 of Whiskey's biggest myths, whiskey lore, volume one, and after a pre-dawn drive through Atlanta trying to beat that legendary traffic jam, that always seems to stop me every time I go through.

(01:08):
I found myself nearing my next distillery destination Dread River in Birmingham, Alabama at 8:00 AM two full hours before my appointment with distiller Joshua Goins. So here I am in Birmingham. What am I going to do for the next two hours? Well, I wanted some coffee and unfortunately I didn't really know any place to go in Birmingham, so I was hitting some places on the east end of town, but it appears nobody has a place for you to sit down and drink coffee anymore. Everything is a drive-through. Instead, I got some coffee, sat in the front seat of my car and caught up on some emails. Well, after that, I was nowhere near the freeway, so I decided to use my GPS to get me down on some back streets to get to the distillery, which happens to be right downtown and is fairly easy to find.

(02:06):
There's a little parking spot behind the distillery. So I pulled in there and then when I went to meet with Joshua to get ready for our interview, he said, well, I want to head over next door and get some coffee. Coffee. Oh man, there's all sorts of seating in there. I should have just gone to the distillery hung around downtown. I will know better next time Josh, walk me around the distillery. I probably should have carried the microphones around with me because we had some really interesting conversations as we were making our way around the distillery, but we're going to sit down here at the table in the front, walk through the kitchen. There's a lot of stuff here, so we got a lot to talk about. And so why don't we dive right into this conversation with Joshua Goins, head distiller here at Dread River. So this is not your first stop on the distilling trail. Where did you work before this?

Joshua (03:05):
Before this I was the distiller for Social still Distillery in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

Speaker 3 (03:11):
Okay.

Joshua (03:11):
That's kind of where I learned everything that kind of started me off on this path. Yeah, it took a lot of self-research and self-teaching to try to get to where I am today, but that was where my passion for distilling blossomed into my career.

Drew H (03:28):
Were you the first distiller there?

Joshua (03:30):
No. The owner of that facility was there, was the original distiller in.

Drew H (03:34):
So you kind of learned you trade a little bit through.

Joshua (03:35):
Yeah, and I just bugged him until he hired me. I remember sending him a million emails. I showed up a couple times and I was bartending at the time, and I just learned about the scotch. I worked at a whiskey bar where they have over hundreds of different types of scotch and Irish whiskeys and bourbons, and so I was really interested in that. I took a class on scotch and I got to learn about the process of making it, and from there I was obsessed with it and I figured that's what I want to do. And just my local distillery, he was a couple blocks from the bar I worked at and I just bugged him until he hired me. I was like, let me come mop the floors even. I'll do whatever. And eventually through time there, I was slowly doing more and more in the distilling process and eventually I was just kind of doing all the distilling process from there. So

Drew H (04:29):
We were looking at some of your experiments back there, and one of the fun ones was the American single malt that you pointed out that was not the easiest thing in the world to produce.

Joshua (04:43):
Yeah, that was, well, we had one intention on the American single malt, and that was to try to keep as close to tradition as possible.

(04:51):
And in our facility we typically run a on grain fermentation, and traditionally a single mallets are made fermented off grain. So you basically cook your grain and then separate the grain from the wash and then ferment it from there. So that was probably our biggest hurdle. We had to use a local brewery just to cook the grain and separate it with their equipment. A lot of breweries, that's how they brew beer, so they will cook and then separate into the wash and then ferment the wash. So it was a mission trying to get the grain to and from them, we rented a Home Depot truck. The overweight limit was blasting the entire way to and from the brewery, but at the end of the day, I think we made a solid product that I don't think we're going to make any money on it with all the cost and all the people that we used to do it, but just like the fact that we were able to pull it off, I think.

Drew H (05:45):
Yeah. So when you came down here, what were they making?

Joshua (05:51):
They were making bourbons and basically what we have now. So none of these things that I'm making now are my own mash bill per se. They're going to obviously have my mark on them. It's a different person doing it with my own procedures that are in place, but I am following their core ingredients to try to achieve some level of consistency, even though in the craft spirits industry, consistency is not always the highlight of the products.

Drew H (06:19):
Well, interesting that your bourbon is using wheat in its mash bill. So what's the percentage in terms of the mash bill on that?

Joshua (06:28):
So we're a 60% Kentucky white open pollinated corn, 30% to red winter wheat, and the wheat is kind of a cool story. So we get our wheat from Crooked Creek in North Carolina, and they're a heirloom grain place. It's been in the family for decades. They do stone milling there, and I'm really proud to put their name out there. They do some quality stuff, so we use their wheat and then we get our malts from Missouri.

Drew H (07:03):
When I think of wheat, I think about its need for a barrel that a lot of those flavors really develop from that time in the barrel. And so a lot of the long aged whiskeys bourbons that you find usually are weed bourbons, and with the heat as it is down here, everything's going to age a little bit faster. Have you kind of caught on to maybe a sense that wheat might actually do better here than the rye?

Joshua (07:31):
I mean, I'm biased, so I'm going to agree with you. I think everything does better here. It's where I work, but I think there's total truth to what you're saying with the high levels of heat here, I think are what helps shape Red Rivers very unique flavor. It just gives it this really refined flavor in a quick time. It's interesting too, when that wheat is coming off of the still, you can just pick it up so nicely. And we have a straight rye whiskey product. It's 90% rye and then 10% malts. And when that's coming off the steel, imagine pumper nickel bread, it literally smells just like pumper nickel and it's one of the most incredible, I just love the smell of fresh rye coming off too.

Drew H (08:23):
Rye is a challenge because it expands.

Joshua (08:26):
Yeah, rye is really difficult actually.

Drew H (08:29):
Yeah.

Joshua (08:29):
If you don't have the proper grain to water to enzyme ratio going, it turns into this bubbly, gooey lava pit thing and it'll start to boil up into the head of the still and it just becomes this crazy monster. So that's exactly what happened on our first batch of rye because it's such high volume of grain that we're distilling. So we've really had to sit and tweak our ratios and really dial in on what exactly that rise is asking for.

Drew H (09:02):
It's funny because as I was doing some episodes with English distillers, they have a little more latitude versus the Scots in terms of what they're making. So they're starting to use a lot of rye and their Scottish distilleries or Vicky is making a rye, but it's sort of new to them and it's funny to hear them talk about it because Borders distillery, when I was chatting with him, he said, never again. I broke the equipment. Yeah,

Joshua (09:31):
Dude. So true. I mean, I don't want to say I hate rye, but it is by far the hardest piece of grain. The hardest grain to process by far is so just thick and gummy. It is really, really hard to work with, man. It'll jam any pump you got. Yeah.

Drew H (09:54):
So you have an interesting thing going on back there where I'm like, where do you store your barrels and within the building, pull up a metal door and there are your barrel barrels sitting there, nice and quiet and a cool space. And how much does the temperature actually get in there in the summertime? Does it get pretty sweltering in that little room?

Joshua (10:17):
Yeah, it's a insulated door and it's not insulated for no reason. It's insulated because we have a giant fan that gets heated off of our boiler. So what we'll do is we'll rip that fan on, we'll start getting steam heat going to that fan, and we'll blast it gets hot in there. So we'll speed up the seasons this time of year when it's cold. So we'll run a two week cycle of just full blast heat in there nonstop, and then we'll shut it off for two weeks, crack the door open, let everything kind of stabilize to outside temp, and then again for two weeks let it sit and then fire it back up two weeks kind of in that kind of motion all through the cold months.

Drew H (11:01):
Yeah.

Joshua (11:02):
So

Drew H (11:02):
I hear you're thinking about moving them outdoors.

Joshua (11:06):
You saw the barrel room. We're pretty much maxed out, so we are going to build a lean two just like a pavilion, and the fire marshal will probably make us put up some fences and stuff like that, and we're going to be storing our barrels outside moving forward. And you stroke a good point when you said it's going to change the flavor profile probably, and it probably will, but I mean, I think it's going to be maybe better.

Drew H (11:31):
I

Joshua (11:31):
Think outside aging is arguably better for a spirit.

Drew H (11:35):
It would be interesting because I think about it in Scotland and seeing places that sometimes have their barrels sitting outside, but the idea of if it rains, so you've got 'em covered, you're not going to get direct sunlight. You got 'em covered as well, but you'll still get all the other elements

Joshua (11:54):
To go

Drew H (11:54):
Along with.

Joshua (11:54):
Yeah, that's kind of why I think it's okay if the Scotland reference these guys, some of 'em have the barrels on a rocky cliff side on the beach and the waves are smacking the rocks and it's like getting the brine, the briny dust, it's going into the barrels. All that is good stuff. I don't know if downtown Birmingham will give you the same,

Drew H (12:21):
The taste of the grid of the city is what you get.

Joshua (12:23):
So we got full moon barbecue. Alright, across the street. We might be getting some

Drew H (12:26):
Smoky character in

Joshua (12:28):
There. Yeah, I don't know. You

Drew H (12:29):
Never know. You got a coffee shop next door, you might get a little espresso.

Joshua (12:32):
It's all good stuff. You got to capture that stuff.

Drew H (12:35):
Yeah. How much did you get to experiment when you first came here? You've got a bigger distillery I'm guessing that you're dealing with here versus the one that you came from.

Joshua (12:44):
Yeah, it, it's a bigger distillery, it's a different, still, it's all new stuff, but in the end of the day it all functions very similar. So it really wasn't that hard to actually run the equipment. It just took a lot of, I did a couple of water runs just to see how fast does it heat up, how does it condense and those kind of things. So I ran water through it in the early days just to really wrap my head around it. Experimenting here

Speaker 4 (13:15):
Is

Joshua (13:16):
What I love about this place. We're able to do anything that we really want to do, which is great. We were thinking about, you ever heard of Kudzu?

Speaker 3 (13:26):
Yeah.

Joshua (13:26):
Yeah. So it's like the vine that ate the south.

Drew H (13:29):
Yep, absolutely.

Joshua (13:30):
And I was like, you know what? Let's make a spirit out of that. But we did some investigation on it and we're like, a lot of these, the kudzu is pesticide out, so I mean, we can't find a good kudzu source, believe it or not, even though it ate the south, people are trying to kill it crazy down here, so it's all been kind of tainted. You

Drew H (13:52):
Have to go up to North Carolina or somewhere to

Joshua (13:54):
Get it there. I even reached out to some lawn care guys and I was like, Hey, if you got any bags of kudzu, send 'em my way. And he is like, man, all that stuff's sprayed. And I'm like, oh yeah,

Drew H (14:04):
I have to talk to my friends in Charleston about one of my favorite smells in Charleston is to walk around town and you'll walk by Confederate, jasmine, and you'll just walk by and this puff of air will go by you and you're like, man, that smells so good. And man, if you wanted to capture the taste of the city, put that in a gin or something.

Joshua (14:27):
Oh yeah.

Drew H (14:28):
Would probably be. So what would Birmingham be known for that?

Joshua (14:33):
Well, I mean, I feel like you can't even walk a block without running into a barbecue joint. I thought I had good barbecue until I moved down here.

Drew H (14:46):
So what is the barbecue like here? Of course we have the arguments about Memphis, Kansas City, North Carolina. We have mustard in South Carolina for some reason. What's the barbecue like here?

Joshua (14:57):
Well, I mean they have their own, every place you go has their own homemade sauce. And I don't know what specifically Alabama would be known for on the barbecue front, but I mean it's all delicious.

Drew H (15:08):
Pork barbecue.

Joshua (15:09):
Yeah, pork

Drew H (15:09):
Barbecue. Yeah, because I didn't mention Texas and they're probably going to yell at me for not mentioning

Joshua (15:13):
Texas. Exactly. Yeah.

Drew H (15:16):
Yeah.

Joshua (15:16):
I would say though Birmingham in itself has some of the most amazing food I've ever had

Drew H (15:23):
That

Joshua (15:23):
A city could offer.

Drew H (15:24):
Okay. And you're coming from a state Pennsylvania, that's a pretty big foodie kind of place.

Joshua (15:31):
It is. It foodie and Birmingham. It came to play ball. There's a famous chef here named Frank Stint, and he has erected amazing restaurants across Birmingham. And then all of the people that work for him go off and do amazing things. So his influence alone is bringing to the table like culinary excellence. Then you got a million mom and pop shops and stuff too that you can just jump in and eat and stuff like that.

Speaker 3 (16:02):
Yeah,

Drew H (16:02):
Food

Joshua (16:02):
Here. Yeah, food here. We offer taps kind of like, this isn't your night cap. This is where you'd come to before your night

Speaker 3 (16:10):
Begins.

Joshua (16:10):
You'd come here and have some really well crafted cocktails, get some small bites, figure out what the game plan is for the night. Maybe you're at the tin roof later, who knows? But this isn't your whole night. This is where you'd come to get ready for your night. That's kind of how I see it

Drew H (16:27):
Looks very swanky around the bar.

Joshua (16:29):
Yeah, it's a lounge

Drew H (16:31):
Setup.

Joshua (16:32):
Everything is textured and kind of cozy. It's kind of like a, I don't want to say upscale, maybe elevated vibe. We do a lot of stuff here. We'll bring comics in. We have a massive event space. We can host 200 plus people. We do concerts and stuff like that, but it's really designed to be just a comfortable, relaxed atmosphere offering elevated food and small bites.

Drew H (17:02):
Yeah. I looked over behind the bar and you had the stairway to, is that a stairway to nowhere?

Joshua (17:08):
Yeah, it acts like storage right now, which is a shame because that would be an amazing upstairs. And we're talking about maybe doing a speakeasy or some way shape or form, doing something really cool up there. It it is a massive space up top.

Drew H (17:23):
Well, it gives that old saloon bar kind of feel in the back. And the first thing I mentioned to you when I saw it was is there a brothel upstairs? Because that would be the old school

Joshua (17:34):
Saloon. And I said, I wish, because I think that'd be a great,

Drew H (17:38):
Well, not the brothel, but yeah, something upstairs.

Joshua (17:41):
Yeah. We'll just start rumors of there being a brothel. You don't actually have to have one, we can just tell people there's one.

Speaker 3 (17:47):
Yeah.

Drew H (17:56):
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Joshua (19:06):
So being in a control state, you got to make it to sell it. So if anyone comes and gets a drink at the bar, they're getting a handcrafted whiskey. They're getting handcrafted bitters in their whiskey, they're getting handcrafted syrups in their whiskey. Every little thing is made from scratch here.

Drew H (19:25):
Was this something you dealt with in Pennsylvania?

Joshua (19:26):
Yeah, same exact

Drew H (19:27):
Same

Joshua (19:28):
Situation except for Pennsylvania. It's a little bit easier on the bar. We were able to source a local beer and put that on draft, which is not something we can offer here.

Drew H (19:38):
And you have the little brewery in the back. Very small brewery.

Joshua (19:42):
Yeah, it's a three barrel system. It's way more than enough for our four tap system at the bar.

(19:49):
But yeah, we do offer beer and we're starting a wine program as well. We're going to be offering wine just for events in the bar, but it's something we want to get changed because say you're a smaller distillery operating in Alabama, the husband, I'm just going to say it's the husband that wants to go to distillery, the wife, maybe she likes wine and they don't offer that those two guests are out of the picture now because not everyone's happy. So we would really like to see Alabama help us out and be like, you can put craft beer on the bar now so that it's something for everybody. And if maybe it's only local. So now we're helping everybody in the beverage industry. Brewers, winemakers, distilleries alike. It brings in more guests, it highlights other crafts, and I think that'd be great. So I'd love to see that in the future.

Drew H (20:34):
I'm assuming there's a dread river. This is how little I know about Birmingham.

Joshua (20:39):
I have yet to see the Dread River, but the tail is, there's a mythical source of water flowing underneath Birmingham like Aquifer. And John Cubic, the founder of this place, has seen it and been to it, so I haven't seen it. I don't even know where to go to find it, but that is the tail of Dread River.

Drew H (21:00):
You're not getting your water from the dread river.

Joshua (21:02):
No, and I wish I could say I did. I might have to filter it a few times, but

Drew H (21:06):
Yeah, I know she had a distillery cat too. Actually, I didn't notice when I was chatting back and forth with Suzanne getting this all set up, the first thing she said was, I'll have to get permission from Patty.

Joshua (21:19):
Yeah, yeah. She's a funny story. She was an Allie cat. She still is an alley cat since I started working here. She's about a year and eight months in training, and we're trying to train her to just hang out in the distillery. And so we just slowly, we got her a food bowl, we start feeding her and we go over there and she'd dart off into the alley and that was how it was for ever. And then now we got it to where we put the food a little closer, we put it in the distillery. Now she just free range walks in and out whenever she wants. Every now and then I'll see her out there and she'll be maing down on a bird or she's like, it's crazy. She became part of the family just by accident. So

Drew H (22:01):
Yeah, I saw her wandering around when we were back there. You said she's not

Joshua (22:06):
A very social butterfly whatsoever, so it's great for the crew to have that around. It just brings the energy up and it's like, oh, who's feeding Patty today? It's like, oh, we're off on Monday. Who's going to take care of Patty? So it's just another leg of the distillery at this point.

Drew H (22:24):
So let's talk about the agave. Was that something that was around when you first arrived?

Joshua (22:29):
It was one of their best sellers. It said double barrel finished agave. If you notice the word says mistaken on it. I can give you a little context on that word there. So the process on the agave is they age it first in a ex bourbon barrel, and then we age it again in a sherry barrel.

Speaker 3 (22:51):
Oh, okay.

Joshua (22:51):
So the word mistaken comes from people mistaken it for bourbon

Speaker 3 (22:55):
Or

Joshua (22:55):
Whiskey. It kind of is whiskey esque. Having those barrel aged notes that you can taste when you drink it. It's a great product. It is still one of our top sellers to this day. Yeah.

Drew H (23:10):
And then the rye whiskey, you said, is that a 95? Five

Joshua (23:15):
90. 90

Drew H (23:16):
10, okay.

Joshua (23:16):
Yeah,

Drew H (23:17):
90 10. Okay.

Joshua (23:18):
Yep.

Drew H (23:19):
Where does that rye come from?

Joshua (23:22):
The rye comes, well, I just made a batch of rye. I can't speak on where they got it from. Four years ago I got the rye from Tennessee. There's a, I think volunteer mission grains, if I'm could be wrong on that. They're the ones that grow it and then we got it shipped in from them.

Drew H (23:39):
And then you actually do a whiskey, not but whiskey, which is a blend. So what's the story behind that one?

Joshua (23:48):
The whiskeys is, it's one of our light wheat whiskey barrels. So it's not for bourbon. It's essentially the same bill, but it comes off the steel at a higher proof. It's putting a barrel out of bourbon speck and they're five years old. So we put one of those barrels to four Indiana barrels, and then that helps us create a product that can stay consistent throughout the course of its whole lifetime.

Drew H (24:15):
Is that a sipping whiskey or is that more of something you use with cocktails?

Joshua (24:19):
I mean, I think if you're asking me, I would say they're all sipping whiskeys, but I

Drew H (24:24):
Do ask the distiller that question.

Joshua (24:26):
So a lot of people put 'em in cocktails and old fashions and you name it.

Drew H (24:33):
Yeah. And then the bourbon, you're using red winter wheat. And so what kind of flavor profile do you expect out of that?

Joshua (24:42):
Yeah, that's a question that I don't like because I feel like it's so subjective. I feel like if I was to drink it and you were to drink it, we may have two different opinions on the flavor. Personally in me, I get a lot of butter scotch notes, some earthy tones definitely coming through and a lot of vanillas. It is the kind of stuff that I tend to get out of the bottle, but everyone kind has a different taste buds.

Speaker 3 (25:08):
So

Joshua (25:10):
Maybe taste buds are the same, but they associated with different memories, that kind of thing.

Drew H (25:15):
And then your gin, which of course the opinion on gin is that a lot of people will kind of walk away from gin if they're not into the Juniper thing, but yours has kind of got a different personality

Joshua (25:28):
To it. So my thing about our gin is there's plenty of London dries out there,

(25:32):
Like the Christmas tree flavor that everyone talks about. Ours is not that. It's against the grain in that aspect. It's more of a just citrusy gin. There's the minimum amount of juniper in it that is needed to be legal gin. And there's also multiple citruses. We take a whole grape fresh grapefruits and oranges, and we microplane them and we just pull everything. But the pith, so just the skin, just those oils. And there's a star nice in there. We got licorice root in there and just a bundle of fresh herbs that we source for that. But really it's highlighted to be more of a citrus forward experience. So like an old Tom.

Drew H (26:17):
Yeah,

Joshua (26:17):
If you like an old Tom cocktail,

Drew H (26:19):
I tell the story of the old Tom because I had never heard this story before.

Joshua (26:24):
Old Tom Cocktail is like a gin cocktail, but I just forgot that we did just talk about the old Tom Gin. Yeah, old Tom Gin was, the story I was told is it came from a gin distillery where a cat had fallen into the vat, and so the distiller barrel aged it, and then they put it outside with a spigot on it, and you could put a quarter in this barrel and get a shot out of it. And everyone loved the flavor of it, and it's because a cat fell in theirs of how the myth goes. So I've been wanting to do an old Tom gin.

Drew H (26:57):
You'll have to say, no cats were, our patty is not in this.

Joshua (27:00):
Yeah, exactly. I was thinking Patty's silhouette in the back

Drew H (27:03):
Though. Yeah, there you go. There you go.

Joshua (27:05):
You got to get her involved, man.

Drew H (27:06):
Yeah, no, that's a good tie in. Absolutely. So you're originally from Florida, you moved to Pennsylvania, you now here in Birmingham. If somebody's coming to Birmingham, what kind of things kind of drew you when you first started exploring the area?

Joshua (27:23):
Yeah. Well, I was here for a short amount of time without the kids. And if you're like me at all, you love a good dive bar. So Birmingham, there's no shortage of dive bars. I just want to be somewhere with a cheap PBR and music that's super loud. So the Nick would be a great place to go if you want to do something like

Speaker 3 (27:44):
That.

Joshua (27:45):
Tin Roof is multiple stages. I was outside and it was hip hop. I walked inside. There's two guys playing Grateful Dead covers. That was a pretty cool experience here with the kids. Davenport's Pizza is great. They got a little arcade area. You can play pinball with them and stuff like that and get a really killer slice of pizza.

Drew H (28:06):
Nice.

Joshua (28:06):
Yeah, so there's a lot to do. This zoo is incredible here. If you like a good zoo, we got passes and it's just something we do. There's plenty to do in the Birmingham area.

Drew H (28:17):
You had a whole football league to yourself for a short time. Of course, there weren't a lot of people running out to the games, but except for the Birmingham stallions were apparently drawing pretty good.

Joshua (28:27):
Yeah, well, it's kind of, I wish UAB and was a bigger football pool, but we got Alabama and Auburn here, so

Drew H (28:38):
That's UAB. Used to be, I always think of UAB as basketball.

Joshua (28:42):
Yeah.

Drew H (28:42):
Yeah. It's still a pretty good basketball program.

Joshua (28:44):
That's what I hear. I've never seen a game yet. It's something on my bucket list though. But I would really love to see their sports program blow up though. That'd be pretty awesome. I'd be a number one fan.

Speaker 3 (28:53):
Very nice.

Joshua (28:55):
When you first come to Alabama, they're like, who are you? Alabama or Auburn? It's like, which one do you pick? And I'm like, UAB. I'm neutral.

Drew H (29:04):
Okay. I thought you were going to throw Gators or something. Yeah, getting all sorts of trouble.

Joshua (29:11):
Yeah.

Drew H (29:14):
Well, Joshua, thank you so much for talking through everything and walking me around the distillery this morning. And I have to say it, and it's not an insult, but having family in Texas and living in South Carolina, Birmingham for a long time was just kind of drive-through area for me. It was like, okay, well maybe I'll stay the night there, but never really kind of wandered into the town to see what was going on. And of course, being a fan of Whiskey Distilleries are a good place to kind of introduce yourself to a community. So

Joshua (29:47):
Yeah, I love Birmingham area. I'd recommend it to anybody. I mean, there's chatter of it being like the next Nashville nice. So I'd love to see that come to fruition all.

Drew H (29:56):
Yeah, it'll be less. Hopefully it's not as busy on the streets as it is around

Joshua (30:03):
Nashville. Yeah, it's packed over

Drew H (30:04):
There. It is. Very busy in Nashville. Yeah. Well, thank you so much. I appreciate you. Thank you. Cheers. Well, I hope you enjoyed this visit, the Dread River Distillery number seven on the whiskey, lower Whiskey flights. Great 48 tour of America's great craft distilleries. If I picked your interest in visiting Dread River Distillery, well make sure to head to whiskey lore.com/flights where you can view the profile of this distillery and sign up for a free account and add this and any of the other 600 distilleries on the site into your very own personal whiskey lore wishlist. And when you're ready to travel, all you have to do is use the site's convenient planning tools, maps, tour dates, booking links, and more to create the perfect distillery itinerary. Start your journey@whiskeylore.com slash flights as we pack up and get ready to head South through Alabama into Mississippi to reach our next distillery destination.

(31:00):
If you're still on the fence about a visit, the Dread River Distillery, let me give you my three reasons why I think you should have this distillery on your whiskey lower wishlist. First, this gives you a chance to see Alabama's largest and most product driven distillery, offering a wide range of handcrafted spirits like whiskey, rye, vodka, gin, rum, and even agave spirit. Don't miss out on the first legal bourbon distilled in Birmingham in over a hundred years. Second, whether it's a mixology class, happy hour, or private event, dread River is a hub for social gatherings, and it's deeply tied into Birmingham's growing food and drink scene, making it a great place to connect with locals or celebrate something special. Third, if you're in Birmingham and you're planning a night out on the town, it's a great place to grab a bite, do a flight, and then rev up the night with Taps paired with a variety of spirits.

(32:02):
I hope you enjoyed this visit, the Dread River Distillery got a long day planned tomorrow with an early morning drive through Alabama and a ride down a dirt road to go see what's going on at Big Escambia Distillery, the home of Delan Bourbon. And then we'll meet up again in southern Mississippi for a tour of a sweet mash distillery. It's known for barrel picks, barrel finishes, and great southern hospitality. The deep south leg of this coast to coast journey of America's great craft distilleries continues. Make sure you've got your ticket to ride along by smashing the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app. I'm your travel guide Drew Hanish. And until next time, cheers and Slava for transcripts and travel information, including maps, distillery planning information and more at to whiskey-lower.com/flights. Whiskey of production of Travel Fuels Life LLC.