Hollow Creek Distillery

Drew H (00:00):
Do you like free things? We'll get 12 extra minutes of interview time in this particular episode by going to patreon.com/whiskey. And if you are not a member, all you have to do is sign up for a seven day free trial to check it out. 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 and the brand new book, the 24 of Whiskey's Biggest Myths Whiskey Lo Volume one. Today I am headed down in a brand new car. I had to say goodbye to my 13-year-old car because of a wee bit of a fender bender on the way down to Florida for this deep South trek. And I am back on the road again in a brand new car. I'm going to start this travel again.

(01:03):
I'm going to start out actually going to a South Carolina distillery today. And then I am heading down, or I should say across to Alabama, Mississippi, down to New Orleans and then back across Florida. And unfortunately, the only state that I'm having trouble tracking down a distillery I can visit is Mississippi may end up that I have to just do a drop in on somebody there because the one distillery that I did reach out to actually I reached out to, and one of them is not open during the week, so I'm not going to have a chance to get in there. So if anybody has any suggestions, feel free to reach out to me on Instagram, if you like, or through my Patreon account. Right now, I am heading down on a Sunday drive, about an hour and a half from my home down through a part of my home state that I've never explored before the Lake Murray area.

(02:01):
And I mainly haven't explored it because it's a little bit off the beaten path. The distillery I'm visiting is Hollow Creek. If it hadn't been for a friend up here in the Greenville Bourbon Group, Tiffany Gibson, I probably would not have known about this hidden gem, and it might've been a while before I actually made my way out in that direction. It does take a little work with the GPS to get to, if you're coming from Columbia, it's not too hard. It's on the western side of Lake Murray and it's about a 40 minute drive down US 3 78. But for me, coming from Greenville to hop off of I 26 near Newbury and then go through the town of prosperity, I didn't come out any richer unfortunately after that, but then made several turns down back roads to get to the distillery. Ended up being a perfect day to visit because normally I don't expect owners to be around on Sundays, although in the world of craft distilling, that does tend to happen more than you would guess.

(03:07):
But on this particular day, the husband and wife founders of Hollow Creek, Craig and Meredith Amick were both here anyway because they're hosting an event for local distributors and these guys do a lot of work for their local community. They have day jobs, but they have been running this distillery for 10 years. And so this is something that's very ordinary for them to do, but I do appreciate them taking the time to, first of all meet with me and get there a little early so they could walk me around the distillery and give me a feel for what they're creating there and kind of their philosophy and a chance to see the equipment and get down into the nuts and bolts of things. And they offered to let me taste a couple of things. I decided that I wanted to do those tastings during the podcast.

(03:59):
Now, I don't do them on this version, they are on the Patreon version. But to tell you a little bit about my experience, I have to say, well, I'm going to do the tasting of the vodka, the flavored vodka on here, but the eight and a half year old whiskey that I got a chance to taste, man, that was amazing. A nice balanced whiskey. Eight and a half years. You might think it was oak heavy being aged here in South Carolina, but I was getting notes of chocolate banana. It was really, really an interesting whiskey. So I am excited about sharing this interview with you here today. And there's a lot of history surrounding the AIC family in South Carolina and they incorporate some of that history into their spirit's names. And so I wanted to start off by digging a little bit into that

Craig (04:52):
History side of things. My family immigrated to the area in 1752. It was a gentleman named Conrad Emig. It was later be Americanized to Amec. He was married and had one young son called Henry, and they actually had a land grant. It's five or six miles from where we are sitting right now under Lake Murray, but we've been here ever since in this very area. I'm the ninth generation. Our son is the 10th generation. So I tell folks we don't get out much.

Drew H (05:29):
Well, you gave me, as we were touring around a little earlier, kind of the inspiration for how you guys got involved in distilling. How did this all start out?

Meredith (05:40):
Absolutely. So we had a good family friend named Lamar. And Lamar was actually the first one in South Carolina to put in an application for a micro distillery. And he got into it and realized all the paperwork behind it and said, too much paperwork. I'm out. And so at the time, I always say that Craig was young and dumb and he was fresh out of his MBA. We had a six month old baby, and Craig came to me and he said, I think Lamar's idea is great. I don't want to let it go. I want to build a distillery. And I said, I don't care what you want to do, I just want to sleep. So he caught me at a weak moment and here we are 13 years later. We did a year's worth of research, two years worth of paperwork and 10 years, our doors have been open 10 years now.

(06:26):
So time flies when you're having fun. But Lamar, he and his dad were big moonshiners about five miles up the creek from where we sit today. Arp stills that we run, or our still that we run right now is an 800 gallon pot. Lamar and his dad ran two 600 gallon pots in the woods, never got caught. They did have one of those blown up by the feds, but they never got caught during that. So Lamar, he came in, Craig built the facility, Lamar came in and taught us everything he knew about Moonshining and he's, why we're sitting here today.

Drew H (06:58):
I'm sure he had lots of stories probably of crazy things that happened in the past. And then on top of that, you have somebody who's been distilling in a way that the market doesn't probably tend to distill. I mean, what were some of the things that he pointed out to you that helped get you on the right track, but maybe sound a little untypical?

Craig (07:25):
So when we started out, we very much took illegal moonshine, brought it inside and started paying taxes on it. Okay. So it was sugar-based washes. We did have some corn in there. Honestly, it yielded a little bit to flavor profile where we ever actually cooking in enough to pull starch and convert sugar. No, we were basically making rum and we had a 250 gallon direct fired pot still. We literally just took moonshine, brought it indoors, started paying taxes. When Lamar was running illegally, they ran what was called submarine stills.

(08:08):
So big pot with a flu through the middle of it. And they would hang a fuel source, typically kerosene and a five gallon bucket in a tree and run a little tube down through the flu that goes through the pot and light it. Wow. Sounded the always heard that it sounded like a freight train coming through the woods. So we worry about insurance agents now and they won't ensure direct fired stills. And they're very particular about your lockout tagout program and your confined space entry and your hot work permit system and everything else. And this guy grew up with a five gallon bucket of kerosene hanging on a tree 10 feet

Drew H (08:46):
Away. Wow. That is crazy. Well, I've seen the still because you still have the direct fired still here. Yes. When you were doing the direct fire, of course, I always hear the stories that they used to have to worry about scorching their whiskey. So you were distilling on grain in that

Craig (09:07):
It was quite a challenge, but

Drew H (09:08):
Yes.

Craig (09:09):
Okay. So to avoid scorching, you have to keep everything moving. So you either need an agitator or you need a pump that you can keep your mash stirred up inside. Of course, your pump has to stand up to 200 degree temperatures, and it's a challenge. I would never go back. I would also never, I would never suggest anyone try it.

Drew H (09:34):
Yeah,

Craig (09:35):
It was entirely too much work.

Drew H (09:36):
So it was kind of a breadth of relief except for the cost of buying the new stills.

Craig (09:41):
Right.

Drew H (09:41):
But you were running through that same still twice, I'm guessing, double distilling through that. Yes, yes. Did he double distill as well, or was that something that, because sometimes I hear the old moonshiners, they would just try to distill it high enough that they could go with one

Craig (09:59):
Run, so they would run a thumper or a

Drew H (10:02):
Doubler,

Craig (10:03):
But a single run through.

Drew H (10:04):
Yeah,

Craig (10:05):
That's it. So you kind of get two distillations.

Drew H (10:07):
Yeah. Was the original intent to do moonshine or was it to move into doing whiskey?

Craig (10:16):
We never wanted to be a moonshine house exclusively. So when you open one of these things, there's a couple of ways to do it. You can either start with a very large pile of cash

(10:26):
And burn it until you can sell brown liquor or you need a cashflow product upfront. So we did not start with a large pile of cash. We started with a very large loan, so we needed a cashflow product. And in rural South Carolina, your basic options are moonshine, vodka, gin. I hate gin, and it's a very small piece of the market vodka. I didn't want to make it at the time. And honestly, with direct fired 250 gallon pot, still, it's just not an option. So moonshine, it was, and it fit the area. It served us very, very well. And still to this day, we sell a ton of it, so we didn't want to stay that. And we've since transitioned, we make vodka and bourbon, and we've got quite the portfolio now, but it was very much the roots where we started.

Drew H (11:22):
So how do you choose those initial flavors that you're going to do? Apple pie seems like a given,

Craig (11:29):
Right? So we used to tell folks, it's almost an unwritten law. If you make moonshine, you have to make apple pie. So that one's on the list. Certainly a lot of our other ones came from, well, some of it came from Lamar. What had he already made? What did the illegal market at least kind of react to? And then a lot of it came from customer requests over the years. Our bestselling flavor of moonshine still to this day is sea salt and caramel. And when I first heard the idea it was from a customer, they said, you should try a salted caramel flavor. And this is kind of when Starbucks ruined the world with salted caramel everything. And the first time I heard it, I thought, that sounds absolutely disgusting. There's no way. Well, I heard it over and over and over. So finally we said, all right, we're going to try something and figure this out. And we did, and it took off like wildfire. Wow. It was from the first time we were released it, I think it's been the number one selling flavor of moonshine.

Drew H (12:30):
You say that flavor, and the first thing that crosses my mind is that you've got an apple pie moonshine. I'm blending them together.

Craig (12:36):
A lot of people do, which is actually a nice way to sell two bottles instead. There

Drew H (12:39):
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(13:42):
Let's talk about some of the whiskeys and the names. It's really interesting to see how you've kind of incorporated in little bits of history and some things that I didn't realize. I saw your high cotton whiskey, and then I saw the poodle on the cover and I was like, oh, I need, what kind of poodle is that? Because somebody in your reviews said there's a swamp poodle. They love the fact that there was a swamp poodle on the bottle, and I went swamp poodle. So I had to look it up and see what it is, and then find out it's the state dog, and I didn't even know they had state dogs. So talk about how you come about this branding and the story behind High Cot.

Craig (14:23):
So the Swamp Poodle is actually a Boykin spaniel.

(14:27):
It is a South Carolina state dog, and colloquially they're called swamp poodles by some at least. So there's a really good kennel not far from here. It's called Hollow Creek Kennels. They breed an absolutely fantastic bloodline of boykins. I tell everybody, it's probably the best bloodline in the world for this dog. We are in no way affiliated, no way related, but since we've got the kennel right down the road, these really good dogs, they came in one day with a picture of the patriarch of their line, a sticker on a bottle, and said, Hey, we should do something like this one day. And at the time, we didn't have anything for it, but a couple of years later, we were developing branding for our first bourbon and it kind of fit. So I was like, maybe we can do something with a boykin. And I tell you what, the dog has sold more bourbon than anything else. It really has.

Drew H (15:21):
Yeah. This is why beer commercials, I think when I was a kid, buds and McKenzie selling beer. Yeah, people love animals. So talk about that whiskey and what you decided to put in the bottle.

Craig (15:38):
I describe this one as we just want to prove you can make good bourbon in South Carolina. There's nothing terribly exotic about it. It's a fairly routine high rye grain bill, 70% corn, 26% rye, 4% malted barley. It stays in a char level three and a half barrel right now. Everything we're selling is between five and a half, six years old. Most of the barrels we're bottling are right at six.

Drew H (16:02):
Okay.

Craig (16:03):
So it's going to be a very familiar flavor profile for a lot of people. You're going to get the notes from the rye, especially being at 26%. You're going to get the black pepper and everything. You're also going to get the influence of the barrel at six years old. It's starting to smooth out really nicely. So yeah, that's the juice in the bottle. I do have to brag a little bit. We have three different expressions of this. We have a 90 proof small batch, then we do a single barrel product at 105 proof, and we do a single barrel barrel proof product as well. This past year, 2024, we only entered one spirits competition, and we only sent a couple of bottles there. The high cotton 105 proof single barrel was what we entered at LA International Spirits Competition. It did pretty well. It won a gold medal. It won best in class. Its class was bourbon whiskey six years, and then it turned around and won best of division. Its division was just straight bourbon whiskey. That's not something you see very often in South Carolina.

Drew H (17:09):
You also have a mash bill that's a high malt.

Craig (17:13):
The William Allen is our high malt.

Drew H (17:15):
Yeah,

Craig (17:17):
The other grain bill we use, it's a wheated grain bill, 25% wheat. Honestly, we do not have any on the shelf right now. We started and we want for a while we started selling it. It was still fairly young whiskey. I'll be honest, when we started selling it, it sold better than I thought, but it wasn't really where I wanted it. So we sold through a little bit of it and then pulled it. It'll come back at some point. The name's kind of cool. It's called 34 0 8. It's 34.08, and that is, it ties by. So we talked about, my family's been here forever. If you come halfway through our lineage in the states here, my great-grandfather's name was Captain Tom. He ran a ferry over the Salah River before Lake Murray was built, and he crossed at 34.08 degrees North latitude. So that's the name. That's where it came from.

Drew H (18:15):
When you're having to choose and get flavors and determine when you're going to bottle something, I would find that it'd be very difficult for me because I would be second guessing all the time going, is this what the market wants versus is this something I would drink? How do you fight that battle and which direction do you kind of lean towards?

Craig (18:41):
So this is where we're kind of fortunate to have multiple expressions of each bourbon that we make. So both bourbons, William Allen and High Cotton. We have three labels, 90 proof, small batch, a single barrel at either 105 or 107 proof, and then single barrel barrel proof. So we go through, we taste barrels and we pull out honestly what I consider to be all stars, and those are going to be our single barrels. And then not to say that any of it's just bad whiskey, but if it's not something that strikes me, then that's going to end up being a batched product. So we kind of have a disposition for everybody as long as we don't get any that are just real stinkers.

Drew H (19:22):
Yeah, I was going to say, what happens to the stinkers?

Meredith (19:26):
Let 'em sit a little

Craig (19:26):
Longer. Right. That's the other thing. Leave 'em in there. See, something good will happen eventually. Yeah.

Meredith (19:31):
We used to do some barrel tasting events and we pull out four barrels and let folks come in and taste through and have these barrel parties. And I believe at one, it was just kind of a random one that we had pulled. There was one that nobody really liked, and we said, man, this isn't it. And so we put that one back, pulled it back out about six months later for another event, kind of again, not knowing what to expect. And that was the favorite at the following event. So it just needed more time.

Craig (20:02):
Six months can make a big difference. It really can.

Drew H (20:04):
Yeah. Well, I found it fascinating too, that you were using toasted oak barrels and doing the finishing with that because barrels are not cheap.

Craig (20:12):
No, they're not at all. Not at all. When we first started, they were not that bad, and now they're pretty expensive.

Drew H (20:20):
You spend three months in the barrel and then you start emptying it out. What happens to that old barrel?

Craig (20:26):
We use barrels for a hundred dollars a piece.

Drew H (20:28):
Oh, nice. Okay. So if somebody wants to table, somebody wants 'em. We've

Craig (20:31):
Got some. Yep.

Drew H (20:32):
Yeah, very nice. You're in vodka as well. How did you come about diving into the vodka world?

Craig (20:43):
So originally I'd said we were not going to make poor decisions and a bad personal experience, I guess, young and dumb, right? I know, right? Yeah. But several years ago, I was talking to someone rather high up with one of the big distributors, and he said, today, I'm looking at your portfolio. You don't sell vodka. You're a craft distiller. You got to sell a vodka. And I said, well, I don't like vodka. There's a story there. I don't like it. We don't make it. And he looked at me dead in the face and said, son, I don't care if you like it. It is a huge chunk of the market, and it's something that you can make in eight days. You have to do it. I was like, ah, maybe you got a point because it is another cashflow product. So then we kind of set out on this, okay, if we're going to make vodka, we've got to figure out how to make what I would consider to be really good vodka, because I'm not interested in being bottom shelf, cheapest bottle, that kind of thing.

(21:42):
So let's figure out how to make really good vodka. We spent actually a good bit of time doing it, and it turned out fantastic. So we've won some awards with our low water vodka brand. So we kind of established a little bit of a reputation for being able to make vodka. And then kind of the next big step was of all things college athletics. So name, image, and likeness is a big thing now, right? We can pay college athletes through NIL money, a mutual acquaintance with us and the NIL collective for the University of South Carolina together, and basically asked both of us, Hey, would you be interested in doing something? And NIL vodka was the answer. It was of course, yes, on both sides. So now we have a Garnet and black vodka brand that is 25% donation to Garnet Trust for NIL efforts at University of South Carolina. So then your vodka reputation starts to grow a little bit more. So yeah, it's turned into a thing. There's some other opportunity in the vodka world on the horizon a little. It's a lot more than I ever thought it would be.

Drew H (22:47):
Yeah. You coming from Clemson territory and making, have you had anybody go, Hey, is that possible to do? Or you say, I'm tying the state together. I'm bringing it all together.

Craig (23:01):
So funnily enough, tiger Net blew up when Word got out. We were doing this. I try to explain to folks, we both went to Clemson. We were both actually raised gamecock families. I'm not, I want to see both schools do well. There's your PC answer. We make Garnet and black vodka. We don't make purple and orange vodka. These things require licensing contracts. So if Clemson is interested, we would be more than happy to make an NIL vodka for them as well. Right now, that contract does not exist, and I am not getting involved in an IP lawsuit.

Drew H (23:44):
I hear you on that. It's funny because having been born in Michigan and know the Ohio State Michigan rivalry, and then growing up in Asheville, North Carolina, not wanting to be a Tarheel fan and latching onto Clemson, as soon as I moved to Greenville, I got a whole feel for that rivalry. And boy, at times it can be as stingy as that Michigan, Ohio State rivalry is.

Craig (24:10):
It gets heated.

Drew H (24:11):
Yeah. People don't know. They don't know. Where'd the name low water come from?

Craig (24:18):
So that's actually another really cool family story. We'll go back to Captain Tom Amick. He ran Amex Ferry across the Saluda for 42 years. I think it was. His best year ever was 1911. So in 1911, lake Murray had been planned, but it had not been built yet, but they had started a lot of timber harvest. So you've got a lot of commercial traffic. So in general, the ferry traffic, it's a booming business right then. Okay. And there are several ferries along this Luda River. You had essentially competition upstream and downstream. Well, 1911 was a dry year, and the water was low in the river. Neither upstream nor downstream could his competition cross. So he got all their traffic plus all the commercial traffic in the area. So as much as you could in 1911, he kind of printed money with a river ferry. We found this in an article printed in the state newspaper in 1930 something. They interviewed him right before he died, and since 1911 was his best year because of low water, that's where the brand name comes from.

Drew H (25:26):
Nice. When I saw the It's chocolate espresso, vodka.

Craig (25:30):
Vodka,

Drew H (25:31):
Yes. Yeah, I said, that's right up my alley. So how did this come about?

Meredith (25:36):
So one of the ladies that works with us, she's very much into mixing flavors, and she suggested a chocolate espresso vodka, and I think Craig's reaction to chocolate espresso was similar to the salted caramel moonshine, which was, that sounds terrible. And so we released this one actually as a family reserve, really small batch release, and it flew off the shelves. It was gone in less than four hours. And so we rereleased it probably three months later, and the reaction was the same, and we said, this is a hit. We've got to put a low water label on it, essentially chocolate espresso, and here's our new vodka flavor. So yeah, that one has been a hit. And again, it was one of those that we didn't necessarily think would be, but you learn new things and you let the market talk to you.

Drew H (26:32):
It's like drinking a Tootsie roll.

Meredith (26:34):
It is.

Drew H (26:34):
It kind of is, which is very dangerous. That's the hard part about drinking moon flavored moonshines or flavored vodkas for me, but especially flavored moonshines. I haven't had a lot of vodkas that are flavored that have really stood out to me. And I guess finding the right amount of flavor to add to where you're not overpowering or making it so sickly sweet that somebody that you can't drink very much because it just gets you right away.

Craig (27:07):
I'll throw a pitch in there for basically some of our experimental stuff we're doing now, flavored vodka, it, even flavored whiskeys. We've started to play with, we call it our Family reserve series, and that was the genesis of this low water chocolate espresso. This is where we get to play around. And you mentioned, Hey, you want something that's flavored but not overly sweet. You don't want to overpower the base spirit. So it takes reps and it's not just what you think, it's what the market thinks. Well, that's kind of the nice part about this is we've got a manufacturing facility, but we also have our gift shop, our retail shop. So we can put together small batches, say 20 cases or something like that, throw it out and see what people think. If it sells out quickly, then hey, that's a good sign.

(27:53):
In the case of chocolate espresso, if you release it again a few months later and it sells out just as quickly with a much larger batch, then that's a really good sign and you go ahead and make a label for it. The second release was kind of cool. There's a girl out here who we worked with. She hand rolled cigars, so cigars and whiskey, pretty natural fit. So for that second release, she actually came out to do a pop-up thing here that Saturday morning, and she walks in, it was, I don't know, 10 or 15 minutes till 10. We open at 10 o'clock, and she walks in and she looks at me, she says, Hey, have you looked outside yet? I was like, yeah, I see we got a few people in line, that kind of thing. She said, no, you should go look outside. It's like, I get it. I see cars. I can see people in the window there. People are waiting. We're going to have a little bit of rush. It'll be fine. She said, no, I think you have a hundred people in line. Now. You have seen where we are in South Carolina,

(28:51):
And I don't know that it was a hundred, but it was a lot. Wow. So that was very obvious. We're making a new label.

Drew H (29:00):
Well, how do you get discovered out here?

Craig (29:04):
So here's the challenging part. Neither of us are marketers. You want to manufacture anything in the world? I can tell you how to do it or I can figure it out. But we're still learning the marketing game. So our Facebook strategies have been fairly primitive. We don't have a lot of ad spend, and honestly this year, 2025, we started to do a lot more. So we've got pretty good ad spend across the meta profiles, Facebook and Instagram. We've got some ad spend across the Google profile. So search, YouTube, YouTube, shorts, all that. We've done email marketing. Honestly, that still really well. So if it's a native email list that we have built, we get tremendous open rates and very good responses. Distilleries are pretty sexy. You still get good open rates. So we've kind of done a wide array of things recently. I will say legacy media is challenging.

Drew H (30:01):
Yeah. Yeah. I think that one of my favorite ways to find distilleries is just do a Google map search and say distilleries and hunt an area and then look at Google reviews. And that's the one thing I noticed in going through before I do research or as I'm doing research, I'll jump in and I'll start looking at Google reviews to see what people are pointing out is the thing that they really enjoyed about a particular tour. This one, there were plenty of people talking about family atmosphere and you really feel welcome while you're here. I think something else that's unique, maybe not so much for the smaller craft distilleries, but maybe the medium and larger size is that you don't really have a schedule for your tours. People just come out and what do they do? They say, Hey, can I do a tour?

Craig (30:54):
Right now, we're still able to accommodate that. We've got plenty of staff here on Saturday. You roll up and say, Hey, we'd like a tour. Then most of the time we can have somebody go start you a tour. Then probably at some point in the not too distant future, we'll start a regularly scheduled tour. I don't know if it'll be top of the hour, every hour or something like that. But yeah, distilleries this size. Just make yourself at home, come in, ask somebody, catch somebody and say, Hey, I've never been here before. What's the deal? And they'll start to guide you along the way.

Drew H (31:30):
Very nice. And in terms of tastings, do you have some kind of a set way that you do them, that you're trying to get people a taste of a feature from this and this and this? Or are you kind of letting people choose for themselves?

Craig (31:46):
So it's more freeform? We do have what we call a pick six tasting your tastings free. We operate under a legal limit for what we can serve as a distillery. So you get to pick six spirits. If you want to taste all bourbons, that's fine. We've got six different expressions you can try if you want all flavored or if you like vodka or if you just want to kind of pick down through the whole array. Everything we make is available for tastings, unless it's one of these family reserve products that is not currently out. Then obviously you're not going to be able to taste it, but you pick six, we pour you a quarter ounce sample of each, maybe slightly over a quarter ounce, but it's not like you're going to a bar. If you're expecting three cocktails, this is the wrong place for you.

Drew H (32:34):
Well, Craig Meredith, I appreciate you guys inviting me down. It's a Sunday, and so here you are living that life of doing the extra events and taking what could be a day off and having a conversation. So I really appreciate that.

Craig (32:52):
Thank you. Thanks for coming out.

Drew H (32:54):
Well, I hope you enjoyed this visit to distillery number six on the whiskey lore. Whiskey flights, great 48 tour of America's great craft distilleries. And if I piqued your interest in visiting Hollow Creek Distillery, make sure to head to whiskey lore.com/flights where you can view the profile of this distillery along with other distilleries in South Carolina and across the globe. You can sign up for a free account, add this and any of the other 600 distilleries on the site to your very own personal whiskey lore wishlist. And then when you're ready to travel, use the site's convenient planning tools along with maps, tour dates, booking links, and more to create the perfect distillery itinerary. Start your journey@whiskeylo.com slash flights as we pack up and get ready to head West through South Carolina and to Atlanta, and then to Alabama for our next distillery destination. Well, a couple of local side trips you might consider including in a trip to Lake Murray, include heading over to Saluda Shoals Park, where you might take a walk along the Dre Shoals Dam walk or check out the Lake Murray Marina.

(34:02):
Or if you've got kids with you, you might head 40 minutes east to the Riverbank Zoo and Gardens in Columbia. For those of you that are still on the fence about visiting Craig and Meredith out at Hollow Creek Distillery, well, let me give you my three reasons why I think you should have this distillery on your whiskey lower wishlist. Well, first, as an entrepreneur myself who's living out a dream and still keeping my day job, I can tell you it feels really good to go out and support people like Craig and Meredith who are putting in those extra hours day in and day out to share their joy of making and selling exceptional spirits. It's worth the extra drive just to support them. Second, you can enjoy an impromptu tour, see the original fired still that Lamar and Craig used to get the distillery started and hear some of the fun stories about their early days.

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And third, you're going to have an opportunity to choose from a nice array of bourbon whiskeys, moonshines, and vodkas. But I got to tell you, I will drive out of my way for that chocolate espresso vodka. Well, I hope you enjoyed this visit to Hollow Creek Distillery. It's time to head a few miles south to I 20 and cross through Georgia to my next destination, a distillery with a fascinating name and a feline Mouser who apparently has a pretty busy schedule, but I think she might be able to squeeze in a hello when I come to visit. We've only just begun on this coast to coast journey of America's great craft distilleries. And 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 the transcripts and travel information, including maps, distillery planning information and more. And to whiskey lo.com/flights Whiskey lo of production of Travel Fuels Life LLC.