Leiper's Fork Distillery

 

Drew Hannush (00:31.038)
So let's kind of get started off by talking a little bit about the name Leapers Fork and understanding because it's a unique name. Where does that name come from?

Lee Kennedy (00:43.63)
Well, you know, there's a couple of origin stories about the name Leapersport. You know, one is during the surveying of the Natchez Trace, which was part of that survey crew in the late 1700s, was a guy named Hugh Leaper. And so one of the consensus is that it was named the creek that runs through what will become Leapersport.

was Leapers Fork of the West Harpeth River. And so there were two brothers. The other was Captain James Leaper, who was killed during the Battle of Fort Nashboro, I want to say in the 1780s. So it was definitely named after one of those two brothers. Interestingly, the original name for Leapers Fork is Hillsboro.

So if you're a Nashville resident or you spend any time in Nashville, you'll notice there's signs for there's Hillsborough Road, there's old Hillsborough Road, and it's kind of an enigmatic thing. And people don't really understand like, where's Hillsborough? Well, Hillsborough was the original name for Leapers Fork. A post office was set in Leapers Fork in 1818. Two years later, they came to found out when the Postal Service was getting established in different,

Drew Hannush (01:37.086)
Mm.

Lee Kennedy (02:06.796)
states that are territories that have become states, you couldn't have two post offices in towns with the same name within a state. And there was already a Hillsborough, Tennessee and Coffee County that had a post office in it. So in 1820, the town changed its name to Leapers Fork. So, but weirdly, you know, the old timers in Leapers Fork have always called it Hillsborough. My granddad was born in

in Hillsborough, my middle name is Locke, L -O -C -K -E, so my grandfather Nick Locke was born in Hillsborough, never called it Leaperswark a day in his life, and that had been changed since 1820, but now it's kind of this kind of enigmatic thing, but yeah, that's kind of the origin of the name Leaperswark, and my mom's side of the family has been in Leaperswark since about 1805, so they were one of the first families to settle in the area.

Drew Hannush (03:01.214)
wow.

Drew Hannush (03:05.086)
It's an interesting area too, as I do my research and you know, when I lived around Nashville, I heard the name Natchez Trace, but didn't really feel the historical significance of that. But Natchez Trace was basically the way all those distillers up in Kentucky and, and, in middle Tennessee, they would come back that way through the trace. It was really an important roadway.

Lee Kennedy (03:29.354)
Absolutely. You know, and that's, we have a brand at the distillery called Old Natchez Trace. And you know, I, what got me into distilling originally was from a historical perspective, a fascination with, you know, the folks came to the new world with, with knowledge and technology that they had in the form of, of stills and converting, you know, small grains into whiskey. So it always captured my imagination. And really, you know, we, we called that our, our,

clear whiskeys, they're unaged. Until 1820, pretty much all whiskey made in the United States was unaged. We didn't really start barrel aging until 1820. So in what I would say any kind of volume, I'm sure that was barely was going on because it was a storage mechanism. But as far as doing it for flavor enhancer or contribution of flavor, I think that came on later. So, you know,

On the frontier, which the Natchez Trace was part of the frontier, frontier distilling was pretty much clear whiskey. And we sit on South Hall Road in Leapers Fort, which was part of the South Fork of the original Natchez Trace. So we named that brand kind of in homage to those early frontier distillers that were producing spirit.

And, you know, as a barter society, they were trading it, it was trading it for goods and they how trade you these cows for this whiskey, or it was in every medicine of the day. It was a solvent, all different kinds of things. So it's kind of a tip of the hat and kind of going back to the Natchez Trace, you know, that history is very interesting. And, you know, so much emphasis has been put on Kentucky, as you well know, but flat boats were also being loaded with whiskey in downtown Nashville in the 1820s.

shipped to from the Cumberland to the Ohio to the to the Mississippi and down to New Orleans as well. And at that time in 1820, I've seen some some art of prices for whiskey where, you know, price of whiskey in Nashville might have been a dollar a gallon and it was $2 a gallon in in down on the in New Orleans. So, you know, there was an emphasis for those guys and in anybody that knows the history of the trace like you do, you know, these guys floated their whiskey down the trace.

Lee Kennedy (05:52.806)
or sorry, down the river systems, they would get to New Orleans. And there's a, I'm sure you've heard this, there's a, it was kind of a mythology that Tennessee and Kentucky were populated with very fine horses because of the whiskey trade. You know, the legend is guys would float their whiskey down the river systems. They would get paid upon arrival in New Orleans. They would be very cash flush. They would buy real fast horses.

Drew Hannush (06:07.102)
He he.

Lee Kennedy (06:19.046)
and used the Natchez Trace to get back to Tennessee and Kentucky. And obviously the Natchez Trace at that time was a, you know, they called it the devil's backbone. You know, it was, it was, it was very dangerous. You had bandits and very mad Native Americans, reasonably so. And so they, they were trying to get back home quick. But anyway, Natchez Trace and whiskey history is a very interesting topic and one that's intricately tied, obviously.

Drew Hannush (06:48.446)
You actually have several family members that you've sort of traced on your website back to, certain whiskey events. Can you talk about some of those?

Lee Kennedy (06:59.557)
Well, you know, and I think that's because I, we were talking this on this before the podcast, you know, there's a lot of myth, a lot of mythology where it comes to our early distillers. And, you know, one of my early ancestors into Tennessee was a man named Phillip Phillips, on my grandmother's side, came into Tennessee in the, in the mid 17 nineties. and they actually came from, from Western Pennsylvania. And so he shows up.

on the general accounting of stills in 1799 that's done by John Overton and which you know he John and you know this Drew but you know he he had for the federal at the federal government's behest had surveyed every year different stills starting in East Tennessee going to Middle Tennessee the name of the steel owner the size of the steel

how much spirit they were producing per year and how much tax they paid. So, and he's probably my sixth great granddad, but he shows up on the 1799 General Counting of Stills after he had moved from Western Pennsylvania, which, you know, there's some lore saying that after the whiskey rebellion was broken up in the early 1790s, that a lot of those Pennsylvania distillers had moved down into Kentucky and Tennessee and set up shop, but.

As we kind of know now, there was, the stilling was going on well before the whiskey rebellion in these areas. So I think that might've been a coincidence of history. I don't, I don't think he was part of the whiskey rebellion. I just think he was a distiller who happened to leave Pennsylvania and showed up in, in the Cumberland settlements basically, and was a stilling whiskey. So it's always fun to have a, you know, deep family connection. on the other side of that coin, I have a great uncle who named Sam Locke.

He was actually my grandfather's uncle. He was murdered in early March of 1925 by the Williamson County Whiskey Ring. So the reverse side of that coin is he was a revenuer and he was a Franklin Constable, which in Franklin, Tennessee, right out, you know, it's Leaper Sports right outside of that. And so, which was basically a share. So he was tasked with busting up illegal stills. And the family lore of that was that before

Drew Hannush (09:04.094)
Mm.

Lee Kennedy (09:23.396)
he became a revenuer, he actually probably dabbled a little bit in the illegal whiskey trade. And so he was from Leapers Ford. The southwest side of Williamson County was inundated with illegal stills. And so in between January and March of 1925, he busted over 60 stills, illegal stills. And so we had something in this county called the Williamson County Whiskey Ring.

Drew Hannush (09:30.046)
Ha ha ha.

Lee Kennedy (09:51.012)
run by the Truett family and early March 1925, he was unlocking his gate around 11 p and two guys stood up from behind a rock wall and gunned him down and killed him. And there's a lot of crazy history revolving around that. Williamson County had a very colorful relationship as it relates to illegal whiskey trade. A lot of the, in this,

Drew Hannush (10:03.55)
Mmm.

Lee Kennedy (10:18.98)
You know, and you know this is one 1896, we had 322 distilleries in the state of Tennessee. That was according to our centennial industrial census. And by 1910, our in -state prohibition wiped those, that industry out. Well, a lot of those gals and guys, they didn't go work at a flower shop down the street. You know, they went to the woods and started making illegal whiskey and, and, and made some good whiskey illegally. But anyway.

Drew Hannush (10:40.094)
Hehehe.

Drew Hannush (10:46.462)
Yeah, it's a fascinating Tennessee has such a fascinating history with, w w with how it evolved in terms of making spirits different from the way that Kentucky did in some ways, which, it was just adds more to the American story of whiskey making your building that you're in is, it's, it's a beautiful building. There's some history behind that building as well. Is there not.

Lee Kennedy (11:13.38)
Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, when we got the distillery approved, kind of took a step back and said, what do we want this to look like? And, you know, I love Tennessee history. I love history in general. But, you know, so we built, we found a local 1820s cabin built by a guy named James Daniel over in Dixon County off of Yellow Creek. We

Up until recently, we thought there was no, so we moved that cabin to our site where the distillery sits. We sit on 30 acres. And so I was originally built in 1820 and we always used to joke on our tours that no relation to Jack Daniel. And so we actually recently had some family of James Daniel come in with early history of their family. And there actually is a family connection. James Daniel was a, was a,

Drew Hannush (12:03.486)
Nice.

Lee Kennedy (12:06.308)
ended up being a cousin to Jack Daniel, who set up shop, obviously down in Lynchburg. So, but yeah, it's, we use that cabin, you know, we try to showcase as much history as we can in the cabin. Our steel house behind us sits in an old, it's not old, it's a timber frame structure that's our steel house. And so what we were trying, a lot of distilleries, as you well know, you know,

in Tennessee and Kentucky, usually it started on a family farm of some sort or a piece of land around a water feature. And a lot of times the old homestead ended up becoming an office that happened down at Lynchburg. And so we're recreating a little bit of that concept. So our front, the 1820s cabin, it looks like a residential home, log cabin from the front, but inside it's a tasting room and retail cabin and offices. And then,

the still house in the bag. And I was trying to keep the aesthetics of the property as traditionally as we could while still having, you know, modern things to be able to make whiskey.

Drew Hannush (13:19.774)
Yeah, I, as I took my trip there, I had seen some photos of the distillery inside on Instagram, but there's a wow moment that hits you when you walk over from the gift shop and then go through those big doors and you enter this beautiful, I mean, just the, the, the wood, the stills, the, the old pot stills there, all of that. what was your,

How did that all come about? I mean, was that really kind of a planned thing? Did you kind of have aesthetics in mind while you were also going function? What are we doing with function?

Lee Kennedy (13:57.796)
I mean, a lot of that was just kind of fortuitous, meaning that I knew I wanted to distill in an environment that kind of inspired me. And so, a lot of distilleries, and I'm not knocking any distilleries, we're all, it's a very familial industry. And so, I knew we had the family property in Leakers Fork. I didn't wanna make...

whiskey in an industrial setting, next to somebody making plastics or something. I could have gotten this turned around a lot quicker if I did that. So I wanted to be, I like the idea of distilling in a rural setting and loving the traditions of Tennessee and the history. I wanted our distillery to kind of be a reflection of those traditions. And so obviously with modern technology and making whiskey, there's certain things you have to do, but our,

We don't make whiskey, we're very clean in our still house, but I wouldn't say it's a sterile environment. When you walk in there, it has its own personality. It's almost like a big man cave, so to speak. But we've got history things on the walls and things like that. So we run a 500 gallon traditional pot still until the 1850s or mid 19th century when Aeneas Coffee invented the coffee still.

Drew Hannush (15:03.422)
Hehehehehe

Lee Kennedy (15:19.268)
you know, all whiskey in the world was made on pot stills, you know, going back to Scotland and Ireland. And, and so, and I was a barn distiller before, you know, the statute of limitations is run out on that, but, you know, I actually built a still in my mom's basement when I was a 16 year old kid, originally from a inspiration of cultural heritage that we were talking about earlier. But anyway, so I just love the.

traditional aspects of pot distillation. So we actually run a Scottish swan neck pot still that's would be very traditional to say the single malt scotch industry. And so for us, you know, we say we're trying to make pre prohibition styles of whiskey. So everything we do at the distillery is kind of inefficient by design. And a lot of that is because we're kind of hell bent on being as traditional as we can in our approach to creating these spirits.

Drew Hannush (16:10.198)
Yeah. I thought it was interesting that you had done the old Natchez trace white whiskey, because as I was doing research into the history of, of whiskey, I stumbled upon a lawsuit that was going on in the 19 or 19 aughts. And basically one of the people who was involved in it said that Tennessee.

actually had a tradition of aging their whiskey in non -charred barrels and that white whiskey was the accepted form of Tennessee whiskey even up to that late point and that color didn't necessarily denote something that would be a traditional Tennessee whiskey. So it's fascinating that you do this and this is the fun part about connecting with history and trying these things out.

is giving you that opportunity to potentially stumble into what really is, you know, the, the heritage of the state. The other thing is the, we, we all call it the Lincoln County process, but this was really a statewide process. When you started making your whiskies, you do a Tennessee whiskey, but you also do a bourbon. what are you doing differently with that, Tennessee whiskey to.

Lee Kennedy (17:11.524)
Thank you.

Drew Hannush (17:35.134)
fit with that tradition.

Lee Kennedy (17:37.397)
So, and you know, I'm a contrarian by nature. And so when I first, you know, the inspiration for the distillery really started around 2007 or eight for me. And at that time, Tennessee had not changed their distilling laws. And in 2009, for the first time since really 1910, the state of Tennessee had, or 1937, we know they're, whatever. But we had that.

Drew Hannush (18:04.798)
Hmm.

Lee Kennedy (18:06.741)
Prohibition period in between there, but so there was no path to be able to open a distillery and So I thought in 2009 when the law changed I knew there was a handful of other distillers trying to open distilleries in the state And so I approached my county in late 2011 in December 2011 early 2012 So I wasn't actually gonna make a Tennessee whiskey. I was because I'm a contrarian. I was gonna I'm a I'm a

Drew Hannush (18:35.198)
Mmm.

Lee Kennedy (18:36.885)
You know, my, my, as a consumer, which I am also, you know, my preference had, had really been bourbon. And so I didn't want to do something because I was expected to do something. So I was actually running a whiskey with a distillery up in Kentucky. that's, that's pretty well known, but anyway, they, they, they said you, you need to do a Tennessee whiskey or you're going to do yourself an injustice.

Drew Hannush (19:02.014)
Wow

Lee Kennedy (19:06.42)
And you know, but in there, in there, and that makes sense, you know, from a, from a supply standpoint, you know, you can make bourbon in all 50 states. A lot of people are shocked to hear that, but it's absolutely true. And, but you can only make Tennessee whiskey in one state. And, and so I knew that if I was going to do it, I was going to do it right. The distillers I was running with up there, they wanted me, and this is a really cool experiment from a distiller standpoint. They said, Hey, we'd like to see you.

take your bourbon grain bill, keep everything constant, except the charcoal mellowing aspect. And so as a distiller, I thought that was a really cool experiment. But what made me nervous is that if we, you know, obviously research and development in the industry is about four or five years. So, you know, three at the least. So my concern was that at the end of the maturation time,

Drew Hannush (19:55.07)
for about a year.

Lee Kennedy (20:02.483)
If the only thing difference was the charcoal mellowing process, and both those products went on the shelf, there wouldn't be enough differentiation. So our bourbon we make with 70 % corn, 15 % wheat, 15 % toasted barley malt. And on our Tennessee whiskey, we replaced that 15 % wheat with 15 % rye. And so, and we actually, we source our sugar maple charcoal

Drew Hannush (20:25.342)
Mm.

Lee Kennedy (20:32.05)
When I say source it, we source the wood source locally. So we have Fox's Mill that's on Pinewood Road, a few miles down from the distillery. His foresters bring in sugar maple. He cuts those into staves. He air -drives them for about 18 months for us. And then we take receipt of those. We use whiskey, same way a lot of other distilleries do. Burn that sugar maple down in a charcoal. A lot of distilleries, believe it or not, in Tennessee, don't actually make their own charcoal. You can actually buy

Drew Hannush (20:44.826)
We use whiskey the same way a lot of other distilleries do.

Lee Kennedy (21:01.586)
sugar maple lump charcoal out of Canada. It's called Basque Charcoal Company and it's sugar maple specifically. So for us is we try to at the, at Leprous Fort, we try to touch every aspect of the process. And so we have fun making charcoal and it takes our, our distillate takes about 36 hours to travel down through our charcoal. It's a

Drew Hannush (21:05.694)
Mm.

Lee Kennedy (21:29.616)
A lot of people say it's a subtractive effect. We see a difference between that whiskey pre -filtration or charcoal filtering and post -charcoal filtering. This is very interesting. So yeah, our deal is if we're gonna make Tennessee whiskey, we wanna do it right. And we love the history behind it. And you mentioned some of the history. Going back and looking at Victorian ads from the 1890s,

Drew Hannush (21:30.238)
A lot of people say it's a subtractive effect. We see a difference between that whiskey pre -filteration or charcoal filtering and post -charcoal filtering. It's very interesting. But, so yeah, we...

Lee Kennedy (21:58.96)
that period, you know, some of them mentioned Tennessee whiskey, some mentioned, you know, we talked about peach brandy being made, but corn whiskey, and then a lot of the, and they used to give commodity prices of whiskey, and some of them would say Lincoln whiskey or Robertson whiskey and corn whiskey, peach brandy. So really that technique, it wasn't,

Drew Hannush (22:14.91)
Some of them would say Lincoln whiskey.

Lee Kennedy (22:28.239)
universal across the state of Tennessee. A lot of Tennessee distillers were using it, but as you well know, after Prohibition ended, our two distilleries that were allowed to come back in the state were happening to use the charcoal mellowing process, which obviously became Tennessee Whiskey and the juggernaut that it's become.

Drew Hannush (22:47.742)
Yeah. so talk a little bit about, first of all, you talk about going green to glass and that you do all the processes there on site. When somebody's doing a tour through the distillery, how much of that do they actually get to see?

Lee Kennedy (23:03.662)
Yeah, so we actually we were growing our grains within a 10 mile radius of the distillery with the exception of some of our barley malls. Some of that's coming from southern Kentucky. We use a farm out of Franklin, Kentucky, called Walnut Grove. And Walnut Grove is they're actually farming about 5000 acres in Williamson County year after year. So Sam Holcomb owns that company and they're very easy for us to work with because, you know, a lot of distilleries.

don't have a lot of input on their grain sourcing or what they would like to see from their farmer. We were growing about 75 % of our own core. We've sent, and when I say that, I live on an 80 acre farm close to the distillery. That's where our mill house is. So all those grains that we're using are for the most part come within a 10 mile radius of the distillery. They're not GMO.

Drew Hannush (23:50.27)
Mm.

Lee Kennedy (24:01.485)
and they're heirloom variety grains. And so we bring them to the, to Riverbound Farm where we live. They're actually milled here and then they're taken pre -weighted batch down to the distillery. So the, the, the guests get to see the, the, where the intake of that grain comes from once it's already milled. But yeah, so we're, we're, we're trying to create as much of a terroir whiskey as we can.

which is an expression of the surroundings from whence it came. So for us, trying to keep everything hyperlocal is very critical to us.

Drew Hannush (24:38.686)
Yeah. So you have had actually some interesting events that you run out there. So you're kind of a, not only a place to come tour, but also to experience some things. Can you talk about some of those events that you do out there?

Lee Kennedy (24:54.155)
Yeah, so I mean, obviously, you know, our tours run Tuesday through Sunday on the hour starting at 11 a But then we do the things and we were we actually before the pandemic, we were more involved with these, but we used to do what we call the still house sessions. So from time to time, you know, we still have a little bit. If you if you come to the distillery Friday, Saturday and Sunday, part of that experience is, you know, there's a little bit of a musical music on our porch. We have a cocktail part.

bar that we run, you know, sourcing or using all the spirits that we make on site. But we do have songwriter nights from time to time, which are cool events. We do a lot of work with charities as well. We do pairing dinners. We've actually got one coming up in a couple of weeks. So we're trying to engage our community in, you know, fun type of things, but then a lot of things that are kind of whiskey education.

oriented, you know, whether that's history or whether that's culinary. So we're trying to offer as many things to the public as we can. Just as you know, the interest in whiskey production in the last 10 years has skyrocketed. So we're trying to kind of meet the demand of the interest that folks have.

Drew Hannush (26:12.83)
Yeah. I, when I lived in Nashville, the one thing that I noticed that was that if you went to an open mic night anywhere, you were hearing people who were amazing. They were like right on the edge of making it in Nashville. and so that's fun, but you had actually had a special guest show up, somebody who, people might be surprised, but just show up at the distillery and start performing at that. Tell us about that.

Lee Kennedy (26:25.929)
Absolutely.

Lee Kennedy (26:38.505)
Yeah, so when we were going to bring the still house sessions back, you know, it was it when we sold out every show and we limited it to about 75 people. And what we did is what you just touched on this, you know, middle Tennessee is is the cradle is the cradle of American music, you know, in a lot of regards. And so we are arguably the congregation, a congregation of the world's best musicians are in our area. So songwriters, session players.

the singer songwriters, artists, you know, you name it. So what the Stillhouse Sessions did is it brought these world -class songwriters to the distillery. And so a lot of times, you know, a lot of these folks had, every song that they did on stage was at one point a number one hit. And so I had a friend named Trent Wilman, who used to write with Chris Stapleton and who the song...

Trent is a songwriter. And so he was doing a still house sessions with another friend named Brandon Kenny and Chris happened to be in the audience and got up and this was actually February of 2020. So a month before the pandemic kind of reared its head in earnest. And so he got on stage and did about a 45 minute set and you could have heard a pin drop in there. It was really cool. But, you know, we've had,

Drew Hannush (27:48.67)
Wow.

Lee Kennedy (28:01.767)
some great artists on our stages there. So we're trying to, one thing that the pandemic did for us is it propelled us into a more aggressive production schedule. And so a lot of the fun things that we used to do, we've kind of put a little bit on the back burner, but we're gonna revitalize the Stillhouse Sessions here pretty soon.

Drew Hannush (28:14.046)
Mm -hmm.

Drew Hannush (28:28.958)
Very nice, very nice. Well, one thing about Leapers Fork, it's not terribly far away from Nashville, but it's a little ways out there. So when people are coming to Leapers Fork, what would be something interesting that they should go see that maybe wouldn't be overly apparent to people that they should go see?

Lee Kennedy (28:49.478)
So you're right about that. I mean, we sit 45 minutes, I mean, 45 minutes really on a bad day of downtown Nashville. So we do get a lot of guests that, you know, what's great about our location is they can come see a rural distillery that's in a rural setting instead of traveling further afield and still, and have a nice day and still get back to Nashville in time for, you know, an early afternoon. So, but yeah, our little village of Leapers Fork has some really cool, I'm gonna plug the village first. So.

You know, Fox and Lock is a little roadhouse that formerly was called Puckets. Very, very kind of well known in the singer songwriter community. They have live music there. I want to say Wednesday through Sunday. And you never know, they have an open mic night on Thursday night. And it's like you said, it's not your normal open mic night. You never know who's going to jump on stage. And there's been some...

really interesting people and famous people that have seen on stage their country boy restaurant across the street. Leapers Creek art gallery is in town. So it's a very eclectic kind of Mayberry is town where, you know, between art galleries, live music, good food and, and some local shops, you know, that's, it's a really interesting village. And we sit about a quarter of a mile outside of the village.

And then also Franklin, you know, Franklin is about six miles away from us. A lot of heritage tourism there, you know, obviously the Battle of Franklin that occurred in 1864 was there, which was practically fought in downtown Franklin. And you've got the the carton plantation there, the Carter house, as well as, you know, we're actually getting ready to open a satellite location of our distillery on Main Street in Franklin.

Drew Hannush (30:31.838)
Mm.

Drew Hannush (30:43.358)
Lee Kennedy (30:43.364)
So we're gonna have an experimental still in the back, showcasing some of the history of distilling in the area in there. It'll be a cocktail experience as well, live music. So downtown Franklin with its square and Main Street is a huge draw and great restaurants from Cork and Cow, Red Pony, 55 South, Grays on Main. So Franklin is, there's a lot for, somebody can come to the distillery.

see us get a very educational what we try to do on our tours is we won't we we try to demystify the process a little bit you know a lot a lot of distilleries is there a lot of it is kind of like Wizard of Oz experience a lot of things happen behind the curtains and so we don't we don't have curtains at the distillery and we try to we want people to leave with some tidbits of knowledge of how

Drew Hannush (31:34.622)
Hehehe.

Lee Kennedy (31:40.162)
whiskey is made and to demystify the process in conjunction with a little bit of history. So, but yeah, Franklin is a wonderful place to visit from all different kinds of levels and it sees about 1 .9 million visitors per year. So it already has a great tourism draw.

Drew Hannush (31:54.59)
Hmm.

Well, it's great to hear about your expansion too, because that's something else people can put on their radar as well. So, well, it's a beautiful distillery and it's fun to watch it grow up and start getting some recognition around the world or around the country. And then as it, the word spreads, hopefully people listening to this podcast will be going, maybe I should go to Tennessee and we'll put you guys on their radar. So thank you so much.

Lee Kennedy (32:02.625)
Absolutely. Absolutely.

Lee Kennedy (32:25.217)
Absolutely. Well, thank you for what you're doing as well with your book. You know, it helps put a spotlight on a lot of the forgotten history of Tennessee distilling. So you're an integral part of the industry. So as a distiller, thank you. Thank you for shining a spotlight on us.

Drew Hannush (32:45.022)
Well, I appreciate that.