Ep. 54 - Alan Bishop of Spirits of French Lick

Transcript

Drew (00:00:08):
Welcome to Whiskey Lore, the interviews. I'm your host, Drew Hannush, the Amazon bestselling author of Whiskey Lores Travel Guide to Experience in Kentucky Bourbon. If you love learning about whiskey and distilling history from areas that don't get a lot of press, then you're really going to enjoy today's episode because my special guest is a man who goes by the name The Alchemist, Alan Bishop. He's the head distiller at Spirits of French Lick. He's the co-host of the podcast Distillers Talk, and he's a man who really loves to research and document the history of distilling in southern Indiana. Before you start thinking that, well, I mean southern Indiana, how much history is there really going to be? Well, just think about it this way, Southern Indiana, the area that encompassed its distilling region is just as close to the Ohio River as the Centers of Kentucky distilling. So while Kentucky is getting all the press, Indiana is just quietly living its own history with big time distillers, moonshiners, and a very interesting subset of distillers known as preacher Distillers. So sit back, relax, get ready to learn a whole lot of amazing history as Alan uncovers all of this for us. Alan, welcome to the show.

Alan (00:01:29):
Yeah, man, I'm super happy to be here. As we just discussed before we came on yours is the one whiskey related podcast short of pot stilled radio that I listened to because you get into the history, you do deep dives, and that's right up my alley. I don't not a bourbon collector, I'm not a whiskey collector. I'm not a brandy collector. If I thought, if I've come across old cool stuff, that's great, or I come across something I like to drink, I drink it, and anything else I give away to people,

Drew (00:01:56):
I am honored.

Alan (00:01:57):
I'm production. Yeah, yeah.

Drew (00:02:00):
Well, and there's so many interesting stories when you talk to Distillers from not only here in the United States, but overseas as well, and you are a pot still distiller. So I have a feeling some of that leads to curiosity on your end to hear some of those stories and how they're distilling over there.

Alan (00:02:21):
Absolutely. And then the other side of that too, one thing that I absolutely love and you touch on it and a lot of your whiskey lore episodes is that there's kind of a spiritual element to all this stuff too, and it's fun to dive into that stuff as well. And your Robert Johnson episodes were Jim. Fantastic. Legitimately so thank you

Drew (00:02:45):
For those. Yeah, that was a fun one to deep dive into, and it felt kind of weird actually for me when I started doing it because I'm like, I'm showing my passion for music now and really wanting to dive into music, and I'm like, I don't want to get too far away from the whiskey connection, but whiskey is so involved in so many different parts of history that it actually becomes easy to fit history into what we're talking about when we're talking about distilled spirits. I mean, tax laws alone are enough to keep us entertained for hours in terms of how it's changed society and affected our paychecks and everything else.

Alan (00:03:29):
Yeah, absolutely. And that sort of alchemical bent as well, that spirituality that comes along with it too. It's a key to a door that sometimes people need open, and sometimes people need clothes. So there's a lot of cool stories that go along with that.

Drew (00:03:44):
Well, we were actually just talking about spirituality before we started the podcast because I was talking about doing my research on Tennessee whiskey and the history of it, and interesting to note in there that it's actually much less scotch Irish and a lot more of your Welsh and your German and your Irish. And so when you're researching this and you're finding that out, you think about those religions and how they interact with alcohol Catholics. They have it at church, and I grew up in the Lutheran church, so I'm used to that. Also. We say Lutheran is Catholic light, so the Germans would've had that influence in spirits as well. So it is interesting to see how those can tie together with each other.

Alan (00:04:36):
So you're getting the full on Hoosier experience right now, by the way. So the fire alarm is going off because my wife is cooking supper. Oh,

Drew (00:04:43):
Nice, nice.

Alan (00:04:45):
So I didn't mention before we started that southern Indiana it's two different cultures. It's southern Indiana and northern Indiana. You meet somebody from Indiana and you say, where are you from? If they're from North Columbus, Indiana, they say I'm from Indiana, if they're from South Columbus, Indiana that say I'm from southern Indiana. Okay. Because it's two different cultures. So that Southern Indiana culture, there's actually an anagram there it goes again, <laugh> your occupied northern Kentucky. And if you break that down actually the anagram is honky. So nice. Yeah. So there's little characteristic for your podcast there. But on the religious side of things and on the immigrants, it's the same thing here in southern Indiana. It's a lot of Germans, a lot of Welsh primarily German from the Black Forest region and I suspect they settled in areas of Tennessee for the same reason that they settled up here in southern Indiana. It looked like home, and it was familiar to

Drew (00:05:45):
'em when you actually have an area you called Black Forest in Indiana, right, that's a wine region or on the edge of the wine region in Germany. And that when I heard Black Forest, Indiana, I thought, isn't that interesting? Because that used to be one of the centers of the wine industry before California which I found really interesting. So again, must be the German influence.

Alan (00:06:12):
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And the black forest in Germany was also the O to V region of Germany, and it was the rye whiskey region of Germany as well for a long time. And so the settlers that ended up here in southern Indiana, they had that long history of distilling in their family whether it be fruit brandies or it be rye whiskey. And they brought that with them, whether they settled in Maryland or Pennsylvania, and then came to Indiana, they came straight to Indiana in the early days before statehood. They certainly brought that history with them and that tradition with them, and they thought it was a birthright and all the way down to the extent that the very first distiller we can find here in southern Indiana, as soon as he gets here, the piece of land that he buys, he buys specifically because they're already peaches growing on that piece of property.

(00:06:57):
And he tries making rye whiskey early on, and he has some luck with rye whiskey, although rye doesn't grow fantastic in southern Indiana but he definitely lent a lot towards the six county region that would become known as the black forest of Indiana. He lent a lot of credence towards that in the future, becoming a brandy region. And that black forest region is Washington County, Lawrence County, orange County Harrison, Perry, and Crawford County so river adjacent, and then just one county north of the river for a couple of those counties. So very much that southern south kind of central slash western tier of southern Indiana, although there are other distilling regions in Indiana, including Switzerland County, which is related to brandy, absent, et cetera. And then up north you get into the 1880s, you get into large industrial size distilleries too.

Drew (00:07:49):
And we talk about mgp, that was around in the 1840s. So people talk about it these days and they talk about all these craft distilleries that are developing, and they talk about mgp. It's a new thing, but it's actually they've been around forever. But have you looked into their history to see where they were between 1847 and when Seagrams took them over in 33?

Alan (00:08:15):
So yeah, no, I haven't looked at that particular area of their history that heavily, but what I have looked at is when they claim the first distillations took place there in Lawrenceburg, Indiana, and so their claim in history is 1802. Okay. Although there is not any written documentation for 1802 being the year that they started. So my rebuttal to their 1802 argument for Southern Indiana is that in 1806, we literally have written documentation of the first distiller that we can prove in southern Indiana, which is in Washington County where I'm from, a man named John Johannes Fleener, who is married three times also, he moved here in 1806, first man in Indiana to have a divorce because his wife would not move here with him. And he had 23 children. And is apparently, if your family has been in the state of Indiana since the frontier days, there's about a 75 5% probability that you are a direct descendant of either him or one of his two brothers, from what I understand.

(00:09:19):
So yeah, I've looked into MGP to a great deal, and I respect MGP greatly. We don't buy anything from them, and we don't do merchant bourbon. We did one product that was 60, 40, 60 Rs, 40% merchant bourbon from Wyoming. But I love MGP because when prohibition hit Indiana, and we'll get there as we have this conversation, I'm sure, and what caused prohibition in Indiana Seagram slash mgp, they kept lights on for the rest of us, us falling distillers small scale craft, distillers, artists and distillers, whatever you want to call us. We wouldn't exist if it weren't for mgp. And MGP really backed up the legislation in Indiana that made all of this possible again in 2013, 2014. So all the respect in the world are those guys. I don't believe they were the first. Now real quick little historical side weren't far away from something that's pretty interesting.

(00:10:14):
Going back to these early German and Walsh settlers coming into southern Indiana. So a lot of them obviously traveled to Monica Hila River. A lot of people don't know this, but if you travel that river and you hit the Ohio River and you follow the natural drift of the river, you'll end up on the northern bank of the Ohio River, the magic river that nobody seems to want cross with distillation history. And for a period of about 40 years in Madison, Indiana there was a flatboat that was moored off the banks of the river that served as a store, and all it did was sell distilling equipment to people coming into the territory of Indiana at that time. So even as early as the late 17 hundreds, early 18 hundreds, they knew that distillation was going to be a big deal in southern Indiana. So

Drew (00:11:00):
That's interesting. Well, and you would figure that they're distilling on the south side. Why wouldn't they be distilling on the north side? It's not like they're two different worlds. Although as a youth, when we used to ride down from Michigan to go to Florida to go to Disneyland, it was like you drive through Ohio and it's just flat, flat, flat, flat, flat, and then you get to Covington and then all of a sudden you have to, you're like, why am I driving 10 miles an hour on the freeway? Oh, it's because I'm on a hill. I have to hit the gas again. My foot got lazy, but there's some hilly terrain in southern Indiana.

Alan (00:11:37):
Oh, absolutely. And that was one of the draws to these people from the Black Forest region and from the Welsh as well, I'm sure. But it is funny, it's humorous that people, for whatever reason, obviously Kentucky has a distinction of being the birthplace of bourbon, but it's almost humorous in some ways that people think that everybody got came to the river and they said, well, I don't know what's over there in those dark woods on the north side, but I'm not going to go. And that's not the way it worked at all. And what you'll even find in southern Indiana history and southern Ohio as well, so if you look at Kentucky and Bourbon was likely born in Kentucky, there were people in Kentucky, Europeans in Kentucky before they were in southern Indiana. But if you look at that term, bourbon, it doesn't really exist until the 1820s.

(00:12:25):
And really all it connotates by then is a corn-based whiskey. Right? Well, if you're shipping bourbon to go to New Orleans, for example, or any other southern port along the way, the interesting thing that happens is that if you were, for example, a distiller in southern Ohio or southern Indiana, you had to actually cross the river first before you sent anything downstream because there were no dams or locks on the river. So if you were anywhere to the east of New Albany, Indiana, and you tried to go down river from the side, you would lose everything at the falls, Ohio. So shipping out of Maysville, shipping out of bear grass, which was Louisville at the time, we have no idea what percentages of bourbon, corn whiskey, as it were coming out of southern Indiana and southern Ohio. And if you think about it, the arc of northern Kentucky as far as culture goes, and the arc of southern Ohio, southern Indiana, that culture's not different.

(00:13:19):
The river didn't stop anybody. There were people coming over here because let's face it, distillers sort of an odd lot. Anyway, sometimes we like being away from people. So there are people crossing the river, coming over here. There's limestone in southern Indiana, there's limestone in southern Ohio. It's the same culture. They have the same background, they have the same cultural memory, the same genetic memory. They're doing the same things. And I suspect that maybe 25% of that early prototypical bourbon before 1820 was probably coming from southern Ohio and southern Indiana and going downstream, but we're never going to prove it. And the real problem that we have in southern Indiana is that up until prohibition, we did great. So between the 1850s and 1914, for example, when things started to really slow down for Indiana, Indiana was one of the three big distilling states. It was Indiana, Illinois, and Kentucky always in contention for who was the number one distilling state. And in after prohibition, a whole generation of distillers died out. Small farm distilling went away because industrialized distilling was favored. And there's nobody to tell the story. And the temperance movement here in southern Indiana, again, tying into religion was huge. And I do want to get back to that religion question you asked earlier before my fire alarm went off there. Yeah, a while ago.

Drew (00:14:34):
Well, I mean, Kentucky's no easy trek to find history either. I mean, sometimes I'll bump into somebody I'm trying to research and I'll hear, well, there was a fire in Frankfurt and that destroyed a lot of the records court records. When I was researching Pennsylvania for the whiskey rebellion, the thing I couldn't understand was that Colonel Neville, he was the tax man for that district, and he was a distiller. There have to be records of these distilleries even as far back as 1794 because it was the law. They had to keep these records somewhere. And so it makes Tennessee, what I'm finding is once we get to 1796, we're fine because now Tennessee is a state and they have a gauger and tax revenue or who's assigned to the state that's going through. And there are ledgers now that will tell who all of those distillers are. But that time period before that there was nothing. So we're just down to guessing at that point. And so it would be hard when Kentucky comes in and says, we have started distilling bourbon first and we were doing corn whiskey first, and they can name all of these people. If the people in Pennsylvania, Indiana, Maryland weren't as passionate about it and didn't hold on to those records, then we can't prove that these other states actually were growing along with Kentucky.

Alan (00:16:14):
Well, that's actually one of the big problems that we have here in who occupied Northern Kentucky is <laugh>. We just said. So Indiana never, there was no excise tax. There was no excise tax until after the Civil War because we didn't become a state until later. We didn't become the state until after obviously, the war of 1812. Right. And so there was never an excise tax. So the only thing that you sometimes will find for anything prior to 1862 is if there was a local tax levied. And in other than that, you're relying on oral history and you're relying on some of the books that were written at the time. There's several great books regarding some of the counties here in southern Indiana, the Water Stevens, Washington County history, centennial history of Washington County, which I've gotten a lot of information from. Then there's a beautiful book called Pioneer Pickings.

(00:17:07):
It was written by one of the gentlemen who really pushed for temperance, which we can talk about here in a little while. He really messed up Indiana distilling history for us. But this one book saves him from being the most obscure, the most obscure person in southern Indiana. History, as far as I'm concerned written by Mr. Horse Hein, pioneer pickings. And then there's a Godfrey history of Orange, Lawrence and Washington County where we get a lot of this information from. But no taxes paid federally unless they were paid locally. There's really nothing to track as far as paperwork. And these are primarily, again, farm distillers. And so I guess the best place for me to start with that history is just to give a very quick rundown up to 1862 potentially of what was kind of happening here. So people can see where the industrialized side of this comes in and Indiana plays in.

(00:17:56):
And so I'll tie the religious thing we talked about earlier into this as well. So the earliest distiller again that I mentioned that we had here in Southern Indiana we can prove in the Black Forest region is John Fleener, obviously a German name Johannes Fleener was the original name. He came here with a brother named Abraham from North Carolina, and their father had been a fruit branded distiller in the Carolinas. And Abraham was a nursery man. John was a distiller when they came here. Abraham brought with him a number of apple varieties. He also brought a peach feo called the Fleener peach, and this is the preeminent distilling peach in Indiana until prohibition hits. This thing is planted like garden seed. It comes back true from seed. Every year you plant a field of it, you plant it on seven year cycles. You plant one field the first year, won the next year, won the next year, et cetera. After seven years, you cut it down, you got firewood for the steel, right? This is the way, this is a whole cycle of brandy distillation. That peach still exists to this day. I have it growing outside the house right now. It's a living artifact of Indiana distilling history.

(00:19:05):
A lot of these Germans that came into Southern Indiana, as I mentioned earlier, they have a background in distilling in either Pennsylvania or Maryland or in the old country, depending on where they came from, and came into southern Indiana. They settle here because it looks like home. They also immediately realize that there are peach orchards that exist here in southern Indiana at that time that were planted by the local Native Americans who lived here at that time. And so they're seeing this as a resource. The other thing that they're seeing is that southern Indiana, much like Kentucky, has a lot of waterways and a lot of limestone waterways, a lot of caves, et cetera. And so mills pop up all over southern Indiana, even before statehood in 1816. If you go back to 1814, and you look at Washington County alone, which actually included a couple other counties at the time, there were 64 mills and basically what is now a three county region.

(00:19:56):
And so these mills become community hubs, but they also become sort of farm service hubs. So if you're growing 15 acres of corn, you don't need all that corn to feed your animals. You don't need it all to feed your family unless you're in an odd year, like the year without a summer, or you have a massive squirrel invasion. And I won't get into that, but that did happen in Southern Indiana. Important time. But basically, these mills exist as sort of this place for commerce. There's no money here. People are taking their corn to the mill. The older sons in the family would fight for their opportunity to go to whatever mill they were going to. Becks Mill was the prominent one here in Washington County. Indiana still exists to this day. And the reason that the boys in the family would fight for the opportunity to do this is there was such a backlog of milling in the fall here in southern Indiana that it might take three or four days for that mill to mill your grain.

(00:20:50):
And so little towns popped up all around. All these mills and all these little towns became sort of a subset of vice as it were. So if you're the oldest son in the family, you want your first opportunity away from your family. You want to experience gambling, maybe women of the night, whatever these mills were where it happened at. And they all worked off of shares. So the mills would bring in the corn, they'd grind the corn, and they worked off of odd numbers, which is fun. So <laugh> for every eight shares of corn, and this is a historic thing here in Southern Indiana you would take five shares back and you could take those shares as either mill or whiskey, and then the Miller would keep three shares. The Miller doesn't need all that corn. He starts making whiskey as well in the fall, and then he sets it in a barrel and he waits till the flood comes in the spring, the ship, everything down river, flatboat wise, the same as what you see in Kentucky.

(00:21:44):
The other industry that came out of this very early distilling with this culture that came here was as we talked about before we came on the show religion. So the religion here in southern Indiana was what was called Campbell like Christian. And that later kind of splits here in southern Indiana into more or less three or four different branches. And the branches are basically first Christian, Methodist kind of southern Baptist. And then there's this other weird thing called a two seed church which is its own fun little endeavor where either you have the seat of God in you or you don't. And so you can't really be saved. So while you're here, you better have all the fun you can before you go to the turtle damnation which as you can imagine, distillers love that. But the truth of the matter is, most of these early distillers were also candlelight preachers, and they're traveling from place to place throughout the 1810s and the 18 teens doing last Rs Funerary services weddings.

(00:22:46):
And it was considered rude not to offer them a drink because you're going to give them a mill. They're going to have to get on their horse and travel elsewhere. They need something to soothe their stomach. Very early on, these candlelight preachers realized there's an industry here, and there is a way for me to find money to build a church. And it sounds incongruent, but it's not. If you think about it. So if you're the one in control of the liquor and you're selling liquor to somebody on Saturday night, and somebody gets a little out of control who you need to talk to on Sunday, and you can also cut them off, and you can also make money to build churches. So a lot of the early churches here in southern Indiana are built off of liquor money to the extent that we literally have VO go back and look at the census records.

(00:23:35):
We literally have a unique subset of employment, which is literally instead of farmer distiller, preacher distiller. And so by the time you get into the 1840s, now, this is becoming an industry. And so the six counties we mentioned of the Black Forest, they are each according to the agricultural census books at the time, growing upwards of 155,000 apple trees a piece. These are not named varieties. They're growing back from seed. Their folk varieties selected just specifically for distillation. Cider was never really an industry here. So these are specifically for apple brandy production. And then by the 1850s, now you're into the Temperance Movement has come along and it's no longer fashionable to be a preacher distiller. It's really good example of this. As a very quick aside, there's a character by the name of Thomas Green, Reverend Thomas Green, who is a preacher out at Beckville Indiana very popular, obviously being a preacher distiller. When you get into the 1850s, you see the kids in church making up rhymes to make fun of him. So one of the rhymes was Reverend Thomas Green, prettiest man I've ever seen Miller Stiller, soul Saver and Sinner Skinner. Right?

Drew (00:24:52):
So nice. I think the thing is because I have German roots, and I think back to people talking about the Temperance Movement and how much was, it was almost an anti immigrant movement in a way, because wine, cider any kind of brandies, those type of things were daily routine absolutely. For Germans. So it doesn't surprise me at all. And like I say, I grew up in a Lutheran church, so I understand you're drinking a church. It may be only a communion cup, but you were drinking in church. So it's interesting when you look at prohibition and you start reading stories about how there was this big battle to try to keep sacramental wine because this is part of our religion. This is one part of the Constitution fighting against another part of the Constitution. We're supposed to have freedom of religion. This is how we live. So again, maybe some of that was worn out of them by the time prohibition came about. But once they came over from Germany, initially that would've been their lifestyle, is to be very well acquainted throughout the family with whiskey. Well,

Alan (00:26:03):
Here in Southern Indiana, just like with the preachers and it being considered rude not to offer them a drink. It was the same thing throughout all the way up to the 1830s with anybody who you invited over. If you invite a neighbor over and they're going to help you harvest crops, or you're going to raise a barn, or you're going to build a house, you better have whiskey. And this is sort of hand in hand with the old fashioned strength competitions and all that stuff. Wrestling, and all <laugh> liquor leads to goofiness, obviously, but it's all on good fun. And I still don't exactly understand what happened here in Southern Indiana. I've never been able to pinpoint exactly what happens somewhere around 1845, something with the Temperance Movement, something changes where the Temperance Movement becomes a thing. And I don't know if that is the new immigration coming in from these countries.

(00:26:54):
What I do know is this, so Indiana, like many states went through two prohibitions. We did have a statewide prohibition in Indiana from 1850 to 1855. And that was on everything that was on production, that was on ownership, that was on drinking, all that stuff. Okay. The interesting thing is, leading up to the excise tax, the Temperance Movement here in southern Indiana is very closely aligned with a group called Knights of the Golden Circle but I don't know if you're familiar with the Knights of the Golden Circle or not. Some of them called themselves Sons of Liberty in the same way that during the revolution there was a tons of liberty. But they were typically, by the time Civil War ran around, come around, they were typically peace Democrats. They were copperheads, they were southern sympathizers, and they very much treated the distillers in the same way that they did African Americans the same way that they would have anybody that wasn't one of them.

(00:27:53):
So their real rationale in what they were really pushing all the way up through the Civil War from the 1840s forward was that liquor was absolutely just destroying the quote white culture. Mm-hmm. Whatever that is, to the extent that by the time that they go full on into the kkk and in the early 19 hundreds, they literally are threatening distillers the same way they did African Americans, they're burning crosses in their yard, et cetera. Here in Southern Indiana, and a lot of people don't know this history, but really the roots of the K K K, the roots of the Knights of the Golden Circle, and this is not a proud fact. It's really here in southern Indiana. So by the time you get to the Civil War what you have is a group of legislators the horse Heparin, the gentleman I mentioned earlier that wrote Pioneer Pickings, which is a fantastic book where he basically captured the stories of early settlers and their children, grandchildren that could still remember those early days and published them in his paper.

(00:28:57):
The Salem Democrat was unfortunately a leader of this group. Another man by the name of William Bows, who owned a hotel where the West Doman Hotel now was another leader of this group. And in the 1860s, they were tried for treason in the state of Indiana. They were going to kill Governor Oliver p Morton. They had imported guns from afar and brought them in. They got 'em as far as New York before they were seized, 300,000 pistols and rifles. They were going to release the prisoners of war from Anderson, Indiana and turn them loose in the south. And their goal was not for Indiana to become part of the Confederacy. What they wanted was southern Indiana, southern Ohio, southern Illinois, northern Missouri and northern Kentucky to become sort of its own sovereign country. And these guys were literally just, they got caught, got slapped on the wrist. Maybe they spent three or four months in prison, and by the 1870s, they're right back in the pocket and they're right back in the legislature. And in the 1870s, they start pushing even harder for prohibition.

Drew (00:29:59):
Wow. Well, again, we talk about this connection with the Germans and drink and the Irish and drink. And that time period was the time period when we had the political party, the no nothings, which were also known as the anti-Catholic Party, we're known as the American Party. So it was basically a political party that was built on the idea of Let's stop I immigration, let's stop and put them into a position where they're not destroying American society. And so many people don't know this part of our history. We think things are bad now, man. I mean yeah, that was a rough time. And we actually had a sitting president who joined that party Miller Fillmore ran for president under that under party. So it was a real thing, and it was big. It had a lot of support, but it never became totally mainstream. But we talk about pockets of the country the way it is now, and that would make sense that they are getting a foothold in one particular spot, and it makes sense that they would be for Prohibition because who is that going to hurt? But the immigrants who are coming in that that's their lifestyle.

Alan (00:31:24):
Well, it was interesting looking back at some of the old, going to the Washington County Museum here, the John Hay Center, and going back through some of the old Salem Democrat newspapers and trying to find out a little bit more about what Horis Hein was up to and whether or not people like to brag about the things they do. And if you're an editor of a newspaper in the 18 hundreds, you probably are going to let some things fall through the cracks. And so it was interesting to see going back to the 1870s Horis Hein, he would just name call guys that were trying to seek advertising for alcohol even at that time. And he would say such and such contact contacted the Salem Democrat for an advertisement about alcohol, but we refused to advertise alcohol in our newspaper. Right. But you'd have to call them out.

(00:32:14):
And so there's definitely some interesting dynamics at play here in southern Indiana that I think really hampered southern Indiana from becoming the distilling state that it could have and being mentioned in the same breath as Kentucky, Tennessee, Maryland, Pennsylvania, et cetera. I mean, obviously it was on par with those states in the 18 hundreds, but by the time you get to Prohibition, it's been killed. And it's literally, these folks were involved in it very heavily. So history is full of people making terrible mistakes and terrible assumptions. And Indiana is not excluded from that for sure. And it, it's still hampers us a lot to this day.

Drew (00:32:59):
But how was it between the time of the Civil War up to Prohibition? Did it ever, well, there's two questions here. One is how big did it get? And to your knowledge, and the other question is that's also the time period once you get into the 1880s where the whiskey trust was said to have owned every distillery north of the Ohio River, which I find hard to believe, but that's the way it's written. And so it's hard to dispute that. But I mean, what have you found in terms of your research?

Alan (00:33:35):
So between the years 1855 and 1914 in the sixth County region, that was the black forest of Southern Indiana, there were 150 plus legal distillers. And these guys are making primarily apple brandy. So they're seasonal, but they're also making what we would now term as bourbon. Now, one of the interesting cultural things that happens here is the opposite of Kentucky. They're not using rye for their bourbon, they're using wheat for their bourbon, and they save rye for bread because that's what they grew up with, or that's what their background, that's their ancestral thing, is rye bread from the black forest region. So the industry flourished. Now in 1862, when the excise tax gets introduced, some interesting things happened. So basically these distillers are producing anywhere between, on the small side, three barrels a year, and on the large side, for example, the Alexander Kemper and David Serling distillery in Harrison County, 3000 barrels of apple brandy a year.

(00:34:34):
And to put that in perspective, to make one gallon apple brandy, you're looking at one to three bushels of apples, depending on number of distillations, how much sugar, et cetera. So 3000 barrels of apple brandy at that time is a lot of apples, right? I mean, you're employing everybody in the county essentially, when the excise tax gets introduced. This is, you'll find this entertaining, I think, on the tax side of things too. So for all those barrels that are being produced, and they're being tracked, and we're getting tax off of, there's a lot of moon shotting happening here in southern Indiana at that time too, because when that excise tax gets introduced, the first thing that sort of strikes these distillers is a little hurtful is, again, Indiana never had an excise tax before. So now you have three generations of very stubborn Germans, <laugh>, who have grown up spilling.

(00:35:25):
It's their legacy, it's their thing, Hey, the government didn't provide anything to us. We're not providing anything to them. And in southern Indiana, just as a little excuse for maybe their thinking, you got to remember that if you're a county north of the Ohio River in the 1860s, there is still no road to get to the river towns. <laugh> a county away, right? Yeah. So what's the government providing? Now, what's interesting is most of these distilleries are on the small farm distilling side, and you go into that regulation and you look at things. Back in those days, they wanted a government storekeeper or an excise agent on hand. Well, you can't do that for these small distillers. The other thing that's happening is the tax isn't fair. The tax is based upon capacity. And so if you are a apple brandy distiller with a 40 gallon still, and how much you make a year, maybe you make a barrel, two barrels, the government doesn't care.

(00:36:21):
They're going to come in, look at your 40 gallon still and say, whether it's brandy or it's whiskey, it doesn't matter. You could run that 40 gallon still twice a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Here's what you would make. That's what you owe us taxes on. So immediately in 1862, a bunch of these guys go underground. Now, the government's not dumb. The state government and the federal government aren't dumb. They know that they can't apply an excise man or a storekeeper to each of these small distilleries. Now, there's a few big distilleries like Kromen, et cetera, come along a little later. They can have an excise guy there because they're big enough to justify it. But they also know that southern Indiana is a very good place at that time to disappear. So they pick an excise man that's supposed to cover all these little farm distilleries, and they don't even give him an office in one of the six counties. They put him in Floyd County. And my question to everybody has always been, he jumped on the train. He came up to these six counties. How far away from the railroad do you think he ever got looking for distilleries, <laugh> that were producing less alcohol? Yeah. Cause I suspect what happened was he came in the each town, he got off the train, he looked around. Nope, I don't see any distilleries around here. Yeah. I'm just I'm going to go on about my day and write down whatever numbers I want to.

Drew (00:37:42):
It's the same old prohibition story, which is enforcement is the hard part, especially when you're dealing with an ability for people to go underground with something.

Alan (00:37:52):
Oh, absolutely. And the distillers were incredibly intelligent. So I'll give you an example of cheating the tax man. Maybe the best example in US history that I know of that has never been really publicized, and it's here in southern Indiana. So on the eastern side of Orange County, Indiana and what was called Millersburg, there were nine commercial distilleries. And the two big ones were the Wolfs and the McCoys. They were intermarried as most of these German families that were Distillers did Intermarry. Quite often. The Wolfs had been here since 18 distilling. They had come from the Shenandoah Valley where they distilled as well. And they set up a distillery in 1818 in a place called Stillhouse Hollow. And even back in the 1850s, 1860s, there was no real road that went to Stillhouse Hollow. If you didn't know where Stillhouse Hollow was, you couldn't get there. Now, this was a completely legal distillery until 1862. In 1862, when the excise tax hits, the second and third generation of Wolfs that were distilling claim that the Stillhouse burned down, they then go a half mile over the hill and they set up a new distillery next to a turnpike, and it's now the new Wolf Distillery. And this runs until 1914.

Drew (00:39:12):
Did they ever pay an excise tax?

Alan (00:39:14):
Yep. They were paying tax at that distillery. And the old distillery never burnt down, which nobody was walking over that hill to go check and see if they burnt down. Yeah, yeah. They're running a legal and an illegal distillery at the same time. And that illegal distillery ran all the way up until 1931. Did

Drew (00:39:30):
They really? Wow. Okay. Yep.

Alan (00:39:33):
And I suspect there was a lot of that, truthfully.

Drew (00:39:36):
And how do you find these stories? I mean, are these stories coming out of the books that you read, or is some of this the research you're

Alan (00:39:43):
Doing? It's books and research sometimes like the Wolf Family, the Wolf Distillery. So I knew about the Wolf Distillery existing, and I knew the legend of what was called Stillhouse Hollow. I am probably the dumbest person in southern Indiana because I will drive through the country, and if I'm looking for something and I see a name on a mailbox that sounds familiar, I'll go knock on a door.

Drew (00:40:07):
Now,

Alan (00:40:08):
Usually that works out. Now, there have been some instances, and I have been shot at one time doing this, which is interesting. Not knocking on a door, but I was in a cemetery and ownership had changed hands and nobody bothered to tell me. But a lot of it's interviewing a lot of these old guys. And truthfully, so if you go to my YouTube channel, you'll see some of these interviews. So Howard Wolf was, or Henry Wolf, yeah. Was one of the interviews I did. And I got him about six months before he passed away. He was the very last member of that branch of the Wolf family that could tell me that history. And I did about a 30 minute interview with him, and I'm super glad that I stopped at his house and knocked on the door and the stuff like that. Once it's gone, it's gone.

(00:40:51):
If it's not archived. Yeah. You mentioned the whiskey trust. So one of the stories we have here in Southern Indiana, these distilleries weren't easy to control because they were smaller for the most part, unless you're talking about Kromen which is over in Tell City or you're talking about again, the Alexander Sterling David Keer distilleries, which were down in Crawford County, or Harrison County, sorry. Most of these, again, are very small operations. I mean, even the most well-known of them old Cliffy, which is at Cave River Valley in Campbell in Indiana, was about 20,000 gallons a year. So it's not huge, but it's well known cause it's such quality. Right? Or Daisy Spring Mill Distillery, what's now Spring Mill State Park was about 20,000 gallons a year. Again, it's quality. They weren't easy to manipulate, they weren't easy to control, and therefore it wasn't easy for the whiskey trust to have any sort of control over them whatsoever.

(00:41:45):
A lot of them did sell their product to Thomas Batman and Louisville, Kentucky who was a brandy broker and whiskey broker at the time. But if he ever gave them any problems, they wouldn't have any problems selling their brandy locally. I mean, they're not making a ton of it. And you're lucky if you get a great brandy crop every two years. So it's not going to hurt them one way or the other. Now, the one whiskey trust story that we do have here in southern Indiana, which is just slightly outside of the Black Forest, you'll have to, excuse me, I cannot remember the distiller's name, but just outside of Evansville Patoka Distillery, the gentleman who ran that also happened to be the gentleman who created the first gauging tank for the US government. Oh, okay. Now how he did this, and this would've been brilliant for the time, and had he gotten away with it, one hell of a story. He talked the government into letting him be his own storekeeper, and he came up with a plan to rip off his own invention. And he conveniently made sure that when it was being ripped off, he was always at lunch. So the gentleman who introduced the very first ging tank was a distiller in Indiana, and he was also the gentleman who ripped off the very first ging tank and sub.

Drew (00:43:00):
So an insurance scam in old times here.

Alan (00:43:06):
Yeah, absolutely.

Drew (00:43:07):
There's so many stories that can not ever be told, because as you say, I mean, I had the opportunity to interview Al Young at Four Roses right before he passed away. And I, there's so many more questions I would love to have asked him. And I actually left that interview going, wow, I could just probably spent three or four hours with him. I'll have to do this again, and then hear the news that he's passed on. And it really does show you that it's important, and it's part of why I do this podcast too. This is a chance for everybody to tell their stories and get 'em documented somewhere. Because there are thousands of distilleries now across the United States, and it's very easy for some of these stories to get lost in the shuffle. And so I think it's important to document and get those stories out and get them firsthand because the person who writes about history is going to be writing from just the knowledge that they can collect, but the person who has experienced that, you can get so much more of a rich experience of it, because personality's in it now.

(00:44:22):
It's not somebody trying to write a narrative, it's actually somebody telling you their life experience from their point of view.

Alan (00:44:30):
Yeah, absolutely. And then the thing about written history too, that a lot of people forget just because something's written down doesn't make it historical. And that's why sometimes these firsthand stories are a little bit different than what was written down. And with distilling in particular, or even the stuff we do at Spirits of French Lick with telling these stories, some of these stories that we tell if you weren't on the right side of politics at the time and the person that was writing the history book was on the opposite side, maybe they don't mention you, or maybe they mention you in an unflattering light, or maybe they tell half truth, so they tell half lies. Now, firsthand, you can also get some hearsay in that sort of stuff too. But it helps balance those things. And especially if one of the things that I do is go to these old still sites, even if there's nothing left, I want to go look and see if there's anything left.

(00:45:21):
And in the instances where there is anything left, those firsthand accounts are absolutely invaluable to be able to walk in as a distiller, use your logic as a distiller, and doing a lot of reenactment, looking at an old still site and going, what would I do if this was presented to me? But then also, what did they say about this site? And that's where you find cool stuff that is still practical to distillation to this day, I don't know. I don't how many methods that I've legitimately pulled out of old still sites in these firsthand accounts and been like, as a distiller, I never would've thought of that, but let's try it. Let's see what it does. Yeah, it does. Is it still have some relevance? Is there still something cool you can do with it? It's absolutely, and for me, it's interesting too because my family is not from Indiana. We're all from Kentucky and I, moon shining background, all that stuff that I can always play off of. And I've chosen specifically to try to stay away from that as much as I can. I figure it like this. I'm the first Hoosier in my family. I'm three generations in of people who've lived in Indiana from my family. And somehow in the county that I live in, I'm still considered the new guy. So maybe this is a little bit of me buying my way into please consider me a true Hoosier.

Drew (00:46:39):
Yeah. Yeah. Well, you started out pretty early on distilling, so I understand. How did you get involved in distilling?

Alan (00:46:48):
So basically I, I grew up around it. My family was all from my dad's side of the family are all from Greensburg and Hodgins, Kentucky. And then my mom's side of the family were all from Clay County, Kentucky, Onida, Manchester, et cetera. And so there were several moonshiners on both sides of the family. Some people that did work in legal distilleries and more or less growing up, I mean, my grandparents, they came up here in 1947 and they bought a little 40 acre farm. And the way that they were able to pay for property taxes was by raising tobacco and making a little moonshine on the side. And so I remember being a kid, two, three years old, four years old, whatever. I guess I was raised in a family of vice, more or less

(00:47:37):
Moonshine still in tobacco. To me, those were just it was farm related. It was farm implements and moonshine still wasn't anything romantic about what people talk about now. It was just, it's another one of those things that we had to be able to make money. And we literally only made enough and only grew enough tobacco to pay for property taxes and pay for Christmas. And if somebody had an emergency in the family or somebody in the community had an emergency, maybe we had a little extra money to donate to towards that cause. And so I sort of grew up around that. My grandpa and my dad were mostly making what now we would look at a sugar shine, prohibition era, sugar shine, 50, 50% corn, 50% sugar bread, yeast, et cetera. But then we also made a lot of brandy not knowing the history of brandy in southern Indiana at that time.

(00:48:25):
Obviously this came later, but we made a lot of apple and pair Brandi in particular, because forever in Indiana, people have always had a couple pair of apple trees in her yard. And nowadays, well, even when I was a kid, people stopped using 'em. Or grandma can only can so many apples before she says, I'm not doing this anymore. But you still got to mow the yard and you still got to deal with the yellow jackets and the hornets. So you know, go around and you go, ah, I see you're not using those apples. I'll come pick 'em up for you. There's plenty of free material to make alcohol out of in southern Indiana. So <laugh> kind of where the family part of it came from. And then when I was like 15, I got either had the best or worst parents in the world. People can judge that however they want to. My parents were willing to let me do things and experiment as long as it happened at home where they could see what was going on. And as long as I was, long as I was always aware that no matter what stupid thing you do on Friday, Saturday, you're going to be in the tobacco field no matter how bad you feel.

Drew (00:49:28):
Yeah.

Alan (00:49:29):
So being 15 obvious reasons, getting interested in distilling, and literally my dad and my grandfather on grandfather on my mother's side, they built me a little 15 or 10 gallon still out of an old coffee dispenser from Fort Knox stainless still. Wow. And the rules were, don't blow yourself up in the backyard and bring us something. Went for drinking.

Drew (00:49:49):
Did they instruct you at all, or you just left your own devices? There were no YouTube videos for you to check out? No,

Alan (00:49:56):
They refused to tell me anything. Now I knew all the things I'd seen them do. I'd helped. Yeah. Right. So I knew trigger shot and all that stuff and that's mostly what I did. I think the only real innovation, innovation I came up with, the first thing I took to them when I was 15 was I added oats to a mash one time. And the rationale behind that was, well, oats are green. I've never seen them use them. Let's try it. And that was the first thing I put in front of them and they liked it. And that's really where the lease and Claire that we do at Spirits of French Lick kind of stemmed off of that. And then when I got into my twenties, I started taking things more seriously. So in my early twenties, I converted the old tobacco farm into a produce farm and was really using that as an excuse to really explore breeding, open pollinated vegetables for organic gardening in the Ohio Valley, because everything in Ohio Valley wants to kill everything that you grow if you don't use chemicals.

(00:50:49):
Right. So yeah the unfortunate side of that is that if you're the guy growing purple tomatoes in the early two thousands, even though they're popular now, and you go to the farmer's market, nobody's buying them because they're purple and nobody's buying tomatoes anyways because everybody in their brother has a garden. They're giving everything away. And so you start growing this weird stuff, then you start getting interested in obviously history and distillation history, and you go, well, distilling is very inherently agricultural. And so all these weird things that I'm growing, they be distilled. And what do they do when they get distilled? And then you end up with 150 gallon pot still that you've made out of a milk stator in your backyard. And then you meet someone who you presume you're going to marry in the future. And a jar gets back to you from somebody who shouldn't know that you're the one making it. And they ask for an autograph and one thing leads to another, and you're now fiance says you're going to go get a job doing this

Drew (00:51:50):
Or

Alan (00:51:53):
Getting a little too out of hand at that point.

Drew (00:51:55):
Well, I mean, you were just kind of following the family tradition, as they say.

Alan (00:52:00):
Right. And that's the thing about it. People don't realize too, I've never talked about following the family tradition to some extent, but then also at the time, I couldn't do anything legally with it because that didn't exist in Indiana. There were no craft distillery licenses in Indiana unless you were a brandy distillery at a winery in Ted Hubers. The only one I ever knew of that actually got that license. So I had to basically look at Louisville and go, craft distilling is growing now. So every distillery I see opening up, I'm sending the most BS resume anyone's ever seen. Right. Cause I don't have a resume. It's literally organic farmer, musician makes moonshine and backyard

Drew (00:52:46):
Real life experience. Yes.

Alan (00:52:48):
And I think the two that I had the most hope in were peerless, which they passed on me. And I don't really blame them. And in Copper and Kings who hired me, and I'm not sure they hired me because I was right for the job, I'm pretty sure they hired me because I was the cheapest person they could find. So

Drew (00:53:07):
But they're making brandy over there, which is right in your wheelhouse. You were doing moonshine. Were you making brandy before you went to work for them?

Alan (00:53:16):
That was actually even with all the things that I came up with, distilling whiskey at the house and the things I was interested in that family brandy connection was always there. And by my twenties, I already was into the history of southern Indiana and the background. And so apple brandy was really kind of my forte in a lot of ways. And I love whiskey and I love whiskey distilling, and I feel like I'm a fairly competent whiskey distiller, I hope. But apple brandy was really, that was the thing that stuck out to me as, as a distiller, even to this day, apple brandy's a little harder technically to distill. So it was something that I naturally gravitated towards.

Drew (00:54:00):
So talk about the distilling of brandy. How is it different from distilling whiskey?

Alan (00:54:08):
Yeah, so let me start with little, the historical thing here as well. So the traditional Hoosier apple brandy, which the six county region was so famous for it was always double pot distilled until you get up to about 1912 or so. Then you start seeing some three chambers come in that were wooden but it was always different from what they were making enormity. And so when I mentioned those 150 plus distillers between 1815 and or 1855 and 1914, the thing I didn't mention was that during that time period, Indiana Southern Indiana was the largest producer of apple brandy in the world. And it was considered higher quality than what was found even in Normandy at that time. And the reason for that is the methodology behind it. So this type of apple brandy is really what I like to say, kind of bourbon's sexier older sister.

(00:55:01):
So there's a lot of tonality that's very similar to bourbon. Yeah, A bourbon drink would certainly find some familiarity there that they would understand. So the traditional method for Hoosier apple brandy is what's called a apple mash brandy. So it's similar to paka or sl avizia where you're using the whole fruit. So you're not pressing the juice and fermenting the juice. You're grinding up the whole apple and you're using the whole apple, and so you're extracting everything from it, including all the tannins in the skin, et cetera. You're using limestone based water to boil those apples and extract everything you can from it. So it's a very big, very heavy, very bold sort of flavor. Now, unfortunately, I'm not able to do that at spirits of French Lick currently, but I get around that by using very specific strains of apples and very specific types of yeast to sort of mimic that Hoosier apple brandy of the past.

(00:55:52):
So apple, brandy, the best apple brandies, in my opinion are double pot distilled. There are some great calvados out there that are single pass off of O two V stills. They just take a very long time to age and get rid of some of the things that you don't want. Apple brandy to me is I approach it, I really built my bourbon and my rye whiskey approach this off of what I learned from apple brandy. And my approach very much so is it's 50 50. So what I want is I want 50% literally the fruit as it was out there on the tree. If you smell it and you taste it, I want you to be taken back to the moment when that fruit was ripe on the tree, but also the things that can come from that fruit. I want you to sort of smell some of grandma's cooking.

(00:56:41):
She's making an apple pie or apple fritters or apple stack cakes. So I want all that flavor and I want also in that 50%, that flavor to come from the fermentation and the distillation, especially with pot still distillation. So pot still distillation, being all about the retention and concentration of flavor, breaking down long chain fatty acids into esters and phenols, you're going to taste in the finished product. Then I want 50% to come from the barrel. So it's a blend and balance of all of those things. I don't want the barrel to become 60, 70% and I don't want the apple to become 60, 70%. I want right down the middle to where the barrel is complimenting All of those other flavors and all those other flavors are complimenting the barrel. The barrel barrels are excellent ingredients and very terrible storage devices. <laugh> is really, really what it comes down to.

(00:57:36):
And there's definitely apple brandy's tricky because so everybody who's familiar with distilling on a technical level to some degree understands that there are compounds you don't want poisonous compounds like four shots methanol and then also acetyl aide, eyl acetate which is where your heads come from. And brandy, especially apple brandy, has a larger four shots fraction and a larger heads fraction. And whiskey typically has, especially on a pot still. The problem is that brandy is a little bit of a trickster. So there are compounds that come across during the heads portion of a distillation, which can trick you into thinking that their hearts and they tend to be a little red raspberry and they can be a little green apple and you may be smelling them at time and think, well, that's fantastic. I want that, but that is not what you want.

Drew (00:58:27):
Yeah, it takes some experience and just knowing and again, apple brandy was something you just kind of learned from watching or was that something that you picked up on your own afterwards?

Alan (00:58:39):
A little bit of both. So the apple brandy we made when I was a kid was kind of, I guess apple brandy and name only because it was, again, the sugar shine thing, maybe 50 50. So 50%, probably not even 50% apples. I mean honestly, more like a peck of apples to a 53 gallon barrel. And then here's 50 pounds of sugar and there's a little apple taste in there in the background. So that was something that I got more serious about as I got a little older and started planting apple trees and started finding some of these old varieties too. So one of the things we have here in southern Indiana is a thing called the Turley wine. And this is the one named apple brandy variety that was ever really bred for brandy in southern Indiana. And it was bred for Daisy Spring Mill distillery bred by a relative of Jonathan Turley who owned that distillery at one point in time. And so I was lucky in my mid twenties to find six of these trees that had been abandoned and they only were making apples that were crab apple sized at the time. So six trees, if you do pure apple brandy, maybe you're going to make four or five barrels of maybe 15 gallons of brandy altogether if you're lucky. But nobody else was using 'em for anything. And to me it was cool. Can't talk about it because it's illegal, but it was cool.

Drew (01:00:03):
Well, and so when I saw that you were doing a bottled in bond brandy, that's the first time I really have heard of that. And so was that, how long were they aging in Indiana? I'm sure early on they were probably just trying to sell the brandy and it was probably anywhere from clear to as long as it sat in the barrel to get the market. But was there a sweet spot that you saw maybe in labels that people were accounting that it was either bottled in bond, which would've been after 97, or that they would even define how long or what color it should be or that sort of thing?

Alan (01:00:49):
So typically with brandy in southern Indiana, they're using anywhere from 30 to 48 gallon barrels. And two years was kind of where they were at. A lot of it was sold as white spirit even up to 19 14, 19 15 kind of the traditional serving method here locally was white spirit with honey added to it. And it was the same thing for peach brandy for whatever reason. Now, what was up for export was almost always barreled and it was usually a two year thing. So bottled and bond apple Brandy Lairds has done that in New Jersey for a long time and all the kudos snow to them for helping build that category obviously and making it a thing where somebody like me in southern Indiana can even bring it back up and talk about it. So yeah, the bottled and bond thing. So the two things I wanted to do when I got out of Copper and Kings and I came to spirits of French Lick first thing was I knew that Copper Kings wasn't a good fit for me just culturally, it didn't necessarily fit what I felt like I was about and where I wanted to be at.

(01:01:47):
And so I knew the Indiana distilling history and I wanted to build that up, and that was one reason for coming to the Indiana side of the river other than, again, new guy in the community, even though you're three generations in. You got to, yeah, back that up a little bit. So the other reason was I knew that apple brandy history, and so the old Cliffy apple brandy that we did, that was a two year that we started with that is the first apple brandy manufactured legally in the black forest of southern Indiana since at least 1916. Wow. Maybe a little before that, maybe 1914. And so I have never seen a southern Indiana apple brandy advertised as bottled and bond. I suspect that they probably were, I'm just not finding it, but this will be the first bottled and bond apple brandy since at least again, 1916.

(01:02:35):
And so, wow, I wanted to play into that and sort of use that to bring things back. And so we very purposely go out of our way to not make calvados and to not make French style apple brandy to not make California style or Oregon style or Washington style apple brandy. When people get a bottle of our apple brandy, I'm making apple brandy for bourbon drinkers. And that's obviously what I was doing at Copper Kings too. And my goal isn't that a bourbon drinker's not going to trade bourbon for apple brandy, but if a bourbon drinker, let's say they're buying 24 bottles of bourbon a year, let's give 'em two bottles a month. Just out of curiosity, there's a very good opportunity that between October, November and December, I can get them to switch out at least a few bottles of bourbon for some apple brandy because the tonality is similar, right? Yeah. It's not so far a field that they can't identify with it, and they may enjoy it quite a bit. And so that's really where I've kind of tried to plant my flag is if you're going to build that Indiana distilling history up and play off of that, you have to start with apple brandy, and then if everything's good after that, you're golden.

Drew (01:03:40):
Yeah. Well, nowadays craft distilling is opening up so many other doors, American single malt and bringing rye back and doing all of these different variations of whiskey. So it seems like a brandy that has a bourbon esque kind of a feel to it is legitimately a category that could open up as long as you get people who are making brandy. And I see some of the craft distillers going into brandy, but very few, it's still sort of, I don't know, is the technique so different that it is really hard for a whiskey distiller to jump into it,

Alan (01:04:28):
Really? I mean, they can learn fairly easily and obviously nowadays there's people they can talk to learn. The real problem with brandy is it's so expensive to make. So for example, with a barrel of our apple brandy, the money that goes into that, I could literally make five barrels of whiskey

(01:04:49):
So little, and obviously it's going to sell a little slower than a bourbon will. You got to market it a little differently. You got to educate people. So there's just more that goes into it to push it out there. But I do certainly think in the Midwest and to Kentucky for example, because Kentucky was a huge brandy state as well before prohibition, it certainly to me makes more sense to make a little bit of apple brandy every year than it does to make say rum, right? Kentucky has no real history of rum. Indiana has no real history of rum, but we do have a history of apple brandy and peach brandy, and apple brandy's tenable, even if it's small scale in the gift shop. Just one more thing to show what you can do and a true taste of culture, because if you go back into the 18 hundreds, and you look at some of those local taxes we mentioned earlier here in Indiana, so if you look at the local county taxes on spirits, and you'll see this in Kentucky as well, apple brandy is taxed at almost twice the rate that whiskey is in the 18 hundreds because it was preferred over top of whiskey.

(01:05:54):
People locally were not drinking whiskey unless they had to. They would almost always drink apple brandy. That was their go-to locally.

Drew (01:06:02):
We talk about how to taste change, and I, I've heard that, well, of course, we look at the history of alcohol in the US and rum was popular until the Revolutionary War when it was harder to get. And so it shifted to rye whiskey because rye whiskey was rye available. So you could distill it and then you start heading down into Tennessee. And my records, the first distiller that I've run into in Tennessee was distilling rye whiskey. So weren't jumping straight into doing corn.

Alan (01:06:37):
And that's what I've typically found in Indiana is they're bringing what they're familiar with and sometimes they're bringing, even I mentioned the flat boat in Madison, Indiana, sometimes they are bringing their own equipment. Very rarely does that happen. You see that a little later on around 18. Some Kentucky distillers come up here in 1818, and they bring family equipment they inherited. But what you really find a lot of times, and I suspect you'll see the same thing in Tennessee where people are coming from Maryland and Pennsylvania, it's like second and third sons, the ones that didn't inherit anything, the ones that didn't, they had the background, they had the history, they had the methodology, but they didn't have anything that was given to them. So they had to go somewhere else, get their own land, buy their own equipment, do their own thing. And then sometimes you get to where you're going, just like the ones coming to Indiana, and you may have a rye whiskey background, but the first time you grow rye whiskey and you're doing 15 acres of it and a storm blows it down and ain't

Drew (01:07:29):
Worthwhile.

Alan (01:07:29):
Yeah, you'll stop that real quick and go, you know what? That corn looks pretty good right now.

Drew (01:07:34):
Yeah, absolutely. Well, I thank you for sending me some samples, by the way, and I was going to do a nosing and tasting on the apple brandy. So talk about well, and I just wanted to throw this in too while we were talking about it. My ad deal, throw me off into different trains of thought, but we were talking about the whiskey trust, and if Indiana was so heavy in apple brandy at that time, it would make sense that the distilleries weren't distilling for the whiskey trust because the whiskey trust was trying to do everything they could to make whiskey production as cheap as possible and to run out the competition. And apple brandy wouldn't have been competition for what they were producing, which is neutral green spirit, basically.

Alan (01:08:22):
Well, and then the other side of that too is that, again, you got to remember, you're dealing with these very st stubborn Germans that have this tradition of double pot distilling, which is incredibly inefficient even if you're making whiskey. And so these guys, I suspect that more than one or two people, probably <laugh> associated with the whiskey trust, probably got punched in the face at some point <laugh> for having the wrong play, right? Cause they're not going to tolerate that because they don't have to. And the whiskey trust isn't going to go out of their way in any way, shape or form. It's country bumpkin, sort of Franklin County Virginia sort of stuff. You know what I mean? Yeah. You just don't mess with some people <laugh>, some people sometimes it's just better off to go on about your day and not even ask whoever's out there doing what they're doing.

(01:09:09):
So I think that that had a real play into it. And here's a good example. So on the history side, I'll bring it up to 1914 and then tell you a couple things going into prohibition here that play into what you're talking about with that whiskey trust thing and the similar attitude. So 1914 Indiana, still a couple years off from prohibition, but the problem is all these distillers see that prohibition is coming. They all know that prohibition is a joke. They know it won't last. The problem is they are primarily farm distillers, and their farms are planted to apples that are no good to eat out of hand. They're no good to ship, they're no good to make fresh cider out of. They are brandy apples. And so a lot of them get out of it, and they cut down their own trees. They suck planting commodity crops because that's what they see that they're going to have to do to survive prohibition coming. The other thing that happens in 1914 is firelight, which is a fungal disease of apple trees, moves into Southern Indiana and it just wipes out apple trees.

Drew (01:10:07):
Wow.

Alan (01:10:08):
Okay. The next piece that happens is the Knights of the Golden Circle are now full on KK K, what we talked about earlier. They're literally, I have records of these guys going to distiller's houses and burning crosses on their front lawns, pushing them out of the business as much as possible. By the time you get to the 1920s French Lick and West Bayden really play into prohibition in a major way that I don't think anybody really understands in any major way. So French Lick is equidistant, if you think about it, really to Indianapolis, St. Louis, Lowell, Kentucky, and Cincinnati. It is off the beaten path. It is a great place for gangsters and Kentucky distillers to meet, to move product.

Drew (01:10:52):
Okay.

Alan (01:10:53):
Every distiller in the Midwest has gotten Al Capone's story. It's a generic thing, but I'm going to give you a great Al Capone story, so I'm sure you we'll probably talk about Lee Sinclair here momentarily as well. But Lee Sinclair's, former son-in-law, a man by the name of Charles Edward Ballard, who Sinclair hired to manage what was called a gaming room in the 1890s, or sorry, early 19 hundreds in West Baden, what we now recognize as a casino. By the time Lee has passed away, Charles Edward Ballard owns nine hotels and casinos in little towns of West Badden and French Lick. He also owns clubs up in Michigan on the east coast, down in Florida and down in the Caribbean. He owns two farms outside of French Lick Castle, no Farms and can't think of the name of the other one off the top of my head. Long and short of it is he also owns every circus in the United States short of Barnham and Bailey.

(01:11:45):
So this is one hell of a guy. He's literally meeting with gangsters from all over. He's meeting with Kentucky Distillers, he's moving product. He has a 400 gallon still set up, literally 20 feet off the railroad tracks, not even in a building where they draw the train up to it, they load it full of moonshine, they ship it to into town, ship it to all this clubs, et cetera, operates with impunity. Yeah. The Indiana State Police is partially put together at this time to bring West Baden and French lick to Hill. Of course, anybody can be paid off. It is what it is. Right. The long and short of it is Al Capone was never allowed in West Baden or French Lick. He was only ever allowed to stay on one of Ballard's farms outside of town, and he was not allowed to come in the town unless he was with Charles Edward Ballard.

(01:12:32):
Huh. So that should tell you something about Charles Edward Powell <laugh>. At the same time, Ballard is meeting with multiple Kentucky distillers, including members of the Beam family. He's moving their product illegally to these different gangsters. He's trying to bring to hill these moonshiners that were legal distillers in Southern Indiana. Doesn't always work. And one good example of it is there was a gentleman by the name of Chester Smith who lived outside of West Baen, Indiana, and Chester had a little 10 gallon still. He worked at a sawmill, and he would also occasionally go up to Jasper, Indiana, which was a later German immigration still. So some of the old timers there to this day still speak what they call it, Jasper Dutch. So they'll be speaking English, and then they'll just drop random German words in the middle of the <laugh>. Nice. So nobody messed with Jasper, right?

(01:13:23):
Yeah, they were very protective. You could go to the hardware store and you could buy everything you needed to make moonshine. And then on the backside there was a copper shop and you could buy a still and they would ride a recipe for your moonshot on the back of this receipt. The other thing they did is they provided local moonshine to the counties adjacent to them. So Chester Smith would go up and he would buy a gallon of moonshine for $2, bring it back to French Lick, and he would sell it for $4. He'd make about go buy 10 gallons a week and sell it. Ballard got onto Smith and he sent the police after him and Chester spent a spring and a fall at the State Farm, planting potatoes and then harvesting set potatoes. The third time that he would've been caught, he would've been sentenced to prison for at least a year.

(01:14:11):
He heard from a local cop that they were going to turn him in again. And one morning early on a Saturday, he gets in his car, he drives down Main Street, he pulls up in front of what was called the Brown Hotel. He knows that there's nobody in the lobby. He lights a bundle of dynamite from his car. He throws it through the front lobby of the hotel. Oh man. Blows the front lobby off the hotel, drives back home. He's never arrested. They never pressed charges. Nothing's ever recorded about it in history as far as what happens after it. The only thing you can imagine is at some point in time, Charles Ballard and Al Capone and all those guys said, all right, don't mess with Chester <laugh> because Chester crazy. Yeah, right. Wow. Just don't let him sell us 10 gallons and go on about his day. Yeah.

Drew (01:14:55):
So was the Brown Hotel there there stopping off point or something? Or why would he blow up that particular hotel? I wonder?

Alan (01:15:04):
Because it was close to the road and Ballard owned all the hotels, so he could have literally picked any of the hotels, but that one was the easiest access that he could get to. So man, he knew that he could drive up to it. He could see through the window, see, nobody was in there. He wasn't going to hurt anybody. So it was just an easy target and they never messed with him again.

Drew (01:15:24):
So

Alan (01:15:25):
I suspect that during the Whisky Whiskey Trust, there are also stories like that during that time. I just haven't found that. Yeah,

Drew (01:15:31):
There's a distillery in Fort Wayne that I found newspaper articles on, and it was a huge distillery, and the Whiskey trust basically muscled their way in there to take it over. And when they did, the guy who had built it, the newspaper article I was reading, said he went to start to build one right near it that was going to be just as big as it, but I don't know that they'd ever got built. It's one of those things where you really almost have to go to the town and just start digging through newspapers and reading all the articles that you can find. And some of this is now online, but it's amazing.

Alan (01:16:13):
It's hard to find.

Drew (01:16:14):
Yeah, it is. And I mean, I have done, back when I lived in, lived in Nashville, North Carolina, and when the internet was first starting to grow, I was doing my first few websites then, and I wanted to do a website for the local baseball team, the Asheville Tourists, who had a history all the way back into the late 18 hundreds. And so I went to the newspaper articles and just started reading, and you'd have to keep flipping through, and there weren't reports every day on what the team did. It was like every three or four days when a horse came over the mountain and brought the box score for them to print into the paper or whatever it was, it was just somebody had to call the scores in whatever it may be. But it was very difficult for them to get daily information like that.

(01:17:08):
And to find those stories, you would be able to look in a certain section of the newspaper, you get used to, okay, I'm going to go about 10 pages in and then I'll find the little sports box score area. But when you start to talk about doing that and you're trying to research just a news story, just a general news story like that about a distillery, whatever, to go through those microfiche and try to go page to page, you could be looking for days and days and days and days before you bump into anything, which is why I would love to see all of this stuff get put into searchable resources to where we'd be able to find all of this. So what do you do in terms of doing your research? I know you actually go on site to some of these places, the state park that you mentioned. I saw some pictures on your site about that. Yeah,

Alan (01:18:06):
So it really just depends. So the very first thing I did, I mentioned those books earlier, the Centennial history of Washington County, the Godfrey history of Lawrence Orange and Washington County. There are various county history books for each of those six counties. Sometimes it's just luck. One time I looked up absent in Indiana because I thought I'd be the first person ever to still have something in Indiana. Well, long and short of that is Switzerland County, Indiana, 1830 before absent is even a thing in Europe. It exists in the Swiss Aon. That's literally it. Wow. There were two legal absent distilleries in Switzerland County, Indiana, which is crazy to me. Sometimes you just luck, right? Yeah. You just bored and typing in the Google and you got a minute, you're doing what you're doing. Other times it's, you'll hear a little rumor from somebody. There used to be a distiller here, somebody got busted here during prohibition.

(01:18:59):
So starting with those history books, I went back with the early Frontier days. I literally went through all those history books, and I wrote down the name of every single distiller that was listed. Right now I'm looking them up. I'm on Ancestry, I'm on genealogy sites, so I'm on newspapers.com, and is there a name that corresponds with this name? And was there an industrial distillery that came out of that? Then I'm going to the John Hay Museum and buddy and bothering my friend Jeremy Elliot, the county historian for Washington County. Can you look this up and take me to the newspaper archive? I'm going through a newspaper archive, and the 18 hundreds are hard, and again, because there's no tax history up to 1862. But prohibition was even worse here in southern Indiana because the problem is the sheriffs knew everybody, right? So you can't get names because they didn't publish names in newspapers. It was just like we found us still at a farmhouse in Fredericksburg, and it was a 80 gallon still, and it was a huge operation. But then no name is ever mentioned, because I'm sure that the sheriff walked in and was like, listen, Tom,

(01:20:03):
We're not stupid and we have to do something about this, but we also don't want to see you go to jail. And so they give them a little warrant and then tear it up, whatever. But it's not easy to find those things. And so you use whatever resources you can and sometimes it's intuition. There have been a couple of just glancing little historical tidbits about, for example, CA River Valley, the Shroyer family ran a distillery in 1872 that made 75 barrels of whiskey, right? Which by the standards of the time where it was a pretty good operation. Well, later on, I came across, ironically, an article in a s Splunking magazine because almost all these distilleries are on Cave Springs. And it was like, oh, there's a wall of the old Shroyer distillery located in this. And you go, look, there's still a wall over here.

(01:20:53):
But those little things, and then you start putting pieces together and you never really have a full picture of it. You never going to really see everything that was here. But to be able to bring any of that to light, I think is very much worthwhile. And I even remember I won't say their names because they do still exist, and I think some of them do still some distilling, but we mentioned the Fleener earlier. So they were in an area of Washington County called Delaney Valley, and if you go back to there's an 18 account where they talk about how if you stood on what was called Walnut Ridge above Valley, and you looked out, you could see the fires from nine still houses. So when I was a kid, one of those families that were involved with those nine still houses was still in the moonshine business, at least this late 19 96, 19 97. Oh, man.

Drew (01:21:45):
Right? Yeah.

Alan (01:21:46):
So you're talking six, seven generations, and they were never legal after the excise tax was introduced. But I can't publish their story because they're still not, I don't think they're doing anything on what you'd consider a commercial moonshine level nowadays. But you don't want to get anybody in any trouble.

Drew (01:22:06):
Well, many, many years ago, and well, about 2005, I guess it was coming up on the 50th anniversary of rock and Roll, and I thought it'd be really cool to put together a book where you took a snapshot month by month, and you showed what songs were on the charts. You showed what movies were out at the time. You showed what the major news stories were. As I started to research this, I was going through all these old magazines. I was living in Nashville at the time. I was going through all these old magazines and newspapers and reading the stories, and I started piecing things together. And I started to realize that it's really hard to understand history as a whole and certain events that happened in history without knowing what else was going on around it. Exactly. In different things. Yeah. Because one of the great revelations for me was the British invasion when it started in 1964, the Beatles came here in January of 64.

(01:23:13):
John F. Kennedy was shot in November of 63, and music changed drastically between the innocent sock hop music of the 63 back in rockabilly and all that stuff. It became like an escapism, listen to somebody else and listen to a different style and something that takes us away from where we're at. And I never would've made that connection if I hadn't have known what the mindset of the people were in at that time. And I keep relating that to whiskey. And as I do this research, I'm like, I just want to know what else was going on at the same time to really get an understanding of, yes, big events like prohibition, that we know that time period that was in there but the attitudes of people and the politics of that area and the rest that kept distilling from coming back to certain areas. So this is a long-winded way of asking, how did Indiana finally come out of prohibition? Was it basically just one company lobbied and got themselves rights and then it was kind of left Barron for a while for everybody else? Or were there pockets of distilling that came back after

Alan (01:24:40):
There were pieces and it was all industrialized? So Barron in mind that prohibition shuts things down literally in order for an entire generation of distillers and distilling knowledge to pass away. So the Wolfs and the McCoys, for example and I've heard this story from multiple sources over the years when prohibition hit, and of course those both being cousins, big distillers there, and Millersburg and Orange County, Indiana, the Wolfs and McCoys both had about 300 barrels of apple brandy a piece. And they were ordered to take that down to the A p h Snitzel warehouse, which if you're familiar with Copper and Kings, there's literally a lot that's cata cornered to Copper and Kings. That's the old a p h Snitzel Distillery. Oh, okay. Is where that was.

Drew (01:25:24):
Okay.

Alan (01:25:26):
They're in intent was when prohibition ended, they would sell that brandy, even though it's going to be a little overage, whatever, it's brandy, they can probably get a premium off of it. When prohibition ended, what they found out was they had been robbed of every drop of brandy that they had, and there was no money to get back up and going. So these aren't big affairs. They don't have a lot of land they can leverage. They don't have a lot of property. They can leverage any of that stuff. So in Indiana, the only ones that make it through prohibition are the big companies. So here in southern Indiana, Krogman was really the biggest. They make it through prohibition. The next biggest was again, the Alexander Sterling, David Keer distilleries. There was one in New Amsterdam two in mock port. Literally Krogman turns around and buys them because at that point, those guys just wanted out of the investment, whatever.

(01:26:16):
And they basically existed in tools in 1960s to some degree, quality lessening as it went and becoming more industrialized, et cetera. But there was no farm distilling law on the books after prohibition here in southern Indiana to get things back up and going. And all the way up until 2013 when they started talking about doing this farm distilling thing again, we literally had a gentleman who was in the House of Representatives that called all these distilling bills. He called them the still on every Hill Bill. He thought that this was just going to, if you let all these little guys go legal, yeah, it's just going to cause alcoholism and it's going to cause problems and hide your children and your wife, et cetera. And so they introduced a number of limiting factors, which they've done throughout Indiana history. So for a little while there, if you wanted to have a farm distillery, you had to either have a brewery license or a winery license for three years.

(01:27:11):
And the argument for that, it had to be active. The argument for that was that brewers and winemakers had shown that they were responsible with alcohol. I was on lucky enough to testify on the summer study committee, and I'm sure I made a lot of fans there, <laugh>, because my reaction to that was, okay, so you're saying you have to have a brewers or a winery license for three years that's been active because they're responsible with alcohol. But I can literally go and apply for if it's open in my county and alcohol license, even a three-way license if I want it, and I can buy a business and sell everyone else's alcohol. So what you're really saying is, it's okay to sell everybody else's alcohol, just don't sell your own.

Drew (01:27:51):
Right.

Alan (01:27:53):
And this ties back into that prohibition mindset. So kind of going back into the 1870s, the Knights of Golden Circle, the ones who got tried for treason, and 1877, they're back in the office. So one of the early laws they introduced was the following. So two men go out drinking, one of them gets drunk shoots, the other one kills him if he was drunk, and people will testify to the fact that he's drunk. He's not in trouble for killing that guy, really. And the guy who sold him the liquor, the guy who sold him the liquor, is not responsible for it. The gentleman who made the liquor,

Drew (01:28:29):
Wow,

Alan (01:28:29):
Is responsible for the death of that person, and therefore, his distillery, all of his equipment and all of his product is up for seizure. And fine,

Drew (01:28:41):
A distiller would have any way to stop that from getting into the wrong hands.

Alan (01:28:47):
And that's how they started shutting them down. And we just recently, in the past few years, had our Sunday blue law repealed which really surprised me. Indiana's become a little more progressive on those things lately. And I think Indiana understands we're an agricultural state. And while there's still a little pushback in the legislature it's changing because they are starting to see that these alcohol in a lot of ways is just a value added product right there. There's no difference between going to the farmer's market and selling apple butter. You can sell apples, and that's one price, and you can sell apple butter, and that's another price because it's now value added. You've done something different with it, and it still hearkens to the agricultural nature of the state.

Drew (01:29:31):
Yeah. What's really interesting though, during this because, and maybe it's just the people that I follow on Instagram, but it feels that the culture around whiskey is different. The mindset is different around whiskey. I don't follow people who are, I'll see a bottle kill every once in a while, but I'm not following a lot of people who are talking about abusing alcohol or talking about how wild and crazy they're getting with it. It's more about, it's a collector thing. It's an experience. It's something that you pay attention to, like wine drinkers that you want to appreciate it, and it's not about a cheap high. Or like I say, maybe those people just aren't posting very much on Instagram, and I just don't follow them. But I see a very responsible culture around whiskey with this go round.

Alan (01:30:25):
I think for the most part, you're correct. I have some of those people on my Instagram, but it's because I find them humorous more than

Drew (01:30:31):
Anything. But I

Alan (01:30:32):
Think, and I play into that a little bit too myself, but I think honestly would say that it's less than 2%. I mean, 98% of the people that you talk to that are into this, they're really into it. And they're not just into it for the alcohol. They're into it for the stories and the history. And that's one of the things that attracts me to this as a legal industry, is that as whatever word you want to use, not really a historian, but as an admirer of history and researching history, I could write a three page, four page article about any number of these figures, and who's going to read it. Four or five people in the historical society might read that whole article, and maybe they learn something from it. But if you put that same story on a bottle and you be as truthful about it as you can, yeah.

(01:31:20):
Right? And you craft an experience around that, you know, take Lisa Sinclair and you talk about his history, what he did, Washington County and Orange County, you put a picture of him on the bottle, an illustration, and on the back, I give you just enough information that you go, wow, that's a really interesting story. And a whiskey that might sort of match in the same way that music can have a color component or a fillin component or an aroma component, all those sort of things. Maybe just maybe you'll look a little deeper into that history, because it's experiential, again, spiritual in a way, it opens a door you didn't think about. And I've joked many times that that's almost, in some ways, it's a form of necromancy, right? Because for example, with Maddie Gladden, nobody knew who Mad Gladden was in New Orleans. Very few people knew who Maddie Gladden was here in Washington County. But now, people all over the south in particular, which seems to be our big market, they all know the story of Matt Black <laugh>. They now, we have given someone their due who didn't get their due in history, and we did it through a bottle of whiskey that tastes good, puts you in a certain mindset, put you in a certain mood, has a certain flavor to it, it reminds you of certain things, and it's just a little racy. Yeah.

Drew (01:32:38):
Well, so you and I would not be talking today if it weren't for the fact that I decided to go on this crazy Kentucky distillery tour where I did 19 distilleries in eight days. And I walked out of there obsessed with the stories. I thought, this is all that me loving history. It just was a perfect marriage. And it sent me off to Scotland. And then I fell in love with the stories that I was hearing over there. And I wanted to learn more about the distillers the history of the area, get more of a feel for these areas, because it opens a door, it creates accessibility. And this is what I love about stories, is that I think that stories entertain at first, but they get that little question going in your mind that makes you hunt for more detail and then opens you to a whole wider world that you really never would've paid attention to in the first place. I just did a story on Winston Churchill, and I was like I never really thought about what he did between World War I and World War ii, but in researching a story on his drinking habits, I found that he had gotten hit by a car in on Fifth Avenue in New York City, and ended up having to get a medicinal prescription which basically said unlimited amounts of alcohol. He can drink whatever he wants, and in fact, he should drink a third of a bottle of whiskey with a meal at least once a day. Yep.

Alan (01:34:21):
Had little asterisks at the bottom that said, we'll not fix it, but we'll make you forget about it for a little while.

Drew (01:34:28):
Yeah, absolutely. But I mean, this is all stuff that it adds a color and flavor to history as well, and gets us more curious about who we are and the rest. So

Alan (01:34:42):
One of my little hashtags throw this out there when I post stuff about history is and more practical history, especially if I'm doing something for spirits of French Lick and a special product. But if you have ghosts, you have everything right. And those ghosts are the ghosts of the past, the spirits that sort of inspire you to do these

Drew (01:34:58):
Things. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, folks, this was a really long interview, actually ends up going about two hours and 45 minutes, so I figured I would split it in half and let you hear the second half coming up next week. And in that episode, we're going to hear about Alan's favorite historic distilleries. We're going to learn how he's trying to capture the flavor of those distilleries and the work he's doing with yeast. We'll also hear about the characters of Indiana history that have made appearances on labels of spirits of French licks, whiskeys and brandies. That's coming up next Wednesday on whiskey lore. If you need show notes, transcripts, or social media links, head to whiskey-lore.com. I'm your Hanish. And until next week, cheers and SL JVA Whiskey Lords of Production of Travel Fuel's Life, L L C.