Ep. 59 - Chris Riesbeck of Westland Distillery

Transcript

Drew (00:00:09):
Welcome to Whiskey Lord, the interviews. I'm your host, Drew Hannush, the Amazon best-selling author of Whiskey Lord's Travel Guide to Experiencing Kentucky Bourbon. And it's time to dig into the past and future of a distillery that I think it's safe to say can take some credit for being the American single malt that brought that term to a wide variety of store shelves across the country. My guest is VP of Sales at Westland Distillery, Chris Rebeck. And over the next hour we're going to talk about the origins and philosophy of the distillery. We'll talk about whether the barrel actually does have the biggest impact on a whiskey's flavor. We'll hear about his experiences in Scotland and we'll talk about what it takes to become a brand ambassador and how that role has changed over the years. And if you want to get some detailed tasting notes on Westland's whiskeys, well make sure to head to my YouTube channel at youtube.com/whiskey. I've already done a tasting of the Sherry Wood impeded and I'll cover the American Oak by the end of the month. But right now it's time to get into the interview that I've got queued up with Chris Reseck of Westland Distillery. Hello there. This is Drew Hanish of Whiskey lore and time for another interview. And today all the way from Washington state to the whiskey parlor here in Greenville, South Carolina. My first chance to use the whiskey parlor welcoming my guest, Chris Reseck of Wesland. Yeah,

Chris (00:01:43):
Thanks

Drew (00:01:43):
For having me on. And so this is fun cuz I haven't really, I only tasted Wesland once and that's when I was in Lake Tahoe and we were just talking actually about a distillery that I was visiting there at that time that unfortunately a shut down. But I was sitting in a bar in Lake Tahoe and I had put these three whiskeys in front of me and one was Haki Japanese whiskey and then Westland and Henry McKenna tenure and so that was my experiment.

Chris (00:02:17):
That's a pretty varied parlor of whiskeys. Yeah, yeah, I like that. I love when people come to us and they're like, oh, I tasted you in the context of a rye whiskey from Germany, a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc cask finished scotch whiskey and you guys, and I'm like, oh yeah, that's exactly the way that whiskey universe should be moving right now.

Drew (00:02:39):
Yeah, yeah. Let's get a diversity of flavors and then kind of figure it out from there. So that was interesting cuz it was my first time tasting a Japanese whiskey. It was the first time I tasted Westland and putting them side by side and as I was tasting I was like the variety in these three different whiskeys. And we'll talk a little bit about the concept of provenance and terroir as we jump in. Cuz these of course are terms that are hitting the whiskey industry now that have come out of the wine.

Chris (00:03:12):
I can see the comments section immediately on this will be, oh my God, provenance versus terroir and

Drew (00:03:18):
People complaining that there

Chris (00:03:20):
Is or is not those things within whiskey. But yes, I am ready and armed to the teeth ready to have that conversation.

Drew (00:03:26):
Yeah. Okay, good. I am feeling this again in deep. We got some tasting to do as well. I've brought actually a mystery whiskey and wesland peed. So me being a Pete head, this will be fun cuz both of them are ped whiskeys. So we'll challenge you and see how your boy century perception,

Chris (00:03:47):
Nothing like a blind tasting to let general public think they can do your job <laugh> with zero efforts.

Drew (00:03:52):
Well, and the fun part about doing those types of tastings for me is that it again, kind of the challenges, I will say that there could be a surprise in this, that it may not be what you expect it to be and that may actually either confuse you or make you go, okay, I think I know where we're headed with this, so we'll

Chris (00:04:12):
See challenge accepted.

Drew (00:04:13):
Yes. So give us a little background on Westland. Yeah. First and the brand's been around since 2010, and so give us a little feel for how it evolved into an American single malt as the project to start out with and a little background on where it's come from since then. Yeah,

Chris (00:04:37):
It's funny, it's hard to even say that it's evolved into an American single malt because effectively it's always been an American single wall. This is probably getting a bit ahead of it, and I'll come back to the beginning, the sort of origin story. But when you look at Wesland, Wesland very clearly knew that it wanted to make single malt whiskey. A huge element to being in the Pacific Northwest and we're in Seattle is the accessibility of really excellent quality. Malting grade barley, we're one of the two best regions in the world, broadly to grow malting grade barley. So for us, it's always seemed kind of funny that it's like, well, yes, you're in America, and America for better or worse is this assumed, hey, we make bourbon, we make rye here. But the reality is, is that you know, make bourbon and you make rye because of the accessibility of the grain that you need to make those things relative to where a lot of it's produced.

(00:05:24):
That's not the case in Washington state. Again, Washington state grows huge amounts of really high quality malting grade barley. Why wouldn't you want to explore what that can do when there is an adjacent industry in single malt scotch whiskey that's shown? Yeah, you can create a ton of flavor and a ton of variety out of malted barley. Yeah so started back in 2010, so it was Matt and his partner, a guy by the name of Emerson Lamb. Matt Hoffman is our managing director, master distill, sort of jack of all trades. It does everything. And Matt is obsessed with this concept of flavor and we talk about flavor and we talk about flavor origins in a variety of different capacities. But one of the things that's sort of odd in the whiskey industry, and I'll say this is more particular to the malt whiskey industry than it would be sort of bourbon rye, is that we just sort of broadly assume that all flavor comes from casks and maturation.

(00:06:15):
You go, okay, if the equation is malted barley plus yeast through the lens of fermentation equals alcohol, then alcohol plus barrels plus times equals whiskey flavor. Yeah, I'm not sure that's the most important way of explaining that. I think there's actually a much better way, which is all raw materials fundamentally create flavor. Barley creates flavor, yeast selection creates flavor, your water has an impact on your fermentation, which has an impact on flavor. The types of o Cass you use, the amount of time where you mature things. All of those elements have a huge impact on the profile of the whiskey that you want to produce. One of Matt's sort of early inspirations was the idea of how do you make a whiskey that has a genuine sense of place? We use sense of place as a placeholder for provenance, probably less a placeholder for terroir, but a placeholder for provenance pretty regularly.

(00:07:09):
We want a whiskey to have a sense of place. We want people that taste Westland to go, I can identify that this is something very much of the Pacific Northwest. The northwest is an incredible region. It not only just for the agricultural unique things that happen there in the types of grain that we grow, but also because there's a culture of innovation that exists within the Northwest that I'm not sure if you look at the real growth of American single Mall, I think it's fair to say that a lot of this has come out of the Pacific Northwest, and hopefully people over time will recognize that Westland's had an outsized impact on this new category as it stands to become one. And to make sure that a whiskey embraces some of that creative culture, but also recognizes the agricultural system there. You've gotta completely start with a fresh slate.

(00:07:59):
You can't walk in saying, well, we want to make X and I think the thing that we hear from consumers pretty regular is like, oh, you're scotch made in America. And that's totally reasonable because their point of reference is scotch whiskey is made out of malted barley, it's matured in a barrel and then it's put out into the market. So that's what malted barley whiskey should taste like. But the reality is like, well, no, that's their style of single malt whiskey. It would be absurd for American distilleries to have the ambition to make scotch in America. I tell people this all the time and it's such a silly way of saying it, but I would rather be the first US than the hundred and 35th them. And that's not because I don't love what they make. It's not because I don't have a huge reverence. Matt, Steve, myself, the whole team at Westland, we drink a huge amount of single malt scotch whiskey. Our sister distillery Brook Lottie makes excellent single malt scotch whiskey, but that's what they should make for us. Why should we be trying to emulate what someone else's life's work and passion is? Why shouldn't we work to our own life's work and passion?

Drew (00:09:00):
Well, it's interesting in talking about Japanese whiskey because the idea of Japanese whiskey was how can we create a scotch and make it better? Yeah,

Chris (00:09:09):
It's interesting I think, and certainly within the context and the reference of time, I think there's a reason for that. The idea was, okay, this thing exists, but it's just starting to become much more viable and commercially recognizable. How do we take this and then improve upon it? That was the idea. You're not going to improve upon scotch whiskey at this point. You can improve upon maybe some of the theoretical ideas that exist within single malt, but to try to say that you're going to do that for one specific subcategory within single malt, it's to the point now where I laugh and I spend a huge amount of my time going around the country and around the world trying to get people to recognize that your single malt scotch section is broadly a misnomer. The reality is you should be selling single malt as a section because malted barley has a profile.

(00:09:58):
We deal with this all the time at Westland. People go, oh, you are an American whiskey because we're in America and we make whiskey. So you're going to go in the American whiskey section. But if the American whiskey section is broadly a place where corn and rye grain made whiskey is existing, well then why would we be there when the reality is is that our consumer profile or aromatic and flavor sensory profiles are much more akin to what you would see in Scotland or Japan, or frankly, I laugh, but you're really in one of two countries where when you say the word whiskey, it doesn't mean a malted barley based product. I mean here in Canada, really you're two obvious ones, but you go to Australia, go to Germany, go to the uk, go to Singapore anywhere and say whiskey. The assumption is malt.

Drew (00:10:44):
Yeah, yeah. There's a few outliers, tailings making single grain whiskey, which is born based whiskey. But yeah, it's interesting to see the understanding of American single malt in this country because I've been in a store that did just what you said. They have an American whiskey section that's tucked way back in the corner of the store that nobody's going to get to because it goes from bourbon to rye, a smaller section of rye to flavored whiskeys and then to American whiskey. And then your American single maltz are under there. And I can tell you as a whiskey consumer that I get to the flavored whiskeys and I stop, I turn around and I go start going another direction, which means there's a whole category of whiskey that people likely are missing because it's being miscategorized or it's too vague.

Chris (00:11:39):
Thi think about it from the context of the way that you shop wine. So there are some people that walk into a store and they shop wine based on country of origin, but more often than not, what you're actually shopping is varietal. Because typically you'll go into a big store and it'll have, okay, there's California wines, but then everything is very purposeful to is this Cabernet, is it chardonnay, is it pinot, is it merlott? And it gets very specific in whiskey because we don't cover as much of the profile of the store. The reality is we should be thinking much more akin to the way that wine producers do, which is what is the thing that gives this thing profile? Well, the thing that gives it profile is less the country of origin. It's much more actually the raw material. That's the core building block to how this thing gets made. So yes, even though the corn and rye whiskey sections would be dominated by American producers, the reality is I think of our be distillery in Scotland, ar biki makes excellent rye whiskey when that comes to the American marketplace. If it ever does it go to the scotch whiskey section, right? Because that's not where the consumer for rye whiskey typically

Drew (00:12:42):
Is. Well, Johnny Walker now has a blended rye. So we've got, that's the question situation there. So

Chris (00:12:49):
That's exactly it. And I think the whiskey industry needs to be its own best friend here and recognize that in fact, instead of trying to draw geographical lines as to where things are from, what we should be talking about is what they are made of.

Drew (00:13:03):
Yeah. Well this is the challenge too in Scotland talking about the different regions, but now you have heated whiskeys showing up in the highlands and space side and you have sherry influences happening in Isla. So

Chris (00:13:17):
There were petered whiskeys made in Scotland in every part of that country before there were non-PE whiskeys,

Drew (00:13:22):
Right, because it was a fuel

Chris (00:13:23):
Source. Yeah, that's exactly it. Yeah. I worked for a number of years for Gordon McFail that owned the Ben roic distillery. Have a ton of love for those guys over there. But I mean, when we were out selling Ben roic in the US and we launched that a number of years ago, the conversation was is like this is classic space side and people are like, no space side doesn't have those profiles space side that and is commercially a viable and accessible here might have that, but the reality is, is that profile isn't historically correct. Yeah.

Drew (00:13:49):
So let's talk about American single malt and how one of the things that you brought up was actually barrels. And so this is something that I consider sometimes when you go to these distilleries in Kentucky and Tennessee, you'll hear that phrase that 70% of the flavor comes from the barrel, but corn is such a different animal to me than malt. When I've been to Scotland and I've tasted new make the new stands on its own it if it's really well distilled, a lot of that flavor is obviously coming from the yeast and the barley not from the barrel. And in fact, I was worried when I came back from my trip there that when I bought a 15 year old version of the same whiskey that it was going to lose all of the character that I really liked. Luckily it still had those.

Chris (00:14:41):
It's an evolv character for sure as it should be. But yeah, to assume that you're not going to see some shift in that would be kind of silly,

Drew (00:14:50):
But you're, so is the opinion more on barrel directed to corn whiskeys or corn heavy whiskeys? Whereas malt, when we think about how scotch is made and how you make your whiskeys that you're using a variety of different types of barrels and that you're using first fill bourbon barrels rather than using brand new virgin oak for your entire process.

Chris (00:15:13):
So we actually use a huge amount of virgin white American oak. Do you listen? We do. However, we use air dried oak instead of kiln dried oak, which is more classically used in the American broader American whiskey industry. So air dried oak substantially less tannin because you've had an opportunity for ours. We buy from ISC predominantly we buy their 18 and their 24 month air dried stuff. So what you end up finding in that is that 18 months of air dried breaks down a huge amount of the tannin and the 24 month even more. So when we go to fill those casts, the extraction that we're getting is more oak, lactone, wood sugars, vanilla, and all those really great things that you want. What we don't need is a huge amount of tannin. Now you were getting to this, and I'm going to kind of draw the conclusion together, but it's like when you imagine tasting corn whiskey, just a standard corn whiskey at a handful of years old now taste that exact same, let's say a three year old corn whiskey versus a three-year-old malted barley spirit in just stainless steel.

(00:16:10):
Let's just, let's have that theoretically. The reality is that the viscosity of the corn based spirit is going to be dramatically more rich. It can handle tannin. So when you put a corn based distillate or even a rye based distillate into new white American oak, especially if it's been kiln dried, the extraction of tannin is a benefit. I would argue to a lot of it because it helps to balance some of those really heavy grain driven tone to it. So some of that viscosity, some of the actual oiliness of the spirit needs that ting element to it. You don't get that in malted barley is a new make spirit. You certainly don't get it in young barley. When you look at a lot of single malt whiskeys, and I won't say sche, but single malt broadly, broadly not from America, that's longer maturation. Well, yeah, if you're using some bourbon, relatively fresh bourbon cast, there's still going to be quite a bit of tan into those.

(00:17:02):
You need that to break down over time. That takes quite a bit of time. So for us using new white oak, even though I think people look at it and they go, oh, well this is what American whiskey producers do for us, it's a very intentional thing. I always describe it as the, it's the raw materials flow chart. So we've gotten accustom as consumers of whiskey in this country to thinking everything get answered in a yes or no capacity. The reality is it couldn't be anything further from the truth. What you end up seeing in whiskey is one of these if yes then and then the flow chart breaks off into four other things. The best way to think about it, and we're just starting to see consumers get this in scotch whiskey, is this whiskey ped, right? People just have assumed, yes, it's ped. No, it's not ped. Well, actually the question then becomes is, okay, where is the peat harvested from? How much peat is being used? How much of the barley has been peed? All of those things have a critical impact on the profile of that whiskey.

Drew (00:18:00):
And then how you distill it as well

Chris (00:18:02):
Because has a huge

Drew (00:18:03):
Impact. Yeah, we talk about poor Charlotte has heavily ped, it's what, 55? I think.

Chris (00:18:11):
So we buy, and actually we buy, they're buying from Bairds Maltings in Scotland. So are Westland peed what you're tastings today that is using some of that, however, only about half of the barley that goes into making that whis or half of the cast would be ped spirit.

Drew (00:18:25):
But to talk about where it comes from that comes from caldonia forest

Chris (00:18:31):
Main mainland sources. Yeah,

Drew (00:18:32):
Totally different. And so you're not going to get that iodine kind of a experience that you would get if you were pulling that barley from Okta, more farms in,

Chris (00:18:40):
If you're trying to compare Port Charlotte Maltin versus Baird's, you're going to get a completely different profile out of them. Yeah,

Drew (00:18:46):
That's really interesting. And I think that's what makes drinking scotch and American single malts so fascinating because I do believe, I like to say I feel like bourbon is a little heavy handed and so

Chris (00:18:59):
You're going to get me in trouble here.

Drew (00:19:00):
Yeah, no, and that's fine. My audience understands that. I mean, we talk about bourbon and that there are bourbons that I love, but I'm more of a malt whiskey fan because I like the personality of the spirit and it's the reason why I like rye. Because to me, rye has that. You have that terroir kind of a experience. Where does that rye come from? And you can really taste it. If you taste something from Colorado, it's going to taste completely different from something that you're going to get from say, Kentucky or Pennsylvania or somewhere else.

Chris (00:19:35):
Well, that's the geographical argument, but there's also another, and we're doing this in our culinary project, part of our outpost range, and that's using different varietals of barley grown in relatively speaking, consistent region in the northwest up in Skagit Valley. And we're seeing huge differences in those whiskeys. Huge differences. I think you're getting some of that. If you think about what Highwire distilling out of Columbia's doing with their Jimmy Red seeing more and more of this, there is a mountain of interesting varietal grain work that still needs to be done in whiskey. Yeah.

Drew (00:20:07):
And we've seen that in corn too with for sure in Texas. A lot of that going on between iron root and balconies. Yeah. So yeah, it's fun to see that distillers are paying more attention. We think of where whiskey was probably 50 years ago where everything was being run through a column still and was, everybody had their own mash bill. They had one type of whiskey pretty much that they were selling, and now it's just exploded to

Chris (00:20:34):
Discerning consumers make that happen when categories, and let's say whiskey broadly as a category has just exploded. The last 20 years have been pretty excellent to the whiskey business. Universally what you end up finding is that comes the added responsibility for distillers to not be complacent because complacency is akin to standing still in this industry, and this industry moves at a million miles an hour. It doesn't feel like it does, but the reality is it doesn't feel that way because you are tasting just light from the sun. You're tasting stuff that happened a moment ago, and it's going to take time for that product to make its way to the market.

Drew (00:21:14):
Yeah, it's fascinating to see how all of this is evolving and to look at different areas. And I had Joe from Oh, hood River, we talked a little bit because they've been doing American single malt since 85. And the thought, the question I had for him was, when did Steve McCarthy know that it was a category or that it was American single malt? And then we got into the discussion about wesland, the fact that you guys really are the first visible, probably one of the first visible American singles.

Chris (00:21:51):
We were the first to really sort of aggressively, it's probably not the word, but very sort of emphatically go out into the market and say, this is American single malt. And then frankly, our work with getting together the American Single Malt Commission as one of the co-founders and actually our vice president marketing, Steve Hawley is the president slash director of the American Single Mal Commission. We've had a seat at that table. I mean, not only did we help build the table, but we've had a seat at that table since 2016. And yeah, I think there were people that were doing single malt, I'm not sure that they were conceptualizing it as this is single malt, this is barley whiskey from America. You can even look at some of the bigger producers is a great example that I think it's only up until somewhat recently that they've actually incorporated the word single malt whiskey on their packaging.

(00:22:37):
I can remember years ago looking at that product and it was Colorado whiskey, which again, everyone has the right to that and certainly they are by definition whiskey from Colorado. That is an accurate statement, but I think it took Wessin coming to the marketplace and saying, no, this is what we need to do here. And I laugh, and you, we've kind of been mentioning Japanese producers here and there throughout this and there, the reality is Japan is very much paying the price right now for not having a clear standard of identity. This is why it's so important for American single mal producers to get this standardized identity through the TTB in the beverage alcohol manual. Because if you do not get that, this industry is rife with people that are opportunists and they're going to be looking for a way to cut corners. Wait, when you've got whiskey that basically leaves one country, makes a port of call interest and leaves as a completely different thing, that's a problem. Yeah.

Drew (00:23:30):
So how close are we to getting the legislation

Chris (00:23:33):
Done? The million dollar question? Yeah. I would say within the next six months, certainly our hope is that we will see this come to fruition, which is a really exciting moment, and it's a moment that's going to have, I think, a fairly profound impact on American single malt here. It's funny, not that the hardcore whiskey consumers need that. I think people that listen to your podcasts, people that are on whiskey, Instagrams and things like that, that are keeping up on this, I think it'll have less an impact on them. But it's funny because I use my parents as the standard bearer of the generic American consumer, 15 years of working in the whiskey industry. My mom and dad, I'm still not sure exactly know what I do for a living. And I always say to them like, oh, well what is it that you guys are doing?

(00:24:15):
And it's like when that goes through, and it's one of those where they can walk into a store, and I always use control. States are a great example of this. When you get someone like NAB pca or you get someone like Nielsen Data that they go, okay, let's start separating out and let's start tracking this data. What you'll find is that the commercial application for it, whether it's dedicated sections in stores or it's grouping the producers together within a larger subcategory, that'll have a real impact on consumers awareness of it. I mean, I know we have been internally making plans for the independence day, launch day sort of thing of this because, and this is where the real I, I'd like to look back and say, when I look at my career at Wessin, I go, wow, we have really been taking on a lot here.

(00:25:00):
Because it is challenging enough to create and develop and engage people in a new brand. It's not easy. Anyone that tells you it is, they're sorely mistaken or just absurdly lucky. The reality is that it's far more challenging than that. And it's even more challenging when your simultaneous mission is to literally create the template for what the category that you want to exist is. And I don't mean this as any insult. Starting a new bourbon van or a RY brand would be challenging. There's an enormous amount of competition in that category. But the reality is, is that when you put that on a bottle, there is a very clear understanding as to what exactly those well clear understanding might be a bit of an overstanding, but there's a general understanding there's a more of an understanding. Whereas when you put American single malt whiskey on a bottle, yeah, I'm not sure that anyone, aside from the very sort of adept whiskey consumers that are really deep into the category of whiskey are going to actually know what that is. And the hope is that over time, the general consumer, whether or not they become a huge part of the sales of any of this is less critical. It's more the awareness that this thing exists and has a reason for differentiation

Drew (00:26:17):
In trying to do writings on Tennessee Whiskey. Morgan outta the book right now on doing Tennessee Whiskey Trail and trying to talk to distillers about the word whiskey, because Tennessee has that problem. It will say Tennessee whiskey, but whiskey as a word, I think for a long time has been looked down upon from a standpoint that the regulations are less for whiskey, to

Chris (00:26:46):
Put the word

Drew (00:26:46):
Interesting whiskey on a bottle. And so that was Tennessee's challenge, and getting a law passed in the state to say, Tennessee whiskey means that we are saying, we're basically making bourbon, that this is on a level with bourbon rather than being on a level with say, early times watered down used barrel. And so I think that is probably where, for me, it's less of a challenge because I am paying attention and the people on Instagram are paying attention. But to the general consumer, the word whiskey, really, it doesn't have the romanticism with it that Kentucky has done such a great job with bourbon.

Chris (00:27:34):
We have to be very careful in this industry of avoiding our own echo chamber, which is, well, we know this, so they know this. And that happens all the time in new categories or in things that have become you. I always say there's two things we really need to look out for. One is a gatekeeper culture where it's the, oh no, you're not allowed into this because you know, weren't drinking this stuff 15 years ago. Well, yeah, most of you weren't either. Yeah, that's the reality of it. And then the second element element of it is that, yeah, it's the broader accessibility and making sure that we are setting up a space where people are excited to dry this with people that want to provide information to the degree that the consumer wants the information. I laugh, I've got a house full of whiskey. You've got a house full of whiskey.

(00:28:21):
We get friends over all the time, my wife and I, that have absolutely zero interest in 99% of this stuff <laugh>, 99% of it. And it's not because these are people we're friendly with that. We have a lot of shared interests, but whiskey isn't one of them. So it's always a good reminder that the reality is there are a ton of people that still don't drink whiskey. The category is growing rapidly. I'm thrilled that there's more and more people coming in that are interested than in it. But that also means that we distillers or the whiskey industry have a huge mantle of responsibility to be good agents of this industry.

Drew (00:28:51):
Yeah, it's interesting to think that still over in Scotland, most people drink blends. And we talk about locally,

Chris (00:29:00):
Most people

Drew (00:29:00):
Drink blends, how much we talk about single malts and we put them up on the pedestal. But when you're looking at actual sales,

Chris (00:29:09):
It's

Drew (00:29:10):
The, it's people grabbing a bottle of Johnny Walker. It's about they're buying a brand rather than buying a particular to see whether it's a single malt.

Chris (00:29:18):
The term, the term or the phrase I've used for years, it's the last hair on the tip of the Dale's dog, which it truly is. Yes. The reality is those brands do in volume. It would be hard to fathom in comparison to even the most successful single malt

Drew (00:29:33):
Brands. Yeah. Makes you wonder if you ask the common person on the street if they knew what Jack Daniels was, is it a bourbon? Do they look that closely at

Chris (00:29:42):
You should ask, read it, and see how quickly they get frustrated by that

Drew (00:29:44):
Question.

Chris (00:29:45):
But I mean, that's the thing. These are knowledgeable groups. It's the one, yeah. Is Jack Daniels technically a bourbon? I see that argument all the time popping up, and there are really strong opinions on both sides of that coin.

Drew (00:29:58):
But your general consumers just buying Jack Daniels. That's exactly it. They're not buying Tennessee whiskey, they're not buying bourbon. This

Chris (00:30:03):
Is exactly it. They're buying a brand and not a product. That's exactly it. And they have every right to that. And there's nothing wrong with that. And we'll see, my assumption is in the journey of becoming a whiskey consumer more than just a branded whiskey consumer is you start by saying, okay, I identify with something within these branding or this brand that I like. I consume this brand. Well, then it's, okay, well what's the adjacent product that gets you into the next step of that? And then slowly, that just sort of opens you up to a world of other experiences.

Drew (00:30:32):
So in your travels, cuz I've been over to Scotland, and when I'm sitting in a bar in Scotland, I look over and I see two American whiskeys up on the shelf, Jim Beam, Jack Daniels. Sometimes I'll see a buffalo trace if they're really creative. And a lot of that probably has to do more with tariffs at this particular point. And the fact that the tariffs now are off. But when I was traveling the tariffs were really kicking up a lot higher. But in your travels, when you're out of the country, I hear people refer to American whiskey as bourbon.

Chris (00:31:07):
Sure. Everything is, I hear Americans refer to American whiskey as bourbon. I, yeah. I don't think there's any doubt about that. I think it depends on the country. I will say I've had a very varied response to that depending on where we are. So when you're in Scotland, I think there is a broader assumption that American whiskey is bourbon or why. But when you're in Germany and France and Japan and Australia, it's exactly the opposite. There's, because those places are non-traditional single malt producers, they get the idea of us making single malt in America. It was like France in particular has an incredibly savvy consumer base there, single malt there. It's just a monstrous business. And what's fascinating about it is those consumers, because they make a ton of single malt as well in France, they get it right away that we're like, well, yeah.

(00:32:01):
And it go, what a shocker that the people that have a great understanding of wine and the fact that place has an impact on the type of varietal of grape that you grow. Yeah. They immediately go, well, yeah, you're in a region that doesn't grow a corner ride to that capacity. Why would you? Yeah. So it was funny. And Japan was one of those where, again, because they're a quote new world style type producer, I would think most people would've fathom that the US and Germany and France would be, they immediately pick up on this. And they're like, yeah, that makes a ton of sense. It's interesting to me that probably the most challenging place for I think, American Singal to become a successful bigger thing will be here in America by a landslide.

Drew (00:32:41):
So, because I'm sure you've done tastings over there with Westland, what kind of reactions do you

Chris (00:32:48):
Get? Yeah, I think it's that they're positive broadly. I think people really love the fact that we are a single malt whiskey at Westland that has a profile that is representative of all of raw material choices. So we're a whiskey that I, I've always found it interesting. People talk about a whiskey's complexity as if it just sort of homogenizes into this sort of amorphous flavor at the end of it. And you go, oh, well it's so balanced. And it's like, well, yeah, but balanced whiskey can have individual components that all just harmonize. Well, but you want to hear all of the individual notes simultaneously. And in Westland, because we use roasted malts, we had to make a yeast decision using a Belgian East to give us more Esther out of our fermentation to help balance some of the bitter roasted malt character. Well, we also knew that if we put that stuff into kill and dried oak, you were going to get so much oak extraction, so much tannin that you weren't going to get any of those flavors, which led us to using air dried new white American oak.

(00:33:43):
But that also has an impact on maturation. Well, if you want your whiskeys to have a lot of grain and fermentation elements to it, you can't leave it in a barrel for 15 or 20 years. The reality is, is that you're going to pretty quickly overpower those flavors. So for us, it's when we go to places and Germany was really kind of eye-opening, cuz it's an excellent single malt market. And when you start talking to consumers there, they are so enthusiastic about different ideas in single malt whiskey. I think Wesland, we've certainly earned the right to be recognized as sort of a thought leader within single malt industry. It's having a huge impact on consumers. I mean, the work that we've done with things like Gara and Aria and soon-to-be Solimar Washington ped project for January of this year. I mean, these are things that are unheard of.

(00:34:33):
I think the industry had gotten a little complacent in some regards to calling limited editions had kind of become things where you're just like, okay, it's the same thing. It's how many times can you finish the same barrel and don't get wrong. Cast finishes are interesting, some of them are great, some of them are delicious. But there is so much more that we can be doing in whiskey. I love the fact that one of the big things that we talk about in the outposts ranges, we see the window of opportunity that exists in single malt whiskey. And we're glad that we're kind of the ones out there navigating this unknown space because someone has to do it. And I think it's, when you're a big brand, when you're a really big brand and you've got a commercial capacity there, you're doing a hundred thousand, 200,000, 300,000 cases a year.

(00:35:22):
I think it's really challenging to go, well, how much should we be not spending on the thing that keeps the lights on here when the reality is, is that when you're a brand like Westland whose identity is wrapped up in the idea of exploration, of trying and challenging conventional ideas within your own category of single malts, it is par for the course for us. We have to do those things. One, because we're, we're just constantly in this state of <laugh> passionate agitation where you want to try new things and you want to do new things. And I'm thrilled with the whiskeys that we're making, but that would never satisfy the creative urge at Wesland. Yeah. Just wouldn't.

Drew (00:36:02):
What percentage of barrels do you kind of play around with?

Chris (00:36:05):
A lot. A lot? Yeah. A lot. I mean, obviously within American Oak we're using quite a bit of air dried new white American oak we're working with, calling it a new species is probably a strange way thing. But certainly Gary Oak has not been classically used very commonly. It's a very aggressive oak species. That's

Drew (00:36:23):
An totally organ

Chris (00:36:24):
Oak, right Organ. Yeah. But Gary Oak by, yeah. Yeah. In Washington, say you would call it Gary Oak, but yes.

Drew (00:36:28):
Okay. You crossed the

Chris (00:36:31):
Border. Yeah, you crossed the border. And it's a completely different thing. But yeah, and it's not just about appreciating that resource because it's something that's localized in the Pacific Northwestern Corridor. It's also about recognizing that we want to make it a sustainable part of our business. So we do an enormous amount of work as a distillery. Every year our team goes out and plants hundreds of Gary Oaks saplings because it grows so slow standard vegetation and grasses basically grow over the top and kill those things. So wow. The first idea of controlled burns really classically came because Native American tribes throughout the Northwest were trying to keep Gary Oak Savannahs and these pastures open because the egg corns brought food sources and brought animals in. Mm-hmm. Well, if your grasses are constantly growing over the top of that stuff, you're not going to get animals coming through because they're not looking for that as a food source.

Drew (00:37:18):
That's really interesting. So when we're talking about the different types of barley, you use five types of barley?

Chris (00:37:24):
We use a five malt. Okay. So yeah, it's to give it some context. So basically one of the first fundamental questions at Wesland was can we prove that barley contributes to the flavor of whiskey? Fundamentally, a lot of people think of alcohol pardon me? A lot of people think of barley as a fuel source. It is the fuel by which we will create alcohol, but the barrels in time will create the whiskey. I think that is ridiculous. I think anyone that you would talk to at Wesland would tell you that is ridiculous. The reality is that the adjacent industry, the brewing industry, has understood for generations that the type of barley that you use has an impact on the profile of the beer, which would effectively long-term have a profile on the effect of the impact of the whiskey that you'd be producing. So we use a Washington state base pale malt that makes about 70% of our mash for our five malt barley bill.

(00:38:15):
Then we have Munich malt, so a Munich style malting to it, so a light kiln to it. We have Brie Extra special, which comes to us from a maltster out in Wisconsin called Brie. It is literally called extra special because they already had a special malt. Mm-hmm. At the time of producing this, a little bit of a heavier kiln and roasting profile. And then we use pale chocolate and brown malt from Thomas Faucet Maltings out in the uk. So we get two questions come of this all the time. One is, well why isn't a hundred percent of the barley from Washington state, because we're using a huge amount of it, 70%, or excuse me what would be 80% of the barley is coming locally from Washington in just our five malt barley bill. The reality is that this was never about making the best Washington state whiskey.

(00:38:59):
That is ridiculous. If that's the scope of your ambition, aim higher. The reality was is we wanted to make a single malt whiskey that could take on the best single malts in the world, take out the better or worst element to it. We wanted to show that we could produce a whiskey that had quality akin to the best stuff in the world being made, whether it's in Scotland, Japan, Australia, anywhere. And that requires you to look at raw materials at the purest level and say, I want to shop for the best ingredients. Well, Thomas Faucet in Birmingham in the UK is probably the most famous producer of pale chocolate malt and brown malt in the world. Why wouldn't you wanna shop from them?

Drew (00:39:39):
So how long did it take, when we talk about evolution of whiskey, how long did it take to come to this what you call a barley bill? Which I think is a cool way

Chris (00:39:48):
To say it's a barley bill. I mean, you can't call a shame that Nashville is so commonly associated with bourbon. Yeah. Because it'd be a great way to describe it, cuz it is, it's the variety of ingredients that are in your mash. But for us it's just five different types of barley. So it took a couple of years and none of this would've been commercialized, but there was basically a four malt for a little while and then eventually it became the five malt that we know today. But yes, since what would've been 2013 ish when the first commercial Westland releases came to the market, it was our five mile barley bill. Okay. Yeah. So it's a pretty proud thing. I mean, in the day and age where there's a lot of brands of whiskey, but there's only so many distilleries of whiskey. Yeah. One of the things that we're really proud of is the fact that every ounce of liquid in a bottle of Westland came off of Westland still.

Drew (00:40:38):
How long did it take to come up with Cezanne as

Chris (00:40:42):
It was one of yeast, one of the first things? Was it actually, yeah. And it's interesting because when you work with the m strain of yeast, so classic distillers yeast, the m strain of yeast is super attenuator, right? It's massively efficient. And I can immediately hear people in your podcast turning off because we're getting into yeast attenuation.

Drew (00:40:57):
Oh, they'll be fine, they'll be fine. But

Chris (00:40:59):
What's interesting about that stuff is it just pile drives through starches. It doesn't matter. Simple, complex glucose, maltose, mal, trio, anything four and five chain bigger, it'll eat everything. That's, that is literally what it does. But it's not very profile driven. That's not the point of it. The point it is, again, it's to convert starches and sugars into alcohol. That's what you're looking for out of that. A Belgian yeast is designed to give profile. It has the benefit of creating alcohol, but it also creates profile. Well, yeast has this really interesting thing that you can stress it in one of two ways. You can stress it hot, you can force it to ferment it a too high of a temperature for its classic profile, or you can ferment it cold saan yeast in particular when you ferment them cold, tend to give off more clove phenolic sort of things.

(00:41:45):
When you ferment 'em hot, they give off a lot of esery notes. So fruity kind of cherries, oranges, lemon zest, will those flavors, cherries, orange, lemon zest, do a great job at balancing bitter flavors that exist in roasted malt. So I describe it all the time as if you think about the bitterness in roasted malt, if it were run through the ster yeast, it would probably accentuate the bitterness cuz there's nothing to balance it. But when you do it with a Belgian yeast that a relatively warmer temperature, you end up getting these really nice Esther that balance. So instead of getting a very accurate cup of coffee, you're left with the crema on a freshly drawn shot of espresso. And that is, my mouth is watering thinking about what that is right now.

Drew (00:42:26):
Yeah. So how long did it take for you to get the science part of all of this whiskey?

Chris (00:42:32):
I don't know if anyone ever gets the science part of the whiskey down. Yeah, a hundred percent. I would say by the time that Wesland was commercialized, Matt, Matt was very clear-headed in the application of what he wanted to do with raw materials. Now over time we've completely added additional things, but that five malt still is a critical part of our releases, whether it's in American Oak that we still have in some markets around the us. It's also a huge component to the, the mash bill or the barrel bill I should say, of our new flagship expression that we're releasing in select markets around the country now.

Drew (00:43:05):
Yeah, the reason I bring up the science thing is because I was not good in science when I, I had no interest in science. It was like the last thing I pay attention to and then all of a sudden I'm diving in and talking to distillers about yeast strains and talking about how whiskeys evolve in the barrel and the rest. And I'm like, wow. I mean that's a lot to really kinda learn. Now you're actually taking a course right now and finishing up a course at Harriet

Chris (00:43:39):
Wat almost done? Yeah. Yeah. I'm a master's candidate at Harriet Wat University. It's been a long ago of it. I was laughing, I know earlier we were talking about this and it's taken me every bit of four years cuz I'm taking a class at a time. But it's been a great program. I've learned a ton. And Matt got his general certificate through Harriet Watt. So Harriet Watt works with the Institute of Brewing and Distilling. It's a great program for people that have a real interest in the sciences. I'll the first to admit, we haven't really talked about it, but I'm on the commercial side of the business. I'm the vice president of sales at Westland. And yeah, I said to myself a handful of years ago, and I remember sitting with Matt when I had this thought and I was like, I know how to sell whiskey.

(00:44:19):
I've been selling whiskey for 15 years. I love whiskey. I love the feeling that whiskey gives you when you tell a great story, a truthful great story that people are excited about and it resonates. There is something compelling about that. But I think there are a ton of people in this industry that understand the science of whiskey at best, a thin level. And I didn't want to be one of those guys. So I said to myself, I was like, listen, I've read a bunch of books. I'm a pretty average the wrong word. I'm an active home brewer. I dunno if my beers are any good, but I like to brew a lot of beer. Yeah. And I said to myself, I said, I want to take this a step further. I really want to have a mastery of the science is probably an over aggressive way of saying it, but I wanted to have more than a commercial view of the sciences of it.

(00:45:06):
And Matt, his credit, wrote me a recommendation letter, got in and it's been an excellent program. Now it would take a sales guide to find a way to turn a master's of the sciences into a commercial application. But my thesis is focused on this idea of commercial viability and sensory analysis broadly. And I found that if in high school, my high school teachers had told me in biology and chemistry, well it's like actually if you focus on this, you can make alcohol whenever you want to. I'd have paid a lot more attention in high school. But they never said that to me either. They certainly never said that. Yeah. I tell people all the time, I was, my mom and dad used to say to me all the time, Chris, you are not good at the black and white in the world. Anything that has a yes or no answer, it's not your forte.

(00:45:49):
Yeah. They're like, you're great in the grays. And I was always a good history, good English, really enjoyed those subjects. I have a degree in biomedical ethics as my undergrad. And I found that when it was something that I was passionate about and I could find a way to bring in the storytelling element of whiskey into the science of it, it completely changed my desire. Yeah. So what was your first job in the whiskey industry? My <laugh>, my first job in the whiskey industry that wasn't on the, we'll call it the distributor side of the business. So I came up as a fine wine salesman in the distributor world. I got an opportunity to be the national brand ambassador for Gordon McFail here in the US through their importing arm, which is a company called Classic Imports up in Massachusetts. And I would like to think a fairly successful run there.

(00:46:36):
I was there for just about six years and loved every minute of it was, I mean, you think about it, I would've been about 20, oh god, 26 ish, 27 ish years of age at the time. You're basically given a book of whiskey that is effectively the Aladdin's cave of the whiskey industry. Gordon McFail has bottled everything. Everything knows everything. And I had a guy that I worked for with in Scotland by the name of Derek Hancock, who might be the quintessential sort of librarian of the whiskey archive. The guy could just walk you through the back roads of spay. And it was one of those things where sometimes you just need a little bit of a push in the right direction to take a passion into a full blown thing. And Derek fundamentally got that. He knew that I had a desire to sell. I enjoyed the commercial aspect of it, but he knew that with a little bit of a push in the right direction that you could become a sort of liquid archivist. And I don't know why, but that really appealed to me on a deep personal level. Yeah.

Drew (00:47:39):
Did you go over there and do your

Chris (00:47:41):
Trades? Yeah, quite a bit. So yeah, I went over there quite a bit. And then this is the sort of total pat yourself on the back moment. But a cool thing that came out of it was, and I believe I am still today, I might not be cause it's been a handful of years, but I was, and I believe I still am the youngest American to ever be named a keeper of the quake. Wow. By the swa. Which was a really, really cool moment for me because it came at this time where I was seeing people that I looked up to in the whiskey industry and I was like, God, I'm never going to reach these high highs. And you just go, you're like, well is it because I'm this or is it because I'm that? And then you just go, no, just keep your head down and keep working.

(00:48:18):
And it happened and it was a really cool moment. I cried so much. I remember calling my wife and my mom and dad and I was so, so proud of that moment because it was, listen weren't when you talked to national brand ambassadors and it's different now 15 years in, it's different now. But when I was doing this national brand ambassadors were guys they brought over from Scotland that worked the US and ran the marketplace and they were great. And those guys, I never wore kilt except for the day I got keeper. It was just not in my dna. Yeah. I was a jacket tie and a pair of dress pants kind of guy. And I will say I like the wardrobe at Wesley, a little bit more flannel shirt and jeans is easier to put on every day. But there was this kind of thing where I was like, oh man, I am always going to have to play the outsider card here and kind of work myself up to it.

(00:49:07):
And now it's great to see there's more and more people from the states getting those opportunities to represent these great Scottish distilleries. But what Gordon McFail gave me was a broader appreciation for the whiskey industry, specifically scotch whiskey, but the whiskey industry. Because even though they owned a distillery and Ben roic, they weren't just a brand house, they were a house that focused on whiskey and Gordon McFail, part of the strength of that business is the accessibility of stocks they have, but also the fact that you're helping to tell other people's stories. Glen turret is just starting to make its way out here in the US is an official bottling. But God, we were bottling Glen turret the second week that I was on the job here in the US with Gordon McFail. So yeah, there was a lot of really cool stuff. I go through my basement every once in a while. I look through some of those old samples and I'm just like, God, I wish I had had bought 8,000 times more whiskey <laugh> when I was there looking at single Casa of brick latti, single Casa Rosebank. And I'm just like, oh man, I wish I had more of this. So

Drew (00:50:07):
How hard was it to sell scotch whiskey back then? I mean US has always been a good market, but the problem was that wasn't a whiskey drinking

Chris (00:50:15):
Time, I left it. We were just starting to get in the throes of scotch whiskey exploding here in the us. It was more admittedly that, and I must have a thing where I like category startups, even though independent bottling certainly wasn't a category startup through the context of scotch whiskey, it was still relatively unknown here in the us. In fact, it was our best customers were typically super fine wine shops that understood the on premier system that exists in Bordeaux and Burgundy because they got the idea of like, okay, here's your price list. This stuff's going to show up in six months, tell me what you want. And then they would, this is in the early days of people emailing out orders and things like that and it was really fun. Yeah.

Drew (00:50:55):
Let's go in and do a tasting one, you said.

Chris (00:50:56):
Yeah, I'm in for it.

Drew (00:50:57):
Okay, so we're going to do the mystery one first actually.

Chris (00:50:59):
Oh, mystery

Drew (00:51:00):
One. Since we're on talking about scotch now, I've sort of given away the fact to you before then.

Chris (00:51:05):
I'd like to point out you didn't so much give it away as I guessed that it was scotch whiskey. Let's gimme some

Drew (00:51:09):
Credit here. Okay. So this is one of my favorite scotch whiskeys that a lot of people here in the states probably don't know much about. So when I do these, I'll have friends come over to the house and I'll say, since I live by myself, I can't really hide a bar or choose something outta my cabinet and do a blind tasting and be able to guess what it is cuz I'm going to see when I pull it outta the cabinet. But I'd

Chris (00:51:36):
Love, that's beautiful on the nose, I'm assuming ex bourbon

Drew (00:51:39):
Bbo like color. Yep. Yeah so the fun part is choosing the region first. Trying to figure out if you can pick out what region it comes from and then determining if you can figure out what distillery it came from.

Chris (00:51:58):
Oh man. I want to guess something really aggressive here, but I know I'm just going to make me look like a complete nbe.

Drew (00:52:08):
What do you think of it first?

Chris (00:52:10):
I like it. I actually like it. There's quite a bit of length in the finish. I would assume The A B V is on the lower side here. I

Drew (00:52:16):
Would 46 I think.

Chris (00:52:18):
Okay. So yeah, kind of in range. I'm not sure I would've guessed that immediately. It's funny cuz there's obviously some phenolic aromatics here, but it's actually pretty perfumed. It's pretty floral, which I really like that. There's two things that immediately come to mind that this could be, and one of 'em, I wonder if you've picked it because it's specifically in my own background, where I would have a sneaking suspicion, this might be Ben Roic, Pete Smoke, because it doesn't have that classic Isla Phenol character, Western Highland Phenol character. And Ben roic was sourcing their P at the time, and I believe they still do from the sort of space side region. So it doesn't have that really big medicinal thing, which this doesn't to me either, which I really like about that. Yeah,

Drew (00:53:05):
That was the hardest part for me was Ben Reik was the first one that I had that was a ped highland whiskey. And it took some getting used to, cuz it was a Heathery Pete, rather than being a

Chris (00:53:17):
Oh, this is really good.

Drew (00:53:19):
Well, guess what? You did it remarkably well because

Chris (00:53:24):
I've traditional, I remember this whiskey. Yeah, I am. I'm actually pleasantly surprised and I wanna point out it's 40% a bbb. Oh. So I, it's 40.

Drew (00:53:32):
Okay. Okay. <laugh>.

Chris (00:53:34):
This is funny. Very nice. I will tell you. So this was a real moment in my career and I, forgive me, I'm going to kind of enjoy the nostalgia here. I was in Boston, Massachusetts at a place called The Last Hurrah, which is this wonderful whiskey bar in the Omni Parker Hotel is run by this guy Frank, who was just one of the all-time greats in running bars and running good quality bars, especially in the greater Boston area. And I was with Derek at the time, and I was in that early part of my career where I was still like, no, I've gotta drink meat. I've gotta drink meat. I don't want this guy to think I'm drinking everything in cocktails because I was an idiot and didn't realize that. In fact, I should just be honest with myself and say, if I really want to drink this in a cocktail, drink it that way.

(00:54:21):
But we got to the bar, he stands up, he kind of walks up, Frank says, what do you guys want? And he goes, we'll take two, Ben roic and Ginger Ale. And I was like, oh, that's wild. I was like, I can't believe he's drinking it that way. And he was like, I don't want to whiskey right now. He goes, I just want an aperitif. And that was his way of doing it. And I remember leaving that moment and being like, oh yeah, fly your flag. Be okay with what you want to drink and just do that. And I have this line now. I tell this to people all the time when I talk about Wesley, this, it is not my place to tell you how to drink my whiskey. It's my place to hope that you like it. Yeah. It's my job to tell you the facts and figures and hopefully you'll develop a positive association to it. But it's as in no capacity as it my role to tell you how to drink it. And if you want it with ginger ale, go with it. Do it. And it was

Drew (00:55:05):
Great. Yeah. That's too

Chris (00:55:07):
Funny. Oh

Drew (00:55:08):
My gosh. So you need to explain this label to me because <laugh>, as soon as I found out that you had worked for Gordon McFail, I said, I gotta figure this out because I didn't buy this that long ago. No,

Chris (00:55:21):
I'm probably the person that sold this to the retail shop in South Carolina. You bought it

Drew (00:55:24):
From, okay. Because what's interesting is, and I actually bought that in Louisville. It was on the bottom shelf in a wine.

Chris (00:55:34):
It was not an expensive whiskey. I wanna say, and this is dating me a little bit, I wanna say we were selling Bero traditional at 29 99 a bottle retail. So it wasn't terribly expensive. That was a great bottle of whiskey for the price point.

Drew (00:55:46):
Yeah, absolutely. I think I paid 35, maybe 44

Chris (00:55:49):
Inflation's getting

Drew (00:55:50):
Everyone. Yeah, absolutely. But they've changed their label twice since then. There has So how long ago would this have been? This would've been 10 years?

Chris (00:55:59):
No, this would've been probably 13, 14 years ago. I can probably give you a better sense of it.

Drew (00:56:04):
Yeah. I'm just like I, I'm finding this old label on different whiskeys now starting to show up.

Chris (00:56:11):
This literally was literally bottled in 2013. Was it? Yeah. So this is just on going on about 10 years ago. Yeah. So you can tell it's with the new Importer Show classic, the guys that I work with, but yeah, that's really funny. So there was a great retail shop in Kentucky actually. Now your listeners probably know it him for what he's doing now. But Jay Risman who ran Party Source, which he's now running New Riff. New riff, which is making some awesome whiskey. He was a huge supporter of ours. And I did one of my first master classes ever at the sort of kitchen area that they had at Party Source.

Drew (00:56:45):
Okay. Yeah. We

Chris (00:56:47):
Sold a lot of whiskey of that. A lot of whiskey.

Drew (00:56:49):
So you're originally from Ohio?

Chris (00:56:52):
Literally from everywhere. I feel like I was born in the state of Connecticut, grew up in the Midwest, moved back to Connecticut after college thought I was going to move back to Ohio almost immediately, and then met my wife the first night I was back. And that kind of changed the course of my life. Nice. I think to a certain degree.

Drew (00:57:08):
So with all your travel when you were younger, it kind of helped you adapt to being a traveler as a brand ambassador? Yeah.

Chris (00:57:16):
My father has this great skillset. My father's been in CPG for 35 odd 40 years now, and my father is the world's greatest chameleon. There's not a social room that man walks into that he can't make it work. And I'd like to think that that is the true skill that you need in the whiskey industry. It's because you walk into a lot of different environments in this business, walking into a restaurant, walking into a retail shop, walking into a whiskey bar, meeting with consumers with a huge variance in their knowledge means that you have to provide them the experience that they're looking for, which means that if you're looking at this thing and trying to play paint by numbers, you're doomed.

Drew (00:57:52):
Yeah. So it's interesting to think, has the job of a brand ambassador kind of changed over? Absolutely.

Chris (00:58:00):
Yeah, absolutely. I think if you, and I would say this to anyone listening to this that wants to be a brand ambassador, you recognize now and hear me well, your job is to be a commercial agent for the distillery. If you don't sell whiskey, you don't work in whiskey. And the reality is, like we say that with our production team, our production people, when they are in Washington state, in Seattle at bars, and someone asks a question about Wesland, the expectation is that every single person that flies the wesland banner can help to a certain degree. Now, is there expectation, their daily responsibility to that? No. But you either generate revenue or you cost revenue as simple as that. And even the marketing folks would tell you the same thing. Everyone needs to be responsible for furthering the recognition and the awareness of the thing you work on. And in Westland, that's some of the best parts of it. We try to blend as much of the marketing and commercial stuff as possible for our team so that way they're getting the full experience. It's a better way to identify talent as well.

Drew (00:59:01):
We sort of think from the outside that the brand ambassador is just running around to a bunch of different parties and pouring whiskey. But I mean, it's a lot working

Chris (00:59:09):
With retailers, it's a huge amount of it, frankly, working with your parent company when you have one. So for us, it's Remi Quantro. So I spend a huge amount of my time doing that. And while I'm not, I guess at this point in my career, I focus more on commercial and marketing strategy than anything else that's sort of arranging the pieces. The reality is that I have a responsibility to sell whiskey. We all do. And we try to do that through good storytelling and enjoyable events and trying to get people that aren't familiar with Westland or aren't familiar with American Single Malt into the category, what brand ambassadors can really bring to the table when they're knowledgeable and they really know their stuff and not just know the brand story, but know their stuff about the industry as a whole. What they can do is they can further the relationship with the Hardcores I, I'd venture a guest. That would be my superpower. I'm happy to get into that really nitty gritty stuff. And the reality is, if all you want to do is checklist the Michelin restaurants that you're getting placements at, get me wrong. There's a hell of a lot of fun in doing that. But at the same time, there is a lot of consumer facing work to do as well. Yeah.

Drew (01:00:18):
Well, let's talk a little bit about where Westland is now and where you are going in the future. And so this is one, when we look at the store shelves right now, you see American Oak and then the Cherry Wood and the ped things are going to adjust a little bit. We're going to do a tasting on the ped, by the way, but things are adjusting a bit here in the future. Yeah, we're going to see something new on the show. Well,

Chris (01:00:43):
We're coming up on our 10 year anniversary, or we just passed me our 10 year anniversary at the distillery of being a commercial facility. And that's really exciting because it's given us an opportunity to look back and start to really take stock <laugh>, forgive the pun of our liquid, of our liquid that we have, and recognizing that now there are things that we can make as whiskey that we just simply didn't have the stock capacity or the variety of stock to create. So we've decided to put American Oak Cherrywood impeded into our heritage selections, which means that we're no longer actively making more of that product. There's still a bit of it out in the marketplace, some states more than others. But this past April, so in April of 21, we launched a new whiskey that's just called Westland American Single Mall. We refer to it as flagship.

(01:01:31):
It is in a lot of ways, it is a learning of 10 years of production history. We know what we want five Malta tastes like. We know we like the element that Sherry Casper bring into it. We like a little bit of Pete in our whiskey as well. So we've taken pieces of all of those three heritage releases now and we've incorporated in this new whiskey, which I'm really proud of the fact that one, we were able to keep it at 46%, no chill filtration, no caramel color. But perhaps even more importantly, we've made the active decision at the distillery level to make this our most commercially aggressive priced whiskey. So I think for most consumers, they'll see our American Oak and Sherry Wood, excuse me, American Oak at probably 70 to $75 a bottle in most stores, PED and Sherry Wood at maybe 80 to 85, sometimes 90 American Oak is going to be as much as I can humanly make it the case.

(01:02:23):
We'll be 59 point 99 everywhere as much as we can because I think we've acknowledged at this point in our journey that we're not just selling Wes and the brand, we're also selling the category of American single malt, which means that we need to bring people into the category as much as Lumi possible. And if you look at what other American Singal producers have done, I think they're acknowledging the same moment where it's like, yes, our raw materials costs are substantially higher than most bourbon facilities, but it doesn't change the price elasticity for the American consumer.

Drew (01:02:53):
Talk a little bit about that, the price of corn versus the price of barley. Yeah. Because I think that is something that people don't understand when they look at the shelves and they say, why are these American single belts more expensive

Chris (01:03:04):
Economies of scale? Yeah. Aside from just being in a pure economy of scale thing. Yeah. I mean, our raw materials costs are typically about five x what a standard bourbon producer's costs are. So even though obviously bourbon producers, do you use a bit of B malted barley for conversion, they need it. The reality is that number two, yellow dent corn is about five times less expensive than standard pale malt in this country. So standard pale malt, typically speaking, if you're buying it in silo quantity, which is the way that certainly a malted barley distillery or a single malt distillery would be needing to do it, you're looking at at least 35 cents a pound. And for point of origin certified stuff like what we need for Washington State certified. It's even more than that. So when you look at that, and forgive me, I don't know the exact price of corn right now today, but there was a time where it was seven or 8 cents.

(01:03:53):
You go and you look at that and you're like, oh my God, this is wildly different. And yeah, it's like when people ask, well, well, why is it that they can make this for 29 and you're 59 or 69? And it's like, well, okay, pure process of the economics of this thing. If you're five x cheaper at your very base level thing that you need to acquire and you're able to make more of it so you get more economy of scale benefit throughout the process. Yeah, they should be, yeah, absolutely no reason that most big bourbon producers shouldn't be that price

Drew (01:04:21):
Point. For the longest time I thought of corn in whiskey as just filler something to kind of take up tonight. And I know people won't love me for that statement, but I've realized it's not that way because Bal no corn balcon has taught me that

Chris (01:04:36):
Corn has a huge amount of flavor and it can be really compelling flavor. I think of, again, I know I called him out earlier in this, but Highwire that Jimmy Red. Yeah. The fact that is a hundred percent corn whiskey, and you taste that and you go, oh my God, how are there not 19 different types of interesting grains in this For the profile it gives off.

Drew (01:04:52):
Yeah, blue corn the blue corn that they use for buckies. Yeah. I was like, wow, this is really good. And they only age it for a year. I'm like, how did they do this? Because it's

Chris (01:05:02):
A really nice, they've also got the variance of temperature and climate that has to have a huge impact on them. And we're pretty lucky. If you think about Washington State and where we are, mid middle of the state, if you were to look at that in terms of latitude, we're like Central France kind of area. So we're pretty, we're cool west of the mountains, people forget, and maybe they don't, but where we are, we're sort of nestled between two mountain rangers. You've got the Olympics out in the peninsula, so all of that cool Pacific moisture that Pacific Ocean Air basically gets over those, but then it gets stuck between that mountain range and then the Cascades. So Seattle and the whole I five corridor is right in between those. So Washington State is two dramatically different environments. East of the Cascades is all high desert.

(01:05:46):
So all that high desert is great for growing commodity barley big, we're talking like hundred thousand acre farm barley, that kind of stuff, like big barley. And we buy a huge amount of our Washington state certified barley is coming from the Palouse in that kind of an area. Western Washington when you're, you're west of the Cascades, but obviously in that sort of corridor you get substantially more rainfall. It's a bit cooler. You don't have those really hot dry days in comparison. So it's a challenging environment to grow barley, but you can grow some really cool stuff if you're breaking away from some of the commodity varietals of barley. Yeah. So this is a huge amount of the work that we're doing with Washington State University's Bread Lab with Dr. Steve Jones. We are fully funding a PhD student within Washington State University's program. All of the research that comes out of that program will be for the public interest and for the public good. So it's widely accessible. We're just starting to see some of this liquid come to the marketplace through our ary project, which our addition to will launch in a handful of markets nationwide or a handful of markets in the us. I wanna say about May one is our plan right now. Supply chain might have an impact on that, but that's certainly our goal.

Drew (01:06:54):
Speaking of the temperatures and dealing with the climate of Washington, I always thought that it would be Scotland because it's on the west side of the continent and you also get that rainy climate and the rest, I mean, what are the temperature variations in the area does?

Chris (01:07:14):
It's very temperate. So we don't get high highs and we don't get terribly low lows. So an 80 something degree day in the summer would be considered quite hot. 90 certain west of the Cascades, east of the Cascades well into the hundreds would not be an unusual thing west of the Cascades. You'll get a bit of snow every year, but it's quite cold and it can be pretty gray and drizzly. I think one of the things that's pretty classically overestimated is the amount of rainfall that Seattle gets. Yeah. It's not so much the total volume that's so high. It's high, but not crazy high. It's the sheer number of days it rains. So it's that constant sort of dreary kind of weather and it leads to some really just wonderful blooming flowers and things like that when the timing is right. But it has an impact and it's more, the humidity has a really interesting impact.

(01:08:04):
So we get this very soft maturation environment to our whiskey where we don't get the classic over extraction big, high heat, big humidity. That really helps to balance it out. If you leave, I always think about this for distilleries that are in Nevada dryer, parts of Colorado, Texas, it's gotta be a nightmare trying to keep barrels in good shape when they're not filled, because those things are just immediately going to dry up and your hoops are going to drop and the thing's going to fall apart. You don't run into that in Washington state. That barrel tends to keep it shaped fairly well for you. Yeah.

Drew (01:08:36):
It's funny. When you arrived I laughed cuz I thought, well, he's used to this weather. It was rain <laugh>, cold, rainy and drizzly. Yeah.

Chris (01:08:44):
Yeah. I will say was, what was it about probably 60, maybe high fifties, sixties yesterday. Yeah. It was a nice change of pace to get some warmer weather. But yeah, it is. We're rapidly approaching the best time of the year in Washington state. Western Washington mid-spring through the summer is stunning as an understatement.

Drew (01:09:03):
I, I've been there twice and both times it was sunny and I said, are they just telling us it rains to keep, we're trying to

Chris (01:09:10):
Keep away.

Drew (01:09:11):
The housing

Chris (01:09:11):
Market's already aggressive enough. We don't need it to get any worse. But no, it is again, people come out in the right time of the year and you tend to get a lot of good weather. But it's the sort of Gracie's in that October through March, really window that can be pretty rough.

Drew (01:09:26):
Yeah.

Chris (01:09:27):
Not a lot of sun those months.

Drew (01:09:28):
<laugh>. So interesting thing about this ped whiskey is that when I was doing my initial nosing on it, I felt like I could smell evergreen trees in it. Oh, maybe it's just cuz I'm the

Chris (01:09:41):
Power of presupposing. Something

Drew (01:09:42):
Is aggressive. Exactly.

Chris (01:09:44):
It can be tough. I will say we haven't really had a chance to speak to this, but this is some of the last fills of Scottish Peter Barley we're no longer a sourcing Peter Barley from Scotland anymore.

Drew (01:09:57):
Wow.

Chris (01:09:58):
So part of that is because we're no longer actively producing ped, and we have enough fills of our ped stock that we're using that in the battings for our new flagship expression. Now, I would caution consumers that say, oh, well, I'm not a ped whiskey drinker. Our flagship expression, if you've ever heard the expression, a whisper of smoke, it is the perfect way of describing the amount of smoke that our flagship bottling has to the point where we actively were trying to decide whether or not we'd even bring it up. Yeah. There's enough that I think you can't, can't not say it, but it's one of those, you have to search for it to a certain degree in the bottle. You have to be looking for it, certainly. But a lot of our PD project now is rotating to the work that we're doing with Pete Bog down in Shelton, Washington on the southwestern part of the Puget Sound.

(01:10:41):
And people forget that Pete is driven by its vegetation. And we have, while we don't have Heather, we have a really interesting sort of vegetation in our box. We've got Labrador Tea, which is a distant relative to rosemary, and it has this really wonderful eucalyptus menthol quality to it. We've got crab apples and these bog apples and all of this stuff has this really interesting profile that when we've been doing sensory on some of the new make for this project, that will be part of the Alpos range. So Cal is our sort of spring seasonal barley. Gara is our fall seasonal oak. And then in the winter, so starting in January of 23, we'll release the very first edition of Solum, which is our P project, which I can't talk a ton about right now. Aside from the sort of broad brushstrokes, which is this peat has a completely different profile.

(01:11:31):
If you're coming into Solom going, I can't wait to taste Okta, more of America. Right. Not going to get that. Yeah. Because that's one, that's not what we're shooting for. And two, the profile of the phenols, it just isn't the same. I mean, we've literally had to work with our malting partner, Skagit Valley malting up in Burlington, Washington, up in the Skagit Valley to Peter Malts. Just not a thing here. There isn't the capacity for doing Peter Malt, where we've been learning with them side by side in how to use their machine. I mean, I could remember the prototypes of this where they had a 55 gallon oil, Dr, obviously not formerly used for oil, but an oil drum that they were using as a spark box to then push the smoke into the malting vessel. And it was just this wild

Drew (01:12:16):
Thing. Yeah.

Chris (01:12:17):
Just really cool because you say petered malt in Scotland, and it's just so ubiquitous. You don't have to think about it. You just go, yeah, I want to buy an order. Ped malt not the case in the us There isn't an industry for that, and we talk about this a lot. Part of the job at Westland is creating the economy around these things. There wasn't an economy for Gary Oak before we started using it actively for our project people. It was scrap lumber. People didn't know what to do with it. They didn't have an interest in it. For the most part. It's the same for ped malt. Yes. You will start to see more and more producers doing ped malt in America. A lot of that will piggyback off of the work that we've been doing at Wesland. Yeah. And I'm glad for that. I listen, there is more than enough room at this table. That's the reality.

Drew (01:13:02):
I've often wondered myself why it didn't evolve that at least in the early days when Oregon was, the trail was coming up and people were coming through in the early 18 hundreds, that you didn't have people who may have come out to the Pacific Northwest and had a background of using Pete as a fuel source and not used it.

Chris (01:13:24):
It'd be interesting to see if there's any historical reference points that I certainly don't know if there is. But there, there's also, there was such an abundance of fresh timber as a fuel source. It was probably one of those things that they just thought they'd never run out of

Drew (01:13:35):
Wood. Well, plus you got more of a French influence up there and a British influence rather than a Scottish influence. So sure, it could just be a change there. And it's

Chris (01:13:47):
Cool though. It is a completely new opportunity within whiskey, no doubt about it. Yeah. I think the creativity that I wanna see and the creativity that I'm proud that we're sort of stewarding at Westland isn't about finishes because there are great finishes and we've got a single barrel program that started this year back up, and it's going to really take off next year where we're doing tons of great finishes, and we've offered a lot of those this year and they've done really well. But I'm glad that the experimentation, the things that we're really pushing are raw material focused elements, because I think we still understand whiskey at a really mundane level in the scheme of things. I think there's so much more that can be done scientifically to understand with whiskey. I was just talking to someone at Harriet Watt, and I won't say their name because they might be working on the project actively, but looking at coffee grinds and how they can register consistent aromatic profiles to Pete for phenol, phenols and whiskey. Yeah, that's fascinating. That's the kind of thing, because there's always been questions around sustainability in Pete harvesting and what it does to the ecosystem of the bogs and the sustainability of it long term. Well, what if there are products that we can use that will provide a consistent phenolic register through sensory analysis, but actually don't require Pete.

Drew (01:15:03):
Yeah. You've learned the science myre and there's still, you're starting more to do slide over my head a little bit,

Chris (01:15:09):
But there's a mountain more to do. But this is the thing. It's like now that there's an active interest and more and more people are getting into it, yeah. You're going to see people that are in the sciences looking at all of these new things that I, again, I'm a firm believer in. You can't know what you don't know. Yeah, right. Yeah. There's a million things that we haven't even started to think about an experiment in it.

Drew (01:15:30):
It would be fun to taste a American ped, truly American ped whiskey. Sure. And have that experience of,

Chris (01:15:38):
I wanna see the I, it's funny, even though obviously I have a vested interest in that coming out, I wanna see the opposite. I wanna see the first Scottish distillery that goes, we want some of this American peat. Mm-hmm. We want some of this American ped barley and see what the profile is there. Yeah,

Drew (01:15:50):
That would be fascinating. Well, it's a world of whiskey and we all should share some. Absolutely. They've been sharing with us for a long time, so no doubt about it. Time to return the favor. Well, Chris, thank you so much for being a part of the podcast. I'm happy to be here talking about Westland than giving us I into American single Mall. But more people we talked to, we've talked to Serena Hanen and Tel was an interesting one because they're working with barley, but they're doing a iris style. So all these different techniques only widens what American can provide. And we've definitely got enough different types of climates and different types of, for sure trains for that American whiskey hopefully someday. I like to say that maybe American single malt will overtake bourbon in people's hearts because they will start to realize that from

Chris (01:16:45):
Your lips to God's ears.

Drew (01:16:46):
Yeah. There you go. Maybe someday

Chris (01:16:49):
We'll see. I think we're probably got a little ways to go, but

Drew (01:16:51):
We do. We definitely do. Well, thank you, Chris.

Chris (01:16:53):
Thanks for having me on.

Speaker 3 (01:16:55):
And if you wanna learn more about Westland Distillery, just head to westland distillery.com or you can head to whiskey lord.com/interviews to view show notes, transcripts, and much more to get pertinent links to this week's and also past episodes. And if you want to keep up with all things whiskey lore, including my big journey to Ireland coming up in May, and just sign up for Whiskey Lores Weekly newsletter, you can find it at whiskey lore.com/members. Thanks for joining me for another great interview, and I am your host, drew Hennish. Until next time, cheers and SL JVA whiskey Lords of production of Travel Fuel's Life, L L C.