Ep. 10 - Glenns Creek Distillery Owner David Meier

Transcript

DREW (00:00:14):
Welcome to Whiskey Lore, the interviews I'm your host, Drew Hannush, Amazon best-selling author of Whiskey Lore's Travel Guide to Experiencing Kentucky Bourbon and welcome to an Encore interview recorded in 2020 at Glenn's Creek distillery. And that distillery is just south of Frankfurt, Kentucky along a Creek that will lead you to castling key and Woodford reserve. But the piece to these systems, at least for me, are the ruins of the 19th century old Crow distillery that actually sit on Glenn's creeks property. And when I decided to look into the history of Dr. James C Crow and old Crow whiskey, which was one of the most popular brands of whiskey in the late 19th and early to mid 20th centuries, where better to start then at the distillery where it was made. And so owner David Meyer was nice enough to take me around and show me the old ruins showed me the boiler room, the old fermentors and the spring house I'm telling you this thing is a Marvel to see up close it towers high above your head.

DREW (00:01:23):
It has that 19th century old stone facade. It is definitely staring into a piece of history and he also toured me around his current distillery, which occupies the former old Crow bottling building. So when you think of me doing an interview with David, you might be thinking that we're going to be digging a lot into history, and this is going to be a big history lesson. And you're partially right, because David loves history. But if you're wanting the full old Crow story, then go back and check out the first two episodes of season three of the whiskey lore podcast, where you will get it in its entirety. Because in this interview, David is going to focus a lot on process philosophies and the science of distilling. They do things a little bit differently at Glen's Creek. And you're going to hear all about those differences. And if you're considering starting your own distillery, how there's actually some food for thought in this episode as well. So let's head into the tasting room just inside the door of Glenn's Creek and find out more about the science of distilling and what inspires a person to start a distillery. Here's my interview with Glen's creeks. David Meyer,

DAVID (00:02:48):
Somebody that I knew said, Hey, this cool old distilleries for sale. That was kind of the start. And like you, I guess I like cool. And I like old and I've been, you know, I spent my career in manufacturing and at some point along the way, I realized that what I like and what I'm drawn to is making things. And I am also fascinated by how people made things long ago and, and how they got to that point to be able to do that. And so when you go in the distillery and you see the, the boilers from 1935, and you look at that and you think, okay, they didn't have computer controlled machines, they didn't have the technology that we have today that allows us to make the things we do. And it just fascinates me. I look at old steam engines and trains and things, and just kind, kinda just amazed at how did they do that back then at the, really at the Dawn of the industrial revolution and you know, explain to people.

DAVID (00:03:51):
And I, and I'll explain to you the situation here at the building. Okay. That's how I found it. A friend said that I drove over here. I stopped next door because it says, oh, Crow. Yeah, next door. Yeah. That used to be the entrance. That's the part Jim beam owns. And so I pulled in there and the security guard came out and asked me what I was doing. I said, well, I think I'm here to buy the place. And he said, ah, I think you want down the road kind of chuckled. And he said, this is Jim beam. I think you went down the road. So then I pulled, you know, I pulled it over there and I thought, man, I'm getting a good price here. Look at all these buildings. And he dragged me over here. And when I pulled up to the gate, I saw the building and the condition I thought.

DAVID (00:04:29):
Yeah. Yeah. That makes more sense for the price. Yeah. And you know, literally it took 30 minutes with the chainsaw to get in that front door, to cut the brush away from the door. And it took two weeks to pull the vines off the building. Wow. You know, when you took it, take a look at the amount of work that's been done. And I look back at it and I think, oh my gosh, you know, how much work did we do when I saw it and heard about it and then understood the history of it and the significance of it and James crow's role in bourbon and then his product. And it probably was the best selling whiskey in the United States for 125 years or so now in the beginning, it was called whiskey that the name bourbon didn't come till later on. Right. So what Crowe was making initially in 1835, when he started the brand was probably more what we would call a rye whiskey today. It was rye was a more predominant grain as far as I can understand back then. But they didn't have the rules like they have now. They didn't have the 51% corn rule or any of that kind of stuff. We don't even

DREW (00:05:35):
Know if he was putting him in charred Oak barrels or not. We don't that we don't.

DAVID (00:05:40):
And so that's a whole nother story and whether it's a logic Craig or someone else who did that and whatever, whatever. So, so there's a lot of, there's a lot of history here, but a lot of it wasn't written down or it's an accurate. And as you pointed out, you know, we, we say, if you, if you repeat a story, a wrong story enough, it becomes true. And then, or it gets picked up by somebody else who's who rephrases it or re words that or whatever. And, and that happens all the time in this business. People come in here and they say things, oh, I was on a tour. And they said this. I said, well, I'm sorry to tell you, but that's not exactly true. Okay. So anyway, I came out here and, and with all those things that just seemed I don't know, it seemed like the right thing to do to buy it.

DAVID (00:06:23):
And I can, I can joke about the fact that he said, well, you know, you squint your eyes and say, you know, a little pressure washing some paint that building will clean right up. Yeah. But it was neglected for 30 years. And we have the whiskey mold because of the aging process. So the building was white underneath, but pretty much black and on the interior. I mean, we had a pressure wash every square inch of the inside and outside to clean it up. And the doors were left open for years and the animals lived in here. And I mean, you know, it was, it was, I don't know what I was thinking. I could show you some photos of what place looked like when I bought it. And I've always kinda been that way. Just kind of look at something and say, yeah, that's not, seems like an interesting thing to do and then, and then go do it.

DREW (00:07:11):
So what was your original idea here? Because there's two different parts of this. As I can see you have the old, I guess, a stone warehouses over on the one side and then here warehouses,

DAVID (00:07:24):
The stone building is a distillery.

DREW (00:07:27):
Oh, okay. Okay. Yep.

DAVID (00:07:28):
Yep. And it was built by currently aged Taylor and his gang w gains and company who Taylor also built old Taylor, which is now the, in key. And he built Buffalo trace, which is old fashioned copper at that time. And then old granddad over here. And some other distilleries that are now gone, they've been dismantled. So Taylor was pretty prominent. And so, so you got that, you got, you got Taylor and you got Crow, you know, two, two big names in the, in the business with this property. And but, but you're right. So, so that was really my thought, as I said, there's, there's two distinct opportunities here. Okay. And so when I put together the business plan, I looked at it that way. I said it was a three phase plan and say, first, first get production, then work on preservation of the existing structure so that they don't take on any more damage and then restoration.

DAVID (00:08:23):
And that, that one business is a craft distillery like we have here. And then the bigger opportunity modeled after Woodford reserve and now castling key and other places to take, take this abandoned place and turn it back into some sort of distillery. And that, that's the big question, because when you look in the building over there, I tell people, I said, some of this, I want to keep the way it is the boiler room and you clean it up, make it safe, but it's the museum. You know, you go in there and you see the history and you feel the history other parts of the building, you know, back in the belly of the building there's there's space that will never have any real practical use. Probably there was I mean, everything here, you have to understand everything here. Initially was steam powered.

DAVID (00:09:12):
That's where I was going a little early in the conversation is, is two main things happened that drastically changed this industry. And that was the steam power, because that was the first time in human history where you could separate a power source from its source. In other words, you didn't have to have an animal. You didn't have to have water and you didn't have to have wind. Yeah. You had something that you could transport. That was a big part, but the development of steam power really facilitated the development of the continuous still. Okay. Because instead of a fire under that thing, which would be impossible with the size of those. Yeah. That's how you ran a potstill. You put a fire under it, but with steam now you've got this power source. You can apply a tremendous amount of heat. And, and now you can have this big, tall column still that wouldn't have been possible without steam power.

DREW (00:10:08):
So is that what was over in the

DAVID (00:10:10):
Opening? That's what I tell people the size and scale of this building indicates that it was built for a continuous still, because if you have potstills you got something like we have here, you know, 4,500 square feet. Yeah. You have a continuous still. And, and the scale goes from four or five barrels a week to 400 barrels a day. Now 400 barrels a day is mid-sized distillery for today's world. But at the time it was pretty good. Pretty big. Yeah. Well, but what that requires is very deep pockets. So Taylor's connected to the wall street, financial money, right. And, and to build those distilleries and have that scale. And I, I try to explain to people. I said, you know, if you're, if you're producing 400 barrels a day and in today's world, let's say they cost $500 and you're going to put them away for four years or eight or now 20.

DAVID (00:11:06):
You better have a lot of money because you're putting away a lot of money every single day. Now, once the pipeline is full and you start pulling, pulling those out and bottling it and so forth, but you have to understand when the continuous still was first invented and adopted in the United States. And what I can guess is the latter half of the 18 hundreds is when that happened. So the building was built in 1878. So that tells me that they were adopting a continuous steel here around that time. Okay. There was another distillery here, smaller scale distillery that was here. There's a painting by a fellow named Paul Sawyer, his famous, famous Kentucky painter. And it shows the old Crow distillery. And it looks like a barn because distilleries, that time looked like barns. Right. And they were had animals in them. That's one of the things Crowe, supposedly suggested was let's take the animals out of the barn because it's not clean, not sanitary.

DAVID (00:12:03):
Okay. so it, it's a quaint little building with its smokestack smoke coming out of it kind of thing, you know, wooden fence around it, whatever. Yeah. So, so we know that were, there was a place called old Crow distillery at some point, and it certainly didn't look like this building back here. So, so you've got this continuous steel and that revolutionized this industry, you know, and, and then now you have a new dilemma and then Taylor was responsible or instrumental in, in the bottle and bond act in 1897. So that's the first time distillery started bottling things prior to that, they shipped to market in the barrel, right. When you're doing four or five barrels a week, you can do that. Now you've got 400 barrels a day. There's no way or shipping that on a wagon over to Louisville. Right? Yeah. So then you have the need to start building aging warehouses.

DAVID (00:12:52):
So we have aging warehouses here, the date from the late 18 hundreds. Oh, wow. Okay. And unbeknownst to me, I didn't know this before, but Frankfurt in the, in this region was a pretty large brick-making region at one time in history. And so all the bricks were made here on site. Okay. And so then over time and say, well, gee, I got these aging warehouses here, but now we're aging these a little bit longer. So I need new warehouses and I need new warehouses. So starting with 1897 and, and stretching out the link to the property, to the end, what Jim beam owns now those last aging warehouses over there were built in the 1950s and the early sixties. Okay. So this building that we're sitting in was a bottling building is added in the 1940s. And then we have this shipping building here that was part of the expansion of the 1950s. And some of those first warehouses were in the fifties. And then they, at the very end of the property, you can see lower buildings are pallets storing in there. So that's a more recent development. The other buildings are traditional Rick houses or rack houses or warehouses, whatever word you use.

DREW (00:14:08):
So this it's interesting to me that they're building all these warehouses, but when national distillers took it over, it seemed like a lot of their business started going towards industrial alcohol instead where they producing the industrial alcohol. No, not that I'm aware of.

DAVID (00:14:24):
National owns several distilleries. And as far as I know, this was only beverage alcohol. Now during world war II, that could have been different. You know, there was a demand for the quote industrial, but I tell people that almost every day, I said, guys, ethanol is ethanol. There's only one molecule. Okay. Why are you putting in gas tanks is the same as you drink. The only difference is industrial. Alcohol is not the same as beverage and it's denatured. So that it's toxic. It's poison. Yeah. Right? Because you don't want, you don't want to go to Lowe's and buy a gallon of alcohol in the paint department and have people take it home and drink it. So when you produce industrial alcohol or fuel alcohol, you have to denature it with fuel alcohol. You have to put gasoline in it. Okay. When these distilleries started making hand sanitizers, the FDA came out and said, you have to put hydrogen peroxide and glycerin in it so that people won't drink it because it's an untaxed.

DAVID (00:15:24):
And it's all about the tax. That's interesting. So, so if they were producing industrial alcohol back in the day, and this, this is really, and this part, I don't have factual, but I believe this makes sense. Right. What I do know is that during prohibition, alcohol was denatured with methanol and methanol is the stuff that causes blindness and death. Yeah. And right now some places used methanol to make hand sanitizer and people are getting sick because on their hands and absorbs through the skin. And so on several brands, I know that red came out of Mexico and it might've been some distilleries in the U S thinking, oh, look, I got this extra methanol. I could use it for hand sanitizer, but it's toxic. It's really bad stuff. We learn this stuff the hard way. You know, if, if distillers are doing it, I find that really hard to believe, because you would think if you're in this business, that you understand that methanol is, is really not pleasant for humans. You know, it's, it's created during fermentation by the yeast and it's in all fermented beverages. So when you drink beer or wine, you're drinking some methanol, but it might be, I don't know what the actual concentration is, but call it half a percent or something. But when you put it in a still because it boils at a lower temperature and it's going to come out of the, still, let's say 150 proof, which is 75% concentration. Right. Big difference, big difference. And that's what you want to stay away from. So you,

DREW (00:16:58):
Even though there was a coffee still at the time that Dr. Crow was working over at what is now Woodford reserve, think he ever did always stuck with. Yeah.

DAVID (00:17:10):
I, I don't, I don't think he ever saw it now. The coffee's still was invented in Europe prior to his death. But what I tell people is, I don't know this to be fact, but I said, look at the size of Woodford, based on the size of the buildings, they never had a continuous, still these things require massive inf infrastructure. Right? Yep. I I'll show you when we go out there later, there's a photo there that was taken of Colonel Taylor and based on what they're fermenting in wooden vessels, that looked like a large barrel, like about 80 gallons or so. Okay. And they're mashing in and olden days, they literally mashed it like mashed potatoes. And based on those fermenters, I'm saying there's no way that fermenter could supply a continuous, still that's a hungry beast. They continued to still has got to feed it constantly. You got to take away from it constantly. And it consumes a lot of mash. I mean, they, they did 150,000 gallons of mash here a day.

DREW (00:18:14):
So I'm guessing in the 1940s and fifties, from what we're seeing here, when old Crow was still a popular brand. Yeah. It could have been the same formula, but running it through a column still and stuff, a potstill, it was not going

DAVID (00:18:28):
To be the same at all. Not the same at all. Yeah. Yeah. And so what I've read when the, when the continuous steel, initially it was the coffee still, and then later that somebody else came up with a different, slight different designs and the name went away. But when those first came out, the complaint from the customers was that the spirit tasted too clean. So, so, well that that's seems a little curious to me, but, but I can explain it to you. And I use the bottle here to represent a column steel, right? Tall pipe. The steel here was seven feet in diameter and 48 feet tall. It was gone before I ever got here. So I never, never saw it, but I've seen, you know, it's a pipe. Yeah. And inside the pipe there's plates and, you know, to keep it simple, you basically introduce steam at the bottom of the thing.

DAVID (00:19:23):
And you introduce the mash above that. And, and the mash is going to come in and it's going to sit on the plate. And as the steam vapors come up through that and heat it, they're going to pull, they're going to pull some vapors up with it. And as those vapors rise, some of them that condense that at a higher temperature water, right. They're going to condense and fall back down. And the lighter vapor alcohol that boils at a lower temperature is going to continue up and it's going to hit another plate and it's going to condense and sit on that plate. And then it's going to revascularize and go up and hit another plate. And it's going to condense and sit on that plate. And it just keeps repeating that cycle. And, and the further up that pipe, it goes the higher, the alcohol content.

DAVID (00:20:13):
Okay. Right. Because you're stripping water away. And that water is, is continuing to fall backwards and are still works in much the same way, but really different in that, the further away on our steel, you get from the heat source, you got the steel over here, and then we run through dabblers. And then we come to the condenser. The further away you are from this, the heat source, just like here, the heats at the bottom, the cooler, the system becomes the cooler becomes the more, the water vapor tends to condense and go back. Right. And the alcohol vapor tends to go forward. Yeah. But you can never entirely separate alcohol from water through distillation. Okay. The highest you can get with a, still is 1 94 and 1 94 0.4, somewhere in that ballpark. Okay. so you could, you know, some people say you can distill it 150 times, and it's not going to matter because you can only get it up to 1 94.

DREW (00:21:08):
Right. That's the limit

DAVID (00:21:09):
Still to get medical grade ethanol, you have to do one or two things. You either have to put it in a dryer to get the water out, or they use a molecular sieve, which is a really fine thing. That'll pull those water molecules out. Right.

DREW (00:21:24):
And so what's interesting about the column still that I just finally knocked into my head is that you're not worried about heads and tails. In this case, you are just grabbing at a certain height right on that still to get the spirit that you want.

DAVID (00:21:39):
Well, initially when the coffee still was invented one of the terms that came up was it was known as the continuous heads and tails problem. Okay. Now here's the thing with the still they figured out finally, because meth and all vape boils and condenses at a lower temperature, right. That's the head's methanol that if you run that, distill it through a condenser with a very tightly controlled temperature, you can condense out the methanol, but not the ethanol. So there's a temperature variation between those two alcohols. And that that's what allows us to separate them. Okay. Okay. So it can be done. They did that here at Crow. It's it's a special condenser. I had the blueprints here of this whole operation and it was called a vent condenser because they vented it to the, to the atmosphere. Okay. So th that that's legal.

DAVID (00:22:37):
Yeah. Or it was certainly at that time. But, but you have to have that on there. Now. I explained to people, I said some distilleries, take it out. Some don't I think most craft ones do, because it's fairly easy part when you're using a potstill, but it's an economic decision. You know, the amount that we discard, if you extrapolate that out to these big distilleries, it would be, it would be tens of millions of dollars of product. Yeah. Okay. But back to your point, the issue is you can take the heads out, but you can't get rid of the tails because those chemicals. So I, I hold up my hand and I say, here's the boiling temperature relationship. This is methanol. This is ethanol. These are the higher alcohols you got higher and lower alcohols are related to the boiling temperature methanol, right.

DAVID (00:23:25):
Or ethanol. Okay. So these guys they're going to that it's possible. And they can, some cases, they put, they put a, a bleed off lower in the system, and that's where your tails might come out. Okay. Or in some, there's all kinds of different design than some of the designs. They, they, they lead it off and they send it back to the bottom and run it through. But but it was called continuous has entails problem. And I don't know at this point you know, distilleries use different versions of the same kind of technology, but th but the da, the real deal is, and why they said it was clean is because when that vapor gets to that final top plate and you pull it out out of the still it's, it's pretty much going to be at a constant proof. Okay.

DAVID (00:24:15):
So, so you can set that based on how many plates you have and how tall it is and all that stuff, and how much heat you're putting in the bottom and so on. But, but it's going to be, you know, whatever one 40 plus or minus two degrees of proof. Yeah. All the time. Okay. Well if you, if you understand what comes out of the steel, you got three things. Primarily you have ethanol, you have water and you have other, okay. And the reason I split it up is because these two things ethanol and water, you really don't taste ethanol has no taste. People think that they taste it, but you don't. Okay. That's what vodka is, flavor lists. So what you taste is other. And so if you're at 140 proof coming out of your still, that means you got 70% ethanol in 30% water and other, and the vast majority of that's water.

DAVID (00:25:05):
Okay. Okay. If you use a potstill on this, still starts at say 150 proof, but it finishes the run at 90. When you transitioned to tails, for example, then you've got all those flavors in between those two points. Okay. Because the amount of other is changing with the amount of ethanol and water that's coming through the steel. Yeah. Right. So the flavor profile on a potstill is wider and it's got more going on. Right. So when people taste this distillate coming out and, oh, by the way, you can't put bourbon in a barrel at 140 proof, you can only go in at 1 25. So you take, you take a narrower flavor profile and you put water in it and cut it even more. And then you put it in a barrel and then you take it out of the barrel and cut it again. And so you really reduce the flavor overall quite a bit.

DAVID (00:25:56):
So potstill, you know, the first time I tasted some dislet from a potstill, my brain was trying to register it. And I thought of that is different. I couldn't really describe it or really say why, because, you know, you, your entire life, you drink disparate from a continuous still, unless you drank scotch, which comes out of potstills. Right. So I didn't have any reference point and I, I know it was different, but I really didn't understand why at that, at that point. And, and then for our products too, we don't we don't cut the proof below the point where the distillate is going to support defy. So pontification occurs when you reduce the proof below about 93 ish. Okay. And what happens when you're doing that as the fatty acids come out of suspension and the dislet turns cloudy. Okay. So when we collect tails at the lower end of the of the run, they typically come out of this still cloudy.

DAVID (00:26:58):
That's a fatty acids. So if you want to cut your dislet to 80 proof, let's say you have to chill, filter it. So you chill it down to about 14 degrees in those fatty acid solidify, and then you filter them out. So that was the other part. When I tasted something out of a potstill, it wasn't chill, filtered. So the whole mouth feels different than the texture in your mouth. It's got more of an oily kind of texture in your mouth. Yeah. so, you know I'm not going to say pasta is better or worse. I'm going to say it's different. Yeah. It's different.

DREW (00:27:30):
And I am a fan of Scott, so, and doing a lot of scotch distillery tours. Yeah. And you talk to different people at different distilleries. They're almost all universal that that shape of that pot still also has a big influence because some are shaped with a bulb in the middle. Some are built out, some are really tall and they get a lighter spirit out of them. Because the spirit has to climb so high.

DAVID (00:27:59):
So does the design affected this lit? And the answer is yes. Maybe. So go back to those three things, right. What you're doing, regardless of what the steel, whatever the steel design is, your objective is similar. You're trying to eliminate most of the water and, and to also clean up the spirit. So at old Crow, for example, the, the column still is used as a stripping still. Okay. Their goal was to get most of the water out of it, or to begin that process when they finished that it was stored in a tank and they call it low wines because the proof is lower. Okay. About 40 to 50 proof, I believe it was okay. Sorry, 40 to 50%, 80 to a hundred proof thereabouts. Then they would, then they would put that in a second. Still that the here they called it a doubler, but it actually operated like a potstill.

DAVID (00:28:58):
Okay. Okay. Yep. And so that's an option. In some cases it comes out of the column still, and it goes directly in a barrel, but here, here they did a stripping still. And in a finishing run in a pot still, basically they called a doubler. Okay. so that's going to affect the flavor, but, but when you, if you're doing a stripping run, your goal is to get rid of most of the water as quickly as possible. Then take that. So if your mash is eight or 9% alcohol, and your stripping run is 30 or 40%, and then you put that 30 or 40% back in this deal and you run it through a second time, and then you do that again a third time. So Allah, Woodford, or all of the Scott Scotty. So typically for those, they have a big steal for the first run.

DAVID (00:29:43):
And then they have sequentially, smaller stills. Because each time you get less liquid, right, you might have to run this big guy three times to do the next one once. And then you have to run that one, three times to do the next one once. Yeah. So it's, it's a, it, it's a difficult process now does the shape it, well, the bulbous thing that you see on the top of that, they call that an onion head. In most cases, there's some, there's some other shapes similar to that. I think they call them a horse head or something. So they have all these different names, but the science there is pretty simple. When you take, when you take a vapor from a confined space and allow it to go into an open space, it condenses jobs to temperature. And then you're going to get condensation.

DAVID (00:30:27):
That's called reflux. And every steel is operating under that same principle. The further away you get from the heat source, the more the vapor that condenses out first water is going to condense out because the temperature is lowering. The further away alcohol, lower temperature is going to continue on its path. Water is going to reflux backwards. Yeah. Go, go back. So yeah, the taller, that thing is the more condensing you're going to get in there. And the more water you're going to drop out and the more ethanol you're going to pass through. Okay. Is it, is it going to be a lighter spirit? It's not going to have the Connors in it that you're going to get. If you're not stripping it so much. I mean, and the Conners is the other that congeners literally, you look it up and it says everything besides alcohol and water.

DAVID (00:31:22):
Yeah. Right. Okay. That's kind of the definition. That's my paraphrasing and what I read the definition. And so if you eliminate those conjures, you're eliminating flavor. If that's your goal. Yeah. And that's what I tell people is you want to design a steel, you've got to start with the end in mind. What are you, what is your product going to be? If you want a flavorful product like bourbon, then don't strip out all the flavor. Yeah. Right. Then the law bourbon says, you can't distill it above 160. If you took a continuous still up at 160 and it ran 160 all day long, you can add a whole bunch of water to get it down to 1 25. Right. So very low flavor to start with. And then you add a bunch of water. Yeah. That's nobody that I know of is distilling at 160 on a continuous, that's what they used to call light whiskey. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. That was an interesting

DREW (00:32:13):
Time when that happily has kind of moved on

DAVID (00:32:18):
As the, there's still somebody out there making something called light whiskey. But I think they're putting it in a blended whiskeys or in some of these flavored the coolers or something like that, because I don't see anything at the store labeled light whiskey. That's for sure.

DREW (00:32:32):
So when you started in here, there was no thought of doing the column still. You wanted to go straight in and

DAVID (00:32:37):
You built up the money. I have the money. I, and quite frankly, those were expensive. And then you have to have all the infrastructure around it. And I tell people, I said, look, there's two ways that I know to get into distilling. One is expensive and the other was really expensive. Right? Yeah. And you got to say, well, if I'm going to put this bourbon away for so, so many years in a barrel you know, that I said we had cashflow, it was just going the wrong direction for a long time. And, and it's tough. It really tough. So the thought process, and we build the stills out of used equipment, the thought process is try to reduce costs as much as possible. And, and honestly right now with, with, with the COVID and, and, you know, distilleries small to series that generate revenue out of the gift shop like we do, and you can't have visitors.

DAVID (00:33:27):
And so on during, during the period of April and may, which are two of our best months of the year typically. Right. you know, and I look, and I see equipment for sale now, and I see these things and, and, and I look at it and I, I go, wait, they have 125 gallons still, and it's $80,000 or 300 gallon steel, and it's $150,000. And I'm like, Hmm, we don't have $80,000 in all four of our stills. And I've got one that's 300 gallons. I got one, that's 151, it's 125 and one that's 500 gallons. And we don't have, we don't have, I have not anywhere near that. And so I'm thinking 125 gallon potstill, if you put 8% mash in that thing, you're going to get out 12 gallon as a finished product, 15 gallons. How can you operate? How can you cover those things, expenses with that little bit of alcohol.

DAVID (00:34:28):
Yeah. And so I, you know, I just take my head sometimes, and I think everybody wants to get into this business because it seems romantic and wouldn't it be great. And, oh my gosh, what a great job you get to taste alcohol every day. And I don't know if they don't understand. I mean, I, I bought this dilapidated place and, and I was doing my own, my own portion of silliness. But, you know, I also realized if, if we're going to succeed, we can't spend that kind of money on equipment. That's just the, still

DREW (00:34:59):
That doesn't include the steam boilers

DAVID (00:35:01):
And that doesn't include the cookers and the fermentors and all the other things you got to have to make it work. Right. And we don't have $80,000 in a whole lot of it. Right. And so, so I don't, and I just don't understand sometimes that people didn't didn't know that before they started looks great. Hey, here's, here's 125 gallon potstill. And maybe somebody would tell you, oh, if you run it three times a day or whatever, you'll get 40 gallons, but it's still really hard to, well, hard to make the payments when you're making that little bit of alcohol. Yeah.

DREW (00:35:36):
So how do you, how do you come from your background and suddenly end up building a potstill? How, w where do you have to go? You go to your YouTube video.

DAVID (00:35:52):
If, if I were telling the truth, I'd say, well, allegedly, I might've built a still before I had a permit. Because

DREW (00:36:03):
That's the history of whiskey. Isn't that a friend of mine. And I worked

DAVID (00:36:06):
With a guy and he came to work one day and he's all excited. He says, I want you to build them still. I want to make sugar side. I said, what makes you think? I know the first thing about a still, I didn't know a thing. Yeah. He says, well, you can weld. Right. I said, yeah, but I don't really see the connection in a welding and steel building, but he had some information, like say, you go to YouTube and you go, oh, okay. A potstill, it's a tank. It's a tank that you apply heat to. And what do you have to have? You have to have a way to fill it. You have to have a way to drain it. And you have to have somewhere the vapor to come out. So you had a beer keg, an old decommissioned beat up beer cake.

DAVID (00:36:46):
Well, the beer keg has a top on it. That'll just coincidentally hold a two inch tri clamp fitting that you can Mount a two inch copper column to, to have your vapor come out. And so you cut some holes in it and you weld some fittings in there to, to have a way to fill it in a way to drain it. And, and, and off you go. And so then I gave it to him and he never used it. And I didn't think much of it again. And a couple of years went by, I was at his house. I said, what are you going to do with that steel? He he's, oh, I don't know he was going to buy the column, the top part that attaches to the steel. And I thought that was the complicated part. The still's pretty basic, right.

DAVID (00:37:25):
It's a tank and you apply heat to it. And you got to have a way to fill it and drain it in vapor to come out. And so, so anyway, he gave it to me and I thought, what am I going to do with the darn thing? I, I made it, but I don't exactly know how to use it. So, so then I bought a, a column, cause I thought, well, that's the complicated part. And and you know, it's like, they call it a column set. There's different words for that apparatus that attaches to the top of the steel and Scotland and so on, they call it line arms and right. So, so there's different ideas there too. And I studied that. You angle it upward and you're going to get more refluxing you angle it downward. And you're going to get more conjures because you're going to get less refluxing.

DAVID (00:38:09):
And so to your earlier question, yes. There's all these different avenues that you can go to modify the output of the still okay. Some make a difference. Some don't probably, or you wouldn't be able to tell, because remember back to the equation where the flavor's changing the whole time too. Yeah. So that makes it confusing to try to figure out is my, is it, did that change to the steel actually contribute to that flavor change? Because you got the grain in the yeast, even before you get to this still. Yeah. So there's tons of variables there that affect the outcome. Yeah. And wherever you're

DREW (00:38:45):
Making your cuts and your yes. Heads, the hearts, the continuous still it's a little

DAVID (00:38:50):
Easier. Cause you got that dude dialed in to give you the same proof all the time. We're roughly speaking. Now you've got to control the heat to do that and so on. But, but still you're getting a flavor profile. That's more similar all the time. Whereas the potstill is changing all the time. Yeah. Throughout the run. Okay. So, you know, to isolate one variable on a pot stale to me, I don't know if it's possible. I just don't know. Yeah. If you analyzed it with a gas chromatograph or something, and you could see the different levels of certain chemicals, maybe you could get more scientific, but taste-wise, I don't, I don't think it's possible, honestly. Yeah.

DREW (00:39:26):
Cause they're, they'll say even if

DREW (00:39:28):
It has a dent. Yeah, yeah,

DAVID (00:39:31):
Yeah. I got four different stills. They're all different. They're all configured differently. You know, I start with, you start with a tank and you go, okay, I need a place to fill it. I need a place to drain. I need a place that vapor to come out. How's that going to work? Right. I bought a tank that came from another distillery up, up in Cincinnati that had closed. That thing had more pipe connection fittings on it. I had it cut off and weld up the holes to just to get the few holes remaining that I wanted. I took me, took me a long time to build that steel just because it was there. So you know that doing it, doing it myself. Then when somebody pointed out to this ciliary for sale, then the business idea came in. I never really expected it to be a business. I was just, I enjoy making stuff. And so doing, doing it. And you know, people think if you don't sell it, it's, it's legal and no, it's not legal at all. You can't distill a single drop in the United States without a permit. Yeah. but I can talk about it now because they have to catch you

DREW (00:40:36):
While you're doing it, doing it. Yeah. You know,

DAVID (00:40:38):
That people always ask about the moonshot and show. So, well, I don't know if they're actually distilling moonshine on the show. They could be running water through the steel. But you know, the ways the laws are set up, they have to catch you with it. They can't just see you on a YouTube video and then em, and arrest you. Right.

DREW (00:40:56):
I laugh at that. Cause I, I keep thinking there's a, there's a crew that's driving out with these guys to video the bank. They probably have their phones turned out with GPS. Yeah.

DREW (00:41:07):
Wait a minute. You were on there last season and I'm the sheriff. I know you. And I know where you live. Maybe I'll follow you on Bagley. Exactly.

DAVID (00:41:15):
Yeah. Well it's TV. Okay. It's entertainment. But but yeah, that, that's how I learn and you know, I like, I like making things, I like experiment try and things. So I probably rebuilt that thing about 20 times added some different features, trying out different things that whole, the idea of the refluxing and then you put a doubler, what they call a Thumper and insurance column thumpers. You add that and you get a totally different effect. And so you know, just trying out different things for the heck of it to see what would happen. And yeah, I'd heard that about dance and all that. And I'm like, yeah, it's super steep. There's, there's a lot of superstition in this business. I tell people. So one of the things that that causes fear in the industry is the story of old Crow. You know, I don't know if you're aware, but, but the brand took a serious decline and the, you know, the, the stories, there's two, there's two possible stories, at least that are out there.

DAVID (00:42:15):
One is that during a renovation in 1964 somebody miscalculated the size of one of the tanks, fermenting or cookers or something. And so the recipe got thrown off kilter and the employees recognized it in the taste of the dislet and said, Hey, this isn't working. And they were told to do it anyway. And then four years later, or whatever, you've discovered your stuff doesn't taste as good. I think it's just as likely, and this, I don't have facts. But it's just as likely, you know, if your business is in a decline, what do you do? You try to cut costs, you know? And if you're looking for a way to cut costs, you cut corners or different things perhaps, and then it might affect the quality. So, you know, whichever one of those is true, I don't really know, but, but certainly people will tell you that the quality of the product somehow declined over time.

DAVID (00:43:11):
And that was, that was the thing that worries other distilleries. So you look at it and you say, wait a minute, you're in Scotland. And you say, hold on, I'm distilling X number of barrels a day. I'm going to put those away for 15 years or whatever it's going to be. If you change something over here and don't catch that 15 years later, you're kind of in trouble. Yeah. You're in big, major trouble with exotic that if you can't sell it, if you can't resurrect it. Yeah. So you know, you avoid that by checking it at the still each day. And if it, if it tastes good, you stick it in a barrel and you can pretty well assume that it's going to taste good coming out of the barrel. It doesn't taste good going in the barrel, the barrel may or may not make it taste better. It's hard to say. So the interesting

DREW (00:43:57):
Thing about the old Crow story is that I've also heard that after they found out it wasn't good anymore, they kept making it right. And if that's the case, then it goes much closer to the cost-cutting theory than it does to. Cause if you make a mistake, you're going to try to rectify it. So when

DAVID (00:44:17):
Somebody figures it out now, it's interesting. The gentleman who used to be superintendent here, he comes and visits us. And he tells the story that that what they figured out was they couldn't keep up with the supply at the dry house where they were drying the grains. They were getting excess liquid every day. And that's how they figured out that the recipe had had gotten off kilter. Because, you know, in manufacturing, when you create processes, you try to create processes that have balanced capacity. So if I'm distilling X amount of liquid every day and grain every day, I gotta be able to dry that grain and get rid of it every day. And, and there's, you know, there's no accumulation of it. You got a 260,000 pounds of corn coming in every day. You gotta, you gotta get rid of it. Yeah. You know, you don't just throw it to the hogs like they did back in crow's day because they were doing what we do.

DAVID (00:45:12):
I generate about, we generate about 12 or 1455 gallon, plastic barrels a week of spent grains that we give to a farmer. He always comes on Sunday and picks it up. It says he has really happy cows. So, so on our scale, which is what the stories were before the continuous steel came into being you know, you had your own animals and that's what you fed. Yeah. You know, and that's how you got rid of your, your by-product. So but yeah, I'm kind of like you and like you know, if your employees tell you your trusted employees tell you that what you're producing doesn't taste, right. You might stop and correct that. Yeah. You know, something's wrong. What is it? Let's figure it out. And, and it, it got corrected, I think at some point, but then it was maybe too late, which is the other thing that can happen. I don't know if that story is true or not. I mean, I've heard it, I can't validate

DREW (00:46:12):
It. Interesting. It happened. So talk about how you came to this idea of OCD number 5 0 6.

DAVID (00:46:20):
Well, you know, we don't own the brand old Crow, but we certainly own the building old Crow. Right. So originally it was going to be called OSI, number five for old Crow. And I got to looking at it. I thought, well, you know, we'll play on words. They're OCD, old Crow distillery, perhaps, maybe,

DREW (00:46:41):
Which gets people guessing at what they look at

DAVID (00:46:45):
My business card. It says old cranky Dave on it, if you look at John's, it says obsessive compulsive distiller, and Joe has overly cautious distiller. Stuart has old cool dudes. And so we've got a long, long list of what OCD might stand for. But you know, in the number five, we caught yeast in the fermentor back there in the distillery for men or number five. And so that's what we use to ferment with. And that's where the number came from. People asked, was there a batch four, or is it going to be a six, no four men or five is where we caught yeast. And that's, that's where the number comes from. So this one actually quarter Beto, vivo, a newer product for us is actually more, more of the old Crow recipe. You know, you can, you can go back into the soil and I've been in manufacturing 35 years.

DAVID (00:47:39):
And what I do is process. And so I can look at a process and make a lot of understand it fairly well just by observing it because that's what I do for a living when I'm not distilling. And I know I know what that is. And it's funny to be doing it now anyway. There's eight grain bins back there where the grain, the mill grains would go into the scale and then that would drop down through the floor, into the cooker. Okay. There's eight bins are all exactly the same number of bushels per bin. Okay. If five of them are corn and two awry and one is barley, what is the recipe? Approximately

DREW (00:48:19):
Five to one. Yeah. Approximately yeah.

DAVID (00:48:24):
I know five parts, two parts, one part, right? So the recipe is actually a 70, 20 10, 70 corn, 20 right. 10, 10 barley. Okay. and then, and then you know, old Crow, the barrel entry proof makes a difference in the final product. They went in the barrel at 115. Taylor was pretty well known for trying to go into barrel at lower proof. But there's a, trade-off in every decision, there's a trade off just like building a steel. When you change the steel, you get a trade off. Okay. And, and back to that story about dense and whatever, if you're worried about changing a variable and that variable is going to affect your, your product and your product is you're not going to find out for many years down the road, it's something to be worried about. Right. And when you're cooking 30,000 gallon mash at a time here or 90,000 now, in some cases you got a lot invested in that one, cook.

DAVID (00:49:24):
Yeah. Let alone the product that comes out of it. Okay. So, so there's a lot to be worried about there. We don't have to worry so much because we don't have as much invested in each individual cook. And you know, we're cooking a few hundred gallons at a time and you know, and it's pretty reliable. So, so we buy our corn from somewhere and they, they do all that testing and so forth. We don't have to do it most distilleries test the corn for moisture. Cause you pay by the pound. And if you have moisture levels higher, you're paying more. Right. So it's a economic choice. So, so there's a lot to lose. I mean, there's billions, when you, if you think about making Berman and say $500 a barrel for it, and you're putting it away for 20 years and you've got a thousand barrels a day that you're producing over most of the year, they shut down for brief brief time at times 20 years do the math.

DAVID (00:50:20):
Yeah. Yeah. We're talking about a lot of money a lot. So you're really cautious about changing anything. Yeah. So for the longest time, this industry really was reluctant to change anything in the product mix reflected that you can go back 30 years ago, when you go into the bourbon island at six feet wide, you know, everybody had their one brand or 1, 1, 1, now you go in and it's like, holy mackerel, everybody's got, everybody's got 20 versions of, of whatever. Yeah. so, so yeah, there's a, I, I would call it more superstitious, but also this, this paranoia because of the expense and what you have to do, you know, and you, you won't find out about the trouble until it's too late. Yeah. Right. And by then, then, then what, because you can't, can't go distill more and sell it the next day. You got to wait those years again.

DAVID (00:51:15):
And so that that's really, I think what drives that kind of thinking, plus it's good storytelling when you go to the facility to say, oh yeah, we're worried about every day I've modified, I've modified each of these stills except for the brand new one multiple times modify them, change them, change the configuration, change the size change or whatever. Yeah. I can't, I couldn't discern a difference. I mean, the proof is changing the flavors changing at the end of the day, you taste the dislet and say, yeah, that tastes good. Put it in a barrel. Does it taste just like the one yesterday? I don't know. We're running four stills today. The output at each four still is going to be a little different. How many, how much tales did you put back in? That's going to affect you output. There's so many variables. And, and to think that one variable is, is going to determine it you're wrong. It's not, there's a bunch of variables.

DREW (00:52:08):
So are, is this cause you mostly do single barrel stuff. Yeah. So is this also the newest barrel? Number

DAVID (00:52:15):
Two, we just came out with it in, in January. It was the first barrel that we released. And you know, when the COVID came along and restrictions, then we, you know, try to get a little creative. We said, well, we've got these products in the works. We've had this malt whiskey that we distilled a few years ago. You know, w what can we kind of release to, to you know, encourage people to come back and try something different or new we do, we have premium products that, that are very limited because of the nature of how, how it comes about. And so that was also when we said, well, we knew I had planned to, to release one of those about every six months is about how much, how much we get. Yeah. And so I'd kind of planned to release one anyway. And I thought, well, you know, this is a great time to be putting something out there that would attract people back to the distillery. And so, yeah, we're always coming up with something new. We have two, two bourbons in the works right now. One is as a secondary grain wheat. So we did bourbon. And then we're actually distilling a 100% corn bourbon.

DREW (00:53:28):
Wow. Okay. Yeah. And that's a question I have too, is that I know that usually you need a little bit of malted barley in there for the yeast. Do you not synthetic enzymes. Okay. Okay. Yeah. There's,

DAVID (00:53:42):
There's a whole market now, synthetic enzymes. And but you can malt corn, you can malt any grain. Barley is, is used predominantly because it has the highest enzymatic value pound for pound of grains. And so it's traditional, you know, and then at the same thing, you got your recipe that includes 10% barley. You're not going to change that all right. Because it will affect the flavor. In that case, the a hundred percent corn tastes completely different than the OCD at the still. And so yeah, and the weeded one tastes different too. And these, all these bourbons that we have, we have this cafe LA on the cafe LA we use a roasted barley. Okay. And then it has a roasted flavor. You, you burn the grain basically. And instead of the regular malt is just toasted, it's heated and this grain is heavy and it would go in a really dark beer, like a Guinness. That would be the grain that Guinness it's really dark color enrich flavor. Yeah. And so you'd put it in a beer at maybe 10% or so maximum. They, they recommend between five and 10% of the ingredients for that grain. It has a strong flavor. And so just 5% change. That's 5% different from OCD. Makes a difference in how it tastes. So,

DREW (00:55:12):
And you've kept everything here because I know I have the Steven barrel at home. Most of them are higher proof actually over a hundred. Are they? Yeah.

DAVID (00:55:24):
The only thing we have, that's a hundred is the vodka.

DREW (00:55:26):
Okay. Interesting.

DAVID (00:55:28):
That's the lowest, that's the lowest proof to have we did on the quarter vetoes. So in trying to, to emulate old Crow, you know, they, they bottled at 80, 86 and a hundred. They had a bottle and bond at a hundred. We, we tried, we cut it back to a hundred to see what it was like, and we didn't like it as much. So we left it, we left it a little bit high.

DREW (00:55:51):
I was going to say, I found a bottle that is dated date stamped, March 5th, 1895. So it's 2 95. Yeah. So it's two years before the bottled in bond act really. And it's at 110 proof and it's a WEA gains. It says at the bottom. So yeah, on opened it's at the Oscar Getz music as a gotcha. Yup. And they look like they've been opened because

DREW (00:56:20):
Yeah, of course they blame

DAVID (00:56:23):
Court, natural cork will, will evaporate leave it out of it. Yeah. Yeah. Very good. No, we, you know, that was one of the things early on. At first time we bottled OCD, you know, I, I experimented with some different proof levels trying to cut it back to see what we wanted to do. And I brought it in, let John try and he kind of scrunched up his nose and he said, what did you do to that? So I like, I cut it back to a hundred proof and he said, don't do that anymore. So he didn't, he, that was kinda how it happened. That's good. And you know, they very, this, this one right now, it's coming in at 110. We've had one as low as 105 and we've had one as high as 125. How much change we're getting in the barrel in terms of proof or that sort of thing?

DAVID (00:57:08):
I, I don't, I don't know enough right now. I when we put it in the barrel, you know, what comes out of the potstill is not exactly the same proof everyday. We don't distill at 140 and add exactly the right amount of water to get it down to whatever barrel entry proof. Yeah. We, we transitioned in details and then the average in the steel is 120 plus or minus a little bit usually minus. Right. so as long as we're under 1 25, we're, we're legal on it. And you know, it it's generally I say, well, I have to run three stills two days to fill a barrel. And the first deal, the first day that net might be X number of gallons at one 18, but the other one's X number of gallons at 1 21. And then this is X number of gallons at one 19 or whatever, whatever it works out.

DAVID (00:58:03):
So you kind of put those together in a barrel and it's, it's, you know, comes out to be one 19.6 or whatever it is. Okay. Yeah. So, so because of the nature of what we do, and we don't add water at distillation we're not getting an exact proof every single time to go into a barrel. Okay. So I tell people to say on the OCD, it's 120, that's our goal. Generally speaking, it's going to be a little bit less than that. Right. But we've, like I said, we've had one come out at 1 25. Now it didn't go in at 1 25. I'm pretty sure because we check it, you know, going into the barrel. Yeah. So we've got some barrels in different storage conditions. They can take on moisture, they can give off moisture and increase or decrease proof accordingly. So

DREW (00:58:56):
Then you do all of your aging in this same. Yeah. Yeah. They don't, they don't give you any space over at eh, no,

DREW (00:59:08):
No. What was that like when the fire happened though? That must've hurt. Yeah. Scary,

DAVID (00:59:13):
Scary. Yeah. Call, I got the call at about 11 o'clock at night from a neighbor down the road. And you know, based on fires at other distilleries in the past, they'd been terrible heaven hill and wild Turkey having Hills really disastrous. And you know, so I get this phone call. It says the warehouse is on fire. We're probably gonna lose everything in the valley. Cause if you think every building over there catches on fire, you know, that one building 45,000 barrels is two and a quarter million gallons. Right. so it was, it was, it was an enormous fire. So anyway, I hustled back out here and in, as soon as I got here, I realized that we here probably weren't in jeopardy because we're about three feet higher in elevation. And then the first building you encounter was the shipping building, which is about three, four feet off the ground. So even if the fire had floated over here on the water, it hit the building, it wouldn't have, it, wouldn't have D and that billings all concrete and brick and everything. Anyway, there's no, no wood to catch on fire. But, but fortunately I think the firefighters firefighters have learned something important, which is you cannot really put out an alcohol fire with water. Cause that stuff in the barrel has, has 40% water

DREW (01:00:39):
Already in it. And when you add

DAVID (01:00:41):
Water, all you do is spread it. Yeah. And so down here in the lower, lower part of the parking lot, down here, there was a lake of fire, not from the firefighters, but, but they were putting the water on the adjacent buildings to keep them from catching on fire, which is a very smart thing to do. And, and a decision was made early to allow the alcohol to burn off rather than try to put it out.

DREW (01:01:06):
She said, the other issue is, is that your water's got to go somewhere afterwards. You get a Creek back here

DAVID (01:01:13):
And came into our lot. And then there's a drainage ditch that runs down to the Creek down there. And so the they, they had a cleanup crew here, like right away. And, and they put stuff around that. So that water wouldn't, it wouldn't go down into the Creek. I mean, they, they did their best to really try to contain as much as possible. And but the water was on fire. I mean, it was the lake of fire down there and there was a little building down here. It was, it was the clock house for old Crow. And it caught on fire. It had a wooden roof stone building, but wouldn't roofing. So that caught on fire and then they, they had to take it down. But it was, you know, literally I tell you, it was, it was the biggest fire I've ever seen in my life. And I hope I never see one that big again.

DREW (01:02:01):
I just wonder how much of the whiskey that was in there was actually going to end up being old Crow in that

DREW (01:02:07):
Building, in that building? None,

DAVID (01:02:10):
None, none, not the one that I use it for. Well, so here, here's what I think is happening there. Based on conversations is they're aging straight whiskey, two year old whiskey, and they're probably taking it over here to old granddad and putting it in those apple, maple and honey flavored products that are not bourbon. Yeah. Because that label on those says that they're infused with Kentucky straight bourbon whiskey. So the stuff that went up in flames was not old. It was less than two years, probably probably the average age of it might've been a year or something. Cause they're constantly bringing barrels in and taking barrels out. And they're not aging for 10, 12 years over here. Okay. I think they're supplying that, that demand there. Now I could be wrong on that. There could be some older stuff there, but, but my understanding is that, is it that it was reasonably young bourbon and they quit. They said that in the, in the paper and the news beam announced and they said, Hey, we're not in jeopardy of shorting the bourbon market. I mean, everybody's panicking like, oh my gosh, we're going to run out of bourbon. And they said, no, not to worry which, which again, leads me to believe that it was younger stuff. It wasn't the good stuff. Yeah.

DREW (01:03:23):
Yeah. It felt good. Well, I appreciate the time and, and running me through the stories and a little bit of the history of the, yeah,

DAVID (01:03:30):
My pleasure. You know, we, we like to chat about it. So usually when people come here you know what, we're what we're known for people. People leave here and they said, well, I, I learned more here than, you know, all the other distilleries combined kind of thing. And it's like, well, you know, we like the history of it. We liked the process of it. You know, I explain to people, I said, look, there's probably a billion variables that affect the final flavor here. And we don't have control over 999 million, 999,000 of those variables right there. They're just not in our control. And so, and then the other part of it is, you know, there's a certain amount of science involved in technology involved and, and you could know, you know, you could go a mile deep and an inch wide or you can, you know, and I said, some of it, it's nice to know, or it's helpful to know, but you can't do anything about it. Yeah. You can't change those outcomes. You can understand them. And so we tend to be I don't know what the right word is. More relaxed, I guess, on certain things like fermentation, you know, we use a wild yeast. We caught in the distillery. I grow the culture here in water jugs with a fish tank aerator in there. We're not, we're not doing it the correct way. Yeah. I know it's not the correct way,

DREW (01:04:56):
But works. If you go back in time, then they talk about Jim, Jim beam taking his east home in a bucket and sticking it down the well of tying it to the dog so nobody could steal it.

DREW (01:05:08):
Well, you know?

DAVID (01:05:10):
Yes. There's those stories. And, and so, so, you know, when we, when we pitched yeast, we take some from this container that's fermenting right now. And we, we scooped some out and we put it in the next one. And, and it's not an exact count. We're not using packages where I could say, oh, there's X trillion cells there that I'm introducing. Right. So, but, but I did, I go back to in my own mind and say, humans have done this for a very, very long time, with very little information on science. They didn't know what used wasn't until the microscope was invented. So somehow humans made it happen without science. And, and while we know some of the science again, I say to people knowing it doesn't change the reality of it, you know, there's certain things that are important and there's certain things that are less important.

DAVID (01:06:05):
And that's what I do in my regular work is try to help people understand that some things you don't need to worry about quite so much. And then