Ep 29 - Davidson Reserve's Co-Founder Jeff Pennington

Transcript

Drew (00:00:14):
Welcome to the all new whiskey lore podcast called Whiskey Lore. The interviews. I'm your host, drew Hennish, the Amazon bestselling author of Whiskey Lores Travel Guide to Experience in Kentucky Bourbon. And to kick things off and welcome you in, I have three brand new interviews that I collected during my recent travels through Tennessee. And my first stop was in Nashville, which is a town I used to live in. And my first guest is Jeff Pennington, the co-founder of Pennington Distillery. And Pennington is a distillery that he founded with his wife Jenny. And if you're a whiskey fan, you may know of one of their products, which is Davidson Reserve. While I'd seen bottles of Davidson Reserve on my local store shelf, I got to admit I didn't know much about it. So on a previous trip to Nashville, I decided to take a tour of their distillery, which is in a neighborhood on the west side of Nashville.

Drew (00:01:17):
And as you come driving up to it, it looks like it's a military barracks at first, but once inside it is all distillery, you see over to the side, a tasting area and some barrels, and then towards the back they're doing the bottling line. But as I was looking at the products, I not only saw bottled whiskey, but I also saw canned products. So during the interview, we're going to find out a little bit about what they are canning at the distillery. Now, about halfway through the tour, Jeff came up to me and we started chatting a little bit about whiskey history, the rebirth of Tennessee whiskey, rye whiskey, and the issues with making rye whiskey. And I asked him because he was in a hurry and he needed to get going to a meeting, if we could potentially schedule a conversation and interview that would allow me to introduce him to you.

Drew (00:02:18):
And so he graciously accepted that invitation. And what makes these guys really interesting, Jeff and his wife, they didn't actually get into the distilling business along the normal route, rather than having grown up around distilling, these guys came from careers in the distribution of whiskey, and in fact, they actually worked for competing companies. So we're going to talk a little bit about how they came to be in the distilling business. We're going to look a little closer at how distilling came back to Tennessee. I learned a little bit more with each person that I talked to in Tennessee, and we'll get into the developing of mash bills, blending versus distilling, and we're going to find out what the Pennington Method is. And this is something that it said goes back to the very origins of bourbon whiskey. But to start our conversation, I figured I'd dig into two subjects that were in the front of my mind. One being that since I had lived in Nashville, I thought we'd talk a little bit about the changing skyline of Nashville. And also I wanted to find out more about the unique design of this distillery. So enjoy my conversation with Jeff Pennington of Pennington Distillery, the maker of Davidson Reserve. Welcome to the show.

Jeff (00:03:46):
Well, thanks for having me. Yeah,

Drew (00:03:47):
So you have an interesting complex here when I walk in. Do you know what this building was in its past history? So

Jeff (00:03:57):
Before us, when we took over, it was a construction company, so a contractor, basically construction company. I think he was kind of an all around gc. So that's one of the reasons that there's a lot of hodgepodge pieces. I think whatever construction he had done, the last job was whatever piece were left over, that's what he built the next piece of the building with, if that makes sense. When we first moved in, we were getting our CO and we went down to codes and they're like, Hey, we don't even have the three buildings on the back on the drawings. And it was almost became a problem. We're like, look, we didn't build it.

Jeff (00:04:35):
And then before that, we don't know for sure, but I think there was some kind of telecommunication or call center in the Quonset hut building because we had to rip out just unbelievable amounts of phone lines. There was a huge phone book of old schools, almost the size of that wall, of just all these switches and wire telephone things. So we think it was a telephone at some point there was a call center or some kind of telecommunication, something in there. And then the farthest I can see back is that there was a concrete company here at some point. Okay. This street was a very industrial street. So if you look up the marble and stone, people are still there. There was a concrete plant here at one point. There was so up and down, there's lots of wood. So if you go on the railroad tracks from behind us. And then on the other side of that is a lot of lumber yards.

Drew (00:05:30):
That quo hut makes it look almost military.

Jeff (00:05:33):
That's what really, well, two things brought us to this. One, the rent was affordable, and two, I like the building of the, it was just an airplane hangar. It looked really cool. And it's actually great. It's a well insulated, it's a really good designed, I've learned more about Quonset huts since, but we first moved in, we're like, oh, look how cool it's a military hangar. And then we quickly realized it's not an ideal warehouse because you can't stack anything up against the walls

Drew (00:06:04):
Cause it

Jeff (00:06:04):
All falls in on you. So nice. We started off just in there and we had other people that were leasing the other warehouses and offices. And then over time we just kept expanding and expanding. And now we have this property and then we have two other warehouses offsite. So it's not the most efficient way to, to get run a business. We've got a warehouse that has all our dry goods, and then we have a warehouse that has all our finished goods. So we have to bring our dry goods in, bottle it, package it, take it to the shipping warehouse, and it ships out from there. The only thing that is holy here is our distilling right now. So in the back we do all of our distilling on site, and then our barrels, we're out of space on barrels here then. So now we're moving barrels offsite. Eventually. We've been looking for a couple years to find a property to bring it all back together. Finding property in Nashville right now in the past few years is I keep waiting thinking that there's going to be a bubble where this things going to stop going up. And it's just not stopping what's going

Drew (00:07:04):
On with the skyline. Because it used to be when I lived here that the bat building at and t building downtown was the center of the skyline. Now you can't even see it.

Jeff (00:07:12):
We had this, we went to last weekend, or two weekends ago to see Wilco. I don't know if you know who they are. I love that band. But we went down and there's an amphitheater downtown called Sin. It's really cool. And we were sitting there and it was me and three other, my wife and three other couples. We were having the same discussion. You can't even see the Batman building anymore.

Speaker 3 (00:07:32):
It's cool that our city's growing. Yeah, yeah. But we can't even see the Batman. That's like iconic.

Jeff (00:07:36):
Yeah, iconic. And I don't know when you lived here, but the Tennessee Tower used to always light up and have messages. Every night they would do the lights, and so it was the bat. It was that, and then the Batman building. And those were kind of the two iconics. And you know, had the Renaissance that had the spinning restaurant. You can't even see all that anymore. And what I'm really afraid of, and I'm not afraid, I like new, not against the growth in Nashville, I'm just so going to be a little bit more disappointed that if you follow the interstates around, you're getting these really tall condos that are kind of blocking the view of downtown from the interstate. Yeah, yeah. Now where we live over in Sylvan Park, you know, go up in the hill and it really looks cool. A friend of ours lives up in, they've got this house at the top of the hill in Sylvan Park. And I mean, you can see the hall in Nashville and the Cranes, my favorite new building that they're actually building is Vanderbilt's redoing their dorm building. And they've got this new, it's a limestone tower. It looks like it's straight out of the Harvard or something. Oh wow. I mean, it's beautiful and it lights up at night. And so just a really tall tower. It turns out it's a dorm room. I'm like, man, it doesn't look like my dorm room I

Speaker 3 (00:08:38):
Went to in my college. But

Jeff (00:08:41):
I mean, it's good in negative. But I do miss the Batman building in the Tennessee Tower. I wish maybe they could just maybe lift a tin, the Batman building up like

Speaker 3 (00:08:48):
10 stories. So we still stood up still. Yeah.

Drew (00:08:50):
So this is a family business, and you got the whiskey business. You were actually already in the whiskey business, but in a different capacity. Kind of give us a background on what you were doing before you started.

Jeff (00:09:06):
So when I grew up, my family was in the hospitality business. My father owned restaurants and bars. And so I always worked in those. I grew up in working in restaurants and I started at probably wouldn't want people, me telling people with 12 and 13 is out there busing tables for tips. Yeah, hopefully there's a, it's call a statue. Limitations. Limitations. So I've worked every position there started. And then about 15 got to start working in the kitchen and worked in the kitchen element till about 18. I really enjoyed that and I realized it's, it's hard money. It's hard to make money in there. It's kind of sad to see that industry cause they feed. It's the second largest employer. My dad told me behind the federal government is restaurants in the hospitality industry, which is obviously what was the hardest hit in 2020. Yeah.

Jeff (00:10:00):
And I think it's taken a really slow comeback. The business is there, they're drinking from a fire hose, but they know the labor's not there. So interest to see how the game changes, I think you're going to start seeing people have to raise prices and raise wages. But we'll see how that goes. So I went to college and went up to Knoxville and went to University of Tennessee and I wish I would've left the state, but for some reason when I was in high school, I just didn't even think about college. I was just kind of having fun. And then all of a sudden I graduated and I had decent grades and good test scores. So I was like, everybody's like, where are you going? I was like, oh, I haven't applied anywhere. So I ended up going to Tennessee because I applied in the summer before and bartended up in college and which was a great job to have in college because you didn't have to work near the hours and you still made good money.

Jeff (00:10:47):
And I wanted to go to law school. And so I was an economics and political science major and thought I'd go to law school and I was going to try to come back and do my JD MBA program at Vanderbilt. And I kind of went on the end, I realized I didn't like school. I was like, you know what? I'm going to take a year off and figure out if I really want to do this before I go commit five more years of college. And so back in those days, you know, didn't have cell phones and I think Google might have existed maybe, but you know, got the old newspaper out. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And you started flipping around looking for a job, right? I mean, it was probably a hundred job sites. And so I just started circling all the jobs that looked interesting to me.

Jeff (00:11:30):
And one of the ones that I liked pretty much required two to four years of sales experience. And so I was like, well, sounds like I need to go get some sales experience. So I was bartending one night and it hit me. I saw one of the people coming in that sold us wine and spirits and I said, you're in the worked for a distributor. I said, you're in the wine and spirits in it. You're in the sales. Yeah, I'm a sales rep. I was like, oh, awesome. I was like, so how do I apply for your job? Well, I don't want you to take my job. I was like, well no. I mean, just in general. Well here's the people and here's the thing. And I learned then about wholesalers and distributors and the three tier system. I would've just thought, and I'm sure most people, I still get people that come in here for co-packing going Well, I was like, who's your distributor?

Jeff (00:12:17):
What do you mean I'm going to sell it myself. I still think there's probably a massive amount of the population that probably doesn't understand the three tier system and how it's set up. So I never knew there was these distributors in the middle. So I sent a resume and sent it out to a bunch of distributors around the state and was lucky enough to, I got hired, found that luckily a job had opened up and I started, went into Horizon Wine and Spirits here in Nashville. Started in the point of sale area probably, I think I was making 22,000 a year. Nice. Yeah. And making way less than I was bartending the job everybody wants. So they don't pay you that much. Exactly. Yeah. It was the leg in, right? Yeah, exactly. Back then it was the only way in. And sadly, there wasn't hardly any women in the industry at the time.

Jeff (00:13:02):
So that was a grunt job. You went and stacked cases at distributed retail stores and built displays and moved inventory in and out and did price signs. So it was a grunt job, but that was the only way into a sales role at the time. So I did that and then I got it promoted to a pre-sale ah manager, which was just a glorified version of the same thing, except you maybe had less counts. And then I finally got a sales role in retail one, and I got in that, but it took about eight months, which isn't that long from the time I got hired to get into it and just loved it. I mean, I didn't even really know a ton about wine at the time, but luckily we were a Gallo house and Cobra House. And one thing I know about those two is they, they're really great on education and not just wine education, but sales education.

Jeff (00:13:58):
The Gallo Sales manual I still use with my people today. Nice. I mean, to me it's the ultimate sales training for our industry. And then I realized about three years after that, I wanted to learn the on-premise. Cause I knew I didn't want to do one job forever. I've never been someone that just likes to sit around and do the same thing. So I went to on-premise at that point, which is the liquor by the drink. So hospitality, hotels, venues, restaurants, I'm sure your people know. But on-premise is considered anywhere where liquor by the drink is sold off-premises retail package where it's sold by the bottle. Okay. So went to on-premise and it's a few years in on-premise. Really love that I got nicknamed all my retail guys. Cause most people go the other way. They starting on-premise to go to retail. So they all nickname me Clank.

Jeff (00:14:50):
Cause they said that's the sound bottles make. Cause I know Premise you're selling bottles versus cases. Nice. So during that time I met my wife, which actually I knew my wife from high school. We had been friends for a long time and never dated, never anything romantic. But she was actually one of the first, at that point in time, this was probably 2003 or four, you started seeing more and more women getting into the industry. I think when I moved in, there was probably three or four women in the total, or out of 20 something sales reps at our company. Wow. Now I'm imagine, I don't even know, but I imagine at least even if not majority women. But my wife was one of the few women in the industry and I was competing against her. And so we kind of took a liking to each other and started secretly dating and we dated swap swapping secrets between them.

Jeff (00:15:42):
Yeah. Oh, it's so funny. We kept it a secret. We'd go to non alcohol serving establishments. We ate a lot of Calypso Cafe and all these places that didn't serve alcohol. Cause we knew we wouldn't run into anybody there for about a year. And then the entrepreneurial bug had always been in me, but I think it kind of bit me around that time when I started getting more serious with my future wife and realized I loved her and I kind of wanted to move on to the next step of my life. And so I went to my bosses and I said, look, I don't know what I'm going to do, but I kind of want to go off on my own and I want to start something. And this is probably 2008. And I put in my notice and I started a digital software business and it kind of went a different direction.

Jeff (00:16:25):
I imagine most people's first business. But at the time I wanted to make wine kiosk where you could go into a retail store and you could search wine by 20 different types of search functions. This is once again pre pre-Google. And right now there's apps galore. At the time it was so cutting edge, three years later it was so archaic, but welcome to my world. But you could go into a liquor store and you could say, Hey, I want to have a red wine from this region that's under $20 that has 90 plus points. Or I want a Sion Blanc that's $15 to $20 from California and all do any endless kind of searches and find one. And it was really intrigued me. I started working on it and was a passion project. And then I quickly realized this is before iPads existed going to be, the equipment was very, very expensive to the hardware for it.

Jeff (00:17:19):
I mean, touchscreens and all that was brand new on the market. So we're like, well, how are people going to be able to afford this? So I ended up doing digital signage for advertising. I was like, well, I'll do advertising. And I started putting some of those out to pay for the other equipment and then quickly realized, oh, there's revenue here. And so any other business, you start following the revenue. Yeah, yeah. Cause you got to pay your mortgage. Right. And then lucky enough, in 2009, I was approached a larger company that we had, we had built our own proprietary software. And so a larger local company had reached out to, worked with over 5,000 hotels. And they just wanted the software. They didn't really care about the advertising business. It's not like they didn't care. It was small potatoes. But they offered us a good bit of money to, or not a good bit.

Jeff (00:18:09):
Not like what you hear, no stupid numbers, no near retirement money, but well worth more than it was worth to come in and basically help them take the software and turn into digital signage for hotels because they had a built-in customer base, which made sense. It was cheaper for them to probably buy us than to build their own software or go and license it from one of the bigger companies. So we went and did that. And I went and worked for that company for about a year on the integration. And at that time, my wife and I got married that year. And so we were like, well, what do we want to do? And we just both missed the alcohol industry. We had spent about two years out of it, and this was 2009. So we heard the grumblings of the liquor laws changing here.

Jeff (00:18:54):
But at that point in time, we never considered doing our own distillery because it wasn't possible. We couldn't do anything here unless we went to Moore County or Lincoln County. And so we were like, you know what? And I was always obsessed with the guy named Sidney Frank that did Sidney Frank Imports, the Jagermeister, Greg Goose Kakkis got quite a track record of successful brands that he signed the rights to and imported or created and did very well with. And said, all right, well why for our honeymoon? Why don't we go spend three or four weeks in Europe and let's go find a brand that we can import and we'll import a brand. And that was kind of our idea. So we did, and we went over there and we went from Turkey to Greece to Italy and France and Belgium. And what we realized, no matter where we go, anywhere from Istanbul to Athens to Rome to, you'd say Tennessee.

Jeff (00:19:56):
And everybody in the world knows two things. Jack Daniels and Elvis Presley, and a lot of Dolly Partons, a lot of Dolly Parton. I, I've got to give her credit, she's got some international pools. She got a brand. And I love Dolly part. The older I've got now that I've got a kid, her whole free book that, I mean, she's an incredible person. I really respect her. But a lot of Dolly and man, I knew Jack Daniels was big. I didn't realize how big globally it was until, cause we, we'd go into all these bars and just look on the back bar. What do they have? What's something that we don't see? And we quickly realized Europe's was like America, it's all big brands too. There wasn't a lot of craft brands or smaller brands. But we started just adding up what do we see everywhere? Well, Jack Daniels was in every bar we'd go to we're like, why are we over here looking for a brand?

Jeff (00:20:49):
When we were from Tennessee, and we knew because I sold Makers and Wild Turkey and she sold Jim Beam and cac, she was selling CAC when she used to give you flat screen TVs. If you would buy Buffalo Trays from her, now you got to give them a Buffalo screen TV to get Buffalo Trace. But we knew there was all these great Kentucky bourbons, and we knew the bourbon category was growing, but there was really no Tennessee whiskeys outside of Jack and George. And there was one distiller called Pritchards, right? Who was the third one to open up. And we're like, why are we over here? We've got the heritage. And that's when I started researching the history of Tennessee whiskey and seeing how rich and fruitful it was and how big of an industry it was and how it just never really made a resurgence.

Jeff (00:21:37):
And so we came back and said, well, we want to get in the whiskey business. I remember selling makers in the two thousands when it was really just, people were just, now early two thousands, people were starting to realize that bourbon wasn't the cheap rock gut whiskey, scotch was the elitist whiskey and bourbon was the cheap man's whiskey. But now I remember there was a billboard here in Nashville that always loved and makers, I think it said something like, it looks expensive and tastes expensive because it is expensive. I always thought, what a great, the one thing I'd give Bill Samuels and and Makers, and they were great marketers. Know what I mean? Unbelievable. Absolutely. I, but I always loved that billboard. It was just like, so, well, yeah, that's a great one. But them, and then Woodford and some of these new brands were showing that, hey, there's room for premium bourbons.

Jeff (00:22:28):
And we said, why isn't there room for premium Tennessee whiskeys? So we kind of decided to come back home and work on what it's going to take to build our own Tennessee whiskey. And so we started with Cordials. Our original idea was to start with Cordials or things we could do with young whiskey. So Whisper Creek was our first brand because one of the brands we saw over there everywhere was Bailey's. Okay. And we realized that there's no competitor to Bailey's anywhere in the world. There's a ton of knockoffs, lower price imitations. And so a lot of 'em are good, but they don't touch the volume of Bailey's. And we started researching more and more in that Cordal category. And the whole category is like that Kalua fr Angelica, grand go on and on and on. St. Germaine, all these super premium cordials or higher price have 20 half price knockoffs, but they still own 70% of their market share. And we were like, so why don't we be first with some of those? So we came up with Whisper Creek, and then we did some flavored rise until 20. Were you distilling at that point? Yeah, we actually partnered with a guy named Mike Williams. Mike Williams owned Tennessee Distilling company. So he was really the man who changed the laws. You're going to hear every distillery you go to say they were part of it.

Drew (00:23:45):
This is my challenge is that I, I'm trying to figure out, wait a second. Who really was the first after the three that procured?

Jeff (00:23:55):
It's funny, I hate calling people out, and I'm not going to say names, but I've been to a lot of distilleries and they all claim that they were there.

Drew (00:24:02):
They

Jeff (00:24:02):
Weren't there, might've shown their face or time or two. The two guys who got it done were Mike Williams and Derrick Bell. Derrick Bell had a distillery in Bowling Green. And he really, he's from Nashville, the Bell family, and he really wanted to bring his operation in Nashville, his family. And Mike Williams went way back. Mike was a former legislator and was a lobbyist. So he was a lobbyist for the, he doesn't take a lot of credit. He sits back and kind of lets you know he was a good lobbyist, former legislator. So

Drew (00:24:33):
This is why everybody else can make their own story because

Jeff (00:24:36):
He doesn't too

Drew (00:24:37):
His own horn something out front.

Jeff (00:24:38):
But he also represent the oil industry. So he had a day job at the time. He always said, I like ethanol, I just like it in barrels.

Jeff (00:24:46):
But he was the guy who got it done. No, I mean, he really did. There's other people that I know were in the photo. Heath Clark was around, Jim Massey was around, but the guy who got it done was Mike Williams. And the brainchild of how to do it was Mike Williams. It wasn't, Hey, we're going to change the law. Let's just write a law that lets, each county will one time opt in. That way we're not saying, Hey, it's legal. Because he knew how it was played. He was a former state legislator. And it's not about fighting the tee about just, or getting them to be on your side. It's about getting them to just not fight you. Yeah. I learned a lot about politics from him. Sometimes it's not about winning someone over, it's about, Hey, I know you're not on my side, but we just not be vocal.

Jeff (00:25:33):
There's a lot about a third of the legislation just wouldn't vote on alcohol bills. They just couldn't because of their constituents and where they're from. They may not be against it, but they just couldn't vote on it. Yeah. Well, no votes a no. So when you're walking in with a third of their votes is a no. You got to uphill battle to beat there. I mean, that's not an easy hill to climb. So I would definitely say Mike Williams and Derek Bell and anybody else who claims that they were part of it. Yeah, I just kind of say,

Drew (00:26:02):
Good, thank you. And Derek is, everybody

Jeff (00:26:05):
Owes those two a big thank you. And

Drew (00:26:06):
Derek is

Jeff (00:26:06):
Corsair. Derek is Corsair, yeah. Yeah. Everybody in the industry owes those two A. Thank you. Yeah, they were the two that got it done.

Drew (00:26:13):
Now you actually, so I heard initially when you were doing some of your distilling, you were doing some of it over at Corsair? Yeah.

Jeff (00:26:21):
So I helped Mike in the beginning while I was working on my business plan. So we came back in 2009 and we had to get money raised. We didn't have the money to do all this. We had sold our company, but it wasn't for retirement money. We had enough money to blast us a couple years to work on a business plan. And so we worked on writing a business plan, shaking the tin can to anybody we knew that had money that would listen to us. And meanwhile, I met Mike Williams through all the law changes. And so I went and kind of brokered, I started a broker business. So I just basically a sales rep for hire. So I had about four or five brands that would pay me to go and help them work with the local distributors here, go and work with retailers. And so Mike Williams was one of them.

Jeff (00:27:03):
And so I helped him. And he had his still, which is here, was at Corsair. So Corsair was the very first distillery to open up outside the three over a marathon. And then our Mike Williams with Tennessee Distilling Company. I had his still there, Jamie with Popcorn. Sutton had his still over there. So there was three distilleries that were kind of in the same until we all kind of outgrew each other. And then in 2011, I signed a lease over here, and then Mike moved over here with me. And then Popcorn moved up to Newport, I think sometime in the middle there. Oh, old Smokey opened up. I think they were the fifth, fourth or fifth. I never can't keep up with the exact number where it's funny, the other people who said they were there at the law changed their distillers didn't open up for another six, seven years, but they were there changing the law.

Jeff (00:27:52):
It's like Mike, Mike was, Mike moved over here with us. So we kind of had a partnership where we bought all the front of the house, bottling, blending, did all the sales, and then he set up the shop in the back. He did all the distilling. So we'd use, he'd distill whiskey for us. We would do all the blending and bottling. And it was really a great partnership for a few years. And I think what I learned about Mike is he loved making whiskey. He hated the marketing of whiskey. Nice. So in 2014, we actually brought in a new partner, and then we bought Mike out. Well, but it was a very mutual, we're still friends. He ended up raising money and going, he's now got the second largest distillery in the state now. He's in Columbia. He's in Columbia. Right. Okay. Yeah. He doesn't even promote him.

Jeff (00:28:32):
Most people don't even know he exists. Yeah. He really just does a lot of contract distilling now. Don't be fully, he's got a lot of barrels, probably the most barrels kind of house accounted for the future that are going to be there for him to play with in the future. But he really took the co-packing model and turned into more co contract distilling like mgp. Because yeah, when he and I first started here, we could go up and buy mgp, four year old barrels for four 50, $500 a barrel all day. Wow. We never did that with Collier mck, which was the first brand of whiskey that he launched under. But now if you can get 'em 2,500, 3000, 4,000, however much per barrel it is. So he knew, he saw that demand growing and he decided he liked making whiskey. He didn't want to, he didn't enjoy the marketing because there's a lot of smoke and mirrors in this industry.

Jeff (00:29:20):
And Mike was just like that. That's just not my wheelhouse. So didn't part ways he went off. We did part ways, but we still worked together. I mean, we still send a lot of business back and forth and friendly. And he's got a large I call, I always went into him. I go see him. You got yourself a big boy of distillery here. We've got two columns running. And then we kind of bought here and then we regrouped in 2014. Cause the first whiskey brand we did together was a brand called Callier and McGill. It was his family brand. I think Mike would admit this too. And we both made the mistake of probably releasing it too early. It was big on Mike about, one thing we liked about Mike is authenticity was important to actually make it yourself. I mean, it's funny, I saw the best distilleries, distiller best of Nashville Awards are coming out. And it was like best distilleries if I go and buy a car and resell it, that doesn't make me a car manufacturer. But for some reason in our industry that makes you a distiller. Yeah. I think it could be a best rectifier or a best brand builder or best blender, but a distiller is a manufacturer. And so that, that's part of the industry really bothers me that I really wish we could actually separate the two. And there was more clarifying. There's nothing wrong with blending and bonding. We do a lot of co-packing for other people here, but we don't do it for anybody that lies. Yeah.

Drew (00:30:43):
Well, to the credit of some of the distilleries, they will say distilled in and let you know it's coming from

Jeff (00:30:51):
Some Well, they have to, by law, they're supposed to on bourbon and whiskey, they're supposed to. And I think most of 'em gotten the hang of it. Back then it was not cool to buy juice from mgp. Now it is, right? Yeah. But there was a couple brands that took it on the chin for lying. And I think it woke up the rest of everybody else saying, whoa, we better be careful. But the marketing side is still there. I think just because you blend barrels, which I do believe blending is the art form, the lost art form. Everybody, if you make enough whiskey, you're going to make good single barrels an accident when 60% of your flavor comes from the barrel, a barrel can hide bad distillate and it can ruin good distillate. Yeah. So there is something, a single barrels, but the blending is a lost art form. But say you're a blender, don't say you're a distiller. Yeah, it's a distiller. You distill, what was it in Bourbon Row? All the rectifier in the history. When I go up, when I saw the Evan Williams tour, their new experience downtown's really cool now. Yeah. Talk about that street where everybody that was for the blending erect. I think Scotland's done it for years. It's a huge part of the industry.

Drew (00:31:54):
Well, we talk about the George Dickel here in town. That's what he was. He was a rectifier. That's what Nelson's Greenbrier started out as. That's what old Forrester, all of those started out as

Jeff (00:32:08):
Rectifier.

Drew (00:32:09):
Rectifier. Yeah.

Jeff (00:32:10):
I But I think the ones that are successful ever, they told were honest from the start. And I think a lot of people learned from that. Couple people who did get caught lying.

Drew (00:32:21):
Well, the Bottled and Bond act really kind of changed things too, because it forced rectifier to have to say, since we're not distilling our own and we can't put bottled in bond on it, we have to really show people that we're doing something that's not underhanded.

Jeff (00:32:39):
Exactly. And we bottled at the time, we bottled a lot of those brands that you see out now. I mean, there's seven, I think an eighth distillery's going to open up soon. That started here with bottling with us because it is, it's an expensive industry to get into. Whiskey is not a poor man's business. If you've got to make something, lay it down, write the check for it, but then wait four or five years and do that every day, that's a hard business to get into. So there's nothing wrong with ra. It's like that's a good cash flow. We did vodka and we did on age things that we could do to pay for it. And we also did. Yeah. But Mike and I, we had brand Callier. Maci was a great brand. We made a mistake of putting in smaller barrels and releasing it too soon.

Jeff (00:33:19):
Not bad whiskey, just you're still young. And as the whiskey got older and better, it was hard to get people to go back and retry it. And so about that point, Mike decided I want to make whiskey. It's really hard to market it, especially at the time when all from 20 2009 to 2013, the amount of craft distilleries that opened up because they were just blending and rectifying really put Mike at a disadvantage because he was really built on authenticity. And so we bought him out where we bought the equipment from him, and then he went and built a new distillery and does contract distilling now. He said, if this whole industry exists, I'm going to at least make some money off of it and make whiskey. Right. And he now distills a lot of brands, which then once again, I'm like, God, tell the truth if you're distilling it or not, but now you don't have, now if they say distilled in Tennessee, yeah, that's all you got to say.

Jeff (00:34:17):
Yeah. But that sold off all the whiskey that he sold off the rest of his whiskey to help raise some money, and then sold us the equipment and then went and did his thing. And then we got partnered with a guy named Tommy Bernard who used to own Horizon Wine and Spirits, one of the largest wholesalers here in Kentucky. And he put some money into us and we got to start over. And we got the ability, we came up, that's when we decided to do vodka. We're like, well, we're going to need something to we make today, sell tomorrow and take what we learned from him. And we started making whiskey and making it every day. And we didn't sell it. We sold about 20 barrels when they were two and a half to three years old. And then we didn't sell another lick of it until it was at least four.

Jeff (00:35:01):
And now most of our whiskey's five to six, we're going to be limited on the size. We can only do about 800 barrels a year at our capacity now. So we're not trying to make entry level whiskey, we're trying to make big boy whiskey. We want that be deep and have a linger to it and have some depth. I think we're reaping some good rewards. It's tough because now there is so many other brands that basically, instead of taking that money and putting it in the long term, they're putting it into building faster. But I think it's hoping the turtle in the hair race comes true. But that was, we're starting to see the fruition, the fruits of the labor and it's getting to sell whiskey is exciting. I get to go up to, I don't know when this is coming out. I'm not just announced the 25th, but I get to go up tomorrow to ADI in Louisville. And on Wednesday at the Wards luncheon, we won Bourbon of the Year.

Drew (00:35:52):
Oh wow. Congratulations.

Jeff (00:35:54):
And then only since we won Bourbon of the Year, we went and won Best Whiskey of the Year of all the best classes of whiskey. So it's going to be fun to get to go up to Louisville and take down Bourbon of the Year

Drew (00:36:04):
Days from Tennessee. From

Jeff (00:36:06):
Tennessee. So there you go. And I think one good thing about AD is in that category, it's got to be distill it. Yeah. So that's, I'm pretty proud of that, my team here for that.

Drew (00:36:17):
So talk about your recipes and how you came up with your recipes for, because you do awry, you do a bourbon, you do a Tennessee whiskey. How did you come up with those formula?

Jeff (00:36:30):
Yeah. Well, it's funny. In 2014, we kind of regrouped. We got to learn a lot from what we did, but more importantly, what we did wrong and learn from the stakes of the first three years of distilling here. And we decided we can't try to make, if we're limited on how many barrels we can make a year, we can't just sit here and try to make different whiskeys every day. Derek Bale does a great job of that. He, man, he will throw anything together and it's amazing. I think one of my favorite things he does is I like his quinoa whiskey. Try to, it's really smoky and it's got this, I really enjoy that one. But he does a lot of really interesting stuff. And he said, we got to be a little bit differentiation, but we really like the authenticity and the heritage of whiskey. And I was at a craft distillers panel in San Diego in 2013, and there was a bunch of other castellers defined craft and oh, it's size, and oh, he's got to be in a pot still. And oh, it's this. And it got to me, I was like, I think it's the definition of craft is art or skill. There's nothing about size. I think those craft guys have hijacked the word craft instead and replaced micro with craft. There's a lot of micro distilleries that are terrible,

Jeff (00:37:53):
And there's a lot of micro distilleries that are really good. But to me, there's a lot of guys in Bardstown and Lynchburg and Bull and County and Woodford County, who I would say have mastered their craft. They're making really good stuff because they got generations on us. Yeah. They've got data and they know the processes. But what we learned from them is we reached out with Tommy and reached out to some really big Kentucky people, and we can't really market their names, but we had three big time master distillers that I sold their brands we worked for that came down here, and we went up and worked with them. And what we learned is you're trying to be as consistent as you can in an inconsistent world. The barrel's so effective and which is why Tennessee and Kentucky is so nice because of the climate that gives us those, all the in and outs and the variance and the hills to hide in and the water.

Jeff (00:38:51):
But with all this variance afterwards, you've got to be, it's, you don't have to have 50 different recipes to make a lot of different styles of whiskey. That's in the blending art form. And so we settled on what's our favorite Kentucky whiskeys and Kentucky bourbons and our favorite other styles and things people are doing, you know, can take the same recipe and make it at 10 different distilleries and it's going to taste 10 different ways. So we learned that there is a lot of fluff to the marketing, but we said, what do we like and what do we not like? And so I've always been a weeded fan, I think, because selling maker's Mark right out of college and being part of that growth and seeing it, and I was just, I've always been a Maker's Mark ambassador, still love still. I love their 46 program, a big fan of their 46 program.

Jeff (00:39:43):
It shows another way of you don't have to change your mash bill to create a whole nother slew of flavors. Right, exactly. And then want to do a weeder recipe because of that. Always been a big fan of four roses, doing two mash peels with four yeast drains and show him what the yeast can do and how he doesn't pump up the specific gravity and tries to leave more residual sugars. And I've always liked how his rise, not just what I call a fighting whiskey. There's some that I just call fighting whiskeys. If you're drinking, put your hair up, guns out. But his has those spiced stones, but it's also got a lot of fruits and other things that I've loved that I love. And so we kind of settled on those two styles if we're going to do a high RI one to have that spice and fruit mixture.

Jeff (00:40:37):
And then if we're going to do a wheated, it's got to be a traditional wheated with nut crack and banana nut bread and graham cracker and all that, and the brown sugar. So that was easy. We were like, all right, we're going to do it. We eat a recipe and we're going to do a high rye recipe. We knew we had to do a Tennessee whiskey being in Tennessee, so we tested him. Why not? Since nobody else could do it. Exactly. Yeah. And so we decided, when we did charcoal mellowing testing, we found that the wheat just didn't stand up very well to it. Wheat is a neutral grain. It needs the barrel, which is why wheat can go longer in the barrel, at least, this is my opinion. Sorry, this isn't fact. But when you go into, were charcoal mellowing it, because it was so neutral, it was picking up so much of that sugar maple.

Jeff (00:41:28):
It pulls the flavors from everything else in. And it was also taking what fu soils were coming through and kind of just blanding it out. And so it kind of tasted bland to us. And then the rye obviously can stand up to a barrel. So that's why we settled. Okay. The high rye is going to be our Tennessee whiskey and the wheated is going to be our bourbon. And then I've always been a rye whiskey pan. I love a good for cocktails. That's always my cocktail whiskey. I drink bourbon pretty much neater on the rocks if I'm making a Manhattan or if I'm making a old fashioned, I've always liked rye. I don't know why I, I think it stands up better cocktail character, the

Drew (00:42:07):
Earlies to it.

Jeff (00:42:08):
So with that, we're like, everybody loves us 95 5 from mgp. So obviously we reached out to Larry Ebersol and we came down and we created our own. But we said, look, we change it up a little bit. So we do a hundred percent rye, but we do 90% rye, 10% malted rye, and we're going to do 95 5. But what we found is malted rye instead of when we replace malted, the malted barley with malted rye. Yeah, rye doesn't have the enzymatic power of malted, so we had to up it a little bit. So it's really kind of, so our rye kind of leans towards the MGP rye because we love that one. Our bourbon leans towards the makers are weller because we love those weed of bourbons. And then our Tennessee whiskey kind of leans towards the four roses style. And so not that we're copying them, we kind of took what we liked about each one, but we did also do differences. Obviously we charcoal mellow or awry. Our bourbon is definitely a higher wheat content than the makers are weller because we do get more wood extraction here. So we wanted to, so

Drew (00:43:05):
Do, actually, your high rye is the one that you charcoal mellow. Yes. You don't, don't charcoal mellow than a hundred percent

Jeff (00:43:11):
Rye. No, we don't charcoal the rye a hundred percent rye or the bourbon. We only charcoal mell to Tennessee whiskey. But because we also learned here from going and visiting with Jack, they showed us the barrel STAs and how their barrel staves. The soap climbs almost an eighth inch farther than Woodford because they own both brands because the climate is that much different, just 300 miles away. So we definitely upped our wheat to stand up. We also toast all our barrels. Everybody's a toasted barrel. All our barrels are toasted. That's just part of our thing here.

Drew (00:43:43):
You're toasting and charring or

Jeff (00:43:45):
Toasting and charring. All our barrels are toasted and charred because we go farther into the wood here and we're in a big bowl in Tennessee. It just gets humid and hot it feels like every day.

Drew (00:43:56):
I guess there's especially right now, pretty warm.

Jeff (00:43:59):
Yeah. I played golf this weekend for the first time. I'm just sitting out there. Oh, can't even breathe.

Drew (00:44:03):
You can see I got a sunburn yesterday, so

Jeff (00:44:05):
It's like 85 degrees. It's not even that hot, but you just couldn't breathe. It's like breathing in a sauna. So we definitely toast and char and we, as we upped our wheat content in our bourbon to offset some of that as well. We also use Tennessee white corn instead of feed corn. We've really focused on, with bourbon's 51% corn. The

Drew (00:44:28):
Corn is in corn,

Jeff (00:44:29):
Better be good. And I think the big guys, they have contract farmers who make their corn a certain way, but we really believe that there's, the corn is, that's your base. So we, we've partnered with the farm, well, all of our grain comes from local, but we really decided to do all Tennessee white corn, really excited. Our farmer actually grew heirloom blue corn for us this year. So we're actually doing our first blue corn. Really? Oh, interesting. We're actually doing, one won't be out for probably five or six years, but we do a, it's a blue corn, white Tennessee, white sory, and Tennessee red winter wheat. So it's going to be our red, white, and blue bourbon. Well,

Drew (00:45:03):
I, I'll say for Texas whiskey and Balcones, they do a blue corn whiskey. And that's probably my favorite in their line because it's just a really nice easy drinking whiskey.

Jeff (00:45:16):
That's where we actually got, when I tasted that, because I think that's the difference between us and most other bourbons. I think the Tennessee white corn, it's got more starch, it's got a little bit more sweetness. It leaves behind more residual sugar, which I think turns into a little bit more of those fruit forward flavors and not, when I say fruit forward, I'm looking for the dried fruits, not the bright ripe fruits. Yeah. So a real big believer in corn, four Roses has two different recipes. You got two different mash fields, and we didn't have the space. We wanted do three recipes of weeded rye and a bourbon. We do malt whiskeys and other things. We let guys go back there. We do 20, 30 barrels a year of just test stuff that we play around with. But those are the ones we do incremental. Every 17 cooks. 17 cooks, 17 cooks over and over and over.

Jeff (00:46:04):
But I was actually reading a book, I was trying to remember the book. It was a Chuck Cattery book, and it was talking about, it was going to the history of bourbon, and there was a section there where it talked about the Elijah Craig always claiming to be the first bourbon that used corn, rye and malt. And he had found something. It was like the Eli Mason papers, the third papers or something, I can't remember. But there was a thing that predated the Elijah Craig, and it was called the Pennington Method. And it said the recipe was a sweet mash recipe instead of sour mash. But when I looked at the recipe and the breakdown, it was right in between the four roses, mash peels,

Drew (00:46:45):
How convenient. I was like, well,

Jeff (00:46:48):
I can't prove it's from me, but it's got my name on it. So we test tested that and ran it and we loved it. It was a very low malt, high rye, high corn. And for us, the malt is not a flavor profile well than bourbon. It is. Bourbon is higher, but in the rye and a Tennessee whiskey, it's, it's very low. It's just there for the enzymatic power. We want the rye and the corn to come out for it. So it was like, here is 70% corn, 25% rye, 5% malt. It was kind of right in between those two and it fit the style we were going after. And

Drew (00:47:21):
It has your

Jeff (00:47:21):
Name on it and it has her name on it. So one day I'm going to spend some money on ancestry.com because I know our family. I can trace this back here about three or four generations in Middle Tennessee. Yeah, I'm sure there's probably some point in time, but I do know there's a lot of Pennington's that's from England and Scotland that kind of came over. So it's hard to trace it back. But one day we were talking about this earlier. One day I'm going to do the ancestry thing and figure out how to tie it all in.

Drew (00:47:43):
See if you can get a connection. Good luck in whiskey history, because there's so much of that early history that it's easy for you to come up with these legends because there's really no way to prove whether it's true or not. Well,

Jeff (00:47:55):
It's funny. I mean, I can prove that our family distilled, but what most people don't realize is in the late 18 hundreds, in the turn of 1900, everybody distilled it had a farm. If you had a farm, you had a still, I mean, I can't remember the exact number of stills in Tennessee, but it's in the hundreds at the turn of 1900. There's a one in just in Davidson County where Nashville is, there was 60 registered stills in 1900. There's like eight or nine now. Yeah.

Drew (00:48:25):
And there's a

Jeff (00:48:26):
Little few more people. Yeah. Yeah. That's just in Davidson County. Yeah, because it whiskey was an agricultural business. If you had farm and you had excess grain at the end of the year, what else are you going to do with it?

Drew (00:48:40):
Well, these were the days before railroads, or even once railroads started, people weren't really, your market was around you.

Jeff (00:48:49):
Exactly.

Drew (00:48:50):
And so you were selling everything to local, but that was a way to hold onto your grain and not lose that revenue and actually make more. I think that's what farmers found out was they actually made more off of selling the liquor.

Jeff (00:49:04):
My great-grandmother had a farm called Seven Springs, had seven springs on it, and it's actually now where Target is, our spring house is still there. It's still running and everything. I've just got to figure out how to get access to it. But yeah, she, that's what they do at the excess green. They distill it off and that's what give 'em through the winter. That was their Give it away to some friends. I don't know if they sold it, but yeah, I can. Everybody says, oh, my great great grandfather, my great-grandmother, or my great this or great aunt. I think anybody can tie themselves to distilling if they came from anywhere rural that had have farmed. Yeah.

Drew (00:49:42):
I was thinking in my own family, if that's possible. We came from a line of Taylors, so Oh yeah. They didn't have a need for distilling really at that point. And we came through Canada. Maybe there was a chance there, but

Jeff (00:49:56):
We did a lot of farm. My family had a lot of farms, Northern Alabama and southern Tennessee where the border is. Our family farm's still down there, and then southern in Williamson County. So I mean, that's what Tennessee was, it was agricultural. So it's always fun to say, oh, we had more stills in any state in the union prior to prohibition, the least after. But a lot of 'em were just farm stills. Yeah.

Drew (00:50:21):
Yeah. So you also do a four grain

Jeff (00:50:26):
Yes.

Drew (00:50:26):
Bourbon. Now is that a blend or is that

Jeff (00:50:31):
It's a blend of our Tennessee whiskey and our bourbon. Okay. So it is a bourbon by definition, but it has, it's our kind of unique one that we get to have fun with. It's, and that's going to be our red, white, and blue. Yeah, actually, cause we're going to do white with blue corn because it's a blue label. Eventually we'll switch over to that. But what happened was we, in 2017, we had released, we were tasting through some of the barrels and profiling barrels. Cause every time when barrels turn two and four and five and six, we pull samples and we kind of profile and we put 'em into different categories. Like, oh, it's a blend. We have for all of our brands. We have three or four different blending characteristics. So we have our own keywords. It's a caramel barrel or it's a grapefruit IPA barrel or a this barrel.

Jeff (00:51:27):
And then if it's a single barrel, we'll classify as a single barrel. It's like, man, it's really death. It's got a lot of depth. And unfortunately sometimes you get a blending of a whisper creek barrels or that needs more age. Yeah. There's always a, and then you get a dead barrel, it's empty. That's always sad. I never realized that was a real thing until we harvest evaporate. There was just the way the whole thing would evaporate. Yeah. So I called a couple distillers, big guys. Oh yeah, about one out of a hundred. I was like, whoa. I was like, that seems like a lot. So we were profiling and we're profiling rye, the a hundred percent rye. We're like, oh my gosh, these barrels are delicious. And we found about 20 barrels that were like, these are ready. Cause we always said it's not a minimum time whenever it's ready. And the honest answer is when we needed cash flow. I mean if the longer I go now the Tennessee whiskey, I think probably six to eight years will be the sweet spot. I don't think we'll really want to go much. You can go older. Yeah. I love 12 and 15 and 20 year old. I don't really love them. I love Weller 12. Yeah. I'm not a big fan of super aged whiskeys of bur American whiskeys. Again,

Drew (00:52:34):
It comes down to the weeded ones seem to be the ones

Jeff (00:52:36):
That, because they could stand up time. Yeah. I feel like one you can over oak whiskey. So to me, I think the Tennessee whiskey will probably never be much older than eight. But man, that a hundred percent rye just, it picked up the flavors of the barrel and it just mellowed out so well. We're like, these are ready. And so we released about 20 barrels. We did 'em just as single barrels. Cause we didn't want to try to create a blend that we had to recreate. Right. And we sold it out so quick. We're like, oh shoot, now we got the name out there a little early. What are we going to do for another year or two? Because I didn't want to sell anything before four years old. So we're like, what can we do? So we, you know what, we could do a four grain.

Jeff (00:53:15):
So we kind of create four grain that we could do with the Tennessee whiskey and the bourbon. And we had barrels that we had blended already. So we're like, all right. So we kind of count with that. And the unique thing about that is every batch is a little different. That's our goal. To make the most balanced whiskey. But surprisingly, nobody really knew for grain. I mean, Taylor had a fore grain, but there wasn't a lot of other grain bourbons out there. But our fore grain's been really, it does. It sells just as well as the bourbon and Tennessee whiskey Shocking league. So yeah, I love it. It's our way of making a balanced whiskey. I

Drew (00:53:47):
Had to scratch my head in South Carolina where I live, a local distillery came out with five grain bourbon. And I went, is that legal? And I thought I had to look it up. And then as long as

Jeff (00:53:59):
50%

Drew (00:53:59):
Corn, he used as many.

Jeff (00:54:01):
I think Derek, Derek won a Whiskey of the Year one time for one called Insane in the Grain. I think it had 13 or 14 different grains. Really? Yeah.

Drew (00:54:09):
Okay. Wow. He

Jeff (00:54:10):
Could never recreate it because he could never get the same grains again. Exactly. Good. It was called Insane in the Grain.

Drew (00:54:15):
So when I did your tour, after the tour was over, I was looking at, I was doing the tasting and I was determined through the whole tour that I was going to buy the rye because I said for me, I love rye and I definitely rye without the corn influence. And so that was the one that I was going to get. And after doing the tasting, I walked out with the four grain. Yeah, really? I did. Yeah.

Jeff (00:54:40):
That's one of the reasons we did the ride with a hundred percent, you know, can add 49% corn to it. And it ups the level. It's yes, the corn adds some viscosity and some sweetness and stuff like that. But I think it

Drew (00:54:53):
Also adds to the burn.

Jeff (00:54:54):
Yeah. The neck tie. Yeah. Tie. But it also ups the yield tremendously. Right. I mean, rye costs us three times the amount in grain and it gives us half the yield. So you know, can throw some corn in. It's like the old sugar shiners. Throw a little sugar in. You can add it up. Yeah. I think that was one of the reasons Rye. But what we've found, because we pot distill everything is we get a good viscosity and we get some sweetness through and just about everything. Cause we don't have the technology that Buffalo Trace and Jim Beam and Jack Daniels have, they're getting every ounce they can of conversion out. Right? Yeah. They've got the blenders to blend the flavors on the backside and they've got the Sure. Mass amount of barrels to make a consistent whiskey. I mean, the fact that you can buy those brands anywhere in the world and they taste the same. I don't think people give that enough credit

Drew (00:55:44):
Mean Exactly.

Jeff (00:55:45):
But for us, we don't, not able to get every ounce of sugar converted every, I mean we're small so we get that viscosity. So what we found at that rise, that rise actually got a body to it without the corn influence. And so that was a big thing to me was to not have corn in it.

Drew (00:56:03):
And you don't chill filter.

Jeff (00:56:05):
We don't chill filter any our

Drew (00:56:06):
Whiskey. And I think that's a difference too. Cause big guys,

Jeff (00:56:08):
If you're below 90 proof, you probably probably should. Because what we've learned is if you do something below 90 proof when it gets cold, the It's cloudy. It gets cloudy, the corn hates. But

Drew (00:56:19):
See, I'm trying to educate people with scotch. If your scotch goes cloudy, that's a good thing. Yeah. Because what it's saying is that you're, it's not been chill filtered. And so you're getting all of those natural oils that are in there. They're not being stripped away as you're running it through the chill filtering

Jeff (00:56:39):
Process. I'm interested to see, I've always been a scotch. Scotch is obviously the grandfather or great-grandfather. Great triple great-grandfather of whiskey, right? Yeah. I mean Tennessee and Kentucky, we were mostly Scotch and Ida, Irish settlers that came over from the WHI building, they came over the mountains. They said, oh, we got all these places to hide. And they found in the mountains, they brought the tradition with them. But I'm really interested to see how Buffalo trace's temp control room does with super aged whiskeys. I don't know if you've done much.

Drew (00:57:08):
No, no

Jeff (00:57:09):
I haven't. I've read about it. But they built this whole warehouse where they're going to try to make a very tempered climate like Scotland. Yeah. Because that's the thing, we've got the great ways to make whiskey quicker. Yeah. I guess you could say, I hate that word, where the whiskey goes in and out cause you've got those changes in volatility. But what

Drew (00:57:25):
Will bourbon do over a long period of time in the condition that you would,

Jeff (00:57:30):
It's not pushed all the way out right into the wood. So I'm really interested now I don't have the money to do that, so I'm glad they're

Drew (00:57:35):
Doing it. Absolutely. Yeah. We, we'll all learn from it. Yeah, exactly. And then you can just keep it in your house somewhere. Yeah. Yeah.

Jeff (00:57:44):
Unfortunately it might be 20 years before you read about it, but I'm young enough to know. Well

Drew (00:57:47):
That's true. That's true. So you are Pennington, I see Speakeasy spirits as a name also associated and Davidson Reserve. How do you fight the challenge of all the different names that you have going on?

Jeff (00:58:04):
Originally, the reason speakeasy Spirits, our corporate name is Speakeasy Spirits. When we were starting this and doing a business plan, we started a company called Speakeasy Marketing. And that's where we did sales for other brands. And still my wife still runs that company. It's still, we do promotions and activations for the big companies. So we walked a fine line for a while doing promotions and marketing for the big still do for the big companies while we played distillery over here. We also Money by just changing, we use the same logo instead of speakeasy marketing speakeasy spirits. Right? Yeah. When you're a bootstrapper and you don't, don't take venture money, you got to do what you can. So we did that and we purposely kind of separated the brands being that we are former distributors and sales reps. We look at the top 10, top 20, top 30 brands in the country. They all do one thing. Jack Daniels doesn't make vodka, but Cardi doesn't make whiskey. Bombay doesn't make rum. They all do one thing. Their distilleries make a bunch of stuff. You know, can go to Jim Beam, who I haven't heard of Jim Beam Vodka or Jim Beam G. But I promise you, if you go to their distiller, you're going to see gin vodka being maid. Well, they're

Drew (00:59:22):
Working on the American single malt now and other things.

Jeff (00:59:25):
But I mean they make vodkas and gins and bottle it there, but it's a different brand. So I think they've trained consumers that a brand does one thing. Well, and I don't know, the only brand I can ever think of that crossed over categories with Seagrams, back in the day they had Seagram's Whiskey, Seagram's Gin, Seagram's Vodka. That's the only brand I could really look at in the history since I've been alive, which is a very short history. But that's crossed over. And then I started looking at the craft brands, the ones that have made it Hans once again. Yeah. One thing. And once. But once again, that doesn't mean their distilleries didn't bottle or make other things. They just separated the brand. So they consumers' minds, this brand does this. It's a more expensive route to go cause you have to market each one.

Jeff (01:00:19):
But for us, that was a specific strategy for us. We looked around the country and there was a lot of craft distilleries. I think Red Mark Brown's report of 90% of, or it's like 92% of craft distillery sell less than 5,000 cases a year. I don't know how 92% of craft still survived, survived at that rate. Unless they're just a glorified, unless it's just a hobby or they've got a just it's glorified retail store where you're just keeping on the margin costs. They got a side hustle some, there's a side hustle going on somewhere. You're still doing, you're still keeping your day job. But a lot of these craft distilleries, it's one name across all their brands because it was easy like that. People say it's, I don't, I'm not accusing 'em of narcissism. It's not, I think it's just easier and less expensive to do that.

Jeff (01:01:06):
Right? But we look at, okay, well what if a whiskey person tastes your vodka? They're like, I don't like that. Or they would that influence them to not try your whiskey later? Or what if a vodka drinker drink your cream laur or your gin, they didn't like it because they're vodka drinkers. Would they not try your vodka later? And from us, the history of spirits shows, the answer is yes. People are very loyal to what they drink. People, especially in liquor, if you drink Kettle One, you're not a vodka drinker. You're a Kettle One drinker. Yeah. Bourbon's the first one in a while where people will drink all kinds of bourbons. Not everybody's going to have their favorite, but in gin, vodka rum, traditionally bourbon, you were a jack drinker. You know, typically drink a brand. And very rarely you say, you know what, I'm going to try their gin, I'm going to try their rum.

Jeff (01:01:57):
Cause it's just not what happened. So we specifically kind of kept our name out of it and we were brand, we've always wanted be seen as brand creators. That's what we like doing. My wife is a great, she designs and develop, does all the design and development of all the brands. So we always want to be speakeasy spirit sauce. Us is a brand company and so we specifically have Whisper Creek. We kind of have three pillars of our brands. We have Whisper Creek, which is our cream leor we're actually coming out with, you'll have to try it today before you leave our coffee Spiked coffees. Oh nice. Cool. We just caned 'em this weekend. It's actually, we co brew the coffee. Oh wow. It's real coffee. So it's a one cup of coffee and it's got a shot of whiskey in it. Nice. And we have pickers, which is our vodka line now we've got our vodka flavor vodkas, then we have our canned cocktails, and then we have Davidson Reserve, which is our whiskey line. We may create some other brands, some other labels of whiskey that might be sourced or other things in the future. We do have our crafted cordials, which is just a cordial line. Once again, we don't market that. That's something no one really pays attention to. It's fine, it's in the will. But once we started making vodka, we're like, well why can't we make Triple Sack?

Drew (01:03:04):
That's why people go to gin because I'm making vodka. Why didn't I make gin?

Jeff (01:03:07):
Yeah, I love it. I go to all these bars. My favorite thing in the world is going to the craft bar. And they're like, we don't sell flavor of vodka. I'm like, you've got 15 of 'em in the back bar. What are you talking about? Well, gin's flavored vodka. No it's not. I'm like, man, it is. But alright. And then we have our Walton's vodka, which is very small. We've got some smaller, very small craft micro brains. But the three pillars are those three. In 2014 when we redid this saying this neighborhood over here, you didn't come to, I mean when we signed the lease here in 2011, unless you wanted to get shot at night, you didn't come over to this neighborhood. This neighborhood flipped really fast, really quickly. And then Fat Bottom opened up and we decided to open up a tasting room.

Jeff (01:03:46):
Well, speakeasy Spirits doesn't say distillery. So we decided to make this campus Pennington Distilling Company. Okay. So the idea is if we do ever have another distillery or we separate it would might have another distilling name, kind of like Brown speaking. Sir is Brown Foreman, Jack Daniels is the distillery. Nice. It's kind of how he went. We're like, now that we're making whiskey, we're selling actual grainy bottle of whiskey and we're having a tasting room. We need a name that says Distillery. And so that's why we did a DBA for this Plant of Pennington Distilling Company later.

Drew (01:04:14):
The challenge is, and I get this with, I do Travel Fuels Life, I do whiskey lore, and then it's like, what do I put on a business card? Yeah, exactly. People would know. So I put it on both sides. But that whole kind of challenge of when somebody is doing a view on the Tennessee Whiskey Trail and saying, where does Davidson Reserve come from? The challenge is getting that connection between the two. We

Jeff (01:04:43):
We're, we're going to fight that for a while and we might always fight, but it's fun because some people come here for Davidson. Y'all make pickers. My wife loves pickers. Or some people come here for pickers, y'all make Davidson. And it's like, yeah. But we always want to be brand first because we do a lot more traditional distribution from a craft distillery than most craft distilleries. 2020 was actually good to us because our retail tasting room was less than 5% of our total revenue. Where most distilleries, it's probably, it's at least double digits if not most. 40, 50, 60. Some of 'em, 80, 90%. A lot of 'em depend on that event business and that tasting room business. We've all, being that we are all former distributors, we really focus on distribution. You don't make as good a margins, but you get better. You get farther distribution out there. Well, when you're in a liquor store, nobody cares what's still where it's made.

Jeff (01:05:40):
I think the brands have shown that they, 90% of consumers don't know where any brands are made. Yeah. They'd be shocked if they did. What do you mean? All these brands come from Connecticut? Well, they know they, DHAs got a big bottling plant there. So we really wanted to be brand spec, brand oriented, which then paid off last year because last year when nobody was doing tours or tastings, guess what? Boomed? Retail liquor. And so that paid dividends for us last year. But now we are really heavily focused this year on growing that side of the business. So constantly fighting that battle. How do we relate Davidson to here and pickers to here instead of just Pennington selling company. So it will be an ongoing challenge.

Drew (01:06:25):
Well thank you for taking the mask off of some of these things about Tennessee coming back into the whiskey industry and helping me understand that a little bit more.

Jeff (01:06:37):
It'll be

Drew (01:06:37):
Fun. Cause it's tricky to work through all of that.

Jeff (01:06:40):
And it's going to be fun though. It's fun now that you've got so many brands that have their own distillate coming out. And I think of more coming, I can't wait till the day. It might be too far in the future that we're going to have a Tennessee whiskey back barge. Not maybe not as big as Kentucky Bourbon, but we're going to start having our own and having our own lists. I remember back in the day when Jack would be on the bourbon list and you'd be like, it's not bourbon.

Drew (01:07:03):
Oh, that argument. Oh gosh. Yeah.

Jeff (01:07:06):
It is bourbon. But they specifically wanted to be separated. And so now I think we're going to have our own list soon and we are, you're already seeing it. But yeah, when it starts spreading out to other states, it's going to be fun. Yeah.

Drew (01:07:18):
Well thank you very much for your time. I appreciate you walking me through all of this and really getting a sense of what you guys are doing. And now maybe people will make that connection between Pennington to, let me go do a trip over there so I can learn more about Davidson Reserve.

Jeff (01:07:33):
Yeah, please come by. It's open Tuesday through Sunday, 11 to five. A little shout out for that. So we just opened that up. We were only open a couple days a week till this year, so please come by any day. We got a great tour group out there. Chris and his team will walk you through and do a tasting. It's a lot of fun.

Drew (01:07:49):
Well, I wish you the most success and I will be back in Nashville often since so much more whiskey here than there used to be. So yeah.

Jeff (01:07:58):
Awesome. Thank you. It's cheers.

Drew (01:08:00):
Cheers. And if you want to schedule tours or learn more about Davidson Reserve, just head to davidson reserve.com. And if you enjoyed this interview, make sure that you subscribe to this all new podcast. And if you can't get enough of whiskey history, check out the original Whiskey Lore podcast on your favorite app. Find show notes, transcripts, social media, links, books and swag, all@whiskeylord.com. And you can support this independent podcast by joining the Whiskey Lore Society at patreon.com/whiskey. I'm your host, drew Hamish. And until next time, cheers and SL JVA whiskey lords of production of Travel Fuel's Life, L L C.