Ep. 105 - The Real History of Pre-Prohibition Texas Whiskey

Transcript

Drew Hannush (00:00.826)
Welcome to Whiskey Lord, The Interviews. I'm your host, Drew Hanisch, the Amazon bestselling author of Whiskey Lord's Travel Guide to Experiencing Irish Whiskey and Whiskey Lord's Travel Guide to Experiencing Kentucky Bourbon. And today I'm excited to have somebody on who has gone through what I am going through right now in terms of doing a lot of research and trying to tell the story of an industry and a state's heritage in distilling that really hasn't been covered that much. So we're gonna...

talk a little bit first about his distillery. He's the co-founder of Still Austin Whiskey Company in Austin, Texas, and also the author of Fires, Floods, Explosions, and Bloodshed, A History of Tennessee Whiskey. Andrew Braunberg is with us. Welcome, Andrew.

Andrew Braunberg (00:50.914)
Drew, you really do have Tennessee on your mind. Texas Whiskey.

Drew Hannush (00:56.167)
Did I say? Okay, there you go. Texas, right? I do have to say. That's because that's all I've been looking at for the last five months. So yeah.

Andrew Braunberg (00:57.302)
You said tennis things. Believe me, I feel your pain. I feel your pain. But it's great to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

Drew Hannush (01:10.518)
Oh, it's great to have you on and boy, you know, I don't know how I stumbled into your book, but I stumbled into it a couple of, probably a week ago. And I was, I guess I was doing a search maybe on Texas in general. And then I ended up seeing this because I've done enough searches for whiskey books that I guess Amazon just figured I must really want to read this book. And lo and behold, I did want to read this book because as soon as I started getting into it, I was really,

Andrew Braunberg (01:25.184)
Mm-hmm.

Drew Hannush (01:40.29)
amazed at the amount of research that you've done. And as I say, there's really not been a book on Texas whiskey that goes pre-prohibition and dives into the origins. So I'm excited to talk with you about that. But first, let's talk a little bit about how you got into this whiskey business. So, still Austin, it's a...

I am always attracted by the beautiful bottles when I see them and the artwork on them. And so it's always been a curiosity to me, but I have not yet tasted your whiskey. So yeah, exactly. So tell me how you got into this business.

Andrew Braunberg (02:13.206)
Yeah, welcome on down. Yeah.

Yeah, well, I guess first of all, I should say I'm not a native Texan. The only one of the co-founders who was not born in Texas, my wife was in Amarillo. And it was two other families. One couple, another couple that were Austinites. And then a father-son team. The son at the time was living in Amarillo and the father was living in East Texas.

Kind of a long story how we all got together, but we did around 2013. Interestingly, my wife and I had only been back into Texas for not even a year when we met this other couple and just kind of fell into it. I'd had a long history as kind of a Scotch fan, I guess I should say.

had just, you know, maybe around 2010 or so had kind of stumbled into the whole craft movement in the US. And the idea of regional variants of American whiskey just really, really appealed to me. You know, the idea of just kind of how, you know, could this kind of be like Skyland where there are some differentiations depending on, you know, some of the...

Drew Hannush (03:29.691)
Mm.

Andrew Braunberg (03:38.326)
the environmental and other, the process factors you're putting into it. And that was kind of the real, you know, for me personally, that was the hook that got me kind of sucked in and got in and got still Austin. We opened our doors in about 2017, I guess, and it's been chugging along ever since.

Drew Hannush (04:01.466)
Very nice. So talk a little bit about the distillery itself. If we were coming to visit, are you a column still? Are you hybrid still? Are you pot stills?

Andrew Braunberg (04:12.97)
Yeah, for the whiskey side of the house, we're a column. We're kind of a midsize. If we're running a shift a day on that column, it's about, it's Scottish, but it's probably about a 15 inch diameter to give folks an idea. So we'd put out maybe, you could do maybe six barrels a day would be pretty good production area if you're running.

So it's a fair size operation. We had a little pot still we were doing our gin on as well. So the portfolio was you know all Texas grain based whiskeys and so you know a weighted bourbon, a rye bourbon, a full rye, an oated bourbon. I mean you know if you're going to start a distillery and only use the grains that you're you know from your state,

Texas is a fantastic place. I mean, it beats Rhode Island, I'm sure. You know what I mean? There's no, there's really no grain that we can't pull from and give it the full Texas, 100% Texas sourced, right? And yeah, so yeah, pretty, I'd say, you know, right now in Texas, there's probably three or four columns up and running. Most of the others being quite a bit bigger than.

Drew Hannush (05:09.428)
Mm.

You got land.

Andrew Braunberg (05:35.574)
then still Austin's calm.

Drew Hannush (05:38.098)
So what was the first Texas whiskey you sampled? Do you remember?

Andrew Braunberg (05:43.242)
Yeah, it would have been one of the early Balcones because they were the first guys out of the shoot. It was probably the baby blue. Yeah, it was probably that old Balcones baby blue up in Waco, yeah. And you know, it's funny now because well, those guys have gone through so much in their evolution. But you know, the number of Texas whiskey distilleries now is...

Drew Hannush (05:55.511)
Okay.

Drew Hannush (06:11.508)
Ha ha

Andrew Braunberg (06:11.944)
I've lost count of someone else, 80 at least. It is crazy.

Drew Hannush (06:16.274)
That's crazy. I know I wrote a book on Kentucky whiskey and Kentucky bourbon and their distilleries. And I wrote it in 2019 and there were, I think I have 42, 43, something like that, distilleries that I visited and said, okay, I know there's some other ones that I haven't been to, but just like a handful. And now I talk to my friends and they're like, well, I mean, there's over 80 now. And I'm going, I don't know how.

As an author, I'm going to be able to keep up with a trail that's growing that quickly, but everywhere it just seems to be exploding.

Andrew Braunberg (06:51.302)
It's crazy. You know you've kind of hit the weirdness when every Hollywood celebrities kind of got his name or her name tied to a spirit at this point. It's like, yeah, it's starting to feel a little wobbly to me, but you know, we'll see.

Drew Hannush (07:00.562)
Hahaha

Drew Hannush (07:07.842)
Yeah. So how do you, in that kind of environment, keep yourself viable and make sure that you're moving forward?

Andrew Braunberg (07:17.226)
Well, I mean, the plan, we want kind of big early, you know, we raised a lot of money and you know, that's its own animal there not, you know, not possible in every location. But we the dynamics of the kind of Texas spirits, I mean, so, you know, Texas was late to whiskey. The early guy in Texas was Tito, right, Megan Baca, and that goes back to the mid 90s. And he was pretty far ahead of that curve.

I mean, making, yeah, I mean, way ahead actually thinking about making, you know, Kraft Baca. What the hell does that even mean, right? And then he makes it into Hot Wheels. What does that mean? You know, but hey, more power too. The guy, you know, Fortune 400 now, so the guy's killing it. But the whiskey guys came later. Chip, Tate, Up and Wayko, we mentioned Balcones and Dan Garrison out in high with Garrison Brothers. And so, you know.

Drew Hannush (07:50.88)
Yeah.

Drew Hannush (07:55.242)
Uh... Heheheheheheheheh...

Yeah.

Andrew Braunberg (08:17.506)
uh the um the those were in the in the mid you know 20 2006-7 right and so but since then uh it's uh well I should back up then uh you couldn't have a tasting room associated with your distillery okay so that was just a stay-law so those early guys in you know there was really no

Drew Hannush (08:39.27)
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Braunberg (08:48.194)
to cite yourself anywhere but in kind of a lower cost place for doing business, right? So they tended to be more rural, even though I say that, and that was generally true, but it wasn't true about Chip Tape, who was set up in Waco, but in a very low-key, small, literally under a bridge, you know, right? Yeah, right? Yeah. So, so.

Drew Hannush (09:00.446)
Hehehe

Drew Hannush (09:06.054)
I have seen, they drove me by there when I went to visit. I'm like, wow, you guys have changed. Ha ha ha.

Andrew Braunberg (09:13.254)
Impressing customers was not part of the deal because you couldn't have customers, right? But in 2013, I think, right when we were starting to get, right before we started trying to get still Austin together, they changed the law so you could have a tasting room. And as I think most of your audience probably knows, the margins at selling from your tasting room are much improved from going through three-tier and ending up being sold in a

Drew Hannush (09:38.168)
Mm.

Andrew Braunberg (09:41.37)
and a liquor store or a bar. So there's a lot of incentive to try to have a nice tasting room and enough people to fill it, which is why we went to the trouble of setting up in Austin proper. So we get a little controversy from some of our friends in the business about if we were really the first distillery in Austin. Well, I can tell you.

As far as the Austin Fire Department's concerned, we are absolutely the first distillery that ended up in Austin. It took us three full years to get through Austin Fire, but we think it was worth it because it really would now. Austin's kind of grown even in just the five or six years we've been open. Austin's just, we set up in South Austin.

Drew Hannush (10:12.038)
Ahahaha

Andrew Braunberg (10:33.514)
For folks who know Austin, just south of Ben White, it's called the St. Elmo district now, very fancy. Wasn't when we moved in. And you know, so I think, it's a long way of saying, I think we kind of built local support from the very beginning, and it's kind of landed and expand, but we really landed and tried to win Austin. And I think we made a lot of friends in Austin, so we're doing well as far as that goes.

Drew Hannush (10:59.874)
It's interesting to see how these claims of firsts, that's something that I've been fighting in my book. I said at the very beginning, I said, I'm not going to try to claim firsts in this book. I'm going to just tell you when these things started. Somebody's gonna come along and dispel my firsts sooner or later, but it's funny, even when I was in Ireland, there was a little squabble over who filled the first barrel in Donegal.

Andrew Braunberg (11:15.787)
Yes.

Drew Hannush (11:25.522)
You know, and because their industry is just really starting to kick up right now too. So it's recent and I've talked to both and those barrels are still aging and they're waiting to, they haven't gotten to the three years yet. So it's, that's how new that industry is. But yeah, there is this real desire. Some parts of me, I'm like, I wish people would actually be more concerned with the quality rather than the fact that they're first.

Andrew Braunberg (11:30.28)
Yeah.

Andrew Braunberg (11:35.395)
Yeah.

Andrew Braunberg (11:41.966)
Interesting.

Andrew Braunberg (11:53.942)
Yeah, that's a whole other conversation, Drew.

Drew Hannush (11:56.102)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So talk about when you got there and you started distilling. I have never been to Austin. I have been near it, but I've never actually been to Austin. Weather-wise, what are the challenges you deal with? I would assume heat, but I mean, is it humid or?

Andrew Braunberg (12:17.354)
Yeah, well, as far as actual distillation and being in the back of the house here, yeah, heat's your main problem. And obviously now in modern refrigeration, you can handle that. It's tough on the personnel, but we would keep our fermenters set, I think, just to keep them below about 90 Fahrenheit for fermentation. And then...

Otherwise, you know, it's manageable. You know, there's a reason why distilling used to be a seasonal occupation though, I can tell you that, man. Spring, fall is a good idea. But then as far as the kind of concerns, it's really more in the Rick house, right? I mean, how does that heat? And in Texas, you know, we're central Texas in Austin. So we're kind of like, I don't know, it seems...

It's hotter, but humidity-wise, it probably feels a lot like it does back east for folks on the East Coast. Now, if you're in El Paso or out there, you're dealing with a lot drier conditions. It's like a lot of the guys in New Mexico are dealing with. But if you're east of us, like in Houston, you're dealing with even more humidity. You know, so it's hard to say, you know, I can't speak for the whole state, but for

Drew Hannush (13:32.418)
Mm.

Andrew Braunberg (13:38.058)
For Austin, the humidity's manageable from a Rick House perspective, and it's more a matter of just like, all right, well, I'll give you an example. I was just tasting some, about five-year-old, we whiskey barrels a couple of weekends ago. And they were fully 50% down angel share after only. Yeah, right, and it's like, damn, man, that's.

Drew Hannush (14:03.24)
Wow.

Andrew Braunberg (14:07.262)
That seems excessive, you know. I didn't even have a meter with me, so, because we were out anyway. And so I'm not sure what the proof was. And so that's always a question around, you know, humidity kind of will affect if you're losing more water, losing, you know, whether your proof's going up or down and the barrel as the angel's share leaves. But just from,

Drew Hannush (14:09.074)
Yeah.

Andrew Braunberg (14:32.738)
taste in it, I think we relive some more water than alcohol. But that gives you an example. I mean, again, five years isn't that old. But to kind of answer your question a little more, is five or six years plenty in Texas, just given the heat problem? And I'm gonna say, I'm kind of thinking you're not gonna see a lot of Texas whiskies. They get up much older than that because just even economically, it becomes kind of prohibited.

Drew Hannush (14:59.93)
Yeah, yeah. Well, I wondered too, because Scotland deals with the issue of sometimes getting their whiskeys too low proof. They have to watch and make sure as they age that the proof doesn't drop below 40%. Do you find the elevation of your proof gets a little out of hand on the upper end?

Andrew Braunberg (15:07.095)
Yeah.

Andrew Braunberg (15:19.218)
I think that's probably true. I should mention that still Austin is one of the, we follow the Nancy Fraley blending ethos, which is very tied to French brandy production. And that's what she calls an Elabodge program. And so we kind of do the extra work of keeping our eye on those barrels and kind of doing a slow.

Drew Hannush (15:36.38)
Mm.

Andrew Braunberg (15:47.822)
proof reduction on them. And so the reasoning there is that depending on the type of spirit, you know, let's say it's a bourbon, there'd even be a difference if it was a weeded or a high rye. As far as kind of the tipping point on barrel proof, as far as whether you're extracting more tannins or more sugars from the barrel.

And it's interesting, you know, it's kind of a way where you can mature your whiskeys a little faster. If it's more work, but you can keep an eye on that. Typically, you'd want to bring that proof down so you're extracting more of the sugars and not getting such a... you're getting as much wood, if you will, which unless you really age it out, it's harder to kind of smooth out, if that makes sense.

Drew Hannush (16:44.41)
Yeah, yeah. It's always interesting to hear the challenges. I just came back from Colorado and talking to them and it gets really, well it was funny because when I was there, one day it was 94 degrees and 16% humidity, the next day it was 54 and pouring rain all day. And it's like, ah, you know, I mean, Kentucky talks about their swings and temperatures but man, when you're out there on the prairie, it can get a little crazy.

Andrew Braunberg (17:00.471)
Yeah.

Andrew Braunberg (17:06.838)
Yeah.

Andrew Braunberg (17:12.682)
Yeah, I'm of the opinion that blenders don't get near the love. You know, everybody wants to talk to the master distiller, but it's the master blender that really deserves a lot of the, you know, success or failure, you know, often falls on that blender.

Drew Hannush (17:23.614)
Heh. Heh heh.

Yeah.

Well before we dive into talking about your book, it's been curious to me what the inspiration was for your bottles. Does this have anything to do with Birth of Venus painting?

Andrew Braunberg (17:46.186)
You know, I honestly I've kind of lost track through we I haven't been day to day over there in a couple of years since I started writing the book. I think you know, it was it was originally I know tied to kind of just a musical heritage of Boston. And then I think it took a couple of turns. I think I've lost track of the turns that it took. I mean, I know people like them. Maybe I should I should figure that out or ask somebody but you know, honestly, I don't know.

Drew Hannush (18:05.042)
Hehehehe

Drew Hannush (18:14.274)
Yeah. So, so how did you all of a sudden end up in this position of writing a book? Have you, have you written a book before? How did this one come about?

Andrew Braunberg (18:25.47)
Yeah, no, I mean, I've got a long history as an industry analyst, mostly doing cyber security work. And so I write for a living, for the most part, talk a little too. But hadn't written a book, hadn't written a history. I'm kind of, you know, I think, you know, averagely intelligent, but maybe a little more curious than some folks. And certainly, you know, always like

willing to dig into something if it kind of piques my interest. And it's certainly true, I think, generally, about history. But as I started, I was working from kind of construction up until we got our first barrels out. I was kind of running the back of the house, not as the head distiller, but more as a COO kind of role. And one of the things, working with our head distiller, John, we really did want to understand.

Drew Hannush (19:16.966)
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Braunberg (19:24.686)
It goes back to regionality, right? It goes back to like, okay, well, I wonder what folks were making back in the day in Texas when we're kind of grains they were using. Well, you got to know what was being grown back then, right? And so, you know, even when I was working there full time, I was really trying to figure out, you know, can we find some old agricultural records? Can we get...

you know, like a lot of soft winter weeks, for example, you know, things you know people were distilling. And so that was something, you know, I was kind of always a little side project I had. Well come, you know, after we open though, and you know, things start to calm down and you start to get a little more, you know, you put yourself out there a little more, you got a little more time maybe I should say to get a little more inventive and, you know.

I read an article in Texas Monthly, which is a big monthly in Texas, big surprise. And it had an article, and this was just when we opened, I don't know, around 2017, about the big Texas whiskey boom, right? You know, cool, you know, yeah. Well, hey, I'm glad they noticed, right? But they had a quote in there from a very well-known whiskey historian, who I won't name, that said,

Drew Hannush (20:28.433)
Hehe.

Drew Hannush (20:41.391)
Yeah.

Andrew Braunberg (20:50.034)
a Kentucky guy who said, Texas never had a whiskey history at all. There was never a registered distillery in Texas. And so I thought to myself, you know, I thought two things. One, bullshit. Yeah, you know, no. And two, was there literally no one in Texas they could ask this question to? Why? You know, I mean, I get the whole Kentucky thing, you know? OK, there's a lot of experts over there, but.

Drew Hannush (21:03.558)
Hahaha

Andrew Braunberg (21:17.39)
Clearly this person doesn't know the answer to this question because I mean, I didn't know anything at that point as far as sexist history goes, but I knew that was wrong. I mean, there was just, right? I mean, there's no way that was true. And as it ends up, it wasn't true. And you know, that was another kind of thing that got me, you know, all right, now I'm gonna figure this out and you know.

Drew Hannush (21:29.629)
Yeah.

Drew Hannush (21:39.066)
You think logically that you have, because there's a lot of influx of people from Tennessee moving into Texas in those years. So you've got people who are already, probably have some distilling background, but also the fact that how are they getting the whiskey? We see, now of course, most of the old west that we think of, we think of probably in the eight, after the Civil War, probably is when most of that, gun fights and the rest, we think more about that from that time period.

Andrew Braunberg (22:02.003)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Drew Hannush (22:08.454)
But then you had Davy Crockett came out from Tennessee. He was a distiller, although he never got a chance to distill when he was in Texas. And then they were drinking whiskey, everybody was drinking whiskey after the American Revolution. It kind of shifted over to that. And so somebody's gotta be getting it out there and there wasn't a railroad in the 1840s. So.

Andrew Braunberg (22:30.602)
No, and then, you know, some things were being imported through, uh, Galveston was a big, was a big port at that point. But, you know, I think, and I agree with all that, Drew, but I would also say, and also, uh, you know, whiskey was, was an agricultural, uh, value add, right? I mean, you couldn't, you couldn't move into, you know, then, well, let's call it the frontier, but I know that's like,

you know, okay, the Anglo's moving in, and taking this space, and planting grain. There's just no way at that time, again, it's related to your point that, you know, there's not an infrastructure in place for that grain to go anywhere. You need some way to be able to make sure it's not going bad on you. Historically, everywhere.

that's what spirits have done for folks, right? And certainly the whole American story is very much that of having local distilleries typically just co-located with Gristmills, right? I mean, because it, again, it's just a natural value add that was needed pretty much anywhere you move that as that frontier moved west. And that was absolutely the case throughout the whole green belt of...

of Texas. So again, I mean, to me, it was like, all right, I know this is true. It's just a matter of putting some names and places to the story.

Drew Hannush (24:02.242)
Yeah, the experience that I've seen in Tennessee is that you basically, if you want to start a community, you build a gristmill. And if you have a gristmill, then you're going to draw in people who have grain they need to distill.

Andrew Braunberg (24:18.306)
that's the, I think that's exactly the model that, that just, you know, worked its way west, right? So yes.

Drew Hannush (24:24.142)
Yeah, yeah. So when you started working on this book, you are from the East Coast and you lived in New Mexico for a while, and now you're digging into this history and you go way back, and this is what I love about it. You had me sold right at the beginning when you started talking about Spain and Brandy and Mexico and what was going on with all of that because...

Andrew Braunberg (24:39.042)
Hehehehehe

Drew Hannush (24:52.958)
you know what I find in Tennessee was that before the American Revolution they didn't care about whiskey nobody was really worried about distilling whiskey rum was what everybody liked so if you were going to be in a barter society and you came with some whiskey to the mercantile good luck getting any kind of value out of it because nobody wants it so then it becomes okay so what do we you know what do we distill here and so kind of talk a little bit about

Andrew Braunberg (25:02.074)
Absolutely.

Drew Hannush (25:22.874)
Well, first of all, this idea of you kind of getting to know Texas history. Did you feel like you had a cram first to kind of get an understanding of the history of Texas before diving in or did you kind of do it at the same time or?

Andrew Braunberg (25:37.75)
You know, you got to be kind of, you know, there's that, what's the, there's a.

There's that graph where, you know, that kind of, as you move along your level of expertise, where you hit a thing where you think you're smarter than you probably are. I mean, you got to be really careful in Texas because again, I mean, you know, I joke a lot, but you know, like the whole Mayflower crowd's got nothing on the Texas 300 crowd. I mean, they're so, so proud.

Drew Hannush (25:55.863)
Yeah, yeah.

Andrew Braunberg (26:11.35)
that early genealogy and they track it. I mean, everybody knows who they kind of fall back to from that early Austin colony. So that's really interesting. So, I was kind of absorbing it as I, after I moved here, just kind of, because I'm again, just kind of a general history buff, but once you start drilling into it a bit, then, and maybe it's...

given my history as an analyst, imposter syndromes, something you worry about, right? And like around cybersecurity particularly, there's so many areas of expertise. It's easy to kind of get sucked down something and get over your head. You gotta be, you gotta make sure you're grounded because there's always someone next to you who knows more than you do about that topic, right? And then you gotta be really causing of that.

Drew Hannush (26:58.78)
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Braunberg (27:04.926)
And so I think with Texas history, same, you know, you got it like, okay, you're thinking you're learning a little bit, but then when you, you know, oh boy, okay. And so I guess my answer is, you know, some areas I felt pretty confident early and some it was clear there was a lot more history there. And so let me give you like a couple the things that were kind of interesting here before we get to, but I do want to talk about Brandy, but you know, one when

When Dan Garrison opened the first modern whiskey distillery out in High in the Hill Country, he actually for a while put out a sign that said, first ever, you know, just like this guy I'm complaining about from the Texas Monthly article, Dan didn't know any better either, right? Here's an old Texan, you know, old Texan family. And it started to become clear that the history wasn't just lost. It kind of had been erased.

right? And erased in the sense that when I started writing a lot of the histories at the county level, which is usually where you find the good stuff in Texas, I don't know if it's true everywhere, I think they started not, you know, these people were, you know, in these small communities and they didn't really want to mention that Uncle Joe had been a distiller. And so they didn't because they didn't have to. And so you'd find someone you thought was like an important person in your story, but then you go try to drill into it.

Drew Hannush (28:23.356)
Right.

Andrew Braunberg (28:32.242)
And it would say something like, well, you know, that Joe Smith went off to Fanning County and worked in business for, you know, but it won't just say he was a decelerator, like, is that the right guy? You know, it was frustrating, right? Uh, but anyway, so that, you know, that, uh, added a layer of uncertainty.

Drew Hannush (28:44.708)
Yeah.

Andrew Braunberg (28:55.93)
about that, am I doing enough research? How do I get to the point where I think I've done enough research to be confident that this is the person that I'm looking for? And again, they didn't make it necessarily easy in a lot of those histories, because they just didn't, at that point, prohibition has been on the rise and it's something they wanna forget.

Drew Hannush (29:21.882)
Well, this is the challenge that I've run into also, so I completely sympathize with you. There are some people, there was a partner of Charles Nelson, Charles Nelson, Nelson's Greenbrier, and of course his great-great-great-grandsons have now reinvigorated that brand. And anything that anybody would say about them was basically that it was the largest distillery in Tennessee at the time. It had a large output.

Andrew Braunberg (29:34.455)
Yeah.

Andrew Braunberg (29:38.53)
Yeah.

Andrew Braunberg (29:49.024)
Mm.

Drew Hannush (29:49.122)
But then beyond that really not a lot of history on it. And what was interesting was there was a, he had a partner, John Speary, and John Speary ran the Bell Mead Distillery. And the Bell Mead Distillery for a time was bigger than Charles Nelson's distillery was. But because he died just after Prohibition, even though he was such a big distiller at one point and such a big part of it.

There is no mention of distilling at all in his obituary. And those, that's why I say I sympathize because even the big guys, when you get into prohibition, there is such a push to not mention their whiskey influences. Very few, George Dickel was one of the few that I found, he was front and center because that's all he did his whole entire life was run a wholesale business. And so what else were you gonna talk about?

Andrew Braunberg (30:24.202)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Andrew Braunberg (30:40.29)
Thank you.

Drew Hannush (30:46.534)
besides the fact that he ran a wholesale liquor business. But yeah, these are the challenges that you run into. Did you find there were people that you were like, wow, man, I really wanna find the end of this story that you just couldn't, that seemed like fairly significant people?

Andrew Braunberg (31:07.402)
Yeah, well, I mean, there's no... Yeah, I mean, certainly there's multiple folks, probably the most obvious in my mind, just as far as how things... And things tended to go wrong for a lot of these distillers. And so, sometimes it's pretty obvious where things ended. But William Parker was a guy in the 1870s in Dallas.

His family had come down from Iowa with some money. He brought a brother and his father, I know was in Dallas for a while. He had built what was described at the time, again, for the mid-70s as the largest mill in Texas. It took up almost a whole block in downtown Dallas, was adjacent to the railroad tracks.

Andrew Braunberg (32:07.376)
He built the mill first, then he built a separate mill for corn, and then he built a distillery, and then he was building a coop ridge. He was really just ahead of his time in the thinking of, I'm going to be able to distribute Texas wide because I'm right here. Dallas was the most aggressive of the Texas towns for making sure they were hubs.

for both East-West and North-South traffic in Texas, which is why they're Dallas today. But through a lot of bad luck, mostly the Trinity hadn't been rerouted at that point. And this whole operation was basically where Dealey Plaza is today, the infamous spot where Kennedy was assassinated, which is pretty far from the river as it's been rerouted.

you know, in the 30s or whenever. And so the whole thing flooded out. He lost everything. And then he disappears completely from the record. Except there's one, I could find one piece of information. He blamed the railroads for misengineering.

Drew Hannush (33:11.516)
Mm.

Andrew Braunberg (33:32.834)
their tracks in the culvert system they had for drainage around the river. And this again happened in the mid 1870s. In the mid 1890s, you see Parker's name on a patent for this kind of bilge grown culvert system. Clearly 20 years later, he was still angry.

Drew Hannush (33:55.278)
Mmm.

Drew Hannush (33:58.97)
Hahaha

Andrew Braunberg (33:59.23)
about the fact that the railroad wasn't building there. And so these culverts are the big round that are moving water maybe across the road or across a railroad track or whatever. And I found that kind of really sad in a lot of ways, that 20 years later he was still thinking about it. And I just love to have found a family history or a relative that could have explained exactly what happened to him after.

Drew Hannush (34:18.662)
Yeah.

Andrew Braunberg (34:27.094)
you know that because it obviously, you know, he was, he could have been one of those big early Dallas guys if not but for just a little bit of bad luck, you know.

Drew Hannush (34:36.622)
Yeah, you know, the have you heard of any brands, Texas brands? I mean, you're doing the research now that probably will lead to this, but I mean, have you heard of any brands in Texas that have a legacy of distilling in Texas that have emerged?

Andrew Braunberg (34:53.886)
You know, not, no, I have not. I haven't heard anyone say, oh, an old family recipe or anything like that. But now the other distillery that tried to go big in the 1870s was the Haners out of Ohio. And so the Haner distillery, they just re-

Drew Hannush (35:14.942)
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Braunberg (35:22.086)
invigorated that brand a couple years ago. So I think it's in Troy, Ohio. So it was some brothers, I forget the William was the son who went on to make Hainter back up until Prohibition, one of the largest distilleries in the country, because his niche was mail order delivery. And so he was one of those big outfits.

Drew Hannush (35:47.213)
Okay.

Andrew Braunberg (35:49.398)
that, you know, so they had rick houses all over the country. The bootleg of Remus, one of the first things he did when prohibition hit was buy up the stocks from the old Hayner rick houses. And it was millions of gallons of whiskey. The Hayners, it was the father son, the father being the brother of the fellow who had the existing distillery back in Ohio. They made a go of it. That's kind of...

A long story, lot went wrong there too. Finally burned to the ground. They scadaddled back to Ohio. William, the son went to work for his uncle. When the uncle died, he took over the distillery. So 10 years later, again, he had built it into one of the largest operations and it was probably the largest one in Ohio.

So that was sort of tied to Texas, but not, you know, not really an old Texas brand. Matter of fact, I called the Hainer guys and tried to get an idea. They were very helpful to try to find a picture of any of the Hainers. And they had no idea any of this history. They had no inkling to the Texas connection for that brand.

Drew Hannush (36:51.579)
Yeah.

Drew Hannush (37:04.082)
Hehehehe

Wow. So how long were they in Texas? Do you?

Andrew Braunberg (37:11.69)
Probably about five years. I mean, you know, from like, I don't know, 1876, I think is when they incorporated. So maybe they were down here in 1875. And I think they were back in Ohio by 1880. And it's interesting because they try, you know, the way the taxes work, you know, they were being taxed on the theoretical production of that.

that set up and they had claimed that they were going to produce, if I remember right, like 30 barrels a day, which is, you know, I mean, that's, now, of course, they were probably 40 gallon barrels back then, but still, I mean, that's pretty good production, right? But anyway, he was paying the taxes all along. And then, and so for years later, he's going and finding congressmen that will petition the IRS director for him to try to give him.

Drew Hannush (37:47.29)
Wow, that's impressive.

Andrew Braunberg (38:09.398)
get some of his taxes back. And he complains mostly around, he describes the whole operation as never being more than a kind of an experiment because he can't get his fermentations down. And I wonder, he doesn't get into enough detail on it to know for sure, but I would suspect he's having trouble with the heat, and that a lot of times he just can't get that thing cool enough to get a proper fermentation and to get enough.

alcohol produced to actually get it barreled. So he struggles for a couple of years. They lose control of the company. Yeah, I mean, I kind of joke because, and it's in the title of the book, fires, right? But distilleries burned down a lot and they burn down because you're dealing with all these flammable liquids. It's dangerous work and you gotta be careful. But...

Drew Hannush (38:56.808)
Hmm

Andrew Braunberg (39:08.166)
The Hayner distillery in Waco burned down after it had been shuttered by the sheriff, you know, so There is no production going on in there, but it didn't have a bit of an insurance premium to it So it's not clear what happened exactly But I do know the Hayners were out of Texas shortly after that. So make what you will on the story

Drew Hannush (39:14.219)
Oh wow. Yeah.

Drew Hannush (39:19.744)
Don't.

Yeah.

Drew Hannush (39:27.474)
What the-

This is what's interesting, is the closer you get to Prohibition in Tennessee, the more fires there are. There are fires everywhere, and they're saying arson, arson. So all I could glean out of that was that the teetotallers probably felt self-righteous enough that burning down a distillery was no big thing.

Andrew Braunberg (39:54.85)
Well, you know, that's a great in the heiners claim. It was, you know, that was basically what happened. I mean, that's what they imply. So, you know, but I'm not sure, you know, who knows? I mean, Waco is kind of a weird town even today. So that's possible, but you know, we'll never know I guess.

Drew Hannush (40:11.669)
Yeah. So let's dive back because we were going to do this a bit ago, but of course very easy to get sidetracked with all sorts of fun stories, but talk a little bit about how the first distillate that we know of that was being made in the Texas area, pre-Texas.

Andrew Braunberg (40:15.982)
Oh yeah, we're gonna talk about branding.

Andrew Braunberg (40:21.357)
Yeah.

Andrew Braunberg (40:29.93)
Yeah, so this goes back to, and you know, right before I came to Texas, I was living in Santa Fe and been in Santa Fe for quite a while. So that story about the native, the Pueblo revolt against the Spanish in the 1670s, ah, that really, you know, I lived a couple of miles from the governor's mansion down there where they almost all barely made it out alive, I guess I should say. So.

The Spanish had pushed all the way up into Santa Fe's right there at the foot of the Southern Rockies. I guess we don't need to go into the whole core details, but it was a rough rule. They were driven out halfway back to Mexico City, which would be back to El Paso, basically. It would be a good 10 or 15 years before they would retake.

Drew Hannush (41:11.044)
Hmm

Andrew Braunberg (41:26.418)
what we call New Mexico now. They had a few friends among the Pueblo tribes and they brought some folks down with them and they all, and there were other tribes down there that were, I guess, friendlier to the Spanish. The Spanish had a habit of always bringing wine, cut grape cuttings with them whenever they moved into a new territory. And they were always keen on trying to plant them and just, hey, let's see if we can get.

a little agriculture going here. And that was absolutely the case in that part of the Rio Grande Valley, you know, just east of what modern El Paso. And so, again, we're talking, you know, 1670s and that so that got established. There were some missions there that would be in modern Texas. The Spanish planted just.

thousands and thousands of acres of grapes. And those vineyards were there for a couple hundred years. I mean, they were finally flooded out and mostly lost. But for literally hundreds of years, they were making wine in that part of Texas. And of course, whenever you got, you know, an alcoholic beverage, there's the potential to distill it down. And that's exactly what they started doing. And so...

Drew Hannush (42:31.091)
Mm.

Andrew Braunberg (42:53.774)
course distilled wine is brandy. And so for reasons unknown, at least to me, they, anyone who passed through, call it pass whiskey. And that's what any of the Anglos coming through Texas refer to it as, pass whiskey. But it was absolutely brandy. And so that, I think, is the earliest for sure distillation.

I think there's a bit of controversy on whether any of the native tribes did distillation themselves. I couldn't find, certainly in Texas, that there was a reasonable argument to be made that they did. But if anyone wants to convince me otherwise, I'd be happy to learn more about it. I mean, you certainly, as we know from looking at some of the distillation in Mexico, even up till today, you don't need metalworking.

Drew Hannush (43:37.131)
Hmm

Andrew Braunberg (43:48.531)
to make a good still, right? You can use ceramics or other techniques. So it's certainly possible that happened, but I kind of put my flag there with the Spanish about 400 years ago for that. And then to your point, we have to get all the way up into the rum era before we see distillation anywhere else in Texas.

Drew Hannush (44:09.198)
Okay, and see this is the surprise for me was the idea that Tennesseans were Distilling rum before they were distilling Whiskey, which is interesting because the third distiller in Tennessee after prohibition the first thing he came out with was Tennessee rum But he couldn't make it out of he wanted to make it out of sorghum but it would not have been able to be called rum and Yet what I found was that in Tennessee in East, Tennessee

where this was all going on, they were actually using sugar maple trees to get the sap and then making their rum out of sugar maple trees. So it's what you have available.

Andrew Braunberg (44:45.311)
Oh wow.

Andrew Braunberg (44:53.403)
That's exactly right. I mean, I don't think we need to overthink it. Folks will ferment any sugar that they can get their hands on, and then they'll try to distill it down. And so the thing I guess maybe, you know, if you're not in Texas, you don't realize is that early Austin colony was very much down in that.

southeast part of the state, very close to the Gulf. And the thinking was that environment, that climate was more conducive to growing sugar cane than trying to grow grains, right? And it's not until 20 years later where folks are starting to move into kind of Northeast Texas in mass.

that you're kind of in the environment and the climate to start growing grains and think about whiskey. So yeah, the plan was absolutely to have these sugar plantations and rum was kind of a natural add-on to those plants.

Drew Hannush (46:08.19)
This is why I love the fact that we're stretching out now and trying to figure out what other states are doing as well, because I read a book not too long ago. Again, this Kentucky-centric thought process says, okay, first thing distilled, we gotta go to Jamestown, and the George Thorpe theory that he had a still, and he had some corn beer, so he must have been distilling the first corn whiskey.

Andrew Braunberg (46:36.587)
Mm.

Drew Hannush (46:37.946)
And it's like, but what if corn whiskey wasn't really something that they wanted? What if they were, you know, he liked his corn beer, he didn't necessarily have to or want to distill that, and then if we discount the fact that people were here from other areas even before that, and we're just looking to where did the Kentucky people come from, rather than saying where was the rest of civilization going on?

When the English got out to Middle Tennessee, there was a Frenchman there already. So who's to say that the Frenchman who was there already didn't already have some kind of distillation he was doing off of his experience as being, he was French Canadian, so maybe he was a rye distiller of anything. But you know.

Andrew Braunberg (47:27.826)
Right, right. Well, it's a good point. I think, you know, also, I mean, I made the point earlier that, you know, distillation is this natural, agricultural value add, but only when there's a real surplus, right? I mean, to your point, like, you know, corn beers and, you know, anything short of distillation, but just, you're gonna get natural fermentations anyway.

Yeah, you know, it's kind of like the old joke about Guinness being a food group, you know, I mean, it's really not all wrong, right? I mean, so there is definitely a distinction between that. Also, you know, there's, you know, hygienic reasons that just fermentation is a good just step to take. But to move to distillation, I mean, you are talking about having a good bit more surplus of whatever the sugar is you're trying to, because the reduction there is, is

Drew Hannush (47:59.687)
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Braunberg (48:25.502)
obviously much higher than if you're just doing a fermentation. So that's something else to think about. Not every environment's gonna be kind of successful enough to move right into needing distillation.

Drew Hannush (48:40.678)
Well, I'll tell you the part that I geeked out on and I was kind of drawing from that idea of, again, the Kentucky centric view of, let's find out where corn whiskey started from. The other narrative that comes out of Kentucky is the barrel and this hyper focus on the barrel being so important to the whiskey industry. And yet, as I'm researching Tennessee, I'm going, they didn't care about a barrel.

The barrel, really the only reason they cared about a barrel after a while was because they could delay their taxes when they could put it into a warehouse and suddenly you start seeing warehouses being built as they stretch from one year to three years and so on. And so we need to, there's a whole segment of distilling that they, and what you do with the distillate that is kind of missing that Tennessee hits and that you hit as well.

And this was what I just absolutely absorbed from your book, was this concept of rectifying whiskey. And maybe to have you go through a little bit of the stages that we'll kind of talk through this, because I think it's important to know that not everybody in America valued a color with their whiskey.

and that it was you wanted it to be drinkable, but you didn't necessarily need it to look like a brown liquor. You just wanted it to not have the fusel oils in it and the things that would give you the headaches and the poisons and all the rest. And so as we were going through, I thought, we talk about in Tennessee, the narrative is that Uncle Nerist came up with,

They've dispelled this of course now. Everybody says no, this isn't the truth, that he was the one that came up with charcoal mellowing of whiskey, but then they tried to attribute it to a man named Alfred Eaton, who was before him, but yet Alfred Eaton too, developed, got it from somewhere else. We know that it came from somewhere else, but you actually, in all of your footnotes,

Drew Hannush (50:55.226)
which this is the value of your footnotes, is that you're diving in and you're talking about the rectifying process and how it evolved. And the first thing you talk about is milk punch. So talk about the rectifying process with milk punch.

Andrew Braunberg (50:55.724)
Hehehehe

Andrew Braunberg (51:08.864)
Yeah.

Andrew Braunberg (51:13.642)
Yeah, so rectification, I mean, is in a sense kind of cleaning, right, of this, as you say, few soils being the main culprit. And so you need something that can pull out some of those cognitures, I guess is the word that they tend to use. And so there's different chemicals have been

applied to this problem going back hundreds of years. Like what can we use either as a filter or something that'll chemically combine with some of these things we're trying to get rid of so that maybe we could redistill the product and those wouldn't come across. Maybe they fall out as a precipitate. And milk kind of acts that way, right? It'll bind to some of those bits.

and kind of clarify a bit of the product or the whiskey. And so, I mean, it's kind of as simple as that. It's just pulling out some of those bitter or off flavors that you would have. And you know, who discovered that? I don't know. Someone who just decided they were gonna do a shot in a glass of milk, I guess. But there's certainly evidence of recipes going back.

Drew Hannush (52:34.318)
Hahaha

Andrew Braunberg (52:38.574)
through 300 years just on milk punch, right? And I think I list one of the early ones, I footnote I think one of the early ones in the book. But I think, you know, so it's an interesting example, but it's one of a long line of attempts or techniques to try to figure out how to make whiskey drinkable.

Drew Hannush (52:50.907)
Yeah.

Andrew Braunberg (53:06.782)
And you know, you mentioned, oh, you know, rectification, it's important or the, and that's not what you said. You said the barrel wasn't as important in a lot of places. I can assure you that was true about most of Kentucky for most of the history of Kentucky whiskey making, that those distillers were more than happy to sell off their whiskey to rectifiers to do whatever it is they wanted to do with it.

And for the most part, it was make it more drinkable. Although, you know, there's certainly, you know, a mixed story there we could talk about, about rectifiers and wholesalers. But in my mind, that was how you made whiskey. And it wasn't until we get to the almost the modern era where national brands are starting to develop.

and the ability of manufacturers to do their own packaging, in this case, because now you've got automated bottle making, that you get the manufacturers, in this case the distillers say, oh, we're leaving a lot of money on the table because all the brands are owned by either rectifiers, wholesalers or retailers, but we're the ones making it. And that was when they started trying to disparage

you know, the rectifiers and wholesalers, up until they had the opportunity to kind of capture more of that value, that they were happy letting those guys do whatever they wanted to do.

Drew Hannush (54:42.33)
Yeah, I find it really interesting to see the news stories that I was going through and listening to the complaints of Tennessee distillers in say the 1850s when they were just starting to get the trains were just starting to come into Nashville and you had trains coming down from Louisville and Cincinnati and they were complaining about this stuff called Cincinnati Bust Head. Which was basically...

Andrew Braunberg (55:09.998)
Hmm

Drew Hannush (55:12.23)
what they called high wines, and yet this was considered low grade whiskey that was being shipped in, and they were stamping the barrels with Tennessee names. And that was really frustrating the people in Tennessee. They're like, we have a quality of whiskey here. We make a certain style. We don't like the fact that they're flooding our market with all of this cheap rectified whiskey, and it ended up getting a reputation.

and you talk about brands, it's really interesting because it's around that time when rectification seemed to be going back into chemical use and all of that up in Cincinnati, they were doing more chemical rather than charcoal. And that, you suddenly see name brands. And you go, oh, I wonder if those, because they're out of Cincinnati and St. Louis, which were two big rectifying areas where some bad whiskey was coming out of.

Andrew Braunberg (56:07.779)
minutes.

Drew Hannush (56:09.862)
and now you have these brands coming out of Cincinnati, they gotta differentiate themselves somehow from the other whiskies and they weren't bottling because in my book I actually go through and I tell the history of bottling so that you kinda know when did these guys actually have access to bottles because there's such a myth around that as well that oh, you know what I mean, even you watch the History Channel, you see General Grant sitting back with a bottle of Old Crow and it's like, they didn't even, you know,

Andrew Braunberg (56:38.05)
Yeah.

Drew Hannush (56:41.064)
There was no way if he was drinking it out of a bottle it didn't have anything written on it. It was a brown bottle or a flask. Yes, the glass flasks, exactly.

Andrew Braunberg (56:45.77)
It was a flask. Yeah, it would have been a flask. Yeah. Well, that I'm very curious. I did not get up into the, you know, because the, you know, the Owens automatic machine before that really gets you. I mean, to me, it's interesting that, you know, there's so much, I think honestly, there's no bigger mythology than around the Bottled and Bond Act in, you know, 1896, 97.

And it's just presented as just so, how we have to defeat these evil rectifiers who are adulterating our fine Kentucky whiskey. To me, it's just one more battle in this major business standoff between the development of brands. And if you look at the amount of booze that actually gets bottled under Bottle & Bond for the first 10 years,

It's not that much. I mean, I don't remember the numbers off the top of my head, but it's not a big business for these guys. And I wonder if really the bottles weren't getting even competitive enough for them to really move fully to bottles until after the turn of the century, I'm sure, by a way. It's great, yeah.

Drew Hannush (57:58.946)
Yeah. Cause the, the Owens was a 1903. So we're, we're talking that's years after and probably got sort of pushed along because of things like the bottled and bond act. But, um, you know, it was interesting because we sort of think, I mean, the story is the H Taylor, you know, wanting Kentucky whiskey to not lose its reputation. And, and I hear that.

Andrew Braunberg (58:03.915)
Yeah.

Drew Hannush (58:22.834)
But then as I'm researching in the records, come to find out it was actually the head of the IRS or the Internal Revenue that was sick of watching Canadian whiskey come across in bottles and they were losing out sales. And so he asked Congress, can you come up with a law that will help us be competitive with these bottles of Canadian whiskey coming across the border? So, you know, we get so.

If you tie it back to E.H. Taylor, it all makes sense because he was a master marketer. His first mention that I can find is after 1897. So basically, he saw something that came about and then he took advantage of it. Now he may have had something to do with it, but as far as I can tell, nowhere in the record is there any evidence that he...

Andrew Braunberg (58:57.348)
Oh yeah.

Drew Hannush (59:17.218)
instigated this or it is in the end of the year in 1895 in the Internal Revenues Year End Report that basically it says, look, Hiram Walker is kicking our tail and we need to figure out how to stop this influx of whiskey that we can't compete against.

Andrew Braunberg (59:39.402)
I think that's exactly right. I mean, that the Canadian bit, I think it gets kind of lost in the history as people start repeating it now. But, you know, absolutely again, it was very much kind of competitive. You know, I think the Kentucky guys and Taylor was certainly a master, but I think they all were very good at it of using their political influence to change.

the laws in their favor and that. And I don't mean, I know I'm kind of starting to sound probably like a jerk, but in a lot of ways, they weren't great businessmen because a lot of the problems that they had and that led to all this, just controversy around changing the bonding, durations multiple times.

was due to the fact that they always overproduced. There was just no discipline within the Kentucky Strait Distillers and they were their own worst enemies. I mean, over and over again. I mean, I admit there was a lot of general economic uncertainty. I mean, there were big crashes in, I guess, 1873 and then in 1893, that were multi-year things. But...

Drew Hannush (01:00:36.254)
Ha ha ha.

Andrew Braunberg (01:00:59.018)
You know, they just couldn't get, they really as a rule and as a group couldn't get their act together as far as what other production levels would be. And that, you know, that just caused a ton, you know, once their prices got depressed, they got much more, the rectifying guys, you know, what was coming out of Peoria was much more competitive to, you know, price wise, because these Kentucky guys couldn't get that premium because their supply was way over what the demand was for straight whiskey.

I know one thing, another, well, a couple of things, I guess we're getting kind of lost track, but whatever, right? We're just having fun. This is great, by the way. Edit out anything that you think is too. But the idea of whiskey in a lot of the pre-provision era being really in a lot of ways just a commodity, I think is lost on people too.

Drew Hannush (01:01:36.829)
That's fine.

Yeah, I enjoy it too. Ha ha ha.

Andrew Braunberg (01:01:55.37)
And certainly pre-Civil War, before the tax structure got in place, the lower grades of commodity whiskey were just trading for a couple cents a gallon, right? And then you get this tax structure in place and things get a little more complicated. But it really was a commodity product. There weren't a lot of those early brands. I mean, I know you know a lot about the ones that were there. But, you know, it...

One thing, and another thing related to that to keep in mind is like the brands that were there, and Old Crow is probably the most well known even pre-Civil War, right, was that the brand was known and but there wasn't the even the idea of trademark protection was really just kind of a foreign concept to most people.

And you can go back and look at the old, there's great old records around old copyright trademark cases, particularly associated with old Crow, after we get into the modern era, which is after, you know, certainly the 1870s, when the national kind of trademark law starts trying to get organized and there's some case law behind it. But before that, I mean, you could go to any city in America, literally.

Drew Hannush (01:03:05.948)
Right.

Andrew Braunberg (01:03:18.89)
right? And you could go to label makers. And the label makers would, if you were going to bottle something locally, would have Old Crow as just an on. Everybody had an Old Crow label you could use. Every wholesaler had multiple versions of Old Crow that they would sell to retailers. And two things. One.

None of the booze might have necessarily come from the actual distiller, you know. But two, every retailer understood that if they wanted a $2 a gallon old crow, they realized that was a different product from the $4 a gallon old crow. And that's just the way the market worked. I mean, everybody wanted to associate with a maybe with a brand.

Drew Hannush (01:03:50.514)
Hehehe

Drew Hannush (01:04:10.503)
Yeah.

Andrew Braunberg (01:04:15.062)
But if you went into a particular bar and were getting it for five cents instead of the usual dime, you knew you weren't just getting a Christmas special there, right? So I think people kind of don't appreciate that. So when we start talking about this idea of early brands and brand production, there's a big gap between when

Drew Hannush (01:04:27.396)
Yeah, yeah.

Andrew Braunberg (01:04:41.502)
You know, we really do get to the idea of modern brands in the way we think about them today and the way people thought about them for, you know, a long time, I guess.

Drew Hannush (01:04:51.886)
Yeah, well, old crow is a really interesting case study. And it's another one I cover in the book. I'm gonna get my old book away. But basically, the first time I see it is in 1842 in Vicksburg, Mississippi. And here's how it's sold. It's sold as Crow's Celebrated Kentucky Whiskey. So it's Crow's. It's not old crow and it's not Crow Whiskey.

Andrew Braunberg (01:04:58.599)
I agree.

Andrew Braunberg (01:05:18.078)
Yeah.

Drew Hannush (01:05:21.09)
it's Crow's whiskey. So what that tells me is that in the 1840s, we're still identifying whiskey from either where it came from or we're identifying if the distiller has a reputation, then we're going to, because there's another distiller, James A. Miller, who was the, his whiskey later became known as Chicken Cock whiskey, but during his lifetime,

It was James A. Miller's celebrated whiskey, but, and he was in Bourbon County. And so eventually he started putting Bourbon distillery on the sides of his barrels, and shipping stuff down to New Orleans and all around. So, there's this evolution. And if you look in the early 1850s, all of a sudden it becomes Crow's, it's no longer Crow's whiskey, it's now Crow whiskey. And it's not called Old Crow.

Probably because they weren't aging it, or if they were aging it, it was just aging in however much time it took to get down on the barrel to wherever, whatever wholesaler. But by the 1850s, I do see in my research on chicken cock whiskey that they had 15, they were selling 15 year old barrels of chicken cock whiskey that was made in the 1830s at wholesalers.

Andrew Braunberg (01:06:26.338)
Mm-hmm.

Drew Hannush (01:06:45.41)
So there was a demand for older whiskeys by some people, obviously, because otherwise they wouldn't hold on to a whiskey for 15 years, especially when there was no tax benefit to doing so. So this is the other part too, is I think we also have to remember that we can stereotype these time periods, but as complex as humans are, so are our tastes and our interests and, you know.

Andrew Braunberg (01:06:56.738)
No. Right.

Drew Hannush (01:07:13.822)
one person may have done it this way and somebody else may have done it another way in the same area.

Andrew Braunberg (01:07:20.094)
Yeah, no, goodbye. That's really interesting research. You can't wait to read your book, by the way. Do you know if those were charred barrels that they were holding for 15 years?

Drew Hannush (01:07:24.454)
Hehehehe

Drew Hannush (01:07:31.094)
Oh, see, now that's an interesting question, because that's what another thing that I enjoyed in your book was kind of this talk about charring barrels and how I had not heard this, but the idea they wanted that barrel as sterile as possible and they didn't necessarily want a new barrel. They were looking for used barrels, although I don't know whether you bumped into this anywhere.

Many times I hear people talking about that they used to take barrels that were filled with fish and they would then reuse those barrels. Now I don't know how much you have to clean a barrel to get the stench of fish out of it and the other consideration is that if the difference between tight cooperage and loose cooperage, because sometimes people will identify things that might have been in a barrel in the past that I think was probably put in loose cooperage rather than tight cooperage and you wouldn't have been able to put.

whiskey into a loose Cooperage barrel.

Andrew Braunberg (01:08:27.366)
Yeah, yeah. And there, I mean, there's tight cupboards and then there's whiskey grade tight cupboards. Like, you know, there was always trouble finding barrels in Texas. The flower guys needed barrels, but you could, you know, you could use the, you wouldn't need tight cupboards for that, particularly if you were gonna bag too. The biggest kind of tight cupridge user, I guess, in Texas was...

was going to be molasses. But they would use cypress, right? Because there's not a lot of oak down here. We've got this scrubbed live oak, but you don't have a lot of white oak down here. East Texas, you got a lot of pine. So you kind of got to grab, try to use what you can use. So if you found some white oak, even if it was a used barrel, you might just have to figure out how to re-

purpose it and I don't know if it had fish in it. Boy, I don't even know what to say about that. But I mean, typically, you could scrape them down. You could sand them down. And they would try to steam them, right? They'd use the crescent and just kind of heat them and steam them. And I think for, when we're talking around 1800, this is really kind of where things are. They're re-

Drew Hannush (01:09:25.916)
Hehehehe

Andrew Braunberg (01:09:50.678)
discovering the ability to use charcoal for purification. And at some point in there, they're starting to use charred oak barrels for spirits. And I think the history on kind of rediscovering charcoal is a little more straightforward and kind of just exactly when charred barrels for whiskey become really mainstream.

uh is really kind of hard to say you know but i did find i mean one thing that i get into a little bit is and this is later so you know maybe take it with a grain of salt because maybe everything's already in charred oak but the discovery of um of oil uh you know in west

Andrew Braunberg (01:10:43.166)
really becoming a modern company that's trying to optimize their storage requirements and they're using, you know, wooden tight oak barrels to move, you know, oil around. And so they really try to modernize that and industrialize cuprage. And so when you look at the patent records around that activity,

Andrew Braunberg (01:11:12.342)
that it's hard when they industrialize cupboards, it's hard to do it without shoring the barrels. Everybody's trying to tell you they're not shoring the barrels too much with these modern techniques. Which makes me think, Kentucky was just blessed in so many ways to end up being the whiskey. Grow great grains there. Obviously, as you've already mentioned, you had easy access to the Ohio and then the Mississippi.

So they had a perfect transportation system. Energy was cheaper and a cupridge was certainly cheaper because they were kind of, and then as things really modernized and all the, since the energy was cheaper, that's why all the glass guys ended up in that part of the country too, right? So the modern glassworks all were around like Pittsburgh and stuff like that, right? And so.

They got a lot of benefit from the entire supply chain that they were going to need. But it was interesting to me to see that history around how it seemed like once they were moved into the oil era, that charred barrels were probably just what you ended up with, because the oil guys didn't care one way or the other.

Drew Hannush (01:12:32.738)
Yeah, interesting. I don't know that bourbon would want to say that, oh, we're charred because of oil. Yeah, it's not as romantic a story. One of the issues I run into in terms of doing research is how names have changed over the years or what they're related to, and rectification is one of those, because when you hear the story of like,

Andrew Braunberg (01:12:41.58)
Right.

Drew Hannush (01:13:00.43)
Four Roses, the story of rectification sounds more like a blending of whiskies rather than it is this chemical and distilling and using charcoal and all these other different methods. Did you find that you were running into that and you had kind of had to, you know, write some notes down and go back and then just try to figure this out or it was their resource.

Andrew Braunberg (01:13:23.614)
Yeah, I think you're right. I mean, I think that, you know, and it depends on if you're, you know, if you're viewing rectification and positively or negatively the way they will kind of spin it. I mean, I think for the early history, rectification was an improvement. It was considered, it should have been considered an improvement on whiskey. I mean, I think, you know, so to me, it was always, you know, and remember, they had very strict laws that

distillers were not allowed to rectify, right? So they couldn't use charcoal as a filter for the most part. And they couldn't distill more than twice, right? They weren't, you know, so they couldn't do, and the column still didn't become legal until the 1870s or so, where they finally did allow. And that kind of really is what, you know, the modern era took off.

But I think there was probably some confusion, maybe that I don't have completely clear even today as far as the timing between rectification and compounding, right? And so compounding would be maybe taking some of the, rectified components and bringing them together, compounding them in, like you think of pharmaceuticals being compounded and making different grades of imitation spirits. And I think the compounding side,

Drew Hannush (01:14:27.333)
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Braunberg (01:14:47.19)
And so the wholesalers might also be compounders. Of course, wholesalers could have also done some rectification too. So there is a bit of kind of, in my mind at least, there is a fuzziness about kind of how those terms kind of evolved. But I think that some of the compounding where you look at some of those, so I guess in my mind, the rectification is,

eliminating those fusels one way or another, either through redistillation or charcoal filtering. And then compounding is rebuilding, you know, a product from that more neutral spirit. And you can look at a lot of the old recipes for making imitation this and imitation that. And again, and Drew, I know you know this, there's different grades, man, you know, if you want something, you know, some of those

Drew Hannush (01:15:33.608)
Hmm.

Andrew Braunberg (01:15:42.406)
grades are very much what we would consider blends today, right? I mean, they're just taking one, maybe a barrel of straight rye with suburban and bringing them together to make something. But some of them are not that at all. The lower grades, you know, might have a little Tabasco in them, might have a little Tobacco in them, might have a little tea, you know, who knows, right?

Drew Hannush (01:16:01.012)
Yeah.

Andrew Braunberg (01:16:08.246)
and the spirits to whiskey ratio could be really, you know, drawn out and the proof could be, you know, much lower than we'd expect today.

Drew Hannush (01:16:18.634)
This was the thing that I found surprising when I was researching the Whiskey Trust and learning that basically when they got in trouble in the early 1890s and were broken up, it was discovered by accident that they were basically making rum and tequila or whatever bourbon or rye, but what they were making was basically neutral grain spirits. And then they had a chemical company in Cincinnati.

Andrew Braunberg (01:16:35.254)
me.

Drew Hannush (01:16:47.858)
that made their flavors. So they could just take a big barrel of whatever, of neutral grain spirits and dump in a bucket of this and suddenly you have Kentucky bourbon or you have a monogahela rye or, you know.

Andrew Braunberg (01:17:02.282)
Yeah. There's a book to be written on the whole Cincinnati whiskey essence business, you know, because it was a big business, you know. And I don't think all of it was super, you know, like, you know, I don't think they were necessarily poisons. They were just, you know, shortcuts, right? I mean, I think some of it was probably fine. And some of it was probably not fine. And again,

Drew Hannush (01:17:09.704)
Hehehe, yeah.

Andrew Braunberg (01:17:26.894)
probably dependent on the manufacturer and the grade, but you're exactly right. And Cincinnati was definitely a hotbed for kind of where those essences would come from. And you know, you look at some of those old trade mags and boy, you know, they're just, they're, you know, advertising in big print. It was not something anyone was embarrassed about. It was just part of the business, you know, absolutely part of the business.

Drew Hannush (01:17:41.047)
No.

Drew Hannush (01:17:44.686)
Right. Yeah, yeah. Well, if you wanted a cheaper whiskey, that's how you got it. And a lot of those ads, I think what confused me initially, but I caught on pretty quickly was, these are all wholesalers. So they're not, most of them are not selling direct to consumer, they're selling to saloons and the rest. And that's what was interesting about watching the influx of bottles. Usually what happened, and you kind of brought this up before, and it's the Irish model as well,

Andrew Braunberg (01:17:58.778)
Yeah.

Drew Hannush (01:18:14.598)
that basically you sold those barrels off to somebody else who then they would go, okay, we're selling to the customer. So we're going to put them in bottles for people.

Andrew Braunberg (01:18:25.554)
Absolutely. And I, you know, you've given some good examples of folks that were more protective of their brands, but for the most part, I mean, and you know, these guys, you know, the wholesalers did, the wholesalers were the ones that seemed to have had the best cash positions. And one of the main things they did was lend on credit to retailers, right? That was huge. And so

Whereas the brewers were directly, there was no separation between most of the brewers in the retail. And that's why you get all the tide houses, where the brewers actually end up owning the retail locations. They own all the bars. The distillers were never cash rich enough to do that. And so the wholesaler was there to help the retailers with their finances.

But they'd also often buy the whiskey right when it was made. It would sit in the bonded warehouse, but the distiller didn't even own most of the stock that they had on site because they didn't have the cash on hand. Right. So, you know, that was just the wholesale and rectifiers just played such a pivotal role in this whole thing. It couldn't have worked without these guys being there.

Drew Hannush (01:19:48.414)
Hehehe

Andrew Braunberg (01:19:49.758)
And we can complain about as much as we want. I mean, three tier today drives me crazy, man. There's not a craft distiller in the country that will say a good thing about their distributor, man. I mean, I'm telling you, you know, it just doesn't happen, right? It's like, okay, you're taking 25 points for what? You know, I mean, it's been a long time problem. But anyway, I got on a ramble there. Now I forgot what I was trying to tell you.

Drew Hannush (01:20:00.672)
Heheheheh

Drew Hannush (01:20:09.415)
Yeah.

Drew Hannush (01:20:20.083)
Well, it's funny because I feel like in a way we've kind of bumped off of Texas Whiskey and we've moved on to talk about that whole area in general. But again, that's what I like about your book is that you go into these things that I think are needed. They need to be discussed and maybe for some it'll be a little bit more on the technical level and maybe less interest. But in a book that's footnoted and that you are...

really doing this level of research in, to me, it can only help future writers be able to get themselves out of just a, rehashing the same old stories over and over and over again, and instead looking and questioning things, because that's been my challenge this whole roll through is going, look, I need to question everything. Even when I think I've got the answer, I need to question it again, because

It's amazing how even once I've gotten this book done, a piece of information will come up that somebody will introduce to me and I go, oh wow, man, I'm glad I can fix that now before I move forward with this book because I made an assumption that isn't necessarily true.

Andrew Braunberg (01:21:26.505)
right.

Andrew Braunberg (01:21:32.054)
Yeah, I mean, it's more work, obviously, and you know that firsthand, but I think it's the right way. I mean, there's enough books out there that are just kind of rehashing the mythology. I mean, I don't think we need another one of those. I think there's a lot of great stories to be told outside of Kentucky. You know, Texas never had, you know, really large scale distilleries, but they had a lot of, you know,

interesting operations. They had some that lasted 40, 50 years. Clearly they were making some reasonably good product if they were going to be around for that amount of time. None of them ever really industrialized. In that sense, it's a bit of a niche story. But one thing about the Texas

Andrew Braunberg (01:22:31.63)
talked about from the consumption side, right? There's just literally a wild west association with the saloon in Texas and whiskey. And so to me, it's just interesting to look at it from the other side. And just given my background, it's hard not to think about it just kind of wearing a bit of a business hat. The things you hear about, and again, not to just completely bust on,

Drew Hannush (01:22:34.546)
Mm. Yep. It's the saloon, yep.

Andrew Braunberg (01:23:00.662)
Harold and Bond and this sort of things. But never believe what a distillery tells you about why something happened, because it's going to be BS. Everything's done for a business reason. I mean, that's why it killed me about around when you really look at the history of the bonded periods, you know? And originally, it's sad at one year. And it's like, come on, guys. Man, you're going to tell me. And now, I appreciate your research that does show.

that there was aged whiskey, you know, really well aged whiskey early. And I do admit that in the book, but I think at the same time, you have to recognize that when the tax structure was put in place, it very quickly fell on a 12 month bonded period. 12 months, man, not 12 years, 12 months, right? And so that's what people were drinking, right? Now you can say, oh, okay, at that point, now they've got to take it out of bond.

Drew Hannush (01:23:50.619)
Yeah.

Andrew Braunberg (01:23:59.542)
pay the tax on it after 12 months. And then what? And then you're telling me a lot of people are gonna just sit on it for 15 years? I mean, it's just not a business model that's sustainable. And I'm telling you, these guys are all cash for anyway, that's pretty clear from just the structure of the business, right? So, you know, and then it was 10 years till it went up to three years. Now, one of the things that I know we are getting off of Texas, but I will say it's really interesting though.

I say that, that it was this lower time allotted than we would maybe think. And there wasn't a lot of agitation to move it up. It was only when they had one of these eras of overproduction where they just were so desperate because they really were all gonna go broke because they knew they couldn't pay the, they couldn't sell it off and they couldn't pay the tax bill.

When you get it, you do see those really interesting stuff in the patent record around what they called these new process technologies, which were kind of really kind of like, you know, like these quick age things you hear about today. There were a ton of these things around, you know, some of them were pretty benign, like just heated warehouses, you know, well, you know, well, a lot of Kentucky guys did heat

Drew Hannush (01:25:20.476)
Yeah.

Andrew Braunberg (01:25:24.434)
I forget if it was the Rye guys now or the Kentucky guys. One of them, but not the others were almost all heated. I'm blanking off the top of my head. Yeah, cause it was cooler, right? Yeah, so it was probably the Rye guys. But another thing was these agitation devices. And you see these crazy things like, they would have full railroad box car designs that you'd fill with barrels.

Drew Hannush (01:25:32.502)
I would think that would be Pennsylvania maybe because of the cooler temperatures. Yeah.

Andrew Braunberg (01:25:53.238)
and then just keep them spinning around on a track. There were patents for stuff like that, or just these really elaborate rocker systems, you know? And if you've ever been in a rick house, man, they're complicated enough, you know, just with the regular bricking. But, you know, I mean, there were just a ton of these kind of really interesting ideas around this whole idea, like you see now, where you want, you know.

Drew Hannush (01:25:55.543)
Wow.

Drew Hannush (01:26:08.501)
Yeah.

Andrew Braunberg (01:26:20.362)
it, and I remember one of the patents actually said something like, you know, just like if your barrel took a trip down across the equator and back, you know, like that same kind of heat and agitation that everyone thought was so beneficial to barrels. So there was some level of trying to quick age, I guess I'm trying to say, but there was not in place a,

regulatory regime that promoted long-age. It did the opposite.

Drew Hannush (01:26:52.866)
Yeah. So I found two examples. One I need to really dig into, which is the history of Madeira. Cause the idea of Madeira wine was that it was, uh, the myth goes, whether it's true or not, that a barrel came back to the island after being at sea. And they said, wow, this is really good. And it crossed the equator. So maybe it's that temperature and maybe it's that rocking on the ship. But eventually,

Andrew Braunberg (01:27:00.758)
Yeah.

Andrew Braunberg (01:27:17.629)
Yeah.

Drew Hannush (01:27:20.454)
They changed and stopped shipping the stuff all over the place to get the aging done and designed a way to have a sunroom and Shake the shake the barrel so This inventiveness, but when they did that I don't know so I need to dig into that The other is the Jack Daniels story coming out of prohibition They had a distillery in st. Louis

Andrew Braunberg (01:27:28.461)
Yeah.

Yeah, I'm slated.

Drew Hannush (01:27:46.018)
because Tennessee delayed for five years before they finally opened up. And Lem Motlow, I have an article where he basically says, we are gonna start aging in 10 gallon barrels, and he says, in six months, our whiskey will be much better than that stuff they sell up in Kentucky. So, and what Kentucky was going through at that time was they were using the 53 gallon barrels and trying to

you know, sell the stuff before it had matured as long as people were used to at that time.

Andrew Braunberg (01:28:20.93)
Yeah, it's a business, right? It's a business. And that's why, so the first whiskey, the first Texas post-prohibition whiskey was not Gerson, who was the first one to get licensed and started distilling. It was Chip Tate who used five gallon barrels, right? He had a, you know, and Chip, I mean, I give the guy credit. He did some amazing blending, but you know, because he needed to get to market sooner.

Drew Hannush (01:28:23.057)
Yeah.

Andrew Braunberg (01:28:48.598)
Right? It's all about cashflow in this business.

Drew Hannush (01:28:51.878)
Yeah, absolutely. Oh, it's fascinating to watch that. So your book goes up to Prohibition, but you really don't go past Prohibition from what I've seen, do you?

Andrew Braunberg (01:29:02.762)
Yeah, no, I didn't. You know, and honestly, I wasn't even going to go to prohibition. I was just, I originally, I was only going to the food and drug act. Uh, because by then most of the, most of the distilleries and, uh, Texas, uh, Texas was one of the few ex Confederate states that did not have statewide prohibition, uh, when national prohibition hit, uh, Texas, Louisiana and Florida.

were the only ex-Confederate states that hadn't completely come around. But Texas had a very aggressive local option law, and most of the counties in Texas, except for the big urban counties, had already dried up. And that's where most of the distilleries were. And so by, you know, the first decade of the 1900s,

Most of the distilling was already done. But when I took the book to the publisher, they said, well, you can't end it there. You got to end it with prohibition. So I went back and wrote that last chapter. There are other books out on the market today that kind of have more of a modern, there's one called Texas Whiskey. I know that's out there for folks who want a little more of a modern view of what's going on.

Drew Hannush (01:30:10.876)
Hahaha

Drew Hannush (01:30:24.442)
Yeah, Nico Martini. Yep.

Andrew Braunberg (01:30:30.146)
But as you mentioned, I go from the 1400s all the way up to 1919. So that's a pretty long stretch.

Drew Hannush (01:30:39.746)
Yeah, well that was my challenge too. I said, where do I go? Because once I get to my last three chapters, it's so funny, most of the book is, there's 30 chapters out of the 30, you get the chapter 27 before you're out of Prohibition and heading back into post-Prohibition. But Tennessee was basically one distillery then two distilleries. And then it was just two distilleries for the entire 20th century.

until we get to Prichard, which came along right in 1999, December 1999. So it's like, okay, I mean, I can tell, I can make this a Jack Daniels book. Because that's what I'm gonna end up doing if I make half the book after Prohibition. And the story building up is great, but the same company that came out with that Texas whiskey book also has come out with the Tennessee Whiskey Book, and that.

Andrew Braunberg (01:31:24.998)
Yeah.

Drew Hannush (01:31:38.138)
book covers, it has history in it, but it's mostly covering what the distilleries are now and what happened recently. So it's like, yeah, it's good. That will introduce people to what it is now. I just feel like that history that's going on before, maybe it's just for geeks like you and me and really just enjoying that, but I think the industry as a whole will benefit by what we're doing.

Andrew Braunberg (01:31:46.23)
Gotcha.

Andrew Braunberg (01:32:03.574)
Yeah.

Andrew Braunberg (01:32:07.414)
Yeah, and we had talked earlier about kind of that, that kind of context, the historical context around the kind of set the stage for why these things happened specific to, you know, distillation. And I just find all those things so interesting. I mean, we've got into the, but around this in Texas, particularly around the civil war, there was just a lot going on that you need to understand to really kind of understand the.

you know, what went on during those five years, or, you know, four or five years.

Drew Hannush (01:32:41.114)
Yeah, I thought it was interesting too, because I ran into the situation where, again, we have narratives in our head about what the Civil War was like, and there's two sides, and we're just looking at it from two sides. But Tennessee had pro-union areas, but yet it was a state where these distillers who had slaves themselves were pro-union. And

Andrew Braunberg (01:33:06.851)
Hmm.

Drew Hannush (01:33:07.374)
as I started doing the research into Abraham Lincoln, come to find out they were on the same page with Abraham Lincoln's feelings before he became president. And you make that connection, you go, wait, how does that happen and why didn't they vote for him? Well, because they didn't put him on the ballot because he was a Republican and that was a Northern party, it wasn't a Southern, so whether they agreed with him or not, they weren't gonna be able to vote for him. So, that's...

Andrew Braunberg (01:33:32.674)
Yeah.

Drew Hannush (01:33:36.474)
political side, especially around the Civil War, create some really interesting narratives.

Andrew Braunberg (01:33:42.254)
It gets complicated. Yeah, and that's true in Texas too. Sam Houston was just a huge unionist, you know. So he basically, he was governor at the time and it just, you know, it didn't work out well for him, right? But there was a fair amount of union sympathies, particularly in the northern parts of Texas. So yeah, everything's, you know, usually more complicated than you get at first blush, that's for sure.

Drew Hannush (01:33:43.965)
Yeah.

Drew Hannush (01:33:56.367)
Yeah.

Drew Hannush (01:34:10.51)
Yeah, two distillers I definitely know had it well, one was a distiller. The other was a drinker that Tennessee passed your way was a Davey Crockett, who of course didn't spend enough time there to be able to set a still up. And, uh, and Sam Houston, who, uh, it's really interesting. I didn't dig into his history too much with, uh, because I did sort of feel like that was more of a Texas story. And plus you're tight.

Andrew Braunberg (01:34:15.97)
Thank you.

Andrew Braunberg (01:34:21.912)
Yeah.

Andrew Braunberg (01:34:25.758)
Mm-hmm.

Drew Hannush (01:34:36.346)
As I say, I have 600 pages of notes and you had the same situation where you have a lot of content you could put in this book. At some point you go, do I need to write about the drinking habits of one Sam Houston?

Andrew Braunberg (01:34:47.758)
Hehehehehehe

I kept it, yeah, I tried to even curtail it even during the Texas story, but I couldn't get away from just mentioning that the native name for Houston was Big Drunk. Yeah, he had a well-earned reputation.

Drew Hannush (01:35:04.581)
hahahaha

Drew Hannush (01:35:09.758)
Yeah, one of the last things because they, uh, Andrew Jackson, that some of the conversations that he, you know, they were all buddies there in Nashville. And so, um, you know, they, some of Andrew Jackson's papers, um, have the correspondence back and forth with other people around Sam Houston talking about his drinking.

and the issues with his drinking. And of course, Andrew Jackson was a distiller, had a distillery as well. So this, the whole idea of whiskey being all around and part of what life was back then.

Andrew Braunberg (01:35:45.718)
Yeah, the 1830s particularly, which is when Houston's, making its way into Texas, it just, the level of drinking is just kind of hard for people to probably imagine now. Yeah, just in a very much in a social context, right? I mean, you're just, when you're out, you're drinking with everybody and it's kind of a, you know.

morning, noon and night kind of activity. It's kind of impressive in a way, but.

Drew Hannush (01:36:19.926)
Yeah. Well, they were used to getting up in the morning and, uh, take, if they're going out to work in the fields, uh, they were used to dipping a ladle and, uh, having some hard cider on the way out the door.

Andrew Braunberg (01:36:31.446)
Well, absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, no, it's, yeah, it was a different lifestyle.

Drew Hannush (01:36:36.93)
Yeah, I heard an estimate it was something like 40 bottles of whiskey a year, basically is what they drank. I mean, that's about, that's about one a week, little less than one a week.

Andrew Braunberg (01:36:42.878)
Yeah, there you go.

Yeah, that actually sounds about right, yeah. We might've got that stat from the same book, which was Alcohol Republic, I think, which is a really good read, yeah.

Drew Hannush (01:36:50.343)
Yeah.

Drew Hannush (01:36:55.866)
Okay. Yeah. Um, so just to kind of wrap up, let's, let's get a vision of what Texas looked like back then in terms of where was the distilling mostly going on? Did they, were they scattered through the state or was there kind of a center for where distilleries were?

Andrew Braunberg (01:37:16.042)
Yeah, no. So Texas was split into four tax districts in the, what they called the fourth tax district, which was basically Northeast Texas. So you can think from, you know, Denison, which well, maybe most people outside of Texas don't know, but let's say Dallas,

Andrew Braunberg (01:37:46.198)
Think of that wedge up in the northeast section. Now is where 90 plus percent of all the distilleries in Texas were for that first 100 years. And it makes sense. It's good grain country up there. It's relatively temperate. It's just, and even today, it's a lot of wheat and sorghum and corn is grown up there even now.

Drew Hannush (01:38:14.766)
Yeah. Some of my research showed that, uh, and when I was trying to trace some of this Kentucky bourbon heading out in that direction, that El Paso seemed like it was a pretty big host sailor area. It was there. Were there pockets where, uh, people basically got their whiskey coming in either because of train access or whatever it may have been.

Andrew Braunberg (01:38:36.95)
Yeah, now, you know, up until after the Civil War, it was all coming in through Galveston for the most part. You know, what was coming over into El Paso, you know, I mean, most of it was coming from the Midwest of the US, right? So it would have been harder to get, although there were other spirits, obviously, that could come up from Mexico for El Paso. But...

Yeah, so mostly by boat and a short kind of hop from New Orleans over to Galveston. And then after the war, the Cady, which was kind of the first big Texas railroad, made it over the Red River through the then Indian country and built the town of Denison, which is up in Grayson County, which isn't too far from

from the Red River, so not that far over the border. And then that connects you to St. Louis and pretty much the Midwest. And that's when you really start seeing a bunch of whiskey wholesalers. A matter of fact, they set up almost immediately. It's a railroad town. They kind of set it up and started selling off lots.

And, you know, a good dozen whiskey wholesalers are up in business. And I think literally the first couple of months, you know, it's kind of insane. Yeah.

Drew Hannush (01:40:06.43)
Wow. So were they rectifying there as well? And, cause you talked about how rough their whiskey, their whiskey had a bit of a reputation.

Andrew Braunberg (01:40:17.259)
The reputation was it was really some rough stuff. But when you look at the actual records, the IRS records, none of them claimed to be rectifying up there. The rectifiers were the earlier guys that were wholesaling into Galveston. So that would have been mostly pre-Civil War. Now, of course, the records aren't there. They weren't keeping that.

Well, there were some state records, I guess, but not the federal ones, which tend to seem to me to be more precise. But Galveston is where historically the rectifiers were, and that's true up through Prohibition. And it seems that they're mostly wholesaling out of Denison, which is a little curious, right? Now, either they were just doing some things on the sly.

or it's not clear, but there was that, again, that Indian trade of sending what was really considered kind of the lowest grade would have been smuggled across the Red River into the then Indian territory. And of course, the natives had some of the earliest prohibition laws, right? Because they were, just because, you know.

the Anglos were often sending that really poor quality whiskey up there and it wasn't doing anybody any good. That was a problem up through Prohibition. I get into a little of that because when Teddy Roosevelt sends Pussyfoot Johnson into the territories there, when he gets elected, and this is a good bit before we get national Prohibition, he tries to get him.

to go down there in Texas and get those distributors to quit smuggling stuff across the Red River.

Drew Hannush (01:42:15.738)
Yeah. Wow. Crazy stories and interesting history and yeah.

Andrew Braunberg (01:42:19.274)
Yeah, complicated history. Yeah, not all of it's pretty. I mean, you know, and then the whole vice bit, we do get into the vice side of things. Because again, I mean, Texas has mostly thought about it's consuming whiskey, not making whiskey. So it's kind of hard to not cover a little bit of both topics, yeah.

Drew Hannush (01:42:36.432)
Yeah.

Well, this was what I found as I was writing. In the early years, it was hard to find any kind of specific detail on a distillery, what their mash bills were, because they were probably distilling whatever they had on hand. What kind of equipment they were using, although I found a lot of them were using log stills in Tennessee, which was interesting. And then, to go beyond that, it's like...

Andrew Braunberg (01:42:47.374)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Andrew Braunberg (01:42:58.722)
Yeah, very cool.

Drew Hannush (01:43:06.05)
It's a struggle in those early years because there's not a lot of, uh, they didn't care really to document themselves. So we don't really have much information, but where the rich stories were, and this is where I don't want to throw people off by calling my book, Tennessee whiskey, uh, is that not only do I talk a little bit about history in here as well as Tennessee whiskey, I also talk about taverns and the tavern culture and teetotallers and

Andrew Braunberg (01:43:29.835)
Yeah.

Drew Hannush (01:43:31.666)
Tennessee was notoriously a prohibition state and it fought it all the way up to the very end. And to me those are all parts of the taverns are as rich in stories as any distiller would be and much more so because again the taverns, there are fun stories you can weave around a tavern that will make the paper. Whereas you know, as you found.

Andrew Braunberg (01:43:47.55)
Yeah.

Drew Hannush (01:43:59.41)
The only things you tend to find about distilleries is when somebody lost an arm, or they fell in the vat of something, or the place burned to the ground. Ha ha ha.

Andrew Braunberg (01:44:04.386)
You're right.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, no one wants to talk about a good day at a distillery.

Drew Hannush (01:44:13.479)
Yeah, exactly Well, Andrew, thank you so much. We can probably go on for hours. I would imagine and

Andrew Braunberg (01:44:20.854)
Yeah, yeah, this is fun. I mean, Drew, you got a good hand on things. I can see why you're a pro at this. Yeah, but I can't, I really honestly can't wait to read your book. Looking forward to it.

Drew Hannush (01:44:31.162)
Well, I highly recommend yours, and where can people find it?

Andrew Braunberg (01:44:34.702)
Thank you. Well, in Texas, you can find it at retail. But I guess I would have to say either Google. Amazon or Barnes & Noble Online is probably the best bet for folks outside of Texas.

Drew Hannush (01:44:51.843)
Okay, plans for another book?

Andrew Braunberg (01:44:55.562)
Well, I've got, you know, I cut half of this one out because it wouldn't quite to the Texas mark. So yeah, I think potentially, you can probably guess some of the areas I'm kind of passionate about outside of Texas. So I think there's still a lot of things that could be, let's say clarified in the record. And so yeah, you know, if I can find the time, as you know, it's a full-time job.

Drew Hannush (01:45:23.31)
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Well, thank you so much for joining me and I look forward to our next chat.

Andrew Braunberg (01:45:30.818)
Thank you, Drew, really appreciate it.