Ep. 117 - The History of Stills in America

Transcript

Drew Hannush (00:00.609)
Welcome to Whiskey Lord, the interviews. I'm your host, Drew Hanisch, the bestselling author of the Experiencing Kentucky Bourbon, Experiencing Irish Whiskey and the brand new historical epic, The Lost History of Tennessee Whiskey. And today we are headed back to Indiana to have a chat with my good friend, Alan Bishop, head alchemist emeritus at Spirits of French Lick Distillery and the author of multiple volumes of distilling books. He is right now just released the Distillers Almanac and

He is my technical advisor on these books because as I start working on the history of Kentucky Bourbon, now it's like, oh, more questions that I'm kind of lost on. And so I was thinking I was going to reach out to him and have a little conversation on the phone like we did with the Tennessee book on stills in this particular case. But then I thought, hey, everybody else gets a chance to kind of eavesdrop on the conversation and learn a thing or two.

along the way as well. So Alan, welcome to the show.

Alan R. Bishop (01:05.228)
Yeah, glad to be here. I had to find my unmute button. So, but yeah, sorry. Technical issues on my end there. Yeah, glad to be back, man. Glad to be a part of this conversation and had an absolute blast talking to you about the Tennessee thing and glad to see Tennessee, you know, actually get their story told in a proper way in a great format with a long form book that really dives into it in a way that had never really been done before. So.

Drew Hannush (01:09.537)
hahahaha

Drew Hannush (01:33.953)
Well, it's been encouraging to hear Alex Castle from Old Dominic was actually up here not long ago or up in Kentucky. And after she left, she had mentioned to my friend, Jerry Daniels at Stone Fences Tours that she said, it's really something we needed down there and that everybody's really loving it. So yeah, it's to have this history just disappear off the base of the planet.

you know, it's like, hopefully somebody sooner or later will take the time to do that research and that it will actually bear fruit in terms of people visiting Tennessee and getting to know Tennessee whiskey instead of getting to know Kentucky bourbon while they're sitting at a Tennessee distillery, which to me seemed a little bit off kilter. So.

Alan R. Bishop (02:26.956)
It definitely, definitely is. And I'll even say this, man, I told you this before, that your book will honestly start new distilleries. There will be new old distilleries, new old brands, right? And it'll influence people to get into that. And that's who would think that in this day and age, the easiest way to be rebellious was just to tell history as it actually was.

Drew Hannush (02:49.601)
Absolutely. Yeah. And so now I'm really kicking into this idea of writing about the early history of Kentucky Bourbon. And so one of the things that I didn't necessarily cover that deeply in the Tennessee book where it was the concept of stills. Now, I did talk about log stills, but I only kind of generically talked about log stills. And part of my reason for that was because I'd never actually seen the log still before or had a good

100 % handle on the concept of it. So rather than speaking out of turn on it, it felt better just to kind of, you know, ease over it and give people that keyword that they could go, hmm, okay, log still, what does that all mean? Now we can follow up and kind of get into that. So I wanted to kind of walk with you through the history of stills. We don't have to go all the way back to old Scotland and in Ireland, but.

Some of it I'm sure will be inspired from the old world. But what I'm finding interesting in my research is that there's a lot of talk in those early days about bringing stills on horseback. And that gets me thinking of what kind of stills those guys were probably bringing with them in the 1700s and what potential they would have had in those early days.

in the 18th century to construct their own still at that time if they're already out on the prairie. They basically have to bring everything out with them, I would imagine.

Alan R. Bishop (04:31.308)
Yeah, definitely. I mean, you know, there's there's obviously, you know, there were early on there were copper stills. A lot of people don't know as well, though, they were also and this sounds goofy. We've been crazy expensive, but they did exist. There were silver stills. There were even iron stills, which is a little contradictory. But, you know, the sizing for that stuff, especially, you know, frontier style still is not very big. Forty to one hundred gallons, maybe one hundred and twenty at the most. You know, something that's manageable that you can move around that, you know, because your distillery, quote unquote,

might not be in the same place forever either. And that's one thing to always bear in mind. You know, do you have a temporary still like a log still, or do you have something that's a little more substantial that you take out of the fireplace and move elsewhere? But certainly they were, you know, importing stills onto the East Coast very early on and in colonial America, in fact, whether those were, you know, small for every home and distillery, you know, making cordial waters and things of that nature, or whether they were larger for industrial manufacture at that time as it would be.

but not really industrial, but farm distillery sort of manufacturer. And then, you know, by the time you start seeing people coming into Kentucky, you're getting a lot of a lot of manufacturing happening in Philadelphia and a lot of that stuff getting shipped, you know, even downstream by, by, you know, flat boats. That's one of the things that happened here in Indiana. There was a little store off of, there's actually a flat boat that was moored.

off of the banks of Madison, Indiana, and all it did for about 30 years was sell stills and distilling equipment to people coming into the state of Indiana. And presumably some of that crossed the river into Kentucky as well. So.

Drew Hannush (06:07.809)
Wow. And then I guess if you wanted to, you know, Pittsburgh after a while probably became sort of a center of manufacturing before Kentucky. I sort of see around 1800 is the time when copper is starting to make its way into the area and you're seeing ads now for coppersmiths and we'll build stills and that sort of thing.

Alan R. Bishop (06:30.924)
The other thing that you see too, at least across that Northern Arc of Kentucky, this is kind of interesting too. And I think you and I might have talked about this once before, but certainly see this Northern Arc of Kentucky, parts of Ohio, Southern Indiana, and even all the way out to St. Louis is very early on. The Roma people, you know, the politically incorrect name being gypsies, just so people know what we're talking about here, but the Roma people who have connections back to old Europe and can get a hold of sheet copper, what they were really famous for,

was tinworking and copper work. And they're doing this, you know, by the late 1700s, fairly far west. And really by the early 1800s, early, early 1800s, at the very least, they're really based out of Dayton, Ohio. And they're, they're essentially, they're traveling out of Dayton, Ohio down to the Ohio River, taking the Ohio River coming west all the way to St. Louis on the north side of the river.

crossing over coming back up the South side, that Northern arc of Kentucky and back up in the Dayton, Ohio. And so if you wanted something made out of copper, custom made, as long as they had the sheets to do it with, they did it themselves. And they were responsible for making very complicated. Well, I'm not saying making very complicated, but they made, their designs were very complicated and that they didn't.

build out of individual sheets. They built out of one solid sheet of copper and they would literally go in, cut a tree down, carve out or burn out the stump to the size and shape they wanted, take that one piece of copper, anneal it and hammer it out around that stump, burn the inside of the stump out to where they could get it out while they were also tending the inside of the copper. So incredibly, incredibly skilled steel manufacturers, you know, on basically what is still Western frontier. So.

Drew Hannush (08:20.897)
Wow. So in those early days though, probably most of what I've seen are what looked like kettles. And I don't know if that's the proper name for it, but it would be a kettle still, were those made completely out of copper.

Alan R. Bishop (08:29.836)
Mm -hmm.

Alan R. Bishop (08:37.356)
So it would depend. Sometimes those are actually made out of pewter, believe it or not. That was a very common thing to build those out of. Not necessarily a healthy thing, but you know, you got money for what you got money for and you, you know, I'm sure, I'm sure if you have, you have other things to worry about other than whatever your long -term metal poisoning is going to turn out to be at that time. So yeah, that was very common. Those, you know, those turnip style stills, those kettle style stills. That was just.

Drew Hannush (08:42.753)
Okay.

Drew Hannush (08:47.713)
Hahaha.

Alan R. Bishop (09:05.228)
the old shape that had been brought over from Europe. That's what people were familiar with. That's what they ran with, what they would call basically an ordinary still or a common still. You know, generally all had that same sort of shape to them. What you do see in that time period, though, which is interesting, is that you start to see slightly very slight variations on on still head as far as shape goes. And that, again, goes back to Europe to, you know, everybody sort of had their own.

I suspect that that was like the customization to a still that most people were familiar with. Like, well, you know, grandpa ran his and had this slight little rise in the head that looked like a little diamond or, you know, it had a very specific bowl shape to it or and in some cases, and I've seen a few of them here and there, there's a still, as a matter of fact, out in Pennsylvania right now. I'm trying to think of the name of that site. Dills Tavern. Yeah, Dills Tavern. Dills Tavern. I'll get that out in a minute.

There's an old school still out there and dude, whoever built that thing. I mean, I've built a few stills that are pretty crude. It's on par with my work. So, so he, again, you kind of maybe, maybe the shape had to do more with, I don't know how to hammer out a bowl, but I can certainly cut some sheets and fit them together. So.

Drew Hannush (10:02.465)
Hehehehe

Drew Hannush (10:12.353)
Hahaha!

Drew Hannush (10:20.673)
Wow, yeah. When you're bringing that stuff out with you and you, or you're sailing it down on your flatboat, basically what other pieces would you need? Now I've seen, I've been going to the George Washington distillery, you see them bringing buckets of hot water over and cooking their mash in the actual barrels.

which was an eye -opener for me. I thought, well, that makes sense, but I never in my life would have thought that they would have been cooking in barrels that way. But was that kind of your total setup, what did you really need back in those days to be able to make spirits?

Alan R. Bishop (11:11.084)
Well, I mean, really, you know, the still is the main implement, you know, something you can boil water in plus boil your alcohol in. You can always, even if you're going to do double pot distilled, you don't have to have two stills. You just run a stripping run until you get enough to actually rerun in the still. But as you know, like with log stills and things of that nature, you could even fashion the still, you know, out of whatever you had kind of out in the wilderness. But there's still going to be a few implements that you're going to have to have access to. Right. So either, you know,

whether that's the material to build bricks out of because some places that you go to is not going to have the right kind of clay to build bricks out of to make your furnaces, things of that nature. So you got to take that into account. And then say, for example, with some of these early log stills that are steam driven or even some of the early pot stills that were steam driven, because that happened way earlier than people realize, you had to have at least some kind of implements like a say a cast iron stove with an iron pot that you could seal up kind of like a still and use that to drive the steam over into your log still.

So the implements are pretty simplistic in terms of what you'd have to have. I mean, I would suspect that any distiller that had any amount of money to really go into the business whatsoever, and by that I mean just enough money to have more than whatever clothes they had on their back that they brought with them, certainly would have wanted to come in with at least a base pot still, or at least building up the money off some other industry to be able to order one in from outside.

The condenser of course is a secondary part and I mentioned pewter stills earlier, but you see pewter worms all the way up into the 1850s and later they were still making the worms out of pewter for a long, long time because it was so much cheaper and there was no real annealed to copper back in the day. So it wasn't something that was easy to fashion at that time. Your cupridge and stuff like that or your barrels for example, like what they use for mashing into Mount Vernon, 120 gallon hogshead. I mean, pretty much anywhere where you go,

where there's any chance of civilization being there. And most of the time a distiller is either going to also be a miller and be putting in a mill or be associated with a mill is going to know that someone within the group that's going to this area to settle is going to know how to, how to Cooper everything from what's on hand, you know, all the way down to many of the early barrels didn't even have metal hoops on them. They were actually grapevine hoops, which is pretty, pretty brave, but it works. You know, if you're a good Cooper, you can make that happen. But, um,

Drew Hannush (13:28.065)
Mm.

Alan R. Bishop (13:32.748)
Yeah, I mean, you can get away much more minimally than say like a beer brewer or something like that. I would say really your biggest concern in a lot of ways is what's your feedstock and how long do you have to wait for that feedstock to grow? And then from there, like, well, do we have a good yeast variety? Right. We can certainly fashion a still. And I've seen some pretty, pretty goofy historic stills and some pretty goofy modern stills with home distillers in the past. But product product turns out good because other factors were taken into consideration. So.

Drew Hannush (14:03.073)
Well, and you bring up a word that I don't know what good would be today versus then. That's the question I think about when I go over to Ireland and everybody was talking about copper contact, copper contact. And it's like, okay, that's the next thing that I've kind of gotten into my brain now, that you're cleaning up the spirit by using copper. But if you're using a pewter,

condenser and you're not really, you know, we talk about the log stills and we'll talk about those in a little bit as well. You know, we're reducing the amount of copper contact that we're getting with these different systems. How is that affecting the spirit?

Alan R. Bishop (14:51.308)
Well, I think that's interesting too, because what I suspect happened quite often was, and yes, copper is very valuable with copper communication and pulling out those flavors that you don't want. But what I suspect happened quite often was, especially early on in the frontier, is that you're probably seeing some early rectification with products as far as, hey, okay, this will get you drunk, but it's not very good. So let's throw some wild grapes in here. Let's throw, you know,

We've got Eastern Red Cedar. Let's throw some juniper in here and cover some things up. And I think a lot of that happened very, very early on. But now the other side of that is that there were some very educated distillers amongst these people, especially people that had ancestry, either in the states they came from or in the colonies that came from or the old world. There are ways to avoid those compounds that you don't want in the first place. There's also ways to.

to take them out to a certain degree. One thing that they would look for certainly would be a yeast strain that would, you know, if they're trained distiller, they're able to tell the difference between heads and hearts and that whole thing. Interestingly enough, that SO2 compound actually connects directly to acetyl -aldehyde -nethyl acetate. So if you have a yeast strain that you find by happenstance and you keep just capturing until you get a good one,

You'll actually produce less heads and so therefore you'll actually have less SO2 that comes across in your distillation. Now there was probably some pretty nasty whiskey back in the day. Certainly even on the commercial scale at that time, you will find you will find records on the East Coast of, you know, one, two, three and four grades of whiskey. And one grade one is literally we ran it through the still one time did very minimal cuts to it. This is, you know, your average, whatever you're going to get out of it.

Grade two might be double pot distilled, three might even be tripled, and four might be four or more, or even rectified through some charcoal or something of that nature. But I certainly suspect there was a lot of filtration and a lot of flavoring happening in the earliest days. And, you know, a spoonful of honey makes the medicine go down, as they say, so.

Drew Hannush (17:03.073)
One of the things that shocked me a bit was in the 1890s, I ran across an article where the guy was talking about how the old timers said that they loved the scorched flavor of whiskey and that they don't get that anymore. That's what they had gotten familiar with. And I guess that's the other drawback to the old way of making

whiskey is that you had that fire going underneath and sometime after that it seems like once we got to the era when they were using steam, somebody wised up and said, well, why don't we just distill the wort instead of distilling the beer and solids. And you wonder whether anybody previous to that,

had that brave idea to get rid of the solids and just distill the wort. And why would they, what advantage was there to cook on grain? What does that add to the spirit?

Alan R. Bishop (18:18.156)
Yeah, so it's there's a lot to that question. But so cooking on the grain, obviously, you know, it's something we do traditionally here in the United States, although I would suspect that within history and certainly I've seen this in southern Indiana, there were places that didn't do it just like there are, you know, now in Scotland. Right. It just depend on if anyone has ever scorched a still like as a home distiller, they know, like once you taste that like and there's no there's no fixing that and then spending the time to scrub that out.

I mean, just from a distiller's perspective of like, this still cost me more money than I'm likely to make in a year. I'm not taking the chances of messing it up. Right. And that's even still true of home distillers to this day that buy a decent piece of equipment. Like you got to be careful with that. You know, you don't want to mess it up. It costs a lot of money and you want to take care of it. So it makes a lot of sense now from from the flavor perspective, leaving the grain in. It makes a much more robust spirit for sure.

And not even just leaving the grain in, but say leaving even if you are fermenting on the grain helps. And even if you are taking the liquid off of that, keeping it from, you know, some people will still let it clear to this day, almost like a wine. But what you'll find is, for example, in traditions in Germany and cognac, for example, the most valued wine out of the entire batch to run through the still was the Lise wine that was left at the bottom of the tank where all that yeast was at. The yeast had a lot of flavor to it.

Secondarily, you know, there's the consideration of trying to be as self -sufficient as what you possibly could be. So when you're running on the grain as well, you don't have to worry about lottery and sparging and not all grains lottery and sparge. Well, a rye is an absolute nightmare. Uh, I would never recommend anyone ever lottery or sparge rye ever. I don't, it's just, it, nothing good comes from that as far as, uh, having a good day, uh, for sure. And you, but you also, you're.

Drew Hannush (20:10.721)
Yeah.

Alan R. Bishop (20:15.276)
you're doing a couple things there. So the first thing you're doing is you are removing as much of the alcohol as you possibly can overall, right? Now there's other ways they could have got around that. If they had say a wine press or something like that, they could have pressed as much liquid out as they could. But if you don't remove that alcohol and you try to use that grain to say, feed your animals, many animals are very, very sensitive to that. You know, you can, don't ask me how I know this, but you can flat kill a chicken by getting them drunk on accident. Also,

Boar hogs aren't a whole lot of fun when they're hung over. That's another another fun story there. But you had to make use of all the things that you had, right? So you want to be able to use that grain to feed to your animals the next day without it hurting them, without you causing loss to your livestock, your livelihood. So you have to weigh that. Is it worth scorching your pot and not removing all the alcohol and then having to do something to remove the alcohol afterwards before you can give it to the animals? Or is it worth running it?

in the pot doing a little stirring, whatever you have to do coming up, coming up with a mechanism, which there were mechanisms that were water driven for stirring back in the day as well, but only the richer people could afford that. So you have to weigh those measures against one another. Like what, what makes the most sense for you? You know, if you're, if you're a Miller, you, maybe you're not that, that worried about.

feeding that grain off to your animals because you have constantly there's more grain coming in for trade. Maybe that's not a concern. Maybe you're much more concerned about, hey, this still was very expensive. I don't want to scorch it. I don't want to be known for, you know, scorched whiskey. And I suspect that the old timers that you were talking about there in 1890s, what they were probably saying is more of the Mallard reaction where you get hot spots in the still as opposed to straight up scorch because man, straight up scorched whiskey, it's a

It's bad, buddy. It'll almost turn you away from drinking.

Drew Hannush (22:02.945)
Not good.

Drew Hannush (22:06.881)
Have you done these experiments? I assume that you've probably attempted a couple of different distilling styles. Have you cooked on grain on the fire?

Alan R. Bishop (22:19.884)
I have, I have many times. So for one at Mount Vernon, you know, we always go on the grain at Mount Vernon. Those stills, they can scorch. Now, the cool thing is that they've got their protocol now to where they don't really scorch at all. Most stills, even the turnip shaped stills, you have to at least stir them every few minutes. And a lot of times what the old timers that I've come across, a lot of them would recommend.

Instead of say a mash rake or something like that, almost like a mop or a broom, something you can really hit the bottom of that still with, kind of scrape with as you go. But as long as you stir until it gets up and boiling, once it starts boiling, you're completely fine. I have also seen patents and plans in the late 1700s, maybe in the 1790s or so for stills that were false bottomed with the idea being that you could put your solids in there, have it up off the bottom, not have to worry as much about scorching. Now it depends on the way that your

your actual setup for heating was, you know, cause some of those, some of those fireboxes, the flame still would go up the side. So you'd still have to be extremely careful with it. Some of the stills like the ones at Mount Vernon though, that are historically designed, they don't seem to take much stirring at all. But yeah, certainly I have played with, there's probably not a grain you could think of that I haven't tried the Lotter or Sparge at some point in time or.

Tried to see whether it was better with the leases in or let it settle out at some point in time. I mean, you know, having come from that background of home distilling and moonshotting growing up, there's probably not a lot of that stuff. If it can be messed up in a historic way, I have messed it up in a historic way. So.

Drew Hannush (23:56.289)
Yeah. Yeah.

Drew Hannush (24:01.313)
Is there a grain that burns faster than another? In other words, if you're making more of a rye based whiskey, would it scorch faster than a corn or vice versa?

Alan R. Bishop (24:11.116)
So the real problem with it is if you even if you're stirring, so bear in mind for a minute that finding distillers malt back in the day, anything with a high diastatic power to actually convert all your starch into sugar was nearly impossible. And, and rye gets really high, but you don't have the efficiency of malting back then necessarily that you do nowadays, especially on a small farm distillery scale, something of that nature.

So what you'll find is in the early days, they were very inefficient at converting all of the starch and the sugar and any grain that they were using. And the starch is really what causes a problem. If you get something in there that's not well converted, that's fairly low alcohol because of that, and there's still a lot of starch left in the matrix, that starch, especially the finer the grind on that, on that grain is, the more that is going to want to settle out. And the smaller surface area it is, the faster it's going to scorch to the pot. Um, you know, I've,

I've done plenty of experiments with home distilling equipment many years ago, trying to find equipment that, or methods that you could use to keep as sort of an insurance policy. If you wanted to as a home distiller run solids in without an agitator, it costs a lot of money. And I certainly messed up my fair share of pots trying that experiment. So, and there's, there is no, there's no.

Drew Hannush (25:28.129)
Yeah.

Alan R. Bishop (25:30.476)
There's no rectification that gets rid of that. I suppose you could read a still and hide it in a larger bulk amount of spirits, but man, it's like the tastes like a burning nylon smells or something. It's, it's bad. It's bad.

Drew Hannush (25:43.521)
Not good, not good. Well, in doing research on James Crow, it's very interesting to note that he distilled in a copper pot over fire, but that the person that was describing what he did said he was very careful with that fire. So he probably was doing what you're talking about. He's constantly got that stuff stirred up so that it's not...

having enough time to burn to the bottom.

Alan R. Bishop (26:15.788)
One of the things I also should have said there too with the fire thing, this is something I've learned at home and at Mount Vernon over the years, but specifically at Mount Vernon from Mark Meltonville, who's a UK food historian. So Mark is like the fire guru, the fire box guru, if you will. He's worked with several of the Royal palaces over the years and done food recreation and all that stuff. And so Mark.

will teach you more about fire in five minutes than you could possibly learn in the rest of your life, things that you never would have thought of. And there's an art and a skill to the size fire that you're going to run underneath those stills. For everything that I know about distillation, Mark knows about managing the fires when you're cooking and things of that nature. And so, you know, most of the time, what you're really going to want is basically a really good coal bed. And in the wood that you're using is much more like kindling to start a fire with.

And it's just, you know, you can go full bore starting up as long as you keep that still stirred up, keep everything from burning. And then you really want to fill that firebox where it's even with coals from front to back, side to side. And then just slowly like three little sticks of wood at a time, one direction, three sticks of wood the other direction. There's there's a real methodology that goes into can you run a pot like that without scorching it? Because here's the other part. Once that pot's hot, even if it's boiling.

If it cools down too much, it's going to stop boiling and all that stuff's going to fall back out of suspension and hit that hot copper and scorch. So once you get it there, you have to hold it there, but you have to hold it there steady and keep it where you want it at. So. But we did, we have learned. Yeah, we have learned on scale at Mount Vernon being there and always gracious to Steve Bayshore that he gives me a chance to ever get in there and play around because I love that. It's like my Mecca, but.

Drew Hannush (27:56.033)
I work.

Alan R. Bishop (28:08.364)
We have learned that there are cool things that we can do to manipulate those stills to some degree as well. Especially the two stills that are closest to the door, leaving the door open, little cooler outside, we can get a little natural reflux and we can bring those stills up real, real slow, the two smaller stills and hold them at almost a hundred percent reflux without anything coming across the line arm and coming off the worm. If you really want to clean that whiskey up pretty substantially. And if we, if we're able to do that, they certainly were aware.

you know that that was okay. I'm sure they if they were there to watch us they would just laugh at us. So, you know, they think they figured out something now. So.

Drew Hannush (28:44.001)
Yeah, they talk a lot in the past about fusel oil and that's a term that just disappeared over over time but this concept that there are oils in there that are going to create flavors now. Someone suggested that Dr. Wiley changed the name of it to congeners so now we call it congeners instead of calling it fusel oil.

Alan R. Bishop (29:08.588)
constructs. Yes.

Drew Hannush (29:11.041)
But the idea being that there is some oil in there that causes your headaches and the rest. And what I'm trying to figure out myself is we talk about heads and tails, but nobody ever talks about heads and tails in these old newspapers that I'm reading or when I'm reading anything about old time distillers. And so I wonder if...

put that question in my head as to is there a relationship between what they're talking about, congeners of course I always think are the tails, and then, but talking about taking the heads out of the whiskey and then they're just saying well we just fix it by running it through charcoal. So what is this mysterious thing, use of oil, and were they always faithful at taking heads and tails out or were they trying to use some other method?

Alan R. Bishop (29:48.876)
Hmm.

Alan R. Bishop (29:58.636)
Right.

Drew Hannush (30:07.521)
to reduce the danger of that whiskey.

Alan R. Bishop (30:11.788)
And so these are really deep questions. And you may have to remind me to answer all of it. So the Fusil Oil thing is interesting because in the real early literature that you originally see that in, there doesn't seem to be a great definition of what it is. Now, the Germans would have told you that it's very much so the bad alcohols that you don't want right now. They may not have identified what those were because chemically they didn't know necessarily what they were, just that they existed.

Drew Hannush (30:16.289)
Ha ha.

Alan R. Bishop (30:40.812)
Other people will talk about it as being the oil from the grain itself, which is kind of interesting too, corn oils and things of that nature. Other people will talk about it as being the, the flims or various, uh, high boiling alcohols, uh, that you, that you don't want coming across if you're later on, if you're running reflux and things of that nature. So it's kind of hard to put your finger on exactly what that is. Now, in terms of.

whether they were making cuts or not. This is where American history gets really interesting because I think what you see, and I'm sure you had this in Europe too, but because there were guilds in Europe, it was a little more under control, right? Like if you were doing something bad or something stupid or you didn't know what you were doing, like those guys were going to bring you to law and order and it was going to get straightened out real quick, right? And maybe you get lucky enough, you get into the guild, they teach you the right way to do it. And they say, as long as you stay within these parameters, you're fine.

Drew Hannush (31:26.433)
I'm going to go.

Alan R. Bishop (31:35.948)
You don't have that in the United States. So you get a lot of it. Well, in the colonies even you get a lot of a lot of fly by nighters that do well, I could I could do that right. And doesn't seem like it takes any skill. It's basically boiling everything that isn't water and you just collect it and sell it to whoever will buy it. So certainly, I think in those those real low grades of whiskey. Well, and this was true of moonshoners across the United States of poor quality moonshoners. And I'm sure somebody's going to get mad about this, but it is what it is.

The guys who were, you know, cutting their hearts using their tails, like 100%, not using sweet water, not using the last little piece that comes across. A good example of this would be if you go and you watch the original popcorn Sutton, the last damn one, and I'm not this nothing against popcorn Sutton or anybody who looks up to him, but he specifically talks about how at one point in time they were using tails to cut their hearts down with instead of just using water because they get more alcohol out of it because it stretches longer. Right.

And I'm sure that if you miss, right, if you're willing to put tails in there and you miss your proof or you miss what you think your proof is, you're probably more likely to want to put heads back in it to raise your proof, right? To get it back up. So that would be on the low end. Now on the high end, especially people that were from stock that understood where distillation came from those guilds we talked about in England in particular, but also in France, the Germans, they were very highly skilled.

Drew Hannush (32:47.841)
Mmm.

Alan R. Bishop (33:04.684)
and very, very highly trained. And a lot of them found the roots going back far enough in true alchemy. And so had a pretty good, almost modern understanding, not necessarily of the chemical compounds or even what necessarily caused them or what order, but certainly by sensory analysis alone, as well as, you know, harm reduction as it were, like, that would only take one person in your family.

causing some kind of physical problem to themselves to look at something and go, hey, we probably don't want to keep this little fraction in our distillation, right? This seems to have caused Uncle Bill some weirdness over there with his eyes or whatever. So there were certainly people that knew without a doubt. Now, that's not to say that hard times are hard times and sometimes you do things that you probably shouldn't do when you fall on hard times.

Drew Hannush (33:46.273)
Thank you.

Alan R. Bishop (34:00.588)
Include fractions that you probably shouldn't but they're also in small communities So I'm betting you that the whiskey and the brandy that went to the local community It's probably a little bit higher quality than the whiskey and the brandy that was going downriver or going somewhere else Because you know They don't want those people coming back and knocking on their door and a lot of my relatives and friends And so you don't you don't want to cause them harm in any way shape or form As far as that the hangover factor. Yeah, if you're mixing your tails and your heads back in there

Drew Hannush (34:15.585)
Mm -hmm.

Alan R. Bishop (34:30.284)
You're definitely asking for that. More so though, I suspect, you know, eventually you build up some degree of tolerance when you're drinking the amount that they were drinking at that time. But the alcohol itself is going to dehydrate you regardless. It's going to and you know, when you're not taking in any more water than what you are because you don't think it's safe and you're outside working in the hot sun and dehydrated. I mean, I've done enough.

enough historic reenactments hung over that I get it. I know, I know how that goes. So, you know, it is what it is. So, but.

Drew Hannush (35:01.441)
Yeah.

Drew Hannush (35:07.809)
Well, this idea of there are ways of fixing, as they say, and I think it's really interesting that in the research that I read, the court transcripts I was reading on an old Crow trial, and they're talking about fusil oil, but you can tell that they don't really know even from one person to the next, what they're talking about. And so it just makes the deposition go on that much longer because it's constantly questioning, well, the last guy said it was this. And so,

Alan R. Bishop (35:24.172)
They don't know.

Drew Hannush (35:37.088)
Um, that lack of clarity.

Alan R. Bishop (35:38.38)
They're funny to read because I've, yeah, I've, I've, I've read those and, and they're funny to read because you got to wonder like when they went on break for lunch, did like anybody ever want to get together and go, do you know what the hell he's talking about? Like, did, did you, did you get any of that? Cause this isn't making any sense to me, but it doesn't seem like it happened. Like there was no, I don't know. It those breathing through some of that stuff to me is a little funny. And I,

Drew Hannush (35:53.537)
Yeah.

Alan R. Bishop (36:05.932)
You know, it's politics at the time and you, you got to suspect too, you know, there's, there's, there's good players and there's bad players, but some of those bad players have the right people in their pocket potentially. So maybe that you don't really want to define it in the right way. So.

Drew Hannush (36:18.977)
Yeah, when I was reading transcripts from the, during the Illinois trial, when they had the whiskey trust on the ropes, I was shocked by some of the politicians deep knowledge of distilling. That's what really threw me is that I'm like, okay, this was a spot where I expected that they probably didn't know what they were talking about or that they were going to ask some stupid questions. But some of those guys actually really did do their homework.

Alan R. Bishop (36:34.7)
Mm -hmm.

Drew Hannush (36:48.737)
before they went through a trial like that.

Alan R. Bishop (36:53.1)
Yeah. Well, and a lot of them too, there's a difference in culture too. So you got to bear in mind how many distilleries there were at that time and even small farm distilleries and, and how common it really, really was, uh, up into the late 1800s and in many places, if you're doing farm work and you've got people over, you're providing whiskey for them to drink. And so a lot of those politicians would have grown up within a couple of miles of a still house and hell, it might've been their job to run down there and go get the whiskey for the workers, see a little bit of the process.

They might've been the kids that were picking up apples out of the yard to take down to the distillery because, hey, if we take them so many bushels, dad gets X amount of gall... or even mom gets X amount of gallons to make our cough syrup out of for the year, right? So they're exposed, they were exposed to it in a way much differently than what we are nowadays. So...

Drew Hannush (37:34.817)
Yeah, yeah.

Drew Hannush (37:42.625)
Something else I found intriguing was as we started getting into around 1815 in Louisville, there was a huge distillery that was built and it was built by some New Englanders who came down and they were using quote, the latest technology. Well, the latest technology that had come from Europe was basically the saucer type stills that they were using in Scotland to make

Alan R. Bishop (37:51.66)
The Hope.

Drew Hannush (38:10.529)
basically rock gut that they could send into London for gin. And I thought that was really, yeah, really interesting to see. And they described it in the newspaper article I was reading. And it basically said that they used that for the first distillation. And it was to just distill this fast as you could distill it. And then they would run it through a second still to kind of clean it up or make it more palatable. Nobody could understand why this distillery didn't survive.

Alan R. Bishop (38:15.788)
shallows yep.

Drew Hannush (38:40.449)
And I was thinking, is it because you're making, you know, pretty crappy whiskey, probably.

Alan R. Bishop (38:46.156)
You know, for as much as things have changed, they haven't changed that much. We went from rapid distillation to rapid maturation real quick. Didn't we say same or similar problems? So.

Drew Hannush (38:50.049)
Hahaha

Drew Hannush (38:54.657)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Well, they were also talking in that same article about the fact that they would ground the cob up with the corn. So they were distilling cobs and corn together. Very strange.

Alan R. Bishop (39:10.572)
They certainly wore, so I don't know if you came across this in your research, but the reason that they were probably grinding those cobs, because you will find this at that time, and I'm glad you mentioned it. So we talked about lottering earlier. Corn cobs work incredibly well for lottering. But back to those bad distillers and those bad moonshiners, right? Fermentables are fermentables if you don't care what people are imbibing. And the thing is, while...

Drew Hannush (39:22.369)
Mm -hmm.

Alan R. Bishop (39:35.628)
That is mostly cellulose. There is a little bit there that actually is convertible if you have high enough conversion rates. You also mentioned, and we're jumping history here a little bit, but it triggered this thought. You mentioned the Whiskey Trust, right? And of course they are working with Koji at the time for their exogenous enzyme purposes. So those exogenous enzymes, this is one of the big differences between modern whiskey and old fashioned whiskey, are incredibly efficient.

when used at high efficiency to the extent that all the way down to that little bitty white piece that holds the kernel of corn on the cob, it will literally convert that, but it converts it into alcohol that you don't want. So there's another fun fact for you. So it ups your yield, but it's not good quality, right? So yeah, and you're talking about, what was that, the Hope or the New Hope Castillery? That's what that was called down in Louisville, right?

Drew Hannush (40:21.633)
Hahaha.

Yeah.

Drew Hannush (40:29.121)
I think it's called New Hope or the Hopewell or something like that. Yes. Hope Distillery. It was the Hope Distillery.

Alan R. Bishop (40:32.364)
Yeah. Yeah. Now there, there was another one just like that, uh, almost the same size, believe it or not. And I'd have to go back and look at the years. There's somewhere between 1812 and 1816 here in Indiana, uh, in the, uh, the far Western side of our County, Washington County ran by Alexander Ralston and his business partner whose name slips me at the moment. But she was, she was a, uh,

We don't know for sure if she was a freed black woman or if she was born free. We're not positive and we're not sure what their relationship was, but it sure looks like they were in an actual relationship and they ran a distillery in a general store running those shallow stills. So Roustin, his background was, uh, he helped Washington, George Washington lay out Washington, DC and got tied up in some scandalous stuff back there and ended up in frontier Indiana and was here for a number of years, ran this huge.

Uh, huge, I'd have to go back and look at the numbers, but I want to say that there was one of the stills at least was a thousand gallon, which for that time in Indiana is massive. I don't even know where you find the fuel, even if it is a shallow still. I mean, you got to be cutting whole trees and chucking them in there to run that thing. So, um, and then of course, uh, temperance preacher came through who used to be a drunkard and he was like, Nope, we can't have you messing up, uh, messing with your still up here on what they, what they called Irish Hill and bought them out. So, but.

Drew Hannush (41:44.993)
Yeah.

Drew Hannush (41:52.545)
Yeah.

Yeah. Well, one of the things that you would hope would kind of cure some of the problems with that whiskey would be maybe putting it in the barrel although you can't solve everything with a barrel. But part of what I read in those depositions in 1906 were it was William Mida who was a

basically wrote a guide book, a price guide book on wholesale whiskey back then. So he had a pretty good knowledge of the industry. But he was asked about when aging of whiskey started. And he said, oh, that's only like 70 years old or less than that. So we're talking 1840s really. Now I do know that it went on before then. And the reason I know that is because in my research on James A. Miller, whose brand later on became

Chickencock is that in 1857 he was selling 15 year old whiskey. So we know that in the 1830s they were at least by then aging whiskey, but you don't see much mention of that prior. I think the earliest I found would point to about 1810 potentially having aged whiskey from 1810.

Alan R. Bishop (42:56.204)
Mm -hmm.

Drew Hannush (43:15.681)
But William Meida brings up another interesting point in that he says that in Tennessee, they used unaged barrels for, or they used uncharted barrels for doing their aging. And that raises all sorts of questions for me, but it could speak very much to what that early style of whiskey was like and.

Have you ever heard of anybody aging in an uncharged barrel?

Alan R. Bishop (43:49.036)
Yeah, so this is another one of those interesting ones that doesn't get talked about very often. And putting the finger directly on the charred barrel, like you said, it's very hard to do that, but there's not much difference between a toast and a char, other than you let it go too long, right? So if you look at cognac, it'd be pretty easy to see the parallel there. And, oh, whoops, it went too long, but it's pretty good. Why not? And especially if you also understand...

Drew Hannush (44:12.449)
Yeah.

Alan R. Bishop (44:14.636)
You also understand charcoal filtration at that time, how common it was with water and everything else, or even putting water into charred barrels was very common. So, you know, it's not a huge leap of faith to go, why would we put it in a toasted barrel and then run it through charcoal or run it through charcoal and then put it in toasted barrel? We can do it all in one go, right? And get it out of the way. But as far as the other method of aging in the uncharred barrels,

Certainly, if you look at some of the old French traditions, specifically, if you get into, I'm probably not saying this word right, but you look at some of the fruit brandies, like it's spelled like gout, but I'm not, I'm pretty sure that's not how it's said. It's G -O -U -T. I'm not even going to try to pronounce that with my Hoosier dialect. And then also finds brandy, which is another one, or go back and look at in.

in particular, look at the regions of Eastern Europe that make a lot of fruit brandy. You'll see that that's a pretty common thing. Now, whether they're doing it in a barrel or they're not doing it in a barrel, even if they're doing it in a demijohn, what they'll often do is for a period of several days, several weeks, several months, sometimes up to a year, they will actually just barely cover the top of that demijohn with a little bit of cloth so the air is able to get in because you're getting that micro -oxidization.

And you're also blowing off some of the volatility. So, uh, one thing that I think any, any pot still distiller will tell you in particular is that when you first run liquor off the still, even at the end of the day, once it's all in the cistern and it's all blended together. And even if you proof it down that day, which you shouldn't do all in one go anyways, but the liquor that you taste that day, the next morning, if you let it set in that container and let some air get to it, it's night and day difference just within a day.

And really good white liquor, almost every cultural tradition is going to let that set for at least a year, if not more and age, but it's aging in a different way than it would in a charred oak barrel, obviously, because you're not getting the filtration and that sort of stuff. But that speaks again to, are you making really, really good spirit right off of the still? Because if you're making really, really good spirit right off the still, you don't need that char layer. That char layer is just there as a filter.

Alan R. Bishop (46:35.276)
is all it is. So.

Drew Hannush (46:38.529)
You have just probably solved another mystery for me in that answer as well, which is many times I have seen distillers in newspaper articles or just describing the old process talking about aging their whiskey with the bung out of the barrel. And I say that to people and they go, oh, why would they do that? But if you're talking about they valued that oxidization of air,

Alan R. Bishop (46:59.532)
Mm -hmm. Yep.

Drew Hannush (47:08.193)
getting direct access to that liquor, then that would make total sense.

Alan R. Bishop (47:14.38)
And the volatility coming off of it, right? So if there are certain things there, so there's several ways you can manage that. That's a quality thing. And this is something that those trained distillers even early on understood. Your speed of your distillation versus what is your raw material? Was there anything wrong with that raw material? And is that, does that raw material inherently have some flavors to it that you don't like? You can blow those off, blow off that volatility by running your condenser a little warmer.

Then you can blow it off by aging it in glass or in an uncharged barrel. Leaving the bung out is going to do another thing too, depending on the environment. You're going to evaporate more water or more alcohol depending on the humidity, right? So you can raise your alcohol or lower your alcohol a little bit while you're doing that. But yeah, they were certainly the good ones were certainly aware of those methodologies for sure. I mean, I have no doubt because that's one thing that I've come to find as a producer.

Sometimes you talk to other producers and, and this is no way me trying to say that I'm any better at producing anything than what anybody else is. But sometimes you, I sometimes find it odd that there are guys that don't and gals that don't know. You just don't know what you don't know. Right. And if you didn't grow up doing these things and they weren't sort of passed down to you, you don't necessarily have them in your arsenal. And, and if they don't have them in their arsenal, then certainly say a whiskey reviewer or something of that nature.

is not going to have them in their arsenal and have an understanding of what that is. And it's going to seem strange when you mention this to some distillers. They're going to be like, ah, that doesn't make any sense. But you don't know what you don't know. So.

Drew Hannush (48:52.417)
Yeah, and it begs the question of what is it that killed his knowledge? Was it the industrialization of whiskey making and taking it out of the hands of families, or was it prohibition and just 13 years of not being able to pass something down?

Alan R. Bishop (49:08.812)
Both really. I think you can very easily look at industrialization by time you hit. When we go from being an agrarian country to being a commodity based country, right? When we go from being a United States of the citizens to the United States of a corporation. Weird things start to happen within all forms of things that would have been considered high art at one point in time. And so the art starts to disappear.

pretty quickly in favor of how fast can we produce things? What are the shortcuts? Where can we cut corners? How can we get, you know, and what you'll see is.

Sometimes you'll see distillers fight back against that, you know, but oftentimes the distillers, by the time you get into this time period, they don't own anything. You know, it's the corporations that own it, but you'll see, there was certainly in my opinion, within certain distilling regions. And I think Tennessee qualifies, certain parts of Tennessee qualifies. Definitely Southern Indiana, where I'm from qualifies parts of Pennsylvania.

There were places that held on to what I would consider the proper identity of distilling all the way up to prohibition. And then there were places where, short of a few examples, and Kentucky is certainly primary for this as well as Illinois, it just goes away. It's just, it's not even a concern. It's, you know, bottom line. What's the bottom line? How much grain can we push through this system? How fast can we do it? And are people buying it? We don't care what happens to them once they buy it.

Just are they buying it? So.

Drew Hannush (50:48.065)
Yeah, I think E .H. Taylor's tale really kind of shows that how influential marketing was at that time period and how that was much more important in a lot of cases than what you were distilling because that shift in 1897 from him saying, you know, making whiskey was perfected in 1812.

And that was his, and he said that everywhere he went. And then the Bottled and Bond Act came along and he forgot all of that. It just all, all went away. And so I think that's a good case study for how, you know, why did all of these traditions go away? Because they weren't valuable to the marketer.

Alan R. Bishop (51:24.588)
Mm -hmm.

Alan R. Bishop (51:38.059)
His traditions went away because he kept selling the same barrels to different people. That was, that was part of his problem. You know, but he was, he was also, he's an interesting case too, because he's one of these cases. And I always bring this up and always try to make it part of any story that I, that I'm part of. Taylor's interesting because he probably could have convinced himself of anything because he was, he's a little different character. So.

Drew Hannush (51:43.777)
That's true. That's fun, yeah.

Alan R. Bishop (52:05.836)
He clearly was very sort of into the esoteric and the alchemical art form and showed that when he came back from Europe, all the way down to the whole, let's name this thing, the Hermitage and all of that stuff. I mean, he was, you know, I'm sure he was of the mind that I can mold the clay of this world to do anything that I want it to and people will listen to it because I say it with conviction. So.

Drew Hannush (52:31.041)
Well, one of the things that, I want to talk a little bit more about this process before we step into the next level of stills, but, and I know we're jumping around a little bit, but I thought it was interesting that you had talked about, it was difficult to malt things in the past, and I've run across some stuff that I find very interesting.

Many times I've heard about malting of corn and you said you've malted a few things along the ways or tried to distill some different types of things. I have read of doing 100 % malted corn as something that was being done early on. I've also read of doing rye where you're doing half malted rye and half unmalted rye and going that way.

So it seemed like these guys probably, and one of the examples I had actually was they were describing how they would malt. Some of them would malt. And this was something that Crow did. He would steep his corn in a hog's head, wait for it to sprout, and then he would put it over something that was hot, that would work as kind of an improvised kiln for him to dry it out. And to think that even if Crow was doing that,

Alan R. Bishop (53:46.54)
Mm -hmm.

Drew Hannush (53:49.793)
You know, that there were probably others that were playing around with that as well. Have you done distilling with 100 % corn, malted corn? No enzymes? Okay.

Alan R. Bishop (54:02.636)
I have, I have a hundred percent malted corn. I've done several times, straight up enzymes. Now you do not get very good yield off of it, but it does make a good quality corn whiskey with a very sort of kind of nutty flavor to it. And that was very common here in Southern Indiana. Definitely would have been in Kentucky. Corn is in my opinion, it's the easiest grain to malt other than barley. And the reason is because of its size. It's very easy to move around. It's very easy to keep the clumps broken up, all that sort of stuff.

Um, very minimal work that has to go into it. And you don't even have to kiln it as long as you're, if you make your corn malt in the summertime, if you've got corn on hand, you can wind dry every bit of that very, very easily, just by spreading it out on some kind of screen or something of that nature. I also know that the distilleries here in Southern Indiana, some of them, they're still furnaces, uh, while they had a block wall between their malting room and the still furnace, the furnace was actually open on the other side to allow heat into the other room to dry everything down as well.

But you'll even see the malted corn whiskey thing continued with moonshiners in almost all the geographic regions where there were people that were moonshining because it was fairly easy and fairly effective just to do 100 % malted corn. And you only have to go up to about 150, 560 degrees to get the effect out of the malted corn. Now, your yield is cut.

substantially. And I mean, when I say substantially by more than half of what almost any other actual malt would give you or any other grain whiskey that's got malt in it as a conversion factor. But your speed is part of it, right? Being able to get through it quickly, your efficiency, it doesn't take a whole lot of skill to malt corn. Barley is easy to malt. The problem is early on in the, uh, the United States in particular,

Um, there were not a lot of high diastatic power barley malts available. Um, and really you first see those show up. I think you and I talked about this once before they show up in Tennessee. Beer barley from Scotland ends up in the Appalachians and Tennessee is where it first shows up and starts getting adapted to the United States and spreads out from there. Not the East coast. Tennessee is where it comes to. Interestingly enough. Um, on the East coast, obviously rye was very easy to, uh, to malt. Um, I'm not going to say rye is easy to malt.

Drew Hannush (56:16.225)
Yeah.

Alan R. Bishop (56:24.908)
by hand, but it's not as bad. Wheat is the one you really got to watch out for because wheat definitely, it can cause some major problems, including creating some hallucinogens. All of them can create hallucinogens and toxins, but wheat is by far more prone to it than anything else. Now, the cool thing is rye malt has a diastatic power that's very, very high. It's not exactly up there where distiller's malt is, but it's high enough that you can actually get almost 100 % conversion.

out of any mash bill just by using about 20 % malted rye. The other interesting thing is that raw rye itself, oftentimes raw rye has some enzymatic power as well, depending on the variety. And many times when you harvest your rye because it's coming on and it's being harvested in June, July, depending on where you're at, what you're having happen is you still have some late summer storms that come through. And so that rye that you're harvesting, even if it's raw rye,

Drew Hannush (56:57.185)
Wow.

Alan R. Bishop (57:20.78)
some of it has already started to malt itself when you're harvesting it. So you certainly have that diastatic power there and magnified to some degree. I love the flavor of a hundred percent malted corn whiskey. And I probably love it because I was exposed to it pretty early on in life because that's a lot of what my family did. Cause it was very, very easy. Something that you might want to check out. I don't know, but a modern, a more modern recipe for that, that's still

you know, antique by our comparisons is in the Foxfire book. They give a recipe for a moonshiner's 100 % malted corn in there. And you can certainly see the roots of where that goes back to in that particular recipe. There's still some people that do it to this day, not a whole lot of them, but and it's a very much, I think, an acquired sort of taste like you're you're either into that or you're not into it. And if you didn't grow up with it, you probably.

You're probably not necessarily going to like it as a white spirit. That's, that's, it's definitely something that you almost have to have a taste for, for sure. It's like malt vinegar or something like that. It's just one of those things. The old school people loved it and you know, new people just haven't been exposed to it in a lot of ways. So, um, the, the, the half a malted rye or half malted rye, half unmalted rye. I've done that a few times and

really love that and I love 100 % malted rye whiskey. 100 % malted rye whiskey, other than expense, I don't know why there aren't a ton of distillers doing that, because in my opinion, that is one of the best possible whiskies that you can make. So.

Drew Hannush (58:56.801)
And it still cuts the yield though with doing the full malted rye.

Alan R. Bishop (59:02.412)
So not necessarily with the malted rye. I've not had a yield problem whatsoever with the malted rye. So, yep. And the reason for that is because that diastatic power we mentioned. So corn basically has just enough to more or less almost convert itself, but not quite. Whereas rye has enough and barley has enough to 100 % convert all the starch there. And even at 20 % malted rye versus 80 % unmalted grain,

At 20 % malted rye, you'll convert almost every bit of starch in that mash. So.

Drew Hannush (59:40.577)
One of the things that I read

Alan R. Bishop (59:40.78)
That was deep and dorky, buddy.

Drew Hannush (59:44.865)
I love it. I love it. You know, my old science teacher would be very proud of me right now because I was so bad in science and yet I figured out with whiskey how to at least ask some half decent intelligent questions. Oh, here we go.

Alan R. Bishop (01:00:01.292)
That's, that's, that's great because my chemistry teacher, I was bad at chemistry and biology. He was my chemistry teacher, biology teacher, and my wrestling coach. And he and I were tight now. We're like best friends now. I mean, it's, it's, and sometimes I tell him something. He goes, I didn't know that. And I'm like, yes. So.

Drew Hannush (01:00:12.801)
Hahaha!

Drew Hannush (01:00:19.777)
You may have already answered this sort of with your last answer, but there was a quote where in one of these books someone said, you know, the old timers thought that small yields actually meant that the whiskey was better. Is that more of a taste thing or is that actually true that you're getting a lot more flavor impact from lower yields?

Alan R. Bishop (01:00:47.404)
So for me, it's both. So remember when we were talking a little bit earlier about the the Koji thing and the exogenous enzyme thing. So all of your modern day exogenous enzymes, this is why you can make something like 100 % raw corn whiskey, right? Because of exogenous enzymes. And these are enzymes that are brought in from outside. They are generally fungal based. They break down starch into sugar. And that's why you don't see a lot of bourbon, for example, with more than 10 % malted barley, because it's not necessary.

Because you're using these enzymes will convert everything whereas back in the day 15 20 percent malt was common to get that conversion Even at 15 to 20 percent you never ever ever ever get full conversion even with really high diastatic power malt Because there's two enzymes you have to have there's an alpha enzyme and there's a beta enzyme There's more than enough alpha enzyme and almost all distillers malt even historically to do the job, but there's not typically enough

beta enzyme. And so what you get is you basically break the starch down into sucrose, but you don't get it broke down all the way into fructose. And so there are pieces of that sugar that never actually convert. There's actually pieces of starch that oftentimes never actually convert. And so what happens is because you're using these enzymes at 100 % efficiency, you're converting everything that goes into that mash. You're creating alcohol out of all of that potential starch to sugar that's there.

The old timers, if they were getting 75, 80 % for them, that was high efficiency. And the beauty of what that does is while starch doesn't distill over and sugar doesn't distill over, the aromatic compounds and principles related to the starch and the sugar certainly distill over and become imbued into the actual spirit itself. And since about 90 % of what you taste is in what you smell,

you have all that extra aromatic character of the raw material that's being distilled carrying over. And so the positive attributes of the grain or even potentially fruit sometimes that's there is actually being imbued into the alcohol from the get -go to where you can really taste it and you can go, man, I can really taste those positive aspects of the corn or the rye or, and then couple that with.

Alan R. Bishop (01:03:08.492)
the things that you don't want running that still a little bit faster. Get rid of some of that volatility aging in glass or a uncharged barrel over a year period. The micro -oxidization that happens. It's a much more brandy centric sort of thing. And I think that that's an important, an important factor here too, that it gets overlooked quite often and, and whiskey production in the United States is that it had a lot more to do.

The good stuff had a lot more to do with brandy producers. Brandy is the root of all of these things. Brandy was certainly being distilled long before grain was ever being distilled. So the principles that make great brandy also can make great white whiskey, even if people don't have an appetite for it nowadays.

Drew Hannush (01:03:49.345)
Yeah, it's interesting that you bring up Brandy because again, going back to everybody's sour mash hero, James Crow, I stumbled upon an article that James E. Pepper was being interviewed. And in the interview, he was asked about James Crow and his background. And he didn't say he was a doctor. He didn't talk about, you know,

hydrometers and all the stuff that we hear about. We heard about cleanliness. He did bring up cleanliness, which that was an important point. But the other was that it didn't talk about him going to school, but it talked about him actually kind of going through the school of hard knocks in France at brandy distilleries. So wouldn't it be interesting to, you know,

Alan R. Bishop (01:04:40.012)
Mm -hmm.

Drew Hannush (01:04:45.217)
verify that and say, hey, you know, some of these techniques that he is using, he learned while he was working first for a grain distillery as the way it was described, as he worked for a grain distillery in Scotland, and then he went off to work in France before he came over here and how that would cause him to do things in a different manner than distillers here would do.

Alan R. Bishop (01:05:11.916)
It certainly would, not only from a methodology standpoint, but from a getting it to stick standpoint. There's a few other distillers that might listen to this that will understand what I'm, what I'm saying here. But until you've had what would seem to be a very humble, very quiet Frenchman yell at you in a whisper, you've never really lived life. So, uh, very, very particular, very, very organized.

Drew Hannush (01:05:36.929)
Ha ha.

Alan R. Bishop (01:05:41.548)
And you do it right. You do it the first time and you better not be told again. Right. So, and it's not even, it's not even a, not even an in your face yelling thing. It's a eyes that can convey your own guilt back at you. So.

Drew Hannush (01:05:59.585)
knife. Yeah. He is an interesting character because I went to look and see at the Woodford County Courthouse if I could find some like an inventory from his will. And it was a very interesting inventory that he had because he looked more like he was a Cooper than he was anything else. So my observation is that he was he was very in tune with barrels and

that maybe, you know, he had techniques going on there, but wouldn't we love to be a fly on the wall and know exactly what he was doing with barrels and where his passion was with how he made his spirits.

Alan R. Bishop (01:06:43.948)
Certainly. And I've, you know, the little bit of research that I've done on him, I would say this and much like the H Taylor thing with the, with the, the whole esoteric thing, you have to wonder with Crow, how much of, of what is said about him just becomes pure legends and it's created out of thin air, but how much of it was like a little bit of him knowing how to market himself, right? Was he, was he a

Was he a doctor in the same way that I'm an alchemist? Like if you, if you had found my character back at his time and was famous for making whiskey, you'd be like, Oh, this, this dude called himself an alchemist. Where did that title come from? Right. You start looking for it and you go, Oh, we can't really, can't really put our finger on it, but we did find out that he worked for a Frenchman one time, you know? So yeah. Yeah. You know, I don't think, I don't think it's. Oh, go ahead. Sorry.

Drew Hannush (01:07:30.497)
Yeah, yeah. Well, part of me wonders.

Drew Hannush (01:07:38.497)
Well, I was gonna say, part of me wonders if this isn't more James E. Pepper and Oscar Pepper than it was Crowe, because Crowe just humbly went off to work for a small little distillery where he ended his life. So, yes, they said that he would just write Crowe on his barrels with chalk. And that's how you knew.

Alan R. Bishop (01:07:48.652)
Mm -hmm.

Drew Hannush (01:08:08.193)
But nothing seemed overstated with what he was doing. It's like the legend all built up over time afterwards. And was that him or was it the people around him who really were? Because James E. Pepper was really kind of a E .H. Taylor wannabe in some ways. I would say he was successful in his own right. But you know.

Alan R. Bishop (01:08:31.916)
Yes.

Drew Hannush (01:08:36.064)
he really took after who was his one -time guardian in his presentation of himself. So...

Alan R. Bishop (01:08:43.276)
No, absolutely. And oftentimes too, I think some of those, some of those legends, uh, probably also grow out of some of the, some of the workmen, right? So there's, there's probably some people who are around Crow and then once Crow's gone, like, Hey, we're trying to reproduce this and maybe we didn't pay close enough attention to what he was actually doing. And we can't quite, uh, we can't quite do it. He was, he must've had some magic to him, right? Must've had something that we just don't quite, we don't quite get.

Drew Hannush (01:09:09.953)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, they were calling for Crow's whiskey as early as 1846. So he, you know, and that was, that was very early on in terms of getting named whiskey. So, you know, his reputation was, and you're talking about, it could go back to what you're talking about with distilleries like the Hope distillery that knew they were sending all their bad stuff down the river.

Alan R. Bishop (01:09:13.196)
so.

Alan R. Bishop (01:09:21.068)
Mm -hmm.

Drew Hannush (01:09:37.889)
And here's the one guy who's actually sending a quality product down the river. It's worth talking about. Yeah. Yeah.

Alan R. Bishop (01:09:41.324)
Doing it right. Yeah. And you, you, you, you know this too. You see that in Scotland, you know, once they started implementing the taxation and the rapid distillation and the lowlands and then who's actually selling high quality whiskey, the dudes with 40 gallon stills up in the mountains and they ain't got anything to lose. Right. So they got everything to gain and what are you going to take away from me? I mean, you know, um, I think there's probably a lot of truth in that. So.

Drew Hannush (01:09:57.089)
Yeah, yeah.

Drew Hannush (01:10:02.913)
Yeah, absolutely.

Alan R. Bishop (01:10:08.876)
You only have to be better than the next closest one sometimes.

Drew Hannush (01:10:09.633)
We were taught -

Drew Hannush (01:10:14.689)
There you go. Well, and if you're far exceeding, then your reputation is going to grow that much faster. So we were, I don't know why it took me a while to connect with this, but maybe it's being around too many pot stills and seeing them heated by these coils within. But when we're talking about a steam,

Alan R. Bishop (01:10:21.42)
Yep, absolutely.

Alan R. Bishop (01:10:38.924)
Mm -hmm.

Drew Hannush (01:10:43.937)
topper distilled whiskey. It wasn't until just recently that I really clicked in my head that they're actually feeding steam into the chamber sort of the same way that we do with a column still these days that you are trying to get the steam and the liquid to be interacting with each other within the chamber rather than it being a replacement for the fire at the bottom, which is what I thought.

Alan R. Bishop (01:10:58.444)
Yes.

Alan R. Bishop (01:11:11.5)
Mm -hmm.

Drew Hannush (01:11:12.609)
it was, it's just heating the still up to create the steam. Talk to that concept there in terms of how it works with distilling in relation to fire. What advantages is bringing that steam and doing besides scorching, stopping the scorching?

Alan R. Bishop (01:11:37.74)
100%. So, and you'll see, uh, early steam designs like the, uh, the Gillespie still, I think it's 1818 or so, which that's, that's a variation on the log still that we kind of touched on before. Uh, but essentially what they were doing is they were running, uh, a big iron kettle and that was setting on top either in a furnace or it was setting on top of a stove to heat it.

And then that had a steam pipe that went into the bottom of the still. And you could do it one or two ways. You could do it with a partial coil directly injecting steam, which was very uncommon. Usually it was just a sparge into the bottom. The cool thing is that, like you said, you don't have to worry about scorching anymore, right? It also speeds up the distillation because the grain itself is moving the whole time. You don't have to worry about thermal stacking because when you're heating from the bottom, everything sort of columns out and it has to flip over during the process of the heat up, right?

So this is going to take care of the stirring. It's going to take care of the scorching. The other thing it's going to do that's really neat is it's going to sit there and just hammer the hell out of that grain and push every bit of everything it can out of it. So you're still getting all that great grain flavor. Now you're not getting necessarily Millard reactions and things like that, that you might get out of the fire copper method, but you're certainly getting a much more consistent product every single time that you run without any scorching.

extracting as much of the alcohol as you possibly can out of it so you still got good feedstock for your animals and things of that nature. Then you can start doing other interesting things because you have consistent heat to the still itself. You're not worried about it falling off all that much. So you can actually start to do some of these chambered things that we're talking about, whether that's a log still like the long trough log stills that now have multiple chambers that basically move steam from the bottom through the mash.

and then into the next chamber through some J channels and maybe a third chamber if you want it or things like the Gillespie, which is basically a copper pot or even a wooden round pot with copper bottom, copper top and in a regular what looks like from the outside an oversized regular copper pot still head. But it has a chamber inside of it that works almost like an inline thumper, essentially. So because that heats more consistent now you can do multiple distillations.

Drew Hannush (01:13:52.001)
Hmm.

Alan R. Bishop (01:13:56.012)
in one run and make an actual rapid fire system that doesn't fast distill, but it lets you be semi -continuous to some degree, as long as you're able to continue to feed alcohol in and take the spent stuff off of the bottom. So.

Drew Hannush (01:14:13.505)
So is it really trying to basically be a step towards doing the continuous distillation? Do they run it through another still after that or is the three chamber still enough to handle the whole distillation?

Alan R. Bishop (01:14:28.204)
So it depends, um, much like a pot still with retort or a thumper. It's, it's a step towards one and done. Right. Um, not all of them were designed as such that they could get a clean enough purity and proof off in one pass, but the Gillespie was certainly set up as a one and done, uh, thing, a one and done commodity whiskey. And in fact, that's what they were doing.

uh, in the 1820s and 1830s at, uh, Daisy Spring Mill at Springville State Park here in Indiana. That was a Gillespie still. There was also a, a site that was excavated in Western Ohio, I think. I can't think of the name of it off the top of my head, but that was a Gillespie as well, also attached to a mill. So trying to get that throughput up, right. And oftentimes, uh, also I had mentioned to you an old still that Eric Wolf and his dad, Jim are on the hunt for right now, uh, from the old Becker distillery in Pennsylvania.

very similar to that Gillespie design, except it has a number of interesting features. So it actually has a beer preheater with a drain cock that goes into that head. So as you're running, you can actually take stuff off the bottom, open that drain cock on that beer preheater, fill that thumper like head, which has an overflow on it. Anything that overflows, it runs back down into the bottom pot. Now you're running semi -continuous. You could run that thing in a 24 hour cycle if you wanted to and really get through.

a pretty good amount of mash. And it's only through steam heating that that becomes a real possibility. The amount of wood to maintain something like that when you're actually distilling off of that versus what you would use to just heat that water or what you would use in coal, for example, because now you're starting to get into an era where you can get a hold of some of those things. It's much, much easier. Or you get out on the Western frontier, you know, Indiana, 1820s, I mean,

you got as much wood as you want any time that you want it. So makes that a much more reasonable proposition for sure. But it's certainly now you're headed in the direction of quality whiskey all the time, as opposed to only when you can make things, you know, when the moon aligns with the stars in the right direction, things work out right. But when they don't, then you're, you know, you're drinking burnt nylon again. But also moving through that throughput as agricultural crops start to become more

Alan R. Bishop (01:16:47.66)
commoditized and you're growing more and more acres of this stuff and your mills getting bigger and you need more stuff to send downriver to bring actual money into the communities.

Drew Hannush (01:16:59.361)
Crow seemed to be very against it. I keep bringing him up because I've done so much research into him, but also because his whiskey was really considered to be some of the best whiskey around at that time. And he was a proponent of fire and very much against the idea of steam. He called it inferior whiskey. E .H. Taylor would later call it inferior whiskey. Why would they have that?

Is it tradition or is it actually in the whiskey itself?

Alan R. Bishop (01:17:34.156)
Well, as a, as a fellow curmudgeon, if it were up to me and I had my druthers and maybe I would only say this for a couple of months until I got wore out of doing it. I would rather do the fire copper thing too. But I think that that has as much as there could be some marketing there. I also think that that's also a passion based thing. Right. And it's also an understanding of like, no, this is the whiskey that we grew up with. This is the method that we grew up with.

Drew Hannush (01:17:46.561)
Yeah.

Alan R. Bishop (01:17:59.244)
You know, this is what our grandparents drank. Uh, it's good quality stuff. We know what it is. We know what to expect out of it. You know, why, why are you trying to, why are you trying to reinvent the wheel here? Why are you trying to do something different? Uh, just in order to get, you know, more mass appeal or get more product out or whatever. I think that there, there really is a, an artist in the heart between the guys that were saying those things. And I, and I say that now I'm guaranteed.

there's distillers that you've talked to and there are distillers who will hear this interview and they're going to say that, you know, Alan's full of shit or whatever. You know, certainly there's, there's a, there's, and no, no offense to them, but there's a difference between the way that some of us look at those things, right. Compared to the way that others do. Like I'm much more comfortable doing something I put my heart and my soul into that is reflective of what I do as an artist. And then I am going, how many, how many

bottles above and beyond what I need to live off of or we're going to make this year. Um, you know, so I'm not a good, I'm not a good entrepreneur. That's what I'm saying. So just not, you know,

Drew Hannush (01:19:06.209)
Well, it's funny because when I started going through and doing the research on this book and then I was running into some of these old techniques, I remembered back to my tour at Barrel House at the Lexington Distillery District and the fact that when I was in there, their distiller was turning the mash by hand and I went...

Oh, that's right. I need to go over and talk to them. And then when I went over and talked to them, they said, well, we're we kind of stopped doing that because it is too labor intensive and I can't do anything else but turn mash all day. So it is the sad. Yeah, it's the sad state of things that but you know, I mean, Crow had two enslaved men doing the turning of the of the mash for him. So it's also time very different.

Alan R. Bishop (01:19:43.884)
It's a lot of work.

Alan R. Bishop (01:19:49.772)
Whoa.

Mm -hmm.

End.

It is. And the other part of that too, is that if you are going to grow at all on any scale and slavery, obviously being what it is and that's, you know, going away at that time, right. The other thing is you're going to have to hire and workers and they're going to have to be quote unquote skilled labor, even if you have to train them to really learn how to distill the old way. Um, in my opinion is a lifetime pursuit.

It's Mark Meltonville. Here's another Mark Meltonville for you. So he always says about things that he teaches. I can teach you the process. I can't teach you the art. Right. So the more of those art like elements are in there, the harder it becomes to train people that are actually going to do this job and make the company a success and keep it, you know, and I've, you run into this in modern distilleries too, right? You, you, you, as a distiller, you hire people in and.

Drew Hannush (01:20:38.529)
Hmm.

Alan R. Bishop (01:20:56.844)
I always, when I hire somebody, I always try to hire somebody in where I'm like, okay, what I want is for this person to get so good that in a few years they don't want to be here. They want to go somewhere else and do this on their own. And it's very hard to find those people. And even when you do find them, maybe the first six months, they're, they certainly give you that impression. And then at some point that just sort of falls away. Right. And then they, they think that they've earned it.

There's no apprenticeship program or anything like that anymore, I guess, essentially is what I'm saying. We're like, no, this is getting sort of beat into you. Like you wanted to be on this path. This is, this is the path that you are on and it's going to take you 10 years to get there. So, um, I suspect there's a lot of that too.

Drew Hannush (01:21:42.881)
Yeah, I think that's one of the things I appreciate about you is that, you know, there's a lot of distillers that get out there and right off the bat, they're throwing a master distiller tag on themselves. And here you've got a lot of knowledge, my friend, and you shy away from that title. And I think that says a lot that you need to be humble and you need to understand that as long as you're, is there something to learn?

You haven't mastered it yet and there's a lot to be, that's why I don't call myself a historian. I'm like, you know what, there's a lot more for me to dig into. There are people who've been doing this a lot longer than I have and who am I to jump in there and throw that title out there when I still got some learning to do on the way. So.

Alan R. Bishop (01:22:32.524)
Yeah, yeah, 1 million percent, man. I'll tell you a little side story here real quick, short. Going out to going out and working with with my friend, Eric Wolf, out at Stolen Wolf in Pennsylvania. He and his wife, Aviana, being awesome and working out one one really great collaboration opportunity with them. They're still set up quite a bit different from a modern lower at Kentucky column still, and I'm sure we'll talk about that at some point here. But.

I realized going out and learning his method of doing things, like going in and just being humble and being like, just watching him work and being like, I don't know anything. I know what I know, but this is different, right? And I could spend 10 years there and still not know what Eric knows about that place. So I love that stuff. You know, to me, that's, that's a blast. So.

Drew Hannush (01:23:13.057)
Hmm.

Drew Hannush (01:23:16.641)
Yeah.

Drew Hannush (01:23:34.209)
May we enjoy learning along the way for sure. Well, one of the things that I may be answering one of my questions about Crowe's opinion on steam, because I just jogged it in my memory as I was looking through my notes, that one of the things he had against steam was wooden steam. So.

Alan R. Bishop (01:23:37.964)
Mm -hmm.

Drew Hannush (01:23:58.017)
he was against the log still is what he was against. And I'm guessing that probably has a lot to do with the lack of copper contact, that it's not necessarily cleaning up the spirit, getting those sulfites and all the rough stuff out of that whiskey. We look back and sort of, when I think about the Tennessee experience and trying to learn all that,

how much pride they had in making log still whiskey back then. Is charcoal enough to kill the stuff that is gonna make that stuff not be quite so easy to drink or in some cases long after not be so easy to survive after you drank?

Alan R. Bishop (01:24:32.876)
Mm -hmm.

Alan R. Bishop (01:24:51.852)
Well, I think there's a number of variabilities there as well. So maybe for example, I could as a distiller see the utility of a log still to some degree and even for quality if you pay attention to what you're doing. But let's imagine for a minute he sees the log still and he's been around all that stuff and he's tasted that whiskey. Let's imagine again that lowest common denominator, sometimes the ones running those, how long has that wood seasoned before it gets turned into a still?

What kind of wood is it made out of? Right. Are there still resins or they're still sat? Right. How quick is that still getting cleaned out after it's run versus is it sitting there going VA on the inside of it and acetylbacter and everything else it's carrying over. So there's a number of quality concerns there other than than just the copper itself. You know, but I certainly I think.

I think that they could have had their place and I think that you could certainly make a good high quality whiskey off of them. And some of the faults could be covered up by the barrel. So I mentioned Acetobacter vinegar there for a second. So interestingly enough, in a lot of those old European cultures, especially if you get more towards Eastern Europe, VA is actually a characteristic of the spirit.

Right? If you, if you were to make a, um, uh, a Slivovice or, uh, uh, uh, Palinka that didn't have a little bit of VA. That would, it would be considered a fault to not have a little bit of VA. Right. Um, so again, I think it depends on what you grow up with, right. And what, what, uh, what you're familiar with, what region you're in, whether or not that's a part of what people expect to taste in a spirit.

Drew Hannush (01:26:28.673)
Hmm.

Alan R. Bishop (01:26:40.62)
whether that was coming from your fermentation because you didn't have clean fermenters or it's coming from a wooden still. And the barrel will cover some of that up or at least esterify it to some degree because it is an acid. So it's actually causing esterification by being in the matrix in and of itself. So I think there's a number of possibilities there.

Drew Hannush (01:27:00.257)
Okay, and the reason I pointed to the charcoal filtering was because in Tennessee, it seems that the opinion was that if the whiskey had a color, that wasn't the Tennessee style. And so they were probably using un -charged barrels and really laying heavy on that charcoal as the thing to clean the spirit up.

Alan R. Bishop (01:27:12.076)
Yes. Right.

Alan R. Bishop (01:27:23.372)
I agree. And the other thing, and your book touches hints on this as well, if people didn't pick up on this, but it would seem that the Tennessee guys had had at least my method is a little like this, but give me just one sec.

Alan R. Bishop (01:27:45.964)
Okay. But it would seem to me that they had sort of a similar method to what I do, which is, so if you look at the way that they're mashing and they're using, you know, basically essentially wild yeast there, they are, they are front loading everything they possibly can with flavor opportunity, right? Whether that's positive or negative, they're front loading everything and then removing what they don't want.

Right. Which is much easier than let's do a really clean ferment and then try to get flavor out of the distillation. Cause that's a little harder to pull off. Right. Sometimes for sure. So, but it certainly seems like that's the case. Right. So they, they knew that they were starting with heavy stuff that sometimes some things went wrong with and the charcoal certainly could help clean that up without a doubt. And I think that's probably true of the barrels too. Right. Once you realize, Hey, why do the charcoal separate from the barrel? And we can do the charcoal in the barrel and you know, save costs, save time.

Et cetera. Very similar sort of attitude there, I think. So.

Drew Hannush (01:28:49.185)
Yeah. So when I'm going through and I'm doing this research, I've stumbled upon sometimes these really helpful articles, but then I think, boy, do they really, this is a reporter. Does this reporter really know what they're talking about? But in 1870, there was a Cincinnati Inquirer article, what they'll put it in the newspaper. I guess they needed to fill up their space, but they basically described what sour mash pure copper was.

Sour mash log and copper, sweet mash pure copper, steam copper, and bourbon steam. Now, what threw me off on this was the designation of bourbon steam and the research that I have done in terms of in the 1850s, there was a wholesale

Alan R. Bishop (01:29:27.276)
Wow.

Drew Hannush (01:29:45.057)
a company called J Monks in Louisville. And J Monks, they even have a sign up on Whiskey Row now, a historic sign for them. So there's got to be some interesting stories behind them. But what I'm finding is that J Monk was a big promoter of bourbon whiskey. And the people who were, and I'm talking about Bourbon County.

distillers because he would name those distillers by name when he was talking about them, but he always called it old -fashioned copper and When I hear copper I don't necessarily you could say steam copper. Yes But I don't think steam I think fire copper is what they're talking about when they're talking about old -fashioned and so

Now to add even an extra wrench into that, listen to this definition of what bourbon steam is. It says it's put into an American still. So what is an American still? The beer is boiled by steam, passed immediately into a wooden doubler, from there into a worm and condensed. It says it only has one worm, no copper still, and no doubler employed.

and that the bulk of Bourbon County whiskey is made this way. So it threw me because he's now saying they're not using any copper in this and they're not using a doubler, although they say it immediately passes without having a worm between from the beer being steamed to being put into the wooden doubler. Is this a...

Is this a three chamber still talking about?

Alan R. Bishop (01:31:35.084)
It, it, it sounds like it could be. So you wouldn't have to have a condenser to go into a doubler. So now we're talking semi -continuous. So there's two things that could happen there would be something like a three chamber, uh, and then straight over. And what you would do on that doubler would be more like a thumper. Right? So there's two ways you can do it. This is kind of how, uh, modern day continuous has run this way too. So, uh, you can either have a, a small sort of, um,

cold finger to condense off of the first still to drop that down into the doubler. And then that doubler is also heated and then that redistills or you treat it like an actual thumper where you are preloading that thumper with a load of ethanol of some sort, whether it's your raw mash or it's, you know, previous lower wines or whatever with, you know, the actual steam line going down into the liquid. Um, so, so that makes sense to me. Um, there's no way. And what year was that?

Drew Hannush (01:32:33.569)
This was 1870.

Alan R. Bishop (01:32:36.46)
Okay. 1870. So 1870 is about the time, um, low rec Kentucky columns still start to come online. So it could be a three chamber or it could be an early low rec at that time. That's fairly common. And if they're calling it specifically a bourbon still, that makes sense for it to be a low rectification column still, because that's exactly what that thing was designed for was bourbon production. And that's the right time period for sure. So I think what you're probably talking about, since I say it doesn't touch a condenser,

You're probably running a very basic steam bottom, a sieve tray column, maybe with probably with a no D flag at top B and no cold finger to condense to go over to the thumper. Cause they said it doesn't touch a condenser. It goes straight to the thumper. That thumper is preloaded and it's being heated at the same time. Redistilling the same as almost the same as running. If you had a pot still, you ran direct steam to it and then it went to a thumper and then to a condenser. It's just.

Now you can feed this thing continuously to some degree. And that's very much what that bourbon time period thing was in 1870. This, this idea of, and I don't even know if that's a proper name, a low rec Kentucky column. That's what I call them because that's what they are. They, they basically what they do, they split the difference between what a coffee still does and what a pot still supposed to do at being lower proof. Uh, but they, they, to me, I don't.

Drew Hannush (01:33:36.545)
Mm -hmm.

Alan R. Bishop (01:34:02.988)
I don't, to me, they don't seem to have the benefit of either. So, but she had to, she had to go, here's, here's how, here's how hillbilly that we are. She had to go feed the chickens and it's really wet out there. So she had to put them up. So she had, she brought me a note. This is what we do. We play the note game when I'm on podcast and it says, if I'm not, it's wet outside, I'm going to go put up the chickens. If I'm not back in 15 minutes, come check on me. Well, make sure that they understand that is because that's the chicken coop is at the bottom of a bank.

Drew Hannush (01:34:21.153)
Ha ha ha ha.

Drew Hannush (01:34:27.969)
All right.

Alan R. Bishop (01:34:32.716)
All right. Sorry about that, man.

Drew Hannush (01:34:33.729)
We need to put a stopwatch on this or... No, it's... and this is where it comes down to, again, talking to... getting the story from a reporter because the reporter is going to probably take... he says the bulk of Bourbon County whiskey was made that way and I'm wondering... this is post -war and...

Alan R. Bishop (01:34:39.532)
Now you're good. You're good.

Drew Hannush (01:34:59.521)
All the stuff that I've read prior to that, in fact, there's an article in the Louisville Courier Journal from 1857 where they're talking about James A. Miller, the guy that would eventually become the chicken cock whiskey, and they would say he's running a brand new, or he's got his new distillery up and he's gonna pump out more of that genuine old fashioned oily bourbon.

So when I'm thinking of that, I'm thinking most likely he's not running it through any kind of more continuous kind of running still or what you're talking about with the bourbon steam, but he's probably doing much more of the old, old fashioned copper way, fire copper direction at that point, but that could have changed because he died in 1860. So it's very possible that they squished things out when new ownership, which was William Tarr,

Alan R. Bishop (01:35:48.716)
Mm -hmm.

Drew Hannush (01:35:53.921)
and George G. White that they may have possibly retooled it because they suddenly became the richest men in Bourbon County in a very short period of time.

Alan R. Bishop (01:36:06.124)
Right. And the other, the other side of that too, is that it even still could have been a, a low rep column, but, uh, think about this. So, and I'd have to do some research to even prove what I'm saying here, just to be fair, but that thing evolved somehow. Okay. What if the original evolution of that saw that it didn't have a, what we call a defilmator at the top of it. So there was no forced reflux at the top of that still whatsoever. Right. And so.

All it's doing is basically separating the vapor without taking the proof up at all. So now, because it doesn't fractionate in the same way you run a pot still, you don't really have a head's cut. You don't really have a heart's cut. You don't really have a tail's cut. It's going over to the doubler as low alcohol steam hitting that doubler. And once it hits a doubler, what if they are literally standing in front of that doubler and making cuts off the doubler as though it's a pot still.

Drew Hannush (01:36:42.433)
Mm -hmm.

Alan R. Bishop (01:37:02.732)
You still get the same effect, but you get a semi continuous run. You have a similar effect to a pot still because you're still making cuts. And it wouldn't surprise me to see, and this is where, man, it would be great to have any kind of like distillers, you know, handbooks that, that they would have had on hand. But I suspect that they, it went through probably several permutations before it got to what it became. Um, you know, and they certainly still would have been making a heavy bodied oily distillate at maybe.

If they weren't deflagging on the, on the column, maybe you're hitting 130, 135 at the highest, probably closer to 120, 125 somewhere in there. Real heavy bodied, real oily, probably familiar enough to people that they would, they would still, they'd go, well, maybe it's a little different than it used to be, but it's still, it's still in the vein of what it's supposed to be. So, um, yeah, yeah, I don't, I don't, it's hard to say, man, how much of that is, is.

Drew Hannush (01:37:53.313)
Yeah.

Alan R. Bishop (01:37:58.86)
Is them trying to market something as old that's something a little newer and, you know, how does it evolve exactly? So.

Drew Hannush (01:38:05.921)
Yeah, and you could talk to one distiller and he gives you the whole story and suddenly that becomes everything that Bourbon County is doing when I know there were distillers actually there I don't know what year it's from I think it was from the late 1850s, but they used to post what their yields were of the distillers in that area They would post what their yields were and some of them were getting one guy Gus Pugh he was getting like

Alan R. Bishop (01:38:28.492)
Mm -hmm.

Drew Hannush (01:38:34.977)
1 .2 bushels or something. He was like way below everybody Everybody else or 1 .2 gallons per bushel. So he really low yields and

Alan R. Bishop (01:38:44.268)
way down there. Yeah. That's that almost sounds like malt corn there. That would be pretty close. So. Yeah.

Drew Hannush (01:38:51.041)
And he didn't make much. He was not a big producer, but his stuff had a great reputation. So, but that reputation has been lost because we don't know who the pews are, even though they were multiple and they were all Bourbon County distillers. So it all points to the fact that there is so much about whiskey that we don't know. And we can talk about bourbon like we know it, but I'm finding stuff that I'm going.

This is telling a completely different story than I've always heard.

Alan R. Bishop (01:39:24.588)
Well, and what's funny is that, you know, and you know, this by history, there's, there's a lot of gray area, especially you get around that 1870, 1880 era, but go and look, um, uh, uh, Veach had a picture that I, I stole off his website years ago off of, uh, one of his blogs of the, um, and this was like 1911, 1914, I think of the Harlan distillery in Harlan, Kentucky. And they were, they were making bourbon, but it is still straight up.

double pot still distillation inside of a mud furnace. Like it looks straight up like, you know, it was right out of the late 1700s, but this is in, you know, the early 20th century and they're still using double pot still by this picture to make bourbon at that point. So, um, and I think that that probably did, you know, there were probably still double pots, still bourbon producers. And this is something that I will say, I believe to be absolute or absolutely historically accurate.

We may be familiar with, with low rep, Kentucky column, still bourbon nowadays. And that might be the preferred method and it has its place and it does make good quality product for what it is. But bourbon was born on a pot still. There's no doubt about it. It was born on a pot still and no doubt about it too. That low rep, Kentucky column system, utilizing a retort slash thumper slash doubler tells me that somewhere along the line.

Drew Hannush (01:40:40.385)
Mm. Mm -hmm.

Alan R. Bishop (01:40:53.964)
There were single pass producers of bourbon in Kentucky using a pot still with an offset thumper or else that would have never came into vogue on that still system.

Drew Hannush (01:41:06.753)
Well, I will say this. I reached out to David Meyer over at Glens Creek when I discovered this because as I was reading through the depositions on Old Crow, yeah, I figured he needed to know this, and I figured he might know it already, but apparently he didn't. That they were talking about pot still, distilling still at the Old Crow distillery in 1907.

Alan R. Bishop (01:41:07.148)
So.

Alan R. Bishop (01:41:15.852)
He's a good guy.

Drew Hannush (01:41:36.961)
And I said, when I walked into that ruin with David, I could swear that they probably, as big as that building was, they were running columns in there. But then we looked up Sanborn maps, and lo and behold, in 1907, they were still using pot stills. So the difference was between what was being made 20 years earlier and then is that no longer did they have 30,

Alan R. Bishop (01:41:56.716)
Mm -hmm.

Drew Hannush (01:42:07.329)
30 tubs around doing their fermentation on small batches. But instead they had gone to the big fermenter with the, you know, with an agitator in it. And that was the main change was they, and in fact, they were kind of getting slammed for it during the trial because they said, well, you're not really making it the same way that Crow used to make it if you're not fermenting the same way that he doing natural fermentation.

Alan R. Bishop (01:42:33.484)
She's not doing it.

Drew Hannush (01:42:36.897)
So, yeah.

Alan R. Bishop (01:42:37.836)
They took the cognac approach of, well, we'll do larger fermentations and hire an army of distillers to get through this. Yep.

Drew Hannush (01:42:47.713)
Yep, absolutely. So no, you're spot on. I believe most likely you would find that there were quite a few pot still distillers still left. And that's a sad part is that when you look at it now, if it weren't for Woodford Reserve, we wouldn't have pot stills and even they don't, you know, in Kentucky and even they only use a part of that for what actually gets put into the bottle. So.

Alan R. Bishop (01:43:17.9)
Well, I know here in here in southern Indiana, as an example, you know, being being right next to the river, right next to, you know, the whole bourbon scene. So especially in the Black Forest region, Washington, Orange, Lawrence, Crawford, Harrison and Perry counties, which is what I focus on. What you'll see, like if you go to Brandenburg, Kentucky, right across from, you know, New Amsterdam and Mockport in Indiana, Brandenburg had a lot of small distilleries there, too, just like they had at Mockport, New Amsterdam. And you'll see the Indiana distillers.

take out ads in the Kentucky newspapers that literally will talk about how all of their brandy and whiskey is fire copper distilled or specifically a double pot is what they'll say quite often. And they'll say, unlike our Kentucky neighbors, our whiskey or our brandy is double pot or our whiskey or our brandy is fire copper. And in fact, the, the Daisy Spring mill brand, they didn't have a brand for the barrels with a name on it. It says fire copper.

So yeah, yeah. So that's kind of an interesting.

Drew Hannush (01:44:17.825)
Okay.

It's funny watching these, yeah, to watch these states kind of fighting and telling the other state's story. You know, that's what they're doing over there. Yeah, but we.

Alan R. Bishop (01:44:32.492)
It really is. And what's, what's so humorous about, about new Amsterdam and Brandenburg, for example, is this is the same families on both sides of the river. You're just rubbing it in your cousin's face, you know? So.

Drew Hannush (01:44:46.785)
the civil war all over again.

Alan R. Bishop (01:44:49.644)
Mm -hmm. Yep. That's what you guys get for letting Morgan cross the river here.

Drew Hannush (01:44:54.785)
Oh man. All right. So let's, this is what really put you on my radar when it came to thinking about somebody to talk to about stills because.

Again, this will show you how observant I am. On 9 -11, when I turned the television on and I saw, and I'm wondering what all the confusion is about, I didn't see anything wrong because there was the World Trade Center. And then my friend I was with said, no, there's two towers. And I went, there were? So that shows that I'm not the most observant.

us in the world. And so I kind of, that's a weird example to use, but when I was doing my trips between Kentucky and going overseas to Scotland or to Ireland, I didn't realize that the coffee still is not what we have here. We'd hear the story about the coffee still and you know, you just assume.

that they made it there, then they brought it over here, continuous still, same thing. And then I was reading one of your posts that you put on your blog and I'm going, whoa, wait, it's true. They only have one column on the stills over here, but they have two columns on the coffee still overseas. So how much do you know about that transition and how we ended up with a

with, they call it the beer still, which confuses me because I'll read beer still also when I'm, when they're talking about old pot stills as well. But then you also either have a thumper or a doubler to go along with it. Whereas they just have two columns in the coffee still. And so what is the evolution to that over here? Do we know what that evolution is? And, you know,

Drew Hannush (01:47:02.785)
Why the difference between the two?

Alan R. Bishop (01:47:07.116)
So to be honest, I don't know what the where and who came up with this idea of adapting the coffee still here's here's what I kind of suspect. So the closest thing to those lower at Kentucky column stills, it's out there is sort of you would see this in lowland countries where they're where they're doing a lot of Genevieve.

or maybe sometimes even Scandinavian countries where you're doing aqua VE and things like that, where it's, it's sort of, again, the best of both worlds. It's, it's got enough of that old school pot still filled to it. And yet it's got, you know, because it's inefficient, but it's also got the industrialization that makes it worthwhile to run it, you know, as a, as a huge factory sort of setting, um, the big difference between them. Some distillers will tell you that a low rec Kentucky column still is a version of a coffee still in their argument will be the following.

that because the column is divided into two sections, the bottom part being what they would call the analyzer section and the top three or four plates being either bubble plates or some kind of sieve cap with a D flag, that's the analyzer section, still not the same as a coffee still, because on a coffee, you can actually fractionalize out off of different plates and select from different plates for different draws of different types of alcohol, different azerotypes and that sort of stuff. It's a much more specific tool.

to use to pull off all of the possible alcohol that you can and recycle all the possible byproducts of that alcohol. It's an entirely different word deal altogether. What it would seem to be with the Kentucky column would be, again, let's try to keep this distillation as inefficient as possible in terms of proof. So keep our proof down so that we keep our flavor up, but let's also make it that we can run thousands and thousands of gallons through it.

to really get a lot of product out there. Now, the interesting thing is you don't, there's no real, there's no cuts, for example, on a low rec column still. And there's also not cuts on a coffee other than the fact that there are multiple different draws that you can take. But what happens on a low rec Kentucky column still is the heads, you basically run your condenser hotter and you run it hotter than ever would have been advised by any of the traditional practical distillers who understood that,

Alan R. Bishop (01:49:26.892)
Sometimes you run a little faster, like we talked about the blow off volatility, but there's a range between 68 and about 71 degrees that you want your alcohol to be at when it comes off of that worm that holds onto the best properties. When you're running a low rec column, you have to run hotter and run the condenser hotter because the only way to get rid of the methanol on the heads is to vent that off to the atmosphere. So I can see how traditionalists, and I've certainly been this way myself as well, about certain types of low rec Kentucky column stills.

could say, well, you're not pulling any of your heads off of here. And yes, you're evaporating them to some degree, but they're still being entrained here to some degree. Now they are going through heat cycling. So they are breaking down a little bit over time through esterification and heat cycling, but they're still there. And that's why you want a hot warehouse and you want a number three char or a number four char. You want that char there to clean that spirit up, right? Whereas someone like me, my methodology would be like, I don't want that because I can clean it up before it ever touches the barrel. So it's not.

no interest to me whatsoever. The same is true of those tails. Those tails are entrained throughout that distillation as well. And all you're doing is bumping that proof up as it climbs up the column and comes over to the double or the thumper, depending on what you're running, raising the proof and the purity. And while in pot still distillation, you will rerun those tails. They do break down with heat. It's still not doing exactly the same thing.

which does require that you're going to use that barrel for a great deal of your filtration and a great deal of your positive flavor contribution. And again, nothing wrong with that, I don't suppose, but not my style thing wouldn't have been a traditional style sort of thing and would have been very easy to have criticized if you were someone from that time period that was familiar with the old style of making whiskey.

without a doubt. And I think that you'll find if you look, I've certainly seen this where old timers at the time that were around in the 1870s, 1880s, they say, well, this new whiskey, this is not like the whiskey we had not only from a quality perspective, but from a moralistic perspective. This is not the same whiskey we had when I was young, when everybody drank, but nobody got drunk, right? Or an example like,

Alan R. Bishop (01:51:45.388)
The song, uh, Mountain Dew, right? If your liquor's too red, it'll swell up your head. Right. This idea that you're getting the hangover because one of two things, either rectification, uh, by the rectifiers and added coloring or whatever they're adding, or because you made a poor quality whiskey off the still and you tried to rectify it with a barrel. Um, and now I, I have slightly changed my mind on some of this, but I will tell you what, what I've changed my mind on. I have not changed my mind at all.

Drew Hannush (01:51:49.857)
Heheheheh

Alan R. Bishop (01:52:15.052)
on the traditional low rec Kentucky column still. Now I know guys that use them and they make great quality product and I do like their product, but it has as much for them to do with the maturation as it does with anything else. And if that's what you're familiar with, then that's what you're familiar with. But we've lost a lot of what made of the diversity of whiskey because of the low rec Kentucky column still. There's just styles of whiskey you can't make on that system. They don't exist. But Eric Wolf would be a good example. So he has a type of low rec Kentucky column still, but it runs a little bit differently.

So it doesn't have an analyzer at the top. It's straight up sieve plate, uh, or rectifier at the top. It's straight up sieve plate from top to bottom, D flag over to an actual doubler that is heated of its own accord with three plates on it. So he can actually manipulate the proof coming off of that doubler. And that still is one of the most amazing pieces of equipment that I've ever seen run or ever had the pleasure of running. Um, it doesn't operate the exact same as a lower at Kentucky column still.

his system has got some real levity to it to do some really interesting things. And I don't mean this as an attack on any of the Kentucky distillers because I can hear the grumbling now. Just saying that there were other ways to do this and there should still remain to be other ways to do this. And nothing wrong with bourbon being made on a lower rec column still, but it should be made on all types of systems. Like I said in an article one time, you know, why wouldn't you want...

bourbon made off of a pot with a thumper? Why wouldn't you want bourbon made off of a lower -ret column? Why wouldn't you want it off of one like Eric's? Why not make a bourbon off of an aquatar and see what that does? No reason not to.

Drew Hannush (01:53:52.897)
Well, when you were talking about lower rec column stills when we were talking 1870, are they similar? Okay, so that's basically when that concept was kicking up.

Alan R. Bishop (01:54:07.692)
Yep. That's yeah, about the time that you start to see companies really become large affairs and about the same time you start to see the earliest bottling works happen. That's when you start to see the low rec move in. It becomes much more, you know, grandma and grandpa's old, uh, uh, woodworking shop that made chairs has now become a.

national corporation and we need numbers on freight box cars to make this thing work. So very similar situation. And that's where I think a lot of that art does start to get killed off as well. Right. It becomes a, we no longer have to necessarily have, um, anyone trained heavily in the art of distillation. We now have to have people that are trained heavily in fermentation and.

not necessarily great fermentation, but keeping it from getting effed up sort of fermentation. So.

Drew Hannush (01:55:07.265)
So I would have to, I'd love to talk to E .H. Taylor and say, what do you think about the fact that your whiskey is now being made on the very still that you called a cheap John method? That was his quote about making, yeah. Yeah.

Alan R. Bishop (01:55:23.5)
That's awesome. Cheap John method. I like that. That's good. That's good. I'm going to remember that man. I'm good. You know what? My next endeavor. I'm telling you right now, Drew, there will be there's going to be a shirt that says not cheap John whiskey.

Drew Hannush (01:55:40.993)
E .H. Taylor. Yeah. Although I don't think he can use this. No, that's for sure. That's for sure. Well, this is awesome. You have filled my head with all sorts of great information and definitely clarified some things for me. So it is always a pleasure to talk to you and pick your brain on these things. And I'm...

Alan R. Bishop (01:55:43.691)
coming man. It's coming. They're not gonna use it. Right?

Drew Hannush (01:56:08.961)
Glad we got to actually share it with some more people and I gave a few spoilers away from my book, but hey, you know, there's gonna be a lot more in there besides just what we're talking about here. And part of it for me is also people need to know. And so let's throw that information out there and get people questioning things and start getting some real answers here. So thank you so much for being on the podcast.

Alan R. Bishop (01:56:32.876)
Man, I can't wait to, yeah, anytime, man, I love talking to you, enjoy talking to you, whether it's on podcast, on the phone and private, all that stuff. Anyway, I can never help you. And, and, and, you know, for the audience as well, I'm, you know, I'm not, not saying that all this information is exactly perfectly correct. I'm just saying to the best of my ability, this is what I know of, and this is what I've experienced and what I've researched and seen.

And that's something to bear in mind because no doubt at some point in time, either you or Laura, one of the two is going to find some stuff that I had no idea about. And I'm going to have to rewrite all this stuff in my head for the next part of the story. But, man, yeah, keep up the good work. And I know this book is going to be every bit as intense and good as what you did for Tennessee. And you know what? Kentucky needs that. They really do right now. If it inspires a few distillers in Kentucky to take a little bit of an alternative route.

Drew Hannush (01:57:06.657)
Hahaha!

Alan R. Bishop (01:57:29.484)
That's a good thing. That's a good thing for the market. That's a good thing for the distillers. That's a good thing for the consumers. And even if it ruffles some feathers, that's not a bad thing either. You know, they, every once in a while we all got to have our feathers ruffled. So, um, I get mine ruffled quite a bit. I'm sure I'll, I'm sure I'll get an email about low rec column stills and how I'm wrong. So.

Drew Hannush (01:57:43.457)
Got it.

Drew Hannush (01:57:48.897)
Yeah, well, that's all right. They can send the mail to me.

Alan R. Bishop (01:57:55.084)
Yeah.

Drew Hannush (01:57:56.161)
I put it out there, so there you go. I'm sure we're gonna learn much more along the way, and that's what I love about history. It does keep evolving and don't hold any of us to what we think today, because surely something's gonna come along to upend our apple cart somewhere. So, well, very good. Well, thank you again. Yeah, absolutely. I wouldn't be paying attention to it if it was that stale.

Alan R. Bishop (01:57:59.372)
Yep.

Alan R. Bishop (01:58:17.164)
Be awful boring if it didn't. Yeah. Thank you, brother.

Alan R. Bishop (01:58:25.804)
Yup.

Drew Hannush (01:58:26.113)
Yep, very good. Well, best of luck to you and we'll chat with you, I'm sure, somewhere down the road. And cheers.

Alan R. Bishop (01:58:36.236)
Cheers, brother.