Ep. 119 - Finding Colorado's Grains of Distinction with Al Laws of Laws Whiskey House

Transcript

Drew Hannush (00:01.903)
Whiskey Lord, the interviews. I'm your host, Drew Hanisch, the bestselling author of Whiskey Lord's travel guide to experience in Kentucky, Bourbon, the Experiencing Irish Whiskey book, and also the Lost History of Tennessee Whiskey. And today we are headed to a state that I consider to be one of the strongest players in the making of quality whiskey, Colorado. And we're going to go to a distillery that I had the pleasure of visiting a couple of years ago, Laws Whiskey House. And my guest today is the distillery founder,

Al was, he put his name on the distillery so we know exactly who he is. Al, welcome to the show.

Alan Laws (00:32.878)
Well, thanks for the good intro there, Drew. I appreciate the time and thanks for inviting us on.

Drew Hannush (00:43.919)
Yes. Well, uh, it's going to be fun to dig into this. I was mentioning before the, uh, podcast began that I didn't know anything about laws. I think Stranding hands was pretty much the extent of my knowledge of Colorado whiskey. And then my friend Israel with a whiskey one channel on YouTube. Um, we were chatting during the pandemic and I was looking up on his shelf and I was like, you have an awful lot of this laws whiskey. What is that?

all about. And he's so enthusiastic about it that it just rubbed off on me. And then I had the opportunity to come there and actually tour the distillery. And, and I couldn't leave without taking home a bottle of the San Luis Valley rye. That stuff. Wow. I actually did a YouTube channel tasting of that.

a year after I bought it and I said, it took me a year to do the tasting because there were so many different things. It was such a complex whiskey that to me, I wasn't going to do it justice if I just jumped right on it. I needed some time with that whiskey. So, uh, I'm looking forward to digging in and talking a little bit about the grains that you've sourced for that and really getting to know a lot more about your other whiskies as well. So thank you for coming on board.

Alan Laws (02:10.602)
That's great. Yeah, no, it's gonna be fun.

Drew Hannush (02:13.167)
So let's get into your journey to starting a distillery and you're not originally from Denver either. In fact, you come from the land up north, so I understand.

Alan Laws (02:26.378)
That's right. The great white north as it was back in the SCTB days. So I'm originally from Western Canada and I've lived here in the US for like 23 years or so. I've spent six and a half, seven years in Brooklyn, New York, and ever since out here in Denver, Colorado. And very much like where I grew up in Edmonton and Calgary is very much like Denver. So very easy transition for us. Whereas one of my...

Drew Hannush (02:31.279)
Bob and Doug, yes.

Alan Laws (02:55.914)
good friends that I worked with in New York were like, why would you go out there? Like they're very eccentric. They're like, no, it's everything's here. And I'm like, yeah, I get that. But like there's more to the world than just this. But we actually got doing this while we lived in Brooklyn. So we were looking for at the time though, I was transferred out here with Maryland. And so we are looking there and we got here became much more of a, you know, a

Drew Hannush (02:59.151)
Yeah.

Drew Hannush (03:06.767)
Yeah.

Drew Hannush (03:11.471)
Oh.

Alan Laws (03:24.361)
project or dream or whatever else it was, it was very, very easily something that we could accomplish and own where we came from, like own our buildings and everything. A little bit different profile then trying to do this in New York and leasing space and all these kinds of other complications of being in Brooklyn or anywhere in any of the boroughs in New York. So here was much better. And, you know, Denver's really great because it's got a culture around craft and started with beer. And I think it's in other food products.

other than California, Denver is like a leader of that sort of thing. So craft stuff where people are looking for ingredients and they know more about what's, or they care more about what's in there, what's in the bottle or, and we've just, we found it pretty welcoming and you know, having a sophisticated customer base in our home state really helped us develop.

Drew Hannush (04:14.671)
And for your own part, coming from Canada, I would imagine that you were probably surrounded by whiskey at the time, but were you a fan of whiskey at the time?

Alan Laws (04:26.153)
Oh yeah. My caveat to this is remember this is Canada. This is a long time ago and Canada is a lot more liberal to these things. This draconian 21 years old thing in the US is pretty crazy to me growing up in Alberta where I was 18 and really I started drinking whiskey when I was 16. So it was really what I like to drink. I don't like beer. I can drink a beer, be social. It's not really what I enjoy and wine, not interested. So.

Drew Hannush (04:27.855)
Yeah.

Alan Laws (04:55.465)
When you get down to certain things, it's like, well, this is my thing. And I liked it a lot. And it started with, you know, Jack Daniels and Wild Turkey were my two kind of favorites. And as I kind of grew up and looked for other things, I started to buy other other brands and go, wow, this is really great. And then I spent some time in Scotch, quite a long time in Scotch. I'm not as a, I'm not big or not a huge fan of Canadian whiskey. No offense to my brethren up there. Like there are some great ones.

Drew Hannush (05:21.711)
Okay.

Alan Laws (05:25.446)
you know, find their way into blends down here like Whistlepig. I think the stuff in Alberta distillery, their rye is particularly good. But you know, like I'm looking for authenticity always in the whiskey and standards. Standards matter and American whiskey has standards. Canada's standards are different and not, they don't gel or mesh with me too much.

Drew Hannush (05:32.335)
Mm -hmm.

Drew Hannush (05:46.223)
Yeah, we found it very interesting. Actually, last year I really made an effort to jump into Canadian whiskey to understand it better. And I was quite surprised by the fact that they distilled everything separately and that it was to blend rather than to necessarily age everything, you know, to have a single barrel product. And there's this sense.

I think for the American buyer, especially, and it's interesting hearing that coming from you, having come from Canada, that when I saw a whiskey called Caribou Crossing, which is made by Sazerac, it's a single barrel product. So, bourbon fans tend to like it because it is basically a Canadian whiskey that is distilled in more of an American tradition rather than a Canadian tradition. So, it's fun seeing that.

Alan Laws (06:43.845)
Yeah, there's nothing wrong with blending the whole art unto itself. It's just that I think age, well, for us, like we're not trying to shortcut it. One of our key things, there are no shortcuts and shortcuts are things like, tasks like smaller barrels or shortcuts, you just get any infusion, you're not getting all the aspects of maturation in it. And also, you know, we want a base to like when we blend our own whiskeys across, you know, age statement, we want to know.

Drew Hannush (06:44.527)
difference.

Alan Laws (07:11.428)
what it is and what it's contributing. Plus, at the same time, we want it to have a decent amount of time in the barrel. And we want it to be in a new barrel for the most part. I do think barley whiskeys and American single malt will benefit when those rules finally come out from, you know, used group rich because I think it lets the grain shine through a lot more. So, but yeah, we've been doing for we're on we're almost 13 years old, actually.

Drew Hannush (07:20.111)
Mm -hmm.

Drew Hannush (07:33.967)
So you.

Drew Hannush (07:37.743)
Okay, wow. What was the landscape like when you first arrived in Denver? Because it really was what I considered to be a beer city more than anything.

Alan Laws (07:48.196)
Yeah. Well, we have the advantage of, of having the very first craft whiskey distillery in town, um, being strand of hands. And again, they make it great. Um, it's a barley whiskey treated more like, I would say like American bourbon or rye going into a new barrel. Um, it's great. It's one of my favorite whiskeys. So I like that one. Um, then we get like, our, our focus has always been bourbon rye and we're really trying to bring out the grains, right?

So we're making a four grain, we're making a hundred percent rye, making things that fill in some gaps in American whiskey. We want to be part of this great tradition and history. And we want to add to it. Like I'm not trying to be Kentucky, I'm trying to be something different from that, but I'm still going to pay homage to that by using traditional techniques. All of our whiskeys are sour mash and we want to make it in small batches. And we, you know, go a little bit step further and insert.

In terms of heritage, we don't even use column still. So a pot still, like in, I think you mentioned your book on Irish whiskey, the pot stills concentrate flavor better. And we're about the grain flavor, where the grains come from, not just varietal, but actually the dirt they're grown in. So we believe in grain terroir and these things all matter and they all present themselves in the whiskeys as we make them and age them and release them.

Drew Hannush (09:15.375)
So how did you get started in the whiskey business? I understand you came from a finance background.

Alan Laws (09:22.5)
Yeah, I was in oil and gas finance. So I grew up in Alberta, Canada. So that's Canada's Texas. And I've been around that my whole life. So oil and gas is something that was pretty natural for me. And I ended up on Wall Street in regard of research into these companies for public companies. And I did oil and gas for a while. And my favorite thing is oil service companies, which are the companies that do all the work to get the oil out of the ground. So Halliburton, Schlumberger, you know, builders like neighbors or.

There's Helmer & Payne, all these drillers that get it out of the ground. So those are the companies that I worked with and provided expert opinions for Wall Street and investors on those kind of companies. And there's a lot of similarities to oil and gas and distilling, right? It's a heat separation is what we're doing. That's what refining is. So there's a lot of things that make a lot of sense, like barrels of oil. When you find it, it's...

Probable no, it's not even sorry. It's possible. And if you drill enough holes, it's probable and then it's You know proven at you know at some point well oil or oil gas that's their thing and well for for bourbon when we put it in the into the barrel It's possible a couple years in it's probable and then once you get you know above four or so, you know, it's proven

Drew Hannush (10:29.103)
Yeah.

Drew Hannush (10:36.591)
Yeah.

Drew Hannush (10:42.959)
Yeah, you got a little more aging time in with your whiskey than you do with your oil though.

Alan Laws (10:48.196)
Right. Yeah. So yeah, I did that for a long time and then moved to New York to do it in New York and at Maryland to work for Maryland in Canada. And I was, you know, still very much involved in whiskey. And when I was in New York, I started to have a lot of time or 60, 80 hours a week. So what I would buy, this is where the collection starts. I know people go, oh, we're a collector. I'm like, I think collecting really happens when you don't have time to drink the bottle that you bought and you've

Drew Hannush (11:07.535)
Mm.

Alan Laws (11:18.116)
gone on to buy another one. And then that's how it sort of evolves. That's how it evolved for me. And soon I had, you know, 15 or 20, and there were ones that I liked for certain things. Oh, it's a Friday, it's this. I want to sit at my friend's stoop and, you know, drink bourbon or I want to drink scotch or something like that. So it evolved for me. Out here, I just have more space rather than a little brownstone. So, you know, the collection grew to like 700. And then COVID came and had some friends that helped me.

Drew Hannush (11:37.647)
Mm.

Drew Hannush (11:43.247)
Wow, yeah.

Drew Hannush (11:48.271)
It happens.

Alan Laws (11:48.292)
Deplete white. Yeah, so but like those whole things during, you know, working and all that, again, only thing I really like is whiskey. So I like to try lots. I've tried so many brands. I've really narrowed it over the last couple years. It's just, I can't try everything. And I'm pretty, you know, I got just across the wall here from this. I got 6 ,000 barrels of our own, which I'm pretty proud of. And I like to drink.

I'm not going to be one of those guys that, oh, I only drink our own stuff. That's not true. Nobody here in our production team or anyone else just drinks our stuff. We want to keep experiencing what others are making, and it allows us to get better at our craft. So.

Drew Hannush (12:30.767)
Yeah, definitely. So when you are getting started, how do you learn to distill? Were you distilling right off the beginning or working with somebody else?

Alan Laws (12:41.053)
Oh, Drew, you know that's illegal, right?

Drew Hannush (12:45.039)
I say, I don't know who I was talking to recently that sort of coward a bit when I said that. And it's funny because I'm always like, well, there is a statute of limitations, I think on this. So it's okay.

Alan Laws (12:59.548)
But so yeah, to get into it, it was something I just decided after 15 years on in oil and gas finance, I was like, well, I don't this is a young person's pursuit and I don't feel that young anymore. And I needed to do something that was a little more soulful. I know some people have views of finance and Wall Street and all these other things. And God bless. I enjoyed my time there, but it is a grind and it is not very soulful.

That's definitely true. And so, you know, like something that meant something to me. I've never, no matter what I worked in my whole life, I've never worked anywhere that I hated. I always just worked a place that I loved doing what I was doing and I was not loving what I was doing anymore. So I had to go onto something else, but it had to be something, you know, people use, oh, you're passionate about it. Ah, that's a weak word.

Drew Hannush (13:29.551)
Mmm, yeah.

Alan Laws (13:54.17)
We're obsessed here with whiskey. So obsession is probably a better word for the whole thing. And so you start to get into that and you're like, okay, well, these are the whiskeys that I like. And here's why I like them. And so could you build something that had the aspects of all of these things and put them into one type of whiskey? And the answer to that is yes. I'm a research analyst. I read every book. The library we have.

is extensive. I read everything, tech manuals, fluffy things about all the, oh, look at the barley in the fields and this whiskey and the sun's going, oh, I should, I, right. And, and cause it gave you aspects of, of like the, of what whiskey is, right? It's, it's the most evolved spirit, right? It's the highest, most evolved spirit, no question. And then I went to the,

Drew Hannush (14:32.591)
Ha ha ha ha.

Alan Laws (14:46.521)
the craziness of, well, I can buy Whiskey Magazine and Whiskey Advocate and buy all this and I still read all those all the time. But back then, this is 13 years ago, there wasn't much effect. There wasn't Whiskey Advocate, there was Malte Advocate, which I bought 10 years of back issues and I read them all. Trying to figure out like there are cycles, there's what's important at certain times of year plus every five or six years there's a trend and I wanted to be able to see how whiskey evolved. And so we're doing this.

Drew Hannush (14:59.567)
Mm.

Alan Laws (15:16.504)
again, 13 years ago, and no one cared about whiskey yet. And we had, there's a curse to this and there's a great benefit to this. And that everyone decided that whiskey was the thing and everyone got involved and that's great. And I think that's amazing, but it also creates a lot of problems for someone who's making it and then the crowded market and all these other kinds of things. But we just kept sticking to.

Drew Hannush (15:20.591)
Yeah.

Alan Laws (15:41.784)
our knitting, if you will, like we weren't going to take any shortcuts and that's a trademark thing. It's on my arm. It's a kind of a hockey thing. Again, this is America, Canada, that's religion. So hockey is pretty important and it's a lot of our, a lot of the slogans or mantras we have around here, like, you know, every day's a tryout, all that kind of thing. And our best whiskey we made today, cause we always get better. And we've for 13 years, that's our approach.

Drew Hannush (15:47.279)
Hey.

Alan Laws (16:10.551)
and has been our approach. But did a lot of research, got to a point where we're ready to do this, convinced my wife, didn't even take much convincing. I thought it was going to take a lot longer for me to spend all our money on this. And she was pretty open to it. She helped write the business plan. She's an accountant and MBA, so she knows the business side. And she was very helpful in all this stuff, too. And she was very involved in it. And she still is today.

Drew Hannush (16:22.319)
You

Alan Laws (16:38.582)
We won't let her retire. She's got too much institutional memory. So she needs to stay. Yeah, we, I'm and so we developed the business plan. We like a lot of folks like get some lawyers to file their stuff. We don't, we'd file all that stuff. So we wrote business plans. We got our DSP. And in the meantime, we're like, okay, we're going to do this. We have a cool model, a mile from us called Strandhans and they do it differently. And, but at the time they were like, they were like one barrel a day kind of operation.

Drew Hannush (16:42.095)
Very nice.

Alan Laws (17:08.918)
like, oh, this can be done. It's economic or it's commercial. And so we just have to take our time or, you know, become patient. I'm not going to say I was patient. I became patient. And we went to, you know, we went to Kentucky, so let's go see how it's done in large format. And so we did the Bourbon Trail. That was way smaller back in 2008 or nine when we did it. And in fact, we were going through there in June into July and what people

Drew Hannush (17:26.895)
Mm.

Alan Laws (17:37.941)
probably don't realize who have come to this amazing thing called whiskey recently is that they just shut those plants down in the summer and do turnarounds. Most of them would shut for like a month. So we got there when a lot of the stuff was shutting down. People have to book a month in advance to go on tours. Sometimes we were the only two on the tours.

Drew Hannush (17:49.391)
Yeah.

Alan Laws (18:01.557)
Oh, and like they know and cared about it in that way. In fact, most people like, why do you, why do you care about you'd ask questions? Why do you care about that? I'm like, well, we're going to build this. We have a place. This is what we're going to do. And they're like, well, that's kind of cute. So, but we went through this process and in this, in Bardstown, we met somebody who said, oh, well, we can get you hooked up to go see, um, old Tom, I think was called Barton's now. And you can go see it, but it's closed right now because they're doing turnarounds and.

Drew Hannush (18:14.191)
Yeah.

Alan Laws (18:29.428)
but we know the head of PR and she'll come and she'll take you through and she did. And she was great. Pam was wonderful. And she's like, well, why do you want to do this? Oh, we're going to think about, well, you should go meet Bill. And I'm like, I don't know who Bill is. And like, wow, let's just go on. We'll give him a call and pick up the flip phone. Phone's Bill. And we go over to his house. It's like five minutes away. He lives in Barnes Health, still does. He's 89 this year. And we went there and.

what was going to be, you know, have a beer for 30 minutes and talk to, you know, an ex master distiller who'd done this in Sigrams when he was younger all the way. He did it for 40 years. So it made everything and great person. His family's great. It was really, really fun to, uh, to talk with them. And it turned into three hours. And, and then to a point where then he's like, wow, what about this? And you ask a question, I'm like, oh, here's this. And then he's like, wow, how are you going to do that? I'm like, wow, here's my formula of, and he's like, son.

This business is built by people with a grade eight education. You don't need no formulas. And so he's like, Oh, well at the end he's like, you know, son, I'm retired and I've done a little consulting before, but often when I do consulting people, I give them the advice and show them what to do. And then they, they do it for a little bit and then like, Oh, this is too hard. And I don't want to do this anymore. He's like, I'm not interested in wasting my time and giving advice. It's not going to be used. And so.

Drew Hannush (19:31.535)
Nice.

Alan Laws (19:56.978)
if you're going to do this right, then I would be willing to do some consulting work for you." And we're like, well, we're going to take the long road here. There are no shortcuts and we are going to do it right way. We're not going to put out an 18 month old project. We are going to take it to three years or so to start. And then we're going to keep raising the bar. And he's like, son, well, I'm interested in this. So he helped us get off the ground in a lot of very critical areas that I would have thought weren't as critical. And like, oh, you just do this and make a cut.

and you do this and but the art, the soul is what he helped add to this. And I'll forever be thankful for him. I still talk to him. We just saw him again in February. I went to see him, him and his family. Yeah, like he's part of this thing. He was my Yoda. He never ever, ever, ever did he answer a question. He just keep asking me questions until I answered the question. So he's the best. And that was how we started out.

Drew Hannush (20:45.039)
Hehehehe

Drew Hannush (20:49.999)
Nice. Nice.

Drew Hannush (20:55.343)
I do remember the days of driving down I -64 between Lexington and Louisville. And the first time that I did that and I saw a distillery sign, a brown sign that said there's a distillery here. And I had just driven back through Missouri, which is a wine country and had gone to a couple of wineries while I was there. And I thought, how the heck would you do a whiskey tour? I can barely walk out of a wine experience, you know?

Alan Laws (21:22.608)
Oh yeah.

Drew Hannush (21:24.751)
And, um, but it hadn't even crossed my mind at that point that you could actually go tour distilleries. And so it doesn't surprise me. And the other thing that doesn't surprise me about the reception you got is that whenever I go to Kentucky in January, it, I always get an extra special, uh, event anywhere I go because I'm usually one of the only people on the tour.

Alan Laws (21:40.335)
No question. Yeah, and folks are really nice. Like everyone thinks everyone's hyper competitive and they are, but at the same time, if something happens to one of them,

Drew Hannush (21:50.927)
And they seem to love that time of year to be able to really kind of show off stuff that can't normally show off or they don't normally show off.

Alan Laws (22:09.519)
they just make a call to their neighbor and their neighbor just delivery goes, oh yeah, we can hook you up with that. And it's always been that way. I don't think it's not that way anymore. And that's something that we value a lot in terms of what we think the community should be.

Drew Hannush (22:26.831)
Yeah. Did you have a particular style of whiskey that you wanted to start with?

Alan Laws (22:32.367)
Yeah, so my, I guess catalyst for the four grain came from Woodford Reserves 2005 Masters collection where they did a four grain that I loved. And I know a lot of like the regular Old Forester has, you know, sorry, Woodford Reserves has Old Forester in it and Old Forester is one of my favorite firms. So I'm like, oh, I love this stuff.

Drew Hannush (22:46.895)
Mm -hmm.

Alan Laws (22:59.118)
But that was very particular to me in that it was very grain forward and still had the sweetness. I love the grains. I think whiskey is about the grain. So it isn't just about the components of sweetness and this and this. It's like, well, it should highlight the grain. It shouldn't just highlight sweetness and wood influences. Wood should be there to influence, not to overwhelm it. So even our flagship is like four years old. And we like it there. And we...

are bonded seven, eight years old and those things get a lot closer to what traditional Kentucky bourbon whiskey tastes like because it has more wood influence. But we were looking for the grains. So those four grains, I'm like, this is so cool. And then they had done some sweet mash, they did bunch of all these other things that I bought. I had all of them up till COVID. They're all gone now. But to me, it was like, this is really interesting and they've taken the time to highlight this.

Drew Hannush (23:50.223)
Heheheheh

Alan Laws (23:57.004)
And I'm like, I want to make that. That's what I want to add to as a, our frontline needs to be a four grain, not exactly like Woodfords, but we wanted to use local grain. I think, well, I don't think whiskey to me comes from somewhere. So where it comes from influences it a lot. And it should be that great. I'm sorry. Whiskey that's made here in Colorado has a certain.

Drew Hannush (24:17.487)
Mm -hmm.

Alan Laws (24:25.579)
character to it because we're on the front range. And those things are really important. And I think that eventually the US whiskey map, if you will, will look a lot like Scotland, right? You'll have Speyside, you'll have Highlands, you'll have the Islands, you'll have like Orkney, you'll have all these things and they have distinctive characteristics because of where they come from. And we're in a layer in on that, but our grains are all grown in Colorado and we're using heirloom varietals.

And then again, it's because it's the heirloom variety plus where it's grown, so the soil that it's grown in. All those things matter.

Drew Hannush (25:00.175)
Yeah. So you have right now two farms that you source from. Was that, what was the conversation like with those farms? Were you going to use the grains that they already had or were you kind of pushing them in a way and saying, Hey, could you grow these particular grains?

Alan Laws (25:21.194)
It would be the former Revin Ladder. But the story there is when we started, we were like, we want to use local grains. We were tying into the local food movement, like this is important. It'll taste like where we're from and all this. And then no one would sell us grain. Even the corn association went, hey, we need corn. And they're like, where are you? We're like, oh, we're like South Denver. And like, I'm not driving my truck in there. Like literally, not going in there.

Drew Hannush (25:38.319)
Oh, nice.

Drew Hannush (25:49.071)
Wow. Yeah.

Alan Laws (25:50.89)
Like, but like, no, we're not doing that. So we are original six months we, we use brie's corn or the Midwest, very good quality. Nothing wrong with it whatsoever. Very high quality, but we wanted something from Colorado Colorado girls control to, and we wanted to get that to our, but that wasn't happening. And even the small grains, we didn't even know where to get those. And nobody was set up to clean them and deliver them other than for feed. Right. And so.

We're like, oh, well, it needs to be cleaner for this. And then we ran into a situation early, like within our first three months, where most of this, I would do this at four o 'clock in the morning or on long weekends was the best, because I could get there early and I could do three full days of this stuff. And we could get our 12 barrels a month or whatever we were making. So I ran it of like, we used a little bit of wheat malt in the wheat component of our four grain. And we ran out and well.

I can't order like a dozen bags. It has to be in a larger order. So I'm like, oh, I need to go. So I went to a home brew store because there's tons of those here in Denver and Colorado in general. And I'm like, I need wheat malt. And they're always have these two or three varieties. I'm like, oh, this one, we've used Brice. And I go, oh, wait, Brice. And he goes, what are these other two? And he's like, oh, this one's this. And this one here is grown here locally. I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, what, this one? So yeah, it's like a nondescript craft paper with like a stamp on it. And I'm like, I want to try this one.

Drew Hannush (27:15.119)
hahahaha

Alan Laws (27:18.057)
And literally there was like 50 pounds of, um, of like wheat malt in our mash bill and everything changed. The whole place just smelled that the floral notes blew up. It just like, this is fresh. Like this isn't been in a silo for a year and a half or two. This is literally, it came off the field probably like a month and a month before that and was malted at the farm. Like this is something we didn't know.

Drew Hannush (27:28.335)
Mm.

Drew Hannush (27:44.495)
Mm. Wow.

Alan Laws (27:46.217)
The first Kraft malting company is Colorado Malting. And so they were doing this and it was the way for them to add value to, you know, whiskey is a value added farm product, malt is a value added farm product. So they were trying to like, hey, how do we make more small family farm? You know, we're getting squeezed out everywhere. So we try, how do we subsist and continue to grow and keep our families on the farm? So they created a malting company. So this mall, I'm like, holy man, this is so, this is.

crazy good. So, phoned them. Small distillery in Denver. They were mostly doing malting for barley for homebreweries, or also to sell to breweries. And we had so many of them. We still do. And I'm like, you know, and they're like, oh, sure. Like, what do you need? I'm like, I need some wheat malt. I need some barley malt. He had that. And he's like, well, and you have to remember, this is a Scarlet varietal, so it's different. And

Drew Hannush (28:19.695)
Hehehehe

Drew Hannush (28:32.047)
Mm -hmm.

Alan Laws (28:44.777)
stuff that you might have been using. I'm like, I don't care about that. It's actually cool. And then where's it grown? Oh, we grow it on everything. Oh, does it even better? And then do you have rye? Like, yes, we have rye. We don't have a lot of rye, but we do grow it as cover. And we haven't really had demand for it before, but yeah, we can definitely provide that too. And I'm like, do you have corn? No, they don't have corn. And like, okay, well, I'll have to go find that somewhere else. But I'm like, oh, this is great. But well, can I order some? He's like, yeah. And he's like, well, how much do you need? And I said, I need five tons of mix. And the phone went.

Dead silence. Tell the story. I got dead silent. And when I talked to Jason and his brother, Josh, who run the company, who run Colorado Malty and the farms now, their dad's pretty much retired. I don't think he ever retires, but. And he was like, well, when do you need this by? Like in six weeks? He's like, whew. Okay, yeah, yeah, I can do that. And then come to pass. That's the largest order they'd ever received before. And that started the relationship.

Drew Hannush (29:41.711)
Wow.

Alan Laws (29:43.945)
And they tell the story way better than I do, but it was important to them. And they're struggled to get this malting company up and running. And we've used them ever since and it changed everything about our whiskey. So, you know, 40 % of that mash bill, because we're a 60 % corn, 20 % wheat, 10 rye, 10 malt is our mash bill. And so 40 % of that is a lot of flavor grain because the malt in our case isn't just for conversion.

Drew Hannush (29:56.367)
Mm.

Alan Laws (30:13.481)
It's actually providing something to the flavor profile because it's of the varietal. And that's really tough to pick out sometimes, but once you dial it in, you go, oh, there's the malt in your whiskey. Yeah, some people pick it up, like, oh, this is fairly malty. I'm like, well, there's a lot of malt in it in terms of a little bit of wheat malt, and then there's the barley malt, which has definite contribution. So the flavors are, the sweetness is the corn.

and then any metallic kind of bite to it, that's the rye. That's the thing you like a lot.

Drew Hannush (30:43.855)
Mm -hmm.

Drew Hannush (30:49.167)
Yes, yes, absolutely. There's so much depth in that, Ryan. We'll get into that in a little bit, but yeah.

Alan Laws (30:53.577)
Oh, yeah. And then the wheat is a spring varietal. So it's, um, whereas the rye is SLV, it's only grown in the valley down in, um, you know, south of here, down in the San Luis Valley. And the wheat is, is a centennial. So it's centennial varietal, which since we're in the centennial state, it's a Colorado varietal. And it's very different. It's not like hard. It's a soft wheat. So it provides esters and flavors that are.

quite differentiated from hard, barbarian or red or whatever the most people use in terms of wheat. And it acts a lot like rye in the fermentation. It's a little more gooey, has a lot more proteins. And so it stresses the yeast and they give off these different esters. These tend to be more baking spice and orange, fruity kind of notes. It's the third kind of thing you taste is doughy.

cinnamon bun kind of thing rising in the kitchen in the summer. And then the orange comes through and then it finishes with a real nutty backbone to it. And that's from the Scarlet Barley.

Drew Hannush (32:01.551)
Yeah, I was noting too that there is this black T note that comes in on the nose as well. Where do you think that comes from?

Alan Laws (32:12.937)
I think it comes from the soil, because all those grains present that. It's like an orange Pico tea, black tea. Definitely. Yeah. It's in all of our whiskies and all of our single grains. So we started out with four grain because we wanted to, you know, add to the fabric. And then what we wanted to do is we want to take all those grains, we want to deconstruct the four grain into single grain varietals so that we could show people, here's what these grains present as.

Drew Hannush (32:19.023)
Mm -hmm.

Drew Hannush (32:36.399)
Mm -hmm.

Alan Laws (32:41.577)
or the flavors they present as 100 % or close to that as we could get. The beginning, we had a 95 .5 rye that was like 47 .5 raw, 47 .5 malted because the malt that they were making on the farm at the beginning, it was, you know, rye's a little harder to do all that stuff too. And even when it's done well, it doesn't tend to have a lot of diastic power. So it, you know, on a regular rye malt, it barely has enough to convert itself.

Drew Hannush (33:04.687)
Mm -hmm.

Alan Laws (33:11.209)
They got it up over two, once it's over two, it's very useful to us and they've got it to a place where it, so we haven't for, I don't know, eight years made it 95 .5, we've always, we make it 100 % now.

Drew Hannush (33:24.719)
Okay. It's your whiskies are so interesting, uh, because I get this evolution on the palette. It's almost like you don't say nose palette finish. You kind of go nose and then the several phases you're going to get through before you get to the end. Because at one point I'm getting like a graham cracker note on this, which is something that I really love in like pot still whiskey, Irish pot still whiskey.

and then you're getting like a little bit of a lemon comes in, I get this kind of egg custard thing going on at the same time. It's like, as I think I know what I'm tasting, suddenly I've moved on to something else and that experience keeps evolving. Is that part of distillation? Is that the variety of grains? Because...

I also will note that I get it in the, in the rye whiskey as well. That same kind of evolution.

Alan Laws (34:20.105)
Yeah. Well, it's complex whiskey. And so it was designed to be that way. It's a, you know, when we do the rye, it's 50 % malted, 50 % raw. The raw is going to give you the taste of the earth. It's going to give you those things like the anise and the peppery notes and then the floral notes and the sweetness, which is comes through very quickly, comes from the malted rye. So there you're homogenizing it to some degree.

and you're capturing the sweetness. So it's not going to add as much to the earthy tones or the botanicals. All those things were in the rye. The rye is pretty close to being a cocktail unto itself. It tastes like it has bitters in it to some degree. Well, every year is different. Like we're using only the grain of the prior year. And that adds to vintage, TTB, not fond of those sort of things. Like you can't like, hey, this is the 19, they don't like that stuff at all.

Drew Hannush (35:00.527)
Mm.

Drew Hannush (35:13.711)
No.

Alan Laws (35:17.801)
So they don't let you do that. You can say when it was distilled, but you can't call it, hey, this is the grain of the, no, they don't let you do that. So, but yeah, like those elements come from the grain. It comes from how it's distilled as well. So those esters exist in the fermentation and then how you cut them is very important. So the bourbon, we're making like cuts that we want to,

Drew Hannush (35:18.191)
Yeah.

Drew Hannush (35:25.711)
Okay.

Alan Laws (35:45.628)
When esters like apple and pear present, once we've gone through all the bad stuff, it was pretty obvious, like methanol and aldehyde and that stuff, you're like, yeah, you know, no one wants this. It's pretty easy in the heads cop, but once it gets into the sweet area, now you have to pick your place. And for us, it's been, you know, what esters were we looking for? And you don't even get like a half a gallon of this at the front end in a 250 gallon spirit run, but it matters. And then those things come through your first sip.

Like you just outlined this, like, oh, this and I got this. And then, oh, well, the second tip, I got this. That evolution is important and it comes from the process of making those cuts, but it does primarily come from the grain, which I would then say comes from the dirt that it's grown in. So we're growing all the small flavor grains in an ancient sea bed in a valley in Southwestern Colorado. So it's at 7 ,600 feet above sea level. So.

We're on a we're an upper mountain desert, right? So it gets really hot during the day cools down a lot at night The soil has a lot of salinity to it has a lot of calcium in it The water table is not far down like maybe only three four feet. So there's a lot of sand in this so the the plants struggle when the plants struggle they concentrate starch and I'm Repeating this like don't think that I know a lot about this. I'm an economist. Don't don't I'm not agronomist or whatever

Drew Hannush (37:06.223)
repeating this like don't think that I know a lot about this

Drew Hannush (37:12.495)
Yeah.

Alan Laws (37:13.242)
Brahmin, but our farmers have taught us all this stuff. So it's like, okay, well, this is stressing the grain that's concentrating starch to change in temperature from day to night is doing that to concentrate starches, give more flavors. And these, these are varietals are not grown for yield, they're grown for, they're grown for flavor. And, and this area of Colorado is renowned for very high quality barley that can be malted.

Not all barley can be malted. Everyone goes, oh, you just malted barley. If it's not high quality, you can't do that. So a lot of cores, barley is grown up in that area. A lot of the farms grow directly for cores for that. And these guys used to do that. The Cody family used to grow just for cores. And they wanted to broaden that out and again, try to add more value to the grain they grew and be more in control of their own destiny. So they built the business around that. But these grain varietals matter.

Drew Hannush (37:47.407)
Mm -hmm.

Drew Hannush (38:03.663)
Yeah.

Alan Laws (38:08.632)
And then everyone's in a while, I think, yes, earlier, like, we don't really dictate it. So we like what we have, but everyone's a while ago. Hey, we're going to plant some of this. Would you buy it? Absolutely. So we had some Scottish varietal, like, what was it like? Think it was a different varietal anyways. And I can't remember what it is off the top of my head, but we made 20 barrels of that and it's different. And it's really good.

Drew Hannush (38:35.663)
Yeah. Yeah.

Alan Laws (38:38.168)
But you're like, oh, well, so we always do that. So we just got corn, got some red corn this year. Last year we did some blue corn, all from Whiskey Sister Supply out in Burlington. And, you know, they provide us with all our yellow dent corn too. We use number one and then one, two, three, all that is just how the level of cleanliness, right? So we get a dent once they've super cleaned it. So it's the best quality. And we have a field, like they've actually, our sign is in front of a field, a big, huge sign. So this is corn grown for Laws Whiskey House.

Drew Hannush (38:58.671)
Mm -hmm.

Alan Laws (39:08.279)
And so that's a great relationship as well. And every year we'll take, try something that they grew that was, you know, we grew this, do you want to try this? And a lot of our peers here, distillers also like have them grow stuff for them. We're more, I guess, production oriented. Like we, we, we don't make three of this and we kind of have a plan that says, Oh, we're going to make 50 barrels of red corn whiskey or something like that. And then we just make that and then we'll go, Oh, we're going to make 250.

barrels of bourbon, then we go like that. And we kind of cycle through all those things. We're not switching back and forth between anything. We try to keep it all in a single, you know, phalanx of runs. So we want to keep it all tight. But this year we made it a red. In fact, it's in the fermenters right now. I think they've almost gone through what we bought and they're actually just they've been stilling it this week and our production meeting will taste it versus our normal yellow number ones. And

Drew Hannush (39:50.927)
Yeah.

Alan Laws (40:05.878)
The blue corn had a distinctively different flavor profile, more fruity, that it added to the flavor grain. So corn can add a lot of complexity, but typically it's for the sweetness.

Drew Hannush (40:16.047)
Yeah. We, you were talking about this, uh, you know, making your cuts in the whiskey. And, uh, this was something that I got to experience firsthand when I was in Waterford in Ireland, where, you know, we got to see how the, I got to taste and smell how the whiskey evolved from the very first moments you leave the heads. And there's like this perfect sweet spot that you can find in there where.

boy, you better capture that not be a minute or two late because that is really truly the heart of the whiskey. And it just brings to mind this idea that Kentucky for so many years has not had pot stills. It was really Woodford reserve, which was the first to bring it back. And as you say, they actually blend what they take off the pot stills with what they get out of the old Forester column stills. So it's still not.

a true pot still whiskey. How different do you think your whiskies would be if you had made the decision to go to a column still?

Alan Laws (41:25.46)
That's a great question. I don't have an answer for that. But like, I think when you look at, you know, Woodford's great whiskey, like no question. And the Goosenecks, I think, produce a lot of the experimental or master stuff. So, and it's just, I think it's better. Or I think, sorry, better is the wrong term. It's different and a little more concentrated flavors.

Drew Hannush (41:53.039)
Mm -hmm.

Alan Laws (41:53.203)
So, and some of that's coming from the grain body being, you strip it so it's on grain, right? And when you're doing it on grain, it's not just running through in the steam, ripping the alcohol out. You're cooking it again on grain, just like when you're cooking the mash. So all that grain body stuff comes off, even like husks and things that would be terrible for beer, really good for flavor profile in...

in whiskey. So I think that just makes it rich. And then I think also, which is something that I learned from Kentucky, and then the sour mash thing makes an incredibly different consistency of spirit. It makes it richer, it has more soul. And that's important. You can tell the difference between, you know, a non sour mash and a sour mash, and then you tell them in Melville. And I like the sour mash a lot, even in some people are bar mal whiskey is

Drew Hannush (42:45.071)
Mm -hmm.

Alan Laws (42:51.762)
so nutty. It's like peanut brittle. So you gotta be ready for stuff like that, because that's because of the process and because it's on grain. That might not be some people's thing. Just saying.

Drew Hannush (42:59.087)
Yeah.

Okay. And that was going to be a question about the, cause you call it straight malt whiskey rather than calling it an American single malt. Is that part of the reason? Cause you're doing on grain. So it's more of an American tradition.

Alan Laws (43:14.386)
No, it's just that there is no such thing as American signal mall yet. So our labels will change to that as soon as they're, you know, as soon as that's real. Like to us, it's not real till the government says it's real and people can use it and they're using it and I can go into TTP, right? So the reason is a fanciful thing, not as a actual distinct thing that the government recognizes yet. They will. I don't know what's taking them so long. It's so frustrating for us.

Drew Hannush (43:18.447)
True, true.

Drew Hannush (43:37.327)
Yeah.

Alan Laws (43:43.602)
more so from our peers around here. We have a lot of folks that make malt whiskey. And because of the beer tradition, especially in pot stills, you can really use specialty grains to create these flavors right out of the gate, right? You can use like modified grain is like, you know, not just base malt, right? So something that's like, Abby would be a light one and then Prince would be really dark one or chocolate malts or any of these caramel malts. That stuff presents in the whiskey.

We're may not in a column still, or it might be way, you know, diffused. But so we a lot of talent that knows stuff about that who now distill and make a lot of single malt. We don't make a lot of single malt. That's not because we don't like it or that we don't, you know, we don't want to participate in that. We just, we really like bourbon and we really like. And our latest and greatest is that we really like wheat, like a hundred percent wheat whiskey is delicious. And our stuff is now.

Drew Hannush (44:17.423)
Yeah.

Drew Hannush (44:32.655)
Yeah.

Alan Laws (44:41.586)
The new release this year is seven year old bonded. So bonded 100 % with whiskey and it's delicious. Like there's a little root beer notes in it. There's a whole lot of really crazy stuff in it, but it's awesome.

Drew Hannush (44:53.679)
Very nice. Very nice. Well, let's talk about yields because you come from a finance background, but it's probably more your wife that would be concerned about these yields that you're working at. I'm doing research into Kentucky Bourbon and its history. And, you know, the, once the government came along and said, you know, here are the regulations and what you should be getting out of your stills. There was some standards, standardization that went on at that point.

Um, but there were still distillers who were using old pot stills and that, uh, I read one guy that said he was getting, um, what was it? 1 .2 gallons of whiskey per, uh, bushel of grain, which was like really low yield versus everybody. But there was this feeling back then, uh, some would say that the lower the yield, the better the whiskey. Is that something that you.

would it describe to or is it the heirloom varieties that are really...

Alan Laws (45:58.45)
You know, Drew, I never been asked that question. It's actually really interesting. I'm thinking through right now. So ours is going to be lower yield already because we use less corn. Corn is the big starch. So it has the most, you know, convertible starches to sugar, right? And then we're using heirloom variety. So there's more flavor there because they're more concentrated. There's not as, again, not as much starch. So, but that's okay.

So it is lower, but it's not like half or anything like that. Like it's still really good yield for, and the government's not showing up going, you know, that whole thing's a material balance calculation, right? Like here's how much grain went in, you said you used and why are you not getting, like, no, we fall definitely not even at the low end of that. We're definitely getting medium to above medium. So our yields are good. They're not.

super crazy great and and then again even the red corn we just did is definitely a step down so we would we how we monitor this is batch to barrels instead of looking at it bushels and and gallons we just go okay well we standardized for entry proof so what does a batch of bourbon generate in terms of barrels and we usually get like on a 500 gallon metric which is the best way because it's

It used to be like one, we get 1 .3 barrels per batch, 500 gallon batch mash of bourbon. Wheat's like one, two. Barley's around one, two. Rye is barely one. So, and often 0 .9. So, sorry, rye, rye is the toughest one. That's it. That's the 0 .9. And it's like, eh, the rest have enough. And especially with, on barley, it's got really good diastere, so it converts everything.

Drew Hannush (47:34.095)
Okay.

Alan Laws (47:49.17)
So we go to, we can go negative, we can just go to like 0 .1 like bricks when we go to distill it. So it's given us all the things. Rye is not. Rye is gonna leave two or three bricks on the table every time. We don't know if it's because it's like resistant starch or we just don't know. We get it wet tested and just some days it's great or some years it's great, other years not so great. But we love it so we keep going on it.

Drew Hannush (48:03.439)
Hmm.

Drew Hannush (48:17.103)
Thank you for doing that because it is exceptional and that's what I want to jump into right now. I was actually really interested in these samples that you sent because the ones that you sent me are straight but they are, let's say, aged at least two years. So they're probably younger. No?

Alan Laws (48:34.61)
Oh, no, no. Because those bottles are screened, right? So we can't get them screened with everything that's in those is a minimum of three and a half years, often older. So the wheat will be like five, five and a half. Bourbon in is like for the rise for the malt, the malts probably might even be six. I can't remember. So we were just filling those small bottles with

Drew Hannush (48:40.271)
Yeah.

Drew Hannush (48:51.727)
Okay.

Drew Hannush (49:00.559)
Okay.

Alan Laws (49:04.626)
when we go to make them off of the batch that's presently being made. So we don't, and those bottles, again, we have to order them by hundreds of thousands. So we can't, we just go, just give us the most flexibility. So it's over two years, it's straight whiskey. That's all, that's so, and we're get away from that. Like, so this year we're going to remove age statement at all from both our flagship rye and bourbon, because they're already,

Drew Hannush (49:08.975)
Okay.

Drew Hannush (49:13.999)
Yeah.

Drew Hannush (49:20.335)
Right. Okay.

Alan Laws (49:33.266)
They're all for Rise 4 already. But Bourbon, we always like the flexibility of putting in something that's three and a half, because we like to brighten it a bit or something. We're not going to do that. We're going to start starting actually next month. Our next batch, batch 31 of Bourbon, will have no age statement on it. It won't say greater than three years or whatever we put on the bottle now. It's four plus. There's some five in it. Actually, there's some tenure in the flagship Bourbon.

to get, this is maybe two years ago, one of the decisions we made as a production team is like, okay, well, I want to add another layer to the complexity. And mostly because we're, you know, a four year old, this whiskey and everyone loves barrel influence and age. We're like, okay, here's what we're going to do. We're going to add between five and 10 % of tenure to it. And, and that immediately got everyone's attention. And I think it definitely,

It wasn't insignificant. It popped the wood influence a bit. And I think that's what, when we had anyone want to be critical, they're like, oh, it needs more time. We're going for fruitiness and green. They're like, yeah, but, I'm like, all right, all right, all right. So this is our concession to those that would complain about it being too sweet or sorry, too fruity and too sweet. So we're like, oh, well, let's add this. And that changed a lot of views immediately. So we continued to do that. So, I don't know, some 10 in it.

Drew Hannush (50:33.166)
Mm -hmm.

Alan Laws (51:01.842)
five, six barrels of 10 and a hundred barrels, like it's, it's good. As I...

Drew Hannush (51:06.767)
Yeah. Well, I was going to say there, there wasn't any youth on these. So that's, that's what was throwing me off about that. I'm like, okay, it must be something in the weather.

Alan Laws (51:15.186)
No, no, way more than two years old.

Drew Hannush (51:20.175)
Okay, very good. So I wrote, as I said, I had a lot of trouble with the, uh, uh, with the rye when I first got it, because it was like, wow, there's so much going on here. I can't really, uh, nail it down. I eventually did. And so what I did was I took my tasting notes from that to see how it would be once you kind of went for a, um, a lower ABV on it. Cause mine's at 60 points.

something ABV and this is at 47. Yes, it's the castrate. Yeah. So, um, uh, the, the flavors I was, well, the, the notes I was coming up with, uh, nutty peanut butter, rye, uh, fresh minty herbal notes, uh, pencil pencil shavings, uh, dark chocolate, orange, and then this almost barley type, uh, grain notes.

Alan Laws (51:51.602)
Yeah.

Alan Laws (52:10.45)
Yeah.

Drew Hannush (52:18.255)
that I was pulling in, which was giving me kind of that graham cracker note that I was talking about with the, with the four grain before. And then on the pallet, I was getting clove, grain, honey, rye and leather notes on top of all of that. And so when I went to taste this one, I'm like, okay, I know this is probably going to be missing some of this, but it was amazing. Most of those tasting notes were still present in that when you come about,

Alan Laws (52:26.82)
No.

Alan Laws (52:45.508)
Yeah.

Drew Hannush (52:48.079)
uh, trying to get these down to a proof level. What, what caused you to choose 47 .5? Because the whole line of your flagship, it sounds like is at that ABV.

Alan Laws (52:52.292)
Yeah. It just, we tasted them all different, different proofs. That's very simple. We like the best in that range. And it fluctuates a bit. Like I think our whiskies are the best at 50 proof. I like that level. I'm not, I get why people love, you know, cast strengths and, and I get that.

but I can't drink it at like 125 or something. It's not gonna make my night good. And so I wanted.

Drew Hannush (53:27.119)
Yeah, well it's a it is a very drinkable this particular gastronomy is very drinkable to me that was the other thing that was surprising about.

Alan Laws (53:38.628)
But we also want to give you the chance to find the proof that you want it. If I take it to 80, I've taken away all your choices. And I don't like doing that. And I think, you know, 95 is a good high. Like alcohol carries the flavor, not the water. So the more you can keep of the alcohol that you produced in it, in the bottle, the better it's going to be. To a point, like we have some hazmat barrels. We sold a few of these. We have some folks at liquor stores that just...

have fans that just love it above 140 or like, I'm like, dude, I can't drink this, but they love it and God bless. But to me, you know, I can't, literally that barrel, I can't put in a batch because I can't get something from 140 down to 95. I have to add way too much water and I will wreck it. And so we're cognizant about it. We go, our barrel entry is like 110 and anything going to go over seven, eight years, we're probably going to adjust that proof.

Drew Hannush (54:24.559)
Yeah.

Alan Laws (54:34.372)
somewhere along the lines to make sure it doesn't get too high. We'll leave some that go, you know, getting hazmat. But we're going to try to keep those down near 120 because otherwise they're useless to us creating batch later on, even in our bonded software. So if you do that in the barrel, like say it's two years out and you add every six months out a gallon and bring the proof, you know, into that low 120s or into the high one and let it integrate in the barrel.

that's a, we learned this from someone in Texas. I can't remember who had a distillery. I'm like, this is a great idea. So we started to use that technique and, and it works. It definitely works in Texas. I think they need to do it because it rises so quick because of the temp. So we just borrowed that. Um, when they, we visited, I'm like, that's a great idea. We need to do some of this for our older stuff. I don't, you don't need to do that for under six years. You don't need to do any of that. But over that, I think especially you get to 10, some of these 10s we've been adding water to for a while. Like,

Drew Hannush (55:16.111)
Yeah.

Alan Laws (55:32.036)
again, every six months a gallon and it definitely has kept them from getting too woody. And that's an important part of it too, is like, you know, we're trying to make something that tastes like the grains, not like the barrel, like 100 % like the barrel, like toothpicks, not that pleasant.

Drew Hannush (55:45.103)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I, yeah, I'm not a big fan of overly. Oh, and it's one of those things with rye that I'm not a big fan of it sitting in the barrel for too long because it kind of pulls away that, that character of the spirit. It's like malt whiskey is to me also that sometimes if you get a really good distillate, uh, you don't want to destroy the personality of the distillate by over aging.

the whiskey or mellowing it down too much so that everything just becomes muted across the palate.

Alan Laws (56:21.348)
want those high notes that that's what you created you want to accentuate those high notes that gives it character. You don't want to taste banal and there's a lot of great whiskey that I drink and I'm like wow this is great but it's not interesting. There's a balance between interesting and great that has to be struck every time you make a batch and you hope that you hit it.

Drew Hannush (56:27.695)
Yeah.

Drew Hannush (56:36.815)
Yeah.

Drew Hannush (56:46.031)
Well, I just had a very strange moment. I was thinking of asking a question and then I thought, I don't want to ask this question because I don't want to put any thoughts in your head of making a change to this whiskey, which I know is a ridiculous thing for me to be thinking. But it's like when you find a whiskey that you really like, you don't want it messed with. You kind of want it to stay the same, but, um, it's a 50 % malted rye and 50 % unmalted rye. Have you.

Did you experiment going 100 % malted ride to see what that would be like and what was your experience with that?

Alan Laws (57:17.86)
Yeah. Oh, no question. We probably have 30 or 40 barrels of that. We just don't think it's ready yet. So, and that we're in use, Coopridge too. So those are very, so it's a little paler, less barrel influence, but all the elements remain, right? Spiciness, our spiciness is a little different too than because of the varietal. It's not like cracked pepper, black pepper.

Drew Hannush (57:25.807)
Oh, okay.

Drew Hannush (57:29.839)
Oh, okay.

Alan Laws (57:45.124)
it, that kind of peppery, like sharp peppery notes. Ours is more vegetative. It's like Serrano pepper, right? It radiates. It's a heat that sort of there, oh, it's peppery. And then, oh, but it just sort of like, you know, pulses with your heartbeat. It's like, oh, it's a different type of pepper note. But those, you know, that exists. The anise is there, like salted caramel, like the salinity is really present in our white spirit in rye. In fact, it often tastes like mezcal.

Drew Hannush (58:14.415)
Mm.

Alan Laws (58:14.596)
So it's very, because it's got so much salinity and that's coming from the soil, right? Soil into the plant, into the seed, and then as we distill it, it shows up for sure.

Drew Hannush (58:25.071)
So being it, where did they get that rye from? Is that something that was naturally growing in the area or was that something that they had to source and then start to grow?

Alan Laws (58:35.748)
That's a great question. It's been the rye of that region for like 75 years or more, probably now probably 100 years. So I don't know if they probably know where it came from or what it was cross -bred with to get to that, but it grows really well there and it's the only place in the country where it's grown.

Drew Hannush (58:58.511)
Yeah. And then I hear, uh, it read in your literature and you talked about stressing grains. What is the idea behind, uh, when you're talking about stressing grains, I'm assuming you're talking about some, uh, very big temperature swings probably and weather conditions.

Alan Laws (59:16.548)
Yeah. So our farm has water rights and okay, what's a complicated stuff? Colorado there, all the Western states are very water is like, I think back a hundred years ago, you shoot somebody over stealing your water. Like it water is owned by somebody in Colorado. So only recently could you even have like a little rain barrel. It doesn't really rain here, but for, but to the extent that it did, you weren't really allowed to collect that.

Drew Hannush (59:23.311)
Hehehe.

Drew Hannush (59:32.751)
Mmm.

Alan Laws (59:44.9)
that water because it's owned by somebody, like somewhere down the road. So having water rights is pretty important. But even those water rights have been encroached upon by the government over the years, as this has been a place of pretty dramatic drought for 10 years. Last year was probably our best year in 10. And this year looks like it could be okay, probably not as good as last year, but fill the reservoirs. And so at the beginning of the season, when they're planning now, like they're going to be able to pull

where everyone's able to pull water off the river and it's a Rio Grande River that's by them. And it goes out into the ditches and everyone's allowed a certain amount to pump from that. So they'll use that at the front end. And then to the extent that they need water as the Rio Grande goes down and you're not allowed to pull from it anymore, then they can go and pull from the reservoir underneath, or aquifer. And then so they're able to do this, but they're not just willy -nilly putting water on the fields. They use drip systems so that they're treating the water with,

Drew Hannush (01:00:39.951)
Mm -hmm.

Alan Laws (01:00:43.364)
a huge amount of respect. So, but it gets enough water. So that's important. The temperatures, again, they've talked about the soil earlier, that soil condition, again, me saying it and make me look like an expert, I'm not. But they are. And so they do a lot of studies with some of the universities and colleges. So to understand growing conditions and what's changing, because, you know, we have, there is shifts in climate, whether you want to believe it or not, it's here. It has for

Drew Hannush (01:00:57.807)
Yeah.

Alan Laws (01:01:12.772)
millions of years on the planet, you know, there are shifts. So we have, so there's, they're addressing some of this stuff and like the water use definitely. And then the grain varietal, I don't, you know, there's a question just came in my own mind. I don't know, like certain varietals use different amounts of water. So I'm going to ask that to them. I just, I don't know like the difference, but so they're, so they have that going and then it gets hot.

Drew Hannush (01:01:35.695)
Well.

Alan Laws (01:01:41.06)
It's a desert 7 ,600 feet above sea level and it gets hot in there during the day, but it's like everything else in the mountains. It cools rapidly at night. So those swings are important. The plants under stress because it doesn't have natural water all the time. And when they do get it, it zips through that soil really quickly. So it's got to be quick and grab that water before it goes into the water table. So those things matter to the plant. And things, that's what...

Drew Hannush (01:01:49.711)
Yes.

Drew Hannush (01:02:03.855)
Yeah.

Alan Laws (01:02:10.852)
creates terroir, right? Air, water, soil, all those things is really that, not just for idols.

Drew Hannush (01:02:13.135)
Well...

Drew Hannush (01:02:17.391)
One of the things that I'm really digging deep into, because I'm working on a book on Kentucky bourbon, the early stages of Kentucky bourbon, and kind of trying to dig into, you know, they talk about limestone filtered water and everybody else talks about limestone. You know, they talk about Kentucky, that is the thing. Well, you know, as I've traveled around the world and I've gone to Ireland, they have limestone water. You can go to Illinois, they have limestone water. You know, it's all over.

What is it that makes that particular region different? And from my studies, it basically goes back to that area being a seabed at one point. And so the soil, they said the early farmers that went to Bourbon County, they didn't have to have a lot of skill. They could really beat that land up. And it didn't matter because the land was so filled with rejuvenating

chemicals that it could rejuvenate itself even after it had been stressed. And so when I read that your that that valley where the rye comes from was a prehistoric lake bed, it made me wonder, it wouldn't be the same as oceanic sea life, but it would be still maybe some special character to that valley because of the fact that it was once a prehistoric lake bed.

Alan Laws (01:03:43.46)
I would say absolutely. I could not tell you why though.

Drew Hannush (01:03:48.015)
Yes, we need the geologists to get out there and let us know.

Alan Laws (01:03:53.316)
There again is like the reason why certain types of plants get farmed in areas for quality suits, like barley and being multiple is like people figure that out. And now in our modern area, you could probably go through and figure out, oh, well, 10 miles from here, I wouldn't use that field, but here is good. And I'm sure that that's if I ask.

Drew Hannush (01:04:06.031)
Yeah.

Alan Laws (01:04:16.58)
Our farmers know that they go, oh yeah, yeah, you want to, here's where you want to plant it over here. Well, you need to plant this there. Maybe put out alfalfa here and you plant this. They would know all that, but I do not.

Drew Hannush (01:04:26.511)
Yeah, well even in the bluegrass region, there's an inner bluegrass and an outer bluegrass and outer bluegrass is not as fertile as the inner bluegrass. So it's still called the same area, but very different conditions. So you do different things. You grow different things in those different areas. So I definitely understand that. I'm going to do a tasting on your, on your centennial straight wheat whiskey.

Tell me what you think, cause wheat whiskey is always kind of a, it's tough for me because it's like, some wheat whiskies are very subtle. And so it's like, you kind of have to give it that extra attention to figure out what the heck is going on there. Some of them, it's like the barrel just takes over and does the work on them. So.

Alan Laws (01:05:07.812)
Mm -hmm.

Alan Laws (01:05:14.212)
Well, first of all, again, we're going to put it in a pot still. It's what's going to be on grain longer. It is not going to be subtle. I can be very clear on that. It's not subtle. When it's young, like under three years or under, it's hot.

Drew Hannush (01:05:21.071)
kind of describe what you feel you get out of this week.

Alan Laws (01:05:43.172)
and it's hot because it's gonna pull a lot from the wood and you're gonna have, the heat is really tannins. So it can be very tannic when it's young. And then that starts to give away after about four years. And now that one you're drinking is easily five and a half, it might even be six. I don't remember what we put in those, but our bonded that we put out last year was a seven -year -old bonded. This year, the same thing. We just picked the barrels. We just picked the, well, we do two or three different iterations with different barrels and we just,

Drew Hannush (01:05:48.655)
Mm -hmm.

Alan Laws (01:06:12.836)
pick the blend, if you will, the eight or nine barrels that we're using, we just picked those this week. The one I like, lost. But that's okay. But yeah, we do it as a collective and we're like, okay, well, everyone's opinion matters. And like, let's talk about what we're seeing everything. And then we made a decision. But what you're gonna get as it gets older and what you have there is you're gonna get what I think are,

Drew Hannush (01:06:23.247)
Yeah.

Alan Laws (01:06:42.084)
some of the big attributes of the wheat that we're using is there's a lot of orange. In fact, the wheat whiskey is our summer whiskey. We put it out in May, June, and we want it gone by September because you put that on ice and the orange and the backdrop of the flavors becomes like a creamsicle. Its body gets lighter, its flavors brighten with the ice. And I think it's

Drew Hannush (01:06:49.391)
Mm -hmm.

Drew Hannush (01:07:07.407)
Mm -hmm.

Alan Laws (01:07:10.084)
It's a delicious, it's almost like I put a cherry in it, you have a cocktail. And that's how we look at it. So it has all those base flavors that you're picking up in the bourbon. Plus it's then it's got these high notes, which is typically orange. I get, once it gets to six or seven, you'll get these, you know, sarsaparilla root beer kind of things to it, which I really like. But just like weeded bourbons, weed takes longer to develop in the barrel. So a riba bourbon, it's great.

like way earlier than a weeded bourbon. And then the wheat, like I liked it at three and we had a lot of debate and they're like, oh wow. And I'm like, well, right now it's a great whiskey. It's a, that three years, it's a good whiskey that happens to be, that is made by wheat. It's a good wheat whiskey, period. As it gets to four or five, it becomes a really good whiskey that happens to be made of wheat. And then once it gets to seven, you would be,

Drew Hannush (01:07:43.023)
Yeah.

Drew Hannush (01:07:59.119)
Yeah. Yeah.

Alan Laws (01:08:09.924)
hard -pressed, maybe in the sweetness profile, but you'd be hard -pressed not to say, what kind of bourbon is this? And that's why I think we're spending more time on the 100 % wheat whiskey than we are on the Single Mal. One, because it's where I, it's my preferred flavor palette, right? I want it to taste like American whiskey. Once we get to Single Mal, we're really dealing with, I'm not really, I think it's different.

Drew Hannush (01:08:18.415)
Okay, yeah.

Alan Laws (01:08:38.18)
American single malt is different. But we're really, this competitive set is scotch. So it's like, oh, well, we have some producers that make amazing malt whiskey. And I would drink those all day, including stranding hands. And I'm like, but I don't, it's not what I'm gonna gravitate towards. So to me, it's like, I want to make what we love. In fact, one of the things we say around here is if you don't love what you make, you shouldn't be making it. There's square words to go with it. You know, goddamn. You know what I mean?

Drew Hannush (01:09:02.159)
Yeah, yeah.

Alan Laws (01:09:07.236)
what you're making, you should not be making it. I don't like vodka, I'm never gonna make vodka. I don't like gin, I'm never gonna make gin. And you know what? God bless everyone else who loves that and let the people who love those things make it.

Drew Hannush (01:09:21.039)
And you will make your beer, but the beer will be distilled. It's not being sold as beer. There you go. There you go. Yeah, it's well, and there's not a lot of people that are making a hundred percent wheat whiskey. Is it now, is this the same thing where you're doing a percentage of malted and unmalted in it, or it's a hundred percent malted? Okay.

Alan Laws (01:09:24.996)
That's right. Like, we think we're better.

Alan Laws (01:09:42.956)
Yeah, again, 50 -50. We just go with, we're not, you know, we've made some 60, we'll probably mess with it in the future to see if we get something different, but we like it where it is. And we know we'll get the conversion. And then we'll also, again, the malta stuff tends to homogenize certain flavors, which we like and definitely adds to the sweetness.

Drew Hannush (01:10:05.519)
Do you find a certain char on the barrel does better than another?

Alan Laws (01:10:10.251)
We use char number three, we use independent stave barrels. And the only real change we've made over the years is to move up the curve from the standard bourbon barrel, which the staves are aged like nine months or air dried, I guess, for nine months to the Cooper Select, which is 12 to 18, I think. And those given our aging profile that we go over, you know.

We tested all this at the beginning. So we put two barrels side by side, standard, Cooper Select, no change, no difference really for us till it got over three years old. And then there started to be material differences. And then once you get to six, it's like, no, we only buy the Cooper Select now. And then we've trifled in some of these like wave stays, deep toast, light char, grooves, and you know.

Drew Hannush (01:10:46.351)
Yeah.

Alan Laws (01:11:04.458)
Independence Day would show us like, hey, look, here's the flavor spider graph and this is what it'll add. And maybe in Kentucky it did that, but like what we were looking for and trying them was, you said you like graham cracker in the burro. I like this little hint every once in a while of coconut. If I could get, and that's what we were going for, it did not happen. So we didn't get it. So we stopped using those and they, it's funny, people go, oh, well that deep toast and the light char and with the spirals, it means it'll.

Drew Hannush (01:11:21.903)
Mmm.

Alan Laws (01:11:33.097)
you should get better infusion and it should take less time to develop in the barrel. And, uh -uh, we found that it actually took six months longer to get to our profile in those barrels then than it did in standard bourbon barrels. And they produce interesting notes. Some of them with the rye in those, we get like tropical fruit rye. So we've had a bunch of those that turned out that way in a particular year. I'm like, oh, that's kind of interesting. So it provides these things that we can offer as single barrels to like.

Drew Hannush (01:11:59.471)
single barrels to like on premise accounts or...

Alan Laws (01:12:00.488)
on -premise accounts and or off -premise accounts and if people get want to have something off more than two standard deviations off the normal and like this this fits your pistol.

Drew Hannush (01:12:07.087)
Yeah.

Very nice. I was going to say that sometimes you get a, a character, a characteristic that seems to flow through all the different whiskies. And maybe it's just because of my love of that Graham cracker note, but I get it in everything. I, I even get it in the, in the straight mall whiskey, which is, uh, which is nice. It's a treat all of a sudden on the finish. Cause this is another whiskey that when I first tasted it, I was like, this is.

This is a roller coaster journey through so many different things. It's like it starts out kind of in the orchard fruit area. Then when you're drunk, once it hits the palette, the caramel from the barrel kind of comes through. But I get like a sugar cookie kind of sweetness and then almost a ginger note. And then it finishes in this graham cracker, dark chocolate, tobacco. I'm getting all sorts of interesting stuff on this.

Alan Laws (01:12:47.048)
Yeah.

Alan Laws (01:12:53.128)
Yeah.

Alan Laws (01:13:08.903)
Complexity is really important. And so we're again, we're not trying to shortcut anything in terms of time or anything that, you know, we just in the distillation process, if it takes longer, if it hasn't worked out after three and a half days, let it sit longer or let it go to five days. And like, like make sure we get what we're looking for out of every batch. And, and so that, that affects what you go, what you get to drink.

Drew Hannush (01:13:34.927)
Yeah.

Drew Hannush (01:13:38.703)
I'd laugh because you, uh, you do point towards your, uh, your love for the weeded whiskey. And then you're kind of like, well, we're, we're also doing this malt whiskey. And I'm going, wow. I mean, to me, this malt whiskey and the, the Ryre like big standouts to me in terms of complexity and level of interest on it. I will say that when I first nosed this whiskey, I was like, okay, I don't know how far this, cause I'm big Scotch fan.

Um, but I like what's going on in American whiskey with, uh, with single malt. And as you say, strand of hands, uh, doing some great work with barrel finishes and, and that sort of thing as well. But, um, um, I, you know, it was like at first I'm going, okay, I don't know if this is going anywhere. And then like I say, it just took me on that, that roller coaster ride of so many different flavors coming through that, uh, that's really impressive.

Alan Laws (01:14:34.981)
Well, I'm glad you liked it. Like it's, when it's young, it's tough to, it's just peanuts. It's like the Spanish peanuts, the skins, it's just all peanuts. And then as it's in the barrel longer, you're going to, we get this pickup of, you know, the sweetness starts to come through and balance that. And then it becomes peanut brittle. And the next iteration of the malt whiskey for us won't be a bonded. Not because it won't be over four, but we're going to, we're going to play with mixture of.

Drew Hannush (01:14:44.015)
Yeah.

Alan Laws (01:15:04.453)
New Barrel, used Coopridge, you know, eight, five to seven years old. And we're going to play with that a little. And we have stuff that is like.

like, we, this is kind of funny. So we make like, our farm will make us a smoke malt, right? Well, how they make the smoke malt is they burn our used bourbon barrels. So we get that extra layer. So we have some that are that has smoke malt in it, we have some peated stuff, but these are alone not drinkable. They're meant to be blending agents, right? They're so strong in those flavor profiles. So we want to play a little bit with that too. So new Cooperage,

Drew Hannush (01:15:23.151)
Mm -hmm.

Alan Laws (01:15:44.996)
use Coopridge, some specialty malt as the backbone, not the backbone, as the accentuator to the two base malts that we're using in the Prime sub. So, yeah.

Drew Hannush (01:15:55.887)
Yeah. Be careful. You're kind of sliding into that Canadian blending attitude there.

Alan Laws (01:16:02.499)
Yeah, well, you know, you have to if you have it you like hey this tastes like Canadian whiskey you better phone me and tell me I'm like, whoa, we're stopping this

Drew Hannush (01:16:11.695)
Oh man. All right. Well, let's talk about the distillery a bit and some of the elements of the tour that somebody might experience when they come there. First of all, I understand that you're getting a new tasting room.

Alan Laws (01:16:13.827)
But, yeah.

Alan Laws (01:16:29.667)
Yeah, we're like 80. I think we're 90 % done now. We're just taking a.

Alan Laws (01:16:42.609)
I don't know. It's going to be, it's almost done, but it's a destination kind of place. So it's attached to the distillery. It's a very cool architecture and it's meant to be an education center as well as, you know, a cocktail bar where there's interaction with, you know, folks that who are making the drinks who know how the whiskey is made and, you know, our lore, if you will, and our, you know, our story and like, here's why we do this and here's what it's doing to your cocktail and.

So all those kinds of things are fitting into this nice and tightly. And it should be open. We should get the keys for certificate of occupancy within the next two months. And then we've never done this before. This is our kind of wading into hospitality, if you will. And we want you to have an experience when you come to do this. You get to tour. Our tours are very experiential already. And I wouldn't take a knee to any other.

place it does tour. We do a great job of it. You're going to learn a lot no matter how much you know about whiskey and how it's made, you're going to learn something. And we answer every question people are like, oh, there's secrets. No, we don't believe in those certain things. Like, well, what's your temperature that it comes off at? Well, 68. Oh, you told us that? I'm like, dude, why would you care? Like, make your own whiskey if that's what you're into and have your own things. But to have those things be secrets, we don't really care. So we

give people what they're looking for in those things and answer every question we can possibly answer. Because we want to make the customer or the consumer more and more educated about it because we win in that situation because they understand the complexity of what we're trying to build. And the Tasty Room is a new addition to that. And it's, like I said, you'll have a good time when you come to it next time. And we're going to, for the next six months, we're going to learn how to do this because we never know before.

Drew Hannush (01:18:34.511)
Very nice. Will people be able to go in and just do tastings rather than taking the tour?

Alan Laws (01:18:41.903)
Yeah, instead of just going through, I think they have layers of stuff. So you can go in and just do quick tastings. You can go up and just do cocktails, or you can go through the full experience, which might take you an hour, but a little more detail. And yeah, so different layers for different things for each folk, right? Like whatever people are into. We want to make sure that our consumer base is how they want to be serviced.

Drew Hannush (01:19:06.497)
It'll be much different than doing a tasting in the gift shop, which is kind of the vibe that it had at that point.

Alan Laws (01:19:13.07)
Yeah, it's kind of our brand standard what we have now, but it's a it's an intimate thing. And I know we're going to have people bemoan how I remember when it was just this little room with little oak tables and you know, it's loud because there's no soft, soft anything in there. And I remember I'm like, yeah, I remember when we sat on these pews out in the yeah, well, we have a whiskey church in the new the new tasting room. So it's a little more elegant. But, you know, like we'll have that like that'll definitely happen. But.

We think this is the next step up and I hope people join us in that journey.

Drew Hannush (01:19:47.567)
So what is the thing you're most proud of when people are going around and doing the tour or that you think would really kind of draw a distinction for them for your distillery versus other distilleries they might visit?

Alan Laws (01:20:02.476)
think it's going to be the people. So I'm most proud of and the whole company is our people. And we've had ups and downs, we've, you know, grown and then had to shrink and, and, but the core of the people and even the people that aren't here anymore have, have left something and contributed something to what Laws Whiskey House Village is over those years. So the people are what you'll, I think you'll gravitate to them. They're very, I guess we'll use the word passionate, but again, they're obsessed.

So from someone giving it to art to somebody making it to somebody out in the market selling it, all those people are very important keeping the cohesiveness of the village. And it definitely, you pick up on that. You definitely pick up on that when you go through Lost Whiskey House.

Drew Hannush (01:20:50.671)
Well, I know this too, that you talk about the village and this idea that I've had this concept that the term master distiller is kind of overused or used too early in someone's career. And so you, you tend to avoid that, that label.

Alan Laws (01:21:09.035)
Yeah, I don't believe in it. So if we had people, like we have great people who do this and our distillers 10 years, like doing this for over 10 years and even they don't believe in those titles because they're not indicative of anything. So head distiller matters, because you have to have some hierarchy of who's responsible for certain things. But if you're on our production floor and you're distilling it, you are the head distiller. So, and you're accountable to the guy who's...

Drew Hannush (01:21:34.831)
Yeah.

Alan Laws (01:21:37.867)
title is that plus me plus everyone in the entire production team, which is important thing. Like if there's no zombies on our floor, just turning knobs or pushing a button. If they're not into it, they can't last very long because it's important. They have to bring the same enthusiasm to everything they do and the attention to the detail in everything they do. And we purposely built the distillery and expanded it to a point where we don't have a lot of computer. We don't have any computerized stuff for literally.

have to turn valves. And that's what our team wanted, because they wanted to be interactive with the equipment. They didn't want to sit. They go, I didn't start becoming a distiller so I could sit in the lab and push buttons on a computer screen. They're like, I don't want to do that. I totally understand. We could do that, but they're like, no, we don't want to do that. So we built it to be that a human has to actually interact with it.

Drew Hannush (01:22:29.839)
Very nice, very nice. So where can people go to find out more information about Law's Whiskey House and maybe schedule a tour?

Alan Laws (01:22:40.105)
Yeah, so lawswhiskeyhouse .com and tours are on our website. Again, that'll be changing in the next few months. It'll still be on the website, but the types of tours and the experiences you can sign up for will be different. And you'll be able to do it in a different facility, but you'll still get the same enthusiasm from the folks that you will grow to love and say, how are they? They've such a great time. So, and then you can follow us on...

on Twitter and Facebook and all those sort of things too. I'm not really a social media user, so you better have Emily on and she or Casey and they could give you all those things, but I'm pretty sure anyone who's into it can find it. But it's important. Those are obviously important things. I just, I don't have enough time on my day to scroll through stuff. So I like like long format conversations like we're having that's valuable.

Drew Hannush (01:23:16.271)
Let them... Yeah.

Drew Hannush (01:23:32.719)
I hear ya, I hear ya.

Alan Laws (01:23:38.504)
Oh, don't.

Drew Hannush (01:23:39.023)
Fantastic. Well, your whiskey is amazing and it's really been great to talk to you and get a little bit more of the background and understand what Israel was glowing about with all of your whiskies. And now I can glow as well because I've had a chance to walk through these again. Sometimes when you jump in the tasting room in that kind of setting and you're sipping a little, it was during the pandemic or right at the end of the pandemic. So we're drinking out of the little.

what I call communion cups. So it's like not quite the experience you probably are wanting to give everybody, but, but yeah.

Alan Laws (01:24:12.359)
Yeah, you want more. Yeah, you want to, you want to swirl it in the glass too. And you want to want to look at it, look at the colors, look at the legs on it and yeah, take your time with it. Break it down. That's what we do. Every whiskey, we got to break it down. Got to give it its time. Don't rush it.

Drew Hannush (01:24:24.815)
Yeah.

Drew Hannush (01:24:31.151)
Well, good luck with the new tasting room and getting everything up and running. And again, thanks for being on the podcast. Cheers to you.

Alan Laws (01:24:37.99)
Well, thank you for inviting me. I really enjoyed our time and hope we'll do it again.

Thanks, Drew.