Ep. 79 - Palmetto State Low Country History and the Mystery of the Burnt Church Road and Distillery

Transcript

Drew (00:00:09):
Welcome to Whiskey Lore, the interviews. I'm your host, Drew Hannush, the Amazon best-selling author of Whiskey Lores Travel Guide to Experiencing Kentucky Bourbon. And today on the show, I am honored to have as my guest, general manager of the Burnt Church Distillery in Bluffton, South Carolina, my friend Chris Crow. Chris, welcome to the show. This is great. The first guest I've had on that I knew without having to get to know a distillery before I got to talk with you, so welcome.

Chris (00:00:41):
Glad to be here. Thank you so much.

Drew (00:00:43):
Yeah, so it's interesting how life evolves because I was I've been a web designer for almost 20 years now and one of my clients was Chris at a school in Hilton Head. And so all of a sudden one day I get a email, or I guess it was through Instagram where you said, Hey, you need to come down and check out my distillery. And I'm thinking, well this is interesting because I'm now doing whiskey and now you're doing whiskey. So we just kind of evolved <laugh> to the That's right. It's same industry.

Chris (00:01:18):
It's interesting the path that you can take to get to the same spot,

Drew (00:01:22):
Right? Yeah, exactly. And so now I actually did finally get down to the distillery to visit about a year ago. And you guys were just at the point where you were about to start doing distilling on site. And it was interesting to me to see online, a friend of mine posted pictures and cuz she visited before I got there and I was looking and I was saying, wow, this is really a beautiful distillery. And you see the stained glass and you go, so they really did a nice job refurbishing that church because it's called burnt church. But you, you're not actually in a church, are you?

Chris (00:02:08):
We're we're actually brand new construction. We have a greeter here that when he works at the front door, his typical spiel is brand new construction. It's never a church, it was never burnt and it's not on burnt church roads. <laugh> typically get the same kinda laugh that you just had with that. So yeah, we definitely had to walk it back a little bit. And so, well let's explain everything here. So it's a little bit of a process, but yeah,

Drew (00:02:36):
So unpack that a little bit for us because it's a really interesting to name a distillery after a road that does exist but that you're not on. Right?

Chris (00:02:46):
That's right. That's so back when I, I'll walk it back a little bit further and talk about the founding of the distillery and how that came about and then it'll lead into one of the characters of the story I'm about to tell. So Billy and Sean Water owned Burnt Church distillery and Billy has a vacation house here has had one for a long time. And then recently back in I think 2016, they came down one summer and just decided, you know what, I can work remote, I'm just not going to go back to Illinois. We're just going to stay here and plant roots. So then that summer I believe it was that summer 2017 he and Sean were on a guy's RV trip to the Black Hills of South Dakota and they were sitting around one night after hiking and doing everything to do outside and Billy was having a bourbon and Sean's having a gen and tonic cuz that's kind of their jams and what they do.

(00:03:38):
And Billy starts asking Sean some questions. It's like, what do you wanna do with your life? And you're so creative and all this kind of stuff. And it's just like, what could we do that would help you blossom in that? And so then Billy said, do you wanna make whiskey? And Billy and Sean's like, huh? He goes, I don't know it's caught. They talked about it a little bit longer and this kind of just went off one of the next topic and just kind of left it alone and then revisited that. And Sean had looked into it and said, okay, so this is not a hobby. It's incredibly expensive and it's a lot of big process to get to that point where you can do that. But they were committed that that's something that they decided they wanted to do. So he got Sean down here, they started looking for property and in the Bluffton area they wanted to be in Bluffton and not in Hilton Head which we'll talk about that too in terms of where we are in proximity to Hilton Head.

(00:04:36):
But driving home from looking at property, one day Billy came across a road about a mile from the distillery here and it's burnt church road. And so he looks up at it and he's just like, why would they name a road Burnt Church Road? What happened here that they would call it that, right? So he does what anybody else does these days and he goes home and he googles it on his computer and can't really find an answer of why it's called Burnt Church Road. But it captivated him in terms of his imagination and his creativity and it's like, I don't know why it's called Burnt Church Road, but I think that's probably a pretty good name for a distillery. So they hadn't didn't have a name yet, so they decided let's call this burnt church distillery and let's embrace the local history and do that in our brands, which we have done.

(00:05:25):
And just try to find out just what's really going on in terms of, from a historical standpoint with that road. So he hired a historian, she did several years of work and she pieced together a story with confirmation documents that explains how it all came about. And so we went about, again, crafting brands around that and the local history. And he then had her co-author a book that kind of tells a story of Burnt Church Road and that's something that you can buy in our gift shop. And you have a copy of that and it kind of tells a story about why it's probably called Burnt Church Road, which sometimes in history you get about 90% there and it's kind of like, okay, that's what probably it. So that's where we are.

Drew (00:06:17):
This is really interesting cuz it's almost like a forensics book you go through and she's really talking about the layers she had to go through to try to figure all this history out and all the documentation that she pulled out, but that nobody really in town knew about it that much. They had some guesses as to what it was, or someone here had said, oh well yes, there probably was a, this is what happens, right? Yeah, exactly. And I can tell you from doing research on distillery histories, there are so many things that get said over and over again. And if it passes a generation, it becomes fact because whether or not it's true, it gets repeated enough. And then the people who could say, oh, well I just thought that up or that was a guess on my part, you have no idea that part of the story has gone. So it does take That's

Chris (00:07:19):
Exactly right.

Drew (00:07:21):
A tough time to That's exactly right. To dig in and do all of that. So amazing work that she did. We'll talk a little bit about that story but let's dig into the design of the distillery and why you didn't put it on Burnt Church Road.

Chris (00:07:35):
Well, quite honestly, they couldn't find the suitable property as they started understanding the scale of our facility. It's on about a three acre site. And so finding three acres of buildable land is pretty tough in this area, especially as you stay close to the old town historic kind of area of Bluffton. And so they looked at various sites and landed on this one, and it's just about big enough. So we're already thinking about what growing pains will look like as we expand. But this site, again, it's three acres. We broke ground in 2019 and opened our doors to the public in March of 2021. We have about a 9,500 square foot tasting room and retail space and history space about 8,800 square feet of production space two stills three fermentation tanks with actually two more that just got installed. So that are just getting installed this week actually. So we'll have five fermentation tanks mill and grain, all kinds of stuff like that. And have about a 5,600 square foot brick house in the back that we have for barrel storage.

Drew (00:08:49):
And you're doing tours now, so I understand. We

Chris (00:08:52):
Are, yep.

Drew (00:08:52):
Do you go back into the mill room? That's an area that not everybody always takes people on a tour. That's right too. Yeah,

Chris (00:08:59):
That's right. I, when I do a tour I like to start in the mill room cause that's where it all starts. And then you think about the grain and everything. It's a good chance for us to, one of the important things about our story is that we wanna source as much grained locally as possible. And so we're able to get most of our grain from within about a one and a half to two hour radius from the distillery so we can get it just in time. We don't have to. We tell 'em what we need for the next two weeks, they'll bring it down and it's supporting local farmers and all that kind of stuff. So that's really a part of our story. And what we try to do is make an impact in the community and we try to do that starting with the grain process.

Drew (00:09:43):
And it's interesting because I've been seeing after going through South Carolina, a lot of distilleries utilizing a grain that I wouldn't think would be grown in South Carolina rye because we always get told, oh, well rye couldn't get grown in the south and they would to. Is that one of the grains that you're sourcing locally or have you found to supply of that?

Chris (00:10:10):
We'd been able to source that locally so far in terms of the quantities that we use the only grain that we cannot get a hundred percent locally right now is Carolina Gold Rice, which is something that we'll talk about when we get into our products, but it's in two of our products. It's the primary grain in one of our products and that's a grain that has it's roots in the United States in this local area, in the Charleston area. So brought over from Africa back in the, I guess, I think 16 hundreds about 1685, I think they can put that back to, and it has it was obviously harvested it grown harvested by slaves. And so it has that kind of history. But there are some folks in this area that are trying to bring Carolina Gold rice back to South Carolina because the primary producer of that right now I believe is the state of Texas. And so we get a decent chunk of our Carolina gold rice from the state of Texas right now. But we hope that with our commitment to the grain and our production, that we'll be able to source more and more of that locally and eventually we'll be able to get all of our grain from the state of South Carolina. That's the ultimate goal.

Drew (00:11:28):
That sounds so counterintuitive to have to go to Texas to get Carolina Gold rice. I know. Yes,

Chris (00:11:35):
Yes. But we're working

Drew (00:11:37):
On it. You have some fascinating, so it'll be fun to talk about those as well. Yeah. Cause you're not doing your traditional types of mashbill on these whiskeys, and I love seeing that. Nope. So

Chris (00:11:50):
Probably anything's traditional for us. So

Drew (00:11:53):
One of the things I noticed when I walked into the distillery, and like I say, it's a gorgeous distillery to walk through, but the stained glass kind of sticks out and there's a story behind that stained glass and how you had to get that in. So if you can get a picture in your mind of this building and that there's this large piece of stained glass in there that had to be put into place talk a little bit about the adventure of that.

Chris (00:12:22):
Oh sure, sure. So when I first started with the project, it was in April of 2020, so it was in the middle of Covid and it was kind of wild and crazy for everybody. But in the tasting room there's about a 12 foot circumference round window that was already in place. So it's all impact resistant, hurricane proof glass. So it's a big old thick monster of a window. And I'm sitting in a conference room with Billy, one of the owners one day, and we talked a lot during that time. It was a very special time for us to just understand each other and things like that. And sometimes we'll just sit there and just talk about ideas and stuff. And one day he looks at me, he goes, what'd be really good? And it's like, or we would be really neat. And it's usually when he says that there's going to be something to try to figure out how to make something amazing or something for me to do or a project or something like that.

(00:13:23):
So I was like, what's that Billy? He goes a big round stained glass piece in front of that round window in the tasting room. That would be really cool, wouldn't it? I'm like, yeah, that would be really cool. He goes, why don't you see if you can find somebody to do that for us? I'm like, okay. And so what do you think I did? So I went on Google, started typing in stained glass artists, and lo and behold came across a website of a lady named Laurel Herder that is a stained glass artist in Bluffton, South Carolina. So that was my first step. I thought, I'll reach out to her and see what she says and then she'll at least maybe have, if she can't do it, she'll at least have some ideas of where I could go to try to get it done. And it's just a great story because when she reached back out to me, she called me back and she told the story that she was on a job site in Mexico.

(00:14:16):
She does sting glass work for big homes and synagogues and churches and all kinds of stuff. So she knows the scale that we're talking about. And she called me back, she goes, I was on a job in Mexico and we came home because of Covid and so didn't really have a job to work on. And then her husband is a sailor and they have a sailboat, and they were going to go on a cruise during Covid that summer just to get away and stay away from folks and just have some fun. And their sailboat got struck by lightning before they had a chance to leave. And so they couldn't take their cruises. And so I'm literally in Bluffton, I don't have a job to do and I have time to do this for you, so I would love to do this for you. And it turns out her studio, you could walk to it from the Waterstone Brands corporate office.

(00:15:08):
And so our first meeting we had with her, we walked down to her studio, so right here in our backyard, she, so she built it piece by piece built it. It's a 10 foot circumference stained glass, thereabouts. And she built it in nine pieces. So if you seen a picture of it online, like a church cross kind of thing. And it has nine pieces. And she built it, had a frame built, brought it in, and they pieced all together. And then to get it up onto in front of the window her husband's a sailor, so he brought his truck in to the side door. He fabricated kind of a pulley system around the brick columns in the tasting room. And he used a pulley to hoist that thing up and used his truck as the power to get it up onto the beam to get it installed at the top. And so it was pretty precarious. It was a little scary. I wish I had a time lapse video of that, but I don't. But it was one of those things where it's like if there's a wheel, there's a way. And it's stunning. It's really stunning. It's beautiful.

Drew (00:16:20):
And the fear that thing is we're loading it up here with a pickup truck like, yep, it's glass. If it goes, it goes.

Chris (00:16:28):
It's bad. Yeah. So mission accomplished. That was fun.

Drew (00:16:32):
That's funny. So then it's beautiful. The rest of the distillery well, once you first walk into the distillery on the right as a gift shop on left is some history. Were you having the history sourced at the same time as you guys were writing the book on the road?

Chris (00:16:55):
That's exactly right. We knew that we wanted to have a strong connection with the local area, both from some of our brands and also just in terms of educating our visitors. We knew that we would be a destination place for visitors to our area that some men even may come to Hilton Head for vacation and not even ever come to Bluffton, but may come to Bluffton because of us. And so we wanted to showcase our history and our past in a positive manner. So at the same time that Billy was working on the book with the historian, she connected with the Hayward House in the historic Bluffton Foundation in Bluffton. And they provided all sorts of documents for her to start with. And then he also then worked with them to develop basically kind of a two wall mural so to speak, that we could get printed up and put on the walls. It kind of tells about the history of the area from colonial times, pre-colonial times to colonial times to civil war times to kind of a history of the rough history of Burnt Church Road and why it's called that and just enough to entice you to hopefully buy the book. So that's kind of what we trying to do with that. So that was important to us just again, since we try to showcase the local history in the local area.

Drew (00:18:21):
Yeah, that's the interesting thing about South Carolina. And I got in this discussion with somebody the other day about it because there's this feeling that there's a lot of civil war history in the area, but it's actually more revolutionary war era. And you probably dealt more in research with Antebellum South and than what was going on after Civil War. I don't know how much of that history was actually Civil War history

Chris (00:18:54):
Not as much. We wanted to try to focus on when you get into the story of Burnt Church Road it wasn't early called Burnt Church Road until 1954, I believe. And before that it was called Palmer Stretch, which was a post-civil war black businessman. George Bell Palmer is the person at that road was named after originally. So they were the black populations and primary landowners in Beaufort County after the Civil War. So for a period of time. So that was important for us to highlight as well. And then when I think about Colonial pre-colonial times, our Devil's Elbow gin talks about Devil's Elbow Barney, which was a land grant from the King of England. And so we wanted to try to incorporate that as well. So wasn't just going to be about the Civil War and what happened and all that kind of stuff. So we're There's more to it than that, just like you said.

Drew (00:20:02):
So yeah, absolutely. When you go to Charleston, you kind of get mix of both worlds. They play up both worlds there. But even Charleston was really heavy revolutionary war, so very, very interesting. So, and we'll talk about it when we get to each of the different whiskeys and all your spirits have associations to some of these different aspects of history. When you first walk in though, between the history and the gift shop, is this oak tree that's a bench? Yeah. So what's the story behind that?

Chris (00:20:42):
It's actually a table. It's going to be a table. So that is a piece of the secession oak. And so the secession Oak is a large tree in Bluffton and its historical significance is the oak tree under which the birth of the Bluffton movement was. There was a speech given to the oak tree that led to the Be Bluffton movement that led to South Carolina seceding from the Union, which led to the Civil War. And what's interesting is that tree in February of 2021, it split apart on February 1st which is freedom day for the black culture. And so Billy's heart is in just trying to establish an inclusive environment and a place where everyone can feel welcome.

(00:21:47):
But he's also, in his heart is economic equity primarily with the minority communities. And so he knew that he wanted to try to obtain a piece of the secession oak so we could tell the story of the secession oak in the distillery from a black perspective. And so what does that mean for the black population in the area? And so that's what we're working on. That piece of tree is about a 5,000 pound piece. It was not easy to get in here. It was another one of those moments where you watch it happen and you're like, I hope the concrete holds up and I hope it doesn't hope everything, nothing happens. But that was kind of quite a feat to get it in here. And the tabletop there'll be a glass tabletop that goes over the top of that that tells, like I said, the story of the succession from the black perspective. And so that's in process and we hope to have that done sometime early next year at this point.

Drew (00:22:47):
Okay. Yeah, I like I say, it's really interesting when you walk in, you see these things and you go, wow, this is a piece of history. And you find things that tell their own stories, which is a lot of fun.

Chris (00:23:02):
That's right.

Drew (00:23:04):
So let's talk about the whiskeys cuz we actually have them lined up and can go through and do a tasting. And what's, what will be interesting about this is that I got my whiskeys back oh, probably 8, 9, 10 months ago. So my whiskeys may not taste exactly the same as your whiskeys because

Chris (00:23:23):
That's true.

Drew (00:23:25):
True. You've had more time to age them. That sounds like they're coming out of different size barrels potentially as well. So that's going to change some of the character. So let's jump in and we could talk a little bit about this Palmer stretch rye. So Palmer stretch, first of all is the name of the road that became before

Chris (00:23:46):
It was called Burnt Church

Drew (00:23:47):
Road. Yeah, Burt Church Road. Okay. So that's

Chris (00:23:49):
Correct. That's

Drew (00:23:50):
Correct. And that road also had some ties to horse racing, from what I understand.

Chris (00:23:56):
That is correct. There's a kind of local legend here there. There's a family here called, their last names are Cram, c r a m. And the father of that family back in the day was quite the wild card and just did some crazy things like rode his horse into the Soto Hotel and Savannah he and his girlfriend or something like that. I believe the local stories. All right, so one of the stories is that on Thanksgiving day he would get out onto Palmer Stretch, which is a straight road, and he would do a horse race with his buddies on Thanksgiving Day. And so there was obviously gambling going on there and some things like that. So it was just one of those local things that everybody did. So when we designed Palmer Stretch, we called it the original wild card. And if you look at the bottle there's screen print on the back of the bottle that's two horses and a polo match cuz he played quite a bit of polo as well. And so pay tribute to some Palmer stretch with the name and then pay tribute to some of the things that happened on that road, like the horse racing on the back of the bottle as well. So that's what he tried to do with Palmer Stretch.

Drew (00:25:15):
It's interesting cuz the man it's named after really didn't live there for very long. I think he was only, he did not, he was only there for maybe 10 years or something like that.

Chris (00:25:26):
Yep, yep. I completely, you're

Drew (00:25:27):
Right. So let's talk about mash bills because again, was it a conscious thing from the start to say, let's not just make a corn bourbon and let's the traditional corn rye, a malted barley mash bill. Was that a conscious decision right out from the start?

Chris (00:25:46):
Yeah, we were pretty committed that we didn't want to just do what everybody else did. And when you have something, a brand that's like for a Palmer stretch, that's the original wild card, you wanna do something that's kind of unique. So we led with rye, obviously since it's rye whiskey, 56% wa rye, we did 32% wheat and then finished up a 12% malted barley. So every one of our mashables has some component of malted barley in it and we get that local as well. There's a malt house that's just up the road from us and they do a great job for us Palmetto malt. So they're good partners with us, so very nice. But that's what this is all about. We wanted to give you a contrast between the spice of the rye and then the sweet of the wheat and see what that looks like when those two flavor heavy hitters do at Hal. Yeah. Where does the land?

Drew (00:26:39):
Well, the thing is that sometimes when I see rye and wheat together, I think about the idea that rye is sometimes considered a bit spicy for people. And so adding the wheat to it could kind of soften that up and give some sweet notes and probably emphasize more of those sweet notes. And this is interesting too, because I'm looking at my tasting notes from a year ago to see how close I am and the urbanly rye note on the nose along with that kind of I call it a sawdust kind of wood note that comes in is definitely still prevalent there and the toffee and the rye kind of working together on that. And then it comes off with a little peppery finish there. There's heat, but it's not overly aggressive. And interesting that I wrote Graham cracker because that's a note I was picking up in a lot of Irish whiskeys. And I think that's probably coming from that barley

Chris (00:27:40):
Could

Drew (00:27:40):
Be that pulls that in. But the other thing that I noticed when I was there visiting and did a tasting there of all the whiskeys at that time was I was tasting cherry and everything. And then when I tasted these, once I got home, I was like, there were a couple that I got the cherry note in, but it wasn't across the whole board, which makes me think my palate wasn't washing out between each tasting. I was still maybe having some leftover there. That's the challenge of doing a tasting of multiple whiskeys. But I get a little bit more of the char in this one now that I didn't really pick up the first time that I tasted it. So

Chris (00:28:20):
What you're tasting is probably, it was probably when it was bottled a little over two years old it was in a 15 gallon barrel. And I don't know if you wanna, can we talk about where the whiskey came from? Because obviously we opened in March of 2021 and we had whiskey when we opened. So yeah, how do you do that? So when you're a production facility's not finished yet. So we had our whiskeys we had our mash builds, we developed our mash builds ourselves. Sean was the driving force behind that. And we found a distillery in Kentucky Jet decreed that had equipment that was similar to what we were going to have. And back in 20 18, 20 19, we had them produce some contract batches for us. And so I wish we had 'em produce more because we're already seeing where we may not have trouble bridging the gap between their make and our make when it's ready.

(00:29:22):
So things are going pretty well for us with some products with all the products, but some more than others obviously. And so they put some whiskey a certain part of it in 15 gallon barrels and theoretically in a couple years of 15 gallon barrels, pretty much good to go. And so that's what you're tasting primarily with the samples that I gave you last time. And then they did some kind of, that's what we call our year one stash. And so they did another round and put 'em in 25 gallon barrels and that's okay. That's what we're worked through all the fifteens. At this point we're working on dumping 20 fives and so all of our 20 fives are three years old. And like I told you, things change obviously, and different barrels are change. Amazing to me in this business how you could take the same mash bill and the same lot of distillation in multiple barrels and you can taste the barrels and how different barrels can taste when all variables are the same except it's just a different barrel. Yeah. But it's so different. It's amazing. So

Drew (00:30:34):
To see actually that, I mean when you think about the construction of a barrel, it all, the wood is not necessarily coming from the same tree and it's not necessarily coming from the same part of the same tree if that's the case. And so there's going to be different experiences that wood went through at the different points within the tree. So

Chris (00:30:54):
See that's a good point,

Drew (00:30:55):
Right? To have two barrels that are exactly the same. I think that's what makes single barrel whiskey so interesting is the fact that yes, if it's coming from this barrel, the barrel sitting right next to it could be completely different because of the wood and different issues that it may go through. But that is a interesting question about a 15 gallon barrel and the fact that at two years, this doesn't taste overly oaky because in that size barrel in South Carolina climate, you would think that it's pretty aggressive in terms of heat, but you also have humidity to deal with.

Chris (00:31:36):
That's correct. And then I will say that Jetta not only distilled that and barrel that for us, but they ate, put it in their warehouses or rickhouses until we had our certificate of occupancy to be able to open to the public. So that happened in February or March of 2021. Okay. Yeah. So then the barrels got shipped down to us and that's where they, and they sit here now.

Drew (00:31:58):
Okay. Yeah.

Chris (00:31:59):
So we're seeing now a big difference in the 15 gallon original distillate and then the 25 gallon that we're dumping now because we're 15 or 16 months into this thing with the barrels on site. So the product's getting better. We were very satisfied with the product when we opened a year ago and we continue to be more excited about the product as it ages out in different barrels. So we're off to a good

Drew (00:32:33):
Start. This is the fun part about watching a transition with a new distillery and going from stuff that has been made elsewhere and then shifting into the stuff that you're aging yourself and you're going to be going into larger barrels as well. So that's going to change different things and your climate, so that's correct. Yeah, that's correct. So are you guys jumping back into the warehouse and having to stay on top of these barrels to make sure that they aren't aging too quickly? Cuz this is kind of trial and error I would say at this point

Chris (00:33:04):
It kind is. Yeah, haven't been to date. We haven't been too super selective about the barrels that we picked to batch. We've just been trying to get a good cross section of that and it was all pretty much everything in that size barrel was all distilled within the same timeframe, so there's not really a lot of aged variability between the barrel sizes. It was all just kind of done and sat. So over the period of two or three months, I think they distilled all of our whiskeys. So we're just trying to keep on top of it the best we can and just try to make sure that we're not have an over oaked type product. And so far it's been better than it was a year ago, but it felt it's pretty good a year ago. So we're pleased with the progression for sure.

Drew (00:34:04):
When you said Jeff Le Crete, it surprised me at first because I thought everybody goes to mg, everybody goes to bars, town bourbon company. Now there are some distilleries, larger distilleries, and you don't think about smaller distilleries actually doing some contract work. But I really think it is the challenge for the guys going to the larger distilleries and then having smaller equipment when they get started is that transition.

Chris (00:34:33):
We wanna make the transition as seamless as possible. And so their equipment, I think I said as similar to ours. And we knew that it was our best chance to have a product that stays consistent when we do bridge which we'll be in the process of doing probably October October, 2023 we'll start seeing. We had a few 15 gallon barrels empty brand new barrels that we filled when we first started distilling in October of 2021. And so in two years, theoretically they'll be ready to start taking a look at those and see where they land and if they're ready or not. So I'm excited to see the first distillate off of our stills. Out of the barrels is going to be a sweet day for sure. Yeah. So one thing this business has taught me is patience. It's tough, man. It's tough.

Drew (00:35:33):
We keep referencing Hilton Head, but kind of give people an idea of where you're at, cuz I have a feeling a lot of people have probably passed by you but don't know that they've passed by you. That's

Chris (00:35:43):
Right. So Bluffton used to be a pretty sleepy community. It's about five miles from the bridge to Hilton Head, and this distillery is about a mile off of the main highway 2 78 that goes onto to Hilton Head. So we're pretty easy to find. We're not off the beaten path just about a mile from the four-way stop down here. That's kind of the historic district, so to speak, of the area. So we feel like we're positioned pretty well to be able to capture visitors from Hilton Head, but then also Savannah, and then Charleston's not that far away either. So if you're in this area on vacation and have a desire to visit distilleries, we're certainly on the map and we feel like we're in a pretty good position. So it's been fun to see where people are from and it's part of the business that's pretty challenging. It's trying to figure out, it's like where do you spend your advertising dollars and how do you spend those? It's how do people find you? So we've used a variety of methods, billboards, digital ads, social, you know, name it. We're trying everything at this point.

Drew (00:36:53):
Yeah. And how far out are you distributed?

Chris (00:36:57):
So we're in South Carolina in Georgia the entire state of each. We started out in South Carolina and then about three months after we opened, we moved to out to coastal Georgia and then latter part of last year and first part of this year we launched into the rest of the state in Georgia, which included Atlanta. Atlanta Metro has more population than this whole state of South Carolina does. And so it was like, it's a whole another state totally for the metro Atlanta area. And that's gone pretty well. We're pretty pleased with our results there. We're truly not a home team brand up there. We get people visit us from that area, but some folks may not see our product on the shelves up there and not really know anything about who we are or where we are, but we're trying to change that. And then the ultimate way to get people to love your product is to get liquor on a lips. And so we try to do that as much as we can with tastings and things like that and retail liquor stores and such.

Drew (00:38:09):
So yeah, just don't tell them that. Don't brag that South Carolina has more peaches than they do.

Chris (00:38:14):
I know <laugh>

Drew (00:38:15):
Subject,

Chris (00:38:16):
Isn't it?

Drew (00:38:17):
And we don't call ourselves the peach State.

Chris (00:38:21):
They can have the name, but we'll take the peach volume,

Drew (00:38:24):
Right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So this next whiskey, when I first saw the name being a huge W K R P in Cincinnati fan, I saw Johnny, I saw Johnny Fever Bourbon, and I went, okay, that's cool. And then once we started talking about it, there's a different story behind this particular Johnny Fever versus the Cincinnati kid. I guess we could call him. What's your tell a little bit about that.

Chris (00:38:51):
Oh yeah, sure. So everything that we do from a brand standpoint has a story or is part of history. So this one is a story. So Billy and Sean didn't really have a father growing up. And so when Billy met his wife, Brenda one of I believe three sisters. And so they have no boys in their, no brothers in their family. And so Billy and his father-in-law hit it off really well. So Billy was the son he never had, and John was the father he never had. And so their time together was filled with hunting trips and campfires and visits to the farm and things like that. And so when they were developing brands for the distillery he knew he wanted to have a brand that paid tribute to his father-in-law. And so his nickname for his father-in-law was Johnny Fever. And then quite interesting enough John's favorite whiskey was Woodford Reserve.

(00:40:03):
And so we wanted to try to not copy Woodford, but have a whiskey that is maybe a little bit similar to that. And so Johnny Fever is a hundred proof primarily corn has a little rye and some wheat and malted barley in it. So it's four grains and a hundred proof and it's just a premium whiskey for us. We don't have a lot of it available. We didn't distill a bunch of it with Jetta. I'm kind of sad about that because we could sell a whole lot better. But we do have some availability from time to time and we're going to ramp up production on that as well. And we will to hopefully get it in distribution, but it's going to be several years down the road for that. But that's a story of Johnny Fever. The bottle has a shotgun shell topper from the paid tribute to the hunting trips and things like that. So it's just a beautiful packaging and beautiful bottle and we're very proud of it again, just wish that there was more of it.

Drew (00:41:05):
Yeah. Oh, it's got really interesting flavors coming through.

Chris (00:41:09):
Yeah,

Drew (00:41:12):
Your rye definitely has an urbanly kind of note to it because that carries through on everything. I almost get a jelly bean on the finish that hit me there.

Chris (00:41:26):
Interesting.

Drew (00:41:26):
The pepper. The pepper is a little bit more subdued, subdued in this so I'm guessing the rye isn't quite as high in the mash bill on this particular one. I was getting some hazelnut on the nose actually this time. The butterscotch, a little bit of a grain note in there, and then that herbal character that rye is hard to miss. But yeah, just nice on the pallet and it's again, a little bit of that grain character.

Chris (00:42:00):
One of the things we did with Johnny Fever with Jeff when they made it for us is we had them put some of it in 53 gallon barrels. So that's the only product I believe that they distilled for us if they put in 53 gallon barrels. And so our hope is that we can let those age out. They're at three years old now, so our hope is we can let that kind of age out and get some age on it. And since it's a premium product, we can also then come out with an extra age product. And so age statements, we want the whiskey to be in the bottle when it's ready to be in the bottle. So I don't know that we'll try to hit a number when it comes to age for age statements, but we want it in the bottle when it tastes good. And we'll see how this one does over time as it ages out. So

Drew (00:42:48):
It was interesting because my palate's grown over the last year too, so that's kind of the fun of tasting these again. And this time I got a cola note, which I've put cola down to being a mixture of the vanilla that's coming from the oak and that cherry note, because I didn't necessarily pick that cherry note up the first time. Well, right, I did when I was there, but I didn't pick it up on

Chris (00:43:14):
My, not when you,

Drew (00:43:15):
Yeah, but I'm getting it again, but it's coming in as almost a cola note on the finish, which is nice. And then it evolves, and that vanilla just lingers. It's, it doesn't doesn't dissipate. It makes you go, okay, I'm ready to jump back in again. Right, right. Yeah, right. Very, very nice. Yeah,

Chris (00:43:35):
That's a good one.

Drew (00:43:36):
Next up is Anita's Choice, which is the one that, is it fair to say this is probably your most widely distributed because this is the bottle I see at my local stores.

Chris (00:43:47):
So it's the biggest seller from our whiskey portfolio by far. And I don't really know what to attribute that to except it's just, first of all, the packaging is really pretty but the product's pretty good too. So Nita's Choice is a six grain bourbon. So it has corn, wheat, rice, oat rye, malted barley. So there's a lot going on in the air. And so it's an interesting story about that product. But when Billy and Sean's friends heard that they were doing a distillery and were working on products and stuff, they had one friend tell you should do a bourbon for Women. And so they're like, okay. And they started thinking about it, and this is, I don't know that two middle-aged guys even make a bourbon for women. I think that's probably not sure that that's going to work out very well. But what they decided to do was make a bourbon that honored a woman.

(00:44:50):
And so again, the history aspect of it. So in studying, who could We name a bourbon after that came across the bio of Anita Pulitzer. So she's a Charleston native. She was responsible or not responsible, she was integral in getting the Women's Right to Vote Amendment passed the 19th Amendment back in 1920, so served in the Women's National Women's Party and was national chairman for four or five years. And so they found bio to be clean and without any type of controversy, and so felt that she was worthy to be honored on a product. And so that's what Anita's choice is based off of. The packaging, again, is beautiful and just wants a little Easter eggs on that label. And it's a fun product. And again, it's the best seller of Brown liquid we have, and we're proud of it.

Drew (00:45:55):
So it's interesting, the use of oats and rice and oats are, again, I reference a lot of these interviews nowadays because of the impact of my trip to Ireland. But oats were a pretty big part of what they used to distill in Ireland. And there are very few American distillers, I've probably come across maybe five or six that are using oats right now. And is there something that you guys feel like the oats bring to the whiskey that might be a reason why you put it in there?

Chris (00:46:37):
Yeah, honestly, drew, I haven't really looked into that a whole lot. I have never really asked Sean why he thought to include that. I think it was just a challenge of can we find a mash bill that has six grains that is going to stand up and be a solid whiskey? One of the interesting things about the Sixth Grain is that one of the things that they studied when they were told about, Hey, make a whiskey for women they learned that women have more fine-tuned old factory senses than men do. And so they can pick up on subtle flavors and things like that. And so I think that's part of what we wanted to do with Anita's choice was six grains. That is probably more complex than maybe what a male can discern but a female might be able to discern the flavor profile a little bit better than a man, a man. So I think that probably played into it. Maybe it's just a numbers game and it worked. I don't know, but

Drew (00:47:38):
Well, the thing they talk about over there is that oats are kind of like a clotted cream, which I don't know what the heck clotted cream is. I need to, yeah, so it doesn't sound great, but kinda like an egg custardy kind of thing. Maybe that comes through on it, which I could see interesting. This is an interesting whiskey for me because you're right, it is. There's a lot of subtleties in this whiskey and on the nose doesn't, not on the nose where it's complex on the nose. I tend to get more of the what I call dried flowers, because my mother was a she used to do flower arrangements, and so I got used to what that smell was when you would walk into a craft shop and you would get that kind of Yeah,

Chris (00:48:28):
You knew where you were.

Drew (00:48:29):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I get a little bit of that in, and that's part of that earthy rye probably again coming in. But where I really get this one is on the pallet and on the finish, because I was getting the caramel note, but I was also getting dark chocolate was coming in there I was getting I got the colon note again. So again, I'm getting that cherry note is coming through, but it's very, very subtle different. Yeah. And so that is one of those whiskeys that I think if you wanna sit there and really test yourself and see how many different things you can pull out, it's drier than the other ones. I think that's interesting is that the sweet notes aren't there as much. And so when we say a wom a woman's whiskey, there's this feeling that women want something that's sweet and delicate, but I find that women like to be challenged. So where this one I think breaks that stereotype and actually pushes probably more to what a woman would wanna taste rather than what people think they would wanna taste. So, yep, very interesting. Okay. And so our last one is Bluffton whiskey. And so if it's going to take on the name of the town, you would think maybe this had some kind of significance to why you would call it that

Chris (00:49:59):
We wanted to have something that had the name of our town on it, obviously. And so we wanted to try to make the product as local as possible. And so this B whiskey is just classified as a whiskey. So if you look in TTB chapter four, there's big long list of the guidelines of what you call what. And so there's really no placeholder for this. It's primary grain is Carolina Gold rice which we touched on earlier. And so it's 80% Carolina gold rice, and then 10% wheat, 10% malted barley. So it has a little bit of wheat in there from a sweet standpoint. And we talked about the roots of Carolina Gold rice in Africa, grown here since at least 1685. And one of the things I picked up on when I did some research on the grain is like it's known when you cook with Carolina Gold rices, it's known for a nutty flavor and then it has some floral notes and a sweet finish. So it's interesting because I kind of feel like it's, it's almost like a stand-in for corn. Yeah, right. Yeah, a little bit because it has a fair amount of sweet to it but it's not corn, obviously. So we just feel like it was unique and it was local enough that we wanted to use the name of our town in the branding for the product because it's as local as it gets for us. So that's bloods and whisking in a nutshell.

Drew (00:51:33):
It's really interesting too, because when we were younger, we used to try to find ways to pick on Budweiser and we'd say, well, they just threw that rice in there to make it a filler. It's they're just trying to cheapen their beer up a little bit so they can don't have to spend so much money on grain. So we walk into this idea of rice, and I grew up in a family where when we had rice, we just put a pad of butter on it and a little pepper, and that was it. It was white rice and it tasted butter and a bit of pepper. Yeah. Yeah. So we don't think about what flavor rice really has. I mean, brown rice definitely has a flavor, and so it'd be interesting to taste. Yeah. Have you tasted Carolina Gold rice before?

Chris (00:52:20):
Yes. Yes I have. And I think that people that cook with rice, if it's standard rice, it tends to just take on whatever flavors are in the recipe. You do a jambalaya or something like that and the rice is going to taste tomato and all that kind of stuff. But I think for us one of the things that's important as you do the mashing and the fermentation and distillation is like what kind of yield can you get out of a grain and how does that work? And actually it's interesting because lot and whiskey the rice is expensive compared to other grains. It could be several dollars a pound, and whereas corn can be like 50 cents a pound or something like that but the yield we get out of this, it produces so much alcohol from the sugar. It's just amazing. And so we can get almost an extra, I'm just trying to think almost an extra barrel out of a run of B and whiskey that we get of anything else that we distill. And so it has a really good flavor and I'm really pretty proud of it. It's one of my favorites that we do. A lot of people, when it tasted earlier versions thought it tasted like a bourbon. I thought they were drinking a bourbon. And so from that, I take that the rice is a good it gives you the sweetness that the corn would give you in a bourbon but it's not a bourbon.

Drew (00:53:58):
So this is, I'm thinking, because the two things that really stand out heavily on the pallet, this whiskey are vanilla and that toffee caramel note, and those come from the barrel. And so when you're telling me that think of rice, you think of it as a vehicle for whatever flavor. That's right. You put with it the flavor. You're basically taking the barrel and saying, here's the flavor of the barrel. Yes. Except it's not overly, yeah, it's not overly oaky. So the thing is how long, what size barrel would I have gotten this one out of? And how long did you probably age that?

Chris (00:54:42):
So it'd been a 15 at a couple, a little over two years. Just like what everything else that we have dealt that we have, and again, we're now into the second year, and so we're at 20 fives at three years. I actually probably we'll send you some samples of our current current bottles, just so you can, if you have a little bit left of the samples I sent you previously. Yeah. Then you can do it side by side. Would you like

Drew (00:55:10):
That? Yeah, that'd be great. Fever's the only one I'm out of, so you can tell I like that one. Okay. No. Alright.

Chris (00:55:16):
Yeah. Something we didn't touch on really, but everything that we do is in the mid upper nineties up to a hundred proof. So we didn't really shy away from, we didn't wanna water things down too much and we were going through the sample batches that we would get from Jeff the back before we opened and trying to decide to determine what the final proof was going to be for the different products and things like that. It was surprising to me how much change a one or 2% in percentage would do for you from a flavor standpoint. So we landed at, what, a hundred for Johnny Fever? 95 for Bluff and Whiskey 97 for Palmer Stretch, and I think 98 for Neatest Choice. I can't remember exactly. But anyway, we wanted to go flavor and we wanted to make sure you knew what you were drinking when you put it in glass.

Drew (00:56:17):
Yeah. Well, I would say mission accomplished because that's one of those things that and of course you're not chill filtering because you don't have to if you're doing it. That's it at that proof. But yet that's right. I'm finding there is a trend these days towards cast strength and so many people are jumping on the cast strength bandwagon. I'm kind of the guy that says, you know what? I like it around a hundred or 90. I don't need it overly hot. Now there are some that once they get over a hundred, they're still very drinkable and you know, don't have to dilute them, but I'm bad about it. I don't put water in my whiskey. People say, oh, you must throw a drop of water in there to open it up. But I almost never do because I just forget. I just wanna drink.

Chris (00:57:07):
Yeah. I don't really either. Yeah.

Drew (00:57:09):
I just wanna drink my whiskey, but it is another aspect. But yeah, this is fun. This was fun to go through these again and taste them a year later. Because when I tasted them originally and I sent you my tasting notes on them, I went, I'm nervous about this. In fact, I told you while we were eating at the pizza place right next built right into your building there, right? I said, I am nervous about my tasting skills and my nosing skills especially coming out of C O V because I had lost my sense of smell there for a while. And then to go back through my notes and then do the tastings here, it's like, no, I hit most of the stuff that I'm catching here. It's a couple extra things that not far off stick out. So it'll be fun to taste what you've got now. And this really helps me appreciate the depth of all of these whiskeys, because as new as you guys are it's great to see that you're really putting out a quality product up already. Yeah.

Chris (00:58:16):
Thank you. Yeah, thank you. We were committed. One of the interesting things about a new distillery that's had their Nashville's made by someone else is when you bridge that gap, it's like, what does that look like and how does it feel for the customer? And if you get used to a product tasting a certain way, so you know, could spend all your time trying to chase your tail and try to chase a flavor profile of a new make that JTA did for us. But at the end of the day, we just have to, and I've told our distiller this, our head distiller this. I said, Peter, you just need to make the whiskey the best you can make it and do the best you can. Make it as good as you can make it. And we'll just let it play out. And it may be a little bit different but it's going to be something that we can consistently reproduce and accomplish time in and time out.

Drew (00:59:11):
Yeah. And that is, it's interesting, the early days in trying to do some experimentation and then once you get it down, you want to create some consistency in there. But do you feel like that's right, there'll be a point where you branch out and probably add a couple of more bottles to your lineup?

Chris (00:59:29):
Yeah. So we've already started that process. Have you? So yeah, Peter our distiller, we talked about the rice source and the farmers, the local farmers and things like that. So there are a fair amount of airline grains that haven't been used a lot in distillation that the particularly Martian mill up in Edisto Island, South Carolina Greg Johns man has worked with us to try to understand it's like, what could we produce with a grain that other people aren't using? And so we have in our production schedule for next year, some capacity for a couple of three other products that we're going to start the distillation of. I've just tasted this week a sample of a bourbon that we've trialed that we're going to probably do a couple production runs of that will come out in four or five years. And it's going to be something that we just don't it's going to involve a corn that's not really grown a whole lot that we only get a limited amount of. And so it's going to dictate that it's a small batch, extremely small batch for

Drew (01:00:49):
Us

Chris (01:00:50):
Just because we can't get any more of the corn. So those are the kind of fun things that I want to try to allow our distillers, the creativity to do other things besides just here's our four whiskeys, just make our four whiskeys. It's just build in some fluff so that we can do some one-offs and some trials and some specialties and things like that. We just ran one recently that was so good. It was awry whiskey. That was so good. I encouraged him to try to procure more of that typical, that style of rye to be able to do more and commit for multiple years. It was, rye is kind of a little bit of a niche product from a whiskey world, but the new make was so good. I was like, we should do some more of that. So those are fun things and those are exciting things and like I said, the distilling business isn't, is teaches you patience. So I'm just praying that I'm going to be around <laugh> long enough to see what these are like in five or six or so years. Yeah. Anyway, that's what keeps it fun and keeps it real, so absolutely. It's good stuff.

Drew (01:02:04):
So if somebody wants to come visit the distillery do you do your bookings online or just drop in or how does that work?

Chris (01:02:13):
We do yeah, so you can go to burnt church distillery.com and we have tours that are booked online primarily right now we're offering those on Saturday, Sundays and Mondays just because our production facility's a little bit tight and so we don't want to get in the way of production, those forklifts and things like that moving around. And it's just safer if we can condense it down and they don't have to worry about it the rest of the week. So that's what we do right now and we just launched tours in the last two and a half months or so. And so we're looking to kind of expand those offerings and include some guided tastings and some things like that. So we just try to keep it fun and exciting and engaging. We love our distillery, we love our area. We love to tell the story about what we do here. We do two different tours. One is a history and a production tour, and the other is just a straight up production tour. And so we get a couple of different looks at what we do here through those. And we're open seven days a week and full tasting room with some food options and some light bites and some good pizza and salads from, and some wings from next door as well. So

Drew (01:03:38):
You get to take a drink underneath the stained glass without having to take communion at the same time.

Chris (01:03:45):
That's exactly right.

Drew (01:03:46):
Exactly right. So that works out really well. And I read too that you were doing a monthly charity partner for your tours as well, that you were donating. We

Chris (01:03:55):
Do. So yeah, we talked about the local community and one of the initiatives that we have is that we created a foundation called Low Country Legacy Fund. And so that fund is actually to promote economic equity in our area and pro promote our to fund infrastructure improvements in the primarily, primarily minority areas of our community. And then we also partner with local charity partners. So we have a different one every month and they receive a portion of our tour ticket sales. They receive a portion of our we have monthly special drink specials and they receive a portion of proceeds from that as well. So we just try to engage and raise awareness to other charity partners in our own low country community, low country legacy fund that we have as well. So

Drew (01:04:56):
Fantastic. Well, it's great to know that I have a friend that I've known for so long that is in charge of bringing out some really great whiskey and I has such a beautiful distillery, so I definitely encourage people to go down if they are headed to Hilton Head. It's a easy stop off. And actually in a way when I go down there because I get tired of being stuck in traffic going into Hilton Head maybe just stay in Bluffton,

Chris (01:05:23):
Right? Yeah, that's right. There are plenty of places to eat and lots of fun to have, so it'd be great. Yeah. I'll just mention this too for your listeners. If you cate tour with us and you put in the comments that you heard about us through the Whiskey Lore Interviews podcast I'll do everything I can in my schedule to be part of that tour myself and to lead that tour myself. Fantastic. So I would love to meet other whiskey enthusiasts as

Drew (01:05:47):
Well. That's awesome. Thank you, Chris. I really appreciate it and appreciate Of course, appreciate your time today and great revisiting your whiskeys. I'm looking forward to tasting a year later.

Chris (01:05:59):
Great. Yeah. Yep. I'll send you

Drew (01:06:00):
Some samples. Fantastic. Thank you, Chris.

Chris (01:06:02):
Sure, thanks.

Drew (01:06:04):
And if you'd like to learn more about Burnt Church Distillery, then just head to burnt church distillery.com and find show notes and transcripts for this episode along with links to my YouTube tastings and whiskey lords social media channels by heading to whiskey lord.com. Now, whiskey Lord Stories is going to continue over on my other podcast feed as I continue working my way through the history of Irish whiskey and my own travels in Ireland. But whiskey Lord, the interviews is going to take a month off as I take a fall break and prepare for the launch of my new book called Whiskey Lord's Travel Guide to Experiencing Irish Whiskey. If you're interested in getting an early copy of that book, make sure to sign up for my newsletter using the popup@whiskeylord.com. Otherwise, I'll be back on October 19th with a whole new host of great guests. I'm your host, Hanish, and until next time, cheers and SL Ofk Whiskey lords and Production of Travel Fuel's Life L L C.