Ep. 28 - Dead Distilers Author Colin Spoelman

Transcript

Colin (00:00:14):
Welcome to Whiskey Lore, the interviews. I'm your host, drew Hamish, the Amazon bestselling author of Whiskey Lores Travel Guide to Experience in Kentucky Bourbon. And I want to welcome you to an encore interview that I conducted back in March of 2021 with a man who has two ventures in the world of whiskey, Colin Spelman. He's not only the co-founder of Kings County Distillery in New York, a distillery that's located in the old Paymasters building at the old Brooklyn Navy Yard, but he's also the co-writer of two books, the Guide to Urban Moon, shining and Dead Distillers. And this interview is actually part of the reason why I decided to start a second podcast called Whiskey Lore. The interviews is a separate one for my more storytelling podcast, whiskey lore, mostly because there are so many great books written about broader subjects on whiskey that well just covering 20 plus stories and not really having the opportunity to stretch beyond those stories.

Colin (00:01:21):
I really wanted to have an opportunity to interview people like Colin. So in this interview, you're going to hear two people who absolutely love whiskey history, and we're going to get into a discussion about the origins of American whiskey. We'll talk about the Gangs of New York, traveling to cemeteries, looking for dead distillers, the forgotten impact of New York Distilling. And we're also going to talk about what Colin is doing today to bring that distilling heritage back. Now, since there was a pandemic going on and New York was a little hard to navigate to, we did this interview over Zoom, but I'm telling you, one of these days I want to go up there and see the distillery and see this historic building. It's just going to have to wait though, unfortunately, but one of these days it will occur if you're into whiskey history. Well, this episode is for you. So here's my interview with distiller and author Colin Spillman. Well, welcome to the show.

Colin (00:02:26):
Thanks, drew.

Colin (00:02:27):
It's nice to be at least talking to somebody in New York. If I can't be in New York, at least I have the opportunity through Zoom to do this. Would love to come see your distillery someday and see what you're doing. How are things going with the whole pandemic thing? You guys feel like an opening is coming soon

Colin (00:02:47):
And opening is coming soon one way or another. I think that's kind of the case, but also it's been different eras within the pandemic, and there was sort of the hand sanitizer beginning to it. And then this sort of slow summer we got outdoor dining back, and that actually helped us quite a bit. We pivoted to e-commerce. We've been doing virtual tastings, but the good news right now is that people seem to be drinking. The media story has always been that people are drinking a lot more during the pandemic. I think in the early days people were stocking up on Titos and

Colin (00:03:25):
To

Colin (00:03:25):
The handles, the handles of whatever they could find. But buying habits now appear to have shifted more to the higher end whiskey is the kinds of things that you might kind of have an experience tasting at home. And our whiskeys certainly fit into that. So our distributor business in New York, wholesale business has gone up quite a bit, especially with Christmas, but then even January, February, which are usually slow, have been pretty strong. So that's a good sign. Yeah.

Colin (00:03:52):
So you've got the Kings County Distillery, and you are also the author of two books?

Colin (00:03:57):
Two books, yep.

Colin (00:03:58):
Okay. One is called Dead Distillers, which I just got a chance to read through, which is a fun read and we'll talk about some of the stuff in that. But I wanted to start with your other one, which is the Guide to Urban Moonshining, because I think it kind of leads into giving us a little background on who you are and how you ended up in New York, because you actually come from a very moonshine slash almost bourbon area, an area that a lot of people associate with bourbon, but you're actually in an area that was much more known for moonshine. So how did you get to Brooklyn and where did you come from?

Colin (00:04:41):
So I grew up in Harland County, Kentucky, which is pretty close to the Cumberland Gap, where Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia come together. And my father was a Presbyterian minister. It was a dry county. Alcohol was certainly not a big part of my family life or anybody's family life really, until I got to be about 14. And then we would go to the bootlegger, and the bootlegger was somebody who would travel to Virginia or Richmond, Kentucky and buy commercial alcohol and then bring it back to high school kids and resell it. So my experience with alcohol was very different than I moved to New York, and everybody just kind of puts bourbon on me because I'm from Kentucky and I would have to explain that I'm from the coal mining, Appalachian moonshine part of the state, and then the conversation would switch over to moonshine. And that's what really people were most intrigued by back in 2000 7, 8, 9, when this was all going down.

Colin (00:05:47):
And so I would bring some moonshine back from Kentucky. That was part of my interest in getting into ultimately becoming a distiller. But at a certain point, I just wanted to be a hobby, a home brewer, which exists for wine and beer, although it's legal to sort of do some home brewing, so to speak. But for spiritist beverages, that's still illegal. And to do that is to be a moonshiners. So there was a little bit of a kind of transgressive quality into trying to recover this cultural inheritance that I realized that I had come from no real intention of starting a distillery until I realized that the idea was a strong one, because people were really into it and there was no way to really continue to do it. At a certain point, it had be gotten big enough. There was a newspaper that was trying to write about it, and I just figured I needed to get a license. I could still do what I was doing, I would keep doing it in the apartment, just do it on the side. And I got into it and went realized that you can't really do that. You have to become a commercial

Colin (00:07:02):
Distiller with all the trappings of a commercial distiller. So we

Colin (00:07:05):
Don't think of moonshine in New York City.

Colin (00:07:09):
Well, right, yes. And there was this sort of cultural disconnect of there's the farm to table movement was happening, and so people were really intrigued by food culture and how things, particularly things traditional food and beverage, how those things had gotten lost, certainly in an urban environment. So to be able to bring this tradition of moonshine to that audience was, there was something potent in that, and that I appreciated it. And then sort of was like, how can I benefit from this? How can I monetize this? Right. Yeah. Well, I was

Colin (00:07:54):
Going to say, how do you, because you weren't distilling at all when you were in Kentucky, or did you? Right. And you went to the bootlegger, but did you ever see a still and did you ever No see an operation?

Colin (00:08:08):
Never. I was never close enough to whoever was actually making the moonshine to go into the woods to see us still. It was really, in most of those instances, there was pretty significant removal from you and your sort of retail bootlegger. Everybody knew the retail bootlegger that was completely well known, and you didn't even have to necessarily have a connection to go visit there. But to get up in the woods with the guys who were actually making the stuff, that was sort of a different ballgame. And to this day, I haven't necessarily, I've met a lot of moonshiners and I've tasted a lot of shine from people all around the country, not just in Appalachia, but plenty of stuff. Once I kind of came out of the woodwork, people would track me down and be like, what do you think of this? And I've got a lot of that, but none of it is necessarily, well, some of it is of that sort of legitimate tradition, but a lot of it is younger people who are rediscovering it and trying to recapture and make sure that that doesn't quite get lost, which was very much in danger of happening when I was in the sort of range that we're talking about, just because alcohol cars made it easier to travel out of the mountains.

Colin (00:09:25):
You didn't have the geographic isolation that you had. There were more counties that were going wet. The price of alcohol relative to the price of attacks got lower and lower. So just the economic reasons for Moonshining kind of went away at that moment. And so from that point forward, it's been sort of more of a cultural exercise than a sort of survival mechanism of breaking the law kind of thing.

Colin (00:09:51):
So you have JW Dan as the dead distiller on your book, and so he started distilling in a log still. How did you start distilling? Because I'm sure you had to be a little bit creative or go out of the way to figure out either how to build your own still or find a still.

Colin (00:10:15):
Right. Well, and I will say I think moonshine kind of flourished back in 2010, in part because the internet made it possible for people to anonymously share information about distilling, because there were books from the seventies that were in the kind of alchemist cookbook, kind of anarchist, just kind of zines, poorly illustrated, typed up on a typewriter stuff that you could find. There were some shreds of things that you could find that could kind of point the way, but the internet really just opened it up. And if you were like me and didn't know how to solder and didn't know copper from stainless steel or plastic, and it was scary to try to build a steel, but you could buy a steel. And so in the same way that there were places that sold pipe water pipes for tobacco use that were clearly intended for a different purpose, there were stills that you could buy that were only for distillation of essential oils that of course were there for hobby distillers.

Colin (00:11:21):
And so I went to brewhouse and was one of those sites, and Hillbilly Stills is one that I ended up kind of gravitating to, but both of those were kind of hobby distiller supply shops. And so with that plus a good home brew shop, you could essentially do whatever you needed to do. And that's how I got started as a distiller, not necessarily as a business. That kind of came only after confronting the sort of, well, first of all, getting into it, I really discovered that I liked doing it and it was fun, but also it was unsustainable. I mean, I was going to potentially get into trouble, which was not my intent.

Colin (00:12:04):
So New York, but we just covered Tennessee over the last year, and how really their whole industry has blown up between 19 or 2010 when finally it became legal in more counties than just three to be able to make whiskey. So what was that process like for you? Where was the law already being enacted? Because New York, did they have any distilleries in New York at that time in 2010?

Colin (00:12:36):
Well, there were distilleries going back to the nineties in New York, and those were distilleries that were associated with wineries. So there was kind of a European tradition of having making grappa and oese at your winery, and there was an infrastructure for that, but there was no infrastructure for whiskey. And to get a micro distiller's license or whatever was on the books from probably back from Prohibition, it was some $34,000 for a three-year commitment. And as a startup distiller, that's basically prohibitive. And as it turns out, there were no real distillers in New York state and none that were making whiskey. But there was a gentleman who was trying to get a distillery, whiskey distillery off the ground, and he kind of raised some money, and he got the kind of farm bureau behind him. And once the farm bureau got ahold of it, they realized there was legislature legislative potential in changing that rule. And so by the time the law passed, he kind of ran out of money, moved to Texas. He never got to build his distillery, but there were people all around that said, oh, what a wonderful idea. We have craft beer in New York. We have many wineries in New York. Why not distilleries? So then in 2009, there was a little subclass of that license, the Farm Distiller license, and that's what we became the first in New York City to hold. And that is a just reduction in fees, and you can have a sort of tasting room and kind of a customer facing side of the business.

Colin (00:14:14):
Does it seem strange to be under a farm license when you're in the middle of urban Brooklyn?

Colin (00:14:22):
Well, we use a lot of farm products, and so it really is a way to connect agriculture to tourism. That was the idea behind the law, was to create some synergies between agriculture and tourism, and that made sense upstate, but that also makes sense in New York City where you have farmers' markets and you have plenty of opportunities for exchange between the agricultural side of food and beverage and the consumption side of food and beverage, which is happening. Course. So in 2010, we became the first licensed farm distiller, maybe, I don't know, first in the state, but certainly the first in the city, and then opened with a moonshine. So our first whiskey that we made was a white whiskey. I can show you, but you can sort of narrate what this is. It's a mason jar. Is

Colin (00:15:14):
That the original? Yes. I mean, he can't have moonshine without it being in the mason jar.

Colin (00:15:19):
Right, right. I was always in that path, and my business partner was kind of like, maybe dial it down.

Colin (00:15:29):
So settled on the flasks and the flasks were sort of well known for today. That's with just a very simple strip label on it. But the idea was always to, we weren't a big business. We didn't want to pretend we were a big business, didn't want to whip up a brand out of thin air and kind of lean into that. It was really more we're starting as a distillery and not a brand, so that there's a lot of businesses that start as a brand and then the distillery comes later. We started as a distillery, and that was the brand. And a lot of our experiments and different kinds of whiskeys have come out of being practitioners or being in the business of every day walking into the shop and trying to figure out what whiskey are we going to make today and how is it going to be different and how's it going to be interesting?

Colin (00:16:17):
And certainly in the case of being in a New York distiller, what are we going to do that's different from Kentucky Bourbon? How are we going to carve our audience that is probably very different from the one that's in Kentucky or Tennessee or even the Pacific Northwest or Texas, which are already sort of developing sub regions within American whiskey. Now that distilleries are 10 years into the craft boom, we're starting to get a sense for what the landscape might become. And you can imagine beer back in the early eighties when there was Milwaukee and there was St. Louis and there was Denver, and that was the regional style of beer. And then you started to see craft breweries pop up and start to define their places. And so I think the same will be true of craft whiskey eventually.

Colin (00:17:11):
How much of the history of New York distilling did when you started this project?

Colin (00:17:18):
Well, on one hand, I knew, I mean nothing so little to reali to even not, I didn't know that there were no distilleries in New York City. I figured there were, as there were breweries and wineries, that there would also be distilleries realized that there weren't realized that there hadn't been since prohibition then realized that New York actually had a very rich history of distilling before the Civil War that had more or less been forgotten. And first was when we were still New Amsterdam back in 1640 on Staten Island. It was kind of part of that colonial economy. Then distilling shifted to rum in the British colonial period. But then after the Revolutionary War really swung back to whiskey, and it was that distilleries tended to be in the cities, and the farmers would come into town with a load of grain. They'd drop it off at the distillery, they'd buy some supplies, they'd pick up the slop from the distillery in the back of their carts, and then they'd head back to Long Island or upstate New York or wherever they went to. And so in that era, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, that's where all the factories were and distilleries were factories. Now, there was also the whiskey rebellion in the sort of frontier farmers, but that was a happening at a much smaller scale, even though history has remembered the whiskey rebellion, right. Farmers that participated in it, Alexander Hamilton passed the whiskey tax thinking of those urban distilleries that were doing barrels and barrels of whiskey every day, even bigger scale than we are now back before electricity and running water.

Colin (00:19:00):
Well, that was the thing I found interesting in researching the whiskey rebellion, is that Hamilton was more for industrialization, and part of the reason why he was somewhat penalizing those on the frontier is because he didn't really want the small farmer distilleries to be the ones that were successful. He knew that they could produce higher volumes and become much more heavy on the output if he gave benefit to the industrial ones in the east on the, in Philadelphia and New York. And so you have that going on. You have right after that, George Washington, and he's come back now and he's got a distillery running on his land, and you've got the city of New York that when we think of, now as I've studied history, I've moved away from that Kentucky only thought pattern and started to realize that from the time of the Revolutionary War all the way up almost to the Civil War, the center of whiskey was probably more in New York and Pennsylvania than it was moving out into those.

Colin (00:20:22):
Yeah, yeah,

Colin (00:20:23):
Sure. Rural areas of Kentucky.

Colin (00:20:25):
Yeah. I mean, people forget that Kentucky was settled ultimately in the early to mid 18 hundreds. It took a while for people to actually populate Kentucky, and that meant that the volume of whiskey that was coming out of there was much smaller. And I remember reading an article, it was only in the 1840s that New York whiskey, domestic whiskey made in New York City was actually outsold by whiskey from Lawrenceburg, Indiana, which I kind of was like, oh, what great irony that is. That's where the distillers were there on the Ohio River. And at that moment, then you had all that farm culture around Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, that were all feeding into that whiskey boom that was happening then. But that was as late as the 1840s, 1850s, and only then as the price sort of thing. And New York land was more valuable then. And so it made less sense to operate a distiller. And there was some cultural friction. A lot of the distillers tended to be Irish or German, right, immigrants. And so distilling began to be perceived as a kind of moral scourge. I mean, certainly alcohol, there's always a temperance through line in American history, but it gets very strong around the 1840s, 1850s as leading into the Civil War issues around the Civil War. But there were also Northeastern issues, certainly in New York. It was the natives versus the immigrants. And that's Republicans versus Democrats or Protestants versus Catholics or non drinkers versus drinkers.

Colin (00:22:13):
Well, coming in with my knowledge of history, and I surprise people sometimes because immigration is something that we talk about now from a different aspect, but during that time when you were having this mass immigration coming from Ireland and coming from the old world here, there was actually a political party called the No Nothings, which was also known as the American Party. And their whole goal was to, it was also known as the anti-Catholic Party. So their whole mission was really to figure out how to take society away from a focus on the immigrants and really benefit the Natives, as they would say, even though the Natives really hadn't been here for more than a hundred, 200 years on top of by then. So yeah, and so New York really kind of encapsulates a lot of that struggle in the 1840s, 1850s, and we think of the movie Gangs of New York and what was going on there. You had Tammany Hall and all this corruption going on. I did an episode around the Swi milk scandal that happened in New York in the 1850s, that basically you had these dairy distilleries that were poisoning these kids with these infants, with this milk because they were doctoring it with everything they could find to make it look like good meat. But they were just feeding SW to their cattle with no other feed. And so they were sickly, and

Colin (00:24:01):
They were cows living in tenement Brooklyn, where again, you have no running water, you have no electricity. They're just, they're living in their own excrement, which the people were living in their own excrement. Yeah, I mean, it was like urban camping is sort of 1850s New York. Everybody's sort of Irish immigrants. You had whole tenement buildings that were stacked full of people. Conditions were not great from a public health perspective, regardless of swell milk. I mean,

Colin (00:24:34):
Yeah, yeah.

Colin (00:24:35):
But swell milk, it was an opportunity to flogged the Temperance Movement, which was, again, slavery and temperance were the two sort of major progressive movements of the 18 hundreds or abolition and temperance. So when the Civil War broke out in New York, Abraham Lincoln passed this excise tax on tobacco playing cards, feathers, pianos, anything that you would find fun, place and alcohol. And that really set the stage for the confrontation that would become the whiskey wars of Brooklyn. And that really kind of killed distilling in New York as far as I can tell, because when the Civil War ended, they would go in and start raiding and breaking up the distilleries and really created a kind of anti distiller sentiment that pushed people into the countryside. And away from that sort of people on top of each other, possibility of explosion, public health, like there was just better to get away from it.

Colin (00:25:58):
You mentioned a place called Dickinson's Alley, which was a place that at the end of that three years or so of riots that were going on in New York or in Brooklyn, that area, there was actually a gunfight in the street, which ended up taking out a 25 year old gauger when we say he was working for the government, going out and collecting for the tax. And that was probably part of what ended up giving these moonshiners a bad reputation. My first question is, are you near that area? Does that still Oh, yes. Exist?

Colin (00:26:44):
That is about 50 feet from the distillery.

Colin (00:26:47):
Is it really? Oh, okay. Yeah,

Colin (00:26:48):
Yeah. No, I mean, it is a great location and not even one that we had any idea about until we went and started doing the research. And of course, we are in a very old part of Brooklyn on the waterfront right near the Brooklyn Bridge and in the Brooklyn Navy yard. And the Navy Yard was ship building for the US Navy and a big employer in Brooklyn throughout the 18 hundreds. So just the sheer coincidence of being in the Brooklyn Navy yard, but then also being on this site of somewhat historic importance, certainly historic importance to the story of American whiskey and whiskey in New York City has been a great opportunity for us. And as a distiller that has no history beyond the 10 years that we've been around to be able to tie into some of this broader history is a great opportunity. And we're not Woodford Reserve at the Oscar Pepper Distillery that was around the 18 hundreds.

Colin (00:27:51):
But to be on a site that really was a historical distilling neighborhood that was a heavily Irish neighborhood, that became a heavily Italian neighborhood. And then of course, Al Capone was born just 50 feet the other direction and grew up on the mean streets of that kind of rough neighborhood. It was kind of the Red light District of Brooklyn for a long time. And Al Capone kind of may have learned the kind of relationship to the federal government, and then alcohol and the opportunities in the sin business from having grown up in that particular part of Brooklyn. And then in 1920 when he became an adult, he moved to Chicago and took all that knowledge and ran it at a national scale as opposed to a neighborhood scale. But the continuity of Irish moonshiners to the sort of Italian kind of gangster culture that was developing prohibition, organized crime, all of that really does have a geographical connection to where we are now. And so to be able to take the modern history of distilling, which is, or the contemporary history of distilling, which is craft distilling, and then lay that over the top, is just, it's fascinating, and it's a great opportunity to tell that story, which has not often been told.

Colin (00:29:18):
Yeah, well, again, we don't associate Moonshining with New York City or Brooklyn, but yet if we start pulling out some of these stories and looking at them and looking at Al Capone, do you think that Moonshining was still going on? Because in the book, you kind of mentioned that after that firefight in 1871, that moonshiners kind of got out in the boats and left. Some of them evacuated the area, but did the area still hold on to that Moonshining tradition all the way through to when Capone was there?

Colin (00:29:56):
Yes, but by that point, he had, well, let's say the generation of Irish immigrants was still around, but they were old timers. They were there to tell the stories of the good old days, but you had a lot more mobility. You had automobiles you could go pick up in New Jersey, and then you start to get that prohibition era of people owning a distillery in Kentucky from which they siphon off to distribution points in Atlantic City. And the whole system became much, much more organized. It was not necessarily the Irish guys in the basement with a little pot still. It was column stills that were hidden in warehouses and really elaborate operations that were built in. There's a picture in dead distillers where you have the still at Buffalo Trays from 1920 or whatever it is, and then you have an illegal still from 1920, and they look virtually the same. They're both 48 inch column stills. So the scale of the illegal distillation was just as big as the legal distillation and prohibition. We think of something that happened all at once, but it in various places would go dark. And so there was this feeling that you could had plenty of time to prepare for actual prohibition. Yeah,

Colin (00:31:33):
As I understand it, there was almost a feeling that the distillers were going to get given some time to prepare for this even up to World War I, but once the war prohibition went in place, they just said, why don't we just go ahead and move into this? And a lot of distillers got stuck with a lot of whiskey, but then there were other states like Tennessee that had gone into prohibition as early as 1910. So w was it earlier in New York, or did Prohibition hit?

Colin (00:32:12):
Prohibition hit at in 1920, in January, 1920, I guess it was. So it wasn't necessarily, but then there were very few distillers left in New York City there. In fact, I don't even know if there were real distillers. There were certainly rectifiers who were buying bulk alcohol. Maybe they were doing some distillation. Mostly what they were doing was packaging and probably adulterating. I mean, that's what Rectifiers did in those days. So wasn't probably a whole lot of business lost and any of the sort of illegal distillers were probably trying to get out of, get further away from the publicity or the scrutiny, shall we say. Yeah.

Colin (00:33:03):
Yeah.

Colin (00:33:03):
So even the fact that Moonshining kind of first blossomed in Brooklyn and then quickly is extinguished and moved somewhere else, I think is just a reflection of, that's where the scrutiny was. There were revenue officers first in the cities, then they moved into Virginia, Kentucky, Alabama, places like that.

Colin (00:33:25):
So another thing that I love to cover in my podcast episodes and try to dispel are all of these claims of being the oldest, because at Go through Kentucky, and you'll hear it overnight, the first to do this, the oldest. So when I'm going through your book, one of the characters that we come upon first is George Thorpe. And George Thorpe is, I guess for, we don't really know if he was actually making whiskey or not. We have a connection where we know that they had a still, and we know that he was making corn beer, but do we really know if he was actually making whiskey?

Colin (00:34:10):
I would argue it seems very unlikely. I mean, if you did bother to put the fermented beverage in the still, would you not? Wouldn't you write about that? Yeah. Wouldn't that be something to put in your letters back east? So I think people have kind of taken the opportunity to assemble those two facts. And also not to yield the first distillery. I mean, the first distillery that anybody knows for sure, that was a commercial distillery was written about as part of the Dutch new Netherland company on Staten Island. Was that the first? I don't know. But that's the first one that was written about that's sort of identifiable. George Thorpe probably was not. And the way this still is described, it was more like a microscope. It was a piece of scientific instrumentation for its era and not necessarily there to make whiskey. Maybe making whiskey with a one gallon, still forget about it. Yeah. I mean, we'll be there all day and all night.

Colin (00:35:12):
So

Colin (00:35:13):
I think not, but rye whiskey came from the old world, and people were growing rye with the intent to make whiskey in the 1640s, 16 in that historical moment as written about in Massachusetts and New York and other places. But I don't know that you can say corn whiskey predated rye whiskey or originated in with George Thorpe or anything like that. I think the corn even grew well in Massachusetts, and people were kind of, oh, this, they're growing their rye looking at how well the Indian corn was doing. And they were saying, well, maybe we should grow that stuff right? Cause this is low yield off the still and not the birds eat it. So maybe we should just take our cues from what people are growing here before we got here. And so I think bourbon developed, if you consider bourbon to be corn based, corn derived whiskey, it certainly came about contemporaneous with rye whiskey in the us,

Colin (00:36:22):
But it was probably more moonshine than it would it because Oh, sure. Yeah. Yeah, you wouldn't, and we think of bourbon now, if we follow the rules of what bourbon is, we have no idea when they started putting it into charred oak barrels, and we have no idea about, well,

Colin (00:36:38):
I have a view on that too, which is just that it was so common in Europe to age things in barrels, and they knew that you could toast barrels and chard barrels to get different effects from cognac. So the idea that the European technology was completely foreign to the Americans, that just gives very little credit to the worldliness of people at the time. And certainly they developed, George Washington sold mostly common whiskey, which we take to mean unaged whiskey. That was what he was mostly selling. But that's not to say that he didn't know that it made sense to age some of the whiskey and whether or not he was aging it in new barrels or toasted barrels, people routinely recycled barrels by toasting them on the inside to kill the bacteria that might have been in there from whatever came before it, or the smell. So to try and pinpoint an innovation in what is ultimately a folk history and a folk evolution of a product is applying a kind of Silicon Valley modern inventor, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford focused mindset to something that really just evolved alongside many other types of alcoholic beverages were being made all over the world.

Colin (00:37:57):
Well, speculation is such a huge part of all of this history, because I mean, you talk about the barrels coming down to Kentucky from the Forks of the Ohio, and they said they had old manga hala put on them. And so we take that word old and we assume, okay, well, they must have been aging it, and that's why, well, the aging could have just been the fact that it was coming down the river and the time that it spent on the river before it got there. Another one that I love is when they say, I've heard this from multiple people, that the word brand originated from them stamping bourbon onto bourbon barrels. And the word brand or the concept of brand goes all the way back into antiquity. It's not something so like, we pick up this stuff and we want to have an answer, so we just make one up. Yes. And that makes it really hard when you're trying to study this stuff and trying to get the story correct when there's all this speculation going on,

Colin (00:39:16):
And alcohol history is particularly rife with the invention for one reason or another. So

Colin (00:39:26):
When you get into writing a book like Dead Distillers, and you're going through and doing all of this research, how do you make that distinction between what may be fact and what may be perpetuating another myth?

Colin (00:39:43):
Well, I think you have to write about what is a pretty clear fact because you have the historical documentation. George Thorpe did write a letter that said, we have made a fermented corn beverage that is comparable to English beer so that you can pin on that. And he did have a still. So those are historical truisms or a truth insofar as there's a documentation of it for things that are hearsay or mythology or apocryphal. I found it was very helpful as a distiller to kind of look at the actuality of it and say, well, that doesn't actually make sense that you would have a little one gallon still and try to produce whiskey from it. I mean, you can't use today. You can't get a one gallon still and make whiskey from it. The cut is so short you, I mean, it's just pointless. Yeah. It's just,

Colin (00:40:38):
But George, there was a while when George Washington's distillery was sort of claiming to be the largest in the United States, which was just refutable by anybody looking through any newspapers of distilleries for sale during that time. And there were distilleries that were 10 times as big as George Washington's distillery. But there just is that temptation to seize on what, and foreground that and assume that what you don't know isn't there because it wasn't written about. But in a lot of cases it was. And also one of the great times to be able, you don't have to go to a research library to get some of this original documentation. You can just go to the internet. And so I think it is a kind of exciting time to apply the armchair historian approach to looking at whiskey history, because sometimes it's just knowing what to look for in the historical record.

Colin (00:41:43):
And certainly for me, and part of the reason why Dead Distillers came about is I was looking for distilleries. I was searching old newspapers in Brooklyn for the word distillery. And all that ever popped up were these gruesome accidents popping, involving children. And it was just these horror stories of child labor that was going into stir the mash, and they fell in, or they were scalded from a pipe that went out into the street where kids were playing. And it's so colorful, but it gives you the texture of life that no amount of looking at the data or the census saying, well, there was a million barrels of whiskey made in Brooklyn. So it doesn't tell you it person nearly

Colin (00:42:33):
As much. It personalizes. It makes you, well, I love that you put all of the clips that you have, those little clips throughout. There was one that you had, and it was from a Topeka newspaper, and it was telling about a boy who had been scalded by swill, but wasn't what caught my attention. You had left enough of the clipping below it that I read the next headline, which was talking about a girl being hit by a train and being sliced in half and her head rolling down the hill. And I'm like, we think nowadays, if you want to go watch a horror movie or you want to, if that kind of macab kind of thing is in your wheelhouse, that you can find that stuff where you want to. But in the 19th century that you think about writers like Edgar Allen Poe who gravitated towards that kind of writing, and then you read this kind of stuff in just your regular news are in graphic detail that feels a bit like sensationalism. You get a whole different kind of a feel for that era by reading those.

Colin (00:43:51):
Right. And I think that pose popularity and the growth of the rural cemetery movement and a focus on sort of death as this transformative kind of experience as the closer you are to death, the more you're living life in this kind of gothic American gothic sensibility, which really did define 1820s up through the Civil War, that just American life, because it was so hard, I mean, let's be honest, did kind of focus on those, the gruesomeness and the macab and the scary aspects. And I think it was a way that people coped with living without some of the comforts that we now appreciate.

Colin (00:44:40):
Well, I think too, if you go back and you read a lot of those newspapers, there are so many stories of infant deaths, so many, I mean, people would have 10, 12, 15 children, and whenever you talked about them from a historical standpoint, you would say How many survived infancy? Because that was a real issue back then, that life was hard. Medical care wasn't right around the corner, and we didn't know about germs and those types of things that could cause death in the early childhood. So death was a regular part of life back then. So I guess that makes sense when you're reading these. But it is a little, I, I've done my own research in going to Scotland, and I went to Glen Turret and learned about this woman named Grace Gal. They discovered she fell into a fermenter, and of course, she did not survive that because the CO2 probably took her out. But those things I, that's just, who is it? Donald Johnston of La Freud, one of the brothers that started La Freud, he fell into a pot of ale or into scalding pot ale, and that killed him. So a lot of the stuff I was seeing in there was about boilers exploding.

Colin (00:46:20):
So that seemed to be a big issue.

Colin (00:46:23):
Yeah, I mean, just the technology was less understood. Safety was as safe as you wanted to be. Yeah. And distilleries were factories. I mean, there were heavy machinery, lot of steam and fire, and all of that was happening in the same place. And dust too, corn dust. And so from lightning and rickhouse fires and corn, dust explosions, boiler explosions. And of course, never forget the flammability of the distillate itself. It was a very dangerous place. Distillers are still very dangerous places to work, but we have a lot of OSHA and various forms of building codes that are written in place to protect everybody.

Colin (00:47:19):
Yeah. Were there any of those that you ran across that either you went, oh, I can't put that in there, or that you're like, man, this is the worst.

Colin (00:47:30):
No, no. I mean, if it was real bad, I've tried to put it in, but I also thought that it was those that got included. I mean, there were some that were just kind of gratuitous and not necessarily saying anything about distilling history, which I felt was kind of important to have. So there's one story of this traveling salesperson who just got fed up and committed suicide and had a sign on his chest as he was a traveling the night train from Chicago to Louisville. I think anybody who's kind of been in the business of peddling whiskey around the country, there is that feeling of just being like, just overwhelming. I can't believe I have to go flu this again in the anonymity of it. So I picked the stories that I felt resonated with me and things that I had picked up on one way or another from my experience, both as a distiller, but in being a distiller is also being a salesperson. And later in the book, you start to get into some of those outsized personalities that really define the modern era of distilling history. And that's Jack Daniel, obviously, but the Samuel's family at Maker's Mark, I think belongs in that category of, and people who are George remiss on the

Colin (00:49:01):
The more illicit side. Illicit

Colin (00:49:03):
Side of things. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the Remus was the kind of character who could go into a courtroom after having shot his wife in plain daylight in the middle of the main public P in Cincinnati, and tell a jury it was prohibition that made me do it. I had no choice. And the jury goes away for two hours, and they come back and they say, this is our Christmas gift. You're free.

Colin (00:49:30):
This book centers a lot around cemeteries or talking about debt distillers. And you mentioned certain cemeteries. Now you visited each of these. Is that a normal thing for you as a traveler? Have you been drawn to cemeteries, or was this more built around research of the book?

Colin (00:49:51):
It really came through the Greenwood Cemetery in New York, in Brooklyn. They had approached us about doing a dead distillers cemetery tour. And I said, it was back in the time when we had just moved into the Navy yard, and I said, how many distillers could there possibly be in Brooklyn? And as it turns out, there were quite a few and

Colin (00:50:13):
Quite significant people to Brooklyn's history, including Hezekiah Pon, who really was just a ultimate, I mean, he was a distiller, but ultimately became a wealthy landowner in Brooklyn Heights and was good friends with Robert Fulton and invested in steam ferry service and steam technology. And then his son, Henry Evelyn Pierpont, was the founder of Greenwood Cemetery. So Greenwood Cemetery, which is a rural cemetery, which is just a kind of model from the early 18 hundreds, really was kind of derived from distilling money. And so that got me kind of intrigued at this older history of distilling. I too come from a Kentucky is where the history of American distilling comes from. But to rediscover those German and Irish immigrants who had built fairly huge factories, probably not good whiskey, but huge factories nonetheless, and had significant fortunes such that they bought very nice tombstones. And then you begin to understand that, oh, there's a different narrative here. And cemeteries tell narrative that narrative newspapers tell one narrative of these gruesome accidents. But the cemeteries told another where there were people who just lived their lives and they were in a profession and they had a huge tombstone or not, or they built a dynasty around it so you get a sense for who their children and their cousins and that sort of thing. And got a sense that it was a real big business in a way that most of us don't necessarily think of distilling being associated with New York City or the Northeast at all.

Colin (00:52:06):
So you see the name Pier Pon, the first thing that came to my mind was JP Morgan,

Colin (00:52:11):
Right? Because

Colin (00:52:12):
Who his middle initial P is for. So when you see JP Morgan Chase that all evolved out of this,

Colin (00:52:25):
He was a sort of a cousin, and all the whole family descended from the Reverend Pier Pon, who was a sort of Connecticut fire and brimstone minister. But that family's wealth and connections certainly are traceable back to some degree distilling, and obviously the Frick family and that kind of Andrew Mellon. There's a surprising connection to whiskey that most people probably are not very aware of, where a lot of wealth in the United States was built on distilling alcohol. And in some cases it was kind of shuttered shunted to the background because we wanted to tell the story of steel and coke and more, I don't know, moral or ethical businesses to trot out. And one ultimately ones that became more financially meaningful to those people. But trying to, those ancient connections are always very fascinating. And there's a lot more of, America was built on alcohol money, and a lot of more of America was built on prohibition illegal activity than will ever be known.

Colin (00:53:50):
I mean, there's no way to ever understand where all that money went to. But there was certainly a lot of money, there was a lot of wealth created, and where that went to is a fascinating sort of study. But I did get into visiting cemeteries through that in particular because Greenwood feels so removed from the rest of New York City and so rural. So I mean, it is to this day a rural cemetery. And that just refers to the landscape design of that era, which had a lot of winding sort of streets. And Frederick Law Olmsted kind of appropriated that for the idea of parks, because there weren't really public parks. The cemeteries were the public parks. That's where people went to go have fresh air. And so be, as an urban person coming to the fresh air as a Uck and displaced of New York, I really kind of fell in love with the place. And so then went to other cities and other cemeteries, and particularly in Kentucky, every cemetery is such an opportunity in particular Cave Hill and the one in Bardstown, Kentucky, which are in the book, but many others. And I visited a dance grave in just a little church on the side of,

Colin (00:55:12):
I have a little winding road, but there he is, and all his cousins and progeny,

Colin (00:55:19):
You really get a sense of the community, the families. When I was doing the research on the Dan family and the Beam family and the Town of New Hope and seeing all the different names that came out of there, and that basil came down from Maryland with 60 families, and they all populated this area. And here is the birth of our Kentucky Distilling, yet they all came from Maryland. So that tells us that, well, there was probably distilling going on in Maryland, and this again, northeast connection to being the origin of right American distilling.

Colin (00:56:09):
I think there's kind of a false narrative. You hear research distilling history, and you hear a lot about the Scott's Irish and the sort of Protestant Irish who came through Pennsylvania and down the Ohio River, but it really was not that so far as I can tell, it was a lot of Catholic immigrants who came through the Cumberland Gap up from, they would go down to Virginia and then come up into Kentucky that way. So looking at those pioneers of American distilling weren't really a lot of who you would imagine it was. A lot of Catholics. And then later, I mean, there are Catholic Irish and there are Germans, and there it's just maybe not exactly who you would expect. And the great image of the master distiller in the Sears sucker suit on the porch really portrays how it was often the, whichever ethnic group was not particularly popular in the United States, be it, you know, have slavery of Irish when people hated the Irish, you have Catholics and Jews, and just every group that was loathed, you could actually find and carve territory in the whiskey business because of its sort of n n.

Colin (00:57:30):
Nobody in the sort of upstanding society wanted to touch the moral association with alcohol. So it was a way for an immigrant class or an overlooked or under appreciated group of people to carve a real legitimate business for their family and for their heirs. And so I think that that piece of it is important to tell so that it doesn't just become the story of good old boy white southern history, although it may appear that way from looking back at this vantage point.

Colin (00:58:06):
Well, you've got elements of each, but one of the things that stood out to me was the 1640 distillery that was built on Staten Island was built by Dutchman.

Colin (00:58:19):
Yeah.

Colin (00:58:21):
And they were, we talk, we're talking whiskey history, usually they were probably making gin. Do you think they might have been making Geneva? Because having a Dutch background, I know you mentioned that you thought maybe later on in the 1760s that they may have that when Livingston was there, Philip Livingston was there. Yeah. That maybe he was making Geneva. But it almost makes more sense to me that they might have been making Geneva much earlier than that, because that was going to the Bowls museum in Amsterdam that was in the 15 hundreds when they first started making Geneva. So it'd be interesting to,

Colin (00:59:05):
It's, well, let's say it's hard to guess mean probably it was either, I would argue, my best guess is that it was a fruit brandy or it was a whiskey, but it would've been what distinguishes a Geneva from a whiskey is just that you don't age it in apparel and you add, don't add, and other botanicals

Colin (00:59:26):
Other thing too. Well, and the degrees between gin and Geneva are,

Colin (00:59:33):
Yeah, right. Same thing. Let's say if you were making gin in 1600, it would've been Geneva. You would've been able to rectify it, distill it enough times till you got what could be comparable to a London dry modern gin. You would've had a flavorful white whiskey base and you would've had some botanicals that gave it some something flavor that made it not taste like moonshine. And that's what you worked with. So whether or not that was done by the distillery or by the end consumer, I mean, there's Martha Washington's cookbook where she talks about all her, what we went today called cocktails, but in that era was called flips and bounces and punches, just ways to make whiskey

Colin (01:00:26):
Palatable

Colin (01:00:27):
Through the inclusion of cinnamon and heavy doses of fruit and other things.

Colin (01:00:32):
Yeah. So let's talk about one other aspect of cemeteries that I found really interesting in your book. The concept of zike. I had never heard this before. Describe what a zike is, and then I have a question about their potential use today.

Colin (01:00:53):
Right? Well, Zuki, there was a moment when people for cost and practicality couldn't get stone tombstones and they would purchase zinc tombstones. And these were things that were sold by Sears Roebuck and were pretty mass produced. And then you would just affix a plate to the front of it that had all the relevant details. So all of a sudden, I want to say, I don't have it in front of me, but I want to say around 1900, you start to see stone monuments, but also you start to see these metal monuments that are made of zinc. And the story goes that it some, during prohibition, people would hide money or contraband. It was a way to kind of have a meeting point, because every gravestone has a name and you just say, go to Collins Poolman out there and just by the fountain and beyond the big oak tree. And that was a way to have somebody find whatever they were looking for. But

Colin (01:01:56):
These were hollow, correct?

Colin (01:01:58):
They were hollow,

Colin (01:01:59):
Yes. So you could hide something in them.

Colin (01:02:01):
Yeah, you could just take the name plate off and you could put a few gallons of moonshine, or mostly money, I'm sure is what was

Colin (01:02:10):
Left. Yeah. Well, so my question is, do you think any of those, if we start seeing those, because they're, you see them now and they have kind of a blue tint right to them from their aging. So when we're looking at those, could there maybe be some moonshine or some whiskey left in there that somebody didn't collect?

Colin (01:02:32):
I asked that question to the folks at Greenwood Cemetery, and they sort of felt like it was unlikely that if anything had been going on that they wouldn't know about it. Which kind of makes sense that there's always the groundskeeper who's theoretically keeping a little bit of tabs on what's going on in the place. I mean, cemeteries were preferred because they were these big empty places that people didn't go than as now. But there were always people who were kind of lingering and grounds keepers and things like that, so they thought unlikely. But it's a nice sort of tantalizing question, but you would really have to open up everyone to find the right one, which might yield some involve a lot of time. Yeah.

Colin (01:03:18):
Yeah. Might yield some amazing stuff though. Or it could be, well, I've got a story I'm about to be investigating about a store of pre-prohibition whiskey that was discovered. And the first question that comes up is, what is the quality of that? Because you're talking about pre-prohibition, see a lot of distilleries promoting pre-prohibition style whiskey, and I'm thinking of what I've heard about some of the whiskey that came out before prohibition. I don't know if I'd want to copy it.

Colin (01:03:54):
Right. Well, it's interesting. I would wager the pre-prohibition whiskey was probably pretty good, and that it was really the post-prohibition whiskey that was very bad for a long time. It took a long time for distillers to catch up. But there are a lot of things and people, the reason people chase after Dusty's, really anything that would be true about why a 1970 bottle of Wild Turkey would be so good would certainly also be true of a whiskey made much earlier, which would be the old growth wood. You know, really didn't have a whole lot of scientific control over the process. So as you say, it might, you get stuff that's pretty bad, but you might get stuff that's pretty good. And if the distiller was reputable and had a good reputation, chances are they weren't making something that was good. So I would stand behind pre-prohibition and also bottled a bond act had been passed.

Colin (01:04:59):
It's probably more the stuff years earlier, pre 1897 that we're right

Colin (01:05:05):
Or something from w l Weller started as a rectifier. And Julian Van Winkle, the first was always kind of saying, I don't make the whiskey that I came from at the Weller firm. I make the good stuff. And just so there was that era of the bottle and bond where there really was a lot of, who knows what you were really getting when you got a bottle of whiskey.

Colin (01:05:34):
So if assuming you were getting bonded whiskey from pre-prohibition, that I would be very curious to try. I've never had had the luck to try it. I've had some stuff from the eight 1940s and 1950s, and it's always impressive to me, not just because it's fun drinking something old, but you get such different flavors from old whiskey. It's more vanilla and chocolate and caramel than necessarily a lot of stuff that is now distilled is distilled at the top of the spectrum. So you come off distill at one 40, you know, go into the barrel at 1 25, all that older whiskey you would come out of low proof, go into the barrel of low proof. The wood was very different. Sometimes it was older trees, more mature trees. Cooperage was more common. So you know, weren't necessarily getting the homogenous sort of characteristic out of barrels that you see today.

Colin (01:06:34):
Well, and what's interesting about pre-prohibition whiskey is that we didn't have the rules of bourbon back

Colin (01:06:39):
Then. Sure. Right.

Colin (01:06:40):
So there's no telling. They could have been made in a variety of different ways at that point. Yeah.

Colin (01:06:47):
So

Colin (01:06:48):
I would like to, I'm still on a hunt for Old Crow from the 1950s, because it really wasn't until the late 1960s before whatever happened to Old Crow happened, and it's never been the same since. So right. Yeah, it's definitely a fun hobby to have and one that I haven't quite gotten into yet, but hopefully one of these days. Well, it's

Colin (01:07:18):
Getting increasingly expensive to play that game. That's true. As people catch on and the stock of old whiskey, dusty whiskey gets consumed, but there's, bourbon has always been cheaper than scotch and why you should have a scotch whiskey that sells for a hundred or $200,000, and the most expensive American whiskey that you can get is $3,000. We deserve better than that, I

Colin (01:07:48):
Would say. Well, they've, I'd like to say that they've been around longer than we have, but when you really get into studying Whiskey's history, our histories are fairly close to the same amount of time because they really didn't take off in legal distilling on a larger scale until 1823. So when you're talking about the us, that's when Dr. James c Crow came over to the United States, and now all of a sudden we're coming up with a brand with Old Crow, and now it's becoming much more established. But we were already distilling before then. Same as the SCOs. Were distilling before then, but not long before then. So, I mean, we can take scotch all the way back to 1494 is the first time that we can say yes, it's in the records. That's that somebody was making ISHKA Bay, and it was what we would call whiskey these days, unaged whiskey. But still, the histories aren't that much different from each other in terms of the commercial age of whiskey. So very interesting. So whatever happened with the whiskey tours, are they doing whiskey tours out at the cemetery?

Colin (01:09:19):
Well, we haven't done one in a while. We were doing them for a good bit, and then it was before, I don't know why. I think they had a change in leadership, and maybe they felt this was maybe a little, ah, you could perceive it as disrespectful, I suppose. So for whatever reason, there was less desire on the part of the cemetery to run those, but if they changed their mind, we would love to keep doing them. And I know Cave Hill in Louisville has been doing them less frequently once a year, something like that, with Mike Veach, and I went on that with Mike Veach, and that was really completely fascinating. I mean, just to go on a cemetery tour with somebody who knows every little thing about every little buddy, yeah. Was great. So it's a fun way to bring a flask and

Colin (01:10:16):
Hang out. Can you carry a flask around with you in Open, I guess it's not open there. I

Colin (01:10:23):
Mean, at this point they're used to it, I'm sure. Blue zip.

Colin (01:10:28):
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I just went out to Mississippi and was at Blues musician, Robert Johnson's grave, and of course, one of the myths around him is that he died from drinking tainted whiskey.

Colin (01:10:43):
Yeah.

Colin (01:10:44):
And so you see a bottle of, when I walked up to the grave, there's a bottle of whiskey sitting there. I guess it's a tradition around how the guy died. You're going to, right, right. Anyway,

Colin (01:11:03):
Grave has gotten some old Fitzgerald poured on him. Does

Colin (01:11:05):
It? Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So when somebody comes to Brooklyn, because we're getting close to things, opening back up again, and if you're a Whiskey fan and you're coming to Brooklyn, what are some things to do when they come to visit your distillery and then some other things that they may want to plan out?

Colin (01:11:27):
Well, I certainly think a visit to Greenwood Cemetery is just a fun kind of way to see a part of New York City that is not really talked about. There's a lot of Revolutionary War history that happened there. Washington kind of camped out on the high point. It's the high point of Brooklyn. So there was an episode during the Revolutionary War that happened there, so that's worth a stop. Francis Tavern is in lower Manhattan. It's a restaurant. It's been a restaurant for, since George Washington, I guess. I can't remember even what he did there, but he plotted something in some upper room. But it's a very kind of Irish focused whiskey bar, but a very revolutionary war era establishment that has not changed very much. And then I like to steer people to the Tenement Museum just because it is such a great, if you're visiting New York and you're interested in history at all, there's Ellis Island, but that's kind of Statue of Liberty. Those are very kind of understood things that you can do. But the Tenement Museum is a building that, for tax reasons, just was untouched for about a hundred years. And so there's a lot of, they've renovated different rooms throughout the tenement to different, there's an Irish room, a Jewish room, a Catholic German room, and the stories that they tell in each of those rooms are actually traced back to the actual people that live there. So they found their descendants, and that's a fun thing to do. There's also other great distilleries.

Colin (01:13:06):
There's a New York distilling company in Williamsburg. Van Brun Distillery is in Red Hook, so there's other whiskey things to visit and do, but obviously bars and restaurants in New York, it's

Colin (01:13:22):
Your picket pick of the litter.

Colin (01:13:24):
Yeah. It's a great place to spend some time and to enjoy the fruits of, I mean, there's places that have great whiskey collections. Brandy Library is called Brandy Library, but it's really a whiskey sort of library, and they have all kinds of great old stuff. So that's another recommend too.

Colin (01:13:46):
I love going to McSorley's down in Greenwich Village to walk in there and see the history. I didn't realize when we went in there though, you order your beer and you get like five.

Colin (01:14:01):
Right,

Colin (01:14:02):
Right. And that it's cash only.

Colin (01:14:04):
Yeah. Yes. Right.

Colin (01:14:06):
Things to know when you go into, yeah,

Colin (01:14:08):
Always good to bring a little cash around New York City. But yeah, it's a place where if you want to never go into a place that's more than 75 years old, you can do that. I live near a place called The Ear in it's, I don't know, 250 years old, and you could just live your urban experience in these kind of Revolutionary war haunts. And it's fun. I mean, you can do that in Bardstown Kentucky too. But yeah, I don't know. It is a fun way to approach the city, not just going for the hottest, newest cronut, but to go actually towards the oldest thing, the thing that has persevered despite time, and who knows who will be left after we come back into business. But yeah, my hope is that a lot of these places that have been around stay around

Colin (01:15:01):
Big time. Yeah. So how do you get there?

Colin (01:15:07):
Yeah, we're just over the Manhattan Bridge or the Brooklyn Bridge. So if you're taking the subway, that's how most people come to the distillery. We're just the first stop off. Once you're in Brooklyn, you can walk over the Brooklyn Bridge from Manhattan. There's parking in the Brooklyn Navy yard. So that's a thing that we offer that is nice in high demand in New York City. So it's a relatively easy place to visit. And we do have both tours that you can take, but we also have a tasting room. So if you just want to come and sit and enjoy a cocktail or a flight, there's a way to do that too. Not everything has to be a guided experience. Sometimes when you go to Kentucky Distilleries, it's you take the tour, but if you don't do the tour, you're kind of just, it's gift shop and go. Yeah. Due to New York's permissive laws and laws that distilleries have fought for, you can sit and have a cocktail and have flights, and you can even buy retail bottles to take with you. So nice. That's a nice thing too. Nice.

Colin (01:16:10):
Yeah. I wrote a book on Kentucky Distillery tours and how each one of them run, and I was going to do one on Tennessee, and as I started working on the one for Tennessee, I realized that Kentucky really is organized in how they do their tours. I mean, there is a structure, and then you start going to Tennessee Distilleries, a lot of them very new. It's more just kind of show up and, Hey, yeah, we'll take you in and show your ads.

Colin (01:16:42):
Right.

Colin (01:16:42):
Just depends. You got George Dickel and you got Jack Daniel, and they're very formula, but the rest of 'em. Yeah. Yeah.

Colin (01:16:50):
Well, my favorite distiller tour that I was ever given was at George Dickel because Nicole Austin, who's currently the head distiller at George Dickel, began her career at Kings County as our head blender.

Colin (01:17:01):
Really?

Colin (01:17:02):
Okay. So I guess she's probably been there two years by now, but I went to go visit for the Nashville Whiskey Festival, and so we took a road trip and we went down to Nearest Green, which is just getting started. No, there's nothing there yet. Yeah. I mean, there's a farm, but then you just go a little further and you're at Dickel. And so we got to go up into the catwalks and nice run around all the places that are not necessarily on the public tour. And Dickel, it's distillery I've loved for a long time. Just I had family friends in Winchester, Tennessee, which is not too far from Tallah. So we, I kind of knew that territory a little bit. And I've always loved the distillate. It's really good. Yeah. Whiskey. I've got a

Colin (01:17:50):
Boisterous fan out there

Colin (01:17:52):
Screaming one year old, which is not uncommon, but that's going on in the background, so just

Colin (01:17:58):
Very nice.

Colin (01:17:59):
Well,

Colin (01:18:00):
Apologies

Colin (01:18:00):
For that.

Colin (01:18:01):
Well, I really appreciate you taking the time and talking through and tell us about your whiskeys and where are they available outside of New York for us to be able to Yeah, sure.

Colin (01:18:15):
Yeah. So I mean, they're given a little bit more about this at the outset, but we are in this melting pot of all these different cultures in New York City, and we've taken that idea and applied it to the whiskeys that we make. So we do make a bourbon, but it's high malt bourbon, so it's a 20% malted barley. We do a peed bourbon, which kind of borrows from scotch tradition as well.

Colin (01:18:40):
That sounds interesting. Do you get your Pete from Scotland?

Colin (01:18:43):
We do, yeah. Okay. It's a peed ball from Aberdeen, so it's not the Isla. Oh,

Colin (01:18:49):
Okay.

Colin (01:18:50):
Rhy. Yeah, peat. It's more of a barbecue peat, your

Colin (01:18:53):
East Coast.

Colin (01:18:55):
Yeah.

Colin (01:18:57):
So we do that. We do a single mall. We just came out with a kind of Irish whiskey style whiskey just for fun for St. Patrick's Day. And that is a project that will keep going nice. But we've got some rarer more higher age statement whiskeys. We've got a bottled in bond and a seven year that came out. In fact, I think we have, nobody has called me on this yet, so I think I could keep saying it confidently. But we have the oldest bourbon that's made outside of the sort of what I would call traditional distilleries. So any, we've got the oldest bourbon from a distillery, not more than 50 years old.

Colin (01:19:35):
Okay.

Colin (01:19:38):
Did I say that right? There's a lot

Colin (01:19:39):
Of caveats to that. Yeah. I had to, well,

Colin (01:19:42):
I want to say Kentucky Bourbon, but then Dickel sometimes makes bourbon, and MGP sometimes makes bourbon.

Colin (01:19:47):
So yeah,

Colin (01:19:49):
If I put Kentucky plus Dickel and mgp,

Colin (01:19:53):
I know they were making in before 2010 that they were making whiskey out in California, but I don't Sure. Yeah. Yeah. But I don't know if it was bourbon.

Colin (01:20:05):
Not usually bourbon. So that's our, that's Ace. And the whole strain of hands has been around the whole 10 year old malt

Colin (01:20:14):
Whiskey. So you make a chocolate whiskey

Colin (01:20:18):
And we make, yeah, we do.

Colin (01:20:19):
So what is a chocolate whiskey?

Colin (01:20:22):
So it's really just a moonshine that's been infused with the husk of the chocolate bean. Okay. So it's kind of the woody fibrous part of the chocolate. It has a lot in common with the barrel in terms of kind of how it imparts flavor to the spirit, flavors that are alcohol soluble, not necessarily water or fat soluble. So you get a really interesting sort of bitter dark infusion out of the chocolate whiskey, but it's polarizing. Yeah. It's not very sweet. So if you have to dark chocolate, not kind of sweet chocolate.

Colin (01:20:58):
Okay. Oh, that might be right up my alley. Yeah.

Colin (01:21:01):
People who think they're not going to like it, usually it, and people think they're going to love it, are somewhat disappointed.

Colin (01:21:09):
Well, I live near Tennessee where we get all the old S smokey stuff, which is Right. Flavored with something. So yeah, infusing. Yeah. This sounds interesting.

Colin (01:21:21):
The audience is there for flavored whiskeys, and we want to make whiskey for everybody. And so if somebody says, I want a grapefruit jalapeno whiskey, we'll give it to them, but we're going to do it in a way that's classy. That's not aiming at the college student

Colin (01:21:37):
Necessarily. Not going to, but

Colin (01:21:38):
Aiming at the person who wants a nice shippable whiskey, but may not be into sort of barrel strength bourbon.

Colin (01:21:46):
And then in the New York tradition, you also have rye whiskey,

Colin (01:21:50):
And we have rye whiskey, which is part of an Empire rye project that's, it's kind of made up New York designation for rye whiskey, essentially does what Tennessee whiskey does for bourbon. It's just a way to make rye whiskey with a New York

Colin (01:22:06):
Twist to it.

Colin (01:22:08):
Geographical identification, which is, that's what Tennessee whiskey is.

Colin (01:22:12):
So what kind of mash build do you have on?

Colin (01:22:15):
So Empire Rye has to be 75%, at least New York state grown and distilled rye. We use 80% New York state grown and distilled

Colin (01:22:22):
Rye. Okay.

Colin (01:22:24):
20% English malted barley, same as we use for our straight bourbon.

Colin (01:22:28):
Okay. Oh, that's interesting.

Colin (01:22:29):
So it's an inverse mash bill. One is just 80% corn. The other's 80% rye. And just in terms of our reach, we're distributed in about 20 states, Tennessee, distributed, Georgia, Texarkana. We got Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas, Missouri. So kind of parts of the south, parts of that, like Texarkana. And then the Northeast, we've got covered England, Japan, Australia, Canada. Wow. But never very much. I mean, if you come to New York, well, distributed, but in a place like St. Louis, you got to hunt for it. But we're there.

Colin (01:23:10):
Yeah. I live in South Carolina, so for me, the Carolinas are always a challenge. We have to take trips to places to get

Colin (01:23:18):
Control. States are very, well, it's South Carolina control

Colin (01:23:21):
State It is, but we're not as militant as they are in North Carolina.

Colin (01:23:26):
I mean, I remember when South Carolina was a mini state. Yeah. Oh yeah, for sure.

Colin (01:23:31):
And yeah, we had fun with the mini law. Law. That law never made any sense to me because it's like, okay, well it's Pennsylvania with their, you have to go buy a case of beer. You can't buy a six pack of beer, but you also have to go to a beer warehouse basically to go buy it. It's like, are you trying to get me to slow down my drinking by making me buy a case of beer? I don't quite understand that. And the mini bottle to me was always, man, when you want to mix a drink for somebody, you have to use the entire bottle. It's now about just drinking a glass of alcohol instead of drinking. Well,

Colin (01:24:09):
The typical college would student that I was, I would get the Long Island iced tea, which somebody would've to crack open five of those mini bottles. Yeah.

Colin (01:24:18):
Holy cow.

Colin (01:24:20):
I mean, I was after a different thing back then involved.

Colin (01:24:25):
That's not the focus of your whiskey these days. Right?

Colin (01:24:29):
Well, I set a foundation that I think I've, I've been able to mature beyond, but nice, but a spirited beginning to my enthusiasm for alcohol.

Colin (01:24:43):
Well, Colin, thanks for sharing your story and walking us through a bit of the history of New York and distilling and dead distillers. On top of that, I highly recommend the book Fun Reads, got some great pictures in it, and those little clippings in there will entertain all on their own. So it's great stuff.

Colin (01:25:03):
Well, thanks for having me, drew. I appreciate talking to you and it was fun. And come visit New York next time.

Colin (01:25:08):
If you're looking for more information about Kings County Distillery, just head to kings county distillery.com and you can find a copy of Dead distillers@whiskey-lore.com slash shop. And to keep up with whiskey lore, make sure that you're subscribed to both podcasts and find links to these as well as whiskey lore, social media tasting videos, show notes and transcripts, all@whiskey-lore.com. I'm your host, drew Hamish, and until next time, cheers and SL JVA Whiskey, lores of Production of Travel Fuel's Life, L L C.