Ep. 45 - Jeff Arnett of Company Distilling (former Jack Daniel's Master Distiller)

Transcript

Drew (00:00:09):
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'd just like to take a moment to have a moment of silence here for those that lost their lives, their loved ones, their property in these terrible tornadoes that went through the Midwest and really devastated Kentucky. If you've seen the pictures, they, they're horrifying, really. And it's, it's something that when you live in that area of the country, there's always that danger lurking. You just hope that it's not going to be anything like what you just saw. And so wanted to take a moment, have a moment of silence for those that have gone through those devastating tornadoes in Kentucky.

(00:01:02):
Now, I want to do something for Kentucky because Kentucky has done a lot for me. And so what better way to help a area recover than to offer up a way for people to go there and spend their money and do some touristy things? And so if you want a copy of my experience in Kentucky Bourbon book, any copy that I sell during the month of December while supplies last, I will donate. First of all, I'll autograph it for you and then I will send it out to you. This is us only, by the way, sorry. I unfortunately don't have the ability at this point to be doing sales outside the us, but if you are in the US and you would like to buy a copy of the book, I will take all of the profits from all of those copies that I sell, and I'm going to donate those to the Red Cross. So if you would like to make that purchase, you can go out to whiskey-lord.com/kentucky book, and there'll be no shipping charge on there. And it'll be 1999. You'll get the autograph. And I appreciate you guys and again, I appreciate Kentucky and all that Kentucky has done for me.

(00:02:25):
So on with the show. And today, I have a special guest when that I went out to the foot of the Great Smoky Mountains to chat with former master distiller of Jack Daniels, Jeff Arnett. And Jeff has moved on from working with the largest whiskey brand in the world to going into the world of craft distilling. And he's assembled along with him a team of all stars, including Heath Clark, Chris Tatum. You're going to learn more about them during this episode. And I want him to have an opportunity to chat with Jeff about his time at Jack Daniels and before Jack Daniels. But we're also going to talk about this brand new company, which is curiously called Company, company Distilling. And so we will find out some of his ambitious plans for the distillery. Were going to learn about his time at Jack Daniels and some of the whiskeys that he came up with during his tenure there and how he got the job of Master Distiller. And then we'll also learn about where he came from, a different beverage actually, that he had some connection with coffee. So we'll find out about that as well. A lot to cover this week. And Jeff's got some fantastic insights on the whiskey making process. So let's jump right into my conversation with Jeff Arnett, with Company Distilling. Jeff Arnett, welcome to the show.

Jeff (00:03:55):
Well, thank you for having me. This is, it's an

Drew (00:03:57):
Honor. This is great, because I thought that I was going to get a chance to interview you over at Jack Daniels maybe, and

Jeff (00:04:04):
Then, but things got in the way.

Drew (00:04:06):
It's like one week later, boy, you don't let any dust gather on your shoes because there you go. You are onto a new experience. Now,

Jeff (00:04:16):
That was probably the toughest few months because from the time I left Jack Daniels, until we announced what our intentions were with Company Distill, it was about nine months. And I had spent the last 12 or 13 years talking, and to put a muzzle on me for that length of time was pretty torturous because I wanted to open up and tell everybody, because a lot of people were like, what are you up to? What are you up to? What are, and a lot of 'em were friends of mine, and I'm like, I'm just not at liberty to talk about it yet. But I so wanted to. I didn't want to get ahead of us either. But yeah, it's so far no regrets at all. I love the time that I had at Jack Daniels, but I'm so excited for the future that we're planning for ourselves with this new company.

Drew (00:04:54):
So this is great because we'll get a chance to actually talk about three different things here. We, we'll start off by talking a little bit about how you got started in Jack Daniels, your experience there, and then moving on to talking about the Tennessee Distillers Guild and really how, in a way, you were sort of creating a pathway for yourself in the future with this new company.

Jeff (00:05:18):
And we didn't really realize it at the time. We had about 29 members, I think of the Guild. So it represents most of the distilleries in the state of Tennessee. But individual distilleries were kind of coming to the guild saying, we need this, we need this, we need this. We were just looking at common thread. What are the issues that are preventing the small distilleries from doing Well? We were dealing with laws that were written in the 1930s right after prohibition. And little did we know that at the time, we were kind of going through, we're like, Hey, we're not going to write any laws that only serve one distillery. We're going to work for the good of the industry. So if it is good for the whole then we'll work on it. So that was sort of our philosophy on what we would do.

(00:05:58):
But at the same time, we look back now and I'm like, those things we were passing for other distilleries that were, didn't necessarily affect us individually back then are really beneficial to us now because we want to be multiple distilleries, multiple disciplines. So each facility will have its own specialty, and it allows us to share product between those which that was not allowable just a few years ago, but it will allow people to experience our full portfolio regardless of the site they go to. So that's the benefit to the consumer but clearly good for us from a business standpoint too. Yeah,

Drew (00:06:29):
Fun to see that you know, worked for the largest of distilleries. And now at that time, you were actually working alongside people who were working at the much smaller distilleries, and we're now I've been to 40 distilleries in Tennessee, and I know there are more because

Jeff (00:06:49):
They keep popping up.

Drew (00:06:50):
Yeah, I was joking with Jenna before we started this conversation that the last time I went down to Jack Daniels, I decided to walk around the town square, and I was taking some pictures and I was like, Lynchburg Distillery? What's

Jeff (00:07:03):
This American craft? American craft distillery of Lynchburg. So that's actually John Manis. I'd go to church with him and his wife, <laugh>. Okay, nice. I'm friends with him. He was a hobby wine maker who decided that the better path forward for him was to get into distilling. But yeah, he started Lynchburg Winery so he moved on onto the square, kind of picking up people that were already beverage alcohol fans, giving him a different experience. But eventually that kind of morphed into him having a steal and creating a line of products and stuff. But

Drew (00:07:33):
I just wonder how many people walk in and look around and go, this is Jack Daniels. Well,

Jeff (00:07:39):
Like I said, the longer you're in the industry, the smaller it gets. Yeah, we were having that conversation, but it is, you get to know one another.

Drew (00:07:48):
So let's step back to your days with and before Jack Daniels, actually, because you were in a different beverage industry, as I understand when you started.

Jeff (00:07:59):
I, so actually we're talking about how big Jack Daniels was, and clearly in the spirits category in whiskey, it is a pretty large facility actually, if you look at what its capabilities are. But I felt like I was going to a small company when I came to Brown Foreman, because it had maybe a total employment of about three or 4,000 people at the time. And that was across all the sites and sales and everything. I had left Procter and Gamble, which was 110,000 <laugh> employees and operating all over the world in a lot of different categories. So I'm a native Tennesseean. I grew up in Jackson, Tennessee. Coming out of high school trying to figure out what I wanted to do. The one thing that I was pretty passionate about was cars. My dad gave me, the first set of keys I was given to drive a car was what looked like a smoke in the bandit, trans Am.

(00:08:47):
My dad, in a moment of weakness, broke down and let me have that car, and I think he got 10 miles to the gallon. Air conditioning didn't work, but I didn't care, care. I thought the car was awesome. So I loved automobiles, and I still do, that's sort of one of my hobbies on the side that I mess around with old cars, new cars, whatever. I kind of buy, sell and trade whatever catches my eye. But I went away to college to get an engineering degree, hoping to work in the automotive field. That was kind of where my mind was. But when I came out of college, I had an engineering degree, but there was no work to be found in the automotive industry. GM laid off about 3000 people that year. They had a hiring freeze on. This was before Nissan, who has a huge presence in Tennessee now had moved into the state.

(00:09:29):
So I didn't have a lot of job opportunities to try to get an automotive field. So the biggest industrial employer of my hometown was Procter and Gamble, and in Jackson, they had 40 acres under roof. So it was a big plant. They made Pringles potato chips, and they made Duncan Hs cake mixes and frosting. So it was part of their food and beverage sector, which made up about, at the time, 20% of Procter and Gamble was in the food business. So I sent them a resume as I was about to graduate, and they said, we're not going to hire in the Jackson plant, but if you'd like to work it's same sector there is an opening at the Folger Coffee Company in New Orleans. So I drove down and I interviewed there. They made me an offer. So actually, if you're familiar with Louisiana, I lived in Slidedale.

(00:10:12):
So I drove across Lake Poncha train every morning for four and a half years. That big long bridge, that six mile long bridge crossing over every morning and worked over in New Orleans East was at, well, what was probably the largest coffee plant in the us so I know it was the largest for folders. And folders was I think 33% market share back then. This was before the days of Starbucks and mm-hmm. And stuff like that, when most people didn't, I mean, they might go to McDonald's for a cup of coffee, but you didn't see the coffee shop stuff that you see now. So I learned the coffee business and the New Orleans plant, because it was the largest of the three coffee plants that made FOLs. It housed all the coffee masters. So the people who had grown up in the coffee business who knew how to class and grade beans who kind of had become masters of how you took beans of different characteristics, and you put them together into a blend so that you had the right flavor, the right acidity, the right body.

(00:11:07):
So you were trying to create something balanced. But coffee beans have a very short shelf life. They basically have a outer shell on them, and you have to go through a drying process to separate that off. As soon as you expose that intervene you can't just put it in a silo, you can corn and it'll set a year. It doesn't have those self-protection mechanisms on it anymore. So you have to quickly make decisions about it. You need to get it roast ground, whatever you're going to do, get it in a can, get it in a bag, get it into something that will preserve it. So as you would go through these crops, you were constantly having to evaluate beans. So you had different growing seasons in different countries. So that function went on inside the plant. So even though I wasn't necessarily a coffee master, they would invite people to come and sit.

(00:11:51):
So you would set it like a lazy Susan type table, and they would have every bean that you were considering, they would be roast ground and brewed individually, and you would go through a classing and grading on it based on the expectation. But you were looking for flavor, you were looking for acidity, you're looking for body mouth feel and stuff like that. So I learned that process from people that had been in the coffee business forever. So I was there for about four and a half years. Then there was a promotional opportunity for me to move to Texas, and it was a sister coffee plant at Decaffeinated Beans for FOLs. It made the first attempt that a Coffee by the Cup which was the single, so that kind of predates the Keurig machines that it becomes so popular. So didn't really go over well. I learned that when if you don't have a lot of very high temperatures and you don't have pressure, it's hard to extract coffee.

(00:12:46):
So the teabag under just normal atmospheric conditions, you could get really hot water, but by the time you put the teabag in it, by the time it, it was truly brewed, the water would be cold or it would be cooler than you wanted to drink it. And most people didn't want to have to go back and heat it up again. So it was losing its convenience when it was meant to be a convenience product. So anyway, it didn't go over as well as Proctor and Gamble had hoped for sure. But they also had bought Sun Door Brands who owned Sunny to Light Hawaiian Punch. So they had a juice business for a little while. So I worked in that part of the plant. So I ran the blend module for them. Once again, having to taste product, made a concentrate form of it, then a finished product. I knew that it was going to be very short lived, that Sunny Delight didn't have the margins that Procter and Gamble wanted. We were constantly trying to reformulate and figure out a ways to get the costs down on it, because you could never exceed the price of orange juice because you were a substitute proctor. So I kind of put you in a box.

(00:13:50):
But in the midst of all that, they were looking to, were starting to reshape the company, and they were starting to sell food brands. And in the midst of that, the only thing that looked like it was going to be on high ground was Pringles. So they said in the midst of selling everything off, they're like, we're going to expand Pringles. So I quickly held up my hand and said, that's my hometown and if there's a role there for me with my background, and I would love to stay with Proctor and Gamble if I could. So I ended up moving back to my hometown and I was there for about four years, and then they put it up for sale. Oh, wow. And Pringles was the last food brand that survived in Procter and Gamble. So they sold it off to ultimately the Kellogg. So I had to basically figure out, do I want to be sold to another company, or do I want to take my career, my rest of my life and in my own hands and just put a resume out there and steer it.

(00:14:37):
So I didn't really know where I would go or what I would do but I was actually thinking at that point, why not Target Nissan? Because that was what I originally wanted to do, worked for Procter and Gamble for 10 years. But I was an engineer. I'd done a lot of project management and stuff like that, and I'm like, those are universal skills. Surely I can go sell myself to Nissan. So I found a head hunter in Nashville, but he contacted me and said, there, there is a well known beverage manufacturer in the Nashville area who would like to talk to you. And I was, at first, I was kind of put off, but I thought it was going to be Coke or Pepsi. And I'm like, I'm trying to leave a hundred thousand person company. I'm not sure I want to go to another a hundred thousand person company.

(00:15:17):
And eventually he just kind of wore me down. Cause at first it didn't intrigue me. I kept saying, do you not know anyone at Nissan? Can I steer me to get me a contact there? And I eventually wrote down and I said, I'll take the interview, who is it? And he said, well, it's Jack Daniels. And I said, well, that's not in the Nashville area. That's Lynchburg. Cause I'm from Tennessee and I know the difference. But I was a Tennessee Squire, so I was a huge fan of Jack Daniels living out of the state of Tennessee. I think anytime I told people I was from Tennessee, I mean, one of people are going to say Elvis, Dolly Jack. That's what people know of the state. So yeah, I was a fan of Jack Daniels, but they needed a quality control manager. And that was back in 2001. I was lucky enough to get the interview to go there.

(00:15:59):
They liked me, I loved them. So that's the first role that I came into. And fortunately for me, not every job at Jack Daniels, because of the size and scale, it operates on three large tracks of property. Most people work on one track or the other, but they don't move around. So there are very few jobs that exposed you to the entirety of what it took to make whiskey from water and grains through maturation in the warehouse, through processing, bottling, shipping out the door and everything. But quality touched everything. So over the course of the week, I might be at the distillery, I might be in warehousing, I might be over in processing. But wherever the issues were, wherever you were, just you're collecting data, making sure, trending everything, making sure everything was in process control as a quality person would do learning what could go wrong, how to avoid it from going wrong.

(00:16:48):
So it gave you a really broad understanding of everything that goes on in the distillery. So that was my introduction into the whiskey space. I already knew sensory sciences from coffee, and I kind of approached, because I took over the sensory panels for Jack Daniels as well. So we would taste the product as a new make before and after charcoal mellowing, dozing and tasting. And then of course, at that time we had three different brands. So we had our old number seven Tennessee whiskey at the time. We had Gentleman Jack and we had single barrel. Each one had sort of standards of identity. So teaching people how to tease those out to be able to recognize them in a lineup. But I approached it largely from my coffee background and understanding the anatomy of the palette and where flavors show up. And I would tell people, it's not just what you taste, but it's where you're tasting it.

(00:17:36):
If you'll pay attention to that, it's telling you something. Gentleman Jack should be very tip of tongue. And that's very deliberate in the process. We're trying to get the finish off of it. Finish is going to be in the back of the throat. So the more forward the flavor feels in the mouth, that should be telling you something. Well, number seven should be more balanced. Single barrel's going to have a heavier mouth feel more coating and stuff like that. So it's about mouth fill on that one. But just kind of training the tasters. And we had a hundred full-time employees who as part of their job, would come in and taste neither daily or weekly based on how the panel was set up. So that was kind of how I got to Jack Daniels was, came in as quality and learned the process.

Drew (00:18:14):
So quality control and getting to touch all those different areas was probably a huge help in later on when you become master distiller and what every other area is doing. Did you have a particular favorite? Was there something that you enjoyed in terms of the three whiskeys that you had

Jeff (00:18:33):
There? I was a single barrel drinker. So before I became master distiller I was a quality control manager, but I was on the master panel, so I would help pick the lots that became single barrel. But I was one of two people that would taste every single barrel. So it could be, normally I could be around the lab, so I could be one of the tasters and I would call someone in. But we had a group of about 10 people who could kind of come in and sign off. But two people had to agree that the barrel was in the range, but everything got tasted. So this was 40, 50 barrels a day. You could put in them out, kind of rinse around, spit it out, and kind of looking for anything that's anything nose that it doesn't smell. Making sure it met those standards, even though every single barrel's different, but you still wanted it to have, you know, wanted to lock the heads and tails off of it, if you will. So I walked around with the taste of single barrel in my mouth all day long. And you really weren't drinking because you were spitting it out. Yeah, but still you've got that flavor in your mouth like a mouthwash. It's like, I really like this. So I came there as an old number seven Tennessee whiskey fan. That's really all I knew of Jack Daniels. I wasn't familiar with the variance that they had, but I quickly became a single barrel person. I really liked the interest that came from it. So

Drew (00:19:47):
The thing that gets me is that sometimes when I'm doing it tasting, and I've always wondered this about tasters who spit it out, is that it seems like the tasting continues after you swallow it. You

Jeff (00:19:59):
Get a little trickling down in the throat. Yeah. And

Drew (00:20:02):
So do you feel like you're missing something when you're not letting it continue

Jeff (00:20:06):
Down? Well, what I have learned is that, of course we would reduce proof that would eliminate fatigue. That way I could go through 10 to 12 barrels with just using a little bit of water. I could rinse between them without getting a massive amount of carryover. Because the one thing you want to avoid is having the flavor of the previous sample to color your view of the next sample. So you try to minimize that. So reduction of proof is one of the ways to do that. But the other one is of course, if you swallow it, it's going to be much harder to get that flavor out too. So that's why you just rinse around and spit it out. I always try to let at least a little bit get back there because you're trying to evaluate finish too.

(00:20:42):
But clearly the carryover increases markedly. So anytime I was evaluating samples just to make sure they were in the range, I would reduce proof and spit everything out when I was tasting with customers. If they were coming to pick barrels, I would go add bottle strength with them. I would swallow it just, I would just be very patient and try to get enough water, make sure my pallet kind of settled between the samples. And what I would always tell him is that the first sample's always a shock to the pallet, especially if you're coming out at 94 proof, just want you to taste the first sample, but really not evaluate it fully. Mm-hmm. Just kind of use it to get started. Get a first sense of it, rinse and clear, make sure your pallet settles, and then go ahead and taste and take notes on your second sample.

(00:21:27):
Rinse and clear taste and take notes on your third sample. And I want you to circle back to that first sample one more time and then stop. If you go back and forth across them, that's not going to get you clarity. It's actually going to create more confusion. Okay. It's going to be harder. Because what I've noticed is that the middle sample will seem to constantly change whether you're going from left to right to left, because you are getting the influences of the previous sample on it. They're like, every time I think I've got this middle sample figured out, it seems changed. I'm like, well, it's because you're going back and forth across it. You can't do that. So I always say, if you go across it one time and then back to the first sample, the sample, if you just go across it one time, always gets ruled out.

(00:22:05):
Cause it's going to seem hotter, it's going to seem a little bit more harsh because the first sip is always the toughest. It immediately kind of settles on the pallet, you acclimate to it, and then it gets easier to drink. So I'm might go across them one time, back to the first stop, look at your notes, which one intrigues you the most? Go to that sample and sip on it. If it's reinforcing what you've written. If every sip seems to get better and better, you've got the right sample. So just simplify that. So that was what I would do in the lab versus what I would do with the customer when it came to tasting very different.

Drew (00:22:35):
So with the move from coffee to whiskey. Yeah. Did you bring in tasting techniques that you think probably the whiskey industry was ignoring, but that you had used in the coffee industry?

Jeff (00:22:47):
Well, I would tell you the Jack Daniels tasters, they were, like I said, a hundred full-time employees who tasted it. I wouldn't say they were necessarily masters of the palette and understanding of the sensory process or whatever, but one thing they did know is they knew Jack. They knew what it was supposed to taste like. And it's like what makes a good taster? It sounds a little bit cliche or to say it, but if you taste a lot, you become a better taster. If you only come and taste one time a month, it's kind of hard to remember or to have those connecting dots of consistency, because that's what you were looking for with at Daniels. You wanted consistency over time because you were trying to create a product in one place that you could ship to the world. And no matter where you found it, you knew what it was going to smell and taste like and everything.

(00:23:31):
So that absolute consistency all the time was what you strive for. I think the whole, not just what it tastes like, but where it tastes, where you're tasting it on the palette was the one thing that I kind of introduced to them to think more clearly. It's like I would talk to customers and if they weren't Jack Daniels drinkers, it's like, well, what do you normally drink? Yeah. So I would quickly think through my knowledge of those things. I'm like, are they finished driven? Are they sweeter, lighter? But if somebody says, well, I'm not normally a big whiskey drinker, but I drink this and this is what I like. I'm like, hang on a second, I got something for you. So I would kind of steer them based on, I'm like, you don't know it, but you like sweet or you don't like sweet. And you may not have thought through that. But if you tend to things that are not on the tip of the tongue, that tend to be more back of throat. If you're more a dark chocolate than a milk chocolate. Yeah. Lover sore, bad analogy. All all chocolate's great. Right? Yeah. I mean, none of it's bad, but you may have a preference in that spectrum. Somebody likes the high cocoa, some don't. And you're not wrong for liking. That comes

Drew (00:24:31):
The bitterness. Sure.

Jeff (00:24:32):
It just comes from, if you like, the dark. Yes. Yeah. And I would use that analogy quite a bit. It's like, it's hard to argue that chocolate, most people love chocolate but they may have a preference within the range that that's covered there. And they may be a 70, 80% high cocoa type, more the semi suite type, or they may be full on milk chocolate, white chocolate, and I love it all, but I actually have my preference in there too. Yeah,

Drew (00:24:58):
Yeah. So we'll talk about this a little bit once we get into talking about company, the distilling. But when I went on the Jack Daniels tour the last time, they mentioned that single barrel came from the top of warehouses. And having traveled through Kentucky and heard different theories on where you put barrels in the rest, that shocked me because I hear usually if Booker was going to go get his whiskey, he was pulling it from the middle of the warehouse in the place that was kind of cooler. And that seemed to be the space to go to, and that it was the rougher whiskeys that were put up at the top because they were getting a lot of temperature contrast up there. And sometimes maybe too much. But you guys toast barrels. So is it a combination of toasting and charring, or is it mostly just toasting?

Jeff (00:25:51):
No, it was on the char chart. The Jack Daniels barrel would be like a four. But they toasted and Brown Foreman had a large wine portfolio when I first came there. So they not only made bourbon barrels, but they also had a wine barrel operation out at the Mendocino Cooperage. And it's much more common in wines that you don't char barrels, but you toast them. And my analogy for that is what's happening to the wood. It'd be similar to whether you go to the campfire with a marshmallow and you stick it in the fire and pull it back and blow it out. Or if you put it in the heat above the fire and slowly turn it and brown it, you get different results from that, you know, can build sweet complexities, or you can build sort of ones that aren't so sweet, you can put more finish type things on it.

(00:26:36):
So there was a proprietary toast, and that was built and by Jack Dino's owning Cupid's and being able to make its own barrel, that kind of held that stuff pretty tightly to itself. So it actually divorced itself from a lot of the industry things like a four chart. We wouldn't call it a four chart necessarily. They had a laser that could drop down in the barrel and scan, and it could actually see beyond what the human eye could, it could measure certain components. So you made it smarter over time. So it was kind of funny because every time I would tell people this, it would make 'em laugh. But I said it was actually measured on a thing they called the FU scale that was flavor units.

Drew (00:27:13):
Oh, okay. Nice.

Jeff (00:27:15):
Yeah. So you basically had a scale that it was kind of taking the toast in the char. Yeah. And basically putting it on a scale that would give you an idea, is this going to be a really flavorful barrel or will it not be? So you had a target on that range <laugh>,

Drew (00:27:30):
Living near Furman University, where you would see the FU on the back of somebody's car. I get that.

Jeff (00:27:38):
But yeah, it was important. But I would tell you the length of time you're planning to put the barrels into the warehouse plays into it. Jack Daniels just recently came out with a 10 year old product. You probably don't want all 10 years on the top floor. You might want some of that time to be up there because you do get deeper into the barrel, the, you know, get more expansion and contraction because you get more temperature swings typically in the top of the warehouse. I always say in the winter, the top floor is the coldest. They're drafty old buildings that aren't insulated. So it seems like you're in the attic of a home, you're kind of shivering, but it, it's like a hot house in August. You go up there and you just sweat popping up everywhere. And whiskey likes that from the standpoint that it's expansive in nature.

(00:28:21):
So it responds to temperature changes, it expands, and then it contracts and expands and it contracts. And the barrel, if it's well made, actually can hold pressure. I would go in the summertime and you stick a drill in the side of a barrel and you could pull it out. That first drill, usually I'd drill a vent, so it wouldn't kind of draw a vacuum on the barrel, but you draw or drill that vent hole at the top of the barrel, you knew above the liquid line, and you could hear it kind of blow out. So you knew it was under some light level of pressure. So it's definitely, there's pushing the whiskey into the wood in the wintertime, you think that same drill hole, and you almost hear the barrel heat in mm-hmm. Air. So it's basically, it's drawing so that that's going on and that's actually beneficial to you.

(00:29:07):
But over time it's like it can become too much. You're talking about it getting a little bit harsh because not there's a level of barrel that's pleasant, and then you can overdo it where it's like it's a burnt stick in the mouth or whatever. And if you get that far, you've gone too far. So that with that 10 year old spent quite a bit of time on the upper floors, but once it was deemed that, I mean, this thing is looking pretty good, a decision was made to bring it down and that light won't be exhausted. So there's not to get too far ahead of what's going on with Jack Ninos, but they have a thing called the jack Safe, and they've got barrels from years back. So there's a nice run of barrels for they can come out with a 10 year old, 12 year old, 18 year old.

(00:29:48):
They can do that by kind of plucking out of these lots that have been saved. So that decision was made years ago because Jack Daniels was not in the age game we called it. We had a CEO who didn't believe in the age game. So nothing really happened in the age space but it was not historically. So we had old bottles of Jack Daniels that clearly said this whiskey is 18 years old, this one's just 10, this one is seven, this is eight. And anytime the age changed, the label changed. So they didn't necessarily sell it on that, but they communicated it as part of the buying proposition. So yeah, it's nice to see that come back. So actually, I got a departing gift from Jack Daniels. They were very gracious to me as I was leaving, and they told me I could take a barrel from anywhere really and have it run anyway I wanted to. Oh wow. So I actually went to that old inventory. So I have a 10 year old single barrel barrel proof.

Drew (00:30:43):
Oh, nice.

Jeff (00:30:44):
It's a hundred, about 136 proof.

Drew (00:30:46):
Wow.

Jeff (00:30:47):
And it's excellent. And I was very appreciative of that. They didn't have to do that, but that was very nice of them

Drew (00:30:52):
To do that. Well, if you ever saw the National Treasure movie and they go in and they are trying to find the archives, the stuff that the president knows, but nobody else knows. So the one question that floats through my mind is do they have old samples, old bottles of whiskey from even pre-prohibition that you could go back as the master distiller and taste and have you done that?

Jeff (00:31:22):
Well, they didn't do it in a deliberate fashion, but there was a massive safe in the main office that's across the street from the distillery building there, that brick structure. They have bottles that were sample bottles that dated back to the forties back from the days that they did apple brandy, peach brandy. So there were still bottles of that in there, old green label that had cell seals on it. So basically when you went through the war they were commandeering materials. So you kind of had to find alternatives to seal bottles up and stuff like that. Because metals were not there, plastics were not there. So whatever was left you improvised. So we can date bottles a lot of times simply because of the way it was packaged but they weren't deliberate about trying to keep a lot of stuff like that over the years.

(00:32:12):
So probably not as complete as people would love to see a national treasure in opening up the vault there. It all is. But we were holding every single batch of Jack Daniels that has been produced in the last two years. There is at least a seven 50 sample setting in the lab for it. So that's the 95% of the product that goes out in two years is going to be exhausted. But you always have people to keep bottles for 20 to 25 years and expect it to still be good. And if they've stored it properly, it doesn't really have a shelf life. If you keep it out of sunlight, you stop it from going through a lot of heat and cold changes and stuff like that. So I say right at room temperature, maybe slightly below in the dark. Yeah. That'll thing will last forever. Unless there's a compromise on the seal.

(00:32:54):
Yeah, it will last. But we had retains that would go back more like about 10 years. Okay. So we had a big window. If we were thinking, how much does Jack Daniels today taste like Jack Daniels of five years ago, 10 years ago, whatever we could do that. Okay. Actually, that was be one of the ways you would evaluate. If somebody ever complained about a bat, said and taite we would have a triangle panel we would set up. So we would go and fish that bottle out of the retains area. This is the batch they're complaining about. And then we would just take any other random batch that had not been complained about and put it in two glasses. And basically the question would not be, which sample is bad, but which sample's different. So the taste all three, and if they couldn't predictably go to the one and say, this one's off, it's different. Then you knew it was within the range of normal. So that was how you evaluated it.

Drew (00:33:46):
Well, the reason I bring that up is because Nelson and I were talking about the banana note. Yeah. And saying wonder if that banana note was around when Lynn Motlow was over the company and whether it was there when Jack Daniel was making the whiskey or nearest green.

Jeff (00:34:03):
I would tell you the culture as far as we could date it back, was the one that they started back after prohibition with. So they obviously had some type of, and there is a jug yeast culture, but it's got a lot of stuff in it. Because that was the problem with using jug yeast every time you opened it. It was like a sour O starter to make bread at home. Every time you open up the jar and backstock it, you're letting everything kind of land in it. And you don't really want to do that if you're looking for laser consistency of character. Because aceta backers, lactics things that can land in your yeast culture. You don't want those to be active in your firmer and the yeast, of course, once it grows up on the small grains, which we credit a yeast mash. And that would be how you would set the firmer. Yeah. So about 4% of the volume of a firmer would come on malt and rye with the yeast grown up to an inoculum level that was pretty high. Billions and billions of sales alive, fired up, ready to go. And then you just started dropping the rest of the grains coming out of the mash cookers on.

(00:35:04):
But they had purified the culture. And no yeast culture is monolithic. There's always some diversity of characteristics in it. And I describe it as the Boston Marathon. You got some people that're going to finish in two hours and you got some people might take two days to finish it. And in your yeast are the same way. What you typically saw is that the yeast would take off very quickly, might flare out. They, they're the sprinters in the group, but they help you make alcohol in the early hours of fermentation. But they may not be very durable when as alcohol content starts to build in the ferer, they can't handle it. And then you have some of these more, the mules in the group that are just kind of plotting along <laugh>. They're not going as fast, they're not replicating as quickly, but they can handle pretty much anything.

(00:35:54):
So because Jack Daniels runs a fairly thick mash, a lot of people on a beer gallon, as you look at bushels of grain versus water content, they might run a 30 35 as far as how many gallons of water at each bushel of grain. Yeah. Jack Daniels is more like a 22, 23 range. It's a very thick when you're in an environment like that, it's very important that your yeast can handle the high, because the more grained you put in there, the higher your potential alcohol's going to be. So most people, by the time their beer finishes at eight, 9% alcohol by volume. Yeah. Jayden's 12. Wow. Okay. And that doesn't sound like a lot. Yeah. On a percentage basis, that's a lot of alcohol that the yeast are having to survive. Yeah. So

Drew (00:36:41):
Let's talk about your transition then. How do you go from quality control to becoming master distiller? When Jimmy Bedford retired,

Jeff (00:36:48):
So when I came in as the quality control manager, there was an opening in the single barrel processing area. And it was small about one barrel and a hundred would actually go through that process. But it was the one that we were the most meticulous on quality and stuff like that. So it seemed to make sense. I'm like, I'll just take over that little operation, have a handful of employees over there, but I'll help select the lots. I'll make sure that we're legal and the range of it is correct, and stuff like that. And Jimmy, that product had been produced under his tenure. So Jimmy Bedford was my predecessor, and he spent a lot of his days out on the road. So Jimmy had been the distillery manager for many years but when he became master distiller, he made a choice that he's like, he really wanted to be an ambassador.

(00:37:27):
He wanted to travel. He grew up in the Lynchburg area. He had not seen a lot of the world. And it was an opportunity. I don't know exactly how many countries he went to, but I can tell you in 12 years I went to 41 different countries. He probably did more than that because I only traveled about 20% of the time. And he traveled half Wow at the time. So he covered a lot of ground. But I think Jimmy had figured out because he was out selling Single Barrel a lot. Cause that was the newest product. He had only been in the market for a few years. So he was out working with customers in the field. He would go to stores and sign them just to kind of build the brand that way. But he figured out because of quality control and the fact that I was everywhere in the plant at some point during the week, but I became one-stop shopping for him.

(00:38:06):
So he didn't have to call everybody in the plant to figure out what was going on. So if he wanted to know something, he could just pick the phone and give me a call and say, Hey, the last time I was over there, this is what it was. Somebody just asked me this question. This is what I said. Tell me I'm right. If I'm wrong, tell me what is the number that I should communicate, because I just want to make sure that all my facts and figures, because like I said, he wasn't in the distillery as much when he became master distiller. So that relationship kind of developed over time where because I was managing single barrel, it gave him a reason to look to me to answer questions for him. But I'd also been promoted to take over all the processing and warehousing. So at that point, I was running about a third of the operation plus quality control allowed me to work in the areas I didn't directly manage. So it was only, I think about two years after I had been promoted to take over. So I was on the management committee. I was one of just a handful of people that ran the facility that they had come to me and said, Jimmy has decided he's almost 70 years old and it's time to call it quits, and we think you're the right one to do it. So my pathway to master distiller was different than all my predecessors. They had all been the distillery manager

(00:39:15):
And I had not. But for most of them, they had to go out and learn the other parts of the process. So when they took that title, because Jimmy did not know much about processing and warehousing for that matter, he had to kind of go and learn that because he had spent all this time with water grains and yeast was fermenting it, distilling it, mellowing it, getting it to the barrel like I'm done. So I had a very broad understanding of what was going on, but I needed to spend more time at the distillery and dig in a little bit. I'd been pulling samples out of there for seven years but really to know more about the process, get more intimate with it. So I joined them in 2001, 2008. I was appointed master distiller. My kids were five and three so I did not have the desire to travel like Jimmy did <laugh>.

(00:40:03):
So that was my one kind of limitation I was putting on them. I'm like, if you want me to be the master distiller, I cannot travel half the days of the year. I just don't want to orphan my kids there. No jobs that important to me. So they agreed to a 20% travel. So I was gone about 50, 60 days a year, which was enough. Yeah. Yeah. I mean a lot. And a lot of mine was international because that was our growth markets during the time. So I would go out sometimes 8, 9, 10 days and go to three or four countries that were just, every few days I was kind of hopping. So once you're over, the pond doesn't, it's a short flight to go from this country to that country to that country. So you can cover in Canvas Europe up pretty good with some short flights. So that's how it would typically be set up.

Drew (00:40:51):
Pretty amazing to think about your tenure. There was really the reemergence of whiskey as being a popular and something that people wanted to go after. So all of your predecessors you'd have to go back two or three predecessors probably before they were seeing what a whiskey boom looked like. And of course, Jack Daniels went through allocation and had all those issues as well. Did you come in thinking you wanted to expand the brand because you went up to, I think there's 11 labels. By the time it was you left, was that kind of something you felt like you wanted to do right from the beginning? Or did you see what was going on around you and say, Hey, maybe we should be looking at adding to our stable of whiskeys

Jeff (00:41:43):
From, I would say from around 1980 to around 2010, you were kind of talking about it. Brown spirits, those were not their heydays. I mean, vodka kind of went on a tear. A lot of flavored vodkas and clear spirits kind of ruled. But those were good years for Jack Daniels because there wasn't a lot of competitive activity. So it grew unchallenged. Most brands were either holding their own or shrinking. But Jack Daniels used it as a time to expand geography. So when I first came to Jack Daniels, it was like 120 countries by the time I left 170. So we kept bumping out When product was available, we would go ahead and kind of open it up. So my first seven, eight years there, that was seemingly what we were doing when there wasn't a lot of competitive activity. We were continuing to open up new geographies. Everybody who wanted to buy Jack Daniels, it was our mission to get 'em one if the laws allowed it.

(00:42:37):
But around 2010 was sort of when things began to change. You saw emerge bartenders kind of came back to brown spirits. It became their darling ri rye whiskey in particular, I think kind of emerged also, I think I give women a lot of credit. Historically, men had always been more apt to drink whiskey. But I think there's something around 2010 where women, as a big contingent of women said, we're not going to drink cranberry and vodka just because you think we should <laugh>. We're going to drink what we want to. So you started seeing all these women's bourbon clubs start to pop up everywhere where they were as into it. And in some cases more into it than the guys are really began to embrace them. So the fact that so many more women were in and they're the home shoppers. So then all of a sudden it kind of opened up this competitive nature.

(00:43:29):
So even for a brand like Jack Daniels as well known as it is, it was important. It's like, Hey here, that's great. What's next? Yeah, Hey, that's great. What's next? What people want, they want to know what's next. And Jack Daniels had only gone to three variants in 140 something years. Then in the next 10 we went to 11. Part of that was the flavor craze of we Jack Daniels did three flavors. Those were the things that I felt like were necessary. I had a little bit of remorse about the way some of those were done simply because I felt like with among bourbon purists, they're always going to be it can tarnish your brand. Yeah. Cause they're like a real bourbon brand wouldn't do that. Yeah, always. I kind of, and I would talk it internally at Jack Daniels. I'm like, if we were working on Woodford Reserve instead of on Jack Daniels, same company here. If they came to us and said, Hey, if sales are soft, we need you to do peach next year. If we were going to have to do peach Woodford, we would hard. The walls would be shattered and shaking and we'd be wondering if the roos going to fall because it would just be heresy. But we willingly, it seemed on Jack Daniels. So I'm not sure we'll have the future will tell if that was a wise idea. But I would tell you this, it allowed more people to drink Jack Daniels as a brand.

Drew (00:44:57):
It's like an entry end, kind of like a gentleman. Jack is a nice entry.

Jeff (00:45:01):
One more rung on the ladder, lower rung that you could grab. But this

Drew (00:45:05):
Is an interesting thing that like old Smokey we talk about. I was talking to some people about that and they're like, ah, it's moonshine. Do they have any real skills in making whiskey? You look at it as a whiskey drinker, not to say your nose is up in the air, but in a way it is. You're saying there's techniques that go into making a whiskey over a moonshine but they're both coming from distilled spirits. But you're right, there is a certain stigma sometimes attached to things that you have to add flavor to because you say, well, if I'm adding flavor to it, it's the stuff that you're adding flavor to really that great. But then you think about cocktails and if you're making a really good cocktail, you need a good quality whiskey beneath that cocktail to add the character to

Jeff (00:45:58):
It. And we'll get into what we plan to do with company distilling. But here in East Tennessee, you're kind of foolish if you have a distillery and you're not at least doing some flavored products because they sell well and you can make them a product of convenience where they're with this bottle and one more item, you can easily make a cocktail. And we've got campgrounds everywhere. And so people are looking for something that's very easy for them to do. So we'd be foolish not to think about it. But there's a way to execute that in a way that's quality. You can use all natural ingredients. You can kind of think about that whole sugar to alcohol ratio because your body doesn't like to have to process through both of those at the same time, when Jack Dinos came out with fire, there was a product already in the market that had a lower alcohol content.

(00:46:44):
It had a higher sugar content. And I'm like, they similar flavor. They were both true cinnamon. They were both saline based. But I'm like, what I could tell you is that what was Jack Daniels selling you similar nights, but better mornings because your body is going to revolt on all the sugars that you're going to get. So I tend to not drink a lot of cocktails, and it's simply because it'll make my head hurt the next morning. It's not the alcohol that gets me because I'll drink to my point of comfort, and I can do that if I'm doing in that need or on the rocks. Yeah. I'll feel very different the next day than if I've had a lot of sugary additives on it. Your body just doesn't want to process through of them. Both give it one or the other. But when you hit it with both working double

Drew (00:47:24):
Time, I learned that the hard way actually. And I was away from whiskey for 20 years because I couldn't even smell it for a long time because I had mixed it with Coke and it just became too much. If you try to drink too much. And that combination of sugar, I kept thinking, is it the carbonation or is it the sugar? But something, yeah,

Jeff (00:47:45):
It's the

Drew (00:47:45):
Sugar. It knocked me out. Yeah.

Jeff (00:47:47):
And you can handle the sugar alone, but when you have the alcohol or you can have alcohol alone, but when you put the two together, it's like, be careful. Yeah. Just slow down one of those. And when I walk into one of the best cocktail doors on the planet I used to go in and say Jack on the rocks. But I was like, that's kind of not honoring their, because you were their craft craft. Cause if they're using natural ingredients and they're getting the balance and everything, I'm kind of missing the opportunity then for them to showcase their skillset. So after a couple of years of just saying, I'm a neat drinker, I'm just pure whiskey drinker, don't want anything, I would always just say no. Whatever your best Jack Daniels cocktail is, I would like to try it.

Drew (00:48:31):
Okay.

Jeff (00:48:31):
Yeah. Whatever that is. And I must give you the full range of it. Whatever you've done with Jack Daniels in the past that you were most proud of, I'd like to try it tonight.

Drew (00:48:38):
Well, it's funny because when I travel, if I go to Memphis, I'm going to have barbecue. I'm going to ask, where's the best place for me to go have barbecue?

Jeff (00:48:46):
And you're going to have a massive argument on people about

Drew (00:48:48):
Where that is exactly. But

Jeff (00:48:50):
Neely's interstate.

Drew (00:48:53):
And so I got to a point where with drinking whiskey, I got to a point where I drank it neat. And I really enjoyed drinking it that way. And I just like you, I said, I don't really prefer cocktails, but then as you say, I've started opening myself up now to show me your craft. Let me see what you can do with a cocktail. Not that I'll probably ever drink that cocktail again, but it's an experience for me. Sure. To be able to taste it there and see what somebody can do with

Jeff (00:49:24):
It. We're talking about the other things that we did at jino. So we did some flavors, but we did the first new grain bill since prohibition when we came out with a rye. And instead of going to the 51 or 95, that seemed to prevail the market. We're like, let's explore the center. Let's do something unique and different if we're going to do it. So we landed at 70% rye and I thought it was great. I wasn't even a big Rye fan, but I felt like it was really, really nice and it's done well and competitions, when people have graded it in, its competitive set, but it, it's been slow to grow. Once again, you had a brand that kind of jumped out early that really prevails the market. So I think Jack Daniels is number two in the rye category right now, but there's a big difference between the first bar and the second.

(00:50:05):
So you have the giant in the room and then you have all the little pygmies running around below it. And so Jack Daniels was the tallest in that group, but I thought really well done. But I was over in Dubai and I'm not a big fan of the black licorice notes and stuff like that. Those were the jelly beans I left in the bag and threw away. So I never really liked the flavor of those didn't like jaegermeister or anything like that. When people got into that crazy, I'm like, nah, a dose of medicine, I hate it. But I was at this really nice restaurant over there and he said, I love your ride, and making cocktails with it and stuff like that. And so he said, I want to basically make you saac. I'm kind of like, oh, it's going to be a black jellybean punched to my head.

Drew (00:50:49):
That's why I like, cause I'm a big black licorice fan.

Jeff (00:50:53):
Yeah. And it's very polarizing. Yeah. Yeah. But I was like, oh Lord. He said, I want to make you like, oh, okay, alright. I'm going to just grin and bear it. But it was so subtle the way he executed it, and I'm like, to me, I think sometimes the best cocktails are defined by restraint where you don't necessarily, inside of our portfolio, we have an award-winning gin, and it's not all pine cones and all citrus and stuff like that. You don't open up the bottle and look around and see who's cleaning toilets. It's so subtly done. It's there, but it's not a hammer blow to the head. And I'm like, to me, the beauty of it is that you can, you're, if you're thinking about it, you can like, wow, that's really nice. I'm kind of catching all the notes. You don't have a hundred botanicals in it.

(00:51:39):
You've got the six, seven that matter, and they're just at the right levels. So I think cocktails can kind of be that way too. You don't have to do the obvious thing sometimes the restraint and the balance and the thoughtfulness that you do it where you're having to tease it out, where it's kind of peeking around the corner and you just taste it. I'm like, there it is it. But yeah, it was one of the best SRAs ever had in my life. Nice. So I'm glad I didn't refuse it. We explored barrel technologies with Sinatra and with the Maple Barrel for 27 goal, which was part of the inspiration of this product. We recognized that proofs were going back up. It was hard to revisit that decision for black label. It had gone from 90 to 86 to 80 largely as a survival mechanism when brown spirits were all seen as too harsh and too edgy to be consumed.

(00:52:26):
It made it more approachable to drop the proof on it back then. But most of what you're seeing come from Jack Daniels and what you'll see from us, it's 90 and up. Yeah. I think is really, we're the sweet spot. Sweet spot. Yeah. I think pretty much from 90 to a cast strength based on where people, most people look at 80 and say it would be a little bit better if it just little more, yeah. Little more umph there. But of course part of our thought process with our first offering too, was that we want to be able to, the people who are just now entering into the whiskey space, we want them, if they trust us with the purchase of that bottle that it, it's like, wow, I can't believe that's 90 proof. That is so smooth. That's what we wanted. And I feel like we hid it.

(00:53:08):
But yeah, you see a lot. So Jack Daniels came out with his first cast strength product. That was an interesting fight. So the thought of doing that was about five years before it actually happened. And you would think that would've been an easy decision to make because it's not like you have to do anything to do is get label approvals because you were dumping it casting all day long and single barrel. The question was what proof are you going to bring it to? Or are you just going to leave it alone? But five years, five years of back and forth before we finally decided to do it, and that became one of the best, from a critical acclaim standpoint, one of the best products that Jack Dinos had released while I was there. I hate to say it would be the one I'm most proud of, but it was probably the hardest fight that you ended up fighting back then was to just let the product in its purest form be sampled by the public for the people who envisioned going up in a warehouse and catching a glass directly out of a barrel and sipping it in it's pure estate.

(00:54:05):
Not everybody's going to get a chance to do that. Can you put that in a bottle and deliver it to 'em in a way that you feel like represents your brand well? And I had reviewers at the time that I knew anything that we ever sent to going to hammer us. Don't just the name on the bottle's going to be enough. They're going to the best. We're going to get a B minus on the review. And I had those people going, unbelievable. Good stuff. Not necessarily a big fan of Jack. Holy crap. I can't believe that. Proof at that character. So that

Drew (00:54:38):
Was good. So one of my favorites and I just got it recently, was the Tennessee Taster Barrel Proof Rye. I love the Rye. I think it's fantastic. And I'm turning into more and more of a Rye fan because Rye to me has a lot of different character to it. To

Jeff (00:54:57):
Me, pepper and spicy I, and I think whiskey's a journey. What you start out drinking in life is probably not where you end, but I obviously you've decided that you do more black pepper, peppery, spicy notes, you find them interesting. Yeah.

Drew (00:55:12):
So that's why you do it. So it's funny, I don't know how much you've heard of people blending your products, but I've gotten into this thing with SCOs and with bourbons of if I taste get something that I'm not as big a fan of, but I want to try to improve it, sometimes I'll go grab something else. So I had gotten a bottle of Gentleman Jack, and to me, gentleman Jack is, I'm kind of past that. I want something that's going to be, I love the mouth feel of it, but it's one of those things where I very soft want more personality to it. It's soft. So I took some of your tendency taster barrel proof eye and poured it in there, made it really, really interesting.

Jeff (00:55:50):
Yeah.

Drew (00:55:50):
So that's kind of fun stuff that I don't know. You probably start seeing more of people becoming their own blenders and trying to

Jeff (00:55:58):
You were talking about the banana note, and that's one thing that's pretty common regardless of the grain deal from Jack Daniels. The yeast culture is very prevalent in the character of Jack Daniels. And of course getting started out, I can't immediately jump to a proprietary culture, but it's one of the things that Selmon gets talked about in whiskey Short of Four Roses telling you that they have five different ones, they have five different ones and two different rainbows. So they can create 10 different variants of whiskey just by working those across one another. But I was fortunate that one of the guys that worked with me at Jack Daniels, who was responsible for taking care of the yeast culture and had actually worked for Laman, for ethanol technologies, was developing yeast cultures for fuel ethanol plus beverage alcohol has decided to come with us. Nice. So he's the type that can basically set up a beehive and put little sweeps on the bees wings and capture yeast from east Tennessee and start to grow it up on a malt and see what kind of whiskey we make.

(00:56:58):
He's got that kind of skillset and you don't see that that very much. So when he said that he was wanting to come with me, I'm like, I want you to come with me too. Yeah. We're in violent agreement here. But anyway, to turn him loose and let him help us author a totally different, because most of your new whiskey brands don't have proprietary use cultures, you know, have a lot, even if they're varying the grain bills there's some kind of standard commercially available freeze-dried yeast most people are going to work from. So to me, why do I think our future may look different? It's going to be because we're going to go and do a lot of what the old brands have done, and there's the really old, big brands. That's one thing they all have in common pretty much, is that they all have their own proprietary yeast cultures and they've been around forever. But it gives them a signature of character that prevails everything they do. It doesn't matter if you change the grains, it doesn't matter if it's a high rye, if it's a low rye or if it's truly a rye, it's a malt. It tends to kind of push through the grains and give you a personality. A personality that's common. Yeah,

Drew (00:58:06):
Because that's the funny thing. The first time I tried the Jack Daniels ray, I'm like, the banana is still

Jeff (00:58:11):
There. It is. And it's like, it's different, but I know that's Chuck Ninos at the same time. Exactly.

Drew (00:58:16):
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. All right. So you're moving off and now running in a new direction with your own company instead of working in more of a corporate structure is the first thing in your mind in doing this is I have more freedom now to be able to, I don't have to go through a committee of, or you still sort of go through that because you have partners that you're working with. The decisions made now as to where you go versus how they were at Brown Foreman,

Jeff (00:58:48):
You know, have more freedom, but you've walked away from a lot of capabilities too. So as a small company, I don't want to have a cooperage that can make me barrels, but I can go and talk to 'em and try to get something made for me. But you've kind of lost leverage and absolute control over some parts of what you did. But everything was a negotiation at Jack Daniels. Not everything that I did I wanted to do. There were things I wanted to do, I didn't get to do. But in the new company we have to be realistic. We're a small company, so we can't just do anything and everything. We need to do the smart thing. But everybody's looking to me to be the author of Whiskey for us. So I came to them with a concept of what I had learned at Jack Daniels and different products that we'd come out with.

(00:59:30):
What were the successes and what were the things that were maybe good that could have been great if they were done a little bit differently? The one product I came back to in my mind was a 27 gold. It was not built for us consumers. It was largely designed to be an Asian for an Asian consumer where you needed basically, I would say they wanted to be whiskey drinkers, but realistically they did not have the tolerance for high proofs, but they were taking some of the most expensive whiskeys on the planet and putting tonics in 'em and stuff like that. And it's like, can we make them a neat drinker or drinker with the right placement of character and proof and everything? So if you look at the bottle it's obvious that it kind of targets the level of gold and the shade of it and everything kind of looks like Oriental Asian kind of flavor to it.

(01:00:20):
And it was very well received. But eventually it was like everybody in the US says, why are you shipping stuff out on Lynchburg to all these other countries and you're not giving us access to it. So you began to hear people complaining that it's like, I don't know anybody in that country who will mail me a bottle, but I want it. So eventually we made a decision, we'd at least release it into Tennessee. I watched people come off the tour and they would maybe scratch their head, look at it in the bottle shop. It was a hundred dollars bottle and that seemed expensive to 'em. But then they would take the tour, they would have a chance to try it. There'd be no hesitation. They would run into the bottle shop and they would snatch it up. It'd be the first bottle they would grab, and then they would start shopping around to see what else was in there.

(01:00:57):
But it was the one that rung their bell. But if I was being honest about it, the way the process was designed and the proof that it was wasn't really best for America. Like I said, 80 proof. It is just you need to be at least 90. Yeah. And that 27 goal was 80. I love toasted maple. So we were making a maple barrel. We toasting the inside of it, not charring it but Maple doesn't have the same retention ability of an oak. So if you spent five or six months in a maple barrel, you were going to bleed out angel share equivalent to five or six years of oak. So you basically had two barrels in you had 40 plus percent angel share on the product. So you were netting back very little of the starting liquid to make the product. So it became very expensive.

(01:01:43):
And I'm like, I think I could execute something like that to have those same characteristics of character, higher proof and make it much more affordable at the same time if we just designed the process. So I began to work on that at home in jars basically saying, can I get this right and trying to find the right basis for it too. Jack Dino is one of its signature things as being low and rye. It's a little bit sweeter in character. I didn't necessarily want to go all corn for the sweetness I had. I'd become more intrigued and almost had an admiration for the weed bourbons and how they had distinguished themselves as a higher end subset. And not everybody likes weed bourbon, especially if you like rye character, you're not going to like the wheat so much because they typically don't see a lot of fore grains and you substitute one for the other.

(01:02:32):
But I thought with Pappy Weller maker Mark Larceny had recently won the top the barrel Barrel proof. Yeah. With the barrel proof. So wheat did, were kind of consistently positioning himself in the upper shelf, slight premium to the rest of the category. And I'm like, and I like wheat too. And more importantly, wheat has a soft enough character that the Maplewood of this product could be a feature on it. So if I go big andry, it's going to be harder. They're going to compete and fight with one another. So I really like the soft initial character of a weeded bourbon for the Maplewood finishing. But it was interesting because we didn't necessarily go to all the sourced options that we had to design the product first. I had worked with a guy at out of our Cooperage in Louisville when I was at Jack Daniels. He was the plant manager there.

(01:03:24):
He had left round foreman and he started a company called Space Side Cooperage. So he is up in Jackson, Ohio. So I was like, know if I'm going to have a great product down the road, I'm going to have to have a great barrel, and I need to know what he can do what his capabilities are at this new place. So I connected with him. He said, please come and see us. I'd like to walk you through and I'll show you what we can do. I'd love to make a barrel for you. I'll do anything proprietary, a special barrel for you if you want it. So I took one of my partners. We went up there and we went through his facility and obviously taking great pride in making barrels. His barrels look like a finished piece of furniture, which you don't typically see in a lot of just commodity cooperage.

(01:04:01):
But he was taking it to a whole different level. And he had been in business for about three years and he had sold his services to a distillery that was maybe an hour down the road from him. So he created different toast and chars and they took one of their liquids and put it in there on this array. So we were able to sample a product at about three years old, and it was better than anything we had tried. Mm-hmm. Up to that point. So we're like, I don't even know the group, but I'm like, do you know think that they would talk about a new mate contract for us and do you know what kind of equipment that they have and all that? And he said, well, here's your contact. So I contacted them. So we ended up going to see them and just so happened that their equipment set was identical to what we were planning to put here in East Tennessee. So that made sense. So we can basically create a new make spirit there getting the right characteristics and basically be able to just replicate it here.

(01:04:53):
But ultimately in working with them, we decided we like before grain approach because you don't see many of those either. So we're starting off as this is a weedy bourbon. There's actually three different weedy bourbons in it, but we'll switch to a fore grain down the road. I'm not too worried about that conversion because if you like the product now, you're going to love it. When we hit that point this was our best representation of what we know we have coming and we're just trying to bridge ourselves to it. But so we're going to do a fore grain weeded bourbon and a proprietary barrel that's been produced by a friend of mine who used to make barrels for Jack Daniels. So I'm very confident about what we will be years down the road, but that's what defined us really is we're let's not let the path be determined by the first step we can take.

(01:05:42):
Let's go ahead and say this is who we want to be. Even though it may be four or five years down the road, this is the liquid that we envision for ourselves that we're going to be proud to put our name on, and then let's work backward in the process to get as close to that as we possibly can. But it'll just, but we know where the target is. So we're the arrow's close? So we have a period of time here that we're going to have to figure it out to get to it. This involved three different states, three different weeded bourbons. It could be four states on the next round, it could be five, it could be one. But what we're doing is we're basically creating an underlying character of spirit regardless of how many components that might take and making sure that the maple shines on it.

(01:06:26):
So that will define us. Now, the batch strength on this one was a 1 13, 1 14 range. It was beautiful. People have asked me about that because a lot of people like higher than 90 proof, they're real purists. And I'm like, I wouldn't hesitate to put out a one 14 if I just had glassware and labels and everything to support it. I have to be realistic at this point. We had liquid ready to go and we're waiting on labels and glassware because of all the pandemic related supply chain issues that we have right now. That was I, if you'd have told me a year ago, I would've had the liquid ready waiting on that stuff, I would've said, no

Drew (01:07:01):
Way. Yeah,

Jeff (01:07:02):
No way. That stuff's easy. Yeah, the liquid's going to be the hard part but no realist. What our path has been, our experience has been is that labels and corks and glassware are almost harder to come by the liquid and it's a competitive liquid market.

Drew (01:07:17):
So are you going to move to pot still or are you staying column still on in the future?

Jeff (01:07:22):
At the Alcoa facility, we're actually putting in both. Are you? Okay. So we'll have a 24 inch column that VE Dom's going to produce for us. We're going to put in a thousand gallon pot. The way this particular one was constructed, we're utilizing a little bit of each distillate. So you know, typically see either in scotch whiskey, it's all pot distilled. Most of your big American whiskeys, Colin distilled. Yeah, Irish whiskeys are the ones that tend to weave the two together to achieve a certain balance in mouth filled and cleanliness of character because each has its strengths. And I think actually maybe the strongest liquids actually utilize both. And that was not something I was able to do at Jack Daniels, but it was, once again, the freedom that came with starting my own company is I don't have to limit myself to just distilled stuff or just column distilled stuff. If it's good, it's good and if it's better together, which was the whole point of trying to put the linkage together. It's like it took us three to get to what we wanted but I won't limit it to one or the other. But clearly the largest volume will come off of a column still I think in small quantities, adds to character, mouth fill and stuff like that. But it also brings some other things that for a lot of American whiskeys are viewed as maybe slightly undesirable charact characteristics.

Drew (01:08:34):
So one of your partners is Heath Clark, and I've been to h Clark Distillery and he's got that beautiful fire run I guess onion still, I guess we call

Jeff (01:08:47):
It. He has an limbic steel and makes an award-winning gin on it without a gin basket. He does all of his botanicals in a macerated fashion, but he able to make, he makes a sort of a Guinness beer, like oatmeal stout beer that he distills into a whiskey <laugh> that's called black and tan. He was doing a four grain bourbon and we started playing around with it and there just wasn't enough volume of it to be nice to launch a new brand. But we did some maple finishing what we did on this. And it was fantastic. We kind of created some early of our launch cocktails and stuff like that. We wanted it to come from bottles that were part of our company and that was what we were limited to at the time. But it turned out that people absolutely loved it. But we've also kind of understand that if we're going to be like three, four different facilities scattered across the state of Tennessee OA is the better location to commit itself because it's got the space to store barrels and to handle the byproduct grains in and out Thompson station, since you've been there, it's really small.

(01:09:50):
I mean, he's barely over a thousand square feet but he's got a capable little steel there, the little engine that could, but we're going to focus it largely on gin and it would be very efficient to

Drew (01:10:02):
Do gin. So that still is not going away. No.

Jeff (01:10:05):
Okay.

Drew (01:10:05):
No that's fun to see the diversity there because traveling to all these different distilleries. Yeah, I think there's only two distilleries. I mean all over Scotland. There's no fire run stills, <laugh> two in the United States that I know of. There may be more, but that's one of the two. So that's really unique to

Jeff (01:10:26):
See. Well, and he's been at it a while. He was actually part of the contingent that came to Nashville and overturned the laws because you were limited. They're 95 counties in the state of Tennessee. Only three of them allowed distilling and he was in a county that didn't allow it. So he had to get some laws changed if he wanted to be a hobby distiller. So as a lawyer, he said he needed to be a distiller just to find honest work.

Drew (01:10:48):
So

Jeff (01:10:48):
He makes fun of himself on it, but it is a small world. Actually worked with two of his uncles at Jack Daniels.

Drew (01:10:55):
Oh, did you really? Okay.

Jeff (01:10:56):
Yeah, so his uncle Bill is actually the head engineer there. Yeah. And he said, I'm not sure how many years he's been there, probably 35 or 40. He's getting close to retirement age. I think he's nearly 70 now. But his other uncle Jerry was actually my programmer at the distillery. So he was a control specialist. And so when you go into Jack Daniels, you get on the mezzanine, they're on the platform and you see a lot of hand knobs and all analog gauges and stuff. And that's there simply because the distilleries on the National Register of Historic places. So you try to preserve the look and feel historically of all that stuff, but that's dead. None of that stuff's actually working. If you can glance into the control room, you'll see a tower of like 24 screens, like all these L e D screens and everything.

(01:11:38):
And from there they have 7,000 points of data flowing through <laugh>. So one operator can literally monitor the entire process of Jack Daniels, and if anything goes out of the normal range of expectations, it'll start to flash red. It'll pop that screen up. So it allows him to monitor more than they could really focus on with as one person. So it's just there to answer the alarms and also to communicate where they are in the schedule and the process. So they've got somebody out who's setting pipes to put in yeast mash and put in the mash cooks and stuff to set fermenters to drop them, to clean them, steam them between yeasts as they go through. But literally you can run that facility as big as it is with just a handful of people, man, very, very automated. But he's uncles two really talented people who've worked in the industry.

(01:12:23):
So Heath grew up running the grounds over there with his uncles, and that was part of his inspiration of wanting to get in the industry. But you didn't meet him through them. I met him through the guild. So there was a fight in the state of Tennessee over what Tennessee whiskey should mean and if it should have a law or a definition. So of course with Jack Daniels there had been a years and years of advertising about the benefits of charcoal mellowing and how Tennessee whiskeys were different than bourbon. So Jack Daniels had an interest to see that preserved, and we would've thought George Dickel would as well, because if you looked at all of their advertising since the 1950s it would be talking about the same thing. So there was a common agreement about what a Tennessee whiskey was because two brands decided what it was.

(01:13:08):
Then all of a sudden you had the laws changed. Now you can distilling 75, 80 counties and all these old distillery start to pop up. So it's like now it's time to talk about it. If we want to have a Tennessee whiskey law or not, a definition by which we'll all operate and agree to preserve that title and it to mean something to the consumer. Kentucky had to do the same thing. Bourbon is federally defined, right? Saying you can make it. Everybody thinks that all bourbon comes from Kentucky. No, 95% of it does, or 90% probably at this point. But to be a Kentucky bourbon's got to be made in Kentucky. But a bourbon can be made in any of the 50 states. It just has to be a product of America. It's got to be 51% corn. It's still below one 60 maturity in a new chart, Oak Barrel.

(01:13:51):
And no more than 1 25 proof has to be bottled at no less than 80. If it's anything less than two years, or excuse me, anything less than four years, it has to have an aid statement. If it's at least two years, you can call it a straight yes. So that's the laws of bourbon. But Kentucky went in at the state level and said, this is what a Kentucky straight bourbon is, and you can't just put it in a tanker and run it by 65 and call it Kentucky Bourbon cause it rolled across Kentucky soil. It needs to have some native origin things beyond that because they didn't want people ripping off the state's name. Well, with no investment,

Drew (01:14:22):
I was going to say, I was just recently doing some history research on Duffy's Piermont whiskey, and in Rochester, New York, they used to make what was called Kentucky Raider. So it's not from Kentucky, but they were using the Kentucky name back in the 19th century,

Jeff (01:14:38):
And that's the one that you can reference. But there was a lot of that going on where people were trying to rip off their reputation of Kentucky with no investment in Kentucky. And Kentucky's like, this doesn't serve Kentucky and we need to have a law to protect it. And I felt like Tennessee was in a similar position. It had a reputation for making great whiskeys and spirits, and it had a distinct statement of process that was unique. So that's kind of what formed the guild. There was no guild, but everybody who had a DSP that I was aware of that I could get a phone number for, I just started making phone calls. We would like to pass a law and I don't want you to hear from the newspapers or to be surprised about it. I want you to understand why we would like to do it, what we'd like to do, make sure that this wouldn't harm you in any way.

(01:15:22):
And so we can craft the language so that it doesn't hurt you. We want to make sure we're taking that into consideration. So I end up calling about, I don't know, 6, 7, 8 different distilleries because those are the ones I could get numbers for. But ultimately when this started coming to a head, were in, the legislative session was in the law was being kind of pushed through. There were negotiations going on around If there was one person who had put out a product that was called Tennessee Whiskey, he had not mellowed it. He asked to be grandfathered out of the law. We allowed that. We were like, cause we didn't want to harm him. We tried to get him to change his label. We tried to get him to change the process. We were willing to pay to change his labels. We were willing to put in the mellowing vat if because he didn't understand the technology and he wasn't sure what it was going to do.

(01:16:08):
We're like, well, we can help you. We've got an r d department, we'll share all that with you. But at the end of the day, he just decided he didn't want to do it. And we're like, that's fine but it's more important that the rest of the industry can hold hands on it. I don't think anybody's worried about what you might do, but let's not have 40, 50 distilleries completely rewriting history. So ultimately that's what got us all together, got us talking, and then we began to realize this is probably the first of many things we need to talk about. So why don't we just start meeting on a routine basis, at least quarterly. Let's talk about the things that are good about being in Tennessee that are not good about being in Tennessee. What are the laws? What are the things that are handcuffing you and preventing you from being successful? So ultimately, I didn't become a part of that at first because there was sort of a thought that the Guild was really more about the artisan small distillers. They didn't want the Igo and brown foreman to be a part of it. These were the ones that were like people had their homes mortgaged to buy steel but ultimately I think they decided that we would have a more authoritative voice. People would be more likely to hear us if we could bring in the big ones.

Drew (01:17:10):
The big guys. Well, there had to be shocked that you were reaching out to them initially, I would imagine.

Jeff (01:17:15):
Well, and I did under my own agenda. And a lot of the things that we did for the Guild, they either were irrelevant to Jack Daniels or we were neutral on 'em. But at the same time, we began to realize if it's good for the industry, even though we're not going to take advantage of it and stuff, we should support it. So just to be a good team player. So a lot of what I was doing, I was voted in as the vice president, one of my partners was the president at the time, Heath was on the board. So three of us who were part of company Distilling were all board members on the Guild. And that's how our relationship developed. We were just hearing everyone out, working on what was good for the industry to grow and make it easier for people to hire people to become a tourism destination and stuff like that. All the benefits that we saw our industry to provide, it's like how do we make that easier so that Tennessee is an attractive place to invest and the people who've already made the investment that money's well placed.

(01:18:14):
But that's what got us all together. It was that now that obviously there're going to be a bunch of us, we need to talk, not show up in Nashville and fight it out in the hallways because the politicians are not going to like that. If we can show up and knock at their door at a scheduled time and we can come with one unified voice about what we need and there's no arguing among us about that. Yeah, we're much more likely. So we went after 11 pieces of legislation, we got them all passed, which, so we bated a thousand over about a three or four year period and it fixed the worst things. But

Drew (01:18:49):
This had to take a step up, I think because my understanding is that there were really two phases of this. One was getting into about 44 counties, and then it was opening it up to the whole

Jeff (01:19:00):
State. So as I understand it there were only three counties that were allowing distilling. So Moore County, where Jack Daniels was Lincoln County allowed it. There were no distilleries there, even though they were allowing it up until 1995. And that would be when Phil Pritchard moved from Memphis, from Shelby County over, he was trying to open up a distillery in Shelby County and they wouldn't even hear him. And that was, even though his brother-in-law was ex-governor Winfield Dunn. So, but he couldn't get it done. So he ended up moving to Lincoln County to open up. And then also Coffee County allowed it, which is where George Dickel was okay to Cascade Hollow. And then they basically just changed the laws and said, if you had ever voted by referendum for liquor by the drink, if you're allowing drinking, then you now by default allow manufacturing. So that was how it got positioned. So they were basically saying, obviously there's an acceptance of alcohol, so let the county make it too. But there were still counties that were dry. So those are the ones I think that got omitted out of that. So out of the 95 counties, I think it's like 75, 80 of them maybe. Okay. So there's still some small counties that would be illegal or you'd have to go and get a voter's referendum together to get it changed.

(01:20:16):
But that's of the things, of course, we had a very called pro business governors who were trying to support businesses and growth and stuff like that. And one of the things that they're most worried about is I think there's 21 counties out of the 95 in Tennessee that are considered to be distressed counties. They don't have any major industry, they don't have tourism there's just no prospects for them. They're located too far away from interstates and infrastructure and things of that nature. But distilleries have proven that you can put 'em in fairly remote places. Of course. And you

Drew (01:20:48):
Can, brushy Mountain is a good example

Jeff (01:20:50):
And you can create destinations out. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And a lot of times these distressed counties, what you do have are family farms and you can operate off their grains. So you can basically create a very local field where basically farmers have a place to sell grains. You're converting the grains into something that has high value, that creates tourism. So you're creating jobs, you're creating a magnet for people to come out into these, I'd say off the beaten path type location. So I think that was one of the ways that we got a lot of support among the politicians. It's like you say you want to be pro-business and stuff like that. You want to be business friendly in the state of Tennessee. Well, this law would allow these 20 counties that you're all worried about to potentially take some of these delict old buildings and create a business in, yeah, create, create jobs, create a reason for people who are passing through the state to stop and spend some money, spend some time and enjoy the state.

Drew (01:21:42):
I think what Kentucky did that I don't think a lot of people realized, and I know Tennessee's done the same thing, is to limit the amount of alcohol that can be served at tours. Because the first question I had when I started planning out a distillery tour of Kentucky was, well, how do I keep myself from drinking and driving? Because for some reason they always give you the whiskey at the end of the tour. Whereas part of me thinks if you gave it at the beginning of the

Jeff (01:22:08):
Tour, you'd have time to work it off. Maybe

Drew (01:22:09):
You could walk it off. But that they can't serve you more than a shot's worth of whiskey if they give you eight samples, they can't go over that amount, which will fit within the state's guidelines for blood alcohol level if you go from one area to the other. And I think this is great because it's really opened up the ability for people to visit multiple distilleries in the day and be able to make that the focus of a trip.

Jeff (01:22:40):
And of course, we didn't have to worry about it so much at in Lynchburg because it was

Drew (01:22:45):
Nowhere.

Jeff (01:22:46):
It was the middle of nowhere or an hour and a half from anywhere else. There were no other distilleries around us at the time. So whatever we served was what they were going to get. So when we set up the tastings, at first it was like, well, if we want to sample them across six products, so it's like we have the high end tour, we have the standard tour. There might be a little bit of overlap on a couple of the products that are sort of in the middle. But if you're a new drinker, if you're a really mature drinker, these are the two tours that you might be most interested in. So you kind of direct them. But if you serve quarter ounce samples, that's enough to taste, you do six of those. You've basically, across those six samples, you've given people one cocktail.

(01:23:28):
And for most people, their tolerance would be that they would still have a blood alcohol, they shouldn't be impaired to drive. So we kind of capped it. But we also, as the Distiller's Guild, we went back and we agreed on each variant, the amount you could serve of that, because it became more of a problem where you had a high density Chattanooga, Nashville, well really the Burg and on the That's so true. So literally there's one spot you could stand on the parkway and you could see at least four different distillery locations that all serve samples. So for them to coordinate together to kind of create a passport where you couldn't drink six here, then drink six there, then drink six there, and then drink six there. And it's like, well, if you did that, if did that in the span of about 45 minutes, you probably don't need to drive and you may not even be able to walk straight.

(01:24:21):
So to protect people from themselves trying to coordinate and figure out how do you limit that. But it's always been a concern. But if you look at it, the distilleries have proven themselves to be extremely responsible on how they serve, regardless of how they've each kind of come up with a process. I want to say there was, I forgot what the number was. There was 2 million, 3 million tastings done across the distilleries. They only had three violations. If you look at that rate of overserving or whatever of illegal sales the distilleries prove themselves to be much better than a restaurant where a retail license account or LBD would be. And part of that is if you have a violation as a manufacturer, they can shut your operation down for two weeks. So you take it pretty seriously. Yeah. Cause it's your livelihood there. If a restaurant couldn't sell drinks for a couple weeks, they'd probably still serve food. They'll be fine. Yeah, it'd be an inconvenience, right. At most. So for those people who are worried what we've shown is that we take it seriously, that we've come up with processes that we do our very best to never serve underage people to overserve any individual we give them. And what our philosophy will be because we'll, our first place that people will be able to taste our product across the range will be over in Townsend here in East Tennessee.

(01:25:45):
Well, we've told the people of the community is that we're going to give people enough that it's educational, but it's a try before you buy. Yeah. We're not trying to get people lit. Yeah. But it's like it's a natural curiosity. It's like you got three products over here, four products. Is there a way for me to sample those so I can at least make an informed purchase purchase? Right,

Drew (01:26:03):
Right.

Jeff (01:26:03):
Yeah. Okay. So that way you'll feel good about it. You're not having to buy it blind. So that's what our commitment will be, is that the only tastings that we're going to do are about that. It's about education, about informed purchase. But people just to sit there and just try all the samples they want to, yeah, that's not going to happen. Yeah, that's not good for them and that's not good for us.

Drew (01:26:24):
So we'll talk a little bit about the locations that you're going to do, because this is a bigger operation than just a distillery. Yes. That's being built. But first talk about how you all came together. Okay. Who's on the team and how you all decided to move forward with this as

Jeff (01:26:42):
A group? So the three people who have distillery experience who are part of company are myself, of course, coming from Jack Daniels, Heath Clark, who already mentioned, who has an operation about 30 minutes or so south of Nashville at Thompson Station notable gin producer, but also bourbon and some whiskeys. Our other partner is Chris Tatum. So he served as the president of the Tennessee Distillers Guild, and he, through a construction company, had started to build some of the small distilleries around East Tennessee. So they, as a construction company, became aware and familiar with how the equipment lays out. And they were doing that type of work. Well, they had the old mill restaurant there in Pigeon Forge, and they decided to buy an old building beside it, and they built Old Forge Distillery.

(01:27:25):
So a lot of what Old Forge does is more in the flavor space because that's what prevails of course in East Tennessee. So we were all friends. So Chris Heath and I working on legislation, a lot of times you had to trust one another. Yeah, it's very sensitive information. Even not everybody in the guild was being told some of the stuff, because sometimes it's like if somebody says something that's going to blow up on us, but we had to trust one another with some sensitive information. And through that friendship Screw Trust grew. We also had decided as a guild that it was good for us to do festival events where we would really celebrate Tennessee spirits, but invite distillers all over the state to come. And that we would try to find in East Tennessee and Middle Tennessee and West Tennessee, an event where we show up in number and we really celebrate the history of the state.

(01:28:15):
So one of the first groups that came to us was in Blunt County, which is where we are now here Merrillville Towns and Alcoa area. And they pitched us this concept called Grains and Grits Festival, where they were going to invite some of the nice restaurants around here to serve sort of their signature dishes. But it would be a tent of where you can try Spirit and then you can try a food item, and then you can try Spirit, you can try food item. So you can just walk around the grounds and sample food and spirit. So it was a great event. But Blunt County was basically hosting this event with no distilleries. They had also reached out to us and they had money to spend for tourism, and they believed in what we were doing. So they helped us print vacation guides and stuff like that on their expense.

(01:28:58):
And through that we just said, they're a great group of people and it's a shame they don't have a distillery. And I think they kind of knew that that was the relationship, the magnet that they were kind of building for it too. So as we all were talking to one another, and it's like, you know, got somebody who knows flavored spirits, you got somebody who's obviously an expert gin maker. I know a lot about whiskey making together. We could be more than a single brand. We could be multiple sites, we could be multiple disciplines. We could become the best of Tennessee, we called it. But creating houses of expertise with what we know. So do we want to do that? Are we willing to take the chips that we have and pull them back and then throw 'em all in together and play a new hand as a unit?

(01:29:39):
So that's what we decided to do. So for me, it was an opportunity. I'm 54 years old so I plan to work another 10 or 15. And I know whiskey is, it's, it's going to be a process. It, it'll take me a good five or 10 years I think, to establish the brand. But to me that seemed like a more enjoyable way to spend that last chapter than just continuing to do what I was doing at Jack Daniels. I was just to trust myself to trust this group of people that I've become really close and good friends with. And I will tell you this from me personally, I'll always miss the people of Lynchburg. I can't say enough good things about them. The confidence that they showed in me, the effort that they gave me, the great products all the time I'll always miss 'em. My brother-in-law still works there and many of my friends do.

(01:30:25):
But I found myself when I was considering leaving that that was the thing I was most excited about. And I just had to be honest with myself and thank God my wife said, I get it, and I believe in you too, so let's go do it. And she's actually going to be actively involved in the company too. She wants to run the store and she loves to order merchandise and stuff like that. So she's going to play a role for us as well down the road. But in envisioning having these locations, we love Townsend. For people who aren't familiar with Townsend, there's only three ways to get into the great Smokey Mountains national Park. You can come through Cherokee, North Carolina, you can go through Gatlinburg. Those are the two heavily traveled, the two ways I've been. Yeah. And the two hard ways to get in where it's a parking lot of cars trying to get in and out, and very frustrating and not always a relaxing vacation way.

(01:31:14):
But the least used of those is the Townsend entrance and it's the one that's closest to Cade's Cove. So if your interest is going and seeing wildlife, if you're trying to see bears and stuff, that's where you're most likely to see 'em in the mornings in Kate's Cove. So even though we're the least used of the entrances into the national park, we still have about two and a half million cars driving <laugh> in that entrance. So we're like, that's a huge opportunity for Townsend. But Townsend had its limitations to, it didn't have natural gas, it didn't have us municipal sewer, so we had to envision something there that could operate with those restrictions. So electric boiler. So we all are going to have electricity and we have to process everything through a septic tank or have some type of holding tank and just pay the expenses having hauled away. So that became an important part, of course of that'll be our first location here. But we also understood that we do have to have natural gas. We do have to have a municipal sewer if we want to have a larger facility, and we're going to need some municipal infrastructure. So we found an old brick plant that was also here in Blunt County.

(01:32:16):
This old brick plant dates back to 19 19, 19 20. Actually, the town of Alcoa was found in 1919, so same year as prohibition. So Alcoa was formed when the nation went dry and this brick plant was, they basically made brick to build the plant. And of course, Alcoa is a big aluminum plant. So they had figured out how to using electricity to stick probes down in the box site and basically melt the aluminum out of it. Once that happened, then all these facilities started to open up around here. The hydro power was what the attraction was of this area because there's rivers and things here where they could generate power affordably.

(01:33:00):
So it's kind of cool that this old brick plant still stands. It's got to be one of the oldest buildings in the entire town and our intention is to repurpose it into a barrel storage facility. The fact that it dates back to prohibition is, oh yeah, just a fun fact. Nice tie in. Yeah. But there was 31 acres there, and it had been largely untouched. So when they shut it down as a brick plant, I think it was back in the forties or fifties they converted it over to livestock. So there were a couple livestock bins there. It's right on the Pistol Creek. So Creek runs the entire length of the property. So that was a place to water. There's the trees still stand there, and a lot of that area kind of got just site cleared when they took down one section of the plant.

(01:33:38):
So there's a large development just north of us over there, plant mix, use retail luxury apartments, single family homes and stuff like that. There's a massive housing shortage. So there's plans to I think put at least three or 400 homes. They're adjacent to us. But we were able to, before the bulldozers came through and knocked everything down, we were able to grab that piece of property. It's 31 acres, like I said, with the creek, with the greenway. So they've done a really nice job. They're connecting a bike path from Knoxville all the way to the national park. Oh wow, okay. So you can basically be able to ride a bike without having to get in the dangers of a road but connecting all these side sidewalks and things. So it wraps three sides of us. So our intention would be to adjacent to where the brick plant is, we'll store barrels there, we'll build our main facility on there.

(01:34:27):
So that'll be the home of company distilling all the whiskeys and bourbons that we do. And then of course, we are working on towns and we're actually headed there next week to go through and think about the reorganization of that facility how we would brand it. We want to expand the cocktail opportunities that it has, maybe look at its hours of operation. There's a nice neighborhood that's being built adjacent to it, so it becomes the opportunity to kind of serve as a local pub to the people there. It's getting a lot of tourism. The Tennessee Whiskey Trail that we worked on is obviously working I think in Williamson County. We've got Lepers Fork and Tom and Thompson Station or H Car Distillery. Most people visit them as a pair. Yeah. Yeah. So I did

Drew (01:35:10):
Same

Jeff (01:35:11):
Day. And it's very easy to do, if you're in Nashville, you can easily hit both facilities and very different look and feel to each of those facilities. So you can begin to sense some of the diversity that it's not in Kentucky, it's all bourbon here. It's a lot of stuff. And that's one thing about Tennessee is it's not just whiskey. So that became one of our early taglines when we first formed the Tennessee Whiskey Trail, was that it's all whiskey, even if it's not, we call it the Tennessee Whiskey Trail, but you'll go to some facilities that just do gin, they just do flavors and stuff like that. So not everybody makes whiskey, but we're like, what? It's all whiskey.

Drew (01:35:46):
It's just fascinating because when I was doing my travels around Kentucky, you got used to sort of a formula and you could go to Jack Daniels and George Dickel and you would get the same thing sort of formula. But then when I started making my way across Tennessee, I'm like, can just wander into a place and the master distiller is coming out the chat with you and take you on. Well, let me just show you around a little bit. And I think Kentucky's starting to realize some of that now because they're opening up all those western Kentucky distilleries. And I think part of the challenge for Tennessee, I think at one point was that, you know, could go to Gatlinburg and there were a bunch of 'em, a few there you go to Nashville. Originally there were just a couple, but now it's starting to build out.

(01:36:35):
So you could find your little centers, Chattanooga, Memphis is just out there all by itself kind of thing. But now, you know, can with Kentucky, there's this opportunity to take day trips out to these other areas. And yes, you'll have to do a little driving between each, but if you drive out I 40, there's three distilleries on the way that you can get on your way to Memphis now or Head South. And there there's more down that way as well. What's interesting about East Tennessee is that there are whiskey distilleries in the East, but there's not really a larger whiskey distillery in the East.

Jeff (01:37:14):
Our entry into East Tennessee will be a game changer. I would describe it if you look, because most of them now, even though they may be marketing some whiskey products, many of them are established, they're in high traffic locations and they're a storefront that has a still in the back corner, but a very small footprint operations we're similar to what we're going to be doing in Townsend. Like I said, the limitations of infrastructure there really dictate that regardless of our desire, what we would like to do there, it's like we got to be realistic that there's not enough support there to get it done. But when you come to oaa, it's going to feel much more like you're say a maker's mark, where you have a lot of trees on the grounds where you have pathways where you can go from building to building. It'll feel much more like the Kentucky Jack Daniels experience because we've got 31 acres to wander with a creek through it Pires property. So we, we've actually been going through in our minds and trying to figure out how to develop the property in a thoughtful way. But we definitely want to preserve as much of the tree canopy that's naturally there. Cause there's close to us, there's not a lot of trees. Like I said, a lot of that got knocked down or it was occupied by a 40, 50 acre plant site and they just had to go through and bulldoze all that.

Drew (01:38:23):
So we have food and that sort of thing as

Jeff (01:38:26):
Well. We will have a restaurant in Alcoa for sure. We'll have a light food service for Townsend. And simply because the footprint of the building's pretty small. So we plan to put a small service kitchen in it, but we don't want people drinking without the opportunity to put something in their belly food wise. So we've been talking to one of the local companies that kind of specializes in that, where with a small oven you can create 10, 12 different items that are all pretty filling and are universally liked. Yeah. So we'll have a small menu where people, if they're there and have a couple of cocktails and say, yeah, I really don't want to leave out here without putting something in my stomach. You can do it.

Drew (01:39:04):
And then

Jeff (01:39:05):
Tom Station, we need to work through that. Right now we don't have a plan to put a restaurant there, but there's a restaurant beside it. The Circle restaurant beside Heath Clark's facility there is owned by the mayor and actually excellent food. I've been there a couple of times and I was really impressed.

Drew (01:39:19):
Such a small facility. Yeah,

Jeff (01:39:21):
It is The Elk Grand re building. Yeah, there's a lot of history there. So we want to preserve some of the history if we're going to stay in that location. We don't want to completely change its, it's character and stuff, but clearly I'd love to have a little bit more space on the roof over there. So we, that's part of what we're going to try to sort through. If we get it really well organized. It don't have anything more in the building than we absolutely have to have. Yeah. Is it big enough?

Drew (01:39:43):
That's

Jeff (01:39:44):
The question that we have to answer,

Drew (01:39:45):
But you'll still do tours there and do tours at Alcoa?

Jeff (01:39:49):
We'll do tours at all locations.

Drew (01:39:51):
At all locations.

Jeff (01:39:52):
At all locations. So actually, like I said, we have about seven, eight acres I guess that we could build on. We have a small house behind where we're building in towns and I would actually like to make it more of a place where v i p media or people want to do more of a sit down type of tasting experience, get more education to create that in the house. And it's got a beautiful view of the little river. It's got a deck that overlooks it. So really special spot there on the water where we could allow people to do a deeper dive into our brand there. We'll clearly we're actually thinking about doing a complete whiskey university complex for Alcoa because we're actually taking the process of beer making and distilling and merging them together. So our distillery's not going to look like what most distilleries look like. It's going to look much cleaner, more sanitary because you have to be when you're a brewer. So a lot of distillers get by with open air vessels and stuff like that because when you distill it, you kill it.

(01:40:59):
But the friend of mine that's come with me from Jack Daniels he, he's an expert beer maker and we've been talking about how we could play those processes together with basically some common equipment that we could be kicking some into a brewery and some over to the distillery and we can share stuff back and forth, do some barrel aged beers and just kind of play around on that platform. But most people don't do this. It's a little bit more expensive way to do it, but in a perfect world, I think most distillers would tell you that you could clean up the fermentation side of the operation and control bacteria a little bit better than they actually attempt to do. But it would be more costly to do it. But we're like, yeah, we can

Drew (01:41:35):
Do that. I was just say, why not pump part driving up the Lexington is going to town branch because they do have a brewery on one side and they, so you can go through, do a sample of a little beer over here and then you can sample a little bit of whiskey over here. So it's all cylinders.

Jeff (01:41:52):
So we actually have spent this week talking to the company. So we've got the process flow chart. So there's a brewery design company out of Germany that have never done this before but using a lot of proprietary equipment that they use we've kind of been able to figure out what it can do and we know what we need the distillery side of that to do. So we've kind of started putting 'em together in our own board to do it. So everything between pretty much grains coming into the building and feeding a beer well, but still they're going to integrate together as a single package for us and engineer it and put all the controls on it. That was one of the things I really like. I see a lot of benefit in not having a dozen different vendors and contractors and try to put their equipment together regardless of what they say its capabilities are.

(01:42:37):
They'll start pointing fingers at one another and say, the reason my equipment doesn't perform is because the stuff upstream or downstream is not feeding me or backing me up. I really want that to be an integrated package. I just, I've, if I've learned nothing else in 30 years of manufacturing, is get with good people and simplify everywhere you can. So this should be some nice clean break points. I know Vindo and how capable their equipment is, they're, what they say it'll do is what it's going to do. The grain stuff is a lot simpler than anything that we do. Fermentation grows. So let's just get to one company who can do it all.

Drew (01:43:08):
Yeah. Nice. So I have to ask a question because it's an interesting name for it is a company <laugh> to call it company. So where did the name come from?

Jeff (01:43:22):
We had a lot of different names. We were talking about names that we liked where everybody was pitching it and throwing it around. I would say that none of them were ones that we just absolutely loved. And one of our partners had worked with a branding company out of Colorado and said, I think it would be worthwhile. We need to get that right. It needs to be something that we're all passionate about, feel good about. But I can probably take us through a process. So actually it was grains and grits, not this past year, but the year before that we invited them in to meet all the team members and they spent three or four days with us. They did individual interviews, they just saw the team dynamic but they just came and just kind of hung out with us. And then they went back to Colorado and they came back to us and said, this is what was compelling about you guys. And they started to spin some names out of that and say, these are names that we think make sense. And I would tell you when this name first came up, at first I was kind of like

(01:44:21):
<laugh> the Wrinkle on my nose. I'm kind of really

Drew (01:44:24):
The company. Company.

Jeff (01:44:25):
Yeah. Yeah. We're company, company. But then all of a sudden it was a bolt of lightning and I'm kind of like, no, not company,

Drew (01:44:33):
Company. Like people

Jeff (01:44:35):
When my mom said, go clean up your room, we got company coming over to me. That's what it is. And you are, you're judged by the company. You need to choose. Well, and this was during a pandemic where people were much less likely to gather with people and you had to look around the room and say, who's worth getting the virus over? Do you matter enough if you're on the cusp? If I just barely you, I'll see you a year or two from now. Yeah. But if you really matter to me, I don't care if you're sick, come on over. I miss you. I want to see you. So I think it kind of forced people. I think there's a whole new appreciation for the opportunities that we have together with people

Drew (01:45:12):
Gathering. Yes,

Jeff (01:45:12):
Absolutely. So that gather around became a central thing. It's gather around good company and I think there's some even scriptural type stuff. There is that iron sharpens iron. If you gather with good people, they'll build you up, they'll make you better. And not, they don't have to, but you need to find people that do. Yeah. Well you could get rid of the toxic people in your life and take a couple of swigs of that and figure out who the toxic people are and who are the good people and make sure you, you're deliberate and spending quality time with them. So that's kind of became a mantra. It was part of our story is that we enjoyed one of those company and through the conversations that we had working at Individual different distillers we're like, we would be stronger. We really work well together and we would be stronger together. So let's do it. Yeah.

Drew (01:46:01):
So where do you see this bottle sitting on a store shelf? Is it top shelf, mid shelf?

Jeff (01:46:08):
Well, the suggested price on it puts it like 55, 60 bucks in the state of Tennessee. So clearly it's not going to be bottom shelf. I would where I have seen it placed and I think it kind of makes sense to place that there is, if they carry the number 27 goal, it was sort of inspired by that. And I had some say in how that product went and clearly all the say in how this one went. So I don't mind being adjacent to, I was expected to be near a single barrel, a higher something that people are expecting to drink. Neat. It's not a cheap mixing type product, even though I think it makes great cocktails and we, we've proven that with the product but this is something that you can pour eat, and even people who aren't necessarily whiskey drinkers, they'll go, wow, that is really good. And I can't believe that's shiny proof. I mean, we've seen a lot of people that are posted on social media who are letting us know they've gotten a bottle and how it went for 'em. And the one common thing that we see is that the bottle, they go through it much quicker.

Drew (01:47:07):
<laugh>

Jeff (01:47:08):
Gone too soon. Yeah, yeah. It's just smooth. It really

Drew (01:47:12):
Is. It's a bottled kill bottle.

Jeff (01:47:14):
It is. And it's easy to go through. That bottle didn't last near as long as I thought it would. Yeah. I'm back to buy another And of course we love to hear that. Yeah. Is that, not only did you like that verse bottle, but you liked it enough that you want another,

Drew (01:47:28):
So are you just Tennessee right now or are you

Jeff (01:47:30):
We're j we're, yes. So we've chosen a distributor here and that distributor also carries the state of Georgia. And since it's close and we're a small company, it's easy because we would want to provide some product support, get out and educate and stuff like that. So it would be easy enough for us to expand into Georgia. And we are thinking that we can do that in the next couple of months, maybe three months. So after that we're probably going to start looking around the southeast, we'll just kind of like it's a pebble on the water, we'll just start to figure out how those ripples should go. But there's some attractive markets for us for sure. If you look at surrounding Georgia and Tennessee Florida, because there's population there's a lot of people who like brown spirits down there, even with their warm climate, it bourbons do well down there. Illinois does well Texas does well. So you can look at it and say, Hey, if we were going to expand beyond Georgia and Tennessee, maybe those three states make sense, but we don't know for sure yet. But we are beginning to look at what makes the most sense because we can't go to all 50 states all at once. Supply chain wouldn't support that or nor

Drew (01:48:37):
Would three tier system does know you need to get heat working on getting the three tier system a relic, a prohibition out.

Jeff (01:48:46):
I would say we have thought that there were, there are things in the three tier system that aren't even necessarily controlling liquid but they fight tooth and toenail for it. They don't even want your branded like POS point of sale stuff to be distributed directly by you as a manufacturer. They want it all to flow through them. And it's like, but it's not alcohol. And the reason you will hear that is a lot of the smaller distillers would say that they've basically created budgets for that and they go and look in the stores and none of their stuff is there. If you spend 20,000, $30,000 on popups, cardboard cutouts and displays and stuff like that, you want to see all of those in a store somewhere. You don't want to see 'em dusty in the back of a warehouse, get hit by forklifts. And they never even went out in the stores because you just, that's a lot of money to try to swallow.

(01:49:39):
So there's been some rows, but I would tell you so far the distributor we've chosen here for the state of Tennessee they love the brand. They see the potential in it. I think they felt honored that we chose them. My only desire was from a distribution standpoint is I would love to stay away from Jack, just for obvious reasons. I don't want any split loyalties there. So I'm, I'm going to do my best to go to the distributor. Who wishes they had Jack Daniels and I'm the Constellation Prize. Yeah, <laugh> nice in that scenario. Yeah. But what we've seen is that great passion great execution. So yeah, I really trust the group that we've chosen to take Georgia they also do Colorado but we feel like Colorado doesn't make sense. It's so far away from everything else. But they would be an option when we got to out to the west to potentially use them again.

Drew (01:50:27):
Sooner or later you're going to, you'll spread across the US and well

Jeff (01:50:31):
Of course we were having a sidebar conversation about Uncle Nears only in four years. They were all 50 states. Yeah, that's a amazing, I know now I know they've struggled too. They've gone off the shelf. And a lot of them, it's just because supply chain has crippled them. It wasn't that there was a lack of interest or sales, it's just getting the product out there. So we want to do our best to not gap out like that. And we recognize that they probably weren't foreseeing this years ago. That would be so hard to get glassware and labels and stuff as an established brand. But I know it definitely delayed our startup. We thought we would have product in market months before we did. But most importantly, when it did arrive on the shelf, it looked good and it tasted good. And we're feeling good about the standing that we have right now.

Drew (01:51:14):
Well, it's kind of good in the way that you can have time to get yourself established here in the area and then when the time comes that you can get out there everywhere else, you'll have your hopefully supply chain issues will be solved and the markets, you'll be able to hit each one at its own time.

Jeff (01:51:37):
Yeah. What's great about Townsend is in these two and a half million cars that pass through about where our facility will be that's part of 12, 13 million people. I think sometimes. I think they reported all the way up to think almost 15 million people visit the national park. It's the most visited national park in the country. And those people come from a lot of different states because half the US population is a day's drive on Smokey Mountains. That's why it's so heavily visited, because all the other national parks are out west and they're in unpopulated areas.

(01:52:10):
But we feel like that's a strength for us. Cause people will get introduced to the brand just simply because they passed through on their vacation. So they're going to get a chance to see us there. Nashville has become the bachelorette capital of the world, so bachelorette parties and stuff here down there. So having a presence in Nashville if what we want is great acceptance and we feel like we will get great acceptance if we can get women to look at company, that may be their go-to. On the Brown Spirit side I think it's very approachable. Wasn't designed specifically for women, but my wife loves it. It's got a nice, that's one data point.

Drew (01:52:44):
It's got a nice elegant bottle as well. And the logo kind of

Jeff (01:52:49):
Well did, I'll tell you this, one of the things that we were looking at, we looked at a lot of different brands that have launched and stuff like that. For whatever reason, a lot of people, even though they're a brand new brand, they try to make their label look like they're a hundred years old and they put so much script and wording on it that it's like you don't even know who they are or what they're about. We just wanted to keep it kind of contemporary and clean. Well, I felt, of course, I know for people who follow me through Jack Daniels, the most important thing that I would have is my name on the front of it. So they know that this is the one that I'm left to do. But yeah, we tried to keep it as simple as possible, but to communicate something that's elegant and tasteful and hopefully the package communicates the liquid that's inside it really well.

(01:53:31):
That was the other thing you were asking about the company name, the same company that helped us figure out what was the most compelling thing about us as a group of people and as a company also helped us with the design of the package. And we'll have a couple of more rollouts of different products that we're going to do that they also did. And I think equally they hit those out of the park. They, they've become great friends of ours over the last year or so. Yeah. Really close to us. And they feel like they've been on this journey with us. So I think if anything is they're kind of winding down their services, I think they kind of sense that they're really going to miss us. Yeah. And I'll miss them too. You have to have thick skin running this group. We tend to not be easy on one another. And you constantly poking and jabbing. They're in it. Yeah. So when they come, they're not off limits. It

Drew (01:54:22):
Feels like you have a bunch of it's the New York Yankees of the 1970s. You bring all these people who have established themselves at other places and then all of a sudden you're all having to learn how to work together. That can be quite interesting. Yeah. So fantastic.

Jeff (01:54:39):
But yeah, if you wear the wrong hat or shoes or shirt you, you're

Drew (01:54:43):
Asking, you could hear about it, you're

Jeff (01:54:44):
Going to ask. Yeah, you're asking for it.

Drew (01:54:45):
Very nice. Well, Jeff, I appreciate you going through, of course, the background on Jack Daniels, how you came up and introducing us to your brand new project, which I think this is it's fantastic. And look forward to seeing how far you guys take this. And who knows, maybe when I'm traveling over in Ireland and Scotland, I'll see Jim Beam, Jack Daniels and company.

Jeff (01:55:12):
Yeah,

Drew (01:55:13):
There you

Jeff (01:55:14):
Go. Hey, it's something to shoot for, right?

Drew (01:55:15):
Yeah, absolutely. <laugh>. Very good. Well thank you Jeff.

Jeff (01:55:18):
Thank you. I appreciate the opportunity.

Drew (01:55:20):
If you want to learn more about company distilling, just head to company distilling.com and join me for a tasting of company's Maplewood finished straight bourbon whiskey on this Friday night's YouTube happy hour live. And note that it'll be a little earlier this week at 7:00 PM Eastern at youtube.com/whiskey. For show notes, make sure you head out to whiskey lord.com. And there you'll also find my book on sale. And again, the prophets in December are going to go to the Red Cross in support of the victims of the Kentucky and Midwestern tornadoes. I'm your host, drew Hamish. Have a great week. And until next time, cheers. And Slah whiskey lords of production of travel fuels life. L L C.