Ep. 33 - Prichard's Distillery's Founder Phil Prichard

Transcript

Drew (00:14):
Welcome to Whiskey Lore, the interviews. I'm your host, drew Hamish, the Amazon bestselling author of Whiskey Laura's Travel Guide to Experience in Kentucky Bourbon. And today I'm going to be talking to a Tennessee distillery legend who predates all but George and Jack and who at 82 years old, is still delivering his own unique styles of Tennessee whiskey rums and liquors. Now, if you go to any distillery in Tennessee and you talk to the distiller there, you're likely to hear the name of Phil Pritchard. And Phil actually founded his distillery in Lincoln County, Tennessee way back in 1997. And that was an era that was much more known for craft beer than craft distilling. In fact, craft distilling really was still a distant dream for most everybody. And what makes Phil unique is that he actually didn't start with the Tennessee whiskey. He started with a Tennessee rum.

Drew (01:19):
Now, when you're talking to those other distillers, there seems to be an air of mystery around Phil, and I think a lot of that is because I can't find any full interviews that anybody has done with him. So I decided to head out to Little Kelso, Tennessee in the heart of Lincoln County, headed out to the old schoolhouse where the distillery resides and sat down with Bill to talk about Pritchard family history, about the fight for the name Tennessee Whiskey, dealing with the obstacles of starting a craft distillery back when there really weren't many craft distilleries, and also wanted to talk about his passion for rum. It was a fantastic honor to get to sit down and chat with Phil, and I hope you enjoy this interview with Phil Pritchard of Pritchard's Distillery. Welcome to the show.

Phil (02:15):
Ah, thank you, drew.

Drew (02:16):
It's, this is fun because you have a longer legacy in Tennessee as a distiller than anybody at this point in terms of starting your own distillery and you're, you are kicking here in Kelso, Tennessee.

Phil (02:37):
Well, it's a pretty interesting story, the fact that you take the first legal distillery in Tennessee in almost 50 years and try to figure out how are you going to put this thing together? And it was a whole lot of details, especially when you go back to the days that when we set about to just do the application. In those days, it was called the atf. This was prior to Okay, nine 11, and it was all done by paper, and the stack of paper that I had to fill out was intimidating, to say the least. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (03:26):
So if we step back a little bit, you actually have some family history in distilling

Phil (03:34):
The family history in this has skipped several generations. The last known legal distiller in our family was Benjamin Pritchard, who lived just south of Nashville in Davidson County. And he left a still tubs and utensils there too, to his sons, Enoch and Benjamin. And near, as we can tell, they married Methodist women and moved to West Tennessee. And that's the last history we have on the stills was his will. And we don't know what happened to him. Okay. We do know something about what Benjamin was making, however, we knew that he was making whiskey as early as 1795. He may have been making it earlier than that. It's his 1822 will. That refers to the fact that he was in fact making whiskey. But we knew something about his whiskey. While there are no surviving recipes, we knew that he was making his whiskey with white corn.

Phil (04:52):
How do I know that? It was white corn grown on a red cob, and that was the only corn grown in Tennessee in those early days. And one of the factors that entered into our production was that when we set about to make whiskey, we set about to try to emulate what he was doing with essentially the same equipment, which is a pot still. Yeah. Because the coffee still, or what's referred to as a column still hadn't been invented in the late 17 hundreds. So we know things about Benjamin. There is actually a cave up near where he lived, and we don't know whether the Pritchard cave or not was where he was in fact making his whiskey, but it very well could have been part of the lore of that particular time. And his personality, well,

Speaker 3 (05:47):
He still would've been dealing with a tax man because the, well, the tax was there until what, 1802, and then it came back around 18. Well, to pay for 18, 12, the war of 18, 12. So you wonder whether, and records are lost unfortunately, or weren't well kept. And so it's hard to know when did he start distilling and how that all progressed through there. It'd be so interesting to know,

Phil (06:18):
Do you really think a fellow making whiskey in a cave in Middle Tennessee was too concerned about those taxes? I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. It's a fun story to embellish. But on the other side of it is we have to assume that he was doing it legally because he alludes to the fact that he did own the still in his will, so very likely

Speaker 3 (06:43):
So far. How far out west do you know? Did he move and did your family stay there for some time? Well,

Phil (06:50):
Benjamin never left Davidson County. Okay. But it was his two sons that moved to West Tennessee. Okay. Yeah. They moved to a little town in west Tennessee called Finley.

Speaker 3 (07:01):
Okay. Yeah,

Phil (07:03):
Just it is in Dyer County. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (07:05):
I'm just learning about David Crockett. I've been told it is not David, it's David, David

Phil (07:11):
Crockett,

Speaker 3 (07:12):
And that he had us still around 1821 out in Lawrence County. So it's, it'd be interesting to know if the paths ever crossed because he went out to west Tennessee after that. I

Phil (07:26):
Don't know if they're paths ever crossed, but the whiskey must be in the blood because I can also provide lineage to Davey Crockett being a distant relative.

Speaker 3 (07:36):
Oh, okay. All right. Yeah, it's all in these hills. Yep. So where you were in New York for some time, did you move to New York? You don't have a New York accent? No,

Phil (07:47):
I grew up in Memphis. Okay.

Speaker 3 (07:48):
Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And so you were in New York for quite some time?

Phil (07:52):
Well, was I left Memphis in 1974 and went to Colorado, went to Aspen to play, and we ended up over in Crested Butte and where I learned to ski very well. But somewhere along the way I had a desire to move to Vermont, and that's where I met Connie. And Connie and I were married. We've been trying to figure out whether it was 82 or 83, but the bottom line was that we had an opportunity to buy a Christmas gift shop in upstate New York. So that was part of my business venture for a while, and it was a lot of fun owning a Christmas. We sold more Christmas ornaments in July than you could believe.

Speaker 3 (08:42):
Wow. Yeah. So you also had some involvement with horses, didn't you?

Phil (08:48):
Sure. You're really talking to one of the most foremost breeders of Norwegian fjord horses. If you go to Norway today and mention my name, you'll hear many of the old timers mention the big lift. I think it was 19 88, 89, I imported a plane load of horses from Norway, 40 horses on one plane that was the largest exportation of Norwegian furor horses from Norway. And that was an interesting and fun, I don't know what to call it, A trip or experience is probably the best way to put it.

Speaker 3 (09:28):
And so you ended up in the horse country down here?

Phil (09:29):
Well, remember, I basically grew up in Tennessee with Tennessee walking horses and what have you, but yeah,

Speaker 3 (09:36):
Yeah,

Phil (09:37):
Horses, you horses. Horses have always been part of my love affair.

Speaker 3 (09:41):
Did you leave the Norway horses behind, or did you Oh,

Phil (09:44):
I still have two of 'em this morning. There's two of 'em out there. I call 'em pasture ornaments. Ah,

Speaker 3 (09:49):
Nice, nice. So what brought you back down here from New York?

Phil (09:57):
Essentially, we were in an area where the two counties that were our major business area increased the taxes, the property taxes, to a point to where people quit buying Christmas ornaments, and our business essentially tumbled. And I said to Connie, let's go back to Tennessee, where I got friends and family, and that's how I ended up back here. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (10:23):
And then you got into the whiskey, well, you got into the rum business, you're tell us how you got interested in rum and also how you got this in your mind to potentially distill your own rum.

Phil (10:40):
Okay. Boy, are you delving into history then, drew? Yes. Essentially, in moving back, I had a cousin named M Pritchard who was the state archeologist and with the Department of Conservation in with the state government. And I was kind of kibitzing with him one night, and I said back, I need to figure out another way to make a living. And out of the blue cousin Max says, my dad always thought we could make rum here in Tennessee from locally grown sgo molasses. That was a good idea. And we had the idea of moving to West Tennessee, and essentially it was a good idea, but it took a while. For number one, you got to have a lot of capital to open up a distillery. But we had this idea and we presented this idea to a bunch of friends and friends of friends, and actually a few friends of friends of friends, if you want to go that way.

Phil (11:49):
And they thought it was a good idea, and so capitalized the business with very small investment and set about to build a distillery. Here. You could not, in those days, you could not just open a distillery in any county. The laws were such in 19 99, 8, 97, 96, when I was playing with this idea in those days to have a distillery in your county, you had to have a referendum, very much like you wanted to have a liquor stores in your county or liquor by the drink in your county. And the idea was to put it in Shelby County, which was Memphis, and the criteria was you had to have 10% of the people who voted in the last general election. My goodness, I would've had to have gotten close to 10,000 names on a petition to even get it before the election commission. But we still had an idea, and we began to explore other opportunities.

Phil (13:00):
Well, in those days, we knew of two counties that allowed distilleries, and that was Moore County and Coffee County, Jack being located in Moore and George Dickel being located in Coffee County. We explored an opportunity in Coffee County, and they thought it was a great idea. At least four of the six Alderman thought it was a good idea, a couple of 'em. And they reported my activities to the Tennesseean and the news stations and television news stations in Nashville. And so I get some free advertising. I promise you, the next morning, nine other communities call me up and said, would you consider putting your distillery Oh man, in our county? Yeah. One of those counties was Lincoln County. And unbeknownst to me, Lincoln County had actually gone through the referendum process in the mid seventies. So when the county mayor, a fellow by the name of Jerry Mansfield called me up, said, Mr.

Phil (14:08):
Phil, we'd like to have you. And he brought me out and showed me this old school house, and it was absolutely perfect. As you see when we go through this. What do you got to have in a distillery? Well, you got to have a building. You got to have a visitor center, you have to have a retail bottle shop, you have to have a bottling room, you have to have a warehouse. You don't want all of your smells and everything going on in the middle of everything. This building is absolutely perfect. As we go through this building, you'll see that it was, could have been designed to be a craft distillery from the beginning. Well, it was fun actually

Speaker 3 (14:50):
Walking through the gymnasium and smelling the angel share. As I'm kind of walking through there getting sort of the whiffs of a distillery, and I'm thinking, well, if I'd been in high school and it smelled like this, I might not have been, wanted to get out of school so

Phil (15:07):
Quick. Well, it it's great that one, we could repurpose this building. This building was originally built the same year I was in 1939. Now, you can do the math on that one and figure out, this building is 82 years old, but it had been repurposed as a community center for a while. They had a Saturday night dance and other activities here. But as it began to, oh, the activities began to wane. We had the opportunity to actually purchase the building. And so when that opportunity arose, we took advantage of it. But interestingly, how do you establish the value of an old schoolhouse out in the middle of nowhere? I could tell by physical examination myself that the building was in poor condition, and we invited a engineering firm out of Nashville to come down and survey the building for us, and they recommended hardily that we bulldoze the building and put up a meld metal building. Well, that would've been satisfactory, but again, this old schoolhouse has a local history. I can't tell you how many people walked through my front door saying, I used to play basketball there. I used to go to school there, or I was part of the girls' basketball team here, and the place where the stills are actually located, where the original lunchroom for this old building. Oh, miss so-and-so, who was used to fix the best lunches for us there. And so there was a heritage and a history of this building that I just couldn't bulldoze. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (16:53):
Yeah. So I'm sure it's not lost on you the fact that you are the only distillery in Lincoln County, but you don't do the Lincoln County process.

Phil (17:09):
Oh, you're going to get me in trouble with my neighbor up the road with this conversation. No, seriously was, as we became aware of the lobbying efforts that Brown Foreman was trying to accomplish that, of distinguishing Tennessee whiskey from bourbon, that they had a technique that was practiced by both Jack Daniels and George George Stickle. Right. But in those days, the three names were Jack, George, and Phil. And by the time that they had really began serious lobbying efforts to memorialize that law, we had been making Tennessee whiskey for 10 years. We knew something, as I said about Benjamin Pritchard, and one thing we knew was the Lincoln County process had not yet been invented. We figured out that Benjamin was making whiskey probably as much as 50 years before Jack Daniels was even born. So the idea of making a whiskey according to the tenants of another technique, we thought we had a very strong case to continue the heritage of my grandfather. And that's where I knuckle down. And I often say, I didn't know what a lobbyist was till I found out I was one. And we did. We successfully lobbied for that exemption. And oddly enough, though, the process is known as the Lincoln County process, we are, in fact, in Lincoln County, Jack Daniels is not.

Speaker 3 (19:02):
Well, and it's funny because I drove through Lynchburg to get here, and as you're driving down the road towards Fayetteville, you see rows of these warehouses. And then when you see the Lincoln County sign, welcome to Lincoln County, the warehouses stop. Well,

Phil (19:20):
You're almost right. When Brown Foreman lobbied for that process to be memorialized, they lobbied that the barrels must be stored in the same county in which the distillery is located, or an adjoining county.

Speaker 3 (19:40):
So they could come over here.

Phil (19:42):
Brown Foreman actually owns property in Lincoln County.

Speaker 3 (19:46):
Okay. If you

Phil (19:47):
Will go back that way, you'll find that there is a warehouse now in Lincoln County. Okay. I, I'm quote me on that, but I believe it is.

Speaker 3 (19:55):
Yeah. It's just funny because I did a distillery tour just a few days ago, and they were showing off the Lincoln County process, and while doing, and this wasn't Jack Daniels, but while they were showing off the Lincoln County process, the tour guide said, and so can anybody guess what distillery is in Lincoln County? And I knew what he was pushing for. He wanted somebody to say Jack Daniels. And I'm like, no, Pritchard is in Lincoln County. I didn't say anything. And then he pulled Jack Daniels out of someone, and after the tour was over, I said, Pritchard is actually in Lincoln County. So

Phil (20:37):
Well, they had to change the county boundaries in those days. And again, I'm not sure what the criteria was, but had something to do with how long it took to ride a horse from your town to the county seat. And Fayetteville being the Lincoln County, Lynchburg was further away than that horse could travel in those required. But I don't know exactly what the criteria, but it had something to do with how long it took to ride a horse from one town to the next. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (21:10):
Well, and so Jack would've been riding down through this area, and his farm probably was in Lincoln County at that time because it was 1871 when they made the switchover. He was at the Dan Call Farm, which I'm not sure exactly where that's located and where the line used to be. But yeah, all parts of history that are really kind of interesting to think about. Sure. So you started with rum, and I heard a little tale about your experiences with a certain pot on a stove. Oh, can you tell us that story?

Phil (21:50):
Well, I had been in, I didn't jump straight from the Christmas gift shop business into the distilling business. Had a little sojourned through the telecommunications industry in those days. When I moved back to Tennessee in, I think it was 1993, it was not unusual to pay 49 cents a minute to make a daytime business call. And I jumped in and I started selling long distance at a much more competitive rate, about 13 cents a minute. And I did very well at that. But as the opportunity arose, I began experimenting with the idea of making rum from locally grown sargo isis. It had not only the unique aspect of making rum in Tennessee, but it also had the possibility of expanding agricultural opportunities. Cotton is a strong product here, soybean beans are, but there's a lot of fallow land in Tennessee that while it may not be suitable for cotton of soybeans, could be suitable for growing sorghum. And so there were some opportunities to explore there. And so one day my wife came home and there was her canning pot sitting on the stove with a fabricated condenser dripping white dog alcohol off into a bowl in the sink. And she says, what are you doing? And I says, I'm making rum here. Have a taste. She says, Ooh, that's good.

Phil (23:34):
So I got my first compliment, my worst critic. Nice. And that was fun. But the real proof of the pudding came to be, you'll turn around over there. There is a little small old keg that we started aging some of that rum in and a little one gallon, two gallon keg. And my gosh, the accelerated aging produced a rum that was very much like a brandy. And to the point that a friend of mine who had been in, whose family had been in the wholesale liquor business in Memphis for years, asked me to bring him some. And I brought him some, and he let his sales staff taste it. And a little while later, he called me back and he said, Phil, I've got two questions. When are you going in business? What's it going to cost me? And he said this. He said, seriously, this was one of the best rums in the world.

Phil (24:34):
And so I set about to do that, but as we begin to really earnestly pursue this venture, federal regulations at that point defined rum as the alcoholic distillate from the sugar cane plant. Now, I know something, and a lot of people in this part of the world know that sorghum is a type of grass, as is sugar cane. They are in the same family, and they very well could have been, we could have made a product from sorghum, but in those days, the federal regulations really only recognize the traditional sugarcane plant. And so I'll never forget Frank Osborne sitting out there helping me fill out the paperwork, said, Mr. Pritchard, I'm not sure you can make rum from surrogate molasses. So therefore, that kind of put the period at the end of that venture, and we begin to explore the history of America. The history of America is absolutely entwined in the business of making rum.

Phil (25:56):
There were over a hundred distilleries throughout New England, and the type of rum that was made in colonial America was very, very different than the vast majority of rums that are being made today. And the simple answer is that your vast majority of your traditional rums that are being made today are really made with the residue in the sugar refining industry. A product called black strap. Black strap is 32% sugar and 68% Lord only knows other. Yeah. But we knew something about early American rum. First of all, the ability to make large quantities of granulated sugar had not been developed. If you had any kind of white table sugar at all, it was very expensive. You can't ship sugarcane juice to colonial America. So they had to refine that sugarcane juice by oh, evaporation into a thick molasses. Well, that molasses was 90 to 95% fermentable sugars

Speaker 3 (27:21):
Perfect

Phil (27:22):
For making. When we begin to explore that, we figured out a way to find a good source of premium table grade, what is now referred to as grade a fancy molasses. And that's what we said about to do it. Now, why in the world, I know your next question's going to be, why in the world would you make rum in Tennessee? Oh, give me a break. The truth of the matter is that if you go back to 1968, whiskey was pretty much in the doldrums, right? Vodka was the darling of the industry. The retail shells were filling up with all kinds of high dollar expensive vodkas. That's when we saw some really 30 and $40 bottles of vodka. Whoever heard us that thing when I grew up and we drank a vodka that was about $10 a bottle. That's what vodka, yeah. But vodka really matured in that period of time. And there were only two products that were really showing positive growth at that time, and one was vodka, and the other course was tequila. Well, you can't make tequila in Tennessee. Yeah, yeah. Now. And so the opportunity to explore and develop this history of rum and how it was intertwined with the American Revolution was an opportunity that we just had to take advantage of.

Speaker 3 (28:58):
And so did you start doing whiskey at the same time, or did you start with just

Phil (29:03):
Rum? We started with just rum. Okay. But remember, you got to capitalize a distillery, right? Yeah. Can you imagine going to a potential investor and saying, we're going to make, well, let me back up, go to that investor and say, we're going to make a distilled spirit, and it's going to be four years before we find out if it's any good or not. Then we got to see if we can sell it. And by the way, that product is going to be rum. Everything was loaded against me, but there were a few people that had faith and helped us get the kind of funding that we needed, and we set about to buy this equipment. We literally fired this still for the first time, I think in December of 1999, and that's when we commenced production. We soon figured out that we could make other products without the benefit of having to age them. And that's when we started making some of our first product was Sweet Lucy. Sweet Lucy is our kind of a bourbon, laur, apricot, orange, bourbon laur that literally gained a lot of traction, especially among duck hunters. Oh, really? Yeah. Okay.

Speaker 3 (30:36):
This something nice to take out in the woods with

Phil (30:38):
You. Every duck hunter after the hunt hunt has been known to have a little swig or something, and his exclamation of joy was sweet, Lucy. Oh, nice.

Speaker 3 (30:54):
Yeah. So a lot of distillers also will go into doing moonshine or vodka or something like that early. Did you want to make a vodka or have any interest in it or trying to do a moonshine? Moonshine is interesting because I grew up in Nashville, North Carolina, so we had plenty of influence of moonshine talk in our area. Now there's moonshine distillers all over the place, everywhere. But during your beginnings, there was no old smokey there. No. I mean, was there even a moonshine as a legal product culture at that time that would have you even thinking that might be something to try

Phil (31:37):
To be very, very blunt with? You drew the idea Never crossed my mind. No. I'll tell you why. First thing that I value most is my name. If I'm going to put my name on anything, it better be good. My name on that bottle is my standard of excellence. Sure, I could have made moonshine and who knew that there was going to be this big surge and interest in moonshine, but you know, mentioned some other distilleries, but they were really distilleries that were more central to where moonshine was common, east Tennessee and North Carolina and those parts. And I'm not so sure that there was ever a moonshine distillery in Lincoln County, but it wasn't going to be me. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (32:30):
Well, and the very idea of moonshine is that it's supposed to be whiskey made by the lay of the moon because you are trying to avoid the tax man. And so it's kind of an interesting idea now that there's a discussion as to whether it should actually even be called moonshine because it is legal. And so is it just white whiskey? Is it, yeah. And of course, the guidelines for whiskey suggest it has to be put in the barrel. So

Phil (32:58):
I do know for a fact that there was moonshine made here in Lincoln County, but it was not on any kind of scale to speak of. We actually heard a story about a neighbor whose son still lives here, and he was telling me that he was keeping his moonshine in his barn, and people were breaking into his barn. So he called the sheriff to come and protect his barn, and the sheriff took the whiskey down to the county courthouse, and I understand they were actually selling the whiskey out of the safe in the county courthouse. Now, don't quote me on that, because I don't know whether that's in fact, but it's a good story. Never let the truth get in the way of a good story. Yeah,

Speaker 3 (33:47):
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So now all of a sudden, 2010 comes along and legislation was passed year earlier to let counties have a little bit more easy access in terms of making their decision as to whether they wanted whiskey to be made or distillery to be set up there. And then a couple years later, they opened it up to everybody to be able to do it. So we've seen this explosion of craft distillers across the state, even from my first visit a year and a half ago, I think there were maybe 20, 22 distilleries on the Tennessee Whiskey Trail. And this, as soon as I went to the first distillery, I looked at the new map, and it's like all of a sudden now there's 28 30, and I have visited 40 so far in the state of Tennessee. So you've seen it go from two distilleries that you were going against to now a whole plethora of distilleries. Did any of those distilleries reach out to you at the beginnings to say, how did you do all of this? Or was it they went about their business and figured it out the hard way?

Phil (35:12):
I never thought I'd be considered the godfather of the micro distilling business,

Speaker 3 (35:16):
But

Phil (35:17):
In fact, yes, there were a large number of people who made their obligatory visit to my distillery to find out what I did and how I did it. And it was kind of a fun project for us. I wish I'd had a little more common sense. I might've wanted to invest in some of those guys. But the other side of it was I was happy to share my knowledge and experience with them, and I hope they benefited from that. And I obviously quite a few have, and it's been fun to see some of these guys I somewhat look at with envy and some of them. But the bottom line is that this is still a difficult industry to get into because of the huge intense upfront capitalization. Oh, like, gosh, you can spend a million dollars on equipment alone, and then of course you got to buy the grains and the buy the fuel to run the stills, and you got to do this, and you have to do it for a long time before you ever really see the product going out and going into the bottle. Now Moon shine's a little bit different, but my gosh, look at the amount of capital that you have to invest in just containers, the bottles, the boxes, the labels, and it we're getting ready to launch a new product, and I've got $50,000 in it, and I hadn't even got it in the bottle yet.

Speaker 3 (36:48):
Wow. Yeah. Well, and then the other thing you have to deal with is the three tier system. So you were kind of having to learn that on your own, I'm sure, because I don't know how much help you were probably getting from people at Jack Daniels or George Dickel in trying to navigate those waters and try to figure out how to get distribution and sell your whiskey because you couldn't sell it. Could you sell it here initially at the Schoolhouse?

Phil (37:18):
No.

Speaker 3 (37:18):
Yeah. Yeah. So that took some time. Yeah. How long before you and was Lincoln County dry at that time? No, otherwise, no. No.

Phil (37:26):
Okay. Lincoln County is, as I said, they passed a referendum back in the mid seventies, and at that time, they did have stores and restaurants were allowed to serve, but however, to redirect and get more onto the subject by the very fact that we were a craft distillery producing a unique product in a gorgeous package, our ability to garner distribution and enter that three-tier system was not as difficult as one might have expected. Had we tried to do that in more recent times, I mean, my gosh, I was at a convention over Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday, and I couldn't believe the size of the room and the people in that room, I'd mentioned there were over 300 people attending that convention. And I remember when it started, it was half a dozen folks making moonshot. The founder of this group was Bill Owens, the American Distiller Distilling Institute. Adi I, and I got to laugh with Bill. I said, you remember that meeting at the Holiday Inn across the river from Louisville, and here we were here, you were inviting these people to come in and show their alcohol. And I know darn good, and well, probably the only legal distillery there was me.

Speaker 3 (39:11):
That's funny. Wow. Yeah, definitely has grown. Yeah. And now there's whiskey fairs across the US where people are being introduced to different festivals are all over the place. Whiskey is really picked up and spirits interests. So was there a point where

Phil (39:31):
You

Speaker 3 (39:32):
Felt like the interest in rum might be sliding a bit because of all of this focus on whiskey? Or have you really just held your own in that rum market and continued on in growth in the rum side of things?

Phil (39:53):
I like your analogy. The interest in the distilling industry is right now intense. Conversely, the ability to establish a relationship with a known wholesaler is difficult. My wholesaler in Nashville, for example, I mean, hey, we were there darling for a long time, and now we're just one among the pack. But the fact that what we are doing is our focus is still on rum, but that has been somewhat less lessened because of the interest in whiskeys. And right now the interest is in Laurs, and guess where we're going?

Speaker 3 (41:01):
Nice.

Phil (41:02):
We're, we've already got a good toehold in the Laur business with our Sweet Lucy and some of our related products, but we're getting ready to launch a line of laurs that I have a great amount of faith in. It's going to be well received by the public.

Speaker 3 (41:19):
Very good, very good. Yeah. Got to keep your eye towards where things are going as well as now you also have a rye whiskey.

Phil (41:27):
We have a rye whiskey. We have not laid down the number of barrels of rye that I would like to have, but it's something that we have to rye. Whiskey is almost a seasonal item you can to make rye during the hot weather is difficult because the aggressive fermentation yeast are very sensitive little critters. If they get heated up over hundred degrees, they die.

Speaker 3 (42:02):
Yeah. Yeah.

Phil (42:03):
So you have to be very careful with your yeast. Yeast is a living organism for all intensive purposes. Yeah. It's the one little element in distillation that is absolutely necessary. And without the yeast, we don't make alcohol, nor do we make bread.

Speaker 3 (42:25):
Yeah, yeah. Well, another thing you make is a single malt, and you talk about it being in an Irish style, does that,

Phil (42:36):
Haven't been happy with my single malt, and we have not made single malt, but

Speaker 3 (42:41):
We'll

Phil (42:42):
Probably come back to that maybe later on this year. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (42:46):
Okay. Yeah. So I mean, that's the other thing that I was wondering about, Benjamin Pritchard, and going back into your history, do you know when the family came to Tennessee and sort of the background on where they came from?

Phil (43:02):
I got a file cabinet over there with a whole family, but I can't quote it chapter in verse at this point.

Speaker 3 (43:08):
You're too busy making whiskey too and Rome to keep up with all of that stuff.

Phil (43:14):
Yeah. Benjamin was actually born in North Carolina.

Speaker 3 (43:19):
Was he? Okay. Yeah. But was it North Carolina as, because Tennessee used to be part of North Carolina?

Phil (43:26):
No, it was that part of North Carolina. I can't name the county. Yeah, yeah. Paquita, something like that. Oh, okay. One of those counties over there.

Speaker 3 (43:34):
Yeah. As I do my research, it's funny, if you want to research Andrew Jackson and Andrew Jackson was born on the north and South Carolina line at a time when North Carolina and Tennessee were the same. Yeah. State. Yeah. And trying to flirt through all that is, it's fun to see that history, but very confusing. I mean, the county's here too. Having a Moore County that wasn't there at one point and now is, and what was Lincoln County prior to that is all speaks to being correct on what you're trying to teach people in terms of whiskey and history. So what are your favorite projects that you've worked on in terms of, is there a rum that done that you're like, wow, this is the one that really is a favorite? Or,

Phil (44:40):
Our flagship is our aged rum. That's the one that we started with, and the one that we really take the most put efforts into it. Yeah. I will tell you that the refinery from whom we were able to acquire that wonderful molasses is no longer in business. And we've had a dickens of a time finding a replacement suitable molasses. But I think we have a good quality source of that molasses, and we be, are distilling rum as we speak. So

Speaker 3 (45:26):
Talk about how you got started with distilling once you're going out and trying to get equipment and all, did you have to construct some of your own stuff at that time? Was there a ven dome to go to get your equipment at that point or?

Phil (45:43):
I discovered the VE Dome Copper and Brass Company quite by accident.

Phil (45:50):
I called up Tom Sherman, president of VE Dome Copper and Brass, told him what I wanted and what I was going to do, and to show you what a gentleman he was. He said, I happen to know where there are some stills. Here is the phone number you need to reach out and contact these people. And that's where I found the equipment was in Burlington, Vermont. And they had, were going to go into the distilling business, but they found out that they could go out into the market and buy grain alcohol and make really good vodka. Remember, vodka was the darling of the industry. Yeah. Okay. So they were at the right time with the right product, but the equipment never went into serious production. It was originally built in 1988, and when we got it, it had hardly been used.

Speaker 3 (46:53):
Wow.

Phil (46:53):
So the opportunity to purchase that arose as a result of Tom's advice. We rented a truck, drove to Burlington, Vermont, loaded it on the truck, and brought it back and began to put it back together again. Wow. It was essentially almost a turnkey project for us. I mean, it had been all assembled before, so a lot of the hard work had been done. So mainly we just had to reconnect the parts. Wow.

Speaker 3 (47:28):
And so many distillers nowadays have, they can go to Moonshine University, they got plenty of people around. They can ask questions of, they have YouTube videos. I've had some distillers who have told me they watched a few YouTube videos to get started on distilling. How did you learn the art of distilling? How

Phil (47:49):
Did I learn the art of distilling? I learned it by doing it.

Speaker 3 (47:54):
Yeah.

Phil (47:55):
That's all it was to it.

Speaker 3 (47:57):
No books or anything to at least get you started in a direction or No, no, no. Just test it out. See if it works. And

Phil (48:07):
I remember I told you I started out with a canning pot on the stove, and I just extrapolated from that.

Speaker 3 (48:13):
Nice. Okay.

Phil (48:16):
Hey, I mean, it's, making rum is relatively simple. First of all, you don't have to do any cooking or anything simply the conversion of sugar into alcohol. Well, molasses is 90 to 95% sugar. So it is really diluting that molasses to a consistency that the yeast could develop and digest the sugar molecules. Every sugar molecule is convertible into an alcohol molecule. And we actually attended a alcohol making class up in Lexington, Kentucky. But as I sat in the room, I realized I was sitting in the room with distillers from the fuel alcohol business, and I was probably the only person in the room that was even talking about craft distilling in those days. I have one fun, I was out for dinner one night with some fellows from Cargill, what was the big fuel alcohol plant at that time? We had dinner with them, and the next morning the fellows came to my hotel room and they gave me a napkin and they'd drawn out how to assemble my equipment. Well, they had it all figured out for me.

Speaker 3 (49:54):
Oh, wow. Yeah. So that's fun. I mean, then from there, learning how to make whiskey was just taking what you'd learned from rum and going a step further with it then. Yeah.

Phil (50:07):
Well, at some point in time as we began to venture into the whiskey business, then we had to start adding different equipment, namely a cooker, you know, can't make whiskey without a cooker and determining your recipes and what have you. Again, we don't have Benjamin's actual recipes, but we knew, as I said, we knew a lot about what he was doing. So we just basically emulated the process of the industry. Now, having said that, I did visit a lot of distilleries in those days. We visited virtually all the mainline distilleries in Kentucky. There were no other craft distilleries that we could go visit.

Speaker 3 (50:58):
Well, I was going to say how many of them were using stills

Phil (51:01):
Probably at that time was probably Maker's Mark.

Speaker 3 (51:04):
Yeah. Acres, maybe. Woodford Reserve. He uses pot stills.

Phil (51:07):
Yeah, Woodford Reserve. Yeah. Yeah. That was another one. Yeah. But essentially we were charting a course that was fall ground. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (51:18):
Yeah. That's really fun. Yeah, it's it, these are the kind of stories that we hear a lot about what went on around 2010, and there were a lot of people that had buddies in that time period because they were all trying to do the same thing at the same time. So it was very easy to share that information. And

Phil (51:40):
A lot of these early distillers were migrants from the craft brewing industry. A lot of these people knew. I had one fellow that called me up out of the blue one day, and I won't tell you who he was or divulged that information, but he was going to make vodka. And I asked him why he was going to make vodka, and he said, because you don't have to age it. And I said, well, when I explained that the competition in vodka, that train had left the station. Yeah, yeah. And he said, well, what do you suggest? And I said, why don't you try making malt whiskey? I'm like, oh, why don't you try making whiskey from beer? He says, what do you call that? I said, you call it malt whiskey. Do you realize that I'm next door to one of the largest breweries in this area? Craft craft breweries in this area said, get 'em to run a hose from there brewery to Europe still, and you'll be in the business. And that particular whiskey is one of the better whiskeys on the market today.

Speaker 3 (52:47):
There are distillers who have teamed up with breweries Sure. To do that. And I think it's really smart, because I've tasted some certain distilleries will allow you to taste their fermenting beer. And it's like, Ooh, yeah, that's sour, or that's not, I wouldn't touch that. And they'll apologize as you're tasting it saying it's going to taste much better when it's whiskey. And it's like, well, what would it be like if you actually made a really good beer and then turned it into whiskey? So

Phil (53:23):
You'll be amazed at talking about tasting the mash. You really need to taste a mash almost within hours after it's been transferred into the ferment and before the yeast has really gone to work. You'll be amazed at how sweet it is. All beverage alcohol is made from sugar,

Speaker 3 (53:50):
So it's going to be sweet. It's

Phil (53:52):
Going to be sweet.

Speaker 3 (53:52):
It's going to be sweet. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (53:54):
Well, I really appreciate you walking me through the history and giving me your background and your journey to this, because it's a story that I think needs to be heard. And Tennessee whiskey and the evolution of it are, we say there was Motlow that brought it back to Jack Daniels in the thirties, in the fifties. It was Chinley coming in and getting George Dickel online. And next in line in the stories is Phil Pritchard in the 1990s. So it's definitely a big, there should be a big thank you, I think to you from the rest of Tennessee who's just exploding right now in terms of what's going on with whiskey.

Phil (54:40):
Well, thank you, drew. That's a nice compliment. I don't often view my actions as memorable, but the bottom line is that I was a pioneer and proud to be so. And I'm glad that I had the opportunity to be the inspiration for many of these new craft distilleries that have come into being in the last 10, 15 years. I mean, you go back to anything prior to 2010, there just weren't that many. Yeah. I mean, there was Fritz Bake Tag and Tito and Me and maybe a couple of others, but that was,

Speaker 3 (55:29):
Yeah.

Phil (55:30):
But I was glad to be there, and I count those people as friends, and I feel like that even most of the new guys that are coming into the business, I'm glad they recognize who I am. And I was, one of the fun things I enjoyed was going to the Adi I convention in Louisville and seeing old friends. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (55:55):
Well, again, thank you very much for your time, and I wish you the success as you continue on and keep inspiring people to taste your rum.

Phil (56:04):
Thank you. Yeah,

Speaker 3 (56:05):
Thank you.

Phil (56:06):
Had a good time.

Drew (56:08):
And if you want to learn more about Pritchards, then just head to pritchards distillery.com and for whiskey lore, show notes, transcripts, hoodies, t-shirts, tasting kits, or just links to whiskey lore social media, head to whiskey lore.com. I'm your host, drew Hanish. Have a great week, and until next time, cheers. And Slane a JVA Whiskey Lores of production of Travel Fuel's Life, L L C.