Ep. 173: Whiskey Lore Volume One with Drew Hannush

Episode Transcript
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(00:01):
Hey folks, welcome to a new and I think a very exciting episode
of the Whiskering Podcast that I've personally been looking forward to for a while. I'm
thrilled to welcome on writer, travel guide, bourbon
and whiskey, I should say, enthusiast and educator, Drew
Hanisch. You may know him from Whiskey Lore. You may know him from
Travel Fuels Life. You may know him from multiple different sources.

(00:23):
I certainly do. And he's been someone whose podcasts
and writings I've been listening to and reading for many years now. So
Oh, thank you, David. It's great to chat with you and meet you
face to face. We've been on Patreon for a while and
chatting back and forth here and there. So it's nice to get
the chance to have some actual verbal feedback this

(00:47):
Yeah, I didn't realize until... So for people who are
wondering, let me set a little context. As
I said, I've been listening to and watching and reading Drew's stuff for
a while. And he's been
someone I want to have on the podcast to talk about because there's so much that he's done. But
we are here because Drew recently published a

(01:10):
new book It is Whiskey Lore Volume 1, Bourbon
Scotch, Irish Whiskey, The Real Stories Behind the Biggest Myths
and Legends. And I was fortunate enough
to get an advanced copy of that to see
it, to read it, to review. And I had
a lot of fun with it. And just knowing that there are about

(01:39):
24. Okay. And knowing that this is volume one, and there
is at least a volume two to come just going through
this. So that is the impetus for having the
conversation now. Having said that,
again, Drew has been a resource for me for quite a while in my own
podcasts. So I want to start off, before we jump into

(02:00):
the new work, just to give a little background of how did
you get into Twisted? What's
your backstory for people who may not have listened to your podcast or
Well, I'm fairly new to whiskey, actually, believe it or not, in
the grand scheme of things, because up until about
2018, I wasn't anywhere near whiskey. In fact, I was on

(02:23):
a hiatus from whiskey for about 20 years because of a
bad experience that I had when I was younger. So it
took a long time to get back into it. I
was actually doing the Travel Fuels Life podcast. I'm
a web designer by trade, and so I had
some extra time on my hands, and I'm like, what could I use this

(02:44):
extra time for? And I thought, well, you know, as a web designer, I
can go on the road fairly easily. And I
was teaching other people how to pack light and be able to use
miles and go all over the place. So I said, well, why don't I do that? And
so I was traveling all over Europe and all
over the US and up into Canada and

(03:04):
trying to live out a lifelong dream
of being able to travel. And so I was doing that
and blogging and doing the podcast at the same time. And
it just so happened that I got interested in
whiskey at that moment because I was sitting down with

(03:24):
some friends and we were doing some tastings and they were trying to get me into whiskey.
We started talking about bourbon and
I was listening to everybody around me talking and
acting like they knew what they were talking about. And I
come from a background, my dad
was a, he used to do research on

(03:47):
presidents' families, and he was always wanting
to write, and he has volumes of stuff that he wrote that
he never published, but he was always one
who, when doing family genealogy, or
whenever doing some kind of history
research, you know, for the genealogy, he would go all the way to

(04:09):
Poland and the Czech Republic. He'd learn a little bit of the language.
He would go to churches, get actual records to go
off of. That was his thing. And that rubbed off
on me. So whenever I hear something that it
sounds like you're kind of pulling the wool over my eyes
or you're, uh, you're speaking out of

(04:30):
the corner of your mouth, I'm, it's going to put the radar
up. And so I was thinking, you know, I just
come back from doing a James Bond trip
across Europe where I went to find all the James Bond locations I
could, I could track down. And when I came back, I
was like, I need to do another theme trip. And it was like,

(04:50):
just serendipity. It's like, why don't I just jump right
in and go to bourbon country? If I'm, if I
want to understand what it is that I'm talking about, well, go to the source.
take some distillery tours and see what it's all about. And
that ended up being 19 distilleries. I don't do anything small
time. I was like, okay, I'm going to go to 19 distilleries in

(05:12):
eight days and I am going to learn everything that I can learn.
about whiskey and video blog, the whole thing. Uh, and
that actually ended up being my book, um, experiencing Kentucky bourbon.
Cause I had so much information. I was like, wow, I can actually probably
teach some other people what I learned along the way. So, uh,
so that was my sort of roundabout way to getting

(05:35):
to it through travel and then just, uh, falling
in love with the stories and the experiences at
the distilleries. And I've been to over 300 distilleries now,
and I still, probably more look forward to hearing
And that's saying something because you know everything tastes better at

(05:57):
a distillery than it does at home. Hence
why I say for reviews I always review at home or at
least a neutral location because if I do it at a distillery nothing I ever review
will be bad again. I do have a copy of
Experiencing Kentucky Bourbon in front of me, the first edition. And

(06:17):
as a way of getting into the hobby, for
most people, it's a hobby of just going to distilleries,
being part of whiskey and getting to really know it.
The stories are It's
hard to understate or overstate how

(06:40):
important stories are. It's what brings people in. It's what arguably
saves a lot of these companies in the doldrums of the 60s, 70s,
80s, even early 90s. It's what a lot of
companies now use to, whether true or not, and
that's part of what we'll get to, to push product
and push their story and say, our whiskey is better than someone

(07:01):
else's whiskey for this reason. So
for people who maybe are listening and haven't gotten into the hobby
of whiskey yet, or in the world of whiskey, I would actually suggest
holding off on your new book for them because you need to
hear those stories. You need to hear the stories first

(07:21):
and go on the tour at Jack Daniels and
hear them and at Heaven Hill and all the big ones. Small ones too,
of course, but these are just the ones that are kind of ubiquitous in
the milieu. Something else that I
would really encourage people to look at experiencing Kentucky
Bourbon for is your, as you were saying, your suggestions

(07:42):
on how to taste things, how to get into
it, the basics of it. And we've had a
couple of people on the podcast who have written similar, not
similar works, but I mean, a way to
taste things and they have their own way. Shouting out, of course, Lou
Bryson, Lisa Roper Wicker, These

(08:03):
are people like you who I respect greatly when they say, this
is how you should do it, or this is how I suggest to do it. It's worth taking a
look at. And the most
compelling reason to pick up your particular book, I think, is
that it's thin, comparatively

(08:23):
Yeah. And I really don't mean that derogatorily at all.
I mean it as it's digestible. It's something that can be read
very simply. You need no prior knowledge. If
you have some prior knowledge, great. It'll enhance it, but it
prepares you to go into these distilleries and For
me, that's something that is really important. Because if you're going to that tasting at

(08:45):
the end, and you've heard the stories, the stories are great, but
not everyone tells you how to taste. And sometimes you get the little plastic cups
to taste out of instead of a Glencairn or a more
traditional tasting glass, and you got to figure out, all right, how am I going to do this in
And so I've been talking a lot at, but the, well,

(09:09):
I was going to say the thing about the way that I wrote that book, if
I tried to write that book today, um, it would be much harder
for me to write because I've been to so many distilleries. Now I
would equate it to when my dad taught me how to drive a
stick shift car. He would tell me, you
know, well, just pull up on the clutch while you're pushing down on

(09:30):
the gas and that will work. Well, I
kept stalling the car out. And it's like he couldn't understand
why I was doing that. And it's because he's so far
away from the process of learning that he's kind
of forgotten how to teach somebody because he hasn't
gone through those pitfalls that you jump into.

(09:51):
And so, I mean, I was thinking about, because now I'm working on
a revision of that book, and it's
like the way I wrote that was I had
just gone through the experience of trying to figure out
how to plan out a trip to Kentucky, and I was going, How
many distilleries can I go to in a day? And what

(10:13):
about drinking and driving? What am I going to do about that? Because
I'm a solo traveler, so I've got to pay attention to
things like that. And what
can I expect when I go on the tour in terms of
tasting? Because it's not like they're going to set you off
in a room, pour you some glasses, and

(10:33):
then let you just sit there for an hour and a half and try to figure things out.
You have the small little communion cups, as I call them,
and sometimes, or you get the Glencairns, but usually
it's a smaller cup. You'll have some distillery tours.
Willet was a surprise for me when I went. They give you one glass and
you're supposed to do all your tasting out of that one glass. And yes, you

(10:55):
can rinse it out. But I was picking all cast-strength whiskeys.
They were like, you can get whatever you want. So I'm like, oh yeah, I'll take the Rowan's
Creek and the Noah's Mill. And yeah, throw them all in there. That's fine. And
I had to go to another tour after that. And it's like, I
couldn't I couldn't drink that much, but I had nowhere to throw it
away, you know, or to pour it out somewhere. And it's

(11:18):
like, those are the kinds of things that I wanted to help people
be able to figure out as well as what is the personality of
each distillery, just from an overview, not
giving the tour away, but basically saying, if you're a
lover of history, which distilleries would fit best for
you and so do a profile of each distillery and say you know

(11:39):
this one focuses a lot on history this one focuses process
or this one will take you into a warehouse this one won't take you into
a warehouse because for a lot of people unlike
me going to 19 distilleries on one trip they
may only get one chance to go to Kentucky. And if you've only
got one chance to go and maybe you're going with family and

(12:00):
you're only going to get to choose two or three distilleries at
most to go visit, you don't want
to just be taking the, you know, flyer on
it and hoping that you picked a good distillery out for what
you're interested in. So a lot of it was that as
well, was trying to help guide people and figuring out

(12:21):
how to pick that perfect itinerary and
I think one
of the areas where the U.S. is actually leading the way, particularly in
Kentucky and Tennessee, is the idea of
the tours themselves, visitor center experiences, the
opportunity to go behind the scenes. As we've

(12:45):
seen in your other works on, for example, experiencing Irish whiskey and
also just talking to distilleries around the world, which you've done
as well, the rest of the world's catching up and new
distilleries that are being built around the world do Not
a hundred percent, but very frequently have a visitor center

(13:05):
component built into the design from the very beginning.
Because I know that that's part of the culture now, is this thing. But that
wasn't the case, even 10 years
ago, it wasn't a huge thing. So five,
six years ago, it's growing. Then of
course, you had COVID, then everyone shifts around their

(13:28):
tours and such. But I agree
with you that people need this kind of in-depth look at,
if you're going to choose a place, where are you going to go? You
gave the example of Will It. I did not have the time to go on the Will It
tour when I was down there, any of the times I was down there. The timing
just didn't work out. I did have time to stop and have the egg salad sandwich because you

(13:51):
have to. And I tasted a few things at the bar,
but the timing otherwise didn't work out. But when
I was planning my trip, the one where I really
went in depth, I think this was before I had read your book. Funny
enough, I ended up doing many of the things that you suggest. I
had a whole spreadsheet and I really went hard

(14:15):
in the paint on this. If I had
read your book beforehand, I would have switched a few things around. Some
experiences. What would you have changed? I think for
example, mainly it was the The
order in which I went to do things was one of them. I wasn't particularly

(14:36):
efficient in how I chose which distillery
to go to, which time or which day. I basically had two days in
Lexington, two days in Bardstown and, sorry,
two days in Louisville, two days in Bardstown, and then went down to Tennessee for two
days based out of Nashville. And I
think I would have also chosen. At

(14:59):
the time I would have actually skipped Wild Turkey, for example,
because they were renovating their entire
visitor experience. The only thing they had was the small hut across from
warehouses A and B, I believe. They
had built the new visitor center and then closed
it during COVID and then were basically completely rebuilding it

(15:22):
again. It never existed. It was very odd. You
know, things like that. I would have devoted more time to makers. And
again, this is where the experience part comes in, is where I'm not
generally a huge makers fan. They produce great whiskey. It's just, I've
kind of fallen out with weeded whiskey recently and weeded bourbon. But

(15:42):
the site and the ambiance
that you get of the property is so impressive. Walking
into the visitor center and there's Dave Chihuly glass on the ceiling and
having time to go through the warehouses, do your own dipping the wax. And
when I was at the restaurant, it was slimmed down quite a bit. I think it's back

(16:03):
open to where it should be. But devoting more
time to certain things, devoting a little less time to places
that the tours weren't that in
depth or weren't anything that I couldn't either taste on
my own up where I live or couldn't get
Right. Yeah. And that's one of the things that I felt like I

(16:25):
needed to include in there as well as what did I taste when I was there?
It's part of the reason why I need to update the book as well, because, um,
when I was traveling around, it was pretty basic that they
can't serve you over 1.5 ounces
of whiskey in a tasting. So
they have to split it up. If they're going to give you five, they're going to split it up in

(16:48):
very small amounts versus if you get two samples, you're going to get a little bigger
sample on those usually, you
know, but trying to, you
know, figure out, you know, what am I going to taste when I go there?
If, if somebody goes to Buffalo trace and they think they're going to be drinking Pappy Van
Winkle, it's just not going to happen. Uh, unless you

(17:09):
really have a tour guide, who's got an in somewhere, uh,
you know, that's, that's not going to happen. So, um, and I
find that in putting that information out
there, uh, I think it's helpful to people as
well because you, I want people to understand what the basic tour
is like and now that this is the big difference between 2019 when

(17:32):
I first started doing these tours to now, is that now
Yeah, get your own, fill your own bottle and, you
know, I mean, a variety of extended
experiences, warehouse tours with, you

(17:56):
know, maybe the master distiller is there or, you know, these
types of things weren't happening when I first started
going around and doing these tours. And it's funny because I'm going
back and I'm going to go to a lot of these distilleries again on this tour
and it's tougher because I can't be incognito. Nobody
knew who I was before. Now this time I'm like, okay, I'm

(18:18):
just going to go ahead and reach out to the distilleries and get this all set up so
they know I'm coming. But they'll ask me, hey,
we've got this extended tour, we've got that extended tour. And it's like,
no, I want to go on the basic tour. Whatever the basic tour is,
is what I want to do because I want to give people a baseline of you
know, what is it that you would really, uh, uh, if

(18:40):
you just went to the, to the bare minimum, this one versus this one versus this
one. And then when I talk to people about,
you know, in, in the writing, I say, you know, look for the extra experiences
at the distilleries you really like. So when
I went to Scotland, um, you know, if I'm
going to Isla, I'm going to go on the Laphroaig warehouse

(19:02):
tour because Laphroaig's my favorite scotch whiskey. So
So do it. I mean, that is the, that's the thing is, um, you
know, we're not all, made of money and can just
do the best experience at every single place. So make
sure that you save those

(19:26):
extended experiences for the places that you're really,
Absolutely agreed. It's
a good thing overall that these experiences have grown
and evolved and extended in many cases. It does present
a problem for a traveler who's trying to hit a lot. You said you're

(19:48):
hitting, so you update this book, you're hitting 31 distilleries in
That's, you know, we're in the Olympics at that point.
That's kind of how I ran mine, but mine was a six day trip.
So it's tough. And as you said, too, managing
your intake at

(20:08):
that point and breaks in between and make sure you're really
fine to drive is a serious part of that, especially
if you're a solo traveler. No,
I think this is an incredibly important and very
useful book. And I'm really looking forward to seeing the updates, having
gone on some of these tours myself. And the

(20:31):
last thing on this too, before we jump over to the
new book is, I want to appreciate
the fact that you're doing the tours that most
people will go on. Right. I'll
call myself a quasi member of the press at this point where I
can reach out to somebody and say, Hey, I'm coming down or I did a podcast with

(20:55):
you. I'd love to do a tour. And
yeah, they usually throw something extra on or it'll
be with the master distiller instead of a regular
tour guide. And that's wonderful. We appreciate those
experiences. But to your point, those are not the
normal experiences. And if you were to write about those, then it

(21:16):
would make for a really good story for your experiences, but
it wouldn't necessarily be helpful to the person reading the book. So
I appreciate that because it's also a sacrifice on your part in a way, because we
want to go on those special tours. We want to go really
behind the scenes on things. But no, it's a

(21:36):
service to people getting into this and who just want to experience this
to do that. So it should be appreciated. And thank
you for that. Now with
that, because you have been on these tours, even if you can
no longer go incognito, you

(21:57):
got to hear all of the
stories that have been told, all of the, as
we call them, myths, legends, trues, falses, all
the things that can come out of people's mouths when they're trying
to sell you whiskey or anything for that matter. But we're
focusing on whiskey here. At

(22:18):
what point in your, let's call it a whiskey journey, did
the idea for this new book about myths
and legends and whiskey lore truly start
Well, I think a foundation was laid way back

(22:38):
with my father's love of history and how he ingrained
that in me and how when
I started doing Travel Fuels Life, the first trip I took was to Williamsburg. because
I just love colonial history. So I was like, I want to go
to Williamsburg and learn some things I
hadn't learned before. I hadn't been since I was much younger. And, um,

(23:02):
I was watching a show at the time called, uh, turn Washington
spies, which was on AMC is a great show.
Um, and they done a lot of
the filming there. And so I ended up going down there for
that. And, um, If
something, especially in that era, but 18th

(23:24):
century, 19th century history, a lot of 19th century history, I'm
a little weaker on. So whiskey actually kind
of gave me an opportunity to start learning some of that. and
I was learning it while I was going through the distilleries in Kentucky and
I was learning it while I was going through in
Scotland and going through the distilleries and I went to Ireland and

(23:45):
I'm hearing all of these names of kings and queens and
I'm oblivious to most of it because I didn't pay that much attention to world
history when I was when I was in school but I was starting to
pick it up and hearing these whiskey
stories, what kind

(24:05):
of got me, even at the very beginning, I went
to about three different distilleries on the first day, then I went to three
distilleries the second day. By the end of the second day, I was going,
did Bourbon get its name from Bourbon County, Kentucky, or from
Bourbon Street, New Orleans? Because I've heard both stories, and

(24:26):
this is only day two, And I'm not quite sure what
I'm supposed to believe. And then every tour you go on,
they, uh, the tour guide will always laugh at
their own joke about, you know, that they feed the spent
grains to the cattle and the area and that Kentucky has
the happiest cows, but then you go to Scotland and they say the same thing

(24:48):
over there. And then, you know, if you're in Ireland. Ireland
will tell you, well, we age our whiskey for three years in a day, and they only
do it for three years in Scotland, so ours is better. But then you
go to Scotland, and they say the same thing about their whiskey versus the
Irish. You know,
the fact checker in me is kind of like, okay, this, this

(25:09):
is, this does not compute. And what is the actual
truth behind this? So actually just after those first
19 distilleries was enough for me to go. There
are some stories here I would really like to dig into. And
so the way I decided to get into that
was because I was doing the travel fuels life podcast, I thought. you

(25:32):
know, I could probably do a whiskey podcast too,
but rather than interviewing other
people for, for the stories, why don't I research it myself and
then I could write a story and then I could present up the story kind
of like, um, you know, I, I grew up like in Ken Burns

(25:52):
kind of stuff and re you know, really kind of produced episodes
where they're telling you a story along the way and maybe injecting some voices
in from, industry experts and that sort of
thing. So that's how I got started. I did a episode
on Four Roses and told the history of Four Roses and
went and interviewed Al Young from Four Roses a month before

(26:14):
he passed away and got his
story of how they brought that brand back, him and Jim
Rutledge, their involvement in it. and went
through and just told and narrated a story as I went through, and then would drop
his overdubs in there
to kind of carry the story along. And I had a
lot of fun with that, but what I

(26:37):
started to find out was, well,
actually, Where the change came, where
I decided I had to move into doing books, came after I
did some brand research for the Chicken Cock brand. Because
as I was going through and doing research, my initial job

(26:58):
was to see if there was any connection to cocktails. If maybe this
is where the name evolved from. And I said, well,
I don't know that I'm actually going to find that. That's going to be pretty
hard to pin down, but let me go in and look. So I
was digging through court records and trying to find out the origin
of the brand and figure out who started it. It

(27:18):
was a weird story that was perfect for me because it was about a
guy named James A. Miller who For some
reason, he inherited a distillery, took over a distillery
from somebody who had just built one in Bourbon County, Kentucky.
And within four years he passes away, but somehow his
name is so renowned, uh, that

(27:40):
they have to call, they have to give the brand a name Chickencock,
but they have to attach his name, James A. Miller Chickencock
to every bottle. And I'm going, well, how does a guy who's
only been around for four years gain such a massive reputation?
Most distillers at four years are going, Hey, I can release my
first whiskey now. So it didn't, it

(28:03):
didn't make sense to me. And so as I was digging through, uh,
I started going through newspapers and doing research and he
supposed he died in 1860. He took over
there, built the distillery in 1856, and
what I found as I was going through court records was that actually
he owned a lot of other property before that. There

(28:26):
was an article written about him in 1857 in the Louisville Courier-Journal
that said, James A. Miller, our friend, is going back down to
New Orleans for his 19th annual trip. well
this is 1857 and then he's saying 19th annual trip
and that said oh I need to go back and see if I
can find out you know that takes us to 1838. If we're

(28:48):
going back to 1838 we're going back to the you know
he is now a contemporary of James C Crowe. So
when we're talking old Crowe how how does Chickencock fit
into this and so I I really started diving in and doing the history and
After I'd done that much deep research and actually going to the source

(29:08):
to find the information, that led
to the Lost History of Tennessee Whiskey book, where I used that same
tenacious attitude of, I got to go to the
state archives and I got to be digging through all the records I
can find here and there. Trying
to get the truth true story because nobody had ever written the story

(29:29):
of of Tennessee whiskey most people think
it starts and I did to start with Jack Daniel or
you know his mentor might have been there before
him, but I found a hundred years worth of history before him and
so I did that deep research on that as
well, and I decided I can't do the podcast anymore

(29:51):
because the way I was doing the podcast was
researching on the internet. And unfortunately what
you're going to find when you read that experiencing Kentucky bourbon
history, the history section where I break down the history of
bourbon. I'm revising that right now. It is going to be
a complete rewrite because almost that entire thing

(30:14):
is marketing lore. And it's like for a guy
who is wanting to try to get the story straight. I'm
reading and I'm, I'm just, I'm banging my head against the wall going, Oh,
I gotta, I gotta replace this. I can't let people read this anymore. Cause
it's like, I'm just playing into the, but it's a double edged sword too,
because it's like, when you go on these tours and I'm teaching people

(30:34):
about these tours, these are the stories they're going to hear when
they're on. And I don't want to go, well, these guys are bad because
they're telling the wrong story. It's, it's a marketing story and
it's, um, uh, And not a lot of people have
gone in and done this deep of research to try to tie all
these pieces together and make it come out. There's some of that going on,

(30:55):
but the myths and lore have been so fun that
nobody's really said, well, we got this. Why do we
need to go any deeper on it? So
really part of this is, yes, I want to update the profiles, but
I want to get the history right too. Cause the history is so, so

(31:18):
Yeah, absolutely agreed. And I reached out to my shelf because I have the lost
history of Tennessee. I have a background on, on my, uh, video
right now, so it's not showing up, but I have the Lost History of Tennessee Whiskey, quite
enjoyed that one as well. And I know I have dozens
of questions from here and follow up thoughts as
well. So maybe I'll talk to you offline more about that. But I

(31:40):
read that book as soon as it came out, and I think
it was in between my initial trip to Tennessee
and then when I went back to
do a barrel pick at Jack Daniels. It was
also somewhat awkwardly, it was
my first trip, I visited Uncle Nearest and I felt a

(32:02):
good relationship with them through Clay Risen and through, got
to interview Fawn, got to interview Victoria and visit, it
was a beautiful facility. But I had also, I had
written a critical article afterwards, not meant
to be critical so much as kind of what The
idea that you're going for, not necessarily about the history, but about the

(32:24):
labels. What's really happening here? What's the accuracy
here? And if there's one thing you can trust less
than tour guide stories,
it's usually the labels on the bottle. So
it was in between those two things. And so there was a massive shift in

(32:46):
my mindset of what does Tennessee whiskey look like? At
the same time, I'm visiting these new places I'd never heard of. When you're just
getting in, you know, and you write about it, you hear about Jack, George,
maybe if you're getting really deep into it, you'll hear about Pritchard's because they're
kind of the first of the new wave and they're exempted from this whole Lincoln County process.
You're probably hearing about Lincoln County process and that's how you're hearing about Pritchard's because

(33:09):
they're exempt. But there's so many other distilleries now
that are there, that are some recreating history,
some trying to revive brands, some creating new brands, but with a
Tennessee style. And I think
if you go in as a distillery owner,
creator, as a whiskey maker, If you go in with

(33:31):
a more accurate history, and you can tell, I
know from your interviews in the past, you know, when someone's done
their research, or when it's even been a cursory level, you
know, when someone's done their research. And it does make,
I think it makes for a better story. You know, the truth is,
it's that axiom of the truth is stranger than

(33:54):
There's meat on the bone. That's the thing that has drawn me to
it. Myths are great
and they're fun stories, but they kind
of drift away into the ether. If
you are telling a story that's accurate and true, there's something
about that. I don't know if you're like me, but if I'm watching a movie and it says based

(34:17):
on a true story at the beginning, it's kind of like I put
extra focus on watching the movie and kind of paying attention.
And then I'll sit there on Wikipedia, you know, trying to figure out how
100% I'm doing that. Yeah. Yeah. Um,
So, I mean, I totally get that. And actually, I saw, I think
the first time when you first connected on the

(34:39):
Whiskey Lord Patreon, I made the connection because
I saw your article about Uncle Nearest.
And I thought what was great about that article and about
Uncle Nearest is that they listened. uh
to what to what you said that there was feedback on that which you
know a lot of a lot of distilleries might just blow blow

(35:01):
it off one of the things i loved about the chicken cock brand is
that uh they wanted to know you know they they
and What's amazing is that, um, once
I started digging in, it's like, you know, you guys are just looking for
this nice little tie in and I'm going, no, your, your brand. That
was a strike of gold because you hit one that is

(35:23):
back to, uh, the very early years of
bourbon and is from bourbon County. So it,
uh, it opens up a door to a lot more than just, Oh,
you know, stirring a cocktail with a rooster's tail. which
And when you're dealing with a brand like that, and Chicken Cock, Greg Snyder was a

(35:46):
guest on the podcast when the brand first started
kind of reviving itself. I think it's
one of those brands where the story is so important too, because of the name.
There's no real way around it. It's just is. And something
that clearly has a different connotation and different arena
or different arenas. But

(36:07):
once you get past the name, then you're like, if you're on a group or
if you're talking to someone about it, you're like, all right, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's funny. It's funny. But then
you have to taste the whiskey and then you have to back it up with All right. Forget
about the name. Name is important, but forget about the name. What does
the whiskey taste like? If you're going to add in finishings or
blends or things like that, is it going to be representative of

(36:28):
this brand that you're reviving? Is it
going to pay homage? And if it does pay
homage, is it going to be the idealized homage
or is it going to be as accurate representation as it can be. We
know a lot of things can change. The woods change, the greens change, the water has changed, the climate
has changed. Everything has changed since 30 years ago, 10 years

(36:50):
ago, let alone 150, 200 years ago. But you can still to
an extent, these brands can try to recreate
what they're doing and pay enough homage to it. Hope
I'm not getting paid to use that word. Pay enough homage
to it to represent it accurately. And

(37:11):
then in between the space of what was and
what is, you can tell the story within that to connect the
I think the one thing that is very difficult is,
through doing this research, is
the realization that it's almost impossible for a modern

(37:33):
brand to make whiskey the way that some
of these historical characters did. Like, you
know, one of the tough spots I had with Lost History of Tennessee Whiskey
was they kept talking about sweet mash and sour mash. but
it wasn't computing to me it's like this doesn't sound like our modern terminology

(37:54):
will come to come to find out well that's not really
are they weren't calling them the same thing that
back then a sweet mash whiskey was a
whiskey that you added
yeast to your starter. So it was
using Baxet the same as a Sour Mash does today, and

(38:15):
they were adding yeast. So the modern version of Sour Mash is
really the old version of Sweet Mash. And the original
version of Sour Mash was you could
not add anything other than that backset. And
if you added in yeast, if
you did anything to try to kick it in, a chemical or something

(38:36):
to get that yeast moving, that
was not considered sour mash. It had to be a 100% natural process. And
to think of a modern distillery setting up 30 tubs like
James C. Crow did and letting them sit there
for a couple of days being hand stirred to allow
the yeast to come in and naturally ferment before they go

(38:59):
to the next step and then using a pot still with fire underneath
and trying not to burn the grains. You're having to do this really
slow distillation. The accountants
would have a fit. if you tried to do that. That's
why, you know, if Jim Beam wanted to
do something with Old Crow, I

(39:21):
would say, man, if you could find pot stills somewhere and you could do that
technique, if you sold that for $1,000 a bottle,
I might actually consider buying it. as a really
extremely limited release. But for

(39:46):
I'm with you on that. I'm looking at three Old Crow chess pieces on
my shelf. It's my favorite, probably is my favorite Dusty at this point.
And I'm not a huge Dusty whiskey guy. I actually, in
most cases, think modern stuff is better. Which,
you know, yell at me all you want for that. But it
ties into Dr. Crow. And this

(40:11):
is one of the conceptions or misconceptions, however you look at it, that
he perfected the Sour Mash or that he created the Sour Mash. I
think that he created the Sour Mash is really the misconception. And
then the perfection point is also subjective

(40:32):
Yeah. So to, to taste an
old crow chess piece or travel or any really old crow from the
national distillers era. So pre beam purchase in
87 is going to be a different product. And
you're also, if you're talking about early seventies and backwards, this
is something I haven't talked about on the podcast in over a year. Cause I promised myself I would

(40:53):
take a break from mentioning it, but you know, the, the levels
of ethyl carbonate in the whiskey You
were allowed to have a lot higher level back then. And
it was cut back because it was seen as a carcinogen. It's
a carcinogen in the same way that a
lot of things are carcinogens. If you give a rat 80 grams

(41:15):
of it a day, it's going to be a carcinogen. But in the levels
that they were drinking, you'd probably die of alcohol poisoning before anything
came from the ethyl carbonate. And
Freddie No himself, he's talked about this because he's a science guy. He loves
delving into this stuff in the labs. He said,
I would love to recreate that true old crow style, not

(41:37):
the bottom shelfer that we see today, but the real old crow. And
he's like, we just can't do it. Because of several reasons,
but one of them being the ethyl carbonate. It gives a mouth feel, a particular
kind of intangible flavor, but
it's something to it that gets the other flavors going. And
the biggest proof to me is just, it's an 86 proof whiskey and

(41:59):
86 proof bourbon at that, that has
body and flavor. And when we're talking American whiskey, corn
distillate in particular, that's very rare. Yeah.
You know, splashes and malt whiskey can get away with it,
Yeah, I think the other piece of it too is the fact

(42:20):
that today we distill in column stills
and this was one of the interesting things I found out about
E.H. Taylor is that E.H. Taylor before the Bottled
and Bond Act was a huge proponent of pot stills. He
said, they perfected whiskey in 1812, why
should we mess with it? And that belief that

(42:43):
you have so much more control over the cuts that you're taking
and the amount of what they called fusel oils back then,
and some still call it fusel oils now, that stuff that's going down
into the tails a little bit, that when you put it
into a barrel, That barrel interacts with that in
particular to create some really interesting flavors. And

(43:05):
on a column still, you're pulling whiskey off at a particular point.
You're not getting a chance to cut into those fusel
oils that are down below. You're grabbing at a perfect
level. Well, the problem with perfect. Coming from a
music engineering background, I laugh
because prior to the age of digital recording,

(43:28):
everybody tried to perfect a recording. They wanted it
to sound as clean as possible. when digital recording came
out, everybody had to find filters and things to dirty it
up because it just sounded too sterile. And
in a way it's kind of that, that same thing that if you are,
uh, cutting from a very fine point, um,

(43:49):
you're going to miss some of that interesting stuff that's going on around
it. And so if that's the way old crow was made, if that's the way old Taylor was
made, um, you know, unfortunately
we're just not going to get there. Woodford Reserve
was the rebirth of having pot stills on the Kentucky Bourbon
Trail, but that only makes up like 20% of what ends

(44:11):
up in a bottle of Woodford Reserve. So it's
got a little of that, but not as much as you would maybe
That can go on a rant for several, for
me, several of my friends of the, well, you know, the Woodford logos,
the three pot stills, because that's the whole, that's the genesis of

(44:31):
their new story. It's not really that
accurate as you know, best facetious
on that one. And you're right, there's just techniques too.
I mean, even with the pot stills, we both know people
and have interviewed people who are trying to recreate those styles. People
like Steve Fashore at Washington's Distillery in Virginia. Basically

(44:53):
anything Alan Bishop does is trying to recreate something. And there
are people like that around the country and around the world. to
a certain extent, there are very few people doing
wood fire, direct fire pot stills, because it's so
hard to control and the accountants would kill them. If you have
a pot still, you maybe have more control than a column still,

(45:15):
but it might be gas fired. So you're still standardizing
it to a certain extent and you'll get the Maillard reaction a little more.
You'll get, as you said, the faints and the fusil oils with more
control than you would with a column still, but there's still
something it's something missing from
it. From that handmade style. And it's the inconsistency

(45:37):
is missing. And which can be some of the most fun things. You know, we
love single barrels because they're inconsistent. And
even though people kind of the flock to like, you know, Camp Nelson F for Wild
Turkey. I love it. They'll say, I love everything from
this particular warehouse. But the idea being it's a single barrel. It
could be dead center of the profile. It could be

(45:59):
way off profile, but that excitement of the inconsistency. So
I think there is a desire for that, but
that's also such a small percentage of the people buying, we see like
the people buying today's old crow or even just general
maker's mark are probably not going for that. They're

(46:20):
Yeah. Yeah. No, it's funny. I, as I was doing my research, I've
been digging into the history of Bourbon County a bit and talking about those old,
uh, whiskeys. And I ran into an article where someone was talking about
how the old timers, there was an old timer that was complaining because
he said, like, I'm not getting any more of that scorched whiskey. He
said, I love that scorched whiskey. It's like, um, it,

(46:42):
um, It brought back memories for them, you
know, that the, the, the way that you used to distill and you'd burn that
grain and it'd get that burnt flavor into the whiskey. That was,
that was like, um, it, again, it brought back a memory.
It was, uh, so for them, it was positive. We would taste it
and go, what is this? And I

(47:02):
think that probably speaks to your experience with
older whiskeys as well, because I have had some older
whiskeys that taste musty to me. It's like,
what is this musty flavor that I'm pulling in? And
I think that in some cases either it's
been how it's been stored or whatever it may be, but it

(47:25):
also may be that that was just something that people
enjoyed in their, in their tasting back then. And it's just fallen
out of the favor. We don't really necessarily like musty these
It's been a long time and I don't remember who's told me this, but it
was someone who was involved in the industry and who was blending. And they said, the one

(47:45):
thing you cannot blend out is mustiness. You can have a
2000 barrel batch. They still call it a small batch, but it'll be 2000 barrels.
They have one that goes musty and you'll still taste throughout. No,
you're right. And this goes back to the, it's
a good tie in with this kind of lore and legends and myths about
it. the

(48:09):
styles and the tastes are kind of
lost to history as well. Let's
take that example. If you were to taste a whiskey from, I was going
to say 1930, but that's probably not going to be accurate or not too available. Let's
say pre-prohibition, early 1900s. The,

(48:30):
at that point, you know, the whiskey trust is so strong in the center of the country. You've
got the controlling aspects in New York as well
at Chicago. Um, if
you can taste a whiskey from that era, you kind
of have to take it at face value, uh, trust
that it was, as you said, that it was stored properly, that it

(48:51):
wasn't exposed to heat or light or anything. So if let's say
it was stored perfectly. you and I, I
think, would both still want to know, is
this the profile? Is this the taste and the nose and the experience
that the distiller at the time wanted you
to have? And that can

(49:13):
be very different from the extant literature
in the histories. If you're looking at ads, if you're looking at
notes even from within the distillery sometimes,
those don't always line up. So then you're wondering, okay, is there something wrong
with the whiskey? Was the notes wrong? And this is where that

(49:33):
history just gets foggy. And I agree. I love that
aspect sometimes, but I also I
would love James Crow to come back to life and taste
the whiskey today and be like, this is not what I had in mind for the sour mash process.
Or Nearest Green or his contemporaries with the Lincoln County
process to be like, I never said you needed 10 feet

(49:56):
of charcoal. What are you talking about? And have
Yeah, I think they would be actually shocked
by the fact, I think Nearest Green would be shocked by the
fact that your charring barrels because the
information that I've seen on Tennessee whiskey was that they
didn't feel like you needed a barrel because they would put up

(50:20):
their whiskey straight off the still run through charcoal filtering.
I mean filtering, running through charcoal,
it is cleaning those fusel oils out as it's going through and
There's a certain way where it is doing the same thing
to a level. I know that people are going to be like, no, it's not the same thing, but

(50:44):
I found articles when I was doing a lost history
of Tennessee whiskey, where when
Lem Motlow was bringing the distillery back, he said, we'll
have whiskey out on the market in six months. And I'll put that six month whiskey
up against any Kentucky bourbon, any day or night. And
that was, now you have to remember, this

(51:06):
is 1938, so the Kentucky bourbons that were on the market then were two years old.
They'd be two, three years old. They weren't going to be that much older. And
so that's what he was comparing against. But he was saying, I
can run it through the charcoal, stick it in the barrel for six months,
and it'll beat any Kentucky bourbon. So
whether that's true or not, you know, that is marketing as well. And

(51:27):
Jack Daniels has always been, from their origins, masters
at spinning a tale. So, you know, that is what it is. But
I think the Tennessee people really truly did believe that they were making
better whiskey than they were making in Kentucky. Uh,
but they were also painting with a broad brush because that's what got
me interested in this new book of diving into the history of James

(51:50):
C Crowe, because. I wanted to see, was
he doing, what was he doing differently from what they were doing in
Tennessee? Come to find out he really wasn't doing anything
different except for putting it into barrels. that they
use the same technique intent that Jack Daniel and James
C. Crowe were both doing the sour mash process. Probably

(52:12):
the only difference would be that Crowe
was doing it on a pot
still with a flame and Jack
Daniel was using a log still with steam. So

(52:32):
Absolutely agreed. And I think with that, it's a
great way to focus us in our last
third year. We've had this experience where we've talked
on Patreon, so I know we could talk for hours and hours, and I hope that we do
have further conversations as well. But to
spend the last, let's say, third of this interview on

(52:54):
the new work, we're talking about some of the
most strongly held beliefs in
the industry and the ones that are pushed the hardest from marketing. And,
you know, I mentioned a few of them, as I said, I've got an advanced
copy, which I was very appreciative of and got to review it.

(53:14):
You know, the ones that I picked out when I was reviewing was things
about Anais coffee and the coffee still in
Ireland. whether Elijah Craig
was the father of bourbon, as you said, where the bourbon name comes
from, and the origin of
moonshine blindness. That

(53:36):
one, I think of the 24 chapter, I think that one,
the moonshiners blindness might've been the one that either,
I think it got me the most because I was like, I thought
it was very scientific of, if you have too much
methane, if you drink methane, you drink the heads basically, you're

(53:56):
going to go blind. And that's scientifically true. If you drink methane, you're going
to go blind. That's not really up for
debate. However, The story was
that if you just drink moonshine, it's going to make you blind. This
is a bit of a spoiler, but I'll throw this one out there. It's

(54:17):
not really from the moonshiners. The moonshine wasn't necessarily
making people blind. It's not to say it didn't, period, but
it wasn't a ubiquitous thing. It was people in the whiskey industry proper
saying, no, we want you to buy our stuff because it's supposedly better and cleaner and
safer. And it's also at the time

(54:37):
when whiskey was provided as medicine and mixed,
my favorite thing when it was mixed with opium, that
must've been a hell of a trip. So
diving into this, as I said, it's some of the most strongly held beliefs. Elijah Craig is

(54:59):
I'm passionate on that one. Yeah, I'm sorry. Side note
I know you're passionate about it. So this is why I'm taking a side note on this one. I
don't for the life of me understand why this is still a debate.
When Jack Daniels themselves says, we
are a bourbon. We fit the categories of a bourbon. We

(55:20):
check all the boxes. We just do something extra. So
it's like, they're telling you what it is. The brand
is telling you. The one that's most known for this is telling you that this
is what it is. Why are we still arguing about this?
Well, and it's funny because it all seemed to come up all
around one time, just before I started working on this book. I

(55:44):
had just gotten done with The Lost History of Tennessee Whiskey, and I didn't put
an exclamation mark on it, but I will tell you that after you
have spent two years digging into the history of Tennessee whiskey, and
you have seen how it's been completely ignored by American
whiskey history writers, If
you start to feel a chip on your shoulder in a way, I

(56:06):
was feeling a chip on my shoulder for Tennessee whiskey. I'm like, look,
nobody's going to take you seriously unless you come
out and S and feel proud of who you are. And yes,
they made a rule in 2013 that states
that it's following the rules of bourbon with an extra step.
But that's a rule from 2013. And if we're going

(56:29):
to start Tennessee whiskey's history at 2013, then Jack
Daniel's history doesn't matter. Just lump
it in with everything else. What is it? And it's
funny because I would go across Tennessee and I would talk to distillers and
distilleries and they would say, you know, well people don't
understand what Tennessee whiskey is so it's easier to sell bourbon.

(56:52):
And in my head I'm going, you do realize that
the number one selling whiskey in the world is a
Tennessee whiskey. So you got that. So you
can start there and you can be proud of
what you've got. And then in doing that
research, also finding out that Tennessee was making whiskey before Kentucky

(57:13):
was. And bourbon didn't get its name until, we
say 1821 because of a newspaper article
I would like to, or an advertisement. I don't necessarily
think that's what they were trying to achieve in trying to say bourbon
whiskey. They were saying it came from Bourbon County because
it was in a Bourbon County newspaper and they wanted to show that

(57:34):
it was local. It wasn't until 1826 in,
I think it's Vicksburg, that
they specifically said in an ad it was bourbon county whiskey and
so at least by 1826 it was important
enough to people that you know I need to

(57:55):
get my whiskey from bourbon county because bourbon
county has a reputation and then sooner or later county
dropped off of it and we just got bourbon bourbon whiskey but
you know this this is the thing is Tennessee
is not going to get the respect until they stand up and say, you know
what, we have a 250 year history and we made whiskey

(58:18):
differently. And this is what I'm hoping will happen one
of these days is that maybe they'll relook at those rules and
say, you know, we used to make Tennessee white whiskey. And
if we're making Tennessee white whiskey, maybe we need to just
change the rules in one more spot in
that, that charred oak barrel and say, you know what? You don't
have to use a charred oak barrel. You could use an uncharred barrel if you wanted to,

(58:42):
um, to give it a different characteristic, you
know, make it different from, um, because I think that would
And this is also where I must point out, as
a point of respect, when talking about where Bourbon
got its name, whether it was the street or the county, I happen to agree with you

(59:03):
very strongly that it was the county, and that was building on
work done by the great Michael Veitch, among
others. I know it's among others, but Mike is the
one most known for writing about this topic before now.
This is, I think, where it's important to recognize the place

(59:24):
of this book as well. Just as we were talking earlier about
how experiencing Kentucky bourbon can be the
great entry point of directing people, how to get into
this, how to start, how to just get started, take
that first step on the journey. When you're
looking at Whiskey Lore volume one, now you're

(59:44):
really thinking about To put
it bluntly, you're looking at people who care enough to
interrogate this and to wonder where did bourbon get its name, to
wonder why a Baptist
minister made whiskey. There are
a lot of ministers that come up in whiskey history, by the way. Dan

(01:00:06):
Call as well. There are a bunch of them.
And how these stereotypes come, how blended scotch
became somehow lesser, or considered lesser rather,
than a single malt. It's
not something that I think even a couple of decades ago, a lot
of people cared about or certainly were not asking

(01:00:28):
questions about. But it also is a second
or third level of people interested in this
Yeah. Well, the goal in a lot of ways
was to write this in a way to where if
you didn't know the history, you could still

(01:00:49):
kind of get a feel for it. It's like, I start off by
telling you, here's the myth. you know, and then dive
in and try to use some historical context,
maybe from a story that's not even whiskey related, but to
try to get people into a mindset and get them thinking and then pull
them into the whiskey side of the story. I

(01:01:12):
am a big fan of writing history in
a way that people have to use their brains in
the process of choosing whether they believe it or don't believe
it. you know, I want to leave that gap open there that
somebody can come in and maybe, maybe question. I'm
a little bit more definite on this book when I get to the end with some of my

(01:01:34):
pronouncements like, you know, Bourbon Street versus Bourbon
County. It's pretty clear to me that nobody ever wrote
anywhere Bourbon Street whiskey. I
cannot find it in print anywhere that, you know, in, in
the 19th century, anybody was saying that. Um, But
there are other places that I also say in the book, challenge

(01:01:58):
me on this. I want to be challenged on it. And let's
make this a dialogue as well as me telling the
history. And I think that's part of also my feeling, that I
want people to read this discovering
that even in regular history there
are myths that we

(01:02:20):
bump into. And if you can see that in a story like
Benjamin Franklin flying a kite, and
the father of bourbon being somebody getting credit for something
that they didn't actually do in terms of invention,
you know, that it'll get you into whiskey. The
stories themselves will get you fascinated. Hopefully

(01:02:44):
it doesn't get people in arguments when they go on distillery tours. That's the
one thing I don't want to have happen is, I
also say in the book, Uh, once you read these and you learn this
stuff and you hear that myth while you're on the tour, you know,
don't interrupt the tour guide and go, ah, that's wrong. That's
wrong. You know, wait till it's over and then you

(01:03:05):
can plug my book if you want to. I don't, I don't mind, but,
uh, um, you know, let people enjoy the tour for what it
is. And then, uh, you know, that's great conversation after the
And like I said, that's where you get the division between people who are just doing this for
enjoyment. They're taking a trip and visiting a few distilleries
versus the people who are going to Jack Daniels, which

(01:03:28):
I should know going to Jack Daniels is a trip. It's an hour and a half from Nashville.
It's not around the corner. So I'm glad that they get hundreds of thousands of
visitors a year, but it's not, it's not like
just right there. Like some of these places are. But
what you were just saying about talking about it on a tour, I
agree with you. I think it would be just rude to challenge

(01:03:51):
someone on a tour like that. Maybe if you ask a question, if something's
really out there, but to do an outright challenge, it's
not the place. Throughout the book, as I was
thinking about it, and as I read it again
in preparation for this interview, I was thinking other than, for
example, the chapter on Jack Daniels being bourbon or not, That's

(01:04:13):
a very specific stereotype or myth to
a distillery. But other
than that, to me at least, it seemed
like you lent away from calling out specific
distilleries with their stories. Some
are inevitable, like the Jack Daniels example, Elijah Craig, because he

(01:04:34):
has been adopted by Heaven
Hill as a brand and as a leading thing. But
other than those, it was more about the broader
ideas, rather than calling people out
or calling distilleries out. Obviously,
you have a good relationship with places you've

(01:04:56):
interviewed, places you've visited. And I think
we tend to be on the same page where we're not looking to start trouble necessarily.
You want people to ask questions rather than get into fights.
But I am curious, as you were writing these, and many
of these apply to current whiskeys, current brands,
did you struggle at all with how far to push the, this

(01:05:23):
Um, you gotta have some fun with it. Um,
and yes, it, there, as I write at one
point, a friend of mine says that, uh, I'm slaying,
uh, sacred cows all over the place. But, um,
you know, I think in some ways people can probably put
the, put, put, two into two together and sort of figure it

(01:05:45):
out for themselves. I will say that volume two, I'm
going to be challenging that 1866 date for Jack Daniels. I
will tell the story behind it. But I also, I do that also in Lost
History of Tennessee Whiskey. There were stories with
Jack Daniels when I was doing that book that I'm
like, wow, you know, should I be the one really telling this story?

(01:06:06):
And there were certain things that I left on
the cutting room floor but I
don't necessarily shy away. I do talk about
Weller and Pappy Van Winkle in the book and go
into this idea of the original weeded
bourbon. And is that true or is that not true? I

(01:06:28):
really wanted to find out for myself. And I think there's
a part of me that says, you know, marketing
is marketing. I used to work in the marketing department. I was a web designer
that worked in the marketing department. I understand what marketers go through
to have to try to sell a product and make something uh,
feel good for people. And so, you know, I

(01:06:51):
can hear these little bits of, of lore and it will kind
of make my skin crawl a little. Sometimes I'm like, stop. Stop
doing that. But then I think, you know, their job is they're
a marketer. I'm a historian. I'm going to be going in.
I'm going to be trying to find the, the real story
for people who want to find the real story. They can look up

(01:07:13):
my books for people who want to just enjoy a day at
the distillery and, uh, being fed whatever
thing makes them feel so good about a particular whiskey roll
with it. And because I don't. I don't believe
anybody has malicious intent in terms of trying to destroy history.
I think it's a lot of people who have found a great story and

(01:07:38):
we love when we hear a story that's good and we want to share it. So
I can step back. and
appreciate that, but I also do
drop some clues every once in a while. For instance, if
you read my chapter on the six

(01:07:58):
medicinal licenses that supposedly came
out during Prohibition, people distilling throughout We
all have heard, if we've gone on a Buffalo Trace tour, that they're the
oldest continuously running distillery, which
implies that they were distilling through prohibition. Well,
there's two clues in my chapter that show that that's not necessarily true,

(01:08:21):
because first of all, there was a prohibition on distilling
until finally distillery started running in
1929 to refill medicinal stocks. But
the other thing, which is you got to be quick to catch
it because it'll fly right by you. But I talk about the fact that

(01:08:42):
it was called the George T. Stagg distillery at that time. And
that I found an article in the paper that said that
they had a fire and they could not start up production. uh,
when they were granted their license immediately because
of this fire and that kept their distillery shut down for some
time. So there's another clue that no, it's

(01:09:03):
not continuously running. It's a fun story. Uh, but
I also get into that with Bush mills and digging into, you know, 1608 and
that date I wanted to know, and I wanted,
and I don't think it diminishes, um, Bushmills
telling that story, in reality what it does is
it gets people to go, 1608, well how did they come up with that? And

(01:09:25):
then they find my book, and then they can find out what the
actual story is. Or if they just like the 1608 and go, it's
the oldest distillery in the world, have at it, just enjoy.
Absolutely. And there are a couple of things that are
mentioned. So in the chapter about medicinal, basically the six licenses, you

(01:09:47):
don't list out the six that had licensed. And I appreciated that
because it can, I think that would have directed
the reader in a certain way. And
by instead telling a story about, like you said, about Buffalo Trace, then
George T. Stagg Distillery as an example, then
it becomes more about the process and the larger the

(01:10:08):
larger scope of really what's being bad. It's not about the six
distillers. It could have been, in theory, could have been any six distillers
that were working and able to do that at the time. It
happened to be these six, but that's not the story. In
talking about the date of 1823 and
1824 is this huge, important date

(01:10:32):
in Scotch whiskey because then you
have the, I'm blanking
on the word, the Excise Act. Yeah. Yeah.
Of 1823. So you have distilleries that are like, okay, we started in 1823 and
1824. But then you go back into their histories a little more. It's like, no, you were distilling in
the 1700s too. It was just illegal. That's right. You

(01:10:54):
know, under a different under a different license or something. The
1823 and 1824 just tends to be a good marketing
slogan. And as I was listening to that chapter in particular, And
that comes through up in a couple of chapters, actually, I should say. So as I kept hearing that
factoid, I was thinking to myself, if that's something that a
brand wanted to embrace more, let's say in the last

(01:11:17):
10 years, there's incentive to do so because 2024 was
coming up. So if you're a marketing person, you're thinking
in advance and you're thinking, oh, we could look at this and say 1824 is a
big date and then celebrate a 200 year anniversary, which is what
a lot of brands did in 2024. They
celebrated, they had big releases and limited releases that of course were

(01:11:39):
more expensive and supposedly rarer and all this stuff. So
it really does come down to what is marketing? What's
the truth? What's the in between that we can also be
comfortable with? Are we okay figuring
that Are

(01:12:00):
we okay with, as you gave the example of Bushmills, are we
okay with just accepting, all right, they wanna say 1608, it's
a little more complicated than that, but we
The fun part of the 1608 story was as my
Whiskey Lord podcast, the last season I did, season six, was

(01:12:21):
on Irish whiskey and Irish whiskey history, and I was melding the
two together. and I had done a
50 distillery tour of Ireland myself and
then I'm tying in I'm learning all these places and I'm learning the
history as well and that was such an interesting process
of taking actual Irish history and mixing it with

(01:12:42):
Irish whiskey history because it showed me
very clearly that the history of whiskey is the history
of us, that whiskey has influenced
so much of society from our taxes to women's suffrage
to you name it. There are a lot of things that we
do because of, you know, we talk about tariffs and all that

(01:13:05):
stuff going on. Well, there was a whiskey tax back then too. And when
they were going to get rid of the whiskey tax, they were
going to do away with the whiskey tax because of prohibition. So they had to come up with
an income tax. So we learn these
things and we go, oh, OK, well, that's interesting. And
then I start asking questions like, well, if we got an

(01:13:27):
income tax because of prohibition, why didn't we repeal income
tax after prohibition was over? You start
thinking of that. But also, it's
the people. And this is why I say the real stories to me
are much more interesting than the fables, because What
I find when I write and I start tying these stories, uh,

(01:13:50):
or putting these stories together, I start finding common threads
and I'll be researching another story that's, uh, it, you
know, a later chapter. And I'll be like, wow, this relates
back to my story before. And I, I didn't even think about
the ties between that. You talk about the, um, you
know, we're talking about, um, Helen Cumming and what

(01:14:12):
she did with the Cardew whiskey and the
idea of Highland distillers who were
trying to, you know, that she was doing the distilling for the
family and that they came out of the shadows with that Excise Act
of 1823, but at the same time you had Anais
Coffey who was with the Irish Excise at the time and

(01:14:33):
he would have been in on those discussions about this
because he had seen firsthand being an excise officer
out in the in the show on the peninsula in Ireland the
violence and the and also the troubles that the
distillers had there in surviving and

(01:14:55):
so he could be there to give their
side of it and it's probably the reason why it shaped up
into what ended up being the modernization of
the whiskey industry because he had
a fascination with distilling, he had a fascination
with taxing and the excise and he cared

(01:15:16):
about the people even though they beat him senseless
when he was out on the wild frontier. You
look at that and you go, wow, okay, that's really interesting. Then
what I found with the Whiskey Lore podcast was that all
this is going on, or the taxes that were going on in the 1780s, uh

(01:15:40):
where they were playing with the taxes over there pushed a farmer over
into the United States named James Anderson and he becomes
the distiller for George Washington and it's like
oh something that happened a tax that happened in
uh the United Kingdom is the reason why
George Washington had this distiller and this highly successful distillery.

(01:16:03):
And it all just ties together and brings
out names that you know. And, and so, um, that's,
that's what really energizes me to keep digging into these stories.
So, um, just because again, there are a few more things I want to

(01:16:23):
hit on and I think, This
is implicit, but I think someone really needs to write a book also
about of
tying all of these stories together, just how whiskey,
and particularly taxes on whiskey, quite frankly, shaped

(01:16:45):
so much of our current legal system, tax system. There
was a point at which whiskey tax and spirits excise
was the largest plurality of government income
in the United States for a very long time. like
nearly a century from antebellum to basically

(01:17:06):
to the income tax and prohibition. You
have Irish pot still in an entire category of
Irish whiskey being created because unmalted
barley was cheaper and taxed less than malted
barley was and oats even less so and why there are oats in the
recipe. But subsequently also why oats are not in

(01:17:27):
recipes in Scotland, in the US. very
infrequently. And even today, it's mainly by craft
distillers who are trying something new. And God bless them because I love oats
and whiskey. But there's so much
that it's the excise, it's the taxes that are driving changes.
It came up in conversations when I

(01:17:50):
had one with Mark Lawrence Schrad who wrote Smashing the Liquor Machine, it was a global
history of prohibition. The tax aspect, the
money aspect was present in nearly every country,
region, situation you wanted to look at. in
Edward Stingerland's book about drunk and how that's more of a sociological
look at it, of how alcohol throughout

(01:18:13):
human history, hundreds of thousands of years, has shaped how
we do things, how beer at Gobekli Tepe 10,000 or 12,000 years ago It
shows that we were drinking and getting drunk and we trusted people because we all woke up
and nobody had killed each other. It was like, if you could pass
out with people, it's good. If the Persians would debate something sober
and drunk, and if they got to the same conclusion, then they went with it. So

(01:18:38):
it comes up throughout human history. And this idea that taxes
and whiskey could be such a vibrant
source of information to explain things. I've
also thought about this in the past, and the last thing I'll say on this is that if
you're an American high school student and you're learning about government,
you're learning about social studies and such, learning about the

(01:18:59):
amendments and the income tax comes up, you're not
taught that the income tax came up
partly, if not greatly, because they needed to replace the
upcoming losses from the alcohol taxes. Suddenly,
it's just like, oh, the government just decided to tax the
citizens. That's not how it

(01:19:21):
was. We didn't go almost 50 years without an
amendment just suddenly to have a tax put on us. The
That was interesting because I had to really dig into that because I was like,
you know, there was an excise tax that came about during the Civil
War, thanks to Abraham Lincoln, and that carried through
for a while and there was an income tax. And

(01:19:44):
this was something, as I'm digging out, I'm going, well, what happened to that income
tax? And what happened was it was declared
unconstitutional in the 1890s. And as soon
as it was, William Jennings Bryan, became
a champion for getting a constitutional amendment
put in to allow for an income tax.

(01:20:06):
So that's how that came out. And he was a teetotaler. So
because of that position, he was
a big driver on getting the
amendment passed. And Going
back to that 1608 story, that's what was so fascinating
to me is that we think and we hear the stories that

(01:20:27):
the excise tax, some people will put it
at 1660 is when it started, when the
monarchy took back over. But it goes back before that. It
was just taxation in a different way where the
1608 tax was the development of a monopoly system
where basically the king said, I'm going to

(01:20:48):
appoint somebody to oversee collecting taxes because
these locals are getting out of control when they're making their whiskey and
we need to control them and there were laws in place already so
this means that the excise was or not the excise but that
there were taxes on whiskey even before 1608. Sure.
But that they were not, they weren't being managed very

(01:21:11):
well. And then you start going up to the time of Cromwell comes in and
Cromwell was the first one actually to create an excise tax. So
he was actually the blueprint. for
what became the 1660 tax that everybody talks
about. But it's so interesting because as you're doing this research, you
always have to keep questioning and saying, well, what were they doing

(01:21:33):
before that? And why did they have to start collecting that tax? And
then all of a sudden you find out, oh, they were collecting that tax, but they had
a different way of doing it. There was a different reason for it,
whatever it may be. sometimes it's
preserving grain, but now all of a sudden we
get into the American economy in

(01:21:55):
the early 20th century and it is really all about
just getting alcohol out of the system, if
you can possibly do it. And so
it's just fascinating to watch. Ireland is a
fascinating story because of how many times they did prohibit
the distilling of whiskey because of food

(01:22:15):
shortages, because they did not have enough grain to make bread and
So, yeah. There's much
to whiskey that is inherently part of our history as
a state, excuse me, as a country, as a
world, as a nation and around the world. I
think needs to be told more. And this is where the myths come in. We

(01:22:37):
need to know what those myths are. Myths are great ways to
get into the story. Everyone loves mythology, because
you'll get an axiom out of it. You'll get a story out of it. It tells you something. And
there's a reason behind that. And I
can't say enough about this. I really enjoyed it. It's an engaging book. As
you said, the prompts at the beginning of each chapter to say, here's

(01:23:00):
what the myth is. I also loved the
inclusion. And I know I'm skipping over this a little bit, but
the inclusion of AI in this. What
does AI say about this? is
AI accurate on this and looking at it through that lens, because that's a modern lens.
That's a very contemporary lens that if you just Google

(01:23:24):
was Elijah Craig the father of bourbon, the first thing you're going to get, if
you do that right now, pause this and read
that in Google, you're going to get an AI suggested
transcript at the top that says whatever it's going to say. And that's
what most people are going to read. So I
love the inclusion of that. And it's not something I would have thought of to do because

(01:23:47):
that's exactly what people are going to see and read today. And
so again, I can't recommend this enough. The book is
available on Amazon. It's on Kindle, on audiobook, paperback.
I am sad by the way that, I understand why, but I am sad that
you discontinued the podcast. You have an excellent

(01:24:08):
voice for radio and podcasting and
storytelling. It's, I've
always enjoyed it. It feels weird to say that face
There is the audio book. Yes. Yes. There's the
And I said also, because there are a lot of podcasts that we listen

(01:24:29):
to. Maybe, you know, my voice might be grating for some people and
there are some podcasts that I simply cannot listen to, even
if they're whiskey podcasts and I want to listen to them for research purposes, because
I just can't listen to a voice or something. So
sometimes we get lucky there. But to wrap

(01:24:49):
it up as well, right now, as
Drew's mentioned, I'm a longtime Patreon supporter of
Whiskey Lore. I didn't realize it was one of the earlier ones, but again,
I've supported for years now. I love it. And as part of that, you
get to be part of things like the brackets that are
being set up. and voting on your

(01:25:11):
favorite whiskeys and which ones you should be paying attention to and which ones
Drew should be paying attention to. And honestly, I know you get
ones from me, I get ones from you and from other listeners and supporters. Right
now, Drew's planning his great 48. He's
soliciting suggestions for all the 48 contiguous states,

(01:25:32):
lower 48. I think there are some in Hawaii and
Alaska at this point, but I think that's going
to require a little bit more Patreon support before you can do
Believe it or not, I checked into it. And if I'd have bought my tickets, uh,
cause I'm going to end this in Colorado. So I'm doing all

(01:25:54):
50, 48 States. I'm going to finish in Colorado. If I flew out of Denver, I
saw the other day for 700 bucks, I could fly to
Alaska, to Hawaii, and then back
to Denver. So it's
You might have to do an appendix on there. I mean, that's, that's,

(01:26:15):
that's not bad. And there are distilleries, whiskey distilleries at that in
Yeah. So, you know, if you support Drew on
Patreon, if you also follow him on social
media, I'm especially following on Instagram, but
we'll have links to follow him as well. Get in on

(01:26:37):
the action. That's the best thing I can say is get in on the action. You
know, throw your ideas in the ring because there's
going to be a distillery that Drew hasn't heard of. And there are other
people looking at these and seeing whiskeys they
haven't seen before, distilleries that they should take a look at. And
I love the idea, especially this

(01:26:57):
many years into the podcast or into the hobby even, of
being a part of something. And I think it's a great opportunity for
people to be a part of your next work and your upcoming journey.
Well, I have to say a thank you to you too, because, uh, some of the, some
of the suggestions that you've given on the Patreon when

(01:27:17):
I was doing the, you know, craft distillery fan favorite craft
distillery, uh, our winner Riyoshi was
actually one that I had not heard about and you had posted
And I was shocked by that winning. Honestly, I came out.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, what
happened is, my last name is Hanisch, which

(01:27:40):
is actually a derivative that comes out of maybe
Czech Republic area. It
was Hannish, which was H-A-N-I-S-H. But
it's funny because there is a Lebanese uh,
Hanish that is spelled almost exactly the same. And

(01:28:02):
so everybody in Lebanon apparently
believes that I'm from, from that area. So the
name connected. And so a lot of people from Lebanon were,
were following. So I think that really kind of kind of helped the secret sauce.
What is your last name and does it draw people in? So, um,
so that was fun, but, but Roy was great to talk to also. And, uh,

(01:28:24):
and it's, It's great to see, uh, I'm really trying
to support craft distilleries these days. Cause I know, uh, times
could get a little way, you know, rocky here, uh, over
time with a lot of whiskey coming on the market. And so supporting
Yeah, we'll be in touch I'm sure over the course of this year and

(01:28:46):
next as we see, we saw the wave starting to crest in
late 2024 around the world, even closure
of Waterford was kind of the one that got the most, or
I should say the pending closure. It's in receivership, but
even entering receivership got the most notoriety, but there
are a lot in the country around the world that are going to be suffering and

(01:29:07):
really facing a trying time. I
wholeheartedly agree in that aspect. We want to support craft
distilleries, support the best stories, the
most authentic stories that we can find. Interrogate
them to be sure. Ask the questions. Make
sure they're not, as you said, talking out of the corner of their mouths or anything like that

(01:29:29):
as much as possible. Give them a little leeway of, all right, you got to
market, you got to sell the whiskey, but ask them the questions. And
then maybe great conversations come from it and more
questions will be asked. And if someone's asking about the whiskey, they're
interested. So that's a step forward. So
with that, again, I know we could talk for hours. There's certainly at

(01:29:51):
least another interview or two worth of things to talk about. So we'll
talk more in the future, but for now, thank you
to Drew for coming on, talking about his new book, Whiskey Lore,
Volume 1, Bourbon Scotch and Irish Whiskey, The Real Stories Behind
the Biggest Myths and Legends. It is currently on
Amazon, the number one new release in whiskey. And

(01:30:12):
I have no doubt it will continue to be there for quite some time. I hope
it is, certainly. You can get it, as
we mentioned, on Kindle, audiobook, paperback. I
received nothing for this, so this is purely me supporting someone that I
really support. And I will
have show notes and links for you to follow Drew to support his

(01:30:34):
work. And with that, Drew, thank
Thank you, David. All the best and success to
you too in what you're doing and keep interviewing people who
are interesting because I enjoy hearing those stories
and I think we feed off of each other in some ways. I see
who you're talking to and it draws my interest as

(01:30:57):
well and opens up more avenues for
sure. And even though you stopped the podcasts, I still go
back to your episodes when you've talked to someone I'm talking to, and
it's a must go for when I do research. So hang
on with me for just a sec after I close out the recording. This
has been another episode of the Whiskering Podcast. Thank you everyone for listening. Once

(01:31:19):
again, I'm your host, David. We had our guest Drew on.
Thank you for listening, supporting, sharing, and

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Ep. 173: Whiskey Lore Volume One with Drew Hannush

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