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#29 Maple, Moose, Heritage Corn & Craft Spirits With Tom From Herrick Creek
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After moving from Canada to New Zealand Tom found a passion for home distilling. Eventually vowing to go pro or leave the hobby behind. He now operates a small distillery named after a legend that ties New Zealand and Canada together.
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Transcript
Welcome and Introduction to Zencastr
00:00:00
Speaker
How's it going chasers? I hope you're having a kick-ass week and welcome to another Chase The Craft podcast which is sponsored by Zencaster. I've been using Zencaster for ages to create these podcasts and in that time a bunch of people have talked to me and asked questions about starting to create their own content to go out on the internet and I think YouTube obviously, obviously I think YouTube is a wonderful platform to do it on but if you want to kind of dip your toes in the water
00:00:26
Speaker
And create content with a little bit less upfront work in terms of production, equipment and especially editing. I think podcasts are a wonderful way to go. And Zencast is an awesome tool to do so. Zencast is an awesome platform that lets you record remotely with a guest. And the best part about it is that the guest doesn't need to download any software. They don't need to create any accounts.
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Speaker
they just click the link and you start recording. It's awesome. One of the best parts of it, and this is the reason I switched to Zencast ages ago, is that it'll stream between you and your guest in the highest quality that allows you to talk easily without it glitching out, without pauses, without buffering, any of that sort of stuff. But it records locally on your computer and on the guest's computer. And when you're finished, you get those
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Speaker
full resolution files to work with in terms of the actual editing for the podcast. But Zencast have upped their game. They now allow you to edit directly in your browser, which is amazing, especially for someone that's getting into this new and doesn't want to, you know, pay for the Adobe suite. And they also let you host your podcast in the same platform. So you can do everything start to finish for a podcast.
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with one login in your internet browser. It's pretty freaking sexy. So go to zencaster.com slash pricing and use my code chasethecraft to get 30% off your first three months of Zencaster Professional. Our guest today
Meet Tom: A Canadian Distiller in New Zealand
00:02:00
Speaker
is a Canadian that moved to New Zealand, fell in love with home distilling and ended up giving himself an ultimatum. He could either stop spending so much time on this hobby or
00:02:13
Speaker
Make it a profession. Guess which one he did. Right now he's operating out of a tiny little distillery in a garage, but he's won a couple of medals. He's in the process of upsizing. And interestingly, he's growing heritage corn right here in New Zealand, which is pretty freaking cool. So without further ado, let's get stuck in with Tom from here at Creek. Tom from here at Creek. It is an absolute pleasure to have you mate. How are you? Yeah, I'm great. How are you?
00:02:42
Speaker
I'm really good, dude. Uh, so this is a, this is a weird one in terms of, uh, I knew, knew you as news and Nadia. Yeah, that was it. Yeah. I knew it was something about like New Zealand and Canadian Canadian. As a screen name. Yep. And then I recently was looking for, uh, information on basically interesting corns here in New Zealand. And, uh, my wife found
00:03:12
Speaker
this website with a bunch of awesome stuff on it. And I reached out and you're like, I know you do. That's me. Yeah. Yeah. I'm so bad with names already, man. And then when screen names and not being able to see people in person, it's shocking. But anyway, so you are ex Canadian. How does this work? Well, yeah, I am Canadian
Tom's Distilling Journey and Unique Approach
00:03:33
Speaker
and I just have moved to New Zealand and I just, I don't know when I was at the YouTube channel and I was trying to do some stuff like that.
00:03:41
Speaker
For some reason that name came up and I thought Newsanadian is a terrible name, but at least it's kind of relevant. I don't know. I thought it was an awesome name. It was memorable too. Like so many people are like, oh yeah, I'm so-and-so from, I don't know, man. I'm sorry. If you put like 12 numbers, yeah, anyway. So I say ex-Canadian because I'm just assuming you're an honorary Kiwi now. I'm pretty close, yeah. I'm getting to working towards my citizenship eventually. Hey, that's awesome, man. So why New Zealand?
00:04:11
Speaker
Well, to be honest, it was never really on the cards. I'm like a, I'm a pretty diehard Canadian. Um, you know, if, if you had asked anyone I ever knew, they would have said like, Tom is the last person who would ever move away from Canada. But, um, yeah, I had a pen pal in New Zealand and, um, she became my girlfriend and she's my wife now. And, um, yeah, so those kiwi girls, yeah, they, they, they just get you.
00:04:38
Speaker
We're the opposite. I'm New Zealand and my wife is from, well, from LA. Also, the Oilers just knocked the Kings out. Even, was it? Yeah. Toronto just got knocked out by Tampa. So that was my sadness for the week too. Yeah. Okay. Well, okay. So I don't have to be too salty about you being an Oilers fan. We can move on. Yep.
00:05:04
Speaker
I'm a Winnipeg fan. Oh, okay. Okay. Fair enough. Yeah. This is a distilling podcast Jesse. Dear Lord. All right, man. So now the reason you're on the podcast, obviously, is you're doing some cool stuff in the distilling space here in New Zealand, which is really dope. Do you want to give us a quick rundown on Herrick Creek? And I guess we can go from there. I'm really keen to get stuck into this corn stuff, but we've got some
00:05:31
Speaker
Yeah, let's lay down some groundwork first. Yeah, I'll give you a little bit of like an elevator pitch. So I started Herrick Creek as a way to sort of keep doing the hobby of home distilling. I just couldn't really justify the time and money I was putting into home distilling. So I thought it's either I go into this or I'm done with it. And it turns out you can open a distillery in your house. So here we are. And so the idea was instead of making
00:05:58
Speaker
sort of the same old thing and everybody's doing something, I just wanted to make something a bit different. So I wanted to bring in sort of more North American styles, even though it's a bit harder in New Zealand to find those ingredients
Local Collaborations and Community Spirit
00:06:12
Speaker
and the correct materials to do it, but it was just...
00:06:17
Speaker
I want to do whiskey for sure. Of course, that's become very hard to do. It's very expensive. But we've now done the gins. We make all our alcohol from scratch. And then we do a moonshine, which we flavor as well a couple of different ways. So that one's really exciting. People love that. It's just fun. You know, at the farmer's market every weekend, people are like, oh, moonshine, you know, and it's
00:06:38
Speaker
Um, people love having that chat. Um, what is it? You know, blah, blah, blah. Um, but yes, cause here in New Zealand, I feel like moonshine is kind of this, it's, it's, it's not like a stereotypical, uh, cliche at New Zealand, right? Like the general public, but like, oh wait, I've heard of that. That's from, is that American? Yeah.
00:07:00
Speaker
You know, it's not. Yeah, it's funny. It's not completely played out here, is it? It always comes up. People are like, oh, have you watched the show moonshiners? And like, of course, I've seen the show. Yeah, like it's it's the only thing on TV about moonshine. And then everyone's like, oh, so what is it? You know, I don't I don't know what anything about moonshine. And then you get to have that one chat. It's it's pretty good fun. Yeah, it's cool. Oh,
00:07:25
Speaker
drop your, tell us your website, mate. So if people want to have a look at the products and the labels and stuff, they can see it. Yeah. It's just Herrick Creek.co.nz, which is H E R R I C K and then creek.co.nz. And yeah, everything's on there and people can always just drop me a line on Instagram, Facebook, through the website. If they got any questions as well, always happy to help people out if I can. Awesome, man. Awesome. So you're doing,
00:07:54
Speaker
You're doing this pretty, how do I put it? The distribution and sales and all of that is pretty close to you and the business and the location too, isn't it? You're doing farmer's markets and stuff like that still. That is really cool. How do you find that? Is that as a, is someone that's kind of halfway between artist and scientist, I guess. And then every freak another thing too, like marketing and
00:08:20
Speaker
accountants and yeah, it's really full on a I mean, how do you find it like literally being face to face and talking to the people that are drinking your products? Like is that? Is that just straight up awesome? Is it kind of intimidating?
00:08:36
Speaker
At first, it was the scariest thing we ever did because, of course, now you're putting your face out there and people can say, oh, this is disgusting to your face or something like that, or really gasp at the price or something like that. So I was really, really scared about that. But honestly, the feedback has been so good and it's been so good to actually see people come up and be like,
00:08:57
Speaker
oh I've tried this thing at this place and I just I've never heard of it before and here you are like tell me about it you know and um and they're like oh I love this and I love that or or they're just like here's some ideas um for you like have you ever thought about doing this or that and um yeah people have just been
00:09:16
Speaker
really good about coming up and chatting like real people of course I mean for some reason I just expected everyone to come up to me and you know tell me oh god this is terrible why would you start moonshine business in New Zealand and it's like oh this is disgusting and
00:09:31
Speaker
blah, blah, blah. But no, it's been so good. The farmer's market itself, like, it's a lot of effort every week to get out there. And not every week's a good week, you know, it's sometimes it's slow with the rain and whatnot. But like, it's fun to be out there with all the other local vendors and stuff.
Experiments with Beer and Moonshine
00:09:48
Speaker
And everyone's sort of, you know, been there, maybe they've been there a year, four years, eight years, and
00:09:53
Speaker
they've all built up these brands and starting from the farmer's market. So it's just really cool to see how everyone else is doing it. And then it gives you ideas and you get a bit of inspiration talking to other business owners and stuff like that. But especially talking to people who come up, like there's home distillers sometimes they get to come up and they're like, oh, tell me about your sales. And then they want to tell me about their sales and their products. And I love it. It's really cool.
00:10:18
Speaker
Yeah, that's pretty cool, man. I guess it's a very nice way to be sort of instating yourself, like getting yourself into the local business, the local business community, the local craft community. And I'm sure you meet, I'm sure it's a great kind of networking tool as well in terms of meeting
00:10:37
Speaker
other businesses you could work with. Yeah. Yeah. We did an apple pie last year, of course. But we use the local apple juice from the farmer's market. They just make it North. So that was really cool to be like, Hey, this is apple pie moonshine. We made it with apple juice from those guys just over there. You know, they think people love that. So yeah, that's pretty special. When are you selling it any other way? Like how else can people get hold of your product if they're into it?
00:11:03
Speaker
Yeah, it's on the website, of course. And then whiskeyandmore.codednz, they've got most of it, I think. And other than that, there's really not too many distributors or retailers. I'm sort of keeping it quite small still until I can up production a bit. Yeah, cool. Speaking of which, you're actually running that bad boy at the moment, aren't you?
00:11:26
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, that's my still Eddie. He's sort of named after somebody in the moose tail. Of course, Herrick Creek is named after the South Island moose tail. So I sort of try and name products and things around here from that story. And Eddie Herrick was the guy who used to actually go
00:11:45
Speaker
looking for the moose back when they were released and sort of losing the word for it. But he was documenting the numbers and whatnot. And he was the one that shot two of the moose after he thought there was a population. And it's also named after Alanis Grandad, but mostly Eddie Herrick. OK, so I don't know the story at all. Oh, really? No, no, I feel like I'm a horrible New Zealander all of a sudden. No.
00:12:17
Speaker
I'll give you the quickest story I can, but basically, back in 1900, the New Zealand government wanted to set up a game reserve in New Zealand, so they sent requests to the US and Canada to see if they could get game over here, which of course we did, we got red deer and stuff like that, but moose were also on the, oh gosh, I'm missing the word again, but the list, and so the Hudson's Bay Company actually,
00:12:41
Speaker
and picked up 14 little moose. They brought them over. 10 of them died on the way here that first time, but they released them in Hokotika. And the four that were left, they kind of died. And the last one got shot just for being a nuisance. And then 10 years later, they ordered more moose. And I think that time they got 10 of them. And they were shipped down to Fiordland, which is
The Moose Myth in New Zealand
00:13:04
Speaker
in Dusky Sound is where they dropped them off.
00:13:08
Speaker
That time they did apparently survive and breed for quite a while. So there was actually a good moose population in Fiordland. And the last one was seen in 1952, the last official sighting anyway. And ever since then, you know, every year we hear in the news like, oh, somebody's seen a moose in Fiordland, but no one's ever gotten a picture of it. So, yeah. So basically Bigfoot. Yeah, exactly. It's New Zealand, along with the moa that people say is down there too. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:13:38
Speaker
So what are you running on with Stillman? Today's a moonshine stripping day. So yeah, I got the core mesh running. And that one was actually a bit of a stuck one. So it was not fully dry, but it was all right. Still not. Oh, it didn't quite fit me until. Yeah.
00:13:56
Speaker
But yesterday I did a really cool one. Actually, we picked up a beer from a local brewery who's going to throw it out. It was a stout, a stout analoguer. And I mixed them together and distilled that. And it's sort of turned out quite, quite good, actually. I'm surprised considering there was hops in it. But it's, yeah, I'm thinking maybe I'll call that a beer ski or something like that. I don't know. But we'll see what it does after one more room.
00:14:20
Speaker
Interesting. I actually have, uh, I think about three dozen, uh, stout sitting out in the shed that are, uh, I actually haven't tried it yet. I don't think it's horrible. Are they hot? Uh, yes. Yes. Yes. It's just, uh, I'm actually still not sure what style I'm hoping crossing my fingers. It's not an American stout, but with, with a huge hop. All right. Yeah. Yeah. Uh,
00:14:47
Speaker
But yeah, I've always been interested to see what happens when you distill a stat because they're such big, bold.
00:14:53
Speaker
flavors. The stripping run was coffee chocolate, like it was exactly kind of what you'd want from it. Like it was really
Exploring Moonshine's Market and Production
00:15:00
Speaker
good. But with that sort of whiskey, you could tell like in the tales that that was a whiskey too, you know, like it was you could tell it's from grain, the tails were just very grain like, but those those first like, the first few years for sure were just like chocolate and coffee, like beautiful dark flavors in there. So of course, a little bit of hops, but like it just depends on how hopped it is, I guess how much hops are going to come through.
00:15:22
Speaker
Yeah, totally. I mean, that's, that's exactly what I've always hoped it would be. And I was always a little bit intrigued about whether you would get that slight Marmite soy sauce thing coming through and whether that would be accentuated. And then if it did, I don't know, man, like I almost feel like that might be fun.
00:15:43
Speaker
I mean, almost savory. I don't know. Yeah, I'm torn on that one. But the biggest thing I was worried about was the kind of the accurate almost.
00:15:54
Speaker
almost astringent, bitterness, not hot bitterness, you know, like bitter coffee, bitterness, whether that would be magnified. I can't tell you yet because I haven't finished it, but yeah, I can see that happening. Oh, well, I'll wait until you've finished yours and we can compare notes.
00:16:15
Speaker
I haven't actually asked you about this, but if there are trade secrets you don't want to share, by all means, be coy. But what's the recipe for the moonshine?
00:16:27
Speaker
Well, it's pretty well known to most home distillers. It's just a UJSSM. There you go. It's actually a really good recipe. I mean, it's kind of versatile as a vodka, almost like it's got that whiskey characteristic still to it.
00:16:46
Speaker
It's easy to make and you can do just so much with it. And I haven't added yeast in two years and I just keep adding fermenters and just taking a bit of the yeast out of the old one and dumping it into the new fermenter.
00:17:00
Speaker
It's great. And those flavors evolve over time. I mean, it's actually quite cool. So I don't actually add any backset anymore. I used to do that. But then it was just getting way too acidic real fast. So I just take out all the liquid. And then I just refill it up after that. I don't actually add any backset. I just add water and your sugar again and corn.
00:17:22
Speaker
Yeah, cool man. What yeast was it? What commercial pitch was it? Do you remember? It was. It was M1. Oh, okay. I just am trying to remember which brand of M1, but I think it was... I just can't remember. Interesting. So it was a whisky yeast. Yeah. And I'm kind of intrigued as to why you decided to go sugar shine.
00:17:49
Speaker
Like, is that just kind of what you thought would fit the quote unquote? Because I mean, let's face it, if you put five people together and tell them to draw swords and fight to the death about.
00:18:00
Speaker
exactly what is and what is not moonshine, you probably will get four dead people. Yeah, 100 percent. And I actually battle myself on this sometimes. Yeah, right. To me, it was that like there is a there's sort of a traditional way of like making like an easy moonshine, like in America, like I remember in Canada, it was always you're going to have a flavor and then and then sugar. It was never like there was never a question that you were going to make it off in grain.
00:18:29
Speaker
So, but then at the same time as a distillery as a commercial distillery, I feel obliged to use all grain as well. But
00:18:37
Speaker
At the same time, it's just not viable. If I was making it from all grain, it would be double the price. And it would be double the work. And I'd have half the product as well. So the whiskey, for sure, will fill that eventually. But I just figure for something that's fun and exciting, spirits don't have to be serious. Everyone takes whiskey so seriously sometimes. And just have some fun with moonshine. You can have something sweet. You can have something
00:19:06
Speaker
totally out there, like just do what you want and have fun. So I sort of settle on that one most of the time. Yeah, yeah,
Maple Syrup and Local Ingredients
00:19:13
Speaker
yeah. No, I totally get you, man. Yeah, it's funny because there's people that are like, no, it has to come from America and it has to be untaxed. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. No, but it has to be illegal. Like
00:19:27
Speaker
You're paying tax, so that is not moonshine. Different people. Yeah, that's cool. I mean, and I must admit that the real stereotypical kind of nomenclature, I guess, like the layman sort of what people understand it to be.
00:19:43
Speaker
I think it aligns with that pretty well. And it's funny too, because it almost gives you a license to be a little bit silly, right? It's like, no, this is no serious stuff. This is just for drinking. You know, you buy this, it's cheaper. It's easier for me to make. It's cheaper for me to make. Yeah. But do whatever you want with it. I mean, I classified as a vodka. I entered into the wards, like the judging as a vodka. Like I certainly don't want anyone to think it's a whiskey. You know, like I'm not pretending that it's a whiskey.
00:20:11
Speaker
Speaking of which, we just want a gold medal for our cinnamon version and a cinnamon or a silver for our maple. So that was pretty cool. I'm excited about that. You can take the Canadian out of Canada, but you can't keep the maple syrup away from him. It's impossible. Yeah.
00:20:32
Speaker
That's pretty cool, man. So is that back-sweetened with maple? It is, yeah. So I distill our regular moonshine, and then from about 75% or 80%, I had a certain ratio of maple syrup back into it, then the rest of water down to 50%, and it's still 50% alcohol, but that little bit of maple syrup in there adds all the color, as well as this just a little bit of sweetness that you obviously know is maple, and it's really easy to drink. Yeah, it's great.
00:21:02
Speaker
I'm sure, man, yeah, Maple has a very distinctive, uh,
00:21:07
Speaker
And in that kind of situation, it's almost like vanilla on steroids. Yeah. In the way that it kind of cuts through. It does. Yeah. That's pretty cool, man. I might have to give that a nudge. That sounds like fun. I should have sent you some. I'm so sorry. No, no, it's fine. It's fine. I'll just have to. So here is the question. Do you have the inside scoop on getting good maple syrup in New Zealand without having to sell testicles?
00:21:35
Speaker
I actually do. I mean, it depends on what you call selling testicles, but that's a wonderful podcast. Yeah. Yeah. If you ever need some maple syrup, I can get it by the leader or I can get it by the 25 liter keg if you want. So yeah. Wait, how long have you been in New Zealand?
00:21:54
Speaker
Uh, five and a half years. Oh, okay. Cool. Yeah. Yeah. So much before that, there was, I, uh, I, I've recently been, had it pointed out to me that we actually can get half decent maple syrup here and it's not as expensive as it was once was. Uh, but before I was into distilling, I was looking for it for cooking purposes and you just, it was just like maple flavored syrup full stock for $25 for it.
00:22:21
Speaker
Or maybe, I don't know, maybe I was just shopping in the wrong places. But yeah, it is getting a little bit better now, which is good. If anybody out there, of course, for the home distillers, wants good stuff. If you're in the South Island, you need to see David's ingredients. And if you're in the North Island, I think it's Gilbours. Just make sure you get an account with them. They've got everything, just about everything, anyway. That's funny, actually. The last place I saw it was there. Yeah. And that's the real stuff from Quebec, if you want maple syrup. It's really good.
00:22:48
Speaker
That's awesome. Everyone in America is going, what the hell are you talking about right now? Oh, they all want their Vermont maple syrup or something like
Challenges in Whiskey Production in New Zealand
00:22:55
Speaker
that, but yeah. Oh no, I just mean the fact that we're discussing where to buy maple syrup. Yeah. Sorry, Americans. Yeah. You don't know how good you've got it up there. We don't even have maple trees. We can't tap them.
00:23:08
Speaker
Yeah, has anyone actually tried to grow them here? Actually, I don't know if you've heard, but they have they have found out that you can grow in a certain places in the South Island, a really good maple syrup farm. And I've just talked to somebody a couple of weeks ago who's actually growing those maple trees. And what they're doing here is they're doing on a really weird industrial scale where they cut the top off and they stick a vacuum on it and they
00:23:29
Speaker
the syrup out of it yeah so they can they can fit like I think it's like four times the amount of maple trees into one into into one area and then they just cut off the top they stick a vacuum on it and they're just sucking it out that that seems kind of
00:23:48
Speaker
gory? I know, right? That's Yeah, that's what I said, too. And he's like, Oh, no, it doesn't sound it's not as bad as it sounds. It sounds bad. Like, I know these are trees supposedly don't have a nervous system and all. But I know I'm looking forward. He said he's gonna invite me down once it's all operational. So I can see it. But like, yeah, I'm really excited to see because it sounds terrible. But it really does. That'd be cool. I mean, if you can team up with someone,
00:24:16
Speaker
You know, yeah, I mean, there's a lot of cool stuff going on in New Zealand with like trying to get our own, I don't know, ingredients down here, like the juniper hunt, of course, a great juniper hunt for New Zealand. And then now the maple syrup, that one's going to be really cool. So and I think now, like, of course, with all the rum producers, they're trying to find more molasses that can be made down here and stuff like that. So, yeah. Yeah, man, I did a video a little while ago with Matt Petric. Yes, the podcast and the video.
00:24:45
Speaker
And I looked for so long to try and find a way to get cane, like fresh cane would have been awesome, but or fresh cane juice or shit, even pasteurized cane juice or just something like that. And I just couldn't. There was just nothing. And then, of course, afterwards, I got the email saying, oh, well, you should have gone to this farmer's market in this town because this guy. And I don't know how I was going to find that out ahead of time. But yeah, it would be pretty cool, man. It would be really dope.
00:25:16
Speaker
It's just so weird. I mean, if you don't, you would never think of New Zealand as a maple producing country. But yeah, there's definitely I think two or three locations in the South Island they said are perfect weather for it. And yeah, it'd be cool to see what happens in five, 10 years for that. For sure. Great. So speaking of another cool ingredient that New Zealand is starting to get corn.
00:25:36
Speaker
Yes. So once again, maybe do you want to lay a little bit of groundwork here for people that are not in New Zealand and sort of explain the situation in terms of, you know, what you mentioned earlier on, right? A little bit of foreshadowing in terms of ingredients and just whisky being difficult in New Zealand, especially if it's corn based whisky. So do you want to just kind of give us the lay of the land there?
00:26:01
Speaker
Yeah, so here in New Zealand, it is really easy to get barley and wheat, even oats. But maize, like corn, is not really produced for food that much. And if it is produced for food, it's yellow corn that is produced usually for like chips, like corn chips. And if it's not for them, it's for feed, which is a lot of it, I think, as well.
00:26:28
Speaker
So corn, yeah, we can only get yellow corn and even I know as a home distiller, it was like near impossible to even find good yellow corn. We had to go to the feed store and it was like bird feed. And I know it depends on where you are in the country, depending on your farmlands and stuff like that. But like, yeah, near impossible. So.
00:26:48
Speaker
on that note, I decided a while back that like, Americans have it way too good. You know, they've got, excuse me, they've got, you can just go to your local homebrew shop and buy all these cool different types of corn, you know, they can buy their bloody butcher, they can buy the Jimmy red, they can buy the blue hoppy, there's like all those different kinds now that they can just buy it. And I thought,
00:27:11
Speaker
Gosh, why isn't New Zealand doing this? So I actually have a couple friends who work for PGG, which is a seed company, and we sort of had a chat about what is the problem. And the problem is just cost versus reward for the farmers.
00:27:30
Speaker
farming down
Heritage Corn Cultivation and its Challenges
00:27:31
Speaker
here is super expensive with fuel and everything. Equipment costs, you know, way more than what you'd have to pay in the States to get equipment down here. So for them, they just need to plant a bunch of sweet corn and get it out the door to whoever's going to buy it at the cheapest or at the best rate. So, yeah, anyway, that said, we've decided we're going to make we're going to grow our own heritage corn. And yeah, I don't know if you want me to just talk about that a bit, please. Yeah.
00:28:00
Speaker
So finding heritage corn seed in New Zealand was pretty hard to do as well. But there is a couple of gardens up in the North Island who sort of preserved those seeds a little bit. So one of them is Koanga Gardens. I believe they're in, I think they're on the west coast, or sorry, the east coast near Gizburn, I think. But anyway, I got a lot of them from there. So last year we started with blue corn. It was actually two years ago. We started with blue corn, which I'll kind of show you there. It's beautiful stuff. This is actually my favorite cob, so I've kept it.
00:28:29
Speaker
I don't know if anybody would ever have a favorite cob of corn but it's just these beautiful like dark blues but also these like little white ones and like light blues. It was beautiful. So what I had to do though is buy like a seed packet and I bought a few seed packets of course from a couple different places and then grow seed stock in my backyard and so my first year was just that and it was a bit sad you know it's about
00:28:53
Speaker
maybe two dozen plants back there. And I was just making sure I'm making them as healthy as possible throughout the year. And then I'd harvest them at the end of the year. And then I had a big bag of seed now. And I was like, this is perfect. So luckily I have a friend in the WiMac area.
00:29:08
Speaker
And he said, here's a half acre paddock. If you want to try and grow some corn, like go for it. So yeah, I took my little bag of corn. He was lucky that he was good enough to cultivate the field for me. And I went out there and I went out there hunched over, you know, on all fours basically. And I put seed in one by one with my finger the first year.
00:29:29
Speaker
at the end of the day, like my fingers are bloody. It was a pretty long day. And so that was I think we planted about 1500 plants last year for that. And I think we got a pretty good sewing right out of that I think at the end of it.
00:29:46
Speaker
Actually, no, it was terrible. That's right. It was terrible. We had like a third of of what we had planted actually grew. So and then and then you got to dry it and then you got to decernal it. And the drying was awful. We had mold. You know, we had corn worms like corn borer. They just hop in there and they live like inside the husk.
00:30:08
Speaker
And it's really disgusting to deal with. And then you got to dry it. Yeah. So like in my backyard was hanging corn, like my entire backyard was corn last year with strings and tarps everywhere to try and keep them dry when it was raining out. And it was a mess. And
00:30:26
Speaker
We ended up with 28 kgs of corn, which was so disappointing. Yeah, that's pretty soul destroying, man. It was. How many hours of work do you think he put into 28 kilos of corn?
00:30:40
Speaker
I can't tell you to be honest, but I'm sure it was well more than it was worth, you know? So unfortunately, that little sample that you do have is probably worth quite a bit. Well, that's what I was kind of fishing for. I was like, how many dollars a kilo? Like, yeah. Just in sweat equity. Yeah. So, spoiler alert, guys, I do have a little sample of some whisky that was made.
00:31:07
Speaker
from the blue corn. What was the grist on this, man? Was this all blue corn, or? That is 51% blue corn, and then the rest is just a distiller's malt. Awesome. All right. I'm actually going to pull some of this now. It is a little more talk in the morning, but you know. So I think it's unfortunately going to be a very expensive release, and it does eventually come out in a year and a half-ish or so.
00:31:34
Speaker
That's so hard, isn't it? Because on one hand, you want it out there. You want people to drink it. You want to get feedback on it. You want to be able to grow the brand and the recognition and get people talking about it. So it's justifiable to do it again.
00:31:49
Speaker
But on the flip side, you got to get paid. It sucks. Yeah. Yeah. Which is kind of the land for whiskey in New Zealand in general, I think, really, isn't it? It is. How do you feel about that? I've done a lot of work on the price sort of map of what all the New Zealand whiskeys cost and on sort of like a 700 mil scale. And there's really
00:32:15
Speaker
The cheapest one is $75. And there's one of them. The next cheapest is $100. And there's two or three of them. And after that, they just keep going up from there. You know, 150, sort of a pretty normal range. But there's, you know, there's two, three, $400 bottles really, going around with New Zealand whiskey, which is just, I don't know if it is just a matter of cost.
00:32:43
Speaker
Or if it's a matter of getting the cost to getting it to the consumer, I don't know exactly what has caused it. But our excise tax, of course, is like $57 per liter of pure alcohol right now. So it's pretty expensive. I think we're second to Australia only. So yeah. Yeah, that's pretty harsh.
00:33:03
Speaker
especially when because I mean, I don't know how you feel, but my general feeling on on whisky that you can buy in New Zealand is Scotch is actually very reasonable here. Yeah. And you can get a really, really nice bottle of Scotch in New Zealand for one hundred and fifty two hundred bucks. You bet you can. So it's pretty damn hard to justify
00:33:29
Speaker
Like I find myself in this situation quite a lot, right? I mean, I guess I'm lucky enough that I can justify whiskey purchases as a flavor library for work, as I'm sure you can as well. So that sort of takes the pressure off a little bit. Like I can spend a silly amount of money on something that is interesting.
00:33:48
Speaker
above and beyond actually what's in the bottle. This is fun. I'm hoping I'm going to be able to talk to this person, or there's an ingredient here that's really cool, or I'm thinking of making something similar to this in the future. So this is an inspiration for that. There's all this additional value that I can get out of a bottle of whiskey when I purchased it. But if I'm just purchasing something
00:34:09
Speaker
to sit down and enjoy with friends, with family, with loved ones. And I just want something yum and complex and delicious as purely as a whiskey drinking experience. It's like I could reach for that bottle of New Zealand whiskey for 150 bucks, which I'm sure is going to be nice. Or I could get that real nice bottle of Ardbeg.
00:34:34
Speaker
for nearly half the price. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Or you could spend the same amount of money and get a really. Yeah. Bump it up to 250 bucks or something, you know, and now you're up into literally the best whiskies in the world kind of category. And it's good, you know, unless you're dropping three, $4,000 a bottle, which spoiler alert, I don't do that. Yeah.
00:35:02
Speaker
That's tricky, man. Yeah, so I'm very torn and I hope New Zealand finds a way to figure that out and to change it.
00:35:12
Speaker
I think there is probably, in the distant future, there's probably hope because now the professional distillers have gotten together. We do have a professional group and I know we are lobbying the government as much as possible to drop excise tax, first of all, which is really hard on small producers.
00:35:33
Speaker
other countries like the States was able to get a good excise reduction for smaller producers. Canada's been able to do it in some sense. I think Australia just did it as a credit sort of thing, but there should definitely be like a leader per year sort of thing. And under that you get some sort of rebate or discount or something like that. But at the same time too, we're going to have a ton of stock of whiskey in 10 years.
00:35:58
Speaker
no doubt the prices are going to have to come down. Right now there's like five or six producers of whiskey in New Zealand, so there's no reason to be cheap exactly. There's not much competition.
Collaborations and Home Distilling Legalities
00:36:11
Speaker
But eventually there will be and everyone's going to have more stock and it's just going to have to come down eventually.
00:36:19
Speaker
I hope so, man. I hope so. I'm very proud of the distilling scene in New Zealand. I'm proud of the fact that it's legal here. It is so freaking awesome that you can be at the farmer's market selling legit products, commercial product, and someone can walk up to you and say, oh, hey, I distill at home. It doesn't have to be this weird wink, wink, nudge, nudge. Oh, I really know what goes into making whiskey.
00:36:48
Speaker
Discussion, you know, that's just awesome. And I would love to see that evolve into what happened. I've said it a thousand times, people are sick of me saying it, but basically what happened to home brewing in California, you know, like, why are we not able to be one of the most progressive and creative distilling nations in the world?
00:37:10
Speaker
because it's so free here and we've got cool people that are into cool things. Anyway, this is super interesting, dude. I've been sitting here sipping it. Actually, carry on. Give me your thought on that because I'm interested to hear what you say about it.
00:37:21
Speaker
I think there is room, and I think there's probably some loopholes we could work on in the future using commercial distillers as partners and stuff like that. It'd be really cool if we could get together for a while. I don't know, we could put together a week or a month or something, and you'd just book a time with your local distillery if they're keen to do this with you. You'd obviously maybe have to pay a small fee or something, but you could come in and make it legit and use their equipment with them.
00:37:47
Speaker
And then we could actually have little competitions that way. It's a bit harder to do it if you want to do an age thing course, but that's a loophole at least. There's no reason someone else can't come in here with me and make something with me. And if I pay the tax on it, it's fine. We're making it to the food regulations. We're making it totally above the board. There's no reason you can't come in here and make your cool vodka.
00:38:14
Speaker
with me for a week or two and then, you know, take it together one day and I'll just have a little bit of competition or sampling or whatever. Oh, I guess I guess I meant more the the fact that it's legal for us to just piss around in our shades and experiment. I would like I would hope and it is happening in New Zealand. Don't get me wrong. Like I sound real cynical and down on this and I'm not like I'm upbeat, but I feel like there's a lot more headroom for it.
00:38:42
Speaker
If you can legally distill in your shed for five years, exactly like you, right? Realize you love it. Realize, hey, I'm actually kind of good at this. And I've got five years of experience. I'm not just jumping into this from nothing.
00:38:57
Speaker
You can take the next step as opposed to someone in America who is not allowed to distill and opens a whiskey distillery who has never distilled a drop of liquor in his life. Yes. You know, I totally agree. Yeah. Yeah. That's just kind of frustrating. But yeah, I agree. That would be cool, man. It'd be cool to I don't know.
00:39:17
Speaker
Yeah, I was thinking sort of like those homebrew competitions they have in the States, you know, they're really cool and stuff like that. I think they do in New Zealand too, but yeah, stuff like that would be fun to do eventually. It really would be dude. It really would be and it's such and it seems like there's such a so many of the commercial distillers in New Zealand are just such cool people like yourself. It'd be really fun to have that, that give and take between the hobby and the commercial side, because the hobbyists are able to do stupid shit.
00:39:46
Speaker
it has no place in the community. You can't do that because you'll lose money. But if you do it a thousand times, five or six really cool things are going to pop up that the commercial guys wouldn't have been able to discover because they've actually got to pay the bills. The flip side as well, right? There's more like, I guess, the science and the research and the scale and economy, all of that stuff can flow back to the home distilling world and they feed each other.
00:40:09
Speaker
And it's good to share what's been learned, all that knowledge back and forth between home distillers and commercial distillers. There's just so much knowledge that can be going back. I'm on home distiller forums all the time. If I have a question, some of the commercial distiller forums don't have the information that the home distillers have. So I'm always on there just seeing what people are up to and how they do things. I love it. Totally, man. Yeah.
00:40:37
Speaker
I'll be real with you. This blue corn whiskey is a tricky one to get my head around. It's really out there. It's different, dude. I'm going to throw out some flavor notes that I feel like I'm getting and you tell me if you think I'm completely bonkers or not. Go for it. There's definitely something kind of like blueberry or
00:41:02
Speaker
The closest thing I can think is blueberry, but it's more just like, maybe like blueberry bubblegum or like Ribena or something like that. Like it's just blue. And
Three Grain Whiskey and Distillation Process
00:41:13
Speaker
then there's definitely some chocolate and some coffee sort of lingering underneath, which surprises the bejesus out of me. I think that's gotta be the barrel that has to be the barrel. Yeah. Cause I'm assuming you just used like an hour malt or a distillers malt or something. It's just a distillers malt for that. Yeah.
00:41:29
Speaker
Um, but the really interesting thing to me is it's, I can't put my finger on it. It's kind of like halfway between Mazapan and Apple. Okay. Yeah. That's really interesting. Um,
00:41:44
Speaker
I want to say sweet and sour. It doesn't taste like sweet and sour, but it has that kind of presence in your mouth where it's just, there's just all of the things are happening at the same time and your mouth, like your brain can't, almost can't interpret it. A hundred percent. Um, when I finished it and I was smelling this thing and I thought, you know, if something can smell blue, like it's that, you know, something that smells blue. Um, and which from a whiskey shouldn't happen. Um, like from a full grain, like,
00:42:13
Speaker
corn and barley, I just never would have thought that would be the end result. And the flavors in there, when I put it into the barrel, were just so, I don't know, sweet, but there was still this like, I don't know, dryness to it, but like it, yeah.
00:42:30
Speaker
I don't know. When I tried that sample that I pulled out for you, and I haven't actually tried it since I put it in the barrel until then, definitely that barrel influence had hit it a bit. So now it's hit that sweet end barrel sort of weird spot, which I think will definitely change over time. But I think that sweetness is going to push away more as the barrel takes over a bit more. But it's so weird. I don't know what to think of it. But that's the fun of it.
00:42:54
Speaker
I, yeah, I don't know. I mean, I, I just kind of enjoy things that are different a lot as well. You know, so I taste this, I'm like, I fricking love it. Yep. That's really good. Yeah. But yeah, I guess that side of my brain takes over a little bit sometimes, but. And I had sort of always wondered, because I never got to try the Balconas baby blues or anything like that. Have you ever tried it?
00:43:20
Speaker
I have. It was a long time ago and let's just say I wouldn't have been driving that night for probably most of the next day. The reviews I had read on it were so polarizing. It was like people either really loved it or really hated it. I just wonder if it is maybe that grain that's maybe just throwing people off. It's just different.
00:43:43
Speaker
Yeah, I don't remember a lot about it. I remember that I loved it. And I also remember that I'm going to be rude and Google this real quick. I'm sure there's like multiple releases of it. Yes, I think you're right. And not just time, like there was different versions and my memories and I tried two different versions. I can't remember what the other one's called, but I know what you mean. Yeah. I know the one you're talking about.
00:44:08
Speaker
Yeah. I don't know, man. I don't remember a lot about them. I couldn't tell you whether they're similar or not. I just remember that it was really freaking yum. But to be fair, once again, if you're having a night like that and you've already drunk
00:44:24
Speaker
you've sampled 15, 20 different whiskeys and then someone serves you something like this, it's going to stand out, right? Definitely. And amongst all of that, yeah. All right. So I've also got your three grain here. It just says three grain, 50%. That's about all the information I've got on it. Cool. That one's sort of our flagship whiskey that I'm
00:44:44
Speaker
sort of been working on. And that's a malted corn, malted wheat, malted barley build. So it's 50, I think that one is 51% malted corn, and then it's split between the malted wheat and malted barley for the rest of it. And then we aged it into new five-gallon barrels, and I've blended them into a new 10-gallon European barrel.
00:45:07
Speaker
Oh, OK. Yeah. So that one isn't finished. I know for sure like the version you're tasting there isn't done yet. It certainly has a bit more to go. But hopefully later this year it will be ready. Yeah, that's definitely a lot further along than the blue, isn't it? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Huh. That's really interesting, dude. What are your thoughts on malted corn? Because once again, people from anywhere but New Zealand are probably asking you what the fuck right now.
00:45:37
Speaker
Yeah. This is the option we have, guys. I think it's amazing that we have malted corn in such quantities. I mean, how cool is it? You know, that we can just buy a bag of it. Like, how cool is that? And then there's nothing to it, really. You just mash it like you would your barley. Except, I mean, it's a bit hard to lauter, but it's...
00:45:59
Speaker
It's so easy to use. But just just back up there for a second. You just said corn is a little bit hard. So let's back up for a second here for anyone if you're listening to this and you haven't made a quote unquote bourbon or a corn whiskey or something. Walk us through the way that this normally happens and why the fact that I'm cracking up at this.
00:46:24
Speaker
Yeah, well, I mean, usually if you're making your corn and it's unmalted or even if it's malted, honestly, there's no has gone corn. So it just returns into this porridge. And then any of your if you do have a false bottom, it just gets.
00:46:35
Speaker
sludged and stuck and your, your, your beer is just stuck there. Um, and your wash is stuck and you get it out of there and then you're stuck, you know, with the bags and the mop thing and, you know, all the good things to squeeze that corn out of there. And it's a mess or just, just a long grain or, or that if you have the ability to have the ability. Yeah. Um, so it's melted corn. Uh, it behaves again. I don't know. I guess I'd say it's probably a little bit more like rye than barley.
00:47:05
Speaker
in that, I don't know, I don't think you'd probably get away with 100% multi-corn in the enzymes, would you, and water it? I kind of wanted to try, yeah. I was thinking actually about changing it to 100% corn just because I thought that'd be really cool. But at the same time, I think it'd just be impossible to finish properly. You'd have to have some hulls or something in there.
00:47:27
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, I tried oat hulls in my mash tun and the oat hulls are the perfect size to put in the holes at the false bottom. So that's worth either. But no, I mean, I think the malt cord on its own, like it just makes so easy. And it does have a great corn flavor to it. Like, I mean, when I've told when I've had people sample that one before, they said,
00:47:48
Speaker
corn I get, that's the first thing I smell is corn. So it doesn't change that it's corn, it's just got this different characteristic to it, and it's easier to make, you know? And it's more expensive, unfortunately. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, and just so people are very clear, it is molted, which means you don't need to gelatinize the corn, so you don't have to boil the crap out of it. But
00:48:12
Speaker
its diacstatic power may as well be zero. So it's not going to convert itself or anything else for that matter. So you still need bottled enzymes or an ale malt or a base malt in there as well. But it does mean that you can just mash it like a beer. Yeah. And that's the best thing about it. I mean, if you mix it with some distiller malt or some other malt, I mean, it's great. It does the job. So yeah.
00:48:40
Speaker
Very cool. Yeah, man, this is starting to hit a bit more of a sweet spot. I can see what you mean with the blue corn. It's sort of a little disjointed right now. You've got the sweetness of the malt and then the barrel influence coming in as well, but it's not.
00:48:55
Speaker
cohesive at all, whereas this is heading there a lot more. You're getting some of that, starting to get some of that really interesting, like dusty, old, like workshop sort of wood as well. I love that smell. It's so funny when I say dusty.
00:49:14
Speaker
How else do you describe it? It smells like powder. It's like cocoa is dusty, right? Not as a form, but if you smell it, it smells dusty. And some people think I'm crazy, but... I definitely understand what you mean. I grew up on a farm, so everything is dusty. It's almost a sense, more than a smell, but when you smell it, you know it's dust. I'm interested to hear what you think, just on the flavor on that. Is it...
00:49:42
Speaker
I don't know if it's something going on with me lately or not, but I'm getting a bitterness on that one. And I'd love to know what you're getting. Hold on, let me palette cleanse. Take a second.
00:49:57
Speaker
While I'm doing that, why don't you tell us what your process is on these whiskies? Are you distilling on grain? Are you using plates? What's the distillation process? Totally, yeah. Actually, for all the batches I've done so far, I had been fermenting on the grain, which was a good way to do it, but now I've got a mash ton, so I'm not going to be doing that anymore.
00:50:18
Speaker
I had a mash ton before as well, but it just was way too small for what I was doing. So on the grain was a really good way to do it. And then I just have to, once I got all the liquid out of there, do some sort of, how did I do that? I can't remember actually how I used to get the liquid out of them anymore. And then it goes into my still, which is run with elements, electric elements. So I can't put solids in there.
00:50:46
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I don't mind that way to do it, but I would love to get a double boiler system when it'd be amazing. But that one, although there is a sight glass on there, there is no plates. So I just run it always in pots still. No matter what I'm making, I really like to get as much flavor as possible. So I don't use the plates. I had some plates and I tried them with like the moonshine. I tried them with our gin and stuff like that. And I just didn't really, didn't do much for me. It didn't change too much. So I just thought it was more effort than
00:51:16
Speaker
was necessary. So I really like right now the way it goes.
00:51:19
Speaker
right through there and the parts still mowed and I don't change it for anything. It just does the exact same mode every time. Yeah. Great. So it's just straight, good, old fashioned, double distillation. Yeah, exactly. Strip and done. I'm interested. I've been asking more people about this lately. What does your low wines come out to be in terms of, sorry, I guess average ABV, like the full volume once you're finished with the strip?
00:51:47
Speaker
On average, I'd say it's between 35 and 40%. Okay, interesting. So you're stopping relatively high. You're not going super deep.
00:51:56
Speaker
I actually do go super deep. I usually finish around like 7%. It's usually where I stop the run. But for some reason, I think I get, maybe there's a lot of good alcohol at the beginning, but it always usually on a stripping run, I'm starting around 85% somehow, which is really impressive to me, I think, for a stripping run. And it stays quite high for a while. So there's quite a bit of alcohol usually. And I should probably do the mass sometimes. I do write down the standard gravity or the, not the standard, oh my gosh, the SG.
00:52:27
Speaker
It's starting gravity. It always confuses me with specific gravity as well. I'm like, you're both S's.
00:52:35
Speaker
I'd write it all down, but I've never done the math. It's like what actually our ABV is in the, in the wash. I just don't care. Um, I just write down what the sugar is to start and what it is at the end, but I've never actually done the math. Um, but I usually start somewhere around 0.07, um, something like that. So, and I go all the way down and I do not let it not finish it. It's a whiskey. Yeah, right. Yeah. Yeah. You want more of that. Fair enough, man. I mean, I guess
Impact of COVID-19 on Taste Perception
00:53:01
Speaker
you do have the big, uh, onion,
00:53:04
Speaker
Yeah. I'm pointing it out with my cursor. That doesn't help anyone. I don't know if it shows on mine either, but no. Yeah. And I guess, what's your like ambient temperature normally like? I'm guessing you're getting a bit of ambient cooling. Yeah, it's quite cool in here usually. It's, I don't know, this morning it was like 12 degrees or something in here. So yeah. Right. Get quite a bit of reflux to start with.
00:53:32
Speaker
Yeah. I don't know about bitterness, dude. I get a slight amount of astringency, but I actually kind of like a little astringency and a little a little bit of something to balance it out. Yeah. I don't like I just kind of get the feeling. Oh, wait. No, I didn't. I would know all about it if I went back to the place.
00:53:53
Speaker
No, that's good. I'm questioning my own palate lately because I feel like everything I've tasted has been bitter. And I think it's, I haven't been drinking as much. So I think my palate's a bit wrecked at the moment. That's funny, dude. I was literally just about to say, I haven't had anything for a couple of days now. And it's morning and I haven't eaten yet today either. And I quite often find the first thing I drink, you know, if I'm, that's so funny, isn't it? If you take this out of context, we just sound like raging alcoholics right now. Yep.
00:54:24
Speaker
The first drink I have in the morning before eating quite often tastes. I tell people at the farmer's market, they're like, Oh, it's a bit early for a nip at 9am. And I said, I'm usually having an 80% drink at like 730 in the morning.
00:54:38
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, it's funny. I was I was going to say I'm kind of I feel like I am potentially how do I almost like grading it on a curve a little bit because I feel like that I do get a little bit of something. But yeah, it's a pretty standard thing for me. Oh, man, I don't even want to go here. But have you had the COVID?
00:54:58
Speaker
I haven't. No, we haven't. OK, because I I did. And I I feel like I'm still struggling to get back to like what a baseline is for me. Oh, really? It's been quite interesting. Not not like crazy, but just drinks that I know really well. Yeah. Like I'll have the
Corn Cultivation Tips and Expansion Plans
00:55:16
Speaker
free 10 and it doesn't taste like the free 10 to me, which is bizarre. And I've had that in the past and then I'll go, oh, that's right. I was, you know, eating tacos with
00:55:28
Speaker
have an aerosol all over it like five minutes ago. That's why. Yeah. Or I just brush my teeth or whatever, you know, some weird thing that's.
00:55:36
Speaker
messing it up. And yeah, I don't know. My taste just, it's kind of like that all the time now with no reason. Yeah. It's weird. There's a chance I've had the COVID and not know it, but. Yeah. Yeah. It's true. All right. I feel like I need to pick your brains a little bit more on this whole corn growing thing, dude. Like, is it something that someone at home could do by themselves just to mess around with something? Or is it just a giant pain in the ass?
00:56:04
Speaker
I feel like if you had enough room, like if you really wanted to dedicate a good spot in your garden to corn, because like if you grow six plants, you're not going to get enough, you know, you're going to get a few, you know, maybe enough to do another field or something, but you won't have enough to
00:56:21
Speaker
really make a difference. Then again, I mean, if you're doing, you know, 2050 litre batches, it might actually be really good. So like for me, it wouldn't be worth it. But like for for home distiller, it could totally be because if you have a handful of bloody butcher and you chuck it in, you're probably going to taste it if you had that blue corn, you know, and you chuck that in something, I guarantee you'd probably get a bit of that blueberry or whatever in it, you know, like it's, it's quite a strong grain on its own, like corn on its own is already a strong grain.
00:56:50
Speaker
And as soon as you start changing up the flavors in it, you're still gonna get that, you know? I guess some key things I would tell you is it needs to be sunny. It needs to be like almost a full sun spot. And they, you know, you can look at the spacing online as how far they need to be apart, but they need to be together. You can't just plant like one or two. They need to have buddies so they can pollinate properly.
00:57:13
Speaker
I highly suggest pollinating by hand as well so when they finally get to that pollination stage at the top you can shake it off into like a piece of paper and I just blow it on to the little bristles that come off the end of the cob that's the best way to make sure that you're gonna get like a full cob of kernels every time.
00:57:31
Speaker
And yeah, you got to water them like every day as well, water and sun. And they just need to be constantly watered so that they, cause they just soak it up. The plants of the blue corn, they were pretty tall, but like this year with the, um, the bloody butcher, they were growing, I think 14, 15 feet tall. And the same with the other one that I'm growing here at home is above my roof. Like it's, they were super tall. Um, and that's just from being in the sun and being watered, you know, so you don't need to add any fertilizer or anything. It's just a matter of.
00:58:01
Speaker
taking care of them. Yeah. Yeah, right. So there's, it's an interesting thing, man. So it's very cool that you're doing it down here in New Zealand, because you just can't get it. Yeah. I mean, I know if you're like, if you want to get in touch with someone and say, you know, I need
00:58:16
Speaker
thousands and thousands and thousands of kilos of corn every year and have it on a, you know, you're invoiced a year and a half ahead. That's one thing, for sure. But on a smaller, you know, it's not like you're still as 8,000 litres. It's kind of a different thing. And the same for a home distiller, right?
00:58:36
Speaker
literally the only way that I've been able to purchase raw corn is to go to the feed store and buy feed maize for cows. It's the only way to get it. So that's one thing. The second thing is though, the reason I bring this up is to juxtapose that against
00:58:54
Speaker
people in Texas that I know, Ironroot Distillery in Denison, they are literally growing corn in their front, like right out in front of the distillery as well, because they're kind of doing what you're doing. They're digging up these old varieties that just no one grows and no one cares about and no one has any inclination to grow. And they'll test it, like in the front, you know, they'll just grow it.
00:59:18
Speaker
And then do a tiny little test batch and be like, well, that was shit. Don't ever do that again. But this has got potential. We've got to convince someone to grow this so we can put it on the big scale. So my point being is it's not just New Zealanders that are going to be thinking about this. If you start thinking about being creative and trying different flavor combinations and bringing back, especially if you're into the story of stuff, if there's a specific variety that was growing
00:59:44
Speaker
I don't know, like in your location a hundred years ago and now no one grows it. It's pretty cool. Excuse me. Pretty cool to be able to bring that back. And the other reason I bring up Lionroot is that Bloody Butcher, can't remember the other ones they were working on. They ended up settling. I don't want to put words in their mouth in this. Don't quote me on the exactness of it. But I think it was like three to six percent.
01:00:07
Speaker
Wow. Of the grist they're using specialty corns in because they are. They're just a kick in the pants, right? Yeah. So I'm just thinking about it. Like for a home distiller, 200 kilos is a pretty damn big mash. Yeah, that'd be huge. Yeah, that's 10 kilos that you have to grow. Yeah. And that's still a lot of, yeah, that's still a lot more. But that suddenly becomes a whole lot more doable, right?
01:00:32
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, if, if, yeah, if you're doing a, what's 50 liter batch is something like 10 kg. Is that what a mesh is now? Okay. I would, I'd say probably, uh, yeah, something like that. Yeah. I mean, if you only need to grow two kgs of corn or one kg.
01:00:50
Speaker
That's doable. You can do that in your backyard. And at the end of the day, you're gonna have something really cool to brag about to your friends, you know, like this, this whiskey has bloody butcher in it that I grew, you know, like, that's pretty cool. Where'd you get bloody buttered corn? Like, what is it? It's like, you know, it's something to talk about. Yeah. Hmm.
01:01:11
Speaker
Let me be a little coy. If there is someone listening to this that can get interesting things like this to New Zealand, I would be very interested in talking to you. Wow, that eight sips of whiskey at eight o'clock, eleven o'clock in the morning.
01:01:29
Speaker
messing with me slightly. But yes, if there is someone listening to this that thinks that they know a way to get this into the country, or knows of it in the country, or can grow it in the country, please, please, please get in touch. We would love to know that either of us please. But you did I heard last time I talked to you that you're growing in New Zealand.
01:01:51
Speaker
Yeah, this is really cool stuff that I've been digging up. I've got a little bit of a seed library going on. And some of them, of course, I haven't been able to propagate yet. But this year here at home, I'm propagating ones called Hokiyaga red and yellow. So this here is actually the same variety, which is pretty cool. Like it's the exact same plant, actually. These both came off like two different cobs on the same plant. That's so cool.
01:02:15
Speaker
Yeah. So this is I think was one of the first varieties they grew as settlers in New Zealand. And yeah, they bred it as I think it was the sweet corn that they were using it as in flower. But it throws they say it throws about 30% red and then 70% yellow, but I've actually had the opposite here. So I think it might depend on which seeds you planted because I think I planted more red seeds than I planted yellow.
01:02:41
Speaker
So it might actually be something to do with that. But this is one of the smaller cobs. They're actually quite big. And the yellow ones are actually quite popcornish color, almost. They don't look like popcorn, but the color is popcorn. And the red on them is like, oh, that's bad lighting. I'm so sorry. But it's dark, deep blood red, which is a little bit in contrast to the Bloody Butcher.
01:03:06
Speaker
Which has like, you can't see it at all, but like black and red sort of. And then this one's just pure red. I don't know. Yeah, they look almost more purple.
01:03:14
Speaker
Yeah, so this one I'm really excited about. The plants, like I said earlier, were absolutely huge. They're above my roof. And next year, for sure, I'm going to do a field of it because I think it's so cool that it's a New Zealand variety that now we can make some whiskey with. So this begs the question, are you going to harvest them all and then split them into yellow and red?
01:03:37
Speaker
Are you going to try and control the ratio or is it going to be almost more like a seasonal whatever pops out of the ground? We'll fucking mash it.
01:03:47
Speaker
That's a great question. I don't know. I don't know yet. I feel like it's a variety that works with the two colors together. So that's probably the best way to keep them, is to just plant them randomly and harvest them and keep them random, I think. That's probably the best way to do it, probably as well for the
01:04:09
Speaker
the health of the genome, if you will. If I started just planting yellow seeds and only keeping the yellow seeds, I'm sure I'd end up with just a yellow variety after a couple of years. The flavor, I haven't actually tried either one of them yet, so I don't know what's going to be on their own or together. I have no idea yet. That's the fun of it.
01:04:34
Speaker
Who else, no one else is making whiskey with it? So like, how can I know? You know? Yeah. That could turn into a very cool, almost like a vintage.
01:04:44
Speaker
That's exactly what I'm doing. That's exactly it. So the blue corn was heavy on the red and light on the yellow, which, you know, gave it this and that. And yeah, that's pretty cool. So every year, like, that's kind of the idea is like, you know, we'll release it as like, this was the 2021 blue corn. This is the 2022 bloody butcher next. Then it'll be the 2023.
01:05:05
Speaker
red, yellow, and we can even put, I can definitely always put like the ratios in there. I kind of love geeking out a bit on the labels, giving as much input as possible, or if it's not on the label, it's on the website somewhere, so.
01:05:18
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, there's other ones too. This is a one that's somebody in the North Island. I believe it's the North Island. He's sort of been making, and it's called Ballard? Billard? Billard? Like B-I-L-L-A-R-D. And it's kind of orangey instead of yellow. You can't really see it on there, but the cob is orange, and it's not a huge cob. It's not too small, but it's an orange one, and that's a New Zealand variety that I'm looking forward to trying in the future.
01:05:47
Speaker
I also really want to try some other ones like glass gem which is those fancy you know all these different colors with like the greens and purples and all the different things. That'll be a really cool one but they're small cobs on that one so I don't know if that'll be as worth it but I think you get more cobs per plant as well.
01:06:04
Speaker
There's also one called Black Navajo. There's Painted Mountain. There's Jimmy Red, which I can't get in New Zealand. So if anyone has Jimmy Red seeds, I would love to get my hand on some Jimmy Red because I hear it's one of the best ones for making whiskey.
01:06:20
Speaker
And they have it in Australia. So yeah. So, so this is the thing that I was thinking about, man. Like I can buy a sack of Thomas faucets, heavily peated malt. Yeah. And sure, it's more expensive than glad fields, which is for those that don't know, it's that it's produced grown and malted here in New Zealand, but it's not astronomically expensive. No. So surely, surely there is a way for us to get
01:06:49
Speaker
some of the specialty corn that is readily available to home distillers and home brewers in America into New Zealand. So you can, I think you can get it from the states if it's cracked. I've talked to MPI about this a few times and you know they're pretty strict on corn because corn has a specific disease I guess that they're trying to keep out. But if it's cracked and it's being used for food
01:07:13
Speaker
you can bring it in quite easily. But of course, there's huge costs, because I think you really need to make it worthwhile you bring like a pallet or, you know, probably more, more than one pallet in at a time. Yeah, and then you need someone on the other end who's willing to organize that for you. So, you know, all you Americans, whoever's got some good shipping connections with some corn connections, this is the time you want to jump in and let us know. Or
01:07:43
Speaker
Have you got a yacht and a balaclava? Either way, we want to hear from you. Yeah, that's cool. All right, man. So what about plans for the future, dude? You mentioned, you kind of mentioned the idea of upscaling. What's the, what's the choke point for you at the moment? What would you have to increase first?
01:08:08
Speaker
Do you mean for corn or just in general? No, just in general. So I'm stuck in a single-car garage, which is the smallest, I think, probably in New Zealand. I don't think anyone's got a smaller distillery, even though some people have said that. But it's space. I'm so out of space. I'm fermenting in 200-liter blue drums, and I've got some new black ones.
01:08:30
Speaker
And then as soon as you start, I think everyone's probably run into this. But if you buy a bigger still, then you need a bigger fermenter. You need a bigger mash tun. You need bigger holding things. There's a choke point at every point, no matter what you upgrade in your process.
01:08:45
Speaker
So right now we're working on moving to the farm where our corn is grown. We've been looking into that. We've done some water testing and it's really, really good water. It's well water, which is exciting. So it'll be a little bit different from just the regular city old stuff. And from there, like we're actually going to be able to have like a 2000 litre fermenter. We might even be able to get a new still at that point.
01:09:08
Speaker
But I'll also be able to grow more corn because I'll be out there all the time. So that's going to be really cool. So this year that we've done, we had that half acre plot, which we did about half of the half acre, so a quarter acre. But next year, I think we're going to be able to fill more of that field and then possibly do another field as well. So maybe two varieties going at one time, which would be really cool as far as keeping the seed library going, but also getting more of this stuff into some barrels, which would be really cool.
Logistical Challenges in Production and Scaling
01:09:35
Speaker
But there's so many little choke points that I could tell you about getting barrels here is nearly impossible if you want to do small barrels. There's storage. Getting bottles here is horrible.
01:09:51
Speaker
Especially at the moment, I have to imagine with just logistics and shipping and freight going insane. Like the price of a container, I think is still what it used to be. This is from when I was working at the old job. I think it used to be like four grand for a container from China to New Zealand or from America to New Zealand, roughly that price. And then it went up to almost 30.
01:10:17
Speaker
It's nice. It's just silly. It's not the only price, but it's the time I tried to order some of our bottles like a couple months ago and I needed them for us told him I probably need him for July or August and that was back in January and they were like probably won't get there till like November or December and I was oh, come on.
01:10:37
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. What am I going to do until then? Yeah. Well, that was it too. You used to be able to get a pellet, right? You used to be able to book a pellet on a container. Easy. No problem. When do you want it? Today or tomorrow? Yeah. And now it's, oh, you don't want a full container? Yeah. Sorry. We can't be bothered talking to you. Yeah. Yeah. 100%. Yeah. I do want to say actually though, because if anyone, if you or anyone else ever needs some barrels here in New Zealand, I've been
01:11:02
Speaker
lucky enough to have gone through that process a few times for small girls. So they're not cheap, but I can get them at probably a cheaper rate than some people can. So if you ever need anything, just let me know. But even the barrels over in the States right now, they're also having troubles making them. They don't have the wood, they don't have the people, and they're selling out of them so fast because there's so many distilleries opening up in the States right now.
01:11:27
Speaker
So I mean, it's great to see the boom, but it sucks when New Zealand doesn't have a cooperage of its own. Yeah, man. Yeah. And to be fair, there is a, I mean, New Zealand's got a lot of wineries, right? And there's a lot of red wine going into barrels here. But what size is yours still? 200 liter. Yeah. So have you done the math on how many times you didn't have to run that thing to fill one wine barrel? Yep.
01:11:54
Speaker
I think it's, I think it'll have to run 2000 liters approximately of wash through it. And it's, you know, 20 was 10 runs. So it's a lot of work and a lot of space. And yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The last time I did the math, it came out at about 3000, but that, to be fair, that was not, um,
01:12:12
Speaker
It was not overly high and that was not taking into account reusing feints. Oh, right. Yeah, I guess that makes sense. Yeah, just it's not really. Well, and you're putting all your eggs in one basket, right? Exactly. I mean, I love the little barrels because they're different from each other and you can do a smell batch and see what they do. And I'm sort of distilling it in a way where like there's not much tails in there anyway. So like
01:12:39
Speaker
It's already nice to drink. If you put it in the barrel, it's going to come out nicer in two years, really. I'm not putting it in there to change the rough edges, you know what I mean? Which I know a lot of people would do with a bigger barrel, because you can sit in there longer. It's going to blah, blah, blah, blah. But the big barrel, I am starting on a big barrel, and I've got it about half full now. And it's taking forever, of course. But that's single malt.
01:13:06
Speaker
The progression on it is so much slower, of course. And I don't mind that. It's going to be great to see what it does in, you know, five, 10 years or whatever. But when you're this small and you've only got a dozen barrels, you know, it's really nice to see how they're progressing a bit faster, I guess. I don't want to say faster. That sounds so like I'm just trying to get product out there. No, I know what you mean. I mean, just cash flow is real too, right? Like it's, yeah, it's, I don't know, man.
01:13:33
Speaker
Yeah, it's all testing for me at the moment until I'm into a bigger place and I can actually make more, you know, because as soon as I can make more and put it down barrels, I can't wait to let them sit there. You know, it's going to be great. But it's just getting to that point. And I'm certainly not a rich man. So it's a slow process to get there. I was just about to say, you don't have a cool 10 mil in your back pocket. Yeah. You have to buy all the equipment and then not have to sell anything for like six years.
01:14:02
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, I mean going back to the core and I think this is something it's probably not gonna unless I can get a farmer who's gonna be able to do it for us in larger quantities, I'm gonna have to be able to grow the seed for them to have enough for a large field too. So like that's all if you do that for a year and then like so if I let's say I did my quarter acre grew that all and I kept all that well, that's the year I also don't get to make like a vintage per se of my core. So
01:14:31
Speaker
Yeah, it's all really logistically a nightmare, but I'm hoping someday we'll find someone who can grow lots of it. Or maybe someone will grow it and sell it to Gladfield and they can sell it too. I don't know, but surely there's a way to do it. It's just I'm a bit of a small cog in what it would be.
Diverse Grain Varieties and Market Preferences
01:14:54
Speaker
Yeah, totally. I mean, I guess, well, it goes both ways, right? It's cool that this is turning into more of a thing. It's cool that there's a lot more distilleries playing with, I guess you'd call it specialty corn, right? Yeah.
01:15:08
Speaker
So as that takes off, it's going to be a lot safer bet for other people to do it. It's going to be a safer thing for Gladfields to be able to come along and say, hey, guess what? We're doing bloody butcher now, because every distiller that is worth their weight in the whisky industry is going to know what that is right away. So that's kind of cool. On the flip side of things, it'd be also kind of nice to be able to do something that is
01:15:31
Speaker
pushing the boundaries a little bit and actually be experimenting and not just following. I think that's another problem if I can pull on that string a bit. When I was talking to the good people at Gladfield, they said that the maze malt really doesn't get touched by distillers in New Zealand, which is a shame because it's
01:15:55
Speaker
You know, I think right now the main ingredient for New Zealand whiskey is barley and everyone's doing it one way or another, whether it's from Gladfields or they're growing it, or it's from a different producer, it's barley first. And I think there's maybe a couple of rise now, which is really cool to see coming in, but I don't know that there's much, even wheat or oats or anything else. So it'd be really cool to see if we could see some more grain varieties coming out from some New Zealand whiskeys, you know, that'd be really neat.
01:16:25
Speaker
Which is actually funny, right? I didn't finish my thought earlier on. I got distracted. But the point was that Scotch in New Zealand is very affordable, even compared to anywhere. Yeah. Bourbon in New Zealand, not so much. Like the idea that you're going to walk into a bottle store and buy a really nice bottle of bourbon and a really nice bottle of Scotch.
01:16:51
Speaker
you're gonna pay so much more for the bourbon, especially compared to the price that you could get the bourbon for in America, right? So if it's a $15, $20 bottle in America, you're probably paying, I don't know, anywhere between $40 and $60 here, depending on the day.
01:17:06
Speaker
as opposed to Scotch, where if you could walk into a, even the distillery in Scotland, you're only paying a little bit more for it here in New Zealand. Yeah. So there's kind of, it's funny, I hadn't thought about this before. There is a, I feel like there is more of a competitive advantage for a New Zealand distillery to be distilling with corn because the higher price that a New Zealand distillery has to put on the bottle can better compete with really expensive bourbon in New Zealand.
01:17:32
Speaker
You know, I had never really thought about that, but that's a really good point. I never liked that just literally when you said, I just popped into my head. Yeah, it's a fantastic point. Like getting corn, corn whiskies down here. First of all, they're, they're few, you know, there's, there's not many of them and they're expensive. So, um,
01:17:51
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, if somebody can just even make a basic corn whiskey, you know, of course, there's excise taxes and all that good stuff, and corn is not very cheap here, but it's totally doable, you know? Yeah. Like, I think I'd rather pay a little bit more, not, I don't know if I'd pay double or triple for the same thing, but like, I'd pay for a younger New Zealand corn whiskey for sure, than a bourbon, I think. I think I'd try that at least, you know?
01:18:20
Speaker
I would be more likely to try it. Yeah. Because it's closer to the price. But I guess, I guess there's a problem too, where the corn is more expensive. The most bourbons are about a hundred bucks anyway. Like good bourbons are here, right? Like they're quite expensive. Um, I mean, I think you could easily make a corn whiskey for a hundred bucks in New Zealand. Um, yeah, it might not exist. Uh, 19 had one. Um,
01:18:46
Speaker
But yeah, I don't know. It's an interesting thought. I wonder too, I kind of feel like there's still a bit of the old, maybe it's old English kind of sentiments where New Zealanders think that bourbon's not very fancy. There's a stereotype against it almost in New Zealand.
01:19:09
Speaker
Well, it's it's this, I mean, New Zealand's quite Scottish, really, you know, I mean, there's a huge Scottish influence. So everyone loves their single malts down here. I mean, there's no no doubt about it. And like, I don't want to discount how good they are.
Innovation and Future Collaboration
01:19:22
Speaker
Like, they're all so good. Don't don't get me wrong. It's just that it'd be fun to see something different as well. You know, like there's no reason there can't be also a North American styled spirit. You know, like New Zealand has a bit of
01:19:35
Speaker
a bit of Scotland, and it's got a bit of American climate, like it's kind of both mixed into one, there's so much you could do. And it depends on where you're in the country, like down south, for sure, very Scottish sort of weather. But up north, you're almost getting into nearly like those Texan climates, not Texas, but like, you know, close to that sort of sub tropic for sure. Yeah, yeah. So like, there's there's a lot of I don't know, there's a lot of
01:19:59
Speaker
stuff to be tried and yeah it'd be great to see it. I just hope I can play a little bit more of a part in it with my production being so low. I just want to make more and more interesting things but of course like time money and all that stuff so yeah.
01:20:16
Speaker
I'd feel you, man. All right, dude, this has been an absolute blast. I can't say thanks enough, Tom. I'm looking forward to being able to come down and shake your hand and have a drink in person. That'll be really cool. Absolutely. Yeah, and I don't know. I like the idea of what you said, not being able to hang out with someone and make some product together. So maybe we can explore that and how we can look at doing that. That'd be cool. No, thanks, Jesse. But I appreciate it, man. Hit us with your socials and your website again one more time.
01:20:42
Speaker
Cool. Everything is at Herrick Creek. If you're on Facebook or Instagram, it's H-E-R-R-I-C-K. I really wish I had thought about the name before I did it, because it's hard to say and spell. But it's also herrickcreek.co.nz for the website. And if anyone ever has any questions, I'm at the Christchurch Farmer's Markets on Saturday. So if anyone at Christchurch wants to come hang out, feel free. We do samples and stuff. And feel free to message me on Instagram, Facebook, website, whatever it is.