Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Alan Bishop From Spirits Of French Lick Talks Absinth & Whiskey
4.3k Plays2 years ago
Alan Bishop is a distiller, podcaster, YouTuber, and historian. In this podcast, we get into the nitty gritty of whiskey and absinth history and production.
Spirits Of French Lick: https://www.spiritsoffrenchlick.com
Alan's Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/hipgnosis2/videos
Distillers Talk Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/6Wa4Z2KV2K5Z6nPGgEkXUh
If You Have Ghosts You Have Everything Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/6NPWGElzbUUeM3AY6RSNNC?si=ce3824769d514e75
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Guest Overview
00:00:00
Speaker
How's it going chasers? I hope you're having a kick-ass week. I'm Jesse. This is the chase the craft Podcast and today I have a super special guest for you. This one's kind of special guys This guy is a moonshiner a professional distiller. That's kind of kicking ass and taking names He is a youtuber a podcaster
00:00:22
Speaker
and I guess
Podcast Preview and Personal Learning
00:00:23
Speaker
like a spirits historian as well and if you do nothing else I implore you please check the links in the description or the show notes down below depending on where you're watching this and make sure you go over and check out his YouTube channel because that is grossly underrated at the moment and let's get him to a thousand subscribers like tomorrow okay
00:00:46
Speaker
And also check out this podcast down there as well because Distillist Talk is fantastic and the amount of awesome geekery information that shows up on that podcast is insane.
00:00:57
Speaker
Today's conversation goes into whiskey and absinthe, spirits in general, and it is both coming at it from a historic point of view, but also production and production tips point of view. In other words, if you're into whiskey or absinthe at all, this is the podcast for you. You're going to absolutely love it. I learned so much from this discussion and it was so freaking interesting that I decided to make my own historic absinthe. I'm partway through that and that video will be coming out on YouTube soon. But you're going to love what Alan Bishop has to say.
00:01:27
Speaker
Let's get stuck in. Alan, thanks a bunch for doing this, man. I really appreciate it. And I know that this is going to be one of those podcasts that I am going to thoroughly enjoy editing. Because to be honest, I don't internalize a lot of the information while I'm talking. And I think there's going to be a lot here for me to go back on. So thanks, dude. I thoroughly appreciate you being on. Yeah, man. I'm sure the listeners going to enjoy this as well. So I think maybe let's start from a point of
Alan Bishop's Distilling Journey
00:01:56
Speaker
Where did this whole distilled spirits, obsession, passion, whatever you, where did it come from from here?
00:02:04
Speaker
Right. Uh, first, let me say I'm happy to be on the show, man. And I've been, I've been watching your stuff for a long time and it, uh, it's always, that's, that's lunch break at work is what that is. So, um, it works great. Um, anyway, so, so for me, I kind of, I grew up around it or in it as it were, uh, here in Southern Indiana. So my, my father and my, my grandfather were, uh,
00:02:28
Speaker
home distillers, although they would not describe themselves as home distillers. But all my families from Eastern Kentucky, they moved up here. My grandparents moved up here in the 1940s. They bought a little farm. So we grew up raising tobacco and making moonshine. And it was literally a way to pay for property taxes. And it was a way to pay for Christmas, which is kind of funny on the property tax side of things. So you're making an illegal untaxed product.
00:02:56
Speaker
in order to take the money and spend it on taxes. So I remember being around stills when I was two, three years old, whatever. And to me, at that time, they were just another piece of farm equipment. It's like a tractor, right? It's another reason why we can't go do fun stuff as a family on the weekend. That's what that was.
00:03:17
Speaker
Um, but I got really into it. Well, not really into it, but I got tangentially into it when I was 15 or so, uh, for obvious reasons. Um, my parents were really good about, you know, they'd let me do things cause they knew I was going to find things one way or the other. Uh, but I had to do those things around the house so they could keep an eye on me or my friends or whatever. They were really laid back about stuff like that. Uh, other than the fact that if you had friends over on the weekends,
00:03:42
Speaker
They might let you drink, but my dad for sure would wake you up at like four o'clock in the morning.
00:03:47
Speaker
And he'd be outside the window with like, yeah, he'd be out there with a chainsaw, like firing up a chainsaw, like you boys ready to go cut some wood. So they,
Professional Experience at Copper & Kings
00:03:58
Speaker
uh, my dad, my grandpa helped me build a little 10 gallon still. It was actually a, uh, I still got, it was a stainless antique stainless steel coffee dispenser that came out of Fort Knox, Kentucky. Um, and I knew all the things I'd seen them do, but they refuse to tell me anything else, which I think was good because there weren't any rules that I couldn't break. Right. So the rules were literally.
00:04:17
Speaker
Don't blow yourself up in the backyard and bring us something when it's worth drinking. And they just kind of left me at it. Right. Very much so. Yes. And of course, you know, their their their point of view on spirits wasn't like they weren't passionate about like what you and I are. Right. They were they're just basically making corn, liquor, sugar, shine.
00:04:41
Speaker
Um, they never got any deeper than that. And there's nothing wrong with that, but it wasn't something that they were, you know, uniquely passionate about, just something the family did for money and alcohol, et cetera. Um, and then.
00:04:52
Speaker
From there, I turned the old farm into an organic produce farm, started growing odd varieties of produce, selling open pollinated seeds, did a lot of plant breeding myself. That was when I was in my mid 20s. And basically what I found out was you can't sell produce in the middle of nowhere because everybody's got a garden. And so your neighbor shows up with a trunk full of tomatoes and just starts giving them away at the farmer's market.
00:05:19
Speaker
And if you're growing weird stuff, it's even worse because nobody around here knew what to do with it at the time. It was before heirlooms were really popular like they are now. So that got me thinking, distilling is inherently agricultural. Well, I have all these weird varieties of corn and these weird varieties of fruits and things like that. What happens if I run them through the still? And that's what really got me
00:05:39
Speaker
thinking on it on a deeper level, not all the way up to the point I had 150 gallon pot still in the backyard, probably not the brightest decision in the world, but it was there.
00:05:51
Speaker
My now wife and that was at the time like when the show moonshiners had just started coming on then. And so we would go to parties and people would come up to me with jars that were mine and they shouldn't have known that they were mine. So my wife was like, you're going to have to go get a job doing this somewhere.
00:06:10
Speaker
From there, I made the world's worst resume and, uh, just went down to Louisville and started going to every distillery that was opening and putting in resumes and tool copper and Kings hired me. And I'm pretty sure they didn't hire me because they thought I was the best person for the job or, uh, the cheapest, or they didn't think I was probably the best person for the job, but that's probably the cheapest person for the job. Um, so we got on there and I was there for a couple of years and headed up their absent program, uh, their Apple brandy program and then the, uh,
00:06:37
Speaker
Butcher Town Brandy was kind of my blend that I worked on there. So from there, I ended up over at Spirits of French Lick. I've been there seven years. So was it a case of you walked into the job and Copper Kings was saying, hey, we want to make some absinthe. Derek, can you can do that? Or was it more a case of you showed up and they said, what do you want to make? So they already had like their product line as far as like what they wanted to do.
00:07:07
Speaker
They sent us myself and the other distiller at the time to moonshine university for a couple of classes and I had never made absent up to that point ever. So I went to that class and it was taught by one of the guys for their to the guys from Coursera distiller actually. So it was a pretty good in depth class. But with everything with copper and Kings, it was literally like,
00:07:27
Speaker
I was the only person that had any distilling experience. The other guy that was the distiller was a winemaker. So it sounds strange to say this, but it was literally like, all right, guys, here's a thousand gallon pot still. And here's a 750 gallon pot still. Here's a boiler. You've never run one of those before.
00:07:47
Speaker
enjoy, have fun, go figure it out. Don't hurt yourselves. Don't die. Don't blow us up. And that's literally how that, how that worked. Cause they, they didn't have that experience. They didn't have any of that background whatsoever. They were, the owners were excellent at marketing. They were fantastic at it. They had sold two other beverage businesses before, um, one to Pepsi and, uh, one to Miller Coolers, I think. Um, so.
00:08:14
Speaker
They knew what they were in, what they were doing. They were, they were trying to get something up and going that they could flip and they did flip it eventually. So that's a, it's an interesting point. I think, especially for people that are on the outside, but close to the outside of the commercial spirits world that how do you, how do you put it? There's, um, I think it comes as a surprise to a lot of people that a lot of companies come at this from a branding point, right?
00:08:41
Speaker
It's almost like the distilling the products, all of that secondary. It's all about position in the market, brand image, brand reach.
00:08:52
Speaker
Like they're more worried about the label and where the ads are running than what's going in the bottle and what's going in the bottle. And the crazy thing is, yeah. And the crazy thing is it really does work. That's a lot of it. And you have to, and they want more out of you, right? They want to, they want to meet the distiller. They want to talk to the distiller. They want to ask questions of the distiller. Um, and the other thing is the bourbon marketplace in particular is crowded and it's getting more and more crowded and.
00:09:18
Speaker
It's not going to, the problem is that if you have, let's say 10 distilleries starting up, like one of them out of the 10 is really unique and original. The other nine are probably using the same consultants. They have the same building layout. They have the same equipment, the same fermenters. They're using the same yeast. They're using the same enzymes. They're using the same grain. They're buying the same product from MGP or a broker. And the big guys, when things get tough, the big guys are going to eat them. They're just going to absolutely destroy them because there's nothing that
00:09:47
Speaker
There's nothing there that's original at all. And I've been on both
Spirits of French Lick and Distilling Philosophy
00:09:51
Speaker
sides of it now. So Copper and Kings was a marketing giant and that's what they were great at. And Spirits of French Lick does like no marketing other than whatever I do on my end for free, basically. So I've gone from the great big giant shiny tourist distillery with copper squirrely stuff to here's an old Kimbles piano factory and some Chinese pot stills.
00:10:13
Speaker
What can you do? Yeah, and a bit of a good because that's what's doing the talking. Yep. Especially if you're going to be this close to Louisville, right? I'm in I'm in Burban's backyard, but I'm on the wrong side of the magic river, you know, where it's well, you can't make bourbon because it's not from Kentucky. Well, I'll tell you something else you didn't know. It's it's actually not southern Indiana. It's who's your occupied northern Kentucky. Wait, what?
00:10:44
Speaker
Who's your occupied Northern Kentucky? I don't even know what that is, dude. You're talking gibberish to me. So Hoosier is a name for people from Indiana, right? So Southern Indiana being just north of Louisville, we call it Hoosier occupied Northern Kentucky. So because culturally- Oh, okay, I'm with you.
00:11:09
Speaker
Yeah. It's much more similar to Kentucky than it is, say the Northern tier of Indiana. There's, there's culturally, there's quite a few differences. So interesting. Uh, but like you say, you're, you're essentially from the wrong side of the tracks and, uh, Indiana on a bottle doesn't automatically make it. It's, I mean, it's Kentucky. It's obviously good bourbon, right? Right. Obviously not real bourbon. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Or, or they don't realize how big MGP is and how much they're producing.
00:11:39
Speaker
Or you get, or you immediately get the, uh, Oh, you're from Indiana. You guys, you guys sourcing everything from MGP? No, none of it. Okay. So you, you left a couple of Kings and now you're with, um, spirits of, what is it? French, French, like, yeah. And you've been there for seven years. You said, Mm-hmm.
00:12:01
Speaker
Yep. Yep. That's pretty awesome, dude. So what's the main driving, I guess, the business drive of French Lick and then also the creative side on the spirit side? Or is that the same thing with them? So the owners of the distillery are pretty hands off on a lot of that stuff, or at least they have been up to this point, other than obviously on the business side and pushing barrel sales and bulk sales and working with distributors.
00:12:31
Speaker
Um, but so they own a winery and the winery has been there since 95. They've done very well with it. Uh, and they originally added the distillery just to kind of go along with the winery. Uh, the mistake that they made was they bought stills that were way too big for what they were thinking. And I think they didn't really understand. I don't think they had a great understanding of the business model in a lot of ways. Cause their original plan when I, when I came in first interviewed was, well, we're going to make a lot of liqueurs and cordials and things like that. And I'm like, listen, you're, you're in Southern Indiana and, uh,
00:13:00
Speaker
You have a winery that makes nothing but sweet wine. Do you want to continue to sell the sweet wine or are you going to take sales away from the wine by selling liquors and cordials? And I probably put them on the hardest business path that they could possibly be on because from the outset, it was, listen, I'm a traditionalist. You hired a traditionalist to some degree. Uh, we're going to do all, you know, real liquor. No, there's not going to be anything sweetened. There's not going to be anything artificially flavored. We're going to do this the right way.
00:13:28
Speaker
Um, and get the attention because being that close again, Louisville, you have to, you have to take it to the next step. You have to take it a caliber higher to get their attention. And so I've been lucky enough there. That they've let me basically do the things that I want to do. Um, there were a couple of years when we first started off, we got close to running out of operating expenses. I'm not going to lie. Uh, but then once we started getting some aged bourbon and it's, it started taking off because we started getting great reviews from a lot of the big writers and the big names out there.
00:13:57
Speaker
Um, constantly on social media, promoting it, talking about it on podcasts, wherever I can go. Um, but the big thing for me is, is having that freedom to be able to create.
00:14:06
Speaker
unique and interesting things, bring back old methodologies that aren't used anymore. I think there's something to be said just for making bourbon on a pot still. You know, bourbon nowadays is mostly made on low-rectification column stills, but it was born on a pot still. And in my opinion, it should have stayed on a pot still, but that's just me. I'm pretty determined that that's the case. I mean, I can understand from a production point of view why a column, especially a continuous still, is just
00:14:37
Speaker
It's awesome from a logistics point of view. But I have to admit, when it comes to, how do I put it? Just pure enjoyment of what's in the glass. Even if you take away the romantic, historic, doing it the right way, hands-on craft. If you take all of that away, which I quite enjoy, I think like you,
00:14:59
Speaker
but just purely what's in the glass. I 100% agree with you. Double pot stilled. If it's made from grain, you've got to do some pretty serious selling to me to say that, you know, to drink something else just for my money, my time, drinking what I want to enjoy. Double pot still is where it's at for me. But I,
00:15:22
Speaker
I'm interested actually, are you the sort of person that's into strong black coffee, dark chocolate? I was going to say black licorice, but we had to talk about that earlier on. Are you generally on the more robust sort of flavour forward of whatever the product happens to be? A lot of times I'm kind of all over the map, but yes, so the flavours have to be
00:15:48
Speaker
Even if they're light flavors, they need to be punchy, right? They need to, they need to really shine through. And yeah, that's, that's, that's for sure me. And we, we came up with a term for it or I did, uh, we call it pot still funk. So, um, and it's just that, it's just that, you know, there's weirdness that comes along with the pot still because of the amount of water that you're also distilling too. And, uh, that weirdness is, is what I'm all about.
00:16:13
Speaker
Yeah, I 100% agree. Yeah. And, and I guess I'm, I guess what I was hinting at is that it seems like it's almost a personality trait or a, uh, I don't know. Uh, maybe it's, I don't know if it's nature or nurture, whether it's something that's just in a person or what they grew up with. But for me, it seems like it was definitely nurture, not nature. Cause I grew up in a,
00:16:35
Speaker
meat and three vegetables, real button down, don't eat any weird stuff. Same here. Until I was about probably 15 or 16. And then suddenly it was like, oh, blue cheese, prosciutto, kimchi, yep, sauerkraut, you know.
00:16:54
Speaker
all of these crazy things with weird flavors and, you know, I found them and love them. Yeah. And I do. And I'm not here to say one's right and one's wrong, obviously, like whatever the hell you like to drink, whatever the hell you like to eat. I don't care. It's entirely up to you. But I do wonder if it's it seems like the sort of person that likes that pot still funk in a bourbon is also the person that is going to be reaching for a blue cheese or a stink, some, some stinky cheese rather than
00:17:24
Speaker
I can't be a, you know, I think you're, I think you're absolutely correct on that 100%. Um, you know, that does seem to be the case. And it seems like, uh, especially with our whiskies, we, we get a lot of foodies in particular who are really into, into, into our whiskies and like to pair them with food. Um, it's funny. You said blue cheese, because that has kind of been, and I didn't think of that, uh, till I did a tasting for my buddy, Tom Fisher recently.
00:17:50
Speaker
But he pairs blue cheese with all of his whiskeys. And now that has become my go-to. It's blue cheese. So it works really well with single malt in particular. Yeah, definitely. Especially something with that kind of Scottish grain funk. I'm trying to think of an example right now. My mind's going completely blank. Yeah, I kind of get it. But that almost it's how do you describe it? It's kind of.
00:18:18
Speaker
It just smells like grain straight out of the bag. Yeah. But almost off, you know, it's almost been wet and spitting for a little while. Yeah. It's beautiful. Yeah. It works. It works extremely well there. I think maybe it's time for me to try a sample, mate. Do you remember what you sent me? That is the question. And if you do, what should I try?
00:18:43
Speaker
I think I had right. Yep. Yep. Yep. And that just came out the foreground, foreground bourbon. Yep. We've got the smoked apple. Yeah. That one was specifically for you, man. That one ain't even been released yet.
00:19:00
Speaker
Ooh, I feel lucky. That's very intriguing. I feel like I should save that for a little bit later. It's 9.30 in the morning here and I'm about to cook up and booze, which I hate my job. And some absinthe as well, which I think maybe that's going to come in a little bit later on. So what should I go for the rye or the bourbon?
00:19:19
Speaker
So I would do the four grain bourbon because it's a little lighter in style than what the rye is going to be. So it's a 60% corn, 17 wheat, 13 oats, and 10% caramel malt. And it's actually not counting the caramel malt. That's the mash bill that I was using when I was a kid. That was a, remember I told you, they said, when you make something good, bring it to us. So one of the first things I did was I threw oats and not knowing the history of distilling oats.
00:19:45
Speaker
Cause I knew they were a grain and I'd never seen them use oats. And from the get-go, the first thing I noticed is that oats are one of the only grains out there that distill exactly like they smell and taste. They represent themselves very well in distillation and they have a ton of long chain fatty acids. And so in pot still distillation, they add an insane amount of mouthfeel to the whiskey and you don't need a whole lot of them to get it. Yep. Uh, I.
00:20:14
Speaker
this I feel justified because I've been using purely on a whim and for me the thinking was if you want to make a beer and you want to make the beer big and chunky and silky and
00:20:26
Speaker
with some kind of chewy mouthfeel in it. Oats, oats, all day long, frozen oats in there. And like you say, you don't need a lot, but it'll make it silky and give you that velvety, thick mouthfeel. And I was like, well, hell, I'll just throw some in, especially with the, you know, if I'm trying to make a more like the safety net, sort of series of whiskeys, which is kind of make an all grain mash, but throw some sugar in there so people that are new to all grain don't stress about it, you know.
00:20:54
Speaker
And one of my go-tos to battle the shiny, sugary sort of emptiness of a sugar spirit was oats. And I never, how do I feel it? The reason I say I feel a little bit justified is I always felt a little bit like maybe it was just confirmation bias to me, sort of saying, well, I did this. I thought that's what it was going to do. And now it totally tastes like that, you know? But I might have been full of shit.
00:21:22
Speaker
Well, and you know, it's hard for me to always like justify my own bullshit too. And it's weird because it always comes off as like bragging, but I'll give you an example. So Fred Menek, I'm sure you're familiar with Fred. Here before last, that was his number six in his top 100 whiskeys and he called it the best bourbon outside of Kentucky, which to me is interesting because
00:21:46
Speaker
He's a Kentucky guy, right? And he, he literally his audience is like the most hardcore of the hardcore bourbon snobs that are out there. Um, so there has to be something to the oats, you know, not to take anything away from whatever I do as a distiller, but.
00:22:03
Speaker
That's an odd grain for a bourbon lover to like, right? But they're clearly coming into it now. They're figuring out that there's something interesting there. And what's crazy, Jesse, is if you look up Kentucky and Indiana both prior to 1870, the number two crop in both states was oats. And it goes away after 1870. Interesting. And I believe the reason it went away, I've never been able to prove this. But I think the reason it went away is because it was primarily being used for distilling, because a lot of the old Mashbills had them in there.
00:22:33
Speaker
And 1870s, when people start switching over to the low rec Kentucky columns still, well, they're going to get thick, right? They're going to be harder to run through a column still. So they move away from using them and it drops off as a number two crop. That's fascinating.
00:22:49
Speaker
I've always wondered why it hasn't been used more. But I hadn't really thought about just the pure logistics of it. And I guess my thinking was, well, if you're fucking with corn, that's already pretty, you know, compared to doing complete off-grain fermentation and distillation and everything. If you're already messing with corn, then a little bit of oats isn't that, you know, whatever, it's the same. But yeah, I could see that.
00:23:15
Speaker
Well, you know, it's the, the crazy thing from a brewing perspective too, is the oats are the same gravity points as corn, which is insane. If you think about it, yup. They're 35. I didn't know that. Yup. Um, uh, sorry, dude. Let me just take a second. The contract is whenever word, no problem, brother. Sorry, mate. That's all good. He, uh, needed the loo. Um, where were we? Oats and bourbon. Um, so.
00:23:46
Speaker
I must admit I'm not a huge bourbon guy because I think mainly the reason is because it's, it's hard to buy good bourbon at a reasonable price comparatively to scotch here. So I just tend to buy scotch cause I can buy a nicer bourbon for least money, a nicer scotch for least money, you know? But so what I'm, what I'm going to say might be full of shit and feel free to, um, to bullshit check me if you think I'm offline here, but.
00:24:13
Speaker
The thing that's really intriguing to me about this is that, how do I put it? The flavor profile is very similar to a Kentucky bourbon, but where a Kentucky bourbon tends to be light and finish. Oh no, we're good. I'm just getting warnings popping up here. I think we're okay.
00:24:36
Speaker
It's, you know, what it is, is those Kentucky bourbon gods heard you say that. And then they were like, we got to shut this down. Yeah.
00:24:47
Speaker
Yeah. So, so when, when I drink a Kentucky bourbon from like just the, you know, Kentucky bourbon, the average, whatever, like not thinking of anything specific, but I enjoy the flavors upfront. And then it just kind of, it becomes very light, dissipates on your tongue, can be a little bit almost shiny because of that to me, just cause there's that weight behind it. And then it tends to finish very clean, maybe with a bit of wood action sort of lingering in your mouth.
00:25:14
Speaker
And that is the antithesis of what we were talking about before. Exactly. So this in terms of straight up flavor is quite similar. And I guess in some ways you probably have to do that because that's what people are used to drinking where you're from. But it finishes like a pot stilled spirit. It's thick. It's creamy. It lingers on the tongue. It's oily. It's, uh,
00:25:41
Speaker
grungy and funk is almost not quite what it is, but it's it's sitting right on the edge of that. Yep. Yeah, that's really good, dude. Yeah. So the I can totally get behind this. Good. I next time I get you some samples, I'll send you some of the heavier stuff that we do, too. So like you, believe it or not, and you're never going to hear this from any other bourbon distiller, I'm sure. I'm not a bourbon. I'm not. I'm not. I don't dislike bourbon. I like bourbon.
00:26:09
Speaker
But if I have my preferences, if there's other things to drink, I'll go for those other things. I find them more interesting. I think for me as a distiller and being as into it as what I am, for me, bourbon's kind of boring, truthfully. And at some point, all the grain whiskies become fairly easy once you understand how they work, right?
00:26:30
Speaker
But out of all of them, bourbon interests me the least. But I have to make bourbon because of where I'm at. And one thing we specifically did was try to set out to make styles that were very unique and different from what was being made in Kentucky because we are right next door to it, right? So give them something different. And so a lot of the methodology that goes into that is old, what we call Black Forest methodology. So there's a region here. It was Washington, Orange, Lawrence, Crawford, Harrison, and Perry County.
00:26:56
Speaker
that in the 1800s was called the Black Forest of Southern Indiana. And as far as I know, I'm the only person researching that. And I've written a lot on it at alchemistcabinet.wordpress.com. But a lot of my methodology comes from the things that they were doing. So you'll see that we have more weeded products than we do products with rye for bourbon. And the reason for that is that up here was exact opposite of Kentucky. So these were all people who originally were from or their family was from the Black Forest region of Germany.
00:27:24
Speaker
And so they grew up eating rye bread. So they use their wheat for distilling and their rye for their bread making, which is the exact opposite of most of them. Interesting. Um, so yeah, there's, I try to use a lot of those antique, uh, methodologies and, and I'm actually in the process of sort of trying to write out like a pamphlet of like, what exactly is the black forest method? Right. Um, cause I've never written it down. It's never been like, I guess I didn't realize that it was as unique of a style as what it, what it has turned out to be.
00:27:54
Speaker
Am I, uh, I feel like I'm getting a little bit thrown off too. I, like, I haven't woken up and I've kind of got that, uh, haven't brushed my teeth kind of feeling in my mouth yet, but is this quite licoricey? So there is, or is that me being weird and it's cause it's the morning. Think, uh, thank whorehound candy. You're not in the wrong direction. Um, we, what candy, sorry, whorehound. Have you ever had whorehound?
00:28:23
Speaker
It's maybe a, uh, an Americanizing next time you're over here, you got, you're going to add it. So it's an, it was an old timey, uh, herbal candy. Um, they still make it. Like if you're ever over here and you go somewhere, like, uh, a cracker barrel, you'll find it there. Um, but definitely leaning in that slightly minty sort of category, right? That, that kind of herbal thing on the back. And that's very common. And that's, that's a function of our yeast in particular. Um, so we use two different yeast strains to actually ferment all the Bourbons.
00:28:52
Speaker
Uh, we, we split our fermenter. Well, our cook or 600 gallons, our fermenters are 1200 gallons. So we'll fill a half a fermenter a day. And day one, we're using the yeast that we propagate ourselves. Um, and that brings a lot of that grain flavor to the forefront, but also some of that more herbal characteristic. And in day two for the second half of the cook, we pitch a brandy yeast to pull out a lot more of those fruity sort of profiles. Um, so we're not using any whiskey. Interesting.
00:29:16
Speaker
We also run really weird pHs. So pretty much everybody in Kentucky starts at 5.2, 5.5. And a lot of them are doing sour mashing or sweet mashing. So what we're doing instead is we're either souring with citric acid before we start, or we will use a malolactic bacteria. We actually use a cheese culture to drop pH. And so our pH values sometimes even on startup are like 4.8. And they'll finish in like brandy territory. Like Lee Sinclair will finish at like 3.5. Wow.
00:29:46
Speaker
So do you have to do anything special in terms of holding that back or trying to buffer it or does it just generally not stall things out by getting going for it's never it's never stalled once all the way to the extent. So the liquid the liquid cultures that that I actually maintain myself for the yeast, they all have that malolactic culture in there. And what's really cool is there's a semiotic relationship between the two of them.
00:30:13
Speaker
It's where what happens is the yeast will kick first and it'll get going. It'll get three quarters of the way through fermentation before that lactic culture kicks in and then the lactic culture drops it down to like 3.5. The yeast just goes dormant and then the lactic keeps anything else from getting started because of the pH.
00:30:30
Speaker
That is very cool, dude. Sorry, someone's trying to call me. I'm going to just throw my phone. There we go. That's better. Problem solved. It's one of those days. Everything's trying to pull me away from this. It's not going to happen. That podcast that I talked to you about where I forgot to record and got
00:30:51
Speaker
pretty tanks before we even started. That was with a dude talking about sour beers and Brett, lacto, whatever sort of crazy stuff you want to throw into a beer. And I'd never really thought about it before. I'd always kind of thought, well, you know, if you let other things in, then they're going to start other than saccharomyces, they're going to start growing first and you're going to lose, you know, production in terms of the amount of alcohol you can produce and so on and so forth.
00:31:17
Speaker
And he just cracked up and said, dude, it's all about lag period. The Saccharomyces kicks off and goes nuts. And anything else has a longer lag period and it just can't compete until Saccharomyces has pretty much eaten what it's going to eat. And then it'll die off. And it's crazy, man, when you think about the fact that
00:31:38
Speaker
How do you put it, it just works? It's almost like nature is on our side here. It was like it was set up for it, exactly. I had a conversation like this, and I think that you'll appreciate this too with maintaining yeast. Going back to that Black Forest region here.
00:31:54
Speaker
So, you know, here in the US and also in Europe as well, early on, a lot of people were maintaining their own yeast varieties, right? And it's actually a lot easier even just on a practical scale than people realize. You don't even, honestly, you don't even need a microscope. As long as you're not noticing any off flavors or off taste, you're on the right track, right? So I've been literally rerunning the same yeast strain now, dipping back legitimately for three years off that one original sample. Wow. And we're getting nothing weird.
00:32:24
Speaker
Anyways, long short of it, so the malolactic. If you were to look at yeast production anywhere on the East Coast in Kentucky, they always used hops to drop their pH for their yeast. So there was subsequently always a little bit of hops flavor that would come through in the whiskey because it was a liquid yeast. So here in this region, when it got started, there were a lot of caves here. So people came here and set up mills and distilleries. And a lot of these guys from New York were coming down and buying into it as like land speculation, basically.
00:32:49
Speaker
And there was one gentleman from New York. His name was Joel Calkins. And he heard about all these distilleries starting up down here. And he sold his farm in New York to buy hops. So he buys this just ass load of hops, brings them down here thinking that he's going to sell them to the distillers. And when he gets here, he finds out that they're not using hops here. And he loses everything that he has because they never used hops here. They didn't know that they had malolactic, but they knew that there was something there souring. Right. That was that was saving their yeast so they didn't bother to use hops.
00:33:19
Speaker
And the funny thing is there's a cemetery Called the hop Thompson cemetery, which is out by camelsburg, Indiana and people think it's a family name It's not it's because when this guy lost his all his money They changed that they called it the the hop Thompson school district. So That's that cemetery is not a family name. It's literally the word hops Right, right. That's crazy, man. I
00:33:44
Speaker
I never knew that there was a history of using hops essentially as a preserver slash inhibitor of microbial action in distilling as well. That's, that's news to me and that's pretty interesting. Uh, so when historically did that die out? You know, uh, as far as I know now, bear in mind that they're not real open with it nowadays at the big distilleries who's still propagating their own East versus having somebody else propagate.
00:34:15
Speaker
But I know that at least up into the seventies at beam, they were still propagating their own and they were still using hops there. They were also doing that at heaven Hill interest up until recently. Um, there's actually some theory that some of those, if you go back to some of the earlier, and I've not had a white label beam in so long, I couldn't tell you, but if you can get some of the real early bottlings, well, not really, but seventies, bottlings of beam, there's a kind of a, what you might call a Foxy characteristic to it. Um,
00:34:42
Speaker
kind of a muskiness and there's some theory behind that possibly coming from those hops because they were scaling up for so much yeast at one time. That's intriguing to me because I've been working with a local, New Zealand has finally got a liquid yeast producer in New Zealand, which is great because, you know, before that it was all coming from America.
00:35:06
Speaker
people were doing it pretty rough, especially through the COVID thing, whatever, it's great to have them here. But they, so it's kind of the opposite for what we're doing is that they are producing yeast, but they have to grow the yeast on a growth medium, which is essentially it ends up being a shitty beer.
00:35:24
Speaker
and the literally paying to dispose it at the moment. So they got hold of me and said, Hey dude, like, do you want to try distilling this stuff and see what we can make with it? Right. Um, and it's, it's super oxidized. Uh, they thought they were doing it at about 10 IBU, but because they were using a, essentially like a pressure kettle to, um, heat it at a higher temperature for sanitation reasons, it looks like it's more like 20 IBU.
00:35:54
Speaker
But we tried distilling it and it it's very interesting. I'm sure you've had distilled hops before it's I don't know how to describe it to people that haven't it tastes a hundred percent like hops and nothing like hops at the same time Yeah Yeah, and it tastes it's weird It's the taste of bitter without it actually being bitter if that makes sense it tastes like it's going to be bitter but then it isn't it tastes like it's almost going to come forward like
00:36:23
Speaker
a citrusy hop, but then it kind of takes a left turn and goes, like you say, kind of vegetally, a little bit cabbage-y. Yes. I don't know how else to describe it. And I've tried aging a distilled APA once in the past, and it started out 100% like that. And slowly, that flavor changed from weird, bitter, hoppy cabbage through to almost lemonade. It tastes like lemonade now. Interesting. I don't know.
00:36:53
Speaker
sort of throwing ideas around on one side. It's like, well, let's just strip it and turn it into gin. It's like, yeah, but that's boring. Why don't we just start with NGS or way product in New Zealand, you know? Like, why not? As opposed to let's make something interesting and different with what it actually came from. Anyway, all of that to say, I feel like
00:37:13
Speaker
I need to do some research into this and see what maybe we can kind of veer this into what a more historic whiskey. That's fascinating, man. Absolutely. Yeah. I appreciate that. If you go and look at like some of the early 1800s American distilling books, like the distiller by Harrison Hall, the practical distiller, they'll all mention it in there as part of the process of maintaining yeast. The beer stops thing is interesting though, because you know, at one point in time, that was a fairly popular thing in Europe.
00:37:44
Speaker
Um, and it was made weird. It was a, it was usually a single pass on a pot still, right? Which sounds pretty rough. Yeah. Yeah. And a lot of the old schnapps were like that. Like a lot of the early curses and things of that nature were single pass on a pot still. And they were just grabbing the early stuff coming off the still, right? Because it wasn't something that they were, they weren't said that you weren't going to sit down and drink very much that stuff at one time. It was like, here have a couple of beers and here's a shot sort of thing. Right. Um, and they wanted to hold onto as much of that.
00:38:13
Speaker
raw, robust flavor is what they possibly could. That's interesting, man. I mean, that was something that kind of crossed my mind too, the idea of distilling it and then using it not as a distilled spirit, essentially fortifying a beer with it or serving it as whatever you want to call them, Boilermakers or car bombs or whatever. Yeah. But yeah. Anyway. All right, dude. I think I'm ready for some rye. Tell us about this rye, man.
00:38:43
Speaker
I love that rye in particular. So I did the opposite of what everybody else seems to be doing over here, which is everybody over here seems to come out with a rye at two years and then set on their bourbon for four or five or six years. So we went the opposite. We did some young bourbons that were two years old. The bourbon you had before is bottled and bond, by the way, as is this rye. They're both bottled and bond. So the bourbon is four years old. This one's five years old. We also use number two charred oak barrels instead of three or four with medium plus toast heads.
00:39:12
Speaker
Um, so we took this, this is our, our oldest, uh, mainline product, which is five years. It's actually the George Washington Mashville. So it's 60% rye, 35 corn and five, uh, victory malts. Um, yeah. Dude, that is a explosion. Yeah. I'm not allowed to bring that bottle home anymore. Wow. I got in trouble. I could see why. Um,
00:39:40
Speaker
I've drank even probably even less rye than bourbon, which is weird to me because the more I drink rye, the more I think, uh, this is where my preference lies in terms of, I don't know how to categorize it, American whiskeys, I guess, more traditional American. Yeah. I think, uh, honestly, well-made rise are better than any bourbon out there. And honestly, if you look at it from a historical perspective, prior to prohibition, rye was outselling bourbon.
00:40:11
Speaker
five to one. Bourbon was not at all the category that people were after. It was rye whiskey made in Pennsylvania and Maryland. Yeah, wow. Um, I'm also not a huge fan of kind of the cherry-ish thing that happens in a lot of Bourbons. Um, and it seems like that cherry sort of thing gets subbed out for things that are more
00:40:37
Speaker
fermentation, funky, adjacent flavors. You know, you kind of sometimes you get that pickly almost sour. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Totally.
00:40:49
Speaker
Sorry, say again. Yeah, MGP is really bad about the dill thing. The dill thing comes through a lot in MGP products and even their riser. So I love riser. I'm not a fan, I'll say this, not a fan of like 95.5 riser because they get that black cherry thing. And to me, it comes off as like, if it goes too far, it almost becomes like cough syrup, like Robitussin.
00:41:14
Speaker
Yeah, right. I haven't noticed that in a row. But like I said, I haven't drunk a lot of them. Even if that cherry flavor, because there's a whole spectrum of cherry flavors that can pop up in any distilled spirit, right? It can be, even if it's a, how do you put it, low threshold, it can still just be that one dimensional cough syrup ester.
00:41:40
Speaker
sort of flavor and that's what I really dislike when people manage to swing it more towards a complex almost like a maraschino cherry or a glazed cherry or even better like actually eating a fresh cherry which seems like it doesn't happen very often but when it does I'm totally on board with it but any of that cough syrupiness it's just
00:42:01
Speaker
I don't know. It makes me think I'm sick and have a cold. Yes. And that's why I can't do the, like I said, the MGP rise stuff. I can't, I can't do it. Um, I've had good MGP rise, but few and far between for me and my pallet. Uh, but I will tell you something that you might, you might want to play around with and your listeners might want to play around with that. I'm a big fan of. Um, so the old, uh, Monica Gihila style rye that was coming out of Pennsylvania, a lot of it was 80% raw rye and 20% malted rye.
00:42:31
Speaker
Um, and there's a couple guys and doing some stuff like that now. And so one of them was a Steve beam at limestone branch. They were doing little 15 gallon barrels. And, uh, these were like specialty barrels for accounts. So they would only do these mash bills and 15 gallon barrels to sell a single barrels. So I don't think it was 80 20, but it was somewhere in that range. It had a lot of rye malts in it, but the amount of like, when you bite into a peach, like right there where the peach meets like the fuzz of the peach, the skin of the peach.
00:42:59
Speaker
That whiskey tastes just like that. Um, I've had three bottles given to me. And the problem is I always intend to share them with somebody and they don't, they're only coming three 75s. And every time I've just destroyed them every time, because it's so, it's so good. So, and then, uh, Stumpy spirits, Stumpy spirits in Illinois, they, they have, uh, they have one similar to that too. And it went like apricot direction.
00:43:25
Speaker
Hmm, interesting. I've only really made one rye and at the time I couldn't get my hands on raw unmolted rye. So I just used all molted rye. Yeah.
00:43:39
Speaker
that's what we had from you know from brew shops kind of thing and it definitely didn't do exactly what I thought it would do I haven't tasted it in probably three or four months so I have to go back and have a nudge of that but it did make me wonder because I mean I guess the biggest analogy or analog to it would be
00:44:00
Speaker
Irish whiskey in terms of malted vs. unmulted, right? The difference you get using unmulted barley is huge. It's gigantic. It's still similar. It's still kind of the same thing, but it totally changes the whiskey. So it would make 100% sense that would do the same with rye. I need to find someone that I can buy unmulted rye from and play with it, I think. I think rye in general is a little underappreciated, still even in the United States. It's starting to catch on. But not only underappreciate it, I think it's misunderstood.
00:44:30
Speaker
You know, if you think, because most of it that's out there in the U S it's 90, it's a 95 five MGP stuff, which is not a historic mash bill at all. That was a blending component is what that was used for. Well, if you go back to the pre-pro stuff we were talking about earlier and you look at it, it's almost all coming out of Monica Gila or the Monica Gila region. I'm not saying that word, right? Because I have too much cornbread in my accent. I can't, I don't have that Pennsylvania thing where I can say that word, right.
00:44:54
Speaker
But, you know, it was again, more popular than bourbon. And I think one of the reasons it was more popular than bourbon at that time is because it had such a high proportion of malted rye in it, which just changes the flavor completely. And then once the Pennsylvania distilleries go away, prohibition goes away. I guess what I think is what I think happened in Kentucky. I think they looked around and they went, you know, there's probably people that remember drinking rye whiskey. If they're not going to make it in Pennsylvania, I guess we could just make a 51% rye whiskey and call it rye.
00:45:23
Speaker
And then at least there's a rye on the market. And I think that ruined a lot of people on rye because it's not a true representation of what a rye whiskey should taste like. So what's the mash bill for your rye? So it's 60 rye, 35 corn, and 5 victory malt.
00:45:47
Speaker
interesting. Uh, and I noticed you said you had, was it a crystal or caramel malt in the, um, caramel in the Sinclair? Yep. Yep. Yeah. Why the hell do we not see people doing that more often? Why is everyone just using, if they're going to use barley, it's distillism or maybe ale malt. Well, especially in a time when most people are using artificial enzymes on top of it, right? Why would you not, if you're going to use artificial enzymes, why would you not use a malt with a lot of flavor to it?
00:46:17
Speaker
Um, and I'm going to tell you why it was some complexity in there. Yeah. And I think the unfortunate answer to that is that most distillers don't, for better or worse, they don't really have a brewing background and they also don't necessarily understand brewing. And you can, this is a little test that I have because there's no, there's no test for a master distiller. If you want to know if the distiller is completely full of shit or not, ask them to write a Mashville, ask them to write a traditional Mashville. Uh, and then look at the percentage of malt that they put in it.
00:46:47
Speaker
And then ask them if they can explain to you the efficiency of that Mashville. And I will bet you that nine out of 10 distillers in the United States right now have no idea. They'll be like, I don't know. You just go by percentages of weight, right? No, not exactly. Yeah, right. So what you're saying is they have no thought whatsoever to the overall average diastatic power of.
00:47:11
Speaker
what the, what the mesh bills, what the Bali is contributing. Yeah. I think it's improving on the craft side. I think a lot of the craft guys know that, but definitely, you know, um, the big, a lot of the big guys, they walk, you know, they come into it and everything's already set in place, right? It's already there. It's set in stone. And so they don't get that education or even some of the people that come into it from home distilling. I think a lot of people got into the home distilling when moonshiners came on and that's good. I'm glad that they did.
00:47:40
Speaker
But they get in those bad habits, right? Like I've had, I've had guys come to me that wanted to start distilleries that wanted me to consult with them and they didn't understand. You get the question like, well, when do you put the sugar in? You don't, you'd like, this is like, you should, before you ever started building anything, you should have known that.
00:48:04
Speaker
But it's happened. I mean, I've literally had to take, uh, there was one guy that dropped a lot of money into a distillery and I literally had to take him to like distiller one Oh one from the get go. So, um, I think that's why you don't see it. It's, it is interesting, man, because I, I guess I can see two parts from that, right? As one do whatever the hell you want, throw bodily enzymes into it. Yeah.
00:48:30
Speaker
And then the question is exactly like you said, none of those grains are for a, we don't need enzymes from anything. So if you don't need to call it, you don't need anything from the practical side of the grain. The only things that you need to consider is basically how much sugars are it gonna contribute and what is it gonna taste like?
00:48:57
Speaker
And it seems like that second one just doesn't get thought of weird to me. I don't understand it. And you're a hundred percent right, dude. I do see a lot of people coming up on the, you know, on the craft side of things, doing a lot of interesting things with.
00:49:13
Speaker
different specialty malts playing with base malts. I see a lot of that, but it seems also like a lot of them are scared of it. So yeah, we use specialty malt, but you only use it at one or 2% because we don't want it to taste different. And I can understand that from a marketing point of view. You don't want to be, you know, you want to be
00:49:32
Speaker
doing something different, but maybe not the first through the wall and maybe not, you know, a complete outlier. But yeah, I don't know, man. That's interesting. We haven't released this yet, but we have one of those. And here's an example of people being afraid of it, like you just said, using one or two percent. So we have a corn whiskey that'll be out probably next spring and it's 90 percent corn and it's just yellow number two corn.
00:49:58
Speaker
and 10 chocolate malt. And when I said 10 chocolate malt to some people, they're like, that's a lot of why, why would you do that? I'm like, because I wanted the chocolate flavor in there and the corn is just there for alcohol. Right. Because I can't. That's a rule. We can't add anything post distillation other than water and barrel for any of our products, as far as I'm concerned, because that's a self rule as well. So if I want that chocolate flavor,
00:50:23
Speaker
That's how you get it. You know, the corn is just bulk ethanol. That's, that's all that's happening there. So, yeah, that's interesting, man. Did you get, uh, has that pushed through into.
00:50:36
Speaker
kind of coffee, dark chocolate, cocoa, almost almost accurate, but in a good way, kind of flavors. Yeah, it's it's definitely went to that, like almost like semi-sweet chocolate and then roasted coffee. And the idea there was, of course, in the the pre-COVID world, because I think on premise is still down pretty heavy, but we're we're a primarily off premise brand. I mean,
00:51:03
Speaker
Um, and most craft brands I think are because you have to be, because you're not going to get in the well at the prices that you have to sell at. But my goal with the corn whiskey was to keep it cheap.
00:51:14
Speaker
as much as possible but make it really good and make it uniquely heavily flavored so that way maybe you could land that and some of these craft bars in particular and because it's going to be so flavorful there's going to be so many options they can use it for and it's not just you know if you put out if you put out corn whiskey unless you're the licorice brothers right and you're and you're doing the cool stuff that they're doing
00:51:35
Speaker
Uh, everybody immediately goes to, well, I can buy mellow corn for $9 and 99 cents a bottle from heaven Hills. So why would I spend, you know, $30 on your bottle? Yeah, I feel, yeah. It's, it's interesting too, man. I almost brought them up when we were talking about the bourbon kind of landscape and flavor, because before meeting them, if you had sat me down and poured me four different bourbons and theirs was one in the middle.
00:52:03
Speaker
I wouldn't have even necessarily known that that was a grain whiskey, I don't think. Like if I was on a slightly off day, I might've said, oh shit, is this some weird brandy or something? The flavor profiles, man, why am I so tongue tied today? The flavor profiles that are coming out of there,
00:52:25
Speaker
stuff is so different. I don't know how else to describe it. And I know that that's part of the ethos, right? They want to pull from bourbon heritage, sort of French brandy-ish heritage and Scotch heritage and kind of bring all of those flavors together into something interesting. But the fact that it's being recognized as good bourbon,
00:52:52
Speaker
Yeah, that's I don't know that that's intriguing and that's encouraging to me to see that other people can do it and take it in a different direction and, you know, make interesting products from corn. Yeah. Still call it bourbon and technically it is bourbon. They're doing interesting things too. Yeah. I'm actually going to go see them when I'm in Texas this time around and not entirely sure what the plan is, but I think the plan is we're going to go down to Bucky's and I'm going to make them pull out
00:53:20
Speaker
They're gonna have to find ingredients off the shelf to distill something with nice. Yeah Doritos I'm gonna make them distill Doritos and see what they can do with it Yeah, Robert was one of the one distillers I ever like actually met at copper and Kings when I was there pretty close over the years, so oh They're just um, they're good people all around me then they're good at what they do in the
00:53:51
Speaker
It's nice to see someone that's good at what they do and then get behind the facade a little bit and realize they're an even better just human. It's awesome. Speaking of which, I know that obviously this job as a distiller is a big part of what you do. And I should probably say too, where can people find your products? And if they're interested just in what, how should people go and find out about the company, if that makes sense?
00:54:20
Speaker
Yeah, so you check you can check out our website spirits of French lick calm and then we are in 12 different states now I don't I don't have them all memorized. Unfortunately, and then we just went into Canada was pretty cool. And then whoa, that's cool. Yeah, yeah, I was I got super excited about that. So that's worked out well and the guys that we went into distribution with so I'm a huge fan of the band rush. And those guys are huge fan of the band and trailer Park boys. And so
00:54:48
Speaker
There have been a lot of trailer park boys jokes made on phone calls. And then they sent me to twelve packs of rush beer, which I distilled because. Why? Right. So that was. Yeah, right. How did that turn out?
00:55:07
Speaker
It actually, it was one of the few hopped ones, like we were talking about earlier, that to me actually turned out really well. Um, I was surprised. I just did on like a little five gallon and I put a definator on there and one plate, uh, one little two inch plate and just tried to hold it like one 20 basically. And, um, it turned out really, really well. We did, we did a video of it on the one piece of time distilling Institute, uh, channel.
00:55:30
Speaker
Um, a little short video installation and all that stuff. So, um, you can also order our stuff from a syllbox.com if you're in the US and it looks like we're about to maybe enter the Netherlands of all places. So, um, yeah. What's the story there? How did that happen? There's this guy that, uh, he's, he, um, I guess he, he's a distributor in the Netherlands and I guess there's a huge.
00:55:58
Speaker
bourbon scene in the Netherlands, from what I understand. And so he's basically out traveling, fun and US craft distillers to take him into the Netherlands. I'm like, OK, I'll do that. That's fine. Does that also include like, let's get on a plane and go over because sign me up. I'm ready. Yeah, man. So I don't know what's going to happen. So they take.
00:56:23
Speaker
Oh, it hasn't happened. It's in the works. Okay. It's in the works. Yeah. Are they taking some of the other interesting stuff as well? Or is it purely bourbon? Are they going to be getting absinthes? Yeah. I think he's going to take a little bit of all that stuff. And, uh, you know, we, we do an old Tom gin and we do an aqua beat as well. So it'd be interesting to, uh, to get some of that, you know, over there with their, their more heritage stuff. So. Definitely. Yeah. That's crazy. Uh, all right, dude. So you mentioned.
00:56:53
Speaker
a YouTube channel earlier on. What's the deal there? Let's start talking about some of the other crazy stuff you do. Yeah. So that, you know, coming from a home distilling background slash moonshining, I'm in a unique position that I may be the only person that ever identified as a moonshiner that got into a distillery and didn't release a moonshine. But I've always tried to maintain a little bit of a separation between those kind of products and what I do at Spirits of French Lick.
00:57:21
Speaker
but also maintain ties with that crowd because it's a good crowd of people. They're supportive people, same as home distillers, right? As well as with the home distillers that are more interested in grain whiskeys or in brandies or things of that nature. The biggest thing that I love doing, my favorite part of distilling is the education part. For me, I've been making these little videos every once in a while.
00:57:47
Speaker
I would just throw them up on my personal YouTube channel. And it just occurred to me a couple weeks ago. I was like, you know what? You're always talking about distilling anyways. There's always something kind of running around. People ask you questions. They call, end up on the phone with them for hours. Why not just start making some little 10 minute videos? And it could be literally just cell phone, you know, and talking to the cell phone and answering questions and people can write in and ask their questions and I'll go into
00:58:12
Speaker
and do as much depth as I can as long as I know the answer to the question. If I don't know the answer to the question, I'll tell you and then I'll try to find somewhere where you can get the answer from. And we may do some more process video stuff in the future too.
00:58:23
Speaker
Um, I have mad respect for you because I try to do process videos and then I just get pissed off. I just, it's so frustrating to me trying to do that stuff. Um, so I don't know how many of those there'll be, but there will be some. Um, but yeah, it's the one piece of time distilling Institute and it's, um, it's done, done well. People, people ask some good questions that I don't really expect them to ask.
00:58:51
Speaker
Sorry, I'm just looking it up now to see. I'll do it later. I was going to put some details up now and read them out, but for anyone that's listening now, I'll make sure to mention this in the intro and I'll also put details to everything that you do, Alan, down in the show notes.
00:59:12
Speaker
But yeah, questions are a tricky one, eh? Sometimes you do get those questions very much like what you're saying about the distillers earlier on, stuff that's just weird. I remember when I first started, the first time I talked to George from Bali & Hops, he was saying, what was he saying? I had a question the other day, Jesse, where someone asked me what to do when the bucket gets full.
00:59:37
Speaker
I was like, what do you, what do you mean? And he was like, someone told me that they were running a hose into a bucket and the bucket got full and they wanted to know what to do. I thought, and I thought he was joking, but now, now I believe him a hundred percent that you get those questions. That's right there with, uh, when do you put the sugar in for the bourbon? That's what I was referencing. Yeah, exactly. But then you get the flip side of it, right? And people will throw a curve for that and you're like,
01:00:07
Speaker
Well, that's an easy question. Let me answer. Wait, hold on. I don't know. And then, and I have to, I have to give props to those people too. Cause often that's what sparks me to go off and do 15, 20 hours worth of research and maybe do a test and you know, try it. Yeah, exactly. You learn, you learn stuff from it. Or the thing that I've ran into is like, you read the question and you're like, Oh yeah, that's an easy question. I can answer that question. But then you go,
01:00:37
Speaker
I have never said that shit out loud to anybody before. Right. I don't know how to word this. And I also have a tendency sometimes to kind of like. As I'm not overly scientific, but because it's it's like all common stuff to me for my daily job, like I have a tendency to to talk in a way that's maybe a little too in depth for somebody that's just now getting into something. And then I have to stop and break that down and go, is any of this making sense or
01:01:06
Speaker
Like the other day, there's a question about how does an expansion chamber work? And I should have done, you know, the Barley and Hops thing and had a board, right? I didn't. So what I did, it's just me going, well, and then the vapor does this thing and it, you know, comes around and just if you had me on mute, it'd look like I was miming.
01:01:25
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Oh, dear. All right. While you were saying that, I pulled the channel up because I wanted to check how ridiculously undervalued this was at the moment. So there's 227 subscribers. And I would challenge anyone listening to this to let's get that to a thousand, like now. I appreciate it, man. Greatly.
01:01:50
Speaker
Yeah, go and check it out guys, uh, because it's not often that we get the chance to have, uh, as home distill as someone that is a professional distiller that has, how do you put a professional experience relating that experience back to what happens specifically on, on smaller equipment. It just is different. The more I sort of flirt with commercial stuff, the re there, I realize I know nothing in terms of.
01:02:17
Speaker
How do you put, I don't know how to describe that. It's exactly the same stuff, but practically it's completely different.
01:02:24
Speaker
Do you know what I mean? Oh, yeah. Oh, just move your 20 liters of wash from your fermenter into your still. OK, easy. That's a whole lot different when it's move your 4,000 liters. You better have thought really freaking quick, like really specifically exactly where your fermenter is in relation to your still and how it's going to get all those sort of things. And learn how to fix all the equipment that you're going to use for all that stuff, too. That's the bigger problem, especially if you're at a rural distillery in the middle of nowhere like us.
01:02:53
Speaker
You know, like starting up and on a smaller budget. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, anyway, check it out, guys. Yeah. And there's make sure you check the video. I want to put this in there. There's cool stuff, too, that you'll like, I think here. So I'm working with a guy, Jason Wade Harrell. He was on moonshiners master distiller, but his forte is really instill building. He does traditional Appalachian style all copper stills. But we're doing this for the channel.
01:03:20
Speaker
we're going to end up making, where does we've designed, I've designed a five gallon still with some really unique features to it that you don't normally find in a beginner still, um, without having to buy a bunch of extra pieces. So you're going to have on this little still, and I won't tell all the things, but you're going to have the ability to do some reflux on it, but it's going to be more like scotch pot still style reflux. There will be a built-in gin basket. And then you'll have two different line arms.
01:03:47
Speaker
that you can run two different ways, build into it from the get go. Interesting, and we're going to use that specifically for some of the future process videos for like recipe development and stuff like that and it'll be basically a black forest style still that you can get into as either a starter that you can grow into or if you're already into it and
01:04:05
Speaker
Kind of like you, I'm sure I have enough equipment where like I look at some of the bigger things I have and I'm like, I don't, I don't want to mess with all that today. I just wish I had something small that I could, you know what I mean? So my, my favorites, my favorite still to run out of everything is the little air still because I pick it up, I put it down, I put shit in it.
01:04:26
Speaker
I turn it on. Yeah. It's ready. I can't. Yeah. I want to know nothing. Oh dear. Yeah. If I was really trying to make something delicious, it's not what I'd use, but sure is easy. Wow. I started saying my favorite actual still is a Tennessee Thumper. It's got two lines of four jars and a bypass. So you can, once you run out of flavor and one line of jars, you can close it and go to the next. And I love it. And I love Rick Gibson, who's one of my best friends, but
01:04:55
Speaker
I don't run it often because it's a bitch to set up and clean. You run that thing and then having to go back and clean it. And it's just a nightmare. Yeah, dude. Yeah, I feel you on that. All right, man. So you also, I was going to say you run a podcast, but now there's two. What's the deal, man? And also when the hell do you sleep?
01:05:22
Speaker
Not enough, for sure. Do you even sleep? No, I have a problem setting still. I even have a problem taking days off work because I feel guilty.
01:05:35
Speaker
if I'm not doing something. And I don't know why I'm like that, but I've always been that way. So yeah, we have distillers talk, which is exactly what it sounds like. So we bring in distillers from all over the world, really mostly craft distillers, although we do have Freddie No coming on here in a couple of weeks, which would be kind of cool. And we get deep into the discussion on distillation and it gets super dorky.
01:05:59
Speaker
We go really deep into distillation theory. Um, we tell the guys up front, Hey, you can talk about anything you want to, um, go as in depth into it as you want to. And we've had some really, really great discussions. Uh, Todd Leopold has been on several times. Um, I always learned something from Todd.
01:06:14
Speaker
We're going to start a guild of distillers who don't wear belts. Distillers with belt alternatives. So either suspenders or overalls. So that's our new thing there. We've had actually Ted Bro from the Jade Absinthe line. He's been on. We've had Richard Seal from four gate on four square four gate.
01:06:41
Speaker
Anyways, I'll probably get punched for that one if I said the wrong name. But yeah, we try to go as in depth in those things as what we possibly can. And it's a great show. And it's it's the show that I walk away from going. I never I never thought about that. I got what you just said never occurred to me at all in any way, shape or form. And it can be anybody from we've had beginners on.
01:07:01
Speaker
And I learned things from them too, you know, cause they, they're thinking in a way that I'm not, they don't have all the dogma that I now have from doing this for years. So yeah. And then we have still the best part of my job is.
01:07:18
Speaker
I don't know what it is about having a podcast, but it just means that you can call people and be, hey, yo, I think you're doing something really awesome. Can we have a talk? Yeah. And they say yes. Right. Instead of saying no crazy person from the internet, please leave me alone. It's wild, man. It's crazy. There have been a few like that where I've been afraid to reach out to them. There's no chance that this person is coming on this show. We had Fred Menek on one time. And the fact that Fred said yes, I'm like,
01:07:45
Speaker
What is happening right now? That you said yes to coming on my show? That's a thing that happens? Oh, that's so cool, man. Well, I feel the same with you, dude. It's crazy. It's crazy for me to be able to reach out to people and be able to, I don't know, it's just, it's very fun. And there's something about a podcast that makes it different. When I reach out to people and ask them if they want to do a video,
01:08:14
Speaker
It's very, very different because it's more in depth. I mean, like you were saying about the process stuff earlier, right? That sucks, dude. I mean, it's so hard to do. People think it's just easy, but that's why I record all of the process in B-roll and then essentially do a voiceover after voiceover because trying to keep, yeah, trying to keep the, um, how do you put, how do you say it? Trying to keep the story going from the, from the video point of view. And at the same time, actually do what you need to do.
01:08:42
Speaker
It's, it's pretty freaking hard because quite often you'll be saying something and you're like, well, okay, I finished this sentence, which means that the next sentence I need to say needs to kind of start like this and go in this trajectory, but you've got a three hour gap between, you know,
01:08:58
Speaker
Okay, now I just switched to to heads and this is what's happening, you know, you gotta Yeah, it's hard to because I'm trying to bring people into that is tricky Yeah, and distilling is not always the most visual thing in the world. Anyways, right? It's you know, I mean you do something thing Yeah, right. I mean once you've once you've seen it you've kind of seen it And sight glasses are nice, but you can really only cut that footage so many times before it's just oh, here's another standard
01:09:28
Speaker
you know, shot of, uh, some stuff boiling in a sight glass. So, yeah. Yep. I, uh, the, the whiskey tribe guys, uh, when they started doing the, uh, will it distill episodes, they said exactly the same thing. They said it sucks, but we're going to have to focus entirely on the ingredients and what happens before it goes into the still.
01:09:50
Speaker
And then chances are we'll probably have, you know, we'll spend a day getting 60 different kind of b-rolly shots of the still running. And then just use that because I mean, how many times can you see liquid drop out, drop out of a copper pipe into a vessel? Yeah. Yeah. I know exactly what you mean. And then the, uh, the other podcast that we're doing is a, uh, uh,
01:10:16
Speaker
So it's kind of like two sides here. So for me, distilling is a spiritual thing. That's why I use the word alchemist to describe myself as opposed to distiller. It's also kind of a jokester sort of thing because master distiller is such a pretentious sort of made up.
01:10:32
Speaker
Yeah. And 100,000%. Right. So if you're going to be a pretentious asshole, just go all in. Right. So what's, what's worse than master the alchemist, right?
Spirituality, Paranormal, and Distillation
01:10:43
Speaker
So next time if I end up somewhere else, I've already decided I'm just going to go with, just go ahead and put maestro on my business card, right? I'll just run, I'll run full head on into it.
01:10:53
Speaker
But the other side of it is that spirituality plays into a lot of what I do. And honestly, distillation, if you go back in time and you look at the roots of distillation, it's always tied to spirituality. And I've always been interested in the paranormal stuff and things like that. So I wanted to do something away from the alcohol industry. And this was the easiest way to do it. And the way that I could still have fun with it was doing a podcast about some of those paranormal things. So we're just now into episode three.
01:11:22
Speaker
Um, episode one, uh, kind of detailed some of the, some of the early distillation things I got into and, and why I named that whiskey Lee Sinclair. Um, and in episodes two and three were some instances of things that happened around the, uh, the family farm that were pretty strange, but we're going to get into, uh, a lot of stuff. Like we've got an episode about the count St. Germain coming up. If you never heard of him looking him up, there's a whole weird story about a potential immortality. Um,
01:11:48
Speaker
He shows up over a long, long, long, long line of history and always.
01:11:54
Speaker
always tied to different royal courts, interestingly enough. And he was as well an alchemist. So there are ties there with distillation. And that's the goal is to make a show that's not distinctly distilling, but distillers might be interested in it. And there can be little tie-ins here and there. And to just be able to do something different and not be talking distilling all the time because I can.
01:12:19
Speaker
But yeah, yeah, yeah, I feel you man. I mean, it's also cool from a podcast point of view. I mean, distilling is great. Don't get me wrong, but my channel is never going to, there's just, I don't think there's anything I could do to grow it. Like.
01:12:35
Speaker
Right. Like Marques Brownlee or Mr. Beast or Binging with Babish. There's just not a wide enough interest out there. It's a very specific thing that people are either into or they're not, or maybe every now and again, they'll be like,
01:12:52
Speaker
Oh, wait, you can make vodka from potatoes. That's kind of interesting. Click and I'll never watch you again. Yep. But this sounds like something that's going to appeal to a much wider audience, which is, you know, it's got a it's got a higher ceiling to it, which is pretty cool as well, man. Right. So you're only on on episode three. Yep. It just came out today. Just started. Yep. Yep. Just started. Yeah. Bought the equipment for it and everything.
01:13:16
Speaker
So try to do it the right way. I will make sure to put all of the details in the show notes for this on the podcasting platforms on YouTube. It'll be in the description, guys. So if you're interested, you can go check it out there. All right, man. I've just realized we've chinweged for an
Absinthe Exploration
01:13:35
Speaker
hour. And the reason we first started talking about doing this is because we wanted to talk about absinthe. Absolutely. Where do you think we should
01:13:45
Speaker
start the discussion about Absinthe. Well, so I think just given a general history and background of Absinthe and what it really is, is probably worthwhile. Let's do that. Yeah. And I'll preface that. Should I? OK.
01:14:03
Speaker
I was just going to say, should I pour some absinthe now or do you think it would be probably smart to do the smoked apple so I can still taste it after the absinthe? You know, I am, I'm so curious of what you're going to think of the smoked apple. I want you to try the smoked apple because I pulled that specifically for you because I thought that you want to buy that interesting and it is high proof. It's, it's at like one 41 or something goofy.
01:14:25
Speaker
Oh, okay. Yeah, right. So feel free to add water to it. Oh, so this is basically a progress report. Yep. Yep. Is it? So it's actually, we're probably going to release it at Hazmat and do it as like an extract where people can add water if they want to. But what that is is- Interesting. Two and a half barrels, 53 gallon barrels of four year old Apple brandy and number two char.
01:14:49
Speaker
We took that out and blended it and went into a sherry butts that was from Islay. We don't know which distillery it's from in Islay, but I wanted to do a smoked apple brandy because I don't know that there's one out there that exists commercially that I know of. We've done a lot at home just by smoking some apples and putting them in apple mash.
01:15:11
Speaker
and then running it, that works really well. But I'm extremely happy with how this turned out. It's not overwhelmingly smoky. It's just, there's a nice lightness to it. Yeah. It's interesting too, because if someone told me I've made a smoked apple brandy, I would assume that it was apple brandy with some apple wood, mesquite, pear, cherry wood.
01:15:37
Speaker
put in there, not Pete, right? Right. Um, it's actually, it's very drinkable at what was basically 70%, but I'll try it with a little bit of water. Cause I wonder if that's going to bring the, uh, the smoke out to fight a little more. Um, this is interesting, dude. I actually wouldn't have picked this as a brandy.
01:15:55
Speaker
Well, and that has a lot to do with the style of Brandy that we make, too. So we make, again, the Black Forest style. So that's what the Black Forest was famous for. Between 1855 and 1914, in those six counties, there were 150-plus legal Apple Brandy distillers in that six-county region. Wow. And they were- And what was different on the style side? What were they doing differently than what people think of Brandy now?
01:16:21
Speaker
So they tended to, it tended to have a little bit more in common with whiskies. So the way that they were actually making them is they were grinding the apples, but they weren't pressing them. So you take the ground apples, you leave the skin and everything in place, and then you use your water, and of course we have limestone water here too, you boil it and throw that in on top of the apples, and then you use the yeast off the apples themselves.
01:16:43
Speaker
Uh, and then double pot distiller. So it's a bigger, heavier, more tannic, uh, more forceful style of apple brandy. Um, and it was actually so popular at one point in time that this, this is funny to me. So we were actually exporting it into France at one point in time, which I find hilarious. Oh, wow. So we always, we always call, uh,
01:17:11
Speaker
We call it a bourbon sexy older sister. Do you know what the draw was in France for it? Was it, was it that people were just thinking, Oh, this is brandy. Or was it kind of a, a strange and exotic different version of what, you know, is brand, like, you know, how are they marketing it or drinking it there?
01:17:34
Speaker
I don't know how they were drinking it there. What I would say is it was well enough known as a style at that time and southern Indiana was well enough known as that region. That it was massive it was sold everywhere and it was it was even if you look here I found advertisements in the east on the east coast and it's talked about in terms of it being the best apple brand in the world.
01:17:57
Speaker
Um, that it's better than Calvado said it's better than, you know, those sort of things that were out there and unfortunately prohibition destroyed it for us completely. Um, especially here in Southern Indiana, uh, because the prohibition, uh, sort of forces.
01:18:13
Speaker
We're also tied in very closely with a group that was called the Knights of the Golden Circle, what would later become the KKK, if you're familiar with any of that history. And a lot of them ended up in government jobs in the state of Indiana, and they went after alcohol really, really hard in the state to the extent that we had a statewide prohibition in 1855 that lasted for three years.
01:18:37
Speaker
And they, they literally, they would treat distillers the same way that they were treating African-American people, you know, burning crosses in their yard, trying to get them out of the business. They thought that alcohol was quote unquote, destroying the white culture, which is the most ridiculous and asinine thing I've ever heard. And that's why, that's why it disappeared. That's why I didn't come back from prohibition. I had no idea dude, that is, that's messed up in the most interesting way.
01:19:04
Speaker
Right. In hindsight. And most people here don't know. Like I said, I'm the only one that I know of that researches this stuff and has written anything about it. But there are people, because I went around and I still do a lot of, I've talked to most of them that I can find, but there were people whose grandparents were distillers and they never knew it. It was never talked about. That's how scared of all that stuff they were. It never came up. I've had people literally
01:19:29
Speaker
that I know their grandparents were distillers. And they would say things like, oh, nobody in my family ever would have done that. And I'll be like, oh, here's a piece of tax paper that says otherwise, right? You might want to look around in your barn and see if there's an old still in the rafters somewhere. So people just literally went from being distillers. And then the next day, what are you talking about? I am a corn father and always have been.
01:19:54
Speaker
Right. Yeah. And the other part of it, too, is I think it was it was hurtful to him because it would, you know, so Indiana didn't have any excise tax on alcohol from the time that Indiana became a state because it was right after all the the War of 1812 stuff happened. They got rid of the excise tax. So from the time Indiana became a state.
01:20:12
Speaker
Up until 1862, there's no excise tax. You've got three generations of very stubborn Germans, right, that don't want to pay a tax period anyways. But, you know, it's Apple brandy and the thing about it is,
01:20:25
Speaker
You know, they're growing acres and acres of apple trees for these, for these brandies, right? And literally, if you go back and look into the agricultural yearbooks at the time, the six counties on average had upwards of 150,000 plus apple trees per county just to support this whole thing. And these are not named varieties. They're grown back from seed every year. So they're not good for anything else. You do not, apple varieties, you're going to eat out of hand or cook with or anything.
01:20:50
Speaker
So when prohibition gets close, these guys are all going. Well, I guess I got to cut my trees down and plant some kind of commodity crop because the key word there was, you know, farmer distiller. So if your apples aren't worth anything anymore. And I think that a lot of it just became not just shame, but also like.
01:21:08
Speaker
It was almost too hurtful to talk about that legacy, that family history got lost. And then you do run into pockets like Harrison County is interesting because the two largest Apple brandy distilleries in the United States were in Harrison County in the 1800s. And pretty much everybody in these two little towns over there, New Amsterdam and Mockport worked at the distilleries. And so the state police had a rule, which was like, just don't go to Harrison County.
01:21:35
Speaker
because everybody's moonshining and they will kill you. Right. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Just don't even bother. Just pretend like it's not on the map. If you hear anything about it, just let it go. It's not worth it. Yeah. So yeah. Um, this, this is interesting dude, because it is,
01:21:56
Speaker
There's not a whole lot of straight up apple flavor in it. I think if you go really hunting for it, there's a little bit, but there is an awesome creamy sweetness to it. Very much like a. Glynfiddich Glynfiddich style scotch that very light, very sweet, very approachable flavor. But then it finishes on my microphone peaking. What is going on here?
01:22:24
Speaker
getting weird stuff in my headphones. Very much like an Isla, except it's not, how do I put it? The flavors, the flavor of smoke doesn't come through. It's the mouthfeel and the presence of smoke without a full-on smoke flavor. Yeah, this is, I've never drunk anything quite like this before, dude. It's delicious.
Challenges and Mysteries in Distillation
01:22:48
Speaker
Good, thank you. I appreciate it. Especially after putting some water in there, it just kind of,
01:22:53
Speaker
the smoke presence jumped out. Uh, yeah, I'm not sure what to say about that, dude. Um, yeah, I'm okay with that. That's good. It's actually, it's, it's interesting that the only time, excuse me, I've made something kind of similar to this. I went about it in a fairly similar way in that I, um,
01:23:15
Speaker
I pressed a bunch of apples for juice and then used that liquid to thin out apple pulp, and then fermented it and distilled it. And it came out quite similar in that it was sweet and fruity, but not appley, if that makes sense. Yeah. Well, it's interesting too, because I think that's where a lot of people, especially people who are new to distilling too, they get turned off by brandies because
01:23:44
Speaker
They don't distill the way you would think that they ordinarily would, right? You don't get, you're not going to get a big, and that's one of the easiest ways to spot a fake brandy too. If you ever open it up and it smells like green apple, there is fuckery happening one way or the other. Right. Um, and peach brandy is the one I think really disappoints people because you're going to get some aroma of peach, but then otherwise it's just going to be like diacetyl, just like movie, buttered popcorn. Right.
01:24:11
Speaker
Um, it doesn't come off as heavy peach in any way, shape or form. So it's all about the, uh, the subtleties and, and that's what gets that for me, that's why I love Brandy. Cause it's, it's so subtle that it draws you back to it. You want to go back to it. Cause you pick up on those little things, you know, what was that? And you just keep going back to it. Yeah. Uh, I did make a peach Brandy and when I first distilled it, I was stoked because it tasted like fresh peaches and I thought it was great.
01:24:40
Speaker
To be fair, it was very much more a aroma than a taste. Two weeks later, gone. Gone. Completely gone. It was just so, I guess it was so volatile. Super volatile. Those peachy, yeah, it's just gone. It was still tasty. But it wasn't peach anymore, you know? Right. Yeah, it was quite interesting. The other thing you got to be careful with any of those brandies, too, if you catch them and you do get what you want out of them and you go to age them,
01:25:10
Speaker
You got to make sure that you put those barrels somewhere where they're not going to get real high temperatures. And interestingly enough, oats are the same way. If you, if you put, so we have two different Rick houses. We have one that's more like a Brandy cellar and then we have one that, well, we have three now and we have one that's more like a Rick house. And, uh, that Leeson Claire bourbon that you have, it stays in the one that's more like a Brandy cellar because we've tried it in the other Rick house and all that fun stuff from the oats just disappears.
01:25:38
Speaker
Yeah. Interesting. Hmm. Um, that's crazy, isn't it? I often wonder with things like that, what came first, right? So there's a, as I understand it, and I know honestly bugger all about kind of the French heritage stuff, but there's this long, as I understand it, history of basically seller aging wine, but also brandy there.
01:26:06
Speaker
And you have to wonder which came first. Did they try distilling stuff and aging it differently and it just didn't quite work? Or is that what they were doing?
01:26:18
Speaker
And it worked. So they kept doing it more. It's kind of like the oak barrel thing, right? We made barrels out of different woods and most of them leaked. So we said, screw it to all that other stuff. And then we started making oak and then we decided that it actually kind of tastes good. So now we make it more. And instead of just being a vessel, now it's actually part of the process of making delicious.
01:26:40
Speaker
And they, they, they still leak, but now we look at it as a great ingredients, really bad storage devices, right? Like it's kind of, it's a, it's a, it's a product of pure chance and.
01:26:59
Speaker
I don't know. It's just spontaneously happens and then people decide it's good. I think that that's the case because distillers, for example, like if a distiller like messes up something, like if I, I don't even admit to it, if I mess up something, I'm like, oh, I'll really mess that up. And it turned out great. It no longer is a mistake. It's now I'm the most brilliant person on the face of the planet. Look what I did on purpose. Right. So totally.
01:27:28
Speaker
The first time I tried to make something that was Irish whiskey esque, I don't know what happened. All I know is that there was a nasty stuck fermentation on it. And then it finally did work out. I distilled it and it tasted straight up like blue cheese. Like if you took an Irish, a white Irish whiskey and then just macerated blue cheese in it.
01:27:55
Speaker
And then probably threw a little bit of dirty gym socks or something really nasty in there as well. They just, that's what it was. That's what it tasted like. And when it happened, I kind of thought, you know, because of the conversation we had before, I was sort of, this is, it's almost good. Like I almost liked this and I almost hate it. Gave it to a few different people and the opinions were pretty much split straight down the middle. Half the people were,
01:28:21
Speaker
What the fuck have you created? Burn it with fire now. And the other half were, this is weird, but I kind of want more. Anyway, I let it sit, forgot about it. And I finally opened a bottle. And I was actually using it as a stunt whiskey. It was just been sitting on the shelf for ages. The color looked perfect. And I couldn't be bothered finding, you know, getting whiskey out of a barrel or whatever. I needed it for a thumbnail, tipped it in.
01:28:49
Speaker
Took the thumbnail with it, smelt it afterwards, and it is amazing. The blue cheese is almost gone, to the point where it's still there. But it has this crazy, like, moccaccino sort of flavor. Tastes like coffee and chocolate. And I have no idea where that came from. And it's only that one bottle. Like, all of the other jars that are still aging, haven't done that. That's weird. Weird. Yeah. Yeah, man.
01:29:17
Speaker
And I wish I could recreate them, but I don't think I can. We have a we have a profile that shows up in barrels every once in a while. And it's it's literally like Ceylon cinnamon. So it's like a cinnamon toast crunch. Right. Oh, and I love it. And I don't have it. Thank you. I don't have any idea how I'm getting that flavor, where it comes from, how it develops. And it's like one out of 10 barrels. And if I knew how to do it, I would do it every time.
01:29:48
Speaker
It would just be one profile across all the brands. Just even out again. Yep. So. Yeah. That's bizarre, isn't it? It's distilling is not a solved problem, man. And I don't.
01:30:00
Speaker
I don't see it being so anytime soon. But anyway, no, right? Then all the fun goes out of it. I completely agree with you on that. All right. Let's start at the beginning with Absinthe, man. I think you're right. Let's start at the beginning in terms of because I know you're into the history side of things as well. And I also know that there is
01:30:22
Speaker
weird, mystiquey, no one really knows what it is, perception of absinthe for most people, even distillers now. So let's start with where it first came from and what it was initially, I think is probably the best way to do it. And then we can go from there.
01:30:38
Speaker
So if you go back to the 15 and 1600s, you'll see a nice and wormwood basically used all over Europe for aromatized wines or for spirits of various different types. Certainly a lot of that information on the medical side was coming out of the school in Slerno, Italy for distilling.
01:30:56
Speaker
You get into the 1700s and I'll keep, I'll keep the history version of this short as well. Uh, you get into the 1700s and you're sort of in the Swiss South region, the Valdez traverse, as it's called, uh, you have a group of women who are.
01:31:12
Speaker
I guess the traditional term would be something like a folk witch or like a hedge witch, something of that nature, right? People, women who are working with various herbs and botanicals, they do a lot of brewing, they do a lot of creating medicines for people, and they're dealing primarily with botanicals from high elevations in the Alps. Wormwood is one of those botanicals.
01:31:32
Speaker
They're also importing a lot of things such as anise and fennel, etc. So early on, they're making basically aromatized wines using wormwood. Wormwood is really good for exactly what sounds like it is, getting rid of intestinal worms. It also helps in general with digestion, etc. So somewhere around the mid-1750s, and we don't know exactly which woman
01:31:56
Speaker
or how many of them, I suspect that it was, you know, this was kind of common knowledge, right? There were a lot of people probably producing this stuff. They start to create what they call an extract of absinthe. And what that is, is it's basically a brandy that's been distilled to 170 proof.
01:32:12
Speaker
And then you are making a tincture with these various different botanicals, all that have synergistic sort of responses to digestion in particular, like wormwood, anise, fennel, all those sort of things are related to digestion. Around the 1770s, you start to see some people get interested in commercializing this as a thing.
01:32:33
Speaker
Now, I don't know at what point exactly it moved from a purely tincture-like alcohol over to an actual distilled alcohol. I suspect sometime in the 1770s, 1780s as it becomes more commercialized. But this is where that green aspect, the coloration for verde absence originally comes from, is that this was known as an extract. So it was always going to be that green color from the chlorophyll from steeping your botanicals and your high-proof alcohol for a tincture.
01:33:01
Speaker
By the 1790s, it's kind of caught on locally to such a degree that you'll start seeing advertisements for it around the Valley and also around Northern France as well. And by the early 1800s, now it's become a full on commercialized product. We think the story is that there's a maybe fictional set of what they call the Henryodd sisters. I don't think there were sisters. There were multiple people in that community named Henryodd and they weren't all related.
01:33:28
Speaker
I think that there may have been sort of a, let's call it a private, like a woman's guild, right? Like kind of a sort of unofficial group of, you know, which is whatever you want to call them. I don't know.
01:33:39
Speaker
But they supposedly sell their process to Dr. Ordiner, who is the one that creates the first real commercial absinthe in the early 1800s. This is the traditional style of absinthe that people are somewhat familiar with. Although very early on, there were some botanicals used that are not typically used anymore for absinthe. And one of them that Jesse and I have talked about is a spinach leaf was actually used as part of the coloration agent at that time.
01:34:05
Speaker
Most of the Swiss absence that were distilled were actually kept as blanche absence. And then when you get into the later years and you get into the band on absent, uh, that became really common in the valid traverse, because so many people there were involved in absent production or drinking absent that despite the band, they weren't going to stop. And it wasn't illegal to, uh, distill at the time, it was illegal to distill absent.
01:34:29
Speaker
But if you made it as a blanche or a clear style absent, you know, and the police see you walking down the street with a bottle in your hand and it's clear alcohol doesn't look like absence. So they're not going to bother you. So yeah.
01:34:42
Speaker
Then the real height of absinthe is in the 1880s, the Belle Epoch period. That's when it starts to get very romanticized. It starts to become sort of the drink of the artist. It becomes popular primarily through two means. So the first means is that the French soldiers were issued absinthe when they were actually fighting in North Africa to help fight malaria. So they came back home with an appetite for absinthe. And then secondarily, when Phylloxera starts destroying the grape crops,
01:35:11
Speaker
in France and wine goes away. Well they have happy hour in France just like anywhere else and wine was the drink of choice. They needed something to replace wine that would be of a similar alcohol content and sweet as well. Absinthe was easy go-to because it served by luching it down with water
01:35:29
Speaker
and sometimes sugar. And so it brings it down to about 14 percent alcohol by the glass.
History and Re-Legalization of Absinthe
01:35:35
Speaker
Unfortunately, as it gets more popular, obviously a lot of very bad players move into the game and start making very bad quality absinthe and things that should have never been called absinthe in the first place. They're using all kinds of crazy things like copper sulfates to color it instead of actual botanicals. So you literally have people getting like heavy metal poisoning. Yeah, it was it was bad. It was really bad. It was every bit as bad as the the gin gin epidemic was in London.
01:35:58
Speaker
Uh, for sure. Um, the other thing that happens is now the wine makers are back in business. They've found varieties that are, you know, tolerant of Phylloxera or resistant completely, and they need their market share back. So they start trying to basically destroy the absence industry by making up anything they can about absence, being a poison that alpha through Joan, which is a primary ingredient in wormwood is hallucinogenic.
01:36:23
Speaker
It's not hallucinogenic. It can in high, high, high doses cause seizures, but you would die of alcohol poisoning long before you ever approached that. There's actually more alpha-thujone in a bottle of sage oil that you buy at the grocery store than there is in a bottle of absinthe.
01:36:41
Speaker
Wow. And they never banned sage oil. So they basically used an example of a man who had been drinking for a couple of days on end murdering his family to vilify Absinthe and say that Absinthe drove him insane and caused him to murder his family. And that's when everything starts going downhill. So they start banning Absinthe in various countries by 1908, I think it was 1908, 1909, might have been a little earlier, but
01:37:08
Speaker
The band just ends up reaching everywhere and subsequently there's a mystique around absence because of that There's a mystique around it as well because it does have that luching effect Because so many painters and artists were interested in it this idea that it you know, maybe caused hallucinations Again completely unfounded what it does do however is some of the botanicals that are in absent have a slight psychotropic effects particularly
01:37:35
Speaker
What happens is when you drink Absinthe, you get drunk, but you are almost lucid. You're aware that you're drunk, which in some ways is kind of bad, right? You can maintain function, right? If you're a painter, all right, now you can have two or three glasses of Absinthe.
01:37:51
Speaker
and you can paint while you're drinking. And it makes sense. It's not messy. It's just sort of everything. To me, the colors are brighter, the sounds are brighter, et cetera, right? It's another key, another tool to open a door just like any kind of alcohol is. That's kind of the short rundown. And we could have went into distilleries and all that stuff, but that would take me days to go through all that stuff.
01:38:14
Speaker
Yeah, right. Okay, so that makes a whole lot more sense to me. So Absinthe was huge.
01:38:24
Speaker
The powers that be essentially get rid of it by telling everyone it's horrible. The way they're telling everyone it's horrible is kind of bullshit. So no one really understands why it is horrible, but everyone just agrees that it is. And then you cut to today and a lot of that stuff is still just kind of percolating around and
01:38:48
Speaker
everyday culture and memory. Yeah. And yeah, that's so crazy. Cause I still hear people saying that absent makes you crazy. I still hear people saying that absent is like going to make you trip. And it's not been helped any reputationally by all these movies over the years either. Right. And I love some of those movies as much as anybody else does. You know, I love, I love, uh, uh, Gary Oldman and Dracula, but you know,
01:39:15
Speaker
That whole absinthe makes the heart row fonder scene. And there's, there's some, there's some romanticism built into all that stuff or like, uh, Euro trip. That was another one. Um, but literally you can thank one person for, for helping re-legalize absinthe in pretty much every country. And that's Ted bro from jade liquors. And if you never had any jade absence, if you get a chance, get them. So he's reproducing old, uh, 1880 style belt epoch absence that were commercial absence of the time based on the actual, uh, uh, breakdown of.
01:39:44
Speaker
uh, samples that he had. So he was actually able to chemically break those down and look and figure out what was in them. Uh, and they're fantastic. And he's the one that proved that the alpha through Joan wasn't ever a problem, even in commercial absence back then. And there's still really weird laws out though. Um, so for example, in the U S uh, you can only have, and it's the same in Europe. You can have a certain parts per million of alpha through Joan or wormwood and a distilled spirit. Uh, in the U S we're like.
01:40:15
Speaker
We're at 10, I can't remember the exact measurements, but Europe's at like 30, right? So it's hard to get an actual legitimate absent in the United States without going over those levels. It's not, um, you can do it and there are ways to do it. And the TTV is not paying as much attention to that as they used to be paying to it. Now they're worried about like licorice root and that causing heart problems and who knows whatever their concerns are this week.
Appreciating Absinthe: Methods and Misconceptions
01:40:40
Speaker
Um,
01:40:42
Speaker
I was going somewhere else with that Jesse and I lost my train of thought there. It'll come back to me in a minute. Maybe, maybe. Can't get a real absinthe in a miracle. Right. Okay. Yeah. Can't get a real absinthe. And you can. You just have to, you have to be careful. Now you can import absinthe as well. At least in the United States you can import in and get a whole lot of the jade liquors and stuff like that. And again, that's great, great stuff.
01:41:06
Speaker
Damn, there was another point in there that I was driving towards dude night. It's gone. I'll find it later. If I think of it, I'll tell you. Oh, it's that there is no TTV category for absent in the United States. That's what I was going to say. Oh, okay. All absence. So it's just distilled spirits. Yep. Yep. Everything's all DSS because there's not yet a category. Um, I know Ted has talked about trying to get it made into a category again. Um, I just.
01:41:34
Speaker
It's hard because it's one of those, it's an acquired taste, right? You either like it or you don't like it. And you can learn to like it, but not necessarily easily learn to like it. And you know, there's markets where it's great, obviously, and there's a lot of attention on it. Key West has become a recent market that's been fantastic for Absinthe of all places. I think they're, you know, kind of having a little sister city sort of feel to it.
01:42:01
Speaker
as New Orleans, for example, and of course Hemingway lived in Key West and loved Absinthe. So that's become a really good market recently. So we talked earlier, I can't remember if this was right when we started recording or before we started recording, but we talked earlier about part of the problem with Absinthe is that people either don't know how to drink it and enjoy it.
01:42:24
Speaker
they drink it wrong, or they're kind of, how do you put it, they're kind of scared off because they think it's too much to deal with. So before we start getting into the more technical stuff on Absinthe, if someone's just picked up a bottle of Jade Absinthe, for example,
01:42:44
Speaker
How do you suggest they enjoy it and what options, like what's the scope of how to drink it and enjoy it, I guess is the question I'm asking. And I think that's absolutely true. The problem is people have a lot of times too really bad absence, like imitation absence that was being made.
01:43:06
Speaker
you know, maybe 10, 15 years ago when all this, you know, the absence stuff was showing up in movies. And that's not true absence. It's basically really badly distilled vodka with some flavoring added to it and whatever artificial color that they, you know, the antifreeze colored absence is not real absence, guys, if it looks like it's like the apple brandy thing, right? If it smells like green apples, it's not real apple brandy likely.
01:43:30
Speaker
So the way I would suggest it to anybody to try it is to do the traditional Parisian method, which is one part absinthe and usually three to five parts water. You get what's called a luch or a clouding effect as those long chain fatty acids fall out of solution, as the oils fall out of solution.
01:43:46
Speaker
And the way that I know when I'm when it's properly looshed and you can do this whatever preference that you have But if you hold the absence up to light and you look at it I like to leave just a little tiny line on the very very top of alcohol that did not loose not much but just a little tiny line where you can see some transparency at the very top and
01:44:06
Speaker
Initially, when you first try it, I would say try it without any sugar. Just to see. Some of these absents don't need any sweetening at all, especially some of the jade lines don't need any sweetening at all. They have a perceived sweetness to them already. They don't have any sugar there because it doesn't distill across, but there's a perception of sweetness there. Absinthe has an interesting thing that does do to you as well when you smell it.
01:44:28
Speaker
Uh, so it actually activates the part of your brain that recognizes food and not the part that recognizes alcohol because there's such a gustatory illusion when you smell it. Um, then I would try it with sugar. And when you do the sugar, uh, you know, you don't need to add a lot of sugar, but dissolve the sugar with the water. Um, running over, you know, if you don't have a fancy absence spoon, put it up, put some sugar on a fork and pour a little water over it really slowly and it'll do the exact same thing. And there's nothing wrong with that.
01:44:56
Speaker
Uh, and then make sure that sugar gets integrated really well. The other way I'd say to try and especially if you think that you don't like absent because maybe you don't like black licorice. Um, first of all, it's actually the anise that is going to give the absent that licoricey flavor. But if you don't think that you like that flavor, take about an ounce of absent and about seven or eight ounces of root beer and mix them together with some crushed up ice. And it is a fantastic high ball. A lot of the flavors that are in absent are also in root beer.
01:45:26
Speaker
of all things. It's interesting. A lot of people don't like black licorice, but they like root beer, which is sort of a fun little comparison there. But yeah, that's a, that's a fantastic high ball. Or you can do a root beer float, which is a, you know, throw you some ice cream in there with your, with your root beer and your absence and have at it.
01:45:47
Speaker
I love to hear that sort of stuff because I've often had this discussion with whiskey versus rum and that whiskey is on lockdown. And a lot of the people that are whiskey advocates are all anti cocktails and shit. They're even anti like having whiskey on rocks and the rum people fully into rum.
01:46:09
Speaker
Like, this is a $600 bottle of rum. Let's make a cocktail with it. It's like a totally different thing. So it's cool. That's refreshing for me to hear someone that's so into Absinthe like you saying, dude, make a root beer float with it. And I can completely, completely understand why that would be delicious. And it's funny, man. I 100% thought of Absinthe as
01:46:32
Speaker
black licorice. That's what I thought the flavor was. And you mentioned the root beer thing to me before we started recording. And I jumped the gun and I poured a little straight with a tiny bit of water in it just to bring it down to probably about 40% ABV. And I poured another little bit that is, that I looshed with probably about three or four to one water to Absinthe.
01:46:57
Speaker
And this still tastes like black licorice to me. But this, with that perceived sweetness, and it's very much, how do I put it? It's like stevia. It's the sweetness that comes from, I guess it has to come from all those, the roots, like licorice root tastes sweet, but it's not sweet. It's that kind of stevia, weird. It's setting off all the sweetness things in your head, but you know it's not. Absolutely.
01:47:26
Speaker
If I squint and look at it sideways and think of a can of root beer, I 100% get that totally on board with it.
01:47:36
Speaker
Hmm. That's very intriguing. And what you have is, um, that's our absinthe Le Blue, uh, as well. So it is a, I will say this, and I wanted to get you some of my homemade stuff. And unfortunately I wasn't able to get it out to you, uh, through our meal system at the time, but I'll get you some shortly.
01:47:57
Speaker
Yes. So that one tends to be a little lighter style absinthe. And we did that because we are in the Midwest, right? And so people do have that aversion to black licorice. And so how do you get them interested in absinthe? Well, make it a little lighter in style. Maybe they can find some of those other flavors other than that perceived licorice that they enjoy, like fennel, for example, which is another primary flavoring ingredient in there. And coriander is also in there. We pulled back on some of the bitterness from the wormwood, et cetera.
01:48:26
Speaker
to make it a little lighter. For me, on my end, I love big, heavy absence. That's the more flavor, the better. So when I do a lot of the homemade stuff that we play around with,
01:48:41
Speaker
I have one that I call all the roots, which is literally like every root that you would ever find that traditionally goes into distilling. And it's bitter and it's funky and it has a ton of contrast. We even put, I went out to the yard and I literally dug up dandelion roots and dried dandelion roots and tried that in there. And it is now a mainstay of the Absinthe production. So it works well. But the thing with Absinthe too is
01:49:08
Speaker
Even if you stray from the traditional thing, there's so much you can do with absence. So a good friend of mine, Ron Rupert, who helped me with absence early on when I wanted to get into making like real big traditional absence, he does a masala absence. So he does all the traditional absence botanicals and then he adds masala spices to it. And it is absolutely amazing.
01:49:31
Speaker
It's, uh, it's one of the best spirits I've ever had in my entire life. So there's all kinds of things you can do to it, to switch it up and change it, or even just switching out your base alcohols. Traditionally, uh, your Swiss, uh, Blanche styles, those are going to be sugar beet alcohol. Um, sometimes they would have been, um, rectified, uh, Brandy basically, uh, as the base, uh, coming from Northern France. Um, but I've done it with everything from.
01:49:56
Speaker
Sugar shine made with corn or sunflowers to 100% oat whiskey, whatever. And the thing is, you can play off that base alcohol and play into it. At Copern Kings, we used Mascot Alexander is what we used, which is a crazy phenolic terpene forward grape variety, almost perfumey in a way. And it played extremely, extremely well with the absinthe.
01:50:22
Speaker
That's crazy, man. Yeah, it's interesting to me because it is very much like, when I hear, how do I put it? So some people will say to me, they don't like whiskey. I'm like, okay, I don't believe you. If there's so many different whiskeys out there, I'm gonna find you a whiskey that you like in a way you like to drink it. And maybe it's not, maybe it's not hard big straight from the bottle, but I'll find you something that you do like.
01:50:49
Speaker
It's the same with Jun, like there's two people, there's people that like Jun and these people that don't like Juniper. And even then, especially now, if you don't like Juniper, I can find you a Jun that you'll enjoy. Or if not find them a Negroni that they enjoy, right?
01:51:06
Speaker
That's my point, right? And I'm starting to realize talking to you that absinthe is going to be the same. It's basically, it's similar to gin, right? There's, there's, okay. So here's a, here's probably where we should go from here. What is the bare minimum that you need to do?
01:51:23
Speaker
to call something an absinthe and not be full of shit. The holy trinity. What is the simplest version of absinthe? That is still absinthe. Wormwood, Anise and hyssop really is kind of the baseline of where you want to start at with absinthe. And then really
01:51:48
Speaker
to really be an absence, right? And we're talking, let's say, a proper baseline for absence. And what you have currently is not that, because, again, I wanted to make it lighter. OK. But to really hit the proper baseline, it requires a ton of botanicals. I mean, crazy amounts of botanicals. And this is what makes it, I think, hard for home distillers to figure out, too, right? So Moon Shotters recently mastered distiller they did in the Absinthe episode.
01:52:18
Speaker
They had Ted on and he did a great job as a judge, but there was really nothing produced on there. They were absent like spirits. They weren't really absent. Um, and I say that because the botanical loads were so low and I think people at home have a hard time figuring out, well, how do you put that in the still and not scorch it? Because when I say a lot of botanicals, for example, with your wormwood, you're looking at like a hundred grams of wormwood. And then to that that's per gallon and into that you're looking. Yeah.
01:52:47
Speaker
150 to 300 grams per gallon of anise and fennel. And then some of the smaller ingredients, 30 or 40 grams per gallon. And you quickly realize that absinthe is almost a solid state distillation because you have as many botanicals in there as you have liquor in the still at the same time. But to be a true absinthe, you need those, the holy trinity.
01:53:09
Speaker
And you need very high amounts of that Holy Trinity to really pull the flavor off and understand what was really happening with it throughout the 1700s and the 1800s when it was a legitimate product that was recognized as its own category. All right, so let's now go all the way back to the birth of Absinthe. And if I understood what you're saying earlier, because I wanted to come back to this because
01:53:35
Speaker
You gave us that rundown of the history and there was so much there to pull apart. And I guarantee you, dude, I'm going to listen to this podcast and I'm probably going to be reaching out to you like the day after I edit it. Yeah. Let me know saying we need, we need to do another one. Let me know. But, um, yeah. So let's go back to the kind of the birthplace of absinthe. And as I understood it, it was.
01:53:55
Speaker
essentially a spiced slash macerated wine that made a jump to being a distilled spirit rather than just flavoring wine. Wine at first and then tincture and then distilled. Right. And when you say tincture, was it a tincture of distilled spirit? Yup. Yup. Distilled spirit with botanicals added.
01:54:19
Speaker
And then it jumped to being kind of like a gin where you're doing a tincture and then distilling it after. Okay. And what would you, at what point in that graduation, in that history, do you think that it became absent? Was it like, is a spiced wine with the right
01:54:39
Speaker
botanicals and absinthe, or is it when it becomes distilled that you think it's absinthe? I, so I think there's twofold. I think when it becomes distilled for me, that's when it becomes absent. That said, I do think that probably the word itself, absinthe, uh, was being applied to a lot of things early on that had artemisia absinthe in them. I think it was a catch all term for any kind of medicine or cordial of any kind.
01:55:09
Speaker
where the main ingredient was wormwood. And generally those tincture absence are pretty bad, but I will say this. We are lucky enough in the state that I live in, Indiana has a huge absent history. There were two absent distilleries here in southern Indiana in the 1830s, which is before it even catches on in Europe.
01:55:26
Speaker
Right. These were these were Swiss Huguenots that came here to start the first commercial winery in the United States. And they were also distilling enough absence. They hired a Cooper just to make barrels for absent. We also have a direct descendant of one of those Henry Odd Sisters that I told you about in that early history that lives in the state of Indiana. And she's had she's got access to some really interesting absent history, obviously through her family. And she does make
01:55:54
Speaker
an extract of absinthe based on that traditional recipe. And it's fantastic. There's no way that I could say that it's not an absinthe even though it's not distilled. You wouldn't want to drink a lot of it, but it's good. It's very good. Interesting. All right, dude. We've been at this for two hours, and I think this has got to be the plan. Right? Let's go deep into.
01:56:22
Speaker
that sort of early to mid 1700s absinthe. So when absinthe was first, what we think of as absinthe in that it was distilled, let's get stuck into that. And then that leaves us scoped to come back and do another podcast for the other styles of absinthe later on. But I'm really keen to do it because I did talk to you briefly about this earlier on.
01:56:49
Speaker
And I finally tracked down what I think is enough botanicals to kind of do something like this, some form of justice. And dude, you're right. It is not easy to get hold of this stuff. And it's not cheap. It's not cheap. No, it's not. It's crazy. Like I was, I was really surprised at the volumes you need. That's why my backyard is full of botanicals.
01:57:13
Speaker
I can understand it, man. Yeah. A bunch of it. I literally couldn't find it in New Zealand. It did not like there was just nothing after an hour. I mean, I'm sure there's someone's going to say, Oh, you're an idiot. You should have just done this. Yeah. Okay. Great dude. But after an hour of Googling, when would
01:57:29
Speaker
and tracking down every path I could think of in New Zealand. The only thing I could find was some like super hippie, uh, little sachets made for tea. And it would have literally cost me about 300 bucks to buy enough, enough to make, I think like three liters of absinthe. So I ended up buying it all from, uh, from America, but yeah. So let's get stuck in there, man.
01:57:53
Speaker
We've even, uh, I'll throw this to you because you'll laugh here. We've even had discussions, several of us absent the stillers in the US, like, uh, one of the, one of the, uh, the pedestals for botanical distillation back in the day with Seagrams with their gin, because they actually did botanical assays. How much of a pain in the ass would it be just to be, just to do botanical assays alone on absinthe?
01:58:15
Speaker
Because the quality of the botanicals too has a lot to do with it and where you get them from, right? I can't, you, you couldn't, you couldn't find enough of enough quality to actually be able to be picky. So there's just no way about, about three or four years ago.
01:58:34
Speaker
At the point where I'd been doing the channel long enough to decide that I was going to keep doing it basically, but it wasn't, you know, it was just firmly a second side hustle thing to the day job and the family and everything.
01:58:47
Speaker
some dude got in touch with me and said, uh, I'm going to start growing. He wanted to start a, uh, a farm, essentially a giant greenhouses and start growing crazy botanicals, uh, and herbs and spices and stuff that weren't popular here. And he basically reached out and said, would you be interested in making absinthe? I'm going to make a bunch of the stuff that you need for absinthe. Could we collaborate on it?
01:59:12
Speaker
And I said yes, and then just never really followed it up because I didn't quite understand how awesome that would be back then. Right.
01:59:20
Speaker
And when I talked to you, I spent literally an hour going back through old emails trying to find who that was. And I couldn't find it for being an ass hat. So if you happen to be listening to this dude, reach out. Anyway, sorry. Doesn't mean to cut you off early, early to mid 1700s, uh, absent.
Distilling Traditional Absinthe
01:59:43
Speaker
What's the deal here? So for that and to stay within the traditional bounds of something like that, your base alcohol is likely going to be a rectified brandy, particularly great brandy, which you can do even off of raisins, right? The goal is to get close, is to get something close.
02:00:06
Speaker
Those distillations typically for the base alcohol, they would be triple or even quadruple pot distilled, just making cuts as you go, going deeper. Because what you really want is your base alcohol is 170 proof. That's where you want to be at the start. You don't want completely neutral. You want some of that base spirit to come through and still be there and still be noticeable. That was considered at that time what they called a living spirit and that it still had some characteristics to it.
02:00:34
Speaker
From there, you have to understand, too, that palates were different at that time. Bitter is a very underappreciated flavor nowadays. It seems to be coming back. At least there's a bunch of people drinking Malort. I don't know why they're drinking Malort, but they are.
02:00:50
Speaker
It's out there. So the absence of that time would have been more bitter. You're probably looking at closer to 120, 130 grams per gallon of wormwood, and you want that wormwood to really shine through. Ideally, you would be distilling both dried and fresh wormwood if you had it on hand, right? You'd have a little fresh in there too, because more of those bitter compounds come through when it's fresh.
02:01:15
Speaker
You're looking at a much lower level of a nice in general And I can't remember and some of the notes that I sent you if I if I had notated that or not But the anise and the fennel They wouldn't have been easy to get a hold of they would have had to have imported it So they would have been sparing with it and they also weren't going for an overly sweet drink So whatever those numbers for like bell epoch were like 300 350 grams per gallon pull that back by half let's say so let's say 150 somewhere in there, right
02:01:43
Speaker
They didn't get real crazy with a lot of botanicals. There might have been some oris root in there. If they had it, the licorice root goes back a long way and they were literally using licorice root. I think of it the same way as I think of we, you and I have talked about oats in the past. It's there for mouthfeel is really what it's there for as much as anything, not so much flavor, but mouthfeel to give that creamy sort of characteristic.
02:02:05
Speaker
Um, it would have been, um, all macerated, no vapor distillation. So you're going to start off with that 170 proof alcohol. You're going to heat it up to a hundred and 40 degrees, which is scary in itself. Cause it's the flash point, right? Um,
02:02:21
Speaker
of 170 proof ethanol, you got to be careful here. You're going to take that and you're going to pour it over your botanicals and then seal off whatever you've got your botanicals in and let it set and macerate at that temperature for an hour. And then it needs to set for 24 hours before you distill it and you're trying to extract as much of that botanical characteristics of what you possibly can. Traditionally, it's going to be botanicals in the still and that's where things get really tricky for most home distillers because a lot of them don't have agitation or anything of that nature. At that point,
02:02:51
Speaker
This is just me. And I'm not suggesting this to anybody. I just say in this work, this has worked for me because I don't have agitation in any of those stills either. And I run on propane on everything. So my redneck methodology here is I took jars and I laid them on their side to cover the bottom of the still completely. And then I take all the botanicals and I basically align the still with a double layer of cheese cloth.
02:03:17
Speaker
Take all the botanicals and pour the liquid in the botanicals through the cheesecloth, catch the botanicals in the cheesecloth, and then tie three or four knots in the cheesecloth and let it set on top of those jars. As long as you don't let your temperature get out of control and your still doesn't start rocking back and forth and all that fun stuff because you're running too hard.
02:03:35
Speaker
The bag usually holds itself up pretty well. You don't get a lot of leakage out of it with the botanicals and therefore you don't get the scorching because it's setting up on something and you that something could either be glass or it could be some bricks or something of that nature, just something to protect the bottom of that still.
02:03:52
Speaker
Once the installation starts, you're basically you're going to pull just like you do in your videos with botanical stuff. You pull a little bit of not really fours, but a little little off the front because it can get funky and throw that out. You're going to collect everything from the time it starts running until you hit about 120 proof.
02:04:12
Speaker
At 120 proof, that's going to be your tail or not even your tails. It's going to be what's called seconds. There's going to be some little, a little bit alcohol there from 120 down to somewhere in the 80 proof region. That's still going to be clear, but it's going to smell very vegetative because those botanicals have been in that distillation the whole time. All of their positive qualities are pretty, pretty well worn out at that point. Then there's a secondary cut. The stuff that you take out between 120 and the 80, whatever proof.
02:04:38
Speaker
Um, rerun that for base alcohol later for another absence, uh, take it back up to one seven eight and rectify it. The stuff that comes out below that you'll notice that at some point around maybe let's say 80 and 90 proof, uh, the oils in that particular, uh, matrix are so heavy that they start to actually distill over and they, and the distillate will turn milky. Just like when you lash that absent.
02:05:02
Speaker
That's your actual tails are what they would call a blanket or blanket. Basically, you're going to save that and you're going to rerun that every time you rerun absent. You're going to put all that stuff back into the pot. And that's where a lot of your flavor and consistency is going to come from.
02:05:20
Speaker
That was basically the common method for that time period. And that should get you close to the flavor. Now you have to deal with the coloration if you do a coloration step. And that's where it gets tricky. One of the coloring agents that they used back then. So petite wormwood was common. That's another variety of wormwood that grows in the valley traverse. It's very hard to find and get a hold of. Lemon balm is almost always used, has almost always been used.
02:05:48
Speaker
Mint oftentimes has been used, but the big one back then was spinach because they wanted the chlorophyll from the spinach. The trick is going to be extracting that color from the spinach without getting that kind of metallic flavor that spinach can have. And you also you're using heat to extract there as well. So you're going to take it's actually traditionally it's like 48 percent or something goofy, 48 percent of your distillate, heat it back up to 140.
02:06:18
Speaker
and then pour that onto your coloring botanicals for traditionally about an hour. Now, the trick is you're doing this in such small batches. I would suggest putting those coloring botanicals in a like a tea bag or something, because it's probably not going to take you more than five or six minutes at the most to extract the flavor and the color from that. Then you take that finished colored stuff, filter it and put it back in with your uncolored absinthe and you have a Verde Absinthe.
02:06:48
Speaker
Okay, cool. Uh, that was like the full on condensed absinthe distiller's crash course. I have questions. Well, I think of this as a, I think of absinthe, it's the distiller's thesis, right? Like you want to be a distiller. Here's the master thesis. You do this and then now the only thing worse is like chartreuse or something. All right. So let's break it down from the beginning.
02:07:18
Speaker
And I'll ask questions as I come along. I have no problem with the list of botanicals, basically. They're all going in at the same time. We're not doing anything different with them. The first question that came to mind was, you said, heat the alcohol up and then pour it over the botanicals to macerate them.
02:07:38
Speaker
for 24 hours. Are you attempting to hold that temperature in any way, shape, or form? Are you just even just insulating it, you know, wrap it in a blanket? Or is the drop off and temperature part of what you're looking for? A little bit of both. So again, this depends on ingredients. With this particular one that you're doing, I would suggest letting the temperature drop off because
02:08:05
Speaker
you're going to have such an amount of wormwood in there. And again, bitterness is a part of this. But if you let that amount of wormwood set at 117 or 140, you know, for an hour, it's going to get pretty bitter. So if you can just let it fall off naturally, you're good. Now, some of the other ones where you have more anise and more fennel or hyssop, things of that nature, those I do insulate and try to hold for an hour. Right.
02:08:31
Speaker
So we are. So I am going to let it master eight for 24 hours before distillation, but let the temperature kind of like almost like blanch it, let it get hot.
02:08:41
Speaker
let it start infusing but let it drop off quickly yeah okay cool uh and then you were saying obviously this isn't a traditional thing but it's figuring out how we can do something as close to traditional with the equipment and means we have now in terms of getting the the herbs into a bag that bag is still submerged in the liquid right yes you're
02:09:05
Speaker
imitating a maceration, you're not hanging it above right in the vapor path. Yep. Okay, cool. Um, one of the things I've tried in the past is that I have essentially like a, a steel pot on stilts. Yeah. Yeah. I've seen that as inside the pot.
02:09:22
Speaker
Uh, so I imagine that would work as well, right? Like as long as once again, it's actually there's liquid in it And yes just to create separation between the heat source and the botanicals is all we're looking for here, right? Right now Let me ask you this question before I say completely. Yes that that that pot that you have on a stand. Okay Does it have a lid? Of any kind? No
02:09:44
Speaker
Okay, so you can do what you're talking about. But what I would highly suggest is that you use some kind of anti foaming agent, even if it's just a sliver of butter or something, because it does want to foam and it might push it might push those botanicals out. Yep. Okay, understood. Groovy. And just for the people listening.
02:10:07
Speaker
some of the other things I've used in the past and heard of other people using a colander or a sieve, something that's ideally stainless steel or copper inverted and upside down. Just be careful with the size because
02:10:24
Speaker
If there is a way, it will get down there. Yeah, absolutely. You want to make sure it's, yeah, you want to make sure it's relatively heavy and fits relatively well because it will jump around and move. Anyway, enough said on that. Let me throw one more suggestion here too, just because I know that the idea of putting solids in a still is going to turn a lot of people off, right?
02:10:46
Speaker
So I have in the past distilled Absinthe, um, not on the solids. And the trick to it is once you, once you do that 24 hour or once you do the one hour, uh, digestion, so with the 140 degree alcohol, let it set for about a week on the botanicals.
02:11:07
Speaker
It won't be as strong of an absence, but it'll still pull a lot of the flavor through. Um, ideally you want the potatoes in there cause you're going to extract more, but if you're absolutely terrified of doing that, and I understand you spend a lot of money on a still and you scorch one, one time it ruined your day real quick. I've done it many times myself. So, um, bear that in mind. You can do this by just letting it set for longer and extract for longer.
02:11:33
Speaker
There's part of me that wants to push this to the edge just for the sake of pushing it to the edge. And what I mean by that is I have that little ear still and I have yet in all this stupid shit that I've done in that thing to actually scorch anything. I mean, I've like throwing chocolate biscuits in there and heaps of gin. So there's part of me that wants to just try this and see if I can get away with it.
02:12:03
Speaker
I don't know, man. Maybe I'll do like a little, little test batch because I do. I'm starting to realize how thick this is going to be with solids. Getting it back out of the still sucks too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Too. Uh, I don't know. Maybe, maybe I'll sacrifice myself as a test to see if that'll work or not. Um,
02:12:23
Speaker
Look, it's like I planted a seed and now you're going to be like thinking about this, like laying in bed at night and being like, if I don't put the botanicals in there, is he going to make fun of me? Yeah, pretty much. This is going to be one of those videos where actually I'm often very, very cool with shit going wrong.
02:12:47
Speaker
because it makes it more fun, man. Like it turns it into a story. And it also gives me the ability to say, don't do that. I'm an idiot. I did it and I fucked it up. You don't have to, you know? So I'm cool with that as well. All right. So once you've distilled it, and it sounds like you've got a fairly good idea in terms of alcohol percentage, what's coming off.
02:13:12
Speaker
in terms of the cuts that are going to work. Is there anything specific in terms of flavor that you're looking to cut out at the beginning? Or is it just the same thing with most botanicals where it just tastes... I can't even describe it. It just tastes wrong for a little while. So once it doesn't taste wrong, you're good.
02:13:31
Speaker
Yeah. And usually it's just a couple of milliliters is all I take off. And then I always throw it in there too, even though you've already made your, and you, you know, this, but I'll throw this back out there for anybody else too. You know, you've already made your cuts to your base alcohol. If there were, if there were theoretically any meth and all, you've recompressed it now. Right. So it's worthwhile just to throw a couple of mills off, but it doesn't take much. It's literally maybe two or three, maybe even five mills at the most. Um, nothing major. Almost nothing. Yeah.
02:13:59
Speaker
And what you're going to see and what you're going to really like about this and people in general will like about this is it pie pieces out. Every one of those botanicals, their volatility is at a different temperature. So for a while you're going to taste nothing but wormwood. For a while you're going to taste nothing but Denise, then it's going to be fennel, et cetera. So. Yeah. Yeah. That's always fun, man. And it's, it's always kind of a case of, uh,
02:14:25
Speaker
trust the process because he tastes it and you're like, wow, that's way too much. But, you know, thinking about gin is when this happens mostly to me. That's way too much juniper or it's way too much citrus. But then by the time you blend it all back together, it works. Yes, that's going to be really fun to do. It's actually good for video, too, because like you said, distilling is the same thing overall. But at least it gives you something to talk about. Yes. Right. And it does. I will also say, too, it does benefit from
02:14:54
Speaker
a short rest period after distillation, you know, a week or so. And then I do tend to and I don't know that they were doing this with that early 1700s recipe. But by the 1800s, they were typically resting in a very lightly toasted barrel for a little while, sometimes sometimes even up to six months. So I've been doing just some toasted American oak chips. I've done some French oak chips. And if you can get a hold of it, one that works really well, if you want to do a really fun experiment.
02:15:25
Speaker
Amburana works extremely well with Absinthe. What's Amburana? I haven't heard of it. You don't know what? What? What? What? Okay. Now I got to find somebody- This is why I do these things, man. I got to find somebody else and mule you something here shortly then. It's a Brazilian oak. The brewers over here went crazy for it a couple of years back. It's just now catching on with the stillers, but it is one of the few
02:15:53
Speaker
One of the few oak products out there that just as chips alone, you can completely mature on it and it works. And it works extremely well. It's crazy aromatic. It's like baking spices, cinnamon, Ceylon style cinnamon. And it does not take a whole lot to get the effects from it. That's very cool, man. I'll have to look into that for sure. Yeah. So, and when you said split the batch, I'm assuming you're talking about
02:16:22
Speaker
You distill it. Do you proof it down to a specific ABV after you've distilled it, or are you doing the, all of this at the high proof still? So I usually do it all at the high proof. So your, your average there should be.
02:16:36
Speaker
You'll probably be 145 to 150, roughly, is where you're going to end up at. Just based on what went into the pot and your cuts. That was a piece, and I'm glad you brought that up because I did not mention that. When you do get ready to distill it, bearing in mind that at 170, your explosion hazard is pretty high. You want to cut it with water. Add as much water to it as you have alcohol before you distill it, right?
02:17:03
Speaker
Um, right. You need to be down around 80 right before you distill. Yeah. Right before you distill. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Cool. Uh, all right. So then you said, uh, it was like 48% splitting the batch and that just literally means you've got all of your hearts. We'll call it hearts for this just so people know what we're talking about. And then you're taking a little less than 40 or 50% of that and splitting it out to do the coloration of things. Okay. So I understood that correctly.
02:17:33
Speaker
Now at this point in time when Absinthe was first starting to be distilled, I know this is probably a bit of a curly question, but do you think they were doing the coloration then? And was this kind of a case of that trying to make it
02:17:49
Speaker
Uh, as similar as possible to what they were doing before distillation methods, you know, that used to have color. So we got adding color back in to make it so people know what the hell we're talking about. Is that you think what's happening here? So I think, I think there were two different products early on. Um, there was a Blanche, right? That would have basically been an uncolored version. Now, later on that does move in its own separate direction with some different flavors. But I do think, I do think that they were coloring very early on.
02:18:16
Speaker
And if you go back and you look at very early absence in the early 1800s, the bottle still says extract of absent. So they're still trying to play off of because the Henry odds, the sisters or whatever they wore, however, that worked out, whatever they actually wore.
02:18:32
Speaker
they had developed a name for this, right? Where people were traveling from all over to come and get this stuff. And they were familiar with it being a green product. And I suspect that was part of their marketing of that product. And so they were trying to hold on to that. I also think, I want to say this because I mentioned you and I talked about the spirituality of distilling and all that stuff earlier too. Some of the things that they do, like the 48%, right?
02:18:58
Speaker
I don't think that's qualitative. I think that there were certain things that they were playing off of with some of the mysticism and all that kind of stuff. And there are things built into absinthe that go back to some of those very early distilling traditions based around sort of spirituality and that sort of stuff. So some of the things that I say, it sounds goofy. Why 48%? Well, I'm sure there was some superstition or some belief of some sort that it is not a qualitative thing, because what's the difference between 48 and 50?
02:19:28
Speaker
With coloration, it's all going to be blended together anyways. But there's some reason or rationale there, right? Yeah. Maybe not a rational reason, but there's a reason. So. No, there was a reason that seemed rational to them. Yes. At the very least. They had everything to do with all of the other baggage that came along with this product, not what it tastes like. Right.
02:19:55
Speaker
Yep. 1 million percent. And who knows? It could be that I'm not even going to pretend to make something up, but I'm sure you guys can start to picture ideas that, you know, for some reason, for something that is similar to numerology, 48% and 52% coming together is significant for their belief or the healing property that they think it gives or whatever.
02:20:24
Speaker
But at the same time, if we're going to try and recreate something historic, why not do it as exact as we can, right? So the biggest difference that I see myself doing here to compare to the information you've given me is probably
02:20:42
Speaker
the spirit and that I don't have, uh, Brandy on hand at the moment. And even if I did go out and make my own, I would be using, I'm sure an entirely different cultivar of grape. That is, um, you know, like whatever I could go again, I could make Brandy and distill, you know, distill from grapes, but it's probably not going to be similar. Uh, you mentioned.
02:21:10
Speaker
using raisins, which is intriguing to me on two fronts. One, I've often thought about doing something similar to that and I've never done it. And two, it's not a completely stripped out product.
02:21:26
Speaker
It's going to have some flavor to it, but it's not going to be a huge component, especially, you know, it was already at what we were saying, 170 proof, and now we're redistilling it again with a buttload of botanicals. Good luck picking the exact flavors that come through. But why not, right? So what's your process on making a, is it basically a sugar shine with raisins added into it or?
02:21:51
Speaker
What are you doing here? Yeah. So the raisins, uh, raisins are probably one of my biggest, uh, cheats and distilling. I use them all the time for all kinds of stuff. Um, even yeast nutrient, cause they've got a lot of pruning in them. So they're great for sugar shines in general.
02:22:07
Speaker
So the way that I make a lot of my bases for, for absent is, uh, I will do just a regular sugar shine, one pound sugar per gallon. Um, right. Uh, so it's not, it's not good. It's going to end up at like 10 55 or whatever. It's not going to be real high specific gravity. Um, and then to that, I will add.
02:22:26
Speaker
And it depends, I don't get real technical on this, but through 50 gallons I'll add maybe four or five pounds of rolled oats is what I'm adding. And then I add a couple pounds of raisins. And the oats are there again for the mouthfeel, that's gonna distill across here, you get some more of that creaminess out of it. And then the raisins are there for the flavor profile and more aromatic than really flavor than anything else. And it really doesn't take a ton of raisins to make it happen. Two pounds,
02:22:53
Speaker
Two, three pounds of raisins and 50 gallons is more than enough to get what you want. Oh, wow. And 50 gallons. Yep. Wow. Okay. Okay.
02:23:03
Speaker
Awesome. And then would you suggest because you were saying they distilled it up to four times to get up to the high enough proof. Right. I'm thinking if I just did a one and done run with like two plates, I'd be in the general vicinity of what the spirit should be. And that's that's generally. Yeah. So the way that I and I'm trying to fix my computer here because my battery is going dead and the damn plug doesn't want to go in. But well, I'll get it.
02:23:32
Speaker
Anyways, um, kill this real quick. What I tend to do is I'll do a pot stripping run and I'll collect everything. And then I go back into one of the, one of the other smaller, like a three gallon pot or something like that, uh, or a five gallon pot. And then I'll run a defamator, but with no plates.
Practical Advice for Aspiring Distillers
02:23:52
Speaker
Um, and I can usually get to one 70. Now my wife's trying to kill me with coffee by spilling it on my hand and burning. I'm sorry.
02:24:05
Speaker
Yes. So I figured that's a reasonable cheat. You know what I mean? To, to, to resemble what they were doing with multiple pot still distillations. But yeah, I think you can do it in a single pass and not have a problem at all.
02:24:19
Speaker
Are you specifically doing that because you think that's what it resembles? How do I put this? I'm saying this completely the wrong way. Are you using oats, sugar, and raisins because you think that represents the kind of spirit they were using back then? Or are you doing that now because that's what gives the best result for your final absinthe in terms of what you want from it, in terms of the least effort going into it?
02:24:48
Speaker
A little bit of both, truthfully. Qualitatively, I really like it. It makes a good base alcohol, and it works well for absinthe. It's also fairly cheap to make as a base alcohol, because you have a lot of expense in absinthe already. The other thing is the grape.
02:25:04
Speaker
Yeah, the grape varieties that they would have been using as well at that time, you have to remember, mostly these are going to be cognac varieties. So they're pretty neutral in flavor anyways. They wouldn't have had a ton of flavor come across during distillation. Things like, I don't believe that this, and I could be wrong, I don't believe this variety existed then, but something similar to like Chenin Blanc, for example.
02:25:25
Speaker
where there's not a whole lot of flavor. So the raisins will get you something similar to that. Not perfect, not exact, but at least trying to get in that direction. All right, dude. I've got way more information now than I need to get started on this. And I'm sure you'll probably get an email from me asking about some stress points that I hit doing it. Is there anything else that you think people
02:25:55
Speaker
I mean, the cool thing is too, I think you've given anyone that's listening to this enough information to go out and get started, which is great. There's anything else in terms of potential issues that people will run into, you know, like little hints or tricks. I don't know, maybe, maybe issues in terms of getting the botanicals or traps that people will fall into getting botanicals, anything at all, man. Because there's a huge topic.
02:26:25
Speaker
Yeah, there are not a lot of, like you found out, a lot of botanical producers out there. And what there are, just be aware of who you're buying from. You know, generally, Star West and Mountain Rose are really good almost all the time. But I would say try to get the freshest botanicals that you can. And that's easy. Message them and ask them when they were packaged, where they came from, et cetera.
02:26:49
Speaker
With a niece, a niece varies in quality majorly. So if you can at any point in time, if you have the option to get it out of Spain in particular, that's where you want it from. That tends to be the highest quality stuff out there.
02:27:05
Speaker
Wormwood is interesting. So if you have access to wormwood, and it's easy to grow too, if you want to grow it, but it is highly invasive. I will tell you that. One of the old things that they would do in France and they still are in the Swiss Alps and they still do this day is they would harvest the flowering tops of the wormwood and then they wouldn't use it immediately. So they'd hang it up and barns to dry.
02:27:26
Speaker
But then much like tobacco, they wanted it to get the two, three, four, five years old before they used it. So there is a qualitative thing there that's going to be a little bit different as well.
02:27:36
Speaker
Um, and I haven't even made to that point. I've been growing warm wood for about three years now and I've got some that's three years old. So I'm going to be playing with it here before too long and see what the difference really is. Um, the main major thing with distilling it again, I would use, um, some kind of anti-foaming agent in order to keep from, from puking because it does make quite a bit of foam. Uh, people get worried about the aroma getting stuck in the still. Um.
02:28:03
Speaker
It does to some degree and copper stills in particular. So when you get done, hit it with hot water immediately. And then before you run anything else, what I would suggest is putting some citric acid in your still and boiling out really, really hard and just vapor out. If you're using a warmer condenser, vapor the hell out of that thing and just let it run for a while like that. And that'll take care of your problems.
02:28:27
Speaker
Other than that, there's not a whole lot. One tip that I will give anybody is on your condenser side.
02:28:34
Speaker
And this is gonna sound goofy and it's not easy to regulate at home. But typically with these style distillations from that region and from France in general, they're very big on watching how cool your distillate is. It's not a matter of going cold. What you're looking for is the up tension temperature. So the temperature of the distillate to be as close to 68 degrees Fahrenheit as you can get.
02:29:00
Speaker
So it's not crazy cold, but, uh, the rationale behind that is because that lets volatize off some of the things that you may not want in the distillation. They're not getting stuck to the liquor in particular. So, um, I wouldn't pay that a whole lot of mind, but it's something to bear in mind too. So groovy. Uh, and then in terms of the final product, do you have, so how do I put it? It's always hard when you're trying to distill a new type of spirit.
02:29:31
Speaker
And you don't know what's good and what's bad. You follow all the instructions, something pops out the end and you're like, well, shit, did I do the thing or did I screw the thing up? Do you have any suggestions? I mean, you suggested Jade Absinthe as somewhat of a yardstick, but then we also get into this issue of these giant
02:29:52
Speaker
spectrums of what is good within Absinthe, right? Have you got any suggestions there whatsoever in terms of people being able to figure out if they screwed up or if they did a decent job? We'll do one that's a little easier to find and it's made by Jade. It's probably not the best Absinthe in the world, but it gives you
02:30:13
Speaker
gives you an idea and that's Lucid. That also is one of Ted Bro's things. So if you can get a hold of a bottle of Lucid, that one's a good one just to say, hey, am I anywhere close to what this is supposed to be? All right, I'm writing that down right now because I'm gonna see if I can buy
02:30:30
Speaker
a bottle of either to get stuck in with this. I mean, I guess I'm lucky in that I have this, but from what you're saying, if I make what we just talked about, it's going to be a lot heavier than this and it's going to be a little bit better than this. Correct. That'll be the two major differences that I run into compared to this. Yeah. Cool. All right, man. I've got to say that was amazing. I freaking love this. I can completely see myself getting into absinthe because of it and especially into the
02:30:59
Speaker
I don't know, just messing around with it and experimenting with it is going to be, is going to be pretty freaking awesome. So thanks, man. I feel like you've, uh, well, thanks and fuck you. Cause I feel like you've, you've thrown me into the deep end on something that's going to be, you know, kicking around in my head for a while. You got to put the botanicals in the pot, man. I'm just, I'm just saying, if you don't put the botanicals in the pot, we can't say you really did your distiller's thesis. Yeah. No, I'll do it for sure.
02:31:27
Speaker
All right, dude, one more time. Give us a rundown on where people can find stuff that you're making and find stuff that you're talking about. What do we got? We got the distillery, the podcasts, and the YouTube channel. Give us a plug for each of them.
02:31:39
Speaker
Yeah, spiritsoffrenchlic.com, sealbox.com if you're in the US for shipping on those spirits to like 30 something states. You can check out my paranormal podcast. It's, if you have ghosts, you have everything and it's pretty much on every platform out there for streaming your favorite podcasts right now. You can check out the One Piece At A Time Distilling Institute by looking it up on YouTube. It should pop up on there. And I'm all over social media, Facebook, Instagram, et cetera. Feel free to reach out there or if you ever have,
02:32:07
Speaker
Any distilling related questions that Jesse hasn't answered, then reach out at BishopsHomegrown at gmail.com and I'll gladly do what I can to help. Awesome. Thanks, Apes, man. I appreciate it, dude. Yeah, absolutely, man. I look forward to trying your stuff.
02:32:24
Speaker
I'm going to have to view it the other direction.
Conclusion and Call to Action
02:32:28
Speaker
That's a good point, actually. So in New Zealand, I am bound to distill for personal use only. But I have talked to the guys, and I can't say this is for anyone else in New Zealand. I can just say this is my situation. They said that it is OK for me to submit a small sample to a expert for the purpose of finding out whether or not it is as it should be.
02:32:54
Speaker
Well, that's I can't think of. Exactly. And I cannot think of a better situation for me to be able to use that. I won't call it a loophole because it's not something I've never.
02:33:06
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know what I've made. I don't know whether it's good. And you are definitely the person that can tell me whether or not it's good. So I might just have to do that. Yeah, very cool. So a huge thank you to Alan for being a guest on the podcast. That was absolutely freaking amazing. I'm going to have to go back and listen to this multiple times just to make sure I get
02:33:24
Speaker
all of the information out of it that is possible. If you're still listening to this, I know you loved it and I know you know that Alan is a cool guy. So please, if you haven't done it already, go down into the description below, check out both of his podcasts and his YouTube channel. That would mean a lot to me and I'm sure it would mean a lot to him as well. Anyway, have a good one, guys. I'll see you next time.