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#28 Picking A Professional Coopers Brain On Barrels
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This has been a long time coming. I'm very glad to say that we finally have a professional cooper on the show. Mitch does an amazing job of answering all the questions I throw at him.
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Transcript
Introduction and Zencastr Sponsorship
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NordVPN Sponsorship
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This podcast is sponsored by NordVPN. NordVPN is a virtual private network with over 5,400 servers all over the world. They act as a buffer between you
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the content you view or download on the internet. You can get a great deal on NordVPN with the code STILLIT or the stuff in the description down below and they even offer a 30 day money back guarantee. But
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Why would you get NordVPN? VPNs do have some cybersecurity upsides, basically keeping the content you view or download on the internet private, but honestly, that's not really the reason that I love NordVPN. The first way that I use it a bunch is for, I guess you'd call it marketing purposes. It's really helpful to be able to see what someone in a different geographic location to yourself is going to see when they visit a certain website. But I'm guessing that that doesn't relate
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NordVPN can help you view that game that's out of region for you or that Netflix series that for some strange reason isn't available in your region. In our house, we use it all the time for those movies that will end up getting released in New Zealand.
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00:03:42
Speaker
So thanks NordVPN. So yes I know there's been a little bit of a hiatus on the podcast but it's definitely something I want to be bringing back more regularly and last time, last month we had a podcast with Ben from Badmow Barrels.
Guest Introduction: Mitch Wetall
00:03:54
Speaker
He's the guy that makes the cool little stainless steel and wood barrels. It's kind of a new idea for home distillers. But to build on that I thought it would be really cool to bring someone from the industry in to talk about the traditional
00:04:08
Speaker
commercial way of using oak to create barrels and what effects that has, what it imparts into the final whiskey that you're creating. So with that in mind, I think today's guest is the perfect person to talk on this topic. His family has been in the whiskey industry for three generations. Now he spent four years as a Cooper and then he moved over to Heaven Hill Distillery as a distilling supervisor. I mean, let's just get stuck in with Mitch Wetall.
00:04:35
Speaker
All right, Mitch, thanks a bunch for joining us, mate. You are one of the wonderful people that I've had the pleasure of meeting through the Whiskey Tribe, basically. We had got to have a couple of drinks together at the Ball Man. When was that? Like 2020, was it? Maybe 2019? Maybe. Yeah. Yeah.
00:04:58
Speaker
Yeah, that's a long time ago. I'm hoping to set that right this year and make it. By the time this podcast goes out, I'll know for sure. And hopefully I've got tickets booked, but it'd be nice to see you again then, mate. Yeah, I'd love to see you. Hopefully I can make it too. Yeah, so I hear you've got a new job, which is one of the things that may hinder that. Yeah, that's pretty much the only thing I would enter that. You know, yeah, I mean, if they don't let me take vacation, then I won't go. But if they do let me go, you know,
00:05:28
Speaker
then I will go. Luckily I don't have to deal with international travel or anything like that. It's just whether or not I want to man up and drive or
Mitch's Whiskey Industry Roots
00:05:38
Speaker
fly down one of the two. Yeah, fair enough. So maybe we should start from the beginning and because you're no longer in a in a profession where you won't be in a profession that's directly tangential to what we're talking about. But you do have experience that could be quite interesting to the people that are listening. So do you want to do you want to give us a quick rundown on what's applicable and what might be interesting to people before we get stuck into the geeky stuff?
00:06:05
Speaker
Yeah, so basically I'm a third generation spirits industry. My grand folks worked for Seagrams here in Louisville.
00:06:15
Speaker
My father was a Cooper for Brown Foreman for a while. Both my father and mother are graduated from the University of Kentucky with forestry degrees, which is a polite way of saying wood science. I was a Cooper, aka whiskey barrel maker, for four years, and then I went to Heaven Hill where I was a distillery supervisor for heading on four years.
00:06:38
Speaker
certification wise, I'm a level three whiskey sommelier, an executive bourbon steward, and then the people who do executive bourbon steward release other related classes. So I've done their six day distiller course as well as their
00:06:53
Speaker
barrel aging and maturation course, which is put on by independent stave company, which is one of the largest barrel makers here in the United States. Very cool, man. That's interesting, actually, I might have to have a talk to you afterwards about some of those because yeah, some of the stuff that independent stave company does, I've been considering trying to organize a trip around it. Yeah, it's really great stuff. I think they
00:07:20
Speaker
Some of them, having worked for one company and talked to multiple other Goopridges, Independent Stave is, you know, has their own laboratory where they are kind of trying to push the boundaries. And I haven't seen, I haven't seen that anywhere else, but haven't also gone to a lot of places. So, you know, don't want to talk bad about anyone. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. Fair enough, man. All right. So basically what you're saying is, uh,
00:07:48
Speaker
You've got long deep roots in this industry, especially when it comes to the oak side of things, which is pretty cool. I've been wanting to get someone on to talk about oak and barrels pretty much since I started the podcast actually. And I think a really big part of it is that in a lot of ways, how do I put it? It's kind of the magic intangible aspect ingredient
00:08:18
Speaker
alchemy side of this whole thing that we all love, right? So being able to kind of peel back the curtain a little bit, have a little bit more idea of what's really going on under the hood, the different levers that can be pushed and pulled to change flavors, the different levers that can be pushed and pulled to change the overall impression of the spirit that you get at the end and kind of have some idea of
00:08:45
Speaker
It's still magic, but understanding the magic, I guess, is the way I look at it. It was really exciting for me. And I know a lot of people have been requesting this as well. So thanks heaps, man. I thoroughly enjoy it. Thank you. I love talking about it, right? I wouldn't have done all that stuff if I was like, you know what my least favorite thing in the world is? Yeah. 100% dude. It's cool to be in something you love, right? It's cool to be in it. Oh yeah, it's amazing.
00:09:13
Speaker
be like, yes, let's talk work. Not, oh, God. Yeah, absolutely. So I feel a little inadequate in terms of starting this discussion where the discussion should be started. Where do you think the story starts? Acorns. Acorns. That's what oak trees grow out of, right? Oh, God, we got to go all the way back to the chicken and the egg thing. I mean, hey, why not? Let's do it. I'll run through that part a little quickly, right?
00:09:45
Speaker
Basically, you know, when you choose your wood, that's kind of like choosing your mash bill for grain. It's one of the most important parts of
Why White Oak for Barrels?
00:09:52
Speaker
making a barrel. To make a barrel, you need a veneer grade oak. So very little white oak actually grown in America can be used for cooperage. It is the highest quality oak that we use. So it's actually kind of, you know, it's really important.
00:10:11
Speaker
normally in America and to be chosen an oak tree would have had to have grown for like 80 to 100 years before they deem it, you know, worth harvesting. Realistically, that's because A, you need the trunk to be wide enough to, you know, actually give you enough wood, but also
00:10:28
Speaker
the way oak trees grow, they create a canopy above themselves. So after they hit a certain height, all of the branches just move up the tree and they no longer form ones near the bottom. And that's really important because knots are basically leaks. So in a knot, all a knot is is where a tree limb or branch grew in that tree. So it takes
00:10:54
Speaker
It's supposed to take 80 to 100 years. We currently have a white oak shortage in America for Coopridge. So they are starting to harvest trees as long as 60-ish years. So long as they grew in pretty favorable conditions, they'll be pretty large. So it's worth it. But yeah, so realistically, the story of most whiskeys started about 100 years ago. At least the barrel part did, right?
00:11:23
Speaker
So that's my favorite part about it. It's so funny. Whiskey is just one of these things where the more I delve into it, the more I realize how crazy it is in terms of trying to, like the production pipeline, right?
00:11:41
Speaker
Like who was a hundred years ago thinking, Oh, this is how much oak we're going to need for whiskey in a hundred years time. It's crazy. It's completely at the mercy of what was done a hundred years ago. That's nuts. Trees are a renewable resource. So anytime we go to a little too low, it's going to come back. It's just a matter of, you know, managing the forests a little better, planting a little more, uh, in America.
00:12:10
Speaker
Fun fact, in 2020, we were growing a cubic meter of white oak every second, which is a lot. I personally use Freedom Units because I am in America, so meters didn't mean a lot to me. So that was 35 cubic feet, roughly, which is a lot of board feet. Because when you're looking at a whiskey barrel, you're looking at
00:12:42
Speaker
about 275 board feet to make the barrel portion, and then approximately another 12 to 15 board feet to make both of the heads. So you need a fair amount of wood to make a barrel. Your average tree will give you about two barrels. So we harvest a lot of oak trees. When I worked at the Coopridge, we made about 3,000 barrels a day. That was our target.
00:13:10
Speaker
It was the Brown Foreman Coopridge that we made barrels for Brown Foreman, who owns Jack Daniels Woodford Reserve. Old Forester, sorry. Couldn't get Buffalo Trace out of my head. Definitely didn't make them barrels. If we did, somebody would have gotten fired. So, you know, that was one coopridge and we used 1,500 trees a day.
00:13:32
Speaker
So that's just, you know, that speaks to the, uh, the importance and the, just how prosperous whiskey is going right now. How far back the process was the Coopridge involved? Were they just selecting trees from someone else growing them or were they involved in?
00:13:50
Speaker
the actual forestry site as well? Brown Foreman owned about half the mills that they bought trees from. So they also, once the trees were felled, they brought them into the mill to cut them into staves. They did have to, when you're using that much, they just didn't expand as quickly. They didn't see it coming. I don't think anybody saw it coming.
00:14:15
Speaker
They didn't really own the forests. They had logging companies that managed those forests and they bought from the logging companies. That being said, Glen Moringy does actually own a forest here in America that they manage and they harvest the trees and they tell Jack Daniels or the cooperage I worked for, Brown Foreman, the specs they want those barrels made of and then
00:14:43
Speaker
Brown Foreman uses those barrels and sends them over to Scotland so they can have their once used barrels to their spec. So Glenn Morangie have realized that they're so reliant on barrels, even though they're using secondhand barrels, that they basically are owning the process. From Acorn till they get it. And they're the second person to use a barrel. So the whole bourbon thing in between is just kind of a
00:15:07
Speaker
Yeah. They're like, thank you for seasoning the barrel properly for us. Once you get your dirty paws off of it, we will take over. I mean, I respect that. They make glorious stuff. Like I love drinking it. You know, their master distiller is also the master distiller for Ardbeg. I can't say anything bad about any of their whiskeys. So, you know, hey, good for them.
00:15:28
Speaker
I mean, it's smart too, right? Like if that means that they are not at the mercy of, I guess the whims of the market either, they can just, they know that they're going to get a certain amount of barrels coming through every whatever quarter or year or whatever they measure it in. And they can plan accordingly. That's smart. I gotta respect that. So you're saying you're getting roughly two barrels per tree.
00:15:55
Speaker
I have to imagine that there's a whole lot of off cuts wastage. Oh my gosh. Yes. Cause surely that's worth a lot, right? So what's the, what are the kinds of the arrangements in terms of who gets what and I dunno, how does that work, man? From the saw mill's point of view, I guess it is. Right. Uh, so the loggers grade it basically when they cut a log or when they log it and then the saw mill gets it and they grade it even further. Um, so.
00:16:25
Speaker
We're looking for a veneer grade log, which is the highest possible. It means it doesn't have any limbs. It's not twisted. When a tree grows, it can grow. I think it works true. We can't have that. We can't have angled trees, any bins, anything like that. So we are hyper specific in the logs that we buy. So the overwhelming majority of the time, by the time it gets to us at the Coopridge, there shouldn't be a lot of
00:16:54
Speaker
flaws in the wood itself. That being said, I think we account for like 2% of white oak usage. So 98%, who cares? They make tree, they make Traeger wood pellets, you know, they make, you know, houses, picnic tables, whatever they want to out of them.
Wood Selection and Preparation
00:17:16
Speaker
So it's not that these trees are specifically growing to be turned into barrels, it's that the the the coopers take the cream off the top before anyone else gets a pick or they're paying a premium to be able to take. Yeah, you're paying a premium. Yeah, everybody gets a pick and it's whoever pays the most gets the first. So barrels cost a fair amount of money just because of that, right? They can't be made out of just any old
00:17:43
Speaker
uh you know white oak and it really does have to be white oak it can't be red oak um i know westland's been experimenting with uh gary oak more power to them it is a completely different flavor profile i was just going to say this is this is probably a clean spot to be able to stop and have a talk about the species the region all of those things which
00:18:10
Speaker
It's something I definitely want to talk about, and here's a clean spot that I can remember getting back to. Yeah, because I ramble, unfortunately. Yeah, let's jump into that now. Why is white oak special? And traditionally, that's what it's been. Does it need to be that still? Or is it just that we're doing that because that's what we've always done?
00:18:35
Speaker
Little A, little of B. Basically, there's two reasons you would ever use a wood with one caveat. The reasons you would use the wood is A, it works. It needs to be sturdy enough. It needs to not leak.
00:18:48
Speaker
it needs to breathe is kind of the polite way of saying it needs to be able to basically absorb liquid and expel liquid. Like here in America, we have teak that we make most of our patio furniture and stuff out of because it is just almost perfectly water resistant without even staining it. You could technically make a barrel out of that. It would be a completely neutral barrel because the spirit would never go into the wood.
00:19:15
Speaker
Um, the second thing you're looking for is taste. Like what does this would impart? Like if you could imagine, I don't know, welcome to America or, you know, our education said, I don't know, you all have time pine trees, but I know you have tar and pine trees smell and taste like tar. So if you made a barrel out of pine trees, it would probably technically work and it would make
00:19:38
Speaker
Awful, awful whiskey. And the caveat is make sure it doesn't kill anyone. So it's very important caveat because some trees are, you know, are toxic. Should we not have put that as number one? Should that not be? Welcome to America. It's a very important caveat. White Oak specifically is great at those first two. So Oak the species has this thing called Tyloces in it.
00:20:07
Speaker
And Tyloces, slightly hard to explain and gets kind of nerdy about it, they plug wood cells. Wood cells effectively look like a straw from McDonald's or whatever, right? So they are a cylinder that is hollow and open on both ends. And Tyloces plug the ends, basically after, as a,
00:20:34
Speaker
As wood grows, the wood on the outside is alive and the wood on the inside becomes something called heartwood, which is not dead, but it's not actively growing. So it's not really called live growth wood. And that's what Cooper's use. And they don't want it to leak, right? They want the opportunity for the wood to go into the cells, but they don't want it to spill out the ends. Right. So basically that means if you have a barrel and you know, it's got that lovely
00:21:02
Speaker
curve shape. If it doesn't have tyloses, it will go into the cell and then it will run up and down the barrel and leak out the ends. Oh, wow. Okay. So you want tyloses. Here in Kentucky, we have this really awesome brandy distillery called Copper and Kings. They also do gin and they decided to do a barrel aged gin, aged in a barrel made from juniper wood.
00:21:28
Speaker
and it leaks so badly. It didn't matter. The wood itself was hard enough that it didn't necessarily soak straight through the wood. It just ran out the edges and you could see it dripping just as it aged. So what you're saying is not through the width of the board. It would kind of get into the board a little bit and then... Yeah, just goes in a little bit and just shoots up the straight. Yeah, because it literally is like a straw.
00:21:59
Speaker
So it's crazy. Yeah, that is probably one of the most important reasons that people use oak. But also, you know, it's robust. It's a hardwood. So these barrels were originally used for transportation. You didn't want to use anything too soft, anything too flimsy, anything too malleable that, you know, when you were rolling it would kind of flex a little because any flex would just let water or whatever was in there just pour out through the seams.
00:22:28
Speaker
The second thing is flavor. Oak has tannins in it. A lot of trees have tannins in it, but tannins affect mouthfield. They are flavor. Tannins are the reason for the Pichio flavor.
00:22:46
Speaker
whiskey. Oak also has this thing, super cool, called oak lactones in it. And guess what? Oaks are the only one to have those lactones. And they are utterly delicious. They're, they're responsible for a lot of the
00:23:04
Speaker
and a little bit of the spice flavor that you pick up in a bourbon. So that's, for all it's kind of like smoky. So if you could imagine a whiskey, sands, vanilla, smoke, and spice characteristic, it would probably not be great. That being said, there are a lot of other oaks, other than white oak that work, dairy oak, chestnut oak,
00:23:32
Speaker
The thing is they all have those flavor compounds in them at vastly different amounts. Gary Oak will have zero of, why can't I? Some compound, but then it will have seven times as much of another, that way you traditionally associate with White Oak. So you'll be getting a completely different flavor profile from Gary Anna Oak than you will traditional American White Oak.
00:24:01
Speaker
So instead of completely giving up flavor sets and moving over to like the example you gave before of your whiskey end up tasting like a freaking Christmas tree, it's just that you're, you're re juggling the, uh, the hierarchy of flavors. So instead of having, you know, a large spice contribution, suddenly it's a vanilla bomb or vice versa. And that's, and so is that generally why the, the Oak family
00:24:29
Speaker
works is it's just that that like a larger proportion of the species within that.
00:24:34
Speaker
family have. I mean, Tyloces is number one. Tyloces is absolutely number one. But flavor is number two. I'm sorry? Because if it's not practical, it's not the logistics don't work. Yeah, I mean, it doesn't matter that like, you've got to keep the liquid in the barrel to be able to get the flavor. Yeah, I mean, that's yeah, it's got to work thing number one. Absolutely. If it leaks, it doesn't work. If it falls apart, it doesn't work. You know, flavor is kind of secondary there. But
00:25:03
Speaker
the flavor is really good. A lot of wineries have started us experimenting with other hardwoods. Wineries can experiment a lot better because, you know, their aging is often much, much shorter than spirits. So, oh my goodness, what a lot of things. Experiments with like Acadia wood, they've experimented with chestnut, they've
00:25:30
Speaker
a whole lot. And I mean, you're a little lucky being kind of close to Australia. Uh, they have experimented with an awful lot and they have a, I want to say a wine program at one of their universities. That is absolutely amazing. I read the thesis from one of their students. Uh, it was so good. They turned it into a book and sold it on Amazon. So very cool. I left to look that up specifically on wood.
00:26:01
Speaker
Uh, let's see here. I think it was like oak lactone formation. Uh, here it is. It is oak lactone formation in wine and spirits, the role of, uh, glysoidic precursors. And I said that G word incorrectly because I've only ever read it. Not a problem. All right. I'll have to look that up and see if, uh, I'll probably just get it to be honest and read it. It sounds pretty fun.
00:26:28
Speaker
It's a, it's definitely a scholarly article. So like, it's one of those things I had to read that with like Google up so I could Google what words meant while I was working my way through it. Oh, okay. Maybe I weren't in because I mean,
00:26:43
Speaker
If you were struggling like that, I'm really going to struggle. Oh, I'll just, I'll buy you a beer sometime and pick your brain on it. Honestly, it's just one of those weird things where, you know, I'll, I'll say something like this breaks down in heat and then they'll be like this, you know, pyro phospholizes or something like that. And I'll be like, what the hell does that mean? And then it's like, okay, pyro fire. And you're like, oh, and also that's the wrong word. It's not pyro, you know, it's, it's something else, but yeah, it was,
00:27:12
Speaker
And it's a slog. It's one of the shortest books I've ever read. And it took me like three months. It was, it was real, real difficult. There's a pretty strong argument that, that, that white oak is still.
White Oak Properties
00:27:22
Speaker
immensely important whiskey. It really is. It's not just a traditional thing. It just works. And it does a good job, is what you're saying. That's what I'm hearing. Yeah. From what I've read and from what people I've talked to, there's just no other wood that does everything that white oak does that has a similar flavor profile. American white oak is
00:27:50
Speaker
in the tree world of vanilla bomb. Right. Yeah. So if you could imagine, yeah, like no vanilla and whiskey. Yeah. That would be a pretty big change. Uh, so the, I guess the other, um, elephants in the room that probably need at least a acknowledgement would be French oak, Hungarian oak,
00:28:13
Speaker
Mizanara, I guess. Is there anything else that needs to go into there? What am I forgetting? Technically, Persian oak is one of the most populous oaks on the planet. Interesting. And we don't use it here in America. French oak is awesome and terrible for certain reasons. French oak has a lot higher tannin content. But when a tree grows, basically
00:28:40
Speaker
If you go back to thinking about those wood cells I described as McDonald's straws, that means it's incredibly good at making nutrients go up and down the tree, but it's not necessarily very good at making nutrients go into the center of the tree or out to the edge of the tree.
00:29:02
Speaker
rays, and there's a word before them that starts with an M that I'm getting tongue-tied on. And in American oak, those rays are so small that they're effectively watertight. In French oak, they're not.
00:29:16
Speaker
So when you harvest French oak, you have to find those rays that go from the center of the tree and then squiggle their way out and not cut through them. Otherwise, you'll have a leak through your barrel. Oh, wait. It's through the width of the board. It'll leak through the width. It's much more labor intensive to cut a stave out of French oak. Because you have to literally read the wood to decide where to cut. You can't just put it through a mill
00:29:46
Speaker
Uh, probably talk a little bit about how the wood is sawn for just a sec. So that makes sense. Um, normally when you have a tree, you know, it's a circle and they just basically cut it into a square and then cut the boards they need out of that square. Uh, you can't do that with, uh,
00:30:04
Speaker
oak trees, because if you've ever seen growth rings, if you have a growth ring that goes from the inside to the outside of the stave, it'll leak. So you need a way of cutting those off. So it's quarter sawn. So if you think of a tree as a circle, just divide that in four, and then they just cut that triangle until it's too small to create a board.
00:30:31
Speaker
oh okay oh right because if you're thinking of a board like so if you're if you're looking at like a plank to put it into different terminology if there's half circles going from one side of the plank touching the bottom and touching the the top of the plank like radials like in terms of the the growth rings it'll it leaks along the line of the growth ring is that what you're saying you never want the growth ring to uh
00:30:59
Speaker
to arc all the way through the wood. You want it to have defined striation. Interesting, okay. Sorry, my brain is not raining very well. I've heard the term quarter sword before, probably just from reading
00:31:17
Speaker
you know, fantasy books or whatever. And I've never known what it meant. Now I do. And it makes perfect sense. So they literally split it into pizza slices, and then cut the edges off the pizza slice until there's no more slices left. And that's basically to deal with those rays, because the rays work out in a squiggly line. So you're trying to make sure that one ray never makes it all the way through. Yeah. And if you have an arced grocery, a
00:31:45
Speaker
array is going to cut through. Yeah. Cool. Okay. So that's beautiful. That takes us right back to where we were. So I'm assuming it's the, it's these slices that are then, is that what turns up at the Cooperage? Like what, what is the raw material that the Cooper ends up with?
00:32:04
Speaker
So basically, those are exactly what turns up. They will remove the bark before it comes to the coopridge. So we don't have to deal with that. And then they get air dried, which is an incredibly important step. It's called seasoning the wood. There is a little bit of discourse that goes on about how important it is. I have taken a side and will fight about it.
00:32:34
Speaker
The longer you season a wood, the better it is, both to work with and flavor profile wise. So it sounds really weird, but just leaving wood outside, it'll lose moisture content. It'll drop down to about 12 to 14%. And that's really important because tannins are water soluble. So tannins will begin evaporating out of the wood.
00:32:58
Speaker
while it's seasoning and you don't necessarily want a high tannin content when you're going to be aging something for a long time. The other thing it does is it allows just kind of mold and moss and anything else to kind of get in there and it actually starts breaking down the wood before you even toast or char it. And that's really important because certain compounds in wood break down with heat, some break down with, you know,
00:33:25
Speaker
exposure to water, some break down with exposure to alcohol, some only break down physically with, you know, like a bacteria or a mold or something acting on those. And sometimes those bacteria actually quite where the employee word is poop out good flavor compounds after eating, you know, whatever they do as they good. So you want those.
00:33:47
Speaker
So, you know, the big guys, they season for a minimum of three months and then they will throw it into a kiln and bring it down to the appropriate amount of internal moisture that they want it to work for you to work with and also to deal with the whiskey that they're getting ready to put in it. But over in France, 18 months to 24 months is pretty normal. I am definitely on the side of the longer you air season, the better.
00:34:17
Speaker
We actually have a distillery here in Kentucky that has a couple barrels that they had air-seasoned for four years before they turned into them. And it adjusts the flavor. It really tones those tannins down, softens them up. And it just, everything I'm about to say is not a fact. It is something I experienced drinking it. I feel like it allowed the flavor to kind of come into the barrel quicker.
00:34:45
Speaker
Right. It got those vanillans, it got those fur furalls, it got that, you know, all those lovely oak lactones in there quicker than I felt like it would have had it just been a regular barrel.
Seasoned Oak and Flavor Extraction
00:34:59
Speaker
So whenever I do these things, one of the most awesome things that happens is when people say things to completely challenge
00:35:08
Speaker
ideas that I've got because it makes me think on the spot, it makes me respect someone else's experience, especially in this kind of situation. I'm having the exact opposite experience right now, which is bad because it means that I'm entrenching ideas that are my personal beliefs and you're not giving me a reason to be able to justify those. There's just some serious confirmation bias going on here. But I've recently
00:35:38
Speaker
Over the last six months, I've realized that a lot of the oak that I've used in the past has been
00:35:44
Speaker
It's not crap oak, it's nice wood, but it hasn't been purposefully prepared for whisky. It's hard to get stuff here in New Zealand that has been purposely prepared the correct way. So people will get off cuts from a furniture shop or whatever and do X, Y, and Z to it and then hope it works. I've made a lot of products with that. It works whatever I get a result.
00:36:11
Speaker
Recently, I've got my hands on oak that is from Kentucky that's been yard aged for four years. And I've started messing around with that.
00:36:20
Speaker
And the biggest thing that I've noticed is the older, the stuff I used to use, it gives a color or like really, really, really quickly, like a week, it'll get to, because we're using it in a higher concentration of, you know, service to liquid or whatever you want to define it as. Color comes really quickly. Spice sort of flavors come quite quickly. And then you start battling the, how do I put it?
00:36:50
Speaker
It's a battle of trying to get that rich vanillans and kind of oak sugary velvety feeling before it gets tannic and horrible. That's the past thing I've had. This new oak, the color comes about the same speed, but the biggest difference is the vanilla and the sweetness and the velvety mouth texture is the first thing to show up.
00:37:18
Speaker
And now I'm waiting for the spice and a little bit of tannin to kind of round it all out. And that sounds very similar to what you just said. Yeah. I mean, it tones the tannins down the longer you do yardage, which, you know, if you're working with a 53 gallon barrel.
00:37:37
Speaker
That's awesome because here in Kentucky, that's what lets you go longer than 10 years. But also, if you're, we have another distillery here, Hartfield & Company, they use a 6.3 gallon barrel. They keep a hawk's eye on that thing because you can over tan and that thing
00:37:57
Speaker
in two days if you don't catch it at the right time. Yeah, it's like taste it this morning and we're bottling it in an hour. Not this afternoon. Oh, yeah, no. They go through that day to decide whether they're bottling. Yeah, absolutely. But it's just very weird. It's also one of those things that terroir really affects, like where your oak was grown will affect the concentration of those flavors again. You know, because a white oak grown in Minnesota or southern Canada
00:38:27
Speaker
has a much shorter growing season than a white oak that's grown in, you know, say like Northern Alabama or something like that, you know, which is kind of the Southern United States. Cause all of those flavor compounds. Are there accepted flavor profiles based on region or is it just that everyone accepts that that are going to be different? Like a certain region sought after for certain properties or does it not really work that way?
00:38:53
Speaker
Yes, and no really what it is is the the growing season will either tighten up or loosen the growth rings on a tree Okay, and the tighter the rings kind of the sweeter the barrel So it has just a higher concentration of those flavor Extradives that you can pull out of it so you can get a nicer better flavor quicker If you have super tight growth rings, then if you have kind of your wider ones
00:39:24
Speaker
So my layman's understanding of the difference in the flavor contributions that I'm getting from that wood was something along the lines of, I'm going to tell you this, and then you can tell me either how I'm wrong or how you can say it more correctly. Feel free to do that. To me, it feels like it's almost, it's almost like the wood is, um,
00:39:53
Speaker
It's already gone through the process that was happening in quote unquote the barrel for me before it got put in spirit. So it seems like the wood that hadn't been yard aged for a long time, it needed the alcohol itself to start breaking everything down and releasing what it needed to release. Whereas it felt like the stuff that's been, that has been yard aged and seasoned correctly.
00:40:19
Speaker
that process had already started, so it was literally just ready to leak into the spirit. Is that somewhat correct? Am I thinking about that? That is, yeah. I mean, if you brought a scientist in to critique you, I'm sure he would find something, but effectively, yeah, that is what's happening. Basically, the air drying has started breaking down those chemical bonds between the cellulose, the hemicellulose, and the lignin.
00:40:46
Speaker
And once you break those bonds, it allows the hemicellulose to start breaking down into sugars and the lignin to start breaking down into those more complex and super fun to say molecules. So if you pre start that process.
00:41:02
Speaker
then you don't have to work, you know, wait for, you know, fire, toasting, alcohol or any of those other things to start that process. So it's just, it's already there. Yeah, interesting. So if, um, I guess now too, we're starting to get into the point where if there's a,
00:41:20
Speaker
people messing around at home that aren't going to be buying barrels. So all of this information is super interesting for people that are in the industry, people that want to get into the industry, people that are thinking of starting their own distillery. But I also have a segment of the listeners that I just kind of wanted to follow along at home. They have my heart, believe me. Yeah. I guess we're starting to get to that point now where they can start playing along, right? So in terms of seasoning oak,
00:41:50
Speaker
What can you tell us about how to go about that process? So the most important part of seasoning oak is airflow. So you do not want to put it on top of something because there will be no airflow going on that. You don't want to put something on top of it. If you buy multiple pieces of wood, you're going to want to put literally just small little jenga block size pieces of wood in between it to keep that airflow going.
00:42:19
Speaker
If you don't keep that airflow going, it will never lose the amount of water that you want it to. So you are not necessarily effectively air seasoning it so much as you are air molding it and that creates kind of bad flavors. Don't get chemically treated wood. Like that's the third caveat, right? Don't poison yourself. If you can find white oak that hasn't been chemically treated,
00:42:49
Speaker
and you have time, you literally put it outside. You don't cover it. You can keep it inside. It doesn't actually help that much. That's actually a little worse for it. But just outside, in the elements, slightly elevated. It doesn't have to be like, oh, I've got a car jack that I keep everything on. And it's six feet in the air. You just need it to where it's not touching something else.
00:43:17
Speaker
preferably leave it for months. Uh, if you can hit years, that's awesome. But if you don't air dry it for three months, it's going to taste funky. And so I've, I've heard that it getting wet, like repeatedly getting rained on and then drying and then rained on and drying is a advantageous thing. Is that? Absolutely. Uh, that helps pull those tannins out because you're, you know, tannins are water soluble.
00:43:46
Speaker
they're not alcohol-soluble. So as the wood gets rained on, the tannins will have been broken down kind of through those natural processes of just the ambient microbes in the air breaking that down. And then the tannins will, being water-soluble, go into the water. Then the water evaporates and you lost some of those tannins, which is...
00:44:10
Speaker
Very important, like I cannot stress enough how important like mitigating initial tannin impact is. There's a joke in Kentucky, you spend the first six months imparting flavor into your whiskey and then you spend the next six years taking that flavor out because it's not good. Is there an optimal size for wood that is
00:44:38
Speaker
How do I put it? I have to imagine, especially as a large Cooper, that there is a constant push and shove between optimal for flavor and optimal just for logistics and economy and economy of scale. So forgetting the economy side of things, is there an optimal size of wood or dimension of wood for seasoning? What does that match up the same with
00:45:08
Speaker
So basically, it depends if you're trying to make a barrel. If you're trying to make a barrel, you're going to want about an inch and a quarter thick stave because you're going to be shaving it down thinner because you're trying to, you know, put a bevel in it. So you create, you know, a circle when you put it all together instead of like a duo centecetihedron or whatever it is, you know, something that has like 28 sides on it. But if you are just using, you know, wood put in in your aging vessel. No.
00:45:38
Speaker
there is no minimum size. With the caveats, if you are charring the wood, charcoal does not add flavor. You are creating effectively activated charcoal, which is an absolutely invaluable part of filtration, and it pulls out a lot of your copper, a lot of your phenols, a lot of those things you don't really want, but it adds no flavor. So if you plan on charring something,
00:46:08
Speaker
you have to make it thick enough that you can catch it on fire and it doesn't all become charcoal. Okay, so let's assume that we've got to the point where this oak is seasoned to our liking. What's the next step in the commercial operation? Because by all accounts, the wood can come out looking pretty freaking gnarly out of the yard. Oh, yeah.
00:46:33
Speaker
100%. So if after you've seasoned it, they still check the moisture to make sure it's where they want it. And they may actually still end up till drying it just a little bit more. Just because the drier the wood is, the easier it is to work. And also, the more spirit will immediately dive into it. So the next thing they'll do is you bring the stave in.
00:47:02
Speaker
You basically cut it down to length because when you're drying wood, it likes to split on the ends. Believe it or not, it's easier and cheaper to buy wood slightly too long and then just cut a little bit off of every end than it is to buy the appropriate length and hope it doesn't split. We'll just end up wasting so much more. So you cut it down to length.
00:47:23
Speaker
Uh, then you run it through a planer, both top and bottom. And that's what puts that bevel on it. And that takes off, you know, all of the nasty growth that has, you know, possibly been going on while you wear air seasoning. Get rid of the fairy stuff. Yeah. I mean, that stuff is very important for making good flavor, but that stuff is not good flavor, right? Right. It's part of the process, but get rid of that shit. Yeah. No, no. I mean, also caveat, right? That some of that stuff can be poisonous.
00:47:53
Speaker
Yeah, right. So after that, you're effectively left with a board that is cupped, running along the whole end of it. It goes to a joiner. When I worked there, it was done by hand. Now it's done by computer. Basically, the joiner, if you think about a barrel,
00:48:14
Speaker
You know, it's it's curved. It's wider in the middle. Right. So that means you need to take wood off of the top and the bottom and leave it in the middle to ensure that it's a little bit thicker. You also have to turn it from a straight sided board to a slightly beveled board. So when you build it, it's not just a line of wood that does no one any good. You need it to create a circle. And the way you used to do that manually
00:48:43
Speaker
was you effectively took a circle and you put angled knives in it. So that way, the edge of the circle, the knife would be sticking out further, and the interior of the circle would be not sticking out quite as far. So if you think of, here's a jigger or a bull, if I were to push something into this,
00:49:07
Speaker
it would create kind of a beveled edge as you push it in, right? Because this is further out than this. It's obviously exaggerated, but we're just trying to remove, you know, maybe an eighth of an inch more off of the outsides than we did on the inside and to put that
00:49:26
Speaker
slight undercut in it. That's also when we inspect for anything wrong. So fun things you find in wood, right? In America, bullets, lots of them. Don't even think about that. Yeah, because you don't want your whiskey having lead in it, right?
00:49:46
Speaker
Well, it's not that it's, it's, you've got spinning knives going really, really fast. And if it hits metal, that's bad. Uh, so that same goes for like nails barbed wire that's grown through trees, things like that. Uh, but on the natural side, you know, uh, small knots that maybe, you know, uh, a twig started to grow out of and then broke off before it could become anything wormholes. Um,
00:50:12
Speaker
Worms love to eat oak and a very interesting thing about them is as they eat, they poop as they go. So it looks, you know, like it's solid wood with just like a weird, you know, lighter color in it. But worm excement is alcohol soluble. So the moment you fill it with alcohol, suddenly you got all these pinhole leaks coming out of it.
00:50:37
Speaker
So what you're saying also is that there is a very high chance when you drink whiskey that you are drinking at least a minuscule percentage of worm crap. I would put it at, if it is a heritage brand, it is 100%. There's not even a very high chance. It is just idiots.
00:50:58
Speaker
Oh, dear. That's how you know it's the good stuff, man. I mean, it really is. I mean, if a worm will eat it, that means you should be able to eat it too, right? It didn't die. Oh, dear. All right. So, you've seen comes in big at this point, but that's interesting to me too, that it's done at this point. I guess it's the same idea as the ends of the board splitting. It's just easier to
00:51:24
Speaker
assess it once it's being dressed once the timbers look at it, right? Like, cause now it's finally dressed rather than rough. Right. When the woods green, it's, you know, sappy, there's a lot of water involved. It's very hard to see a lot of those like wormholes and other stuff like that. Also, if, uh, if there's only one problem in the, in the board as a Cooper, you know, when you're joining the wood, AKA, you know, using that joining wheel.
00:51:53
Speaker
you can notice that and cut it out. So it is inspected like they run it through a metal detector at the logging point because when it gets to the sawmill they don't want to mess up the sawmill. The guys who quarter saw it also inspect it.
00:52:12
Speaker
But humans are fallible. They miss a lot of things. Also, some of them you just can't see when the wood's green. So it's inspected all throughout the process. Crazy. Sorry. I was just going to say, so now we're getting pretty close to actually putting all of these individual pieces of boards together. That's exactly the next part.
00:52:33
Speaker
So it's really weird. It's called raising a barrel. Effectively, you get this super strong iron hoop that is the exact size that you want the head of the barrel to be. And you just start shoving staves into it, which is what the boards are called at this point after you've finished them.
00:52:52
Speaker
Um, if it's a huge industrial process, every single board will have the same angle. So they'll tell you how many staves need to be in a barrel to make sure that angle is correct. Um, because, you know, we've got 360 degrees, every single stave is cut at, you know, certain degree angle. That means you need 27.
00:53:15
Speaker
in this barrel or you need 31 in this barrel to make sure those angles add up to 360. So that's not a standard thing like that. That depends on the light. Will any one commercial outfit always do the same number of states or is it very depending on season or a solid average is 29 like 30 ish, but it depends on how wide the wood you're receiving it. So if you're getting a lot of just narrow wood,
00:53:46
Speaker
Like it's kind of the job of the supervisor or the foreman or anybody to go out there and be like, wow, you know, this wood is really narrow. We're gonna, we're not gonna be able to put, you know, 29, 30 in the barrel. We're gonna up that up to 32 or 33. And then, you know, the joiners who were making the staves have to adjust their knives angle so that it comes out correctly.
00:54:10
Speaker
That's crazy. I hadn't even thought about the fact that you'd have to roll with the, you know, just roll with the material like that. Now that you say it, it makes a whole lot of sense, but it's just one of those things I wouldn't have thought of, right? Yeah. But, but smaller, smaller cooperages don't do that, right? Like they just, they will make the correct amount of staves and will vary the,
00:54:37
Speaker
the angle they put on them based off of the thickness, especially if they're using computers, like they'll just be like, Oh, wow, that's a real thick stave. We're putting a tight angle on that because, you know, it's taken up more of the circle. So it needs a slightly more acute angle or, Oh, wow, this is a really thin piece of what we're going to put a, you know, much more obtuse angle on it, where it's a lot closer to 90 because it's only that wide, you know,
00:55:02
Speaker
Oh, right. So like, if you're using computers, it literally assesses it on a board by board. Like not every, how do I put it? Not every stave in the barrel is going to be the same width and the same angle they'll adjust. So they use, if it's a, if it's a thicker board, they can use more of that wood and have less wastage per board. Is that what you're saying? Basically. Yeah. Huh. That's pretty cool. Uh, cause unfortunately.
00:55:27
Speaker
Uh, like the way I described it first, you know, where every board has the same angle. If you put a lot of wide boards next to each other, followed by a lot of narrow boards, you'll have a really flat side to your barrel, followed by a really, you know, you'll end up making ovals. Yeah. And then you don't really want that. So, you know, computers alleviate that.
00:55:49
Speaker
If no one has seen the process of then bending those staves back together, which I'm sure you're going to describe quite well, I'm going to say right now it's worth looking up because it is actually, it's quite spectacular, I think is probably the right word for it. It's, I mean, the way we did it, I thought was awesome. I've also seen the way ISC does it and it's much more beautiful and like art driven.
00:56:18
Speaker
independent stave burns their wood scraps and then they heat, uh, bend their staves. So they will literally just have a fire in there and they'll spray water on the staves and they'll just slowly, you know, tighten the top. And since the bottom is in that super heavy iron ring, it's not going anywhere. So the staves just slowly bend, slowly bend until they get into that circle. And then they put another heavy iron bent on there.
00:56:49
Speaker
Where I worked, we had a steam tunnel, which is exactly what it sounds like. It is a tunnel of steam. It's just 240 degree hot water just billowing out. And they just impregnate that wood with as much hot water as possible. And then when it comes out, they have a windlass, which is effectively
00:57:15
Speaker
an upside down comb with a hole in it that comes down and it just catches all of those pieces of wood that were standing up straight, forces them together into the hole of that upside down comb. And then a incredibly strong man throws that iron hoop on top of it and beats it down with a sledgehammer to make sure it fits. And then it comes apart, raises up, and he does about
00:57:45
Speaker
1500 of those a day. And I'm guessing that guy is built like a brick shit house. Well, when I worked there, that guy's name was Joe Matt and Joe Matt was retired military and Joe Matt was in better shape than when he was in the military. So he was, he was not someone you wanted to mess with. He was a big guy, man.
00:58:07
Speaker
Oh, dude. Yeah, that's pretty hardcore. If someone's strong enough to do that, are they going to be able to do it? Or is that deceptively intricate work as well? Like, do you have to be have a deft touch for it? Deceptively intricate, because as you're banging it down with your sledgehammer, the opposite side wants to pop up. So you have to know
00:58:31
Speaker
exactly where to hit it, or you're going to spend just a very long time, you know, with your sledgehand, like, you know, five pound sledge, just bang, oh, whoops, bang, oh, whoops, you know, and just kind of like a Daffy Duck cartoon where you're just back and forth. So it's one of those jobs where it actually does take more than brute strength.
00:58:53
Speaker
That's pretty cool. All right. So now, uh, now we're at the 60 part, I guess, and we're, we're doing testing. Is that right? Uh, so it depends on the Cooperage. So some Cooperages toast and then char some Cooperages don't char at all. Some Cooperages, Cooperages don't toast at all. Um, and every Cooperage toasts different than the other, right? Oh, okay. So at,
00:59:22
Speaker
At Brown Foreman, they toasted, basically they had here in America in front of like grocery stores, we have yellow concrete stoppers that stop people from driving through the grocery store. They looked a lot like that, only they just heat up to a certain temperature. And it's like a giant element, basically. Yeah. I mean, it's like a three foot tall. Like a rod. Rod that heats up.
00:59:49
Speaker
And it's super precise and it ensures that the entire barrel is given the same temperature for the exact correct amount of time because different temperatures bring out different flavors. So I pulled up a little picture here earlier. But basically from 200 degrees freedom units all the way up to 520 degrees is where
01:00:18
Speaker
your kind of toasting profile is at 200. It's very oaky, like you get a lot more of that oak. And then once you hit 520, you're kind of pushing the edge of almond all the way to two bitter. So in between 200 and 520, you get a couple different flavors. So vanilla tops out at like 400. That's where you can get the most of that. And just kind of generic sweetness is around 320.
01:00:48
Speaker
Um, good luck converting all these to Celsius because I can't do that in my head. That's what, um, that's what you're listening to this and you want to know, pull up a Google tab. Google's got your back. So the other thing is the problem, I'm going to phrase that the problem is those flavors that you pull out, um, at those lower temperatures get burned away.
01:01:17
Speaker
as you go past them. Because what you're trying to do is break those bonds down to release those certain compounds. So if you're like, I want vanilla and more vanilla than anything else, then you want 400 degrees. But you're also destroying a lot of that oaky like those oak lactones that I was talking about earlier. And you're going to lose a little bit of that sweetness because you've
01:01:45
Speaker
you broke the bonds down to create those and then you continued to break the bonds down within those flavor compounds so they no longer taste like that. So it's very much a narrow window that you're selecting and it's not like you get the benefit of everything before or everything after it. You're just getting what you aim for. And that's why time is so important because if you say
01:02:11
Speaker
You're like, I want max vanilla. So I am 400 and I'm going to do it for half an hour. Sweet. Then that means you baked 400 degrees in, you know, how many millimeters? Right. And if you do it for an hour, you baked it in many more millimeters, but then it starts to cool off, you know, the further it goes in. So that means, yes, you have maximum vanilla and you destroyed all that oak character and all those sweet compounds until you get
01:02:41
Speaker
four and a half millimeters in and then it started to drop in temperature and oh you're starting to pick up those sweet characters again and oh six and a half millimeters you know seven eight somewhere in there oh that's where the oak character comes back in so you have to think about how long you want to age because how far your spirit can get into that wood
01:03:02
Speaker
is how long you need to toast it. And you also have to think about how hard you're charring it because how deep you char, right? Like a level one char, you're effectively going one millimeter into the wood. A level four char, you're going up to seven millimeters into the wood. So if you toast for 20 minutes and then do level four char, you have burned off all the things you spent toasting.
01:03:24
Speaker
right so there was no point toasting at all because you just now obliterated the entire like all of the wood that was affected by the heat and toasting you just burnt it to a crisp and now it's gone and now all you're getting was that transition period from like because there's a gradient from the charring too i have to imagine right yes so yeah so that's why they didn't
01:03:47
Speaker
You know, that's why toasting's kind of a new thing. It used to be you just charred, and then you got that lovely toast gradient behind the char. So people were like, why do you char? We already have it. And then it's like, oh, well, if you're going for an in particular flavor, you can extend the amount of time that the liquid spends picking up that flavor before it goes deeper into the wood. So what you're saying is it's really freaking complicated.
01:04:14
Speaker
It's I mean, yes and no. Basically what I'm saying is if you get really into toasting things, do a level one chart. Like just set your wood on fire for 10 seconds or less and then put it out and you will get amazing toasted
01:04:29
Speaker
toasted oak flavors, you'll get the vanilla, you'll get the kind of caramels, you'll get those lactones and you'll get everything that was, you know, you were shooting for in the toast. And if you want a heavy char and you still want those toast profiles, you just have to toast much longer. Right, right, right, right. So, hmm, how do I ask this? Let's say that you're going for a vanilla bomb.
01:04:56
Speaker
and you're going to toast it and then do a level one char over the top. If you just toast that for like six hours,
01:05:08
Speaker
and the entire stave gets to that temperature. Does it get to a point where you're just, even if you're at the temperature that gives the flavor that you want.
01:05:27
Speaker
Are you working against yourself and it's just, it's not adding any more vanilla by toasting longer. Do you end up losing from that or is it just these practical reasons why you would never toast that long? So it's a kind of a mute point.
01:05:41
Speaker
Realistically, it's practical reasons you would never toast that long because the wood would never go into the barrel that deep that you wouldn't eat. The whiskey would never go into the barrel that deeply that you would want to char it that long to get it that deep into the wood. Could you do it though? Like if you were just throwing a chunk of wood into, you know, yeah, like put it in your oven at 400 for three hours. See what happens.
01:06:12
Speaker
I guess my gut reaction to anything like this is that I tend to always err on the side of natural complexity, I guess is the best way for me to answer it. And obviously I don't know what I'm talking about here, but it comes up a lot in whiskey where people are like, oh, I love this flavor and that's what I want. But I feel like, I feel like anytime you focus specifically on just one thing, everything becomes one dimensional and boring.
01:06:42
Speaker
Does it make sense? Like, vanilla's only fun if you have some oat and some almond and some, like all these other things put them together, right? Like, so just chasing vanilla or just chasing oak or just chasing almond by itself is probably a trap, is what I'm getting at. It is and it isn't.
01:07:06
Speaker
Yes, one dimensional flavor is not necessarily what you're going for. However, this is a natural product and it can and it will never always do what you want it to the way it's supposed to. So it is very, very, very difficult to be like, no, this is perfect. This is 400 degrees. This is max vanilla, like one dimensional. It will never work perfectly. So you will have parts of the wood that don't hit 400. They go higher than 400.
01:07:37
Speaker
Um, if you're charring like that, obviously helps, right? Cause that takes it well over 500 degrees. So you are going to get that almond. You're going to get that better. You're going to get that grass. You're going to get all that other stuff. Um, also.
01:07:54
Speaker
depending on how long you season, is what flavors can break down. So like oak, vanilla, caramel, almond, and then if you go past almond that bitter, that's for like super well seasoned wood. If you go for kiln dried, rather than that, it's kind of, you can get green notes, which are, you know, kind of those,
01:08:23
Speaker
green bell pepper, eucalyptus, grass clipping type notes that a lot of folks can associate with rye, acrid. You can get pencil shaving notes just because suddenly you're breaking down bonds using only heat. Whereas earlier you broke down those bonds using a mechanical means. And then you can further break down those with heat.
01:08:51
Speaker
So also, it's not a complete list of flavors that you can get out, you know, just from that. Right. It's just because the book I got that from was written in the 90s. It was written by Independence Dave and it was a presentation they gave because they were kind of rolling out toasts.
01:09:09
Speaker
to the distilling industry and they're like, guys, really? If you do this, you don't have to hope that you have enough vanilla honey barrels to make your blend. You don't have to worry about, oh God, is it going to be oaky enough? What if we just have a bad year and it's long winter and it's not oaky enough and we have to start using
01:09:34
Speaker
Barrels that are a year two three years to older than we want to in order to get those flavor compounds out So is that a complete list of flavors? No, but it is the main players like it's the the obvious
01:09:50
Speaker
Yeah, it's the biggest ones. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And this is the thing too, because home distillers or anyone that's played in that area have this horrible way of, it's not horrible, it's just a different way of thinking about it in that, how do I put it? Home distillers are much more likely to try and create a finished delicious product than one barrel, which is just not the way it's done.
01:10:17
Speaker
in the commercial world, right? Like you want a vanilla bomb in case the average blend doesn't have enough vanilla. So we'll take half, you know, we'll put one of these barrels in with the other 50. The other 700. And you want something that's too tannic and you want something that's too peppery and too so on and so forth. So if you're a home distiller, toasting is helpful because it can kind of point you towards sweeter vanilla or a little more accurate.
01:10:46
Speaker
But if you are not using charred oak, you're doing it wrong. Barrels do effectively three things in an incredibly broad sense.
Barrel Influence on Whiskey Flavor
01:10:58
Speaker
They add flavor, they take flavor away, and they change flavor. If you don't have charcoal, you can't take flavor away. And you really want to take some of those flavors away. I mean, you make stuff. When you taste it straight off the still,
01:11:15
Speaker
You're like, wow, yeah, no, that's, that's white dog. Right. Like, and when I worked at heaven Hill, right. When we made white dog, it did not taste good. It tasted like corn, stainless steel, alcohol, and caramel. Not necessarily the most delicious thing you've ever heard in your life. You know, not bad, but definitely not, you know, like, yeah, you know, it's not the award winning, like Henry McKenna that won, you know, all those awards are all, you know, all that.
01:11:43
Speaker
All of that came from removing that stainless steel, changing the alcohol and oxidizing it with all the acids. It came from taking the corn and filtering out some of those copper notes that come along with the corn. So you have to char. Sorry.
01:12:05
Speaker
So the only way the charring works is because the spirit is moving in and out of the wood, right? It's literally filtering it as it goes in and out. Is that? I mean, it's effectively activated charcoal. So you can just, I mean, I've never heard of anyone putting activated charcoal in their white dog, but that's why charring works. It is activated charcoal. It's effectively like, what is it? One gram of charcoal has like a
01:12:32
Speaker
Thousand square meters of surface area or something like it is absolutely insane. Yeah So that's where you're saying is if you just sprinkled a little bit of powdered activated charcoal over the top of a stainless steel vessel of whiskey Would it have the same effect as a barrel where it's literally a barrier as it's moving in and out of it? Or do you or do you think that whole movement into and out of the wood is kind of? over romanticized it would still
01:13:01
Speaker
Technically move in and out of that powdered activated charcoal It would just it would move in and then it would get you know Filtered or whatever and then the next bubble or molecule would bump it out or whatever until it just becomes Depleted and it can't filter anymore The the breathing in and out of the wood It'll do that with raw wood. It does not have to be charred. It will seep into
01:13:31
Speaker
just completely untreated raw oak, like completely virgin. However, like charring it and toasting it does break those bonds down. And it does make it easier to kind of get into those cell walls and start extracting those flavor compounds. All right, cool. So we've talked roughly about the kind of different degrees in terms of toast.
01:13:59
Speaker
And it's basically pick the temperature you want based on the flavor you want and then pick the amount of time you want to decide how deep that certain flavor goes into the wood before you start hitting the gradient of fall off in temperature. And then how long you want to let the spirit age to reach into that gradient. And we've also talked about the interesting thing which I hadn't thought about in terms of the quality of wood and how seasoned it is
01:14:28
Speaker
And I didn't actually get to ask you this, that reminds me. So to go back a conversation or two ago, you're sort of saying that the oak you're dealing with is going to change the way you toast it or char it. And the way I thought I understood what you were saying is that you're sort of saying if you've got this wood that's been seasoned really well and it's already gotten rid of a lot of the tannins,
01:14:52
Speaker
you're more able to treat it in a way that would push it towards being tannic because there's less tannin there. If that's a creative choice you want to take. Is that kind of what you're saying? Whereas if you had a kiln dried oak, you wouldn't want to toast it really hot and really hard. Yes and no. You can't put tannins into a barrel. Like it's boring. When you cut it, it's got whatever tannins it has in it and it cannot have more.
01:15:20
Speaker
All you can do is kind of change the accessibility of those tannins, because tannins are the very first thing you pull out of the barrel. You pull it out before you pull out of black tones, you pull it out before you pull out any fur for all, you pull just tannins first. So if you can just delay your access to those tannins,
01:15:41
Speaker
So it gives your other flavor compounds a chance to develop before you start pulling those tannins. It can create a much more well-balanced whiskey as you age it, right? Because if the first thing you pull out is tannins and then you just continue to pull out tannins, you're effectively just hoping that the other flavor compounds can overwhelm those tannins and create a balanced whiskey. Otherwise, you're just like, oh, great, yay, yum.
01:16:11
Speaker
My tongue feels weird and this tastes like vodka, you know? And my teeth hurt. If you are trying to create like a super young whiskey, like a three months old whiskey, do you need to be excessively concerned about tannins? No.
01:16:31
Speaker
If you are trying to create like a young one to two year old whiskey, do you need to be excessively worried about tannins? God, yes. Cause that is the point where the tannins are still being pulled out that the other, you know, nothing else has begun to even come close to hitting it. And the tannins have just swelled to a point that, you know, it's unpalatable, right? And this, I have to imagine is the reason that Glenn Morange won.
01:16:59
Speaker
the bourbon distillers to fill the barrels first, right? Oh, yeah. So that's another interesting thing. Everything I've been talking about has been virgin oak, like first use. You've never done it before. If you have a first fill, so like it's not virgin anymore. This is the first fill you're doing in that barrel. You get approximately one fifth impact. Sorry, Mitch. We had some technical troubles there and got kicked out, but we back into it and seeing as
01:17:29
Speaker
Both of us are old crazy people. We don't remember where we would at what we were talking about. That's fine. I think what I would like, what I would like to do very much so with someone that you hear is to maybe give ourselves like four goals to aim for and then get some ideas from you in terms of the best way to accomplish that.
Crafting Sweet Whiskey
01:17:59
Speaker
So what is the, what would be the four ends of, if you've got one end of the spectrum, it is, I just like my whiskey smooth. I want it to be sweet and approachable. And then at the very other end, I want it to fight me and I want it to be tannic and spicy and crazy. And then what's in between, I guess in between is the fairly standard bourbon profile, is it?
01:18:28
Speaker
the barrel to get you to each of those different places. So the nicest, sweetest, easiest one is probably the easiest one to talk about.
01:18:46
Speaker
You're going to want a super heavy toast, you know, kind of in between three and 400 degrees, because that way you'll be balancing kind of that sweet Carmelie note with that vanilla note. And that's kind of vanilla is our brain just picks up as sweet. You're going to want a level one char. You're going to want what's called a high piece count barrel.
01:19:09
Speaker
What that means is effectively they went out of their way to put a whole bunch extra staves in it. So instead of having like an average of 29 in it, you're going to have like an average of 40. And that's going to allow the whiskey to oxidize a lot quicker because those kind of slats, that's where all that oxygen is going to come through. And when you oxidize something, what you're effectively doing is you're taking an acid and an alcohol
01:19:33
Speaker
and merging it with element oxygen. So not O2 that we breathe, that big fan of, but just O. Right. Okay. And that's, and that's what creates a lot, you know, all of your like peaches, cherry, like your fruit notes, your kind of floral esters. That's where those come from. So any way you can accelerate those, that's how you're going to make, you know, like a sweeter, more approachable bourbon.
01:20:02
Speaker
You're gonna want to age it In the bottom of your Rick house relatively cool not a whole lot of high Temperature fluctuations you don't necessarily want to drive it all you know into the wood as much as you possibly can you're just trying to Get it into that toasted part and keep it in that toasted part that you toasted to And you will come out with
01:20:27
Speaker
a really gorgeous, sweet, hopefully slightly more complex because of that high piece count where you've oxidized some and created those cherry, peachy kind of flower notes and then proof it down to 80. And you'll, you'll be like, all right, this was pretty good. Whiskey for the masses. Whiskey. I said whiskey for the masses. I mean,
01:20:53
Speaker
The great thing about whiskey for the masses is I am a member of the masses. So like I get to drink it too, right? Really, there's not necessarily a way to find, right? Like a super aggressive bourbon. You're gonna wanna char it higher than a level one. I would recommend level three char. If you toast it, you know, you're not necessarily going for a vanilla or anything like that. I would probably toast a little higher at like 420.
01:21:23
Speaker
because that will drive the toast a little further into the barrel. You're going to want to age it in the hottest, like the top of your rick house where the temperature fluctuations are wild and it gets super, super hot because it will drive it further into that wood. It will pick up all of those flavors all the way through the wood. So you're going to be picking up, you know, your almonds, your vanilla's, your vegetal notes, your toasted smoky notes, your fur for alls, all of that stuff.
01:21:53
Speaker
It doesn't really matter that much about the piece count because when you are in that high part of the warehouse, you're going to be evaporating a lot more. And because you're evaporating a lot more, that's going to take care of that oxidization for you. So you are going to get some of that complexity. If at all possible, you're going to want to have a stave with really tight grain because that's going to increase the amount of extra divs or amount of flavor compounds that are in that barrel.
01:22:23
Speaker
And you're really going to be shooting for those fur for alls. And really what you're going to be doing is you're going to be going a little deeper into your tails, uh, to pull out some of those more fun and funky acids. Uh, I know it sounds weird, but buteric and acidic and all those acids taste disgusting in white dog, but oxidize and absolutely delicious and lovely things. Um, Asian is a beautiful thing, man.
01:22:51
Speaker
It really is. Right. And then, you know, don't put any water in it. Like you're going to want to put that thing in there at one hundred and twenty five proof and just ride it out. Like ride that lightning. Right.
Creating Bold Whiskey
01:23:11
Speaker
And at the end, you're going to have a bourbon that, you know, you don't take home to mama. Like, I don't know how to put it. It's going to be
01:23:21
Speaker
all about flavor all the time everywhere. Yeah, yeah. And like I say, you've just described the extreme, right? So if you're kind of, if you're messing around at home, I would say you probably want to mess with the spectrum in between, right? Yeah. So fun things to mess with if you're not necessarily into like toasting and all that stuff, mess with your like barrel entry proof.
01:23:50
Speaker
Because like I said, certain flavor compounds break down in water, others break down in alcohol. So as you adjust the percentage of alcohol and the percentage of water you put in there, you'll pull out different compounds. Generally, if you start hitting closer to 100 proof instead of 125 proof, you'll be starting to pull out a little sweeter compounds.
01:24:09
Speaker
Uh, whereas if you put it at 125 proof, like welcome to the big boys, that's where they get that, you know, half of that rice spice that everybody talks about in bourbon is like wood spice. Yeah. Right. So, and what would you say is the tipping point in terms of the average between the two is just literally linear right in between, or is it, does it lay one way or the other? Um,
01:24:38
Speaker
So here in Kentucky, most folks do 125 or 109 or less. So I can't tell you about 110 through 124. I just don't know. Interesting. Yeah. They just, they're, you know, if you're doing 125, you're doing, you know, you're trying to get as much as you can out of that barrel. When you're putting less in there, you're making a very conscious decision about
01:25:05
Speaker
you know, I am trying to get a different flavor profile. So they are taking a big step away from them because you're not gonna be like, hey, I wanna make 10% less whiskey and have a 2% flavor distance, right? Like, no, you wanna make 15% less whiskey but have a very obvious flavor difference.
Discussion on Specific Proof Levels
01:25:26
Speaker
So, 109 and below, I know mixtures and peerless,
01:25:33
Speaker
I think are 107 and 109. Oh my goodness. In Colorado, Leopold Brothers is a hundred flat even. So if you can get your hands on any of those and compare it to Jim Bean, Heaven Hill, Four Roses, that sort of thing, you can see a little bit of what that does. But if you're going to play with proof, one ten or below.
Cherry Flavor Development
01:26:01
Speaker
There's one of the flavor that's been kind of pestering me and I've been chasing around for a little while, and that is the cherry note. Cherry, yes, that is the esterification of... So it's actually two esterifications, and I don't remember the proper terms, but acetone esterifies and it starts tasting like nail polish.
01:26:29
Speaker
And then that will esterify again. And that turns into cherry, which I used to know the scientific name for, but I don't anymore, but really it's, it's a product of time. So if you have created a whiskey where you're like, this tastes like nail polish, you are probably six to eight months away from this is a cherry bomb. Interesting.
01:26:56
Speaker
the mysterious ways. But I also read that 12, no, not 12 years ago, seven, eight years ago. And I'm really thinking back on that. And I want to say that's what it is.
01:27:11
Speaker
So I could be completely wrong in talking over my butts, but I remember nail polish led to cherry. All
Traditional Bourbon Treatment
01:27:21
Speaker
right. So, uh, one last stab at this, if you just wanted to make a completely, uh, like a totally traditional tasting bourbon, what would be your treatment of the, the barrel and in the maturation? Treatment, uh, completely traditional.
01:27:38
Speaker
Um, actually, and probably it's probably worth you defining what you would consider, uh, traditional bourbon by picking a, like a common bourbon. Let's just go heaven Hill. Okay. Funny. It's almost like you didn't know what it's almost like, uh, so everything I say is my own personal opinion. It has no bearing on anything. Heaven Hill actually thinks or does.
01:28:04
Speaker
But if I was Heaven Hill, or if I was trying to make Heaven Hill, I would try and get staves six months to a year, air-seasoned, char-3, no toast, normal piece count staves, no high piece count, anything like that. If I was trying to make kind of the lower end Heavens Hill stuff, you know, I'd keep that kind of towards the bottom of the warehouse. If I was trying to make the higher end stuff, I'd expose that to a little higher temperatures and age it a little longer.
01:28:34
Speaker
I'd put it in at the barrel pretty high. It is a heritage brand, so they're not going for the low 100, 107, 109, so 125 is a pretty good idea. You're also looking at what proof it comes off of the still at that point before you proof it down to go into the barrel, because that'll also decide what factors you're going off of. But really, the heritage brands,
Consistency in Heritage Brands
01:29:05
Speaker
it's almost a commodity market. So they are...
01:29:11
Speaker
You know, they're not going to do like the artisan cognac. We're going to air season this for two years. We're going to, you know, dial in the perfect temperature and toast it for exactly 32 minutes and 14 seconds. We are going to, you know, cut grooves into this so that, you know, it increases surface area. They are about, hey, we need 50,000 of this and we want it to be as close to the same as every other, you know, of all 50,000 of them.
01:29:39
Speaker
And anytime you introduce a variable, that's another instance that it could be different. Right. Right. Right. So it really is just, uh, terrifying to do anything, but what's been done in the past. Yes. And I mean, yeah, but I mean, if you went out and you bought Jack Daniels and it tasted nothing like your previous bottle of Jack Daniels, even if it tasted better, you would be furious. Like, where is my Jack Daniels? Right. Yeah. So.
01:30:08
Speaker
When you're in the heritage game, the name of the game is keeping it the same, right? So you want to remove all, you know, all variation because the people that go out to buy Jack Daniels want Jack Daniels. It doesn't matter if you can make Jack 2.0 where it's sweeter and better and everyone likes it more, you know, like they want Jack. Yeah, completely understandable.
Conclusion and Gratitude
01:30:33
Speaker
All right, man, this has been an absolute blast and you've given me a whole lot to think about. I'm sure a bunch of other people have suddenly got a whole lot to think about as well. So I really hope that we get to catch up in Texas this year. That'd be great. I'll make sure to hunt you down and shake your hand and have a drink with you. I'm sure everyone that's listened to this is very thankful for the information that you've given. So thanks, man. We thoroughly appreciate it.
01:31:01
Speaker
Thank you. I know I rambled, but I have too much fun talking about it, so thank you.