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Little Barrels That Act Like Big Barrels With Ben From Bad motivator
1.8k Plays2 years ago
I have been using bad motivator barrels for a while now, while none of mine have been filled for that long I have very high hopes for them.
Today I got to talk to the man behind the barrel!
Texas Distillery Take Over Tickets Here: https://www.eventbrite.co.nz/e/387824241747
Get your own Badmo Barrel Here: https://badmotivatorbarrels.com/?aff=2
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Transcript
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Texas Distillery Takeover Event Overview
00:01:09
Speaker
Before introducing today's guest, there's one other thing I need to tell you about and that is the Texas Distillery Takeover happening on the 12th of September at Andalusia Whiskey Company in Texas. Now, basically the long and short of it is that we,
00:01:25
Speaker
if you decide to pick up a ticket, are going to descend on Andalusia Whiskey Company and take the place over. Not really, but Ty and Moose, the crew there, are going to give us a whole bunch of knowledge, answer a bunch of questions, give us a little bit of industry insight. The samples will be flowing. We'll be able to taste those just for fun. Also to be able to kind of put an exclamation point on some of the things they're sharing with us in terms of information. And to be able to answer
00:01:55
Speaker
some of all of the questions that we get to ask them as well. Now there's two different types of tickets available, the long and short of it is that the VIP ticket will get you in at 11 o'clock, you'll have an extra session with the crew and with me there as well. And the cool part in my mind is at the end of the day,
00:02:14
Speaker
When everyone else is doing the happy hour thing and hanging out, you're going to be able to pick from a couple of different barrels that they're going to make available and make your own bespoke, literally one of a kind Andalusia blend. You'll be able to choose different proportions from different barrels and make it up to your own personal taste preference. That's pretty freaking cool. If you don't want to do that or you just want to spend a little bit less money and still want to come and hang out, you can show up at lunchtime. Lunch is
00:02:41
Speaker
part of the ticket price for both tickets and you'll get the afternoon session and then the happy hour in the afternoon. So if you're keen to pick up a ticket, I'd suggest doing it soon because I do think they're going to sell out well before the event happens and
00:02:56
Speaker
I don't know, it'd just be really cool to put faces to names and be able to shake your hand and have a drink with you at the end of the day. That'd be really freaking
Guest Introduction: Ben and His Innovations
00:03:02
Speaker
cool. Anyway, let's get stuck into introducing today's guest who happens to be one of the people that completely helped me out when I was first starting the hobby over on the forums, which I'm eternally grateful for. But he's also very well known for starting to develop the concept of, aha, these bad motivator barrels.
00:03:23
Speaker
Motivators The Guest, which you probably figured out from the title and the thumbnail. If you don't know what these are, we'll get into talking about them in the podcast, but generally the idea is that they help you maturate spirits in a way that is similar, at least to a large barrel, but in a much, much smaller volume. He developed this idea and he's cheered on the forums and stuff, how he makes them, helps other people make them if he wants to, but obviously, you know, if they
00:03:50
Speaker
would prefer the convenience, he'll just sell them a barrel. I've been using them quite a lot lately. I've been filling as many as I can. I plan on filling a whole lot more. So in this podcast, we're gonna talk through the idea of these barrels, what he's found out in the process of researching for the barrels, both in terms of how wood acts and how to physically put these specific barrels together. And we also touch on the just downright feeling of
00:04:17
Speaker
pride that you get having one of these sitting around. It really is a very good feeling. And of course, he talks about the pride that you get from being able to make your own. I don't know what else to say. Let's get stuck into the podcast. I am very, very happy to introduce Ben from Bad Motivator Barrels. Ben, thanks a bunch for being here today, man. It is very nice to have you on the podcast. And I've appreciated it. I mean, we've been talking for a bit now, haven't we? It's been what, about three months? We've had pretty decent contact, I think.
00:04:45
Speaker
It could be a little more, but yeah, I think you're on the right track. It's a real pleasure to be with you. Oh, it's great to have you,
Insights into Barrel Making and Maturation Process
00:04:51
Speaker
man. And I, it's interesting actually, cause when I, I'll have to go back and check and look through the forums because I know that when I first started looking into distilling, there was a little R2 droid that helped me out a bunch. I remember the post where you mentioned possibly making a YouTube channel and looked forward to seeing what you can do. And it looks like you've done okay. It looks like you've done that job pretty well.
00:05:15
Speaker
Well done. It turned out well, man. It's interesting to go back and see the naivety come through for myself in certain ways. But I guess in a lot of ways I wouldn't change it at all. Because if I was on that naive, it never would have happened. You know, I think a certain amount of the charm of naivety helped you along, you know? Yeah. I'm counting on the same thing myself, by the way, with my enterprise.
00:05:42
Speaker
Anyway, I do thank you and thank you to everyone else that was kicking around in the forums on Facebook groups and stuff that helped me out when I started. I do feel guilty for not being in there nearly as much as I can anymore. Once something turns into a job and then suddenly... Well, being a participant on the forum isn't the only way to be helpful. And you've done your part, I think, very well.
00:06:11
Speaker
But yeah, anyway, so I mean, I guess we contacted each other or we were in contact at least somewhat. What was that like six years ago or something silly? Could be. But yeah, and since then you've developed this idea for a barrel. So right up front I'll just tell people that they can find the website at badmotivatorbarrels.com
00:06:36
Speaker
I will make sure to stick a link in the description down as well. So if you want to pull the website out so you can pull the website up so you can physically see what we're talking about while we're talking about it, by all means go ahead. If you're watching this on YouTube, you can see his barrels in the background. I'm sure we'll have a sample pop up at some point in time to look at closer. But Ben, do you want to give us a rundown on what the barrel is physically and why that's interesting or important?
00:07:06
Speaker
Sure. Well, I'll go back to the beginning, the reason for them. So right about the time I think you joined the forum and started thinking about it, was that around 2015 perhaps? 2016, 2017. Yeah, 2015 when I probably joined late 2015, and then by the time I actually had something happening, it would have been 2016. So yeah, you're right, that year is probably when I was most active in the forum. Yeah, I got interested in the question of how someone can
00:07:36
Speaker
age, mature brown spirits in small quantities. The problem as I saw it was that people like home distillers don't have
00:07:46
Speaker
a lot of really great options for keeping their spirits maturing progressively over years and years and years. If you happen to be home distiller, you probably know what the tried and true home distiller hacks for aging spirits is. It involves putting a stick in a jar or putting a spiral in a jar. Then in the last, let's say five, six, seven years, people have gotten increasingly interested in some
00:08:14
Speaker
accelerated aging techniques like heat, ultrasound, vacuum, blah, blah, blah, cycles of temperature as well. So I had some raw spirits to play with, and I tried many of those techniques. And just speaking for myself, I know some people like the results they've gotten. I hated the results I got. I felt like there was something deeply missing.
00:08:40
Speaker
I've come to believe that what was deeply missing was, you know, frankly, just time and slow access to oxygen. I've come to believe that the kind of chemistry that occurs long term in a barrel, a proper large barrel, is sort of critical to what I want to taste in a spirit.
00:08:59
Speaker
So without any prejudice against any other preference that anybody else might have for how spirits might want to taste and they might want to taste spirits, it just wasn't working for me. Sticks didn't work. Spirals didn't work. None of the accelerated aging techniques worked. It didn't get me where I wanted to get. Furthermore, I wanted to put things away for a very long time and have them improve with time. So we knew that large oak barrels work because the best spirits you can buy in the world are all put into large barrels.
00:09:29
Speaker
And so I got irritated, thinking that there had to be some way around it. And the solution I came up with was something like taking a plug out of a large oak barrel and then encasing the plug in some inert material. Stainless steel and glass. Glass isn't really suitable. So I looked around and found these, which are just kind of inexpensive stainless steel cans. Stainless steel is well-loved material for home distillers and anybody storing experience.
00:09:57
Speaker
And then I thought, how am I going to get a small
Ben's Barrel Experiments and Learnings
00:10:01
Speaker
amount, a small section of a large oak barrel in there? I figured out a way to just press it in there. So it turns out not to be really very complicated.
00:10:12
Speaker
I did some experimentation, posted on the forum, on the home distiller forum, which is large. Hey, there's this other idea. We could do this. It's not expensive. It's not difficult. And it makes a barrel that should have roughly the same surface area to volume ratio as a larger barrel. So it should theoretically work. That was my optimism at the time.
00:10:37
Speaker
And it's, it's been well, uh, repaid by time. So I've got, uh, some raw spirits that I've put into these barrels and I have lessons along the way, but the long and the short of it is it works. You can put spirits in these for five years and I think probably 10 and maybe even 15 and you don't lose the spirit and spirit doesn't get overrope and it just keeps getting better year over year.
00:11:00
Speaker
So in the years after I described the making of these barrels, many, many people just ad hoc would email me and say, hey, I'd love to make one. And I appreciate that you told us how, but I can't do it. Could you sell me one? And I did a few times. And then just a couple of years ago, I thought,
00:11:20
Speaker
The sort of path is cleared for me to take this on in a serious way and offer them in larger numbers to more people. So I got a workshop and put it together and I make them now. And that's, I think that's the, that's the summary. It's maybe a little longer than we were hoping for, but it's perfect. It probably tells the story about as quickly as we need to.
00:11:40
Speaker
Awesome. So for those that are listening, basically it's a, imagine like a stock pot, I guess, but without the handles, um, the rough dimensions you would imagine for a stock pot, what is like 3.7 gallons, isn't it? Uh, these here are 1.7. Oh, 1.7. Sorry. Yeah. Oh man. Why can I still not convert back and forth? I have to think about it every time, brother. Yeah.
00:12:04
Speaker
And it doesn't have, they don't have handles on the side like a stockpot would, but they're literally just thin stainless steel that's rolled over at the top. And there is a, essentially an oak disc pressed into the top that completes the, that fully seals the vessel.
00:12:26
Speaker
with a, yeah, he's holding one up for those that are watching. If you are listening to this on the podcast, catch us, feel free to jump over to YouTube and you'll be able to see it all. But we have a bung at the top and then a stainless steel tap down the bottom. So it's not only that we are getting the benefit of having
00:12:44
Speaker
of altering the surface area to volume back into our favor closer to a full-size barrel, 200 litre barrel. It's also that the interface between the atmosphere and the liquid is oak again. It's not a sealed jar with oak in it.
00:13:04
Speaker
So we do get enough oxidization and diffusion through the barrel here as well, which is pretty freaking cool. I also understand that you have been sending these barrels to a few different places and you have graciously shared with me some samples that you've been able to procure that of spirits that have been aged in these things.
00:13:25
Speaker
And there's a bit of a story to talk through. Uh, there's also a lot of spirits here to taste. So let's crack one open. Yeah, we can carry on tasting, uh, carry on chatting in between. Um, I'm wondering if maybe we just do something that is, uh, what should we do? Should we do barrel 57? Yeah.
00:13:53
Speaker
And I've been sitting on these for a while and I must admit I have cracked a few of them open and had a swig directly from the bottle. You don't. But for the most part, this is as much a surprise to me as it is to anyone else. So we have a weighted bourbon that was in a, that was in barrel 57.
00:14:14
Speaker
If any of you guys are interested in these barrels, the really freaking cool thing is that you have numbered every single barrel you've made. So when you get a barrel, it's not just some random barrel, like Ben actually cares. And he wants to know what the barrel is.
00:14:35
Speaker
So I knew from the very beginning that I was going to be evolving my processes, evolving my materials, evolving my tools. And so I wanted to keep track of how well I was doing. And so that was one reason why I wanted to keep track of every barrel and see if I could learn something about how successful each of my strategies was. Another thing was I was seasoning my own oak out in the backyard in the wet Oregon winters. So I wanted to keep track of how long the oak had seasoned as well.
00:15:04
Speaker
These were all things that were attached to a particular barrel. I was later going to be tasting things from the barrel and I wanted to learn something from that. So that's how it started. And then as I started to think about selling these in larger numbers, it became important to me to keep in touch with maybe old customers, recognize when somebody had bought more than once.
00:15:26
Speaker
Um, that was another thing. Um, and again, with the materials processes, uh, and so forth, I wanted to keep track of that as well.
Impact of Wood Treatment on Spirit Flavor
00:15:33
Speaker
But the most important thing is I can't sell a barrel until I have made it and tested it. So what you can see in the background in a couple of places over here and over here is barrels that I've made and, uh, they're on racks and they have been sitting there wet. Uh, the wood has swollen, uh, made a seal with the barrel, uh, with the can, excuse me.
00:15:56
Speaker
Um, and also not cracked, um, actually for the benefit of those of you who are watching this, I'm going to show you a barrel that I recently, uh, recently had to, had to not sell. I don't know if you can see what's going on with that, but, uh, the force of expansion of the wood, uh, really just cracked that cam like a, like an egg. And so this is a, this is a perfect example of why I can't pre-sell barrels and why I can't, uh, why can't.
00:16:23
Speaker
I can't really be happy about selling a generic barrel style that I will then fulfill later with whatever barrel I have around. It just doesn't feel right to me. I'd like to have a handle on every barrel. I'd like to make sure I know what's going out the door and can connect a person with a barrel and so on. So that might sound a little grandiose and I may have to abandon it at some point, but for now that's what makes me happy about this kind of endeavor. I've got my finger on every one. Yeah. So barrel number 57.
00:16:53
Speaker
We did bourbon. That's really good, man. You know, I love the smell. It's not a very old one. It's just, oh, I guess it is four years old. Yeah, it's a four year bourbon. Plenty of vanilla, plenty of wood sweetness, like a tiny amount of cooking spice and a tiny amount of pepper and just a touch of astringency. I get a fair amount of pepper on the nose. Yeah. Yeah.
00:17:23
Speaker
Yeah, you're right. There's more people than those. You notice this is a low number. The barrel serial number on this one is 57. I'm now making barrels close to barrel 500. Since the time I made that barrel, I've switched from the wood that I bought and cut and seasoned out in my backyard to wood that has been seasoned by a Cooper in Kentucky for four years. I never got to any four years with any of my seasonings. The wood I'm making barrels out of now is
00:17:51
Speaker
just unquestionably better wood than the one that you're tasting right now. So the astringency is likely a symptom of that, that this wood was only seasoned for probably one winter, nine months, one admittedly very wet Oregon winter, which is sufficient for a lot of Coopers in the world. A lot of people are making barrels with six months season wood or nine months season wood or 12 months season wood.
00:18:18
Speaker
partly for economic reasons and partly because they want that spice, they want that heat. There's something strongly fresh and oaky about younger wood. I prefer more mature wood personally and so unfortunately my customers only get the wood I want to sell. I do not mind at all even a stringency in some
00:18:44
Speaker
It has to be suitable and it has to be balanced within that drink. But I don't, I don't see a strenutency or pepper or cooking spice definitely as an off flavor. You know, it's just a, it's just another lever to push and pull. Agreefully. But, but I'm going to just go ahead and say that, uh, in this spirit, I think it's unbalanced. I think that my, I do like it.
00:19:10
Speaker
But if I were to make a constructive criticism of the spirit, I would say, I wish that the sugar and the sweeter flavors balance the heat of the wood flavors better. And I think there is no doubt that as I build barrels and fill them with spirits from the newer wood pile,
00:19:33
Speaker
Sorry, not newer. The wood pile that I'm using now, which is older wood. I'm sure I'm going to enjoy that much better. Yeah, exactly right. So I'm going to enjoy the more seasoned wood barrels much more than this one, or really any of the older barrels. But live and learn. I just didn't have access to four-year wood when I was making these, so I made them with what I have. It's a pretty interesting thing, man, because I've heard this progression
00:20:01
Speaker
with home distillers, I've heard this progression with commercial distillers, anyone involved really, there's, it almost seems like a rite of passage to go, ah, screw it, we'll try the cheaper wood, you know, like, or, unless you know better, right? Like, just give it a nudge and how it'll be fine. And then inevitably, ah, shit, you know, we should have paid for the nice oak to start with or treated the oak better.
00:20:28
Speaker
And I know that story that's really fascinating. Yeah, yeah, I've had the same experience Yeah, obviously there's especially in the commercial world that a lot of people that have had really good Help along the way or you know had they had the rice the right contractors or people come in and tell them where to get on the right track from the beginning and
00:20:52
Speaker
A lot of people skip that, but I've heard it from commercial distillers, and I've experienced it myself, man. When I first started, I had some oak that was from a furniture shop. I was like, ah, that's oak. I've read that story a thousand times. Since my antennas went up about wood, people in fire water on Reddit, people at home distiller, people in every other forum, they say, hey, my buddy makes cabinets, and he has some oak offcuts, and I'm going to toast him and char him.
00:21:20
Speaker
you know, my heart breaks a little bit because I know what's going to happen to that spirit. I'll tell you what, while we're on the subject, I think maybe we take a look at barrel number one because barrel number one is, this is the heartbreak right here. This is barrel number one. This is the very first barrel I ever put together. I bought some quarter sawn white oak from a local specialty lumber company. I made a barrel out of it. I put some, I
Challenges in Distillation and Spirit Profiling
00:21:43
Speaker
don't know, it was like some white dog, some
00:21:46
Speaker
It was basically moonshine. I put some moonshine there. And I, you know, and I smiled and grinned and patted myself on the back and waited six months. And then I tried it. And I just about cried because this was made with a barrel with unseasoned oak. So barrel number one will tell you, you know, what the range of oak quality is. At the lower end, it is very bad is what I'm getting at. Yeah. So it's three years older.
00:22:13
Speaker
similar but not the same. It's a similar kind of spirit. Yeah, well. Sure. Yeah, as I recall, I'm going to say UJSSM to give the people watching listening an idea of what I'm talking about. It was just your basic kind of corn flavored white spirit. And I don't know if I don't know how you're doing inside your head right now, because you just put some of that in your mouth. But that stuff is really bad. It's what I mean. I wouldn't say it's horrible. You're very kind.
00:22:46
Speaker
It's very similar to a lot of samples that I've been asked to taste in the home distilling world. I wonder if there's a connection. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think there is two things going on here. One is that it does have that sugary moon shiny thing to it. And when you're comparing that to an all grain bourbon, you know, it's not great. But two, it is, it's almost, it's almost past a stringent through to chalky.
00:23:17
Speaker
I find it really hard to describe. It's not overly puckering, astringent, like a really oversteep teabag. It doesn't have that flavor. It's just got the mouth feel to it. It's got that drying, tannic, teeth stripping, almost like a really bitter, old school IPA. Fair enough. It also has that just chewing on a green stick kind of flavor. And there's an aggressive biting
00:23:46
Speaker
kind of quality to the alcohol, um, to the, to the spirit. And I hesitate to try to put a name to that, but I'm sorry, man. So, you know, it's, uh, it's fascinating. Yeah. Yeah, it is. And I feel a little foolish whenever I taste it, but I keep it around actually as a, as a, uh, I don't know, as a humbling reminder for myself of, you know,
00:24:14
Speaker
I started with zero information and I have some information now. I hope in the future I have some more information about how this all works and how it works best. So I'm actively learning. I love doing my homework. Maybe not the best student at it, but it's a real part of my outlook on this whole thing is, you know, there's never an end to
00:24:37
Speaker
to the frontier, you know. Oh, totally. I think it's, I mean, it's one of the awesome things about the hobby, the craft, the profession, wherever you're at for distilling is that I'm a hundred percent convinced there is no such thing as an expert in that. There's no one that knows it all, man. Like there's people that know a lot about a very specific
00:24:59
Speaker
I mean, the classic example is if you go and meet a master blender or a master distiller at one of the big distilleries in Scotland. There's not a lot of people that could tell you anything about single malt scotch that they couldn't, but then you ask them about Brandy. They're like, wait, what? What's that? I know the general idea, but I've never made it before. They'd probably say it's not worth talking about.
00:25:31
Speaker
But my point is, heavy rum, or kashasa, or baiju, right? There's a world of spirits and they only know one neighborhood. Maybe they don't, maybe they know three, but it just kind of gets to the point where you just can't expect everyone to know everything. And it's pretty obvious too that there's a lot of knowledge that just hasn't been, it's not a solved problem yet, in any way, shape or form, I don't think. So it's pretty freaking hard.
00:25:59
Speaker
You know, it's a better world for the unanswered questions, I think. Oh, totally. And it makes it fun, right? That's the fun in it. But there is a huge difference between those two spirits that I tasted. One is very, very nice. And I would, I think I would argue the point on a personal preference note that I don't think the barrel, what was it? Barrel 57. I don't think it's unbalanced at all.
00:26:29
Speaker
Great. That's fabulous to hear. Yeah, I appreciate that. But I think we're down to talking about what your taste prefers and what my taste prefers, which is a great place to be. I would rather be there than talking about barrel number one, which is an objective failure. Oh yeah. It ain't good. And I respect and appreciate you being able to serve up a quite and quite failure, you know?
00:26:53
Speaker
With fair warning, I think. Yeah. And to be fair, that is a very, very extreme example. Oh, the most extreme. Absolutely. It's had five years or six, seven years now to collect the worst flavors you can imagine. So yes, you can almost not design a worse spirit.
00:27:13
Speaker
Totally. And the interesting thing is, too, that it has none of the rounding, softening properties that you come to expect in an age spirit, right? It's been sitting there for years and years and years. Yeah, but you'll notice it doesn't have any heads and tails. Did you notice that? I don't pick up any of the raw spirit character. That's gone. The wood was able to allow that raw spirit character to be eliminated completely and replaced it with some of its own terrible vices, right? Yeah.
00:27:44
Speaker
I would agree, but it hasn't had that seasoning added to it in terms of the sugar, right? Like the wood sugars. Correct. There's no interesting addition from the wood. There's no cinnamon. There's none of the more complex ester formation stuff happening either. Absolutely.
00:28:06
Speaker
orchard-y, fruity kind of stuff, which is really interesting. And I'm sure some of that could be down to the fact that the raw spirit is just different than the others. You just brought up something about barrel number one that I hadn't thought about in a long time. I don't know that I even toasted or charred the back of the barrel head.
00:28:25
Speaker
Interesting. For those watching, you can see the back of this barrelhead has been toasted and charred. You may be able to see a line of depth right in the back of the barrelhead that shows you how the toasting process has penetrated deep into the wood and forced the wood to undergo some pyrolysis, which frees up sugars and creates a hole, just a zoo of organoleptically interesting molecules. And the charred doesn't do that so much. Primarily what it does is creates a
00:28:55
Speaker
a filter, an adsorption filter for some of the less pleasant tastes and smells that are in the spirit. But if I didn't toast in char barrel number one, then it wouldn't contribute a lot of sugars and body and mouth feel. It wouldn't contribute a whole lot of those interesting flavors you were looking for and didn't find. I think I probably didn't toast it or char it, which is another bonehead move that
00:29:20
Speaker
I'll regret, but we'll enjoy sort of regretting it and seeing how far we've come since then. Oh, totally. So I guess the moral of the story is that wood really does matter. And actually, while we're on the subject, shall we talk through all of the ways that you have come to believe that wood does matter? Like all of the different variables. Sure. Yeah, I don't know that I have a complete, let's say, Encyclopedia Britannica article about that in my head.
00:29:50
Speaker
Little bits may come up to mind as we talk, but what I can say I've learned is that
00:29:58
Speaker
What I know best is the flavor potential of American white oak. I know a lot less about European oaks. And actually there is some interest, there's growing interest in an Oregon species called Quercus cariana, the Oregon white oak. There are some people making barrels out of it. I've tried a few spirits aged in Quercus cariana and haven't really enjoyed them myself. So I'm sticking with Quercus alba, American white oak, grown all over Appalachia and the eastern half of the United States.
00:30:29
Speaker
I can't tell you much about, I can tell you nothing at all about the different flavors you might expect from the different origins of the Quercus, Alba, American White Oak. I can't tell you what Southern Appalachian Oak tastes like as compared to Northern Appalachian.
00:30:45
Speaker
I was lucky to find any Cooper who had any wood, sell me any wood and happen to be fabulous wood. So I haven't had the opportunity to shop around, taste samples. And unfortunately that process would take a year anyway before I could learn anything. I would like to do that. That's one of the frontiers for me and my knowledge. And it excites me to think that I could learn something really interesting and useful to people who might be interested in my barrels. But I can tell you this.
00:31:14
Speaker
After the oak is harvested and split into rough stave shapes and stacked out in yards and allowed to season for a long time, the amount of tannin in the wood is reduced by a great deal. And raw oak has a phenomenal amount of tannin in it, an absolutely mouth-destroying amount of tannin.
00:31:33
Speaker
That's barrel number one illustrated. That needs to go. So the wind and the sun and the rain and the microbes, the microorganisms, the biofilm, the fungi that live on those stacks of oak have the principle effect of removing and modifying the tannins that exist in the wood.
00:31:52
Speaker
So that would be enough, but it turns out that more happens in the wood during that seasoning time. That's useful to us. Um, there's also partial breakdown of the wood of the, uh, the chemicals in the wood, which is of course, primarily cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin and all those, uh, molecules when broken down become available to your spirit. So hemicellulose and cellulose are of course, polysaccharides.
00:32:19
Speaker
they're multiple sugar molecules stacked together and in breakdown, whether it's from heat or from microorganisms, now sugars, they can be in your spirit. That's where the body and the mouth feel come from. From lignin, you get all kinds of interesting molecules like, oh, I don't know, syringe aldehyde, conifer aldehyde, vanillin, eugene all, there are just so many of these, the characteristic flavors of, of,
00:32:44
Speaker
oak aged spirits, cloves, spice, vanilla, and there's the oak lactones. All those things are improved and increased by the seasoning time. And then of course, toasting does the same thing. Toasting also breaks down elements of the wood and makes them more available to your spirit for extraction. So all of the things being equal, if you have a longer seasoned wood, you'd expect more flavor from it.
00:33:09
Speaker
a longer toast, you would expect more flavor from it. The temperature of the toast is maybe a separate question. The temperature of the toast may affect which direction the flavor goes, but maybe not the amount of flavor that it produces. I should quit there. You sparked one of those things I have a lot to say about, but nothing very knowledgeable. It's an area I've been researching for years, and it almost just doesn't stick in my head. I'm not much of a chemist, unfortunately.
00:33:37
Speaker
I only pick up little bits of the stick. Yeah. No, that's very interesting. And I have played with the toast levels, both in terms of time and in heat in the past and I've
00:33:53
Speaker
I've come to pretty much the same conclusion that you just stated that it's the flavor that changes the flavor. Yeah, muff it. The temperature that changes the kinds of flavors that you'll get. And it works relatively in a somewhat logical law. You can kind of guess at it that the higher the temperature, the more you're going to get roasty, toasty, almondy.
00:34:17
Speaker
types of flavors. That's the general experience I've had, but I've never actually been able to just set up a really solid, almost like a matrix of flavor, I think would be really fun to do. I just set up that matrix last night. Oh, did you? Awesome. Okay. So what have you, what have you done and what are you hoping to learn from it?
00:34:38
Speaker
24 mason jars. I took four pieces of wood from the couperage, like this one. I don't know if you can see how funky this is and how stained by tannin and other things from the wood it is. This is a side that didn't get the same amount of water on it, but I cleaned it up. I took strips out of it. So I had four pieces of this. I took strips out of it and made small, thin dominoes for maximum extraction. So for these 24 jars, each one gets four sticks from four different pieces of wood.
00:35:08
Speaker
And every jar has the same four pieces of wood in it. The reason I did that is every piece of wood, every piece of wood has its own flavor. Every piece of wood from a tree will have its own flavor. But I wanted to somewhat average that out some so that we could learn something about toast level. So in these 24 jars,
00:35:26
Speaker
I have six temperature levels, 350, 375, 400, 425, 450. Maybe that doesn't add up, but you get the idea. I also have four time lengths, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 45 minutes, 60 minutes.
00:35:45
Speaker
Do I have that right? I may be off. Yeah, for these six different temperature levels, I also have four different time lengths. So there's my matrix. And I just filled it with neutral spirit, because all I'm interested in is the extractive element.
Balancing Spirit Flavors with Wood Treatments
00:35:59
Speaker
I'm not interested in the aging, I'm not interested in how it goes with bourbon, or any other spirit. So there may be a point where we can talk about that, the results of that experiment in a knowledgeable way. And I look forward to sharing that with you if I can.
00:36:13
Speaker
Of course. Yeah. I'd be very, very interested in that. And this is, so this is the beauty and the tricky thing of dealing with distilled spirits, especially aged spirits, right? So you're saying that you've, you specifically used neutral because you want to just, you want, you want to get an idea of what the oak teabag flavor is basically, right? Like you just want to pull the flavor out of the oak and see what it does. And I completely respect that. But then there's this whole other level of.
00:36:44
Speaker
Everything that you put into that barrel, including the wood and the spirit, obviously, it's adding a whole bunch of precursors into a mix and then you let it sit for God knows how long. And there's just, the flavor becomes so much more than the sum of its parts. It's no longer where it just comes from. It just magically appears. Obviously it's not magic, but you get the idea, right?
00:37:08
Speaker
No, I totally agree with you. It means that my reductive approach has very, very, very tight limits, but I'm okay with working within those limits and at least attempting to learn anything at all I can from that experiment. The other thing is I'm on the hook for actually toasting wood for actual people who are going to put them in barrels. I feel a keen interest in being able to say something knowledgeable about why I'm doing what I'm doing and what they can expect from it.
00:37:38
Speaker
Yeah, hopefully with time, my ability to say something meaningful to them will increase. Hey, should we choose another barrel? Yeah, let's. I just realized that we do the, we should probably finish off this cross section of quality of oak. I don't think we've done one for one, have we yet? All right. The new four year aged.
00:38:05
Speaker
Yeah, let's do that. That actually excites me. I like this one. I think I just took a drop last night. I was really pleased to... Oh, nice. So this is... It's very young as an aged spirit. It's very young, but I think you can already tell what that four-year wood can do for spirits and how it differs from the wood that I seasoned for much less long.
00:38:30
Speaker
Mmm, so so I still have some raw spirit character in there, but yeah, we're looking past that for now Yeah, yeah right off the bat the the the one that we tasted before barrel 57 is just a bit of spirit and just about every freaking way possible But it's had the benefit of being you know four years old so if we just kind of set that aside and forget about it the thing that comes straight to mind straight away is
00:38:55
Speaker
is a fullness and a creaminess that even 57 struggles to compare with, I think. And sure, it has layers of new oak sitting on top, and it doesn't have the complexity of esterification, I guess you would call it. No. And yeah, it is quite light. The color is quite light still. So you wouldn't expect, yeah.
00:39:22
Speaker
you wouldn't expect that process to have gone very far. Oh yeah, that's a good shot. Yeah, continue. Yeah. So I'm very, very much intrigued to see where this heads over the next few years. And let me, I'm going to be slightly coy about this right now, but let's just say that while talking with Ben and trying some of his products and
00:39:50
Speaker
messing around with the barrels that you've sent me, I've become very impressed with this wood and also acutely aware of the differences between good wood, average wood and bad wood.
Commercial and Personal Applications of Barrels
00:40:04
Speaker
And I knew it was a thing in the past, but it's been hammered home to me in the last six months. So let's just say sometimes you gotta, sometimes you gotta prove it to yourself.
00:40:11
Speaker
Yeah. Sometimes you really do, man. And sometimes I'm just a muppet like that. I can't take, you know, I can't just listen to what other people have been able to learn. I need to be proved to myself, like you say. But let's just say I've always taken a highly skeptical outlook at most of the tried and true knowledge that's handed to young distillers. And, you know, frankly, a lot of it is dead wrong. I've got a couple of hobby horses where I have proved an old tried and true kind of thing wrong.
00:40:40
Speaker
No one cares that I proved it wrong. They're still saying it, you know, but, uh, but I think it is, it's part of how I enjoy the hobby. Uh, some people enjoy the hobby by reading a recipe and following it and getting what they get. Um, I enjoy the hobby in part by questioning everything, uh, and putting it to the test if I can, you know, and sometimes I find out that they were right all along and that's fine too, I guess. I've interrupted, I've interrupted you again. So you were talking about the quality of wood and how you.
00:41:08
Speaker
Oh, I was just saying, let's just say that I have a large amount of very, very similar wood to Ben to play with now. And the reason I bring that up is I'm experiencing very similar things in the spirits that I've put similar wood into.
00:41:26
Speaker
In the past, when I've had a large reaction from average wood early, it is a large flavor contribution of the wood itself. So the teabagging stuff we're talking about, the flavor of the toasted oak, you can get that out really quickly. And it takes a long time for any sort of rounding, mouthfeel changes to come into play, even longer for a sweetness to come into play.
00:41:53
Speaker
and I'm getting exactly the same reaction in using this kind of wood that I'm getting here. That's coming first. The sweetness comes out, the vanilla comes out really quickly, and then everything else follows along behind it. And this might be, I'm interested to hear what your thoughts are on this, but as I understand it, like you described earlier, it's actually, how do I put it? It's the breakdown of the components of the wood.
00:42:20
Speaker
that add sugar and vanilla, especially all of the other things as well. But you can get that breakdown just in the solvent of the alcohol, right? Like the longer the alcohol sits in the wood, it's going to break those components down. But if the aging and the seasoning of the oak has done a lot of that heavy lifting for you, it's almost like it's predigested. Unfortunately, I can't speak to that hypothesis in any knowledgeable way.
00:42:49
Speaker
You know, I would have to test it. I would have to take untoasted wood and I would have to leave spirits in it for 20 years and see if it got sweet. Oh, no, sorry. Not the toasting, the seasoning. Sure. I have both hypotheses. I would have to be tested in that kind of way. I just haven't been able to do that and probably wouldn't bother. It'd be interesting to know the answer. Does alcohol break cellulose?
00:43:14
Speaker
does alcohol break hemicellulose? Or does it spontaneously break on its own? Because it's a molecule and molecules break, complex molecules break. But I've seen old wood. I've seen hundreds of year old wood, and it seems to be still wood. And so, you know, I have my skepticism about the question. Yeah. Yeah, I just don't know. Actually, it's a really interesting idea. The only reason I'm even striking it up is that that's kind of the process that
00:43:39
Speaker
All of the older products I have that have sat for a long time, I get the flavor first and I get the sweetness and the body a lot later. This is the opposite. So at the point where I would be getting almost nothing from it. So it's, yeah, it's only eight months old. There's not a huge flavor contribution yet. But mind you, that could be a function of the surface area too, I assume.
00:44:07
Speaker
I think, I think that's probably what it is. Yeah. Um, yeah, I think you should expect to get a whole lot of flavor from a large oak barrel in eight months. Uh, you would, you would go for two years, three years before you're starting to see the barrel fully contribute all it can to the, to the body and mouthfeel of the spirit. Um, yeah, I w I wouldn't want to drink a one, a one year spirit. You know what I mean? Oh, no, no. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. And they barely sell it. I don't, it'd be hard to find.
00:44:34
Speaker
It's not so much the, how do I put it? It's not so much the individual flavors that are interesting to me. It's the ratio, the fact that there's so much body and sweetness and a hint of vanilla coming through already compared to the flavor. I don't know. It's very interesting. What sort of predictions do you have between the self-seasoned oak and the four year Cooper seasoned oak?
00:45:02
Speaker
Well, I think we've seen what we, what we're going to see from the, from the, yeah, from the older barrel, uh, it was barrel 57. It was, uh, it was wood I seasoned and, uh, it's been in the barrel for four, uh, four years. I don't think it's going to change much. We're already 97% of the way toward it's, it's, you know, whatever full potential it's going to be. Um, all I can say is, uh, the newer barrel, uh, which is made with the older wood.
00:45:27
Speaker
Boy, I'm gonna enjoy watching that ship sail around the world several times, so to speak. And the stories it'll tell when it gets back. I have obviously high hopes for it. I will say this, and maybe this is a segue to another sampling. There's a little risk that is unavoidable and it's tragic, but this is the game. There's a little risk in trying to learn too much from one barrel. And the reason I say that is that
00:45:57
Speaker
Among the experiments I've tried is a large group of barrels that are filled with the same spirit and treated the same in terms of toast and char. And now years have gone by on those barrels, years and years. And I've laid them all out on the counter for friends to try in a group tasting.
00:46:15
Speaker
And they're just wildly different. They were the same spirit, the same barrel treatment, the same source of wood, as far as I could tell. It might've even been the same tree. They really are different. You've heard that story from Coopers. You've heard that story from Distillers. And it's just, it's true. It's true. There's just a lot of variability in any two pieces of wood. These guys don't taste the same. There's nothing I can do about it.
00:46:39
Speaker
And in fact, this is useful. I think the number of barrels in that series is something like 13. Although there's some oddballs in there that were made with X bourbon wood and X wine wood even. But there's a large group of barrels and there's even among that group one barrel that's just really bad. And it was identical as far as I could tell otherwise.
00:47:00
Speaker
So there's some risk. So here we are. We're looking at this barrel. I made it with the old wood, and it's going to go four or five years before I think I could learn something about it. It may be the case that this barrel just really isn't good, or it's only pretty good, let's say. You know what I mean? What I really ought to be able to do is put 10 barrels down, and then maybe I could tell you something about the results of my processes and my ingredients.
00:47:23
Speaker
Yeah. Um, but what are you going to do? I can't do that. Uh, I can't be filling 10 barrels all the time. If any of you listening out there can, I would worry a little bit about you, you know, I don't think that's the game. I don't think that's the thing we're, we're not, we're not doing 10 barrels at the time. Yeah. Yeah. It'd be fun to talk to a distiller and yeah. And have him do that experiment for me. Yeah. I was just going to say, I mean, to say this a whole lot earlier, I really do feel like there is a, an interesting opportunity for.
00:47:53
Speaker
commercial distillers with this kind of barrel. Whether it be testing, I feel like maybe that's a little bit tricky for them to commit to because if you're going to be doing a five or six year test and just the different form factor and the fact that there's stainless in there and all that sort of stuff, I don't know, I'd be kind of wary of that myself in terms of really being able to translate. You know, you'd have to do a whole lot of tests just to see if it
00:48:18
Speaker
is viable to do the test, I guess. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And for the same reasons, the same concerns you have, I haven't promoted that idea at all. Wouldn't know where to start. But in terms of, I mean, the one that really jumps to mind is the idea of being able to sell white spirit, unaged white spirit
00:48:39
Speaker
direct to, uh, whether it be investors or people that have signed up for your club or whatever it freaking happens to be, you know, distilleries have a group of people that are basically the VIPs for whatever reason, their business model States that now the VIPs being able to sell a couple of gallons of white spirit that hasn't been aged. You don't have the overheads for it.
00:49:06
Speaker
and let that be something kind of really special to that person. Yeah. And let them age at their house or you have a wall in your distillery of personal, you know, the old school thing of like the sushi restaurant where you have your set of chopsticks on the wall. Yeah. Or the beer stein on the wall at the, yeah. Exactly. Yeah. That's a great idea. It's a fabulous idea. I would actually support that. It would work better for my situation than
00:49:36
Speaker
than maybe putting them on the shelf at the homebrew store would. I have questions about how that's going to work out well. I would love to see a distiller offering their people a vessel that represents hope for the future. I think people would really love to have it in their home too and watch it. The cool thing about having a spigot is you can take a half ounce anytime you like, see how it's progressing.
00:50:02
Speaker
and blow the whistle when you want to and just take it all out and bottle it. Although I usually tell people, hey, if you wait a few more years, you know, I got to tell you, it's going to be fabulous. Yeah. And I think that's kind of the question because I never want to bottle anything. It just slowly gets sampled low and lower.
00:50:26
Speaker
Yeah, I got some barrels that make a nice hollow sound now, but there's still something in there. I'm not going to empty them out. Even though I could reuse the can, I could reuse the spigot. I just like having it up on the shelf. It's a point now.
00:50:43
Speaker
I'm in the process at the moment of trying to get a, I don't quite know what to call it, perhaps like a distillery bootcamp kind of event set up in Texas for this trip with Andalusia. And we're kind of toying around in terms of the idea of, you know,
00:51:02
Speaker
the value we put on it, how pimped out the experience is gonna be versus the ticket price, right? And I'm just sort of thinking too, it'd be kind of, it'd be a pretty cool way to make something really special out of an event like that for people is to be able to have their own barrel that they take home and can sample or nurture or- Well, I think that would be amazing, but then I would say that, wouldn't I?
00:51:30
Speaker
Well, I'm just thinking too, the other thing is too, is for people that are trying to learn this craft themselves, for people that are trying to get into the industry, for people that don't know 100% if they want to get into the industry, all of those things. A huge part of the difficult aspect of the hobby of the craft is that you just don't know what you're going to get until you get it, until you've done that process thousands of times.
00:51:58
Speaker
And I'm starting to get, I guess, a little bit of a handle on, you know, trying to predict what this barrel that's a few months old is going to be like when it's three or four years old. But to be able to have that yourself and know that, how do you put it? Know that the person that made this white spirit is making kick-ass, top of the notch, award-winning spirits. And wait, it still smells a little bit like Sharpie.
00:52:26
Speaker
Do you know what I mean? It's pretty cool at a personal level to be able to know that maybe what you're experiencing in your own personal journey, I hate that word, but you know what I mean, isn't you fucking up. It's just part of the process. I agree. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. So one thing that I learned from these barrels, the big question was, when you learn about distilling, they talk about
00:52:54
Speaker
There's a headsy region of the distillation, there's a hardsy region, there's a tailsy region, and the distiller's job is to decide how much to select as hearts. No problem, I get that, I understand it. And then you do that, and then you taste the result, and it still tastes like heads and tails because, of course,
00:53:12
Speaker
distillation is a big, you know, a big continuous curve. It's not discrete. So here I have this, let's say I have acquired some raw spirits and they taste like heads and tails. And the question is, what happens to heads and tails when you put them in a barrel and you wait for years and years and years?
00:53:31
Speaker
And I can now answer the question, they go away completely as heads or tails and probably become, uh, ingredients in some far more interesting, complex, fun, desirable flavors. So you could put headsy tails spirit into barrels. If you wait long enough, you were rewarded for having included some of the heads and tails flavor. It would be dead boring to put vodka in one of these barrels. You should not do that.
00:53:56
Speaker
And I'm not only talking about the corny flavor that you get from a corn liquor or the grapey flavor you get from a grape brandy. I'm talking about heads and tails as well. Those are significant features, if given enough time in a barrel, in the spirit that's matured. But I can say that now because I've had the time to do the experiment and look at the old barrels and go, I get it now. I get where that all comes from.
00:54:20
Speaker
And that's one of the few areas where the experts I read about many, many years ago turned out to have been correct. But even that in and of itself, it's one thing to say, oh, if you're going to age your spirit for, what's the easiest way to say it? The longer you age your spirit, the wider your cut.
00:54:40
Speaker
is allowed to be and probably should be to create complexity further down the road. It's one thing to say that, but then for someone who's new and trying to learn their cuts, like, well, it's not, it's not like, do I, yeah, do I include one or two heads? It's not that it's, it's a, it's a spectrum and you've got no, no way you've got no yardstick to put next to it in terms of what you've had before, because all you can taste and try is either.
00:55:10
Speaker
white spirit that's on the market is white spirit in which case it was cut differently or stuff that's been in a barrel for however many years and the stuff that you're trying to put into a barrel no longer exists. Do you know what I mean? That's right. Yeah. So there's that whole thing as well. And it's just, it has really, really, I don't know. It is, it is a magical thing. It's something that you can't tell someone and just kind of have to discover it themselves. And I, so one of the, one of the first spirits I made a long time ago, uh,
00:55:41
Speaker
What was it? I was calling it a peated Irish. It was supposed to be somewhat similar to Connemara. And it came out with a really, really strong flavor of blue cheese.
00:55:54
Speaker
And that's unfortunate. Well, some people loved it. I actually thought it was pretty interesting. Like, it was similar in a way to some stuff that I've had in Isla spirits before. And I just kind of like funky different things. And some of the people that I gave it to are, were professional distillers and I wanted their opinion on it. And they were really divided as well. Some were like,
00:56:16
Speaker
What is this fucking abomination that you've created? And then some of the others, yeah. How did you do this? How do I get that? You know, very, very interesting. And funnily enough, that's just kind of sat there on the shelf and I've forgotten about it.
00:56:34
Speaker
And some still had oak staves in it. Some of it was even just, I bottled it, but kind of corked it with a crappy cork. And I think there's been some gas exchange. And I went through and tasted them all a little while ago. Two of the samples that blue cheese had just vanished. It's not there anymore. And instead there is this amazing floral, almost like rosehip, or even just rose.
00:57:01
Speaker
I've never really tasted it in spirits before. It's just this crazy floral, um, almost like potpourri or like granny's perfume or something weird. And I'm not sure it's good, but it's, it's just really different. Uh, and then some of the others still have the blue cheese thing and none of the floral stuff. And I'm just kind of perplexed amazing, but just wonderfully mystifying. Yeah.
00:57:24
Speaker
Exactly. Yes. Yeah. I hope you figure it out. You know, Oh, I'll never figure it out. I'll never figure it out. It's not like I'll be like, Oh yes. I know exactly how I did that. I'll just, uh, no, I've got no idea. Yeah. I was trying, you know, as you were talking, I was like, try, I was trying hypotheses and I couldn't make one of them match, you know, the data. Yeah. Just nothing I know tells me about blue cheese flavor.
00:57:49
Speaker
My only guess was that the fermentation stalled out heavily for about a week and a half before I could get it cracking again. And I wonder if there was some other microbial action that took off and created an acid, I would assume, that later esterified into something rosy, something floral.
00:58:12
Speaker
yeah i guess that's possible i don't know don't know anyway um yeah should we do what would you like to try yeah i'm i've been eyeing up this ample brandy man i'm gonna have some of that let's do it which one do we choose for that uh i've got 56 barrel 56 five and it is a medium toast with no char which is another interesting thing we have yet to really yeah so one thing you might
00:58:38
Speaker
you might think about getting some data from this spirit on is, I mean, so many of the spirits that I like to drink are, you know, rums and, and, uh, uh, Burbins and other American whiskeys that typically have a medium to heavy char level. And I like that flavor and I like what it does, uh, filtering the spirit as well. But some spirits are put into traditionally put into unchartered barrels like a Brandy's. Uh, so you might be able to learn something about,
00:59:08
Speaker
I think more precise about the flavor of the wood from an unchartered barrel. It is tricky because there is a very pronounced apple. Luxuriousness isn't the right word. It's juicy, really, really, whoops, excuse me, trying to burp into the microphone. It's juicy, it is. Bright and flamboyant.
00:59:36
Speaker
It's not overly flamboyant though at all. It's not, uh, it's not, uh, there's not heads in any way, shape or form. I get just a little, little bit of the solvent, just a little bit. Yeah. How old is this one we're talking about? Uh, wait, it's already five years old. Yeah. Well, you know, do you happen to know off the top of your head? Um,
00:59:59
Speaker
Our Apple brandies, Calvados are those kinds of things aged in the same scale of time as Cognac's and things. They go 10, they go 15 years. I don't happen to know. I don't know what the market offers. I don't know what. I don't know, man. I don't know. Almost, I don't even know if Apple brandy is a thing that is traditional in France, is it? Oh, absolutely. Northern France, yeah. Calvados is an Apple brandy.
01:00:23
Speaker
Oh, of course. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Cause some of the, some of the brandy and cognac and stuff, it just occurred to me, I might totally be wrong. In which case I just made an ass of myself. I apologize world. But I'm pretty sure that I've read that once. Uh, anyway, please go on. Well, no, I was just going to say a lot of those, a lot of those traditions, it's like the grand dad is putting spirit into barrels. So the grandson can decide what happens with it. You know, um, in which case,
01:00:53
Speaker
I just have no way to even comment on that kind of thing.
Crafting Personalized Barrel-Aged Spirits
01:00:58
Speaker
My only understanding from it is, and I'm going to completely put my foot in my mouth here, is basically they end up using older and older barrels. They cycle them through and then it gets to the point where the barrel's got basically nothing left to give and it's just a... Yeah.
01:01:12
Speaker
It's more of an inert vessel to let oxidization and esterification and so on and so forth happen in for a really freaking long time, like a silly amount of time. But I think the other way that I've had that described to me too is that it's not necessarily about creating product that is that old. It's about having a wealth of
01:01:40
Speaker
samples sitting around for the new generation to be able to get their bearing on them as well. Like I don't know whether that's the reason for it or that's a, I should probably just stop talking about something I have no idea about, but it's an intriguing idea. It's fun to wonder though.
01:01:54
Speaker
I'm with you. Cause like we just talked about, right? Like, especially when you're aging spirit for a really long amount of time and you have someone that that's just come into the family business, like, well, how do you, how do you get 60 years worth of experience in 10 years kind of thing? Uh, you take a walk down this hallway and you, and you try, right? Yeah. You try one of every barrel on the way to the other room. Yeah. Yeah. That's fascinating to me. You know,
01:02:22
Speaker
It's wonderful to think that using barrels of this kind, we can all play that game a little bit. A lot of folks are getting into home distilling in their 20s, 30s, 40s. Those people still have a lot of time to put down a lot of barrels and learn a lot over the course of the rest of their life. And their children will appreciate that they did it.
01:02:45
Speaker
Oh, totally. So the other thing that we haven't, I've talked about this obviously in the past, but we haven't, I don't know if we have talked about it. Yes, we have. The idea of, we touched on it earlier that, how do I put it? You cannot trust any one thing you make to be what you expect it to be. It's just not the way it's going to happen. So you have people asking questions like, Hey, Jesse, I want to make makers, Mark. How do I make it? Well, step one, get prepared to make a hundred barrels.
01:03:13
Speaker
Discard. Choose the best. Choose the best 25. Yeah, yeah. And then get to work blending because that's where the magic is going to happen, you know. You're not going to be able to just clone a spirit by making a certain recipe and putting in a certain amount of oak and leaving it. It's just never going to happen like that. Yeah. Well, it's not that linear. It's statistically improbable that you will be the one person in the 100 that nails makers mark by doing that or whatever you want to make.
01:03:41
Speaker
The way to do it is to have a stockpile of spirits to blend from. How do you put it? We make ingredients that we can then cook with later on. And when I say cook, I'm talking entirely about blending and mixing, not about creating recipes. That's a wonderful way to look at it.
01:04:05
Speaker
And I'll just add one thing. Uh, so I'm, I'm always surprised every time I crack open any of these barrels, like, Oh, it can taste like that. Oh, that's unusual. Oh, you know, every time I try a sample, I get to experience an unexpected thing and try to put my finger on what's happening there. So all that's to say, I may have had expectations there in the bin now.
01:04:30
Speaker
What I have now is I have a bunch of barrels that are almost every time I try them, they're like a new acquaintance. And I've enjoyed making every one of their acquaintances with the exception of that one dog barrel I told you about. I just love to walk into the room with my barrels and make a new old trend, you know, find out what they've been doing for the last year or two. I've really never been disappointed with what I ended up with.
01:05:00
Speaker
Because I didn't really have expectations and hopes about what they would become. I just wanted to see where they would go. It's almost like children. I've never taken the position that my children should grow up to be a certain way or grow up to have a certain job or grow up to look a certain way. What I wanted them to do is grow up and then be themselves. And my girls have the same opportunity. They grow up and then they are themselves.
01:05:24
Speaker
And then I get to enjoy what that is in a new way. Does it make any sense to you? Yeah. So I love your strategy. I love your idea of then, and I have done this actually with a buddy. We did a series of brandy barrels and he really enjoyed figuring out a blend of those maybe six barrels or so that he thought best represented the best qualities of the best of those barrels. That was great fun.
01:05:50
Speaker
It's not my particular interest. I love how each one is different. Just a personality thing, I think, or just a preference thing. So that's a way to offer another way to enjoy a large set of barrels in addition to the one you offer to use them as raw materials for a later blend, which is awesome.
01:06:11
Speaker
I was thinking of it more of having a wall of barrels and because you've got a spigot on it, you can take a small amount out. Uh, so you can walk in and say, I'm going to have 20% of this and 30% of that. And you can do that. Absolutely. You can do that for years and years and you never even touch the half of the spirit, you know.
01:06:30
Speaker
Yeah. It'd be pretty cool. I mean, you do have to get started now and start putting that wall of spirits together and don't stop either. Yeah. And actually with that strategy, you get what they call network effects. Have you heard the term? Every additional node you add adds value to the whole network. Right. Yes. So if you have three barrels, you have some value because you have three barrels.
01:06:52
Speaker
But if you have four barrels, you have a multiplier of the value of the three barrels. And if you have a fifth barrel, it's even better. So network effects come into play here. So, you know. That's especially true too, as you start jumping between styles, right? So if you've got, if you've got two Irish whiskey,
01:07:12
Speaker
you know, Irish whiskey barrels down and then you throw down a, like more of a, um, Scotch style single malt. Now you've got the ability to blur the lines in between or to say, you know, actually what, what would this be like with a little bit more astringency? Oh, I've got this one that's, you know, and every time you add something new to the mix, it's got
01:07:35
Speaker
a whole other vector that it can go in that direction from. And you'd also have the advantage is if you turn it into almost like a schedule that you put down whatever, four barrels a year or something, then you've got this plump line that you get back through of
01:07:54
Speaker
you know, look at your notes and say, oh man, this one was actually quite headsy and tailsy at this point in time. Oh, I've got this one that's the same age. Let me go and try that next to it. Oh, you know what? That does sort of match up with what my notes were on this. I'm worried about this right now, but I've got kind of the proof over here that in a year's time, it's going to be a non-issue, let's say. Yeah, totally. Yeah.
01:08:19
Speaker
Yeah, I think there's so many experiments of that kind you could imagine because we can't make large barrels full of stuff. We're not four roses. We're not buffalo trays doing there. They did some fabulous experiments. We're going to have to work with smaller volumes if we want to do experiments like that. Yeah, and then I think the learning curve is accelerated if you have more barrels to look at.
01:08:43
Speaker
You can examine classes of barrels and see how classes of barrels behave if you have smaller barrels. Well, it turns into the thing too of you're just collecting data for no apparent reason, right? Or not no apparent reason, but you don't have to know what it is that you want to know from the data when you start. That's true in most of my stories, yeah.
01:09:07
Speaker
The revelations came after the data and even the question came after the data.
DIY Barrel Building Guide
01:09:14
Speaker
Yeah. I think when I was starting, I didn't know what the issues were, what the questions I didn't know the answers to were. Yeah, it's funny how it plays out like that. But sometimes you got to just strike out on some path.
01:09:31
Speaker
and see where you end up and then tell a story about why you ended up there and what went wrong along the way, what went right. Yeah. I didn't actually ask you about this ahead of time, but how would you feel about running through a down and dirty breakdown on how the build processes, if people are interested in doing it? Oh man, I would love to.
01:09:56
Speaker
Yeah, I'd love to. And I think I can give you a nice, fairly concise story about that. I think I actually have some kind of props here that'll help you do that. But before I start, if someone is interested, if you have some modest woodworking tools and space to work in and some interest, some even modest interest in doing this yourself, I have a series of videos on my web page.
01:10:20
Speaker
uh, explaining a sufficient number of the processes that will get like any, any person out there, uh, all the way through the build process. So I would love to see people make their own. I strongly encourage people with the means to do it, uh, that they try. Uh, I think it's a fabulous thing to do. The, the pride level you.
01:10:40
Speaker
you feel from accomplishing your own barrel, I think, is akin to filling your own barrel like you were talking about in a recent video. It's just off the charts. And it's on your shelf reminding you how awesome you are for a long time. And you get to talk to folks about it if you choose to do that. OK, so go to my web page and click on the Build link. I think it's the second link under Shop. There's a lot of information there. And by the way, if you are going to build one
01:11:09
Speaker
world. You may save yourself some heartache by looking through these even if you think you know how to do it because I've made a lot of mistakes and revised my processes to fix those mistakes so you may learn a couple things that'll save you trouble. Okay so here we go. Well before you get started I'm going to crack into barrel 36, the rum.
01:11:30
Speaker
um okay so this is what we're going for we're going for a barrel head that's pressed into the can um we could go backwards or forwards i suppose the barrel head looks like this right before it gets pressed in it looks like this yeah let's go backwards i've never done backwards shall we okay so this is the barrel head just before it gets pressed in
01:11:48
Speaker
The really only noticeable things, the interesting things about it are it has the stainless steel spigot attached to it. It's just screwed through. In my case, the spigot pipe is 16 millimeters, and so I drilled a 15 and a half millimeter hole. So it's really tight in there. I drive it through with a wrench, actually. And then, of course, the swelling of the oak when it gets wet completes the sealing of the wood around the spigot threads. OK, so there's also a bung that I've made. You'll have to work out your own way to do that.
01:12:18
Speaker
I've got some tools which cut a tapered bung and which cut a tapered hole that's the exact same angle so that the bung seats in there perfectly. You'll also notice there's beeswax around the edge. I do that for security. I've made a really smooth barrel head that should, in theory, mate perfectly with the stainless steel can.
01:12:38
Speaker
And of course with swelling of the wood, it makes an even perfecter made with the can. But I put beeswax as a little bit of added insurance. You'll also notice it's made out of three pieces of wood. I've joined them with dowels. And there's just a little thin stripe of beeswax between those joints as well. So how are we going to make this? Well, we're going to cut it out of a square thing. It looks something like this before you cut it out.
01:13:04
Speaker
I actually don't have pieces that actually go together, but you get the idea, I think. How do I do this? So yeah, it was a square at some point and I put it on a band saw and I cut a circle around it. Um, and I kind of somewhat rough circle. The next step is to sand it very, very smooth on a, on a jig that sands it, um, very precisely to the right radius so that it just barely fits into that can and has to be pressed in with some force. So how do we get, how do we get this thing?
01:13:34
Speaker
The square, well, you just take three boards that look like this. These, one's toasted and the other's not. You get three boards like this and you join them with dowels. Before you do that, you're going to want to make sure that that edge right there is really smooth and that mating edge is really smooth. And when you put them together, there's like no light that comes between them or almost no light. The swelling will take care of any small gaps.
01:14:00
Speaker
So you're gonna smooth these edges really nicely and put dowels in and a scrape of beeswax if you can. And then you're gonna join this together and press them real good. You don't need glue, you don't need staples, you don't need biscuits, you don't need anything else, just dowels. If it's a nice tight friction fit, it'll stay together until you press the barrel head into the can. And so how do you get this? That's a toasted piece of wood. Well, you're gonna have to get some quarter sawn American white oak and you're gonna have to season it or find somebody who will sell you seasoned wood.
01:14:30
Speaker
which is not easy, unfortunately. I actually do sell it on my website. It's not a big interest of mine, but I know it helps people out. So they can buy a small quantity of seasoned wood from the same supply I'm using. And then you're gonna wanna work out some way to char it if you like charred barrel heads too. A shield is pretty handy to make sure you don't burn the edges of this thing. I don't know if you could tell, but the edges are unburnt. Let's see.
01:15:00
Speaker
So that's the backwards version. If you want the forwards version, go ahead and look at the webpage because I've done it in the normal way there from start to finish rather than finish to start. You'll find it easier to follow that way. I might have skipped a couple of interesting steps, but hopefully not. Did that do the job for you? Sort of down and dirty. Three questions jumped out at me. The first one was, what are you using for the DOWLs to join them together? Is that American Way Oak as well?
01:15:28
Speaker
I wish. The joining dowels, I think are birch, some other hardwood. It's just a cheap hardwood. The position I put them in in the staves is high enough that the spirit basically doesn't touch them. So if you look at the gap between those two and imagine this inch, they're about two thirds of the way up, which is well outside the liquid penetration line. I wouldn't even have a problem with using glue for my own barrels, but I understand that glue is a thing that
01:15:54
Speaker
kind of no one ever really wants to see in a barrel and I sort of agree so I don't use any glue but you could if you wanted a little more security when you're putting your barrel together it really wouldn't be a problem especially on the like just on the outermost third of the wood or something like that
01:16:09
Speaker
Yeah, I don't think the spirit ever really gets there. And it certainly doesn't get back. Yeah, right. Number two, the sanding jig. Is that just pivoting it from a central point so that it can't get close enough to the sander to cut off what should be there? Yeah, so I'll see if I can show this. Let's see if I can get that. Right in the center of this, you'll see a little hole. It goes about 10 millimeters into the 25 millimeter barrel head.
01:16:39
Speaker
So it's a weak spot, but it hasn't been an issue ever. So that 10 millimeter hole is what accepts a pin for my circle cutting jig and for the circle sanding jig on it in a later operation. There is an example on my webpage of me using the circle sanding jig. It's an earlier primitive, more primitive version. Right now, the sander is right behind me. And this white piece of wood right here, this white piece of wood is a whole sled. It pivots right here.
01:17:09
Speaker
It pivots around this point, comes out, you know, away from the table. And right here is the stop screw. And that screw determines the distance between the sanding belt and the pin. If I screw that in, it hits the table earlier and the pin can't get close to the sanding. And if I screw this out, it hits the table later and the pin can get closer to the sander.
01:17:32
Speaker
Does it make any sense? It's a little hard to see. Yeah. I wish I could carry the camera over there and show that, but on my website, on the build page, on the circle sanding jig, I think you'll see maybe at least one idea about how to get a circle sanding jig that makes a really very, very precise and very smooth circle. What are your thoughts in terms of how, how do I put it? How precise does it have to be to create that seal in terms of
01:18:00
Speaker
I know you're making barrels and you just, it makes a whole lot of sense for you to have a jig that you can bang out 50 of these and you just know that 49 of them are going to be no trouble whatsoever when you need to, you know, maybe you need to, whatever, like they're all going to work in the end. For me, if I was making one of them. You'd like to know that that one was going to succeed, but you can't make it precise down to the micron, right?
01:18:25
Speaker
Well, it's almost the other way, right? Like if it doesn't work for me straight away, then I just slap some more beeswax on it. And if it takes me an extra week to get the thing watertight, what does it matter for me? Like, so I guess the question is, if someone's making this just purely with hand tools, do you think they really, like, do they need a jig to get it precise enough to seal eventually? Or is that just more of a luxury because the fact that you're banging out a whole lot of this? Because I could buy the equipment. Yeah, right.
01:18:52
Speaker
Uh, I think I have an answer for you. Um, my confidence in my answer is medium confidence, but I'll give you the answer. I don't think it has to be very precisely round. Um, but, but when I say that I'm talking about, um, you know, if you imagine spinning the disc against a, um, a runout meter, uh, what do you call it as a dial indicator? Um,
01:19:17
Speaker
A one millimeter run-out would be a big, big one. But here's what, I haven't explored this, but remember that the wood after it gets pressed in there is going to swell. It's also going to swell a lot more in the across the grain direction than it is in the with the grain direction. I did a test once and I think the with the grain direction spread is about 1% and it's about 3% across the grain direction. Does that make any sense? Yeah. It's a lot more in the across the grain direction than it is in the with the grain direction.
01:19:48
Speaker
That having been said, it means that you could probably be off by a half of those values, you know, one and a half percent off in this direction and a half a percent off in this direction. And it would still match up with the can. And once it's swelled, swelled, swelled, swelled, swelled. Blooper reel. Furthermore, if you imagine that this can is somewhat flexible, that means it's going to accommodate
01:20:17
Speaker
a thing that swells imprecisely. So if one part swells a lot, it's going to squeeze the can into a slightly more egg shape. Actually, that might be an issue at the ends. I might make it worse at the ends. But I think the answer really is it should be as round as you can possibly make it. The smoothness is pretty important, but not quite as important. And it should just be a snug fit.
01:20:41
Speaker
If it's a snug fit, if it just only barely starts to go down there with hand pressure and it only really goes down in there with like hammer pressure at every point. And you can't see any gaps. I think you're probably going to be okay. Let it swell for a week. I don't care. I have had barrels that didn't prove tight for three, four days. Uh, and then they did. So, you know, you could actually wait three or four days before you give up on it. It could still be fine.
01:21:08
Speaker
Yeah. Does that, does that help a little bit? Yeah. Yeah. I'm just trying to get a feel for people in terms of.
01:21:15
Speaker
It's one thing to just try and make one and put a fair amount of time into it. It's another, you know, to build a bunch of tools and jigs and acquire different things and, you know, just how far do people need to take this to, to give it a go for one. I get the horrible feeling that it's the sort of thing, uh, you're going to try once and then you're not going to be satisfied. You're going to want more after that, but that's another point. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think you can easily see why I made the second one. Yeah.
01:21:43
Speaker
And the third one. And the last question I had, which I think you've already answered, is how do you get the things in there? Are you just going around with a mallet and tapping it gently in a millimeter by millimeter all the way around? Initially, I was. Let me just turn the camera a little bit. Just over this way, you can see my shot press right at the edge of the camera there. There's a shot press back there. Let me bring over the press follower, which I think is pretty interesting.
01:22:11
Speaker
So this is called a follower, I think. I'm not a machinist or anything. It's just a heavy piece of oak. It's three inches thick. It's made of oak. There's a thin section down at the bottom here. And that thin section is as thin as the distance down under the lip I'd like the thing to go. So when I'm pressing a barrel into the can, this goes over this. There we go. I have a bung in the way.
01:22:41
Speaker
But I think you can get the idea. That thin section there is going to press the barrel head down until the corners of this follower, right here, into the corners, rest on that lip, and then it will stop pressing on the barrel head. That way I get a pretty repeatable, reliable kind of distance down into the can. That has been said, I started with...
01:23:04
Speaker
You're using like a screw or a hydraulic press or something to push that? Yeah, this one's a jack that's in a press kind of frame. And I have it on pneumatic because I can't be doing this all day with the jacks, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. What do we call it? The lever. Yeah, I just squeeze the thing and my air compressor does the work for me. That's nice. But yeah, initially, when I was making these initially, I was literally just hammering them in. And I was trying to keep the thing going in nicely and not going in this way and then trying to get that back in down. That doesn't work very well.
01:23:34
Speaker
You want to sort of, you know, sneak up on it. Uh, now, you know, in truth, when you're beginning, you're going to make some that are a little too loose and they're going to, you're going to hammer it. It's going to go way down. You're going to be like, Oh, that's, that's not what I wanted. And then there are going to be others that are a little bit too big and you're going to have trouble getting them in enough. Like that's, uh, and that's in, I don't know, an inefficiency that a hobbyist kind of relishes like,
Comparing Rum Flavors from Different Barrels
01:23:59
Speaker
Oh good. I have a new problem to work on. You know? Yeah. Yeah, totally. Yeah.
01:24:03
Speaker
While you were going through that, which I think you did wonderfully, I poured 36 and 32, the two rums next to each other because we flagged these ahead of time as a way to demonstrate. Both of these were made as, how do I put it, with as few variables as possible.
01:24:27
Speaker
And really the only variable between the two was that they went into two barrels that were tried to be made as close as possible as well. But there is a difference. Yeah, there's a little color difference there in there. I mean, actually significant. I'm confused, which is a sensation I'm comfortable with, familiar with confusion. All right.
01:24:55
Speaker
That's actually really fascinating, the color difference, because they really are both medium toast, char three, and I believe they're both new American, I'm surprised at the color difference. So I have a favorite between the two, initially. And they're different, aren't they? They are definitely different. And interestingly enough,
01:25:24
Speaker
If it was bourbon or single malt, I think my favorite would be reverse, but because it's rum, I feel like one fits the other a lot better. I'm just going to grab some water though and make sure that I'm not talking up my ass here. I like the deep, rich, dark smell of 32. Yeah.
01:25:52
Speaker
Yeah, I agree. It's slightly more, yeah, it's slightly more dry on the finish. Um, which I'm not a huge fan of for the rum, but yeah, the more, the, uh, the flavors from the barrel more closely accentuate, uh, and season, they, they bring out the flavors of molasses more. Mm-hmm.
01:26:18
Speaker
Um, whereas the 36 is a little bit more like a honey finish. It's more like, uh, like, uh, what do you call it? Like, um, pastry, like glazed pastry or something is that the sweetness in it is more soft and, uh, what do you call like the, the fruit pastries, the French ones. Um, Oh my word, Danish, Danish. Yeah. I bet they don't call them Danish in France though. Both of these are relatively restrained rums in terms of.
01:26:48
Speaker
They're quite delicate. There's no huge ester profile. Uh, there's no huge, uh, like dark molasses things going on. Yeah. These were made with Penella actually. Oh, interesting. Yeah. Um, yeah, I'm not getting any dirty great big banana esters. Hmm.
01:27:10
Speaker
I believe I was trying for that actually with this whole series. I had a, uh, dunder pit that I fed with. Oh, interesting. Well, you know, at all program with trying to promote, um, uh, carboxylic acids in the dunder and then in the wash that was going to go into the still. I mean, it's there dude, like you can tell it's a rum. Yeah. Yeah. 32 seems a lot more history to me in a way that I'm familiar with. Um, and, and the butterscotch and caramel kind of thing.
01:27:41
Speaker
from the wood is so much fun for me. I get a lot more butterscotch. Not sure about the butterscotch. Caramel and vanilla, I get more in 32. Yeah. They're both good. I love that stuff. Yeah. Thank you. And I guess, how do I put it? I guess the exact flavors that we're getting are whatever for the listeners. The point is that they are markedly different. They both taste like rum. They both taste good.
01:28:08
Speaker
Yeah. But if you poured these next to me, I would assume, you know, if I didn't even see what I came from, I would assume that I came out of two different labeled bottles, you know? Yeah. They've got a wildly different origin story, right? Yep. Totally. Yeah. Different ingredients, different distiller. Yeah. You could easily convince me that it was two different companies made of them. And really at the end of the day, it was just two different barrels.
01:28:35
Speaker
Which goes back to our whole conversation earlier about you just can't clone a spirit. You know, it could literally have been the same distillation. There were times when I do a large distillation and end up with maximum is three barrels. Like a distillation after taking cuts, you can fill three barrels. That's a big distillation. It might've been two, I can't recall now. It's very possible they were the same distillation.
01:29:02
Speaker
Which is bizarre because one of them's got more solventy nose, right? 36 is much more hot and solventy even after all this time. And 32 is just mellowed out completely. You're getting the same heat from 36.
01:29:20
Speaker
Yeah, I almost don't think, I don't think that's a distillation thing though. I think it's a, a balance, the way the, the woods balance, like it doesn't, it does, it's not, um, it's not headsy solvent. It's, it's just, it's brightness, not. Fair enough. Yeah. But yeah, I, I don't know. It's fascinating, man. Uh, so at the end of the day,
01:29:47
Speaker
You are going to do everything you can to make every barrel an absolute banger. But there's just no way that you're just going to have. That's the beauty of wood, right? Things are going to be a little bit different. Yeah, yeah. In some ways, it'd be easier to make microchips. It either works properly or it doesn't. But this is an organic substance.
01:30:09
Speaker
Yeah, there's just no way to guarantee what the, I wish I could taste every board, honestly, in some meaningful way. You know, if you get a board from me, maybe you get like teeth marks in it, you know, it's good. I like this board. Yeah. And the other thing that's occurred to me, this is a little esoteric, but when a Cooper
01:30:30
Speaker
The South makes a full-size barrel. They make it out of, I think, something on the order of 26 staves plus the head staves, which is another, I could be another 20 staves. So there's something like, let's say 40 pieces of wood to 50 pieces of wood that are contributing to the flavor of that barrel, which is something like averaging. And even they say the barrels all taste different. I've only got three pieces of wood in every one of my barrels.
01:30:58
Speaker
And so the influence of any one piece of wood is unfortunately quite high.
Influence of Environment on Barrel Aging
01:31:04
Speaker
Now my experience empirically with a large set of barrels is they all end up good, except for one that I've mentioned several times. They all end up good. They just end up very different from each other. So that's a little bit of uncertainty that we're just going to have to live with, I think.
01:31:19
Speaker
I think also there's a lot to be said too for the fact that there's other factors other than the wood that are going to change things. Even if you had barrels sitting in a rack similar to what you have behind you, I'm going to guess that over the course of five years, the barrel on the top and the barrel on the bottom or the barrel on the outsides versus the insides, they're kind of almost insulated by the other barrels. There might be a half a degree Celsius
01:31:47
Speaker
difference in average temperature over a year in that barrel you know so and that doesn't sound like much but I don't know man I feel like that that's a big difference all the the ones on the outside swing you know they have the same average temperature but they have a you know it's a one or two degree higher max and a one or two degree lower minimum
01:32:10
Speaker
So they're going through a greater temperature swing or just all of those things. And I've had this experience at Balconas in Texas who make amazing spirits. And long story short, the event that I went to, it was my job to taste through the new American oak, I think it was. So it was all exactly the same recipe, all barrels from the same Cooper. But we had 30 odd to choose from.
01:32:38
Speaker
and the variation within them was insane. It was crazy, man. It went from stuff that was- I believe it. I completely believe it, yeah. Some of it was super astringent, which as a barrel in and of itself may not be great, but you need a little bit of that to change the balance of a mix, which is awesome. Some of them by themselves were just
01:33:07
Speaker
Unbelievably good as a single cask somewhat average. Uh, the probably most were average, right? I mean, to be fair, their average is pretty fucking good. I would, I would love to hit that baseline myself. Yeah. But yeah, totally dude. Like there was a, there was a bunch there that were, um,
01:33:30
Speaker
You know, they wouldn't be, they wouldn't shine as a single barrel pick. They were just good. There was some that had completely different esters, you know, somewhere full on pear, somewhere really plum like. So it's, and once you get up to that scale, like you say, too, you've got, you know, like you've got more wood, you're, you're, you're doing one distillation run and filling.
01:33:52
Speaker
multiple barrels. There's just something else happening as well. So I think for any one person to sort of put all the blame on just the wood or for you to assume that it's a difference in manufacturing or whatever, I think it's just kind of foolish. It's going to play a part of course, but you know what I mean. Sure. And we won't ever know what the contribution fraction is.
01:34:18
Speaker
No. Well, I mean, I guess there's ways you could potentially try and find that out, but that seems like a very daunting task. Well put. Yeah. I think I'll leave that for someone else to run that experiment.
Future Collaborations and DIY Encouragement
01:34:32
Speaker
They'd like to do it with my barrels. They're welcome to get started with that. Yeah. And then of course reports to the community, their results on that, that experiment.
01:34:39
Speaker
Yeah, totally. So this is once again is not exactly public knowledge, but we have a sneaky, sneaky plan to get together after I go to the bastards ball in Texas. So the plan is for us to hang out and have a drink together, which I'm very much looking forward to. And also obviously make some videos. So.
01:34:59
Speaker
Actually, I mean, if there's specific things that you guys would like to see happen when we do that, by all means, feel free to make a contribution in the comment section in the YouTube channel. It's probably the easiest way to do it on this video. Absolutely. That'll be fun. Me too. That's going to be a highlight of my year. And I would love to know what people would like to see us tackle. If they're having problems,
01:35:27
Speaker
with aging or having problems with making a barrel or having a problem with my haircut. Just let this happen. Yeah. I'd love to fix it all. The hair is going to be a little challenging, but. All right, Ben. I thoroughly appreciate you coming on for a podcast, mate. I'm looking forward to doing this in person. It'll be much better. Likewise. Yeah. I couldn't wait to get through these samples, man. Now I'm allowed to drink them.
01:35:51
Speaker
You are allowed to drink them. Oh, I may not have mentioned they're all, they're all cast strength. So you might want to put a little water in them too. Oh, no, I, I, I assumed nothing less of you. Fabulous. Now what am I going to do with all these now? That's what I want to know. You need to come and help me finish these up here.
01:36:13
Speaker
Yeah, that'd be just the most amazing thing to put together some barrels with you, show you around the tools. I don't know, put some tools in your hands so you can take them home and make your own barrels. I think it'd be fabulous. I'd be pretty keen to make one with you. Yeah. And then come home and see if I can do it without the specific jigs and all the stuff that you've got set up. That'd be pretty cool.
01:36:38
Speaker
Anyway, I'd like for people to believe that it's totally doable. It's totally within their reach. If they don't want to, I'm here for them. But if they don't want to, they can. They can make them.
01:36:50
Speaker
So a huge thank you to Ben for joining us and having a dirty great big long conversation with me, I appreciate it dude. I'm sure all of you guys do as well. I'm really looking forward to being able to hang out with Badmo headquarters in September, that'll be awesome. Gotta say another huge thank you to NordVPN for sponsoring this episode. And if it works out, I'd love to see you in September at the Texas Distillery Takeover. Keep in mind guys too that I know there's a bunch of you that just can't make it, logistics, distance,
01:37:20
Speaker
Geography that kind of stuff if it works out the plan is to do these in different places So eventually hopefully if you want to you'll be able to attend one. Anyway till next time guys. See ya