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#15 Bearded & Bored On Food In A Distillery
628 Plays4 years ago
Bearded and bored has his runs a youtube channel but used to work as a Chef in a range of different establishments. We sat down to have a talk about how food can fit into a distillery to create a full experience for your customers.
Bearded's Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeV6Yuzb5M-ak6dPzTE3grg
CTC Support: https://chasethecraft.com/support
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Transcript
Introductions and Sponsorships
00:00:00
Speaker
Hells ago and chases, I hope you're having a kickass week. This podcast is brought to you by Gladfield Malt. Thank you so much Gladfield Malt for making this stuff possible. I totally appreciate it, and I really appreciate your products too.
00:00:15
Speaker
This podcast is also brought to you by Adventures in Home Brewing, a sweet online and brick and mortar stores in America for the home winemaker, beer maker and distiller. You can find them at homebrewing.org slash CTC for all your equipment and ingredient requirements.
00:00:32
Speaker
And last but definitely not least, this podcast is brought to you by the Patreons. Thank you so much guys, I appreciate everything you do for me. Our little community over on Patreon is pretty cool and I really appreciate the support. If you're finding value in the podcast or the still-up videos, you can head on over to chasethecraft.com slash support to find all the different ways you can help out, including if it's right for you, Patreon.
Meet Bearded and Bored
00:00:58
Speaker
My guest today is Better than Board, who just happens to be my oldest and longest YouTube slash creative buddy. We've had a lot of epic yarns and discussions over the last four years. I thoroughly, thoroughly appreciate his support and just being able to talk to someone in a similar space doing similar things. It's, uh, it's awesome.
00:01:18
Speaker
But today what we're talking about is the idea of food connected to a distillery. So many of you won't know that Bearded is in fact a chef, or used to be a chef. Doesn't do that so much anymore. But he's got a lot of experience in the kitchen and that comes to bear when thinking about how to incorporate food into your distillery experience for your customers.
00:01:47
Speaker
All right, we're live with Bearded and Bored, whose real name just seems to stay anonymous forever, but that's kind of cool. No, I actually had my name legally changed to Bearded and Bored. It's going to be on my tombstone. Nice, I like it. All right, man, so the plan was for us to hang out and talk about
Culinary Background and Distillery Integration
00:02:13
Speaker
food in a distillery to various degrees. And I don't know how many people know this, but before you were bearded and bored, you worked in kitchens a whole lot. I was a chef. You were indeed. I was a line cook and the fancy, fancy term for line cook is chef de partier. So that sounds so much fancier. I know. Right. Yeah. It it literally just just means like touring chef.
00:02:42
Speaker
Uh, meaning you go and fit in wherever you need it in the kitchen. Yeah, which is cool. Cause you get to see a whole lot of different things. Uh, but I did spend a lot of time in commercial kitchens. Uh, I think if, uh, unless you're like a child of privilege, you probably spent some time in a commercial kitchen at some point in your work history.
00:03:06
Speaker
I don't know man. I don't know about that. Did your wife? No. She was in a different field, but I guess she, um, she, she did tables for a while and bars and stuff. I guess that's the thing. If you, even if you're just waiting tables, you still know, you still know the craziness that goes on in the kitchen. Somebody posted the other day.
Food and Alcohol Regulations
00:03:29
Speaker
Um, if I'm hiring you to be a server,
00:03:33
Speaker
I expect you to have great customer service skills. If I'm hiring you to be a bartender, I expect you to have a knowledge of drinks and be able to talk well with customers. If I'm hiring you to be a cook, I expect you to have just a little bit of jail.
00:03:55
Speaker
Yeah. And not freak the fuck out when I show my jail. Right. If you've ever worked in commercial kitchens, you know they're full of reprobates. And if you can't find them, that means that you're the reprobate.
00:04:12
Speaker
Yeah, that's very true. So I think we need to preface this entire conversation by saying that neither of us have owned a distillery, nor a distillery with food in it. Nor a restaurant. No. But in saying that, here's some brain dumpings from some guys that are slowly starting to drink. It's going to be one of those ones, guys. Bearded has his Turkish wrestler cocktail, which
00:04:41
Speaker
If you want to know what goes into that and why it's called that, you should check out the Chase the Craft Facebook page or the Chase the Craft Instagram. It's a secret family recipe. If you don't know what Turkish wrestling is, I highly recommend that you look it up right now while you're at work.
00:05:07
Speaker
Don't do that. Don't look into it. You're baiting me. We're trying to get you fired.
00:05:13
Speaker
So there's another thing that I think we need to preface this conversation with, which is that anywhere you go, just about on the face of the planet, your local laws are going to be different for how food and alcohol integrate together in the commercial space.
Food as a Supplementary Element
00:05:31
Speaker
Especially if you're serving that alcohol on the premise where the alcohol is being made. I know, for example, in many places in America, you just straight up can't do it.
00:05:42
Speaker
right you have to have a different you know it could be on the same premise potentially but it would have to be a separate different building um you know depending on where you are uh here in new zealand it's kind of the opposite like you you almost need food to be able to serve the booze which makes sense to me yeah it does actually um i'd rather you have a full stomach when you drive away from my establishment than just be full of sloshy booze
00:06:06
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, here's the thing guys, even if you are like, you know, even if you are being responsible, there's a very big difference between having two beers and getting in a car and having two beers and a burger and getting in a car. Anyway, it's a better experience. I wish that was the way our laws worked here because to me that's a, that's a better customer experience. Um,
00:06:34
Speaker
I think if you want to start a distillery and you also are interested in having food be an element of it or a brewery, I think you need to focus on making an awesome business that is focused mostly around the alcohol. And the food also be awesome, but it needs to play a lower note because here's the difference.
00:06:59
Speaker
Your markup on liquor can be as much as like 300% or 3,000% depending on what you're serving in a bar, in a standard bar. Markup on food is between 5% and 30% always for any menu item at all. So your margin of profit is always higher on alcohol than it is on food. So it makes sense just financially to focus on the alcohol and make food secondary. Don't make shitty food.
00:07:29
Speaker
But you know, if you're like, if I were to open a distillery, I would. If I were also allowed to have a restaurant like right next door or somewhere nearby across the street or something or in the in the day or or in the buildings, if the law changed and I was able to do it in the same building, that would be great because I would glass wall the distillery so that you could see what was going on in there and see all the cool equipment because
00:07:59
Speaker
Copper is cool. Stainless steel is awesome, you know? And brewery too. But I would integrate pretty much everything that
Enhancing Customer Experience with Food
00:08:14
Speaker
I could. I would make, you know, if you have a whiskey, make a whiskey and black cherry sauce to put on your steaks. If you've got a gin,
00:08:24
Speaker
do a juniper sauce to put on like some chicken dish or fish dish or something weird. Duck. Duck would be good. If you make your own bread, you should have spent grain in that bread. If you have fruit mashes, make your desserts with some of that fruit mash, that alcoholic fruit mash. Things like that where you integrate as much of your product as you can
00:08:52
Speaker
to make a completely unique experience. So everybody's going to have a whiskey in a gin, but does everybody make a whiskey tartlet with spent grain in the crust? No, but I do. I think let's back this way up. There's probably a few people out there right now thinking
00:09:14
Speaker
isn't this? I've been thinking about this for like, let's talk about food and alcohol. So I've been, I've been churning with this for a couple of days. Sorry, I jumped way ahead. No, no, it's cool. Here's my entire plan for success. But I mean, I don't think the connection between the two things is necessarily obvious to someone who is thinking about opening a distillery, right?
00:09:38
Speaker
And I see a few huge pros and a few huge cons to even contemplating, do you even have food at all besides some fricking knobby's nuts sitting on a rack on the, you know, in a bag of crisps? If you do pickled eggs, fuck you. That's my pet peeve, guys. I don't hate you, I hate the eggs. Yeah, so maybe let's talk about that a little bit, right?
00:10:08
Speaker
Was I sorry, dude? I just said the pickled egg parts are pretty spectacular, though.
00:10:15
Speaker
Let's talk about the pros and cons of offering food from a distiller's perspective. So I think let's frame all this. I mean, people are here because they're interested in distilling or owning a distillery or creating a distillery or getting into the industry or whatever it happens to be. So I think everything we're going to talk about is going to come from the point of view that, like you said, the booze comes first, right? And the food is a way to supplement that or a way to
Creating a Distillery Community
00:10:41
Speaker
Enforce your story or to get people in the door or whatever or keep them there That's a very good point. Yeah Yep And especially if well, I mean, so let's just come right out and say it as a distillery If you are going to if part of your market is going to be that you've got Essentially a cellar door At the distillery and that you are trying to interact directly with your clientele, which I think is a very very smart
00:11:11
Speaker
move. I do too on a whole different level. Right. Unless you're just going with like, I'm just a commercial distiller and I'm just sending it straight to the distributor to go to a shelf somewhere and not interact with my customers. That's one, that's one tack. I mean, some people go that direction, but if you, if you put your heart and soul into this and you want to kind of share what you've made and share your story from your perspective, food is a, is a good option.
00:11:40
Speaker
to add to your quiver of arrows to make sure that that happens, that you are telling the story, that you are creating your own market. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. And I mean, let's face it. If you're going to start a distillery up now, I had a long talk with Daniel from the Whiskey Tribe about this in our podcast. Sorry, guys, I can't remember the episode, but you'll be able to find it by his name. Maybe 10. I think it was 10. Yeah, 10 or no, I think it was 11.
00:12:07
Speaker
Ah, somewhere around there. One of the things that he was saying is the days of becoming a rock star through owning a distillery are gone. This is not going to happen. What can happen is you'd have a very solid local business and you earn some amount of money and respect or whatever you want from a distillery as the guy down the road that owns whatever, the restaurant or the computer store or something.
00:12:33
Speaker
Yeah. You're not going to be a million. You're not going to be Tito beverage. No. Most likely. Well, it's not going to happen. Right. But you can you can still earn a respectable income for your family and take care of your community. Yeah. So and and if you're going to do that, you need the community, right? So the idea of opening up a distillery and just supplying distributors. I don't know, man. I unless you spent five million dollars on that distillery and you're putting out a hundred thousand bottles
00:13:03
Speaker
every other month, you know, you're not, you've got another five mil sitting in the bank for marketing, right? So people know who the hell you are. Yeah. That's your game. And the restaurant's not going to do it for you. Yeah. And why the hell are you listening to this? Why aren't you on an island somewhere? If you got that kind of money. Yeah. Yeah.
00:13:24
Speaker
So my point being is that food is one more little thing that you can do to get people in the door, right? If you get them in the door, you have a chance of getting them to try your products, your spirits, which is the main thing you're trying to sell, and they fall in love with it and they keep buying it. They talk to their friends about it, so on and so forth. And a lot of distilleries are also in locations where foot traffic's not a thing.
00:13:47
Speaker
Right. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, turning your, turning your, your distillery into a, a destination where people take friends, you know, someone comes from out of town and stays with these people, you know, Oh yeah. Let's take them to bed. It's distillery, you know, cause it's a fun night and food plays a huge role in converting a, a place to a destination like that. Right. Yeah.
00:14:16
Speaker
So you can either, I mean, if you, let's say you do have kind of a crappy location, you're in the middle of nowhere or you're, you're just not, you're not anywhere close to a restaurant that you could partner with, um, or build your own, whatever. That's a huge can of worms. Um, you know, you can always do food trucks.
00:14:40
Speaker
That's a big thing here in Texas, at least a lot of the breweries and distilleries and a couple of meteries around this central Texas area, they have perpetual food trucks. And so they're serving food. I haven't seen a lot of collaboration as far as recipe development in any of them, but it's just like, Hey, we have this cool tasting room and also there's some food trucks outside. So it makes for a cool guest experience.
00:15:07
Speaker
uh, me being, you know, coming from a culinary background, I would want to tie those together a little bit closer. So even if it wasn't my food truck, I'd be like, Hey, could you pretty please make this recipe that I came up with, you know, using my whiskey or whatever you guys, we'll bring some booze. Let's hang out in the evening and let's hammer some ideas out. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. And you know, it's things like things like that, that if you can
00:15:36
Speaker
you know, like Jesse was saying, if you can keep people around for more than just your tasting room to try a couple of cocktails that taste like the other guys cocktails down the road who also makes gin or also makes vodka or whiskey or whatever. Um, you know, granted nobody has a Turkish wrestler, but, uh, you know, that's not going to keep people
00:16:01
Speaker
there and spending their money and coming back and bringing friends. You've got to create some sort of an experience. I don't mean a theme park or a themed restaurant by any stretch. You never want to go down the themed restaurant kind of thing. So even if you have a distillery, you don't necessarily want to kid out your restaurant in nothing but whiskey barrels because it's going to get old. People are not going to want to come back again and again.
00:16:30
Speaker
How many times have you been to cracker barrel person who's watching this right now? I've been like twice in my whole life. You know, it's just, uh, themed restaurants work for a little bit, but they, uh, they don't really keep people coming back. So make things that are, that are unique to you, but mostly make, make it feel comfortable. Make sure that your staff treats people like family, make sure that you're,
00:16:57
Speaker
that your cooks know what your vision is. Make sure that if you have food trucks, make sure they're on the same page as you. Make them part of your family. Because if you don't, if it's all separate, it's going to feel that way to your customers. And they're going to shop here to buy a couple of bottles and a couple of cocktails. They're going to shop here to maybe get a hot dog or a hamburger or something. And then they're out.
Operational Strategies and Food Trucks
00:17:21
Speaker
And then you won't see them again until maybe next year.
00:17:24
Speaker
But if you make it something that is really comfortable for people to come to and hang out, it's going to draw them back. They may not come on a date night, but if they just want to hang out and have a cocktail and play dominoes or cards with a bunch of strangers or something because you have tables set up and multiplayer participation games, physical games like
00:17:53
Speaker
There's a metery that has a giant Jenga set up, you know, and you know, that's kind of cool because you end up playing Jenga with like nine people you never met, you know, if you can create experiences like that around your business, um, to make it feel like you're just hanging out at home or hanging out with friends in their backyard, you know, that that's going to go a long way to making those secondary sales where people start recommending you.
00:18:20
Speaker
to their friends and their family or bringing their friends and family with them. And that just blossoms out further and further into the community. So. Yeah, totally, man. You said something kind of interesting there where you said. I did. Yeah, well, it was all interesting. But one thing that I wanted to carry on talking about was the idea that you said you need to make sure that the people in the kitchen are on the same page as you. And.
00:18:45
Speaker
I have seen so many people that have never had anything to do with a commercial kitchen. Just assume that it's easy and assume that you can do everything, right? I'm here to tell you right now that if you are an owner and you're running any sizable operation, you cannot be the person fucking doing it. Especially if you have a distillery as well. So if you've got a small distillery and your goal is to make
00:19:10
Speaker
craft spirits, you better stick to your missing, dude. I'm telling you right now, you don't have enough time in the day to make craft spirits. You don't have enough time in the day to run a restaurant. You can't do both. For me, I would have to fight with myself about not being in the kitchen because that's my first inclination. That's where I have the most experience. If you have a lot of
00:19:35
Speaker
like management experience, you might want to oversee the front of the house operations because a kitchen or a restaurant
00:19:45
Speaker
It requires a lot of attention and it makes you think that you have to be there, but you really need to just hire awesome people and make sure that they know exactly what you want so they can run the day-to-day and you can sit your ass next to the still and make awesome spirits because ultimately, that's where all your money is. That's the lifeblood. That's the golden egg coming out of the goose. The goose is your still. It is not the restaurant.
00:20:12
Speaker
Yeah, and even further down the line, the horrible cheesy adage of you wanna be working on your business, not in your business. You need time to put into strategy and marketing and all those sorts of things. So I guess my point here is I wanna warn people, this whole like tacking awesome food onto the side of your business is not something that's easy to do. And the food truck thing that you brought up is a great option, right?
00:20:42
Speaker
If you don't have any restaurant experience or if you have not seen an episode of kitchen nightmares or restaurants on the edge, first of all, watch those shows because it teaches you a lot. Second of all, let somebody else handle it. Go eat at their food truck. Make sure it tastes good. Eat at it a few times to make sure the consistency is there.
00:21:05
Speaker
and then find out what it would take to get them to come and park at your business for a week or every Thursday or whatever. Don't do it yourself. Let somebody else handle that. They handle their own transactions. You don't have to worry about any of that. And it's basically
00:21:25
Speaker
You just added, it's a value add that you didn't really have to put anything into other than saying, hey, do you wanna come and park your truck here and serve people that come out of my place? And I will occasionally supply you with some of my product in order to make different dishes if you're so inclined. But if they're just like a hot dog and hamburger place, that's not gonna be part of the arrangement.
00:21:54
Speaker
Let somebody else handle this shit if you don't have experience. Yeah, totally. So my buddy Matt runs Brave Brewing and Hastings. So shout out to Brave and Matt. Awesome guy, awesome food. If you ever in the area, make sure you go in and hang out. And the reason it's awesome food is he does exactly this, right? He extends invitations to
00:22:18
Speaker
food trucks that he thinks are sweet, that he thinks are making awesome food.
Community Engagement and Live Music
00:22:22
Speaker
It's great for him because he essentially has to have food there provided to be able to sell the booze. Food trucks love it because they roll up and there is a hard indoor kitchen sitting there that they can use to prep in, right into the truck.
00:22:38
Speaker
The truck literally parts kind of almost like on the awning of the, like where you sit and buy food. And because the law is here, people can literally take two steps out the door, order your food, walk back inside, sit down on the leaner or on the table with, you know, one week it's dumplings, the next week it's fried chicken or whatever. Yeah. See, that sounds like a perfect setup. Sounds like a perfect setup.
00:23:05
Speaker
And it's great for the punters too, because, uh, he gets a, he gets an excuse to communicate with people through Facebook and Instagram and all that. Hey, guess what? XX, you know, whatever kitchen is back for two weeks, make sure we come down and then you go, Oh, you know what? I haven't been to brave for a couple of weeks and that is good food. I better get down next week while they're still there. You know, there's all these advantages to it. Um, thing, if you're, if your area allows you to do it live music,
00:23:35
Speaker
live music. Just get in local artists and either pay them or let them collect tips or both, whatever the arrangement you come up with. But as far as providing live music, always go listen to the bands first. Don't just hire out on Craigslist for local bands. Come and play here for X amount of dollars because you never know whether or not they're good. They might suck.
00:24:05
Speaker
I mean, the other thing is too, you need to decide what sort of place you are, right? And I know you said that you don't want a themed restaurant. And I know what you mean by that. You don't want... So here in New Zealand, every now and again, you run into Mexican restaurants because Mexican food is almost non-existent. Well, it used to be, it's coming in now. And when you did find it, it was atrocious. New Zealanders just didn't get the concept. And if you did get the concept and you started selling the food,
00:24:33
Speaker
your clientele would beat it out of you until you were selling shit as well, because no one wanted to eat it. Sweet chili, like Thai sweet chili sauce is horribly spicy for lots of New Zealanders. They go and order like a Mexican style burrito and then bitch and moan that it's too hot. Like, yeah. Yeah. Anyway, so it's like, Oh my God, is there pepper in this ketchup? It's horribly spicy. Like black pepper. Oh my God. Yeah. Yeah. Get out of here, Karen. Yeah.
00:25:03
Speaker
You'd roll up and there'd be sombreros everywhere. That's just not good. But in saying that, you need a common thread running through your entire business. If your thread is not, this is where people come to party, then you're not going to have that sort of music. If it's not where people come to chill. My point being is if you want to be the place where people come and hang out and talk, you maybe don't want live music. It's hard to talk while there's a band playing.
00:25:32
Speaker
If you have a bunch of really awesome whiskeys and you want people to talk about those whiskeys and taste things together and interact together based around those whiskeys and that culture, then yeah, loud live music is not going to be your thing. But just like when you're deciding what kind of alcohol you want to produce and you have to then think about what kind of still do I need, you've got to
00:26:02
Speaker
put that same kind of thought process into what kind of business do I wanna have? Is it gonna be a place with live music? Is that something I'm comfortable with? Because you're not gonna make alcohol that you don't wanna drink. And you're also, you shouldn't be in an environment for your business that you don't wanna be in. Like if you can't stand live music, don't have bands.
00:26:27
Speaker
Don't do stuff like that. If you're not a fan of spicy food, don't have spicy food there. What are you going to do for lunch? Go across town? Bring it back, lunch? No, you eat at the food truck that's outside. Show everybody how good it is. I think the food truck option is an excellent
00:26:53
Speaker
it's a great way to kind of test the waters too, right? So you can have a food truck for a year or two, and then sort of say, you know what, it would be really awesome to be able to get a really good chef on staff in here every night. So when the doors shut at night, we can spend half an hour sitting down and sharing ideas from the culinary world back to the craft spirits world and back again. And that really just kind of boils down to finances if you want to
00:27:22
Speaker
add something free right now, because you're just starting out. You've just opened the doors of your distillery, boot trucks. If you are making enough money to want to invest and build that restaurant, and not just build the restaurant, but also hire people to run it for you, because you are not two people, you are not 10 people, you've got to run it yourself.
00:27:50
Speaker
or you got to run the distillery yourself and then have some awesome people to run the restaurant for you. Even I, having the experience, I would not run a restaurant myself. Personally, I don't think I would actually open a restaurant because I've had enough experience with watching them fail. I are a notoriously shitty business to open. Here's the thing. During the lockdown, and this is just kind of common sense.
00:28:20
Speaker
people don't stop using their fights. If their vice is weed, then the dispensaries in California stay open. The liquor stores around here stayed open. None of the bars did, but the bars did take out where you could go and buy, you know, either mixed drinks or bottles or whatever. Those things last when the shit hits the fan and the situation gets really bad.
00:28:49
Speaker
There's almost no situation in a, in an economy, uh, in a downturn in an economy where people aren't going to want to do something to escape. Um, so no matter how bad shit gets, people are going to drink, but they're not going to the restaurant. So if you own a restaurant and you're worried about now that we've seen, we've all sat through a pandemic, um, that's not over yet except for this guy over here.
00:29:19
Speaker
Yep. We kicked the graduations, New Zealand. Um, you know, that restaurant's going to sit with the doors closed while you're still making liquor and closed doors is lost money. So those are all things to think about.
00:29:35
Speaker
Yeah, totally. I think, I mean, I guess the reason I brought that up is I think that's an excellent option and I think we could just stop the podcast there, you know. But we've got some time to talk and there's a few other things that I'm really interested to get your opinion on. So I think maybe from here on in, let's assume that someone has decided to
00:29:55
Speaker
to take the next step or just to go balls deep from the beginning and open some sort of establishment. Yeah. Balls deep is a cool restaurant, dude. Let's do that. Balls deep brewery. I feel like you'd need to have a really cool
Food Quality and Consistency
00:30:11
Speaker
system. No, that would just be the restaurant name. Then you'd have to have like a sister name for the distillery. That by itself, the distillery isn't weird or dirty, but when you put it together with balls deep,
00:30:25
Speaker
then it's funny. Or you could have like the balls deep distillery and right next to a taco shack. Yeah. With clam on the menu. Was that two on the nose? Yeah, so I think let's hear and then let's assume that the people still listening kind of want
00:30:53
Speaker
to at least entertain the idea of running it, running something themselves. And I, I don't know, man, I'm interested to hear what you have to say about this, but I tend to gravitate towards places where
00:31:06
Speaker
the food itself and the concept of the food kind of gets the fuck out of the way. And it's about the booze and just my general comfort and enjoyment of the place. So I don't want to go to a brewery or a distillery and see a 45 page menu with five star food. No, you want a, you always want a single page menu. I don't care if you're serving fine dining, you want a single page menu.
00:31:35
Speaker
You don't want people to spend 30 minutes on the menu. You want them to spend five minutes on the menu, looking at your five entrees and your five sides and your, you know, never go too, too crazy with a menu. One of the biggest, one of the biggest things I saw, there was a mistake for one of the restaurants they worked at. Awesome French restaurant. Um, all the food that we made was really, really good.
00:32:02
Speaker
but the menu was like six pages. It was ridiculous. We had so much prep and we threw away so much at the end of the day. It was a nightmare. I think, I almost feel like on some nights when the tourists weren't in town, we had more going in the trash can than we had going out the front door.
00:32:25
Speaker
I believe it, man. I wasn't even thinking about it from a logistics and print point of view. I was just thinking about it from a conceptual point of view. And I guess what I was saying is as far as the concept. Yeah. I mean, make food that people want to eat, that most people want to eat. Most people like comfort food. Most people like burgers. Most people like I don't know. Just think about your region, your area.
00:32:51
Speaker
What do you always want to go eat? What do your friends and family always want to go eat? What makes people feel happy? That's, I'm kind of of the Gordon Ramsey school of thought when it comes to redesigning a menu, when you, when you pair something down from all the shit that, you know, everybody added 19 items to the menu one day, um,
00:33:17
Speaker
Just get rid of all that crap. Find out what grows locally, what kind of farmers are around you, what kind of farmers markets you can go to, and make stuff that features your community in a simple way. You don't need to have items that's so goddamn confusing and has this sauce and this sauce and a drizzle of this. Fuck all that, man. Just make good food. Make everything should
00:33:47
Speaker
tastes fantastic all the way across the menu. If you can't do that, you have too many things on the menu and you need to edit. Yeah. Or you're just not sticking to your lane, right? Like we're putting Indian food or New Zealand, Mexican on your menu. If you don't know what the hell you're doing with it, if you're in New Zealand and you do not have five Mexican guys running your restaurant,
00:34:14
Speaker
then don't open a Mexican restaurant. Unless you studied how to make Mexican food under a really good chef so that everything that you make, you could feed to a Mexican family in Mexico and they would all say, wow, this is really good. Or if it's not, maybe it's not actually mixing, maybe it's Tex mix or California style mix.
00:34:40
Speaker
you know, but you have to know what you're making. And I guess that's what I was driving at before, right? I don't want to go to a brewery and look at a whole bunch of French fine dining items on the menu. I don't want that. I would rather go to a brewery and literally eat fried chicken or wood-fired pizza or a burger or a toasted sandwich. That's made by someone who kicks. Even if you were making all French provincial beers with lavender and shit in them,
00:35:10
Speaker
I would still just do a rotisserie chicken or oven, a brick chicken, just simple stuff that you got to think about.
00:35:22
Speaker
When people are coming to your establishment, they're not coming to sit down and they're coming to talk. They're coming to share drinks and try, Oh man, did you try this beer? This one's fantastic. Try this whiskey. Oh my God. And they're sharing back and forth. You want them to feel like they can do the same thing with the food. So you need to make your menu kind of, you know, work towards that goal so that people can
00:35:47
Speaker
pulled chunks off of that chicken and they've got a big old hunk of bread over next to them and some veggies that they can all share. Shareable food, partner plates, whatever the local term happens to be. I 100% agree, dude. And I've been to a few places recently and I've talked to a few people recently. And there's this really interesting resurgence of, from the culinary side as well,
00:36:14
Speaker
uh, really swanky ass chefs from fine dining restaurants saying, fuck this and getting out literally cooking burgers at a wine cellar door or making Anthony boarding. Yeah, exactly. That sort of thing. And that is exactly what that guy would, he, he hated, hated pretentious food, even though that's what he started making, you know, for 15, 20 years of his career.
00:36:43
Speaker
He was making those items that took a paragraph to describe on the page of the menu. But all that shit is tiring. It's not only tiring for the chef, it's tiring for the guest. Unless you're going to, I mean, honestly, I think society has kind of moved away from that. And unless, it's almost like those kinds of restaurants are now the theme. Those are the theme restaurants.
00:37:10
Speaker
Those are the places with all the mariachi hats, except, you know, you have, you know, 14 waiters per table, you know, that's great. That's great once in your life, you know, but if you're a regular person who doesn't take a limo everywhere, that kind of shit is tiring and old. It makes you feel uncomfortable, you know.
00:37:32
Speaker
Like I can't relax while I'm eating this because it's just too damn pretentious. Yeah, like Anthony Bourdain was the first one that opened my eyes when I was cooking. I went, the last job I had cooking, I started working for a grocery store company here in Texas. And they had this thing where you could, basically there was an on staff chef and my job was to take stuff from inside the store
00:38:02
Speaker
Um, and teach you how to make dinner with it, you know, and honestly that opened my eyes to what people want to eat more than anything, because I came in with all these, um, you know, culinary world ideas. And then I remember those aren't the people that go to the restaurants. People that go to the restaurant is the mom with four kids and she's tired and she needs to make something that tastes fantastic. Like she spent all day on it and it's quick.
00:38:33
Speaker
And when you start thinking about who your clientele is rather than what you think they might want, just think about who's actually walking in your door. Just make food that they're gonna wanna eat.
Customer Experience and Brand Alignment
00:38:51
Speaker
Yeah, totally. And I mean, all the places that I love going back to brave is one of them. Uh, there's another place on Hastings that I love going to. They've just, I love going to them and all they did, um, was essentially bar snacks, but, but really good bar snacks. So curly fries in New Zealand are almost non-existent. And if you do get them that January shit, this place straight up like competes with the best curly fries I've ever had.
00:39:17
Speaker
And I don't go to someone and I'm like, Hey, dude, do you want to go grab a drink? Like, yeah, sure. Do you know a place? Yeah, I do know a place. Oh, and by the way, let's get curly froze. Like, and I kind of feel like you want you, it's almost, you want that food to be the, Oh, by the way, this whole thing, right? It's, it's not necessarily.
00:39:38
Speaker
If people go there for it, then that's great. But it's that one little point of difference that flicks the switch from going to some other place to come into your place. And you want people to walk in and love you for basically sticking to your knitting, doing what you do best, which is making kick-ass booze.
00:39:58
Speaker
And it's almost like, I can't believe that this place makes such good booze and their food is actually this good as well. You know, that would be my goal if I was going to do all of this. Right. And it might be, you know, like you say, maybe there's only three things like in and out style. There's, it's like maybe a little more than that. There's like two or three burgers and two or three sides. Full stop finished. I mean, you can, you can have a full, a full menu, but it needs to, it needs to be on one page.
00:40:28
Speaker
you know, you need to have, I mean, especially for a place like that, where a lot of times your clientele is going to be standing, you know, because on weekends, you might get a lot of people in there. And so those, those two top tables that you have, they might end up with four or five people around them. And, you know, everybody's standing up, eating their burgers, drinking their, their beer, and listening to whatever music you might have, or just bullshitting, playing games.
00:40:59
Speaker
You've got to think about what do you want the inside of your building to look like when it's full of people? What is everybody doing? Are they talking? Are they listening to music? Are they eating? Just kind of think about all those things together and keep that consideration alive when you're planning what you're... Honestly, I would make sure you have that planned out before you decide
00:41:27
Speaker
what equipment you're gonna get for your distillery. If you're determined to do food, you need to know all the way, you need to have thought all the way through that whole plan to when you have the place is packed. What does it look like? And then you walk back through and you see what your distillery or your brewery looks like and all the equipment that you would need to support the business that you've developed in your mind.
00:41:57
Speaker
And like you said earlier, it's kind of like icing the cake first. You know what the icing looks like. You know what that cake is going to look like now, but what does it take to make that happen? You know, you need to build all the different steps. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, sorry, that's a little far afield. No, it's good. It's good. It's good. I.
00:42:21
Speaker
And there's one place in town too, and I'll give a shout out for this place as well. It's called Brew Union in Palmerston North in New Zealand. If anyone is anywhere near here, make sure you hit it up. If you come from America, you may not think it's that fancy or that great. It's not fancy. It's very approachable until you spend some more time in New Zealand and realize what bars are normally like here. It feels completely at home in San Diego, which is a compliment, not an insult. And I mean that very seriously.
00:42:48
Speaker
And we were going to go there on Friday nights until the babysitter hit herself in the in the ankle with an axe. So that got called off. We've got a rain check for some babysitter still have a foot.
00:43:02
Speaker
Babysitter still has a foot, yes, which I'm very... She's a lovely lady and she deserves a foot. That is rough. And honestly, the thing that they do best is just wood-fired pizza, but they do it good. I have a wood-fired oven in my backyard and I like making pizza.
00:43:23
Speaker
and I'll tell you right now. I remember when we were first coming up with our channels, we were talking back and forth online and you were in the process of building that thing and I was like, you should do a video about that. Did you ever? I still haven't finished making it yet. This is like ammunition for my watch. It's built. You haven't unfinished projects? He looks around at his own yard full of logs.
00:43:50
Speaker
Yeah, dude. My wife tends to give me shit for that. Right around this time of year, when summer comes to a close and she's like, you missed your window again, you didn't finish it. I just need to weatherproof it. But my point is- Throw some trash bags on it, it'll be fine. It's basically got a giant trash bag on it now.
00:44:08
Speaker
My point is that I've spent, I've invested a lot of my hobby time into making wood-fired pizza. And I do a pretty good job of it. It's not amazing, but it's damn good. And if I went to a restaurant or a bar or anything, and I ordered wood-fired pizza, and it's not as good as what I can make at home, I am pissed. Like why the fuck did I just spend $16 on a shitty little pizza?
00:44:39
Speaker
out the door, never coming back. Never coming back. Screw you guys. You lost your chance. How hard is it to get the one thing you do right? Basically is what I'm thinking, right? Yeah. That sounds harsh, but it's 100% true. That's how we all are. I mean, you're not going to, you're not going to waste your money, you know, giving somebody a second chance if they fuck up something that you make, you know, if, uh, you know, think of a really complicated menu item that you've never made and you don't know how to make.
00:45:09
Speaker
If they fuck that up, you might be like, that seems like it's really hard to make. I can see how they- I'll give you one more chance. I'll give you one more chance. My wife had the XYZ and she said that was really good. So we'll go back. But if you fuck up a pizza, yeah, no more chances. No. And the reason that I love Brew Union is because they do a really good job of wood-fired pizzas. It's maybe not the entire, it's not exactly the style of pizza,
00:45:38
Speaker
that I like all the time. But I can get behind the fact that it's a personal preference that's different, not a quality, a process, a skill as a pizza maker thing, if that makes sense. So I guess if you can dial things way back to a few core ideas on the, maybe your menu is if you can't cook it in a wood-fired oven,
00:46:05
Speaker
we don't make it. Right. You know, that can be and you can make stuff from all over the world, different types of cuisine, but it's all wood fine pizza. And I guess that's what I'm saying with a common thread. Yeah. But making something simple like that, you can master it. You can get the kitchen to a level where it is very, very, very good food, even though it's simple. Quickly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
00:46:30
Speaker
You want them to nail it on day one because your grand opening, you can have a soft grand opening, but where it's just friends and family and maybe a couple of business owners nearby. But when you do a big grand opening, don't do it until you're ready. If that pizza is not perfect, every time it comes out of the oven, wait.
00:46:54
Speaker
And I think the thing that people, I've seen them do this so often, right? It's kind of like, well, we're here for X and we've got this other part of the business that's tacked on almost as a necessity. And that doesn't really matter. Everything you do in that establishment reflects on the quality of your gym. If you're there and half-assing it on this part of your business,
00:47:20
Speaker
why should I trust you to whole loss it on this other part of your business, right? Yeah. And that's, that's, uh, you've got to think about every aspect of your business, not just the food, not just your booze, your, your, your service staff. You know, if your, if your weight staff is rude or they're, they're just, they're, they're not the kind of person that you want to hang out with when you're getting food.
00:47:50
Speaker
then don't let them work for you. You need to have people that mesh with you really well so that they represent you the way you would want to represent yourself when you're not in the room.
Chef Collaborations in Distilleries
00:48:04
Speaker
So you've got to think about all those different aspects. Or if you have food trucks, make sure they're run by awesome people that you like hanging out with.
00:48:16
Speaker
If the guy that makes the really cool chili dogs that you have in your parking lot is a total dick and drunk half the time, but he makes awesome chili dogs, get somebody else. You do not want a Yelp review. Yeah, the booze were good, but man, that chili dog guy was
00:48:34
Speaker
complete asshole and he kept putting his dick all over my chili and which is ironic because the Tucker truck right chili dog truck was called balls deep I didn't realize it was gonna be literal yeah dude it's it's a tricky one man and I think the staff need to be on the same page but everything right like if yeah you're a distillery that is making craft whiskey you can't have
00:49:04
Speaker
Like even a waiter that isn't serving drinks, you can't have someone who just doesn't like whiskey and doesn't get why people are here and doesn't care. And it's like, Oh yeah, we do whiskey, but I don't know. I don't get it. Honestly, I'd be into everything. If I had, if I had a business, the first thing I would do before we ever opened is I would have each and every one of those people sit with me when I make a batch, when I run the still.
00:49:32
Speaker
I want them to know the work that goes into it, the whole process so that they get invested in the grain that's going into my fermenter or into my mash ton. And so that they're invested in the drops that come out and in what goes into the barrels and all that all the way through the process. And even if you just do it as a team, you know, have everybody in great, everybody's going to sit with you all night long babysitting that still.
00:50:03
Speaker
so that they can just get immersed in the process so that when they talk to customers about it, they are just as passionate about it as you are. And you can't manufacture that. You can't just give someone a rah-rah meeting. This is what we're about. And we make whiskey, and it's really good. And make sure you tell everybody about, no, no, no. No, no. Take the next day off from whatever else you had planned
00:50:31
Speaker
because we're all going to go camp out in the distillery and sleep next to the still while it's running. We're going to run a big 12 hour batch together.
00:50:41
Speaker
Yeah, and do it conversely as well. If you're going to do that, have the same night. Right. We're all going into the kitchen. Exactly. And we are all making our dinner tonight. We're all going to hang out and make it. Everybody should know what everything tastes like on the menu. And everybody should know everything that goes into making the liquor that they're going to be responsible for promoting and selling. So yeah, all the way through the business.
00:51:11
Speaker
Yeah, if your staff are not a united front and don't believe in everything that you believe in and are aligned with the company. Failure City. That is Failure City. Yeah. So the same place, Brew Union that I was talking about, that do the Wood Fight pizzas, they also have a
00:51:33
Speaker
It's funny, man, I keep coming back to the food that I want in a brewery or in a cellar door or in a distillery to basically be street food. Yeah, that's been taken to a slightly higher level, you know, like it's food that instead of charging.
00:51:48
Speaker
you know, four bucks for whatever it is, you can charge twelve dollars for it and people are pissed at you. You know what I mean? But it's not fancy food still. No, it's still a burger, but it might have a might have a three dollar slice of cheese on it from, you know, some cool place in Spain, you know, because it tastes good, not because it's from Spain, but because it fucking tastes good. You know,
00:52:12
Speaker
And the bacon on this burger was made by my friend down the road who's got a pig farm and a smokehouse and, you know, all the cool things that you can still kind of have that rustic made here feel, but have a little bit of a story behind it. All those things kind of add to the experience. It doesn't, and you, you avoid it being pretentious by not being a fuck.
00:52:41
Speaker
Huh? By not being a fuckwit? Yeah, well, yeah. You can't make a burger pretentious, right? Well, you can, but you've got to be a real cold to make a burger like douchey. But anyway, so my point was that the chef there is a really damn good chef, and it is cool to see a really good chef
00:53:04
Speaker
making that sort of food and kicking ass at it, and having the skill and the management abilities to have everyone else on the team making that kick ass food too. But,
00:53:17
Speaker
What it then allows them to do is to do some really cool conceptual stuff and event type stuff. So one of the things that I did, that I attended at the establishment was a collaboration between a local New Zealand gin distillery and the chef. And it was, I think it was a five course meal and every course was paired with a gin and every gin
00:53:48
Speaker
had a cocktail made for it and I went into it thinking ah whatever it'll be nice food and I'll just drink the gin straight so I can actually kind of like try and pull the gin apart I'll tell you what man those guys are nailed it the cocktails that they made made the gin taste more like gin than drinking gin by itself
00:54:09
Speaker
the every single cocktail made every single bite of food taste better every single bite of food made every single drop of gin or cocktail taste better and every single course and pairing kind of had not like a full story to it but i guess a theme to it yeah
00:54:30
Speaker
A common thread that runs through the whole thing. Citrus can be, if you've got a citrus thing in one of your gins and you can have several different items that are all made from that gin, that can be a storyline. Oh, every gin was different too. So it was like five different gins with five different foods. And that doesn't happen unless you have a chef of that kind of caliber
00:54:58
Speaker
working at your location, right? So that turned into a really cool event. It was cool for the distiller because he could show up and show his stuff off to everyone. And it was actually a collaboration between the two. So like they'd been talking for weeks and weeks and weeks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of planning goes into that stuff. Yeah. Because it's an exhibition for both venues, even though they're separate businesses, they're working together to draw more customers to both of them.
00:55:29
Speaker
and the fact that that's what it is it's an experience and it's an it's an evening of being entertained by food and booze means that you can do stuff that you wouldn't I would never
00:55:41
Speaker
Dream of doing on a regular menu right because you you pre-sale tickets, you know, there's a hundred people asses and seats You know that we're doing every second plate is different or everyone gets exactly the same thing or whatever it happens to be You don't have the concern with prep and all those sort of things. So I would be very interested to hear
00:56:01
Speaker
Um, I know this is a little bit off the top of your head and I'm cornering you here and putting it on the spot. But, uh, if you had a, like a classically trained chef on staff, what other sort of things would that enable you to do? And I think the circles right back to what you're saying at the beginning, right? Like making using the alcohol that you have in certain sources or pairing things together. Yeah. I mean, there's a.
00:56:29
Speaker
There's a whole lot that you can do. You can make a burger fantastic by having a whiskey sauce on it that uses classical French techniques to create it, but you don't have to go into that on the menu. But having a really high-end chef who knows what the fuck they're doing to produce that and produce it consistently every single time
00:56:58
Speaker
Um, like it came out of a bottle. That's, that's one of the things that's really important for restaurants is so that my experience when I come in November is the same as it's going to be in July of next year. And the better the chef is the better, the tighter they run the kitchen and the more likely you're going to have that consistency, but also.
00:57:26
Speaker
you're not gonna have to come up with all the really cool menu items, they are. They're gonna sit with you and baby the still, and they're gonna learn how mashes are made and how that whiskey or gin or whatever is made, and they're gonna love it. Because let me tell you, the chef part of me loves the shit out of recipe creation when it comes to liquor and beer.
00:57:53
Speaker
One of the most interesting things about this hobby for me is the fact that you can take one ingredient, modify it very slightly like getting the grain from a different field,
00:58:06
Speaker
and you have a completely different product. And having a chef that is competent enough to be able to taste that whiskey that you made last year and the whiskey that you made this year and say, you know what, I think because this has a higher vanilla note or this has more wood tannin, whatever, we need to do a different sauce. We need to go with a different tack. I think we should even use lamb instead of beef and whatever. That's what a really well-trained chef is gonna be able to do.
00:58:35
Speaker
And it's not just somebody that went to culinary school. It's somebody that has experience and also the willingness to learn from you and do things that you want done without too much of their own ego in the way. When chefs are young, speaking from personal experience, we are dicks. They're absolute dicks. Let me tell you a little story.
00:59:06
Speaker
I was in culinary school and I was not with my wife, but we were friends. And her sister was having a Thanksgiving party and invited me over. And I got just drunk enough to critique her boyfriend's gumbo.
00:59:32
Speaker
I'm tasting everything that I need to taste here on my tongue, but on the back of my tongue, I mean, I was awful. It is a cringy nightmare memory that I have to live with for the rest of my life. Here's the fun part. My sister-in-law lives next door. I have never made gumbo for her ever, and I never will because I know she remembers that night. And that kind of ego,
01:00:01
Speaker
Sometimes we'll stick with a chef through their entire career. They'll always be like that even when they're wrong. Avoid that. Look for that. Know that it can happen and avoid that in a chef. Yeah, it's funny man. I think it's with any hobby, with any craft. It's so often when people feel like they have something to prove.
01:00:24
Speaker
especially when you have ownership over something. And I don't mean physically I own this business. When you create something, it is mine. This was my creation. This came from me. If you can't take criticism about it, if it's your whiskey or your burgers, you should just go pound sand because it's not going to work, man.
01:00:49
Speaker
It's not going to work. Yeah. If you cannot be, if you cannot have sort of a self critique. Yeah. Yeah. And you need to be able to take a step away from your product. You need to be your own worst critic. That's the perspective perspective. Yeah. And that's another thing is when you're picking a chef, you, you'll kind of, if they are on the same vibe as you and, and you guys work together, great.
01:01:15
Speaker
A lot of times you'll kind of fall in love with how they do things and how you communicate and you'll become great friends and you will miss mistakes that they're making. And so you have to have the ability to take a step back and examine the people that you trust the most as well as really taking a hard look and an examination at yourself and your own practices.
01:01:40
Speaker
So you've got to be able to critique yourself and critique the people that you trust the most. I think that's almost even more important once you start to discover a little success, right? It's pretty easy for everyone to be hungry. What's the biggest criticism? What's the biggest criticism that you have when you find something that's wonderful and amazing and they just started like last year? Two years down the road, you try it again and you're like,
01:02:11
Speaker
something's missing. This is different. What happened? Are they cutting corners? Did they get a different chef? Are they using different, do they not give a crap anymore? Did they sell the business and it's run by new people? And I just don't know. Why does this whiskey taste so different? Why is it so flat now? You know,
01:02:30
Speaker
You've got to be able to take a step back and be critical of yourself and say, my whiskey sucks now. I have to go back to doing things the way I was, or I got to figure out what I'm doing now that I wasn't doing before and eliminate that, or whatever changes I've got to make. You've got to maintain that consistency perpetually. I mean, why is Jack Daniels still so popular?
01:02:54
Speaker
because it never changes, not ever. It is always the same. You know that the bottle you buy in 1976 is going to taste the same as the bottle bought in 2016. It's always the same. That's how you make money in the long run.
01:03:13
Speaker
if you're mass producing, but you can take that idea and scale it down to from year one to year five of my restaurant or brewery or distillery, is the quality still there? Or better? Because here's the thing, guys. Nobody's going to open the door. It's a good point. Nobody's going to open the door, and it's perfect on day one. If it is,
01:03:39
Speaker
Yeah, then you are at a rock star. Yeah. The other thing is too, as a producer of craft spirits, you just don't have the volume to be able to create a completely consistent product. So you go. Yeah. Never have. You're never going to have a barrel warehouse with 4,000 barrels in it that you can.
01:03:59
Speaker
pick and choose a leader out of all the different barrels that you need in order to make that 5,000 liter batch that's going into your bottler. Yeah, so if you're going to have variation, your variation needs to err on the side of improvement. And also intention.
01:04:20
Speaker
If the characteristics of what you're producing are going to change and you can't help it because of the size of your business, you need to make that intentional. So like Garrison Brothers, you know, they have some whiskey that's not my favorite. It's a little too hot. It's a little too sharp. It's a little too tannic. But they market that one. I think it's their cowboy whiskey. It's not my favorite.
01:04:50
Speaker
Um, that one is marketed with kind of that in your face kind of attitude. And then they've got the reserves and, you know, so you just have to kind of, if you're going to make changes, you got to mean it, you got to own it and, and label it as such. Don't try and pass it off as, Oh yeah, this is the same as it's always been. No, it isn't. And everybody could taste that. Yeah, dude. Um, all right. So.
01:05:20
Speaker
we were gonna talk about some random shit as well. I think we've beaten that about to death, or at least, I would be interested actually to put this out of the universe, to see whether people give a shit about what we're talking about, to see if it's something they're thinking about, and potentially circle back to it, you know, maybe in six months after there's been some response. So if- And honestly, if you want, you can get someone who's actually qualified to answer these questions that owns a distillery or owns a restaurant.
01:05:48
Speaker
Okay. So here's the thing. I have a lot of experience, but it's all just for someone else. Yeah. So here's the thing, guys. I've been drinking the 1919 Pineapple Bits gin, and I've seen... I need a transition, actually. I'm going to get a whiskey now. What am I going to have? I am going to run in and grab a beer real quick. I'll be right back.
Casual Discussion and Yeast Experiments
01:06:13
Speaker
Yeah, no problem. I'll carry on. So I'm going to hit up a Starwood Solira
01:06:19
Speaker
bottle both of which guys uh guests on the on the uh on the podcast recently and both of which i am very impressed with their product so i'm not just drinking this because it's here i'm drinking it because it's delicious uh let me knock this back but my point is that we've gotten to the point now where uh better than i are both obviously slightly tipsy and slightly jolly hold on and i knew we were going to get into the weeds on a few different things
01:06:47
Speaker
to talk about one of which is I have just started a fermentation with hold on there we go that's the star with celera hitting the glass very very nice drink by the way guys if you can get it and i'm pretty sure you can get it almost uh worldwide now pick one up and give it a natural straw but uh for hornondale
01:07:12
Speaker
The Hornedale has just taken off today and if you're not sure what this stuff is, it's a Kvike yeast. Are you talking about that? Yeah, I figured we'd get into it, man. I think we're both admitting that we're slightly tipsy and we're into the weeds now, so let's just talk about that. You might be. God damn, this is good whiskey, man.
01:07:34
Speaker
This is a good fucking beer. I'm going to have to. I'll see if I can get a sample of this. The Starwood Celera. I'll see if I can get one out of it. I'll be really interested to see what you think of it. There's some stuff I need to send to you. OK, cool. So anyway, the Kvayk. Fuminting at 40 degrees Celsius. 40 degrees Celsius. Let me do a conversion for you real quick. What is that? What's your normal temperature? 27.
01:08:02
Speaker
I know we do around, well, it depends what it is. Beers 18, see up to about 21 rising over time. Try to remember. We start at about 22 to 23 and then it rise up to sort of 26, 27 over time. But this is? 40 years. What is it? It's going to be closer. 104. Whoa! 104 degrees Celsius.
01:08:31
Speaker
I'm just double checking that to make sure I put the right numbers in. I did. Yeah, that's crazy. And let's back up a little bit further even. These are beer people recommending 104 degrees. And I normally like with the same yeast that distillers will use, they'll be fermenting at 18 or 19 degrees. And this is the Omega? This is a Hornondale by Omega. Okay.
01:08:57
Speaker
Yep. I don't think I'm going to put this little saga into the video that I'm making about it because I think it just kind of pollutes the, well, it takes away from the idea of what the video is about. But due to COVID, I have to assume the pack that I got was very old and it looked like it had been through the ringer a little bit.
01:09:19
Speaker
And I was worried that it was just completely dead. It stunk like yeast autolysis. It was pretty nasty. But I pitched it anyway and gave it a whirl. I did two teaspoons of liquid yeast for 23 liters at 2.75.
01:09:41
Speaker
Like if, to put that in perspective, if I was using a USO five, I would pitch two or three packets of USO five. Yeah. I mean, that's dry use. So it's not a great comparison, but yeah, it's nuts. And then the day after ripping, absolutely ripping, just cranking with what time, what time of day did you put that used in? Oh, probably eight o'clock, nine o'clock last night. So you didn't, uh, you, you pitched it and then you went back inside. Yeah.
01:10:11
Speaker
Yeah. Okay. So you didn't like hanging out. No, I checked it about an hour and a half, two hours later, because I've heard stories that the stuff will just take off like it's ready. Uh, and it did not, but keep in mind that this is yeast that is dude, like if it was half the viability rate of what it should have been, I would be surprised. I would think it would even lower than that. Um, it's possible that if you've got a brand new fresh pack, that it would kick off even faster than that. But
01:10:40
Speaker
104 degrees Fahrenheit. That is nuts. That is time to go to the hospital because you have a crazy high fever and you're just about four degrees Fahrenheit away from having a stroke.
01:10:57
Speaker
That is crazy. And the smell coming off it right now is absolutely intense. What do you got going on? It's pineapple, but not pineapple. It doesn't have that, not citrusy, no, it doesn't have that sour tartness that pineapple, the fresh pineapple has. The appetizer I think has pineapple, mango and mandarin, which I think is accurate.
01:11:27
Speaker
But I would almost just say more like mango paupau or papaya, whatever you wanna call it, and passion fruit, I guess. There's definitely a little citrusiness to it. But it just- Is there any of the banana and clove thing going on that you sometimes get? Really? Nothing. That is interesting. So I cannot wait to put this stuff through the still and see
01:11:54
Speaker
What was your mash ingredients, by the way? You never told me. Did you tell them? Yeah, I will. This will actually be coming out a little bit ahead of time, but whatever. The people that listen an hour and a quarter into this podcast. I'm on. Nobody's going to watch it with me.
01:12:12
Speaker
Um, it was, uh, I made the, it was the video that went out today. So it was a, it was a basic, um, like one type of baseball and it was, uh, distillate. Oh, yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah. I haven't watched that one yet. I have several of your videos in my queue.
01:12:28
Speaker
Yeah, I've been shitty at watching. I still haven't watched your wine one, dude. Yeah, so it was literally just a Gladfield distillism, which to be fair is more like a hybrid kind of thing. It's not really a true distillism, I would say. Eight kilos for 23 liters starting or strike water plus sparge back up to 23 liters, mashed at 65 degrees Celsius.
01:12:58
Speaker
and it hit 1075. The reason I used the distillers malt is that I made a very, very similar recipe, damn near exactly the same for the malt collab a while ago. So I figured I can use, instead of having to side by side the Hornondale with US05 to see if it has an impact, I can side by side it with that one I made a while ago. Yeah dude, but if any of that flavor carries through,
01:13:27
Speaker
Hell yeah. Yeah. It smells like, it straight up smells like a more tropical version of a Nipah. Like it, like more, it's like more tropical fruit than that. Doesn't, for Nipah's, um, doesn't a lot of the fruit character for those come through from the hops? Yep. Isn't it like most of it or all of it? Yeah. So you're getting this from yeast and grain.
01:13:57
Speaker
That is nuts. It is the single most prominent yeast characteristic I have ever had. Have you used SO4? Which one? SO4. It's kind of reminiscent of that, but dialed up to 11, like just off the charts.
01:14:24
Speaker
It's, yeah, it's bonkers. And I know for a fact that there is a shit ton of distillers using, it's funny, the first people I heard it from was ironroot.
01:14:34
Speaker
And they let me know that they were co-pitching SO4 and M1. So the English beer strain along with the quote unquote McCallum strain, this still is used, essentially to get some fruity esters going on from the 04 and then clean it up and get a few more sort of conjunate creating stuff. But that's a dry it out.
01:15:01
Speaker
And since I've since I've talked to them, there's been a bunch of distilleries that are doing exactly the same. But this is the thing is, you know, if you have somebody like Ironroot that is basically there, they're the take a chance guys. You know, I mean, there's a there's a lot of guys out there that are that are doing some amazing things and taking risks and trying new things that nobody else has done. But it seems like
01:15:29
Speaker
And maybe it's just because I watch your channel all the time. Iron Root is doing a lot of that and they're doing it really well. And it's working for them, you know? So, I mean, I guess that's what I was saying. I thought that co-pitching 04, when I first heard it from them, I thought it was something that they were doing that was very experimental.
01:15:52
Speaker
Um, I don't, the more I hear it, the more I think it's, uh, I'm sure that kind of thing has been around a long time. Um, just exact combination. Oh, that exact combination. Sorry. These guys, uh, these guys starwood that I'm drinking right now. I can't imagine anybody else bothering to reveal that combination. What, whatever yeast strains and combinations they might be using.
01:16:16
Speaker
Oh yeah, the guys at Ironroot, the Licorice brothers are insanely transparent. Generous. They are generous. Oh dude, totally. Sam? Yeah, Sam from Starwood.
01:16:28
Speaker
he told me that they use a fruity brewer's strain plus M1. And so I'm having a hunch it's probably similar. I know that Balconas do the same thing. Anyway, my point being is that this is so freaking fruity compared to 04 that if even half of what it's doing now carries through into the still, it would probably be a case of you'd put down like
01:16:55
Speaker
a few barrels with this stuff and then you blend it. It's going to come out tasting like a rum dude. That's what I was thinking. When you first said pineapple, I was like, wait a minute, he's not doing molasses. When you were describing all the different fruits, I'm just thinking, wait a minute, he's not doing a rum, he's doing a whiskey.
01:17:18
Speaker
Wait a minute. What? I mean, the plan was to do something that I am most comfortable with, so it's easy for me to compare, to A, B it later on and see if there's actually. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. But yeah, I could totally see it being applied to a rum. I think that would be fun. Oh, can you imagine if you had some stinky rotten dunder and then you threw that at the viking? Oh, what? What? Check some dunder and throw some blue cheese in it.
01:17:47
Speaker
old bacon and whatever, just to let it get all stinky and grows on the back porch and then growing some kavai. I mean this it might actually be a good option for more like a something more like a like a clean commercial sweet fruity rum with none of the interaction just to make something that's that's quite yeah like uh
01:18:14
Speaker
The wood aging experiment that I did with the rum with like four different types of wood in it. That one, I mean, it's just, you know, Captain Morgan silver and it's back to that, you know, commercial, very consistent flavor. No matter when you buy it, it's always going to taste the same. But that said, it had a really interesting like mango and raspberry thing going on.
01:18:43
Speaker
no matter when you drink it, it always has that. And I don't think they dunder that one.
01:18:49
Speaker
I think that one's coming from yeast. I just, I have a, I have a suspicion because there, there's no funk at all. It's just the fruit esters right on top. So, so if, uh, if anyone's out there and doesn't know what we're talking about with the, the hogo, the funk, the danda, uh, the few ones that I've found a Smith and cross get that you should be able to get it. Like we can get, I can get it here in New Zealand, so you should be able to get it. I think I've seen it.
01:19:17
Speaker
Very good and rum fire and it's essentially it's very much a Jamaican pot still Funky Rum thing going on and if you're into if you like blue cheese, if you like kimchi if you like sauerkraut Any of that sort of stuff Yeah, you should you should probably give it a nudge. You're gonna love it Those things you should still try it. I mean
01:19:49
Speaker
I don't know, that's one of the, bug landing on me. That's one of the weird things about rum. If you do not know what thunder is, look it up because, holy crap, that is some gross stuff. There's an apocryphal story about somebody that went on a distillery tour at one of the rum distillers down in Jamaica and there was a pit.
01:20:15
Speaker
over outside the distillery where they were pumping this sludge, you know, all the waste from the distillery. And a guy saw them drop like animal carcasses into the pit. And that's the stuff. They mix it back in. Yeah. Yeah. Dunder is crazy. But like every time I've heard about somebody's funky dunder on their back porch that they've got going and they can't wait to
01:20:45
Speaker
to put it in the still to run it. Um, I'm just like, are you sure you're not going to die? You're not going to die. All right, man. Uh, what have you, what have you, what are you working on at the moment that you want to tell us about Zuni, uh, sneak through? Um, I have, um, I have an update on the beer garden coming.
01:21:08
Speaker
We got hit by some really powerful rainstorms for like four or five days and it flattened my grain. So I had to do some extraordinary measures to get that to stand back up. And so that'll be in the video. I also started a... Oh, there it is. I started something called a wicking bucket. If you've never heard of it, Google it.
01:21:37
Speaker
basically a five gallon bucket with some coke bottles in it, some soils and fertilizer, and then you plant your stuff in it. And the interesting thing, I just did it as an experiment. I have some extra corn seeds and I was like, let's see what happens with this. The corn in my bed is, I think the biggest one is probably about that big around. The two that I have growing in my wicking bucket,
01:22:07
Speaker
are almost as big around as my wrist and they have pups growing out of them. So there's one plant has turned into three because there's just more than enough water, more than enough nutrition, and they're growing crazy. So I think I'm going to do a video about that for folks that live with limited backyard space or an apartment, you know, balcony that they can't really
01:22:33
Speaker
grow a ton of stuff on, but you know, you could put five buckets out there and grow. I think you could grow enough corn to do one batch of beer or one batch of whiskey. That's pretty crazy, man. You are nuts, dude. I like, I've got a lot of patience for, uh, trying random things I think compared to most people, but dude, growing your own crate and then molting it.
01:22:58
Speaker
And then brewing with it? I don't know, man. It's fun, man. Before you and I had our channels up, you asked me a question about what kind of stuff I was into. And I said that I really liked learning the most basic way things are done. The primitive skills channels, how do you do things when you have nothing? Or how did they used to do things when they had nothing?
01:23:29
Speaker
That's why I got into malting. And you said, oh, you're a skills collector. And I think that that's true. I mean, I taught myself how to make soap for crying out loud. I like learning the most basic way to do things and then seeing if I can. I don't know, I just. The pandemic really kind of put a pin in it for me. You know, I don't want to I don't want to run out of stuff and I
01:23:59
Speaker
I really like alcohol. Yeah, it's a good point. Like I can make my own moves, but I can't if I get cut off from the local homebrew store, I, you know, there's only so many times you can raid the pantry and still come out with something that. Yeah. And you know, the thing is, there's still no baker's ease. There's no bread used at the store right now. Wow. I have champagne. Yeah. I have champagne yeast that I've been making bread with.
01:24:25
Speaker
I have a sourdough starter and I have champagne used because that's all I've got and let me tell you pretzels don't turn out quite as well when you don't have baker's yeast. The champagne used it just uh it needs a lot more sugar to to really do its thing but um you know it's it's things like that that just kind of make you think
01:24:49
Speaker
you know, the world is a lot smaller now. So if something really bad happens on one side of the world, like I don't know if this is accurate or not. I was complaining about the yeast thing to my sister and she said that she heard, now granted this is on the internet, so it might be total crap. She heard that one of the main facilities where most of the bread yeast is made for the world
01:25:18
Speaker
had a bad outbreak, so they had to shut down. And that's why it's hard to get. I don't know if that's accurate or if everybody just hoarded so much bread yeast because they somehow decided that they were going to start baking, that, you know, the market is just having trouble catching back up. But I can get sanitizer and I can get, you know, like Clorox wipes. And I think you can probably get masks online now.
01:25:45
Speaker
But yeast, that section of the shelf is now filled with baking soda, you know?
YouTube Channel and DIY Projects
01:25:53
Speaker
Yeah, totally, man. Yeah, we had rumors going around here because we couldn't get... Yeast disappeared for a little while and then came back. It's not too bad. But to be honest, I haven't been looking. I didn't have any of that. I got like 10 things of champagne yeast and I haven't needed any more, so I haven't looked.
01:26:15
Speaker
But every time I go to the store, I look for the baker's yeast, and there's none there. That's funny how everyone suddenly wants to bake. Yeah. Are you actually baking? I don't think you're baking. No, I can guarantee you there's probably half of that yeast that was bought is still going to be in people's cabinets a year from now. And all I have to say is, fuck you, dude, who bought all the yeast, because I really need it. Yeah.
01:26:42
Speaker
Yeah, there is. I really want to make some pretzels. A mass slow yeast genocide happening right now. Yeah. Yeast cells just finding a nasty death in people's covers all over the world. Slow pitiful death in someone's dark cabinet. Just, you know, desiccating and drying away to nothing. They wanted to go out in the blazing glory in a hot oven. Yeah. Yeah. And sad. All right, dude. Sad yeast here.
01:27:11
Speaker
I know that we have a fairly long list of questions from the Patreons. And I also know that we've run out of official things to talk about. So I would have put this in the intro, but let people know where to find you on the internet and find your videos. My channel is called Bearded and Bored. And if you don't know that, you probably haven't been watching Jesse's channel very long. But come on over because I do a lot of interesting brewing stuff and I am growing my own beer from scratch.
01:27:41
Speaker
other random shit too, you were like milling your own timber.
Innovative Timber Milling Technique
01:27:44
Speaker
Oh, dude. Oh my God. I totally forgot to tell you. Oh, tell me. Do tell. I figured out a new way to mill timber. Like I had that saw mill, the attachment that you hook onto your chainsaw to go horizontally.
01:28:02
Speaker
Um, there's this Russian dude named, um, Max Egorov and he has a really cool, really cool YouTube channel. He's building like a log cabin out the woods in Russia. And, uh, he tried the, the Alaskan mill and he tried one other technique and he got frustrated with him. So he just tried something else and I copied him and holy shit, it worked. Basically he would just take a rope and run it across the top of your log.
01:28:32
Speaker
And then you let the, basically the nose of the chainsaw draw a line down next to that rope. And then you just keep going back down that line and it goes deeper and deeper. And you just let the bottom tip of the chainsaw touch down in the crotch of that groove. And so there's only two or three teeth of the chainsaw coming in contact with the wood. But man, it just, I've got a,
01:29:01
Speaker
I wish it was daytime. I could show you. I have a 17 foot long, 22 inch in diameter. So almost two feet in diameter and more than three meters long log that I cut in 15 minutes. I just cut a slice right out of it. And so now I actually have a real method. I've been procrastinating so long on cutting these timbers because I was just
01:29:30
Speaker
I mean, the experience I had doing the cedar was a nightmare. It took 30 minutes to push through a two meter long log. It was maybe about that big around. It was just, you know, but this thing, man, it just ripped right through it. So you can keep moving quick. You just keep going. You're almost like scoring through the tree. You just go down through the top. And then, yeah, you just kind of, and the weird thing
01:29:59
Speaker
is the cut is completely vertical. As long as your chain is sharpened properly, both directions, that saw will just guide itself straight down. So if you go and stand at the end of the log,
01:30:14
Speaker
It's just this perfect, you know, like, here's the round log and then this perfect little line cut. And I was like, holy crap, it worked. So I sent him a message on Facebook or on YouTube. I was like, dude, I tried it and it worked so well. Thanks so much. And he was like, cool. It's like, if I do a video about it, I'm going to give you a shout out. But man, I have so much wood to go through and
01:30:43
Speaker
you know, my whole family's like, so when are you gonna get to that? But now I actually have a viable method to cut through it all. And I think tomorrow I'm gonna cut a couple of timbers to make a raised bed out in the front yard.
01:31:00
Speaker
Nice. Very nice. All right, man. Thanks a bunch, dude. This has been an absolute blast. We're going to chill backstage and talk for the Patreons, answer their questions. But thank you, man. I appreciate it. Everyone, if you haven't checked out Bearded's channel yet, do so.
01:31:19
Speaker
Thanks a bunch to Better Than Board for hanging out with me again. It's always a pleasure to be able to hang with this guy. I thoroughly appreciate his company and his companionship. Make sure you go and check his channel out, guys. Better Than Board on YouTube. If this is a discussion that you think warrants a little more time later on, we can circle back around to it in a future podcast. Let me know. Perhaps you've got a different guest that you think might be applicable to this conversation as well. In any case, guys, don't forget the sponsors of this video.
01:31:49
Speaker
adventures in homebrewing at homebrewing.org slash ctc gladfield malt and of course the kick-ass patreons Keep on chasing the craft guys. I'll catch you next time. See ya