Barrel to Bottle Episode 66: J. Rieger Distillery

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to another episode of Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. My name is Kristin Marie Ellis. I'm happy to have my guests and co-hosts here with me today. Let's start with Mr. Greg Versch. Hey, Greg. Hey. welcome back. Thanks. And of course, the Whiskey Hotline dudes, we've got Joe Maloney. Hey, Kristin. Hey, how are you? Yeah, thanks for having us here. Thanks for coming back. It's good to have you. Brett Pontani. Hello. Oh, hello. How are you? Oh, you know, super good. And our special guest, so happy to have Mr. Ryan Maybee. Hey, Ryan. How are you? I'm very well. So, you're here to represent J. Rieger. J. Rieger and Company, yeah. And can you tell me about the beginnings of J. Rieger, how it all got started way down in Kansas City, Missouri? Yeah, do you want the 1800s version or the 21st century version? Whatever one is longer. No, whatever one is the most fun and has the most illegal crime, you know, stuck into it. Oh, wow. That's a tough one. Well, okay, so the origin of the company actually dates back to 1887 in Kansas City. It was started by Jacob Rieger and grew to become a really big nationally known brand. It was actually, they claimed to be the largest whiskey wholesaler in the United States. They shipped direct to consumer back then. And we have a lot of records of old mail order order forms and about 100 different bottlings. And they claim to have had over 250,000 unique customers. It was shipped coast to coast, you know, grew so big that the founder's son, Alexander Rieger, then built a hotel in Kansas City called the Rieger Hotel in 1915. But then in 1919, prohibition happened and put us out of business entirely. The distillery shut down immediately. And then within a couple of years, Alexander sold the hotel and the whole thing was kind of lost and forgotten for about 95 years. Until I kind of accidentally stumbled upon it. And how did that happen? Well, my background is in the bar and restaurant industry. So I was looking to open up a bar back in 2008, looking for kind of a small, discreet, kind of tucked away location to do kind of a high end craft cocktail bar. And I was looking in a part of Kansas City that was sort of emerging at the time, but not a lot of traffic down there. So I found this basement space in this old hotel building. It was no longer a functioning hotel, but opened Manifesto in April of 2009. And then one year later, I was looking to expand and open a restaurant on the first floor of that old building and just wanted to know more about the history of the building itself. So I started digging into the history of the building and discovered its roots as a hotel called the Rieger Hotel, and then discovered the connection to this brand. Prior to that, I had no idea it even existed. I had no clue that there was a whiskey distillery in Kansas City dating back that far. So it was kind of a light bulb moment. I want to know more about this building. Is there other stuff in it or is it just like a bunch of squatters above you? It was for a while, yeah. I mean, it was kind of dilapidated for several decades. And, you know, it's actually kind of hard to trace the history of it exactly because it changed hands a lot, you know, like through the 60s, 70s and 80s. And then in the 1990s, it kind of became a seedy kind of dive bar for a while. And again, there's got some like old newspaper clippings and stories about some things that went down. There was kind of interesting. But then around the early 2000s, a gentleman bought it and remodeled the whole building, turned the upper floors into residential, into a condo space. It was really beautiful. And then a few years later is when I rented out the basement to open the bar. Captive audience. You gotta have a consumer base built into your building. It's terrific. Right. Absolutely. Now, there was only one couple living upstairs when I first opened Manifesto. But there was actually a transient hotel across the street that was still advertising hourly rates at the time. It was something else. Yeah. So you're like, oh yeah, we're in the hotel down on Jones Street. And they're like, oh, that one, like no, the other one. The one across the street, yeah. Tell me about resurrecting the distillery then. How was that project for you from start to finish? Like how stressful? I can just imagine. Well, I never intended on starting a distillery. That was never part of the plan. I just wanted to have a restaurant and a bar. But as soon as I learned about this, I felt like it was something I absolutely had to do. Then when I opened the restaurant called The Rieger in 2010, I met Andy Rieger who is the great-great-great-grandson of the founder, Jacob Rieger. He was the last living member of the Rieger family that started this whole thing. I was just like, wow, we have to bring back your brand. We got to bring back your family's brand back from the dead. That started this whole journey back in 2010. Eventually, Andy jumped on board and we released our first product in October of 2014. We're about to turn four years old. Wow. Happy birthday. When did you start to sell with us here at Binny's Beverage Depot? That's a good question. Illinois and Chicago specifically was our first market outside of the Kansas City area, outside of Kansas and Missouri. I believe we launched here one year after we started the company. We would have been around this time in 2015, so about three years ago. And I think Binny's was the first. Correct, because the first tasting you did for us, we ended up having to abbreviate and cancel, so we could go and watch the Cubs and the Royals both play in the playoffs. At Clark Street Ale House. Correct. Absolutely. Nowhere else. What happened with your brand here in Chicago? How was it received being the next focus market for you guys and in growth? I think it's been really, really great. We kind of coincided the launch of the Chicago market with the release of our gin and really made the gin, you know, the Kansas City Whiskey is our biggest product. That's our kind of our flagship, but the gin has been a focus as well. And so the reception has been overwhelmingly positive. We kind of focus on premise, you know, with a lot of bars and restaurants, that's kind of, you know, where I think our products and our brand fit in best. But we've done a lot of business with Binny's. I think we're in all of the locations and, you know, it's been, it's been a lot of fun. And I think what I heard when we first launched here in this area was I just get, I got so much feedback from other people in the industry, other bartenders, other bar owners, other people that work on the distribution side that I've known for years. And they were just blown away by just how quickly we were getting the brand out there. So it's been very positive. Well, you had some help on the gin. Do you want to give a little background on the gin? You know, we do have a lot with my history in the spirits industry, have managed to meet a lot of people and make a lot of really, really great contacts. And we had the opportunity. We were going to make a gin to bring on who I believe is probably the most accomplished gin distiller in history, Tom Nichols. He was the head distiller at Tankeray for he worked there for 42 years. The only job that he ever had. And the guy created Tankeray Number 10, which is the most awarded gin of all time. He resurrected those amazing recipes like Malacca and Bloomsbury. And in 2015, he announced that he was going to retire after 42 years at Tankeray. But one month later, he announced he was joining our company in Kansas City. Why am I the only one who always does this? Can we taste your gin? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Because you're the smartest one. That sounds amazing and I want to try it. So how do the botanicals compare on this? Is there inspiration from his previous projects? Yeah. So, you know, Tom being an old school London dry gin distiller, it fit perfectly with what we wanted to do because we, from the very beginning, said if we're going to do a gin, we wanted to do a gin that was a classic London dry style. The new Western gin category has really exploded over the last 10 or 15 years or so, where you've got a lot of those really unique botanicals and there's been a lot of a departure from the classic juniper forward style of gin. But I wanted to make a gin, I wanted our company to make a gin that works perfectly in classic cocktails. So it makes a perfect Negroni, it makes a perfect martini or even a gin tonic. So we didn't want to get real weird and esoteric with it. We just want to go classic, old school, London Dry Style and obviously, Tom is the perfect person to do that. So it's a no-nonsense, really simple but meticulously well-crafted London Dry Style gin. So only five botanicals, juniper, coriander, angelica root, liquorice root, and then just a little hint of dried orange peel for a little bit of citrus. Yeah. Which those four, those first four botanicals are what Tom based all of his Tinkeray recipes off of. That's kind of like the basics, the base for anything and then you kind of elaborate from there. You said just a little bit of orange peel, but I think the citrus really shines through on this along with the juniper. To be just defined as a London Dry gin, it has to be juniper-forward. That's got to be kind of the primary flavor and ingredient, but it's not as dominant as say like Tinkeray London Dry, like your classic Tinkeray London Dry is what I would describe as a spicy juniper bomb, whereas in this one it's there and it's prominent, but the orange peel really comes in second, I think, as far as the flavor and aroma of it. It adds a lot. Well, in that style, I think, is really heavily influenced by bartenders. Absolutely. It strikes me, then you're a long-time professional. It strikes me that that bartenders like. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's delicious. Isn't that sort of the beginning of the new American style? It was. The shift of the new American style gin is a shift towards citrus floor with gins? I would absolutely agree. I mean, actually, Tank Reign No. 10 is arguably the first ever new Western style gin created. Tom created that one where he took that basis for the London Dry and then added citrus to it. But in that case, he added whole grapefruit, whole orange, and whole lime, as well as a little bit of camomile. And so it was really lush and citrusy, right? Whereas this one is just dried orange peel, so it's dialed back a little bit. But yeah, the new Western category was really created by the addition of citrus and it's sort of elaborated since then. It's kind of evolved into a lot of floral components and things like that. Yeah. But this seems really classic. Absolutely. It's easy to see why it became a hit. Yeah. We're still working on it. We're trying to get it out there and get people using it. I think what's great about it is that it's first off, the quality is spectacular and making gin is truly an art form. We weren't going to just go into this and say, hey, let's make a gin for the sake of making a gin because we didn't want to screw it up and make something that sucked. So having Tom lead the way, someone who is a master of his craft and watching him work is phenomenal. I mean, from the selection of the botanicals and the selection of the neutral green spirit to how he runs this still and everything, it is really something to see. It's an art form. It's very nuanced. Well, you did a great job for not to be redundant with the London Dry Style. It is dry, but it's very pronounced. And so it doesn't completely dry your mouth. The alcohol doesn't dry your mouth out, drinking it straight like we are today or tasting it straight like we are today. And you still get a lot of that pronounced aromatic flavor that really lingers for a long time that I think can be a bit difficult. You can. Absolutely. You can. And also I hear all the time people always comment on the mouthfeel of the gin, the texture, kind of has this like creaminess to it. And there's actually a really specific reason for that. And it's something that Tom is kind of known for. It's kind of a hallmark of his style. And being from Kansas City, I can kind of appreciate it because I have a profound love for barbecue. And there's a, you know, you talk about like making barbecue right. You know, you talk about cooking slow and low. And watching him distill, it's very much the same thing. He actually uses a stopwatch and times the flow rate of the distillate coming off the still and monitoring the temperatures in different parts of the still. So the temperature in the pot, the temperature in the column, and then on the coil and everything. And what he's doing is he wants the vapor as it's evaporating and rising up through the column before it hits the condensing coil to spend as much time in contact with copper as possible because that's what enhances that richness and that mouthfeel gives it that texture. So it's kind of like he employs almost like a slow and low method to distillation, which is really cool. I like that. That's a good selling point, I think, as well, because everybody can relate to barbecue in some way, especially with slow and low. So if you can kind of take that and use that, superimpose that into distillation, then that would make a lot of sense for people. I never thought I'd be able to compare London Dry's style gin production to Kansas City Barbecue, but there is some similarities there in the production. Congrats. Well, and you've also got a close tie-in because at the distillery, I believe you have. Of course, we do. On the shipping dock, and you're located right next door to a butcher, which means that you can have barbecue all the time. Every day. Do you make Tom cook that or Tom? No, we just do. Ironically, he cooks it really fast and hot. How many thermometers does he have for that? So what's next on the product range here on the tour? Rieger's Kansas City Whiskey, the flagship. That is the flagship. That's kind of what started it all. So the whiskey, the way we brought this, when Andy and I partnered and decided to resurrect the brand, back in the 1800s, gin was not a thing in the US. And vodka literally did not exist. There was no vodka being produced or imported into the United States. So we were, like most brands, really heavy on whiskey and then some other kind of obscure spirits like Peach Brandy and things like that that we did. But we wanted to come right out of the gates with a whiskey. But the problem with that is that if you're going to distill your own whiskey from grain to barrel to bottle eventually, you're looking at many, many years of production before it's ready. And we didn't really want to use any shortcuts in the production or aging methods. So the other option is sourcing, sourcing whiskeys that have already been produced somewhere and have been aging. And we didn't want to just say go out and buy a whole bunch of barrels of bourbon and put in a bottle with our label on it and sell it. We could have done that and there's nothing wrong with that. There's a lot of products out there like that. But we wanted to do something proprietary. So I started looking into the history of the production of American whiskey back in the 1800s. I would have loved to have found an actual recipe for our whiskey back then, but those records just weren't kept. You know, there was no documentation or anything like that. But I discovered that rectified whiskey back then represented a vast majority of all the American whiskey at that time. And what that meant was, you had brands like ours, products like ours, where you were sourcing barrels from different sources, bringing them in, perhaps blending them with a little bit of your own distillate, but then adding a proprietary ingredient to make it your own. The most common proprietary ingredient back then to blend into whiskey was sherry. And I was kind of blown away to find that out. But with my background in cocktails and bartending, I was already I already loved using sherry in cocktails and everything. So the opportunity to blend a little bit of sherry into our whiskey was really intriguing. And one of my dear friends and mentors is Steve Olson, who is kind of considered one of the world's foremost experts in sherry production and and everything. So I called him up and explained to him, you know, that this was something that not only was really widespread throughout the United States at the time, but it was also something that our company was doing. So we went to Jerez de la Frontera, where sherry is produced and sourced a bunch of different sherrys and started tinkering with the recipe and adding tiny amounts. So that's what we ended up doing. We ended up blending three different whiskies together. What's in the bottle is actually the youngest part is five years old. Five year old bourbon, there's a five year old straight rye, and then a 10 year old light corn whiskey, where we add just a tiny amount, 2% of 15 year old oloroso sherry. And that's really what makes our whiskey what it is and what makes it unique. So 15% of the light corn whiskey or 15% of the total? No, it's 2% of the total blend. And it's a 15 year old oloroso that we use. It really adds a round richness and creaminess to the texture. It adds a ton of depth and complexity. Sometimes people are like, well, it's only 2%, you know, you can't really do that much. But when we were formulating this recipe, I was tinkering with everything as low as 1% sherry up to 2.5 and basically every 0.2% intervals along the way. And the difference was phenomenal. It really, really changed the flavor profile of the whiskey itself. And right on the nose, I get the notes from the sherry. I get kind of a nuttiness, kind of an almond character. And then right in the mid palate, you get that sweetness and richness from the sherry, you know, the dried fruit, the prunes, it's all there. Absolutely. Right. And having done, how many iterations do you think you went through? I mean, you mentioned the fractions. How many iterations do you think you went through to finally settle on this blend and ongoing, which is a bigger question of the skill of a blender, how do you actually replicate it batch after batch after batch? Because that can be difficult. Those are really great questions. The first one, I don't know exactly how many iterations, because we were literally blending this in my loft before we even had a location. We didn't have a location for the distillery yet. We hadn't moved into an actual space. So I was bringing back all these samples, like samples of the whiskeys that we were sourcing, samples of sherry, and we were blending in my loft in Kansas City. And Andy would be over there with an Excel spreadsheet, just typing away on whenever I would tell him, change this much, that much, you know. So we did a lot. And then coming from the bar business again, I really wanted bartenders to have some influence on this and people in the industry that I trusted. So whenever I would get to something that I really liked that I thought was good, I would take samples of it to, sometimes even down to Tales of the Cocktail, I think it would have been July of 2013 and 2014, I took samples down to Tales of the Cocktail and just had people try it and said, what do you think? And then I even held focus groups at my law firm, friends and experts in the industry would come over and I would blind them on different versions of it and sometimes the difference was just microscopic, but get their feedback and then say, okay, well, if you like that one, how would you use it in the cocktail? And then I have them mixed into a cocktail. So there was a lot of trial and error. So was there ever one real big aha moment or were there just a whole bunch of little ones? Well, I think the biggest aha moment was, we were experimenting with some different types of sherry initially, and the 15-year-old Oloroso just was like a unanimous standout. It's a phenomenal sherry in itself. So realizing that that's the one that we were going to use and then dialing it in from there, I think was probably the biggest turning point. It's great. Well done. Thank you. And then your other question is about the ongoing consistency of it. That's another really big challenge when you're talking about blending. I mean, even if you're just blending, say, a house blend of bourbon or something that you produce a lot of, like how does Jim Beam or a company of that scale have such a consistent product year over year? I mean, it's really an art form for the people that do that, the master blender. It's really something to see because there's so many little nuances and characteristics from barrel to barrel. What typically, how big of batches do you guys typically do when you're trying to get this lot? We can do about 750 gallons at a time right now, which is a decent size. But we do have to be very careful with variation because we don't want bottle variation. And this whiskey, the Kansas City Whiskey, we really look at long term as being like our house whiskey. This is our flagship. This is what we'll be most known for. And considering that we're sourcing the ingredients in it, there's three different whiskies in there. But as we grow the brand and grow the company and increase our sales, we need to increase our production. So we, at some point, will be blending in some, like say, some rye that we produced in our distillery from grain ourselves. And that'll have a little bit different flavor profile than the one that we sourced, right? Or if we buy some from a different source. So we also, we always very carefully vet the quality of every barrel that we source. And then if we need to, in order to achieve that style of KC whiskey, we sometimes have to tweak the percentages of one whiskey to the other. But I think at this point, now that we're four years in, I know we're still young, but I have a, I think we all have a pretty good handle on what Kansas City whiskey should taste like. But I do like that you're open to rolling with the punches. You kind of have to. You know, so you're going to try to maintain the integrity of this house style, but if you have to source or create whatever it is, then you're going to roll it in and just kind of let it ride and let it become what it is over time. Very cool. And there's a couple of things to keep in mind in taking that approach. Like we don't have an age statement on the label. And there's a lot of new whiskies out there that don't have age statements, and you're sometimes left wondering, like, what does that mean? Well, how old is it? Well, I can tell you that in ours, the youngest is five years old, and we all are firmly of the belief that, you know, you need to have, when you're talking about straight bourbon, straight rye, that kind of thing, you really need to be, like, at least at four years before it's fully matured and ready to go into the bottle. So we don't have an age statement on the label, because if we said on the label right now that the youngest component is five years old, and then we find a four and a half year old rye or something that's really good and works, you know, then we would have to change the label. So it gives us some flexibility there, you know, to add new components and make things work. But we need to be able to do that. We need to be able to kind of, like, be nimble and bobbin weave a little bit. What's the actual classification of it? So it's actually classified as Kansas City Whiskey. So when we submitted the recipe after all of this trial and error and all of this research of, you know, what our company was doing, what kind of whiskey was popular or being produced back in that time, we submitted the recipe to the TTB for label approval and recipe approval. And they were just completely baffled. They had never, they in fact told us initially that we can't do that. Like you can't blend sherry into American whiskey and still be called American whiskey. So that would be like specialty spirit or something. Well, that's what they would have, that's what they would have tried to get us to do in the beginning. Distilled spirit specialty. Yeah, distilled spirit specialty. Did you get Kansas City Whiskey inserted into the CFR? Not yet, but it has been, they've allowed us, they've granted us permission to use it. So making it a more official category is something that I would really love to do. But what ended up happening was they initially said you can't do this. And so we had to show them the historic precedent, show them that historically, even in the Beverage Alcohol Manual, they're governing piece of literature that defines every category of spirit in the United States. There's actually a reference to the historic use of sherry. It's just that nobody's really done it since the, probably since the repeal of prohibition in the 1930s. So the people at the TTB today are like, we've never seen anything like this before. So we had to point that out to them first off. And they're like, okay, well, I guess you can do that. But it didn't fit in to any category. Even though there's straight bourbon in there, even though there's straight rye, it doesn't qualify as those categories, because those are components as opposed to being the whole. And so they said it doesn't fit in to any modern category. And then I said, well, if that's the case, we're resurrecting this brand from Kansas City that was around in the 1880s when this was a common practice. And if nobody else is doing it, if you don't have a category for it, it's like, what if we were to call it Kansas City Whiskey? And I think at that point, they were just ready to say, fine. Well, honestly, we've been having this conversation too long. So whatever you want. So to answer, nerd alert, CFR is the Code of Federal Regulations, which is the Bible that governs every single thing that goes on a label and classification for any distilled spirit. It's actually something I want to get it more set in stone and more official, but they did grant us permission to do. That's kind of the first step. And now the next step is to take it further and make it official. And then now that you guys are distilling your own stuff, in the future, are you planning on releasing like the components as they are? You put it like a corn whiskey and a bourbon. Well, so what we're doing right now in our distillery, in addition to blending this, we are distilling on a daily basis. We can produce about 1.8 barrels per day, and we're producing straight bourbon, straight rye, and we're producing some light corn whiskey. So when those are ready, when they're fully matured and ready, some of them will go a little bit into this blend, but then we will do bottle extensions, like line extensions. We'll bottle a straight bourbon and a straight rye as an extension of the line. Brett, how much is this bottle? $49.99 for the J. $39.99? $39.99. $39.99. Sorry, $39.99. Do you want to disclose any match bills? I'm an open book, man. We take pride in being very transparent. So I talk about how we source different whiskeys. So both the five-year straight bourbon and the 10-year-old light corn whisky both come from MGPI in Indiana. They're both incredibly good whiskeys on their own right. And then the rye is from Alberta and it's 100% rye. So you'll be replicating that in your own? Well, so what we're distilling right now, the bourbon that we are doing, our proprietary match bill for our bourbon, which isn't on the market yet, obviously, but we're doing 56% corn, 30% rye and 14% malted barley. And then our rye is 96% rye and 4% malted barley. And how much fun is Nathan having cleaning up the stills after running a 96% rye mash through? Oh, man. He's got two assistants. So, you know, Jay and Tommy are helping him out quite a bit. But, you know, it's a lot of work. You're running the production side of that, of this business every day. I mean, I'm almost never at the distillery. I'm always, you know, doing stuff like this. But, you know, they're, yeah, it's a tough job. It's definitely a tough job. And, you've been there, you've seen where we're going to expand. And so, it's just going to get that much more difficult, because it's going to be, you know, bigger fermenters and bigger mash tins and everything else. Yeah, and another nerd alert, Rie is notoriously difficult to work with. The kids that tends to gelatinize get foamy. What kind of still are you guys using? We have two stills right now. One of them is dedicated to making our whiskeys, and the other one is dedicated to making gin. But our whisky still is a 750-gallon Vendome, a copper Vendome single batch system with a four-tray column on the top. Her name is Sherry, by the way. Great name. And then we're in the middle of an expansion project right now where we'll be adding another still just like that one, and we're also going to add a column. So we're essentially going to be able to quadruple our production. In column, you can do your own light whisky if you want to eventually on a full column straight down. We're doing light corn whisky right now with our current system. Because the only difference between light corn whisky and bourbon during the production process is instead of keeping the distillation to under 160 proof, the light corn whisky goes up to 165. So that's really the only difference. We're able to get it up there to 165 with the current still that we have. But the column will just allow us to run everything so much faster and just output so much more. We've got another battle in front of us. What can you tell us about the private stock? Private stock was, you know, if you go on our website or if you look at our historic stuff, we actually did a label back in the late 1800s, early 1900s called private stock. When prohibition shut us down in 1919, Alexander Rieger, who was running the company at the time, went to court to argue for his right to basically keep all the whiskey that we produced prior to the law taking effect. It became labeled as private stock because it was produced when it was legal. He actually went through a court battle over it and ended up winning. That's where the private stock label comes from. What we have today, we're using private stock more or less as a very limited edition single barrel type thing. If Brett wanted to buy a whole barrel for Binny's, we would label it specifically for them and do a custom barrel for them. This one that we have here is the first one that we did. One of my best friends in the world is a head wine maker at an estate in Tuscany. He makes Chianti Classico Reserva. I was over there once several years ago and we were just chatting and talking about the barrels that they use for Chianti Classico Reserva, which have to be new French oak barrels every time that they make it. I said, what do you do with the barrels after you're finished aging the Chianti? He's like, we burn them. I'm like, you burn them? You think about the market for second-use barrels in the United States, you know, for microbreweries or wineries or other distilleries. I mean, the lifespan of a barrel is amazing, like how long they can last and be used over and over for different purposes. And yet, then in Italy, it's like they use them for two years, you know, 24 months, and they burn them. So I said, Lorenzo, can I just get like three barrels and play with them? He's like, sure, but shipping them from Tuscany to Kansas City is a trick. And I don't necessarily mean just financially. It's not that, but it's like literally really hard to do. Because it's almost like you're clearing food or alcohol. I mean, yeah, it's an organic thing. Yeah, it's really it's really something. So but we ended up getting three barrels to the distillery and filled all three of them with five year old straight bourbon, one of the components, you know, that goes into our Kansas City whiskey and did about a nine month long finishing term in the Chianti Classical Reserva barrels. And as far as I know, I think it's the only straight bourbon that's ever been made that's been finished in Chianti barrels. And I think it has a really, really beautiful, really unique flavor profile. And Monique Houston from Winebo, our distributor here in Chicago, she was in Kansas City at the distillery, I think it's about a year ago, right around this time. And we were just kind of like walking through and talking. And I said, Oh, check this out over here. And, you know, pulled some samples out of this barrel. You know, it had been sitting there for a few months. And she's like, I've got to have one of those for Chicago. So we literally bottled up just one barrel of that of that bourbon and just came here to the Chicago market. What's the finish time? It's about nine months. Yeah. And you can't miss when you taste it, because I mean, it's that classic high rye straight bourbon mash build. But the French oak and the Chianti, it's just got to do the touch a little red berry fruit and that nice sort of toasty dryness. It's very lush. A backbony spicy quality. Nice nuttiness too. Ninety-five proof. So it's got some muscle. Yeah, I like high proof here. Yeah, but I mean, it's versatile, because the proof isn't particularly daunting if you're drinking it straight like we are. But I can see bartenders falling in love with something like this, because the strength is just right, that you can play a lot. Man, that's good. I love that sour cherry right in the mid palate. Absolutely. That's super good. That's the most prominent flavor I get out of it, and that's so indicative of Chianti or San Gervaisa. Any San Gervaisa wine, you get that bright cherry. It's really a cool flavor. For only a few years in the biz, man, you're doing very well. We're hustling. I love what I'm tasting here today. This is great. How much time do you actually see your family and friends back home? They're on the road. Well, I have an almost four-year-old Great Dane, and he misses me. I miss my Great Dane. I would say the family now that we have created over the last 10 years with Manifesto and the Rieger, and everything that we've done that's led to this. It's tough to be away from them for long periods of time and on the road so much. This has been a new experience for me to travel all over the country as much as I have this year. But I believe in what we're doing and we're out there building this brand, and I think it's delicious and it helps. Also, we can tell the story about Kansas City. We get to talk about where we come from and the history, and show that with people. I think it's really cool. Is the label historic? Yeah. So the shield, the trademark, the name, everything. In fact, when I found out about all this back in 2010, I went, it was in the process of opening up the restaurant at the time called The Rieger. So I had a trademark attorney that was working on trademarking the Rieger for the restaurant. I called her up and I said, hey, I found this old brand that was connected to the hotel, and I want to look at the trademark. And so she checked it out and it had expired in 1922, and nobody had touched it since 1922. I'm like, I want that. So I registered the trademark then, and we didn't change it at all. I mean, it is literally the shield there, the mark is exactly the same as it was back then. And when you look at especially the whiskey bottle, it's very, very reminiscent of our original bottlings back in the, you know, around the turn of the century. There's new labeling requirements that didn't exist then. So there's more information on the bottle because legally, that's required, but it's exactly, you know, it's very clearly the same brand. Okay, Brett, just pour to something else. I know you said final, but we're going to have a final. Yeah, yeah. Well, this is an amazing smell that I've never smelled before. This is a final final. So tell us about Cafe Amaro. Cafe Amaro is kind of the, I don't know, it's a little bit different from everything else that we're doing. I'm really proud of this one too, because this is literally the result of a homemade ingredient that I had been making at Manifesto for years. So Manifesto is a little craft cocktail style bar, and we still do a lot of homemade ingredients in-house, and I'd say about probably seven or eight years ago, roughly, we started making a coffee liqueur, and just for cocktails in a tiny little 45-seat bar. But I have always loved drinking espresso and Amaro side-by-side, and so that really influenced this. So we were making a coffee liqueur, but started adding some bitter ingredients, bitter and herbal ingredients. So Gentian wrote it as a primary bittering element, cardamom, bitter orange peel, star anise, vanilla bean, mint, things like that, and it just was a hit. It worked really great in cocktails and it became the house shot and bartender's handshake kind of thing. So we had to do this. Dude, I haven't smelled anything this layered, like this precisely layered in a long time. This is killer. It's like three Amari at once, like three different styles all at once. Well, there's actually cold brew coffee in it too, and that's the thing. Coffee is a naturally bitter and acidic beverage and it's not sweet, but you get all these coffee liqueurs and coffee beverages on the market that are like sticky sweet and that's what we didn't want. We wanted to highlight the more bitter notes and brighter notes of it. So we literally start by making an Amaro base with all those botanicals steeping in neutral spirit, and then instead of cutting it back to bottling proof with water, we cut it back with cold brew coffee. We partnered with a local coffee roaster in Kansas City that they source the coffee. It's a single origin Sumatra and they produce a cold brew for us and then we blend in the cold brew and we take that mixture and then rest it in spent whiskey barrels for about six weeks. Oh my god. I got nothing to say. I'm just like speechless. It's like I'm eating mint chocolate chip ice cream in a cup of coffee inside a Turkish bazaar. With a chocolate covered orange peel. That's basically what I'm doing right now. Yeah. I've heard a lot of descriptions of this, but that's got to be the best. That's what's happened. That was fantastic. Thank you. Yeah. That's delicious. Yeah. Super good. Folks, that brings us to the Q&A segment of Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. Write your questions to comments at binnys.com or hit us up on social, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, at Binny's Bev. Our question this week comes from Andrea De Cola. The question is, what does the charring of a barrel actually do to whiskey? How does the charring affect other types of alcohol when applied? Charring, so there are a couple of things that go on during aging. There's a subtractive fact and an additive effect. The charring actually creates a subtractive effect. Essentially, you're creating a label of carbon, basically activated carbon. And so people think that charring is going to impart a charred flavor. That's actually not the case. What charring does is actually removes flavors and removes harsher elements just like you would filter a vodka, for instance. So think of the char in a barrel and the requirement or why it's required and why it makes bourbon characteristic to what bourbon is. It's actually a filter. It's not adding anything. It's removing. Interesting. Is charring used in wine ever or is it just toasting? It depends on the wine. I would say more toasting than charring on a whole. And then you're actually like altering vanilla into sugars. But it's definitely been done, but we're looking more for a heavy toast versus char. And with there's toast and char is going to imply that there's going to be a layer of toast as well. And it's called the red layer, which is creative name for it because it's just a layer that looks red. But you char and then the red layer and that's important in wine because you're starting to convert the lignin layer to make it more penetrable. You're also eliminating some very, very harsh, like high pH chemicals and allowing whatever liquid is going to soak into the wood to have access to mostly the tannin and the vanilla. Right. In that particular layer there, right. You guys use any special charring at J. Rieger? So for the straight bourbon and straight rye, we get all of our new barrels from Independence Dave in Lemonan, Missouri. They're char level 3, which is like right in the middle. Nerd alert, Andrea. Hope that answers your question. Anybody else has a question? We try to answer them on the podcast. Give you a $20 Binny's gift card at the Binny's of your choice. Once again, reach out to us. Comments at binnys.com via email, on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, at Binny's Bev. You could call Greg at 312. Hey, I had to take that out of the email signature. So that's it folks for another episode of Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. Ryan, thank you so much for coming on today. We really, really appreciate your time and effort. Thank you. I appreciate it. Really kick ass stuff, man. We really love it. I'm Kristin. I'm Joe. I'm Brett. I'm Greg. And I'm Ryan. Thanks folks. Keep tasting. Is there a singing or has there ever been singing in this podcast? Yes, there has. We've broken into acapella style harmonizing. You want to do it? Yeah. No. Do you want me to sing? Yeah. Give us a basic note. We'll arpeggiate over it. Yeah. Good word. La, la, la, la, la, la. You just hold one note. Sustained, buddy.