Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to another episode of Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. Kristin, this is a fun one. We had Bourbon Industry Luminary, Fred Noe at Binny's Beverage Depot, and Brett Pontoni in the Whiskey Hotline sat down with him, asked him a bunch of questions. Gosh, the history, just when he walked into the door, or walked into the room rather, the history that the guy brings with him is just... Oh yeah, the guy exudes industry. For sure. All right, let's get into it. Brett Pontoni, Fred Noe, part one. So I have the pleasure of sitting here today with Fred Noe, who is a master distiller at Jim Beam Distillery. And Fred, what generation master distiller are you now? I'm the seventh generation. Seventh generation master distiller. And you have number eight coming up. Eight, he's working right now, he's in training. Is he working, is that what he calls it? He's working right now, he's really... We actually have a ninth coming up. His wife, Kate, had a baby September 6th. Oh yeah? Frederick Booker Noe the fifth. Really? And we call him Booker. What we're going to do today, I'm curious because you're seventh generation master distiller, so you're heavily involved in the process of designing everything. Can you give us some insight, where did Knob Creek come from? Well, Knob Creek was developed by my father, Booker. But the name, just to start off from the beginning, Abraham Lincoln was born about 28, 29 miles south of Bardstown. If you go down 31 East South, you come to a little area they call Lincoln's Boyhood Home, which there's a creek that runs through there that's relatively dry most of the time. When it does rain, you will see some water in it called Knob Creek. That's where Abraham Lincoln was born and then later moved up here to Illinois. That's where we thought it would be kind of cool to name a bourbon for one of the president who got his start in Kentucky. Dad always enjoyed bottled-in-bond bourbon. He drank old tub pretty much all of my young life until he developed these small batch bourbons, which was a four-year-old bottled-in-bond bourbon, old beam label from the 1800s. And so Dad just took his, you know, his favorite unapproved bourbon, aged it extra long. The original batches were nine years of age. And that's what he wanted was to get back to, you know, an extra age, full-bodied, big, bold-flavored bourbon. And, you know, Dad's saying on the small batch bourbons was, you know, it's made and tastes the way bourbon used to be. The way it was meant to be. Because that was the way he liked his stuff. And as you know, you've been around Knob Creek probably since its infancy. This one's been around about 27 years now. And so you probably remember some of our sales guys coming in saying, take these four bottles. It wasn't one, we came up with four, which was a tough sale back in, you know, the early 90s. You know, a bourbon wasn't on fire in the early 90s like it is now in 2018. And I remember going on sales calls with salesmen, and you would go to places and, you know, you'd walk, especially on-premise, with four bottles of bourbon, and bourbon wasn't selling that well anyway. Right, right. Why do I need four? And trying to explain it, there's four different taste profiles, four different, you know, different distinct bourbons. Back then bourbon was bourbon. Right. You know, the connoisseurs were not out there then. And I think Dad and his good friend, Jimmy Russell, and their other good friend, Elmer T. Lee, and Parker Beam, I think were the elder statesmen who developed these extra-age, higher strength bourbons, and went on the road and educated people on what bourbon is about. And I think that's what got this old bourbon phenomenon really rekindled a fire under bourbon, I guess. Well, again, it made all of these things something besides just bourbon. Bourbon was kind of considered your dad's drink or your granddad's drink. Back in those days, cocktails hadn't hit like they are now. Guys that drank it were almost like cowboys that bellied up to the bar. Give me a whiskey. Usually it was a bourbon. Ride a horse across the desert. The first thing they give you is a shot of bourbon. It would have been about like Booker's, you know, right from the barrel. Right from the barrel. It would be kind of tough, I think, but you know, that's the movies, right? So it's kind of a... So when you're tasting now, I think for a lot of people there's a difference between tasting and drinking. So when you're sitting down and tasting, just trying to pick out some of the flavors and aromas, what process, how do you go about it? Well, I use the four steps that dad taught me when I got into the business. You know, in college, we drank a lot of bourbon, but we just were always kind of laughing and saying, we were firing for effect. We weren't really assessing it too much. We were just drinking it. But you know, dad kind of had a little four steps where he'd look at the color. You know, because really enjoying a good glass of bourbon is a sensual thing where look at the color, look at the aroma, get your little taste, assess the finish. And it's all about what you enjoy. And that's where, you know, you just look at it and sniff and smell and look at it again, take another little taste and chew on it a little bit. Do the Kentucky chew. And you know, sometimes add a little water to open it up. It just depends on what you like and how your, as Booker would say, how your snoot's working that day. How's it smelling to you? What's it taste like? When you do the Kentucky chew, what is that? What's that doing when you do that? The big thing is just getting the bourbon all in your mouth, all over. So all of the flavors can be assessed, different parts of your mouth, pick up different flavors, and then to bring in a little bit of air, aerate it in your mouth as you swallow it, almost to let it get absorbed in your tongue, inside your mouth. You know, you don't take a huge drink, and then just kind of let it kind of get absorbed, and then take in a deep breath and assess the finish. The main thing I look for is off notes. I mean, it's all good. It's just what are you looking for? You know, like you did when you look at the nose, part your lips, don't keep your lips tightly closed. It's amazing some of these so-called experts on bourbon, when you watch them, they take a glass, and they sniff it with their mouth closed. You know, especially some of these big whiskey fests around the country. These cats, they won't act like they know a lot about whiskey. You can watch them and see real quick if they really know anything or if they're just bulls**t that want to make everybody think they know everything. But a guy that knows, I was watching you, somebody knows how to assess bourbon or whiskey, you got to part your lips. I mean, it's too much alcohol. You keep your lips tight, you push the alcohol up in your nose. Well, I think too, it lets your tongue help because you can't taste without your nose and you can't really smell anything if your tongue's not working right. So if your mouth's open a little bit, I think it allows some of that. When you're breathing in, it allows some of that to hit your tongue and let your tongue help the nose out. Yeah, Dad would always say you can taste it before you ever put it in your mouth. Sure. He does. I mean, when he first taught me those four steps, I was kind of amazed at some of the stuff that, I said, he might know something about this s**t. But I'm sitting there talking to a guy who lived it, and he's telling me I was 27 years old, 10 feet tall and bulletproof. Right. Like all naughty sons are, they think they know everything, except when they get broke and they come looking for money, then your parents get pretty smart. But listen to him assess how to do bourbon, and he was teaching me how he does it for knowing that he wasn't going to be around forever, and that I'd be doing bookers by batches at some point. So he was always about teaching. Whether you knew it or not, he was trying to teach you something, when he would talk about stuff. Well, and it seems like the way you explained it also, I think is very easy. A lot of people can take classes, where they will tell you the exact same thing that you just said, but they try to use a lot of flowery words and a lot of really big broad terms, instead of just talking about smelling and tasting and looking. Right. And then, you know, why every single one of those steps is important. So what are you looking for in Knob Creek? The thing I look for on the Knob Creek is, you know, the wood, bins it is, extra age. The big thing I look for is off notes. I know that you're not going to find them, you know, but when you're looking at it, when you're making up batches, to see if, you know, is there any geosmin that might have been in the water or in the grain, you know, mustiness. Right. That's what we look for when we're building it. Once everything passes the test, when I'm tasting, just to be tasting, the finish, the warmth that leaves behind. I'm not big on telling people what I smell because I don't, I think it's bad when you show somebody how to smell and then you try to lead them and say, oh, you should smell toasted nuts or, because the way you describe what you smell and what I describe when I'm smelling could be totally different. It doesn't mean one of our noses is good and one is bad. This is what it reminds you of, very subjective. I mean, I could lead you in a tasting and say something, if you're smelling, you'll smell whatever I say. So it can lead you right down that path. Well, and you grew up in Kentucky, I grew up in Indiana, somebody could have grown up in England, somebody could have grown up in California, so I think everybody is also, the things that you ate and smelled and tried when you were a child were a lot What's funny, all these new descriptors that come out. Well, you know, people that are professionals like us get paid by the adjudive. We have to continue to, we have to, exactly, we have to continue to come up with more, we have to continue to come up with more. Well, you know, Jimmy Russell, Jimmy and they were up here in Chicago, it's been years ago at a whiskey fest. And the new term at that year was Marzipan. Right. And Jimmy looked at me at one of our media lunches, and I mean, they're all writing down notes. And Jimmy said, Fred, have you ever seen one of them marzipans? I said, not yet, Jimmy. He said, you find one, we'll catch him, cook him and eat him and see what he tastes like. Okay. Well, Jimmy's got a great story one time that he's told a couple of times on Elmer, about him and Elmer being at a tasting. They had both at the same time been flown over to France to do a whiskey tasting in maison de Whiskey, which you have probably been to because I don't know if you have or not, but a lot of people end up at maison de Whiskey in Paris. Great whiskey shop, primarily Scotch, but if you're going to find whiskey in Bourbon whiskey, American whiskey in Europe, it's going to be the one of the great places to go. Apparently, they were sitting there at some point in time and somebody got up and somebody was describing Elmer Teeley or Buffalo Trace or something, and Elmer had a couple of cocktails. He's listening, listening to somebody get up and use all those flowery descriptors and toss about all the things. Apparently, Elmer leaned over to Jimmy and he goes, Jimmy goes, I didn't put any of that s*** in my whiskey. What are they talking about? I just made whiskey. I remember Parker Beam, God rest his soul. One night we were, it might have been in New York, and somebody was describing one of his small batch single barrel releases and he started talking about leather, and I was sitting beside him and we'd had a couple, I was leaving at that, and he kept talking about that leather and leather and leather. He leaned over and he said, Fred, I just don't know what I would think about people saying, my bourbon smells like a pair of shoes. I said, I hope they were new shoes, Parker. He said, damn, you had to go there, did you? But I mean, some people use those descriptors, I can see where you pick it up on it, but we don't use all that stuff when we say it smells like bourbon. It smells like, and I think that you cross the line too, there's tasting and there's drinking. When people are drinking, they're tasting, but they're tasting a level of quality. I don't think that they're necessary. I don't think people are sitting there talking about marzipan and leather and that's what's running. That's the only thing that's on my mind when they've got a nice end of the day and they got a nice glass of whiskey in front of them. Yeah. We have a lot of fun with all the guys that make it. We love hearing the new descriptive terms, especially when you're dumb old boys from Kentucky like us and they come up with these words. It's nothing William C. Marzipan is running around Lonsburg or Bardstown yet. So we've kind of jumped on to Bookers. So this is, I would guess, one of the most personal of the four in the Small Batch Collection. This is the most personal. So what's the background behind Bookers? Well, Bookers came from Dad, you know, and it was an experiment, essentially, one of our Vice Presidents, Mike Donahoe, from up here at our corporate headquarters, came down to Kentucky and asked Dad, could you create a new bourbon for us? We want to release a premium product. And Dad said, I got it. He said, what? He said, Mike, if you'd come out of the House of Knowledge, that's what he called our office up here in Chicago and come down to Kentucky, where the work's being done, you know that I've been working on this. He said, you guys in Chicago, y'all stay up here, you don't come down here. So Dad put him in the truck and went up to a warehouse, knocked the bung out of a barrel, doing a thief, drew out a couple of glasses of whiskey, and said, here's what I want to sell just like this. And he had already experimented with lower distillation strength. You know, anything to steal over 125 proof, you have to bring, put water in it, bring it down to the entry proof. Dad did the second distillation at 125, so no water got added before it went into the barrel. Stored it in the center of a nine-story rack house, not real close to the top, not real close to the bottom, right dead center, so it would get the change of seasons, but none of the extremes. And he pulled it out, he said, I want to sell it just like this right out of the barrel. And Mike looked at it and said, why do you want to do that? He said, well, back in the day, you know, he'd heard stories from his grandfather, Jim Beam, that back in the early days, before we were actually bottling bourbons, you brought your container to the distillery and it would take you up into one of the aging rack houses, deem the courthouse, and they drew the liquor right out of the barrel and charge you 50 cents a quart. Whether you brought a bottle, whether you brought a jug, they filled it up, charged by it. We found some old ledgers and it would say like, Fred Noe, two quarts, old tub, one dollar. And he had it in a ledger where he gave it to him on the cuff. And then when you come back and paid, Fred Noe paid one dollar, put it on the credit side. So he gave it to you on credit. I said, well, I guess they made sure they made good whisky, so he'd come back and pay. Exactly. He didn't get any more until you paid for your person. Well, I think that's the bigger incentive. If you don't pay for it, you can't make that second trip. Right. You don't get any more. And so that's why dad released the Bookers at cast strength, uncut, unfiltered, right out of the barrel. We strain out the charcoal, which you can't really say unfiltered. I shouldn't have said that word. With the legal mumbo jumbo. They say that straining of the charcoal is filtration, but you and I know that we're talking chill filtration. Chill filtration and trying to remove lipids and things like that. But if you look at some bottles of Bookers, if they sit for a while and you look at it and shake it a little, you may see a wisp. Or they get cold, which is actually funny because a lot of times, well, I think a lot of people in the business started chill, and it really started even more with scotch than bourbon. And the chill filtration happened because of exactly that. They were afraid that the consumer would get a bottle home, it would get a little clouded up, people would lose their mind and think that there was something wrong with it. Whereas my perspective, I would say not the opposite of wrong. That tells you that nothing was taken out of there. Correct. That's all body and goodness. Yeah, because whenever you filter, whether it's chill or any kind of filtration, you're removing solids. Solids is your flavor. I mean, that was dad's old theory. And the very first batch of Bookers in 1987 was actually done as Christmas gifts for our distributor partners around the country. And that's why I say it was a test to see if there was a market for $50 bottles of bourbon. Sure. And Parker, we were at a Christmas party that year, and Parker said, Booker, you think people get 50 bucks for a bottle of bourbon? He said, look what they give for that damn scotch, Parker. They'll give 50 bucks for a good bottle of bourbon, and it kind of broke the price barrier for bourbon, and cash strength. He was breaking all the rules on that, because at the time Dad released Booker's, you didn't see cash strength scotches. Probably since Prohibition, right? I mean, everything would have been bottled at $120, or somewhere $115 to $120 in Prohibition. Yeah, it cut a little bit to a flat-bottling proof. So it took a lot of research by a legal team to make sure you wasn't breaking any rules, but there were no rules on the bottling strength, because they did it before. Well, as long as you say what it is, I mean, you just have to say what it is on the label. How much variance do you think happens in Booker's when you're going since this is essentially a single barrel product? No, we combine barrels. Are you batching it now? Yeah, we batch them. We always did. Dad was never a fan of single barrel. When Elmer went down the single barrel road, dad and Jimmy went down small batch road, where take a few barrels, mingle them together for consistency. But dad always wanted everything you got from being to be as close to the same as it could be. That's why he always batched it with barrels. It got to where everything gets back to a story about Jimmy or dad or Elmer. Those guys, they taught me everything I know about the industry. But one year it was up here in Chicago, Whiskey Fest. When this was all relatively new stuff, they asked, what defines a small batch? Jimmy kicked me under the table and said, I'll take that question. At the time, he didn't have anything he really deemed a small batch. I mean, where's he going with this? He said, well, if you dump 1,000 barrels a day, and then we dump 999 tomorrow, isn't that a smaller batch? Okay, son, answer the question. Thanks, dad. You set me right up. But dad coined that term small batch because we would dump several hundred barrels for Jim Beam because it's bigger runs, 10,000-gallon tanks. Booker's started off 150, 200 barrels. So he said it's a smaller batch. That's why I thought it's small batch. And it kind of stuck with him. And Jimmy did that with his Russell Reserve. But Elmer went down the single barrel road because people who like single barrel, like those slight variations from barrel to barrel. Now you'll see slight variations in Booker's from batch to batch. Because you just pick the barrels and they could vary. Well, and that's the difference, I think, between small batch and what you're talking about with. When you make Jim Beam, you really want a Jim Beam that gets dumped today to taste like a Jim Beam that's going to get dumped 10 years from now. To taste like a Jim Beam that was dumped 10 years ago. Whereas you've got a little bit more variance here if the color is a little bit off, if the flavor is a little bit off. I think, what flavor profile, I mean, what kind of profile are you looking at when you're doing Bookers? Dad's one descriptor and I've kept it going forward, vanilla. That's what he always looked for in Bookers. And he always used the analogy of like the orchard farmer with an orchard growing apples. A guy that grows apples and knows what he's doing, knows exactly when to pick the apple, when it's ripe to get the most flavor and the juiciest apple. He said, that's the same thing you do with these barrels. Leave them, taste them, you know exactly when to pick it, when the flavor is just right, and then put it into the Bookers. And that's kind of what we've been doing ever since. And I think that you work a lot off of instinct there. I mean, you just kind of know. Yeah, I look for the vanilla and a nice finish. And it just comes around. When the bourbon stays in that barrel, you know, he always on the label. His dad, Ann, wrote the first labels. He wrote the, he tried to mimic what Jim Beam liked. He's bourbon between six and eight years old. So we don't look at barrels until they get over six years old. And we do let some get a little older for limited releases. But that's kind of the range. The strength is whatever it comes out at. Usually between 124 and 130. You know, that's a little bit of variation that you might see. So you were talking about having the heart run that comes off your second distillation coming out at, because legally, you can go up to 160. You're talking about trying to hit 125. We do hit it. And you're hitting 125, that's on all products, or is that just specifically for Bookers? Just for Bookers. So you're doing separate runs just specifically for Bookers. In the distillery, we bypass, we have a retention tank and some other things that we do, but it goes essentially straight from the steel, the column steel, to the doubler, which is a pot steel, and no water is added at any point. So dad, you know, is lower proof at distillation, is, the theory on that is, lower proof you distill at, the more flavor comes over from the beer. Because essentially you look at, vodka is distilled at 195, 199 proof to get all the flavor out, because vodka is odorless, colorless, tasteless. Lower proofs, flavor comes over from the beer. And when you said that also ties in perfectly with what you were talking about when you're doing the initial tasting of a barrel for assessment are the flaws. And one of the things you said, the biggest, one of the biggest factors is the musty character. And you're right with that. That comes through, that musty character comes through with everything else. And you can't get rid of it. Yeah. I mean, I learned that dad when I was a little boy, they got hold of some bad grain and he would let me smell. He said, you could pick it every time. I was like eight years old. He had two glasses of whiskey. Just smelling it. Smell these. Which one smells bad to you? Which one smells better? He said, I could pick it every time. He'd mix them up. And he said, he knew right then that if I wanted to go down this road, that I had to know was for the bourbon. I could pick up the musty. You could pick up the musty. I mean, some people, it's funny. I've been in bars and I'm sure you have too. People want to show off some great whiskey that they've discovered and they give you a glass of it. As soon as you smell it, you go, really? This is great whiskey and it's smells like an old pair of dirty socks. Yeah. And you describe it like, I say, what? I say, you can get musty whiskey. It smells like dirty socks. I mean, I think a lot of people confuse that sometimes too with it being corked because of course that's, which is a completely different thing, but part one of the things that identify something that's corked is that musty character. It's all right. Whereas, you know, whereas you're right where you can just tell if it's bad grain, but you hope that that never happens because you hope that grain gets rejected before it ever makes it. Absolutely. Before it ever gets mashed. That's why we do a lot of testing on every load that comes in. And put a little water on it, stick it in a microwave, zap it, and boom, and smell it, you know. So it's a big thing on that where you can detect that mustiness in it. So a couple of questions. What was the genesis of the thinking behind Knob Creek Rye in the first place? Well, then what was the, what led from that step A to the step B of the twice barrel dry? Well, as you know, being in the business and being up here in the country that drinks a little rye whiskey before rye was very popular, I mean, I can remember my first trip to the neighboring state of Wisconsin and I walked into a liquor store and there was three facings of Jim Beam rye. I looked at it and I said, did y'all do that because I'm up here visiting? What do you mean? Because you got three facings of rye? Y'all say, oh, we sell a hell of a lot of rye up here. And so up in this northern part of the country, rye whiskey was a phenomenon before it was a phenomenon. So we've been making rye for many, many years. You probably remember the old yellow labels. Absolutely. It went to green. I don't know who made green the official color of rye, but you ever figure that one out? Tell me and Jimmy. Right. But so, you know, as this rye became more and more popular, we said, well, what if we took, it was kind of my idea there, some of this rye that we normally age four years and aged it out like Knob Creek and gave it a little higher strength to be big and bold like our Knob Creek bourbon family. And we did it and the response has been overwhelming. And that just happened a year or two ago. Three years ago. About three years ago on the rye. Then we went to the last year. We started talking about doing a double barrel. Because you'll get more wood influence on a rye. And so I said, well, sure, we can do that. You take it. We did it with our Jim Beam with our double oak. And so we are doing the same thing we did with double oak. Take it out of the first barrel. Put in another new barrel. We will use a number four char, just like the original barrel, and age it till it picks up the more oaky flavor. Pulls a little bit more of that. Now here's the question. Barrels are expensive. Exactly. That makes us that right out of the gates has to make this a little bit more expensive product just because barrels are expensive and you can't, if you put that second pass of rye in that barrel, that barrel's gotta go, I mean, you can use it for Yeah, you can't use it. Barrels gotta be a virgin barrel to be used for bourbon. And you know, this one, when you do put it in that second barrel, you get a little smoothness. It takes a little bit of a bite out of that rye. You know, most ryes have that bite. Super pepperminty, minty dill. Yeah. And it just smooths it out. And so bottling it at a hunter proof, you're gonna have enough for a dilution for a great cocktail, if you want to put it in a cocktail, which these mixology folks have taught me. I always thought, just to show my ignorance, you know, how little we drink cocktails in Kentucky back in the day. I thought when they shook a cocktail, they were mixing it, or when they were stirring your Manhattan, they were mixing it. But Bobby Gee, our mixologist, said, no, no, no, it's for dilution. I said, what? He said, we want the ice to melt, to dilute, to get you water in your drink, to get the balance right. I said, really? And so that's why he said, I like to use the regular Knob Creek in the Manhattan, because you start to under proof when you bring it down to the strength of the drink, you can still taste the bourbon. Same way with the rye, you know, you can do that with your rye based cocktails. Now that begs the question, shaken or stirred? For me, if it's a whiskey sire, you shake it. If it's a Manhattan, you stir it. For me, but, you know, if you like your Manhattan shaken, I'm sure Bobby would shake it for you, look at you. Sure, well I wonder, yeah, no, I wonder too, shaking must cause more dilution, or cause the dilution to happen a lot more rapidly. Well, a lot of it now with these whiskey sires with the egg whites, they want to get that frothiness in it too. Sure. So they want to shake it, or they dry shake too with no ice, then add the ice to it. These mixology guys teach me all this stuff. This is a proper blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But it's funny how, I'm sure you remember when guys that make drinks were called bartenders. Uh-huh. Now they're mixologists. Or sometimes referred to as worse than that. Oh yeah. That's almost like what the garbage man is now the sanitation engineer. Correct. Same, same deal, but you know, it's a different name. We can give them a little grief. You know, they can take a joke. Fred, this is great. Thank you very much. It's my pleasure. It's always, it's always good tasting with somebody who is a master and somebody who is, uh, who's out there actually on the front lines, creating these things that everybody enjoys. Oh, I enjoy doing it. I enjoy talking about it. You know that. Cheers. Cheers. Well, there you have it, folks. That is part one of our two-part series with the industry icon, Fred Noe. Really interesting to hear about the family history there and to know that there's personalities behind this huge bourbon producer. We forget that a lot, you know, especially with those big, big, big producers like they are. They're real people, and it's really cool to see it stay in the family like that. For sure, I'm looking forward to part two. Back next week with part two, including Fred Noe answering your Q&A. Thanks again, folks. Keep tasting.