Welcome back to another episode of Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. Picking up part two. I'm excited for this. This is actually my favorite one. So for this part, Brett Pontoni was talking to Fred Noe, Joe Maloney, and me, Greg Versch, regular Barrel to Bottle podcast contributors, jumped into the conversation too. The audio gets a little spotty, because we only had like two mics in the room, and we were all tasting whiskey at the same time. That's fun. Binny's Beverage Depot customers got their questions answered by the legendary Fred Noe on Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. And on top of that, we also had a lightning round Q and A with Fred Noe. And he actually answered almost all the questions in one or two words. Beautiful. That's great. Cool. So, yeah. Enjoy. We've had a unique opportunity because he happens to be in town to sit down, and we're going to have a discussion and ask some questions with Fred Noe. Fred is the seventh generation master distiller for Jim Beam, following in his father's footsteps with his son following behind him. So, Fred, welcome to Barrel to Bottle Podcast. I'm glad to be here, Brett. Thanks for having me. Also sitting in with us is our host, Greg Versch and Joe Maloney from the Whiskey Highline. Hi, everybody. What's it been like working with your son? It's been like working with a young Booker. He's a lot. I mean, he always takes self-skips generations. He's my dad made over. It's amazing. He has no tolerance for anything not the best. If it's not perfect, he raises hell with employees. He would think everybody should come to work and work hard. Why the hell they, why won't he do his job? What the hell is going on here? I said, Freddy, man, you got to chill a little bit. Why? Why? I said, okay. But I mean, that's just my dad. He's my dad made over and very particular about his liquor, which is great. It's been easy working with him because, you know, you've seen his little book, Creations. He's so particular. It's about getting everything just right. Carrying on the tradition that Booker started. How different was it the way that you were drawn in to work with your father and the way that Freddie would have come to you and to start working with Bean to start working at the distillery? Freddie had a better agent than I had when he came to work with our CEO, Matt Shaddock. You know, Freddie was a C student at Beth's in school, and Matt was down, I'm sure you've met Matt. He was an English guy, you know, he was a Armory, Armour Battalion commander and a great speaker, and he asked me, you know, Freddie was in college, he said, you know, following in yours and your father's footsteps isn't going to be that easy for young Fred. He said, you guys are like legends in this bourbon industry. Would you like for me to be his mentor and kind of bring him in to the business? I said, Matt, he's yours. I said, you really want to take this on? I mean, he said, I would love to. So he took Freddie and they walked off. They were down at the plant. They walked off, had a conversation. That kid turned in from a C student to a straight A's. And has been just when he came to work, Matt made sure that he was regimented. He wanted to do everything. And his training was regimented from, he went from the unloading the grain to running the cases out of the back door onto a truck with increments of time to learn each part of the business. Cause he wanted to learn what this part did, how it affected the next part, and how they all intertwined. And he's been a great, you know, Matt's been a great mentor for Freddie. And he talks to him regular, keeps up with him. Helped him with some leadership training, and he's turned into a hell of an employee. I mean, it's been, now me, when I came along, Booker said, go out there and help him in the warehouse. Go out there and help him in the cutting the grass. Go. My training was like as needed. Where you need somebody to sweep the floor, go sweep the floor. What are you doing this afternoon? Come give a tour. You know, mine was not very regimented, but Booker just kind of threw me in the fire. When he was a kid, you talked about the grain, smelling the grain and that your father would mix up, take different batches and mix up and you were able to, even as a kid, pick out the ones that were musty or weren't exactly right. Was there a moment when Freddie was a child? Booker did it with him. So was there a moment where he picked it up and where he did the same thing? Booker did the same thing with him when he was a little guy. I mean, they used to go to the distillery together, because Freddie went because of the fishing. Dad had a lake that nobody could fish in but him. So he would take his grandson, I would call it catching. It wasn't really fishing. Because if you threw a line in, you caught a fish. There was no, Booker wanted to make sure that that boy caught fish. He didn't want him to get bored, to be over playing in the weeds. When he threw his line in there, something hit it. So that was always a good time. And when dad passed away, I remember, Freddie was 13, I think, 14. One of the executives asked him, Rich Reese, asked him, said, What are you going to miss most about your grandfather? Fishing in our lake. He said, what do you mean? He said, there's a lake that only me and granddaddy can fish in. He said, now that he's not around, I'm not going to be able to go fishing in that lake. So Rich wrote a letter, and it's posted on the guard house. Freddie Noe can fish in this lake anytime he wants to. Rich Reeves, CEO of Jim Beam. It was kind of funny that that was just their bonding time. It's been great. I mean, he's a good kid. He loves the industry, he loves the business. Yeah, I think that's important because you can't shoehorn, just like you couldn't be shoehorned in, because you kind of had to come about it on your own as well. Oh, you got to. It wasn't just that you were told from this big that you were going to do this. My dad tried to push me away from it. He said, don't bank on us being here because in the 70s, when I was in high school, bourbon was not that popular. You know, we shut down one distillery and didn't need the inventory. So dad kept saying, you need to go to college. Said, this is fine, I'll be here. You know, it's closing down the Boston plant. They mothballed it and left it empty for a while. Then when the man picked up and started making more whisky, they opened that plant back up and cranked it up. Where did your father spend more time as just actually running the stills? Did you spend more time in Claremont or at Boston? Boston. He learned at Claremont and then they bought that Boston plant in 1954 and sent him over to run it. Because that's the Booker Noe Distillery, right? That's the name that, yeah. That's a massive, people don't understand, it's easy to get to Claremont and see Claremont, people don't understand exactly how powerful that Boston facility is. Yeah, it's the biggest urban distillery in the world, I think. They're putting out a lot of liquor every day over there. That's the way Booker wanted it to. He always wanted to be the biggest and the best. Is there an expansion going on there? Yep. They're expanding right now as we speak. More fermenters, more two-steels. They're rocking and rolling. What's it been like now that the Suntory and Beam being tied up together? It's been great. I mean, the thing about the Suntory guys, they're whiskey lovers, Japanese whiskey. They're learning about bourbon. They didn't have that much knowledge of bourbon. So we've been teaching them and they appreciate what we do. And they've been great backers of investing a lot of capital to let us increase production. And they're not over telling us how to make bourbon. Are they're shipping any corn over to Japan to go to Yamazaki or Cheetah to try to make their own? No, they ship corn over there, but we're not shipping them any corn. We have been able to play with some of their oak barrels that they've got. All of them is in our... Yeah, so we haven't really figured out what we're going to do with it. And Sinji has been a great resource on wood finishing, and we've brought some Sinji's barrels and we've played with finishing. We learned, at least I learned, that you can take Spanish oak and get a lot of color real quick, but if you leave it too long, it gets real strong. Sure. So, it's kind of fun. I guess the accents, my Southern drawl and their Japanese, sometimes we look at each other kind of funny, but we put the liquor in the glass and taste. You can read eyes. You know what people like? That's a universal language, yeah. Yeah, you know, but as far as the talking, I don't speak Japanese and Sinji's English is pretty good, but sometimes I zing something. He doesn't quite some of my Southern, I guess, slang words, right? He gives me that look like, what the hell are you saying? But I mean, we get it together. He's a big fan of the fried chicken too, so he likes it. There's been a big deal in bourbon lately has been experimentation, and Buffalo Trace has certainly been at the front of that in terms of commercializing experimentation and everything they're doing with the Single Oak Project and the Buffalo Trace Experimental Collection. You guys actually have been doing it as well and doing it early because a few years ago, you released all the single grain releases where you had red rice, the harvest collection. Anything, we're going to assume that you've got all kinds of stuff like that running. Anything that you've done like that, that's getting close to? We've remade some brown rice that will be coming out again. I mean, after that harvest collection, the brown rice got such rave reviews from writers and consumers that we have revisited that and been making some more of that and aging it out. American Single Malt, we've been playing with that a little bit. And running that through the column stills, making it run through the interesting. Yeah. So that's, it's aging now. You know, how it ages out, it ages differently than our normal bourbon. So we've got to figure out how long, what part of the house is. You've got to go into new wood or old wood on that? We went into wood, new. New wood. We went into the new, but wood finishes. We've been working a lot of the independent stave on different wood finishing, different char and toast levels in the barrel, which is all new stuff for innovation going forward. Looking for ways to change flavors, you know, and not make it up. Do either of you have any ideas of possibly why that brown rice is so popular? Because I got a pretty solid idea myself. I'm curious to see what you guys think. I think it just didn't have the bite that rye does. You know, rice is not a real spicy grain, and it just balanced out with... It seemed to be like cleaner, closer to just clean, pure sugar, right? That you're not going to get, there's not a lot of other character in it. Yeah, it was great balance, and people were very approachable. Yes, the thing I've noticed with the rice spirits that we've had, we have several Japanese rice whiskeys that seem to kind of be chameleons in the barrel. They seem to take on the flavor of whatever barrel they've aged in. So we can have one that's aged in a sherry barrel, ends up tasting like a young Speyside. And if we end up having one that's aged in a bourbon barrel, we end up having something that can trick somebody in a bourbon tasting. So I feel like with the rye being gone, typically when I have a weeded bourbon, that people seem to rave about all the time, it's not so much that the wheat is the flavor, it's for me, it's more that the corn gets to shine through. The wheat that's very, very strong. We've had debate with everybody chasing Papy Van Winkle and Weller and all those legendary weeded bourbons, exactly that. Is it the wheat that's making the flavor or as Joe said, is it the wheat that's just not getting in the way of the corn? And then if you move it out of the way even more with the rice, then I think people may be, people are actually, the weeder fans are actually closer to corn whiskey fans more than anything maybe. Yeah, because I mean the wheat doesn't have the bite the rye does. You know, it's softer. Sure. And are you running anything? Are you running any wheat on any kind of scale? Are you running either wheat on its own or a weeded mash belt? No, we did that one, Jerry Dalton did that one years ago. In that harvest collection, we haven't really revisited that wheat. You know, with the acquisition of Maker's Mark, we kind of let Bill and the boys at Maker's do the weeded bourbons. We'll stick to the other stuff because they don't do that many innovations within their, you know, they do their... They don't really do, outside of 46, they don't really do anything except for put different colored wax on the bottle. Well, you know, and they got their private select, where you put your staves in. Yeah, we've been able to do a few of the experiments. It's pretty cool. Yeah, it's a cool problem. Just brought in four different ones. So yeah, that's it. I mean, you wouldn't think that those staves would change the flavor that much, but by god, it does. If you guys ever played with that, I'd be curious because it certainly works on makers and it works on makers in a short period of time. I think the resting time with the staves is 90 days tops. When you do that, have you guys ever done any experiments to see if you could stick it in a barrel of bean distilled that's about six years old and to see if it changes? We've talked about it, but we really haven't gone down that road because it's kind of their thing. But what I was wondering if you took, built a barrel, and I've talked to Brad Boswell about it, he's probably gonna make me one, and maybe put one Spanish oak stave in there. And, you know, all those different ones, when you build the barrel, put them in that barrel and let it age in. Don't finish it, but have the barrel built. Be full on with the char and with everything. Now, what if you took it and you threw it down in that maker's cave that they got for $46 and let it age at an even cooler temperature? I hadn't really thought about it. Maybe put it on the bottom floors and do about the same thing. I guess what Buffalo Trace is trying. What do you think about Buffalo Trace's experiment, where they're taking 25-year-old bourbon and they're sticking it in cold storage, and they want to stick it there for another 25 years and see if they can make a 50-year-old bourbon. They probably could if you don't lose the angel share. That's the only thing, cold, you're not going to lose it. We can move them to the lower floors for 50 years. Well, do you have an age you like? I know you were talking about earlier, 12-13. That's kind of my sweet spot. Do you run into anything that's 20 years or older that you particularly like or do you think that's too long? To me, the ones I've tasted have been pretty woody. I like for them to have balance, not be so woody. Well, and there's nothing in there. I would assume at 20 years, you run the risk and not have it. Yeah, you run the risk. 4% a year roughly. It's nice to have something left to sell. You got 20% of a barrel, not much left to do. I mean, if it's all about a number, put it in low storage and leave it the whole time, but then you don't get the good balance, I don't think. It was all about just having a number on the barrel. Sure. I guess you could take the barrels and decant them, go from one to the next, the next keep consolidating, but then you start off with 100 and end up with one at the end. Right, right. But I mean, we just try to turn it over and get it on. When you're pulling, I mean, when you're pulling and doing a batch from Beam or anything where you're talking about, you need to talk about small batch, doing the large batch. Bookers is unique because the ware would go in the warehouse, but everything else is being drawn. You have to be pulling from everywhere. Vertical cross-sections from, don't use the top 10 percent and bottom 10 percent of the house for the small batch bourbons. So we're using 80 percent of the house top to bottom. So we do a customer Q&A segment, where customers give us their questions. Sure. Via email and comments at binnys.com, on social media, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, at binny'sbev. All right, here you go. And if we answer their question on the podcast, we give them a $20 Binny's Give Card. At tjksky asks, what's your favorite non-Jim Beam bourbon? My favorite was probably Eddie Russell's release called Decades. I think Eddie did a great job. We were actually, it's funny, it seemed like a lot of our stories come back to Chicago. But we were up here at WhiskeyFest a couple of years ago. We're all buddies. I mean, I think it freaks people out. How good of friends all of us are in the bourbon industry. Eddie and his slow Kentucky draw, come over by the table, I got something I want you to taste. An old man wants to see you too. I said, all right. So I eased over to the Wild Turkey table. They get underneath, you know, it's always good when one of us gets a bottle out underneath the table. That's what we call a slick, which is a bottle with no label on it. It's like when you're working on products, you just get a bottle, it might be a Basil Hayden bottle with no labels, and you get your blend in it, you just kind of keep it. He brought a bottle of this, and he poured some in a glass, poured Jimmy a good drink, me one. I fired back on it. I said, God damn, that's good stuff. Jimmy shook his head, nah, too old. You young boys, y'all like it. Y'all like it too damn old. And I said, what is that? It's something I'm working on, decades. And so later on, maybe next, later in New York that year, it was out there. I said, oh, you got that out? Yeah. Then somebody asked me the same question. I said, yeah, I think the question was, if you were going to buy bourbon, it wasn't a beam, what would you buy? So I'd like to buy some of that decades from Wild Turkey. He said, well, they're selling it. I said, how much? He said, $30 a bottle. I said, I'll take a f**king case. And then I walked over there and said, you're selling that for, who told you that? He said, it's 150 a bottle. I said, oh, okay. I don't want a case. I want a case. But yeah, some dude walked up out of the blue and he said, yeah, $30 a bottle. I can't take a case on him now. Jimmy and Eddie were here last year and we did a podcast with them. The same thing was good and that was one of the debates they got into, we're talking about that and Jimmy taking the piss out of Eddie because Eddie likes stuff too old. Right. He gives us grief. Jimmy and Booker are just alike. If it got much over eight, nine years old, he don't want to be bothered with it. Too damn old, too woody. I mean, those two were like two peas in a pod. They're old school and their sons are a little different than they are. But that's the nature of the next generation. Tarsiccio Duran asks, are you nervous about a Rick House collapse? Not now. I mean, when Barton had their collapse in July, we started looking at ours real close, and we found a couple of ours that were starting to lean a little bit. So the ones that we had that were leaning now have external skeletons on them, of I-beams and concrete supports. So I'm not now, but that weekend of the 4th of July, I was. Did you guys get inside your houses and see, I think that they finally attributed some of the weakness to some kind of boar that got in the couple's warehouses in Bardstone Beach? Those beetles, everybody's got them. They come out of the ground, they're bugs, and they eat the wood, it's kind of hard to imagine, from the inside out. So you can look at a board, made 2 by 6, true 2 by 6. These old houses were built in the 30s. I mean, when a girl that weighs, I'm thinking Faith may weigh 120, 35 pounds, worked in a warehouse, stepped on a step, and broke the board. That made us start looking at wood, so there's a knife test. You go stick the boards with a knife, and if it sticks, it's good, but if it goes in, then the beetles have gotten inside and pretty much eaten the inside, like a termite, where you can see where they've gotten into the wood. There's a little hole, and they get in and eat the inside of it out. And you've got a hollow board with the outside, so you can't see it. You've got to stick it. So we've been replacing wood in warehouses for a couple of years now. Does that affect barrels as well as the Rick House? No, they protect the barrels. They just go for those big boards. We haven't seen them in the barrels, but now we have seen them in the boards, the walk boards and the structure of them. Duffin Ralph asks, if you could do it all over, who would you partner with to create your favorite flavor profile? My favorite? Anybody? Anybody. Oh, my dad, Booker. If it was just one, I'd want him. If I could have three or four, I would take dad, Jimmy, Elmer, and Parker. I'd like to sit down with those guys and do it. I mean, I'm sure a lot of people think Jim Beam, but I never knew Jim Beam. He died before I was ever born. But I mean, I grew up with watching those four gentlemen and to just be in the room with them and listen to them, give each other a hard time. It'd be kind of cool to do something with them when they were all in their prime and all of them were full of piss and vinegar because I know they were at one time. I know they were because I mean, I saw it on the end and I couldn't imagine what they were like in their 20s and 30s because I was with them pretty hard when they were in their 60s, 70s. And they were just great guys. What is your favorite Booker's batch from the last three years? Why it or ask? I guess my favorite one was Kathleen's batch, the one's name for Kathleen DiBenedetto. Because Kathleen, when I called her to ask her if it would be okay to name a batch, she broke down and started crying on me. Because she was the first brand manager and she did work on these small batch Bourbons from their infancy as the brand manager. They were her babies and letting her pick her batch, and just the significance of it, I think made it. Because I mean, all the batches taste good in their own way. But seeing how that one was so special to her, and knowing that Booker would have been very proud to see one. She was the daughter that dad never had, and she's so passionate about her babies that she still calls me, even though she works on on-premise work now, she doesn't have anything to do with the actual brand management. But she still, these are her, these are my babies. Take care of them. Yes ma'am, I'll take care of your babies. Do you want to do a lightning round in Q&A? Like one, two, three word answers? Sure. Alright, here we go. You don't have to answer a thing that short, I guess. He's spent too much time around me. What was your least favorite job in the distillery? Night shift. Favorite sports team? Kentucky Wildcats. Red or white wine? Mmm, red. Jim Beam, apple or vanilla? Apple. Favorite menu item from KFC? Extra crispy chicken. Favorite place to travel? Australia. Who do you look up to in the industry? Currently, Jimmy Russell. Morning or night? I'm morning person. Where do you want to retire? Boardstown, Kentucky. Biggest accomplishment? Bringing my son into the business. Bourbon or rye? Bourbon. Biggest pet peeve? Only three words. Lightning round questions. No, I wouldn't do that. Young liquor, I guess. Chicago or New York? Chicago. Dogs or cats? Cats. Wiccans are fired up. I don't know. I guess I'd say my wife. I don't know there. Summer or winter? Summer. Manhattan or old fashion? Old fashion. What's your spirit animal? Spirit animal, probably. Damn, that's pretty good. A horse, a mule, a jackass. That was most enjoyable to me. Terrific. I loved it. And it's cool having Brett Pontoni with his industry knowledge. The man himself, he's an encyclopedia of bourbon info, and to get those two guys in a room together. So we'll be back in a week with another Barrel to Bottle episode. Thanks again folks for tuning in. We'll appreciate it. Keep tasting.