Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to another episode of Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. I'm Greg, I do communications at Binny's Beverage Depot. In the room with me is Roger. Hello. Roger's our beer education and marketing, and we have Pat. Yeah, I'm Pat Brophy, Director of Spirit Sales. Whiskey Hotline Emeritus. Yes, Whiskey Hotline Emeritus. And Pat, we have some special guests in the room today. Yeah, we'd like to welcome Matt Hofmann today. Matt is the co-founder and are we calling you Master Distiller now? That is correct. Master Distiller of the Westland Distillery in sunny Seattle, Washington. Beautiful distillery, making some really beautiful whiskeys. Very exciting. I'm very happy to be here. How long ago did Westland pop up on the scene? Well, it kind of depends on how you look at it. You know, we founded the business in 2010. We didn't start selling any whisky until late 2013, but you didn't start seeing any outside of Washington state until basically late 2014. So relatively new on the scene in the grand scheme of things. I was actually from the area and my parents were still living in the Seattle area. And the next time I went out, I visited the distillery and I was just blown away. I mean, it was obviously a gorgeous distillery. There was a lot of time and money put into it. But I got to go through the lab and taste a bunch of really cool stuff. And it really opened my eyes as far as interesting, innovative things that you can do with malt whisky in America that, you know, really nobody else has been doing. And that is why we want to talk to you today, Matt. You got some really cool new stuff here. New Pete Weekwood just got released. Garriana's won some major awards. Use of Garriana, period. So there's all kinds of, I mean, this could be an hours long podcast, but we do got to shave it down a bit, I suppose. Westland Whiskey is kind of known for using innovative, different barley. In Scotland, you use whatever is giving you the highest yield of alcohol per acreage of barley type of thing. And they're not really considering different flavor combinations. And with that, what brought you guys to using this? Are you still calling it the Five Malt Mix? Yeah, absolutely. We use the Five Malt Barley Bill, so that's five different types of malted barley. They're not variations in varietal, they're just variations in roast levels. So people who are familiar with beer, who had a porter or a stout or an amber ale, the reason those taste different is because of the different roast levels in barley. And we started looking at it, I mean, I went through formal education in Scotland. They didn't teach us any of this stuff. There was never, they taught us how to make single malt Scottish style whiskey. But when we started doing it, we said, look at different types of malted barley, and you talk to maltsters, and there's hundreds of them, all sorts of different roast levels, different flavor profiles. And we said, why is nobody tackling that? Why is nobody trying to do anything like that? We never really got a good answer. So we just started doing it. We look at what makes a whiskey, what we're doing from the Pacific Northwest. And a big part of that is agriculture. 80% of the barley comes from Washington State. But then this kind of cultural influence and ability to just kind of leave the traditions of things behind and pursue something new. We didn't really think about it in those terms back then, but now kind of it makes a lot of sense. So those five different types of malt and barley bring this whole spectrum of malt flavor to things. And that's foundational for us. It's in all three of our core whiskeys, our American Oak, our Sherry Wood and our peaded. And you can almost always find it in our special releases at the same time. Very cool. Now, is that something where the Scots are going to look at you and just be like, why are you doing this? You're throwing money away. I have to be careful here. Not usually the Scottish Distillers. In fact, most Scottish Distillers I talk to are actually really excited about what we do. The thing is, is that they're not in charge. You know, in those distilleries, they're, you know, the distilleries are numbers on a spreadsheet. There are some exceptions to that rule. Brickladi, Glenmorengy, you know, which is the only distillery that I'm aware of that has used roasted malts. Pretty cool. But, yeah, I mean, what we represent is a very different approach to single malt, and that is to focus on flavor from the raw ingredients rather than the raw ingredients providing yield. And basically, you know, whiskey starts at the barrel, which is kind of the Scottish model. Well, yeah, I think that's really cool. So which whiskey is going to showcase to Joe Consumer here, this five malt blend and really what that flavor is all about best? Try our American Oak expression. It's our flagship whiskey, precisely because it showcases that at the highest degree. It's our biggest departure from Scottish whiskey, but at the same time, it's, we think of the core three, the clearest expression of what American single malt can be all about. So that five malt recipe is really front and center in American Oak. How about the yeast that you're using? Is that conventional or something a little different? The yeast strain we use is really, really important. Again, it's the same influence from the brewing industry. We saw what they're doing and have been doing even before they knew what different yeast strains were, before they understood what yeast was, there were different yeast strains being cultivated by breweries accidentally at the beginning. And there are hundreds of those strains out there, in the same way there's hundreds of different types of malt. And in Scotland, basically, almost every distillery is using exactly the same strain of yeast. It's called the M strain. It is provided from a couple of manufacturers. And it ferments very quickly and is relatively neutral in flavor. And that's it. And if you look at the brewing industry, there's all this variation, but also the wine making industry, different yeast strains. And even when you look at bourbon, Four Roses, of course, is famous for having five different yeast strains. A lot of the bourbon distilleries have their own kind of house yeast. The Japanese distilleries use different yeast strains. So it's really like just Scotland that hasn't really focused on yeast. I mean, I think sometimes they talk about, you know, fermentation time, that being a factor, but yeast is basically untapped. You know, we're looking at malt and yeast. There's four ingredients in single malt. Two of them, they basically kind of disregard. And it's really actually surprising. So we basically went the polar opposite of the hyper efficient yeast. We went with as close to a wild yeast as we could get. And that was a Belgian Cezanne yeast. We wanted to showcase what that fermentation flavor could give us. A lot of, you know, bright citrus, cherry notes, some spice. In our American oak whisky, which we have in front of us, the orange peel, that comes off straight away. And then I get a little bit of the cherry and that sort of thing on the palate. Now, is that... Cezanne yeast is also kind of famous for being a particularly durable yeast. And it's got a pretty wide fermentation temperature range. What are you fermenting this at? Yeah, so we have to be careful with this because it can ferment and it throws all sorts of fun stuff out there. We start the fermentation about 60 Fahrenheit. We let that rise up to about 85 Fahrenheit and then we cap it there. So most distilleries, both in Scotland, but also you look at bourbon distilleries, they have like open top fermenters with no temperature control. You know, if you're using the M strain, that's fine. It ferments, you know, and it doesn't produce a ton of flavor. But flavor, a lot of that is kind of logarithmic. So the warmer it gets, you get more and more flavors being produced exponentially. And not all of them are good. So, you know, we cap it at about 85 Fahrenheit to make sure it's not producing an excessive amount of flavors. And so that's kind of the sweet spot that we found for our strain in particular. And does it still ferment in a typical whiskey timeline? You know, a beer is going to take a couple of weeks, but you're not fermenting those for two weeks, are you? We have a five day fermentation. So, that is actually pretty long for a whiskey company. And it yields a little bit less with the saison yeast, but you get great flavor out of it. And that's the thing, is if you just disentangle yourself from this notion of efficiency at all costs, and you just look at little things that can drive flavor, there are so many new options in this business that's been around forever. And a business that's simple, as I said, like four raw ingredients, all you have to do is pay attention to those things. Took the words out of my mouth. Flavor over efficiency, I think, is going to be a recurring theme here. Well, it's funny because there's nothing really wrong with efficiency. Within the context of our yeast strain or our malt bill, we have efficiencies that we try to hit. We just never do it at the expense of flavor. And that's the big difference. Being efficient is in general a good rule, but we're all sitting around here with a liquid that we want to drink. Nobody's going to go pick a bottle off the shelf because it's the most efficient whiskey. That would be depressing. Well, speaking of this liquid, this is fantastic. And I've always gotten a bit of that roast malt kind of chocolatey character out of it, too. You know, you point out oranges and cherry, and it definitely has a fruit forward nose. But on the palate, it just really screams chocolate to me. And I've always liked that about it. But, you know, visiting it now, it tastes notably, I think, older than it used to. Is that something you've gotten that's just a function? You taste older than it used to. Yeah, you should get your mouth checked. No, it's, you know, first of all, what you're talking about there with the fruitiness and then the maltiness, that's really intentional. The balance itself is timeless and people can come back to it and have more than one. So we build that into all of our whiskeys so that when people taste it, they don't go, well, this is just a novelty. You want to be able to taste the chocolate, but also the fruity notes and the sweetness, the caramel vanilla from the cask. So you don't get exhausted by it. You've got the classiness of the malt style, but it's still like immediately approachable for an American bourbon lover, right? Yeah. It's not overloaded with wood either though. Exactly. So that's a great point. Our American oak definitely appeals to American whisky lovers. It is named for the American oak that we use for it. It's about 90-95 percent virgin American white oak, the same way that bourbon producers would. There's a few really big differences though. We're really particular about the quality of oak that we get. So it's all slow-grown oak, which slow-grown oak has really tight rings. But counter-intuitively, those tight rings are actually more porous. So slow-grown oak is actually less dense than fast-grown oak, and there's more oxygen exchange with the atmosphere. That's a really big thing. If you're looking at what happens in maturation, it's not just extraction, it's not just pulling the caramels and vanillas and those flavors out from the casks. The oxidation is actually much more important. Totally. It's something we talk a lot with our staff about when we're doing group tastings and trainings and stuff with the staff, is you cannot, there is no substitute for oxidative aging. Absolutely. And there's these guys trying to molecularly manipulate whiskeys and stuff now. And some of them, there are some aged flavors they create. We are very much naysayers on that stuff. I have a very strong opinion on that sort of thing. You and I can agree with that strong opinion sometimes. I would not record you. I'm quite happy to say it. I mean, I think, you know, one of the things you said, you know, the oak is not overly aggressive and that's very much intentional. Certainly a part of that is the fact that we age thing in the our whiskeys in the ambient climate of the Northwest. The Northwest doesn't get any big temperature swings, you know, so they talk about like the summers, you know, pushing the whisky into the oak and the winters, it contracts back out. And that's where you're getting the extractive flavor. But it never gets super warm in the summer in Seattle and the Northwest. It never gets super cold either. So you have a much more delicate style of maturation. Now are you losing alcohol? We are. Yeah, we lose about a degree of proof per year. So, you know, we'll go in to new oak at 110 proof. And so, you know, when we start blending with stuff, it's 107, six or five or something like that. Is that more akin to scotch? That is definitely scotch. When you have a more humid climate, you lose alcohol and a drier climate, you lose water. That is so interesting. The other big thing just on that same front is, you know, we don't believe in any, you know, not only do we not do, you know, the artificial maturation conditions, but, you know, there's like the oak spirals and the chips and all that stuff. And I feel like that stuff misses the point. And even when you get to, like, let's say if somebody does that and it works, you know, what are you trying to achieve ultimately? Why are you doing it? I don't think people are asking that question. For us, you know, what we're trying to do is make something that is representative of the Northwest. So, you know, we're using really high quality oak, but it's all 53-gallon casks, very traditional size, and nothing else artificial, because what we want is that, you know, part of the Northwest to come through in the traditions of whiskey making. I was going to ask about your Coopridge. What do your barrels undergo? So this is first use? Yeah, so we use, first of all, a variety of casks through Westland. In the American Oak that we have in front of us, we use two different types. Both of them are slow grown oak, which is actually a ring spacing count. Slow growth or actually extra slow growth. We also have air drying of the staves for 18 to 24 months. That's huge. The air drying part of it, in addition to that oxygen exchange that you get with the slow growth oak, the air drying, I say this in the Northwest, everybody knows what freshly cut timber smells like in the kind of sappy and resinous. Well, there are saps and resins and all sorts of other things in the wood, tannins that you have in freshly cut lumber. When you make a barrel, you need to dry the wood down so it's at a moisture content that you can use to work with it. You can do that in two ways. You can kiln dry it, which lowers that moisture in about six weeks, or you can air dry it. The air drying is the traditional method, and that can take anywhere between six, 12, 18, 24, even for us, some of our stuff, 36 months. That gets you to the same moisture content, but it also removes a lot of those tannins and the excess of oakiness. Air-dried oak is almost entirely what is used in the wine industry. Very rarely will they use kiln dried oak, especially in high-end wines, and yet in the whiskey business, it's the total opposite. There's a couple of exceptions to that. I think Mikters and Buffalo Trace are famous for having really good oak programs, but largely, it's whatever is cheapest, and those things make a huge difference. Between the two of those, with the two different air-drying times, 18 and 24 months, we also have two different char levels. We have a number three char, so that goes in on the 1 to 4 scale, a medium-heavy char. That produces the toast layer behind the char. The char actually doesn't have any flavor itself, it's the toast layer behind it. And then the other type we use is a really long toast, so they toast it first, and then they do a very light char, so actually below a 1 on the 1 to 4 scale. That gives us two different types of maturation profile, one more cask influence, one with less, and that allows us to have complexity in the blend. Can we try the second one in the core range? Definitely. So the whisky we have in front of us right now is our Sherry Wood Expression, so this is of our Quora III, another really popular whisky that we have, you know, taking the Sherry cask maturation tradition from Scotland, carrying that forward. At the same time, though, we're trying to make sure we don't lose sight of what makes it a Westland, you know, Sherry cask expression, so it's not all about the Sherry cask. We're very particular about sourcing those casks. They come directly from Spain. We have them shipped whole, which keeps the vibrancy of the Sherry character intact. That's not a common practice in the whisky business. We get Oloroso and PX wine casks, Hogshead and Butts, but as a technical term, for those of you who are not familiar with that, so as Hogshead for that matter. Hey, if they're still listening to the Barrel to Bottle podcast, they're probably... Yeah, fair enough. So we get these casks and, you know, Sherry, in my experience, it can dominate a blend. It can be very, very powerful, just a little bit. So we want to make sure that it balances with the malt, because that's still what's at the core of Westland, is the five malt grain mill. We use the same one that we have in American Oak, in the Sherry Wood, same yeast strain and everything. So to be able to balance that with Sherry is really important. It's not so immediately pungent as a lot of the Sherry finishes that we see. Yeah, I think, I mean, the Sherry is there and it's defined and you can taste it. It's just that there's other stuff, you know, and they work really well together, like, you know, PX, you know, raisinated wine. You know, it's not just the raisin flavor now, it's oatmeal raisin cookies, you know, and the oatmeal cookie part, that comes from the malt. But you have these flavors that are beginning to integrate really nicely. Same thing with the Oloroso flavors, the dried fruits and the nuttiness. You like the salinic and almond quality to this? Yeah. It just screams Oloroso. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Sherry casks are very hard to come by these days. Do you have a set producer you work with or are you sourcing them through a broker, whoever can get you the cask that meet your specifications? So we work with the broker, he's actually a cooper by trade, but he'll go out and buy casks from places direct and ship them to us. When we started the business, nobody was selling Sherry casks in the US. I mean, it's possible that somebody was, but we couldn't find them. So we went to Spain to find somebody to sell casks to us. They were selling to other places around the world, but not to the US. So we went over there and that process was a long one because we needed to make sure they understood you can't sulfur the barrels. These practices where they burn sulfur candles inside of the barrel, which every winery does when you're using a barrel because the wine doesn't pick up that sulfur flavor, but whiskey does. You get a lot of older, especially Scottish whiskeys that sometimes have sulfur in the Sherry cask. So we developed that relationship for a long time. I mean, the challenging thing actually with Sherry wine casks is that it is inherently an unsustainable practice. And what I mean by that is you only get, Sherry wine producer will keep a cask around for a long time. If you're making a normal red wine, you might keep a cask for a couple of cycles, two years, four years, six years, and then get rid of it. There's Sherry butts that are more than 100 years old at a lot of these bodegas in Spain. So the only reason why we're able to get them today is basically because wineries have been closing and downsizing and that won't work forever. Eventually, all the wineries will close. I think Sherry has bottomed out and it's begun to pick back up. It's certainly become much more popular in the bartending community, which is great. But even that, that means they're going to start holding on to their casks. And so then what? And that's like a fascinating part of this business that nobody seems to have addressed yet. Well, I mean, that's why the Scots are all turning to the Sherry seasoned cask now, right? Where it gets washed with Sherry for a few months, they turn the Sherry itself into vinegar, and then they just move the cask to Scotland. Yeah, that's, you know, that sort of thing is, is we're not interested in that, because the use of Sherry casks, why we carry that tradition forward, is rooted in the fact that it came from an authentic practice, you know, shipping Sherry by the cask to the UK, dumping the Sherry out and they'd have that. But now there's people, to your point, just making, you know, a low grade of Sherry, flavoring it, and then they turn it into vinegar. And that's not real anymore. I mean, the flavor might still be consistent. But to me, that, you know, that you kind of lose the soul of it. If they have the choice, that probably isn't the choice that they would make. Yeah. It's just that, you know, their brand is beholden to the Sherry heavy profile. And it's the only option. It's to change the brand itself or change the way you approach your casks. Yeah. Well, it's actually kind of interesting on that front. You know, we went out to Spain most recently, sort of in December of 2017, to go look at producers, not just actually within the Sherry area, but across all of Andalusia. And we were looking at producers that could try to get around this problem another way. And what I mean by that is people who are changing how they make Sherry and the relationship to casks rather than, you know, people making a false type of Sherry and seasoning it in oak. Well, I mean, this Sherry whiskey is pretty phenomenal. I like that it still has that citrus and ripe fruit character, but it's complemented by that kind of more intense leathery dried fruit thing going on. I really like it. Thank you very much. Yeah. Stand shoulder to shoulder with any other. The nose is incredible. It's that nice mixture, like you said before, of the nuttiness, but also the fruit. It kind of you can tell it's a mixture of those two Sherries, not just overly sweet, but some depth in there too. Yeah, definitely graceful. Let's move on to the next one. So yeah, the three whiskeys we have in front of us, Westland peated, that's our core expression. We're taking heavily peated malt from Baird's. So 80% of the barley we get is from Washington State. Most of what isn't is peated malt. And basically that's because when we started the company, no malting company in North America was making peated malt. There is Washington State peat, but nobody would malt it for us. So we sourced Scottish peat. So from Baird's, that's, you know, that goes into Berk-Lotte, that goes into a number of other producers. So mashed distilled mature that and then our five malt recipe, mashed distilled mature that. So it still has that malty component to the whiskey and the fruitiness. So the average of that is about 15 to 20, you know, part per million phenolic content. And then the other two whiskies we've got here are Peat Week whiskies. And that's the only time of year that we release a heavily peated whiskey. So that's 100% heavily peated malt. The edition for the 2017 release, that was named American Singable Whiskey of the Year at the World Whiskey Awards. And so we've just released the newest edition, the 2019 or the edition five. And each one is different. So the 2017 one had much more new oak on it. So there's really cool complimentary flavors that go on between oak phenolics and peat phenolics. So you kind of get this, you know, it's not iodine and, you know, these typical peat notes. It's like leather and tobacco and all these other interesting flavors. And the 2019, the newest one is almost much more classically styled. It's more iodine, it's fruitier. And that's the fun part with these releases. We get to do something new each time. It's really cool. Now, for the standard peated, the peated malt and the five malt blend are distilled and aged separately. And blended together before bottling. Yeah, we have very much a... It's kind of like the Japanese philosophy of creating different flavor profiles and spirits. So we've got our five malt recipe, we've got a recipe with just the peated malt, we've got a recipe with just standard pale malt. Within that, we vary varietals. Now we have Washington State peat that we've been working on. It's not in any of these whiskeys, to be clear yet. And within that, they all go to a variety of casks, and it gives us a matrix of dozens of different options, actually more than a hundred different options in terms of flavor profile. Other, you know, the Japanese distilleries kind of came up with this concept. Most distilleries in Scotland, certainly traditionally, were producing one spirit type, maybe a couple types of casks. And if you wanted variation, that's where blending came in. And the Japanese distilleries said, well, we can't do that because we can't just blend, you know, there's nobody else to blend with here. And so they would intentionally create variation to give themselves the maximum amount of blending tools, like Nika has some like 3,000 different. Yeah, I mean, they have interchangeable heads on their stills and they can make all these different whiskeys out of one single distiller in Japan. It's really cool. Yeah. So we want to make sure we want to do stuff as separately as possible. And then blending at the end is where it all comes together. All right. So you want to move on to the 27th. I should probably say release number four, Pete Week. Release number four, the 2017 edition. So this is, I think, was this one Cast Strength? I think so. 54.4 ABV. With these, sometimes they're Cast Strengths, sometimes they're not. It's based entirely on what we think is best. Well, this edition four is shockingly soft for 108 proof or whatever. Exactly. And that's because it's, think of it, it was a seven cask bottling and five of those seven casks were Virgin White Oak. And so you get a little bit more body that way and other flavors that you don't notice the alcohol as much. That's not a lot of casks. These are some pretty seriously limited. These are limited. I was going to ask, is this a tease? Are we doing a tease segment right now? Kind of. I mean, we have some 17 line around. We're not getting much of the release number five at all. So if you see a bottle, scramble. No, I mean, if you're into limited release whiskeys and want something collectible like this, these fit the bill. But they're going to talk about how good the 17 is. This is incredibly good. The Pete here is spicy. It's coming across like baking spice. And this is like almost a cinnamon roll. Tremendous. Yeah, it's really cool. I mean, you never see that happen in Scotland like New American Oak with Pete, but those flavors really are complimentary and they come from the same kind of flavor family. These phenolic compounds, so like flavors like cinnamon and pepper and these other things are phenolic also in the same way that Pete's smoke is phenolic. It's super integrated. Yeah. Like the wood in the grain and the Pete all coming together. Yeah, it's really richly layered and balanced. This is an exceptional whisky. I'm dancing in my pants over here. Yeah, you're moving around quite a bit. That's impressive. This is a great whisky for people that have tried peated whiskies in the past and get caught up on the idea of this is smoky and I don't get anything else. Or a good example of how it could show other notes. Yeah, Pete doesn't always have to show smoke. You mentioned Washington Peat earlier. What kind of flavors are coming out of Washington Peat? So that's, it's hard to say right away because we're still learning so much about it. The things that are growing in our bogs are totally different. There's wild cranberry and crabapple, and there's more trees in our bogs. There's plant called Labrador tea, which is kind of this, kind of looks like a, like a rosemary plant and drops its leaves every fall. And it has hyper aromatic herbaceous fruity smell to it, which is really interesting. So we are just beginning to like try to quantify exactly how that that changes. We did a chemical analysis recently to see we ran some of our stuff against Scottish peat. And we see that there is definitely a difference, but there is also phenolic content, the kind of classic phenol and gresol and all these other ones. The best way I could describe it at the moment is like Christmas mezcal. That makes sense. You know, mezcal, okay, well, I tried. No, I mean, it's like it has this kind of wild kind of greenness and herbaceousness that mezcal has, but then spiced, you know, with these kind of, these baking spices, the cinnamon and that sort of thing, and pepper, and so it's definitely distinct from the Scottish peat. There's so much more to learn though about it. Like we're taking, you know, peat from this one section of one bog and the peat, you know, 40 feet away is very different from that peat. You know, to say nothing of the other 50,000 acres of peat in Washington state, like we could spend lifetimes working on it. So we're quite excited about that, that we started doing in 2016, getting that spirit into Barrel. We started the project in 2011, but it was only 2016. We could finally do that with a company called Skagit Valley Malting. That's not ready yet, so it's not in any of these releases. I need to be careful about that. These are all still the Scottish peat. When that is ready, you will know. We'll make a big deal about it. It's pretty exciting though so far. But if we come to the distillery, can we taste it now? Sometimes we have. During Peat Week, one of the fun things about Peat Week is that we're producing the spirit, distilling the spirit made from the Washington State peat at that time. You can always taste the new make spirit. I mean, if you guys came and you gave us a little heads up. He knows the secret handshake. Yeah. Sometimes we have it lying around. Sometimes we don't because it's just not ready yet, so we don't need to have samples around, but it's always fun to show people. So, yeah, if you've got the secret handshake and give us a little time, we can send it to you. Have you ever had any of the Lark single malts from Tasmania? I have, yeah. Yeah, and they use that Tasmanian peat. Yeah, there's a couple distilleries that are doing that globally. There's Swedish folks doing that too. It's awesome. Yeah, it's cool. I mean, we were talking about different plant material and different things in the strata of the peat. And, you know, Australian Tasmanian peat has a lot of eucalyptus in it, so it gets like a bit of a minty thing going on, even though it's peated. It's really cool. That is what is exciting right now in this category, in whisky. You know, and there's this kind of idea when you talk to a lot of the Scottish distilleries, not all of them, but most of them, frankly, that this is whisky and it's done. But it's not. Like, that sort of stuff is super, super interesting. Different types of peat, even within Scotland, it's not even really explored anymore. There's just, you know, the source from Islay or the Highlands or Orkney. But, you know, what else can you learn about these different types of peat to say nothing of everything else around the world? And, you know, that's, that's what's exciting, not, you know, to come back to our conversation about forcing, you know, oak flavor into whisky. Like, yeah, that's the point of that. So anyway, I don't want to get wound up on that. Let's talk about the 19. It's I mean, it's huge. It's completely different, but it's also an incredibly classy whisky. Thank you. What you alluded to earlier about it being in more of that classically Scotland peated whisky vein. Definitely. I mean, if I were tasting or smelling this blind, I would think this was coming straight out of Scotland. This is awesome. It definitely has more of that classic peat character. Yeah, this has more iodine to it. So when we source peated malt from bears, as I think I was saying before, and that's Highland peat, which has a specific phenolic character, it has much less iodine than Isla peat, which is which is famous for being full of iodine. When we kind of blended this together, it was really interesting because we were getting a lot of those characteristics coming through. But at the same time, there's also this great integration with the fruitiness. Peat-smoked fruit and all sorts of like bright kind of like yellow fruits and tropical fruits. So you still get, that's the Belgian East. That's what's going on there. So you kind of get this combination of these classically styled things, but the fruitiness kind of gives it away as a as a Westland. Yeah, it's an awesome whiskey. This reminds me, there's a bacon thing that I get from this that reminds me of fruited smoke meat, like applewood. Yeah, like applewood. It's all in that same family there. You know, you get those flavors coming through. So I'm a big proponent of people drinking whiskey while they eat instead of after they eat. And I think this is a this would be awesome with barbecue. Yeah. Yeah, this is great. There's not much more to say about this. This is phenomenal. We're barely getting any of it. Grab a bottle if you see it. Yeah. Don't miss it. If you see it, grab it. This is awesome. What was the yield like on this? And he said it was limited. Yeah. How many casts are in this one? I think we did a thousand eighty bottles of this total. So it was a five casks instead of seven. So smaller than last year's release. You know, it's kind of funny when we do these blends and you just, you know, the one that's second best, you know, was eight casks, but we don't try to shoot for second best. So the best one was a five cask vetting. And so that was it. Of the five casks, one was Virgin White Oak. Two are what we would call ex-Westlands, which are the new oak casks that we use once, and then reuse those, which now we're starting to see those come out and already, and they're awesome because they're kind of somewhere between a Virgin oak cask and a bourbon cask, and it gives you a really unique profile. So we have two of those and then two bourbon casks in the blend. So you kind of have this cool variety of maturation, but no Sherry, all the fruitiness is coming just from the East drain. So, something worth mentioning with Pete Week here is that we actually still have some of the 16 and 17 releases of Pete Week around. We are obviously big fans of Westland, and we were definitely early supporters as early as we could be. As soon as they were ready to start selling whiskey to us in Illinois, we started buying their whiskey. Did we have hand picks? We did at least two hand pick casts, I believe. Okay, so what we have in front of us is two editions of Garriana, the 2017 edition 2 and the 2018 edition 3. They're very, very different whiskies. Just like Peat Week, we're exploring these different characteristics each year. Garriana oak is the Pacific Northwest's only native species of white oak. So American oak, Quercus alba, grows in the whole eastern half of the country, including here in Illinois. Quercus garriana only grows from north of Vancouver, BC down through the Seattle and Portland metropolitan areas. There's a totally different flavor profile that comes with it. So I like to say that American oak gives you caramel and vanilla, coconut, baking spices, and Garriana oak does all of that, but darker. So more molasses, more clove instead of the generic baking spices. So the fruitiness, this is going to be interesting to see if you guys taste this. The fruitiness that we get with our Belgian yeast, that bright fruit, now becomes like this stewed tropical fruit thing, which is really, really interesting. Garriana kind of takes that, integrates really, really well and becomes like blackberry jam and blueberry jam, things like that. It works really well with other flavors, and you kind of can't tell where the Garriana flavor ends and the other flavors begin. So, when I first heard about this Garriana project and this Garriana release, my first thought was like, that is the most quintessentially Pacific Northwest thing to do. I lived outside the Seattle area for junior high and high school, and in sixth grade, every sixth grader in the state of Washington has to do a tree project, at least you're used to. It's part of the required curriculum for public schools in Washington State. In sixth grade, you have to do a tree project, and I had to go out all to all these different state parks, and it had to be native Pacific Northwest trees and plants, only native to the Pacific Northwest. It was really cool, because I learned all about these stupid esoteric trees that I would otherwise not at all know anything about, and you stand and you had to press all the leaves, and you had to make this big folder, this binder full of stuff. Did you have to do that as a kid? Did you live there as a kid? I did, but I was in a private school. Oh. Fancy guy. Fancy guy. To be fair, sixth grade was the only year of my life that I went to public school and happened to be the tree project here. The tree year. Yeah, the oak thing is really interesting because, I mean, even in our logo, our logo is something we call the tree coil within the red diamond. And that's got a fir tree in it. And people think about the Northwest and many times they associate that with these fir trees in the forest and everything out there, which is certainly a huge part of it. But actually, most places that you wanted to live in the Northwest had oaks, all these oaks of anise. But now, they're only growing in 3% of its former habitat. And the reason why Washington state does stuff like what you were describing is because there is stuff like that that people just don't know. And we basically now, nobody knows anything about these oaks, at least not in Washington. And people are trying to bring that back, including us. We want people to understand that oaks are actually a part of our climate. That's really cool. What kind of challenges have you found working with Gary Oak? I mean, is it more or less porous than typical American white oak? There are a lot of challenges with Gary Oak. One is sourcing it. We don't want to cut the trees down. In Victoria, I think it's something like a $10,000 fine if you cut one of these trees down. They're quite serious about protecting them. So just getting the oak for one. The other thing is because they're not growing in these cultivated forests, essentially, like you'd have in France or in the Midwest, where they have these straight and tall oak trees that are part of forestry there. They begin to branch out four or five feet on the ground, and they have these massive branches that come out, and they look beautiful, and they knuckle, and they curl, and they do all this other stuff. But basically, once the tree starts to branch like that, for our needs, it's useless. It sounds pretty tough to make that into a stave. You can't. That's the problem. The other funny thing is Gary oak is rare for a couple of reasons. One, because we cut all of it down over the past 150 years, but also nobody seems to want it because it's actually much more difficult to work with. It's more brittle than American white oak, and just because of all the knots and everything, it's not used for furniture as much anymore oak. It's just kind of unloved, and so a lot of places they just cut it and burn it. That's a big part of the challenge is just getting high-quality oak that comes down and only comes down when the tree falls down and then taking that. The other thing is, for us, we use all air-dried oak, so 18 to 24 months, which is already a unique thing in our business. The Gary oak needs a lot more air drying because it has a lot of tannins in it. So we air dry it for 36 months, three years, in order to break down all of those tannins. But nobody is doing that, so we have to do that. So we go out and buy the logs now, have somebody cut them, we're buying it at that point, cut them into staves and then they sit for three years. Where do you keep them? You keep them out by the warehousing or something? Yeah, we've got them in a couple of places just for safety. We have some in Washington State and some in Oregon. Have you ever considered doing any, I know Buffalo Trace did a couple of projects where they did like enzyme baths or the seasoned wood and the cured oak expressions. Buffalo Trace's oak project they did was awesome. It's really, really cool to see that. We're experimenting with it. There are so many things to experiment with. There's different air drying times. We've used some three years, some five years, some seven year air dried. We just got some wood that was drying for 20 years. I'm not really sure if that's going to work, but we're giving it a shot. That's just forgotten wood. Yes, exactly. We're trying that sort of stuff, toasts, chars. With American White Oak, it's now gotten to a point where if you say, I want this amount of vanilla, this amount of caramel, they know exactly how long to toast, how long to char, the exact temperature of that toasting. It's really quite remarkable. We don't know any of that yet for Gary Oak, which is also very exciting. We're working on getting some butts, some 500-liter punch-in-size casks, and then maturing the oak, air-drying it in different climates. What is that going to do? Then the sourcing of the oak from different regions within the Northwest. All of that is to be explored, and we're working on it actively. Very cool. Now, how many Gary Oak casks do you have whiskey maturing in right now? I think we've got roughly 100. The challenge was there wasn't very much when we started and we took a flyer on this. We weren't the first to use Gary Oak. I'm pretty safe to say we were the first to talk about it and make a big deal about it and celebrate it. But there was never, to the best of my knowledge, there was never anything that was 100% matured in Gary Oak before. So we didn't really know what it was going to taste like. You know, we bought five casks, we did five casks a year for the first three years. We were a much smaller distillery then too. But then, you know, we realized like, oh man, this stuff is really good. By then we had bought all of the wood that was air drying out there from mills that just kind of had it sitting. And so that's when this program started where we needed to go out and buy the logs and cut it and plane it and let it sit. So that's now beginning to pay off. So, you know, we've accelerated that quite a bit. I think this year we filled 70 Gary Oak casts. We're also we've also grown quite a bit as a distillery, increased production by, you know, double. So that's part of it. But it's just sourcing those casts takes takes a lot of time. Is the Gary Oak video you guys produce still on your website? Yep, should be. Yeah. I recommend any listener to check out the website, westlanddistillery.com, and look at this video. When they did the first releases, they had this video of them going down to these, you know, finding these fallen logs on farms in Oregon and stuff, and trying to find this oak and then seeing what it looks like, bringing the mill on site, that kind of thing. It's really cool. Yeah. Well, we're trying to tell people, you know, this is the cutting edge of single malt. Like, this is what it looks like. It doesn't look like a romantic but overly played out image of somebody swirling, you know, spirit at the spirit safe. And it's like, if you want to try something new and to innovate, you need to like go out, get out of the office, get out of the distillery and go find it and go talk to people. That's a fun thing to be able to contribute to the world. I mean, we're excited about it because it's from the Northwest. But as malt whiskey enthusiasts, you know, which we are at our core, to be able to contribute something new to this old industry is really exciting. Did we talk about the differences between the two expressions? And it shows, which we're going to talk about right now. So the 2017 edition, you know, we had taken this Gary Oak flavor, and Gary Oak flavor is really strong, by the way. So we can't, we've basically decided that it's so powerful that it's not ideal from a balance point of view to release it on its own. So we blended in with other things, all the Garriano releases, that's what we've done. The 2017 edition, Garrioke, it's like 23 percent Garrioke, and the rest of it is bourbon cask stuff for the most part, which means that you kind of get these really powerful flavors that are coming in there, but the rest of the whisky is so delicate. The 2017 is all about elegance and balance, and a powerful flavor inside of a really nuanced and delicate whisky. Whereas the 2018 swung the other direction, which is part of the fun of it, it's much more rich, it's got other oak types in it, it's got new American oak in there as well. We started blending the 2018 edition two years ago and getting these casks together. So what makes the 18 really interesting is how how cohesively those flavors have come together and the palette and the length of that sort of thing. So each one of these releases, we're learning something new at the same time you guys are tasting it. As soon as those come out, that's part of the fun. That's what we're doing with the Garriana series is basically learning and then making something delicious and then passing that directly on to anybody who buys it. Both great. I love 2018 even more though. 2018's got a richer flavor to it, I think. 2017 is phenomenal, and it's got this vanilla nougat that kind of balances that clovey darker spice thing. I really love them both. There's more body on the 18 too. Yeah. I think for people who typically gravitate towards American whiskeys and bourbon, they'll go for the 18. It's definitely the bigger one. It's higher in alcohol as well, but because there's more New Oak, it's fine. People who like more Scottish style where it's a little bit more restrained, they go for the 17. But that's the fun of having them both. Yeah, these are great. These are great. Collectors should be looking for this. We were talking about a hilariously small bottle count on Pete Week, and this is probably just a fraction of that even. Yeah, I mean, the Garriana series has been limited by stock availability. There was one year where we didn't get a supply of Garrioke barrels because the cupers that was sending them to us went out of business. So there wasn't any. So the 2018 edition is actually smaller than the 2017 edition by bottle count. Those first two years, 16 and 17, were, I think, 2500 bottles globally. This past year, the 2018 was like 1700 bottles globally. Really, because we did not have any more than that. You know, the next edition, which we're working on, the next release of Garriana, which seems like a long ways away, but it'll be September. Again, we try to always do it in September at the distillery. That volume will be back up again because we were able to get that supply. But the 18 is the smallest release we've done. Is the base spirit all the year five malt blend? It's a mixture of things and we're totally transparent about all this stuff. If you want to learn about it, first of all, it's on the box of 16 and 17. The way that we blended 18 was so complicated that we just basically put a note on the box that said it's complicated. You have to get the decoder ring. Yeah. You can go to our website. We actually had to draw a diagram to explain. Oh, now I'm hooked. That's why I got to get in on this. Because we started blending it two years in advance and there was four different ways that we blended this stuff altogether. It was pretty nuts. So it's a mixture of things. We use both the pale malt recipe where it's just without the roasted malts. We do some of the five malt recipe. There's a little bit of peat in this one, a pretty small amount, I think 15. I was going to ask if there was a little bit of peat in it. Especially in the 17, I noticed just a tiny, tiny tinge, maybe. In the 17, that's actually the phenolics of the oak. That was actually one of the exciting things about the 17. That's exactly why we did it, is because Gary Oak has phenolics. American White Oak has this compound called Whiskey Lactone, colloquially. That's like the coconut flavor. But when people think about whiskey oak flavor, American White Oak has a lot of that. Gary Oak has none of that. But what it does have is a lot of these spices that are smoky. They're the same compounds that you have in peat. You can get it a little bit in the 16 and the 18. But we wanted to take the peat out of the 17 so that you could taste exactly what you were tasting. But knowing that that's all coming from the Gary Oak, that's actually one of the things we wanted to highlight it. So that's nicely done. But yeah, there's a little bit of peat in the 18 to get these complimentary flavors. Again, it comes back to balance. The Gary Oak flavors can be massive on their own, but massive flavors for us is not what we're trying to achieve all the time. That balance is what we think makes a good whiskey. Well, Matt, thanks a lot for your time today. I mean, this is always eye-opening talking whiskey with you, but especially with still in the weeds category of American malt, which we didn't even get to. American malt? Yeah, like, what is American malt, who controls it, and Matt's had a lot of work, we probably should. Yeah, I can do it really quickly. Yeah, nail it. Okay, so we make nothing but American single malt. That's all we do, 100%. No bourbon, no rye whiskey, no white spirits. And we realized that we were making a category, a whiskey in a category that didn't really exist yet. American single malt doesn't actually mean anything at the federal level. So on a label, it currently doesn't mean something, whereas it does, single malt does mean something legally in the UK. As we said, okay, we need to get out ahead of that because there's this big problem happening in Japan right now, where Japanese whiskey, it's so loose that people are bringing in spirit from Scotland. It just spends some time in Japan, gets turned around, bottled as Japanese whiskey, and it is still legally Japanese whiskey over there, which hurts the category. Absolutely. So we said, let's come up with a definition for American single malt that will petition to the federal government. We got together with seven other producers of American single malt at, do you guys know this? We did this at a Binny's store. Actually, we got all together in March of 2016 and held this meeting. And we came up with this definition. We penciled out four hours for this meeting, thinking that we were going to end up fighting each other, not agreeing. But actually, in about 30 minutes, we were all in agreement about what it should be. 100% malted barley made at one distillery. So that's the same legal definition you have in Scotland, made in America. Mashed, distilled, matured in America. A couple other things that are mostly procedural stuff, you know, bottling strength and stuff like that you have to have, but still allow room for innovation within the category, which is the strength, I think, of the category of American Single Malt. So from that group of eight, we now have 120 distilleries in the US that are making some single malt that are a part of this group that we call the American Single Malt Whiskey Commission. So we have formally submitted a proposal to the federal government to get that changed. The federal government is actually in the process of reviewing its guidelines for their labeling rule book. So we hope to get that done this year, here in 2019. There's been a lot of momentum on it. We've got backing from a number of sources, not just the distilleries, but for everybody, because it's actually really important. You know, if you're a retailer or if you're in a bar, you've got all these American Single Malts and you know, you want those words to mean something. So we've been pushing that forward and we hope to have that done by the end of the year. There you go. You're in a public commenting period right now for the TTB for these labeling requirements. So never hurts as an interested consumer to, you can always put your two cents in through their website. If people want to learn more about what we're trying to do with that, we're doing this in a totally transparent way. Just go to americansinglemaltwhiskey.org, whiskey with an E because it's American, and you can learn all about what we're trying to do. Cool. Thanks for the info, Matt. Well, ladies and gentlemen, that brings us to the Q&A portion of Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast, where we answer your question. If we answer it on the podcast, you win a $20 Binny's gift card. Binny's your choice. Reach out to us via email, comments at binnys.com, or hit us up on social media, at Binny's Bev, on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook. This is the second question from PleaseSendScotch on Instagram, who asks, what kind of grain is in grain whiskey? Well, right now in Scotland, mostly it's wheat. But we talked earlier about how they're beholden to efficiencies and not to flavor anything. So sometimes it's been corn. Corn, yeah. Corn's been the big new one recently, is just because it's about yield. Yeah. So grain whiskey means it comes from a single grain or? So a grain whiskey in Scotland still contains some malted barley, because they cannot add enzymes to help catalyze fermentation. So most are still usually around, I think like 14% barley, something like that. Yeah. Is grain whiskey something like neutral grain spirit or is that a different thing? Neutral grain spirit is technically different. It's distilled to a higher proof. Yeah. So neutral grain spirit is, I think it depends on the country, but in the US, that's like vodka territory. So 95% ABV distillation and above. In Scotland, whiskey needs to be distilled to, I think it's less than, it's either 94.3 or 94.8 or something. It's very, very high. So any whiskey can technically be distilled to that, including malt whiskey. However, you're only allowed to use pot stills in Scotland. So that kind of naturally limits the maximum distillation, because in order to get to that, you have to distill like 30 times. So most grain whiskeys are basically distilled, typically, I think it's 94.3, like way up there. So it retains very, very little flavor. So then to answer, please, on Scott's question, malt whiskey is whiskey made from malted barley. 100%. Grain whiskey is whiskey made from? Any grain. A mixture of cereal grains. All right. Typically, if you want another little interesting tidbit, there's, when they use that malted barley in the grain whisky, a lot of times what they're doing is they use what's called green malt. So it's malt that hasn't been dried at all. So basically, it's right at the end of its malting process and it has more enzymes in it. So it's actually a totally different style of malt that comes through. It's just basically alive as soon as it goes directly into the process. All right. Please send Scotch, reach out to us and let us know if that answered your question. I hope it's $20 worth of answer. Everyone else can email their questions to comments at binnys.com. Hit us up on social media at Binny'sBev on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook. This was a great one. I think this is going to be our first hour and a half long straight up podcast, single episode. All right, everybody. Thanks for listening to Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. We'll be back soon. Until next time, I'm Greg. I'm Roger. I'm Pat. I'm Matt. Keep tasting.