Hey, you're listening to another episode of Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. I'm Greg, I do communications for Binny's in the room with me today. Pat, I handle all things specially spirits related. Shannon, I do social media and events. Roger, beer. Pat, you want to kick off our guest? Yeah. I'd like to welcome Jay Erisman to Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. Jay is the co-founder of New Riff Distillery out in Covington, Kentucky. Kind of an interesting story started Jay on the retail side like us and is now a gin distiller and bourbon ambassador champion of all things sour mash, right? For New Riff, can we say that? Yes, that would be accurate. Well, thanks for coming on today. Thank you. So New Riff, one of the most exciting new distilleries we've tasted in the past couple years, finally available at Binny's. It's been here for maybe six, seven months or so. And they were started, what, back in 2014, right Jay? Yeah, we opened in May of 2014, started distilling late June that year, and really took it up in July on. They're in the beginning of our careers. We had the terrible misfortune of opening a distillery in the great barrel shortage of 2014. And here we are with this finished distillery and people to run it and everything and no barrels. And finally, we did get some barrels and capitalism right at itself and all was okay, but it was kind of a slow start. Yeah, but you guys are ripping and roaring now though. I mean, your production is what per year about now? We make about 8,000, maybe 8,100 barrels a year. And we did expand the distillery by 50%. We added two more from Edders in about September of 2015. And important to note with those barrels, New Riff has always been full-size 53-gallon American standard barrel size. And New Chart Oak, all that, no small barrels, no refill barrels, nothing like that. I'm making the sign of the cross against the small barrels in front of the microphone. And I can't stand those things anymore. All right, cool. Well, we'll start with the classic New Riff Bottled and Bond Bourbon. Bottled and Bond, important to note, you don't see that from a lot of young distilleries, do you? You do not, no. And furthermore, we launched New Riff with our whiskies in about a year ago. We started selling our finished four-year-old whisky only bottled and bond. We only make bottled and bond whisky. We always only make bottled and bond whisky. We only always ever make bottled and bond whisky, except for single-barrel bourbons, which we do bottle at Barrel Proof. But the point being, we have a commitment to bottled and bond that, I guess I don't see out of any other distillery where everything they do is bottled and bond or a single-barrel. We always hear that when you're kicking off a new distillery, you kick out a bunch of vodka, maybe a bunch of gin, and then comes the young whiskies. Did you just have a tremendous amount of capital right up front that you were ready to go? In part, yes. And not make money for five years? We had both good capital, but also private capital and private ownership and impassioned ownership from Ken Lewis, the founder of New Riff. I worked for Ken from 2001 at the Party Source, and between the two of us, each of us credit the other, I think, spun up the idea that we could make this ourselves, and that sounded like a great idea. Well, here it is. But we all of us had a determination to do it right and to be able to wait four years, and so we did. So Party Source, integral part of the story. Listeners, if you haven't been there, if you're in the Cincinnati area, it is the specialty alcohol retailer in the Cincinnati area. It's right across the river in Covington, Kentucky. So and New Riff Distillery is actually shares a parking lot, right? Some vacant land on the other side of the parking lot. Now it's got this gorgeous glass distillery. We don't have to walk very far. Yeah, it's literally in front of the Party Source and most fortuitously found underneath the parking lot, 100 feet down right on the land he owned, a fantastic water source for running a distillery. That's pretty serendipitous, like that happened. That's meant to be. Thank you, Shannon. That's exactly the word we use, serendipity. There were several moments of striking serendipity as we open New Riff and the water is indeed one of them, yes. And is that that's ideal water for distilling for you guys? Do you have to do much treatment to it? I wouldn't. I don't know what ideal water is, but we do not treat it. It comes right out of the ground and it goes into the into the into the bourbon. It also provides a great amount of the cooling water for the distillery and so is a tremendous energy saving resource for us. We get a thermal gradient of cold water. It's 58 degrees every day of the year and that means we can run every day of the year with great consistency. That's super cool. It also is in fact very, how do you say, tasty water. It's really got some flavor to it and body and it's a watery tasting water, which sounds silly until you taste it and boy, it's really big water. It has about four times the dissolved minerality of the local tap water. Oh, that's cool. It was a coolant pun. Need to get a water some out there to endorse it. Is that a thing? It's a thing. A water some. Water sommeliers. I'm done. All right, well, let's try this bourbon already, right? So this is New Riff Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey, Bottled and Bond. So Bottled and Bond, of course, means it is four years old and 100 proof. The Bottled and Bond Act of 1897. It's very American in that our first food quality standard was applied to whiskey and not food. This smells like prototypical bourbon. It's got the caramel notes, it's got the butterscotch qualities, and like a little bit of green apple fruitiness. Thank you. Sometimes the word I use is classical or classically inspired. That varies batch to batch and lot to lot, and fermenter to fermenter, and sometimes barrel to barrel. But there's an element of which certainly we are making something that has a certain classicism to it. We aren't reinventing the wheel necessarily in our recipe, although we are 30 percent rye in this mashbill, and there's only a couple other distilleries that are in that neighborhood. So that was going to be something I brought up next is, there is a distinct spiciness to this bourbon, and that part of that is, you guys have always loved high rye bourbon, right? Then you have a particularly famous consultant who helped you get this thing off the ground. Right. The other piece of serendipity, I say was finding master distiller Larry Ebersol to hire as a consultant on the project. We realized while we thought we could do this, we needed some help and especially some help in designing and orchestrating all the moving parts of building a distillery. Larry was the one guy who could sit at the 10,000 feet level and look over the whole project and tie everything together, as well as make little adjustments to the pipes. There's a pipe running down inside of our beer well that he commissioned and spec'd out for Vendome to build and they had never built something like that before. It's just a simple pipe, but it shoots across the bottom of the beer well at an angle. When we fill the beer well, it fills it very gently in sort of a centrifugal motion. It means that we don't aerate the beer at that point because oxygen getting into the beer at that point would be really problematic. Larry, with this simple pipe, took care of that. So Vendome today calls that the Larry pipe. If you're building a distillery and you order a beer well and they get out their pencil and sharpen it, say, okay, do you want a Larry pipe with that? Other people now have the Larry pipe. So Larry Eversol was the master distiller at the Seagrams plant in Lawrenceburg, Indiana, famous for making high rye bourbon and high rye content rye. Seagrams has a as a operation for many decades, famous for its strict quality control and master distiller training. We talked to Greg Metz at lengths about this when we did that before. So key tie-in in history there with a very famous high rye producer in Lawrenceburg, Indiana got this thing off the ground too. That's right. Another important thing that I want to point out with this whiskey is the mouthfeel of this whiskey and this is a big chewy whiskey. That's not just owed to the fact that it's a little less water is added because it's only cut down to 100 proof. That is also owed to non-chill filtration, right? Yes. Bottling without chill filtration is a foundational quality principle at New Riff. We are one of the number of distilleries such as Spring Bank and Brook Lottie around the world that embrace that as standard operating procedure or only operating procedure. Everything we make is un-chill filtered and always will be, including the gins that we make. Those are also unfiltered. It improves or retains everything we like about a whiskey. When you chill filter a whiskey, you diminish obvious things like the aroma and the flavor, but also the color, the texture. That all gets attenuated to sometimes a slight degree or sometimes a large degree. And we just don't want to do that. Yeah, we talk a lot about chill filtration being existing as a visual thing and maintaining clarity and this picture-ex beauty of a whiskey, even when water or ice is added. But you were talking about it yesterday when you were in the store about how really it's just more of an excuse for distilleries to add more water and save money. If they would bottle the whiskey stronger, they wouldn't need to filter it. And indeed, when you see many distilleries bottle cast strength or barrel-proof whiskies, they do them on chill filter. It's only when they start adding water that they need to chill filter them. And why do they want to add water? Because it's real cheap. And if you can add the water, the shareholders will be real happy. So that is the real reason for chill filtration is to take things below 100 proof, below 90 proof, all the way down to 80 proof, and get more and more aggressive in the filtration all the way. So is that why this bourbon, though it's on chill filtered, has such beautiful clarity? In part, yes. We knew we were going to have on chill filtered whiskey, and that commits us to being a relatively high proof whiskey. Our prior brand that we had called OKI was also on chill filtered, and we could bottle that at about 97 to 98 proof. It varied batch to batch. So you can take bourbon that low. Scotch can go often down to 46 percent, 92 proof without chill filtration, but there's a lot less sort of stuff in Scotch, thanks to the used barrel that they have. The new barrel that we have puts a lot of junk into the whiskey, a lot of wood proteins and compounds out of the wood that are more likely to cause a problem if you start adding water. Some of my favorite of our hand picked bottleings way back were the Blackadder ones. And there was like a matches worth of black **** Yeah, I mean Blackadder is famous for raw cask filtration where you get chunks of wood in the bottom of the bottle and stuff. I wish I could have done it. Natural whiskey. You guys want to try the next one? Yeah, so we have three hand-picked barrels of bourbon that just came in, they just landed new to Binny's. So, when Larry was consulting, did he advise on the type of still you were going to go with? Was that something you already had designed? We had already pretty much determined that we would make whiskey in the classic Kentucky format of a column beer still feeding a doubler. And we do, however, have a 500-gallon pot still. It mostly makes our gin, and we have made whiskey on it, and we'll make whiskey again, and we made an apple brandy one time, and who knows what all sort of concoctions we can run through the pot still, but we do not subscribe, as some people do, to the notion that pot stills are better somehow. They're just different. They're what they use in this country or that country, and it's not what we do in Kentucky. So what we have is Binny's hand-picked single barrel, New Riff, Bourbon. The proof here is 111.1, that's 111.1. Barrel distilled on 6215 and bottled on 10119. This is barrel number? 153501. All the nerds tasting along at home. So what was the genesis of getting hand picks here? Good whiskey, offered hand picks, bought hand picks. That's what it takes. It's about all it takes. It's an easy sales pitch. I love that the rye spice doesn't overwhelm these bourbons, and you still have this nice fatty structure of corn and nice good oak without it being that, it doesn't have that young raw green. Roger always likes to say, banana smashed up with a two by four wood character that you get from some young whiskeys, or especially small barrel whiskeys. What do you think of this one, Roger? Roger is usually a tough critic. I really enjoy this. This was actually the whisky that the other week, you had given someone else a bottle of their whisky, and I tried it, and I went back and said, what's this distillery all about? I really like that whisky, so I'm always suspicious of some of the craft stuff. I think that, I don't know, maybe it's that I just grew up drinking such traditional, when you're developing a whisky palette, if you have traditional Kentucky bourbon. Roger was weaned on a old overhauled rye. But yeah, I mean, the little barrel stuff is always what I have the biggest problem with. So it definitely shows that I think that is a shortcut that just doesn't quite work. Maybe some people, if they, again, if they develop their whisky palette and that's what they start with, then maybe they do like that really aggressive wood character or the youngness. They like the grain coming through. But this, I think, definitely speaks more to traditional old school bourbons that I enjoy. But a lot of character for this is a four year as well. Yeah. I mean, I think this is really a really nice whisky. Is New Riff Bourbon a four-year-old bourbon going forward? Or is the end game, this is going to evolve into a six-year-old brand, for example, or is it just going to be, it's ready when it's ready? Good question. We are saving back 20-30% annually of everything we make to become older. We won't say now how older, maybe it's six, maybe it's seven, maybe it's eight. But I think we would persist with making four-year-old bottled and bond and other four-year-old whiskeys, and in the future when the time is ripe and the whisky is ripe, come out with amounts of older stuff. Then in the more distant future, older stuff than that, 10 years old and 12 and some 15, it's going to take a long time to get there, but we are holding back what we think is a generous amount. It's hard to say what other people do, but 20 to 30% annually is a lot for a young distillery to stomach. We are looking forward to paying more for those bottles. Yeah. Another one of Roger's gripes is always, why would I pay $70 for a super young whisky from Namier Flash in the Pan Craft Distillery, when I can pay $25 for a well-aged Namier Kentucky distillery? Come on, it's Roger. It's $11 and it's old charter or something. But it's worth pointing out that though this is a startup craft distillery doing things in a different way, that the well-aged bottled and bonned bourbon starts at $40. Yeah. Which is amazing. It's priced competitively and where it should be. Thank you. The hand-picked, which is the Binny's guys finding the honey barrels, the best of the best, is only $50. Yeah. Right? Yeah. For a barrel-proof single-barrel bourbon, $50 is incredibly fair. That's all down to Ken Lewis. He has a saying now, pigs get fat, but hogs get slaughtered. We will make our money at New Riff, but we want to make lasting relationships too. Some short-term gain of $110 for this bottle is not the long-term win. We are taking a long, long view of this. We view New Riff to be a generational business. This is not here to be sold off as soon as we can and retire to an island someplace. We are going to be here for decades. I mean, you're already kind of living the life, right? Well, if you mean I'm here at Binny's, sure. All right, next up, clocking in at a hefty 113.8 proof, Binny's Handpicked Bottling 15, 41.15. All right. What are you putting the new make into the barrels at? Yeah, our entry proof is 110. We chose that, although it cost us in Cooperage, we have to buy more barrels to bottle more wine gallons. We chose that because we thought there were some flavors that we would obtain at 110 that we would miss at 125. I wouldn't say superior flavors. I don't think bourbon barreled at 125, which is the industry norm, is in any way inferior. It's just different. We wanted the flavors a little more water soluble components that would come at 110. But even a bigger reason was doing some research that indicated the whiskey would show better younger, bottled at or barreled at the lower proof. That highlights our need for a four-year-old whiskey versus many companies need for a four-year-old. A lot of four-year-old bourbons are the loss leader, the entry level, the bottom of the shelf, you mix it with coke. Plastic jugs. Plastic jugs, 80 proof, ship it off to Australia in a can with coke or something like that. That's a lot of four-year-old bourbon. But we needed a four-year-old bourbon to be banging to be the best quality we could possibly put forth. So if we spend more in Cooperage and since those early days, we even have increased our Cooperage specifications to include mostly 18-month and 24-month air-dried staves. We were happy to spend money on Cooperage if it would get us a better product at four-years-old. I figured that was the case given that these were barrel proof but at the lower. And I think that's a standout for your brand. And I've always been a big Wild Turkey fan and I feel they were famously support the same theory of let's do a lower entry proof and you're adding less water then. I love seeing the low entry proof because even when they're proofed down to whether it's 100 for bottled in Bond or somebody's bottled in 96 or whatever, you're adding less water at the end and it's just going to maintain more body of the whiskey. And I love that. And I really think there's some credence to what you're saying about if it's a younger whiskey, it's better at the higher proof. I've drank the bottom shelf backwards and forwards over the years and always been a big fan of bottled in Bond. And for those younger bottled in Bond whiskeys, they always greatly outperform the 80 proof, be it old Grandad, old Fitz. Every time I would recommend to customers, you know, sometimes they shy away from the 100. They're like, oh, 100 proof, that's too intense. And like, trust me, do not. Don't get the 80, get the 100. If you want to add ice or water, go ahead. But no sense in paying for water. Yeah. Not when you can drill down below your parking lot and get it for free. This one seems a little heavier on the spice. Little spicier than the last one. The last one I think was a little fatter, a little more of that crowd pleasing profile. This one is a little more rye driven, wood driven, but really well-layered though, by no means extreme in that direction. It still has that nice round fattiness to it, but more spice forward. There's a lot of complexity here too. I think that's something we always struggle with is the misconception that older is always inherently better. You need a bourbon to be 12 years old. It's just not true. I think this is a great reminder of that. Right. It's a little hard for a producer like us or for me to talk about, I wish you would all drink younger whiskey because it sounds very self-serving because that's what we sell and what we have. But I think there is a beauty in a youthful whiskey in a way that you don't have in older stuff. Good in my head, I would say older is better out to a point, but it goes for scotch too. There can be gorgeous eight-year-old scotches, seven-year-old scotches, that are sprightly and zesty, and fresh in a way that's something that is really deep and rich and oaky is not. You can say the same thing about wine. Much as we might like to drink aged Bordeaux and Barolo every night, isn't it great to have a Beaujolais here and there? What do you want with your sausages on the patio? More sausages. More sausages. But that's a good point though. I mean, complexity can be found in freshness. It just has to be done well. And also, it's really scotch to blame, I think. I mean, when you're using reused Cuprage, you need more time. But that was always one of the things with American whiskey. It was particularly bourbon. You're using fresh oak. You're going to get a lot more out of it much quicker. So it's really just that one bourbon that everyone always asks us about that happens to be bottled at old ages. Very few bourbons age that gracefully that long. Yeah. So. I hope ours does. We just don't know yet. We can only put into it here at the outset, the best we can do and sometimes the best equipment. Our entire distillation path is copper. There are stainless steel lines that might carry condensed spirit. But any place that the beer is hot or the spirit is in a vaporous hot state, we want it in touch with copper, interacting with copper ions and giving it the very best chance we can for the quality needed to age. You need some copper exposure for any aged spirit, whether it's from tequila to Scotch to back to bourbon. There's got to be some copper in that line, in that path. And our path is entirely copper. So will that ensure it ages? Well, I don't know, but stainless steel wouldn't help. And so we invested in copper and resigned ourselves to someday we're going to have to replace that copper column still. I mean, you know copper makes a quality new make. And if, you know, a quality new make generally is going to turn into a quality whiskey, but a poor quality new make can never be fixed, right? Right. So you got to make the investment in the copper. Number three on the Binny's Handpicked New Riff is weighing in at 113.6, this is Barrel 15, 36.48. I think your mash bill, too, is something to emphasize as far as the in correlation with the age. Some of the younger whiskeys that people may have tried that have a more traditional bourbon mash bill with higher corn, less rye. I think you get more of that young corn sweetness that can sometimes be unappealing, but I think the rye here adds a depth of complexity that, you know, covers that up a little or it kind of steals the show. So then you don't think like you're drinking young whiskey. Yeah, well, rye drinks great when it's young. I mean, this is something we always talk about internally in our spirits trainings, you know, and whether it's, say, a Russian Imperial Stout beer, you know, intense flavors, intense bitterness, whether it's from, you know, dark roasted malt or extra hopping, covers up some flaws, right? And so same thing with a young whiskey, rye covers up what you could maybe describe as flaws or youthfulness. Same thing with heavily peated Scotch whiskey. I love, you know, we have a, we just brought in a four-year-old heavily peated Buna Havin under one of our signatory hand-picked casks. And it's gorgeous. And it drinks far more mature beyond its years because that intense, intense peatiness really covers up the youthful notes. These do come across as a greater age than what it says on the bottle. Oh, for sure. If I tasted these blind, I would assume they're like six-year-old bourbons. And they show their wood. Like, it's not hidden, you know. And it's not a knock. It's this wood spice, this grainy quality. But it's not the young green wood, though. Yeah, right. No. Everything is super balanced. I mean, every barrel that we've tried so far, including just the Bottle and Bond, I mean, I get this wonderful like cherry cola, like vanilla note throughout all of them. And it's like a very consistent thing. But every each of them has their own uniqueness, which I think is really cool. Do you guys think this one is the most spicy of the three handpick casks? That's what I think. And I think we happened to, there's our serendipitous word again, but tasted them in the right order, I think we went from kind of fattest, sweetest up to this is the most punchy, spicy one. Good hefty dose of clove on here too. Look, baking spice. It's worth pointing out that the three barrels are not merely three separate barrels, which obviously they are, they're single barrels, but they come from different lots or began their life in different fermentations. Three different distillation dates. That's right. Three different distillation dates, different lots. At New Riff, for better or for worse, we preserve the integrity of each fermentation through to the barrel. A lot of distilleries for consistency will take, let's say they make three fermentations that day, they will mix them all in a big tank and put that in the barrel. That is a fantastic way to make whiskey. I highly recommend it. It makes a very consistent product. We take each fermentation, put it in the tank, and then put it in a barrel, so that in each lot of barrels, 12, 13, 14 barrels we make from each batch, there is a difference fermentation to fermentation that we preserve. That makes it a tad, I don't want to say difficult in making a consistent vatted product like the bonded whiskey in the end, because we simply gather several four, five, six, seven different lots that go into a batch of bonded, and therefore we get a swath of new riff character. But when we go after single barrels, we have the opportunity not only to find differences barrel to barrel to barrel, but differences lot to lot to lot. For example, when someone comes to our distillery, or if we provide samples to them like we did to Binny's, we send them samples from different lots. We make sure, don't pick three things from the same lot or two from the same lot, go and get stuff from different dates and different lots. If you guys had to pick one of these three, which would you pick? That is 3501, 415, and 3648. It don't matter, one, two, and three. I'd probably go two. Two. I like number one, but I like sloppy stuff. Yeah. I'd lean toward number one, two. Not to say that it is, but it just has a little more of the caramel richness. Yeah. I think number two is a little more like chocolatey-ness to it that I like on a finish. All great though. Sweet. These were easy picks. These are all easy recommendations. Also of note, though, at New Riff, you're not just making bourbon, you're making some pretty exceptional rye with a unique mash bill. You want to break that down for us? Right, so we knew we wanted to make a lot of rye whiskey. We wanted to be a rye-centric, rye-grain-centric distillery. We were not going to be Loretto North, although we have made a weeded bourbon. In multiple years, it'll come out someday. We wanted to make rye whiskey, and we knew once Larry came on board as our consultant, well, here we have the Jedi Master Yoda of rye whiskey. He is the man who charted the course for modern rye in America. There are younger drinkers out there who think that there were always 125 ryes on the shelf, and it was always made with 95% rye, and that was not the case. When I started at the party source in 2001, we had three ryes, three, and now a store has got three bays of rye, three whole shelf sets of rye. We've come a long way, and that's down to Larry Ebersold and what he did at Indiana, which later got out to the world, and here we are with 95% rye. So we being, as it says on the back of the bottle, a new riff on an old tradition, like a guitar riff or a jazz riff, I'm playing an air guitar here, right? We are a new riff on an old tradition, and so we put a new riff on Larry's recipe to the tune of 95% rye, but 5% malted rye, not malted barley. We have malted rye in our building on a regular basis. We make- Oh, no. We're going to start talking about enzymes again, aren't we? Maybe. We make- Hey, we'll geek out as much as you want, Greg. We make 100% malted rye whiskey at New Riff also. It's not available yet. We're going to wait a few more years before that comes out. But we had this malted rye in the building in 50-pound bags, and we can put any bag of any size into our process, and so we tried it with 5% malted rye. We really like that. So we've stuck with it since then. So this is actually, it's funny that it's made in Kentucky, but that mashbill is more of that Pennsylvania Menongahela style rye tradition, where it's just rye, rye, rye, and malted rye. No corn, right. Jim, get the Oak Ridge boys for the music break. Just for comparison, for example, Rittenhouse would be- About 51% rye. So that's that Kentucky style, which is the bare minimum rye, a lot of corn. It makes it drink a little fatter and sweeter, more like a spicy bourbon, where this is that punchy. It's not- This isn't a lean whiskey though, because what we're tasting is actually, we should have mentioned this, this is the new single barrel rye from New Riff. We just got this in, in our last order, and this is bottled at barrel strength as well. So there is a bottled and bond four-year-old hundred proof rye that we've carried since New Riff launched with us. But now we have this new single barrel here. This one that we have happens to be 15, 49, 37. I'd say this is probably representative of what you're going to get. Yes, very much so. The single barrel rye follows the stylistic shifts and different colors and different styles, batch per batch barrel to barrel, just like the bourbon does. It is not available yet in a private selection. It'll take a few years before we get enough rye to do that. But it otherwise is much like the single barrel bourbon in terms of its variety of flavors from one to another. It's punchy. Yes, this is a punchy rye. Add some water. I super want some of that coquille vermouth de Torino and one of those gloppy cherries in here. Oh, that'd be great. So good. But this is rye. This is rye wearing the rye on the sleeve. It's right there. You know what you're going to get here. You have this rich balance and complexity of spice. It still has nice vanilla and caramel notes from the wood. It's a well-balanced rye, but it is rye for sure. It's always been a challenge recommending ryes to people because they oftentimes fall in love with a rye that's unstylistically rye-like. Yeah. It basically tastes like a bourbon that has some rye in it. This is an excellent traditional rye. I mean, it's spicy and like Greg said, it'd be awesome in a cocktail. But it's not lean. You run that risk with a lot of especially high rye, a content rye tend to get lean and sharp. They also still has a roundness to it. They can get vegetal and grassy and not seeing that here. Well, nice work. Yeah. Thank you. Is there gins? Do we want to do gins? Yeah, we might as well. I mean, have you got time to talk gin? I sure do. Yeah. Oh, I love to talk gin. We've been making gin at New Riff from the early days. It was obviously a product that we could make that would get us a small revenue stream right away because it doesn't have to age. But it's also an item you can make with a lot of soul. We had no interest in making vodka. If we were a potato farm, we would no doubt be making vodka. That's a great story to tell around making your vodka. But we were not that, of course, at all. We didn't want to make vodka, but we knew we could find a great story and idea around gin. But most of all, we are gin lovers. I particularly am a gin lover. I was raised by a gin lover. My dad is a martini man. My dad has made about 38,000 martinis since 1958, and he brought me up right to like them as well. There was never a doubt that we wouldn't make a gin also. And the question was, what kind of gin? Well, should it be London Dry or Citrus Forward? Should it be new Western postmodern gin or an old Tom gin or something? What kind of gin do you make? And inspired by, I have to give credit where it's due, my friends at Brooklottie Distillery, Island of Islay, where I went out and did a bit of a stage as a chef might in 2012 before opening New Riff. And I spent a few days there and had the run of the place, and they treated me great. They're such lovely people. And they make a gin out there called the Botanist. And to make the Botanist, they scurry around the island and they pick up in the brackish pond and the pools and the hills, the gorse, they get flowering gorse and mugworts and sealies. I don't know what all they get. Are you saying Harry Potter characters or is that? Those are real plants, I think. But I'm sure there's some Harry Potter, some Harry Potter things in there somewhere. At any rate, they make a gin out of their island, right? Here is this great whisky island of Islay. We all love the botanist. Oh yeah. It's a great gin and they make a gin out of their terroir, I think is the term now that has been applied to a terroir driven gin or the foraging movement among gin. I was taken with that and I thought, island of Islay, I love you. You're a great whisky region, but damn it, Kentucky is a great whisky region. We should be able to make a gin. So what can we make a gin out of our neck of the woods, out of our little corner of the earth? The Ohio Valley. I don't know if you've been enough to Cincinnati to eat the chili, which I love. I quickly dismissed Cincinnati Chili Gin. That was not going to fly. Someone else can do that. Is that like Cincinnati's food? Oh, the chili. You don't know about Cincinnati Chili? I didn't know this was a thing. They have a just horrible way of eating chili in Cincinnati. By your tongue. What is it? They put this overly greasy chili and they put it on a plate of spaghetti. What the f**k? Yeah, it gets better. Then they add like oyster crackers, cheese. If you want it with beans, it's a chili without beans, first of all. Then if you order it with beans, they just sprinkle beans on top. Oh, such Philistines I am cursed with. You stay in Chicago. Yeah, Skyline is the big popular fast food. It's like fast food chili joint. All right. So you decided not to make a gym themed after this dog s**t chili. Listen, Cincinnati Chili is like a national joke, but it's like if you're really hung over in Cincinnati, it's not bad stuff. That's all I'm saying. Anyway, I dismissed that and I can see I was right to do so when it gets out in the world. But I wanted to make a gym of our region. So I went looking for, as they did in Ireland, some local botanicals and who knew, but we've got a juniper species all over the place in the Ohio Valley, in Kentucky. It's the Eastern Red Cedar. And after figuring this out and commissioning farmers to go and harvest, climb up in the trees with a ladder and a cherry picker, harvest these juniper berries for us, I later found, years later, documents dating back to a historical production of this use of the juniper berry, the local juniper berry in Kentucky spirits, dating back to 1819, 200 years ago, people had the same idea. And so we put this local juniper in our gym. And then we also found another spice called the American Spice Bush. And this is a bush, six to 10 feet tall. It puts out this little berry and it kind of tastes like allspice. It's like allspice with a twang. If allspice was learning bluegrass banjo, that's what it would taste like, is the American Spice Bush. And these are native plants to the Ohio Valley. What a Kentucky name for a plant, too. It's like, oh, smell that? Smells like spice. What do we call that? Spice Bush. No, no, no, no. That's not even really the Kentucky name. I mentioned one time to our distributor in Kentucky that, oh yeah, our gin is made with spice bush. And he said, oh, Busberry? And I said, what did you call it? He said, my Kentucky grandma down in Eastern Kentucky calls it Busberry. Not because it gives you a buzz, but maybe it has like a buzzy flavor. And you didn't name it Busberry Gin. We did not. No, no. It's named Kentucky Wild Gin because it is made out of the wilds of the Ohio Valley. I get the berries and the spice bush berries from Kentucky and Indiana and Ohio. So it's an expression of our whole home region that goes into this gin. This is awesome. Shannon, you're a fan of gin. You want to describe this one for us? I love it. I mean, on the nose, I kind of get like this bergamot almost, like beautiful. I was going to say English tea. Yeah, like just almost like citrus. And then the mouthfeel is just beautifully velvety. The mouthfeel is incredible. Yeah, it's so good. And I'm so filtered. It is an unfiltered gin. I've been living my right life. So as an unfiltered gin, if we're going to make a cocktail out of this, it might cloud up a bit when we're adding some ice and water, though. It might. You know, when I'm out in the in the restaurants or bars of our home region or any place that they have my gin and I order a cocktail, I order a martini and I take a picture of it to document how cloudy is the gin this time and out in the real world, not just on our lab bench, but a bartender is shaking it up and stirring it up, whatever they're doing. What does it look like? And it does turn a little, the word I like to use is opalescent. It turns a little pearlescent. That's a way of making cloudy sounds. Yeah, gently cloudy like that. And maybe that freaks some people out. I don't know. We've never heard anything about it. We're happy to live with it if it delivers a mouthfeel like that. If it retains the botanical oils, that is something that would get compressed and attenuated with a chill filtration on a gin. Let's chill filter it so someone can put it in the freezer, and when they pour it out, it won't freak them out. We would rather live with that and get all the mouthfeel we can. This is a whiskey drinker's gin. Yeah, this is amazing. How are you infusing the botanicals? The process is in our pot still, we use a GNS we purchased made from corn. I wish we had a GNS still, maybe someday, but right now, we purchase a grain neutral spirit and cut that to 100 proof and add the botanicals right in the still overnight and it macerates overnight. The botanicals are the aforementioned local juniper and American spice bush. And I don't put a cup or a teaspoon in there. I put about four pounds of this stuff in each batch. It's a significant amount and it makes scaling up the gin challenging because I got to get these farmers out in the woods and we're going state to state now, we're in Chicago. I need lots of spice bush. And so we have to keep up on that. You mean buzz bear? Buzz bear, yeah. So we have in there angelica and orris root and licorice root. Licorice root, not star anise. This isn't the licorice that people object to in absinthe or licorice jelly beans. This is licorice root and it adds, in a sort of cunning and sneaky fashion, adds an amount of sweetness to the gin. It doesn't make it quote unquote sweet, but you almost don't notice it's there. Oris root, which along with angelica, has gorgeous flavors, but it is also a fixative. They use sometimes oris root in perfumes. If you smell oris, sometimes people say, oh, it smells like my grandma's perfume. Well, because it had oris in it. It's a fixative that binds these flavors together. And then there are three citruses, but at a very low level. This is not what I call a citrus forward gin, but I add dried lemon peel and bitter orange peel, and I add whole dried Persian limes. This is something out of Mediterranean or Persian cooking that is a whole sort of black lime that I smash up every time in a mortar and pestle. And that goes in there. And then also cinnamon and of course, juniper and coriander. How many recipes did you go through before? Like this is it? Mostly just one. What I did was distilled all of those botanicals I just mentioned and many more. I distilled about 30 or 40 things in separate distillations. We have a small lab still. It's a 10 liter copper still in our laboratory. That is an R&D still. And it allows us to pinch off very, very small lab research distillations. And I distilled all of these things individually. Because to be fair, honestly, in all my years of drinking gin, which was a lot of years, I never tasted oris as a distillate. I never tasted what is cinnamon as a distillate, not just a flavoring that's added. What do those things do? And they don't always do what you would expect. And so I tried each of them individually and put those together in a certain ratio that then became the base recipe. And the first full sort of R&D batch was largely a finished product. I had to make a few tweaks here and there, but it wasn't a wholesale revision. Oh, that didn't work. Oh, this one didn't work. Let's try again. I think that research in the beginning was really the important part. Years of gin drinking paid off. Thanks, Dad. Yes. We don't have the Barrel-Aged Gin yet, but it's coming on the next load, and we'll bring some in. So it's a cool little sneak peek of a really fantastic Barrel-Aged Gin. So coming soon. The Barrel-Aged Gin is the same stuff off the still as the standard Kentucky Wild Gin, same proof. It's 94 proof. It's also, of course, unshilled filtered. It's aged seven months in New Riff, Bourbon and Rye barrels. And the Barrel-Aged Gin is particularly fun in a couple of cocktails I like to mention. I personally don't think it makes a great martini. It makes a nice G&T, especially with a ginatonic, with like an orange garnish instead of lime. But it really makes a good Martinez cocktail, which is a Manhattan, but made with gin. And it makes a terrific, what's called a very simply, a gin cocktail, which is an old fashioned made with gin. I love it those two ways. Those are really good. Barrel-Aged Gin is also distinguished by a certain victory it earned earlier this year, along with our entire portfolio. So, over the years, we had put our spirits into some of the craft distilling conferences and the gin came back winning a bronze medal or one time it won a silver. And I thought, I'm not saying it's the greatest gin ever, but I think it's better than that. I know it's better than that guy's gin and you gave him a silver. So things like that. We had some acclaim for that, but nothing amazing. Once we had our whiskeys under our belt and we had bottled and bonned bourbon and bottled and bonned rye and our single barrel bourbon, we had five products along with the two gins. We took them last year and entered them in the world's most prestigious spirits competition, the San Francisco World spirits Competition. For some people, it's the only one that matters. And we put them before the highest stage in the world and the toughest judges. And in San Francisco, they award silver medals, gold medals. And if everybody in the room, the judges think a spirit is a gold, then it gets double gold and that's the highest qualification. All five spirits, the whole portfolio rang up the double gold. That's how we felt. It's just unprecedented for a new distillery to run the table like that. The barrel age gin also won best in its class. So until the 2020 San Francisco World spirits Competition, we got the best barrel age gin in the world. Thank you. All right, world's best barrel age gin. Let's see what we got. Oh, that's gorgeous. I'm just glad the cork didn't break off in the bottle. This has aged seven months in bourbon and rye barrels. It's a nice, you know, we're on radio, so people can't, never mind, rewind. Being a podcast, you can't see any of this, but the packaging on all these is really sharp. And this is same proof as the regular 94, right? 94 proof, right. OK, now we haven't gotten this in yet. Where can we expect this to land retail wise on the shelf? It's usually about $33.99. OK, a couple dollars more, not much. So we're actually we've been running the regular Kentucky wild gin on sale, I think, for around 28 bucks for a little while now. Fantastic. So, yeah, it's a great gin for that price. That's one of the, you know, kind of that 30, $35 where a lot of crafty gins kind of fall. So to be able to get that bottle of gin under 30 bucks, one of the best deals in that aisle, for sure. The spice definitely comes through in this one, that rye. Some people find more orange comes out. It seems to accentuate the citrus and particularly the orange a little bit. So what's your go-to cocktail for this? I like, if I have red vermouth in the house, and I can run out sometimes, then I make a Martinez, which is, as I said, a perfect Manhattan. So half dry, half sweet vermouth? Half dry, half sweet, and a good bitters of your choice, and then gin. Now, if you make it with ordinary gin, preferably Kentucky Wild, that's a nice cocktail. But when you make a Martinez with, and this is an old cocktail, 1890s, it's one of the cocktails that emerged around the emergence of vermouth, just like Manhattan's. You make it with barrel-aged gin, and it really starts to blur the lines between what am I drinking here? Is this a gin cocktail or a whisky-ish cocktail? Because you return to the drink some of the barrel, vanilla, oak tones that you remove when you swap out the whisky for the gin. So a Martinez with barrel-aged gin is really a cool drink, and also a very nice drink to enjoy gin in the winter. If you're a gin and tonic drinker and then October rolls around, and the Bengals start losing again, what are you going to drink? You can drink a gin in the winter when you go and make it into a Martinez. Martinez is amazing cocktail. I've never had a Martinez, I have to admit. Sometimes people refer to it as the original martini. I'm not a big dry martini fan, but Martinez is a great, and I can imagine this gin is phenomenal. Yeah, there's a lot of barrel-aged gins out there that are just unbalanced or overly wooded or just tastes like, I don't know, like watered down herbal whiskey or something. This is a really nicely done balanced gin. It's not too dark in color, but you can tell it's barrel-aged. Then like Jay had mentioned, it picks up a little bit of that vanilla and oaky lactone character that just softens edges of what is pretty peppery and spiced for a gin. This is really, really well done. Thank you. This is a gin to try if there's a lot of people out there who think they don't like gin. They've tried maybe a famous namesake London dry gin and had it warm or something. I don't know. Yeah. It's like, oh, it's perfume. It's terrible, but this gin is beautiful and it is the kind of gin you could just drink. Neat. It's that nice. Yeah. I look forward to having this on the shelves. That's a tremendous price. I mean, that's awesome. Yeah, and a lot of people, a lot of small craft distillers are barely gin, you know, $50, $60 or something. Oh man. This is great, Jay. Thanks for bringing this. Thank you. Thank you so much. All right. Well, I hope you guys enjoyed listening to our little journey through the New Riff portfolio today. We've got these exciting Binny's Handpicked casks. We're not going to be able to get any more of those, probably until maybe Q2 2020 or so. So if you're interested, I'll make sure you check in with your local store as soon as you can. Also, the New Riff Single Barrel Rye in stock at Albany's locations and these gorgeous, complex Kentucky Wild Gin's. So Jay, we really appreciate you coming on today and it's been great. We're happy to have such an exciting small distillery, family-owned distillery on our shelves. My pleasure. We're thrilled to be here, Pat. All right. So till next week with Barrel to Bottle, I'm Pat. I'm Shannon. I'm Roger. I'm Greg. I'm Jay. Keep tasting.