Welcome back to another episode of Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. I am Pat. I'm the Director of Spirit Sales here at Binny's. With me, distance across the internet today is Greg. Hey, Greg. Do communications at Binny's. Yeah, that's Greg. Our special guest today is Dave Vitale. Dave is the founder of Starward Whisky, which is an Australian whiskey distillery company that we have some particularly excellent whiskies from in our stores, and we actually have a single cask on the way, which we'll talk about today, too. Dave, thank you for joining us. How are you doing today? Yeah, pretty good. Thanks. Thanks for inviting me along. Dave, is it like 4 a.m. where you are right now? No, actually, I made a big, bold move. March last year, I moved my family over from Australia to the United States, and perfectly timed it, I think, for the best years of the United States. Did you get the fire and the lockdown? Well, you know, you've had a hell of a year. Yeah, it's been interesting, you know, and that's been, you know, it's always the way, right? And, but honestly, it's been a really, like, I can't express how excited we are to be here, and also just the response that we've had to the whiskeys, obviously in Binny's, but around the country has been amazing. And it just, I think, talks to the fact that people are way more curious about their whiskeys today, and are open minded about looking at drinks that perhaps their dad didn't drink, and that's pretty exciting for us. Yeah, it's always cool to see these younger crowds and these younger drinkers experiment and try new things. Like you mentioned, like your dad didn't drink too often, I think you kind of fall into what you were raised around, and to branch out and take a leap on a very unfamiliar whisky, even though when you do taste it, there's a lot to be found that's familiar there too. Like whisky is whisky, whisky is made from grains, and it's aged in wood barrels. That changes slightly depending on where it is around the globe, but you're always going to find some familiar flavors in there. Can we start with when did Starward start? What motivated you to start making whisky? Were you always making whisky? No, I actually started in tech, so this is a pretty big departure from that world. It was 2005 that I realized that the business that we were in, which was e-learning, would never amount to anything. I was a little bit wrong on that. 15 years later, it's all of our lives, or certainly the people that have children's lives. But it wasn't something that I was really passionate about. I was actually an avid home brewer and wanted to think about setting up an organic microbrewery. But good beer doesn't travel well, we know that. I had this thing within me that I wanted to export whatever we did internationally, particularly to the United States. That was how Starward was born. Basically, whiskeys are just beers that have grown. For us having discovered that actually the process of making, particularly single malt whiskeys is very similar to brewing beer, I got really excited by that and started to explore it in a bit more detail. Because growing up, whisky for me was, I don't know, like Johnny Walker was what my Greek friends' dads drank when they were playing cards. And, you know, Shivers Regal was what we gave our accountant for Christmas. You know, like that's all I knew of whiskeys, really. And so discovering single malt was a bit of an eye-opening moment and realized that they were the original craft whiskeys, really, weren't they? In terms of place and providence and flavor. And so that got me really excited about taking that for a walk now. Do you have a particular single malt that you can kind of hone in on as like that one was your aha moment where it's like, holy cow, this is this, can you credit a single malt with kind of your whisky growth journey? Yeah, there's probably about, there's five in the, and they're not just single malts. You know, I think that that was kind of really that single malts with a gateway coming from a craft beer background, just because the process was the same. But very quickly, you know, I became a student of whisky spelt both ways, you know, from around the world. And, you know, the five that are always at home and, you know, were inspirations or are inspirations for me are, you know, in the single malt world, it's Belveni Double Wood, the 12 year old. I mean, that's kind of just amazing. It's a classic. Exactly. Beautifully crafted whisky. They kind of took this idea of barrel aging and the fact that you can really have a play with that. You know, Dave Stewart was really good at sort of exploring, you know, this transferring of liquid into different barrels and seeing where that would go. Really pioneered it. Laphroaig 10 is always at home amongst a whole heap of other peated whiskeys. We love peated whiskeys at home. Our middle daughter's name is Isla, so it kind of gives you an idea of how much we love peated whiskeys. While Turkey, I mean, you know, just amazing high rye content bourbon that's just, you know, great value for money. Makersmark, which is kind of the opposite really, it isn't as a weeded bourbon, but I just think that they kind of owned their place as a step up whisky well before premium was a thing, you know? Yep. And you know, somewhat controversially for some people, but you know, I love it. Johnny Walker Black, you know. Johnny Walker Black is a phenomenal whisky, you know? People dismiss it because it's blended, but it's awesome. It is awesome. You know, like it's extremely consistent and I've had the privilege of being able to drink some from the 40s, 60s, 90s, and today. And you can thread a needle through it. Like it's just amazing. And you know, they've had like six master blenders of that distillery over 200 years. It's amazing. So, you know, those are the five whiskeys and they all tell a little bit of the Starward story or you know, we've been inspired by a little bit of their story to make Starward what it is today. That's very cool. So you're messing with the home brewing thing, started drinking whiskey, and then when did you found Starward? 2007. So there was like a light bulb moment for me, which is like actually Tasmania, particularly had a great whiskey kind of making- Big whiskey trail down there, yeah. Yeah, and I learned how to make whiskey in Tassie from 2005 to 2007. And it'd be fair to say, and some of their websites say as much, you know, that they were making Tasmanian whiskey in the finest of Scottish traditions. And for me, I kind of figured that if we were going to create a whiskey that was going to be in people's sharing cabinets, then we needed a whiskey that was made in the finest of Australian traditions. You know, even though we didn't have them, that it was an incumbent upon us to kind of figure out how we were going to do that. Is that freeing? Do you have like the whole menu of techniques and flavors from around the world at your fingertips? Pretty much. You know, so the options are really broad because you can shoot a cannon through our regulations. It's so broad. You know, like, they're just very, very simple. It's one line. You know, it's a, you know, whiskey is a distillate from a fermented grain mash that's aged in wood for two years. That's it. Wait a minute. If it was that easy here, Pat wouldn't even have a job, you know? It's true. Very much of his job is just explaining minutiae to people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's true. And look, you know, don't get me wrong. It's great to have that broad canvas, but you also have established norms that exist. And, you know, part of the challenge for Starward, when we started, was that, you know, I wanted to be disruptive. I wanted to kind of push the boundaries of what whiskey can be and start to think about it in a modern context with food, you know, talking to the place it's made, as great whiskeys do, but not just from an ingredients perspective, but a cultural perspective as well. And you have to bring people along a journey. And this is 2007, not 2020, right? Like, so whiskey was still very much in that world of Tweed Jacket, Fireplace. Stuffy white men, call it what it is. Sure. Thanks, Pat. And so, you know, for me, it was like, okay, well, how do I bring people along this journey? And Single Bottle was a great starting point, because, as I said, I was a frustrated homebrewer, and I could have lots of beautiful shiny kids to make lots of beer that we would never drink, you know, and distill into the Single Bottle spirit. But I wanted to really stretch it further. And, you know, over the different whiskies that we've released, I feel like we've taken our drinkers along that journey. And so, you know, interestingly, we started with Solera and then launched Nova and the most recent whiskey we launched was Two Fold. And Solera was the most, I guess, even though it was quite modern in approach, it was still kind of a tip of the hat to Scotch Whisky. It was aged in fortified wine barrels. Most like Sherry, but Sherry comes from Spain. This is Australian fortified wine barrels. By the way, Australian fortified wine is some of the best fortified wine I've ever had in my life. Wow. That's fair. Sapeltz field? Oh yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It is amazing. And look, sourcing those barrels is a challenge, but when we do get them, they make amazing whisky. It really just talks to quality products all the way through, like being able to source these amazing heirloom fortified wine barrels that have had these wines in them for 40, 50, 60, sometimes 100 years. And the reason why they're getting rid of them, the barrels, is that either there's been a diminishing demand for these fortified wines or they're literally falling to bits. And so what we do with Solera is a traditional approach, that's shave, toast, and recharge of the barrel. But we also resize them into 50s, 100s, and 200 liters. So that's 50 gallons, 26 gallons, and 30 gallons. I was going to ask you about that. Also, where do the Australian wineries get their wood in the first place? Is it Australian oak? No, it's American and French oak, European oak. A lot of the barrels that we've had from some of these wineries, particularly the fortified barrels, actually were ex-Scotch barrels, interestingly. So back in the day, Scotch used to arrive in Australia in barrels. Yeah. And so the Scotch was emptied. They've had fortified wine for tens and tens of years. And then they come back to a whisky distillery, which is kind of neat. It's funny because the Scots can't even get barrels like that anymore. You know, like they're out of truly old sherry barrels now. And so these guys get these sherry seasoned American oak, you know, nothings that had sherry in them for nine months. And then they turned the sherry into vinegar, and then they kick the barrels over to Scotland. And it's you don't get those old school, like decades old fortified wine casts anymore. They're just not available. That's really cool that you've gotten them down there, you know, with that kind of native fortified wine. Yeah, it's great. And you know, and so with Solera, the great thing is that it is, you know, we wanted to shape things up in an Australian context. When we landed, we were half the price of the next Australian whiskey. We were kind of doing the Solera process, which is quite expensive. We were going, you know, like, you know, for those of you that like to geek out on tech specs, you know, we were going into the barrel at a lower proof point, like 110, when most of them are at 132 to 135. Yeah, that's very low. How did you come to that decision? Was that just you were going to lose too much yield if you went in at a higher proof? Well, interestingly, in Australia, particularly Melbourne, we're kind of famed for our four seasons in a day weather. So if you can imagine, you know, those cool breezes that come over into Napa in the afternoons that make their wines so delicious, it's the same sort of thing that we have, you know, temperature ranges that can kind of swing 40 degrees Fahrenheit in an afternoon, no problems, you know. And so, and that's just a function of geography. We've got a huge desert in the middle of Australia. Everybody knows the outback, but we also have a huge desert to the south of Australia called Antarctica. And so, depending on whether the wind's coming from the northwest or the southwest, it's going to be either very hot and dry or very cold and frigid. And, you know, so particularly during summer, that can have a huge impact on maturation and our whiskey. So going at a lower proof point means that over time, the alcohol in the barrel goes up as opposed to down, which is quite common. And, you know, what we're looking for in all of our whiskeys is balance, obviously, between the oak and the spirit. And so had we gone in that traditional number, we would have ended up with a very unbalanced whiskey that was over extracted from a spirit perspective. Yeah, considering you're gaining, I'm a big fan of the low entry proof. I mean, it's just especially because these aren't bottled at cast strength and you're just adding less water on the back end. It's making a more balanced, richer, fuller whiskey, even though it is on the younger end of the spectrum for malts. Yeah. But it certainly doesn't drink that way at all, of course, because those warmer climate malts famously age a little faster. Yeah. And so we're not Robinson Caruso in that. I mean, you've got... Kavala is a great example of the tropical aging process, but also more recently, I don't know if she's sure if it's landed in Chicago yet, but Milk and Honey from Israel. We have Milk and Honey now. It's outstanding. Isn't it? It's great, you know. So and it's the whole modern era of distilleries, I think, that have been inspired by Dr. Jim Swan too, you know, or work with Dr. Jim Swan that kind of had a mindset of look, quality spirit, quality crafted white dog, you make spirit, doesn't need that much time in wood, you know. And if you've got quality spirit with quality oak, then you're 80% of the way there in terms of crafting a spirit. You had mentioned the STR, the Shaved Toast, Rechar, and I was gonna ask if Jim Swann was involved in your project at all, just because that's the kind of what he's really famously known for, spreading that Bible all over the world. Yeah, no. In fact, we had a conversation with Jim to sort of see if there was something that we should be doing, and he kind of said, no, you know, I don't know that there's much I could kind of offer you. You're on the right path. And so that was nice to hear. And so we never worked with him formally, but you know, the STR process on stuff really early on on the fortified wine barrels was a function really of the fact that they wouldn't have held liquid if we didn't actually recoup them. So Solera is that modern take on tradition, as I was saying, you know, but we pushed the envelope a little in terms of age, the climate, you know, proudly talking about the fact that this is a young whiskey. Our approach to production was quite innovative and pushed it. Oh, look at that. We should try it. We should try it. You're absolutely right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, I'll continue to ask technical questions as we try. Yeah, let's do that. You know, for us, Solera was really just a great starting point to kind of plant ourselves on the modern whiskey making map, to bring people along a journey to say, look, whiskey can come from places other than Scotland and Kentucky, and Ireland. I mean, even Japanese whiskey back then was a bit of a curiosity, I guess, more than anything else, and it's bloody delicious. That was kind of job number one to do. We'll be the judge of that. So backing it up, it's a grain whiskey. It's in a Solera. Is it a single Solera that's all of the Solera bottleings that you put out is all from the same Solera process? So basically we have a, I have to do the math, 5,000 liters. So that's about 1,500 gallons, I guess, Solera tank that's never been emptied. So that's in your glass right now is the first barrel we ever emptied, which is pretty exciting for a young whiskey. And it's going to be like that forever. I don't want to make it sound like I'm a big deal, but I've got a growler that I just put whiskey in and it's all the same. So we're kind of like the same guy. Yeah. Same, same. All right. So if I'm tasting this blind, I would guess it is Scotch, just right off the bat, like Highland Scotch, probably Sherry Cask, Highland Scotch. Yeah. A little brighter in fruits, I think. So it definitely lends itself to the Scotch world. And there's a bit of bourbon influence in there too, I think, just in terms of those charred barrels, most of them American oak, really give it a bit of that caramel, creme brulee, toffee characteristic, which is common in bourbons. So it was deliberately sort of positioned to be something that would be really approachable, something that you could share with friends and say, yeah, this is pretty good. But to your point, it's a single malt whiskey in fortified wine barrels. Okay, they're from Australia and we're taking a brewing approach to the way that we ferment the wash that we're going to distill. And there's some really interesting hacks to get it to be even more delicious. But let's call it what it is, right? Like it's still a couple of double pot distilled single malt whiskey in fortified wine barrels. It shows great. So the job was not done for me when we started this, because if we go back to the ambition, it was like, if we think about those inspirations, I wanted something that was to Australia what LaFrogue is to Islay. You open the cork on a bottle of LaFrogue, and you know that it's peated whiskey. Well, you know it's LaFrogue, right? But you know it's peated whiskey that you're drinking, and there's only one place in the world that does that exceptionally well in my humble opinion. So I wanted us to be able to put out, for someone to put their nose to Starward and go, this is Australia, you know, ideally, this is Starward, right? But this is Australian whiskey. You know, it's distinctive. It has an aroma and pallor and finish that could only mean it comes from one place. And so with Solera, as well crafted and as sentimentally, it is my favorite whiskey. Of the whiskies that we have, we wouldn't be here without it. Nova was the one that really put us on the map as like, okay, you guys are doing something really interesting and different. And in a weird way, I now have permission to be in everybody's sharing cabinet alongside the best Scotch, Japanese, Irish, Kentucky whiskey in the world. Yeah. And do you credit that to the cask treatment on the Nova? I mean, it's a pretty unique thing. Yeah. Yeah. 100%. So what's Nova? Nova is, so it's the same single bolt whiskey spirit that goes into the Solera barrels, into the Apera barrels, supported by wine barrels. They're fully aged in red wine barrels from the day it's made. And again, we're not Robinson Caruso. That's been doing, that's been happening for some time. But the big difference is that these are wet filled wine barrels. So wine goes out and whiskey goes in for the full aging. So either you're getting them overnighted from Napa or their Australian wine barrels. Their Australian wine barrels. Yeah, absolutely. So as I'm saying, great whiskeys talk to the place they're made. All of our ingredients arrive from a day's drive away from the distillery. So this is more Australian than Scottish Scottish in a way, right? And don't say that in Glasgow. I tried that once. Yeah, maybe in Edinburgh, but not in Glasgow. Yeah, Ponchton, Glasgow. Yeah. So, but you know, this is exciting. You know, it's exciting for me as a distiller to be able to finally have something that we can say, look, you know, this is this is Australian whisky. You can't do what we're doing anywhere else in the world and do it as compellingly as we can, you know, like have the barley grown in the same effectively, the same catchment as the wines are being grown and aging it for three to four Melbourne years. You know, because of that climate and releasing it in a fashion that, you know, makes it double gold at San Francisco, Best Crafters, still whisky gold, best in class in London. All right, settle down, all right, settle down. All right, all right, I had to do it. But it's exciting, it's exciting, you know. Couple quick technical questions. So the barley is grown in Australia. Is Australian known for growing barley or did you have to find someone who was going to do this for you? We drink a lot of beer in Australia. Yeah, that's true. Fair enough. So, so, you know, we saw- Is that Cooper's? Is Cooper's the one? Cooper's is one. Cooper's is a great, great, it's probably the OG craft brewery in Australia, really. And in fact, for quite a long time, we were sourcing our malted barley from Cooper's. Oh, cool. They'd been doing their own malting, bit to their kind of spec, and then increased production capacity, and we're able to kind of really dial in a spec that worked for us as well. And that's the key, right? We want brewing barley, not distilling barley. So two row barley. Uh-huh, it's darker in color and character. It's more flavorsome, and we compromise yields to do that, but that's the least of our concerns. You know, like we're just looking for flavor first. Now, this is not the first time you've mentioned kind of taking a brewer's approach. What kind of yeast are you using to ferment this barley? So it's a mixture of ale and distilling yeasts. So the ale, the ale yeast, you know, if you're at the distillery and had some of our wash, it's 8% ABV, so it's pretty boozy. And you know, it'd be probably closest to a saison. Okay. You know, like a really Belgian style. And then it gets double distilled in copper pots. How big are your stills? So we've just got new ones installed. So they are, I'm going to do them in liters because I can't do the math. So the- Liters is fine. The larger one is 10,000 liters in size and the smaller one is just a smidge over 3,500. That's like pretty average size Scotch distillery size. I mean, that's pretty big, Greg. I mean, the biggest you see over there is, you know, maybe 15 to 20,000 liters. But I'd say most wash stills I see in Scotland are usually between like 8,000 and 12,000 liters. How about in Ireland? There's a little bit of a resemblance to Irish whiskey here too. Interesting, yeah. I think, you know, a lot of Irish whiskey more recently is starting to age in wine barrels. I mean, Tealands, a great distillery that's sort of sourcing some amazing barrels from California, I think, maybe even Australia. But historically, a lot of the Irish inventory has been aged in American oak, ex-American oak bourbon barrels, you know. So, you know, this wine characteristic that we're getting, that fruitiness is quite distinctive and something that, you know, we're on that journey to kind of saying, okay, well, if this is in the cabinet, it has a reason to be there because it's not a modern take on Scotch. It's not imitating bourbon Irish or Japanese whiskey. This is doing something pretty distinctive in and of itself. Sure. So this Nova, it has that kind of pear skin fruit. This one touches up with a little bit of cherry or some other kind of red fruit like that. And then there, it's just a delightful, like milk chocolate underneath, like this baking spice thing. Those are pretty basic series. I think you're bang on. Oh, man. Yeah. And the interesting thing, so we have to park everything we know about aging whiskey, if you're a Scotch whiskey distillery or an American distillery, bourbon distillery, and think about aging whiskey now and with the mindset of a winemaker, we're in the hands of the wood policies of the wineries that we source our barrels from. So there's a mixture of French oak and American oak, medium toast, light toast, heavy toast, never charred. And so when we're, and if you think about wines, if you're using a barrel and putting in a wine at 15% ABV, there's nowhere for any oak imperfections to hide. So the quality of oak that winemakers are using is just a step up from those that we as distillers can use because we've got that higher proof point. And so the characteristics, the flavors that we're getting from these oak barrels is really quite distinctive. There's been wine finishes for quite some time. Lots of distilleries do wine finishes. But you're getting a double hit of oak in that process. You had the first however many years in a whatever barrel and then a finish in a wine barrel. Especially bourbon, if it's a finished bourbon, it's soaked up a lot of primal oak before it gets a second dose from something else. Yeah. I think some wine finishes have given the perception of being really oaky and over extracted whiskeys, which if you're having a cigar, fantastic. But what we wanted to do with Nova particularly was make sure that this still maintained a degree of approachability and balance between the spirit and the oak characteristics coming through. We think we've done a good job of that. Having said that, the great thing is that because we're sourcing from 40 or 50 wineries in South Australia and Victoria, because we have French oak, American oak, Hungarian oak, and because some of these are actually shaved, toasted, and rechanned because they do give some depth and complexion, when it comes to them picking a single barrel, we've got all these different permutations that we can take for a walk. It's really fun to say, well, all of these barrels that we're picking here or That's a multi-barrel vatting. So is it labeled by batch or is it, like, do you just work for consistency? Johnny Walker Black consistency. Awesome. You know, that's what we're looking for. Learn from the best. Yeah. So, you know, like I said, each of those distilleries really imparted something to the Starward story just in terms of approach and consistency was the one from Johnny Walker. Now Dave, you know, in America, we're kind of varietal obsessed with our wines. So, I mean, the question we have to ask is like, if you're just getting truckloads of barrels from wineries, do you have any controller say in what varietals you come in or as far as you're concerned, they're all wine barrels and our blenders are It's a bit of both. So early on, we were like, it's a wine barrel. I know this winery makes $100 bottles of wine. We'd be crazy not to get the barrel, right? Because I know that there's some integrity and quality attention to detail. But what we learned through that process is that not every $100 wine makes a great wine barrel for Starward. And so on our team, we have brewers make our wash that goes into the still and winemakers select the barrels and age the whiskey. Interesting. And it's deliberate because we want our winemakers to talk to the winemakers at the wineries to make sure that we're both on the same page about what the intention was of the winemaker with this particular barrel and how it's being treated and used at the winery such that when it comes to the distillery, we know where to slot it into our kind of inventory profile. So now that we understand a little bit more about those wineries and the wood policy and our own, we're still a baby in the world of whisky, right? Like we've only been distilling spirit for 13 years. So, you know, it's still a learning process. So we want to make sure that we're keeping our eye on what barrel inventories we're sourcing and how we age it in the bond store. So, varietal matters. So, varietal matters in the context of big Aussie reds need, if you're making quality Aussie reds that you're going to sell or you're more than likely going to want to have an oak backbone to that to give the wine some structure so that it ages well. That's really important for us because we want all of those oak tannins, those really extractive big oak tannins in the wine, not the whiskey. Right. So that's why we can create these beautiful soft toasted oak characters that are really approachable and easy to drink because all of those oak tannins are in the wine. So big Aussie reds are our favorite. Pino makes part of the cut as well. But that's more about light and shade than it is about flavor. So it's giving the distillers some depth and complexion because typically those barrels are going to be less reactive and they have less extractive power I guess than those big Aussie reds that may have had one or two turns in them. At the winery and then moving them out. Well, a really good example, one of our favorite wineries to work with is a few, but Molly Duca is famed for single use of their barrels. So we'll take them every day of the week because it effectively, brand new de-tananized oak barrels. Yeah. Do you have to worry about sulfur? No. Well, yes, sorry, let me say that differently. Yes, we do, in terms of we want to avoid it with a 40 foot barge bowl, but this is part of our relationship with winemakers and wineries. So I mentioned that some of the product is STR, like there's a component of the inventory that's STR. That will be often, Treasury Winestates makes brands like Penfolds, Wins, Wolf Blast. If they're doing a dump of barrels, I'm not going to be able to say, hey, can you hold off for two weeks while we build up our Spirit Inventory enough? Yeah, they're going to tell you to go Pound Sand for sure, yeah. So we're stuck with a dilemma then of saying, okay, do we want these amazing heirloom quality oak barrels that have had some of the best wines in Australia, put them in them, but they're going to have to be somehow preserved, or do we say no? The traditional model of preservation, sulfur in wineries, and so what we've done is said, well, you know, for that parcel that comes in, we'll STR, we'll shave, toast and recharge them because we're still getting these amazing characters coming from It would be a real shame if the RWT barrels went to become like flower planners or something. Correct, yeah, yeah, yeah. The frustration is that, you know, we've kind of like let the cat out of the bag because early on, you know, that was the next alternative for Starward Barrels. You know, those barrels was the garden store as planter boxes for lemon trees. And we've kind of created a secondary market and they've caught on that we can win, you know, awards and make some money from their barrels. So the price has gone up a little over the years. Yeah, your cost of acquisition has rose slightly, I imagine. It's worth emphasizing again that for a whiskey, this Nova, for a whiskey that was aged 100% in wine barrels and in fresh wine barrels, it is not at all vinyas or grippy. You know, it has tons of fruit and tons of red fruit. But almost always when you get a wine barrel cask whiskey, especially a malt, that's pretty delicate, you know? Like it gets vinyas and tannic fast. And this isn't like that at all. It's plush and soft, like you mentioned with that toasted oak profile, but it doesn't have all that tannin. I think that's, it's really excellent. Yeah, it's something that we work really hard to make sure that, you know, this can be as much as Belveni Double Wood was my gateway single malt, maybe for some people, Starward might well be their gateway into whiskey, you know, and that you're not All right, so your third whiskey that we have pretty much all the time here is Two Fold, which is, you're calling it a double grain whiskey. What is that exactly? Yeah, we had a bit of a dilemma. So if we were aging our whiskey fully in brand new American oak barrels, it would be a weeded whiskey. And if we were a distillery in Scotland and sourcing aged whiskey from different distilleries in Scotland, it would be a blend. But it's neither of those two things because we're obviously aging in wine barrels and where it's all from the house of Starward. Now, are these grains distilled separately? It's wheat and malt. Australia is pretty known for growing a lot of wheat too, right? Right. Yeah, so wheat is separately distilled, malt separately distilled, all aged in red wine barrels. The wood policies for wheat and the malts are a little bit different. We skew a little bit bigger on, well, let me say differently. We don't skew as small on the grains. So there's still barriques and hogsheads, so that's 200 and 300 litre barrels. But sometimes, if we're working with Yolumba, for example, they've got an amazing Shiraz called Octavius. Yolumba is one of the very few wineries that has a coupe ridge on site. So they'll coupe those barrels for the wine to 100 litres in size, hence the name Octavius. So we'll put that into the single malt and not the grain whisky. But fundamentally, the wood policy is the same for the wheat as it is the malt component. And the 40% component of malt is composed the same way Nova is. Okay. So it's essentially 40% Nova, 60% grain whisky. The grain is wheat. The wheat, that wheat whisky is aged in larger barrels, which makes sense. I mean, if it was smaller barrels, wheat would get overtaken by oak pretty quickly there. So you have a blended whisky. Yeah, pretty much. It's a blended whisky. And I'm not afraid to say that, but it's just kind of like... It's more in the Japanese style where the grain and the malt are kind of coming from the same distillery. What does that all do for Brett and Joe's theory that the wheat doesn't necessarily like lend sweetness, but it just gets out of the way so that the corn can shine through versus a rye. Well, you're talking about much less wheat with a wheated bourbon. So like 60% wheat, right? Yeah, this is 60% wheat, whereas a bourbon is usually around 12. Like the most, the heaviest wheated bourbon out there is Heaven Hills Weed and Mashbills 20% wheat. So this is really much more wheat. Showcase that grain in a way that you rarely taste it. Well, wheat certainly adds a soft mouth feel to it and a little bit of fruity sweetness. But when compared to corn, it's relatively flavorless. Barley is pretty delicate too though. Even compared to corn, barley is relatively flavorless. This was entirely aged in red wine casks? Correct. So the same with Bollison. Kind of has a little bit of that sherry nose, like a little bit of that super sharp uplifting nose. Yeah. I think often the red fruits can come out from that perspective. So if you think of plums, I was going to say dark fruit. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So I can see where you're coming from. To me, this is just breakfast. It's got a whole heap of cereal characteristics to it. I may or may not have poured this over oatmeal on a camping trip. That's fair. We're not going to ask any follow-up questions to that. No. But I will say I am a big proponent of whiskey breakfast, breakfast whiskies. I've been trying to get this trend going for a while to little success. So I might have to start promoting this. We'll start hashtagging breakfast whiskies. Mrs. Brophy keeps telling him to stop trying to make it a thing. So this is amazing whiskey. It's light and fluffy on the palate. There's fruit and then the cracked black pepper, and then this maple syrup quality. Maybe you put that in my head because you poured it over your oatmeal like an animal. But, yeah, this is superb. Like a genius. Oh, man. Yeah. This is a $28 whiskey right now at Binny's, Greg. Is it really? Like this is on sale for $27.99. It's normally $33 bucks, but like... How do you watch the kids? Yeah. It's ludicrous that you get a whiskey of this quality at that price. It really is. This is incredible. Thanks, guys. It means a lot to hear that from you. We were really hard to kind of think about this in the context of those whiskies that I spoke of earlier, right? And they're titans of their categories. And for me, we knew when we started that it's easy to create a well-crafted whiskey. It's really complicated to do that as a craft distillery at a price point. That means that we can kind of have a conversation with drinkers and give them the confidence to give it a go. And at 27, 33, all of a sudden, people... I think that they're really... Of course, I'm going to say this, they're my kids. But they're really well rewarded for that leap of faith that they make. Absolutely. This is... I don't know. This is a blind date. If you haven't tried, that you're going to leave very happy with. It's just a great whiskey for the price. It's not a sludge hammer. It's complex, but the complexities are in nuanced waves of flavors and not in overpowering spice or overpowering fruit or anything like that. Like there's even... I don't know. Just every time I go back to it, there's a little bit more. There's a tiny bit of menthol and a tiny bit of like Swiss cheese or like washed cheese rind, which sounds not great, but it's just another nuance in this whole pile of like honey and a little bit of floral quality. We kind of joke that these whiskies are really good friends for Netflix. When you queue up six episodes of something that you want to watch, and three fingers in the glass, and you just get to know the whiskey over the episodes, like they really do reward that kind of patience, because they are... I think you've got it right. Yeah, they evolve. Yeah. And there's a lot of complexity to them, but not a lot of intensity. And I think sometimes we kind of mix those two things up, right? Like intensity and complexity. And there's a lot going on in both of those, Nova and Two Fold. Makes sense you would want to usually try this one first, although it does kind of shine through now that I'm paying attention after those other slightly bigger whiskeys. Yeah. Yeah. So Tess is right. She's always right. But like I just thought we'd tell the story and drink the whiskeys chronologically. It's great that we get to rag on the marketing suits, even when we're not all in the room at the same time. Yeah. You had brought up the amazing variety of barrels that people can choose from if they're buying a single barrel. And Binny's Beverage Depot did just that. So I guess we need to ask the marketing suit in the corner. When can we expect our single barrel to arrive? Brett and Joe and I picked a single barrel of Starward a few months back, and we ended up with barrel number 10305, which was American Oak and a charred red wine barrique is all the info we really had. I think I had a fancy info card somewhere else too. Wait, what does that mean? American Oak and a charred red wine barrique, like two stuff? Sorry, sorry. Charred red wine barrique, but made out of American Oak. Oh, American Oak charred red wine barrique. I don't know what happened to the fancy little info card. Well, I can talk to it a little more. Remember the story I told about Treasury? Yeah. And we don't really get to tell them when they can empty their wine barrels to make wine. Is this the **** cask? No, no, no, no, no, we can't say that. Jim, bleep the name of the cask that I just said. But is it the- What the hell is ****? No, it's this really nice Penfold's wine that isn't the obvious one, like the Grange or whatever. Oh, okay. I know Penfold's Grange. But it certainly come from that Coupe Ridge that Penfold's sourced their wines from. And it's a Barossa Shiraz more than likely. And yeah, so this makes up about, I don't know, I'm gonna say maybe 5% to 7% of our inventory. So it's very, very scarce amongst all of the barrels that we have, because we're fighting for this wet fuel process. Bullet point one, bullet point two is, I think you get way more of that caramel and vanilla characteristic coming through on the barrels that go through the charred process. And the third point is the jammy-ness. Like there's, you know, like the wine berry characteristics become quite concentrated. Just think of the jam that you have on a cheese board to kind of put on a cracker with some cheese. It is right up front on the nose. There is red fruit dominating the nose. Yeah. That's a good point about those classic American oak carmeline vanilla notes are totally there, but they're like kind of buttressing the fruit. They're not dominating the fruit. And I want to say this was the info card I had, I don't know where I put it, said it was like 3.6 years old or something when the sample was pulled, but the sample was pulled all the way back in May or something. Correct. Yeah, so obviously we've got a little bit further to travel than Kentucky to get you a barrel. Yeah. So basically we needed to sort of obviously pull the samples and then get the bottles on the water and then figure out who they're going to go to once they're here. So what you're drinking is what you'll be, what's in the bottle. Making its way across America. Yeah. All right. So maybe when this airs, it'll be in stores then. Okay, Pat. Depending on how fast their distributor can turn this around. Holy is this good. Isn't this good? Oh, okay. Everything we were talking about, grace and complexity before, this one is a sledgehammer, but it's a very complex sledgehammer. This is awesome. Yeah. So I went into this, like we obviously do a lot of barrels and, but we don't just like do a barrel just cause it's offered. And I went into this thinking like, okay, like I like these whiskeys, but they're still kind of getting some traction. We're still trying to build up this brand a bit, like more people need to pay attention to this brand. But like, I wasn't sure like a barrel is a lot of cases, you know, and it's going to be a little more expensive. And it was always kind of a gamble. But when we tasted this, it was like, well, you know, this is obviously we want our name on this barrel. This thing is just awesome. Yeah. And so and he comes, you know, if you think about if you go back to Nova and those 18 barrels, you know, barrel types fundamentally that we have in the inventory that kind of craft that it sort of makes to me, the reason why I love the single barrel Yeah, totally. It has, okay, so it has this big punch of Caramel. It's not like a bourbon. It's definitely more like a malt. But punch of Caramel, dollop of vanilla, a lot of red fruit. And then if you ask me what kind of barrel this is, I would guess it's an Amador Zinn barrel, because it has this like chicory spice, this like gamey chicory summer sausage spice that comes across in these wines that I love, that I never tasted this in a whiskey. This is awesome. Oh man, this is incredibly complex and layered and huge. What's the proof? What's the bottle proof? 54.3. Is that cask or is that nice? Yeah. So this 108.6. And what we typically, when we're looking at single barrels, like the guys are going through the inventory selecting barrels for the next batch of Two Fold or Nova or... They'll set aside those that are like, still have all this complexity, but balance is key, right? Like, I just feel like we've all had our fair share of Fast and Furious whiskies that are completely, you know, over-oaked and just really, you know, dominate in the wrong ways. And what we wanted to do is have that balance. And what we find is those whiskies that have actually evaporated the same amount of water as they have alcohol. And therefore, around that 54 to 56 level is the sweet spot for our single barrel program. Do you offer single barrels from other Coopridge projects or other lineages? Mm-hmm, yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is the fun bit, right? Like, we're gonna burn through this first series, and then we'll catch up with Pat and Brett and you, and maybe, hopefully, we can do it in person, right? Don't make me your hype man. And we'll sit down and say, where should we take the wood policy story next, you know? And do we want to continue down this charred red wine barrel that think about a Cabernet or a different Coopridge? Do we want to go wet-filled American oak to sort of see, compare and contrast American oak barrels? We want to flip it and go to a French oak charred barrel. There's so many different potentials. I'm really curious to taste the fortified barrels that have been broken down in different sizes. I'd be really curious to taste what a 100 liter versus 50 liter versus 200 liter barrel that used to be all be the same barrel tasted like. I think that would be really interesting. Yeah, one of those tiny ones could get really wacky. Yeah, totally. Yeah, the smoked bacon, smoked bacon in the 50 liter barrels. There you go. Mr. Summer Sausage Whiskey over here might actually like it. Yeah. Sweet. Would you ever do a tiny vatting, like a two barrel batch, where you take some of that and then put it with some of the charred red wine barrel? I'm not a buyer and it shouldn't affect our cost. That's all I'm saying. We've done, in the past, we've done sort of like hybrid fortified and to our own version of a double wood, really. So we did the double wood and then we did the reverse double wood, which was the other way around. It's called single wood. No, it was basically a pair of first, then wine, and then we did one which was wine first, then a pair of. We've got a whole series of projects that we launch every year in that sort of vein, that are limited, rather than committing. Binny's having to commit to hundreds of bottles. We can kind of do the work for the American market and then say, hey, here's this wacky idea you're interested in. You know, not have to take all of them. Hmm, cool. I can't wait to taste more of these. These are great. I agree. This one's great. I can't wait to have this one in the store because this little sample bottle isn't going to do me. I'm going to have to get one of the full size ones. And to be fair, it's probably one that the founder might need to get a couple of cases of as well. You might know a guy. I think you actually have a particular marketing suit working for you who lives in Chicago who can possibly arrange a legal cross-state line shipments or something. Yeah, we'll figure it out. Pat, I learned something today. What did you learn? Okay, so I learned that people who are getting into whiskey and just want to taste the breadth of what the world has to offer should definitely try this Two Fold because it's an incredible bang for the buck. And I think that collectors who trust our handpicked program, even the slightest bit, need to get on our Binny's Handpicked Starward Bottling before it's gone. Yeah, totally. You whiskey nerds who listen to this podcast, thanks for listening, and you jump on this one. Hopefully, it's here. Seriously. Yeah. Hopefully, it is here. If it's not, if it's not, just email spirits at binnys.com and bug us about it, and we'll let you know when it is here. So, all right, well, this has been great. Dave, thank you so much for joining us today. Pleasure, Pat. Thanks, Greg. Yeah. Everybody, thanks for listening. Do us a favor. Leave us a review. Tell your mom about the show. We'll be back in your feed next week. Until then, I am Pat. I'm Greg. And I'm Dave. Keep Tasting.