All right. What else? Good? Good. Good? Let's do this. You good? Just making sure. Marketing man in the corner. There's always one of those in a podcast. Last time it was a sales podcast. Keyspring Solitaire. They both equally earn my ir. Raj, I think it's your turn to start it off. Can I do it? You get to introduce William H. Macy and Dave Matthews and then we'll explain that it's not that Dave Matthews. Say David. We can call him Dave. Yeah. You've tuned in to another episode of Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. Today, we have a very special guest with us, acclaimed actor William H. Macy is here with us to talk about his new whiskey and with him also the man who makes that possible, Mr. David Matthews. David. David Matthews. Yeah. So, in the studio today, we have- Studio. Well, we do what we can here at Binny's. Hey, I'm Pat from the Whiskey Hotline. I'm Greg, Communications at Binny's. All right, cool. Well, that wraps it up. Good work, Roger. That's enough for today, don't you think? So, we have David and can we call you Bill, Mr. Macy? Please do. All right. So, we're here to talk about the Woody Creek Distillery, which is in Basalt, Colorado, right outside of Aspen, near Woody Creek, Colorado. So, they are makers of fine potato spirits, grain spirits, all kinds of spirits. They might even have some hidden barrels of rum that some crazy Englishman has distilled and squirreled away somewhere. I've heard that. They're not selling. And somehow the barrels keep getting emptier and emptier as the years pass, not just through evaporation alone. But so, this is a very cool distillery. It's a large distillery. We've been supporting them for a couple of years now. We had the pleasure, a few of us visited a couple of months ago and bought some single barrels of spirit. So, can you give us a background first, Dave, on how long Woody Creek's been around and what's going on over there? Absolutely, yeah. Woody Creek's been operational for almost 10 years. In fact, we're mashing potatoes right now. That's the 10th season we've done it. I guess the project started about 12 years ago. And obviously, you can't just walk into a store and buy a distillery. It takes some setup. Yeah, we've been in production for 10 years, so we're starting to have the benefit of some well-aged whiskeys, which you guys just selected some of. Yeah. And you guys were known initially for the potato vodkas. That's still the driver in the local market? A lot of people are under the impression that all vodkas made from potato, and it's really, really not. I don't know the exact number, but I'm guessing less than 5 percent of vodka you see on the shelf is potato, probably lower than that. I mean, it's just Chopin and then that big factory distillery up in Idaho, right? Yep. In Rigby, Idaho, that makes most of the other potato vodkas. I love this. We're pouring vodka even as we speak. I love this job. We do have cool jobs. So the original sort of vision at Woody Creek was just to make potato vodka. That was where the project started. Pat and Mark, two of our founders, were potato vodka fans, Chopin, and they wanted to do it better. They're from Colorado and Colorado historically, particularly the Roaring Fork Valley where the distillery is located, grew a lot of potatoes. Back when you used to do this with a horse and cart kind of thing, it was a great place to grow potatoes, but we're in the mountains. Potatoes come from the mountains. Potatoes are from Peru, the Andes. What? Seriously? Yeah. They actually grow really, really well up there, but it's not suited to industrial agriculture. The fields are small. At a point, Colorado exported more potatoes than Idaho. Yeah. Yeah. Until about the 30s. The more you know. Yeah. I had no idea. So the original vision was to make the best potato vodka in the world, and I think we may have got pretty close. Yeah. It's a damn good vodka. Yeah. Can we ask Bill how you got involved with these guys and their crazy potato vodka? I live next door. I live next door to these guys in little Woody Creek, and they used one of our fields to grow some of the potatoes, and maybe two years ago, I came on board to be their spokes guy, and I'm just crazy about this whole company. The distillery in Basalt has got to be one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen in my life. These two great German stills that are two stories high and gleaming copper and stainless steel. And I just love the way it's made. It's at once the way they made, the way they distilled hundreds and hundreds of years ago. And at the same time, it's the most modern distillery that you could imagine. It is a really impressive distillery. They have this big German carl still. They have a huge column. I mean, you don't think of smaller brands having the capacity that you see at a distillery like this, like how wide is that stripping column that's in there? The stripping column is 80 centimeters, whatever that is, about a yard probably. Wow. Hey, we speak freedom units over here. What is this? Didn't mean to go all European and Communist on you there. Speaking of, you brought up the stills, so Woody Creek Potato Vodkas distilled one time. One time? One time. When you visited, you saw the tall copper columns. Yeah. Single distillation gets us up over 190. That's German efficiency right there. How many plates? Are there plates in this stuff? 42 plates. 42 plates. That explains it. Yeah. Single distillation. When the Germans were designing the still, they were concerned that the distillery is at 6,600 feet. So- A little higher than Chicago. 2,000 meters. The Germans had never installed a still at such altitude and were a little concerned about how the atmospheric pressure, the lack of atmospheric pressure would affect the distillation process. Right? Even cooking macaroni and cheese was different. I know. My cheesecake came out terrible the other night. Well, the boiling point is way down. The boiling point's swing, yeah. So at sea level, water boils at 212 stupid or 100 degrees centigrade. This guy's going to keep bashing free to me when it's all podcast. But the same thing happens with alcohol. And I'm sure some of our listeners need to Google how distillation works, but you're basically separating different liquids by their volatility. By the way, our listeners regularly hear the word amylase. I'll be sure to use it later. I'm looking it up. Similar to the boiling point of water, the boiling point of alcohol drops it as the higher you go up, as the atmospheric pressure decreases. And so at sea level, it boils at about 76 and I don't know what that is in Fahrenheit. At our altitude, it boils at about 72. So getting back to where I started, the Germans were concerned about the separation and how the altitude would affect it. So their solution was just to give us this massive column with 42 plates. Just to make it humongous. Just in case. Our solution happens to cost twice as much as we originally thought it would. That's where I was going. The solution is we're just going to charge you out the backside of a rat's ass on this. So this is the spirit that the Woody Creek Distillery was first known for, was this potato vodka. It was and we submitted this in 2013, I believe, off to San Francisco World Spirits Competition. And it took a double gold and best in class, best vodka. I make it a point to not compliment vodkas, at least unless I have to, but this is a really good vodka. Okay, I'm trying the vodka. You know, mostly vodka tastes like whatever you mix it with, but this has a taste. I love it. I love it with just a squeeze of lime in it. It is. It's round and plush for a vodka. It's not just this stream line of burn that you get from lesser vodkas. It's pillowy. Yeah, it's got some viscosity. There's some mouthfeel that you wouldn't get from a grain vodka. And you're not adding glycerol to it to get that. There's absolutely nothing. It's distilled once and it's unfiltered. There's no chill filtration. That's very deliberate. We want some of the characteristic of the base ingredient, the potato, to come through, and I think we've achieved that. You're going against the key meaning of vodka, because it shouldn't taste like anything. I think what makes this stand out is that it does taste like a little bit of something. Absolutely. We've always been proud of that and stood behind that. The TTB recently changed their regulations on vodka. Vodka is no longer supposed to be absolutely neutral. You can describe it as having some of the flavors. I make a little rye vodka from time to time. I'm going to use that for a new gin, but some of the characteristics of that come through too. I want to talk a little bit more about the potatoes, though. We actually grow the potatoes ourselves. We touched on the fact that the Roaring Fort Valley used to grow a lot of potatoes. It was famous for it, in fact. Why is that important? Well, it's important because we select the variety of the potato that's going to go into this vodka. We're not just using whatever potatoes are cheapest that day. We're not just using the ones that Pringles didn't want to use. Those aren't made from actual potatoes. We're actually using a specific variety. This vodka we're drinking is made from my Rio Grande, which is a Russet. It grows really well. The first season, we grew four different varieties and made four different vodkas. I was amazed at how easy it was to tell which one was which. The varietals actually came through and made very, very subtle. I mean, you're not going to taste it in a Bloody Mary, but drinking warm vodka out of the bottle, you could actually discern which one was which. That's Roger's favorite way to drink vodka. Straight out of the bottle. I don't even use a stroll. Life's too short for neutral spirits. But I will say, I think I like, I perceive a little bit of sweetness or floral character to this which nowadays, at least here in Chicago, everyone's really in the Tito's, and I've always said that I think part of the draw of that is that it almost has a little bit of sweetness to it. I think if you're into that, you'd enjoy this. This is like in the running for the longest we've ever talked about vodka on this podcast. Well, it put us on the map. It's a fabulous vodka. Yes, there is such a thing as craft to still vodka. Yeah. So, the vodka base serves as the base for your gin? Absolutely. You stole my segue, but let's go. Way to go, Roger. Everything that Woody Creek does comes from Colorado. It's all sourced out of the state, within the state. It's the finest ingredients for everything. I think that's worth really putting a finer point on and emphasizing that you're making the spirit for your gin with potatoes grown there. I think less people that don't necessarily know as much about the distilling process might not realize that a lot of gin makers are just buying. 90% of all other craft distilleries are buying just bulk pre-matrial spirit, distilled from corn on one of the largest columns on the continent in the middle of Kansas by some just big agri-company. Then they're just running it through a pot still and saying, we hand made this with a bunch of botanicals. But the fact that you're actually making the neutral spirit first from ingredients, you grew yourself and then aromatizing it is really something else. That's what got me hooked. I looked in the backyard, I see these potatoes growing, and then they gave me a bottle of vodka that was from our field, and it was eye-opening. That's so cool. I saw the potatoes, the distillery is about 14 miles away. The potatoes didn't have far to travel before they became vodka, and I think you can taste it. You really can. Macy, you're bogarting the gin. Oh, that's my bad. Give me two seconds. I just wanted to build on the points you were just making there about the fact that we make the neutral spirit that we use for the gin. When I was developing, working on the formulation for the gin, I made a bunch of different neutral spirits. Potatoes are expensive. We have a finite amount of them. It's an expensive way to make vodka. So I thought to myself, let's try making a corn vodka. Let's try making a rye vodka. I even made a vodka from malted barley which is a stupid expensive way to make vodka. It's a very expensive way to make a really bad vodka, it turned out. I really didn't like it. Then I took those five different neutral spirits and all these different botanical formulations and had spreadsheets and was messing around forever. We decided to go with the potato as the base for this gin because I strongly feel it brings something to it that you didn't get with a corn base. It's a little higher proof, so our vodka is 80 proof as everyone's is. The gin is at 94. Good cocktail proof. That was part of the thinking on that. The viscosity curve of ethanol and water, alcohol and water peaks are around there as well. Love a good viscosity curve. Yeah, totally, right? Sexy. It brings some extra mouth feel to it. When you make a martini with this and you chill it down, the viscosity becomes even more evident. Yeah, it amplifies a bit. Yeah. When you're crafting a gin and you're trying to come up with the botanical list, I would imagine that that might be a little daunting. A lot of people obviously associate gin with juniper, but there's so many different options. Well, it has to have juniper, right? It has to have juniper. That's the legal definition is it should be juniper forward. In this gin, we dial the juniper back. It's still forward. It's still the predominant flavor, but there's a lot of citrus in here. Your gin smells like Sprite. Thank you. It's so like lemon. Yeah. It's like a razor. It's awesome. So early on, I went to lemongrass. I use a lot of fresh citrus peels, but some of the really bright notes don't ferment over, but you do get them from lemongrass. Then I went a little further and sourced some fresh lemongrass, which is bizarrely grown in Colorado. You can source green lemongrass, fresh lemongrass from about- Colorado. The agricultural diversity from the state. I'm going to name check them. It's Osage Gardens. They're down in Rifle. They're great people. Shout out. That brings some of what you're picking up on, the particularly light notes. You can't actually come to distill over from lemon or lime or orange peels. Those are all in there, but the lemongrass brings that really particularly light flavor over. It's so vibrant. Dave's got the best job in the world. When you walk into the distillery, there are only about six people that run the whole thing, and Dave sits at a little desk just drinking all day and jotting down notes. My wife thinks I'm at work. He's got a spit bucket, but I've never seen him use it. That's dry. What struck me most about Dave at this distillery is that somehow the accountants in charge, let him do whatever the hell he wants. Yeah. He's just like, yeah, I'll make rum. I'll make a malted barley vodka. At no point did somebody be like, actually price per pound here is, you should not do that. He just gets to do whatever the hell he wants. Bill's right. My job doesn't suck too much. No. Bill, are they growing any of the botanicals on your land? No. The field's a little tired and they're letting it rest for a while. It's been an amazing experience. I've always been attracted to distilling and the history of it, and you walk into that distillery and it takes your breath away. So beautiful. When you were attracted to this, would you say that you were a vodka and gin drinker or were you like, so when are you guys going to make a whiskey? Well, my favorite is the whiskey, the rye whiskey. It is, oh my goodness, it's heavenly. It's my favorite and I was a bourbon drinker before that. Now I mostly drink the Woody Creek rye. It's magnificent. It's a bit sweet and smooth and I just love it. Let's taste that one next. I'm bogarting the rye. You can tell it's a rye because the label is green. That's how you know it's a rye. That's literally what our marketing people said. It's like, it's a green label. It's going to be a green label. It's got to be. It has to be. Dave, what proof is this at? I would imagine that was a big decision, right? Yeah, absolutely, yeah. The proof that you bottle at is really significant to how you're going to experience any spirit. I'm always a little disappointed that everyone insists on vodka being at 40, 80 proof. And ours is. You think it should be higher? I would take it up to probably 47. And that's a federal rule? No, no, no, it's just- The federal rule is it's got to be at least 40. Yeah, so it's the minimum. Yeah. A lot of vodka drinkers obviously aren't vodka tasters. They're just like you mentioned earlier, you're in it for the mixing agent, not the actual spirit. So it's just whatever goes down smoothest. I mean, yeah, that was what Bond was using in his Vesper martinis. Maybe you need to do a special edition. James Bond? James Bond. Bond, James Bond. We've got to do it. All right. So about this rye, sorry. Oh, rye. Cheers, Bill. Cheers. Lord, that's good. Yeah. This is really nice. So good. So the rye in this bottle is about four and a half years on average. We blend a little bit obviously. It's similar to the potato. We use a specific varietal for this. So this is 100% elbon rye. There's no other grain in it. So it's a really pure rye expression. Rye has a reputation, I think, for being a little bit astringent sometimes. I'm gonna let you guys tell me what you think about it. I'll take my earphones off and not listen. It's a little bit citric and a little bit butterscotch and a little bit of pepper. And it's lovely and sweet and really easy to drink. Yes. Yeah. I think most people, when they think of especially high rye content mashbills, they think of something very lean and punchy. We use the word spicy a lot. Yeah. And it's a little bit of that here, but it's not. But it's more of the voluptuous side. But it's gorgeously balanced. I mean, it's got that sweet doughy character to it. I've got to learn some of these terms. I was going to say it has a humorous bouquet, but I don't know what that means. It's got a sense of humor. Well, we can't say everything's good. Yeah. Well, it's good. It's pretty good. On your rating scale of meh, good minus good, good plus, good plus plus, very good minus. I have a slightly complex rating scale when I'm tasting things. We need to roll out a blackboard and get some graph paper. No, this gets a very good plus to a very, very good. Wow. Oh, we'll take it. This one. It's a high rating. You're on the same page as the judges at San Fran because this one also took a double gold. Yeah. This is a fantastic ride. And this is Bottle, they're what proof? We're at 90 proof. 90 proof. Dave mentioned that some of the barrels are now what? Six, eight years old, something like that. Wow. When you go into the warehouses, they've got a couple of warehouses, but that is so cool, the smell as soon as you walk into the warehouse. Oh, yeah. And I went in the other day, I guess somebody was checking it with the whiskey thief, which is my favorite term ever. And we were tasting the barrels with the whiskey thief. It's a different experience tasting barrels in a rick house like that. It's just a complete sensory overload at times. And for a woodworker, the barrels themselves, they're just so romantic. I love it. And it's all American oak, right? Yep. From the taste of things, it seems like you're using full size barrels. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 200 liters. I think that's a, well, here's that. Is that full size? I have no idea. 225 gallons. How many gallons? You couldn't lift it. Right, there are 53 gallons, sorry. But for drinkers that are used to some of the artisan nano smaller craft distilleries, there was a trend for a while, at least, to use the smaller Coopridge, which I wasn't a fan. Very early on, I did use some small barrels. My opinion is you can make a decent whiskey in a smaller barrel, but it's not the same as a full-size barrel. You're not achieving the same product. It's perfectly drinkable. It's a different product, and people should be clear about it. Just be transparent. We aged it for a year in a 10-gallon barrel. I'll probably drink it, but don't tell me that you accelerated the aging and just miraculously made. But you're also keistering 100-proof vodka home from the distillery. I mean, I always laughed with this movement to use the smaller barrels, since barrels have been around for how many years? If you could make the spirit in a good way with a smaller barrel, I think they would have done it by now. They would have done it, right? And it's expensive. Small barrels are expensive. A full-size barrel is 20 bucks more than a 10-gallon. Because as Bill would appreciate, it's the labor that goes into making the barrel is the expensive part, not the wood. I was going to ask Bill about that. So you mentioned woodworking and seeing that craftsmanship in a barrel. Is that a big hobby of yours? Not making barrels, but yeah, I've got a great shop in Colorado and I like to do woodworking. I'm the worst carpenter I've ever met, but I am loving it. I build stuff all the time. Very cool. Are you making anything out of the used barrels? No, haven't done that yet. I've got some though. It's really nice oak. It's great in a smoker. Oh, yeah. We break them down sometimes afterwards and use them to smoke duck. It's fantastic. Speaking of, and spoiler alert, you make a bourbon too. Bourbon requires new oak. Is some of the bourbon oak going into the rye? The rye goes in new oak as well. All new oak? All straight whiskies have to go into a new barrel. You have a lot of leftover wood that needs to get made into smaller toothpicks or something. Planters. Yeah. There's a big market for them. Yeah, totally. Sell the breweries. Brewers hit me up all the time. I recycle them a little bit first. I'm single malt, which we haven't released yet, and I make a little bit of rum. It keeps hitting at this rum. It was awesome. Did we buy any single malt when we were out there? You tasted some. It wasn't one of your selections. Okay. But we have a couple of barrels of rye on the way. Yes. Rye, a high rye, the- Weeded bourbon. The weeded bourbon. The weeded bourbon, which is fantastic. So good. Listeners, we brought in a big chunk of six-year-old weeded bourbon from these guys last holiday season, and there's still some floating around. It's not in every store, but there's probably 20 stores or so that have a few bottles left. Do yourself a favor and go find that whiskey, because it beats the pants off of any other weeded bourbon at the same price. Thank you. Dave has a great job. You're talking about the small barrels. He gets to make anything he wants, so there's a whole room filled with these little barrels, and they say, what's in that? He gets very coy about it. I'm working on some stuff with some walnuts right now. Walnuts. Green walnuts. Hey, we're big Amaro fans here. Did you know we're Amaro fans? We just tried a walnut liqueur that was dynamite. Italian or French? Austrian. Austrian. You want to try it? Have you got it? We happened to be recording next to the Whiskey Hotline Sample Library, and I know exactly where it is. You got to check out this room. Yeah. It's ridiculous. Really? Yeah. They don't throw anything away, and they don't know how to clean up after themselves. So they've amassed every sample bottle of everything. I think I cleaned up pretty nice today. You look great. You look great. Thank you. It's like that scene in the end Indiana Jones. Yeah, of whiskey and other crazy liqueurs. Also possibly some occult artifact. So Bill, you were saying that this, the rye is your favorite expression. How do you typically drink it? By the gallon. Rocks. Just rocks. We invented a cocktail at my house. It's called A Life Without Fear with a Twist, and I won't go into it, but you can make it with rye. Can you go into it and we can put it on the blog? There you go. Okay. It's a dollop of maple syrup, rye whiskey, half a lemon, more than you would think you want, and ice and then top it off with club soda. It's a very interesting twist on a whiskey sour. I dig that. I'm a big fan of maple syrup. Oh, me too. It's my favorite. It's also kind of similar to a gold rush. You're the gold rush man. You're subbing in the maple for the honey. Yeah. There's nothing new. You just come up with a new name. I thought A Life Without Fear with a Twist is a good name. Don't give away the secret. Yeah. Bill, have you seen that The Watkins Company came out with cocktail bitters? Stop. He just released them. He's referring to a film I did about a door-to-door salesman who worked for The Watkins Company. I was trying to find some. If I could order them, if only there was a salesman that could sell them to me. I stumbled upon them online. I think it's all online now. Yeah. There's an old-fashioned and there's an orange. So I'm going to order some. I'm going to play around with them. You should make them in a life without fear with a twist. Yeah. You might have a signature cocktail. You need to come up with those. There you go. Roger diving into esoteric references. Hey, what else do we need to mention about this rye, Dave? 100% rye. You said it was Elbon rye? Elbon rye is the variety I did. That's grown in Colorado? It's all grown in Colorado. We don't grow grains ourselves. We thought about it and then realized we were making our lives hard enough as it was. How long are they in the barrel before you sell them? These are the rye and the bourbon that we're going to drink today are both four and a half ish. It's four year minimum per the straight. Okay. Then dumb question. We know that whiskey ages differently in Kentucky than it does in Scotland. How does it age in the mountains? That's a fascinating question. If anyone's listening who can tell me. Does anybody in the room have any experience with aging whiskey? I mean, you lose a lot more to evaporation. We lose a lot more. So, similar to what we were talking about before with the altitude. There's two key factors in Colorado where we are. It's incredibly arid. The ambient humidity is typically under 10 percent. So, yeah. So, angel share is a problem right there, just compared to Kentucky or Scotland. I love that, angel share. It's a romantic way to write off a loss on the accounting sheet. Yeah. It's not just me drinking it. There is evaporation out of the barrels. They're thieving angels. Let's be clear about that. The altitude has some effect and I've never been able to find any research on it, but there's definitely barrels age differently and we definitely accelerate our loss, our angel share. Because the atmospheric pressure outside the barrel is lower, the partial pressure, our proof shoots up, particularly after about year five. I think some of the barrels we selected, you guys selected, are at 130 plus, right? Yeah, they were ripping and roaring. They went in the barrel at like 120, under 125 obviously, but I like 120. I was just going to ask what your entry proof is, is it one? I varied a little bit. I like 120 to 125. I know there's a lot of people out there who argue for 110. I like a little higher. I go 110 on single malts and run. When are we going to get to taste this rum? Have you not tasted it? I haven't tasted it yet. You got to come hang out sometime. You're using his land to grow potatoes and you won't even give him some rum? I don't share it with anyone. Wait, you haven't tasted it either? I don't feel so bad now. I wish you'd stop teasing it. There isn't any in the rum. It's not for sale yet. It doesn't exist. There's no rum. No, it's like Dave's personal stash in their little barrel room at the distillery. I like rum, but I had a mental issue with making rum in the mountains. It doesn't seem right. Rum should be made somewhere with a palm tree. Yes, typically. You should be able to see the ocean if you're making rum. No, that's where you should drink it. This you said was around four and a half years? Yes. Are you letting some age longer then? We have and we're now getting to the great position of being able to blend some of that in. We also use some of the older stuff for single barrels. Yes, the age is, we've always out produced our sales guy. How many barrels? He's sitting over there. He's not on the podcast. Note how he's not selling anything currently. How many barrels? Which is a great thing because it means that we've been able to get age established onto our spirits. We're not going to run out anytime soon. How many barrels do you have in the warehouses? There are three or four warehouses. We're at about 5,000. Whoa. Whoa. A lot of rye. No rum. A lot of rye, a lot of bourbon. That's a bigger distillery than I thought we were talking about. It's a big distillery. I mean, this is a huge column, two columns and pots. It's a big distillery and it's a modern distillery. It's an efficient operation. Didn't you say we could double or triple the output if we started running it at full tilt? If I work 24-7, yeah. Yeah, you gotta get the night crew. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's coming. All right. Hey, let's try the bourbon, huh? Yeah, for sure. You picked single cast of this, right? Yep. Are we getting them at Barrel Proof or? Yeah, of course. Yeah, no added water. By the way, the water in Colorado is a big factor in this. We have great water. That's interesting, too. You're closer to the source, right? Yeah. Yeah, Rocky Mountain Spring water. That's like what? Like granite stone? We have a lot of granite and some basalt. The town is called basalt because there's a mountain right there that's an old volcano. I wasn't paying attention during that part. Colorado is not good at naming their towns. Basalt, silt. Yeah. Rifle. Rifle. Say rifles. Yeah. Well, cheers, guys. Cheers. This is the bourbon. This is same proof, so 45 again, 90 proof and similar age profile. Well, that's good. You can drink this. I do. Mashbills, corn, obviously 70% corn, 15% rye, the same elbon because I'm lazy, and 15% malted barley. All Colorado sauce. That's a good chunk of malted barley. Are you adding any enzymes to the bourbon? Obviously, you have to with the rye. Here it comes. Yeah, here we go. Hit amylase. I do use enzymes. The only thing I make that I don't use extraneous enzymes in is single malt. Okay. Yeah. And rum, which I don't make. We should bleep the word rum every single time. This bourbon is terrific. And it seems like it even has more of a spicy or maybe even like a tannic backbone. Like it's, it has more spine than the rye does. And that's kind of surprising to me. Yeah. I like that. There's a little bite to it. Yeah. Obviously we don't have any, but it's interesting to taste this alongside the weeded, because it's then you're just literally swapping out the wheat, the rye and the wheat are trading out. Yeah. And it's very educational for people. I do a lot in the tasting room to just give people too and be like, that's what a weeded bourbon tastes like, and that's what a more standard idea. We like the weeded bourbon. Now, something we tend to promote with weeded bourbon is that wheat doesn't particularly have much flavor and it really just kind of gets out of the way of the corn, and adds a little bit of mouthfeel. Do you agree with that? Yeah, absolutely. I get a ton of clove on here too, which I love. Which comes from the rye, I think, but it's weird how it's more pronounced here than it is in the 100 percent rye. Because it's on this bed of softness, right? Or like butterscotch again, but some kind of caramel kind of candy. It's a really elegant bourbon, it really is. I don't need another favorite bourbon, so f**k this. How much is the bourbon in the rye? What, you wanted me to do research? $39.99 for the bourbon, and $44.99 for the rye. Oh, so it's affordable and delicious. Yes. I'm sounding like an advertisement, I kind of wanted to come harder. Keep going, keep going. Well, you make vodkas, so who cares? I think that's really hip, that it's affordable. I mean, sometimes I look at the price of some of these things, I think, oh, come on, you saw me coming, didn't you? Easy mark. Yes. I wanted to touch on proof a little bit. 45 is as low as I go with a brown spirit, and that's for a bunch of reasons, not just that I like more alcohol than water in my glass. We don't chill filter or anything, so going below 90 proof is really difficult to keep the spirit clear unless you chill filter. Chill filtration, in my personal opinion, takes all the backbone out of a spirit. Science backs you up with that. Yeah, absolutely. That's like our hard floor for a brown spirit, and some of them are a little higher, the Wheaties Bourbons at 94. I would like to release some 100 proof stuff. In fact, I think the Alatha that we're shipping you, we did it bottled in bond, so it's going to be 100 proof. Yeah, we did. One of the barrels we picked, we wanted bonded. Yeah. That's something that we try to drive home, especially at least me. I beat this drum to death, but it always annoys me when people think that if you know whiskey, you don't put ice in it. I'm always trying to say, if it's higher proof, you absolutely can put ice in it. A, you should be able to drink it however you want, but I understand if you put ice in an 80 proof bourbon, it's going to taste a little washed out, but you put it in bottle to monitor cast strength, it can be great. Even 90 proof. Yeah, absolutely. The thing where I go with that chain of thought is, you can't take the water out. If I sell you the bottle at 80, you can't try it higher, but if I sell it to you at cask or 100, yeah, put some soda in there, not coke, but some soda water or clean water, whatever you like it or an ice cube and let it slowly melt into it. As a former bartender, ice is a huge ingredient in any drink, and it's important what ice you put in and how much. Yeah, absolutely. Any drink like that, part of the recipe is not just calling for ice, what it's really calling for is dilution. And you use the ice in that way, it's a tool used for dilution. Yeah, absolutely. And it's important to appreciate the way that a whiskey changes. As you alter the proof, you're going to experience different flavors. There's a whole bunch of essential oils that are soluble in the alcohol component. So as you reduce the alcohol, they come out a solution and are more available to your palate. So yeah, people need to do that. They need to experiment with it. You can try this at home, but only if you start with a high proof. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And when, to your point, the kind of ice really matters. And we, a lot of us are guilty of that. You go up to your fridge and use that banana ice that's white. It's full of air, it's white, it's white and it's gonna melt super fast. And it's totally gonna change your drink versus if you use a nice fake. And if you don't have a filter, it might have chlorine in it and all kinds of stuff. You guys, we did this ice episode where we compared a bunch of ice's. It was ridiculous. He brought his laser thermometer. It didn't even, I don't know. Anyway, we found that the solid store bought, but not fancy ice was the right balance. Yes. It's gotta be cold too, really cold. I was getting, well, if it's half melted, you're gonna ruin your drink. I was in Great Britain one time and I went into this scotch store and the guy was a fan and we were tasting all these scotches and I found one that I really loved and I said, do you have any ice? And he looked at me like I had just on the counter. And we stared at each other for a second and I said, I think you're full of, I think you've got ice back there. He said, yeah, I like it with ice too. Hey, Jim, you're going to have to bleep William H. Macy. What kind of barrels were these two whiskeys aged in as far as char or toast? So New American White Oak, obviously, it's a straight whisky, has to be charred. I like number three char. We get our barrels from independent stave company mostly, like 95 plus percent of our barrels come from those guys. They do a barrel that's number three char in the staves, and then the heads are toasted. That's the super select barrel, or whatever they call it. You have met these guys. Yeah, absolutely. That's what we use. Yeah. That's a great barrel. Yep. How do they char it, by the way? You can probably see on YouTube or something like, put it over an open gas flame. Yeah. It's like a propane jet flame, and they pull it over, and then once the barrel physically catches on fire is when it's considered charred. If it just sits on the flame and slowly and never actually ignites, then it's just toasted. That will go deeper into the wood? Yeah. The longer you toast, you're breaking down more lignin in the wood itself. Yeah. Cellulose and hemicellulose are breaking down into sugars, which are then extracted, and this is where most of the sweetness comes from in these. That's right. We said lignin again, everybody. Lignin. So that's a bingo for this episode. Amylase. That's bingo. Yeah. Bill, have you had any of your colleagues and friends from your acting past come by the distillery at all, visit or ask you about the brand? No, but when I'm in LA, I give a lot of this away and I get one of two calls. Can I have some more or where can I buy this? I like the second call better. Yeah, me too. They love it. I give it to all my actor friends and I get good reviews. It's great whiskey. Can I have some more rye? It's right in front of you. Well, I was just saying that for the sake of the microphone. What else do we need to talk about with Woody Creek? What's next for Woody Creek? We're going to the moon. Going to the moon? We're going to talk about that? So I'm getting hand signals. So what's next for Woody Creek? We have another bourbon coming out, 70% corn, 30% rye, no malt. I really like it. It's something I threw together about six years ago. So potatoes, and I probably already mentioned this, but when we're making potato vodka, we're using fresh potatoes. So when the harvest comes in, we stop making whiskey and just make potato vodka. That's an important distinction. Most potato vodka is made from dehydrated flakes of chopped up potato. No idea. Yeah. So they're actually bringing whole potatoes in and they have this whole processing rig that chops them up and mashes them up in order to ferment them. So, as the guy that grows the potatoes, he starts calling me and saying, two weeks, one week, they're coming on Monday. I'm looking at my ingredients. I got left lying around and I had corn and rye and no barley and I was like, I'm just going to mash it. What the hell? Let's just see what happens. Is the accounting department like in a different building? It's actually my wife. Even crazier than it gets away with it. That's all I get away with. But honestly, honey, if you're listening, that's all I get away with. Anyway, 70-30 coming soon, we'll be a little limited like the we did. We don't have a huge amount of it. There's probably a couple of hundred barrels. I like it. It's a nice balanced bourbon. But it's interesting when you take the malt out of it, you don't get those bread notes. I wish I'd brought some. There's some somewhere. I think we tasted it when we were out there. This is slightly older too, right? Yeah. This is Pat's favorite, Pat Scanlon who owns the place. Yeah. He's a big fan of the high-ride bourbon, the 70-30. What's that? Okay. We bought a barrel of it. Nice. Hey, here's a plug. Did we buy so many barrels? I can't keep track of them all. Yeah. Last thing I want to throw out there is I'm working on another gin. I think I mentioned earlier, I've been making some Rye Vodka to use as the base for it. It's going to be saffron, so it'll have the color. Sounds cheap. Yeah. Saffron, gin? Saffron, gin. I've done some preliminary batches with this, and if you put just a little bit of saffron in which is really expensive, it looks like a urine sample. Yeah. I think you're understating it. It's one of the most expensive commodities in the world. So once again, spare no expense. So yeah, so I didn't tell my wife how much it cost, and it's going to be a more reddish hue. And the flavor comes through too. It extracts really well in alcohol. Where in the process do you add it? Do you steep it afterwards? Afterwards. So this is not a, you can't call this a distilled gin. It'll be a compounded gin. We don't, I mean, we don't know. It's too volatile. It would be lost. They'd be wasting it if they tried to distill it too. You know, I haven't actually tried distilling it. I don't think the flavor would come over. It's more of a water soluble flavor than an alcohol soluble flavor, but I want the color. So it's going to be an amber. You can do whatever you want here. You don't have to worry about the British. The compound versus distilled gin. Yeah. Gin's gin here. We won. Don't forget that. I will, yeah. Binny's select saffron gin is coming. It's about the color of your beard. Gross. Is it how everyone's going to want it? No, you're never going to drink it. So wait, is it like a Fabergé egg? With unicorns and diamonds, right? When you buy a really big quantity of saffron, these are like a kilo. How do you buy a saffron? I'm about to find out. I've been buying it 50 grams at a time, which to your point is you have to sign for it when FedEx turn up. Do you have a saffron guy? I'm developing a couple of saffron guys. Hey, sales guy, how expensive is this going to be? It's so expensive, people bother to counterfeit it. Yeah, totally. In reality, I obviously have costing constraints. I've negotiated that I can spend four bucks per bottle on the saffron, which gets me to where I want it to be. Originally, it was a price that only dogs get here. Bill, I know we're here to talk whiskey, but I feel like it would be doing an injustice to our listeners that are cinephiles to not just ask you, what's next for you. I did a little limited, after Shameless finished last year, I did a limited series. It's called The Dropout. It's a lovely six-part thing about the Elizabeth Holmes story. That'll come out next year sometime. Other than that, don't know. There's a bunch of projects, but nothing that I've signed up on. I think I might be retired. Really? I'll let you know. How about film-wise? I feel like you've been spending so much time. Do you miss film? Well, the best stuff's on television, man. They're just doing great stuff, but I'm wide open. I want to work with Woody Creek more than anything for a while. Hell yeah. But we'll see. I can still remain upright and learn the lines, so there'll be some work for me. If somebody's sitting down with a glass of your rye and they want to enjoy something from your career, what would you recommend? There may be somebody that only knows you as Frank. What would you want them to watch? State in Maine. State in Maine by David Mamet. It's so, it's pee your pants funny. It's really a good film. It's about showbiz, and I have all the best lines. I'd like to recommend, maybe you wouldn't want to since, you know, it's kind of like recommend your own movie, but I was particularly impressed with your directorial debut, Rudderless. Oh, man, thank you. I think that was a phenomenal movie. You just made my day. I was proud of that. That's a good film, and great music, don't you think? Yes. I love the music. Great music. I can't say enough, like how moving and amazing that film is. Everybody should watch it. It's got a reveal that's pretty stunning. The turn is very, very touching and amazing. Well, thank you for saying that. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers. Is that the show? I think so. All right. We talked whiskey, we talked gin, we talked vodka, we kind of teased some upcoming casks, teased what's next. There is no rum. There is no rum. No potatoes growing in Bill's backyard this year. Not this year. All right. Well, hey everybody, thanks for tuning in to this episode of Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. We'll be back in your feed next week with something. So thanks for tuning in. If you like this, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Tell your neighbors about our podcast. Tell your mom hi. Until next time, I'm Greg. I'm Roger. I'm Pat. I'm David Matthews. I'm Bill Macy. Keep tasting. What time is it? Is it lunch yet? I'm getting toasted here