Hey, welcome back to another episode of Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. I'm Pat, the Specialty Spirits guy, in the room with me today. Hi, I'm Chris. I'm the master of puppets. I'm Jenna, I do communications. Hey, we got a special guest today too, Rob Dietrich, master distiller for Blackened Whiskey. welcome, Rob. Thank you. Thanks for having me. So you've been master distiller there since what, like 2019? 2019, May 1. Blackened for listeners, if you're not familiar, is a whiskey project involving Metallica, sonically enhanced whiskey or whatever you guys are calling it now. We'll get to that, I'm sure. Rob, you want to give us a little background on your history as a distiller, where you were before you were making whiskey with the world's most notable rock band? Yeah. I was very fortunate to have Jess Graber, the legendary distiller, the creator of Stranahan's Colorado Whiskey and Tin Cup Whiskey. He was the founder, he was also my mentor. I started working at Stranahan's in 2006 on the bottling line. We had an awesome volunteer bottling line where we'd bring in all our friends, have everybody hand apply all the labels, put everything together. At the end, we had this big stainless steel bucket that you just ladle whiskey out into your glass. Those were the early days and then- I'm sure there were no labeling errors after that. I know exactly. Everything is on upside down. We learned to bring the bucket out afterwards. But I started there and then I talked Jess into creating a third shift and I was working, from- I did the 1 AM to 9 AM shift for about four years straight distilling. That's a tough four years. It was brutal. I was living on a horse ranch at the time, so I was mucking stalls during the day and making whiskey at night. Mucking stalls is slang for cleaning poop? Yes. Yes, it is. Okay, Hercules. The nice version. Yeah, and then I was there almost 13 years. I was there just a little over 12, 12 years at Strainy Hands, got to help really build the Snowflake Edition, our limited cast finished edition we did there. Really just had some fun learning under Jess. We were out here, Binny's visiting almost every year, doing bottle signings and- Jess complaining about his table at World of Whiskey every single year. Yes, he does. Without fail, the first person to complain, not the only person because everybody complaints, but Jess always complaints. Yeah, you can guarantee that. Yeah, so I was there and then of course, I was friends with Dave and we're a small community of distillers. We all know each other. Three months after Blackened Whiskey was launched, Dave passed away at Whiskey Fest in San Francisco. I was there at the event. It was a very sad day for all of us. We held a moment of silence for him and I happened to be in front of a Mezcal booth at the time. I had a Mezcal in my hand when we did a moment of silence and a shot, which I thought was kind of, he loved Mezcal. He would have appreciated that. Yeah, he appreciated it. Then shortly after that, I actually have a friend who's mutual friends with James Hetfield, the lead singer and also I knew the sales director for Blackened and I ran into them at Whiskey Fest in New York and offered my condolences about Dave and he said, Hey man, we really need a master's degree. He goes, I think you'd be perfect for this. You've got your rock and roll background. You've got a nice set of lamb chops on you too. It keeps the cheeks warm for sure. Yeah. I would go mutton on those. They're big enough to go all. Yeah, they're definitely mutton for sure. But yeah, so I created, learn my whiskey skills, I think, making the snowflake, creating that single malt whiskey, doing different task finishes and blending those finishes together, really set me up to be able to work with Blackened and create some Yeah, it's really cool, man. And you saw, you were at Stranahan's through a wild period of growth too. Oh yeah. I mean, so they had been around before you got there, but they were still like just tiny, tiny, tiny little brand. I doubt they were even close to national distribution at the time. And then what they are today is just ridiculous. Yeah, it's not even the same. We were right next door to the Flying Dog Brewery who was brewing our wash for us, pumping it up and over the building and down into our distillery, which I'm not sure how legal that was. It was a really good time. It was really raw. We were all making whiskey outlaw style. And we were pretty small. That was 2405 Blake Street, which no longer exists. They knocked the building down after we moved out. The apartment complex is now unfortunately, but we moved over to the current location in 2009. Lock, stock and barrel, stills, everything. We moved over to where Strain of Hands is located now and just started expanding from there. 2010, Proximo Spirits bought them. We were able to get a good influx of financials to be able to hit our 10-year business model in a very short period of time. We got to buy more stills, more fermenters, buy the property next door. Because you're always running out of space for barrels. We call it still house chess. You're moving these barrels to get to these barrels, to these barrels. It was nice to be able to have that rapid pace growth. Yeah, that's cool. We've seen similar rapid pace growth, I feel with Blackened where we were the first ones to try to get after it in Illinois. I remember Brett calling up Dave and bitching at Dave like, how could you sell this in Wisconsin and not sell to us? Dave's like, they got to show up there. I'll get you guys covered. You'll get it. Next batch, next batch. Next batch turned into next batch a few times with Dave before we finally got it. Then it just really blew up for us. It's national now, right? We are in all 50 states. We are in Canada and Australia, and we're looking at the rest of the international- Just big Metallica markets. Yeah. Minus Russia, of course. Right. Yeah. Take us through Blackened then. For people that might not be familiar, it's a blend of whiskies with a certain cask finish. Correct. Yes. This is a blend of bourbon and rye. We've got some fantastic whiskies that all stand independently on their own, but just like any great blend, when you blend these good whiskies together, you can get a phenomenal whiskey from it. What Dave set out to do and what my job as the steward of the whiskey is to really uphold and continue to maintain the quality and consistency of the blend. So it is a blend of bourbon and rye and we do a brandy cask finish. While we are doing that brandy cask finish, this is when we apply our Black Noise Sonic Enhancement process to it. I can get into detail with that later. So let's pour this as we talk about it. Yeah, you can't talk about whiskey unless we got whiskey in this. Correct. It's Friday. I always need a drink to hang out with Pat anyway. There's a certain level of abrasiveness. I consider it the Barrel to Bottle Black Noise effect. Sing us your Irish version of Whiskey in a Jar. I don't need to sing. I was at my oldest kids' band concert last night and my youngest kids' first grade Christmas sing-along this morning, and both of them had sing-along things for the audience at the end. I made a very conscious decision not to ruin that time for every other family there. That was good of you. I just kept my mouth shut. Looks like everybody's sufficiently whisked up here. My first question, and I've had this question on this for a while, the label says it's aged in black brandy casks. What the hell is that? That was a Dave-ism. Okay, that sounds like a Dave-ism. That was a Pickerell-ism. Originally, it was Spanish brandy, and that was the term that he coined for black brandy. Black brandy was Spanish brandy, especially with COVID, trying to get a hold of the same casks that we had before. I've had to look at different suppliers for the brandy casks, and maintain that quality at the same time. We stopped calling it black brandy, but that was originally coined by Dave. Okay. The warehousing and everything's in California, right? The production facility? The production facility. No, that's in Columbus, Ohio. Columbus, Ohio? I was just there this morning. Okay. I didn't know that. Where are you getting brandy casks from now? Do you get a lot from like O'Neill or something out in California? We get them out of California. Yeah. Because it's a ton of casks. I mean, if you're in every state and international. No, it's a real, it's a fun problem, but it's still, you've got to come up with these on a consistent basis. How many times do you use a brandy cask? I mean, I assume it kind of varies by some will have more to give than others. Yeah, I use them a minimum three times. Okay. And so like second use or third use, I'll leave them in there longer. Yeah. Trying to pull as much flavor out of there. So, you know, when I get a when I get a fresh, fresh fill, first use, that might be only a couple of weeks cask finishing. Pretty standard for any cask finish. Just like anybody. Yeah, exactly. You look at an Angel's Envy or anything else like that, similar process. Yeah, yeah. Because, I mean, you're going to you're going to pull most of that flavor out of there after. I know some places will use them all the way up to five times. Oh, yeah. Like I've been out to Bushmills and I think they use their casks, you know, they'll use them up to five. They'll use them until they fall apart. Yes. Yeah, that's why they have a cooperage there. Jenna, what do you think of this whiskey? It's pretty nice. I really like the finish. There's like a nice vanilla, like almost those little marshmallows that are in hot chocolate. We were just talking about those the other day. Dehydrated. Dehydrated. Dehydrated marshmallow. This tastes of dehydrated artifice. I really like this. It's good. I like how the brandy kind of sneaks through in the back, but it doesn't dominate the whiskey. I think, you know, it's something we talk a lot about with cast finish whiskeys is they tend, so many of them tend to be over finishing cask and then the whiskey secondarily. The good ones are a whiskey through and through just with some added enhancement of the finishing cask. And that's always my goal is I want to approach it like a three act play when you're creating a blend. You want to draw your palate in, kind of bring it up to that point and nice long finish there and just layer everything in between. I think you can over finish a whiskey fairly easily and then you it's like to me, it's like putting hot sauce all over a burrito. All you can taste is the hot sauce. So I want to layer those flavors in there. I want to be able to taste every single thing. Does the percentage of rye and bourbon you use on any given batch very much? No, I keep the percentages the same. We might as far as getting our whiskey, we may not always have the same source for the whiskey. So I was trying to maintain the quality in whatever whiskey that we are blending in there. Okay. So the match bills might be different on the bourbons? No, I try and maintain that too. I mean, we keep it as closely as possible. And a lot of times, that's just doing it through blending through flavor, being able to taste it and maintain. Because I always take the last whiskey that we released and use that as the control for blending the next blend. That makes sense. So that way, I've always got to control that leapfrogging off the last whiskey that we released. All right. I'm going to open the can of Black Noise Worms here. Yes, let's do it. Can you walk us through that? And there's some high-end audiophile speaker company involved in this or something? Yeah. Meyer Sound, which is world-renowned. They've worked with everyone from Skywalker Ranch to every band on the planet. They create that wall of sound for Metallica. So those speakers are proprietary speakers made specifically for Metallica and the sound that they like. They tend to go very bass forward, bass heavy. So we worked with Meyer Sound to create a proprietary device that we use to play low-frequency music to the barrels while they are cask finishing. So while they are in the brandy casks, that low-frequency, just think about walking in front of a speaker at a concert, you feel that vibration, that movement in your chest. We are doing exactly, we are mimicking that motion inside the barrel. So natural aging, as most of your audience probably knows, when you char the inside of a barrel, the natural sugars and those vanillins in the wood, the tannins will create a caramelized band of sugar right there near the char surface. So natural aging, when the pores of the wood are open, the spirits are moving in the wood, and then when it's cold, it's expressing back into the belly. With the sonic enhancement, now you've got rapid movement, you've got motion. Just like the image on front of the bottle, the blackened bottle, you see the word blackened and then you see the sound wave. This is an actual sound wave of James Hetfield singing the word blackened. So a little Easter egg without over-metallicizing it. But this is a physical representation of the motion of sound. You have your peaks, you have your valleys, so that's moving. The sound is making motion, so that whiskey is moving in and out of the wood at a rapid pace. So you're saying it actually forces the whiskey in and out of the wood. It does. It goes on a faster frequency than temperature change. It is. And so we obviously wanted to know the science behind that. We wanted to make sure that this was something that was a real thing. This wasn't just a bunch of bulls**t. Yes, exactly. Yeah, there's nothing like a little bit of truth to maintain new innovation. And that's exactly... Totally overrated. Right. The cool thing about it is, when we first started this project, and I've done my own research on it as well, we took a control barrel, we had three barrels of whiskey, two of which we applied the sonic enhancement process to in one room. And then another room, we had the same exact aged whiskey in another room that we did not apply the sonic enhancement to. Over the course of 60 days, we took samples from those barrels once a week, and we sent them off to a lab. You're looking for those nine different markers from the ochroma panel that you get from the woods. So they actually ran it through like a GCMS then? Yep. Exactly. Spectrophotometer. We did- I respect the science behind this. Yes. So we found every single one of the nine ochroma panel markers were elevated in the two barrels that had had the sonic enhancement applied to it over the whiskey that had not. And of course, you have samples from when they first started before we even did, applied everything. So you know where your base level is before we even- See, being loud and talking over you guys is doing you a favor in all things. Just for the record. More lactones. Thank you so much. Yeah. Expressing, sir. Expressing more lactones. I'm exuding lactones right now. Well, that's just because I drank too much whiskey last night. I didn't. I'm less hung over this recording than I was last week. Yeah. It's a very non-traditional approach. So, the sonic enhancement, if we walked into a warehouse and they're very famously, each batch is a different playlist, curated playlist of Metallica music. Right. If we walked into the warehouse, are we hearing this or is this so low frequency, you're really just kind of feeling it? No, you're feeling it for sure and you're hearing like a muffled, kind of a muffled roar so you can pick it up. Because there's other guys that do this, like Copper and Kings. Jenna, you were there with us down in Louisville and then you just go there and they just have these giant f**king speakers in the corners of all the warehouses playing whatever music. With the giant f**king spiders everywhere too. That was a nightmare. It's a warehouse. No. Get over it. No. We went to plenty of warehouses that did not have giant monsters lurking in every corner. They had, okay fine, whatever. They got a spider issue there. But that's interesting. They're rock and roll spiders though. They're doing it just kind of. Spiders from the arms. Oh yeah, that makes a difference and it's just loud, whatever music anybody happens to put on that day. Calypso. Yeah, right. It's great working with John Mayer because the guy is an absolute genius. He's one of those almost like savants where you can see him creating circuit boards in his head when you're talking to him. With a crazy engineer like that. Yes, and it's pretty incredible working with those guys. So on every level, there was a professional aspect to creating the brand. You had Dave Pickerell, a legendary craft distiller. Absolutely. Then you've got the legendary Metallica who, when they set out to make a whiskey, they didn't want to just go to a larger company and say, hey, make a Metallica line, we'll slap a Metallica sticker on it. They understood the need for this whiskey to stand on its own, and that's why they set out Dave. We don't know how to make whiskey, you know how to make whiskey, we went out and found the best. So they had Dave, and then of course, with the sonic enhancement once they had that idea, I mean, it's the loudest band on the planet. It made sense to try and incorporate that somehow into the making of the whiskey, and working with John Mayer and their team to be able to create the equipment for this, which is a patent pending right now. The process is a patent pending. That's why it's called Black Noise with a trademark on it. Interesting. Is this like a device that is on each barrel, or is this something you have on like each floor of the warehouse and it adequately spreads this love around? It's a lot more individual devices than- Okay. It's wild. Yeah. It is wild. It's a lot of fun. I was just on a meeting with Meijer Sound earlier this week and just, I mean, John can just go down these crazy, John Meijer can just go down these crazy rabbit holes of... And I'm like, okay, back it up, back it up. Yeah, you got to think, are they thinking of ways to improve this now? Now that they have results in whiskey, they have measured laboratory results. You can think with brains like that, they're always trying to think of, okay, how do we make this better? I was working on the second version of the equipment. I was doing my own tests earlier this year with the new version. And I was doing this out in Colorado, where I live, and it was a lot of fun. I mean, just you got this whole science project set up and music thumping, and cops getting called on you and- I'm Andrew Whiskey here. That's okay. Hello. Get off my back. It's just a lot of fun because I really feel like we're taking traditional whisky making and adding this innovation that really, we have technology that we can catch up from traditional whisky making methods into a more modern approach on what we can That's wild. And it's aging at standard high proofs and all that. It's just the only different thing is the black noise, right? Right. I mean, if you're, I mean, if you're, but also I think the other approach is, you know, is blending. You know, you look at, you know, master, a master blender of scotch, you know, it's, it's really fine tuning and taking all those, those details and turning it into something that is layered and has complexity. For sure. Yeah. And so I think we start with that. But what really does stand us, you know, apart is, is this, the sonic enhancement. And, you know, we're going to start working with, with New Make Spirit too, just to see about acceleration, you know, and that's, that's just for experimental, just to see about whether. Yeah, I don't mean a discount to blending. I mean, if you put crap into it, it doesn't matter what kind of black noise you run through it. It's not going to make a difference. I mean, it helps that you're starting with such an awesome product. Yes. Yep. Exactly. And just seeing what, where this can take us, you know, like working with New Make Spirit to see if there is a way to accelerate aging. You don't, we don't know if we can or cannot, you know, and we don't, we don't claim to accelerate aging. We just, that's why we call it an enhancement because we, there needs to be a lot more research on it. You know, I want to make sure that we're diving deep and really understanding what we're doing here. That's awesome. Cool. Which one do you want to try next? So we have our new release. This is just hitting the shelves right now. So this is the second in our Masters of Whiskey series. This is the first one that we launched. Masters of Whiskey is where I will collaborate with another master distiller to create a phenomenal whiskey and a limited edition whiskey. And then we'll co-release that together. The first one we did last year was with Willett. I worked with Drew Colesveen at Willett, a great friend of mine. And then I was very fortunate to work with the great Wes Henderson on this. We had originally... He got him out of his house in Florida for once? Yeah. So this one was a lot of fun. Now this was more of a tribute to Dave. Dave had always wanted to take a straight Kentucky bourbon and cask finish it in white port barrels. Oh, nice. And so I reached out to Wes because Wes was one of his best friends. And I said, hey, man, let's finish Dave's project. Let's see if... Let's finish his last project he had up on the shelf. And Wes was all about it. But not only did we work well together on this and really created what I feel to be a phenomenal whiskey, we also took a portion of the proceeds and donated to a charity, Team Rubicon in Kentucky, because last year they had all the tornadoes and went through there and devastated a lot of communities. Wes Henderson is also a first responder, so we wanted to donate to the rebuilding of Kentucky from the tornadoes. And then Metallica's charity, All Within My Hands, also matched our donation as well. So we were able to not only make a great whiskey, but we got to donate back to the Kentucky community and also honor the late, great Dave Pickerell with finishing his last project. That's very cool. White Port, pretty cool. There's got to be like what, six of those barrels a year globally or something? Right. You want to talk difficult to find. I bet. Chris, what's the big difference between White Port then? Well, it's made with white grapes and it's still fortified, but it tends to have more citrusy profile, which I totally get in the nose here. The last one, as Jenna said, was so really vanilla forward. And this, I get like a hint of Valencia orange in the nose. Yeah, definitely citrus, yeah. It does not drink. It's proof either. It's what, 116 something? Yeah, I think 116.2. Wow. Oh yeah, very different. The citrus in the palate is even more pronounced than it is in the nose. Wow. I could be fooled into thinking this was a Madeira barrel. It's so kind of like that dark burnt citrus. Yeah. With port, it's always that sweet kind of over, and this was another one that I was very careful with, not over finishing. And it was funny, Wes and I have a little bit different school of thought on that. He's like, I will over finish all day long. I want sweet, sweet, sweet. And I tend to not like sweet as much. I'd like to find those layers and compliment. Yeah, I think here the finishing barrel makes itself absolutely known without a doubt, but the whiskey is still there. But the whiskey is still there. Yeah, definitely. I think it helps that it was just a bourbon too, though. Yeah, straight bourbon, straight Kentucky bourbon. And this was a six-year bourbon that we used, which I think is a sweet age in bourbon, I think, between like six and ten. The OG. Angel's Envy was like that. I think it's gotten younger as the brand's grown a bit, but those original batches of Angel's Envy were all six-plus-year-old bourbon, and they were in the Port Barrel for a little bit longer time. Those were some awesome whiskeys. This is really notably darker than the standard stuff. That was the first thing I know. What a color. Yeah, you've got a lot of color in there. Wes and I found a good balance between his want for like super sweet and my kind of holding back a little bit. We found kind of that perfect time where we're like, okay, yeah, we can pull it now. Yeah, I was going to say, you've got two hands pushing the knobs on your Neve mixing board here. Yes. It's a music reference. But I like that it's got that plush sweetness up front, but it does finish with a good firm hand of oak, I'd say, and dryness. It doesn't taste sweet. Yeah, you can taste the age of the whisky. That's where the oak comes in for sure, the oak profile. So you're not just tasting all port, you're tasting a good balance of the whisky and a balance of the port, and you get those nice oaky notes from the barrel. Nice. This is really good. It's spicier than the first one, too, which I enjoy. Yeah, I think that kind of shows the age, too. I mean, just bourbon for six years or so is going to bring out some more of that brown baking spice character. Right. Yep, I agree. Man, what an awesome whisky. I'm really glad I got to try that. Glad you enjoy it. We had a lot of fun building it. Working with Wes was just great. I mean, he's such a fun guy. He's a character. He's a character for sure. Just getting to spend some time with him working on this was a lot of fun. We announced this at Bourbon and Beyond in Louisville, Kentucky. It was funny because we were going on stage to announce that at Bourbon and Beyond and the guys who were going on after us were the brothers Bond guys, the vampire. The vampire Bourbon guys. Glitter vampires. Yes. It was just funny because we- Metallica doesn't open for vampires. No, but it was funny because Wes and I were peeking our head out and looking at the crowd and it was just a lot of females, younger females that were all just waiting for the guys behind us. When you and Wes walk out, this wave of disappointment washes over the crowd. Wes, he peeked out and he's like, you think they're here for us? I was like, no. No. No. Wrong demographic. But it was fun. It was fun drinking with those guys too. They had a blast. They were, we had the bottle with us. So they were, you know, they got to try with us backstage and it was a lot of fun. We had a good time though. That's cool. They've come in a few times and like stealthily signed bottles in store and post pictures on social media. And then leave before they can get overrun by like freaking fans. Freaking ham. And then all the fans get mad at us. Oh yeah. So, and then all the comments come in. Tell them you didn't know about it. They just stopped in. What do you want us to do? Yeah. And you're also not old enough to shop here anyway. So. Oh, you'd be surprised how many moms out there are big fans. I'm sure. Oh, man. You were mentioning that the band members pick different lots of the regular black and white. They pick the playlist. They pick the playlist. What about for this same thing? So Wes and I, we pick the playlist for it. Same with the Black and X, Will It, Drew Colesween and I both pick the playlist for that as well. And it's a lot of fun. So if you go to blackandwhiskey.com, you can look up the batch number or which batch. You can see who selected the playlist and there's a Spotify icon or an Apple iTunes icon. You can take a photo of it and we'll actually populate the playlist that was used to sonically enhance the batch of whiskey that you're currently enjoying. I don't know how you can possibly drink this at home without cranking the playlist. Oh yeah. No, you have to crank the playlist. It's kind of part of the enjoyment. The first playlist I selected was Batch 100. The band asked me to select 12 songs and they were going to, and I would send them to Lars who would curate it down from 12 songs down to six, and we were going to release a one vinyl record, Bottle, and record box set. I dove deep. I'm a big Metallica fan, so I was looking up, I was found all sorts of obscure stuff. Lars came back to me, he's like, I love every single song you selected so much. You're like, we're going to release a two record box set instead of just the one vinyl box set. I got to dedicate songs to my former Armory buddies, high school metalhead buddies, my family. It was a lot of fun. It was so much fun to be able to make a record with Metallica. That's awesome. How much of your playlist was Cliff Burton versus post Cliff Burton? No, there was definitely some Cliff era for sure. I feel like most Metallica people are like, it was different then. You can never please all Metallica fans, I think, because everybody has their own era, everybody has their era of Metallica that they love the most. That seems important since you're emphasizing the low frequencies. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, with the bass. And the other thing I was thinking about is like, okay, if we're using music to sonically enhance the whiskey, it occurred to me is like, if I pick some songs that are from a live show, now we've got the voices of the fans, the voices of the audience are now helping to make these changes inside with the whiskey. So now it's not just the band, it's the audience from Mexico City. It's two the same playlist, one live versus one studio on two different barrels and see how that shows up with the difference with those oak markers. And see what happens, exactly. That could be interesting. So, we're now, we're getting to that point where we can start playing around with stuff like that and really dive deep. What about the symphonic stuff? Yeah, we did a special release with their symphony orchestra from 2020, no 2021. No, we definitely had some weird Metallica fans calling and asking for it, for sure. Yeah, we had, and we did a special box for that symphony, but we used, we played, I think, the entire album from their San Francisco symphony orchestra. Mm-hmm, man. And it wasn't just Metallica fans, it was San Francisco symphony orchestra. Those guys are more hardcore than the Metallica fans. Who's playing first violin on this? They will throw down, man. They're up there smashing the violin on stage. So, the West Bottling here that we just tasted is the second in that series. Correct. Do you have eyes on anything going forward with that? I'm currently working on our third release with a Kentucky Distiller. Okay, cool. And that's going to come out next year. Cool. So, that one's going to be a limited edition as well, also with another phenomenal whiskey distiller. And it's just a lot of fun. I mean, we're such a small community. We're always so focused on making our own stuff. Getting to go and work with somebody else and collaborate on a fun project is, you know, it's similar to, you know, the music industry. When you go and collaborate with another music artist, when Metallica collaborated with Miley Cyrus and Elton John, you know, to make, you know, something phenomenal. I just, I love that kind of stuff. And that's what we're trying to do with whiskey. So, are you the Miley or the Elton in the next movie? Probably Elton. Definitely Elton. For sure. Are you going to try to get on a cadence of like one a year type of thing with that? Yeah. Get a piece of that fall release craziness pie? That's exactly what we're doing. So, fall release, you know, this one came out a little later, you know, it's just like, you know, everybody's dealing with their own shipping issues right now. And next year, we're already working, we're well ahead on that project. So, that's going to come out in fall next year, the third release of the Masters of Whiskey series. Exciting times, man. It's nice to see Blackened be more than just the one bottle on the shelf now. Yeah, and that's, this is fun. I mean, this is where we're kind of playing around with some stuff. And I've got some other projects we're kind of looking at doing. So, yeah, it's always about innovation and keeping things fresh. All right, so we tried The Core, which is a blend of bourbon and rye, finished in the brandy, of course. The Wes Henderson Collab, which is bourbon, finished in White Port. You want to talk straight rye here then? I am really excited about this. Whiskey Advocate Magazine named the Rye the Lightning. This is a double cask finished rye. This was one of the top 20 whiskeys of the world. Congratulations. From Whiskey Advocate Magazine. Thank you. Thank you. It deserves that just for the name alone. I think we are the only brand on the planet who could get away with Rye the Lightning. And not be sued into oblivion. Yes, exactly. Exactly. But this was a lot of fun. This was taking a rye and I wanted to do a double cask finish. I felt that Madeira would balance well with a rum cask finish. Man, where is Roger today? Our other host is, I think, 40% of his body weight is both Madeira and rum in some combination. At any given time. Awesome. Yeah, this was a lot of fun. Playing around with this, I just wanted to do a limited edition. Again, this goes back to my stranded hands days of taking a different cask finish and blending with a different cask finish and how you can layer in those flavor profiles. Using the Madeira with the rum, you get that there are two different types of sweet. Rum has that cane sugar branchiness, where as you get the super sweet of the Madeira, I feel like this was just a great balance with everything. That really spicy earthy notes of the rye, and then you add a little sweet and savory. Interesting that you got a Kentucky rye here. Most sourced rye obviously is all coming out of MGP in Lawrenceburg, Indiana. Right. It's cool. This rye you used, was this a higher rye content like the other sourced commonalities or more Kentucky style? There is a higher rye in there. There's a 95 percent rye, but there's a lower percentage of rye. I used two different ryes. Yeah. So that was a lot of fun to really identify where I wanted to find that balance between the two rye recipes and then furthermore, see what I can do with finishing. Doing the double cask was really exciting and it was great to wake up this morning to a flurry of texts and people saying, wow, you guys made it to the top 20. Now that's top 20 in the world. So we're pretty excited about it. Team Blackened has been kind of jumping up and down today. That's awesome. That's a huge thing obviously. We have people that every year, people come in the store with a printed out list. I mean, when people still had printers. Now I suppose it's on their phone. Which of these do you have? And they just shop and they'll buy one of everything that we have in stock. Now we haven't had this for a while though, right? It might be hanging around a couple of Binny's. I'd have to check online though. But it's been so popular. I'm trying to consider how I could do this again. The hard part is always just getting your cask finishing barrels on a regular basis. Yeah. What a friendly ride. Where was the rum barrels from? Jamaica. Jamaica. Yeah. Okay. They were held up in port for a while. I was really worried about them because they were held up in port for almost two months. I thought, okay, they're going to be dried out, they're going to be toast, they're not going to be good. You're rolling the dice with rum barrels anyway. Yeah, and so you don't know. The reason they were held up is because apparently, someone was smuggling cocaine in rum barrels- Somebody. Out of Jamaica. I don't know if you taste the aftertaste in here, but- It's a little bit numbing on the lips. No, but that's why it was held up because they were having to inspect all these barrels because someone had gotten caught with a shipment of rum barrels that were smuggling cocaine. I was like, you got to be kidding me. Really? We got COVID and now we got this whole drug smuggling thing, holding up our barrels in port and I'm like, I'm going to freak out if they don't show up and they're ruined. That's a pretty rock and roll reason. Yeah. It is. I think it's one of the better held up in port stories that I've come across. This is very fascinating whiskey. Like you say, it's very friendly. It's I think strangely softer than the other two. Yeah. The nose is really interesting. There's this deep savory middle part of the nose. I don't know how to describe it otherwise. But then there are dark fruits and it's really cool. Yeah. There's a lot going on in there. You still going to get that. I mean, the rye is apparent, like you can taste that fresh cut hay kind of. But it just has balanced out with the sweetness of the Madeira and the rum. Man, this is awesome. Yeah. This one was a lot of fun to wake up to that news today and get to be able to crack into it today as well. Nice. The finish lingers for a long time. Just like herbal sweetness. This might be my favorite of the three, actually. It's nice. It's so easy. It's really easy rye. I like that it's still a rye whiskey again, like hearkening back to my point with the other ones where it's still a whiskey first. I like Angel's Envy Rye a lot, for example, but whenever I drink that one, it just very much it just goes rum, rye, rum, rye, rum, rye. It just goes back and forth all the way through the finish. I've always said it doesn't know what it wants to be. It's a really good, enjoyable, easy drinking product, but this is just different. It's still just, this is a rye whiskey, but then it's just got all these crazy flavors to it. Yeah, I think the most prominent thing on the finish, for me at least, in the long term, and it is a very long finish, is kind of that subtle minty and peppery rye note. Yes. Just rides along, rides the lightning all the way through. I didn't mean to do that, honestly. That was a mess, sorry. Man, this is really good. It's great to be able to share this with you guys too, and especially with the news we got today. The fun thing about making whisky is you want to make whisky that you want to drink, and then hopefully other people will like it. So that's always kind of the goals. I have a lab at my house in Denver. I get so focused on it, I'm trying, I'm like, oh my gosh, I think this is great. Is anybody else going to think this is great? Because you get so focused in your head, in your own palate. And I learned to trust that generally that's the case, because you know what's good or you know what's bad. You just know. And this one I had a lot of fun with. Any other weird finishing barrel that you think, harkening back to your time at your previous distillery or even just with this product in general that you think is going to be an interesting experiment for you as far as the black noise thing goes? Yeah. I mean, as far as like cask finishes, I definitely had some weird barrels in the past. You know, at Stranahan's, I had a good barrel broker. I think the weirdest one that I had, well, weirdest tasting one was I had a barrel that I had, because we had our single malt whiskey. I gave it to a brewery and they did a cask beer with an ESB. It's an interesting choice. Yeah. Well, no, I'm sorry. It was a chocolate stout. Okay. It was a chocolate stout. So the chocolate stout, and then we got the barrel back after they were done with it. I was like, let's put some whiskey in there and see what happens. So about a year later, I tasted it and I was like, the only descriptor I could come up with was swamp ass. That was it. There was no other word for it to describe it. I was like, well, that's the ruin of 53 gallons of whiskey right there. Then I just let it ride. I let it sit in the corner for another four years, I think, another three years. Then I tried it and I was like, oh my gosh, this is amazing. It came around. It came around. So we had a little event there where we would pull whiskey directly out of the barrel and into your glass, and then you could get a small 375 bottle of it. You could pick which one you wanted to buy. That one was a pretty popular one. I honestly had written that one off for years prior and it ended up being a really cool single barrel later on. Just goes to show. You never know. Don't give up too early. Yeah. What else are you going to do? Yeah, exactly. Let it sit. Yeah, you don't want to dump it. And then I had some other ones. I had a weird one. It was a scotch, like a hog's head barrel. The scotch had been removed and then a gin company finished their gin in it. Wow. And then I got the barrel and put some whiskey in it. And that one just never really came back around. That was a weird one. That was too many weird components and weird directions. The finishing barrels that we have for this release for next year, it's something I wanted to do for years and years. And I can't say what they are, but you're going to be pleasantly surprised next year when we do that release. It's a very interesting, a very interesting finish. And I think it's going to be really phenomenal. Cool. Cool. Do you think we're ever going to see a rye full time on the shelf? We've been discussing it. I mean, I think, you know, I'm a huge, I'm a huge rye fan. I absolutely love rye. We've certainly discussed the possibility. There's always there's always the possibility. OK, cool. We're talking about barrel finishing, but this this blackened idea. You know, I know it's kind of restrictive because it's Metallica music, right? Right. But Metallica has famously covered some punk bands and stuff. Do you ever use the cover songs? And conversely, would you ever consider putting out an album of a tribute album by other people doing Metallica and then using that for blackening? So we have. So there is the the blacklist. I'm way behind the curve. So the blacklist was released last year, and that is where 35 different artists covered Metallica songs from the black album. And and then they made an album of all those artists, you know. So one of the coolest songs, and this was a fun memory for me. I was James Hetfield lives an hour and a half away from me in Colorado. And I was up on his back porch. We were smoking a cigar. And before they had released this, he said, hey, you got to hear this. He pulled out his phone and he played me Miley Cyrus, Elton John and Yo-Yo Ma covering Nothing Else Matters, working together on that song. And he's like, I'm getting goosebumps. This is so crazy. I never would have even thought to sing it like this or play it like this. And he's just like, this is so cool. And so we took that album and we used that entire playlist for our Sonic Enhancement for that release. I have so many great ideas that have already been done. You can't even. I think Ghost did a cover of Enter Sandman on that album. Was that one Ghost did? Oh, they did, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Was it acoustic? No. There's a band in Mongolia that's like, they're almost like the guar of Mongolia. Oh, yeah, yeah. I've seen videos of those guys. Yeah, they did an awesome cover on there, and they're just, it was so badass, just watching these guys are going, oh, that's a wha. All this crazy throat singing. Yeah. Are you going to do fermented yak milk version? Ooh. Man, that just, I just curdled my insides right there. I was thinking of it. It's horse milk in Mongolia. It's fermented horse's milk. You're correct. That's like the standard alcoholic beverage in Inner Mongolia, right? I don't know how I got my history so wrong. I'd like to try it sometime. I know the Mongol horde always rode yaks into battle and stuff. One of our spirits guys at the Lincoln Park Store was in Mongolia on vacation like four years ago and actually tried the horse milk and he said it wasn't bad. I've had camel milk when I was in Africa and I wasn't a big fan. Yeah, I'd stay away from that too. Was it fresh or fermented though? It was, well, I guess is what you could call fresh. Who knows? It did not taste fresh to me. Oh yeah, no, everything tastes better with a little alcohol in it, I think. Nothing like some milk of questionable origin. Is that camel eggnog? Camel milk eggnog. Now, see, I'm saying this, but I'm going to literally go home tonight and drink year old eggnog that I made last year, but it's 30 percent alcohol by volume, so it's totally sterilized. It's an Alden Brown recipe. I highly recommend making it sometime. I am not an eggnog fan at all. Oh man. You haven't tried year old eggnog, obviously. No, I have not. There's a cigar collab coming too, right? Our cigar buyer was telling us something about this the other day, but he's the cigar buyer, so my first reaction was to tune him out. Like that has nothing to do with whiskey. He's always blowing smoke. The door's over there. Yeah, you know, this was an exciting project that I came up with the concept during COVID, you know, 2020, I wasn't doing my normal whiskey road show, so to speak. And this kind of bulls**t. This fun stuff. I love this. I've got a good friend, Jonathan Drew, who is the founder of Drew Estate Cigars. Another character, man. Yeah, Jonathan, he's a blast. We've been all over the world with him. We've had some adventures for sure. The original disruptor. That is totally it, man. But James enjoys smoking cigars. I was spending a lot of time up at his place. He lives an hour and a half away from me outside of Denver. I was spending time up there smoking cigars on his back deck. I brought up the idea. I was like, hey, we should make a cigar. He's like, I love the idea. I reached out to Jonathan. Jonathan started sending us cigars from their portfolio, and we started keeping cigar journals, and writing down what we liked, what we didn't like, the wrapper, the filler, the binder, all the different elements of a cigar, and really fine tuning to narrowing it down to what we like, which ended up being a triple Maduro. So all dark tobacco, dark filler, dark binder, dark wrapper, what we call Maduro to the core. So it is the M81- It's blackened. Yes, it is blackened, exactly. So it's been dubbed the blackened M81 cigar by Drew Estate. Cool. And so I did this collaboration with Hetfield and with Jonathan, and that is just hitting the shelves just now. I think December 1st was the launch date for that. And you've got different sizes. You've got your Corona, Petite Corona, the Robusto, and you also have the Toro. Nice. So did I miss this? Is some of the tobacco cured in a whiskey barrel or anything? No. Out of respect for James Sobriety, he doesn't drink. I wanted to keep the whiskey element out of it. That makes sense. So we wanted to really embrace the maturation process of the tobacco. So you've got a San Andreas wrapper, you have Nicaraguan broadleaf, you have Connecticut broadleaf, and then a Pennsylvania broadleaf in there. So there's some aspects in there that really tie well together. It's a beautiful cigar and it's on the shelves. Did you rock the tobacco curing barn with some music? We looked into, I was trying to figure out, okay, is there an element that we can do the black noise process in here? And there really just wasn't any opportunity, I think, for that. If I was doing like a barrel-aged tobacco, if we were doing a barrel fermentation or barrel-aged tobacco, maybe we could have tried something with that. But I wanted to, it needs to be authentic, it needs to be doing something. And with whiskey, it is doing something. It's moving that whiskey in and out of the barrel at a rapid pace. With the tobacco, there really wasn't an opportunity for it to do anything. So we didn't get a chance to use our black noise technology for that. Nice. Well, I was asking about whether you cured it with bourbon or anything. No, it would be great. I really enjoy it. The box turned out phenomenal. It's a very nice kind of this matte black with copper tones. On the top, you'll see Blackened, M81, Cigar by Drew Estate, and then Hepfield Dietrich Drew on there. You should turn it into a music box that plays like Waltz and Matilda when you're on it. Nice little Tom Waits. Yeah. Oh, cool. I'm looking forward to trying one of those smokes. Well, obviously, it pairs well with Blackened Whiskey. That was the whole idea of creating something that could pair well with it, but also be enjoyed separately if you imbibe in spirits or do not. You get to be able to- Still enjoy a good cigar. Yeah, enjoy a cigar. Nice. Exactly. Rob, thanks a lot for dropping all this knowledge on us today. That's a pleasure. Pretty cool to see the behind the scenes on something that's so different versus everything else on the shelf. Yeah. It's exciting. I think anytime you're applying some innovation into a traditional industry, it's kind of like the sky's the limit. Yeah. Yeah. You feel like everything's been done, but it clearly hasn't. No. You get a lot of people that are pissed at you for just doing something different, but you can't argue with the results here because these are great. This is like the modern version of putting a barrel on a ship and shipping it across the equator. Exactly. I mean, there's way faster. There's different versions and this is one of them. Cool. Thanks, man. Yeah. Well, thank you. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me on. Yeah. Anytime. All right, listeners, thanks a lot. We'll be back in your feed with something else next week. Until then, I'm Pat. I'm Chris. I'm Jenna. I'm Rob Dietrich. Keep tasting.