I was at Schuba's with a friend. I love Schuba's, yeah. And they do the dollar shots, it's a dollar mystery shot. And I got one of each, and I shared them with a friend. I'm like, oh, okay, what is this one? This is a, is it like a weighted bourbon? I don't know, what's that? And the bartender was like, well, it's more of a Kansas City style. And I was like, oh, so it's Rieger. And she was like, yeah, and my friend was blown away. That's great. So thanks, it's like you helped me win trivia night, kind of. Like one question trivia night looked like a stud. So, you know, thanks. Thank you for that. Okay. Rab, you ready? We got a general plan of the product line up that we're going to taste through. We're getting an update because everybody who listens to the podcast today was definitely listening in 2018. Right? Exactly. Hey, you are listening to Barrel the Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. Back in your feed, we have special guests, you know that, because you already hit play and says that on the podcast episode, you know? So I'm Greg, I do communications at Binny's. I'm Lexi, I'm on social media. I'm Rob, I'm part of the Whiskey Hotline team. And I only expected one person, but two people. I'm Ryan Maybee, the co-founder of J. Rieger & Co. And I'm Nathan Perry, I am the Master Distiller at J. Rieger & Co. And as far as I'm aware, nothing has changed in the seven years since they were on our show last time. Nothing at all. Did you get more tattoos or something? I probably, that's probably changed a little bit, yeah. So we're catching up and we're going to look at today in the future, right? The last time I was on, you said 2018, right? Wow. I mean, we would have been relatively new to the Chicago market first off. Like we would have, I think we launched in Chicago in 2017. We definitely didn't have any of our own juice out yet, as far as like the whiskeys go, right? The gin was in the market, the Cafe Amaro was in the market, and our Kansas City Whiskey was obviously like kind of our flagship and the one we're most known for. But back then, it was 100% still sourced barrels of whisky that we were blending and everything. But now we've added a number of additional new whisky skews, so straight bourbon, straight rye. That's 100% ours. We've been laying down since the beginning. And then also we've transitioned most of the Kansas City Whiskey blend into our own stuff as well. Not to mention the fact that we didn't even have the current distillery back then in 2018. So when we met in 2018 and I came on, we were just making booze in a warehouse with no tours, no tasting room, no bar, no hospitality aspect of the business. We were just making booze and trying to get it out to market. Now we have a really incredible visitor center, open seven days a week, daily tours, historic exhibit, museum, four bars on site, event spaces and a 40-foot slide that deposits you right in the gift shop on your way out. I love that. That's awesome. Wait, a slide into the gift shop? Yeah, you want to talk about that, Nathan? That was your idea. That was my idea. I love it. This was probably in 2016, 2017. We always talked about Distillery 2.0 as we referred to it. We knew the building, we wanted to do it and it was attached to the initial building that was this cast concrete building that we were in. It was this beautiful old brick building, two stories, huge, lots of character built in 1901 as a bottling hall for the Haim Brewing Company that was in Kansas City. As we talked about it, I threw out the idea first of, and this is over some drinks, over of a fire pole and that was pretty quickly vetoed. That's risky. Because yeah, let's have some drinks and then go down a pole. Yeah, it's injuries. And so someone said, well, what if we do a slide? Well, actually, it was I, was that someone? I said, what if we do a slide? And I was a little inspired by New Belgium in Fort Collins. They have a slide coming from their offices down into like the guest area. I was like, that could be really cool. And I expected to get vetoed really immediately too. And everyone's like, actually, that's kind of cool. Okay, you guys were in Kansas City, but in St. Louis, I just discovered this like last year. There's this place called City Museum. You know what I'm talking about? Yeah, that's great. It's this magical mind-warping space. And it completely blew my mind. And I got tired and my family went to watch a magic show and I wandered into a guest sub-restaurant and they had beer. And I was like, can I have a beer? And they said, yes. And I said, is there anywhere I can't take it? Like thinking the restaurant. And she goes, don't take it on the slides. Right. Yeah, City Museum is a place that probably could never be built again. I think there had to be some... It's time is limited looking into the future. There's like sharp fractures of shells glued to things. And like any kid that trips and just like tears off part of a face or whatever. I could have died of a heart attack and they would have had strong difficulty getting my body out of there. There's some little tight spaces. Yeah. And adults made it. Anyway, that's not the point. The point is you're making your own juice, so it better be good. Oh, I hope so. That was always the hope that we had. Are you allowed to have whiskey on the slide at your place? We have a sign that says no drinks on the slide. That is not always followed. There's like a whole, we have a big sign with like, I don't know, 10 or 12 rules actually. And I'm sure most of them get broken at some point or another. If somebody spilled their drink going down the slide, it would be fun to clean up because you would just take a chamois down the slide. Oh, it's just going to take one. Absolutely. You're going to need a waiver soon. One of my favorite things, well, there's a couple of things I love about the slide. First off, I would have in the very beginning when we first started talking about the whole concept of building this visitor center and the distillery and the slide thing, I'd never thought it was going to happen. Like the slide. I'm like, that's going to get nixed from the budget. There's no way. But it did happen. We did build it and now I'm so glad we did. I mean, it's the easily the most like Instagrammable aspect of our entire operation. And people just absolutely love it. And there's no way you can leave that place without a smile on your face after going down a slide like that. But what's really funny about it, my other favorite thing about it is that, we've now had that building open for six years and at least one person in our company never ever ever gets sick of going on the slide and he's sitting right here. Oh, the guy whose idea was the slide? For the first probably four or five months, I never went downstairs. Even if I was on the other side of the building, I would just walk over and do the slide and then go back. Even if you're having a bad day, I usually just go up and I'll do the slide real quick, have a little whimsy and it helps it out. We should put this on our list. As long as we don't get the other things that we're asking for in the office, we might as well add the slide to the list. I was talking about dunk tanks earlier. That's actually plausible. We know some people with dunk tanks. Yeah, I want to go. Rob, the next time that the Whiskey Highline goes to Kansas City, obviously, the communication department needs to tag along to document. We must. It's going to be so viral and not like bad viral, but like social media viral. Exactly. It's more content. Rich content. Yeah. After getting through all that, getting to that point, where are you at? What's the focus and where is that progression? Where are we going with this? For the most part, over the course of the last 10 years since we launched the brand, there have been multiple times we've had to pivot. COVID was a huge pivot out of necessity, but also just from a regular business perspective, like you sometimes have to pivot. Even though we launched with the Kansas City Whiskey, and then we started distilling right away back in 2015 and laying down barrels with a commitment to doing it the right way and waiting a minimum of four or five years before we even considered dumping them. We did vodka, we made a gin, and I know we're going to talk about the gin because it has become an important part of our brand. But we're now at a point 10 years in where we have a lot of bourbon, a lot of rye, and we have the ability to kind of expand our footprint with our core whiskeys. And we're really leaning heavily into our whisky production and whisky selection as kind of the core focus of our entire brand identity. We've done a little bit of a rebrand with like the bottles and the labels, the packaging, and we're starting to see a much more clear vision kind of come into focus when it comes to like, you know, what rieger whisky is. Yeah. You know, so that's really, really exciting. I mean, these the two offerings that we've just introduced in the last year with the straight bourbon and straight rye are off to a great start. And we have some older expressions coming and some really cool things that are we're looking at in the very near future. Can I have the Kansas City Whiskey? This one right here. Yeah, give me. I mean, you can pour some for yourself too, but I'm... So speaking of the Kansas City Whiskey, so that was kind of the starting point. That was the starting point. What made that unique and became Kansas City Whiskey? Yeah, so resurrecting the brand that died with prohibition, right? You know, lasted from 1887 up until 1919 and grew to become one of the largest whiskey distilleries in the United States. Resurrecting that, bringing that back after 95 years, I felt this really strong obligation to do justice to the original as much as we could. We didn't know exactly what Rieger whiskey was. There was no formula passed down, you know, from one generation to the next. And so we didn't have an exact recipe or guideline to follow. But after doing a lot of research into trying to figure out what Rieger whiskey was, and also doing a lot of research just in American whiskey in general, back in that time period, we landed on a really, really unique style of American whiskey that was commonly done back then, which utilizes sherry. There's a long and rich history of using sherry in American whiskey, which we've documented at length and we've made a part of our historic exhibit and everything. And it is what makes Kansas City whiskey really different and special. But so it's a blend of three different types of whiskey. So it's light corn, straight rye, straight bourbon. And then we add just a little bit under 2% 15-year Oloroso sherry. Like literally blended in. So this isn't a sherry cask finish whiskey, but that's a component in the blend. And that's something that was commonly done in American whiskey back then. And so in going through that process and resurrecting that style of blend, that recipe, we were actually granted permission by the TTB to label it as Kansas City whiskey as a style. So that's really what started everything for us here. That was our first product right out of the gate. And it's still to this day what we're probably most known for and our kind of flagship. Is there any other bottle that says that? We were the first ones, but now there's a couple of other distilleries in Kansas City that are following suit. And doing that fully with our blessing. We didn't trademark it or want to protect it. We wanted it to be a category. And so now there are a couple of others that are kind of following in our footsteps. We're not giving them our exact recipe, but it kind of falls into that world of blending different types of straight whiskeys with the addition of some kind of sherry. Like it doesn't have to be Oloroso. It could be a different kind of sherry, right? 15 year off of Solera. Yeah, 15 year Oloroso. You ever pinch a little of that on the side? Oh, yes, Nathan has not it vigorously. Yeah, well, we even, yeah, I mean, the tastings that we were doing here at the two Binny's locations over the last couple of days, we actually brought samples of the sherry to pour for people so they could get a really good understanding of like what Have you always worked with the same bodega? Right, yeah, it's called Williams & Humbert. Now we have a really, really good relationship. We'll talk about it in a little bit. We'll talk about the botas that we've been able to bring in and actually have some sherry botas from the Solera that made the sherry that we use in our Kansas City whiskey. So we have a beautiful project that came out of that with our Monogram whiskey. That's cool. Cool. All right, I'm trying this now. You guys are like the Sriracha guy, you know, like everybody knows the recipe for Sriracha, but he makes the Sriracha better. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's something to be said for that. Right. Everybody wants to like, you know, knock off Angostura, like no one's going to do it. Right. You could have the exact recipe of what we utilize and you could try to make it. And you're not using the same lots of bourbon that we are and you're not doing it. You're not. So if I say like it's X percentage of bourbon, X percentage of like you could try and it would be something, but it would be completely different because you're using different whiskeys, you know, even if you had the same sherry, which you have a hard time getting because we buy, I think pretty much all of it from Williams and Hummer. So it would be very difficult to find that one. Okay. Okay. This smells, this sherry is so apparent on the nose. It's so beautifully fruity and oxidized and soft. Yeah. Actually, we had in one of the tastings last night, one of the customers there called out the exact same thing that I always get the most prominent on the nose and that's maple. I get like a maple-y, kind of an earthy maple-y richness right on the nose. And to me, it's a dead giveaway of our Kansas City whisky. And there's more than that, like once you kind of get into the palette, you're getting all those components of those whiskeys. You're getting the sweetness from the corn and the bourbon and the stone fruit and all that. You're getting some spice from the rye. But in the mid palette, you're also getting the sherry again in the form of like the dried fruits, like the raisins and figs and things like that. It's really cool. And structure, it gives it a structure for all of those more voluptuous kind of notes to grape on. Yeah. Yeah, it's nicely layered and then it has that finish of that spice. Yeah, that's really nice. Also, I definitely burned my mouth with pizza two days ago. Suddenly aware of it. We got to numb that. This also seems ideal for mixing. This would be great in an old fashion. Yeah. So I'm really glad you mentioned that because that's the purpose behind it. That's the incentive. I mean, I love drinking it neat, on the rocks, straight, whatever. But my background was as a bartender. I mean, I was a bartender before any of this and became a bar owner and a restaurant owner. And really, my career kind of took off with the whole craft cocktail boom, right? Yeah. You know, being a craft cocktail bartender kind of drives you to learn about spirits and where they come from and why they taste the way that they do. And then try to understand how base spirits work with other flavors and components like that. And so in launching this company and bringing back J. Rieger & Co, we wanted this to be a cocktail-friendly whiskey, all of our base spirits. And that's kind of like part of our ethos across the board, from our KC Whiskey to the gin to the straight bourbon and rye, not only from like a flavor perspective and its mixability, like you mentioned, but also coming down to price, the design of the bottle and its ease of use in a bartender's hands. Like all of those things come into play and we think about every one of those details with the bartender and cocktails in mind. Those big dumb fat lip bottles. Yeah. You hate them. Oh yeah. The whiter the bottle, the worse. You know what? For bartenders, but also if you're just pouring some alone in your basement, still a pain in the butt, you always spill. No matter what, there's always a spill. Rob, how much is this Kansas City whiskey? Regular price is $39.99 and on sale right now at Binny's for $34.99. That is an everyday drinker? Everyday. Okay. Can we try the next one? Okay. So what do you want to get to next? Well, I wonder if because we started with the KC whiskey, maybe we should do the monogram next, like side by side. That's up to you, boss. All right. Well, I mean, we're talking about sherry. I say before we go to the bourbon, right? Go for it. Like we're on the sherry subject. We mentioned the botas. Let's do this. So this is our monogram, which is the high end KC whiskey. So now we have a second tier of our KC whiskey, where instead of just making the blend with the sherry added to it, we have received 10, 500 liter, 100 year old botas from Williams & Humbert in Jaret de la Frontera. So like the actual botas from their Salera. Old transport casks with the really big staves. Huge. They're enormous. Oh, you can reuse those multiple times. Oh, well, they've been used for a century to make sherry. And now we have 10 of them at our distillery and we've filled them with the three component whiskeys that make up our KC whiskey. So some of them have light corn, some of them have straight bourbon, some of them have rye. And we actually do this blend in a Salera method, like they would in Jaret de la Frontera, where instead of dumping each barrel every year, we're only taking a small amount out and doing fractional blending. Hit the mic. What's the volume of a Bota? 500 liters. But we're not getting anywhere near emptying either any of them. Because you're running it in as a... Yeah, we're taking it out. Well, it's like, yeah, so it's like fractional blending. So like in some cases, some of the Botas, we may only take like 5% or 10% out each year, and we may not even top it back off because we want more oxidation to lead in to the next vintage. And then we'll eventually top it back up, but we never drain them completely. And so the whiskeys in there just continue to age and evolve and mature over time. And it kind of becomes this like living, breathing thing. It's really, really cool. But when you taste this... And some of it has always been there. Yeah, yeah, I mean, they're like components and pieces of... There are parts of whisky in this blend that are, I'd say, pushing 17, 18 years old now. You said maple. I can't unsmell maple. Well, and what's really cool about this now that you're smelling this one, the Kansas City whisky is soft and sweet and really approachable and very mixable. This is big and bold and robust. And while it's got the richness and the sweetness of the sherry and it even kind of takes it to a whole new level with all that additional oxidation, like almost becoming more like butterscotch, salted caramel, but it's got this like salinity to it and this savory quality that really reflects the terroir of sherry and the terroir in the cellar, like where their their cherries are aged. It's just really intense. Oh, yeah. The oxidized cherry pit almond kind of flavor that comes off the sherry. Yeah. And it like accentuates that quality in the whiskey, too. And it's darker, denser. There's like a chocolatey character. That's really that's lovely. I like the heat on the end. It's not too overwhelming. This one had 100 proof. I think if we put it down at 92, like the other Kansas City whiskey, those botas really, really softened everything out. And I think it drinks like 100 proof. I think like there's a little bit of that there, but it's like it drinks like really, really smooth. I agree. Smooth is like that four letter word. I mean, balance is the problem. This is plush and it comes across as softer even than the Kansas City whiskey because of its plushness. Yeah. It's just velvety, like buttery. I just I absolutely love it. And this is my cigar whiskey. Like, it's so elegant and yet really powerful. What's your cigar soda orange crush? I like that. I think probably root beer. Root beer works. I was out in the country at a huge bonfire like two weeks ago and with my cousins, my family, and my aunt brought out a round of root beer floats for everyone. I love it. And I think that this would have been a nice follow up. The root beer float by the fire is like a dull version. With both the root beer float and the bonfire. Yeah. There's nothing like this monogram. I don't think I've ever had anything like this. How much is this? Regular price $129.99 and we have it on sale right now for $114.99. Is that okay? That's okay, right? What, to say that? Yeah, we're not ruining your price point or anything. No, no, no, it's awesome. I mean, I mean, we... Oh, no, not at all. I love it. I mean, I want people to have it. And I also, well, this is a really special bottle of whisky. We only make $2,000 each year hand numbered. I don't think of it as like a trophy type whisky. Like, I want people to drink it. Yeah. And like you just said, like you've never had anything like it. I have not. Right. There's no other American whisky that tastes like this. That's largely because of those botas. Yeah. Yeah. The influence of that. The just the I get like the brininess from the Sierre. Yeah. I've never. I mean, you can't get that. No. You cannot create that. Yeah. The terroir in Hereto Frontera where, you know, sherry is made is just unlike any anywhere else in the world, which is why you can only make sherry in that place. Okay. Is the rest of this going to be a letdown now? Oh, shoot. Well, I'm curious right away. Yes, some swills. So, looking at these, I love that you put your recipe on the labels. These are really unique. I mean, the rye is super high rye, but even the bourbon, 30% rye? Yeah. Talking about our straight rye, straight bourbon, wanted to go with like a Pennsylvania Menongahela style rye, specifically because we already had a high rye bourbon. The bourbon is 56% corn, 30% rye and 14% malted barley. So, you can't go in a Maryland style rye, I think would be just too close, and really wanted to showcase some of these classic big rye. Thought it would work really well to have the differentiation there. But those two whiskies, Ryan kind of talked about the expansion in 2019 and talked a lot more about the guest-facing, and inside all that guest-facing stuff is kind of like joke. It's like a terrarium for the distillers. That's where production floor is in there. That's where we expanded and we have now, instead of just having our 750 gallon Vendome Pot still, we have our Column still. That's what we made these whiskies on. That was a project that I got to design with Dave Pickerel, which is really crazy thing. Unfortunately, he passed away before it all got to come to fruition, but it was one of those ones when we started distilling on that system, I'm like, man, I hope we were right. I hope this turned out really well. Starting to see now as those whiskies are maturing and getting to the point where they're four, five, six years old, yes, we're really, really happy with the characteristics that we got from them. A unique distilling method that we do for this is actually utilizing the column and the pot as distinct entities. And so instead of doing it like run it through the column and then going directly into the pot, it's a function as a doubler. Yeah. We do our low wines one day and then the next day we'll do our high wines and our finish. What was going to go into a cask? So we can get our heads and tails cuts there. It allows for a little bit more refinement. And the hope was that that was going to turn out a product that we're really, really proud of and it happened to work out that way. How many iterations of going through recipes did it take to get to the final? The Grainbills? Yeah. It was sitting around having a drink with Dave, Ryan and Andy and we thought, what do we want to do? What whiskeys do we like? And we all, we kind of wanted to high-ride bourbon so we thought, okay, what about 56, 30, 14? He's flexing right now. No. Well, when you're getting to design a Grainbill with Dave Pickerel, he's done it a few times. And so that was something we had, it was always nice to be able to lean on someone with expertise, like legit expertise. And so we knew that we're going to be in a good spot. And then with the rye, we wanted to differentiate from, I mean, there's a lot of good rye out there that's made at 95, 5, but also wanted to make sure that we didn't get mistaken for that. And so we went 96, 4. Wanted to utilize a little bit of malted barley. We could have gone just 100% rye, a little bit of that tradition, and it helps it in the mash process. It's a little bit nicer to- For some reason, we haven't said the word amylase in quite a while. We can say it, we've got Glucoamylase, Alphaamylase. Is it East Coast rye? That's just Canadian. It's Canadian rye. Yeah. So everything in that bottle is Canadian. I've shopped around some different ones, and we've even done some test batches with some more local rye, but that's never been the goal. We're close enough to the best rye in the world. You can't grow it any better than you can really in the Manitoba area. Yeah. Mr. Pickerel was responsible for a bunch of different bottled Canadian ryes that are pretty famous. Yeah. Also just the ability to mash rye without making a mess was something that I got to learn from Dave and work with him. This is the methodology. Stuff that if I've been stuck to my own devices and just trying to learn, you're going to make a lot more messes and make a lot more mistakes. Probably a little more nerve wracking to be making a bunch of new make and putting it into a bunch of expensive barrels and then just hoping it tastes good, knowing that it did taste good. One of my favorite complements I've ever gotten, and it was probably, we were a couple of years into distilling. Dave wasn't there with me all the time doing the distillations. He is in town and we were going to talk about some other projects. I said, hey, can I just want you to taste my new make? Can we just do that real quick? Because I've been losing sleep thinking, what if this is terrible? What if I've done something completely different from what Dave told me how to do and now I'm just making a bunch of crap and I've been putting it into barrels and when he tasted it and he looked at me, he said, that's professional and like that, I do get emotional when I think about Dave and the whole thing. I really care a lot about what we're putting in bottles and so it meant a lot to hear that from him. I don't care what a lot of people say about our stuff. He's like, oh, I hate this, whatever. But here from certain people, I care a lot about what they said and I remember just specifically where I was standing when he said it and that felt real good. So yeah. Your pride is clear. Yeah, that's great. To hear that from a legend, that's amazing. That was cool. Nathan may not always like to tell this story, but we took so much pride and care and attention to detail in the whiskeys that we were making and then waiting to release them when they were ready and sadly, Pick never got an opportunity to even see this system in action because he passed away while we were under construction, we were still building it when he passed. So we talk about this two-step discontinuous distillation system that we've got and Dave never had a chance to taste these whiskeys. I know that he would be proud. I mean, I feel very strongly that he would be very proud. And the bourbon that we have here, just a week ago, we found out got best in category for best craft bourbon at the Ascot Awards with Fred Minnick. And so we got a double platinum medal and then he takes all the double platinums and they reevaluate and pick a winner out of the whole category and it got best overall category. But every time we get any kind of accolade or nod of recognition like that, Nathan and I both still have Pick's phone number and he always texts him and doesn't know what who he's reaching out to but... Usually I apologize at the start and say, hey, I'm going to send this message if you have this phone number now. He used to belong to a close friend of mine and I just wanted to tell him this. And so far nobody has it but it's always fun because it's a cool thing that was a very personal thing to get to design the system and talk about it. Like just whiskey making theory with him and get to learn that. And so definitely colored how I distill and how I want to do things. Can we try it now? Yes. This is the bourbon. I know we were talking about both the bourbon and rye. We poured the bourbon first. I can't tell because every focus group, international spirits, supplier conglomerate will tell you you got the color of the label wrong. We did. We totally screwed up. We did. Sweet, I'm missing the color of the label. It was a complete accident. No, that was intentional and we did it just because of that. Like, okay, everybody, everybody for whatever reason associates rye with green label will make it red. Yes. And then we made the bourbon blue. Like, why not? Yeah. It doesn't hurt that the professional sports teams, the main professional sports team in Kansas City are red. And blue. But that might have, that could have influenced it, but no. Well, and not with the white here and we're going for an all American, Midwest. It all ties together. Okay, let's try this bourbon. It smells great. It smells a classic. Making mouth sounds. When you guys keep remembering to spit it and I'm sitting over here like, I'm not driving anywhere today. You know what? I'm going on vacation after today. How much after this? Friday. I'm going on vacation in about 10 minutes. I'm punching out. You're going to see it. Yeah. Okay, so this bourbon shows it's rye. I mean, it has the structure. Once again, I think cocktails when I try something like that. But it's not too herbal. It's not too green. It's more spicy. That's the key component is that the grain doesn't take over. A lot of craft whiskeys, that's something that we'll hear complaints about. This is balanced. It shows the oak. It shows the spice. It's round. It's really nice. Especially, it drinks above proof, not from a heat perspective. But it has all of the character that's not lost. What's the proof? 90 proof. 90. Got to be to be straight, right? No. No. It has to be 80 to be straight. It has to be two years old and don't add anything to it. But then it can be 80. I used to know these things. I lost it. I mean, as far as I'm concerned, it should be 90 at least. If you want to have the ability to use it in a cocktail, between 90 and 100 is where you're at. Sweets back. Yeah. If you're just drinking it, 80 proof, yes you can. But if there's brands out there, if they can put it out at 70 proof, they would. Yeah. I mean, going back to that idea about incorporating it into cocktails and things like that, I mean, I have no problem with 80 proof whiskeys, for the most part. I just think of them as kind of shot in a beer type whiskeys. And the main reason is that it's not a quality thing. It's that when you're adding other ingredients like sugar, bitters, herbal ingredients like vermouth and things with a lot of flavor, a lot of big bold flavors, you just need a little bit more muscle from your base whisky to kind of stand up to those Especially if you're adding breadth and sweetness. Right. And don't forget you're adding water to your cocktail as well. That is one component of a cocktail. It's always water, whether it's in the form of ice or whatever. What's your bitters? What's your go-to bitters? Depends on the drink. I mean, Angostura is one of my all-time favorite brands of anything. I absolutely adore Angostura bitters. Salt and pepper of it. Yeah, absolutely. But it depends. I would never make a Sazerac with Angostura. It has to have pate shows. It kind of depends on the drink, right? I'm not a good bartender. So I love Ango, but my cocktails are whiskey. This is my vessel. Whiskey on the rocks. This is glass. It's a vessel. I can drink out of that. That's the easiest thing. All right, so now on to the Rieger? Yeah. Red Rieger, Red Label Rieger. Rieger in the Red Label. That was a good pop. What's the inspiration behind the Bottle? If you look at our historic bottles dating back to 1887, this one here, you look at the Monogram Bottle, this one is about as close to the actual original Rieger Bottle as there is. And so when we first launched the Kansas City Whiskey 10 years ago, it was in this bottle. The Monogram has always been in this bottle. The Cafe Amaro is still in this bottle. But I mentioned at the beginning, we just did a recent re-brand. And with this new focus and new direction, highlighting our straight bourbon, straight rye, and going further and deeper down that path, we felt like it was time for a little bit of a tweak on the brand side. And so we did some, I mean, it's kind of significant, but you can see a direct connection. So like this arched shoulder here, it's just got a little bit more, the new package has a little bit more going on. You know, we've got the embossed name around the bottom, you know, so it's all custom, but it still has an obvious connection to our past going all the way back to 1887. It's beautiful. Rie, Rie. So just to touch off of the 95.5, 96.4. Yeah. 96.4. With Rie, I know that from a fermentation standpoint, it can be a pain in the butt. But we recently had our anti-foam get switched up on us for some fermentations. The company swore. It's like, it's the same stuff. And it was not. It was not the same stuff. And so that's the thing. It kind of sucks is we finish up a mash and the fermentation is not really active by 5, 6 o'clock when everyone's kind of leaving for the day. It's going to start ramping up 9, 10, 11. That's when it's most vigorous. We have open top fermentation. And so we'll get messages from the bartending teams like, is it supposed to be doing this? And it's just pouring over. It's like, no. Most recent, it was just a couple of weeks ago and I'm the one that caught it at like 8 or 9 o'clock at night. I was leaving the building and I heard, I thought, is it raining? It's not raining outside, is it? And I look, I kind of walk around the corner and get a closer look and I mean, it's just pouring out onto the production floor. I'm like, uh-oh. What do you do? Well, what I did was actually, well, I'll be honest, I was actually really excited about it because I don't get to play around on the production floor that much like those guys. And so I was like, oh, I can fix this, right? And so I called Nathan, I texted him and he told me what to do. And so we had the anti-foam right there on the table. And so he told me how much to measure out and run up there and dump it in the top to calm it down. But yeah, it doesn't happen a lot, but I mean, it has happened. Rie is the worst offender of it just because it's so gummy. Yeah, then the next day it's cleaning that up is the worst part. And it's just because it's everywhere and it's sticky and it's a huge pain. So yeah, my team could definitely, there's a couple weeks where we're having some issues with that anti-foam. We're back to the old stuff, back to the old anti-foam and it's going to be fine. Everything's going to be fine. Are you producing Rie like all year round? No, we do, we kind of call them like campaigns. We'll do several months of Rie and we do a majority of bourbon distillation. But throw a big end of Rie session party. Kind of did, like they're kind of already happy. But we're working on that right now, getting ready, because we'll switch over in July. We'll be switching over. We'll do some light corn whisky. So that's the one that we still have a little bit higher proof. And then it goes in second use cupridge. And that's 99% corn. And so we'll be doing that and then we'll switch over to our bourbon. One percent barley. Some of that's just in there for tradition. We obviously use enzymes that we're adding in because one percent barley is not going to cut it to convert all that starch. Yeah, it was a little bit just tradition to do it. Because we've also done, we haven't released anything, but I've got stuff in barrels of 100 percent corn, bourbon and some things like that. Here's the part where you spill tea. Did I say that right? Yeah, you did. Thank you. Yeah, all 100 percent corn. Yeah, we just did that one a little bit ago. It came across some cool corn. It might be a distillery only. I think it'll end up being like it's five barrels worth of something that in five years we'll start really to win. In five years, we're going to have another podcast episode in two years. Yeah, right. It's like, okay, this is rye. It's good. It's really rye-y. That was kind of the goal. We really wanted to make it distinctive since, like you said, the bourbon is quite rye-y as well, because it has such a high proportion of it, and so I wanted to really step it up. But still have that softness, still have the mouthfeel that's coming from just the distillation process. Also at 90 proof. Okay, so I don't want to say two by four, because it's more than that, but there's a really structured spirit. It's very structured. I like that. I think that's a really good descriptor. I like the structured analogy, yeah. Yeah, I think in terms of, I don't know, I've got a lot of whine in me. It's like, historically, you haven't said Venice yet. I think about mouthfeel. Nothing's been too Venice. But it's not quite tannic, but it has like this, I don't know, just this column of structure. In this case, I think of like, it's some kind of weird synesthesia, like melted butterscotch coming down the sides of it. It's just a little bit enough to make it slick and oily. I like when the description of flavor is more of like a feeling or a picture, like that type of stuff. It happens to me all the time when I'm tasting different things. We could talk about this for a while. I think of taste in music kind of the same. I was in jazz band as a kid, and the director described it as like the bass and the trombones fill out the bottom and the snare is right at the top, and we got a clarinet up near the top, and it kind of makes this shape, and like a really sweet bourbon to me, just like this, and like this rye is like this, you know, in the shape of the EQ that's in my brain. Anyway, this is a good rye. I want to pair this with like a ginger, lemon, ango float situation. That sounds pretty tasty to me. That sounds like a horse feather. You guys should have a fancy cocktail off. Let's do it. Except, most of your cocktail brain is tied up in agave spirits. It's just retired these days. It's been a couple of years. She got better at tweeting. It's the price on the fervent of the night. These are both, well, right now you guys have them on sale for $29.99. Nice. Right. And that's another thing that's like really important to us is being a high quality, high value brand. And it's difficult in, you know, being an independent, independent distillery, craft distillery, if you will. You know, the reason that there are so many craft and independent, you know, products out there that are $50, $60 is because the cost that goes into making them so high. But it makes it almost impossible to compete with some of the larger brands that are putting out incredibly high quality bourbons and rye is that, you know, everybody knows and loves for, you know, 20, 25, 30 bucks. This is true. And so this has been a goal for of ours from day one. When Andy and I started the company 10 years ago, we had this in mind. We knew we wanted to build for the long term. We knew we wanted to establish ourselves as a high quality brand that could compete. And now 10 years in, we're finally getting to that point where we have the volume and the quality that we can put out there at that price point. And it's something that's really exciting that we're actually able to put these out on the shelf at $29.99. Cool. I think that that price point opens the doors for a lot of people to try new stuff. I think people also, they get so scared of trying something and they're not going to just buy a $60 bottle if they're nervous about it. And that is just great that it's- It's prohibited. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Are your barrels in the city, in the same spot? Yeah. Oh. So we have actually two different brick houses. One is the, it's actually our old, I described that cast concrete building. That was where our original production was. When we moved into the new beautiful brick building, we just filled the other building up with barrels. And so now we have that site has about, I think it's got room for about 5,000 barrels. And then we have another warehouse that has room for around that same amount. Do you do climate control? No. You want the air in? Yeah. Well, we still- For temperature cycling and stuff? We have a big ass garage door. Yeah. And it just gets open for deliveries and stuff. So there's a lot of air circulation in there. So in that recalice, we see some really skyrocketing proofs. So the 90 proof, the straight bourbon, straight rye, in the barrels that we dumped to make these different blends, one was 60, 60 barrels for the rye and 80 barrels for the bourbon. The average proof on those, the average was around 140. That's wild. And at like four and a half years, four and a half, five years. And what are you entering at? 125. Okay. Yeah. So it's picking up quite a bit. Holy cow. And so some of the ones we see up at the higher part, What's your evaporation loss? What's your evaporation loss? It's obviously not that, but you would think it's like, if you get a barrel that's at 100 and, you know, 155 proof or something like that, it's like, Oh man, you've lost so much. We're still total proof gallon. Not that bad. We're getting good yields. You've got to prove it down. And it's got that's because we're proving it down, but the humidity is also really low. So the has really, really big temperature swings. Like on any given day, like the hotter, we actually track the temperature and the humidity in multiple locations in extreme detail. So like, I think we got those readings from several locations in the rec house like every minute of every day. And it's just automatically like gets sent to the cloud and we can track it, right? And on the hottest day of the year, last year, the high point in the corner, the back corner was 117 degrees. And at that same exact moment, just 50 feet away on the bottom level, like on the floor level, it was like 98 degrees, 99 degrees. And so you're talking like it's 18, 19 degree range and temperature in the same building at the same exact time, on one floor, right? And also really low humidity. How many barrels high are you? Six. Okay. And if you would have asked us, when we started putting this up, we're like, oh, it's all in the same room. We're not going to get these huge temperature swings. When you think about the rick houses in Kentucky, where they've got, you know, six floors. They're parking structures. Yeah, they're huge. And that makes sense. And we won't see this huge amount, but it also kind of depends on where the barrel is tucked into the rick because one's on even the bottom and it's further back in. That takes a while for even on a, if you have a hot, you know, it's 100 degrees outside for several days. It takes a while for that, just the thermal momentum of all the liquid to actually heat up enough, whereas the one's closest to the roof. It's not even insulated. It's just a metal roof with the membrane on top. And so it is just hot that as soon as it's sunny, it's going to be warm. I think of it like just like radiating heat, like a salamander in a restaurant, right? Like from the top down. They're real fun to take samples from in the summer. It's really fun to climb up there. Super saturated. I don't know if you can tell the little sarcasm. It's terrible. That's where some of the blood and sweat comes into the entire process and in the tears, but yeah. Get up there in the oven. And climbing up in the rick. And yeah, it's... We give daily tours and we go through all of this stuff. We go through the production floor. We go through the rick house and everything. And we have to actually adjust our tour format and schedule seasonally based on those temperatures. It's going to be, you know, if it's comfortable in there, we can spend more time in there talking about the barrel aging process and the microclimates that exist in the space and what's happening like we're talking about now. But, you know, when it gets that hot in there, we just can't do it. We have to, you know, alter the route. We do have a really cool room. It built into the rick of our main distillery. It's like a dining room hidden in there. And so it's all glassed off. So that is actually conditioned. And it's a great spot to sit and you can you can point at all the barrels and do a lot of explanation in a temperature controlled environment, because no one wants to stand out there. I don't want to stand out and talk about it. I'll be I can tend to be really overly verbose. It would be a good way of saying it when I'm talking about process and things like that. But even in the summer, I'm pretty quick. I'm like, OK, there's that. There's that. Let's go. Let's get someplace that we can talk about. I answer all the questions, but I don't want to be out here if I don't have to be. So we already talked about your mash bill. Do you ever play around with yeast strains or how did you decide on your yeast strain? We actually don't play around with the yeast strains. We've got one. We liked it because it was a pretty clean yeast strain. It didn't actually impart any ester character. In a previous life, I worked at a brewery and I was a microbiologist. And so I loved all the yeast strains. That was a big part of my job. And you think about that in the beer and how you're really looking for this influence of, you know, I need these esters. I need this just to be of style. Whereas with the whiskey, really wanting the grain to be kind of the showpiece of it. And so allowing that to happen without really a lot of ester influence. And so it also ferments really warm. It's happy to ferment in between 95 and 100 degrees, which is wild when you think about that in any other fermentations where you're just going to end up with so many off flavors, but it's just kind of a workhorse yeast strain that we use. Toied around one time, we did a single batch of a bourbon. Actually, when the Royals were in the World Series, we did a single batch of bourbon with a champagne yeast that I was familiar with. We used it as a bottle of conditioning yeast when I worked at this brewery. And so I just wanted to try it. And serendipitously, it was ready to go into a barrel the day after they won the World Series. So we did that. So that's coming up on 10 years old. It's actually our oldest barrel that's in the Rick House right now. A single oldest barrel. I gotta say, so we recently pulled samples from that barrel. And I don't know if everyone realizes just how much impact that yeast has on flavor. But I was so excited to taste that barrel and I was absolutely blown away. It was so fruity and bright and just electric. I just loved it. But we pulled samples because we're coming up on the 10 year anniversary of that day when they won the World Series. And we're like, we gotta do something with this barrel. So we have figured it out. We are definitely not getting any of that. No. Maybe we can do one for the... Get the Cubs to win a World Series and we'll do one for them. No, White Sox. No, not the White Sox. Binny's Beverage Depot is the official champagne provider of the Chicago Cubs and the Chicago White Sox. Smart. We got our bases covered. And the Pope. And the Pope. The show's ending for the year of the Pope. See if you can spot the transition in this. Do you use the same yeast on the gin? We don't use the same yeast on the gin. Our distillery is really designed to make whiskey, and so what we do, like a lot of people, we bring in a neutral spirit. It actually is an imported wheat-based spirit. Wheat was really important when Tom Nickell, the former master distiller at Tank Array, and kind of one of the, I guess, to say a worldwide expert of gin and the techniques in which to make it, is the guy who taught me how to distill gin. He was adamant that we wanted to use wheat. Wheat's not as easy to get domestically, produce as far as like a neutral spirit. And we wanted to just get a nice neutral spirit to be a vehicle for the botanicals. The one we found just happens to be an Italian wheat neutral spirit. We then bring it in. You've seen a picture of our gin still. It's actually one that Tom and I designed. That's a cool process to do. Just tell Tom like, hey, if you could make your own gin still, what would it look like? And so he actually sketched it out on a piece of paper, which I think I might have lost at this point, which is really a shame. But it also is a very, very simple still, but it was very similar to the ones that he had used in his career, but we were able to put our own little tweaks on it. So we'll actually bring it into neutral spirit, and then we'll run it through that just to get some copper contact time. And so copper interacts with even a neutral spirit, you'd think it's not going to do much, but due to the FM principle, it actually softens it up a little bit. We call it softening, honestly, but the mouth feel is just a little bit better. So once it's run through our still at one point, then we'll use it again and do a second distillation with the botanicals. The same still with the basket. You mentioned the FM principle, can you tell people what that is? It's f***ing magic. I was expecting something kind of heady. It was so serious too. I found it. I usually try, that's a Jim Perryism, that's my dad, he gave me that one. He does, I don't know exactly what happens, but you could taste it before, if it's just been in stainless steel, and then taste it after, and it does round it out. Just enough, and I think it's what makes, that's actually the base we use for the vodka that we put out. It's a nice, just clean, rich, classic wheat vodka, but yeah. How are you guys getting access to these industry legends? That'd be a Ryan story, probably. You know, prior to starting this, my bar, Manifesto, and the restaurant, Rieger, we got a lot of recognition early on for winning a lot of cocktail awards and things like that. And I was really looking to just kind of identify other people in the industry that, you know, kind of had similar interests and goals and that type of thing. And I think the early days, I'm kind of fortunate to have been. I turned 21 in the late 90s, and that's right when kind of the craft cocktail boom was just starting to take off. Right. And those of us around the country who were doing this, they were doing the whole speakeasy thing and bringing back the golden era of cocktails and all that. We kind of became tight knit, like even if you were in different cities, like, oh, that I know someone in that city that's doing the same thing. Right. And then we got to know each other. And then we started going to Tales of the Cocktail and becoming friends. And like, we just sort of ran in the same circles. And so I was really lucky enough to meet people like Dave Pickerel and, you know, pick his brain. And then Tom Nicol happened because I first met Tom in, I think, 2009. Tales of the Cocktail did a Tankeray dinner with him. So this is like five years before we started this company. I would do kind of one off things with different brands. And I did some work for Tankeray, like at Tales and things like that. And so I was at a dinner with Tom. But then really that happened because of Steve Olson, who was another really good friend of mine and mentor of mine, who was a co-founder of Del Magay Mezcal and kind of a total icon in the industry. Like he's done everything, knows everyone. And he worked very closely with Tom to do Tankeray No. 10 and to introduce Tankeray No. 10 to the United States. So back in 1999, 2000, 2001, when Tankeray No. 10 was launching, Steve was a big part of that. And so he and Tom became very close and Steve and I were very close. He became a partner in the company and said, we need to get Tom on board as if we're going to do a gin, like we need to get Tom. That's a good story. Yeah, that's good. You got to run in the right circles. It's been 10 years ago when we first made this gin, this gin classic London dry style. We call it a Midwestern dry because we're in the Midwest. It was August of 2015 when Tom actually came to town. We were going to do our first distillations. He had the recipe that he, so it's his recipe. He was something he came up with. And I remember the night before I couldn't sleep. I was, I mean, I'm getting ready to distill gin. I've never, like, I don't know what I'm doing. I've never done this before. And I'm about to do it with Tom Nichol and I'm really nervous. So come in, make our first batch. Kind of talked about it, wanted to make a couple of tweaks. And then over the next two batches, so by batch three, we had it ready. So that was actually the second day we did a double distillation and we got batch three. As we're kind of relaxing, we like we got it. This is exactly what we want. It's got this got the mouth feel we want. It's got kind of the flavor kind of explodes over your palate rather than just be kind of linear. And we've got everything we were looking for. I remember talking to Tom, I was telling him, I was like, oh man, I couldn't sleep before doing this. And he's like, I couldn't either. You don't expect it from him being such a legend to still be like wanting to make sure you're doing the best thing. So that made it feel really good. It's been great to have him as a mentor. And that was done on a smaller still when we initially started. So getting to design a still with him that I absolutely adore. And I think you're never supposed to say it's new and improved. I loved how when we distilled on that still the very first time it like hit it, it wasn't a huge market difference. It was just like, yes, if I could have done that on my other still, I would have. And I did all these kind of quirky steps on the other still to try to get to that point. And it's just a little bit more in the mouth, feel the botanicals on it. It's the juniper, coriander, angelica root, licorice root and orange peel. So orange is the fruit. Honestly, a lot of the citrus is coming from that coriander though, too. One of the things about making gin, it's remarkable how much flavor comes from a small amount of certain things, you know, and how if you do it right and treat it right, how little it takes to really pop and still be there. It's complex though. I mean, you don't have to have 45 different botanicals in order to make a complex gin. Getting most of my opinions on gin making from a kind of a cranky old Scotsman, I kind of get those myself. And one of the things I really wanted to make certain, if I put an ingredient in any spirit that we're making, it has to be there. And you have to, it needs to be there. I'm not gonna put it on just to have an X amount of this. And I really, I think it's very difficult to maintain balance as you start adding more. And I was like, did I just lose this one as I added this? And like, I want to make sure, like, if you took one out, it's, the product is completely gone, and you can clearly see it. And then in this one, even though there's some that are just like in the kind of the Angelica root, it's not a huge flavor, but it's there. And it's like this kind of muted earthy melon type background, like it's a Harmony note, but it also it's perfect to distill with other botanicals. We do them all together. But as you add that Angelica, it allows for the others to be a little more cohesive in the distillation process. I've heard the word binder. Yeah. Yeah. And then there's another way to say it, like a like aurus root is used for the very similar, like a fixative in like a kind of helps it go. So yeah, there's times where I'll even use like a small amount of Angelica. If I'm just distilling like a single botanical distillate, just to see how it comes across in different distillation points, I might add just a little bit of Angelica to make it taste more like it. It's like using vanilla and chocolate, or salt. Yes, salt. I mean, it does help. And I think I've noticed a difference when I'm just doing that. So I'm not trying to make it taste like Angelica. I am just trying to make it taste like the best version of itself. Yeah. I think of the licorice root like that because I don't taste anything that you would like associate with licorice in there, but it's really used as like a sweetener, right? Which adds to the richness in the mouthfeel. And if I'm thinking about it in the terms of like building a cocktail, sometimes you add sugar to a cocktail not to make the cocktail sweeter, but to amplify certain flavors, right? To push other flavors forward. And I think of the licorice root in this as that purpose, serving that purpose of like amplifying the orange and amplifying some of the juniper and things like that. It pushes other flavors to the forefront and gives it richness. Is this a round in body gin also? And yeah, the flavors explode, but it stays like palate coating. And I kind of like, human beings are stupid, so we categorize things instead of just understanding the four. They actually are. But this straddles the line between like, and I'm thinking about cocktails. You could use this with a lime and sugar gimlet and add sweetness and fruit, or you could use this and add the salinity of olive brine and make a martini. And both would be absolutely fabulous and would amplify flavors that are in here. That was the goal. When we first had the conversations with Tom, he was like, what kind of gin do you want to make? So he's seen us as American gin makers and knowing a lot of the gins that were being made in America is that nude Western style, more of a departure from traditional juniper forward gin. And when we said we would like to make a London Dry style gin, I think there was a relief in him. And then he already had a recipe in his mind that he wanted to make and it was a little departure from some of the things that he had made. And getting to make it on our scale, we actually got to make it in what, well, Andy Rieger would probably describe as the most expensive way, and it is. But it also, at our size, we don't have to do like double shot gins or, like we don't have to do anything and get cute to try to make more volume. So we can make it the most expensive way, but it allows us to get the best picture of it. But being able to, if there is a gin cocktail out there that you like, having a gin, they're like, it'll be pretty good in that. Where there's some gins that may be beautiful and in specific cocktails, but you're not going to use it in a Groney. It may be good for this, but it's not going to work in something else. Super specific gimmicky kinds of gins that have like that one identifiable fruit, yuzu or Chinese allspice or whatever. Yeah, if you go over the top with cinches. The usability of it gets narrow. I love that you mentioned the gimlet because that's like one of my favorite go-to's is a gimlet. It's like a daiquiri with gin, right? And it's bright and it should be ice cold and strong and actually not too sweet. It actually should have some like tartness to it. Right. But I love ordering a Rieger gin gimlet. Absolutely. Simple drinks that highlight quality ingredients. I think that's one thing we wanted to make sure that what we're doing is like, you can make simple, you don't have to hide. There's nothing to hide in this. You can amplify and you want to showcase it. I had a mentor real quick tell me one of the best ways to drink or try a new gin, is to just put it in a shaker and just shake the hell out of it, and then just try it that way ice cold. And I think that this is one of those that would just back to back to back. That could be so good. Just ice cold. Well, it has the proof to back it up in a cocktail at 92.2. And it's deptly layered where it hits every part of your palate, which is really interesting about it. You were about to speak to that. Yeah, it was. Actually, when I was talking about the three, the first distillation, the very first distillation, when we tasted it, we're like, it's a little linear. It's not, it doesn't, we were able to kind of tweak some things. And some of that was getting a little more copper contact time. And that involved using, we have a defecmator on that original still, and we have one on our new one, but had to utilize that in a way to have it get some reflux with some contact with the copper. Once we did that, we were able to actually kind of hone in on a technique that we wanted to do. FM gin. FM. When I first mentioned that to Tom Nickel, he also, most of the time people want to, they're like, I think I know what that is. And they don't ask. And so I did it at a tasting at Binny's and no one asked. And so I just left. They probably went home and they were Googling it. And it's something about frequency modulation. I don't know how they do that. But Tom Nickel didn't know. And then I was like, I got weird. It was just he and I, we were getting, we were doing some stuff. And I was like, you know what that is, right? He's like, I don't. And I was like, uh, and told him. So he's like, this kid's telling me, teaching me stuff that I don't even know about distillation. And man, he's really fun to work with. It's a humble, but very smart, going to learn a lot more than just making gin from him. Kind of knowing the talent you have, what you have, and then knowing where your limits are too. And so not getting to, don't get, never get like arrogant. He probably has a reason to be arrogant. He could if you wanted to, and he's not. He is just a very, like very friendly, very warm, well, cranky and very curse word filled man. But great person to learn how to make gin from. It's been been pretty lovely. How much is this gin going to cost me this weekend? $34.99. $34.99. I can handle that. At Binny's. At Binny's. One more question I have for you guys is, obviously, for mapping out where you want to take things, what's going to be the focus and where do you see yourselves going within the next few years and on? We get that question all the time. I get that question all the time and I knew it was coming. The thing is, it's so hard. It's like if someone had asked me back in 2010 and 11, when I first started down this path, where do you think this is going to be in five years, ten years? I mean, there's no way I would have predicted where we actually are now, right? It has been such an unexpected, crazy journey, and I'm super proud of where we're at. So it's hard to know exactly. But if I could say what I hope, where I'd like to be, my hometown, Kansas City, is really important to me. I grew up there. I've lived my entire life there. Andy's family is from there. This brand was built there in 1887 when Kansas City was just kind of a Western boom town, right? And so we have such a strong connection to Kansas City roots and history. And I want to continue to build on that legacy. And I want Rieger to become synonymous with Kansas City and people to think about Kansas City when they see the bottle and they see the name Rieger and hear the name Rieger. Kind of like how you hear Jack Daniels, like, oh yeah, Tennessee. I want to have a strong connection and sense of place. I want Rieger to have a strong sense of place in Kansas City. And so I think we're on that path. And I think if we continue to stay true to like our roots and how we started and where we come from and continue to put a focus on quality and, you know, taking a lot of pride in everything that we do, I think we'll we'll get there. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good answer. Yeah. I'm actually looking forward to it. Like now we're 10 years in. And a lot of those things, I can't even talk about the questions. I don't know what I'm like, start off, don't really know what you're doing. And now I start to know a little bit more what we're doing, but still know there's so much more to learn. And but now I'm excited to see what we develop over the next 10 years. And that's maybe not even like a specific product. There might be something that we're going to be doing that I haven't even realized we want to do. And that might be in the next year or next three. But being able to have that eye for the future in a more comfortable way, to have an idea of like, OK, if we do these types of things, we've succeeded doing like, this worked out well if we did like this in the past. Like we can now tweak this, we can try this and be able to develop some things. Really, like I like the idea of leaning into the whiskey portfolio as much as I love like the gin getting to do that. And we've got some ideas for some things coming up there. But I'll be pretty disappointed in myself if I don't have a gin or two in the next, you know, five to six years. I don't have that as like a, then I don't have a timeline, marketing is not saying like you have to do this, you have to knock it out. So it's just I get the chance to, if we want to try to develop a product, make sure it needs to exist before we do it. And so keep giving him toys to play with. Oh, yeah, absolutely. We we actually, you know, we have to sometimes practice a little restraint because we are creative individuals and passionate about what we do. So it's easy to like want to like try something new every day. So sometimes we have to dial it back. But there's certainly lots of opportunity for us to get creative and innovative and do cool things. And you're going to see more of that in the future. It's it's it's happening. So cool. Cool. This is great. I really appreciate the refresher. And this is going to cost me personally, once again. So thanks, guys, for coming. Thank you. Thanks for I mean, thanks for heading around to the stores and talking to our customers and our employees. Absolutely. It's been a blast. And also our listeners. Yeah, yeah. Real cool. And if you're passionate too about podcasts, you should leave a review for ours wherever you listen to podcast listener podcasts. I think the app is called Podcasts. Thank you for listening to Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. Back soon with something awesome. Until then, I'm Greg. I'm Lexi. I'm Rob. I'm Nathan. I'm Ryan. Keep tasting. Now, we always end the episode with the guest or whoever saying, keep tasting, but there's two of you. Yeah. What do you want to do? I could say keep and you could say tasting. We don't have to get that. Absolutely will not work. I would like it on tape anyway. Just say it at the same time. Okay. Three, two, one. Keep tasting. That's perfect. You guys done that before? No. That's how we actually end every phone call at night. Love you, bud. Keep tasting.