You are listening to Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. Back in your feed, I'm Greg. I do communications at Binny's Beverage Depot. I'm Brett. Hey, Brett. I am the emeritus professor of the Whiskey Hotline. Okay, and we have a guest, but the listener already knows that because they downloaded this. You know, they know what's up. Melissa? Yes. Hi. Hi. Thank you for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. That is an introduction of a special guest. I'm patting myself on the back for having done a good job. I think it was one of the best I've had. Okay. Take it away. I did my job. I'm just going to taste whiskey now. Oh, so I'm driving this bus. Maybe have Melissa introduce herself. Are you sure? Yeah. So Melissa, we're about to talk about one of the most historical distilleries in the wonderful history of bourbon in the state of Kentucky. Could you please tell us what your role is? Yeah, absolutely. So my title is Master Taster of Old Forester. And that of course leads to the common question, what is a master taster and what do they do? And really, I think it depends on who you're a master taster for. It's a really kind of unique role and it sits right in the crux between a lot of different parts of the whiskey world. Master distillers, they oversee the whole production process. Master blenders are working on the maturation and finish good side. Master tasters usually fall underneath one of those two roles and kind of connect the marketing and production worlds. So I spend a lot of time with all of the stakeholders, both in the production side and on the marketing and sales side, and kind of participate in conversations across the board so that mostly like our future focus strategies are kind of aligning with what we've done in the past, or a brand that has a lot of continuity. And so my role ends up becoming a lot about creating continuity. All right. I still don't completely understand, but I guess it's better than being a master taster at like the plant where they make deep woods off. Right. So you're sort of, well, I mean, that fills in a lot of things because you're providing input to production, you're providing input to organoleptic. Trying to maintain a DNA of the brand. Are you doing QA also or is that...? Yeah. So like on the production side, it's a lot about continued quality assurance, but it's mostly about innovation and special releases because we're a relatively big brand at a long time established company, which means there are a lot of scientists on our payroll that are very good at quality control. So I play a role in that, but I also take our practices in that space because I'm embedded in them, and I take them to my trainings and my presentations to consumers to explain to people in an I am envious of your job. It's a cool job. Sometimes I feel like we have cool jobs, but your job is cooler. It's pretty cool. Yeah. I know people say that to me all the time and I still in three years haven't come up with a good answer, like response for it. I'm like, yeah, it's a cool job. Yeah. Just strut. Yeah. You know what you're right. It actually is. Yeah. It's fun. I'm a big E extroverted person and I've been in the bourbon industry going on a decade, which is kind of crazy to say. And I really like having this kind of macro lens into the industry. And this job is perfect for that because you're really people-centered and you're also interacting with the industry in lots of different ways. Well, we'll get a little bit of history on a couple of fronts. Where were you before this role at Brown Foreman? So right before this role, I was actually with Beam Small Batch Brands, but I had just been there about six months and I had been with Bullet on an agency side, mostly at the home place, their visitor experience at Stitzel Weller and then their new distillery in Shelbyville. And I was with that company for about five years. So that's where I got my start. I really wanted to work for a supplier, so I just obtained a role at Beam and this role became available and it was kind of again, like perfectly situated for me. So I kind of had to shoot my shot, worked out. That's great. Any technical background or just a great palette? I'm pretty self-taught on all fronts. The nobody can see the air quotes technical background for me was I spent about three and a half years running a single barrel program where I was speaking to production on a regular basis is just by way of running the back end of the program and then tasting every single day with folks. That program had different mash bills, different yeast profiles, so we were tasting lots of different varieties of formulated maturates but all at the same proof. So it just so happened to be like a perfect training ground for sensory analysis because proof was never playing a role. It was all about the grain bill, the yeast profile, and the maturation. All other things being equal is impossible, but you seem to have come from that space. Yeah, just by sheer luck because the decision to make the program one singular proof, I didn't have a seat at that table, but it just so happened to be a really good opportunity for me. We would have certainly had to have worked with you. Because I know the program you're talking about. I sold a lot of barrels to Binny's and it was an unallocated program. So again, speaking of cool jobs, people would come in for a single barrel and leave with five. And you don't get to do that in most single barrel programs. They're usually like highly allocated. So it was a great space to learn, honestly. Let's dive a little bit deeper so we have some context when we talk about what you have created as a master taster. Old Forester, maybe a little bit of first paragraph Wikipedia, talk about what Old Forester is. Yeah. Old Forester was founded in 1870. And I know in the bourbon industry, you hear a lot of founding dates, 1700, 1800. So history and heritage, not necessarily unique and ownable to one brand. But what I love about working on this brand, history is a big part of our industry. And we were founded 155 years ago and we have been legally offered at shelf the entire time from 1870 until today, without interruption, same company ownership, same brand name. You just don't find that continuity anywhere else in the industry. We're the only bourbon brand that that's true for. And so when we look back, and I'm a big storyteller by nature. So when you look back at our history, we've been there for the ups and downs, ebbs and flows, highs and lows of the industry. And we've also spent a lot of time kind of honing our skills and our best practices. We were founded by a pharmaceutical salesman who was trying to improve the kind of quality control of whiskey. So he was the first person to take whiskey out of the barrels, batch it and put it in glass bottles. A lot of those techniques he began led to standard industry practices we use today. And so that's kind of the foundation of Old Forester. Over the years, we brought a lot of other firsts to market. We have our 1910 expression, our whiskey row series that tells the story of being the first double barreled bourbon on record. We were the first single barrel by selection, which we'll talk about today with the president's choice. So really just kind of a pioneer in the industry, but simply by way that we've been there and we've just been trying to do the best that we can for our consumers every step along the way. So we're going to talk about Whiskey Row and Presidents. So for anybody that's ever been to the distillery, actually when it was built, which would have been the 60s, probably 70s. So we acquired it in the 40s. I don't know when it was built, to be honest with you. That's a good question. But we bought it in the 40s. That's when we started operating out of there. But it's interesting because we're going to talk about a wide range of spirits that are in Bottle for you yet you have a distillery who is known for very, very high quality but also known for very high consistency. Everything from distillation regimen to aging and especially aging. Because you're one of the only distilleries that actually heat cycles warehouses. And have a consistent size. And 100% of the warehouses for everything across the board. So with that, how did the Whiskey Row program start? I guess because my memory going back into the 90s and early 2000s, the Old Forester was just one of the fighting brands along with Wild Turkey and Jim Beam, and Jack Daniels, and Evan Williams, and so on and so forth. Where did the idea come from for Whiskey Row and the variants? And then how did it start to lead to your position? So the idea for Whiskey Row, like you said, if you look back on Old Forester's history, we were a pretty simple brand. We were all about having a singular brand to recognize. We had 86 proof, 100 proof, bottled and bond. But it wasn't until this modern day renaissance of bourbon that we started dabbling in more of a craft style series, which is what the Whiskey Row series has grown to be. So with our core expressions, our 86, our 100 proof, and our rye, we really want those to be good value for robust flavor. We want them to be really utilitarian for bartenders. We also want them to be that trusty bottle on the shelf that our consumers are going to come re-up on every week or two, responsibly. But the Whiskey Row series answered the call for those folks who are getting into the bourbon industry and who are really interested in tasting notes and sitting down with a Glenn Caron and dissecting the flavor coming out of the 20 teens. Old Forester, even though we're a really historic brand, we were almost dead in the water in the early 2000s. Bourbon had not been popular for so long. Brown Foreman had really found this success story in Woodford Reserve because it was appealing to people that maybe weren't that interested in the classic Kentucky bourbon. That's what we were. But the Brown family and the company was really behind resurrecting the brand and the Whiskey Row series I think has been a really big part of that because it serves up what craft bourbon consumers have been looking for and what they're asking for. And that's what, again, we try to do is we listen to our consumers and we bring our Old Forester take on what they're really interested in. So what we do is this is all our Old Forester bourbon. We use one mashbill, one yeast strain. So all of this distillate goes into the barrels as the same product. I always say every barrel of Old Forester has the potential to grow up to be any one of our skews. And we kind of leverage different techniques in the process to create four very unique flavor profiles that can appeal in their own way to every kind of singular bourbon drinker, but also has different consumers that kind of gravitate to them. So that's in a nutshell what the series is. Does that answer your question? Yeah, it does answer the question. And so that, because I remember the first, it seemed to me that the first innovation or the first step towards that was a little bit of a baby step was signature. Yeah, the signature is definitely, it shows, you know, our 86 proof is a really like sessionable, accessible, and also like price point accessible expression. And the 100 proof brings in a little bit more of that robust flavor, that really kind of presence of body that we like to serve up for Old Forester. So I agree with you. And then the Whiskey Row series just takes that to another level. And it's also a storytelling opportunity for us because we have all of these stories in our back pocket. I've never heard anyone use the word sessionable to describe whiskey. And I'm putting that in my lexicon. Yeah, you should. I'm actually on a crusade right now to teach people how to drink whiskey in warmer months because it can be very sessionable, especially in cocktails. I'm 100%... Yeah, evangelized. As a long time user of the word sessionable, I'm... Sessionable. I usually do describe Guinness. But I absolutely know what you're saying. I heard you're a beer drinker and beer is my second love. And so I think I'd pull some flavor and texture language over from that for sure. So we're at Signature, and we have a bunch of marketing people that decide that it's time that we need to do something to resurrect this Morbin brand, and we've got a lot of whiskey sitting around that we can't use for Woodford or for Old Forester or other uses. So how do you start, or where does it start, besides the idea? Can we try one while we talk? Would you like to try? Yeah, do you want to taste one? Well, look at these bottles. Do you want to start at the beginning? Yes. Since that's what we're going to talk about, where do you start? So the series started with the 1870, and I'll caveat this conversation by saying I was not working on the brand when the series started, so I can't necessarily give insight into the conversations that were being had. But Chris Morris, our master distiller emeritus, there you go, you got that ASMR of the cork pop. Chris was really kind of, this was his vision as the Whiskey Row series, and Chris is just a memory bank of Old Forester history. And so he has a really great way of understanding the liquid that we have in inventory, and how to bring it to life in a connection with an Old Forester story. And so he has really been the driving force behind the inception of this series with the 1870. An 1870 original batch, that's what we call it. It's supposed to tell the story of the starting of Old Forester. It was the first bottled bourbon. But it also tells the flavor story of what makes Old Forester unique, and that's our yeast profile. I mean, it's a lot of things that we do, and we'll talk through that kind of as we taste these different expressions. But this one really exemplifies what we get from fermentation, which is much more fruity and floral than you're used to finding in bourbon. I just always think of bananas and strawberries when I think of Old Forester. Exactly. Yeah. So it's fruity, red fruits, tropical fruits, orchard fruits, stone fruits. It's floral. This actually ties back to what we were just talking about with summertime cocktails. That's why we're really well suited for things like that. So the 1870 original batch is really going to highlight those notes. And it's funny. And to me, this is, I remember when this was launched, this is the direct extension of how do we take signature and make more money, and rebrand it, which is okay. It's a bit rebranded because that was such a good bottling that I think never quite did what people were hoping that it would do. And this is, I mean, this is the original recipe at 90 proof, right, without a whole bunch of other things. And again, it's accessible, it's sippable. The thing I love to say about this is it has this really nice spectrum of appeal, because if you're just getting into whisky, this is going to be really appealing to you. It's juicy, it's got a big honey note versus those big baking spices and kind of rye aromatics we tend to get. But if you're a seasoned whisky drinker, even if you drink cast-dranked whisky on occasion, you might like this on an evening where you want something that's a little bit more sippable. So it really can appeal to everyone. It's so pleasant. Pleasant is a great word. I also use the word finesse a lot when I talk about this expression. This fits into a few different distilleries whose products that I like. It's chocolate-covered cherry to a certain extent to me. That's stone fruit with a little bit of the nice chocolate, but like dark chocolate a little. The aromatics are beautiful. More complex too. I like banana candy. It's so plush. It's so round. Did you say polished? Yeah, it's like a totally, everything's in place, totally produced, wonderful little package. Also, there's like this tiny little pop of clove. I like that too. Yeah. The clove is, because we talk a lot about spice, especially in the rest of the series, the bottled and bond is very spice forward. We get those notes really present in the other expressions, which is a more classic way of styling a bourbon. But I like that the clove note is still in this one, even though the fruit and the sweet aromatics take center stage. Yes. And then, Softin, where does the age fall in this? Because you're running it about four or four and a half years on the regular line, correct? Yeah, so four to six years is the range for the whole series. So it can range really from top to bottom, because these are small batch craft expressions. We're really selective about the inventory we're using, so they tend to run that kind of two-year span. When you're picking, do you pick from favorite parts? I mean, I would guess part of your role is being relied upon to have tasting notes or an idea of what everything tastes like in profile throughout your housing system. I mean, I imagine you probably had them. The standard flavor is definitely something I interact with a lot. Now, I am really transparent about the fact I'm not writing dumps for our everyday skews. So I think a lot of people, when they hear the title Master Taster, they kind of presume that I'm putting together a batch of the 1870, which to be honest with you is not true, because we distribute this all around the country. And so this is, it's a small batch expression, but it is a constant expression of ours. And so we have folks on our team. I mean, there are hundreds of people that work on bringing these bottles to market. And we have folks on the maturation team, research and development, that are the folks who write dumps for something like this. I would be more something like our 117 series, or like selecting the barrels that go into the President's Choice Program. That's a little bit more of where I'm playing. Now, I do participate in the paneling. And so if, you know, I'm participating in that on a weekly basis, but if we had a consumer write in and say, hey, the flavor on 1870 is tasting different to me, that would be something that would come back to Caleb, our assistant master distiller, and myself. And we'd sit down with the product, taste it against a standard from our quality lab, and be able to say, yeah, you're right, there's something going on here. Or, you know, I really think that maybe I had something super spicy. Or, you know, sometimes people, they don't realize how much their environment can be. It's hard to tell people they're wrong when they're wrong. Well, and, you know, that's the thing about whiskey. I think it's so subjective. But the nice thing is that Caleb and I, and we have infrastructure in place to say, okay, we're going to take that seriously, and let's go back and really kind of check ourselves, because consistency is a high value of ours. Sure. And we are dealing, everything we deal with is subjective. So you're right, there's so many more factors involved than just the empirical liquid that's in the bottle. Yep. But I'm not writing the dumps. So I do like to let people know. And I love to shine a little bit of light on like how that actually works behind the scenes, because I think it is actually a lot more complicated than people realize. When they learn about the whiskey industry, it is really hard to wrap your head around just how layered and intricate it is. How much is this, 1870? 1870 is $49.99. That's great. So we have our DNA. What was our next step as we're going through the history of bourbon? So you kind of established the origin story, and really the practices, like I said, that George Garvin Brown began with the bottling of the bourbon, batching for a consistent flavor profile. They went on to inspire things like the Bottle and Bond Act, which I'm not saying we were the reason Bottle and Bond was passed. That was lobbying by a lot of US distillers to kind of bring that forward. But this is a great opportunity when I tell folks, the history of Old Forester is really intertwined with the history of bourbon, but the history of bourbon is really intertwined with the history of the country. So this is a fun civics lesson, and the fact that Bottle and Bond Act was the first consumer protection law ever in the United States. And it was really inspired by the movement of people like George Garvin Brown, our founder, who were trying to communicate through packaging, that this was a product you could trust. And so that's what Bottle and Bond ended up doing. If you put Bottle and Bond on your product, it had been vetted through these rules, through the legislation, and so you could trust it as a product. So we decided that was kind of a worthy bench point for the next expression, and we decided this would be a really classically styled Kentucky bourbon. So this is going to pick up on more of your barrel characteristics than say the 1870 where we're highlighting what makes us different. This is going to really flex our muscles when it comes to the nice oak influence, baking spices, sweet aromatics. You get a big vanilla note right there in the middle. You're still going to have the fruits, but they're just going to take on more of a dried fruit. Some people say fruitcake kind of tone. It's like graham cracker pie crust. Yeah, graham cracker is a common note for sure. Hundred proof, that's what it has to be to be bottled and bond, but we've also got Signature 100, we've got our hundred proof rye. I did a tasting the other day with only hundred proof expressions of Old Forester, and it was called Old Faux Slays at 100 proof. This is a nice expression because our brand is just always really good at 100 proof. This is a cocktail bourbon too. Yeah, this is a trade favorite for the Whiskey Row series, and I always love talking to people about it in cocktails because it's really versatile. Yeah, I mean, it's structured and it would play well with stuff like vermouth, but it's still fleshy at the same time. Yeah, and a lot of people identify and I agree that it almost masks as a rye. You get so much of the rye aromatics out of it. So a lot of people know rye is just a workhorse in cocktails. So I think it can almost shape shift in a cocktail between being a really great bourbon presence, but also having some qualities of a rye. Well, if you're going to be adding other ingredients, it has to have something that makes you not forget that there's bourbon in there. This might be actually my favorite of them. This is rock solid. He said classic bourbon styling. That's it, right? This is bourbon. Yeah. That's how bourbon tastes in my brain. Yeah. This is classic. You got your caramels, your toffees, your baking spices, dried fruits, a little bit of oak influence, some char on the back end, I mean everything about it. I have to say, like you said, it might be your favorite. I honestly think when people get right down to it, we have some that are real fan favorites and success stories for us. But this is the dark horse. Everybody always comes back to this and they're like, you know what, I really like that Bottled and Bond. It recently won gold at San Francisco Spirits Competition. I definitely think it's getting its flowers these days. We're going to be progressing and trying a couple of other variants on top of this. This is the one that's truly in the middle. Yeah. It's got a little bit more strength than it's. The age is probably the same. It's right in the middle of all the other offshoots of where you go with the series. Brett, how much is this Bottled and Bond? $49.99. All right. That's just phenomenal. That's the best. It's not going to get better than there. Well, it depends on what your opinion is. Now, we're going to go out of date order. Yeah. You want to go in order of how things are released. Yeah. Order of how things are released. Because I think that also it's funny, we'll go in the order of how things are released because it's actually a timeline of the marketing of the business. Yeah. Because you do 1870 when everybody's starting to think, especially the big legacy distilleries are starting to think about doing some innovation so you do an innovation and then you hit bottle to bond when bottle to bond becomes important. Now, we're going to 1920. 1920, which I always say everybody loves talking about prohibition. Really, there's no bad time to be selling a prohibition style because it's just a fascinating historical marker in the bourbon industry specifically because it was such a booming commercial industry in 1919 when the Volstead Act passed and it wiped out an industry except for six licensed distilleries, which is just a crazy story in and of itself, but then you get into the fact that Old Forester sold continuously through that time period and is the only existing brand still under the same name, You didn't have Purple Creek Moon or Out in the Holler. It's also when we acquired a lot of really significant facilities of ours. We purchased the GL. Redmond Distillery in 1923 and that became our corporate campus eventually. So our headquarters in Louisville still sits on that site today. So it's just an important time in the company's history, the 1920. I'm wondering what defines a prohibition style. It's punchy. Yes. So the reason we call this prohibition style is all about the proof point, the 115 proof, which is the highest proof in the Whiskey Row series. And it's because that was the proof point that, quote unquote, barrel strength whiskey was being bottled at in pints for medicinal use. People always ask me, what did you do to your product from 1919 to 1920 to make it medicinal? And the answer is nothing. We just didn't water it down before it went into packaging. And so that was the cash strength of the day, quote unquote, but barrel entry proof was a lot lower than it is today. So typically, you'd enter a barrel around 110. Today, we go into a barrel at 125. So when you look at our barrel strength today, it's going to be much higher. But we really wanted to proof it as if it were at that proof point of the Prohibition Era. And that has actually been what makes this product shine. This is actually our best seller in the Whiskey Row series. And it's because the way that we develop our flavor and our grains, our fermentation, our barrel treatment, and truly our maturation, you mentioned before, it makes this 115 proof just sing. And so people really like the body, the texture, and the flavor profile of this one. Sorry to wax poetics along on that. Yeah, it strikes me, too, that based on that, that you still, again, haven't lost the DNA, but it has its own unique characteristics that make it a distinctively different bottling, that because of the ability of the whiskey to stand up to the extra Yeah, and I think that that's what people, sometimes they can't articulate it, but that's what they like about it, is you're getting this really big pop of flavor, and not saying it's devoid of spice. I mean, it's spicy right there on the front of the palate, which is what you're looking for with a nice robust whiskey, but the finish, it just kind of finishes off in this really nice dark chocolate, a little bit of sea salt, smoky char, red fruit, that black cherry note's coming back, and you don't get the ethanol or the alcohol. And so, yeah, that's definitely because of the techniques we use bringing this one together. It's a bruiser, though. I never put water in whiskey, but I did on this one. But it is, and this was released right around the time when you had a whole bunch of chest beating that I'm somehow proving something if I drink the things that are the strongest. And you again stepped in with something that is really that's strong, but is elegant and actually drinkable. And would be certainly if you ever wanted to introduce somebody to a higher proof bourbon, this would be one of them. It's like, just try this. Yeah, this is again accessible. But yeah, for those folks who are looking for the experience that it serves up, I have to say too, I do a lot of tasting through the whiskey row with consumers. And so I'll talk to people about their preferences. And if folks like drinking on the rocks, first of all, you can drink any whiskey expression on the rocks. Nobody should ever tell you not to. But I will suggest this one to them because it's going to keep its structure as it proofs down. And I always say you're going to get like a journey of flavor with this one. And even like non-whiskey drinkers will end up liking that the best. If they have this over, say, a large cube, because that flavor is really accessible. If anything, it brings out more of the milk chocolate on the finish. Very chocolatey. Yeah. Okay. How much is this one? Brad, how much is this bottle? This is a relative steel at $59.99. Uh-oh. I need to stop discovering things that I like so much. That's a problem. Now we're going to Tarantino back a decade. We're going to go back a decade, and we're also, which is good that this happened in history, because this was one that was definitely, I'm sure, inspired by the next wave of innovation, or what people were calling innovation. Bourbon is really, really difficult to innovate with Bourbon and Rye, because the rules under what you have to do are so strict, right? You have to be, you have a very, very set parameter for your mash bill. You have set parameters for distillation strength. You have set parameters for aging. So at some point in time, it's going to be difficult to do innovation. And one of the innovations that the industry started coming up with, that Brown Form and Old Forester jumped on, was 1910. Yeah, double barreling. And barrel finishing really is what I would say the category of innovation has become. And I'll say, I think you're absolutely right. It's difficult to innovate on bourbon and rye. It's also really difficult to innovate on bourbon and rye when you're trying to keep a well-established core flavor profile present. Because a lot of innovations in bourbon, especially the last decade, have been playing with grain bills. I mean, maturation innovation as well, but we can't really play with a grain bill that much if we want to maintain the Old Forester flavor. And so we do have to kind of ask ourselves, what in innovation makes sense as an Old Forester expression? Well, just ombre on it. So finishing has definitely become an industry trend, but the cool thing about it, and we have a very rich archive department at Brown Foreman, and definitely for Old Forester because we have all that continuity. And so our archives department can go back and verify claims. And so we had this story from 1910. We have actual bottles. We have pamphlets that talk about this in the news and to shareholders. There was a fire in our Whiskey Row location back in 1910. For those who don't know, we had a commercial office and bottling operation at 117 West Main Street, which is where our visitor location is today. We're back in the original space from 1882 to 1919. So in 1910, there was a fire, compromised our bottling operation. They dumped the totes of whiskey into new charred oak barrels to remove them from the premises as quickly as possible. That would be considered double barreling these days. You take a fully matured whiskey, you dump it into a new charred cask. Well, those barrels sat for years because life goes on and things get set aside. I'm sure they didn't have the advanced inventory tracking systems that we have today back in 1910. Even today, barrels get lost in the shuffle. So they ended up tapping into it a couple years later, and we have documented storytelling of this back from the era. So they established that it was the first double barreling of a bourbon, which of course is a modern trend today. We were able to bring the old fine whiskey to life, which is what the brand called it at the time. It was a one-time release called Old Fine Whiskey. And we actually have some of it. I got to nose some of the original 1910 Old Fine Whiskey the other day, and it was a very fun experience to kind of call back to, yeah. The classic oops, all barrel. Yeah, I call it our Betty Crocker moment. I don't know if that's trademarked, but chocolate chip cookies were created by accident. So delicious things created by accident. That was at the Toll House. This is a nice side story. I actually got to try this not for the first time, not for the first time, but I was able to try this early on in its life cycle in Louisville at the Main Street facility with Campbell. And I believe that I was in a little bit of trouble because I said I don't like double barreled whiskey. And it wasn't my favorite. And apparently it wasn't the appropriate time to say, oh, nice. Double barreled whiskey. Okay, put up or shut up. Let's try it. As double barreled whiskey goes, yeah, this is a good one, but I still don't personally like double. I appreciate that concession. Just a caveat for everything he's going to say over the next three minutes. Well, so let's talk about double barreling, right? Because I always tell people when you're maturing your bourbon in your barrels, you're accessing those wood sugars, right? And so you're going to get the maximum amount of wood sugars at the beginning of your maturation and year over year you're going to get less and less because you've already obtained them. So when you go into that second barrel, you're starting with the maximum amount again. So you're basically squaring your number of wood sugars, which gives you a lot of those sweet aromatics. We in the spirit of innovation, rather than just saying we're going to put it in another barrel, same specs, get those wood sugars, we wanted to treat the second barrel differently. And because we were making our own barrels and really kind of skilled coopers for a long time, we played around with some different manipulations and we ended up going with what we call a heavy char. So really one of the longest char times you'll find in the industry. And that's where you get the sweet aromatics and the viscosity, but you're also getting some smoke and some char notes. You're getting a little bit of that roasted coffee bean. I call it the roasty toasty factor. That is a technical term you guys can go use if you'd like to. Roasty toasty. Yeah. It's buttery. Yeah. It's super viscous. Yeah, the texture is one of the best characteristics for sure. Cause it's interesting, cause people don't think about when you're talking about accessing all the wood sugars and all the elements of the wood, sometimes early on that if you've ever had a bourbon that's only been aged for a year, year and a half, it's gotten maybe 50% of its color even at that point in time. But there's a whole bunch of stuff in there. Everything in wood isn't great, right? And so the reason why you bounce, why you're not doing bourbon at two years old, you're probably doing it four and a half or five as an entry level, is subtractive aging. And part of subtractive aging is also the char level and the fact that it acts as a filter. So that would be for people who are sensitive to wood, that's the issue is taking all those great things that went in there, then over time all the bad, all the really bitter, metallic elements start to sort of fade away, that when you go into a For sure. And I think you do a good job of balancing this particular one because you can tell that it's been a new oak, but it's not green, it's not. Yeah. And I think too, we're talking about original maturite, so that hundred proof that we end up maturing and then sending into the second barrel, you know, that was aged in heat cycling as well as the additional year in the heavy char. So I think that heat cycling also has to do with how much depth of flavor we're able to access as well as the toast level on our barrels because we've got that nice toast, so you can really get those kind of vanilla flavors behind there too. I also think the 93 proof has something to do with its sippability, and that was Chris Morris really kind of determined that proof point as its best kind of sipping proof. And I got to say a lot of, you know, I'm not, I won't claim to be proficient in scotch. I have, I always say I'm all depth, no breadth. I'm really bourbon focused in my career. But a lot of scotch drinkers that are at like trade events and they taste our portfolio, they gravitate towards this one almost every time. So I definitely think that kind of smokiness and the softness of the texture is really appealing. Exactly. The fruit's still there too, but it's just wearing this big plush coat of spice and vanilla. Plush coat like that. Very nice. Brett? So, next up, we don't have that here, but maybe you can describe a little just because it has been much more limited availability, but it comes out periodically, is 1924. What happened in 1924? In 1924, I actually alluded to it a little bit earlier. So, prohibition starts in 1920. We have permit number three as a medicinal whiskey license. So, a lot of people don't realize having a medicinal whiskey license meant that you didn't get to keep distilling whiskey. You could just sell what was already aging in your warehouses when the law went into effect, which means that as people continue to get sick and remain sick and drink those pints of medicinal whiskey, you're just dwindling your stock and it's eventually going to run out. And so, all of the warehouses full of whiskey that was not owned by a licensed company started getting purchased by companies like ours. And the government passed kind of an additional law called the Concentration Warehouse Act because all this inventory was floating all over the country and the state. And so, they said you have to have one site per licensed company where you can keep all of your barrels. And that became the GL Redmond site, which had been closed. Brown Foreman purchased it. We started storing all of our medicinal whisky there. And we started bottling other matriot under the Old Forester name at that point. So we thought 1924, it's a significant year in our company's history. We released it in 2024 originally. So it was a 100 year anniversary of us purchasing that site. And also the versatility of Old Forester and the resilience during that time. So to this date, our bourbon portfolio has been one Mash Bill, one yeast profile. So this was an opportunity for us to bottle a different Mash Bill. And we just decided it would be a 10 year age statement for fun. How much innovation are you guys doing of things that haven't seen the light of day yet in terms of possibly different Mash Bills? Possibly different aging. I know you can play around with Barrel styles. Yeah, we have, I would say, a pretty healthy idea bank and a nice handful of things that have been laid down. And we're kind of sitting on to see how they develop and what the right moment is. We're actually just doing a lot of work right now on kind of like really looking into the future and understanding like the Whiskey Row series. It's a chronological series. You know, we love to call back to our history. So like, where else can we play that makes sense for the series? It's going to resonate with consumers and that also utilizes our product in a way that makes it shine. So we have some good ideas in the pipeline, yeah. That's good. And anything kicking around that you would have done? Because I know there was a period of time when the bourbon business was way, way down because of the efficiency of the Shively facility, you would have done a lot of contracting for people at that time, for either brands that had maybe come out of there that had spun off, or anything. Do you got any of those things still kicking around that would have been, they would have had to have distilled to the spec of the person? If we were contracting for other folks? Not to my knowledge, no. So we, especially as Old Forester, gained momentum with the establishment of the Whiskey Row series in the opening of The Homeplace. The Shively site really got focused on putting their full-time efforts into the column Still Distill It for Woodford and the production of Old Forester. We also went through a significant expansion in the last two years. So that was a journey for our production folks over there. But to this day, I'm not under the impression we're doing any contracting. How about Rye, which is a very undersung, I think, from Old Forester, except amongst some very rabid dedicated fans, a very, very undersung product that's been coming out of that facility that's fantastic. Yeah, I would agree with you. I appreciate that. And I think that we have tons of runway on Rye. So I hear lots of momentum, especially in the on-premise right now. But we're definitely kind of getting the awareness on Rye up. So I'm very excited because I'm a Rye fan myself, just as a category. And I love hearing people talk about it. And I always call our Rye kind of like the cat for dog lovers because I think it's really friendly to folks who aren't, who are bourbon drinkers that are maybe not fans of the style of Rye whiskey. But ours, I think our mash bill is unique. So we use 65% Rye, 20% malted barley, and 15% corn. So the malted barley content is relatively high. And rather than getting all of the Rye and aromatics at like a 95.5, not knocking it, but it's a totally different style. You really get this nice balance and rounded flavor from the malt presence. And yeah, so we produce all of the Old Forester Rye in Shively, and part of our expansion was to really be able to scale up grain recipes like that, because we do see a lot of runway on the Rye. So we are producing quite a bit of it in our annual plan. And we actually have new systems of grain milling, of cooking, where we can actually make sure we do that more efficiently, so that we can kind of increase what we can fit into a schedule. Super selfishly. Can we try the Rye? The 100 proof? Yeah, okay. Bread, is that okay? Yeah, of course. I want to try it. Absolutely. I mean, while we're talking about it. What am I missing out on? And like I said, Old Forester at 100 proof, super solid. So that's true for this as well. We are using the same yeast strain. So this is our Rye Mash Bill with the yeast strain. I was wondering about that. So I mean, like the, but in more barley. So the same yeast strain is pulling fruit, ester notes out of the barley, out of the Rye, out of everything, out of its own. Out of everything. Yeah. So the yeast profile, really it's eating up sugars and it's expressing those fruits and florals. Well, the other thing that's interesting, you just don't, one, Rye is more expensive than corn. A Rye is by a magnitude, the biggest pain in the ass of all the cereals, except for maybe oats of all the cereal grains to distill. Number two, nobody else, the only other person that really, that I can think of, of the big producers that does a mash bill with that high of a proportion of Rye is MGP. One of the MGP recipes is fairly high Rye too, and it's the one they produce by far the least of, that they probably had the most difficult time finding commercial use for. So it's interesting that this is for really widely commercial use, this is certainly the highest barley content. And I think it's like the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. I think again, it gets back to like, this is a Rye mash bill we use, but our yeast strain definitely complements it by bringing those fruits in. Our heat cycling maturation practices give it that kind of roundedness of depth of sweetness. So I think all those factors end up making it just this really nice layered experience. It's great. It's like an all rounder Rye. There's that other kind of Rye that's 51% Rye and it's almost bourbon, you know? And this ain't that. This has a backbone and it's like a armor or something, you know? A skeleton, whatever metaphor. But the soft fruit and the plush confectionary qualities surrounding it. Well, it certainly makes you understand why, or not understand or not be able to conceive of why Rye is so polarizing. And like even right now, there's a bit of softness in their eye business, I think out there. Certainly for Take Home, I mean, it's still very popular as a base for a whiskey base cocktail, an American whiskey base cocktail. But I just can't fathom because this is a number of the characteristics that people love about bourbon termed up at high volume. Yet somehow people are like, that's too much. Rye is what all the hazmat drinkers should try when they grow up. It's just like, okay, so instead of just getting slapped in the face with a massive amount of alcohol, why don't you get slapped in the face with a massive amount of flavor? It's a much, much better option. I think that's a better selling point. Yeah. I also think that there's a perception there, just as you're saying, like a lot of high proof drinkers will kind of meander into the rye category. I think part of it's because of flavor, but part of it's because consumers that maybe aren't into that amount of prickliness and structure, that was a lot of what was being offered and platformed for a long time in rye whiskey. And so folks kind of like that weren't into that, they got kind of turned off. And I think there is more versatility to a rye whiskey than what the industry served up for the last several years. So I'm excited to see people playing around with it more. And I really believe in the power of the Old Forester rye to kind of bring people into the category a little bit more. I just want to say people should be making cocktails with this. It is perfect. I agree with that. It's distinctive and stylistically you start to, I think it's a style that is closer to a more traditional Pennsylvania or Maryland style rye. Like when all those distilleries, Maryland first and then Pennsylvania later in the 80s and 90s, when they really started shutting down, they were known for rye. It grows very well in that part of Pennsylvania, that part of the United States. And the need for rye, even if it was only a little bit, had to be fulfilled by Kentucky primarily when everything shut down. And then you develop sort of a Kentucky style rye, which was even neutering of that great character you would have gotten from Pennsylvania and Maryland. Whereas let's reduce the rye 51%, 52%, 55%, whatever. Make it just as just barely legal rye. Yeah, yeah, just check the box. Yeah, exactly. Because it's all about the corn, baby. But this is really, I think this is such a great balance. I love the mash bill. And it was a historic mash bill. We acquired the rights to a bunch of recipes when we purchased the Old Kentucky Distillery in 1940. And one of those is called Old Normandy Rye. So when Chris Morris was looking at developing a rye for Old Forester, we didn't have a historical Forester rye to call back to, so he wanted to find something from history. And this was the one he pulled out. No, beautifully done. Yeah, agreed. Glad you like it. And now we're getting... Yeah, we should. We should talk about these. So have you ever had to tell Campbell Brown or John Hayes or Lawson that they're wrong, since we're talking about the President's Select? That they're wrong about something related to President's Select or just in general? That they picked the wrong Barrel? No. Okay, never had to do that. Although I will say... I stand in for our audience and have no idea what you're talking about. I will say John Hayes was out before I was in, so maybe I would have had to tell him no, but... So tell us about the President's Select. Yeah, so President's Choice, as with everything, is rooted in our history. So fun little story about George Garvin Brown, the original. He gifted the governor of Kentucky a barrel of bourbon in 1890. Just a little thing he did, but... Sounds like Paola. It sounds like Chicago. Or the whole state of Illinois. It's never been framed like that, but now I'm sitting here in Chicago and it's sounding a little off when I bring it up. No, it's just a gesture. And in the 1960s, George Garvin Brown II was aware of that gesture and got to thinking, and listen, Old Forester and Brown Foreman have always been really innovative brand marketers as well as whisky makers. Really from the name Old Forester from the beginning, not naming it Brown or something like that, was brand marketing. And so George Garvin Brown II decided he liked that idea of kind of access to a single barrel. So he wanted to start a selection program for presidents and executives of other companies. And that was the first single barrel by selection program ever in the history of the industry. So there were other commercial single barrels that may have been sold, but nobody was allowing people to select a barrel and then personalizing the bottling of the entire barrel. And, you know, that's a bread and butter program for our industry now. We were talking about earlier, that's where I built my career, basically, was in single barrel selection. So I love the history of President's Choice from 64 to 72 that program ran. George Gordon Brown II passed away unexpectedly and that program got discontinued. But we resurrected it, I think, about five years ago, started with President's Choice Bourbon that are just hand selected, high quality barrels of ours that we want to prove for perfect kind of sipping and bring to market in a really premium way. So we've been doing that with President's Choice Bourbon single barrels for a few years, just out of our distillery experience on Whiskey Row. But this year, we also brought the rye to the portfolio. So we decided it was time for us to do a little innovating on rye. We think that again, our rye is delicious and we wanted to see it at a more selective single barrel high aged expression. So that's what we did. You can tell it's rye because the label is green. It's green. Sometimes if you can't beat them, join them. You know, if we made it any other color, people would be like, why isn't it green? You know, so I do think it's kind of sexy that, you know, the label though. It's a good looking label. The two next to each other, really. The tax stamp trick of going across the top of the cork. Can we try these? Would you prefer to start with rye since we were just drinking the rye, or you want to start with bourbon? Let's start with the rye. Okay. I still have rye on the palate right now. Yeah, exactly. That was what I was thinking as well. What's the proof? 55.55, so 111.1. Do you want me to tell you a little bit about the parameters for the president's choice? Yes, please. The rye that we're tasting right now is at 11 years old. Everything from our inventory we're currently putting out is in the 10, 11-year-old range for the rye. Then we target proofs between 110 and 125 proof. What we do is we pull the samples out of the barrels in the warehouse, we sit and taste through them as a group, and then we decide where the proof point is going to be best for this to be a finished good, and then we send it to be processed and I'd like to think that you put the president and brown foreman on a blindfold and in a warehouse. And we say, just feel out the right one. Whichever Barrel he runs into, there you go. That's the president's choice. There's a bunch of words on the label that the graphic designer didn't want anyone to be able to read. So the label is inspired by the original president's choice label. So it has some of the wording. I think it used to say for the distinguished gentleman back in the 1960s, which we can't fault the 1960s for, but we did change that up a little bit. Take that, Don Draper. This smells amazing. I mean, it's very similar to the rye that we just tasted, but everything's dialed up, especially the bananas and the caramel. Yeah, the tropical fruit in the middle is just massive. So something I've been saying to people about the introduction, because everyone that I'm talking to, if they've interacted with our 100-proof rye, we talk about the rye aromatics and how balanced that is. Because this is a totally different animal and the maturation, 11 years in heat cycling, for a rye whisky, I think is more fruity and has way more confectionary notes than people realize. Yes. And standing in contrast to that plushness is like a stony, almost tannic grip on the palate too. Yeah. The oak tannins, in this expression specifically, they're really present, but they're really enjoyable. You're not tugging at your taste, but you're not getting that astringency and dryness you sometimes get. Yeah. They're drying, but it's like drying as a pleasant part of the finish. Yeah. And I'll tell you, for those folks who are really into cast strength, we tasted these at Barrel Strength to determine the proof point, and I've been on also a big kick about talking about the craft of proofing, because I think people forget it's part of the finished goods process, is just determining where this product shines. And at cast strength, it can be really astringent and tannic. And so when you get it to this like 111 proof was a very specific proof point for us, because it really opens those layers up and it allows you to access them in an enjoyable way. And some of these, I think the highest proof point we tasted at cast strength was 149. Whoa. Yeah, that's rough. After that, everybody goes on break. I will say, I'm like more hydrated than ever when we're doing our tastings because I just guzzle water. It's interesting that you would get something based on the controlled and the fact that you tend to not have, I mean, I'm sure that there are some super really old things sitting there like you said, no matter how good you try to control, things get lost. But for the heat cycling and control you have over your aging to not get, there's a difference between heat cycling during the winter in a rick house versus having a rick house sitting on top of a hill that's eight stories tall that is exposed to the sun for the whole summer when it's 100 degrees. You know, even you would get up to 140, 150 is amazing. Yeah, we get some pretty high cast strength proof points because of our heat cycling because we just lose so much to evaporation. But I tell people all the time, you know, heat cycling, a lot of people have questions like, why would you do that? It's so much more expensive. You're going to lose all your liquid is evaporating. And I always say, especially this is true for this expression because it's 11 years old, you know, evaporation means oxidation. And this is what you were talking about earlier. I always tell consumers that aren't familiar with aging. Oxidation is like your magic fairy dust for your finished good. It like just opens up these flavor compounds that you get rid of some of that ethanol and you really get into some of those funky notes you can get from maturation. OK, that's pretty great. Pretty tasty, right? Yeah. Hard to beat. Do we think the bourbon can hold up to it? Is the bourbon gonna? The bourbon's pretty good. I think Caleb and I were both when we tasted their eye, we were like, damn. We did that. That's right. The initial commercial releases of these aren't huge. We will have some. It's going to be relatively limited. So there are going to be a few lucky people that are going to have to not cause a traffic jam in Louisville standing outside the distillery trying to buy these, which is typically what happens when they get released. We just had a big release at the home place on National Bourbon Day. And they had a line. I think folks started camping out a day or two before and the line went all the way, if you've been to our facility, down to the bridge. So it was pretty crazy. How many releases of this have you been doing per year? How many releases do you think might be done going forward? That's a great question. It's honestly been a little bit different every year. I've been in this role just under three years. It's been a bit of a wild ride from an industry standpoint for the last almost three years. So the volumes have really changed. It was relatively very small when I first came in, but luckily we have some aged inventory and we've also prioritized it for this expression because we found that it really resonates with people the way that we've selected them and brought them to market. We do tasting notes at the home place and people get really into it. So we're definitely growing the volume. I don't necessarily have barrel number quantities, but we have planned in our forecasting and our distillery production to really have this expression in mind because, as you mentioned, we were just distributing it, so it's been only available at the home place. Now it's going to be in some select markets, but it's still going to be really hard to find. We really believe in the value of it, especially when you get it on the palette. It's just fantastic. So similar with Birthday Bourbon, our goal and really passion as a team is to get things like this in the hands of as many people as we can. So we're hoping to be able to scale it in a way that we can keep it special and keep it premium, but that people get to access this because it is special juice. It appears that the retail on this is going to be $250. That's what they tell me. Okay. Now that you said that, I'm going to put it in my mouth. Right. 113.4 proof. Am I doing that math right? 56.7. Yes. Cool. This is a nine-year-old bourbon for this one. It's so wild going from a high-aged rye to a high-age bourbon because usually you only get high-age bourbons in the industry. Ryes are like four to six-year age range for the most part. You get maybe some eight, nine, tens out there. I don't know about you guys. I interact with 10, 11, 12-year-old bourbons quite often. It's really wild going from a high-age rye to a high-age bourbon. It's just so different. Some nerds don't even think that nine years is that high of an age for bourbon. I know. But I have to say, especially with heat cycling, it's a real sweet spot for bourbon, where you can capture those sweet aromatics without so many of the oak tannins coming into play. For folks who like that nice sweet note and the baking spices, it's a pretty nice one. Yeah, this is good. This is like a higher strength birthday. That's a high compliment. Yeah, a bit like a higher strength birthday, which is, in the interest of full disclosure, probably of all the really tatery unicorns that get released every single year, birthday bourbon is probably still my favorite. Yeah, it's a fun expression. And honestly, it's a great concept of vintage-dated bourbon. I mean, it's still the only, I think, the only one being done in the industry that I know of. Yeah, because the other ones, the Buffalo Tracy Antiques are not really vintage-dated because they want to hold on to the ability to blend. Right, exactly. So some years they are the same vintage, but they don't put it on because that gives them the ability to blend. Right. And I will say it does, so anytime you're kind of locking yourself into a concept like that on a production side, it does like tie your hands in a way sometimes. So that's why you'll see people be a little bit hesitant to do that. Nobody cared what it was when we established the concept in 2002. It's another one of those things that went from when we opened our Buffalo Grove store now located in Wheeling right down the street, we had floor stacks of old Rip Van Winkle 15-year-old, that we were worried about having too much and how long it was going to take us to sell this stuff. Nobody wants this. And then we also, I remember in the South Loop store having when Old Forester birthday launched, it was just this real old Forester, nothing else in the Old Forester line, then all of a sudden birthday pops up. And it was 50 bucks a bottle and we had stacks of it. And people are like, that bottle is kind of hard to handle. I don't know. It's hard to pour. And now look at where we are. Now everybody wants it. And that's so to your point too, about just like being able to batch and whatnot, it gained this following, which is that's one of the great things about Old Forester is our consumer base will kind of create their own followings and trends and slang and things like that. It's a very fun thing about working on this brand. But as it kind of grew, it outpaced what we had kind of earmarked, because you got to hold your inventory if it's something like a vintage dated bourbon or else that stuff gets batched and blended off over the years. Once it hits four years, it's viable for different expressions, right? And so they started kind of protecting what was going to be birthday bourbon and it kind of outpaced what they had been protecting. So now we've kind of scaled it to like a day's production. But again, you can only produce so many barrels a day. So that's where when you do something like vintage dated bourbon and you really kind of stick to the concept, you can see how that can limit you sometimes. But we don't see it as a bad thing. It's really fun to bring to market every year. And we bottle it at the home place every year so that consumers on our tour get to see it being bottled, which is also kind of ceremonious. And the exact date is September? September 2nd. Which is George Garvin Brown's birthday. That is why it's called birthday bourbon. A lot of people don't know that. They just thought we made it up birthday bourbon. Which is funny. It's funny the cadence because you always do a press release. And that's one of those, you always do a press release on September 2nd and say hey, birthday bourbon is here. Except they always use the phrase wrong, say birthday bourbon is here. Then every single store in the chain gets blown up. Birthday bourbon is here. Birthday bourbon. Where are you hiding it? It's like they just announced that it's being bottled today. Pet peeve of Brett's. You can't tell. Whiskey out like it's blown up. Next time I'll ask them to put an asterisk. Takes time to move through distribution. Nobody reads that far anyway. If it's not right, it's not on the home page. You don't see it. We'll put it in the headline. There's got to be some alliteration you can do with birthday bourbon and bottles. Got to be. We're working on it. Yeah. Okay. Brett, you want to take a crack at their press release for next time? Yeah, I would be more than happy. We've got a pretty good marketing team on our side. Do you have good editors? No. Okay. I write better with good editors. I'm sure we have great editors. True, Brett. That's true. All right. Wow. Okay. There's a couple of bottles here I'm going to have to buy, but I'm not going to say which ones. But I'm definitely buying a whole case of that one before I. Anything else coming? I know that there's a lot of ideas that are getting bounced around. Is there any concrete plans for another addition to the Whiskey Row series or is that still TBD? Yeah. I guess what I'll say is, like I said, we've been having lots of innovation conversations just about what the future ethos of the brand is going to be. Because as a historic brand with so much authentic ties to our history, we do have to be mindful about how we're using our history and pulling it forward to what we're doing in the future. So I would say focusing on how we call back to our past in a way that's still very relevant is kind of the core of our innovation strategy right now. So I think you could see us using some more storytelling opportunities, which would really exist in the Whiskey Row line, but also some other just inspiration on how the brand has marketed themselves in the past. You'll see some of that come through. Can we make some pitches? Sure. Like 2015 and it sees about 45 days in a cask that's only this big. That'd be a good one. A mini cask. 1982 it gets discontinued and they make vodka instead. They strip all the, it's a cristalino, they strip all the color. 2018 and you finish it in the wackiest, most obscure wine barrel you can possibly think of from David Finney. Viable ideas, yeah. Just say it. The timeline of bourbon, yeah. Yeah, it's funny that you, that's the, it is nice that you haven't, that you haven't really fiddled around for this. Not that there is an ability to innovate with other liquid that comes from that distillery, not cold old forester, because I think that if you start to mess around too far off of the historical timeline, I think that you mess things up. Yeah, we definitely try to. And Ambarana's dead, so don't worry about that. 2023, Ambarana's dead. We have done two cask finishing projects in our 117 series, and that's a great example of where I think we were really mindful about letting flavor lead our decision making. But it's hard to tie back to why it's relevant for old forester. So we did a scotch cask finish and a rum cask finish. And I will tell you the rum cask finish is one of my favorite things we've ever put out. It was so phenomenal. I was using Diplomatico casks and it really just gave us the periphery of like tropical fruit that already plays well with our flavor. But listen, that might not be an everyday expression for old forester, but it is fun to have that 117 series kind of sandbox to play in where we get to flex our creativity a little bit more. Cool. We do have a couple of handpicks thus far, even though historically it's the first handpick ever, it's a very, very limited program. So we have a couple of handpicks coming in the next couple of months, and we are, the Whiskey Hotline is hoping to make a trip to Louisville and probably meet with you to discuss a little bit wider program if those things are becoming available. Those are things that are in the works in the background because they're amongst our favorites of handpicks, our old forester. Great barrels, yeah. Yeah, they've always consistently been really well screened. Thank you. Appreciate that. More to come, nerds. Thank you for listening to Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. Melissa, thanks for bringing all this stuff. Thank you. This has been such a pleasure and a fun conversation. Thanks for letting me. The whiskey is good. Your insight into them is really cool too. Well, I appreciate it. And I liked your flavor and more your texture notes. I mean, that's part of it, right? It's a visceral part of whiskey. Totally. Yeah. And life. Okay, whatever. Let's get heady right at the end. Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast, backing the feed real soon. Something great, maybe not this great. I don't know. Until then, I'm Greg. I'm Brett. Melissa. Keep tasting.