00:00 Estate Whiskey Innovation Okay, so a little bit. Nevada? Nevada. What did you say earlier? Nevada. Nevada? When I first moved there, this is the kind of gems that you're going to want to end up. When I first moved there, I insisted on calling it Nevada. Nevada, that's great. I watched one lady's head just explode. Yeah, it's Nevada, not Nevada. And as growing up a proper Massachusetts boy initially, hard A's are just something you try to avoid. Nevada, I can't do it. Nevada. So yeah, it's Nevada. Nevada, okay. That sounds good. You are listening to Barrel to Bottle The Binny's Podcast. Back in your feed with something whiskey, I'm Greg, I do communications at Binny's. I'm Rob, I work on the Whiskey Hotline team. Rob, we have a guest today. Yes, we have Joe O'Sullivan. Hi, everybody. Yeah, I'm Joe O'Sullivan, Master Distiller at Minden Mill and Fully Family Wines and Spirits. I don't think I've seen this many props in years on this podcast. You guys know that this is an audio medium. We have a map at a place map with different spirits. We have five different bottles of spirits. We have one of the biggest available Ziploc bags on the market full of corn. Yeah, that's a two-gallon bag of corn. You have to chew all of it. By the end, you have to have it chewed. It's gorgeous corn. It's beautiful corn. And as I was saying, whenever they ask for corn samples for sales and marketing, I always have to make sure they know that this is like a 10-ton silo. And that the second I pull the plug, a lot of corn is going to be coming out. There are no small samples of corn. The silo will express the corn. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's engorged with corn. Okay. All right. So I'm going to tell you what I think I know, and then you're going to correct me, I think. He's going to tell you your story. Game show rules. I like this. Do I get a bell that I get to dig? Well, there's just so many cool things. Okay. Estate Whiskey Alliance. Yes. Boom. Farmland in Nevada. Farmland in Nevada. You just saved your soul, boy. That's arable. That you're in, you're tucked in like a little mountain range where you're getting snow melt from the Sierra Nevada. Yeah. Nestled. Nestled. Nestled for sure, yeah. Also, because of state, growing all of the types of grain. 100%. Your maltings are on site for your barley. Correct. Are you? Yeah, I have questions about that. Yes. Oh, so many cool. I have opinions. I don't know if they're good ones, but I have opinions. Then you have a warehouse that directly replicates the style, the dunnage style of warehouse for humidity and temperature in Scotland for aging your barrels. Correct. We also have one that does the exact same thing for our bourbon or rye, that is tied to a weather station in Bardstown, Kentucky. You're mimicking the weather in Bardstown, Kentucky. Yeah. Well, we can talk a little bit more about that when it's appropriate, but the short story is the high desert is great for a lot of things, but distilling is kind of a difficult one to do there. Well, then you f*** up. Well, words like that, I've been encouraged by the marketing team to say it's challenging, but not... So what elevation are you at? Just under 5,000 feet. Okay. That's crazy. Yeah. It's 11% absolute humidity on average around the year. So early trials of what we're trying to use, the local humidity, the local climate to try to mature, right? We were losing 3 to 4%, sometimes 5% to angel share per month. That's not going to make good anything. You're making whiskey extract. Very saturated. I'm pretty sure it's a new type of soy sauce at that point. In that low humidity, you're going to get a real creep of proof, and so you're not getting any of the water-soluble compounds, and you just have a very lopsided, unbalanced whiskey. So we had to start replicating these other climates. People ask all the time, like, well, why did you choose Barstown? Well, it just happened that we really liked the whiskey from Barstown. Why did you choose Blenderlock? Well, we really like space-eyed single malt. And sticking to those inspiration points, if you're going to choose something, don't just choose something arbitrary, choose something that inspires you, something that you think is the best for your conditions. Yeah. It's really nice to use local climate. My earlier career is at a place called Clear Creek Distillery. I had the real honor of being the only person that worked in all three locations between its original location, Northwest 24th in Portland and then out in Hood River, Oregon. At one point, I had to disassemble the entire barrel room and bring it over the Cascades to Hood River and reassemble it. At this point, me and Caitlin Bartome, who I was working with at the time, we were taking really average measurements of how things change in the barrel, and you can see some pretty obvious when it was in the wetter, on the western side of the What you're probably also then seeing in your warehouses that you have that are climate controlled, because Scotland, you're losing proof over time, high humidity, cooler climate versus Kentucky. Where it's creeping up. Do you want to start by tasting through? What do we got? Yeah, we have a fair number of our products here. We're going to go through the High Ground Vodka, the Bourbon, the Rye and the American Single Malt, all of which are Minden Mill products. And finish up with the Evil Bean Coffee Liqueur. These are all made right there in Minden, Nevada. Oh, yeah. For the vodka, this is the base for what you're using for the Coffee Liqueur? With those two products, there is some DNA in the sense that they're both state distilled. I mean, we're using sand grain, but I don't want to tie the base of the Coffee Liqueur to any one particular type of grain. One, we're going to be covering it with a lot of really nice coffee flavors, but two, and most importantly, we're going to, I want the Coffee Liqueur and any base of that to be the surplus. This still has to be a very functional, very smart approach to distillation. The great thing about Liqueur is you can use them as a way to absorb things. Maybe a fermentation doesn't go great, just distill it to its neutral. You're not taking that as a loss. There's a local coffee liqueur out in Madison, State Line, fantastic product. And I will say they were a big inspiration for me on this one. Recently, when we were at the Tasters, Top Shelf Tasters Association, they were runner up. We were neck and neck. And I remember when it came up and they were trying to decide what was going to get best in category for San Francisco. It was us or them. And I was like, well, if we lose them, I'm okay with it. Because they were always considered one of my favorites. But we snuck in at the end and got right by them. Good to hear. Yeah. The bottle says 100% rye. So I would imagine that would be the biggest pain in the ass vodka to distill. And you wouldn't want to have to make extras of it for coffee before forever. Yes. Yes. But you have to understand this is a correction off when we tried to make one out of oats. Okay. Which is even worse, even worse. It's like going up the works. Yeah. The amount of just coked up nonsense that was clogging all the, that's clogging the stills was just insane. And our whole production goes through some pretty, I mean, we start off with a stripping still that's made by Headframe. And so there's a lot of plates in there and a lot of little hidden pockets to get just burned oatmeal into. Okay. But making 100 percent rye vodka is like the same mindset of someone who puts a farm to a glass distillery in the high desert of Nevada. We did everything easy. Almost everybody in this industry is a failed scientist. This is why we have failed. We don't make good decisions. So was the infrastructure already, some of the infrastructure already in place at that facility or location? Yeah. So the totality of the history of Minden Mill dates back to 2019. It was originally started as predominantly a single malt distillery known for a short period of time as Bentley Heritage. They also made a gin and the bourbon and the rye were, the whole team is the same, like the name just changed. A lot of it got pretty waylaid by COVID. And it's a story we've heard a million times, businesses just about to hit that next plateau. And the pandemic came in, really squashed everything. Post-COVID, it was picked up by Foley and we've been running ever since. And like I said, it's the same team, same group of folks. Quick shout out to everybody at Minden Mill. I love the fact that I get to be here, but they're the ones that are doing the work right now. And so I don't really, they support me as much as I support them. And I really want to say thank you guys. Yeah. Sweet. You want to talk about some vodka? 9:07 Vodka Bourbon Craft Yes. Okay. So here's, here is my, my take on vodka. I think that vodka can be very cool. I think one of the reasons why everyone thinks that vodka is kind of crappy is that we've been given a lot of crappy vodka. The marketing team would say it's challenging vodka. Well, I mean, the whole idea like odorless, tasteless, colorless is the definition. So it's like a means to an end, right? Like it's meant to be a purpose built thing. For me though, it still is a form of tradition. It is still is a distilling art and you can make this better. We don't have to settle on something that has that typical bitter aftertaste. When I'm given a challenge, let's say design a vodka, I will find the entire comp set and I'll find one or two things that just really bother me, that I think is just a flaw in the category. And I'm just going to try to fix those. I'm not going to try to make the best one ever, because you never really know where it's going to head. I just, if I can cure the bitter aftertaste, I'm happy. And I'm thrilled to say that this has none of that. It has a very nice light spice, but almost a confectionary sweetness to it, so a baking sweetness to it. And that bitterness just is not there at all. I agree with you. I was expecting mint or something like it, and it's not really there. It's just a little pepper. And like maybe cherry? Yeah, a little cherry. There's like a fruity quality, which is kind of unexpected for me. There's no point in fighting nature, and fruitiness is a big part of everything that we make at the distillery. That's going to be coming from the ground, that's going to be coming from the growing conditions. Unique as it is, that 5,000 feet of elevation produces a different sort of flavor, and I find it is most pronounced in rye. Interesting. On a finish that's super clean, like you can feel it evaporating off of the tongue. It's nice. What would you say your favorite thing to do with this vodka would be? I like very simple cocktails. You may have heard a lot of distillers just say, we're not really great at cocktails, we don't really know what we're doing. It has to have a name in it, and so a good quality tonic in this, it really brings out some of the characteristics that are particular to this vodka, that sweetness really emerges out, matches really well with the quinine, and then you have something that's kind of an all easy to do, already made, expert tasting cocktail. And so if it's not, I just don't have a lot of- Clean and refreshing. Yeah, exactly. When I'm drinking something, I'm so used to tasting raw spirits, I just want to see that slightly elevated or slightly complemented. Cool. Proof down with on-site well water? Yes, proof down with on-site well water. Am I doing your job for you? You are. Oh, hey, Greg the marketing guy. So one of the great things about where we are is, this is a really cool and interesting watershed that we're on. The east and west forks of the Carson River meet right around Minden, and this is an endorheic water system, so it's snow melt, comes down, feeds these two tributaries that go into a larger river, and then it heads out north by Fallon, which is where Frey Ranch is. We use the same water table, but at two different ends of it, and it drops, I think, about 1,000 feet. And this is an ancient seabed, right? So we're starting with the snow melt, comes down to us, that's our well water. On-site is the actual first well that was dug for Minden, Nevada, and that's where we pull from. It also is what feeds the town, but we have first access to that water, even at the height of summer, fills up at 150 gallons a minute. So this is a very healthy aquifer. But then it travels all the way up by Reno and heads out to Fallon, where it ends in the Carson Sink. So unlike most water systems, it doesn't end in the ocean. It ends in a wetland and it connects the two distilleries over, I think it's maybe about 60 miles, 80 miles. It takes a long time to drive. You have to go around about way, but as the crow flies, it's about 60, 80 miles. Squirreling versus crows. And then as it drops down, it actually becomes more saline. So you have a very interesting change in the quality of the water as well, because they have a lot more of a saline environment. It's just lower down in that ancient sea bed. Interesting. I mean, really interesting. That kind of stuff is like the primal force that shapes the world around us. Yeah. Like in Chicago, we live in a swamp, but it's a continental divide. The water flows different directions from Chicago, which boggles my mind. Yeah, and then the river was like switched at one point. Yeah, yeah. The continental divide used to be a different part of the state. Yeah. It's wild. Weird. Yeah. So yeah, you're at the headest of the headwaters, right? You're at the very top of this aquifer. The freshest of the snowmelt. The freshest of the snowmelt waters. And they're at the far end, and it doesn't go anywhere. It starts where we are, ends where they are. It comes from snowmelt. It ends in a wetland, and it supports these two distilleries that are both members of this Estate Whiskey Alliance and the whole Single Malt. Since you brought it up, explain Estate Whiskey Alliance. Oh, so I'm really lucky in my career. I started off, as I said, at Clear Creek. So we were the first folks to make an American Single Malt. And I thought, oh man, I have hitched my wagon to a first. And that felt really cool. Steve McCarthy was my mentor and loved the man immensely. Very big deal for American Single Malt. Yeah, and me personally. Some of the best American Single Malt you can get, McCarthy's. Yeah, McCarthy's is incredible. It's phenomenal. And still really, really good. The new batches are fantastic. But then I come to Minden and with the promise of, hey, you have 1200 acres that you get to farm and control. And any distiller in the entire world would jump at that chance. Oh, of course. All of us want to grow our own grain. Very few of us are fortunate enough to have that opportunity. And most of the people who are live somewhere where grain grows. Right back at it. And why are you growing in crop circles? Yeah, that's environmental privilege. I'm not going to be shamed over here. Given that promise, given that ability to grow our own grain, I jumped at this opportunity to take this job and this brought us into what a state whisky is and how it's defined within the state of Nevada, which is that 85% of all of our fermentable goods has to be grown within the state on land that we control. We do 100%. There should be a little bit of a slush fund of about 15% or something in case of a terrible crop year. Like, let's be realistic. As we've commented, this is not the best place to choose to grow grain. But it does allow us to have a greater sense of terroir. Is that total production? Like, if there was a blight on just one single grain crop, that you could bring in that crop and whatever, like your corn doesn't grow in here, can you bring in up to 15% just corn in order to make all of your stuff as a state bottle? I think there's enough gray area that we don't know how to handle that yet. Fair enough. Yes, because there's enough bigger producers that are involved with this as well. There are some big producers on this. Well, this is just... But keep in mind, this is Nevada state laws. Oh. And so, there's all-town... On top of the alliance. Yeah, Nevada was one of the first states to do it. The EWA, which is the Estate Whiskey Alliance, of which we're members, their standard is 75% and they have... So, we're automatically kind of part of it just because of our own state legislation. But the Estate Whiskey Alliance and our partnership with them is about trying to bring this to a larger next step. And again, we have a flooded market of a lot of whiskey, a lot of really good quality whiskey. So, how do you stand out within this? It's pretty easy and natural to see the movements that happen in other aspects of food and beverage being reflected back eventually on to whiskey itself. And where you have estates within wine, we wanted to do the same thing within whiskey, but we wanted it to be very clearly defined. And there's an actual... I mean, because of the designation and the growing knowledge of it for the consumer, there's an actual badge. Will that end up on any of your labels? That's a question that we're trying to work out with. I mean, unfortunately, we launched... We bought all of this, all of these labels. We have all of these bottles, and then the WA we got involved with. So we're trying to figure out how do we handle this change over time. Our support and our involvement is non-disputed. We're gonna be part of those guys forever. I love working with them. I was just at their conference this year doing a big presentation on local terroir, and again, involved the phrase, because I just cannot imagine describing what we do without the contrast of the folks just a few miles away and saying that there's massive differences between these two distilleries. Because if anything indicates the real purpose of the, of estate whiskey, it's the contrast between us. You want to try the bourbon? Oh, yeah. Okay. So now for the bourbon and rye and vodka, anything that's not the malt, I'm assuming column still, correct? And hammer mill? So for the bourbon and the rye, we're using a headframe stripping still for first runs only, and that's kind of the efficiency engine. After that, it's going through a Christian-Karl hybrid still, but we're not using the columns, that's only for the vodka. For the single malt, we're using two Forsythe stills. Okay. Translate that, please. Pot stills. Forsythe is pot stills. Traditional Scottish pot stills. And then this Christian-Karl still that I referenced, there's Christian-Karl and there's Holstein. These are kind of two very famous German O2V companies. I like O2V stills a lot for everything, because they're kind of like a surgical Swiss Army knife. They can do a whole lot. They have a lot of tools. They have a lot of control. They tend to be, in some ways, the number of options can get you in trouble. So you really want to just take a couple of philosophies on how you run it and stick with it. Yeah. Huber Starlight started with Christian-Karl still, because they were producing brandy first, because they couldn't produce grain products. So that was their powerhouse. And it's not this giant still. I mean, I don't even know how many proof leaders it puts out, but it is a powerhouse. Like that thing just churns. Typically, a lot of these hybrid pot stills will have just a two or three column chambers up top. So you can get a single pass through, which allows you to push for a lot of product really quick. With using the stripping still to just make low wines, that's kind of our efficiency engine, because at the end of the day, let's say your pot still is 100 gallons and ours is 1300. So I'm just going to stick with 100, because it's easier math. But you would have to run that four times in order to produce enough low wines to make whiskey on the fifth day. By us using this head frame still, we are actually able to process through 5,000 gallons of whiskey wash and do that in one day and the next day to still our spirits run. And the other aspect of this is that's worth mentioning, because it does have to effect flavor, is that we're using wooden fooders. We're using wooden fermentation vessels. So rather than sour mashing, we're relying on that colony of yeast and bacteria and all the flora and fauna of the natural area that lives inside the wood, because clean them as much as you want. Wood is porous. Something's going to live in it and those secondary fermenters can come out towards the end of the fermentation and give it a little bit of an interesting flavor. See with old bourbon brands or especially in Scotland, call it Oregon pine, but it's large. Yeah. Beautiful and gross. I mean, just like the rest of us, right? Right. We'll notice with our bourbon, you're going to get a lot of cherry cola. I typically try to find one flavor point that people are going to enjoy. Oh, yeah. Well, that's one of the favorites that people are looking for. Cherry cola? Hey. And again, you're going to see a lot of fruitiness. That's part of anything that we do and how it's coming out. This is all going to be aged in that rick house that has the ties to the weather station in Bardstown, Kentucky. Number three char, American oak, and the vast majority of the barrels we use are going to be made with 36-month air-dried staves. Okay. A good amount of time. Yeah. I'm a big, big believer in the need to properly allow your staves to cure by weather. You just get a much better quality of flavor. Do you mind quickly explaining that? Because we've seen anywhere between six months all the way up to 36, even 48, maybe 60 months, like if someone's really wanting to spend a lot on a barrel. Yeah. So I like 36. Again, this is going to be kind of how I came up in the industry and coming from, much like the Hubers, much like St. George and a few other folks. I come from an O2V background, much like Todd Leopold, for example. And so that kind of ties you a little bit more into some of the wine-making philosophy. And so you tend to work a lot more with wine cooperages. And the quality difference in this, in my opinion, is kiln-dried versus air-dried staves. That, when I'm talking about 36 months, they're literally cutting the raw staves, stacking them on pallets, and exposing them to the elements for three years. We've seen that at, obviously, Independent does their own thing, but Kelvin Cupridge. Yeah. That's what they're doing. So, and they're physically, like, the wood is, they're making little fires, making the barrels themselves. There's no more, there's no automated process. And they just have these big piles of these staves just sitting out in their back area. Seasoning. Seasoning. And the advantage of that is that there's some really pretty tough gums and other, you know, wood used to be a living object, creature, as we know. And it's basically a bunch of compressed straws. And as the living wood goes to dead wood, different compounds and gums called phthalosis will block off that xylem and phloem of the... I think I pronounced those correctly. It's been a while since I took my botany classes. That will block off the flow of that, of water up and down the tree. If you allow that to sit outside for a number of years, it's going to naturally break down a little bit, giving you a much better access to the different alcohol and water-soluble sugars and compounds that are within the wood itself. Okay. That's a very good explanation of that. No, it's perfect because you hear it all the time, but very rarely is it explained, which is why this is like a perfect opportunity for something like that. I personally, Nancy Fraley, I talked to her maybe 10 years ago and she said something that, you know, she just said distillers need to use better barrels. And I felt very cool because I was taught to use good barrels for the moment, like right from the jump, but I couldn't agree more. And usually when she says something, it's, you know, you just listen. She's a legend. For a very good reason. All right, we got to talk about this bourbon. This is incredibly soft. And I have the cheat sheet here. It's got 20% winter rye, but I have to assume like the oats are making a pillow out of this bourbon. Yeah, the oats really soften it up. And that's going to be the massive effect and why we included them. But you can still get a little bit of that fruitness that are coming out. And we can't talk about the bourbon without discussing the corn itself, which you can see in a big bag in front of us. OK, big old bag of corn. Here we go. What colors do you see in that corn? The color of dried apricots. It's like various levels of like orange and yellow. Yellows and pinks and purples, deep, deep purple. Yeah, this is a very ornate corn, an heirloom, heritage corn. This is a heritage corn. There's actually a difference between the two. But what I really like about this is that if you were to take this off the, as opposed to a yellow dent corn, I got nothing against yellow dent corns. This is also a dent corn. But those are really sweet, really high access to sugar right off the bat. You can break one off the stock, bite right into it. It's going to be, you know, starchy, but it's going to be edible. You do that with this, and it's going to be like biting into a potato. But in the same way that some of the best ciders are made from apples that look like rocks and taste like rocks and make the most amazing hard ciders, this corn itself, once it goes through that full conversion of starch and sugar and through the fermentation, is going to have a lot of flavor components that come with it as well, because we don't have to worry about the available sugar. We can make the sugar from the starch. But what we can't introduce is any of the anthracyanins, any of the carotenoids, any of those different compounds that are indicated by the color, that's going to translate into the flavor of the bourbon as well. And you're going to have just a much more enjoyable experience. The other aspect about this too, and I'm sorry, I really like corn lately. We were talking about that. It's become kind of a big deal with me. I started doing a little research on the Tiacente plant and how it evolved into corn as we know it. And then I went down this rabbit hole about like the establishment of all the indigenous cities and tribes across the US. And it's now like my thing. I'm just obsessed with it. Do you have like any experimental plots? We planted some experimental plots last year and had some, you know, not starling results, but it doesn't mean that we're going to stop experimenting. That's how you learn. Yeah, that's exactly how you learn. And we only have 90 growing days for corn out there. So that's not a lot. We get really late frosts. We get really early frosts. And so- I'm not going to make the joke again. It's, how do we make this tougher? Well, and I'm surprised you haven't made the joke about the crap circles. Well, they definitely, I understand that. We use pivot irrigation, everybody. Meaning you've got these little curly diamond shapes in between your fields. That's grass, weeds. If it's corn, it's going to be weeds. If it's rye, we're probably going to put some sprinklers in there and eat up the corners as well. I see. Oh, yeah, the rye looks more rectangular. Yeah. On this beautiful map that looks like it was painted by the guy who painted the little engine that could. I will proudly say, guys, no AI used in our... No AI. That's a very important thing. AI was trained on this. Yeah, probably, yeah. The recipe for this is 60% earth tone corn, 20% winter rye, and 10% barley and 10% oats. Correct. And again, it's going to be in those really nice, high quality barrels. Big shout out to John Crumbly, our barrel lead, and it's just fantastic. I mean, it's beautiful. It has that cherry cola, like you were talking about, on the nose, and then the finish just has that, it's almost like luscious, dark dried fruits. You get that sweetness of the corn and all that. But I mean, you have four years on the label, I imagine, over time, different age statements. But for the age that it is, it is not, for lack of a better term, grainy. No. That can put some people off. I mean, one of the key things is you can make good whisky in two different ways. You can make it in the barrel or you can make it on the still. Don't be greedy with your still cuts. If you want to get rid of some of that graininess, really look at how you're distilling, really make sure that you're getting the right amount of heads compression or whatever you need to do in order to get some of that nasty stuff out before it even Yeah. I've done a great job. This bourbon is delicious. You make it with grains grown in the difficult part of Nevada, which is all of Nevada. In one of the shortest growing seasons that you could possibly have because, listen, we are high desert, so it is 120 degrees in the summer. We also, just because we are right by Lake Tahoe, Tahoe just got seven feet of snow yesterday. So it's not exactly, I mean, the Donner Party is somewhere up there still. And you muck it up with rye and oats to make a difficult distillation process too. You go through all of this trouble to make this delicious bourbon, it is fabulous. And how much is this going to cost me? $44.99. But we're talking about Binny's prices here and I cheated. It's every day $39.99 and I don't know how long it's on sale, but it's $34.99 right now. It's also a four grain. We really need to embrace four grain a little bit more. Bourbon's flooded and there's not a lot of daylight, but where there is daylight, it's only because we're not really experimenting in those corners. That's a good point. So to any bourbon distillers out there, mess around with your mash bill, have some fun. Because there's a lot of opportunity out there that just the public just needs to be educated on. So one thing I want to say about Rye that I'm now allowed to say is, the Rye got Best American Rye Whiskey under 12 years at the World Whiskey Awards. 30:16 Rye Whiskey Excellence I know. It's not nice. That's great. We also got the single estate distillery at the World Whiskey Awards. That's wonderful. We took that prize as well. That's great. The Rye, and I'm a single malt head, it's the Steve McCarthy connection means so much to me. This rye, however, is kind of what sold me on the job. This is a really interesting approach to rye that I love. Did you bring a gallon bag of rye too? Yes. Hold on. It's actually somewhere. You have to smell it and taste it. That was a joke, but there is a lot of props. Oh, look at that. I brought everything but oats. Winter rye. Winter rye. So we're going to be using Serafino or AC Haslett for this. Both of which have issues with making sure they don't lodge. They kind of grow a little bit shorter, and we're always trying to make sure that this shrift grows a little bit better and better every year, but what I really like about it and what I'm kind of sold about rye is this is a good indication of where I would like to see the industry grow. Grains are largely a commodity for a lot of distilleries. They're only grown in a couple of locations. Rye is a lot of it's coming out of Canada, and corn, a lot of it's coming out of Indiana. You're kind of getting it from the different parts around the country and around the continent. But with us and growing it in one location, as opposed to the Earth tones corn, which is obviously different, we have all of these different phenotypes that affect flavor within corn. There's not a lot of people like putting up gem rye or ornamental rye on their porch at Halloween. That's not a thing. So winter rye tends to be more of like just growing conditions related, largely tends to taste kind of the same, the rye itself. You take that same very common strains of winter rye, AC. Haslett, Serafino, and you plant them at 5,000 feet with those extreme growing conditions, and you get a different manifestation of the flavor, which typically with rye is what? Black pepper all the time people say. Yeah. This. Black pepper, herbal, usually you get winter green. Yeah. Mint sometimes. This is all candied orange. And when I say candied orange, it's when you take a thin slice of orange and you cure it in sugar and it kind of like goos and gelatinizes and you eat the whole thing, pith and all, and it's just kind of the most amazing flavor of natural candy. This has that. And there's a lot of, I mean, you get baking spice on rye also, but there's like a really nice, almost five spice, all spice character as well. You said cherry coke on the cherry cola on the bourbon. This is root beer. Yeah. Your spices and the underlying sweetness. Candy, definitely. Orange, yes, but there's popping spice spot too, yeah. I can see that for sure. This is rad. But a really nice- There's like a depth of character. This is like a Virgil's or something like that. This is a nicer root beer. A good root beer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Something with a good bite to it, like a root beer sarsaparilla or something like that, where you almost get like candied ginger. Yeah. Roger has opinions, both of those guys. Sarsaparillas and root beers. I love sarsaparilla. But you can get those nicer flavors that come out in this, and it's just beautiful. And to me, this is an indication of like 20 plus years in this industry. There's new ways to go. There's new places to approach flavor. And man, I didn't think rye could quite taste this way. And I'm really, really happy with this one. Well, this is 80% rye too, so we would expect that to be really spiny and herbal and really overbuilt. Yeah, and sometimes like way too drying on the finish. This is so easy to drink. There are some good things about growing where we are. Rye doesn't really like a high humidity environment. It's gonna be coming from Poland and Russia. They have those really intense winters. And so it does want cold. It does want some low humidity in the growing conditions because it can be very susceptible to mold. The first, second and third rye whiskeys ever made were all made like between New York and Massachusetts. The first proper distillation came out in Massachusetts. I don't think it was very good because I don't think there was like a fifth and a sixth. And it's probably because it got very, very mold infected. Lots of ergot and stuff got in there. And we just don't have to deal with any of that because the humidity is so low. Yeah. And this is 80 rye, 10 wheat, 10 barley. 10 barley. Yeah. And the barley is unmalted barley. OK. It's line priced with the bourbon. Guys, get out there and try these. Currently $34.99. Yeah. God, that's a steal. I know. It's very good. Kind of. That's what we do. And to me, the rye, I think, is truly a special product. It's for me, I would expect it to be the one that puts Minden Mill on the map. Well, you made the label green, so we got back on for it. Yeah. That's always helpful. Whenever it's not green, it throws everyone off. Yeah, we were talking about the conventions of coloring within labels. It blows my mind every time. It's like, well, it's not green, it can't be rye. No, no, no. What color is single? It's got to be blue. Same barrel type 36 months, level three char, et cetera. Same deal at all. Those are side by side in that rick house. And these are all traditional Kentucky style ricks. I mean, wooden ricks all the way down. How high do you go? Two stories. Each one has three levels. Okay. So total of six possible stacks with a platform in between. $34.99 for the bourbon and the rye. Single malt is $49.99 right now. Thank you for sharing your bourbon with us. We're devaluing your brand. No, we're making it more accessible. This is excellent bourbon and people need to try it. 36:17 American Single Malt Vision And next up. American Sing-A-Malt. Wow, that was so crisp. Good pop. Good pop. Good pop. Here, you can do it. I put a cork back in, so you can do it yourself. It gets progressively lower pitched as it goes around the table. So, American Sing-A-Malts. So, now a designation. Now a designation. Very, very proud of everybody on the American Sing-A-Malt Whiskey Commission. There was no designation official before. It was hodgepodge. Everyone assumed that American Sing-A-Malt was just like new wood and hammer mills and column stills and like trying to replicate bourbon with malt. And malt is delicate. Yes. So, what happened? So, it's maybe 10 years ago at this point, maybe even longer. The first American Sing-A-Malt released in 1996, McCarthy's Oregon Sing-A-Malts, Steve McCarthy. Again, fabulous. Second one, I believe, was St. George. Yes, as far as I remember. Yeah. Yeah. So, came out in 96, St. George, number two. And then we enter into a world of other people trying to get into this. The important thing to remember is that within the US and Canada, bourbon, rye are king. Anywhere else, it's about malt. As distillers, we want to join the larger distilling world. And that includes following the same guidelines as close as possible that you would have with scotch, Japanese single malt, Indian single malt down the line. And 100 small distilleries got together to form the American Single Malt Commission. It was started here. Here. Was it not? Yeah, that's right. At a Binny's Beverage Depot. It was at a Binny's Beverage Depot. It just occurred to me on a rainy day. Yeah. So yeah, look at all this history. As a matter of fact- A wee bread in the room to tell this story. He got everybody together. He's in France. I'm very sorry. As a matter of fact, I wasn't at that meeting. I will never have that knowledge. I wasn't at that meeting, but one of my distillers, Noya Gilmore, was. She was there. Binnys is excited for the category and proud to have the slightest history in getting it going. Well, and it's also through many meetings over various times, and I'm only a small smidgen out of that timeline, but I know for a fact that it's been pounding the table for the longest time to say, how can you take this thing that's hundreds and Yes. Yeah. I mean, only in America. It's just like the arrogant. Yeah. It did start. It started here. I kind of forgot about that. And then- Go Binny's. Go Binny's. And then over about eight years of work, it grew in numbers. I think it was originally, I'm going to live out a bunch, but it was triple eight, I want to say it was Westland, Westward, triple eight, Santa Fe Spirits. Cole Keegan, right? Cole Keegan. That's Santa Fe. I know I'm going to leave. Was Copperworks involved? I don't remember. Virginia? Virginia, I believe. And then Balcones? Yes. Possibly. Yeah, I forgot the original crew. It's basically like a super group. It's kind of like they're the first round of the Avengers, and I'm going to like swipe in as Moon Knight, and no one's going to care. I hope you understand that. I didn't understand that round of name dropping you just did, nor the Marvel references. I have no idea. It's funny because like... I know the names. I don't know the Marvel stuff. Amazingly, I don't care about Marvel films. I have no idea. I don't know why I went down that line. The Single Malt, yeah, it grew from eight small distilleries with a lot of love to more than a hundred small distilleries with tons of love, and as one large unit, we voted on, we talked about, we wrote the laws together, and it was all headed by Yeah. And that's always been something that's really important to me again, because my career was made by Steve McCarthy, so I talk very heavily about his forethought and his sight looking into it. Now, Minden, we've still wanted to take this even a little bit more traditional, but also a little bit more innovative. And growing our own barley is one thing. We're malting our own barley. We have some floor malting capability. So the floor maltings? Yeah, floor maltings. Is someone manually? We have both. Is someone's arm growing longer because of monkey shoulder? Like, what are we looking for? Yes, we haven't done a floor malting in quite some time. But yes, when it was in effect, people were doing that. We switched to an auto malter and that's been running since then, which is a lot easier on folks. And right now we're actually in the midst of moving malting equipment. So I think this year's production is going to be done malted elsewhere. But that's going to get back to standard once we have to. We have to actually rebuild the malting house. Give us that pause. Does your HVAC in the malting house reproduce the climate of some other place? Of other malting houses. It's really dusty in there. They're very dusty places. And then, of course, 100% malted barley, that's going to be brought into our single malt distillery. And that's actually within the old actual Minden Mill. And this building was built in 1906. One of the first of the five green mills within Nevada that supported the emigration out to California for the gold rush. It was the largest. It could produce 100 barrels of flour a day. And I think it's the only one of the five that's still standing. So it's in this historical building. We've actually, we got LEED Gold certification because we were able to just environmentally bring this up to a new standard, which is really cool. But the coolest thing, the coolest thing about it is how we heat these stills. So in trying to replicate as much of a traditional form of single malt as possible, you have to consider temperature within your distillation because we have to consider the difference between low pressure steam, which is going to top off at 120 degrees Celsius, and direct fire distillation, which is what we did at Clear Creek originally, but typically is not all that welcome by communities anymore. I get it. Like we're right next to the fire department and the sheriff's department. If we blow up, we take everyone out. Watch out, Minden. I mean, it's a very small town. It's probably no one in Minden has to worry about. What do we use instead of direct fire? We're using a thermal oil calandria system, which is basically heating a mineral oil, the same thing you use to cure butcher block while food grade. Instead of low pressure steam and a bain-marie going around the pot, you're heating it with this much higher temperature thermal oil, which you can build temperature without building pressure. So we are cooking this at 185 degrees Celsius. The key difference between those two temperatures of 120 and 185 is 160 degrees Celsius, because that's where the Maillard reaction occurs. For anyone who doesn't know what that is, that's the interesting complex flavors that happen when you expose carbon chains to extreme heat. We talk about Maillard reactions all the time. Really? I never as a child thought this is something I would be discussing regularly. It's insane. Browned meat, toast, the fond. Honestly, to me, the way that I always like to say it, it's like the difference between custard and creme brulee. It's the brulee. It is what makes it a better product. And we can do that at those higher temperatures. And so what's coming off the spirit still actually has a larger amount of complex aminos and esters than you would if it was just coming off of a low pressure steam distillation. And so we're starting off, when you try this, I mean, it's oily and rich and fatty and all of these wonderful ways that you want in a single malt, where you're just like, wow, this is rich like blubber. And I know there's not words that... But it's like, you know what I mean? You want that richness, you want that velvetyness, and that's going to be coming. That oily character, yeah. And that's going to be coming from even within the new make. There's a fresh brightness here too. It says aged five years. It seems like not insultingly young, but it seems like it's youthful and vibrant. Oh, and you're getting some really good spice from the sherry cask. The sherry shows. Yeah. But without the spray paint. So I like the sherry a lot here. The spray paint. Yeah, sometimes sherry, especially scotches, have this like kind of... Acetone. Yeah. I'm a little bit of a sucker for that, but I understand to some, it's a fault. Depending on quality of barrel, you can get the sulfury character. Yeah. That's not present at all. No, this is like super clean. Oh, yeah. That's lovely. That oiliness really is there. Yeah. And so for anyone out there who's like new to... And I want everyone out there to try American Single Malt. It's definitely the most exciting thing that's happened in my career is how America can change its distilling practices and to have like a footnote in what's going on is a real honor. But for the consumer out there, if you haven't gotten into American Single Malt, I don't want you to think Laphroaig. I don't want you to think Lagavulin. Like those are fine products, but American Single Malt is really cool. We have this massive country that is, I don't know, probably 40 times the size of Scotland. I've never done the math, but like way bigger than Scotland. If you can develop all of these little culinary pockets between Islay and Speyside and Highland and Lowland within Scotland itself, within the British Isles. Think of what that means for the US where you have the same experiment done on a larger scale that involves so many culinary histories, so many different types of people, so many traditions of immigrants coming in, bringing in their own food, that we can do something really interesting within American Single Malt that the world's never really done before or has the opportunity of. We're a unique nation in the sense that we're so diverse, and that itself could be our biggest asset in creating new products. You smash cut from this moment to 20 years in the future, you're going to have expressions of American Single Malt that are going to wow the world, and really inform what can be done. I'm just going to call out right now Striker, the Single Malt out of Andalusia that's made by Moose Allen. It's all made with the three classic Texas barbecue smoking woods. It's like immediate idea of regionality of local culinary aspects, influencing a Single Malt that you would never get coming out of Scotland. Which is also interesting because Malt is so delicate. So delicate. It would be very hard not to overpower it. Well, and it offers a greater canvas on which to paint. Yes, for sure. Yeah, takes to the cask while it's already fruity, delicate. So with all of this in consideration, in that 20-year timeline, America is going to produce some really amazing whiskeys that nowhere else could have the possibility or the history to really come up with. And bourbon and rye are going to be bourbon and rye. Like they're not going to evolve in the same piece. So if you want to be part of something interesting and exciting, like go to check out what your local American single malt is because it's going to be something cool as can be. Well, and you're already doing it in a fashion that is comparable to Scotland with your warehousing, you're using roller mills as opposed to hammer mills for the malt, you're using pot stills. You're growing your own grain. Growing your own grain, which they don't, I mean, almost all of them do not malt their own and grow, there's no way. I mean, they're using whatever barley is most like prevalent at the time. Are you sticking to the same barley or are you switching depending on what's grow, like what could grow best at the time? We're going to be... Because like when you go over there, it's like, oh, we're using Laureate this year or we're using Sassy. Yeah, I mean, there's going to be some sort of consideration. I'm a big dogged, let's keep this GN0, glycosidic nitrile zero for folks listening. That's a compound within barley that can produce a carcinogen when it's mixed with high humidity in copper. So perfect within the still itself. We use Copeland, which is a GN0. It's not going to produce any of it. A lot of the older varietals tend to be GN0. I'm going to stick with those as much as possible. That being said, I don't want anyone to worry about the amount of glycosidic nitrile in their whisky. The bigger issue is- I wasn't worried about that before. Yeah. Now you're considering. You're sweating. Then on grain, off grain? This is going to be off grain. Off grain. Again, like Scotland, can you quickly explain how on grain is typically like bourbon, and off grain is typically malt? Yeah, and so it really has to do with the difference. I messed up in one thing I said early, because the bourbon and the rye are on grain. We're not doing any lottering with that. Basically, you're doing that first distillation with the actual fibrous material of the grain itself within the pot. Whoa. That's for bourbon and rye. For the single malt, it's lottered off the way you would a beer, so you're just getting the wash. I'd said wash earlier, meant to say mash. Then you have your yeast just in the wash, so that's after you've already removed the solids. Correct. You have it fermented yet? It's fermented without solids in it. Got it. Yeah. Are you, speaking of yeast, using different yeast strains, same yeast strain? Are you trying to cultivate yeast? We're not trying to cultivate yeast. I know that yeast is, we're using pretty, I mean, honestly, it's pretty neutral and unexciting yeast enough for me not to remember the technical. Your focus is on the grain. Yeah, focus is on the grain and I can't, it's like, it's N01 or something like that. Like I don't even remember, it's a bucket. Whatever is making a great conversion for you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And great conversion should be always taken in stride. A little bit of funk in your single malt ferment is definitely preferable. You get some better flavors that way, in my opinion. Yeah, you don't want it, you don't, as any, like we're not trying to make beer, we're trying to make whiskey. And so you want a little bit of, a little bit of just something of character in there. Yeah. So when you were creating your single malt, were you trying to replicate anything or just say like, here's what we're doing? Just like it is with the bourbon, the rye, us at Minden, like when we're looking towards the single malt, what is a region that really inspired us, that's going to be the space side region. So the space side part of Scotland is going to be where we replicated the barrel house or the rick house. That's going to be all Dunnage style. Then also it's just like, okay, well, this is what's inspired us to begin with. So let's end in that way as opposed to being like, well, at McCarthy's we're really looking to more of an Islay Bend for it. So we were as the smokiness, the peediness is part of it. What's been fun for me is making two single malts that are so different, but still have one foot in two very different parts of Scotland itself. That's fun. You're replicating the climate of Scotland, Spaceside. Correct. But you're growing the grain in Nevada, and you don't have the salinic influence of the water, you're pulling the very clean water locally. So though you're replicating the temperature, you're definitely creating something with a unique fingerprint. Yeah. And that should be first and foremost of anything, like in my opinion, it's pretty hard to try to revolutionize everything at once, and make it a good product. So there should be things that you're comfortable with when you're designing a spirit. And again, just like the vodka itself, you find a couple of key indicators that you want to change, and that's what you focus on. And the rest usually follow suit. At the end, it's going to come down to blending, and that's going to be the work that me and John and everyone at Minden does. All right, I'm just going to say $54.99, short-term sale, $49.99. $49.99. $49.99 for a high-quality American single malt. It's a little absurd. This one got, this got platinum from Fred Minnick, which was really flattening. Like, thank you, Fred. I've never met the man. I hope to sometime. We have some of his books over there. We have a chocolate-citrus finish on this. It's like citrusy and chocolatey on the finish. Yeah, chocolate's definitely a component. But there's like a brightness there too. That's fun. That's fun. 52:51 Evil Bean Coffee Liqueur We were talking briefly, and this got Greg real excited. So I like coffee quite a bit, and this was a really fun, same, same. really fun experiment because it involved me getting more caffeinated than any human being possibly should. Well, sounds like us on a typical day. It was insane. I tend to have a little bit of a build by committee approach to things, and we were doing that with the coffee blend, and it just wasn't really going anywhere, and we were up against the timeline. So I took every possible sample of beans from a local roastery, Alpin Sierra, fantastic coffee. We worked with them on the first few batches, and then quickly grew out of what they were able to provide. But love Christian and everybody at Alpin. I took every single sample that they could of their cold brew within certain flavor of specifics made a bazillion types of cold brew, and then blended them over a two-day period, and like I said, drank more caffeine than, I think it aged me. Do I look okay for 34? You look wonderful. And then it was just about adding in a good quality sugar, 100% cane sugar. We use it in inverted sugar. Folks out there, don't be scared of inversion. That means you add citrus acid to it, and it turns half the sucrose and the fructose, and then it doesn't crystallize, which is the important thing for drinkers out there. That's neat. You notice it doesn't have like little sugar boogers? That's because you're using this inverted sugar, and the citric acid just like keeps it from crystallizing as easily. Yeah, you can really dry it out and do it if you want, but it's not going to be like half the bottles you see up there. Well, and the added benefit is playing around, and you can play around with pH at that point too. Yeah. Yeah. Then a neutral spirit that we make as well. So the neutral spirit is going to be, at one point it was barley and oats, and at one point it's corn. It's just kind of what we have extra of, and it doesn't really affect the flavor when you're putting a bunch of coffee on it. So for the coffee aspect, you were working with a roastery. Now, are you roasting? We're not roasting our own. We're working with a bigger producer that I'll keep anonymous at the moment. It is not, no offense to Starbucks, but I don't want anyone assuming it's Starbucks. It's not. It's a Peet's. It's not a Peet's. Is it Intelligencia? I think I bought that Peet's. Let's go with, name more roasters. You'll eventually hit them, but it's just going to keep that quiet for now. But they're working within our specifications, and again, this wouldn't have started without Alpensier. Is it always the same beans from the same location? Yeah. Arabica versus Robusto. It's a combination of a few different areas, Arabica mostly. Okay. And then what's really been great about this is just the ability to grow something really quickly. We were supposed to sell 500 cases of this last year. We sold 10,000. So the panic... I'm going to call 2025 my coffee year because I spent my entire job just working on how to figure out how to scale something that I designed for 500 cases up to, let's make this international. Yeah. All in one year. At this point, I can say thanks to the support of everyone I work with. We did it. Yes. I'm really, really happy with it. And it is doing well. The label is pretty cool. The label is really cool. Anyone who finds it out there, Evil Bean LeCure are going to see two crows on there. Marketing says that they're ravens. I'm really throwing marketing under the bus. Yeah. They're not ravens though. We take it. It's okay. I'm not remarketing under the bus. These are crows. Ravens look different. I'm a birder. Very intelligent. Very intelligent. Oh, they're like the best. They are. Them and the scrub Jays. I love a scrub J. Different sort of bird. Same bird, different bird. Also, it's $27.99. This is $27.99? Get out of here. Okay, this is rad. You like it. So, pontificate on coffee liqueur. Sometimes they're too sweet. This is not too sweet. Sometimes they're too green and herbally. Sometimes they're not roasted enough so they have these like funky esters that I don't like. I like a darker roast. But the risk of going too dark of a roast is it only tastes bitter and burned. Which is really nasty. Which we have seen also. Which we've seen also. And this makes none of those mistakes. It's perfectly sweetened. And along with the dark, dark roast and cocoa notes, there's like chicory. There is a complex spice built into this thing. Yeah, that was the hardest thing to kind of dial in. And had a lot of great leadership from our marketing team. Way to go marketing. Yeah, thank you marketing. You are appreciated. We love you. On how to really nail it in. Because I'm a distiller. I'm going to want it to taste a certain way. I'm going to want it to have no sugar in it at all. Because you know, sugar is the enemy. And just emotionally, you kind of go that way. And I was really led to a really good spot on this product. And I'm super happy about it. At this moment, it's becoming kind of what's... I'm not going to say what keeps the light on, but like, thank God we have this right now. Because it's really making our path to success a lot easier. But it's still a really handmade, carefully produced product. And it's only those three ingredients. There's no flavorings added to it. But there's no vanilla. Because there's a plushness. That's going to be coming from the combination of knowing how to build the base blend of the coffee in anticipation of the sugar content. And once again, that's going to go back to the Clear Creek years and all the fruit liqueurs I made there, as well as the stuff I did at Hood River Distillers. That's outstanding. So yeah, that vanilla is kind of cool, right? Yeah. That was really key to me in terms of flavor design, mostly because I like coffee, but I like melted coffee ice cream more than anything. I want an IV bag of that, or just a feed bucket or something. There's something amazing about coffee ice cream, which I feel like is just, just imbrogia, you know? And I wanted to kind of hit on that with an air, with a little bit of a twist towards the adult side. I want to pour that on top of coffee ice cream. It is so good. And that coffee character just like, it just keeps going, but it's clean. Like you're not just getting, like there's no level of overly bitter character or overly sweet. Often you will see on Evil Bean a thin, maybe about a quarter inch or so of like a tan line at the bottom. That's the crema from the coffee itself. We did versions of that where we removed it and it just fell so flat that it was like, okay, every, you give me a, I think you gave me a water earlier. I shook it. You can't give me a Gatorade without me shaking it. So as human beings, it's every orange juice we've ever had. But the incorporation of that crema into it is a really big deal for the flavor. So I always encourage people to get it, give it a quick shake and it's all back in solution because it's not sediment, it's actually coffee oils that have separated out of solution. Well, it does remind me of some of the best espresso I've had that's not overly done in one way or another. This has been a really fun project for me because, or for everybody because I think it opens us up to again, a few different expressions that we'd always kind of, if we extend it, we have a lot of room to go. I would love to see a Mexican evil bean, a frijole mallow. You know what it kind of reminds me of also? Line extensions. Caffe de olla. Caffe de olla, yep. Only know what that is because of Jim. Yeah, when we did that. Yeah. Because there's almost like a little bit of that like roasted cinnamon. Spiciness. Spiciness to it. Yeah, you can see kind of why I was going in that direction. That's fun. So, yeah, all kinds of line extensions and limited editions. In time. We need to grow any of this stuff. We need a coffee tomorrow. I have a fine line emotionally where I'm just like, no extensions until we hit a certain number of K sales. That's just kind of my- Establish the thing before you bastardize it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Don't ruin it just because you get excited. Do the job. I would say this for our listeners again. Espresso martinis are having a moment. Swap out the nothing of vodka for the yes of bourbon and you've got a better cocktail. Even better, espresso martinis are great. Espresso tonics or just like this with tonic water is incredible. I love an espresso tonic with a little bit of lemon. This lemon tonic water is a perfect light summer drink. Why do we do this before lunch? Have you ever measured the caffeine content per ounce? I did. And? You want me to get out my calculator? Okay, okay, okay. This is really fun. This is going to settle so many bets. Yeah, I had it all measured. I worked it all out. Evil Bean contains 1,030 milligrams of caffeine per liter. A 750 milliliter bottle contains 772.5 milligrams of caffeine. Each ounce contains 30.5 milligrams. An average cup of coffee contains roughly 90 milligrams of caffeine. An average eight ounce cup of Starbucks coffee contains 130 milligrams of caffeine. In short, four ounces of Evil Bean is roughly a cup of Starbucks coffee. The CDC describes low to moderate caffeine usage as 300 milligrams per day, which is roughly three to four cups of coffee or 40% of a 750 bottle of Evil Bean. That is the exact kind of nerding out that I want to hear from my coffee liqueur. The CDC says you can drink about half a bottle. Yeah, that's what they said. That's exactly what they said. About a half a bottle of this a day and you're good. Yeah. I mean, at 25% alcohol, you're perfect. That's just only low to moderate. Just go the whole thing. How many grams per liter of sugar are we talking? Do I have to worry about my sugar content? I could do the math, but you don't want me to. No, I'm more concerned about the caffeine. I love this. The caffeine thing, I was super curious about too. So I went and did the big boy test. Because no one ever says. Yeah. So it's roughly a four ounce pour. That's a pretty big pour. Yeah. It's called an average cocktail, two ounces, two cocktails. It's a cup of coffee. Awesome. And real quick. Half a cup of coffee in your black Manhattan or whatever, or your coffeeed up Manhattan. Uppers and downers. Yeah. Okay. Put a shot in a, honestly, I've tossed a shot in a Guinness before and really, really enjoyed it. Oh wow. How have I not done that? Split the G. All right. All right. Real quick before we finish, are there any projects in the works, anything for us to keep an eye on? Yes. It's all going to be, we're trying to drive people to come visit us. We're trying to figure out how to really make, I mean, honestly, this is the most beautiful distillery I've ever worked in, been in. It's truly gorgeous. So we really want to really drive people to come visit us. Please go to mindenmill.com. You can absolutely see what we have. There's going to be some LTOs that are going to be coming out this year, and they're going to be mostly handled through the tasting room. So how we want to handle that, if you can order direct from the tasting room, I'm uncertain at this time. But we have a couple of different blends. We have some floor malted stuff that's up for contention for a possible release. We have a orange wine barrels that we made ourselves that has been aging some rye in it. I'm sorry, orange wine, like Mexican oranges making wine or like orange wine, white wine with too long of skin contact. First. Ah, orange wine. They make buzz balls out of- Vino de Naranja. Yeah, Vino de Naranja. And then so we made ourselves and then we finished a bunch of rye in it. So that's going to be coming out as an LTO. And then there's just some specialty blends. I have- Rob, can you get us some of that? Just like, get some on the course. I have some dreams that I want to try to do. Again, I've been really focused on corn. I want to do a deep dive on some of the Paiute corns out there and maybe talk to some of the tribes and try to handle this respectfully. But it'd be pretty amazing to do a burb and not use what came from that area. That would be cool. And also just educational. I mean, we got to look at corn for these folks as almost a form of heraldry. It's coming from a region. And there's something, if you can make whiskey and educate folks about how cool this country and this nation and on the people before us all were, like, let's do it, like, let's try to really learn about our past. Cool. Cool. Well, I'm really happy. Yeah. Did we start talking louder and faster once the coffee of the corp got passed around? I think so. That's great. These are all really great. And I gotta say that they're pretty affordable for what they are too. Yes. That's the deal. Yeah. We're really looking at trying to grow this brand and do things the right way. Bourbon, rye, American single malt coffee liqueur, and I guess they also have a vodka. There's a vodka. Oh, come on. That vodka is good. It's pretty good, yeah. It's good. All right. Cool. Well, thank you for coming. Thank you for having me. We really appreciate it. And thank you for listening to another episode of Barrel to Bottle The Binnys Podcast. Back in your feed real soon with something cool. Until then, I'm Greg. I'm Rob. I'm Joe. Keep tasting. Will do. No, you say keep tasting. Oh, keep tasting. Perfect. Perfect. That happens like every time. Yeah, fine. Good work. Thanks for telling me what to do.