Welcome back to another episode of Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. I'm Pat from the Whiskey Hotline. It's a Whiskey Hotline episode. Joe's here. Welcome back, Joe. Thanks for having me. I'm so glad to be here. Yeah, we're glad to have you here. Jim's here too. Hi, Jim. Honorary Whiskey Hotline member, because I went on a trip once. There you go. We've got a special guest to remember with us today, Bruce Joseph from Hotaling & Company. Are we calling it Anchor Distilling still? No. No, okay. No, it's Hotaling & Company since 2017. Are you allowed to use the anchor name at all? No. When we were Anchor Brewing & Distilling, our owners sold Anchor Brewing to Sapporo. Sapporo, yeah. The anchor name went with it. Yeah. So since then, we rebranded to Hotaling & Company. Anchor in the news again this week, pulling all the beer back. What a... Yeah. I was reading some industry rag this morning, and apparently the employees are kind of upset about it. Yeah, it's a sad thing. I think pulling back from national distribution might be a good idea, but the Christmas sale thing is... That's crazy. I think they got a backtrack on that. I'm sure they will. I mean, people are really up... Yeah, Joe, they're not going to... They pulled back distribution from all 50 states to just California, and they said they're not going to make Christmas sale anymore. Well, and the reason they're not going to do the Christmas sale is because it takes a longer time to brew, and they have to do a different label, a different tree every year. And I was thinking... So what? That didn't sneak up on them. They've been doing it for 40 something years. I'm like, I understand what you're saying, but we need this beer for Christmas. Let's make a Christmas miracle happen. Enough about the beer, though. We'll talk... Well, I suppose we'll talk more later. So Bruce, you are the master distiller at Hotaling then, correct? And that's been a title you've held since what? Since Fritz retired or something? But you've been making it all along. You know, I've held that title of master distiller, I don't know how many years, but I didn't take it right when Fritz left. And part of the reason was, real early on when Whiskey Advocate, one of their early whiskey fests in San Francisco, we had the booth next to Jimmy Russell. And I thought, well, damn, that's a master distiller. I'm never going to be that. And I didn't really care. And at some point my wife said, well, you ought to just do it, you know? At some point I started, you know, taking the title. It's not like you hadn't put your time in, right? You want to give us a little background on how and when you got started with Anchor? Yeah. I went to work at Anchor Brewing in the fall of 1980, pretty much just out of college. I knew someone who worked there. And so I kind of stumbled into, you know, it's not like I planned a career in brewing or distilling. I kind of stumbled into it. Anchor was really small. It was a great time. There were 12 employees for the whole company. Wow. So it was a great time to join the company, you know, quickly got a chance to do, you know, pretty much everything at Anchor. Yeah, I was a brewer for my first 13 years. And then in 1993, in January of 93, we got licensed to distill. And I was asked to switch over to the distilling. I mean, is that something you found a natural transition, I guess, or did you have to go back to school for anything? Or was it kind of like typical craft brewing, like, well, you'll figure it out. It was, we'll figure it out. And I think one thing is, you know, at Anchor, I think Fritz Maytag kind of passed this down to everyone there. And, you know, and Mark Carpenter, who was the assistant brewmaster and became brewmaster after Fritz retired, he's the one that hired me. You know, kind of this sense of confidence that we can do whatever we set out to do. And I think, not that it was kind of misguided overconfidence or anything, but, you know, we felt like we could get there. And that was kind of the prevailing mood at the company. By 93 then, when the distillery operation started, how big had the company gotten as far as, I mean, when you started, you said 12 employees. How much different of an operation was that then? Boy, that's a good question. When I started, you know, we did, I think that that first year I was there in 1980, we did like 20,000 barrels. And I think that's a lot. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was their first year at the current location. They moved from the old kind of tiny space that they were located in when Fritz bought Anchor in 1965. And they had been about one year into the current building. And the current building is still the big brick one, the multi-story old old building. Yes, yeah, yeah. We were a lot bigger in 93. I can't remember the exact number of barrels, but the production staff had gotten bigger. But at that point, we really still didn't have, well, we never had a marketing staff. And we didn't really have much of a sales staff. We had a couple salesmen at that point. So, and an office manager and someone that had helped her. And other than that, it was all production. So, I want to say we were probably around 40, 45 employees by then. Something like that. And, you know, probably approaching 80,000, 90,000 barrels, something like that. I don't know. That's a lot for that building. I mean, that building is big, but it doesn't seem like it's that big. No, no, it started to fill up. At first, it seemed like when I first went to work there, we had a lot of unused space. But we started, you know, the main thing is expanding the cellar, expanding fermentation, you know, we took up a lot more room. Space disappears and you're not paying attention. Yeah. Did you have a favorite beer to make while you were making beer there? Or was it one of those things where you made enough beer at work and then it was just you got home or and you didn't want to think about it outside of that. It was just a transactional thing. A favorite beer to make or to drink? Both. Well, we didn't like wheat beer because we didn't get wheat malt in bulk and you had to grind. Well, then it was 100-pound bags rather than 50-pound bags, so it was a hell of a lot more work. It's a sweaty brew day. But no, I enjoyed making all of them and it was exciting every year doing the Christmas sale. Everyone was excited to do it and see how it would come out and have some initial brews and then tinkering with the recipe and kind of fine-tuning it. So it was a fun thing for drinking. Yeah, I love Anchor Steam. I think Anchor Steam is like the perfect just everyday beer to have with food or something. But I'm a huge fan of Anchor Porter. Yeah, if I had to pick one beer, I'd probably pick an Anchor Porter. I drank an enormous amount of steam when I lived in San Francisco, just non-stop. Yeah, it's even in movies now like anybody in San Francisco drinking a beer, they're always showing steam now. I drank a tremendous amount when I lived across from Twin Anchors in Chicago, and they always had Anchor Steam on them. Oh, yeah. It's the only beer that is allowed to be called steam, right? Fritz trademarked the name, and he was pretty vigorous to protect the trademark. Yeah. Well, you have to be. Yeah. All right. You guys started distilling in 93, and what was the first whiskey that got made or first thing that got made? Because you didn't start with the gin, did you? No. The purpose for opening the distillery was Fritz's interest in doing rye whiskey, and he had talked about it for a number of years before we ever got licensed. I think it satisfied Fritz on a couple levels. He liked things that had a historical background, and I think that probably was one of the reasons he bought the brewery because of the history of steamed beer. But his real interest is the roots of rye whiskey going back to the colonies and everything. Then the other thing that motivated Fritz too was he only liked to take on projects that were really unpopular. I mean, that's why Anchor never made an IPA. We didn't make one early on, and he wasn't going to make one because everyone was making one, and that just didn't appeal to him. At that time, just American whiskey in general and rice whiskey specifically, it was just like not much respect for it. Joe and I were talking, at that time in the Bay Area, when we started distilling, you could get Old Overhold and bars would have on the back bar like a dusty bottle of Old Overhold, and you could find Jim Beam Rye and Wild Turkey Rye, and that was That was it, yeah. So I think those two factors led Fritz to have an interest in rye whiskey. Right away, you were using malted rye too. I mean, was that more just because it was a comfort level thing with brewers, or did he find some ancient manuscript that talked about malted rye, and that's what he wanted to recreate? You know, I wish I would have kept a diary of, you know, kind of early how everything progressed. You know, I think Fritz really had, early on, had the idea of 100% rye, and I think he was kind of interested in, you know, like during colonial times some subsistence farmers would distill, and if they were growing rye, they probably had access to one grain. You know, this was remote. This isn't, you know, people who were distilling near a brewing center or something where, you know, malted barley might have been available and everything. You know, so there was that idea of 100%, and we experimented with malted and unmalted rye, but I'll tell you, when we started distilling, we fell in love with the flavor of malted rye, and we were just really taken by it. Yeah, and it was the only one around for so many years. I mean, now we've seen some small craft distiller start playing with it, but for decades, the only access to any malted rye, right, was potrero whiskeys. I can't think of any other. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and it makes sense to, if you're going historically with that rye, that it would be malted rye, because it's, of course, pre-having all the enzymes that we see another 100% grains. Yeah, if you're going to make a rye, you needed some level of malt. And that's what they used to make in Pennsylvania way back in the day, was they would use unmalted rye, but they didn't use barley malt, they used rye malt. Yeah. You know, we weren't distillers, we were brewers, but Fritz still did a huge amount of research. It not, you know, distilling then, I guess, wasn't that well-documented. And he felt like in some situations like that, like, you know, a remote farmer distilling or something, that they might have tried to malt all of their grain because, you know, the conversion and, you know, the diastatic power would have been so low Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, modern maltings is a lot of big difference, you know, with what you talk to any brewer or distiller now and even the malt we get now versus 30, 40 years ago, you're probably getting better efficiencies just based on better malting Yeah, I mean, it doesn't take very much malted barley to convert a mash anymore. The other kind of defining feature with Old Potrero whiskeys, if you had to say, that would probably be the heavy toast barrel, right? You know, when we started, we were trying to learn, you know, what would happen. So we, from the very beginning, we put whisky into new toasted oak, new charred oak, and used bourbon barrels. The first release was very, very lightly charred barrels. But yeah, we over the years, we've released both toasted barrel and charred barrel, and the used barrels too, which after that first round, and we started to have our own once used charred barrels, we switched to, you know, once used Old Potrero. Yeah, and it's always been a blend of those though. I mean, cause if you were just going to use the used barrels, don't you run into, run afoul of some labeling or something? You couldn't put rye on it or something? No, the Hotaling's Old Potrero, which our current company name came from, has always been all 100% once used charred barrels. So, you can't call it straight rye whiskey, but you can call it, I don't know what it is, rye whiskey or whiskey distilled from rye mash or something. Yeah, something like that, but you can't call it straight, though. No. Yeah. No, that's new charred oak only. And then, so, how did that evolve into what we see today? Cause now it's just the six-year-old, right? We're just getting ready to re-release as single barrels, the toasted barrel. Okay. The used barrel, we have so little of it, we're just kind of sitting on it for now, but it'll come out again, but we don't have that much of it. And, you know, obviously that's always been bottled. Well, the minimum we've bottled that at is an 11-year-old. So, you know, we don't have a lot and, you know, we're just kind of holding on to it right now. But, yeah, we did this package redesign, and when we did it... It's great. Yeah, yeah, it's a nice-looking package. Hell on a bottling line, a little top-heavy, likes to fall over, but, you know, that's my complaint, huh? Marketing rarely thinks of practicality when designing things like this. They could give a damn what... If it topples over. You know, we did the redesign, and, you know, that allowed us to kind of pull back a little, and we changed the age statement for the straight-ray whiskey from four and a half to six years, an age, you know, we really liked. And we kind of held off. We had always sold the toasted barrel as kind of a nod to history as a really young whiskey. The age statement on that was two and a half years. And now with, we're doing single-barrel releases of the toasted, and those are all going to be six plus. I think probably at some point, you know, there might be a regular bottling of six-year-old too, but. Have you guys ever messed around with barrel sizes with this? I mean, were you ever in smaller cuprage in the early days? Once, we did. We did some 100-liter barrels, so half-size. We didn't like them. We did it, and, you know, whoever thought up a 53-gallon barrel, I think, did a good job, because it seems like, you know, maturation and oak extraction are kind of, you know, neck and neck there. Yeah, there's a nice middle ground. Yeah, and, you know, not to say, you know, there's people doing small barrels that do a really good job with it, but for us, we didn't really like it or we didn't see the point of it. And at the time we did it, too, our production was small and we thought, well, if we kind of try to rush these along to release them, we're just not going to have whiskey down the road. So, you know, it didn't really serve any purpose for us. Where are you keeping all these barrels? I mean, real estate in San Francisco is notoriously a hot mess, I think, as the kids would say. Everyone has one at their house, all the employees. No, we've, you know, when we first started, we only had room for probably about 120 barrels at the Distillery in San Francisco. So very early on, we've had Sonoma County Warehouse, you know, so they're all in Sonoma County. Are they racked or palletized? Racked. Really? Yeah, we've never palletized. Boy, that sound came through really well. I like that. We should probably try some whiskey, right? Have you tried aging in bigger barrels or the 53 is the biggest? Just finishing in, you know, like Sherry and stuff. And, you know, in truth, like the handling of bigger barrels is an issue for us too. You know, when we bought Sherry, then we had to have custom-made barrel racks made and, you know, it's like, God, yeah. Yeah, we see that when we're in Scotland and the Dunnage warehouses, they've got a couple of rails. And that's an ordeal. It's to deal with them. Smells great. What would you say the calling card for a malted rye is? For me, it's always, it has this like fruitiness to it. This is like granola bar, fruit and nut bar type of thing to it. Yeah. You know, to me, I think, you know, some of that fruitiness and I think kind of the elevated maltiness, I think, is because of our yeast. Anchor Brewing had two house yeasts, the logger yeast, which was used for steam beer, and an ale yeast that was really used for almost everything else. You know, not to say they didn't bring in, you know, for kind of one-off projects, bring in some, you know, like an English ale yeast or something for that. But the standard ale yeast at Anchor was real workhorse, you know, like Liberty Ale, the Wheat Beer, Porter, Christmas Ale, it was all used for that. And that's the yeast we've used for Old Potrero. And still to this day, that's, I mean, you don't run in, do you know of other distillers that are regular using exclusively brewer's yeast? I mean, I see some guys like blended in or mix in and try it, but like for a, for a, a distribute, a widely distributed full scale product, that's kind of odd. I don't know. And when we, you know, we had the, the sales Sapporo coming up and we continued, we had a three year lease in 2017 to continue distilling at Anchor's, at our space. So we didn't move out until 2020 and part of that deal was access to the yeast. And, and so we knew we were going to be leaving. So we did experiment with distillers yeast and to me, it changed the flavor profile quite a bit. And in our opinion, not for the better. So yeah, it is a little different. We don't get the low finals like we get with a distillers yeast. Yeah, it's not as efficient. Yeah, yeah. It gets to a certain point. It wants to, it's beer yeast. It wants to quit. How, what's the strength on the wash then with this beer yeast? You mean the alcohol? Yeah. We get to about 9%. That's still pretty high. Yeah, yeah. Kind of standard, you know. You know, of note, these are pot distilled whiskeys. There's no column in there at all. No. And you've got a couple of different size pots, right? Like I've seen, I've never been there, but I've seen pictures and some of them look kind of comically small. And it's like, how are they making this much whiskey on this thing? Like the output of one, like I've seen a pot that's like the size of a person or something. And like when you're talking there, like how much whiskey are you actually collecting from a run on that still? Well, when we first started, we had one still. We would mash and distill low wines until we ran out of tank space. And then we would shut down, clean the still out really well and start doing spirit distillations until we ran out of low wines. And then we'd switch back again. And that was a 250 liter still, which we still own, but we don't make... It's a gin still now actually. So our production was tiny and it was labor intensive. And we eventually kind of worked our way up. And like our last setup at Anchor, we had a four scythe wash still. That was 1500 liters, still small, but you know, the big... And then a 700 liter spirit still. And that's also for scythes? No, no, that was one of our hybrid homemade, a Carl Pot. But you know, at the flange at the top of the pot, that's where Carl ended. We found this guy locally who did metalwork and made still tops, you know, kind of to our specifications. And so it was a homemade pot. It was a mishmash, a kit. Early on, we wanted to try a worm condenser, but Fritz didn't want to do a worm tub. So we fabricated in-house a line within a line so that you had, you know, distillate product with water running the opposite direction in the second line. And originally the product was on the inside and the water was on the outside. And then we found out that the inside was too small of a diameter and we were getting back pressure. And so we just switched them. And so we had the water in the middle and this is a totally homemade thing. And so, but once we saw that it worked and it worked well, we wanted a better looking version because the first one that we built, it looked like some dummies made it in their garage like us. And so then we actually built a few of them and Vendome did them and did a beautiful job. You know, they're really nice looking. That's funny. So we've got a Karl Pot, some San Francisco hippie made swan neck, and then Vendome made worm. Yeah. Yeah, that is a pretty fun mashup. So you can't buy that one off the shelf, that whole arrangement. That's wild. Now, is that still in the new facility now? No. No. The new facility that we've moved to in San Francisco is small, and so we also have a second facility in Sonoma too. So anything we make there won't see the light of day for like six years or so. So all the whiskey we're drinking is made at Anchor. In our glass right now, we've got the, what I guess we'll call it the flagship product, right? Yes. The six year straight rye whiskey, six years old. So this is in a charred barrel. Only charred barrels in this one? Yes. Okay. A combination of number three and number four chars. And since you're mentioning barrels too, I think something that Fritz brought to, you know, American whiskey really was the type of barrels. And we got to the point where we thought we had it together enough that the new spirit was worth putting into a barrel. We didn't want to, you know, foul barrels until we, you know, got the distilling part down. You know, we started getting in touch with Cuperges and we realized the standard American whiskey barrel at the time was coarse grain kiln dried and then just, you know, charred over like a propane flame or something. And they were cheap and, you know, and defense of the whiskey industry, you know, they weren't selling whiskey for very much. There's not a lot of build in there to support more expensive barrels. But Fritz wanted to explore different types of wood. You know, we did experiments. We were really helped by Independent Stave where, you know, that was the Cuperge we used and they were really good to us. Our first order of barrels was for six, you know, so. Yeah, now you're on a waiting list to get a barrel from Independent Stave. You know, they were very helpful. They helped us experiment. You know, I used to go, every time we made barrels in Missouri, in Lebanon, Missouri, I would go there. And, you know, I learned tons from them, you know, going there. And we were experimenting with, you know, air dried, fine, extra fine grain wood. So our standard barrel now is 24 month air dried, extra fine grain. And they do it on their, you know, their wine line where they're doing it over oak fires. Instead of the propane jet. Yeah. And they're also go through a full toasting regimen before they're charred. So, you know, they're a much more expensive barrel, but we think it's an important part of, you know, the care. Yeah, it's part of DNA, the product now. Yeah. What kind of toast do they put on it? They have the ability to do proprietary toast, but it's, you know, since it's going up to a char, it's a heavy toast. But, you know, they have all kinds of different profiles that you can use. You know, they have a whole bunch of like standard profiles of, you know, combinations of time and temperature. And then they have proprietary ones. And they said, you know, like wine makers are lunatics and have these really, you know, complicated ones and stuff. But... Well, yeah, they can't make it easy for wine people. It's impossible. That's good. Let's trash wine makers for a while. Oh, that's my favorite pastime. Are you kidding me? Should we talk terroir? No. It's worth noting that it seems like you guys have always taken, you know, a brewer's approach to making whiskey, whether it's through casual experimentation or kind of a why not attitude with some of these things, you know, because most American, like you mentioned, most American whiskey makers, you know, well, that's our barrel. It's whatever. It's cheap. It's there to hold liquid. Like we're not looking for some distinct difference or change in it. And you had talked to any big distiller, you know, talk to Jimmy Russell and he's like, well, I make bourbon and I make rye. And they just, you know, they make two things and they put in the same thing. And and it's just it's an assembly line. And not not that those aren't beautiful whiskeys. But I think a craft brewer's approach of trying different oaks, trying different chars, trying different grains, you know, different yeast. It's you don't I don't know. You have this certain level of of nimble kind of experimentation with a small distillery like that. Yeah, I think that, you know, that might have served us well that, you know, we're totally an experience with distilling that we didn't felt we didn't feel when we started out bound to doing it a certain way that we were, you know, we were in it to What a breath of fresh air is up from a production brewer though, I would imagine, like, you know, obviously you like what you're doing making but making the same thing every day and all of a sudden it's just like, ah, figure this out. Was that intimidating at first? It was exciting, you know, because, yeah, you know, by the time we started the distillery, the brewery had its core beers and we had a couple, you know, Christmas ale and then the wheat beer we were doing mainly in the summer. So, yeah, it was really, you know, just a lot of time just production. And so, you know, a new project that took a lot of, you know, a lot of trial and error and it was fun and it was exciting. You know, both the Old Potrero and the Junipero working on that, because once we started, you know, putting whisky in barrels, we started on the gin and we found out everything we learned about the whisky didn't really apply to gin at all, you know. So, it was almost a whole other set of skills that you needed to work on to make gin. Yeah, I don't want to gloss over the gin by any stretch. I know we're kind of whisky, we tend to be whisky focused and it's such a beautiful gin. Are you guys bringing in GNS and then making the gin in house? I mean, you're not making GNS. No, we, you know, when we started, you know, all these kind of hybrid split column stills that are available to small scale distillers now, none of that stuff was around when we started distilling. And we looked at this one column still and realized we'd have to cut a hole in the roof and everything, you know, and also just the space considerations to, you know, ferment enough to, to do a, to operate a column. Yeah. No, we just went out and looked for the, you know, the best for us, the best GNS that we could find and went that route. It's got a pretty traditional botanical load or you using any kind of wild California stuff in there? No, you know, I would say everything that's in Junipero, you know, when we were putting the recipe together had been used in gin, in London dry gin at one time or another. And Fritz, initially with that, he wanted to, he wanted to work in the London dry style, you know, wanted a bold version of that, you know, I guess as craft beer guys or want to do. Extreme flavor, yeah. That, you know, and I think that ended up working out well for us too, because, you know, with the whole cocktail renaissance, it's, you know, a bold enough gin where you can drink these more kind of complicated cocktails and the base spirit still Yeah, it doesn't get drowned out by everything else you're using. Yeah. So, you know, yeah, some of the decisions we made for the Junipero ended up working out pretty well, I think, for us. Yeah. And that's still available and still reasonably priced too, which is great because we're seeing more and more people like, I don't know how many $60 gins better I get presented with. I'm gonna open up this handpick that we did, what, last year or something? When did Brett grab this one? He was out there at some point, I think. I think it was last year, or the very beginning of this year. And this is a sherry barrel. Now is this, I don't even look, how old is this one? This one is young, and it had kind of a complicated history. Really? Yes. We aged it for only about three years, and then put it into sherry barrels. And after about six months in the sherry barrels, we took it out of the sherry barrels, and it sat. And the idea was, at any time, we were going to bottle it. Well, this was when stuff was kind of, you know, the company was splitting, and, you know, things were happening like that. And it ended up sitting in a tank. And so then eventually I put it back into used old potrero barrels. And so it continued aging. But it's still, this one is still fairly young, but it had a lot of tank time in between there. So it's, you know, not the way we would have chosen to do it. But, you know, sometimes stuff kind of happens. No, it's a funny whiskey. That's we love that kind of stuff. One time we had a who's the guy out in Oregon, Joe. Mr. McCarthy. Yeah. At Clear Creek. He was in town doing like a like a staff training seminar or something. And he happened to have this cool thing. He's like, hey, look what we found last week. They were moving some pallets of barrels around and they happened to find a distilled beer schnapps they had made like 14 years before for a customer who like stiffed them on it. And so they just like put it in a barrel and like forgot about it in their warehouse. And they found these two barrels and we tasted it and we were just like, what are you doing with it? Oh, I don't know. I just think it's kind of a cool thing to taste. Said, we'll buy it. What do you think it could sell for? I don't know. Sixty bucks. And so we had this 14 year old beer schnapps on the shelf for a few years. That was just like one of those weird little meandering voyages of some lost and a small distillery. Yeah. So fun. I think that was Red Hook ESB that had been distilled. I think it was a Widmer Brothers beer. Was it? I think it was a Widmer Brothers beer because he was a. He'd keep it in Portland. Take some Seattle. I meant to ask earlier, you mentioned using the anchor yeast for all the distilled products here. We're using the top fermenting or the bottom fermenting yeast. The top fermenting. It's the ale yeast. What are you doing with that now? I mean, I assume you just propagated it and you still have it. It's kind of a secret now. You're not just calling up White Labs and buying the California common yeast that they're selling. Man, I can't afford it. It's a great yeast but the problem with right whiskey is you get one use because you're fermenting on the grain. So we don't collect yeast from it. Do you have any of the famous foam issues with that ferment? Oh yeah. How does that look in the distillery? Well, we try to keep it in the fermenter occasionally. Occasionally not successfully but we've gotten pretty good with it. Yeah. We've been doing it for quite a while. We do like an upward step mash and we try to hit some temperatures that deal with the foam a little bit. Yeah, you hit certain temperatures and rest at certain temperatures and it should help manage that. Yeah. Should. Should. What do you think of this sherry barrel, Jim? It was good. Yeah. It's very strong. What's the proof on this, Bruce? Was it 126? Yeah, 126.7. I mean, it drinks high but it doesn't, it's not like a throat ripper though. No, no. I was telling you, we pulled this out of the sherry barrels. Kind of what we've done and what we like to do is really use the finishing barrel just for the flavor of what was in the barrel. And we've normally done right around that six-month mark. And this was an exception but in general when we do finishing barrels, it's a fully aged whiskey that's six, seven years old, eight years old. And it's just going in for a few months. Yeah. And we've done probably the most of what we've done is like port finish. And with those, we would get a lot of port flavor because Fritz Maytag has a vineyard and made port and grows all the port varieties. And so, those barrels, we would get wet, they would get dumped and we'd get them immediately. Very good port and that worked out really well, getting that sourcing barrels. And you kind of get varying degrees of influence of what was in there, barrels that have been shipped halfway around the world. Is there a finishing barrel kind of off the beaten path that sticks out to you as a memorable experience with any of this? You know, we were kind of late getting into, you know, whiskey finished and other barrels. And kind of the first year or so that we were doing it, we did some wine barrels and we did, you know, red wines. But we did a Chardonnay and I wasn't sold on the idea. In fact, we got some Chardonnay barrels and I just, one was French oak and one was American oak. And I just put, you know, I didn't want to put a whole barrel of fully aged whiskey in it. So, you know, we put like about three or four gallons in a barrel and let it sit for like two or three weeks and tasted it. And it was, it was good. But that was the one that we kept in a barrel longer because it just kept developing. And we really liked it. I'd like to do it again sometime. And we like the American oak better than the French oak. Really? That was my next question. The big, big butter bomb American oak chardonnay? It wasn't a huge buttery chardonnay because I don't really like that. Yeah, I don't much, you know, I don't know. Joe, you're a big fan of buttery chardonnay, right? That's all I drink. Yeah. So it goes on, puts a straw in a bottle. Yeah. Chug a lug. Chug a lug. Brushes his teeth with it. The buttery it is, the more I like it. So, Bruce, what's next with Old Potrero now that it's kind of, you know, it's its own thing now? I mean, are you going to try making some other whiskeys? Have you guys ever tried making a bourbon? Or is this just like, ah, we make rye and we're just sticking to rye? We've got some other stuff that's aging that, you know, come around at some point. I don't think I'm at liberty to say exactly what it is yet. But yeah, I mean, at some point we're going to we're going to branch. I don't know if it'll be under the Old Potrero label. I mean, that's not really decided if our company decides that Old Potrero is just too tied to just Rye Whiskey. It might be under a different brand name. But yeah, we've got some other stuff going too. That's cool. Anything different on the gin? Are you gonna jump on the purple gin bandwagon? No, yeah. Everyone's got one now. And why just purple? I mean, you know, we've done other gins in the past. We did an old Tom. Yeah, I remember the old Tom. And we did a Geneva, too. And, you know, probably at the time, it was the only Geneva out there. And it was 100%, you know, pot distilled. It was a combination of wheat, rye, and barley. And we used the same botanicals, of course, in different proportions, as Junipero. You know, in the United States, that's kind of a limited product. But it was popular on a very small scale, like in, you know, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, you know. Yeah, yeah. You find the gin nerds, right? And they tend to find that stuff. When we first released it, I got a call from this guy, and he said, you know, my friend told me to buy Anchor's gin, and I bought a bottle, and there's something wrong with it. I said, what color is the bottle? I said green. I go, okay. Yeah. That's it. That's what's wrong with it. It doesn't taste anything like an American thinks gin should taste like. Yeah. Yeah. We sold it originally as an unaged, but then the last bottling we did, we aged it for a little over two and a half years in once used old Potrero barrels. It's a long time for a gin. Well, it wasn't the intention. Again, this is label approval, TTB. Oh, yeah. Thanks to the TTB, it was aged two and a half years. Yeah. I think the idea was to distill annually and bottled what was distilled the year before, like about a 12 month aging. So someday I hope we can do it again and it would be a real small, even when we did it, we would only spend a few weeks doing it per year. Okay. One question here, like how big is this brand now? Because we, I still tend to think of it as this little tiny experimental offshoot of a brewery, but you're working on bigger equipment now and it's in, this whiskey is available in how broadly now? Because I'm sure Hotaling takes it all over the place. Yeah, but we're not distributed every place Hotaling's other products are. So it's, it's still, you know, we're, we're growing slowly. So it's, it's still small production. Wow. Is there a particular type of whiskey that you'd like to try to make? And you got to talk the accountants into it or anything? Yeah, I'd like to, you know, I'd love to do a bourbon sometime and, and, you know, we've always dealt with all malted grains. So you know, it would, you know, it would require, we can do it, you know. We could do it on the grill. We could get a cereal cooker and, but yeah, we could do that. And, you know, we do have a little experience with a single malt. That's what I was going to ask. Cause we were talking about a very famous. There goes the secret. Very famous person we were talking about earlier. Great with single malt, so. You asked me about it and I say it's a secret and then you give me a couple of glasses of whiskey and I just start blurting it out. Were you kind of waiting for the American single malt regulations to kind of fall into play first? I mean, I would assume you're putting in and use Coopridge. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe not. On guard. Yeah. We've been calling Old Potrero single malt. Well, it is technically, right? Well, you know, Fritz wanted to do that because at the time when we came out, single malt has no legal definition in the United States for an American-made whiskey and it was something you could put on a label because it's true. You know, it's a single malt. It's 100% malted rye. Do you have like an anecdotal story about a lesson learned from moving from brewing to distilling? Something that didn't go the way you thought it going? You got to have some whole... You guys were making worm, condensing worms in your garages or something. There's got to be some hilarious story about one of them blowing up or something. Oh, man. No, thankfully, I'd say in general, we've always tried to be kind of safe and not kill each other or something. I think we had a good background with the brewery, that kind of thing. Just that kind of discovery of learning to distill. Fritz had a good idea when we first started. Our distributor in Marin County got us a pallet of empty bud quartz with screw caps. We wanted to learn what happened at every stage of the spirit distillation so that we could do cut points and everything. As it came off the still, we would collect every quart in a bud bottle and number it. Then we would sit down and we would taste from the first quart that came off the still all the way to the end and taste through it, so we could learn what was happening at each point of the distillation. Stuff like that was just kind of a real valuable tool for us to learn and get it where we wanted it. Now you just have, it's just programmed into a computer that's just cutting everything for you and stuff. Yeah, that's easy now. We don't even need to show up. We can do it from the iPad at home. Really? Yeah, and not. Well, some distillers you can. How hands-on is, I mean the old equipment was 100% manpower. Your opening and closing steam valves and stuff, I assume, has any automation at all come to the Hotaling & Whiskey brand over the years? No, not really. No, we still like the hands-on approach of, and also of a distiller at the still, maybe overriding our SOP and making a little decision. That's cool. How many distillers are there now? The distilling staff is four people. Four people, yeah. We have more people for packaging and stuff, but it's small. Joe and I went through a thrust in Scotland a few years ago with Brett, and that's a massive Diageo plant that does a lot of the bulk meat and bones kind of whiskey for different Johnny Walker, Bell's blends, whatever. They have a big dumping facility there that they start batching Johnny Walker batch that. But either way, it's a big distillery. I mean, we're talking like, I don't know, three and a half million liters a year or something, and the whole thing is run by two people. It's just there's two people at a computer screen that just runs everything. Yes, there's more people working in barrel disgorgement than have ever touched fermentation or distillation in there. There were at least two big distilleries who visited in May that had the cuts hooked up to a computer. Yeah. That had sensors that were reading when the alcohol percentage got where they knew they wanted to cut, that they would just move automatically. If you only ever make one thing, and if your raw ingredients are consistent and you have enough testing on the front end, sure, you could program it and say, we know that we're going to have to start a spirit collection run at this point and end it at that point. Yeah, you could set it up, but it's like at that point you have a stillman sitting in a room just for show, it seems, just to keep, just if anything goes wrong. Yeah. I mean, really the way we do it, like a very hands-on approach, it's what we, what I grew up with, that it's Anchor Brewing, even we got bigger, it was a German brew house, a traditional copper German brew house that was built in 1950, and so everything was hands-on, and that's just the way we do things. It's what we feel comfortable with. Did you have a background in brewing before you started working at Anchor? Were you illicitly home brewing before Carter legalized it or something? Once in high school, but that was just a way, so you didn't have to stand out of a liquor store and ask someone to buy a six-pack. It's one of my favorite pastimes. Yeah. No, I was a fan of Anchor Steam, even though we couldn't afford it when we were in school and stuff. We used to drink Rainier Ale, which we called- I loved Rainier... . which we called Poor Man's Steam Beer. Jim, have you ever had Rainier? I have not. It's the hams of the Pacific Northwest. Obviously, it's got a close place in my heart. Bruce, thanks a lot for your time today. We really do appreciate it. I feel like I could ask you weird questions about brew house stuff for hours, and I don't think we got to say happy anniversary, right? If you started distilling in 93. Yeah, this is our 30th anniversary. Happy anniversary. Well, thank you. I'm sure there's some kind of specialty release plan for that. Yeah, I guess. It's this wonderful Binny's Sherry Cast Single Barrel. That's what we'll say this. All right. Well, again, we really appreciate your time. These are phenomenal whiskeys and listeners, if you haven't visited an old Potrero whisky lately, I mean, you ought to. It's, you know, early on, I feel like 15 years ago when they were still kind of they were, I don't know, these are different. They're it's a different experience every time you get to them. There have always been great whiskeys. I always got a lot of like real fudgy, fruity character out of out of a malted rye whisky, and they don't taste like anything else on the shelf. That's for sure. They're really cool. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. I enjoyed it. Amazing time. Thank you so much. Yeah. Thanks for having me. It was fun. Yeah. All right. Listeners, we'll be back in your feed with something interesting next week. Until then, I'm Pat. I'm Jim. I'm Joe. I'm Bruce. Keep tasting.