Hey, you're listening to another episode of Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. I'm Greg, I do communications at Binny's, and I'm excited to be at Lincoln Park, where I get to hang out with the Whiskey Hotline. Yeah, Whiskey Hotline episode. Take that wine. Hey, it's Pat from the Whiskey Hotline. Hey, Roger from beer. And Brett from the Whiskey Hotline. And special guest. And special guest. Owen Martin, master distiller at Angel's Envy. Welcome to the podcast, Owen. Hello. Owen, you've been master distiller at Angel's Envy for about a year, a little over a year, something like that, right? Yep. But you have a pretty storied history with brewing and distilling. You want to take our listeners through how you got from point A to point H here? Yeah, happy to. For one thing, I've been pretty much in the industry since I turned 21, if not before that. So that's sort of how I've maneuvered into the position I'm in. That's how I explained it to my parents when I got caught too. I'm in the industry. Yeah, no, I'm sampling. I'm from Kansas City originally. There's a brewery there that I got involved with doing small batch bottling during my summers of high school, which- Hell of an internship. Yeah. In retrospect, I'm not sure the legality of that. So that's why I won't name them. You mean them unnamed? The brewery. But anyway, that was one of my high school jobs, my junior and senior years. Greg worked at a grocery store, a little more mainstream. I did when I was like 17. I had to explain to people the difference between Pop-Off and Smirnoff. Oh, man. That was your industry intro? Yes. Not even joking. Brutal. I went to the University of Kansas, did a mechanical engineering degree, thinking I'd get into whatever that entailed. But by the end of that, I was already pretty disillusioned with working a desk job and was looking to do something different. I finished it out just because I was that far along, but I really started looking back at my dip of my toes into the brewing industry that way. Was interning with Boulevard Brewing in Kansas City, was brewing with a brewery called Free State Brewing in Lawrence, Kansas, a little bit. Still close with those folks. Yeah, just wanted to go to school and get a brewing education at that point. There's a couple of ways to work your way up. You can either wash kegs and really grind it out and I- Or you can get a degree. Or you can get a degree. It's funny to be in bourbon now because really the whole reason I moved in those directions is because I wasn't patient enough to go to UC Davis or Siebel or anything else. Those had wait lists. Like I said, this was the height of- That was the boom of craft beer. This was the boom and so we're talking year wait lists, super expensive. Really, when I went and found Harriet Watt through Googling online and found this program in Scotland that was actually a master's degree, was dual brewing and distilling. I think it ended up being cheaper than any of those accreditation ones through- Listeners, this is the gold standard for brewing and distilling education globally too. This just happened to stumble upon Harriet Watt, the best distilling school there is. Well, I think it's more known now, through the course of being in that program, obviously drinking in some of the pubs of Edinburgh, going to these different distilleries and- Watching soccer. Watching- Football. Watching Hibbs play hearts. Yeah. What kind of beer were you drinking in those pubs? I had next to no money, so I drank a lot of Tennant's. A lot of Tennant's. We'd go to the Hanging Bat, like a nice beer bar and drink maybe one craft beer, or certainly started to make some friends who were making the beer. So I'd try to get one of those, but by a few beers, then I was almost always the first guy to be on some Tennant's. I didn't know this. Is Tennant's like the hams of Europe? Yes. That's probably putting it in a generous. Yeah, Tennant's is better, of course, but Tennant's is just the light locker of Scotland. What? So no Dukers? Dukers is fairly inexpensive. Yeah. I mean, it was an equal opportunity drinker, whatever was. What's that nasty malt wine they drink over their breath? Buckfast. Yeah. The caffeinated wine. Yeah. You were in a Bucky Warrior? I'll show you some pictures after this. Thank God they can't come through on the podcast. Buckfast? Yeah, it's caffeinated malt wine. That is a hilarious spoonerism. Yeah. Very popular with the thugs and children in Scotland. Yeah. It's like the yabs in Glasgow before they stab each other. Yeah. There's a different formulation in Ireland and Scotland, I believe. One has higher caffeine and one has higher alcohol. I forget which one's which. For a good time, blend them. It was basically a monastery making Four Locos for the last 50 years. That's the best way you could put it. Yeah. Monastic Four Loco. It's like they figured out a way to make Four Loco, tastes like beer. No. They call it a Cluster Loco. Hey, good whiskey podcast. Yeah. You just never know what direction you're going to be heading in. So yeah, I did my master's thesis through a lowland distillery, and I was the guy. At that point, I was still kind of clinging on to my engineering degree just a tad. So I was trying to... I actually did it as a dual... Or sorry, between the engineering department at Harriet Watt and the brewing and distilling department. So I was kind of studying the byproducts, so spent wash. Meanwhile, I had friends making their own gin recipes, making their business plans, all these cool things. And I was the guy studying the stinky leftovers. So did all that. By that point, I was pretty firmly in the distilling mindset. I actually got inducted into something called the Worshipful Company of Distillers over there. And so that kind of sealed the deal that I was coming back as a distiller and moved straight to Little Rock, Arkansas. A natural transition. Yeah, right. Rolling Hills, one to another. I joke around that it was pretty intense reverse culture shock at the time. But then I got my wife to move down there and we actually really ended up loving Little Rock, working for a little mom and pop distillery called Rocktown Distillery. And after a couple of years there, I basically had convinced my wife to move down to Arkansas. And I said, okay, you move here and take the leap with me. Her now wife, she was my girlfriend at the time. And then you pick the next place. And so she said Colorado and kind of just perfectly coincided with a contact from Harriet Watt giving me the intro there because he'd worked there and then left. So, so yeah, I got my foot in the door there and joined in 2016. And this is Stranahan. Yep, sorry, Stranahan's. So yeah, went Scotland to Arkansas to Stranahan's and started there just as a rotational brewer, night distiller type thing, and just kind of kept plugging away and working and suggesting ideas and then worked my way into fermentation and then into R&D. And then from R&D to the head distiller position and then from head distiller to also that in production manager and then I say the main thing to focus on with why the transition to Angel's Envy makes sense is that a lot of what I was doing by the end in R&D was with cast finishing. So even though it's a different single malt verse bourbon, rye, more American whiskey production, really the parallel is that. Snowflake and everything else. So which snowflakes were you responsible for? Snowflake got canceled during COVID like many other things. And so I married those barrels together and I'd meant to just marry them for like a month, right? Because there's all these different finishes that one actually was two types of apple brandy. It was Calvados and then New York Applejack with shoot, I think, Moscatel in the background and a little bit of French oak. And so my brain is exploring. Yeah, snowflakes are crazy. And when we start tasting these casks, you'll see kind of the influence there. But certainly in my mind, I tried to pare down some of the snowflake process to make it a little more simplified and streamlined. We'll get into it with these because he's both had extended marrying to make them. And really, you can see the common thread there because with snowflake, I'd wanted to do that. There's all these different types of finishes and wanted to really get those to mingle and become a really coherent release and then it got canceled. So they married for a year. And then we did a double release the next year and the double release, I obviously want to make it very different than the other one. So that one had two types of tequila barrels and then Tani poured in French oak. And so we had the kind of bright, like, apple-y fruit one and then the... Tequila and Tani. It's like me at a wedding. Yeah, and again, you know, you can see how crazy those releases could be, but I think kind of applying some of the more Scotch blending mindset to it, knowing the conditions in Colorado and, like, trying to play against those with how dry it was and proof shooting up and everything. Yeah, it's so dry. And then to apply both of those ideas to the two Castrink, Angel's Envy releases, I think is a really good background to understand that. All right, so you have to try one of these ones. Yeah, you have good bona fides, but what have you done recently? Well, these. It went from, you know, selfishly, I wanted to get my own release out within the first year of being Angel's Envy. For the Cast Strength Ride that we'll try, that easily probably could have been a seller collection. And in the past may have been that I really pushed that we do that to kind of surprise people. And my PR line, I guess, on that one would be, you know, if Angel's Envy took something years ago, bourbon, and did something, you know, unexpected, which was apply the European concept of finishing in wine barrels. For me, I wanted to surprise our own fans with, you know, take something familiar, which is our Cast Strength bourbon, and then do a double release and do a Cast Strength Ride. You know, talking about doing a double release with Angel's Envy, or sorry, with Stranahan's, you can even see the kind of common thread there of people losing it over that. So we have the 2023 Cast Strength Bourbon in our glass now. And when you say your first release, last year it had already been blended when you took over. Yeah, so this is, is this the first release with your signature on the bottle? Correct. And is that a surreal thing to you? Yeah, for sure. I mean, you know, I think even from the beginning to have bottles with Lincoln Henderson's name on it and even be in the same conversation feels surreal. So it's all been a bit surreal front to back. It's, my wife grounds me by just making fun of me when I get home from work. That's good. That's good. You have that balance. Yeah, exactly. And my, you know, we've known each other. My wife hates me too. Yeah, I understand. Well, I'll say it. So my wife and I have known each other since we were 12. We went to middle school together. So she's seen this whole journey front to back and been there, supporting me the whole way. So. That's amazing. Yeah. What's the proof on this bad boy this year? This is 118.2. So this is actually, to my knowledge, the lowest proof we've ever done a cast like that. And that was purposeful. We had some 110 low entry proof barrels that we purposely blended in because I wanted to take the proof down. I'm not a hazmat proof chaser guy. I mean, I like high proof stuff when it's done right. But to me. You're not a real bourbon. I know. Just a sad, a coward. I thought it was an interesting position we put ourselves in where our yearly special release is a cast strength, which means outside of your bourbon enthusiasts, your nerds, it's honestly going to be inaccessible to a lot of people's palettes. And so my goal is like kind of a secondary goal of this was to make something at Castrink that was drank as low under the proof as I could so that I could give it to my parents. I can give it to whoever and still they could understand how much craftsmanship and work went into it and not just be immediately hit with as much alcohol as they could. Yeah, this is always a great bottle every year, and I feel it's gotten better and better as they've continued to release them. And this is easily one of the best yet. I mean, the signature, like all that fruit, like that stone fruit, all the signatures right there, not buried by the alcohol, gets significantly better when it's watered down a little bit. Yep, a little drop of water for sure. Yeah, and I'll take it back to where we left off with the snowflake one. So this, the goal here was to marry this as long ahead as possible as I could, because I'd learned that I really liked when I'd done that to whiskeys in Colorado and I wanted to see how that applied to Kentucky Bourbons. So there was about 100 barrels laid down before I walked in the door, I want to say. So one of the first things we did was we kind of got our top tasting crew together and we assessed 100 barrels in an afternoon, kind of a divide and conquer thing. And really, I think out of those 100, we only determined there was about 20 of them we really liked. And so I wanted to get back to the drawing table and start figuring out where I was going to make up the other 75%, 80% of the release. But the 20 that were laid down, this is kind of cool, were 9-year-old bourbon. Wow. That was two years finished in port barrels. But I will say it's kind of counterintuitive. It was actually the lightest of all the, there was three main components we'll get into. But it was the lightest because those port barrels had been filled probably four or five times at that point. And so all 100 had been multi, or almost all the 100 had been multi-filled. So that was one of the things that I wanted to do was put a lot more first fill port in there. But those 20 were nice because they kind of provided the old bourbon component, the aged character, more the oak obviously, with a nice little touch of port. And then I wanted to put big punchy port kind of layered on it. A good base to start. It's interesting because we've had the opportunity to blend, constructed a few things. We've done some stuff with Don Livermore. Yeah, cool. I've worked with John Glazer a little bit. Sure. And the first thing you learn is the respect and the appreciation for a blender, somebody that's in your position because people think that when you're blending, it's a one-to-one thing and it's not a one-to-one thing because stylistically, you have to know how the more intense styled whiskeys are going to pair with the things like you said, the backbone and how much influence they have. And you might have a 20-barrel vatting that can have one really intense barrel. It simply changes everything. So you've pretty much taken all my lines for the rye. So we'll get back to everything you just said, like to a tea, the rye is a perfect example of that. So to interject on this cast-strength bourbon real quick, I added a little bit of water, just enough where I saw a little bit of the oily character kind of separate. Holy cow, does it just explode with like toffee and burnt caramel then. Like it goes from so- Candy ginger and candy orange peel, it's unbelievable. It's amazing. It's so good with water. Can we also talk about the texture? There's this like, I don't know, it's not gritty, but it has like a real like viscosity or thickness, like a wall or something. And this probably isn't a marketing approved tasting note, but one that I came back to as we got closer to the end with the blend and it was actually cool to taste that with you guys when you came in back in August or whenever that was, or you got to try it back in April even. So you saw it a couple of ways along the line, but I like to call it fudgy. It's kind of like mouth coating, but in less of a viscous way, it just like sticks there. Yeah, exactly. But tanned and just kind of like stick to your jaw. Greg gets called fudgy a lot too, it's true. Well, to Pat's point, it's very old English, like the walk around caramel that you put in your pocket. The walk around caramel. Pocket snacks. You've never done that? They warm up, softens up some. I mean, I've put chicken tenders in my pockets before, walked around with those. Yeah, this is incredible. And again, I think as people start to nerd out with whiskey, it's very bizarre the way people are so afraid to add water to whiskies. I think part of it is the obsession with the hazmat proof. I don't know, people have something to prove to themselves that they can drink a whiskey neat at 130. But it tastes like alcohol. That's what makes me nuts when people say that because it tastes like alcohol. Nobody takes a relatively young Bordeaux and pours it in a glass and just puts it down on the table and starts immediately slurping. I mean, you have to can it. You have to do a lot of things to sort of blow alcohol off. I had a customer recently at Geneva return a bottle of a very famous full proof bourbon label from a famous distillery in Frankfurt and was like, this tastes terrible. I said, yeah, that's what it tastes like. You need to add a little water to this. Well, when you add just a tiny bit of water to this, even though it is lower proof, it does completely open up and the fruit character, I think, is what really jumps out for me. That's a chemical reaction. That's a chemical reaction, breaking up bonds. Hydrogen bonds, yeah. To me, and I don't have the exact science to prove this, but I think that extended marrying effect then really adds to the opening up effect of when you add that water because that whiskey mingled with itself for so long. So yeah, I'll get back to- So that was something that's your signature touch on this too, though. Absolutely. They didn't do the extended marrying before. They were making their cast-straight blend and it was their cast-straight blend and it was higher proof. And you're letting these things get to know each other more. Exactly. Cask on cask before it actually gets bottled. Yeah. I tried to workshop this and I still never came up with a better example, but I keep saying just think like chili, right? It's only going to be better on the second, third day, the next week, whatever. Yeah, gumbo. The gumbo effect. Perfect. Yeah. We tried to workshop and be like an elevated French sauce, saucier, and they're like, nah, screw that. Just chili hits better. But yeah, so there's two other components in it. So once we kind of identified, we had the 20 barrels that were extra age, so to speak, outside of what we normally do. Extended finishing time, albeit in multi-fill pour barrels, so more in the vein of Scotch-Irish type of multi-use, because after we used the first barrel once by a lot, in terms of finishing, we can do whatever we want. I actually like that to give you a full spectrum of flavors. Then I started tasting bourbon barrels that were laid down, that had not been touched, had not been finished yet. I found a really beautiful lot of bourbon that was laid down in fall of 2016, which is the first season that the distillery downtown was active, the first time we were laying down bourbon barrels. That had been held back maybe for an anniversary thing. I didn't use all of it, just some of it. But that has this amazing spice profile that I think adds more depth. That nine-year-old gives you the oak, gives you a nice creaminess, but then this adds the spice and that viscosity we're talking about. I waited and waited and waited. We get about a shipment of port a month. I waited. Didn't have to wait too long. December of last year, the right lot of port barrels came in. Then filled that off with the 2016 Angel's Envy. That made up the second component, probably about 30 percent, I want to say. Then really for the remainder of the year, I just cherry picked my favorite barrels out of the single barrel program. They hated me at certain points, but this was working hand-in-hand and also my first year at the company, so figuring out how we all work together. I made sure they were well taken care of, but those are the three components. The third component being five-year-old Angel's Envy distillate with six to eight months finishing time. That's got to be your powerhouse behind this whole thing. Yeah. That's the core character within these two other unique lots of whiskey put into it. Then because we had five-year-old bourbon, seven-year-old bourbon, nine-year-old bourbon finishing time anywhere from six months to two years, even though they all have this core bourbon identity, they're all over the place. What I did, I think this would have been right after you guys came in April. I think it was May of this year, we married all three of those components together. Through the Kentucky summer, let them sit. Basically, what we did was we'll get to it with the rye in a minute, but that's a much smaller batch. With that, I was able to marry it and put it in stainless because I was super happy with where it was. I don't really have the means of 100 barrel batch. I don't have a tank that can just hold 100 barrels. Well, I do, but I can't tie it up. What we did was we actually put it right back into all 100 barrels it came out of. Blended it and then just divided equally into the component barrels. Right back into it. Through the summer, those barrels continue to mature and go in their different directions. Some of them were now second fill port barrels, some of them were still fourth, fifth, whatever. Really, on a very nerdy fun way, this was blended twice over. It was blended pre-summer and then post-summer, and we kept tweaking it. We were tweaking this right up until about a half hour before it was bottled. We pretty much siphoned in one last barrel through the top of the tank because we just wanted to keep dialing in. I'm neurotic enough that I made the team do that. Roger, it's like a beer buzz. Yeah. Hey, it shows. The complexity here, I think, is really incredible. Yeah, you would never ever walk out and find one barrel that was exactly identical to this. No, this is really great. Are you concerned that people are going to be like, hey, what happened to the box? Yeah, we've heard some of that. It doesn't have a fancy sarcophagus anymore of a box. I'm so okay with that. Well, everyone should be. I was expecting some pushback. You get some keyboard warrior trolls that have commented on it, but really quite a bit less pushback than I thought. I think when people actually get the new bottle in front of them, that speaks for itself. And to me, I'm a whiskey maker, right? It's much more so about what's in the bottle, and people that get all in a huff about the box. I'm like, did you even really care about the whiskey to begin with? Can't drink the box. Yeah, right. So to me, it's not really my focus anyway. And that, you know, through corks, through anything else, obviously, we want to have an elevated package. But to me, if it's anything, you know, like if the cork has not, could introduce TCA or something like that, hell no. Like I would go full synthetic before I'd even risk that. So it's always about what's in the bottle above everything else. I would hope everyone shares that same mindset. Obviously, some people are upset about the box, but I would say it was a much smaller vocal minority than I thought it was going to be. You said it though, the people that are worried about the box aren't worried about the Whistler. Yeah, it's a real bummer for the resellers with no box. But who cares? But it's a funny story though with that, this actually was part of the genesis of the Cast Strength Rye because I walked in the door, that decision had already been made. I was like, oh, I'm going to get skewered. I'm going to walk up on a stage and just get fruit thrown at me when we release this because I got to take the blame for it. And so I'd love to tell you that every decision is made based off what's going in the bottle, but there's always other considerations to a blender's mindset. We had to pre-print these labels, so I had to hit the proof bang on months after we blundered it. So there was a little bit of a, yeah, kind of crazy, but there's even more basic case count. For a cast-fringed release, we're going to shoot, I think this one ended up being a little bit under 2,000, nine liter cases, but I'm not going to waste everybody's time by just blending 10 barrels and being like, no, this is what you get. No, there has to be a case count you hit. Case count proof, obviously, liquid quality is there, but with this one, I was like, you know what? You know what would be cool? That's another reason why we should do a second release because if anyone is going to come at me about the box, someone will be like, no, don't look at that. Look at this whole other second thing you get to try. There's always these different things. I'm thinking in terms of storytelling, both of the liquid but also just whatever conditions you find yourself in to then craft your releases. I think the storytelling aspects got to be important there. To one thing we said earlier with addressing kind of the Scotch and Blenders and Whiskey Makers, what I think is interesting about American Whiskey is the emphasis is put on the distiller. Even my job title, Master Distiller, this past year, I've been a blender. What I had been doing at Stranahan in the last couple of years, because we had our processes pretty much set in stone and knew what we wanted, we could tweak things here or there. It's interesting to see you look at Cognac, you look at Scotch, you look at maybe less so Irish Whiskey but like Tequila, Rum, Maestro Blender, the Blender, Blender, Blender, Blender. America and maybe a little bit of Ireland, I feel like are the people that focus on the distiller. Even then in Ireland, the distiller is the Blender. Yeah, exactly. For me, I always say maybe it's a little bit of both and the job title is what it is. Honestly, I like Compass Box where it just says Whiskey Maker. That's what I would prefer if I could just pick my own. But your title has got to carry some weight and all this, that, and the other. All right, we got the rye in front of us now. Yeah, new whiskey. So, listeners, we had the Cast Strength bourbon. That's pretty widely available at A Binny's Near You. Chances are still when this airs, because we got a good chunk of that. How much is it? 230, I think. It sounds like that's right. I actually don't know the price of the rye. So, now new- It's 279. 279? Can people get the rye? The rye is going to be harder to get. The price of the rye is moot. Well, you might. This is the first ever release of the Cast Strength Rye. It wasn't a huge batch. There's not a ton to go around. So, hopefully, you get a chance to try this at some point. So, you want to first ever. This is really something you get to put your own stamp on. So, not that the other one is not my baby, but think of it like there was already the parameters of what an Angel Envy Cast Strength Bourbon is. I knew it was going to be Ruby Port. I knew, again, case count, that sort of thing. So, I was working to hit the notes, make sure I wasn't alienating our super fans off the bat. As much as taking the box away, screw those people anyway. But this one was me making in my own parameters. Obviously, the rum finishes are our core rye. Not to say we don't have some really cool rum barrels down that I'm looking at down the line, but at the same time, I was tasting those port barrels that were laid down, we talked about in the 2016 Angel's Envy and other lots of bourbon. I was tasting everything. I was tasting anything that was specialty that had ever been laid down. We had these small little lots of different rye whiskey that had been laid out. Ten barrels in Sauternes, ten barrels in Toasted American Oak. On the side, I just started playing with those, just Friday afternoon to start blending a little bit. I started combining them and I was like, Oh, I think I'm on to something. Then, like I said, parallel was like, You know what I should do? I need to do something that takes our audience, surprises them, moves it in a different direction. All these ideas towards the end of last year, end of the beginning, like January, February is when I started pitching our leadership team on it. Of course, then, they're like, Well, maybe that's more of a seller type thing. I was like, No, no, no. This one's already lower proof, so this is 114.4 proof. I was like, We don't want to add any water to this, and we can do something really cool with this too. So that was all the thought processes behind that getting going. So this is a blend of sautern and toasted oak barrels. So again, we touch on Snowflake earlier, you can see this is the idea of like, not that there's not other people doing it like Barrel Bourbon or Barstown Bourbon Company, but this is my own way of like, Let me take a Snowflake type idea and start looking at combining different finishes. A little more paired down and digestible way than Snowflake in some ways, but that same ethos nonetheless. So that sautern had this amazing floral character that I played with the herbal character, the rye, the toasted oak ones, then gave it more back into the whiskey oomph of it. So if I'm going to give you a marketing line, my thought was, okay, let's look at, we got a wine finish component. So again, more, at least historically, the European way of finishing with a wine barrel. And then we got the double-oaked, which is, I would argue, more the American way of doing it, like Woodford, Elijah Craig, or Mixers Toasted, right? And putting those two finishing ideas together to show like, we're still, you know, doing our, again, the storytelling part of it, right? Doing your own thing. And so the sautern was the base, again, 10 barrels. And then the toasted American oak, I thought, I gave what you would expect to toasty caramelized character, vanilla caramel, nothing too crazy there. And then to your comment earlier, we sprinkled in just a couple French oak barrels as well. Because some people, then talking to other blenders, think that every single component needs to be knockout, lights out, whatever. And, you know, sometimes I think they have to be, have a remarkable aspect to them. But I would argue that, and I think you guys tasted this actually, the French oak was over-oaked, I would say. But knowing, again, some of the principles from Scotland, and principles learned in Colorado, that was also the highest proof one. So when we blended those, it brought the proof down. And in general, the lower proof is going to solubilize those tannins, round out that, you know, maybe jaw-hitting kick into more of a rounded, cohesive experience. And so by marrying those through the summer, again, in steel totes this time, back in the barrels, we, it behaved how we thought it was going to behave, which is really cool to see, put that into action in principle. That's awesome. I mean, you got to have, you know, from the blending point of view, some barrels are going to be basic salt and pepper, right? And not, not like some are just there to accent and kind of elevate other flavors, you know, more than to stand on their own. And I think that's really what the French Oak did, because we were lucky enough the last time we were down there doing barrel picks, and I think September, maybe you had, you know, you always have this cool stuff, you know, these unlabeled bottles in your office and like, here, try this, try this, try this. And we tried all these different components of these. They were already marrying, but you say you held some back and we could try them all individually. And absolutely, that French Oak was a little powerful and dry, I would say. Well, and it was in April at the at the warehousing. It was also, which is like, I hate over wooded. Like, I'm not a fan. I'm not a fan of any of the double oak bourbons, the toasted, none of that stuff. It's too much. It's already, you've got enough new wood because it's all new wood. Now you're going to double it up. Brad once referred to a very prominent over, a double oak bourbon to a distillery CEO as an over wooded mess. Well, that was good feedback. I think, yeah, but what we're talking about right now is like nuance and balance, whereas the industry a lot is about flavor blasting, you know? That's where the blending and the finishing and the marriage period really comes in. Like if you have the luxury of space where you can blend these things and allow them to just sit, that's what great Scots sisters do. Look at Glen Fittick. We'll look at Glen Fittick from the single Balvinie, but also look at how Johnny Walker Black Label is constructed or how Dewar's White Label is constructed. It's amazing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because it's all about that. They have a recipe that they know works very well. But even when they get that recipe put together, it's not always quite right. And they have these components that they can make sure that that- The whole Dewar's Double Aging thing gets its name. They blend it and they put it back into the barrel. Now, you took the segue out of my mouth. So at the same time, when I met up with Alex Chasko with Tealing, so it was basically like a whiskey summit of, again, the Bacardi whiskey distilleries. And so Dewar's was there, Tealing was there, and myself was there. And it was really cool to have seen all of us kind of develop these same, or at least me being the new guy in the room, starting to develop. But Dewar's Double Double does it. Tealing does it between grain and pot still and malt whiskies. So everyone, and yeah, Double Double is the easiest example of marrying those two and then marrying them again. So to see those principles, and then I look back at my old Whiskey textbook, I still have my office and who wrote the blending section? Stephanie. So yeah, it's cool to see that. And I think apply those principles to bourbon. There are other people doing it. You see Solera on certain folks' labels. To me, I guess just to back up, obviously we hang our hat on the word finishing. You hear that over and over again, see it everywhere in the distillery. To me, it's more of a broader concept of finishing. It's like maybe the tip of the iceberg, but blending, marrying, they all go together. You're marrying the bourbon barrels into the port barrel, or whatever your finishing barrel is, then you're marrying those different finishing barrels to create your final release. Well, the early, we were lucky. We had a good relationship with Wes, and we're actually able to do the first ever, what we're referred to as single barrels with Angel's Envy. We did, this is going back to 1215, the Special Blends, that he allowed up to- Hey, Brett, every time somebody says, what's your favorite whiskey you've ever had? That is mine. Which one? He's not blowing up your ass either. No, I say it all the time. St. Patrick or St. Joseph. Our first handpicked, which one? St. Patrick or Joseph? Probably Patrick. Because they were too slightly different, but that was, took us literally two years of conversation. Les, he goes, well, I'll construct something, and we'll give it to you, and you can approve it, and that'll be your batch. It's like, no, no, Wes, give us the components and let us lay around. Because yes, it's finishing, but what he was doing at that time was, they were different in what Lincoln was doing, were different components of different strengths, and he's like, okay, this is younger whiskey, like you just said, younger whiskey and newer port barrels that had been, these we lost. You can only have five percent of this because we only have one barrel of it, because we just lost track of it in the warehouse. The secret ingredient was this one barrel of oops, all port. But he came in and it took him a long time, up until, I mean, he wasn't even sure he was going to let us, he was going to even bottle it until he came to Chicago with a half a dozen samples of different iterations of age of port versus the age of finishing in the portwood. And we constructed it and he tried it and he's like, okay, we'll do this because this is really good. And that was really the start of the program, which when Wes was really running things before joining with Bacardi, that was kind of the style that we did. And so we did a series of those and then the program was shut down for a period of time, sort of making it their hands around what it was. And now that it's come back, which we do pretty extensively with you guys, now they're true single barrels. Yes, absolutely. If I would have known, I would have brought these down. So I have some Blend B in my office right now. So next time I make a trip to Chicago. Well, here's the question, because there are other independents we work with. What Binny's would like to do is pioneer with the McCarty suit. Oh, you're in the pitch right now? A single barrel. We got you when you have none of the marketing suits in the room with Ray. A single barrel beside. With the headphones on, he can't escape now. A single barrel beside a small blended batch, which we actually have done with another independent bottler. We do true single barrels, but then we also take a four-barrel blend with Pin Hook every year. Yeah, cool. Launch that with those guys, yeah. I wonder. Boy. Yeah. I'm going to have to take a look at what the verbiage says on the single barrel label and see what we can get away with, but we'll take that conversation elsewhere. I don't want to just segue into other stuff before we talk about this. Rye, a little bit more. Greg, what did you think of this thing? Yeah, right. The foundation of the thing you said is the Saturn cask. Saturn seems like it could be a little bit risky because along with sweetness and lemony citrus fruit, sometimes it has kind of acrid or overbearing high-toned chemical. I've got Saturn barrels in previous places that I thought were going to be knockout and I end up getting like a- Like aerosol or something. Yeah, it was weird. Yeah, like Lysol. I think it's from the Botrytis, but I don't understand it. Yeah. No, I need to do more look into it. But it could also be preservation to be able to ship it too. Sometimes you put stuff in there. I mean, yeah, sulfur. So was that a challenge? No, these salt terminals were lights out. Let me be honest, I taste it and I was like, if anything, I thought it lacked a little bit of depth, but hence layering things on it. I thought as a base, each of the components highlighted rye. The point with this was that you tasted it, you still know you're drinking a rye, but each of those components kind of pulled out a different piece of it. So whether that's floral or spice in the case of the French oak, you know, that cinnamon nutmeg, whatever. It sounds straight, but like you built a little lemony custard pie dessert. Okay. It's the lemon custard, it's the graham cracker crust, and then like some baking spice from the French oak, and it's wonderful. Yeah, it's good. It's annoyingly expensive. Well, I didn't know that. You actually knew that, Pat. But it's really good. Pat, what was it? I think it was April. This line has stuck with me. I really like that. I think we were at High Horse late at night. We were like, you know what? He was envy pricing is aspirational. I was like, I've never heard that before. But hell, if I got to keep the liquid quality up to the point where you got to, you're still mulling over that pricing thing. Listen, for years now, I've sold this stuff and people ask me, well, is it worth it? And every single time I'm like, listen, it is. Like, it's, they actually, these things are worth the price of admission. And the price of admission is high. And it's, you're not buying, you know, the $40 sourced high rye bourbon from Southern Indiana with this. This is, these are going to cost you, but they are, they're worth it. They just are. But they're complete, they're whole and complete bottlings, especially the rye, because this, you know, this isn't a cocktail rye. It's not one dimensional. It's not the rye that scares people off. It's the rye that gets bourbon drinkers to actually drink rye. Yeah, absolutely. Because it's so balanced. Yeah, yeah. Nope, I love it. So on this one, the component parts you said were the French oak and sautern, is there, there's no rum then, right? Yeah, toasted oak. So, sautern and then two types of toasted oak, predominantly American, both a little salt and pepper being the French oak. There's no rum in this, I thought briefly about, so we... A first for Angel's Envy rye, right? Yeah, and again, I think the line there is that I'm going to put, especially with something like this, that's the first time I've ever done it, I'm always going to lead out with the best thing I have. And I had some really good rum barrels, but I thought this was better. The point's not to lead out with something familiar, maybe just in terms of, oh, Angel's Envy's done a rye, but it's to lead out with the best thing you have. It's fantastic. It's worth mentioning if people are familiar with your other rye, it's a leaner bottling that doesn't have maybe the plushness of traditional. Yes, certainly less sweet. And I think, so, we talked on some marketing stuff earlier. I generally hate the lost barrel line, really lazy marketing in my opinion, but we have a couple lots of two plus year finished, two year rum finished right. And those ones, I guess our warehouse team was just filling the rum barrels and then pulling them off the front of a stack in a palletized warehouse. And meanwhile, the last two stacks were just being untouched. So, I thought about briefly that going into this. I want to give that a little bit longer because I'd like to hit 10 years total time in oak for, you know, my own purposes. Another sort of wrinkle that people don't think about when finishing barrels is, how old is the finishing barrel itself and how much was it used? Because that's certainly changed in Single Malt. The age of the components they're getting, especially the Sherrywood, is changing so significantly. So, you're affiliated with Bacardi, so you obviously have a whole bunch of rum barrels that you're access. But there are barrels that in Puerto Rico will get used, especially the barrels that they're using to make the white, that might get used for 50 years. That barrel is going to yield a whole bunch of different product than something that was just eight years with new distillate that then was released. You're teeing me up beautifully. I love it. One of the things I did this year was kind of review our rum barrel purchasing and procurement policies. So, Bacardi has a Bacardi Ocho Rye Cask, which is our, I mean, MGP barrels, right? We don't make any bones about sourcing that. But we sent the MGP barrels to them. They're putting eight-year aged rum into those barrels. Now, what I set up was getting those barrels back to go into our normal release. So, it's basically not only are you getting an aged rum profile, but then that barrel is only on its third use by the time it gets back to us. So, that barrel has got a lot more to give. And there's not enough of that to prop up the entirety of the release. But I'm trying to make that a core component of it. Meanwhile, sourcing some Bacardi Limitada barrels, barrels that are multi-use but have a more aged rum profile and trying to not rewrite what that release is, but steer it in a little bit of my own direction. Do you think there would be value? Is there any experiments going on? Or do you think there would be value in taking some of those, getting some of the super, super, super spent barrels and using them for the marrying purposes? See, you know what you're doing. We still have the original plantation rum barrels, which were Cognac barrels that are becoming rum barrels. We still have those and those were filled a lot of times. That used to be the thing is that the original was only in the plantation, the Barbados rum. Yeah. And so I still have those barrels and you literally take the words out of my mouth. I'm like, I still want these, but I want them in more of a spent Marion capacity. And then it obviously still has kind of the lineage to the beginning of it. Not for our core rye, but for some other project down the line, because they're really cool barrels. They're these short stubby Cognac barrels that are completely different than the other rum barrel we have in the house. So yeah, really cool. Part of the reason that I brought all that up is that I just want to say, I think Angel's Envy Rye is one of the standout whiskeys on the shelf, regardless of category, especially every holiday season. I'm always recommending it to people. It's a shame that people are always steering away from anything that says rum. It's like the ghost that we're never going to escape as people snobbery towards rum. But wow, is it a fantastic whisky that everybody should try? The compliment I get the most on it is that it opens the door for people. So I find the value in that. Obviously, this is Wes' baby and he crafted that. And I'm not, to go back to earlier comment, I'm not trying to rock the boat in certain respects with the core products. I want to keep that quality where it was because that's what people know us for. As I introduce other SKUs and other line extensions, then you'll kind of see more of my DNA in that. Sure. Well, the cask is great too. It's transparency in how you label and what you say. You're not selling people a bill of goods by claiming it's something that it's not. And I think it's smart and you see a lot of companies doing it really well already. Your consumer wants to know more than they've ever known before. There's more eagerness to understand why it was made and how it was made. And so I think across the board, you're seeing companies up their transparency because that's what the consumer is asking for. We have a couple of very prominent distilleries now who have been busted for transparency. The one thing that nobody ever said in the whole, when these distilleries were getting pilloried for blatantly lying, the one thing that nobody ever said was that the whiskey wasn't good. Yeah. Right? So the story was that they were not being forthcoming about where it came from. Yeah. But if you ask the person the second question, well, do you still like it? Well, yeah, I love it. That's why I drink it. Okay. Well, I think it's a cool comment because before we went online, we were chatting, you know, just amongst us, we were talking about independent bottlers. And to me, I don't understand why the US did that. And maybe it's just because of my time in Scotland. I am a huge SMWS nerd, a huge independent bottler nerd. And I love that. And Rock Town, the first store I worked at was one of the first bourbons bottled by SMWS. And I pushed, I'm still pushing to try to get us in the door there, too. But for some reason, the US, instead of, you know, this transparency, like you see amongst Scotch independent bottlers, the US wanted to say, my grandpappy's recipe, blah, blah, blah. It's all about whatever yeast you kept in the crick behind it. Right. You have to. And I don't understand that. And I think we're getting, you know, talking about transparency, I think we're kind of almost looping back around to, like, I lost Lander and it's awesome. You guys have had a chance to talk to those folks. But the difference being that when the Scotch business was commercialized, the Scotch business was commercialized as blending. And single malt, they went that total opposite trajectory. It was all about the blends until the early 70s when Glenn Fittick would have been the first person that really commercialized. Other people had done malts, but Glenn Fittick were the first people to commercialize it. To try to monetize single malt, yeah. So this is only 50 years old in a nearly 300-year-old industry. The whiskey business in the United States, we can say, is almost 200 years old. And it's only now that they're coming around to actually cooperating with each other instead of, you know, screw you, what's mine is mine and what's yours is yours, and we're not going to let the things mix. And I think that's just the difference in mindset between the two. Yeah, I mean, having been able to get in with the Kentucky Distillers Association and start to become part of that, it has been really cool to see that here. I mean, Colorado, you know, kind of felt like I was the distiller in a room of brewers, right? And here's almost the opposite. You know, not that there aren't great breweries in Louisville, but it's a whiskey town. Oh, yeah. Yeah, very collaborative. I mean, not only do I feel welcomed by the Angel's Envy people, but I felt welcomed across the board. We like going to Falls City for their fine Crispy Boys. Yes. Crispy Boys may usually have a good 80s or 90s teen movie on. Sure. What's not to like? John Cusack movies. Not that I'm complaining, but why are we having this amazing Bourbon County Brands doubt again? I needed a beer. No, because it's the Angel's Envy Bourbon County Collab, so we're going to shoehorn it and Roger into this episode right now. So I will say that we had the opportunity to taste the whole Bourbon County lineup. Usually, there's some that I prefer more than others. This year's is one of the strongest lineups in a long time. But without a doubt, no pause or hesitation, the standout for me this year, and I heard this from several other people, has been this Angel's Envy. And I think it shows the most creativity of flavor, and it also doesn't just wear the flavors on its sleeve, like some of the pastry stouts these days that are so popular, like we added this and this, and of course, that's what it tastes like. It's so fun to drink this and suss out all the complexity to it. And it also has a leanness to it, a semblance of balance in a very indulgent stout. Oh wow, you can actually drink a whole glass of this, unlike some of the richer ones that are a little tougher. A little bit of a venous spine. Yeah. But it is, but it's like a really good mocha coffee chocolate bar melted in your mouth. Yeah, I like that. Yeah, this is a, wow, I'm glad I got to try this. Yeah. Yeah, it was cool. The Goose guys came down back in the spring. I don't think they've even had it finalized at the time, but just to be able to pick their brain on how they created that and how that really goes back to a lot of the things we were talking about with the cast bourbon, to see those parallels was awesome. And I had to get clarity on exactly how they did it anyway. So just like me, they've made it very complicated by being neurotic on it. True homage to the angels of the new brain. So this is a two year finish in bourbon barrels or barrels in general. And some of that was entirely in our own ex bourbon barrel. So after the five years, four and a half, five years that our bourbon spends in the new oak, dump, disgorge those barrels, send them to Goose. Then I was, if I understand right, we also sent them our own ex port barrels that had held bourbon and they used those and did not get enough port out of that to blend to what they were looking for. So what they did is they got a hold of one of our port suppliers and actually ordered fresh port barrels. Some of the stuff, a portion of that was in our ex bourbon barrels then was moved over into fresh port barrels. This is good. Your story is synced. Yes. I'm safe. It's worth mentioning that, yeah, they were really much like how it comes across, how careful and methodical you are in the way you're blending. They really wanted to make sure that this wasn't just port by name only. By putting some in the fresh port barrels, it was a complete unknown for them. That's why they called it like a cask finish. They normally, this is the first time they've ever used something else than bourbon barrels and they were super nervous about that. Sure. Well, from a brewing standpoint, using a port barrel is a different beast than using a spirits barrel. You have safety in a spirits barrel, right? It's not getting an infection. Yeah. Spirits barrel is going to kill anything harmful, but a wine barrel is a total disaster. I have a buddy who is now, he's the head distiller at High West right now, but he came from Brewing World and was telling me horror stories about when he'd sourced Sherrier port, one of those, and basically an entire massive batch got infected Yeah. They have a slight background with that. So that's the last road they want to go down, and they've been so meticulous. Yeah. Yeah. I think that the way this blend came together, I think they introduced that port character without it overtaking the bourbon character. But it just, I think, especially when you're drinking alongside the other ones, the complexity here is like off the charts. It's just so fun. To go back to, again, to apply a blender's mindset to that beer, not that they haven't blended other things. I think they did a blend of different distilleries at one point. But this to me just rang true. And I think one of the coolest things was to see in the same way we're applying port to a bourbon, it takes on a different character. I mean, you still get port influence here, but with a roasty, chocolatey base, as opposed to me, classic bourbon, nutty, grainy. Yeah, it gets almost more spiced to me. And that's the fun stuff, is nerding out on that. Queen and chocolate covered cherries. What are those? They're the cheap ones and they're fabulous. Cherry cordials. I always write cherry cordials in my reviews. Yeah, and it's funny how they did that backyard rye this year that's very fruit forward. I was like, you're getting almost as if they used fruit in this, like blackberry, raspberry, such a great beer. And also, I would suggest trying this alongside some Angel's Envy whiskey. My least favorite comment as of late is, what are you drinking these days? Oh, bourbon, like I forgot you're not allowed to drink bourbon and beer together or both of them. So, enjoy these side by side because I think... Let me give a......just complement one another. Just because it popped in my head from that. Let me give a shout out to Against the Grain, locally in Louisville. Again, with kind of my background in brewing, we got ahold of each other very quickly because they're literally catty corner to the distillery. Yeah. They're the nicest guys. Yeah. A little grumpy at times, but nice guys. But what we did was I wanted to do a collaboration with Manu that off the bat. There's enough barrel-aged beers out there in general, and there's people doing it really well like we're just trying. So what we did was we actually, they brewed a beer that is meant to complement a glass of Angel's Envy. To your point on having a glass of bourbon and beer next to each other. So we wanted to take the collab and take it in a slightly different spin. What we haven't told as many people is that we collaborate on both sides. So what we did is we took some of their yeast, their house yeast and did our same normal process, normal grain bill 72% corn. You ferment it off of their yeast? Yeah. And so, well, earlier pre-show, we were talking about kind of the constraints of what I have here versus Colorado and vice versa. We pretty set on like a two, three day fermentations, like, you know. In the same way I talk about considerations of case counter proof with a blend, we're not going to ferment for two weeks and just take the distillery offline because that's not a real life thing. So we're pretty used to turning around fermenters like that. I can experiment on grain bills or other things within that timeframe. But other than that, there's not a lot of leeway. But the one time that's not true is Christmas break. And so we did is last Christmas break, we pretty much rolled kegs of yeast across the parking lot and fermented those for the better part of a week with against the grain. And to go back to me being a blunder, yes, a lot of the sarturn, the French oak, these things were laid down before I walked in the door. There's a natural handoff of things, both for me and Angel's Envy and for me back to Stranahan's as well. So I'm sort of blending right now releases with prior age stock while laying down experimental stock that's going to take another five or ten years for you to see and then we'll match that with finishing casts and so on and so forth. But those are the sort of things that I think are fun that are coming down the line. That's super cool. Dude, those guys that are against the grain are party animals. They're just going to do boiler makers with this stuff. We made a call on a barrel picking trip. We made a call at the time we were there was when they had first started experimenting with Ambarana. So it goes back a number of years, but we were there listening to them talk about the wonders and foibles of Ambarana. They're way ahead of the curve on that. That's like the darling now. Yeah, no kidding. I think that's an interesting topic maybe for another podcast. That is bizarre to me. And honestly, wish I had been at Angel's Envy earlier or had a relationship with them earlier, because it was like 20, I want to say it was like 2016 or something. Oh, yeah, they were way early. They were so early and also was really cool. I mean, you know, whether or not you like Ambarana, that's a whole other conversation. But what is neat to me is that you almost always see barrel age trends go from spirits to beer, as you'd expect, right? Even with the use of port barrels in this Goose Island release. That is purely a release that Jerry, on the back of him, getting the Ambarana up from doing, I think, a brewing collab with Sun Brew in South America. That is a trend that went from beer to whiskey, which is cool. Although your friend Alex was using them at about the same time. Yeah. Because we did an Ambarana barrel with Teeling. He's early. He was early. 8 years ago. Yeah. But it's funny because the one thing that always resonate is I think they put an Imperial Stout. They decide the first thing they're going to have to do is they put a Imperial Stout in it and 24 hours it was undrinkable. They had to take it out after 24 hours of their stout. Yeah. Things to be learned. They're blending it with the two barrels worth with something like 20 barrels worth volume wise of non-barrel-aged stout just to tone it down to a drinkable level. If more distillers had actually consulted against the grain and their experience, you'd see a lot better releases out on the show. We should mention what whiskey we are enjoying alongside this beer right now. This is five new handpicked Angel's Envy barrels. These are the ones we picked when we saw Owen down in, I think it was September. We've always jokingly referred to these as Cast Strength Jr. We get them bottled at 110. We oftentimes lean towards some of the port heavier ones, but not always. But these ones specifically, Owen, you said these were essentially regex from the Cast Strength bash that we got as handpicked. You're not supposed to be that harsh on yourself. But yeah, this is the definition of Cast Strength Jr. Because when I said we picked through the single barrels through the course of the year to make up that third component of the Cast Blend, it really hinged on a, we found this specific lot of barrels we really liked. It was about 40 of them, honestly. And so most of those went into Cask and then we held a handful back. And so this to me was the kind of jammy pork component. So if the nine-year-old was the aged oak light port and the 2016 Angel's Envy was the spice, sweet and spice kind of thing, then this was just the length of finish. This was the big port. And so obviously kind of stand out as a single barrel in terms of just the intensity of it and talk about the salt and pepper. But really cool, especially for anyone listening to this as a fan, if you do get the Cask, then you can literally taste, not a reject, just a sister barrel. They don't play well with others, so they had to be modeled on their own. So we just want to... They're in timeout. We've got Barrel 231237 here. Bingo. And so by the time you guys picked this, because like I said, they were filled, it was January 31st through the first week of February. And so I believe by the time you guys picked this, we were shooting at like a seven, maybe eight month finish by the time it was packaged, but something like that. It's funny, the Bourbon County might have blown out all my taste receptors. The biggest thing that I taste here is the grain. I mean, in a very nice way, very bright. And from what you were describing, not as like jammy as I anticipated, but very beautiful whiskey. Yeah, and I couldn't tell you exactly which barrel this was. The fruit is definitely there. I mean, if people play around with the alchemy of trying to blind guess exactly what they're drinking versus Bourbon versus rye, we're finished versus not finished. This is clearly something that's had a wine barrel influence. Yeah, and you see the color on it. This is the second one. Yeah, this is the second one. This is 231238. So we've got sister casks here. Sequential. We taste them blind. When we go in and taste them, we'll taste 10 or 12 of them sometimes, and we're only choosing four, five, six. About 39. Oh, cool. We did a single barrel pick right before coming here, and I usually lead in. I probably am only involved in about 10% of our overall barrel picks. But I lead in by saying, what do you want me to do? Because some people just tell me to shut the f*** up, aka Binny's guys. Some people want me to hold their hands and tell them which barrel to pick. And then some people want the in-between. And he's like, let me taste through them and then you can chat up. But I usually give you guys a shout out. I'm like, hey, they just want me to hang out and come in at the end. But they do their thing, clinical, and on to the next thing. Got places to go. Dive bars to get to. Well, that was, we had to get to a tool show that day. Fair enough. Oh, these are great. That's great. It's a little drier, a little spicier. Again, hit the stores. These are 90 bucks when they come in. Only way to get high-proof Angel's Envy outside of the yearly Cast Strength release. So pretty cool thing. And again, we tend to, historically, we kind of lean in port-heavy directions, but not always. I mean, we're taking, as always, we're taking what we feel are the best, highest quality barrels that still have some kind of brand identity to them. 237 seems pretty high-toned and fresh and sweet and open. 238 is like, yeah, 238. 328, 238, whatever. It's like darker spice. It's also fatter. It also is. Yeah, I know. I think richer. That's the second one. It's got more tannin on the back sides. It's like, it's rich. It's like the meaty, fatty one. Yeah, I think, I guess maybe Eileen buttery, but yeah, fatty. All right, I might take that from you. Let's see. I just Boilermaker-ed it too and who is that good? It's really good with the Braywood County, but the Braywood County is really good. This is Roger's last stop of the day. Did you by the way get any of the Goose Barrels back? Now, that's what you need to do is the double boomerang and ask them to get the barrels back. Just you wait. Yes, I brought something to taste off, not now, but it'll touch on a couple of the topics we've talked about today, and that's as a general hint as I'll give the audience. Cool. Always new stuff in the works, apparently. Available at the distillery and Binny's Beverage Depot. What I intend to talk about later is an interesting product we have going with doers, and we do a lot of interesting things with your parent company that we could find some synergies, as the marketing suits would say. Hey, I'm always open to whatever bright ideas we got. I think, not to overly just bring it back to the cast, but that has now opened the door. I got my first releases out. We got a couple of things in the pipeline this year, all the way from small scale to really big scale, and obviously there'll be a seller collection somewhere down the line that we got to get out the door too. Those are always so good. Yeah. We got certainly some fun things. My intention, and maybe it's me coming from more of a craft background, from mom and pop to Stranahan's. I mean, and also you got to think, Stranahan's the biggest distillery in Colorado. It's between like a tenth and a fifth of the size of Angel's Envy, so it's been a gradual step up in scale. And also just to make it clear, Angel's Envy is by Kentucky scale relatively small. We're still 125 barrels filled a day. I mean, you talk about a Heaven Hill, a Beam, a Sazerac, like thousands. So to me, it's a nice scale to be at because I can still kind of apply a craft mindset, but at a much larger scale. Buffalo Trace's theoretical scale right now is 2,500, but they can't get the barrel filling operation to run fast enough. So the last time we were there, I think they were at 1,800 and on a good day, 1,900 barrels a day. So I always kind of think that wine region laws, especially in Europe, are stupidly restrictive and it's ridiculous. But those grapes have grown there for thousands of years and they figured out what works. And whenever there's legal limitations, originally they're put in place so that they protect the consumer so they know what they're getting. But eventually, you make a good enough product that it's kind of an antiquated thing and you guys are painting with a more diverse broad palette of barrels and options than anybody else in America and it's awesome and keep it up. And I never kiss anybody's ass like that. Tell him, I don't. Well, generally not. But it's... I'll come back whenever. He's told more than one wine maker that their wine smelled like a fart. Well, if they quit making wines that smell like fart, I wouldn't say it. Well, let me... Pat Nat. To kind of rephrase... And one of the things I've had to push with our team and I think we're getting towards is, I said it earlier, you see finishing on damn near every wall of the distillery in some capacity and some phrase. But the one that has resonated with me from the moment I walked in the door, we have a massive facing the highway and it says, Revere Tradition Embrace Progress. And I'm like, the use of a wine barrel finishing at the time that Angel's Envy did it and the scale they did it at was novel and was progressive and now everybody's doing it. But you guys were able to evolve out of that because you could have been, you could have stuck with the sort of a maker's mark where for years and years and years, the Samuel's family said, listen, we make one thing and it's excellent. What we make is what we make. That's what we make. What we make is we make one thing excellent and that's all we're going to make. And then 46, they started pivoting and now they're really pivoting. Seller's good. Seller collection's good. You guys are doing the same thing. You start with, I mean, even Wes didn't want to let us get even behind where getting away from the consistency of what he was trying to do. Lincoln had passed, Wes was running everything and he wanted to keep it consistent. And you were doing one thing and then Rye came out and now just in the last three or four years with the seller collections and things that are getting released and the bandwidth that you're given now to experiment and find good things that are different. It says something to always progress. Yeah, we live in the future, man. Well, and I think we have to. I mean, I've read some pretty good blog posts and just general posts on how the whiskey industry has changed and you guys probably live it day to day. It's about what's new. Yeah, you got all the beer nerds, so you're welcome. You got all these people that are used to a new beer every two weeks. So now you're so well suited. It reminds me of the fact that a lot of people now are interested in loggers, and that can be one of the most challenging things to make. So now everyone's interested in cask finishing, and as you've just discussed, it's not just like bing, bang, boom, put it in a unique barrel and you're good to go. So you guys are in a great position because you have that experience and you actually know what you're doing. People should be paying attention to what you're releasing. I'll give you one big hint. The craziest thing that I think in the last 10 years, we talked about the height of the craft beer boom when I talk about getting into it. You had the sour based breweries, whatever, all barrel-aged stuff. And the craziest thing that Crooked Stay ever did was then come out with a lager. Yeah. And so you won't have to wait too long to peer into the future. But when I'm like with us, what's the craziest thing that Angel's Envy could do? And yeah, no barrel finish. Let's see what happens down the line. Things we're working on. I can't speak to them too much more than that because it's still being shaped. But obviously the mindset will always be revere tradition, embrace progress. And so not to release something just to release it, but make sure, you know, maybe it's applying some sort of European concept either in terms of cask or process or hell, combining American concepts in ways that haven't been done before. So this is as broad as I'm going to give you. I'll come back on the show in another eight months. There you go, folks. Whiskey nerds, thank you for sticking around to the end. You got a couple of pretty exclusive tips there. So keep listening to Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. And if you enjoy our podcast as much as we enjoy this whiskey, leave us a review on the podcasting platform of your choice. Just kidding. Only Apple Podcasts. The rest of them don't matter. That's also true. And yeah, tell your friends, tell your neighbors, tell your mom, I said hi. Until next time, thanks for listening to Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. I'm Greg. I'm Brett. I'm Roger. I'm Pat. I'm Owen. Keep tasting.