Look at all these bottles, Brett. One of them is bound to taste good. Oh, I had some really old stuff back in the sample cabinet. We don't have to get to those. I just was like, well, we should, I don't know, more for Roger to taste. Well, we started a tradition, I feel, on some of these podcasts of enjoying things no one can ever buy. Yeah, we don't need to totally tease the pure unobtainium. Roger's favorite element. You can't have this. There is an element called Livermorem. What? Yeah, look it up. After the laboratory? Yeah, that's who invented it. Yeah. It's half life is like a nanosecond or something. It's one of those crazy, crazy, the third additive to the periodic table type of thing down at the bottom. Yeah. The ultra radioactives. Well, let's ask Farmer about that. Yeah, we should have to ask Farmer about that. That's the laboratory he worked at, right? Yeah, he was. Look at this. We got a Farber reference in before we intro the podcast, didn't even start yet. Hey, welcome back to Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. I'm Pat from the Whisky Hotline. We got a Whisky Hotline episode today. Welcome back, Brett. Hey, it's Brett from the Whisky Hotline. I'm very excited to be here, Pat. Thanks for inviting me back. Who else is here? I'm Raj. I do beer for Binny's. Beer for Binny's. And auditive beverages these days, you know how it be, seltzers, iced tea. Hard tea, hard tea specialist for the company. We've got a special guest in the room with us today, Dr. Don Livermore, Master Blender for JP. Wiser's. Don, welcome. Thank you. It's been a long time since I've been to Chicago. It's great being at Binny's. Don, welcome back to Chicago. You want to give us a little background on yourself and kind of your role as Master Blender at what is one of the largest distilleries on the continent, right? Yes, the Hiram Walker Distillery in Windsor, Ontario. For any of those geography nerds out there, it's right across from Detroit. It's actually south of Detroit, the only Canadian city south of the US border is Windsor, Ontario. Fun fact. Yes. I've been there for 27 years. I started out as their microbiologist, as you know, yeast makes alcohol, and I was the guy that's looked into the microscope for many years. But the company was very good to me. They spent 100% of my tuition money where I did my Master's of Science in Brewing and Distilling at Harriet Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, and then I'm a sucker for education, so I went on to do a PhD in Brewing and Distilling, in particular, working with infrared sensors on measuring the quality of barrels. Funny enough, the week I defended my PhD was the week I became the Master Blender at the distillery in 2012. So I've been at the helm of that position for 10 years now, and it's a lot of fun, certainly being a blender at the Canadian Whisky, and I think we'll probably chat a little bit about that, the styles of whiskey we can make in Canada. Being the blender at a distillery that's sitting on over a million and a half casks of various types of whiskey, you got a lot that you can choose from. Brett and I have been in the distillery, and Brett, how many different whiskies were in that blending lab? I mean, it's an insane amount. I think it leads to just a discussion about blending because people, I think when you hear the word blending, it has different connotations for every single different area or country where it's done. Blending a scotch means one thing, blending, bourbon or blending, blending whiskies in the United States means another thing in blending in Canada is the core nature of Canadian whiskey. You know, it was, we were fascinated to learn the first time we ever went to the Distilled Whisky Hotline to walk in and say, okay, well, what are your mash bills? And it's like, we have, we distill wheat, we distill rye, we distill corn, we distill barley. There are mash bills per se. Yeah. And for Canadian whiskey, just to backtrack, all we have to do is be made of grain, fermented, aged and distilled in Canada, aged in a wooden barrel of less than 700 liters for a minimum of three years and 40, a minimum of 40% alcohol, that's it. So we can make a mash bill. However, the larger producers probably during the 1930s, 1940s moved away from making a mash bill style as a whiskey because I think it comes down to the innovation and creativity, the adaptability of Canadian whiskey. I think they came to realize that if we separate everything out, it allows you to be creative at the end process. And I think as you guys know more better than myself that consumers are always looking for something different. If you can tell me what you want 10 years from now, I'll make you the mash bill. But I don't think consumers know what they want to drink 10 minutes from now, let alone 10 years from now. So I think that's the wonderful thing about Canadian Whisky and you guys had an opportunity. I probably lined up 140 different classes of wheat, rye, corn, barley, different ages of different casks, of different strengths and just finishes, different distillation methods. And it's one of those things I'll put on for consumers as a blending 101, I call it. $100, you come to distillery and you get to make your own blend. It's insane. It's a daunting task with that many different components in front of you. And so when I'm trying to explain it to our staff and our customers, I always go back to that there are essentially two different styles of whisky being made in most Canadian distilleries. Kind of the base whiskeys and the flavoring whiskeys. Is that a dirty word to call them that way? No, base whiskeys certainly carries a lot of your flavor in your whisky, because you can still do a lot of things with light base whiskeys to start with. You can age them in different kinds of casks to bring more cask forward. We were just talking about Madeira casks a few minutes ago. So I could put a base whisky in a Madeira cask and make it that the front flavor, or that I could put it in a single column of So Rye and the Rye will come up with. That's the wonderful thing that base whiskeys can carry your flavor and textures and colors to your final whisky. So I don't think it's a dirty word at all. It's just part of how it's made. Yeah. And blending, we mentioned earlier before we started, I think about blending being a dirty word in some circles. And largely, we have American whisky to thank for that because of prohibition. Yeah. Certain brands that are now up to 80% essentially vodka with just a little bit of whisky added in as the flavoring component, not the other way around. Our whiskeys tend to be light. I'm not going to... Can you? Our traditional Canadian whiskeys tend to be lighter and smoother, but if you go back to the history of Canadian whiskeys, that's what Canadians really wanted back in the early, early days, and hence that the tradition has come through. Now, we're starting to see changes here, and I think we're going to talk about some of our brands here shortly, where we're seeing a trend, where people want bigger, fuller body style, style of whiskeys. Yeah, and you guys have certainly come out with several of those over the years. What is the typical proof in Canada? Is it usually 80 proof like here? That's a great question for us. They don't legislate us on how, what strength it is still at. It's our choice, whether we use pastels, columbusils, combinations thereof. At the end of the day, we have to be a minimum of 40% alcohol or 80 proof for our products. I will age our whisky anywhere from 58% to 76% depending what style of whisky I'm putting into a cask. Another way to get different flavors is what strength they put into the cask as well. Rule of thumb when you're blending is if you want the grain or the wood notes to be the front and forward flavor to that whisky, put the strength higher. If you want the floral fruity notes to come out, that's what people say, open up whisky. That's where you add water. So put the proof down to 80 proof. So that's what my mindset. So we do have a brand called Lot 40. If anyone knows the brand Lot 40, there's the mother brand sets up 43%. It's 100% rye, brand new wood, pot distilled rye. We did come out with a Lot 40 Dark Oak, which is available, which double aged. And so if I'm double aging, I want more wood to come out. I brought the strength up to 48%. So that's the mindset of a blender is what do you want to emphasize? You start playing with the strength of your whiskey. Well, I passed around kind of the core JP. Wiser's whiskey for our market here, which is the 10-year-old Triple Barrel. Customers, it's got a kind of ruddy, orangish, reddish label to it. There's a new label coming next year, I think. This whiskey, I got asked a number of years ago to introduce JP. Wiser's into Europe, and I had an opportunity to make a brand new blend. And I thought, you know what? We need an age declared whiskey at a good price in the European market. We brought it over there, and one of the strangest things in the country is Sweden, that sells over 25,000 cases annually. Holy cow. And it was doing so well in that country. Our Canadian friends and American friends says, why is that not in North America? So we brought it last year. It's been in the market now for a year in Canada. It's been the number one whiskey innovation in Canada this year in terms of case sales. And by triple barrel, how do you define that for JP. Wiser? Yeah, so my mindset of a blender here, this has a more rye content than the mother brand, which is Wiser's Deluxe. I realized that today's consumers are looking for more body, more complexity in the whiskey. And the one way to do it is up the rye content, as your listeners probably know that. But I'm like a whiskey chef. So when I'm thinking I'm gonna up the rye content a little bit, I then gotta balance some sweetness with it. And one of the ways to draw in sweetness into the whiskey is play with the barrels. So this has three different barrels in it in the recipe. That's one of the things you can play with when you're making a blending recipe. It's got brand new oak, which gives you four to five times the amount of vanilla caramel toffee than a used Canadian whiskey barrel. It also has once used bourbon barrels as part of the recipe, which gives you that dried fruit. Barrel's like a sponge, right? Brings in those notes. So again, helps balance against the rye. And then we have Canadian whiskey casks as part of the third barrel. And that's what we mean by triple barrel. And it's just amount of balancing out the amount of the rye that you put into the recipe. And this is just a really nice whiskey. It's award-winning. Like I said, it's and I think the reason it's a good, I'm not sure what the price is here, guys. I think we're at $22.99 or something. Yeah. Really phenomenal. Yeah. Each declared whiskey had a good price. And I think that's consumers are searching that. It's pretty dynamite. Speaking of like kind of the old guard brand Canadian whiskeys that tend to be bulk brands and big plastic bottles and sold cheap. This is very much a premium whiskey. You taste this and this is a rich, full bodied whiskey. Yeah. I get comments at whiskey festivals all the time. And really, that's what you're charging for this. But but again, I think it's a niche in the Canadian whiskey platform. I know that that that price point age declares probably nonexistent out there. Are very few working there. But not in the bourbon world or not in the Scotch world. That's for sure. Yeah. Sure as hell not in bourbon anymore. Now, how would you what would you put this as a drink strategy? I mean, I'd use a glass. I don't know. The bottle is easily a couple of different things. You always think of things that that are really well balanced and integrated tend to make good are good for cocktail. Good using for cocktails, especially things cocktails that are whiskey forward because it's not aggressive. I mean, the other thing is a great bridge. If you have somebody who is complaining about not liking Canadian whiskey because their experience or things that are sort of light and benign, this is it's like, OK, this won't cost you a ton of money to get into the category. Try this because this is for what our experience is becoming more and more. This is actually closer to what Canadian whiskey is now than a lot of the legacy brands that are much more popular. I would say with that richer, more rye forward spice, it would actually play really nice in a whiskey sour, like a gold rush. It would actually shine through in that it wouldn't be totally overpowered by the lemon. Yeah, and highball. I mean, that's something nice and elegant. We're working great in highball. If I'm hearing, it's a versatile whiskey. Yeah. And that's what the thought was to do it. Drink it neat in highballs, whiskey sours, old fashioned. I mean, there's enough kind of that vanilla, caramel, butterscotch notes that people who like those kind of more plush bourbons would, I think, could just enjoy this neat too. And I would be a little surprised at that. It maybe has a little more depth and mouthfeel than some of the Canadian whiskeys are used to. It's a fun category to be a blender with. And I know you guys have had the opportunity to come to our distillery, crack some casks open and try different things. And the struggle is when you guys come visit me is, can I do a cask pick? And I think that opened your eyes, Brett, and you kind of slightly mentioned it here earlier is, you can't really do a cask pick with us because all the thought is you're designed to blend down the road, right? It's antithetical to what Canadian whiskey is, right? Yeah. You run into the same thing with Cognac blenders too. You ask them and they're just like, well, why the hell would you want to do that? Then it's not Cognac. Right. It's like when Rick Bayliss and say, hey, can I buy some of your tomatoes? Yeah. It just opens up the world. And at our facility, just to touch on it a little bit, we've been there since 1858 and we've been continuing making whiskey all the way through many eras of whiskey making right through prohibition and everything else. And when I started 27 years ago, we were making about 18, 20 million absolute liters of alcohol a year. That's what we were distilling. Today, we're over 50. That's huge. I mean, there's huge inside in terms of distillation. And last year, we blended over 150 million liters of product. Well, let's talk about the distillery a bit then. So I want to know about the Rick House. What are you keeping all this stuff? Sure. How many football fields worth of hockey rinks? There you go. That's the true Canadian measurement. You really want to know it's 132 hockey rinks. I don't know the translation. Depends even whether you mean US football or Canadian football. Exactly. Is it a European sheet or a North American sheet? Yeah. So it's the size of 132 hockey rinks. We got 1.6 million barrels sitting, aging in our warehouse, and they're stacked six barrels high. So it's not a Rick House, I would say. Okay. It is just your standard palletized barrels. We've moved away from the Rick House probably in the 1960s, 1970s. A lot of it is, I mean, economics play. It is a little bit of an economics play because if you can put them on pallets, you're not rolling the barrels. Safety, employee. Yeah. Nobody's getting, people aren't getting injured as much just doing their standard warehouse work. And I was not involved in moving it, but I talked to the years, Blender's previous, and they said, yeah, really people cannot tell the difference. But I would say when you walk into our warehouse, and I know you guys were here in the summer when you were out to visit me, but it's its own living organism in a sense that wood is a good insulator, and alcohol keeps energy. It holds on to the energy. So over the winter, our whiskey will get in a cask down about minus five degrees Celsius, which is about 20 Fahrenheit. It'll get below the freezing point of water. Likewise in the summer, when you guys are there, the barrels were probably a little warmer, and it gets up to about 82 Fahrenheit. So liquid will change, but it takes a bit. And the fun part is when the season's changing. So you've come out of winter, you got 20 degrees inside of it, and all of a sudden Detroit's like Chicago. That's the area we're in. You'll have 80 degrees all of a sudden, and then you got warm air coming in as you're walking to the warehouse. As the warm air is going in there, you'll see an effect that's very interesting is that condensation starts forming on the hoops of the barrels. And I've had one of Scotland's top chemists come walk in, why are the hoops so rusted? I've never really seen that before, but the whole body, when they're so tightly packed together, moves as a unit and temporary, and it's almost like a meat locker. And it's like that's about June, inside of Los Huéros. And it strikes me too having, because we've had the opportunity to drive around with you and go to a couple of different areas of the complex, and there is, there seems to be a lot of consistency. In other words, the buildings are pretty much identical, they're in the same area, they're the same height, they're loaded the same way, and that has to be good for you as a blender, because you can rely on the fact that if you start to pick the same age, and I'm sure when you load the warehouses, you don't put every single thing from every single year in one warehouse. If you lose that warehouse, you lose that year, right? So you spread stuff around, but it strikes me that if you spread things around and you really needed to collect it back later to use it, that you could have some level of reliability that it would be... Yeah, consistently aged. Yeah, so when we make a recipe, it's set in stone. I mean, we're not mash bills, we make recipes at the end of it. And then when the recipe, age is considered, barrel type is considered, distillation method is considered, grain is carried. So by the time you make a recipe, you got six, seven, eight different ingredients in that. Just looks like making at home, right? So with that, we're just trying the Wiser's 18 year here. Speaking of consistent recipe, right? Yeah, it's funny. We were at an establishment here in the city last night and we walked into a bar. Imagine that, we walked into the bar and... Were you with a priest and a rabbi? Yeah. And then they had the Boda bottle of this Wiser's 18 year that was probably two generations ago. I figured the bottle is probably over 20 years old, so I had to have a dram of it. And where I'm just tasting the 18 year here now, it's consistent 20 years later. And one of the things you want to point out in this one, if anyone really wants to know what happens in a cask in terms of oxidation, that's one of the things, barrels breathe, oxygen touches alcohol. Try Wiser's 18 year because it is base whisky. That's all it is aged in a used Canadian whisky cask. And what happens is that green apple flavor, that ethyl acetate, acetaldehyde I talked about, this is the taste of Angel Share. And what I say to people, memorize this taste. You'll get it in highly aged bourbons, but it gets covered under the grain because the way it's distilled, you'll get to see it in highly aged scotches, but it gets buried under the peat. This is the front and foremost flavor in this whisky. This is the taste of age. This is the taste of Angel Share. This is oxygen chemically reacting with alcohol. Yeah. Well, here the other thing for people, this is a beautiful whisky. Beautiful whisky. It's also for sale at Most Binny's for $59.99. $59.99. This is, I mean, ridiculous. I remember my first encounter with Wiser's 18 was actually reading about it, and I think it was Paul Packelt way back when with the wine enthusiast and the ratings that Packelt did in his Spirits Journal said that this was at that time, it was Yeah. It hasn't changed. It's an 18 year old. It's a beautiful 18 year old whisky for $60. I said to you, you're a group yesterday. The recipe hasn't changed in 60 years. I haven't touched it, but that goes to show you making these recipes and the consistency you talked about, Brett, it is very, very important as a blender to make sure the ingredients you're using are consistent. It makes a headache for me when I go in day to day, but things don't go into a barrel unless it's right. We don't screw around with that. Yeah, you talk about the things and that's one of the other things we've seen, which is very impressive. And amazingly, it's impressive at the same time, a little bit smaller than you think it would be is when you walk into the lab, that everything has to pass through. Oh, the grain. Do you talk in the grain handling? Well, you go to grain handling and there's, you know, we've had the opportunity to see, and so people understand the context. This is a facility that gets multiple dozens of trucks. 15 a day. 15 a day. They come in, right? 15 trucks come in a day, and every single truck has a core sample taken out. And if the core sample doesn't pass, people don't understand if you can't get a flaw in your grain and distill it out, people think, well, you just ferment it and distill it out. When you distill, you do the opposite. The only thing you're taking out of the liquid in distillation is the water. Everything else is staying. Well, it depends how you distill. I mean, it really does cut. So if you single distill like a bourbon, all the flavor stays except for the sulfur. We talked about sulfur yesterday. But if you double distill through two column stills, it strips and removes all the flavor. So you can distill things out. When you're distilling those different grain component whiskies, what percentage do you mostly making corn, I would think? Is that the grain that's most plentiful and cheapest? Great transition. I wanted to ask about how this distillery is set up, because it's not just, you tore a bourbon distillery, and here's our grain handling, here's our cooker, here's our fermenters, here is the still, and the still makes whatever whiskies we're making, bourbon, rye, whatever, it's all done on the still. And this is a little different. Yeah, do you want me to geek out for a second? Yeah, please do. So the way you distill is everything goes through a column still first. That's how bourbon is made. And one pass through a column still, you're going to keep the grain flavor and you're going to keep the fruity, floral, green grass, soapy notes the yeast has made. So it's going to be a full body whisky as Brett just talked about. That's what happens in a bourbon distillery. We will keep that and age that. Or you can take that again and distill it through a second cycle, through a column still. Sometimes they call it the rectifying column, if you've heard of that word before. And you can get up to 95% alcohol and it's close to vodka. It's like a very heavy vodka in a sense. And we call that base whisky. You could not tell if it comes from corn, wheat, rye or barley. So I'll always tell people of your stature, nature and podcasters, when you ask a Canadian whisky producer, don't ask a mash bill. You got to ask two questions. You got to ask what grain did you use? How did you distill it? Oh, I distilled it once. You know, it's going to be full body whisky. Oh, I distilled it twice. You know, it's going to be a light style base whisky. So, there are places in Canada that will have a declaration on their label as 100% rye. You taste it. I'm not getting a spicy warm feeling through the chest, but they're correct. But then you'd have to ask the second question. How did you distill it? Well, we probably doubled distilled it to make a light whisky, which most Canadians like to drink light whisky, right? That's the traditional style. And you're thinking, why would they choose rye? It's because that area, Canada, rye is the cheapest whole form of starch, right? In my region and we're around Chicago. Most other places, rye is the most expensive grain you can get. But in regions in Canada, it's not. Oh, yeah, Western Canada, it's what's grown. I mean. In the middle of the bread basket. Whereas in Ontario, we're corn. So if I'm going to double distill it anyway, I'll use the cheapest form, because we want to keep costs down for everybody too. So that's what we're doing. You don't get this beautiful 10-year-old on the shelf for under $25. Sure. Yeah, that's exactly. So distilling shapes your whisky. There's a pun in that statement, if you know. Distilling really does shape your whisky. And it's a real art, it's real craft. And I work closely with our distillers to make sure we get the flavors we're looking for in the final blending recipe as well. Yeah. So what was the recipe in the last one we tried, the 18, what? It's double distilled corn. That's it. Double distilled, like, and that's it. And like I said, that whisky. In used barrels. In used barrels. That's it. And it's got that much flavor. That's oxidation. Oxidation, though. I mean, you need to age it that long to get that level of flavor with it. You got it. And there's a real cult following to the 18 year. Like you said, you had it many, many years ago. It's very, very popular to chase age in bourbon right now, which to me, from a personal standpoint, is bourbon. Most bourbons at about 13 or 14 and beyond are undrinkable to me because of the wood, because it's fresh wood and it just is too much wood. And that it's a one trick pony. And that's dominant. This is more in the mentality of Scotch, which takes a little bit more delicate whisky that is going to work together with the wood that has been somewhat tempered by having something else in it. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So this leans more in terms of the subtlety towards Scotch than really that it does towards bourbon or- Or blended Scotch anyway. Yeah, blended Scotch, yeah. It's a fun thing to play with. So when you talked about strength, Roger, the thing is too, when we distill, we can distill them many different methods and it comes off at many different proofs. So we do have a range of strengths we play with. I said from 58% to 76%. So the whiskey we're trying here is the Wiser's 27 year. Nice. That was the year I started. That's what this came into. It is like the exact same recipe as the 10-year-old. Exact same recipe as the 10-year-old. But I put it at cash strength. But the confusing part to me, Roger, and I don't know how you define this, usually when you talk about cash strength whiskeys, you're talking about something from the same style of distillation, same mash bill, or the same case of scotch, single malt, and then you make a cash strength. What if I took different grains and put them in barrels at totally different strengths and I put it together? Is that really cash strength? It's uncut, but I don't know. We're doing a project with another major, with a major bourbon producer that has a tendency to be very, very picky about their IP. That's the debate we're going to, well, you can't call it Barrel proof because we already call things Barrel proof and cash strength. So we settled on another term that sort of skates around it. But you're right. I mean, cash strength is sort of a little bit- There's no legal definition. Right. There's no, it's a dog whistle for some people. It's like, well, I drink everything. That's great words. Yeah, yeah. You're right. Cash strength could be anything. Look, I was just at a distillery this weekend, whose barrel entry is 103. So cash strength for them is 105 to 110 by the time it comes out, right? Everybody's like, well, that's weak. Well, in this case here, the Wiser's 27 year because I have different grains of different strengths. I call it a cash strength blend because I did blend. I didn't add water and I think 59.9. This came out at 59. Yeah, 119.8. I knew back to your warehouses, do you tend to gain alcohol or lose alcohol or stay relatively neutral? Lose. In humid climates, your strength will go down. In arid climates, your strength goes up. So when you're telling me wherever somebody's strength is going up, it's a drier climate. I don't know whoever you're working with, but it narrows it down for me a little bit. Yeah. Well, it certainly narrows the region down. And that would be typical of Scotch. That's the same thing happens in typical dunnage warehouse aging. They lose alcohol over time. Wow. This whiskey is incredible. This is we don't have a ton of this. It's at a few Binny's, I think, for $179. Yeah, that was an older release. I don't know that this is around. No, this is a new one. Brand new. This is a new one. You're thinking these are the older ones. Yeah. The 27 year is exclusive to the US market and into Sweden as well. So if my Canadian friends are listening to this, unfortunately didn't get into Canada. Road trip time. Road trip to Binny's to. Our American friends from our importer will be happy to get us more of this. Yes. It's a delicious whiskey. I must say the flavors at the higher strength, the grains coming out a little bit more, even though it's the same recipe as the tenure, I can get more of a grain flavor. Really just makes me want more Canadian whiskey at quote unquote cask strength. Well, it does. And look, 27 years old, the price is very, very, and you're right. There's wood, but the wood is pleasant. There's like a citrus, dry, you know, dry, curious how orange peel sort of thing, a little bit of baking spice, some sandalwood sort of element. It doesn't taste 120 proof or 119. Yeah, it is so good. The nose is pretty incredible. There's a lot of complexity there. A lot of different layers going on. Now, you mentioned this was the same recipe as the ten year old. Can you break that down again for us? The ten year old is got a high concentration of rye in comparison to our mother brand and double distilled corn whiskey. And then three barrel types. I don't like getting in percentages of rye. I can tell you percentages between my brands. But the thing is, you can distill in creative ways to concentrate up the perception of rye. So if I set a percentage of mine between myself and my competitor, that's not fair because maybe I have a technology that concentrates it up or maybe they have it even more so than mine. So I like comparing our brands across than comparing one to another. Whereas in Bourbon, I understand why you do that because they distill all the same methodology, right? Yeah. So in the United States and Rye too, there's a little bit for the people that want to bring it up. There's also a difference in where they source Rye because you're starting to see because of the production style, you're starting to see a little bit of a movement towards actually describing the strain of Rye and the strain of wheat. Are you using heirloom that are native to an area or are you using things that have come over? And the largest producer of Rye in the world and certainly based in North America, all of their Rye is German, it's not even grown in North America. If you want to talk about that, I'll talk about Lot 40 if you want. Oh sure. Good segue. No, why bring up Lot 40? Lot 40 is our 100% Rye proposition. To build on what you're saying is when I was kind of new to my role and through the years, what agriculture or farmers would do is Rye was treated as a cover crop. It was treated as a secondary kind of green and a lot of farmers would just plant it on the field to make sure the soil would not erode. So what they would do is they would sell 70% of their product to us as distillers, keep 30% for seed and these people had their own heirloom seeds for generation and they call it phenotypes in the world of biology. So you'd have its own biology, its own flavors and tastes and years and years of working at a distillery, that was one of my fears of inconsistencies, that you're buying rye from Joe and then one from Roger and then one from Brett and everywhere else, right? So you would have an inconsistency. So in 2015, what we started to do with our rye, we actually worked with a company out of Germany, which where a lot of your rye hybrids are developed, to use a strain called Bresetto rye. So a lot of our whisky is the one we're going to have here shortly in the Lot 40 Dark Oak, has a strain for Bresetto rye. Then we saw some more consistent flavors. You could see that coming into as to getting these heirloom or cover crop rye. Versus just the leftovers. Yeah. So this is one of the things we built inconsistency. We actually are switching over to a different one this year. That's the growers that, so the Bresetto has been discontinued and they have a sister hybrid that we'll be switching. So what's this year? 2023. So pick up bottles made from 2023 in about 10 years. It sounds like then the rye is sort of hybridizing just like the barley strains do in the Scotch business. Same way. Like right now it's what's Triumph and Concerto. Concerto moving to Sassy. Yeah, Sassy Triumph. That's Sassy. Yeah. Well, and you're seeing that interesting. You talk about growing rye as a cover crop and then utilizing it rather than throwing it away. That's actually happening in Scotland right now. There are three producers that are one very well known and then two startups that are producing ryes that are in the market in the UK and are very soon to be in the market in the United States. Yeah. And it started the Scottish Growers and Fife grew rye as a cover crop over the winter to protect the fields for the barley, which was their cash crop. And a couple of producers said, hey, well, you know, hey, are you getting rid of that? We'll take the grain. Yeah. Well, when I talk to these producers, it's one of the things I stressed in your class yesterday. And I think I opened up some of your product consultant's eyes a little bit, is rye was growing because it grows in crappy conditions, but rye has a functional reason why it is spicy. And you look at the husk of it and the husk is fiber. Fiber is made of cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin. Those are big words. All you have to remember is cellulose and hemicellulose is bricks, lignin is cement. So rye naturally has a lot of lignin content to it. You've been to our distillery and you've been to hundreds of distilleries. I know you guys. What's the temperature like in the distillery? Very hot. You're always heating and cooking and distilling, right? So what happens is you bust apart lignin and that has molecules in it like 4-ethylgylchrysolyl. Those are the spicy notes that are in it. So rye has a lot of lignin content to it. Therefore, once you cook it and heat it and bake it, you're going to bust those big molecules apart and that's why rye is so spicy compared to barley, compared to wheat, compared to corn has very little lignin content into it. And that's why we use rye functionally today. So when I go to these hybrid producers, I said, I want a rye that has high lignin content. Yeah, I want to maximize my spiciness. Yeah, I want to be bold. I want to be daring. And that's my ask to my rye growers is that's where we should be heading down as rye whiskey producers. So how similar is that effect to releasing any elements from lignin in wood, because that's also a big component in wood? Pat, do you want to say, because I said, you're smiling. Well, how do you break apart wood? What's the best way to break apart wood? I mean, it was just like with an ax. Fire. Fire is faster. No, right. Heat, obviously. You burn it. So that's all you're doing is busting apart lignin. And I was saying to the guys yesterday, I said, lignin is the world's most unappreciated molecule. Most of your flavors in whiskey is coming from the lignin in wood or in the lignin in rye. And the other part, I was saying to your group yesterday, too. What is peat? What is peat? What was peat? Well, peat was just desiccated plait material. Yeah, it was broken down lignin again. So fire, broken down fire, a thousand years, and they heated it and it gets encapsulated on the barley as it's drying down. Again, another source of lignin. So diamonds are made out. So diamonds are lignin. I guess maybe at one point, at one point, I suppose. Break them down to the most base level carbons and then wait a few more millennia, sure. But as a blender, you want to break the stuff down. The other thing I wanted to ask you is that I think we run into an interesting problem here. Years and years ago, I was on the floor selling whiskies, and when rye was really taking off and people were curious about it, how rye presents itself can vary so widely by producer. So especially here, I think so many people fell in love with rye because they were familiar with Templeton and Rittenhouse and some of these that are sweeter Kentucky styles. Sweeter, not as rye forward. So I think what's exceptional about this whiskey is that if you try to describe rye to people and you use the analogy of, well, you've had rye bread, right? And you know that earthy spicy character to rye bread, that really presents in this and you know that you're getting 100% rye, but it seems like in working with Canadian whiskeys, I've had some ryes that aren't this way at all. I mean, they have like almost no spice. Yeah. So we can call them rye in Canada, regardless of the percentage. The analogy I use is like the dish curry chicken. What's the main ingredient? Don't overthink this. What's the main ingredient to the dish curry chicken? Chicken. Chicken. Curry is the spice. So it comes down to heat units at this point, is how much rye. Rye is obviously the curry, right? And so it's curry chicken, but how much curry? And like this one, it's 100% rye, so it's going to be a little bit more of a body and a spiciness to it. But what I'll say about Lot 40, it's column and then pot distilled. So going through the column we talked about earlier, you keep the grain flavors, fruity floral, green grass, soapy notes the yeast is made. Most rye whiskies that are on the shelf today will not take the next step and distill the white dog in a pot still. We call it high wines in Canada, but white dog for the majority of the audience here. We will go to that added step and run it through a pot still. Classic pot still like you would with Scotland. And what that does is through the heads and tails cutting, right? The heads is the green grass flavors. Nobody likes the raw flavors. So we cut that out, let the pot still go on for about 12 hours. Fruity flavors comes next. Then flower flavors comes after that. And then the grain flavor, forethogyacol, those things come out towards the end of the distillation. We stop the pot still and what's left in the tails is a soapiness, a waxiness, a bitterness. We cut that and throw it away. So by doing a pot still, we can actually concentrate up the flavor of rye. That's why I don't like getting into percentages because that pot still, we know it concentrates it up even more. Interesting. And a lot of people will come to our ryes. Man, this is a pleasant rye bread. You described it to a tea, Roger. Nice rye bread, pleasant whiskey, where some of them has got a bitterness to it. Yeah, I can tell those have just gone through the straight column. Or a doubler, or in the case of Kentucky. Doubler just brings up the strength. It's still in the road. But they're not taking a cut with a doubler, so it sounds like it's just going through a doubler. Same premise, but they're taking a cut. Doubler kind of functions a little bit like a pot, but they don't cut it. But they don't cut it, yeah. They don't do a heads and tails. When you do the heads and tails on it, that's why I don't like comparing against my competitors, because maybe I got a competitive edge that, yeah, maybe that pot still is dialing up that rye spice and that pleasant rye bread. It certainly did in this double o'clock 40. This thing is a beast of a whiskey. It's 48 percent alcohol. So if this isn't in our stores yet, it is soon. I know that. Beautiful, beautiful rye whiskey if you're looking for something exceptional. Hopefully, people will seek it out because we've been working on, Lot 40 has been very much a diamond in the rough, hidden gem for that we have sung the praises of. So, I'm passing around. We've done three times now in the stores. Two of the releases are here of some blending that Brett and I have been, and Joe have been lucky enough to do with Dr. Don. You've talked about the double distilled base whiskey. You do the double distilled corn, you have the pot distilled rye, but you also have column distilled wheat whiskey and column distilled barley whiskey as well, right? And so you have a lot of different tools and paints at your disposal in which to create something here. Well, you guys did the creation here, not me. I just gave you the paint and you guys did the painting. So this is the JP. Wiser Signature Series, meaning it's your signature style for Benny's store exclusively and all of your stores. I put some guardrails when I talked about earlier about doing a blending 101 with consumers where I lined up 140 different whiskies, they can make their own blend. Commercially, that's not realistic for people to come in and do those sorts of things. So you approached us and want to do a cask pick and I said, we really don't do cask picks. It's just not really Canadian whisky style. So this is your recipe. This is your signature style of Binny's and you ended up creating two of them here. This is from the release in 2001. 2021. 2021. They'll get delayed. COVID put a lot of wrinkles into things and now it's coming out now into your stores. But you wanted to design a whisky that you felt that the Chicago area or the Illinois area would certainly use at a certainly good price. So you came up with two of them here. One of them is JP. Wiser's Signature Series. We call it AA. 1677. Which is what we have now. Which is what we're trying now. And tasting this one, I was not even reading it. You could taste the rye. Of this first round, there was a rye heavy one and a wheat heavy one. And this one is 50% of the double distilled corn base and then 30% column still rye and 20% column distilled wheat. So kind of classic bourbon almost. If it was going to be a mash bill, you could, it's almost a bourbon mash bill. Yeah, definitely a rye ford. I'm not sure what they call the rye ford mash bills, but that's certainly where I was. High rye, that's the word I was looking for. Because they call it high rye in that fall, but that also high rye falls in with the high rye is whatever. If you think 20% is a lot, well, that's high rye. If you think 15% is a lot, that's high rye. That's high rye, yeah. Well, in the world of JP. Wiser's signature series, this is high rye. Yeah. I don't know, what do you think about this, Roger? Have I brought these on the podcast before? I don't think so, no, it's really nice. These are $39.99 at your friendly neighborhood Binny's, sometimes on sale for $34.99. They are all 86 proof. These are phenomenal whiskies at a great value. This was another one that was intended to bridge the gap between that forward, more aggressive bourbon style for people with some elegance and some ability to define and pick out certain components. It shows to the fact that this is not traditional Canadian whisky. Traditional Canadian whisky tends to be lighter or smoother. When we can adapt and we can create whiskies, and you mentioned it three or four, between the three of us here, that it is a bourbon style-ish whisky that, yeah, we can get there too. It's just dialing up certain ingredients and that's exactly what you're looking for in this whisky. I looked at, I definitely, I put that one into a cocktail. Make it beautiful old-fashioned. Oh yeah. Got high rye content in that one. The thing that jumped out at me for that was that it seemed a little fruitier than some of the ones we've been drinking previously. I don't know what you'd maybe attribute that to from the... It's just the column still. The column still will keep all those fruity flavors and that's where it's coming from. It comes from yeast. That was the other thing I was going to say was that in the beer world, I always say how yeast never gets and it's due. How much it contributes to beer and from a distilling standpoint too, I think other than maybe for roses, you never really hear yeast brought into the conversation. I know and I'm a microbiologist. Yeast probably is the most important factor for whiskey. You guys are nodding. I'm sure you've talked about with people before, but definitely it is. It is for everybody up until the point in time where it goes to the bottling hall and it goes into wood and then all of a sudden it's like, no, no, no, no. You can physically see a barrel. I think that's the thing. You can physically see it where you can't see yeast. But the second one that you made from this one is the- This is the high wheat. So this has a split base, 20%, 20% of both double distilled corn, but one of them was in first fill bourbon casks. And then 30% wheat, 25% barley, and only 5% rye. So this one, a little more crowd pleasing, softer, sweeter in style, brings out more of that American oak character with that bourbon cask. We've also had this debate over really what does wheat taste like. And I'm sure you can define wheat taste, but they're very subtle. And most of the time we settle on the conclusion that wheat's job is to provide some body and stay the hell out of the way of the corn. I would agree with that. In my case, it's to provide some body and stay out of the way for rye. In Canadian Whisky. Because this one's beautiful. Because this is again, the flavors are there, but the flavors are so much more subtle. And this one is more delicate, but just has a really rich, robust mouth feel. Yeah. I don't know if I do it in old fashion with this one. I think just meat is beautiful on its own. For all the weeded bourbon fanatics out there, this is a must try. A must try. What is the percentage when you're playing around with different styles of Cooperage, what are you using the most of? Like oak that's already been used. American oak. And I get this question all the time. Is it Canadian oak or American oak is corkous elba. Doesn't matter. Oak trees don't care what country they're grown. Canadians, well, is it Canadian oak? Because it's Canadian whiskey. And now we'll get it. Because we're only six hour car ride from Kentucky. So we get a lot of our Coopers, our partner there. They do have a good one that they'll do use in France to get some of these specialty ones. Then Madeira casks and things like that. That they'll procure ones for us and they'll go through a broker in a sense. In the lot 40 cast strength that Brett and I got to help blend a few years ago, we actually used some French oak in that. Oh, nice. French oak is a beautiful vanilla. I've got a bottle of that in my house, Rodger, you can try it sometime. I love French oak. It's a very, very pleasant flavor in your whiskey for sure. Not to make your process any more confusing than it already is, but do you ever age anything with like extra staves or? Yeah. There's ones I played with that there's very specific temperatures that will break down lignin and hemicellulose and those things in wood. So I've put the inserts inside of them before and they work out quite well actually. Again, it depends what people are looking for. That's always the struggle with it because some of them turn out so bizarre. It's too far gone a little bit. That's a struggle with me is you want to blend some interesting things, but you don't want to go overboard either when you get into those staves. Canadian Whisky tends to be pretty, it's very versatile. Maybe that's the downfall of Canadian Whisky. You've tried so many different things here today, even your signature series, we're trying your third one in the one here. They're all three are different. They're completely different. I mean, maybe that's the downfall of Canadian Whisky is that you don't know what style you're going to when you pick it up. Well, when it's not a distilleries core brand, yeah, it can be wildly different. The first two signature series we tasted through were our blends from 2021. There are still some cases that left at a Binny's near you, although that's dwindling in stock. Yeah, that came very late. Yeah, very late in 2021. The 2022 batch came a few months ago, so pretty much most stores still have some of this. And there we again did another two blends, but Don let us get another component that year, and that was actually 14 year old corn whiskey that was aged in space-side single malt casks. That's delicious. And so the first one I passed around is a split base of 10 year and 14 year space-side cask corn, and then a lot of barley, 25% barley we did on this, and 15 wheat. Roger, you're the beer drinker. I'd be curious on what you think of that. The barley. Pretty amazing. Well, in this one we did virtually, I think with Gina Fawcett, who is our local representative for Wiser's, in the bar, and that I believe started with me going on a diatribe about barley. Yeah, I think so. I think I was reflecting back on my love of scotch. You're not known for diatribes at all. Now interestingly, we used no rye in this. Didn't exactly do our jobs making a Canadian Whisky. Yeah, Canadian Whisky, you don't have to put rye. You just could not put a Canadian rye whiskey on this label. You could not do that because there is zero rye content into it. But no one says you have to put rye into it. It's just a traditional thing that's been done in Canada. But hey, this is why I said Canadian Whisky can be very adaptable. When you were saying that, I was thinking about how fun it would be, even if you brought together professionals who know how to taste. If you blinded people on your creations, I don't know if they did. I mean, this almost has single malt aged in bourbon barrel flavors to it. I mean, I could see someone being like, yeah, this is a really nice single malt, probably bourbon cuprage. It's awesome. It's got that, I don't know, that granoli grainy kind of malt character, especially on the back end. But you can tell there's older wood in it too though. It's got a green apple. That green apple. Green apple. But this is where you have to really get people who just truly love whiskey. I mean, if you, people truly love whiskey, this is a very interesting thing for them to try that I think that they would really love because of that, because it does- Yeah, you really want to explore flavors in whiskey, you ought to be trying these. These signature series, yeah. I mean, you got a wide range, and that whiskey wheel would be a big help. And I think we're the only people in Illinois to have yet taken them up on the offer of this program, which is pretty damn cool. And again, it's so excessively priced. These are $39.99. We run them on sale once in a while. Like these are great. Yeah, absolutely great. Yeah, once you get one, you almost got to get all of all of them, right? Just to go back and forth and compare. Definitely. This next one is wild. We used all five whiskies in this one. It's 25% 10-year corn, 25% 14 corn in the space side cask, 25% eight-year-old rye in a rechar cask, 15% wheat, and 10% barley. And the barley was new oak. Wow. The whole thing just blows your mind. We went through four different whiskies here that are- So you couldn't call this anything in the US. It doesn't meet any kind of match, but this is a distilled spirit specialty in the US. Well, it's Canadian whiskey. Well, yeah. There's a lot going on. The complexity in this one is probably out of the fours, the most complex. Yeah. You certainly find the rye. I don't know what we were thinking with this one. I mean, this one to me, and I kind of remember, and what I'm getting right now is exactly that. It's just like, yeah, I would probably, I might guess that this is a single malt, but like, did somebody dump rye into a single malt? Because there's, you know, the subtlety of rye is present, but it's a subtlety. It's not straightforward. Yeah, it's almost like a little mouth. It's almost like a legacy bottle. Yeah. You just dump different things in there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Infinity Bottle are we here for. Infinity Bottle, you guys call the Infinity Bottles, yeah. Thanos Van Winkle, yeah. Yeah, this, it does. It seems like exactly what you did was combine styles, and that's very interesting. That's what the category needs and needs stuff like this. Yeah. No, I know we. It's an awesome whiskey. Yeah. We've had a lot of fun playing with these things, and I know there's another set coming that you guys that are. Our set coming in 2023 where we've got some PX cask aged stuff in the blend. Yeah. Yeah, there I think that that focus was a little more paying attention to the wood, I think what we did this year. Yeah. No, it just comes back to the thing that Canadian Whisky is the most innovative, creative, adaptable style of whisky, I think, in the world. And it's a lot of fun if you really dial it up and leverage the regulations you have with us, you can make some real interesting things. And speaking of that, and something that gets misunderstood a lot is the so-called 9.09 rule with Canadian Whisky. Can you actually break that down for us? Because a lot of people are this is really misunderstood by a lot of US consumers. It really is. And you're not the first to bring it up, nor will you be the last to bring up the 9.09 rule. If I go back to the infancy of Canadian Whisky, Canadian Whisky even back in the early days did not have to be aged. All whiskey was never aged actually way back in the era. Incidentally, Canadian Whisky is the first whiskey category in the world to mandate a minimum aging requirement in 1890. The government forced it into our category because they wanted to bring quality to it and to compete against world wide whiskeys at that time is why they did it. But by then you had the infrastructure to be blending. The first blending books in Canada were about 1886. I could see them doing it. When they made their whiskey, you could see them putting 10,000 gallons of whiskey into their blends and then Hiram Walker owned a Jamaican rum distillery. He put like five gallons of rum into this, put some scotch into these blends, small amounts. You could see them doing this stuff. Prune wine, you could see them doing that sort of thing. Prune wine. Yeah, I don't even know if you could buy prune wine anymore. I don't know what prune wine is. Sure you can. It's somewhere. I did talk about Slovenia. I talked to old timers about prune wine years ago, and they said they stopped using it because the quality just got so bad. Anyway, prune wine was used at that time. But 1886, you could see them blending 100% of whiskey and then putting and limiting themselves to 10% of these other things. They called them blenders, if you want to call it that. So fast forward a little bit, and they wanted to clean up our rules. It's something that's always been done, always been done. From the very start of Canadian Whisky, they blended these things into it. And they said, we got to clean it up. We can't call it the 110 anymore. So 100 plus 10 is 110. 10 divided by 110 is 9.09%. So that's where the 909 comes from. And they said, you cannot blend anymore. And the 909, it has to be two-year-old spirit or wine, nothing else. So these things, I could blend in Cognac, I could blend in Irish Whisky, I could blend in Bourbons, I could blend, there's a competitor of mine in Canada blended in a two-year-old Mezcal. It's interesting. Yeah, Port, Sherry. Very famous, yeah, very famous, blended in Harvey's Bristol Green. Yeah, you could do all these things. If I go to the 9% of wine, you'll kill the whiskey. So I usually, if I were to do that, I usually stop about a half a percent or it just kills it. But it's one more paint to the painter's palette. And I swear to goodness, my supply management guy and I approach him, I want to blend in a bourbon into Canadian whiskey, he wants to strangle me. Do you know how much it costs to go and buy a bourbon, to blend in to your stuff or aged cognac or aged tequila or whatever the case. They tend to be more expensive ingredients, but if you want to dial in a layer of flavor, you have the opportunity to do it. I think the common misconception is that it's a flavoring agent and that it's no different than making screwball or fireball or something like that. These are aged products. They have to be aged in wood at least two years. They're distilled spirits or wine, and this is a little accent, a little dribble, the salt-based chef with the salt at the very end. I'll tell you, Pat, the story I always like to tell, I did a brand called JP. Wiser's Union 52 for British Columbia, where I blended in 52-year-old Scotch at a 4% level. Nobody complained. Well, I think that it's become, you know, it waxes and wanes in terms of how important people think it is. I think now that more and more people are discovering the fact that tequila can in fact have up to 1% other blended in. But that's the rule. And in fact, it's the rule and people are learning that it has an outsized influence on character because there aren't rules. Like in Canadian whiskey, you have quality rules around your additives. There aren't any quality rules around. When you're using artificial, like crazy stuff, 1% can dominate the flavor. Yeah, once you hit extracts. No, no, this is not extracts I'm talking about here. This is legitimate spirits. On the podcast, especially with beer, we like to refer to this as flavor blasting. Yeah. Yeah, no, no. There is a category. It's a flavored whiskey. I mean, in Canada, they don't actually call them flavored. They call them the Coors, that is the name. But do you know how you tell the difference? It's the back label. So if you have a Canadian whiskey producer and you see an ingredient statement on the back label, that means they added a flavor like a, we do a Wiser's Old Fashioned, and you'll have to list out Canadian whiskey, orange essence, orange flavor, that sort of thing. Whereas a Canadian whiskey, you don't have to do that. So look at the back label. If you really want to know if it's something flavored from Canada, they have to put on an ingredient statement. And it's, you know what, if they do, it's fine. Look, there's a market for it. And we sell lots of flavored whisky. The problem people get into when you start to do these things isn't that in and of itself, the fact they're doing it, it's that they're not transparent about it. Yeah. Boy, did we ever find a market for that that little boutique Canadian product, Dr. McGillicutty's Cinnamon Schnaps, which then became Fireball. Yeah. We have the Canadians to blame. I was really curious about the work you did for your doctorate about evaluating barrels. Yeah. How does that play into what you do now? Well, PhD is about theory, and that's what it was. And one of my things that keep me awake at night is buying used bourbon casks, because they can be all over the place in terms of age, in terms of mash bill, in terms of a number of different things. And you can see, once you age our whiskeys in these bourbon casks, that different flavors definitely come out. So one of the things I would say is, well, how do you tell the quality of it? So what I did is I destroyed a barrel, basically, butted an infrared sensor, which almost looks like a checkout at your stand here. It shines light again. And what an infrared sensor can do, it can measure the quantity of the lignin and cellulose and hemicellulose. And I was able to predict what your whisky is going to look like at three years of aging in about 30 seconds. So I could determine how much wood extract will be pulled into your whisky if I used an agent in that barrel. Now, the thing with PhD is I had to tear apart the barrel, scan this thing, and there's no way I resurrected the barrel again. But there are certain things I could do to age it out to prove my case. So that's where I left it. I'd have to partner with an infrared fiber optics company to take my PhD even further to be able to make an online kind of thing. Hey, this barrel is going to give me XXX and then quality. But it's certainly theoretically possible. Yeah, proof of concept is there. Proof of concept is there. Absolutely, yeah. The other thing I did claim to flame was during my masters too, is I was the guy in my early part of my career that used infrared sensors to measure things in mash, alcohol, sugar, acids. When I started one fermenter to be able to do one of those tests analytically took me four hours. You guys were at my distillery, we had 39 fermenters. And they're huge. They're huge, but 39 of them, I could not do 39 in a day for a four hour test for one. So I developed infrared sensors online that can measure those components in 30 seconds. So I've written textbooks on it. I've talked around the world on this topic, is using infrared sensors for a fermentation analysis. I'll say your fermentation right now is the heartbeat to a distillery. If you ferment, cannot ferment correctly and you talked about yeast, that's why it brought a tear to my eye. Yeast is the heartbeat of what we do. If it cannot perform, your whisky is not going to taste well. There's no coming back from a bad fermentation. You can try things, but yeah, typically you can't. So what you're trying to minimize, it's going to happen. I'm not going to lie to you. I functionally work in a distillery. Like mechanically, things will break down. And you don't want them to do it over and over as you fill it again and fill it again. So you want to put a stop to that. And one of the things I'll say is we've actually can ferment our corn fermenters consistently up to 16% alcohol. A lot of producers kind of stop it and peter out around 11, 12%. Whereas we've now have the technology to get up to 16. And we do it routinely. One of the things I wanted to ask you. Yeah, it is. With that reading, what if you twice as high as some scotch produce? Yeah, scotch is high. Oh, no, but there's ways to do it. If you treat yeast properly, the problem is yeast, it's how you feed it nitrogen. I'm sorry, I'm geeking out on a maybe I shouldn't be. It's really how you feed it nitrogen is you can get yeast to get up to that alcohol content. Interesting. One of the things that was really interesting to hear when reading about cooperages is the amount of time that they have to spend curing the oak. What if you applied this infrared technology to evaluating the staves before they were made into a barrel? Yeah, they could. Definitely, they could. And I've thought about that. I mean, barrel companies should seriously consider this as a technology. You could probably shortcut, hey, I got this technique. I'd like to try it in your distillery, but I want to see what it looks like after 10 years. But this way you can do it in a matter of seconds. It would also give you the ability to articulate why a barrel made out of staves that were yard aged for three months are significantly worse than nine months or 12 months or 18 months. Yeah, you'll probably bring an economics factor to it too, right? Do I let it sit another three months or is it time to put it? How much law of diminishing return is going on? Because it's another additive, subtractive thing, right? Because that's a lot of the letting a stave yard age is a lot of subtractive activity going on. Yeah, they leeches out the tannins. Yeah, a lot of them, they feel like they do that. And people don't think, well, why don't you just kill it to dry it out? Well, if you're killing it, it's like anything out if you're killing it. When all that stuff is there, you're just concentrating, locking it in. You could potentially build these like honey barrels before they even see the liquid. If you proved that it had this exceptional aging potential, then you could sequester those instead of putting them in a giant warehouse. Yeah. And then make like a ultra premium. I don't know. One of the Buffalo Trace whiskies that I thought was worth all the accolade was that Cured Oak Project. And I just thought, wow, there must be something to this. It was pretty exceptional whisky, but I've always been fascinated with the potential of the wood before you use it. I'm not sure you'd have to get somebody on your podcast that's in the barrel, whether they're using infrared sensors to do their stuff, but they could. The potential is there. There was a Wiser's years ago that I loved, and my sister and I loved, and we kicking ourselves for not buying more of it, called Legacy. That's my favorite whisky. Really? That's my favorite whisky. Do you want to make a Cheap Man's Legacy? Yes. Okay. Take a Wiser's 15 year, or Wiser's 18 year, two thirds of that, and then one third Lot 40. All right. There you go. So you got a couple Lot 40s, you got the regular Lot 40, and Lot 40 Dark Oak, and you got the 15 year and 18 year. So two thirds of the Wiser's 15 or 18, one third Lot 40. Perfect. It'll get pretty close. Nice. Why don't you just make legacy again? Are you going to cut this out of the plug? No, it's fine. No, that's perfect. We don't want to cut this out of the plug, because now we get people to buy three bottles. Yeah. Wait, what was the rest of it? Yeah, we just said people should be blending stuff at home. I stockpiled on legacy knowing that it was not being made for quite some time, and I do that at home all the time. But it actually helps me play. I know what are my brands, and I know them quite well. I actually do that at home. What if I put this percentage, this percentage, and I'll try it at 10 o'clock at night? Yeah, okay, it's working. Maybe there's something to it down the road kind of stuff. Note the time of day he's doing this. Whisky at work, whiskey at home. There you go. I mean, no, it's a fun, fun category. Listeners, I hope you learned something new about Canadian Whisky Day. Like Dr. Don said, it's arguably one of the most innovative and expansive categories of whiskey out there. And it's a bit underserved in the US market, honestly, just because it's not majorly underserved for what people are looking. People always want something new and new flavors. Yeah. This is where you're going to find it. Check out these signature series while they're still in the store. We are going to have a couple more coming next year. And these age state advisors, I mean, there there is no better value around right now. And if you like rye whiskey and you haven't tried lot 40, like really, what the hell are you doing at this point? Like we've carried this for years now. All right, Don, thanks again for joining us this week. It was really a pleasure. It's always always learn something new talking to you. Listeners, I hope you learn something new as well. We'll be back in your feed next week with something else, maybe a boring wine episode or something. Until then, I'm Pat. I'm Brett. I'm Roger. Thank you for having me, guys. I'm Don. Keep tasting. Sassy.