BRC S2 E13 - Crafting Whiskey with a Sense of Place

00:00:00
Well, hello. I'm here with Brendan Carty at the Killowen Distillery. It's a very small distillery. We are next door in the tasting room from the actual distillery and Brenden's going to take us for a little tour here in a minute. But before we do that, wanted to taste some of the new products, including an Irish poitin chocolate, which I'm kind of excited about.

00:00:21
So, Brendan, tell me, when did you start working at this distillery? How did the whole concept come up and what's the dream and the goal for this distillery? Our own distillate itself has just turned three years old, but a few months ago in May time. So you guys have arrived just at the right time, the week in which we're releasing our own whiskey. And it took a few years of planning before that as well.

00:00:47
So I used to be in Australia for a while, working as an architect. It was that time whenever the global financial crisis was on and everybody immigrated for a while and I was the same and it was great fun. I loved it out there, but I was drinking some lovely Irish whiskies out there too, some lovely pot still Irish whiskies. And at the same time, I was going down to Tasmania and tasting beautiful whiskies, in particular one from Belgrove Distillery in Tasmania. And around the same time, Fuanan O'Connor was doing a lot of shouting in the wilderness back home here in Ireland about these old school Irish mash bills and proper pot still Irish whiskey, basically, as I would call it, because it's both traditional and contemporary.

00:01:32
And it was just this longing to taste this stuff. And if you ever were lucky enough to taste it, it would cost you an arm and a leg. And you were teaming up with sound minded individuals who had bottles, and we would share them amongst ourselves for reasonable sums, but they became less and less and inaccessible. So the only thing to do, I suppose, was make your own great. Yeah, that's it.

00:01:55
So how did you decide upon this location and how long did it take to get it up and running? So I grew up about ten minutes from here. I suppose in global terms, that's nothing. But in regional terms, here it's the next parish over. It's far away.

00:02:14
And for me, being from this area south down, which is signified by the Morn Mountains, and we're in the shores of Lock Been, between the mountains, the cooley mountains and the sea and Carniford Locke. And then for me, this place just really signifies who we are and where we are. And as a result, the whiskey does the same. Great. Okay, so what do we have to try?

00:02:44
So I think you're getting spoiled today because I've got my own bottle here that I haven't took at home yet. So it's been cracked open. Yeah, I suppose. Let's start with cask number one. This is the whiskey I'm talking about.

00:02:59
This is pot still whiskey. Actually, it's not pot still whiskey, so I have to correct myself there. Cask number one, for the record, is not a single pot still Irish whiskey, according to law. Yeah, that's what the problem is. But it's still half malted barley and half rye barley.

00:03:19
Raw barley. Yeah. So you're allowed up to like, 30%. It's a mixed mash bowl. So there's unmalted barley.

00:03:27
Unmalted barley. And then there's oats and Ryan wheat. So it's 30% of oats ryan wheat around, in, and around 15% oats. And then with seven half percent Ryan wheat in there. Of course.

00:03:40
You're very kind.

00:03:44
I actually want to enjoy this because I suppose it's whiskey drinking time now and I haven't really got a chance to enjoy this yet myself. So this is it. This is cast number one. This has been released this week. So there was thousands and thousands of entries into a ballot to get this.

00:04:03
And unfortunately, only a couple of hundred people got bottles, which was devastating for us because so many people deserved to get bottles. Wow. It's got a big punch of flavor. Yeah. That's pot still space.

00:04:15
Although this isn't pot still.

00:04:20
The problem with this is that there's too much oat in it. Even though it's historically accurate, it doesn't fall in line with the current legislation, of course, but it's gorgeous. And you're getting things like pulled pork in there, like Canadian bacon, maple syrup and ginger, and you're getting mint leaf. And of course, it's a single sherry cask with PX cask its whole life. And so you're getting lots of fig in there, too.

00:04:46
And dried raisins. Definitely some dried raisins in that. Oh, lovely stuff. Or dried grapes, which are raisins.

00:04:57
Oh, dear. That's amazing. So, as I sound very big headed sorry. With that. But this is just something we're really proud of.

00:05:04
And yeah. Again, following the clone discipline, cask strength, mo, chill filtration. Sometimes you get a clone bottle. There's a bit of char in there. So, yeah, goes down better locally than.

00:05:19
And it was finished in a sherry cask. Yeah, it's whole life in a sherry cask. Okay, so it's a sherry bomb. Sometimes when you put stuff in a sherry cask, it's all life. The distillate takes a backseat, but for this, the distillate chains through that complexity of that mash bill and that pot still space.

00:05:38
The oiliness as well. Is great. Come from the oats. Yes. Fantastic legs.

00:05:43
I don't know if you guys can see this. The legs are really, really good mixed up. It's delicious.

00:05:52
Very nice. And what's the other expression we're going to try today? Oh, it's cast number two, which is a single pot still an Irish whiskey. So it's only got 30%. Only got 5%, adjuncts being oat, ryan wheat.

00:06:08
And of course, it's got its 30% malted barley. Unmalted barley. Sorry. And the rest is malted. So give you a weed drop of it.

00:06:21
Again, cask strength no filtration and no chill filtration. Sorry. No chill filtration. There was barrier filtration, which came through our bottler. Actually, I'm going to hold yours because you have more in it, but the colors on these are very different.

00:06:36
This is more of a red ruby and this one's more of a chardonnay color. You got a camera going to this one. Yeah. Lovely. Yeah.

00:06:45
So the one was a PX cask. This one was entirely on a bourbon cask as well, so that lovely. You get creamy vanilla note. Yeah. American bourbon casks were just gorgeous.

00:06:57
So bourbons take a lot of that sweetness out of the cask before we get them, so they're much more toned down by the time they come to this side of the Atlantic. And as a result, then I find it a more balanced sweetness as a result. It's good. It's nutty. It is.

00:07:13
And vanilla.

00:07:17
But both of them have a nice bite.

00:07:22
Got a little spice on the end. Whoa. Yeah, there's a lot of possible spice there. I probably should have switched those around because there's a lot more going on in cast number one than cast number two, although they're still brilliant. But have an earthy note on this one.

00:07:39
Yeah. Like a grass. Yeah. I call that the cologne DNA. That earthiness is a lovely balancing factor and it comes in all colognes, all of our podgines as well.

00:07:51
Like a bit of grass or autumn leaves in the ground type thing. It's definitely there. Mushroomy Note it's always there and it shines through and it's part of our DNA and we absolutely love it. Tell me a little bit about this. Where did the chocolate come from and what was the idea behind it?

00:08:10
Yeah, we released another podging now, so we released an awesome podging. It was the best distillate we've ever made. Today it is known as Balcon Balkan Irish podging. And Balkan was one of the podgings that was it was the first podging that was made illegal. And whenever excise duty was introduced in the 16 hundreds, and what they actually said was there was three pence per gallon on all Ishkoaha whiskey and three pence per gallon on all agave.

00:08:39
But Bulkhan had seven pence per gallon because it was the drink of choice. Bulkhan, meaning blow to the head. The Bulkhan budging we made was phenomenal. It was just 50% Oats, 50% barley, 100% smoked here on site as well. And with local turf.

00:08:56
I suppose the rest of the world might call it peat, but we call it turf here. Hopefully our whiskey industry follows suit soon as well. Why do you call it turf? It's just part of hibernate English, I suppose.

00:09:10
It's in our speech now and that's what it is. There's no point in changing just to suit the rest of the world. Nice reasonism is a good thing. All right, I'm going to take a. Piece of this chocolate.

00:09:23
Did you make this with a local candy shop or how did you come about with that? Yes, nearly nogg's chocolate makers are just down the lane from us, down the lane. So if you open the door here and you look down the mountain, they're about half a kilometer as the crow flies. But we have to obviously go down a lane and up a lane to get to them. They're fantastic place.

00:09:41
They really put their heart and soul into making chocolate. They're massively in the fair trade and fair employment practices. They know where they get their beans from, they get them from places that are running as charities, employing women in areas that they don't provide employment for women, especially women who are out of children, out of wedlock and things like that. So their hearts are in the right place. And as well as that, their skill set is phenomenal.

00:10:05
So it's like cologne. I call it the Cologne of the whiskey world. Take a wee bit. Thank you. All of the information is on the label with these guys.

00:10:16
70% coca from Nicaragua. You just need to call in there and you get all the info and the guys are brilliant. Delicious. It's got a good little coffee flavor to it. Yeah, it's a nice dark chocolate.

00:10:28
It is. And we've got this smoked barley that we smoke on site here. The guys used it and put it into their end of the chocolate and it's great. You just got this lovely peded Parching, or Smoked Parching flavor. Gorgeous stuff.

00:10:41
And it works very well with whiskey. It really does. Or Podching or you don't want to be too much of a rebel on a Sunday morning like this. You could take it with a cup of tea. There you go.

00:10:57
Well, this is fantastic. I'm very excited to see the process in the room next door. So we'll go next door and you can show us around. Yeah, let's do right cilantro.

00:11:14
All right. So why don't you show me what the distillery is all about? What we got here. Very good. Well, this is Cologne distillery, I suppose it's a very small distillery, but for that, we make a hell of a lot of noise to see the distillery as being a part of the environment, part of the Highland environment that we've got here in Cologne.

00:11:33
So this little area is called Know, and it's tiny, it's laid out in a very diagrammatic way, so it's very easy to understand. There's no mechanization as such. Well, if there is, it's very minimal. We do things by hand from start to finish, so it's got a real hands on approach. The tanks you see beside us here gone.

00:11:53
Right now, they're running some solar power, so there's a real ethos on sustainability in the environment here as well. So we're heating up our water for tomorrow. So these are just water tanks. And then the next stage of the game is gram is important. So, Mashville, this is Marshbold so we've got our oats that we produce here that are grown here locally as well.

00:12:16
There's our barley, which is grown just across Conniford lock. This idea of mixed marshmallows, so, malted barley, unmalted barley, oats, and wheats. And rye. Not so much wheats, but just to sprinkle the OD. Time goes through here fresh.

00:12:32
We break it up freshly, and then it falls down into our mash tongue. So the Mash tongue is made from upcycle as much as possible. We're using upcycled materials here in order to try and try and preserve the environment as much as possible. And we don't use an agitator to mix. We use good old elbow grease.

00:12:54
And this you can see this has had many years, so we need to get a new one. We use both paddles and we mix it in my hand and basically create a big bowl of porridge, fill it right up to the top, and then we open up the bottom and we let out the sugary solution known as whit. We collect that. And this is where we differ from other 1st Reel Entertainment as well. They cool it automatically about 30 degrees, and then they allow they add their yeast.

00:13:21
And then within two days, they basically got a beer ready to be distilled, known as wash. But what we do is we let it sit outside and we allow a little bit of wild interaction with the produce. And then when it gets nice and funky, we then add our yeast so it's natural cooler. So we add our yeast after a couple of days, sometimes even more, and then we've got a two week fermentation. So within that two week fermentation time, you get a much more impressive beer, a bit like a Belgian cruise ship, if you like.

00:13:53
A lot of environmental influence native yeasts, native bacteria from the area create this beautiful wash which could drink as it is. We could sell it as a beer if we wanted to. But there's that joke I'm sure you've always heard about brewers. I'm sure I'll upset a lot of people here. Good brewers are only ever lazy distillers because they only ever half do the job correct.

00:14:16
So we don't stop there. So we go on to the next stage as well. And then that takes us to our stills. So you can see these stills here. They've got a lot of wear and tear.

00:14:27
They're flame fed stills. There's a fire underneath the still here, burning against. We reintroduced that into the country as well. It's very important because whenever you've got the proteins coming from the grain and the sugars as well, not proteins and sugars, they burn into the base of the still. And it's a process known as the mayor reaction.

00:14:45
The French culinary scientist in 18 hundreds coined the term, and anybody who studied, anybody who's a chef today, for instance, would know what that means. It's the difference between a raw creme brulee and a cooked creme brulee, the difference in the flavor. In Italy, we've grown to love those flavors as we evolved as a species inside these stills. I worked in another distillery for a short period, and we ran the same size of stills for 6 hours. But what we actually do here is that we run between 12 hours, 07:00 A.m.

00:15:16
And seven GM. They're only ever a third filled. This one is half filled, the other one is a third filled. And it just allows much more interaction with the water, with the copper. So there's no residual sulfates coming through.

00:15:28
So none of those eggy sort of notes that you might get some whiskeys, which is very important. So it's all about being slow. You can't make any GS. We could speed things up, but if. We did, we change everything.

00:15:43
It's not worth it. And then if you have a look in here, you get to see a warm top condenser. So these are the most ancient forms of distillation. It has never changed since. So in the last century, of course, there's a thing known as a shell and tube condenser.

00:15:59
Shell and tubes. Shell and tubes are the way to go in terms of efficiency. You can make good whiskey as well, and everybody uses shell and tubes. But Cologne uses worm tubs. If you imagine in a really cold winter stay, if you open your door in a hot room to the outside, the heat just rushes out the door, and shell and tube does that.

00:16:18
It draws the gases from the stove very quickly and very efficiently. But for us, we let it dry very slowly through a one tub, and you get a much more interesting spirit. You get much more space. You get a little bit of brininess almost in there as well. Gorgeous flavors coming through, and they're very evident in our spirit.

00:16:39
We call it the cologne DNA. Part of it's earthy, part of its brainy. It's just gorgeous. Sits in there in the background and yeah, we love it. So I have a question.

00:16:49
Cologne. Yeah. How did the name come about? Well, you're in Cologne now. If you were to go 50 meters that way, you leave Cologne.

00:16:58
So it's a thin land. Ireland is a super regional place. You travel 5 miles, there's a different accent. People know who they are, they know where they're from. There's great rivalry.

00:17:10
It's great camaraderie in that. There's great fun in it as well. And I think any food produced here or any drink produced in this country, it wants to reflect where it comes from. That idea that lore of place is known as the Shannon in our language. I think Cologne is really of this place.

00:17:28
It really is part you said you. Were about 10 miles away. Is that still Cologne or no, I'm. Not even 10 miles away. Ten minutes away.

00:17:37
No, it's not cologne. So you go through it's in a completely different parish, but they'll be different. So there'll be a couple of different timelines as well in between. So Cologne is part of Cologne as part of Restraver are two different places. And then you get into so as I say, we're hyper regional in Ireland.

00:17:57
So I'm guessing you didn't have a name for the place until after you chose the location for your distillery. That's it. To tell you the truth, if we have been 50 meters more in that direction past the Cassie Water, we would have to call ourselves something very different. We would call ourselves probably Bally Mcdurphy. Then.

00:18:17
It doesn't have the same ring to it? No, it doesn't. Tell me, what's the five year plan for the distillery? Oh, right. That's an interesting question.

00:18:27
One thing's for sure is we just got to the point now where we can take a breath and probably start to consider that up until now it's been survival. Up until now it's been get our own whiskey out. People don't realize how difficult that was. And crippling, making whiskey is expensive, especially when you're not a multinational and conglomerate. And we've had our pearls.

00:18:49
Definitely have. Going forward, people say, Are you going to scale? That's the idea, isn't it? You have to scale, you have to grow. We can't do that.

00:18:59
We would lose our charm, we would lose our quality. If we were to create more stills, maybe two more stills in here of the same size, find an inch to put them in.

00:19:11
It would be a miracle in itself. But maybe we would find room in here, move some casks, and get another still in. That'd be it. I suppose surviving the next oncoming recession will be part of that five year plan as well, but I think, no, we just need to sit back and relax and enjoy what we've gotten. We need to stay small.

00:19:34
That's part of the plan. Find a way to stay small and be successful. That's the first time I've spoken about that. Really? Thank you so much for showing us around.

00:19:44
No, it's fantastic. It was great. Thanks very much. And make sure you come back. Good stuff.

00:19:52
Shane McCarthy. How are you? Very good, how are you? I'm good.

00:19:56
So here we are at two stacks. I love the name, first of all, so I'll let you explain the name, but you are a bottle and bonder. A bonder and bottler. We are indeed, yes. Okay.

00:20:05
Based in the first one, we're visiting here on this trip. So it's very exciting to meet you. Oh, awesome. Yes. So tell us about Two Stacks, where'd the name come from and what does Two Stacks do?

00:20:18
Okay, so Two Stacks is an independent bonder and bottler based in Uri around the beautiful Moor Mountains. The name Two Stacks derives from Old and Dock distillery. You'll see a beautiful picture of it when you first come into the bonded warehouses. And that is really for us, it's leaning a little bit in the past, but also very much looking into the future and the new generation of Irish whiskey, the current 1st Reel Entertainment period that is happening, we feel that we want to be at the forefront of that when it comes to independent bottling. We are also a big part of the team at Cologne Distillery.

00:20:56
So, for us, the name two stacks, just to go back, I suppose, is derived out of the two largest chimney stacks that would have stood at Olden Dock Distillery. And a lot of seafarers would have used it to find their way into Ireland back when Irish whiskey was at its pinnacle. It would have been a powerhouse and people would have used 1st Reel Entertainment and the two large chimney stacks to navigate their way. So it's a kudos to Old and Duck distillery. And when you look at the bottles, you'll see the abstract.

00:21:30
A lot of what we do is more portion of the contemporary look. Nontraditional, very much nontraditional and proud to be blenders and bonders. So two stacks, for us, it's a great way to, I suppose, narrate and also navigate people's whiskey journey and bring them on this new journey, exciting new journey for new Irish whiskey drinkers. That's great. So if we were down in the warehouse, what would we see?

00:21:54
Starting from over here, what would we see? And what is the process that you guys do? Well, when you come to the warehouse, the first thing you probably see is the electric car chargers out the front, which is a big part of our ethos. Everything is run off, solar panel. So the electric forklifts, we drive electric cars so employees can fuel up while they're working from here.

00:22:15
And then when you walk in, you get the containers upcycled containers, four beautiful upcycle containers. This is our office space and our tasting rooms. And when you turn around the corner, you will see the casks. So the exciting part of it, and a lot of that is interesting and rare casks, but also casks that we have commissioned ourselves. So the likes of for us, it's also about collaboration in a big way.

00:22:42
So we've grown up with a lot of the new 1st Reel Entertainment and the likes of Wand Distillery, we'll be quite close with and obviously Cologne Distillery. And we'll commission mash bills with them, such as 100% rye, and we'll lay them casks down, also a big part of their journey. So the likes of Juan commissioned a vintage mash bill with Finn and O'Connor. We took five of them casks as much as we could. We're going to get to taste some of those.

00:23:09
Yeah, we will shortly. And also you'll see some beautiful 100 year old oloraso casks. I wish they were all ours, but we're doing a bit of a favor for Bon. We do own some of them. So a lot of what 1st Reel Entertainment have done themselves, we'll go around and we'll pick what we see as some of the most exciting.

00:23:34
Or, as I said, we'll actually commission the distillate ourselves, or we'll work very closely with the master distiller and then we'll take the casks in house. So that's what you'd see when you come in to your right hand side and then tucked away in the corner is what I believe, Europe's. Only 100 mil can in line. And that's for our very unique Drama Can. Okay.

00:23:57
Let's talk about this drama. Can you want to hold that up to the camera? How many ounces is that? So it's 100 mils. 100 mils, okay.

00:24:07
So it's the same size as the little bottles that you can get, the sample bottles. It's two miniatures. Two miniatures, okay. Two miniatures. And yet Drama Can, for us was twofold.

00:24:18
It was how do we get our award winning whiskies onto more lips? And for that, it was about revolutionizing. The vessel that you put whiskey into the miniature, would you believe, was also invented in Ireland. Yeah, baby pars. And it was for luxury cruise line ships.

00:24:37
And you used to take your nip of your favourite DRAM and off you went. And then we coined the term DRAM in a can. Just rolled off the tongue really nicely. And it was a big R and D project. We had to scar the world to really find the perfect vessel, the perfect size, what we thought was the perfect size.

00:24:54
And then when we got more and more into it, we realized it wasn't really on purpose, but it's quite sustainable when we started packaging these up, because you're kind of at the demise of the size of a container or the. Size of a pallet. So when we were doing our packaging, we almost reverse engineered how we were going to put our packaging together. And then we realized that, well, you can actually get almost 30% more whiskey on a pallet compared to this exact same product in a bottle. Wow.

00:25:26
People are trying to save one or 2% in what they're shipping around the world and containers going out. But, yeah, 30% for us was very impressive. And obviously, it doesn't break, there's no light exposure, less oxygen. And we grew up out of the craft beer world, so we have a big understanding of cans. And even the movement in the craft.

00:25:45
Beer world is the same juice that you'd find in one of these bottles? It is indeed, yeah. So we do the bottles in 700 mils as well. So this one is the blue single malt. And as everything on our products, we have the full breakdown in the bottle and the can.

00:26:00
So you can see it's 40% double malt, 50% triple malt, 10% peat of malt aged in bourbon and oloroso casks. Okay, so you want to try something? Yeah. Open it right here?

00:26:13
Yeah. All right. So we just launched the 700 mil bottles in Sweden and they become a massive hit there. Massive hit. The cans themselves have only launched in Ireland.

00:26:30
So these ones are an Ireland exclusive and they come in two different products. They come in a blend and they come in a single.

00:26:46
That's lovely. Yeah. It doesn't have any can influence. No, I hope not. Sometimes people do maybe have this cliche that you will get a can or a tinny taste, but I think even with the movement of craft beer, there is definitely no influence from the packaging.

00:27:07
If anything, we would argue it's a better package than a bottle. And especially we found 100% recyclable. Exactly. Again, there's a lot of I suppose when we brought them to market, we realized more and more that there was a lot of green ticks with this packaging and we didn't realize how much of a success they would have become. We've sold hundreds of thousands, if not close to over a million, for a two year old brand.

00:27:33
That's a lot of liquid going on to Lips. And then are you only doing these two drams in a can or you have plans for more? We do have plans for more. So for us, the journey of whiskey and the category of whiskey is very broad. We want to push it into a pot still style as well, and a single grain.

00:27:53
So we have a single grain double barrel in 700 mil that we're launching this month that will go into a can and pot still. We're very particular about. We do not want to put potsill out that we feel is not ready. There's a lot of young pots still out in the market, potsill that maybe just isn't at the right stage. And anything that we put out to market, we'll definitely want to be doing it justice, especially the pot still because it's quintessentially Irish liquid.

00:28:22
So how many different expressions do you guys bond and bottle here? This year alone, we've done well over 20 different bottles and expressions. So I suppose that gives you an idea of what you can do. The variety of as an independent bottler, it can become very exciting, but a lot of what we find is we don't make something that you force onto a customer or onto a partner distributor. You ask them, you kind of say, do you want to work on a project together?

00:28:55
But then, yeah, a lot of the time, especially recently, you get a lot of people coming in saying, can you do this and this? And most of the time we can. As a Bonder, you get loads of flexibility. So they'll come and choose their own cask, do a single cask, or we'll blend something unique up for them and that tends to work very well. Okay.

00:29:12
And the bottling system downstairs, does that only do the cans or does it also do bottles? So there's two systems. We have the 100 mil can in line and then around the corner is just a forehead filler that's all hand bottled. And again, a lot. Of it allows for quick turnaround, so someone may come in and ask for a single cask.

00:29:30
And we've got an amazing designer, actually the same designer as Cologne, and we managed to turn it around very quickly where if the casks are mature, they're ready, we'll be able to get it out very quickly to market. So the bottle in line at the moment is probably running at full speed. So, yeah, we do bottle and can just right alongside the containers. That's great. So Phenon.

00:29:56
O'Connor. I've had him on the show before. We're going to see him tomorrow. I've been waiting patiently to taste some of his experimental stuff that he did for his thesis. And I hear you have some stored here.

00:30:07
Yes, we do. We've got five of his mash pills here and yeah, we can for sure. Great. So I think we have the PX, the rum and the NEOC. And then we chose five different mash bills.

00:30:24
So it was a little while ago, it should be on the cask, but yeah, they're tucked away at the back and they're coming along incredibly. And I think Fennon gets very excited every time he comes up to crack. Let's go taste them. All right. Awesome.

00:30:55
Well, that was a little bit more difficult than we thought it would be. Yeah, definitely. I didn't realize how difficult that one would it, but to say the harder it is to get it out of the cask is well worth it. But yeah, I'm excited actually for you to try it as well because we've tried this numerous times and every time I go back to it, the cask has taken a little bit more flavor, but just the distillate is so distillate forwarding and it's all about the mash bill. So what's in the mash bill for this one?

00:31:25
So it's 40, 4015 and five, which is 40% malted party, 40% unalted, 15% wheat, I believe, and 5% oats.

00:31:40
And this is expression number ten. Yeah, historic expression number ten. And it's been aging in Plantation rum for close to two years almost now. I do smell the rum. Yeah.

00:31:53
I'm surprised as well how much it's taken on. And they're all cut to about 63 and a half, so that's probably sitting around 61 cast strength, isn't it? It's incredible. Really lovely. So, yeah, it's smooth, but it has lots of different flavor.

00:32:11
And then the after finish is just like pungent on your tongue. Yeah. Out of a lot of the cast, these ones are obviously the ones we're most excited about.

00:32:25
Yeah, that's great. Well, I'll be happy to take a sample of that to Fanon tomorrow. Yeah, he would be only delighted. Every time it comes up, we do crack one or two of them to see how they're progressing. And even I'm surprised, I think it's been six months since five or six months since we last tried them.

00:32:44
We have twelve year old green, our famous twelve year old green aged in American rye that went into the time well spent boxes. This is his number ten, number ten. Of his experiment, vintage Mashville in the. Experimental, the new make and the current. Couple of little gems for you, Fennel.

00:33:02
But, yeah, this is all about the vintage Mash bill and reviving a lot of what is lost in the Irish potsville world. And Finon is an absolute hero in that space. I'm sure you guys will get a good chat with him tomorrow, but due to his research, we're bringing back alive a lot of how Irish whiskey would have been made when it was very much the whiskey of choice for a lot of people. So you can probably see when you talk to a lot of people making potsill, that's what gets them really excited and that's why we're different to a lot of other whiskey makers around the world. This is definitely quintessential to how Irish whiskey came about, and it should be front and center, in my opinion, of the 1st Reel Entertainment that's happening.

00:33:49
But I do think if you looked at it from a holistic viewpoint, there are probably way more single malt 1st Reel Entertainment than single pot still. But some of them had started doing both, which is great, so they realized the importance of the whole single pot still category, which overlays a small bit into the world of craft Parching. Do you think that anybody's going to start making these expressions? The ten that he so sorry, I. Should have mentioned, the 100 year old Olaroso is vintage Marsh bill number nine.

00:34:22
Oh, number nine, yeah. The Bannon, I believe so, yeah, they've all been filled. So, to a degree, it allowed Juan distillery to experiment a little bit and be like, all right, we love A, B and C, so let's champion this one as our kind of high smash bill. Great. So, yeah, you're going to see a lot more of this come to market.

00:34:43
It's not going to be these ones. There are only 100 casks in total, but Vaughn will do one of them as their own. And I believe there will be ones that are similar, maybe not the exact same, and you'll get to try them. But for us, we more than likely will bring an expression out at three years. So, one of these casks, we will do a single cast just to show where it's come and how far it's come since the experiment kicked off.

00:35:12
That's great. And again, I think it does it even for Phenon as well, because a lot of them are tucked away in other bonds. So, yeah, we'll certainly want to get it to market and allow the Distillate to sing as well. The cask is having beautiful influence, but a lot of what we like to champion is a Desolate forward whiskey. Yeah, it's fantastic.

00:35:36
I'm really proud of him and his endeavors with Desolate. When I heard about him doing bringing back ghost whiskeys, I was like, what is this about? He's a great interview. Yeah. For those of you who haven't seen it yet, I think it's episode two or three.

00:35:51
Oh, with finon. Yeah. He's much better at articulating it than I would be. And we're very lucky to have Finon in our industry. And as part of this movement, I don't think a lot of what even we're doing here at Cologne, there's a lot of collaboration with great minds, and that's what it's all about, bringing them creative minds and visionaries together.

00:36:14
Great. Well, thank you for letting me try this. It's fantastic. Thank you.