S2 E14 - Discovering the Secrets of Irish Pot Still Whiskey: Insights from Fionnán O'Connor

00:00:00 (This transcript has been auto-generated, please excuse any typos)

Fionnán, it was so great to see you in person. How have you been? Very few people have said that before. That is not true.        

00:00:11
            

All around the country, everyone's like, you know who you should talk to? Fionnán O'Connor, he's got I said, oh, I know all about him. Obviously, you haven't listened to the podcast because he was already on. Ah, yeah.        

00:00:20
            

That's what you tell them in return, you know. Exactly. So since the last time you were here well, we weren't here together, but we were here together in a cosmic virtual yes. You're still working on thesis? Yes, eight days.        

00:00:36
            

I have now had a chance to taste some of the or one of the recipes that was in your blind tasting. Oh, right. And I got to taste not only the new make, but the current version of the aged product, which are right here. Right. I'm in a dead heat with do I become a doctor legally, or does the stock become whiskey legally first?        

00:00:57
            

It'll be a great moment of shame if I don't beat the whiskey to it, but I think I'll get in. There the number ten. And we drove by Bowen last night to take some pictures. That's a beautiful distillery. It saddens my heart that they haven't been able to get permission to put the barrels in the back where all.        

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Those big glass windows oh, yeah. No, it is a strange looking at. You can see it from the road. Do you know the history of the building? No.         

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It used to be a garage, like a car sales garage. Okay. And that's why it has these big glass front windings windows. And when you go in, there's still marble flooring because they didn't take it out. So it's the best tiled distillery I've ever been in.        

00:01:34
            

Very snazzy tiling and window dressing. I thought they should at least store some empty barrels there just to make it look pretty. I mean, it looked pretty, but maybe they would think people come by and said, you're going to explode. Get up out of here. All right.        

00:01:50
            

So everybody's been saying, we need to talk to you. You're the wisest man in whiskey. And now I'm learning. You also know a little bit about Pouchin. Well, I'd say at this point, Pouchin knows a little bit about me.        

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It's a give and take. It's not as clear as kind of mastering and student. I'd say it's more of a tango with that drink. But yes, obviously, they're joined together at the hip as drinks. I mean, pochin is kind of the protein magma from which whiskey sprung.        

00:02:26
            

Certainly pochin is just the Irish manifestation of grassroots cereal distilling. Well, originally cereal distilling and then kind of cereal plus irreverence distilling. So, of course, whiskey share the initial birthing years with each other, and it's only when they kind of hit their 20s they're like childhood friends that kind of are a bit embarrassed by each other after they hit 18, but they got on from the age of four to 18 inseparably. Now, let me ask you, with all your research, did you take a look at the Red Book? The Red Book of Osri?        

00:03:04
            

Yeah. Yes, I have seen it. Did you get to touch it? No, but I have with gloves gone through it. It's curated by a fellow named Adrian Empy.        

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He's a reverend, and he organized very generously to get me some time with it. A lot of that stuff is really for mysticism at this point because you can access the digital version without too much of a fuss. And that's always the let down, is when archives have been digitized. There's no real reason, unless you're doing, like, manuscript studies, to go near them, but you still don't turn down the opportunity when you can get it. So when you were looking at that book, the recipe that's written in it, would you say that's more of a pouchin or more of a whiskey?        

00:03:52
            

Neither. Okay, so The Red Book of Ossry is itself actually part of a family of texts, so well, The Red Book of Ossri contains a lot of stuff. It's mostly hymns and things. It's only just a sliver of it that's this distilling treatise, but it's not. And this is where a lot of people kind of make a mistake.         

00:04:12
            

It's not actually a description of whiskey or even of Irish distilling at all. It's actually a copy of an Italian manuscript. So there's a manuscript called Concilia Medicinalia, written by a guy named Aldorati and that's passed around Europe. That's a big part of just pan European distilling history. It was written in Bologna, and it's the first major text to detail kind of the kind of auxiliary cooling that we would call a worm coiled.        

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He calls it a canale serpentinum. And so you're seeing the still design evolve into means of slowing down cooling so that you can create essentially refined cuts. So the Concilia has loads of the Concilia is a big medical work, but what's called Vertutus Aquav incipient. Vertutus Aquavita. It's the beginning of that bit.        

00:05:01
            

Here begin the virtues of Aquavita. And it's hilarious. It's a long list of stuff that spirit cures, and it's, like, helps your eyesight improve and all the almost a word by word hit list of everything whiskey does not do restores youth, along with other stuff like cures, cures, boils and ills. But anyway, it was early days. People hadn't done too much testing.        

00:05:28
            

There was a lot of confidence in the air. But anyway, the consilian medicinalia itself is disseminated around Europe. And when you look at the Red Book of Ossri containing this rendition of it, and it's almost word for word, it's more a sign of Ireland's connectedness to the history of broader spirits distilling in Europe. It's a sign of attachment rather than Genesis or rather than even a commentary on contemporary Irish distilling. And what's interesting is, okay, that's the first reference to distilling in Ireland.        

00:05:59
            

The second one is written in a place called Firmoy, just down the road. I mean, a little bit further down the road, but East Cork by a physician named Abu Oleen. And it's in Irish, but it's essentially just an Irish translation of the same text again. It's just no longer in Latin. It's now been translated, and you see it appear again and again and again.        

00:06:22
            

And there's a certain kind of set of texts that this belongs to when you take away all the veils. And there's a lot of words I could use around early whiskey history, the romance, let's say, or the misguided ends of romance. There's this romance worth being romantic about, and then there's just some very bad history that goes around. And I don't think it's done out of malice. I think people just take it for granted when they hear stuff.        

00:06:47
            

But we're always told that wandering monks brought distilling to Ireland. And actually, if you look at this, there isn't a shrapnel of evidence. It's all gibberish and like, yeah, my original background was in at one point in life, I wanted to be a medievalist, and I studied along that course. And so I look at this stuff and you're saying, well, hold on. You're saying something happened in the 6th century, and the first piece of evidence appears in the 14th.        

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There is as much time between those two points as there is between the 14th century and now. It's such ludicrous suggestionism, but you can see where people make the mistakes. A very early text describing well, actually not describing just a throwaway line to Aquavita is something called the Annals of Claude Mcnoyce. Claude Mcnoise is the name of a monastery. But if you look into the text the Annals of Claude Mcnoyce, first thing you learn it has nothing to do with the monastery.        

00:07:39
            

It was given that name in the, like, 16 hundreds by an antiquarian named James Ware, and it wasn't written by monks as a text. But anyway, when you're looking at proof and I'm a very big fan of evidence, of real proof, and I found this bit of the thesis writing really enthralling, and it almost took up more space. It might have to get edited down because it wasn't really the main topic. But looking at a lot of there is a huge archive of especially Irish language medical treatises, usually from the 14 hundreds, but they stretched from the 14 hundreds to 15 hundreds and even into the mid 16 hundreds. And you had a class of people, olivoner and olive singular, who were essentially hereditary physicians, hereditary doctors, the Gaelic world, both Ireland and kind of up the belt into Scotland, had these strange classes where poetry wasn't something you decided to do.        

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You were born into a family of poets, and you learned to do it from a young age. You had none of the idea of vocation that we have now. And so you had surnames that were attached to different things. You had bardic families, you had physician families, you had again, this stratified lawyer families. They must have been real fun.        

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They were called brejons. But anyway, the medical families are where you start seeing these initial texts again. You see certain families in Ireland, the O'lens, the oh yeah, well, hickey itself actually means healer. They're all names for doctor, really. Ole lee is from OLEM, which is Leech beaten famously in the Scottish Highlands.        

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Not call the hickeys, we do, but hickey. The surname is an anglicization of an Irish of a Gaelic word for healer. It's just an unfortunate coincidence. I'll make you a bloody mark and then we'll heal you. Yeah.        

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And you see that class of people are a quite connected to each other. You see manuscripts move up and down again. A lot of that material ends up in the beaten collections. Originally family called Mcvehe, which is literally from Baja life, nothing to do with whiskey, but just because they were doctors. But actually a lot of the early distilling treatises you find in Scotland are themselves beaten manuscripts.         

00:10:08
            

But when you look at what these manuscripts are, they all tie into this essential kind of sphere that's going on in Europe that informs a lot of other forms of aquavita. I mean, even the name aquavita is a know that comes from the Mediterranean and spreads its way out and you get urdevi and aquavit and so forth. But when you look at that shared early kind of plasma of distilling as medicine, you get certain hubs. You get Solerno is the early big one. And then after that you get Montpellier in the south of France and Bologna in the north of Italy, Florence to a degree.        

00:10:43
            

And you start seeing these texts pop up and the Concilia is one, the Lillium Medicina, the Lily of Medicine is another. And a lot of these are just circulating around. So I think the problem is we tend to think of the invention of whiskey as when was Red Breast and Lafroyg and our modern understanding of whiskey invented. And actually it wasn't invented. It's the product of history.        

00:11:07
            

It's the terminus of history. Rather than it's like tracing us back to our kind of slightly embarrassing trilobite ancestors. They look very different, but the lineage is there and they've been shaped similarly by historical forces into something very peculiar. So I know that's a roundabout way, but what you see in the Red Book of Austria is not really punching is the history of grassroots distilling. Grassroots lay, agrarian distilling as a social trend.        

00:11:47
            

And that's not what that is. And whiskey is really the history of the professionalized product and that's not what that is. You're really talking about that initial history of aquavita as a shared concept in a very specific kind of scholastic setting. So then in your opinion, do you think that the Red Book is not the definitive start of Irish whiskey? No, it is, because there is no definitive start.        

00:12:10
            

Someone didn't wake up one day and you could say the history of brewing is the ancestry. In that sense. It's part of the process, and you can trace it back as far as you like in that sense. Let's get back to your project. This is the number ten sample from Bowen that you had them make?        

00:12:30
             

Yes. So you got all the recipes from all your research? Yes. Brought them over to Bowen. They made them.        

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Then you did your blind tasting. Yes. Okay.        

00:12:42
            

From the blind tasting, did you have a winner for the favorite one? So they weren't ranked in that sense. They were ranked by olfactory traits. So you'd have something that said fruity non citrus, and then there'd be a few suggestive prompts in parentheses, and you were rating on a scale of zero to three. And so from not detectable to extremely present, because we're trying to make something that's highly subjective as objective as possible.        

00:13:10
            

So you're given very little breathing room. Someone's idea of a zero and a three is easier to track than if someone has a different idea of what's a seven. And so you'd get the lineup. There were twelve, so ten mash bills and two controls, and you were to go down. They were cut to blending strength, and you would go down nosing for one trait, say it was citrus, and you mark them, and then you're given a pencil with an eraser so that if you go further down and you realize what a three really is this, then you can go back and change.        

00:13:41
            

And it's all comparative for one trait that you're reviewing at them at the same time. When you've gone through that, then you take another trait, say that's vanilla, and you do the same thing again. The only reason I managed to get everybody to volunteer, I'm sure, is because I didn't properly explain to them how thumpingly taxing this whole day was going to be just absolutely zero crack. But no. And we got them at the goodwill of the participants themselves.        

00:14:09
            

We ended up with 27 head blenders and distillers and industry spirits consultants top the Who's Who. And they all volunteered their time, and they all just wanted to participate. And it was real kind of show of love toward what could be done. And in return, I was at every turn trying to make it clear to them that boan distilled this stuff because somebody has to. And they had the right conditions.        

00:14:37
            

They had a control that looked like contemporary mainstream pots, still triple distillation in large pots. They had semiautomated cuts they could take so they could ensure that the cut points were the same. They were able to separate faints that they weren't recycling across samples. They had everything that was needed to do this. But the data belongs to everyone and it has been subsequently embraced.        

00:14:59
            

I always try to make that clear. The minute thesis is done, it's going in a PDF online on some faraway website, some shadylooking.com, and anyone who wants to can download it, plus a virus, free of charge. So was there out of the ten, there was ten and then the two controlled. Out of the ten that you brought, was there a favorite number you had? It might have been ten.        

00:15:26
            

It's hard for me to separate them from having found them. And ten was the first that's the old Kilbegan Distillery mash bill. And that was probably the first mash bill I found that wasn't in a book or wasn't in, you know, that was actually found in archival material. Again, I kind of probably gave it a psychological head start, but it's funny, again, some of them had much the biggest takeaway from the whole thing was oats, and oats seemed to spike. There was one category that said sweet non fruity, and in parentheses it says vanilla, sugar, icing, glycerin.        

00:16:11
            

And that kind of again, fruit is sweet, but not fruity. That clean, sugar, sweetness and oats. Just almost invariably, the more you raise them up, you see it's spike. There wheat, surprise, surprise. Tasted very serially to people, not a huge and of course, you're also manipulating malt and raw barley themselves.        

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And that was a big learning. I didn't go in expecting to take away was the assumption is always, oh, well, we're adding more oats, we're adding more oats. Yes, but what are you taking it away from? There's only so much percentage to go around. Is it cutting down the malt or is it cutting down the barley?        

00:16:51
            

Is it cutting down some other adjunct cereal? And again, the ten were decimalized historical mash bills. And so we had to be clear that they were bound by history, obviously, in decimalized form, and picked to kind of scope out certain boundaries. But we can't test everything. They're more kind of pitches in the desert than a fence.        

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So out of all the research that you did and found all these recipes, were any of them copywritten or made so that only specific people can make them? No, almost all the archives I went through were public. At a later stage, Irish distillers came on board with their archive, but that actually happened after the Boan stuff. But they've been very open with that. As long as I don't defame them or something, it's still academic research and it'll go in showing what it is.        

00:17:48
            

They're not hard to find for some of the larger historical brands anyway. The Jemisons were always in court telling people they were making fraudulent jemison, so you see it in other spaces. And of course, mash bills in even the same distillery changed over time. So, to be honest, there's just so much of it, especially when I was doing individual distilleries, because they're dealing with 100 weight sacks. So the Mashables are never exact percentage points anyway.        

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They kind of vibrate and say there aren't any oats that day. You still kind of do it, live and do the thing without them. So if you're just doing a headcount of all the possible percentages, I mean, there's dreams of it, but there's core concepts that emerge and core trends and certainly those have been open. So again, the Irish Whiskey Technical File is going through revisions at the moment and they very to my great humbling, thanks. Took my advice on the new parameters.        

00:18:53
            

So the new parameters for single pot still allow for up to 30% oats, wheat or rye, which is what the thesis was suggesting and what the initial selection of mash bills was to a certain extent testing already. So malt in some distilleries malt might drop down to 27, but it was rounded up to 30 to make sure everything keeps 30% each way and the adjuncts similarly aren't allowed to drift above 30. So again, it was two things at once. It was again a recreation of the past, but also picked and investigated in a way that would allow for a certain degree of exploration about what that new category might look like. And it was thrilling because, yes, they do taste different, they do taste strange and I think wonderful, but they don't taste unlike Irish Pot still whiskey.        

00:19:40
            

I might even said this to you, I said it to somebody. It was almost like they were almost like sepia tinted versions of Irish Pot still. They were the same, but different. And then again, my two big fears were that they would all taste the same as each other, which thankfully they didn't. And the other fear was that they all taste like shite.        

00:20:00
            

So let me ask one more question here. Out of all the experts and distillers and tasters that you had come to the panel, did anyone come back to you and say, I want to replicate that at my distillery? Yes. Now, unfortunately, they were all blind submissions as well. They were anonymous.        

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So I have no idea what anybody is talking about.        

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They can't say that one eye, blah, blah, blah. They were all put in a pile.        

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But there were questions about and it was quite clear at the pub afterwards, I showed people what was on the table. So if they remembered what they were drinking that day, good luck to know. So with all this work that you did with Bowen, did they pick one of the recipes that they want to run with at all? I think their big project on the far side of this was to actually just keep exploring molding pot still, some learnings more than again, returning to it, I kept a log with Michael while I was doing it and it was meant to be are certain mashes more problematic to process or did anything go wrong? It all went fine, so the logs just turned into these, like, 09:00 A.m.        

00:21:16
            

Drinking sessions. Yeah. So there's all this material there where we were comparing what happens if you push Oats 5% up and take it out of malt or raw bardy. And I think michael certainly learned an enormous amount about how to manipulate mash bills in general, and I've never seen that happen. Because when we first had the first two next to each other, which were the control, and then one with 5% oats and we were kind of stunned by, oh God.        

00:21:49
            

If this is what it's like at the beginning when there's a 5% difference, what's it going to be like when we really jump in? And so now, again, they've kind of moved into that direction. I think Michael's new gig is he wants to design mash bills forecasts and say, I want to pick a mash bill that would do well in the bourbon versus a sherry. So he's doing all kinds. And again, especially now that the file has changed and the industry has kind of gotten behind that, I think there's a lot of optimism in the air at the moment, and certainly those who were interested before can do that with a tremendous degree of confidence, and I think it's spreading into the bloodstream.        

00:22:33
            

There was a little trepidation to start with some people, because they didn't know if it would qualify as potsville whiskey or not. But now, again, a certain kind of boldness is entering and a lot of people are looking. And even once you are talking to me, it's just happening. It's an exciting time to be alive and drunk. Speaking of exciting, I think it's time we taste number ten in its original state and then in its state as of yesterday.        

00:23:00
            

Okay, here is the new make version. Ten launches. Wow. I love the smell of this. It's got a nutty ODI.        

00:23:13
            

This is half oat. Yeah. It's like breakfast. Yeah.        

00:23:24
            

MMM. It's a cracker. You know, I'm I'm a big fan of that one. So that's 15% Oats, 5% rye and then 40% malt and 40% raw barley grist. When was the last time you tasted some of the age stuff?        

00:23:41
            

Some of the age stuff?        

00:23:44
            

That sample came from two stacks. I think the last time I was at two stacks, but not that one, because they bought five of them. Right. And I think I had the wheated one. I try not to exhaust my welcome there, because Boan made a point of selling all the vast majority of the stock off, and a lot of it was bought by whiskey shops, kind of retailers like Celtic Whiskey Shop or festival groups or third party bonders, the likes of Two Stacks and JJ curry.        

00:24:20
            

And that was where I wanted it to be. I wanted it to be in the bloodstream. A lot of it was bought by pubs, by whiskey societies. And so I anticipate in the coming years, having the ability to try this from other places but that kind of flock has flown, so I have no idea what's going to happen to all of it now. And people can put it at whatever age they want, or this or that.        

00:24:46
            

Let's taste it. Yeah. Do you mind if I try the new make first just before I yeah. So what I loved about that spirit again, they have that weird icing cake kind of taste that spiked with oats. Is there there is that weird?        

00:25:07
            

It's like frosted flakes, almost like sugar coated cereal kind of taste. It's. That strange. Again, not quite glycerin, but like powdered sugar mixed with you can tell this is sweet, not fruity. And oats really seem to kind of perform in that kind of vanilla landscape.         

00:25:26
            

And then they do have that kind of husk taste at the tail end, and then you're obviously getting a little bit of the rye there. And after this was done, I did a project with Bon where they did a few distillates pushing out the rye. Because historically, rye, the three adjuncts in Irish pot still were oatsweet and rye. And rye was usually the smallest, and so it didn't feature as a big one. It was there in the historical Mashables, but it didn't really go up.        

00:25:53
             

Correct. The highest I've seen rye go up in historical Distillings, about 17% of Irish pot still. Anyway, do you think that's because it's. So hard to mash because it overflows a lot? It is, but it's also just not grown that heavily in Ireland.        

00:26:08
            

It was always there as a minority crop, sometimes used as a cover crop. But there isn't a huge history of rye bread in Ireland. Rye's real history in Europe is like Central Europe and up into Denmark. So it was probably just to do with a reflection of availability and landscape and what's there. I've seen references to rye distilling as early as the 17 hundreds.        

00:26:33
            

You see it mentioned in lists, usually on bands of things you're not supposed to distill because they're food. But it does pop up and you do see it again, pushed out to again. So the new regulation says the three adjuncts can go up to 30%. Now, oats often went up to 30% wheat before the famine. You can see in that kind of space, not so much after it.        

00:26:52
            

And then rye was the least. But again, I've seen that go out to about 17%, but that was kind of an outlier. So anyway, we went back and tried these maxed out to the 30% space because that's now what the category posts are. And it's funny with Boan's rye, probably to do with triple distillation as much as anything. What was coming through from the rye was this kind of more of the potpourri lavendery side of rye rather than the kind of dill pickle kind of pastrami sandwich stuff you can get in rye whiskey in the States.        

00:27:22
            

But there was that weird, like dead flour kind of potpourri and even A-5-I think it's there. So the things I love about that mash are A, that vanilla, but B, it's kind of quirked up a bit by that a, that potpourri, and B, just pot still oil. The raw barley gris, that was another big takeaway. Raw barley is what defines Irish pot still as a style. And we kind of took it for granted how valuable it is, but it really does make an enormous difference.        

00:27:49
            

And when you see it in action again, that just oil, it's a mouthfeel thing. And it really does, again, come into its own in some of them. Now, this oh, I know what I'm losing the empty glass. It still smells like it. And this one was in a rum cast, correct?        

00:28:07
            

Yes.        

00:28:12
            

I can definitely smell this one in this one. Yeah, absolutely. That was my next big fear was that it was all going to get drowned out by the cast, especially because Boan made some very loud cast decisions with these, where they put a third of them into sherry, a third of them into rum, and a third of them into rejuvenated wine barrels. The cast they chose were almost kind of tie ins to the thesis topics as much as anything. And also they just had access to some really good casks.        

00:28:42
            

So I was thinking, did you get. To have any say in what ones went into what cask? So I showed them a receipt for a cask that had it was a port cask with rum heads and saying, how about this? And I could see the eyes kind of raise and to their credit, they actually looked into it to see if it could be done, but it was just too much of a nightmare. But no, again, I was curious about how they would survive or what they would do in these different woods.        

00:29:16
            

I didn't have any of them for the first year and I've only had a few of them since, and rum was one. I was wondering, well, okay, what will happen with something so sugary and rich? And there is a lot of records of rum cast floating about back into the bloodstream, not just in this kind of early 70s heyday of Rum and Ireland, but even into the 1950s. You see rum casts, but yeah, you can still smell, obviously, that vanilla has just got on like a duck to water with rum. I mean, it makes sense, that kind of icing flavor and then that very specific sweetness that rum can give off, that is in that same kind of non fruity, clean sweetness space.        

00:30:00
            

Not that rum can't be fruity, but there is that weird, almost more ethanol vapor kind of sweetness. Yeah.        

00:30:16
            

And even the potpourri is still there. I was wondering if that would last. In fact, if anything, it's more there, it's more noticeable. Definitely that kind of like crushed, dead lavender flower things that my mother might. Have burnt in the bathroom.         

00:30:31
            

Yeah. The once upon a time. Yeah. And not that I wouldn't do it myself. I only knew what those things were and where they could be purchased.        

00:30:40
            

But for want of that, I'll just leave the bottle open and let it kind of fumigate. So you're happy with the results of that? Yeah. And that'll be two years old in December. They were all made two Decembers ago, or 2 December and January kind of space.        

00:30:57
            

So yeah, it's not even whiskey yet.        

00:31:04
            

And again, I drank quite a bit of that one match ten. There were ten bottles of still strength liquid held from each run. And at first we thought, okay, this is plenty for both the GCMS analysis and the sensory analysis, and Michael I to do as much logging as we want. And by the end we were kind of thinking, oh, do we have as much ten as we thought we did? And we kind of had to cut ourselves off of a few of them.        

00:31:32
             

And definitely again, this was one that I probably drank a good bit of at various stages in the process, even though it's called Mash bill ten, it wasn't actually the last distillery, the numbers or thesis numbers, not the regimen numbers, because, of course, there was the big thing with the amount of adjuncts used. So the first day of the thesis project, the engineering firm that had kitted outbone, they said they wouldn't take any responsibility for what happened, but the liability did not cover this. I thought, well, this is a really optimistic start, and if like a pipe burst, it was my fault. And I remember the 5%, soakes going through no problem, 1520. And it was when it got to 30, I thought, okay, if something goes wrong today, this is it.         

00:32:21
            

And when we got over that kind of wave, I felt a huge sigh of relief. And funnily enough, even the rye, when they did the rye to higher volumes at 30%, it was more or less fine. But then when they did a few runs of making American style rye whiskey, and that's where they started having problems. So it was amazing that up to 30 was okay, but after 51, part. Of you think, no, not at all.        

00:32:46
            

So I was there that day and I saw Distiller Michael walk in looking like the walking dead, and been up since three in the morning in this nightmare and thinking, oh, thank God I wasn't responsible for this. And I didn't want to rub it in at the time of like, well, I didn't come up with this. But they were done in an order that would would kind of lead up to the in case there were problems along the way. So ten was there from a relative. Ten has 15% oats again in it.     

00:33:18
            

And, yeah, it definitely did end up in a lot of comparisons. There's one that was 15% oats and 5% wheat. There's a lot of them that share again, they were picked on purpose from all the Mashables in thesis a because of these guidelines, and B, to create parallels. So you get one where it's 30% malt, 40% barley, 30% oats, and you got another well, it's 30 40 and then 30% wheat. And you can make strong contrast, or 15% oats, 15% wheat.        

00:33:46
            

And the other two variables are the same, trying to keep as much stuff alignable so you can make comparisons. So, again, it was an OD. It all made sense at the time, this apparatus of choices. There were a lot of stuff to go through. And of course, they all had to be decimalized from original source material anyway.    

00:34:06
            

The source material, especially before the 20th century, the idea of, like, a hard fixed mash bill is not it's there, but it's not down to the percentage. They're like waving vibrations and you can tell people have a house practice, but it sometimes drops or goes up. And of course, there's real word problems where you see in the legislature, they just say, like, wheat too expensive. This period, there's no wheat. And that's it.        

00:34:31
            

And where you really start seeing precision is when you start getting the bigger ones, where they're working to scale and it's just more economics. The numbers are so big that the percentages don't really vary that much. That's fantastic. Panon, it's always a pleasure to talk to you. Yeah, I'm glad you cleared up the Red Book question for me. 

00:34:50
            

Question. And I'm very happy that I got to taste the number ten and be a part of the tasting of the today's version of number ten. And I can't wait to see what the whiskeys will taste like when they're illegal. I know. Neither can I.        

00:35:03
            

Our so thank you so much for being part of the show. Thank you very much. Kerry.