Laws Whiskey House

Drew H (00:00):
Hello there Drew Hannush. Whiskey Lore time for a special edition of the Whiskey Lore podcast. This is the Whiskey Flight podcast, except we are actually going to go backwards to the very first pilot episode that I created to do a proof of concept of the Whiskey Flights podcast. And this is going to center around law's whiskey house, and if you have listened to whiskey lower the interviews, you will have heard parts of this interview already. But I wanted to do this proof of concept so that I could see how to structure the show. And the concept of this show was to basically take what I had been writing in my books in terms of giving you a outline and information about distilleries to help you choose which ones you might want to go visit. I decided that I would like to actually do distilleries across the globe rather than just focusing on one little area because I'm very close to having one put together for Scotland.

(01:00):
But I thought about it and I thought, why don't I get these out there now so that you can start doing your planning if you want to. And so I've put those profiles out on whiskey lord.com/travel guide. In fact, I'm doing shortcuts so you can get there faster depending on where you want to go. So you could go to whiskey lower.com/scotland and you'll get there. Or if you want Maryland, you just go to whiskey lower.com/maryland, Tennessee, Kentucky, and so on. For the ones that I've gotten finished, and I've gotten over 300 distilleries up there so far, so I am really getting a lot of this work done and I'm about to do a whole lot more of these. Just completed England, of course, got Ireland and then here in the United States, and of course here in the United States, we've got Tennessee, Kentucky, Maryland. I am now releasing Pennsylvania.

(01:56):
And that is because my next two episodes after this one are going to be in Pennsylvania. And then after that I'm going to have Michigan and Wisconsin. And I'm mainly paying attention to those areas. First of all, because I was invited up to Michigan for a very special event, and that got me excited about going around Michigan to see some distilleries and also going around next door neighbor Wisconsin, and seeing some distilleries over there, but also because of Bracketology on Instagram and you guys voting for these distilleries, I have been blown away by how passionate Midwestern whiskey fans are about the distilleries in their area. So I'm going to be going to distilleries in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. And unlike the other episodes that I have done up to this point where basically I'm interviewing through a Zoom chat basically, and then building an episode around it and doing research and giving you all of the information that I've found, this is going to be firsthand knowledge, and this is really the way I want to do this podcast because I love going to the distilleries.

(03:08):
I love meeting the distillers and the personnel face to face, but of course I'm not a millionaire, so it's a little hard for me to travel to say England, Tasmania, anywhere around the globe to go to these distilleries. So we do this through the theater of the Mind instead for the most part. But as I say, our next two episodes will be Theater of the Mind with Pennsylvania. But then after that, very excited to be bringing you my Midwest tour, my Great Lakes tour. I've got at least 11 interviews that I'll be doing, and we'll probably be building a few more in there as well as I travel around the area. So things to look forward to coming up. But I wanted to give you an opportunity, since I'm doing a lot of research and a lot of planning to get this trip underway, I wanted to give you an episode instead of just skipping one this week for the second episode.

(04:04):
And so I'm going to go back to the pilot episode that I recorded many months ago, and it is my interview with Al Laws from Laws Whiskey house in Colorado. And sooner or later I will cover Colorado, but it's not going to happen immediately. I've got a lot of Michigan and Wisconsin coming up and may be some other stuff coming up there in between. But I will get to Colorado because it's one of my favorite states for distilleries. So hold out for that. But today I'm going to take you back to the very beginning so the show may sound a little more polished. Now this is going to be an episode where I was trying to get a sense of how I wanted to put these episodes together, so see what you think about it. Always feel free to leave me comments if you want to.

(04:53):
You can email me at drew@whiskeylore.com. Always happy to hear from you or join me on Instagram or join the Patreon because there is patreon.com/whiskey. And these are all great ways to connect with the things that I'm doing. And I also want you to know I am working on a new book and that new book will be out very soon and I know you're going to like it. It is all about whiskey and whiskey lore. In fact, the title of the book is going to be Whiskey lore. So if you're a fan of the show, I think it is going to be right up your alley. Alright, without further ado, time to jump into the pilot episode of the Whiskey Flights on Whiskey lore.

(05:42):
Welcome to Whiskey Lores Whiskey Flights, your weekly home for discovering great craft distillery experiences around the globe, part of Whiskey Laura's Travel Club, where we're building the greatest online database of distillery experiences on the planet. At whiskey lord.com/travel guide, I'm your travel host, drew Hanish. Join me now through the Theater of the Mind as we touch down in Denver, Colorado and head to our first distillery destination law's whiskey house, and as we make our way through Denver International Airport And look for the Aline Light Rail train that heads into Denver's downtown and Union Station. Let's take a moment to get used to this altitude by soaking in the city that we're about to meet in our minds known as the Mile High City, due to its elevation reaching 5,280 feet. Denver is the capital of Colorado and a vibrant city with a rich history. It's known for its beautiful parks, including the expansive city park and the picturesque Washington Park.

(06:50):
Denver also boasts a thriving arts and culture scene with numerous galleries, theaters, and museums. You also find great sports teams here from the NHLs Avalanche to the former NBA champions, the Nuggets, the NFL's Broncos. And for a real treat, catch a Colorado Rockies baseball game and make sure to sit in the upper deck behind home plate for a spectacular sunset view of the Rocky Mountains right there from your seat. And speaking of the Rocky Mountains, Denver is a great jumping off point for hiking, skiing, and other outdoor activities. And with its blend of urban attractions and natural beauty, Denver is definitely a top-notch destination for travelers who are looking for a great starting point on their excursion into the best of Colorado.

(07:45):
Well, after a long flight in the train ride over to Union Station seemed like a good opportunity to grab a bite of lunch and an espresso to both warm up and wake up a stop by the bindery downtown with its unique American Fair. Looks intriguing. It's one of the only places I've ever seen with rabbit pot pie. I might give that a try after lunch. It's time to make our way over to the distillery and it's just a few miles south so we could contact a Lyft or Uber, but there's also the O Bus line that for a couple of bucks and a 30 minute ride will do nicely for our light budget. Getting off at South Broadway and West Florida Avenue. It's just about a four minute stroll over to the distillery where we're about to meet our host laws. Whiskey House founder Alan Laws hailing from Western Canada. Alan moved to Brooklyn, New York. It was there that he worked in the finance industry and it was that industry that brought him out to Denver. He started his journey into craft distilling some 13 years ago. And to start our conversation, I wanted to get a sense from al of what the distilling culture was like in Denver when he first started his business.

Al (09:02):
Denver's really great, it's got a culture around craft and it started with beer and I think it's in other food products and other than California, Denver's like a leader of that sort of thing. So craft stuff where people are looking for ingredients or they care more about what's in the bottle, and we've found it pretty welcoming and having a sophisticated customer base in our home state really helped us develop.

Drew H (09:23):
What was the landscape like when you first arrived in Denver? Because it really was what I considered to be a beer city more than anything.

Al (09:32):
Well, we have the advantage of having the very first Kraft whiskey distillery in town, being str of hands and barley whiskey treated more like American bourbon or rye going into a new barrel. It's great. It's one of my favorite whiskeys. So I like that one. And then we get, our focus has always been bourbon rye, and we're really trying to bring out the grains. So we're making a fore grain, we're making a hundred percent rye. We're making things that fill in some gaps in American whiskey. We want to be part of the tradition and history and we want to add to it. I'm not trying to be Kentucky trying to be something different from that, but I'm still going to pay homage to that by using traditional techniques. All of our whiskeys are sour mesh and we want to make it in small batches. And we go a little bit step further in terms of heritage and stuff. We don't even use columns still. So a pot still in, I think you'd mentioned your book on Irish whiskey, the pot stills concentrate flavor better, and we're about the grain flavor where the grains come from, not just varietal, but actually the dirt they're grown in. So we believe in grain terroir and these things all matter and they all present themselves in the whiskeys as we make them an agent of them and age 'em and release them.

Drew H (10:48):
So you have right now two farms that you source from. What was the conversation like with those farms? Were you going to use the grains that they already had or were you kind of pushing them in the way and saying, Hey, could you grow these particular

Al (11:04):
Grains? It would be the former rather than latter. But the story there, when we started, we were like, we want to use local grains. We were tying into the local food movement, and this is important. It'll taste like where we're from and all this. And then no one would sell us grain.

Drew H (11:20):
Oh, nice.

Al (11:22):
Even the Corn Association, Hey, we need corn. And they're like, where are you? We're like, oh, we're like South Denver and I'm not driving my truck in there. Wow. So our original six months, we used Brie corn or the Midwest, very good quality, but we wanted something from Colorado, Colorado gross cone two, and we wanted to get that terroir, but that wasn't happening. And even the small grains, we didn't even know where to get those and nobody was set up to clean 'em and deliver them other than for feed. And so we're like, oh, well it needs to be cleaner for this. And then we ran into a situation early, within our first three months where I would do this at four o'clock in the morning or on long weekends was the best. I could get there early and I could do three full days of this stuff and we could get our 12 barrels a month or whatever we were making.

(12:10):
So I ran out of, we use a little bit of wheat malt in the wheat component of our fore grain, and we ran out and well, I can't order a dozen bags. It has to be in a larger order. I'm like, oh, I need to go. So I went to a home brew store, tons of those here in Denver and Colorado and general, and I'm like, I need wheat malt. And they, oh, we have these two or three varietal like, oh, this one we've used briefs and like, oh, we brief and what are these other two? And he's like, well, this one's this and this one here has grown here locally. I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa. This one. It's like, yeah, it's like a nondescript craft paper with a stamp on it. I want to try this one. And everything changed.

(12:50):
The whole place just smelled, the floral notes blew up. It's just like, this is fresh. This hasn't been in a silo for a year and a half or two. This is literally, it came off the field probably a month before that and was malted at the farm. This is something we didn't know. The first craft malting company is Colorado malting. And so they were doing this and it was the way for them to add value to whiskey's a value added farm product. Well malt is a value added farm product. So they were trying to like, Hey, how do we make more a small family farm? We're getting squeezed out. How do we subsist and continue to grow and keep our families on the farm? So they created a malting company. So this mall, I'm like, holy man, this is crazy good. So phoned them small distillery in Denver, they were mostly doing malting for a barley for home brewers or also to sell to breweries.

(13:46):
And we had so many of them. I'm like, and they're like, oh sure, what do you need? I'm like, well, I need some wheat. Well, I need some barley mal, you have that? And he said, oh yeah, with plenty of that. And he's like, well, and you have to remember this is a scarlet varietal, so it's different than stuff that you might've been using. I'm like, I don't care about that. It's actually cool. And then where's it grown? Oh, we grow everything like, oh, this is even better then Do you have rye? Yes, we have rye. We don't have a lot of rye, but we do grow it as cover and we haven't really had demand for it before. But yeah, we can definitely provide that too. And I'm like, do you have corn? No, they don't have corn. And I'm like, okay, well, I'll have to go find that somewhere else, but I'm like, oh, this is great, but well, can I order some?

(14:24):
He's like, yeah. And he's like, well, how much do you need? I said, I need five tons of a mix. And the phone went dead silent, tell I got dead silent. And when I talked to Jason and his brother Josh, who run Colorado malting in the farms now, their dad's pretty much retired. I don't think he ever retires. And he was like, well, when do you need this by in six weeks? And he Okay, I to pass. That's the largest order they'd ever received before. And that started the relationship and they tell the story way better than Idel, but it was important to them. And their struggled to get this malting company up and running, and we've used them ever since. And it changed everything about our whiskey.

(15:10):
So 40% of that mash bill, because we're a 60% corn, 20% wheat, 10 rye, 10 malt is our mash bill. And so 40% of that, it's a lot of flavor green because the malt in our case isn't just for conversion, it's actually providing something to the flavor profile because it's of the varietal. And that's really tough to pick out sometimes, but once you dial it in, you go, oh, there's the malt in your whisker. Yeah. Some people pick it up like, oh, this is fairly malty. I'm like, well, there's a lot of malt in it in terms of a little bit of wheat malt. And then there's the barley malt, which has definite contribution. So the flavors are the sweetness is the corn and then any metallic kind of bite to it, that's the rye, that's the thing you like a lot.

Drew H (16:02):
Yes, yes, absolutely. There's so much depth in that rye and we'll get into that in a little bit. But

Al (16:08):
Yeah, and then the wheat is a spring varietal, whereas the rye is SLV, it's only grown in the valley down in south of here, down in the San Luis Valley. And the wheat is centennial, so it's centennial varietal. Since we're in the centennial state, it's a Colorado varietal and it's very different. It's not like hard. It's a soft wheat. So it provides esters and flavors that are quite differentiated from hard barbarian or red or whatever, what most people use in terms of wheat. And it acts a lot like rye in the fermentation. It's a little more gooey, has more proteins, and so it stresses the yeast and they give off these different esters. These tend to be more baking spice and orange fruity kind of notes. So it, it's the third kind of thing. You taste this doughty cinnamon bun kind of thing, rising in the kitchen in the summer and then the orange comes through and then it finishes with a real nutty backbone to it. And that's from the scarlet

Drew H (17:13):
Barley. Yeah, I was noting too that there is this black tea note that comes in on the nose as well. Where do you think that comes from?

Al (17:24):
I think it comes from with soil, because all those grains present that and it's like an orange pico tea, black tea, definitely. Yeah. It's in all of our whiskeys and all of our single grains. So we start out with a four grain because we wanted to again, add to the fabric. And then what we wanted to do is we want to take all those grains and want to deconstruct the four grain into single grain varietals

(17:47):
So that we could show people here's what these grains present as, or the flavors they present as 100% or close to that as we could get. The beginning we had a 95 5 rye that was like 47 5 raw, 47 5 malted because the malt that they were making on the farm at the beginning, it was R is a little harder to do all that stuff too. And even when it's done well, that doesn't tend to have a lot of dtic power. So on a regular rye model, it barely has enough to convert itself. They got it up over two. Once it's over two, it's very useful to us and they've got it to a place where we haven't for, I don't know, eight years, made it 95 5. We make it a hundred percent. Now

Drew H (18:35):
Your whiskeys are so interesting because I get this evolution on the pallet. It's almost like you don't say nose palette finish, you go nose, and then the several phases you're going to get through before you get to the end, because at one point I'm getting a graham cracker note on this, which is something that I really love in pot still, whiskey, Irish pot, still whiskey, and then you're getting a little bit of a lemon comes in, I get this kind of egg custard thing going on at the same time. It's like, as I think I know what I'm tasting, suddenly I've moved on to something else. And that experience keeps evolving. Is that part of distillation? Is that the variety of grains? Because I also will note that I get it in the rye whiskey as well, that same kind of evolution.

Al (19:31):
Well, it's complex whiskey, and so it's designed to be that way. When we do the rye, it's 50% malted, 50% raw. The raw is going to give you the taste of the earth. It's going to give you those things like the anise and the peppery notes, and then the floral notes and the sweetness, which comes through very quickly, comes from the malted R. So there you're homogenizing it to some degree and you are capturing the sweetness. So it's not going to add as much of the earthy tones or the botanicals. All those things are in the rye. The rye is pretty close to being a cocktail unto itself. It tastes like it has bitters in it to some degree. But yeah, those elements come from the grain. It comes from how it's distilled as well. So those ester exist in the fermentation and then how you cut them is very important.

(20:23):
So the bourbon, we're making cuts that when esters like apple and pear present, once we've gone through all the bad stuff that are pretty obvious like methanol and aldehyde, that's if you're like, yeah, no one wants this. It's pretty easy in the heads, Scott. But once it gets into the suite area, now you have to pick your place. And for us it's been what were we looking for? And you don't only get a half a gallon of this at the front end in a 250 gallon spirit run, but it matters. And those things come through your first sip like you just outlined. It's like, oh, listen, I got this. And then, oh, well the second sip, I got this. That evolution's important. And it comes from the process of making those cuts, but it does primarily come from the grain, which I would then say comes from the dirt that it's grown in.

Drew H (21:15):
Let's talk about the distillery a bit and some of the elements of the tour that somebody might experience when they come there. First of all, I understand that you're getting a new tasting room.

Al (21:25):
It's a destination kind of place. So it's attached to the distillery. It's a very cool architecture and it's meant to be an education center as well as a cocktail bar where there's interaction with folks who are making the drinks, who know how the whiskeys made, and our lore if you will, and our story. And here's why we do this and here's what it's doing to your cocktail. And so all those kind of things are fitting into this nice and tightly. And we should get the keys for certificate of cus B within the next two months. And then we've never done this before. This is our kind of waiting into hospitality, if you will, and we want you to have an experience when you come to do this, if you get to tour, our tours are very experiential already, and I wouldn't take a knee to any other place that does a tour.

(22:14):
We do a great job of it. You're going to learn a lot. No matter how much you know about whiskey and how it's made, you're going to learn. It's learn something. And we answer every question. People go, oh, there's secrets. No, we don't believe in those certain things. Go, what's your temperature? That it comes off well, 68, oh, you told us that. I'm like, dude, why would you care? Make your own whiskey if that's what you're into and have your own things. But to have those things be secrets, we don't really care. So we give people what they're looking for in those things and answer every question we can possibly answer because we want to make the customer or the consumer more and more educated about it because we win in that situation. They understand the complexity of what we're trying to build. And the Tasty Room is a new addition to that. And it's like I said, you'll have a good time when you come to it next time, and for the next first six months, we're going to learn how to do this. We never know before.

Drew H (23:10):
Very nice. We'll, people be able to go in and just do tastings rather than taking the tour

Al (23:17):
Instead of just going, I think they have layers of stuff. So you can go in and just do quick tastings. You can go up and just do cocktails, or you can go through the full experience, which might take you an hour, but a little more detail. So different layers for different things for each folk, what are people into, we want to make sure that our consumer bases service how they want to be serviced.

Drew H (23:40):
It'll be much different than doing a tasting in the gift shop, which is the vibe that it had at that point.

Al (23:47):
Yeah, it's kind of below our brandand of what we have now, but it's an intimate thing. And I know we're going to have people bemoan how, I remember when it was just this little room with little oak tables, and it's loud because there's no soft anything in there. And I remember I'm like, yeah, yeah, you remember, oh, we sat on these pews out in the, well, we have a whiskey church in the new tasting room, so it's a little more elegant. But we'll have that. That'll definitely happen. But we think this is the next step up and I'll hope people join us in that journey.

Drew H (24:22):
So what is the thing you're most proud of when people are going around and doing the tour or that you think would really kind of draw a distinction for your distillery versus other distilleries they might visit?

Al (24:34):
I think it's going to be the people. So I'm most proud of in the whole company is our people. And we've had ups and downs. We've grown and then had to shrink. But the core of the people and even the people that aren't here anymore have left something and contributed something to what laws whiskey house Village is over those years. So the people are what you'll, I think you'll gravitate to the most. They're very, I guess we'll use the word passionate, but again, they're obsessed. So from someone giving a tour to somebody, making it to somebody out in the market, selling it, all those people are very important. Keeping the cohesiveness of the village, you definitely pick up on that when you go through laws whiskeys.

Drew H (25:18):
Well, I know this too, that you talk about the village and this idea that I've had this concept that the term master distiller is kind of overused or used too early in someone's career. And so you tend to avoid that label.

Al (25:35):
Yeah, I don't believe in it. We have great people who do this and our distillers doing this for over 10 years, and even they don't believe in those titles because they're not indicative of anything. So distiller matters because you have to have some hierarchy of who's responsible for certain things. But if you're on our production floor and you're distilling it, you are the head distiller

(25:58):
And you're accountable to the guy whose title is that, plus me plus everyone in the entire production team, which is important thing. There's no zombies on our floor just turning knobs or pushing a button. If they're not into it, they can't last very long because it's important. They have to bring the same enthusiasm to everything they're due and the attention to the detail in everything they do. And we purposely built the distillery and expanded it to a point where we don't have a lot of computer, we don't have any computerized stuff, or we literally have to turn valves. And that's what our team wanted. They wanted to be interactive with the equipment. They didn't want to sit, they go, I didn't start become a distiller so I could sit in the lab and push buttons on a computer screen. They're like, I don't want to do that. I totally understand we could do that, but no, we don't want to do that. So we built it to be that a human has to actually interact with it.

Drew H (26:49):
Well, good luck with the new tasting room and getting everything up and running. And again, thanks for being on the podcast. Cheers to you. Well, I really

Al (26:57):
Enjoyed our time and hopefully we'll do it again. Thanks

Drew H (27:01):
Drew. And if we piqued your interest in Visiting Law's Whiskey House, well stay tuned because I've got some bonus planning details for you coming up in just a moment. But first, it's time for this week in Whiskey lore. On May 15th, 1924, George Remus, the king of the bootleggers, took a break from his stay in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary where he was serving time on volted violations to testify before the Wheeler Brookhart US Senate Committee. The senators were curious as to the rumors that George was being given a millionaire suite at the prison, to which George said he definitely was not, and said in fact, he had lost 15 pounds while staying there. But what senators were most interested in were the payments made by Remus to a friend of President Warren g Harding's, attorney General Harry Doherty Seems Remus had paid one Jesse Smith between 200 and $250,000 in $1,000 bills to help get medicinal whiskey withdrawal permits for his various distilleries. In the preceding years, Remus had acquired the Fleshman and Edgewater distilleries in Cincinnati, the Squibb distillery in Indiana. And in Kentucky, the old Lexington Pogue Rugby, Clifton Springs and Greendale distilleries law lawmakers were a little surprised when Remus was open about admitting that he knew that the liquor he was trying to withdraw would end up being used illegally. He went on to call the medicinal section of the Volstead Act, a farce saying, I don't think there's one globule of liquor ever prescribed by physicians, which actually is used for medicinal purposes.

(28:59):
Remus would return to prison after the hearing, serving out his full sentence. He was released 18 months later on November 2nd, 1925, and now it's time to check in with who's making whiskey history. This month on whiskey lore, for the first time since its founding, the name Beam will no longer be used in the name of the parent company that owns the Jim Beam brand and its distilleries. The firm announced on April 30th that Beam Centuri is being rebranded Centuri Global Spirits. The Beam Centuri name goes back to the merger of Centuri Holdings and Beam Incorporated in 14. And the change reveals the company's determination to embrace all of its brands. Equally, both companies have storied histories and both started as family businesses. St. Tori's founding goes back to 1899 and Beam goes back even further, claiming a 1795 date when family patriarch Jacob Beam arrived in Kentucky from Maryland.

(30:12):
Well, it's time to wrap up our trip to Law's whiskey house in Denver. But before we step back on the bus to head back downtown, I wanted to give you some side trips you might consider if you're planning to visit now, if you just can't get enough of distilleries. Well, Denver is loaded with some of the best in the country. You don't have to go very far from laws to find the very next one to hop back on the O bus and go for a seven minute ride to the south, or take a 17 minute stroll and visit the Bear Creek Distillery where you can take a tour and enjoy a cocktail or a flight. And when your belly starts calling out to you for some food, you might head over to the oddly named Gastro Pub, the Brutal Poodle. It's just steps away from the Bear Creek Distillery. If you're looking to diversify your stay, you want some culture, well head back north some three to four miles and visit the Denver Art Museum. The museum features a diverse collection of artwork from a wide range of eras and pieces from around the world. Heck, even the buildings a piece of art.

(31:25):
Well, if you think you'd like to put laws whiskey house in Denver into your future travel plans, then head to whiskey-lord.com/flights and use the convenient wishlist feature to build your own whiskey trail from over 150 distillery profiles listed in Whiskey Lores Travel Guide. But if you're still on the fence about a visit to laws, let me give you my three reasons to add laws to your wishlist. First, it's law's focus on finding unique local grains. The San Luis Valley Rye is one of the most expressive American whiskeys that I've ever tasted. This is all thanks to their focus on terroir. Second, remember that laws is expanding their visitors experience with a new tasting room and giving you more reasons to stay and enjoy a flight. And lastly, it's the people. And not just because Al says so, it's because I could sense that attitude back when I visited in 2022. And this focus creates a pride that could be the difference between a good experience and a great experience. Now it's time for me to make my way to my next destination. Make sure to subscribe to Whiskey Laura's podcast so you can join me on my next whiskey flight to another great craft distillery. I'm your guide Drew Hanish. And until we meet again, cheers and Slava for transcripts and travel information, including maps, distillery planning information and more. Head to whiskey lo.com/flights. Whiskey lowers a production of travel fuels life. LLC.