Hochatown Distilling Company

Drew H (00:01):
Hey, whiskey lore, Patreon members. If you want to hear an extended interview from this episode, then just head to your Patreon account, patreon.com/whiskey lore. Welcome to Whiskey Lore's Whiskey Flights, your weekly home for discovering great craft distillery experiences around the globe. I'm your travel guide Drew Hannush, the bestselling author of Experiencing Kentucky Bourbon and experiencing Irish whiskey. The brand new book that busts 24 of Whiskey's biggest myths, whiskey lore, volume one, and after a fantastic stop at Iron Root Republic in Dennison, Texas. I am on the road again. Sun is shining, a little bit of a chill in the air, and today I am driving across southern Oklahoma, near the banks of the Red River and heading into a part of the state that is significantly different from any Oklahoma I have ever seen. Our destination is the Hocher Town Distilling company located just north of the tourist town of Broken Bow, and we're headed to an area, maybe you think about the Sooners coming out in the 1880s and the Great Land grab, but this is also an area where the Choctaw tribe was relocated, thanks to President Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal Act of 1830.

(01:27):
And what's always confused me about that history is that part of the act required that the tribes be relocated to an area that was similar in terrain to their homes back east and being somebody who had grown up in the mountains of North Carolina, around the Cherokee, and then the Choctaw coming from Tennessee, Mississippi, that area. Well, it's amazing when you get here to see that this place has a field that's very close to some of the tourist towns back in the mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee. I think the only thing that's really missing are the mountains themselves, but it is a very hilly area around here. You might be wondering how I found Hoch Town Distilling Company. Well, it wasn't through last year's Bracketology where we were looking for fan favorite craft distilleries. I had no Oklahoma distilleries nominated, and part of me thought, well, maybe Oklahoma doesn't have any distilleries because it was notorious for being a prohibitionist state.

(02:30):
But then I found a couple on Google Maps around Oklahoma City, and then I found this one with really great reviews out right there in the corner of Texas and Arkansas and Oklahoma, and decided to give it a shot. And I had no idea what to expect. But Tommy Blue McDaniel, the co-founder of the distillery, he's a man who's got a background in science, as did his brother and his co-founder, and both of them looked for a way to pave their own path. Being so far away from Kentucky, it really gave them a chance to open up to whatever creative energy they had themselves. And walking around the distillery with Blue Eye, I could definitely tell his passion for creating whiskey. They used the Sweet Mash process. We're going to talk a little bit about that, but let's first jump into this tourist aspect of the area and figure out what kind of things are there to do around the distillery if you're planning a trip to Hoch Town.

Blue (03:40):
Okay. Well, the area that we're in here where Hoch Town Distilling is, it's named after the town. We are Hoch Town, Hoch Town, Oklahoma, Hoch Town, Oklahoma is located in southeast Oklahoma. We've got mountains here that come out of Arkansas. It's the Kai Mishy Mountains, which is part of the Wasaw range where some old mountains here, but most people don't really think of Oklahoma as having any type of mountainous terrain. It's flat and it's farmland and it's wheat and it's corn. But where we are here is, like I said, is the mountains that come down into southeast Oklahoma. And our area has very much a feel because of the pine trees, a lot of pine trees, they do a lot of pine timber harvesting here, and we have a lot of moisture here, so it grows pine trees. Very good. And you get a feel here because of all the evergreens of a, it's kind of a Colorado feel. It's maybe a western North Carolina, east Tennessee mountain. And our culture here is a lot like a mountain type culture that you'd see in east Tennessee and western North Carolina for the rest of the state of Oklahoma, as they call this area Little Dixie originally, because we are more of a southern mountain type culture. Hillbillies, if you want to say that much

(05:02):
Is what you have here. So we're in the far southeast part of Oklahoma, and most people would know this area by the name of Broken Bow. We're right here on Broken Bow Lake. Broken Bow was the town that was here when the lake was formed in the late sixties. HoChi Town was an old settlement. It's the second oldest settlement in the state of Oklahoma. So it was settled in the 1820s under the Indian Removal Programs during the Andrew Johnson administration. And the second community that was formed here of people living in a compact form was Hoch Town, but it's where currently Broken Bow Lake is now. And it was a community with a school and a post office and stores and a thriving community up until the lake here, a broken bow lake covered it up and they moved the community out to the edge of town on us 2 59 here. They brought the church, they brought the graveyard out, and that was really all that came out of the old town. They moved everybody out and it sat there for 30 years. Wow. With really not a lot going on, but a settlement. And then we have the Oklahoma's nicest, most agreed, not really arable, prettiest and best state park in Beaver's Bend State Park here. It was built in the CCC projects in the thirties. The designers of our state park here were the same ones that designed Yellowstone.

(06:24):
So you see a lot of rock and abutments and roads and some things of that. So we have a beautiful park here. And then when the lake was built and the late sixties, early seventies, the lake is just above the park. And so we have a trout fishery here. So the cold water coming out of the lake feeds through the park. We have a reproducing trout here. One of the interesting things, because the southern end of our county in McCarton County here is located next to Texas, and the eastern edge of our county line is Arkansas, and we've got the Red River. And what's interesting about it is we have alligators that come up the Red River and they'll come in the county. So one of the things about our county is we're unique is that down along the Red River bottoms in the south end of the county here, we have nesting alligators that are reproducing.

(07:07):
And then you get up here in the north middle of the county and the water goes down into that part. So within just a few miles of each other, we have both reproducing populations of trout and reproducing populations of alligators. It may be one of the few places in the United States that has that. Our town here is started in about 2000 with a lot of tourism coming into the park. When the internet became available, people started finding the area, started building cabins around here. We're three hours from the DFW market and we all know what that market's done over the past 25 or 30 years, the growth that's going on in north Texas. And we're the closest type of environment for North Texas when you want to come to the mountains and experience the mountains. So we get about three and a half million visitors a year here.

(07:53):
We're a town of about 250 people, but our weekends and during holiday type seasons and vacation season, we'll grow to 25, 30, 40,000 people in here every weekend. So our family's involved in tourism. Tourism allowed me to move back home. I grew up in the area and my brother Mitch and Mark grew up. We all grew up here, up the mountains up here. My brother Mitch and I left to go to college and military and different things, but tourism allowed us to come back home here. And about 10 to 15 years ago, we started building properties, but we really wanted to get into distilling. And we knew that with the tourism component here and all of the people from that North Texas market, we thought we could make a go with distilling here. And my brother Mitch had just retired out of his corporate job. His company had gotten bought and he was looking for something to do.

(08:47):
And I had started a property management company to get out of corporate America. And Mitch was a chemist and a career chemist. My degree is in engineering and chemical engineering, and we like bourbon and we thought we could do a pretty good job. And our original thing was let's just make some moonshine and have fun with it. But then through circumstances, we both wound up here full time, and our oldest brother, mark, is a land developer here, and he stayed here. And then we all wound up here together. And I had another business partner, Nathan Jewel, who helped me form a property management company in 12. And then in January of 15, so we are right at our 10 year anniversary mark, almost to the day when we sat down around the table and decided, Hey, let's do this. This is what we're going to do.

(09:32):
And all four partners wrote a check for Seed Money, and we got started with Hoch Town Distill Company. I had started the idea in my head three or four years prior, and it was as simple as our logo. I had our logo, something that I could look at and tangible, and then just started talking about it. And with tourism, it made more and more sense. And we were bourbon drinkers and we knew that the spirits market was growing and we had access to a lot of people coming here and finding our area. And we thought, you know what? I think we thought we could do it. And back when we started, even in 15, it doesn't sound like that long ago, but the whole bourbon world was a lot different then.

(10:13):
There wasn't a lot of sourcing bourbons like you have now. You get new distilleries that start up and they're sourcing until they get their own. And then the law in Oklahoma, we couldn't even sample. You couldn't sell out of a distillery. A lot of prohibition type laws were still in place, and they were put in prohibition. Prohibition in Oklahoma wasn't lifted until 1959. Prohibition was in place when we were a territory. And then up until we become a state 1907 in our state constitution, when it went in a couple of years later, prohibition was kept in place. So when the United States went into prohibition, the 18th Amendment and out of prohibition in the 21st Amendment, Oklahoma here in this southern part of Oklahoma was in prohibition. So one of the things that's interesting to note about that this area where we live down here, we have the most average rainfall per year in any place in the state of Oklahoma.

(11:00):
We grow pine trees here. So when you grow pine trees, you have a lot of moisture. And we were a long ways away from Oklahoma City where our state law was Texas. We were next door to Texas and Arkansas, but they didn't have jurisdiction here. And the people here come out of Arkansas and migrated in through of the Carolinas up into Kentucky and into Arkansas. And then right after statehood, a lot of people in Arkansas come over in this part of Oklahoma because the land was available then the allotments were made to the citizens, not the tribes, is the way it was done to the individuals of the tribal members. And so the tribal members were selling land, and so it made it available for people to come in here and buy land. They weren't held by a reservation per se, and that's just the way it was done in this part of the us. One of the things to note though is that when prohibition was in place in there was a network already set up here of bootlegging.

Drew H (11:56):
So you even found that you had some bootlegging in your own past

Blue (12:00):
In a family history. I did, yeah.

(12:03):
And this was after we started this project in 15. My brother Mitch and I were doing some family genealogy, and we come across a family member who, and we've got source documentation and all this area when it was a territory, and this was in the 1880s, was under the jurisdiction of the US Western District of Arkansas. You've probably heard of Fort Smith and oh, judge Parker's court and federal agents would come over and if there was problems that the tribal nations themselves couldn't handle, or if there were people that they had committed crimes needed picked up, brought back for trial, then the agents would come into Oklahoma and pick 'em up and bring them back. And so we had a family relative and name of McDaniel come out of the Carolinas, picked a bride up in Bourbon County, Kentucky, and then moved into western Arkansas, which is just about 35, 40 miles over the line here. Johnson McDaniel's his name. Well, we start finding out that Johnson McDaniel in his later years was arrested for bringing Spiritist liquors into the Indian

Speaker 3 (13:10):
Country.

Blue (13:11):
So he was caught up around Taliqua, Oklahoma, bringing spirits in, and we have affidavits and was tried in federal court in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and then wound up doing six months in prison in Michigan in a federal pen. And this is in the mid 1880s or so. And we never really knew about this until we found out later on through some genealogy and then started finding some of the court records online, searchable records. And so there is a bootlegger in the family, and he was living, he is buried in western Arkansas here in Cove, Arkansas, but all the McDaniels that come in this area where we are trace their lineage back to this gentleman. And so we didn't know that, but here we are, a hundred, what, 40 years later, 45 years later, one of the first legal distilleries in the state of Oklahoma. And our distillery has a lot of firsts for Oklahoma. And a lot of it is because of the prohibition. And prohibition wasn't lifted in Oklahoma until 1959. And when it was lifted, a lot of the laws were written in that were protecting the distributors in Oklahoma. So out state distributors couldn't come in and they were set up in place to protect the businesses in the state. But it really held back distilling in the state of Oklahoma because lifeblood for a young distillery is to be able to do tastings and sales at their distillery. And Oklahoma was the 50th state to allow a person to come in and actually taste a sample, buy a drink,

(14:47):
And then buy a bottle to take back with them. And that was passed in 21. And my brother, Mitch and I worked on that for five years through our state legislature and made a lot of relationships with our state legislative and friends. And when we went up there, it was just talk, but we blindly went forward with doing our distillery. Mitch and I started this process. We were both at a point in our life where the journey was going to be as much fun and interesting as the end stage, and it was just YouTube videos. We tasted a lot of bourbons. We figured out processes and studied and talked to a lot of people and sourced our equipment and put our equipment in and did a lot of the installation ourself and get it working. And that was a process we started in January of 15 and we started building our building and all, but it was September of 16 before we ever was able to do our first bourbon mash.

Speaker 3 (15:49):
Now

Blue (15:49):
We had had our steel set up a couple of months earlier, but we were doing trial and error and we were doing some corn, a hundred percent corn with enzymes and just working on our mashing, fermenting and then the distilling and getting that down. And we did about 30 or 40 runs and we saved those runs and they're actually in barrels now. They're corn whiskey, and we put 'em in used barrels so they wouldn't be bourbon. But then in September of 16, we barreled our first bourbon

Drew H (16:20):
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Blue (17:27):
Our chemistry and our engineering and our biology background. So we're both science guys.

Drew H (17:32):
And so you came about things in some very interesting ways, some decisions that I hadn't really seen in distilleries before. One being the way that you handled the sweet mash process. So you decided to go sweet mash instead of sour mash. But talk about kind of your thought process in coming to Sweet Mash and what you learned from sour mash and what you needed to do to make that sweet mash work.

Blue (17:59):
Well, that was a debate that Mitch and I often had was a sweet mash and a sour mash and what to do. And part of understanding Mitch's background being a chemist and he worked in food science and Mitch, he was very, very conscious of microbiological contamination with a sour mash, you take your back set and you add it into your next batch that you're fermenting. And just in studying what sour mash does, and we didn't have a history that we had to really stay loyal to or true to. We were plowing new ground

(18:37):
And you see a lot of distillers now that will use a sweet mash. So we knew that the sour mash and the old timers didn't know. They knew it made their whiskey better. And what it did was it added nutrients. It helped adjust the pH to where it was a more favorable pH to what the yeast liked to do their work in. Then we backed into using a sweet mash that we add in the nutrients and do some pH adjustments on the front end of our mash to get some of the nutrients that the yeast like and then get the pH right. And then through a combination of our mash bill is 80% corn, 10% malted barley, and then 10% rye. And that rye has some malting, a malting to the rye as well that we use in there. And there's some certain flavor profiles you can get with some malted rye that we liked and the rye that we use. So with that, and then with the help of, we use enzymes just like a production distillers do to help reduce the viscosity and then so you can heat it without burning it, and then taking those dextrin chains and breaking those down into fermentable sugars.

(19:49):
So a combination of modern chemistry that our main big distilleries use and then our equipment and our limitations. And we didn't have investors just pouring money into us, so we had to fund it all ourselves. So we went almost four years without ever selling anything.

Drew H (20:10):
Wow. Yeah.

Blue (20:10):
So what you have to realize is that especially a young distillery, it's not like beer. It's not like wine. You mess it up, you can turn around and three months later, two months later, you're back where you started with whiskey, with bourbon, you don't know for two or three years where you're going to be. And if you're not good and you're like us without a bunch of capital start up, it's hard to start over. So we had one shot at it, and Mitch and I always had a saying that we took on early on just through the equipment and all that was work behind your learning curve. And we knew we didn't have to know everything at point A, what we knew was what we needed to know at point A and where we were going and then start learning as we went through the process. That's from label development. And that's been one of our biggest successes when we take our product to people is they see that label and they're like, well, that's a beautiful packaging. And it looks like one of them labels that has always been on the shelf.

(21:14):
We started doing our mashing. We opened a gift shop up, but we didn't have any products sell. We had t-shirts to sell, but we were here all the time running our property management companies and doing our distilling. And then we were working with our legislature selling an idea, and after a couple of years we started getting some of our product out and being a tourist area, we get a lot of our state legislatures here on vacation and stuff. So when they were in, they were always stopping by and hanging out and visiting. And then we started getting product out. In 2019, we released our first product. It was a small batch bourbon. It was a 90 proof, it was two and a half years old,

(21:53):
But we were anxious to get something out and get started. And it was a little bit, but it got us started, but it was still pretty decent actually. But one of the things about kind of jumping back over to that sweet mash and doing our distilling and our still, we're not hooked up on automation. We do our distilling by hand. We do our cuts by hand. We do our cuts by flavor profile, so we're very hands-on with ourselves and our distillers about making our cuts where we make our head cuts where that's a pretty easy when the head cuts, but then you get into the body of the run your hearts, but then getting your tail cuts is where the trick is. And there's a lot of craft and thought process going into your tail cuts because as you move through your distilling process in your tail cuts, you're starting to move out of that ethanol.

(22:42):
I mean, you do have primary ethanol, but as you move, as you boil ethanol out of your bot, as you start moving up in the higher temperatures, you start getting some of the longer chain molecules out. Some of the fusel oils start coming out, and those fusel oils are important. They give us a flavor, they give us a mouth feel, but they also have to be aged out. The aging process of oxidation reactions that break down and mellow it out once it goes into the barrel. And when you use continuous distillations, like a lot of biggest distillers for mass production, that's economy of scale and efficiency, totally understand why they do it. Maybe one day we'll get there. It's a little bit more difficult to get good tail cuts. And so you sacrifice getting some tailings in and storing it in a barn and taking longer to age out versus to get the efficiency that you need for mass produced. And we don't have the efficiency to mass produced. We're a small little distillery, so we take our tail cuts and cut 'em pretty tight. And you'll see most of our bourbons are three years old, and then we have four years old. And I've got some bourbons down there now that are six and seven years old in the barrel. And when we hit seven, we're going to start pulling some of those out to do.

Drew H (23:50):
Well, one of the things I wanted to talk about was that whenever I go into a distillery in Kentucky, you'll see your column still and then you'll see your thumper or doubler, which is a pseudo pot still over to the side to finish it off. And so when we were talking about things, you said, well, we do one run through and I'm going one run. Okay, wait a second. How does that work? But you actually kind of do it the opposite way from the way that Kentucky does it in that you start in the pot still and then you go through the column.

Blue (24:28):
Yeah, we do batch distillation, not continuous distillation. So in Kentucky you do continuous distillation where they have a countercurrent flow of the mash that they're feeding into the column and steam coming through and stripping the alcohol out, and then they're moving over into a thumper for lack of it is. And that's where they can do their finishing.

(24:49):
And where we're a little bit different, we use our pot still to do our stripping out, and then we move over into, then the vapors go over into our column and it's a six plate column. And then the column is where we do our finishing in our product, and we control that by the amount of cold water that we use through the shell. It's a defter through the top of the column heat exchanger. It's a heat exchanger where we control the amount of reflux going back through the steel to, and then once we start getting everything set up right, then we'll back off of the coolant and let some of the vapor come over into the worm and then we capture that. So it's just because it's batch distillation, it's a different type of distillation versus continuous. And so we can get our finishes there.

Drew H (25:39):
So when somebody's coming to visit and do a tour, what will they taste while they're on the tour?

Blue (25:47):
Well, our tour guide Rod Davis, he's a retired teacher, principal football coach, knows how to communicate with people, and he's a bourbon enthusiast. He loves bourbon and loves good bourbon. And Rod, I've leaned on Rod a lot because he helps me do the tastings, but Rod does the tour about an hour and a half tour, and they'll go over into our distillery and then they'll go into our barrel house and then they'll come up to our tasting room. And one of the neat things about our tour is if you look at our distillery, we are a smaller version of a big Kentucky distilleries in the fact that we use steam to heat our mash, to heat our steel, run our steel. And everything's on a small scale, much smaller

Speaker 3 (26:30):
Scale,

Blue (26:31):
But on that small scale, you can really kind of see what's going on and understand it. Rod spends a lot of time talking about bourbon history, and one of the things here is that we get a lot of tourists that they don't really understand what bourbon is. And a lot of people, their experience with brown liquor has been when they were young, shooting brown liquor and getting sick on brown liquor,

Drew H (26:51):
They're

Blue (26:51):
Like, I don't do the brown liquor. I like the clear liquor, but I don't do the brown liquor.

(26:54):
But our job here is to educate 'em. And if you take 'em through the process of showing 'em what you're doing and showing the craft and taking 'em to the barn, letting 'em smell in the barn, it smells like maple syrup in there. And then coming up and doing a tasting and showing 'em how to do a proper taste, not shooting it, but you're taking a small little sip and tasting the flavor profiles. People come away with a whole that had no education or anything about bourbon, they come away with an appreciation for bourbon. I'm not going to say they're going to like bourbon. Most of them do, but they understand it. And part of getting to where you like bourbon is understanding what you're tasting and then starting to learn about the different nuances and different flavors and different profiles that the different bourbons can get you.

(27:41):
We make a vodka here and we make a great vodka here. We red distill it and seven times and chill, filter it and got a great product. But clear liquor is a commodity, more or less a commodity. And clear liquor drinkers are hard to break off. Vodka drinkers are hard to break off into a different brand. But I say about bourbon drinkers, bourbon drinkers will drink a lot of different bourbons and they're always willing to try wanting to learn. And when you come here at Hoch Town distilling, one of the things that we pride ourselves on is that when you get into our heritage series here, which is Flies our Hoch town flag and our loyal and tree reserves we do with Oklahoma State, and then we do a PBR teams product called Fearless Pursuit. Those are our bourbons and those are made here on site. So you're getting a full experience of a bourbon that's made here on site and when you buy it,

Drew H (28:34):
Fantastic Blue. I really appreciate you walking us through all this. And I don't know how I stumbled upon you guys because I was like, I need to see if I can find a distillery somewhere in Oklahoma and here on the very edge of Oklahoma in the corner, like, oh, okay. I had no idea what I was going to get out of that visit. And you guys do a great job. You are fun to talk to and great whiskey. It's definitely something that should be on people's radar.

Blue (29:07):
Well, thank you for finding us, and we tried to stay below the radar until we were ready. We weren't going to be that ones that we're the latest, greatest whiskey out there, and we don't have any whiskey for you of our own. So we laid low. Look forward to, if you get back into our area, I'd love to have you come by. We got a lot of cabins here. Hang out with us and watch what's going on in our little community. We're a fast growing community, and it hearkens back to that earlier you said it feels kind of like a Gatlinburg. We're not Gatlinburg though. We're not. We're not Tahoe Lake Tahoe. We're Hoch town and we've got our own unique little vibe here. And if you get a chance to come here and see it and visit, our little town has four wineries, two breweries and a distillery.

Drew H (29:56):
Awesome.

Blue (29:57):
And we're a town of 250 people, so there's plenty of things to do, plenty

Drew H (30:00):
To do,

Blue (30:00):
And a lot of high quality products around here. So thank you Drew, for taking time to spend on this.

Drew H (30:06):
Well, I hope you enjoyed this visit to distillery number four on the great 48 tour of America's great craft distilleries. If I peak your interest in visiting Hoch Town Distilling company, make sure to head to whiskey lore.com/flights where you can view the profile of this distillery along with nearly 600 others around the globe, and sign up for a free account and add this and other distilleries to your list to create your very own personal whiskey lore agenda. Then when you're ready to travel, you can use the site's convenient planning tools, maps, tour dates, booking links and more. All you have to do to start your journey is head to whiskey lo.com/flights.

(30:49):
Well, as we pack up and get ready to head to our next distillery destination. If you're still on the fence about visiting Hoch Town Distilling Company, let me give you my three reasons why I think you should have this distillery on your whiskey lore wishlist. The first thing is science. If you have been out to a distillery like Wilderness Trail in Kentucky, and you've seen how they take scientific knowledge and create amazing tasting whiskeys, well, this is a place to check out for sure. You're going to learn a little bit about local history and also have a few laughs along the way on a fun and informative tour. Second, this tour ends up in the speakeasy, which will give you a chance to relax, talk to locals about Oklahoma history, and dig into a little lore while tasting a flight or a house favorite cocktail.

(31:38):
And third, you might not think of Oklahoma as beautiful hill laden country, but this part of it definitely is. So if you live in Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, even as far away as Kansas City, it's a great spot to spend the weekend. And while it does have a tourist town feel, it is not overdone. Well, it's time to wrap up the first leg of the great 48 tour. I'm on my way back to South Carolina, but on the way I'll be stopping off at one of the distilleries from last year's fan favorite bracketology competition, one that I knew nothing about until Whiskey Lore fans turned me onto it. And so I'm going to drive through the hills of Arkansas and stop in at the state capital on the next episode of Whiskey LO's Whiskey Flights. Don't miss a moment. Get your ticket by hitting that subscribe button. Join me as we travel coast to coast and discover America's great craft distillery. I'm your tour guide Drew Hanish. And until next time, cheers. And for transcripts and travel information, including maps, distillery planning information and more, head to whiskey lo.com/flights. Whiskey lords of production of Travel Fuels Life, llc. See.