Ep. 110 - How Bourbon Shaped the Law and Vice Versa

Transcript

Drew Hannush (00:00.438)
Welcome to Whiskey Lore, The Interviews. I'm your host, Drew Hannush, the bestselling author of Whiskey Lore's travel guide to experiencing Kentucky bourbon and experiencing Irish whiskey and the new historic epic tale, the lost history of Tennessee whiskey. And today I am happy to introduce a guest who I've been long wanting to have on the show. And we finally met up in person at bourbon on the banks in the fall of last year. We're doing some book signings and intimidating people as they walked by with our height.

this we were standing outside the tent. This Brian Hara. Brian, welcome to the show.

Brian Haara (00:35.891)
Thank you, Drew. Appreciate you having me. And it was definitely fun to meet an author and a researcher taller than me. It's rare to happen. So I liked the effect that we could have on bringing people into the tent by seeing the two giants out front.

Drew Hannush (00:43.554)
Hehehehehehe

Drew Hannush (00:53.034)
Yes, I was going to say, how tall are you?

Brian Haara (00:55.239)
Um, I'm shrinking, I'm that old. So I'm officially there, but, uh, the basketball program back in the day listed me as six six, I won't, I won't say how much I've aged or shrunk since then.

Drew Hannush (00:57.09)
Hahaha.

Drew Hannush (01:07.114)
Okay then, I'm still at 6'6", so we're, I thought you were, it's hard to tell. When you get up to somebody who is your height, sometimes they feel like they're taller than you because you're just not used to seeing people that tall.

Brian Haara (01:20.227)
Agreed, 100%. I would have sworn you were taller than me. So it's, I have the same sensation. That's funny.

Drew Hannush (01:23.542)
Heheheheheheh

So this is, this is funny because you are, you're an attorney. I've always had interest in the law. So it's like, uh, I'm spinning through questions that, uh, that I want to ask you even on the legal side of things. So we'll, we'll pop into some of that in terms of bourbon history and kind of how all of that works in with doing research, because as I worked on the Tennessee history book,

I was amazed at how many laws and statutes I had to go in and look into and try to figure out, you know, if I read this and I go, well, why did that happen? Then I have to go back and find a law. And now I've been really fascinated the last few days because I've been digging into this case that happened around 1907. I guess it dragged on for some time between W.A. Gaines and a wholesaler out of St. Louis.

And it's history. I mean, everything I'm reading in there is telling me the behind the scenes secrets of old Crow and of the way whiskey was made back in the day. So we'll, we'll talk a little bit about that also. So, but let's, let's start off first in talking about how you got interested in the law in the first place.

Brian Haara (02:46.131)
Sure, it was kind of a slow burn on getting interested in law. I had some exposure to it as a kid. No family member as a lawyer or anything like that. But in college, I found myself graduating with a double major in philosophy and political science and a minor in history. I had essentially nothing else to do.

I could have, I suppose, gotten an advanced degree in one of those disciplines or weighted tables, but it was law school for me. So law school came calling. I grew up in Michigan and when I visited University of Kentucky for my visit in my senior year, there was three feet of snow in Michigan and there were flowers blooming and trees budding and

And it was the opening weekend of Keeneland in Lexington. It was the week before Kentucky was playing Michigan in the Final Four in New Orleans. There were street vendors. There were girls in shorts. It was a fantastic place to visit. And that's how I ended up in Kentucky and am still here today.

Drew Hannush (03:49.085)
Mmm.

Drew Hannush (04:01.354)
Well, there's another thing we share in common because I'm from Michigan too. So what part of Michigan are you from?

Brian Haara (04:07.336)
The west side, right on Lake Michigan, a town called Muskegon.

Drew Hannush (04:11.122)
Okay, all right. My brother was just up there. He was taking the ferry across to Wisconsin and back. Yeah

Brian Haara (04:13.651)
Hmm. Right, Milwaukee. Right, it's straight across from Milwaukee, so there's a cross-lake ferry that goes twice a day. It's easier to get to a brewer's game than it is a Detroit game on my side of the state.

Drew Hannush (04:23.414)
Very nice. So now somehow I moved.

Drew Hannush (04:32.184)
Very nice. Uh, that's an interesting stadium too. I had fun going up there and, uh, watching people tailgate before a baseball game. I'm like, okay, this is new. I like it. So yeah, absolutely. So now you're into the, the bourbon culture. What drew you into, uh, into bourbon?

Brian Haara (04:36.801)
Mm-hmm.

Brian Haara (04:40.732)
Right.

That's right. Tailgate when you can.

Brian Haara (04:53.567)
The history of it is really what did it. I didn't know bourbon from a box when I moved to Lexington. My first bourbon I remember would have been in Commonwealth Stadium at a SEC football game and it was awful. I mean, I couldn't stand it. I'm sure it was something that was 6.99 or something, but I didn't like it. And slowly but surely, once you could afford it, I found some Maker's Mark and then

later in the mid 90s found Woodford and slowly found better bourbons than I had started out with and came around to liking it but it was really the, once I learned the history behind bourbon that really got me engrossed into it and to what I am today as a bourbon enthusiast or whatever they call us these days.

Drew Hannush (05:46.411)
So you're into bourbon law now. How did that come about that you suddenly worked into working in the bourbon industry?

Brian Haara (05:57.219)
Well, when you're in Kentucky, you end up working one way or another, at least on the fringes of the bourbon industry. So in the last few decades, I suppose, I've had cases on the fringes, but it was an insurance case or it was some sort of breach of contract case or an employment case, something like that just happened to involve a distillery. So not what I would consider bourbon law.

It's the same sort of law that applies to everyone. But then I stumbled on a case from 1881 that just in researching a different subject that I could tell was about Woodford Reserve. And when you're from Kentucky and you have family coming in, you wanna take them to a bourbon tour and you're either gonna take them to Makers Mark or Woodford. Those are the two.

I think most idyllic, beautiful drives to get into the distillery and you get there and they have both have historical properties and it's kind of the country look to it. It's what you I think dream about when you think of a distillery. There's plenty of other great tours too, but they don't have that small history, I guess is a way to say it. So I could tell this case was talking about Woodford Reserve and I had been there probably 10 times for tours.

But this case is talking about James Crow and E.H. Taylor and LeBron Graham, which I remembered is how Woodford Reserve got its start. They called it LeBron Graham. But they never mentioned those names on the tour at all. So I kept reading the case and thinking why, you know, if James Crow was the distiller there, why don't they mention it? And then I had the bright idea that there might be other cases out there.

Drew Hannush (07:38.827)
Mm-hmm.

Brian Haara (07:52.315)
that might talk about some of these distilleries from back in the 1800s and in early 1900s. And sure enough, there were. I mean, I was finding them left and right. So because lawyers have so much spare time, I started a blog called Sippin' Corn. And my initial focus was not so much to review bourbons or do anything like that, but it was to tell the story of bourbon history through old lawsuits.

Drew Hannush (08:05.518)
Ha ha.

Brian Haara (08:20.903)
And each time I would find an old case, I would research it a little bit more and then write about it. And that really got me into thinking about bourbon from the legal standpoint. And then I ended up with a case that was a little more front and center in the bourbon world, but it was still the sort of things that I had done all along. It was a trademark infringement allegation. So I was defending a distillery, a new distillery.

Drew Hannush (08:21.226)
Mm.

Brian Haara (08:49.683)
from one of the heritage distilleries who was alleging trademark infringement. And that actually required me to take a really deep dive into the history, to talk about the historic name of the distillery, the location, what happened there in the 1800s and 1900s, because it was all part of our defense. And that was really, I would say, my first case that was bourbon law. And it's.

Drew Hannush (09:00.352)
Mm.

Brian Haara (09:18.551)
snowballed since then. We got a great result there. It got national attention. Other distilleries started calling me and then as Kentucky passed a vintage spirits law, I started guiding a lot of clients on that. As more and more brands started cropping up, people call me to represent them on their brand development and their trademark issues, their contract issues, all those sorts of things. So...

So now I'm to the point where I'm helping brand startups, helping build warehouses, helping start brands and make sure that you're good with your trademarks. And it's been fun. I don't know that I've ever timed anything right in my life, but this one's worked out. I'm blessed about it.

Drew Hannush (10:01.526)
I'm gonna go.

Drew Hannush (10:06.018)
That's great. And the thing that can be tough about going back through some of those old documents is that the language is somewhat different and what you call this or what you call that. And of course the names of distilleries change over the years and trying to get all of that. How do you approach that in terms of trying to...

in this case, you are trying to defend the client or you're trying to help a client. How do you go about making sure that you're getting all those old bits of information into the proper context?

Brian Haara (10:49.027)
It's all about research and just dedication to looking under every rock and making sure that you're better prepared than the other side. I don't know that there's another, there's no shortcut to it, that's for sure. It's a really labor-intensive process, as is most of the law. It's not as sexy as the movies and the TV shows would portray us. It's just...

Drew Hannush (11:13.131)
Yeah.

Brian Haara (11:14.559)
is just bearing down and doing it. And like many things, once you do it more, you're better at it. And once you see all of the old archaic language and you understand it, you're better at deciphering it and translating it into modern language and modern theories. So a lot of it comes with a learning curve. And fortunately, by the time I really got into bourbon law, I'd been practicing long enough.

that I had some of that backbone.

Drew Hannush (11:47.254)
Do you kind of have to, cause I find this as a history researcher that you've got to kind of be humble as you're going through and doing this, because you'll feel like you have the answer and then you'll dig a little deeper into a document and it's like, Oh, that's, that's not true at all.

Brian Haara (12:03.587)
completely. It just blows it completely out of the water and it takes you in six different directions and sometimes you actually end up back on that original thread but you've just taken this detour for weeks or months at a time but there's just so many layers of information and so many different sources.

Uh, that's, that's one of the reasons I think that ties back to, you just have to bear down and, and do the research and make sure you understand it and make sure you've, you've looked everywhere. But I've definitely experienced that, uh, too, with trying to find history out of these old lawsuits.

Drew Hannush (12:45.786)
when you're reading these old lawsuits and you're going through depositions and testimony, and you see how the lawyers are working, the defendant or the plaintiff, and you're trying to figure out, do you see a lot of similarities or are there some quirky things that you've kind of bumped into where you're like, boy, that wouldn't fly today kind of thing?

Brian Haara (13:12.455)
But it was so much more formal, which I suppose that it doesn't just apply to the law, but it was so much more formal in the 1800s and 1900s. The level of formality is just off the charts. You know, they were expected to both speak and write in this really artificial, not user-friendly language using a lot of Latin phrases.

um, using a sentence structure that just was not conversational. And during it's, it's really evolved more during my time of practice, the, uh, the entire profession, I think has made a nice shift toward being more understandable and approachable, which has got to be nice from the client standpoint. So you just don't, you don't feel, I mean, if you're a client back then, you

Drew Hannush (14:05.498)
Ha ha.

Brian Haara (14:09.703)
You just don't know what's happening. I don't know how you could follow it. And I think it's better for client service now to have it in a more common language that's approachable and understandable because there's enough things to not understand about the law. There's so many intricacies in the law. A lot of it doesn't necessarily make sense from a justice standpoint when you're one of the parties who's committed on one side or the other.

So there's plenty of things that lawyers have to explain to their clients without being bogged down by artificial language. So that part's been nice, but it was really dramatic to see it written both in the way that the lawyers were talking during depositions and asking the questions, and especially in how they wrote to the court in their briefs.

Drew Hannush (15:03.59)
One thing that always gets me about legal documents is that it appears there's no rule in law or with lawyers about run on sentences. You can make a sentence as long as you want. And so I find myself reading these sentences and I'm lost about halfway through it because I've lost the point. We're just going on with, you know.

Brian Haara (15:27.935)
You're absolutely right and I don't know why lawyers do that, but somehow or another we got trained to do that. And the use of, I mean, who else uses semicolons other than lawyers? And there's so many of the dashes that we set things aside and footnotes and parentheticals and they're all in the same sentence and it's really hard to follow. So I know exactly what you're talking about.

Drew Hannush (15:31.202)
Ha ha ha!

Drew Hannush (15:52.546)
No.

Brian Haara (15:54.299)
It's one thing that a lot of attorneys in the last at least a couple of decades have really tried to improve their writing and there's all sorts of continuing legal ed seminars that are supposed to help lawyers relearn how to write from the way we learned it in law school.

Drew Hannush (16:14.95)
When I was studying the Lem Motlow case in the 1920s, he was up for murder. And he's the nephew of Jack Daniel, who ran the distillery for many, many years. What I was struck by, and I wrote about it in the book, that you can read transcripts, but you're not going to get certain elements.

when somebody's speaking sarcastically or when somebody's coughed and the room has suddenly changed mood and that sort of thing. Do you find yourself when you're reading these old transcripts that you feel like you've missed something because the tone of the discussion changes and you're like not sure why?

Brian Haara (17:07.435)
I know that I'm missing things and so many depositions now are taken on video and they can be stored so much easier than they had been even in past years. And I think researchers 150 years from now will have a lot better time of being able to capture those.

those changes in tones and the sarcasm and those sorts of things. When it's just written, you can't tell. You can't tell if the witness paused before the answer or paused in the middle of the sentence because all the transcription shows is exactly what was said without any pauses.

So I know I'm missing things. I know I'm missing some finer details and so much can be said non-verbally. I know I'm missing things. So part of the fun maybe in researching and trying to put these stories back together is guessing on what was really going on, guessing what the motivation was, guessing what people were thinking and seeing if you can put that part of the story. Because I think that's what makes history interesting.

is putting yourself there and how would you feel or putting yourself there and seeing what motivations were. History that just tells you fact is I guess more of you know in encyclopedia. It's not a story so that's what I like about the bourbon side of this of history is that you and I we're telling stories we're not just telling dry history.

Drew Hannush (18:51.426)
Yeah, and that's the challenge too, when all of a sudden you're having to write in a book about this and try to detail it in the most truthful way you can, but there's a certain amount of speculation that you have to do on your own end to piece things together. And I think one of the bigger challenges I run into is trying to figure out between, you know, this is all...

oral tradition really in a way being handed down, it's firsthand accounts or it's somebody talking about what somebody else did and how can you crawl inside somebody else's mind and actually have exactly what they were thinking or what their motivation was behind what they did. And you're also talking about two competitors, defense is trying to make its case and you

when you're doing that, there's room for manipulating the, you know, amount of evidence that you're going to give to be able to get your point across. And so again, when you're having to write about this and in doing your cases as well, I mean, how do you filter that? I mean, what, what can you do to kind of, um, figure out how to approach that or how do you approach that?

Brian Haara (19:54.129)
Right.

Brian Haara (20:17.019)
Well, one, you have a healthy degree of skepticism whenever you're reading witness testimony or party testimony because like you said, they are putting their best spin on it and they are trying to avoid answering the questions that they know will harm their case or they're being evasive. They're doing all those things. That part has not changed in the world of witness testimony.

So what I have tried to focus on are probably two things. One, I try to focus on what the court actually found to have been the facts. Because the judge, when the judge gets to decide a case as opposed to a jury, the judge is making those decisions on what the facts are based on who's more believable, who's more credible, who had a greater degree of the evidence.

And that I think helps establish what the facts are and what the verifiable or trustworthy facts are. The other thing I look at is documents because I've got the theory that documents can't lie. They can be used to lie, but the document itself at least can't lie. So one thing I've done in my research is I've really tried to pay attention to the exhibits that were used at trial.

and try to piece together what the facts are from a little more disinterested, let's call it a piece of evidence rather than testimony.

Drew Hannush (21:49.494)
Yeah, it'd be nice to be a fly on the wall if you could. And, but you, but you figure that the judge hopefully has seen all those, uh, he's heard all the sarcasm and he's dealt with all of the, and hopefully he doesn't have his own agenda and is kind of pushing it in a particular direction or not. That's.

Brian Haara (21:51.738)
Oh gosh.

Brian Haara (21:59.024)
Right.

Brian Haara (22:07.611)
Which I found that too. There were there were judges leading up to prohibition that clearly had an agenda and As they were campaigning they stated what their agenda was, you know to make the county dry or to run out anyone who was dealing in liquor and then sure enough you get some of those folks on trial and The judge is trying to just Run them through the mill. So there are there have been judges with agendas. No, no doubt

There are judges who are no doubt better at reading character and veracity than others But when it comes to reading something from the 1880s I think my best choices are what the what the judge ended up ruling or what the what the jury found That may be even better than just one person when you've got a jury finding The jury decides what the facts are and then the documents. It's probably the best we can do

Drew Hannush (22:54.093)
Yeah.

Brian Haara (23:05.295)
But I'm with you. I'd love to have been a fly on the wall during some of those hearings during the depositions during the strategy sessions Hearing what was going on? In in EH Taylor's head as he was in litigation He was in several lawsuits at any given time so that the guy really loved his litigation He would have been someone great to follow or represent actually he would have been great to have as a client

Drew Hannush (23:20.526)
Ha ha.

Drew Hannush (23:30.882)
Hehehe

Yes. You make a lot of money off of him. He's, he's constantly at it. Um, some of the things I was reading today, I mean, honestly, I don't know how many pages this document is that I'm going through, but I'm just a hundred pages in on the WA gains case and I'm learning so much about whiskey, but then I'm also at the same time watching some of these devices that are used by attorneys. And so as this, uh,

Brian Haara (23:35.869)
Yeah.

Drew Hannush (24:03.094)
vice president for W.A. Gaines is on the stand, or he's giving his deposition, he's constantly being interrupted by the, by the, I guess he's a defense attorney, I'm trying to think, put on which side he's on, but Mr. Huff. And it's so funny because every time he interrupts, he says, that's incompetent, irrelevant, and immaterial. And it's like,

Every time the guy asks a question and they're legitimate questions to me, but yet he just keeps going in confident, irrelevant and immaterial. And after a while, I started feeling sorry for the attorney on the other side because I'm like, who wants to be called those things over and over again? So, I mean, do you think that he was doing that mainly because he was trying to knock the

the guy giving the deposition off of his, uh, off of his stride and get him to shake up a little bit or, uh, was there another purpose behind that? I mean, I know sometimes you're just trying to get something in the books to say, I don't agree with that, you know, or what that question that's being answered.

Brian Haara (25:14.759)
My guess is that you're right on target. This is, these are still things that lawyers do today, both when they're, they're the ones asking the questions and then also when more particularly in this scenario, when they're the one who is objecting to the questions or objecting to the answers as non-responsive and then.

There's you say motion to strike as if that's going to do anything. But you, but you object to every single question and you, you do it in order to take the person off their game. You do it to get them frustrated. You do it to push their buttons. You do it so that they're not thinking straight because the, in, in witness preparation, you focus on being calm and deliberative and thinking.

about what the question is before you ever say the first word of the answer. And making sure that you know fully 100% in your head what the answer is and you're not guessing and you're not speculating and you're not adding anything else into it. You're just answering the question that's been asked. And that's your rules as a witness who is answering questions.

And the sometimes an attorney looks at it as their job being to take that person off their game, to get them to guess, to get them to speculate, to get them frustrated, to get them in a faster mode so that they're not thinking about what the question is and they're not thinking ahead of time of what their answer is. So I think it's mostly gamesmanship is what you were saying.

Drew Hannush (26:54.818)
Okay. And I mean, I've never seen so many questions rephrased about fusil oils. And it's like, constantly, he's asking and then you realize after a while, he's asked the same question about six different times, but in six different ways. And it's always after the guy starts to give an answer that he jumps back in and goes, but you said before, and then, you know, so it's really interesting to watch how they're just kind of

picking away at this guy and trying to get him to, uh, either say something that, uh, maybe pull something out of him that he didn't expect, uh, or didn't want to say or whatever it may be.

Brian Haara (27:34.659)
Right? That's what the goal is. And if you don't get the answer worded the way you want it, you ask the question another way. Or if they don't give you everything that you want, you take another run at it. You know, maybe three, maybe four more runs at it. Because going into the questioning, you know what you need to prove by the end of the case to win. So you wanna get the best sound bite as you can. I think particularly now.

with so much deposition testimony on video. It's so easy to take a clip of the eighth time that you ask the question and then finally got the answer that you think works perfectly. And you can ignore those, you know, the first seven dress rehearsals at the question.

Drew Hannush (28:23.306)
So it's interesting that you mentioned this case from 1881, because while I was doing my research on the Tennessee book, I came across something interesting. I was trying to figure out when brand names really started to come about. And it looked like in the 1850s, really around the time when they were starting to adulter whiskey, and now you have transportation where you're getting whiskey shipped in from all different places.

knowing the source of that whiskey became very important. But when I read those old documents, I tend to read when they say the Old Crow Distillery or the Oscar Pepper Distillery, that there wasn't really an official name for these places, that they would call the, there was a distillery in Paris, Kentucky that they called the Chicken Cock Distillery, they called it the James A. Miller Distillery, they called it the Gigi White Distillery.

Um, and so you get all of these different names going on and it leads to that question of, you know, when did they start actually officially giving these things name? Now I know during the excise, uh, act in, in 62, then all of a sudden they had to start registering distilleries. So you had to probably give them an official name at that time for your distillery.

But, um, but trademark law didn't really hit until 1881. And that's why I thought it was really interesting that you've bumped into a case right there that the first one that I'm reading about, I'm going, Oh, 1881. I know that date. Cause that's when, uh, they, they first, uh, finally, officially got the trademark, uh, law in place.

Brian Haara (30:04.77)
Great.

Brian Haara (30:12.679)
Yeah, so I think it probably, the true answer is I don't know exactly when. I wish I did. My guess, the best I can tell from what I've read is that it's around the time that Gaines starts their empire, WA Gaines, and which of course they, one of the first people they hire is EH Taylor. And he's of, he's of the same mindset that they are. I mean, they were. They were of the.

the same ilk. What they realized and what I think distillers before them really didn't realize is once you have something that's popular, you want to continue that after the death of, in this case, the distiller.

So, whereas in past times, the name of the distillery would change to the son's name or to the mentee's name after the distiller died. Take pepper, for example, it starts with Elijah Pepper.

in the 1830s in Versailles, Kentucky. And eventually to our lawsuit, it gets to be the old Oscar Pepper Distillery. And it's being run by a young ward of EH Taylor named James Pepper. And it probably would have got changed to James Pepper, but what Gaines learned and what Taylor learned is they wanted to continue using the name of the popular person.

So, E.H. Taylor and W.A. Gaines actually lifted the James Crow name and the rights to using that name out of the old Oscar Pepper Distillery. It couldn't, it wasn't for anyone's good other than their own. I mean, I think they had a plan to lift that out and leave the Pepper Distillery behind, but they started their own distillery called the James Crow Distillery.

Brian Haara (32:15.851)
And at the time from maybe around 1862 with the excise tax laws, distillers had to put their name of their distillery on the government side of the barrel. There's two sides of two heads to a barrel. Um, one, they really could put anything they wanted to on it. Uh, but the other one needed certain information that needed information that this state, the city, the name of the distillery, the registered distillery number, all those things.

had to be branded onto the barrel. And so they tended to be burned on at the time. So that's the brand. And as you say, as whiskey is shipped out and its name and its source and its provenance becomes important, people were asking for their bourbon by the name of the whiskey that was branded onto the barrel sitting behind the bar at the tavern.

and that's what evolved into what we call brand name.

Drew Hannush (33:18.59)
It's really interesting because I was reading today as I was going through and that that's where I jumped into this thing about the government head of the barrel and the commercial head of the barrel. And again, here's something that's kind of lost to time that you find in this deposition. And what I found interesting about it is that I had talked to somebody not long ago and they said, you know, old crow has always been called whiskey. It was called whiskey almost up to prohibition.

Brian Haara (33:28.188)
Right.

Drew Hannush (33:48.022)
And then I'm reading this deposition and it basically said that it was called old crow on the commercial side. So it's what they wanted to call it. But on the government side, the official designation was bourbon. So it had to have bourbon written on the other side of the barrel. And so when we read newspapers from that time period and you see sometimes people are calling this a whiskey and sometimes they're calling it a bourbon.

losing their mind. I mean, can they not read a barrel? But now, after reading that, it's like, it makes sense. It said both on the barrel. But interesting, too, because that every time I find one of these things, it sends me down another rabbit hole where I go, well, when did the government all of a sudden say bourbon was a name that needs to be associated with this style of whiskey? Because I was finding

Brian Haara (34:22.463)
It's both, right? Right? Right.

Drew Hannush (34:46.322)
articles basically in the 1840s that talked about bourbon rye whiskey. So what they were suggesting was that it was rye whiskey that was made in bourbon counties. So they just called it bourbon rye whiskey. So in that way, it wasn't a corn based whiskey that they were talking about. And so somebody in the government at some point went, you know, we should make this an official designation. But

There's really, I've never seen anybody write about something in the 19th century where the government said, okay, bourbon, that's an official designation.

Brian Haara (35:21.251)
I haven't found that either. And it's something that I think evolved, but I'm not sure the first source that would have required that sort of identification as bourbon whiskey versus just whiskey. And then of course there's the old legend stories about the barrels entering the port from bourbon County onto the Ohio river. And so it had to be stamped with a port of origin and that's why it was called

The contents was whiskey, so all of a sudden it became bourbon whiskey. I mean, there's just so many rabbit holes to go down and so much legend that is not verifiable like that story. But it makes sense, right? It makes sense to some extent.

Drew Hannush (36:03.166)
Yeah, it's fun. It's one of those things that in 1971, I think is when that really started, because there's a Henry Croje wrote a great book, well footnoted on the history of bourbon in the early days. And that was one of his pieces of speculation. We talk about going through government documents and trying to figure out tone and what were they speculating on versus

Brian Haara (36:15.27)
Mm-hmm.

Drew Hannush (36:32.638)
So that's where it came from because he specifically says he's kind of working this out in his head and he's going, Oh, it must've been this big bourbon county before, you know, they're saying it was part of old bourbon county because now that's Mason County. So, um, they wanted to designate that because that area was known for making whiskey, um, that they were going to use old bourbon. Um, and it's interesting because it's hung on for so long as a theory yet as I've gone through and done the research.

Brian Haara (36:34.883)
Mm-hmm.

Drew Hannush (37:02.826)
Just looking at Old Crow whiskey, I thought it was interesting in this deposition or one of the depositions, they talked about how WA Gains all of a sudden backdated and went to 1835 as the date when Old Crow was first used. But I was seeing barrels of whiskey being sold in Natchez, Mississippi in 1846 that were selling it as celebrated

Brian Haara (37:17.199)
Yeah.

Drew Hannush (37:32.334)
Crow's whiskey. So they weren't using the word old and they were actually talking about it like it was a person. It's Crow's whiskey because he's still alive and so this is his whiskey. And then a couple years later, all of a sudden it becomes old Crow or it becomes Crow whiskey before it becomes old Crow whiskey. And old is really only attached to it when it's got some age to it. And so you're...

Brian Haara (37:42.267)
Right.

Drew Hannush (38:01.602)
I mean, how do you find all of this stuff? And that's what makes it really difficult because until you know these pieces of history, it's hard to be definite on anything.

Brian Haara (38:13.435)
Well, and I think that's where lawsuits actually help. And, and, and I like that that's my really only schtick that I have for telling bourbon history. Um, and my, my theory is this telling it with, you've done a lot of research, so you might be able to debunk me right now. But so much history from the distilleries and from distilling families was lost during prohibition.

There was never any thought that it would be repealed. It seemed, of course, like it's here to stay. Distilleries are being decommissioned. The copper is being ripped out and used for something else. They're being torn down, and there's no use in saving any of the paper. And the oral history, after even a short amount of time, is forgotten, and it's gone.

So the, uh, maybe the only place only at least verifiable place to find this history now is in the pre-prohibition lawsuits. And you've still got that's, that's where the exhibits are. That's where the testimony is. That's where all that history is located. And I think that's, it's really fortunate that.

that courts have tended to be hoarders of this kind of information. And in Kentucky, unless we have 120 counties in Kentucky, so each with a circuit court. And unless the courthouse burned down or was flooded, they sent all of their records to Frankfurt, our capital, and we've got a really great archive system.

Drew Hannush (39:32.054)
Hmm

Brian Haara (39:52.135)
And that's where I go. That's where I read these transcripts. That's where I put my hands on these exhibits that were used in the Taylor v. Stagg case. That's where I find all of my information is from the archives. And it's, I don't know that it's really anywhere else.

Drew Hannush (40:10.678)
Do you find yourself having to be a handwriting specialist after a while? That says these handwritten documents, some of them are insane.

Brian Haara (40:19.455)
They were awful. It really took a long time to kind of learn what the letters were and learn that, oh, in this phase of history, the S looked more like a different letter. And my mother-in-law writes calligraphy. So I actually had her read some of these transcripts to help me decipher what some of them were. So I probably had three, four people look at

Drew Hannush (40:20.787)
Hahaha

Brian Haara (40:48.208)
especially sections that I just couldn't figure out. Just to try to decipher these things, it was definitely a challenge.

Drew Hannush (40:56.43)
I spent a lot of time in the Bourbon County courthouse going through old title deeds. When I was in Tennessee, I would be in this certain... They would have eras that they would talk about in the archive office about, oh yeah, those are the hard years. There was a guy in Bourbon County, he was in love with loops. Every single letter looked like a loop.

Brian Haara (41:23.379)
Had a loop.

Drew Hannush (41:25.554)
I have no idea what this says. I've looked at it 30 times and I cannot figure it out. So.

Brian Haara (41:31.451)
Yeah, and there's sometimes you get a breakthrough and that's you practically find a Rosetta stone and that helps you go back. And I found myself saying, no, I saw this kind of thing here in another letter. And then you go back to find it and you put the pieces together. And that's sort of what makes it fun is the moments of discovery.

Drew Hannush (41:37.142)
Hahaha

Drew Hannush (41:53.154)
The typewriter was the greatest invention to the researcher. So we talked about EH Taylor. I actually, we both have stuff that we're going to sip on tonight. You've already been sipping a little bit on yours and I have a special one that I pulled out. We're definitely going to jump in and talk a bit about EH Taylor because I don't know if there's a more litigious guy that I've run across. In fact, as I was doing the research on the Bottled and Bond Act.

Brian Haara (41:55.831)
Oh, absolutely.

Drew Hannush (42:22.722)
I kept looking for where he had any kind of input before the Bottled and Bond Act. All I could ever find on him was that he was suing anybody who had a name Taylor because he was dead set on anybody not degrading his name in one way or another by doing that. But the whiskey that I pulled out...

Drew Hannush (42:50.355)
You will appreciate the name on this, I'm sure.

Brian Haara (42:54.476)
Oh dear, yes, the Hermitage. That's your gains right there.

Drew Hannush (42:58.502)
Yes, it is. This is an interesting bottle. And you scared me in your book when I went back through and was doing a little review on the book because you have, uh, discuss a lawsuit that happened with WA gains going after a California, uh, entity that was using the Hermitage name. And this whiskey was aged for nine years in California. And I went, uh, Oh,

Brian Haara (43:24.323)
in California.

Drew Hannush (43:27.778)
But then, so this was distilled in 1914, and it was bottled in 1923, which is the year that E.H. Taylor passed away. And this was distilled in Frankfurt, but shipped out on rail car, and then aged in a California bonded warehouse. But because this is 1914, I had to check the dates, and it was like that lawsuit was in 1901. And I went, oh, good. I'm like, I'm not drinking a fake whiskey here, I hope.

Brian Haara (43:52.899)
Right.

Drew Hannush (43:57.454)
Ha ha ha.

Brian Haara (43:57.859)
No, no, that's no, if it's distilled in Frankfurt, that's right. Um, hermitage, hermitage was just a juggernaut and, uh, it's, it's a really amazing story. And it's, it's the really first time that investment money is coming into the industry. They had so many innovations. They, they did it big and they did it hard and it's, uh, it's so many great stories.

Drew Hannush (44:23.882)
Yeah. And that was a, I mean, it took up a good plot of land down there along the Kentucky river and in Frankfurt, we actually, when I brought this back from California, because we got, I got this, I had to do a cross country trip because I knew I couldn't fly it back. Um, there was a vault filled with pre-prohibition whiskey. And the reason why I felt like this was probably legit was because the other whiskies they had were old Taylor's old crow.

Brian Haara (44:39.967)
Mm-hmm.

Drew Hannush (44:52.482)
They were all stuff that was associated either with, uh, in some way with the HD Taylor, even if they were stag, um, products afterwards, but, um, uh, it was like, okay, well this, this has to be legit. So we actually took it up, uh, Todd Ritter, you know, Todd Ritter, uh, he and I met up at EH Taylor's grave site, which looks over the old Hermitage location.

Brian Haara (45:11.363)
Right, right, right.

Drew Hannush (45:20.538)
And we broke this bottle open to do a tasting in a, in a toast to him. And of course the cork decided to break because it's only a hundred year old cork. So what are you going to do? But anyway, so it was fun getting, getting to toast him. So, uh, I figured I'd give you a treat and although I can't share it, unfortunately through the internet, I would be more than happy to do so, um, to kind of give you an idea on this because

Brian Haara (45:28.559)
Right. Sure.

Brian Haara (45:40.849)
Ah.

Drew Hannush (45:49.342)
As I was reading all that deposition today, and he's describing the process of making whiskey, and this is 1907. I'm thinking this is only seven years later. How different could the process have been in what they were doing then into this glass? And, um, the thing I'd love about.

Brian Haara (46:07.)
It's the same. He's describing the bourbon that you have. That's amazing.

Drew Hannush (46:12.842)
Exactly. And so, um, this thing is like apple vinegar. It has this really heavy apple vinegar note and then it's, it's nutty, but it also has a, um, a musty warehouse smell that I smelled in a lot of those old whiskies. Um, and the way they describe the, you know, today we learn about, they take the heads and the tails out of the whiskey from that.

deposition, it's, I sense that they weren't necessarily as worried about those cut points, that wasn't really what they focused so much on. They thought the barrel was going to solve some of those oil issues and some of those. So it makes me wonder how much, um, heads and tails are actually still in this whiskey and makes this the funky thing that it really is because it's, it's a heavy bodied whiskey and it just.

comes at you with these, everything is just right in your face in terms of sense. There's no, let me find that smell. It just comes right out at you. So it's a fascinating experience.

Brian Haara (47:23.055)
Yeah, I find that characteristic of the really old ones as well. And I wish I knew the science better of water in whiskey. But of course, it was distilled to a lower proof. It was put into the barrel at a lower proof. So it's put into wood that is tighter grained. And it's just, it does different things when it's in that.

that situation than putting it in at 120 or 125 and, you know, aging all the way up to 130 something proof before you cut it back down. It makes it different. And it's really amazing what some of these really old bourbons can taste like.

Drew Hannush (48:07.31)
The thing that this does that I don't think I've ever experienced either with a bourbon is that it coats the tongue and that apple, it's like a red delicious apple. Like you just bit into one and it just stays on the palate. It doesn't go anywhere. I'm still tasting it. And then there's like a little chocolate coming in behind it. But it's just like, how do you get a flavor to hang on your palate that long?

I could probably go another two minutes and it's still going to be there. And so you wonder the different talents that they had back then and what they were doing and whether any of that is really used at all today.

Brian Haara (48:43.172)
It's.

Brian Haara (48:54.335)
That's a great question. I wonder it too. And I mean, I guess it's the oils that are either distilled out now or filtered out now. It's really a completely different animal.

And I found that sometimes it, yeah, sometimes it's not good. I mean, it's, and that's because of oxidation and those sorts of things. So you're, you're really, really lucky when you can find something that's that old, that is you can still have that same experience that someone opening it in 1914 would have had.

Drew Hannush (49:29.294)
That's always the amazing thing about, about tasting something that old is that you think, first my mind goes right to, man, they've all been dead for a really long time. All the people who have made this whiskey, you know, the lives that they lived and the, there was a realization with me at one time where I was watching this program about the 20th century and they start in 1900.

And you're talking about people still having outhouses and you know, there's not a communication was definitely across the countryside. Uh, you know, places like Tennessee and Kentucky still didn't really have telephone poles running through and electricity and the rest. And that at the end of the century, here we are all on computers. The internet has come along, you know, all within that one span. And to think what those people back then.

Brian Haara (49:59.517)
Right.

Drew Hannush (50:25.366)
the life they lived and what they did and how that all speaks to you through an old whiskey like that.

Brian Haara (50:31.635)
It's part of why I love whiskey. I mean, it's family, it's history, it's technology, it's advancements, and yet it's all still home to the heart.

Drew Hannush (50:47.19)
So there was a case that you brought up that I thought was interesting that I had never heard before about E.H. Taylor having to leave the country, basically. This was early on. Can you relate some of that story?

Brian Haara (51:03.879)
Sure. So, E.H. Taylor, I go hot and cold with him. He's someone who clearly contributed a tremendous amount to bourbon history, and yet I think he's kind of a scoundrel. I don't know that I would like him. I would probably admire him, but I don't know that I'd really like him.

One thing that he did that led to him having to flee is that he was starting to get in a financial bind at the, when he owned the OFC and he started selling the same barrels of whiskey twice, uh, by some reports three times. Um, now the way you would sell a barrel of whiskey back then is through something called a warehouse receipt. So someone would, would pay you upfront. You would give them a piece of paper that had barrel numbers on it.

And in a certain amount of time when the whiskey could be taken out of bond, the buyer could come collect his barrels of whiskey. So he sold some to farmers. He sold some to distributors. He sold some to other distilleries. He sold some to George T. Stagg. He sold them all over the place and he sold them more than once. So when it came time to deliver the barrels, he couldn't.

And so he had all of these different folks he sold warehouse receipts to, suing him and it happens. It culminates, I should say in, I think 1877, which there was a panic in the financial grain and financial industry at the time. So there were pressures on him already.

Um, and he was, he had overextended himself, uh, both on at the OFC. And this is the timeframe when James pepper went bankrupt. So he, for a very brief time, uh, bought the old Oscar pepper distillery. Um, and he lost his shirt. He, he went bankrupt. So, uh, stag actually bought the old Oscar pepper distillery from Taylor.

Brian Haara (53:18.195)
and then ended up selling it to LeBron Graham. That's how it got into LeBron Graham's hands and eventually Brown Forman's. But as it relates to the OFC, he owed everybody money. He had no money to pay them. And the story is that he, and I found it in a case, there were rumors that he had left, really, really smart researchers like Mike Veach said, well, no, he really didn't leave the country.

Drew Hannush (53:22.026)
Mm.

Brian Haara (53:47.007)
Um, and he, he has a bunch of Taylor papers that he curated at the Filson historical society. Um, but no, he didn't leave. He didn't have to leave the country. Um, I found reported in a lawsuit. So I take it as truth that he fled the country because of his pecuniary troubles.

Drew Hannush (53:57.934)
Mm.

Brian Haara (54:07.675)
And he left his sons behind to deal with all of the mad creditors who were practically, I can picture had pitchforks. And he left his sons to deal with them. And not until George T. Stagg came in and said, all right, this is my plan. This is what I'll pay. The creditors will come back better than ever. I'll own the company by the way, Edmund.

But, uh, I'll, I'll let you back in and we'll make more whiskey. Not until all of that got settled. Did he, H Taylor come back to town.

Drew Hannush (54:43.058)
Wow. Yeah. He is an interesting character. And I know he and stag had quite a few battles against each other. You find through what you're reading that you sort of can see who the troublemaker was in that, or, uh, is it kind of up in the air?

Brian Haara (54:59.995)
I think the troublemaker probably was E.H. Taylor most of the time, but Stagg in his own right, even though he I think is perceived as a calmer personality, he was still shrewd and maybe the shrewdest thing he did was to play on E.H. Taylor's pride. And when he bought, when Stagg bought the OFC from Taylor, bought it out of essentially

Drew Hannush (55:14.638)
Hmm.

Brian Haara (55:28.915)
He named it, and this is just genius, to play on E.H. Taylor's pride, he named it the E.H. Taylor Jr. Company. And he owned the company. Taylor owned one share, Stag owned the rest. But he wanted this public face of Taylor. And Taylor, with all of his pride, was all but too happy to let the company be called the E.H. Taylor Jr. Company.

And then, you know, 10 years later or whatever it was when they, when they part ways, Stagg has a company named the E.H. Taylor Jr. Company and Taylor has to sue him to try to make them stop. But it's the company name at that point.

Drew Hannush (56:06.519)
Ha ha

Drew Hannush (56:12.37)
Wow. Kind of the thorn in your side. Yeah.

Brian Haara (56:13.747)
So, Shrewd. Yeah, exactly. He was definitely a thorn in Taylor's side, for sure.

Drew Hannush (56:20.974)
Taylor, one of the things that I found in doing my research was that Taylor was a big proponent of the pot still and the old style of making whiskey. But you see how quickly he can shift directions by the Bottled and Bond Act coming out. Because as soon as the Bottled and Bond Act, I see nothing about him beforehand, but nobody was embracing it in Kentucky initially.

And I think that was mostly because bottle production back then was still, um, semi-automatic machines and very expensive to purchase bottles. So not everybody was jumping on it, but Taylor went all in on the bottled and bond act and he was shipping off massive amounts of whiskey and bottles to Chicago and all around. And then that became his thing. And it's so interesting to watch because.

Everything that he was promoting beforehand was pot still old fashioned whiskey and sour mash. And none of those words appear anywhere after that. It's like he grabbed his marketing, a new marketing friend and, um, forget the past. This is what we're all about now at this, at this point. And I think that kind of speaks a little bit into who he was.

Brian Haara (57:40.287)
He's a genius marketer, if anything else. And he always continued to embrace the past, even when he wasn't doing things in the old way. Just remarkable way of just kind of pushing through.

kind of force of nature way. And it's, I loved listening to your, she called the updated podcast when you did the record scratch. I mean, it's, it's just amazing how it's, it's kind of part of what all bourbon enthusiasts think is that he led the charge on the Podlvin Bond Act.

Drew Hannush (58:07.614)
Yeah. Ha ha ha.

Brian Haara (58:21.955)
And I mean, I do know that a guy named Atherton here locally was a big proponent of it. He, he did a lot toward it. Uh, but it was really Taylor who is identified with it, um, and identified himself with it. Um, and it's, it's just amazing how, how you can take that and run. And all this time later, it's just kind of accepted as, as truth. And, uh, until someone digs.

Drew Hannush (58:37.313)
Yeah.

Brian Haara (58:50.435)
several layers deep because you had to dig for that because all of all of the press and all of the writers during this entire time frame adopt sort of hook line and sinker that he is the guy who pushed propelled the bottle and bond act

Drew Hannush (59:10.71)
That is really the challenge is how. Nope. Hang on just a second. Your recorder stopped for some reason. It says, uh, recording start stop due to hardware limitations.

Huh. What should I do? Let me see what it says. Let's see. Cause all running apps and tabs and rejoin the studio.

Drew Hannush (59:45.982)
If on a laptop, make sure it's plugged into a wall outlet. If your camera has auto light exposure, turn this feature off.

Drew Hannush (59:56.754)
That's probably what it is.

Drew Hannush (01:00:05.503)
Okay.

Drew Hannush (01:00:13.902)
Okay.

Drew Hannush (01:00:22.306)
The question is, how will I know that you are definitely recording? Okay. Oh, it will have a little REC by you. It is going to force you to leave and come back. I think.

Drew Hannush (01:00:37.311)
Okay.

Drew Hannush (01:00:41.638)
Okay, good. Hmm.

Drew Hannush (01:00:49.382)
Okay, perfect. Okay.

Drew Hannush (01:02:15.006)
There we go. And you're recording again.

Brian Haara (01:02:19.402)
Well, I'm plugged in and closed all the other tabs.

Drew Hannush (01:02:24.094)
Well, the good news is you got to the end of your sentence before it decided to pop out. So although I've completely... Yeah. Exactly. We'll just continue on. So one of the things I find interesting about Taylor is that in all of his fights to get his name and make sure that he protected his name...

Brian Haara (01:02:27.899)
Good! I don't have to try to splice together two halves of a sentence.

Drew Hannush (01:02:50.562)
Then when Prohibition came along and then the name got sold off, I think it went to National Distillers after that, the old Taylor brand. And then was it his son or was it a relative, Kenner Taylor? That okay. And Kenner tried to start up and make Kay Taylor whiskey and then he got in trouble because now he's using a name.

Brian Haara (01:03:06.683)
Kenner is one of the sons, yep.

Drew Hannush (01:03:18.038)
that, um, after his father fought so hard, that all of a sudden he can't use his own name.

Brian Haara (01:03:24.335)
Right. Yeah, that's a, it's a great story. Um, so, so Kenner is old by the time prohibition is, is repealed. Uh, but he's one of the few people, one of the few old timers who knew anything about the distilling business. And as the writing was on the wall that prohibition would be repealed, investment money from New York and Chicago starts coming in and people are buying mothballed distilleries.

the ones that still hopefully have the copper piping in them and some sort of infrastructure because they know that there's going to be a demand and they want to be on the ground floor to build a new distillery. So that's what, that's what happened here. There was a distillery in, in Frankfurt that is now an old granddad bottling plant. They don't do any distilling there, but they bottle beam bottles. Uh, uh,

lot of their whiskeys there and it's called the old granddad plant. So investment money comes in and buys it. They don't know what in the wide, wide world of sports they're doing. They at the very least know that they need some legitimacy and you get legitimacy by hearkening back to history. So they ask around and they're trying to find out who can help them, who can lend them that

credibility and they eventually find Kenner Taylor. They talk him into being the name and the face of the company. They rename it the K Taylor distillery and they start production as soon as they can. And, but by seeing that they're actually selling whiskey right away, they must have been sourcing it somehow, some way, which I don't know how, how anyone sourced at this time period.

but they were getting whiskey out to the market. And as you say, National Distillers owned the old Taylor brand. And so they took offense and they sued the K. Taylor Distillery because of using the Taylor name. Looking at the bottles and looking what was on the bottles, they weren't too terribly similar other than Taylor, but then I found some marketing materials, which was really funny.

Brian Haara (01:05:46.747)
They didn't have in the marketing materials, they didn't have just Kay Taylor's name and bio and picture. But the very first picture and bio that they had was of E.H. Taylor Jr. And they also had his son who was named Edmund Taylor pictured, he was really integral in the Pure Food and Drug Act timeframe. His dad was always sending him to D.C. to deal with politicians on that front. So they had all three of them.

Drew Hannush (01:05:58.478)
Ha ha ha.

Brian Haara (01:06:17.071)
pictured in the, in the bio and they're also talking, this is probably what really did them in is they were talking about the tailored name and how important the tailored name is. And you just, you just can't do that. That the marketers made it clear for the court that this was all about the goodwill that was part of the EH Taylor old Taylor name. And that's exactly why the owners got them involved.

Drew Hannush (01:06:29.617)
Mmm.

Brian Haara (01:06:47.879)
Um, so the court, the court prohibited the K Taylor distillery from doing some things, but not others. They wanted them, uh, they ordered them to put a, uh, a disclaimer on all of the bottles that they weren't affiliated with old Taylor or national distillers. Um, but the brand still existed and, uh, and national couldn't abide by that. So what do you do?

Here's trivia question. What do you do if you're a massive conglomerate and you lose a lawsuit to an upstart? What do you do? You buy the upstart. That's why today in 2024, this, this distillery is called the old granddad plant because national also owned the old granddad brand. That's where they started making old granddad.

Drew Hannush (01:07:21.578)
You buy the upstart.

Drew Hannush (01:07:37.25)
Mmm.

Brian Haara (01:07:40.879)
They've decommissioned the still, but again, are still using it for warehousing and for bottling. That's, that's why it is what it is today because national, you know, it didn't lose. It wasn't a complete loss. They got some things out of it, but they didn't have a complete win. They didn't totally destroy the brand. So they bought it and immediately stopped production of K Taylor.

Drew Hannush (01:07:49.006)
..

Drew Hannush (01:08:05.75)
You know, this reminds me of something. This is what history is all about is it, it shows you from the past things that will repeat sometime in the future. And I remember driving down to new hope, Kentucky and seeing a big water tower with the name dance on it. And then the next time I came by the name, Dan wasn't there anymore. And the first thing that goes through your mind is don't sell your name, whatever you do.

Brian Haara (01:08:25.816)
Right.

Brian Haara (01:08:31.875)
Right. Never, ever sell your name.

Drew Hannush (01:08:34.518)
Do not sell your name. We'll get you every time. Ah.

Brian Haara (01:08:37.739)
And that, that story has been told so many times in the bourbon world. I mean, if, if I had a, a track on repeat, it's that, um, it's happened with the Samuels, as you say, it happens with the dance. It happened with Dowling, Mary Dowling and the, and the Frazier brand. Um, and, and of course, Taylor time and time again with Taylor. Uh, it's just, it's just remarkable with history repeating itself with that very issue.

Drew Hannush (01:08:53.707)
Mm.

Drew Hannush (01:09:06.182)
Yeah. Well, we wouldn't have a maker's mark if, uh, if that hadn't have, uh, come about, but, and honestly, I think it's, it might be a better name. I mean, honestly, the way they've branded it. And as you said earlier, um, these old brands, when they are associated with an individual, um, and I think about James A Miller and the chicken cock brand, cause that's one that I really did a lot of research into. Uh, James A Miller,

Brian Haara (01:09:09.539)
That's... That's right. That's right.

Drew Hannush (01:09:35.358)
was such an important piece of that. But then he died when he was only like 42 years old and they adopted this name, Chickencock, but they had to put his name with it. And his name hung with that all the way through until prohibition. And so, but it was really interesting because they could have disconnected that name at any point because the name of the whiskey had become the thing that everybody was looking for rather than

James A. Miller. And in fact, history has shown that the reason why nobody really knows about James A. Miller is because in 1881, when they were having a book written or somebody had gone out and talked to somebody at the distillery about the history, they were like, well, he only owned it for like four years. And so they missed another 15 years of history before that, because he just had become a name rather than...

Brian Haara (01:10:33.787)
Right.

Drew Hannush (01:10:34.486)
being associated with the actual person. So it's interesting to see how this, uh, how this happens. Um, so let's talk about it. Now that we talked about, uh, maker's mark, we, we talk, uh, about their brilliant marketing through the years too. Um, one of the things you bring up is the story about, uh, how they got sued because of using handmade as a.

Brian Haara (01:10:38.796)
It is.

Drew Hannush (01:11:02.47)
marketing term and we've seen all sorts of different things, but I thought I would throw this at you because you made a point in the book that I thought was interesting. This is where we kind of look at things from a legal standpoint and you try to figure out, can you hand make something? Can you hand make whiskey? I think your point in the book was that...

really because there's a machine involved somewhere in between. Can you really call something handmade because it's gone through a machine. So I'm, I want to play on the other side of it because I was cooking my eggs this morning. And while I had the eggs in the pan, I was thinking, okay, wait a second. Many years ago, I had gotten on this kick where I was going to places and I would listen to audio books that were

somehow related to the area. So I was listening to Henry David Thoreau's Walden Woods while I was in Massachusetts and he kept talking about making unleavened bread. So when I got home I said, I should try to make, he talked about it so passionately that I should see if I could make some unleavened bread. So...

It's not easy. If I was like, I'm just like wearing my arms out with a rolling pin, trying to make this stuff. I am not going to use a bread maker. I'm doing this all the way that he said to do it other than I'm not putting it over a fire or whatever. I'm going to put it into the oven, but I did a lot of work, which makes me feel like that's a handmade product, even though I stuck it into a machine to cook it. But then I went a step further and I thought.

What about a pot still? Isn't a pot still, because if you know the way that James Crow and those old timers made whiskey, they used that still with fire underneath it. So it's basically just a vessel. It has no moving parts in it. It's just a piece of equipment and you're putting the whiskey into it with the grain. You're doing the distilling, but it's the fire. And you, and all the work you did beforehand.

Drew Hannush (01:13:14.122)
hand stirring the mash and doing all of that sort of stuff that they had to do. It seems like you could call that handmade and probably get away with it versus makers Mark, who we know they're using machines to do a lot of that work.

Brian Haara (01:13:15.863)
Right, right.

Brian Haara (01:13:30.475)
I think you're right. It's a one, it's a continuum. You're absolutely right on that. Some things are more handmade and some hand make a bowl than other things are. So you're right on that. And you're right that nothing that a modern day big legacy distillery does is

is handmade at all. I mean it's all computer driven. The master distiller is probably not even there for distillation runs. It's being run by a plant manager. The master distiller is not there deciding when to put another log under the pot still or to add more coal once they started using coal to heat. There's not a team hand stirring the in the vats with large paddles.

So it's very different. So I think there is an argument that bourbon was more handmade at one point in time. And if you look at labels historically, they do talk about being handmade. And when column stills are being introduced and where more mechanized procedures are being introduced, there's a lot of people lamenting the new mechanical mechanized ways.

and they are hearkening back for the bygone times when it was really handmade over an open flame. So all of that's true. Today though, calling something handmade, not so much. And so it's on the Maker's bottles and it's probably on other labels as well, but there were class actions that were filed in Florida and California against Maker's mark.

alleging basically fraud that their bourbon was marketed as handmade. And so that gave the impression to these purchasers allegedly that they were envisioning some small idyllic place in the Kentucky Hills and the Hollers. And that's where the whiskey was made by some old timers in overalls.

Drew Hannush (01:15:48.43)
Ha ha.

Brian Haara (01:15:48.659)
and doing everything by hand. Not a strong claim to begin with, but essentially all claims need to be taken seriously, and this one was, and makers came in on both of these cases and explained methodically, and with plenty of citation to law as to why they can put handmade on their labels when it's not literally made by hand.

and it's this concept called puffing or called puffery sometimes. And it's a great concept. It's basically sanctioned, I mean, lying is a strong word, but it's sanctioned lying when what you're saying is so obviously not true and not measurable that no one's gonna believe you. So be careful when you're saying things like,

voted the best whiskey ever. That's measurable. That is, you can define that, you can prove it, and if you put it on a label, you might get sued if you really weren't voted the best whiskey. But if you put handmade, you're fine.

Drew Hannush (01:17:06.643)
I've noticed that sometimes they'll say handcrafted. Well, the marketers try to adjust a little bit and make it even more vague. So there were not a hundred percent. Sounds like handmade, but it's not quite.

Brian Haara (01:17:10.412)
Yes.

Brian Haara (01:17:19.809)
Yeah, one of those, there are plenty of meaningless words when it comes to bourbon marketing and handcrafted is totally maybe one of the least meaningful words.

Drew Hannush (01:17:31.406)
Scratch made biscuits. It drives me nuts every time I hear it. Wait, guys, guys. Yeah, what's, what's in my biscuit? It's crazy stuff. So let's talk a little bit about you do. You seem to be involved in a lot of charity work. I see you.

Brian Haara (01:17:35.627)
Right, absolutely. He's scratching his eczema off onto your dough.

Right.

Drew Hannush (01:17:58.567)
bouncing around from place to place. What kind of stuff are you involved in terms of charities?

Brian Haara (01:18:04.963)
It's something that I never expected to find in bourbon, but that in retrospect, I should have known we would run into because I have found such generosity among bourbon enthusiasts, both in sharing this rare bottle that they've got and they've been hanging on to, and you're the person they're gonna open it with. And it's fine that you, that's

that they're going to drink that with you. They're not going to save it forever. Uh, or sharing experiences or they're going on a barrel pick and they invite you, or they're sharing their knowledge of history. It's, it's been such a great group of people to get, get to know that I should have realized earlier that we also have a spot in our hearts for charity.

and that bourbon can help raise money because there are so many bottles and there's so many distillery experiences that people will pay over top dollar for that we might as well put some of that toward a good cause. So I'm involved in something called the Bourbon Crusaders.

And we've done auctions ever since, I think 2016, if I'm bad at before COVID and after COVID, remembering how long ago something started. But our last auction was this past November, we partnered with Old Forester and Woodford Reserve to benefit the American Heart Association. And we raised a bunch of money. For the first time ever.

Drew Hannush (01:19:25.314)
Hmm

Brian Haara (01:19:44.927)
Old Forrester put up for auction the President's Choice, a private barrel selection of President's Choice. And it went for a quarter million dollars. And it's just amazing the generosity that is out there, both from the people who are donating the items, the experiences and the individual bottles, and then the purchasers as well. And it's just, it's made a difference for...

Heart research and it's made a difference for Heart Association here locally. We've also done benefits for the American Cancer Society and we've gone smaller too. There's a Crohn's and colitis foundation in Louisville that with Jim Rutledge, we helped support another year. We with Four Roses as our distillery partner, we benefited food banks in Lexington and Louisville. So we what we try to do each year is partner.

with a charity, we're a 501C3, but we partner with a charity and we have a distillery partner and try to raise a bunch of money. The other thing we did is in 2021 and two, Western Kentucky was first hit by some devastating tornadoes. And then the following August, Eastern Kentucky got hit by devastating floods. So there was a lot of need, there's a lot of people displaced, a lot of people's houses just...

blown away or washed away. And the Governor, Andy Beshear, Governor of Kentucky, called the KDA and the president of the KDA, Gregory, called me on the morning after the storms because the governor had already contacted him and asked whether we would help create an online auction because this is during COVID, so we couldn't have anything in person. So we did a virtual auction for...

Drew Hannush (01:21:31.059)
Hmm.

Brian Haara (01:21:42.023)
tornado relief and raised something like $3.4 million. So it's been really rewarding and it just warms my heart that there's so much generosity in Perp and Bump.

Drew Hannush (01:21:46.634)
Mm.

Drew Hannush (01:21:54.758)
You think of corporate America and everybody's stabbing each other in the back and it's a rugged atmosphere. The whiskey industry is so different from that in what I've experienced. I do remember during that time when the tornadoes were happening, just all of the activity online through...

social media, Instagram, and the rest of people really jumping on there. And it's a testament to what you're doing. The fact that the first person they reach out to is your organization to, uh, to help in that kind of a cause.

Brian Haara (01:22:34.875)
KDA first and they were such an integral part of it. They took a laboring or on a lot of the back office things and all along the way, but it wasn't honored to be on the phone the next morning and help to be a part of that. Now, your point about the distilleries fighting, yeah, they'll still do that. Don't use a trademark that's too close to theirs or they'll get you, but the great thing that I've seen at these...

Drew Hannush (01:22:55.726)
Ha ha ha.

Brian Haara (01:23:04.071)
Crusader auctions, in the last one in particular, Rob Samuels was a guest there. And he comes in and starts bidding on an item for an experience at another distillery. I mean, it's great when you've got that. And we've got distillers, we've got the rock stars from different distilleries at these things. And a lot of them are bidding on experiences at their, what you would say,

Drew Hannush (01:23:17.314)
Ha ha ha.

Brian Haara (01:23:33.731)
competitor distilleries. It's great. There's a lot of camaraderie among the distillers.

Drew Hannush (01:23:40.11)
That's fun. Well, I always think back to the Heaven Hill fire and how all of the different distilleries really competitors or not, they're going to help each other out when the time comes. So that's great. So you've done all of this research. And when did the book come out?

Brian Haara (01:23:50.191)
Right. Absolutely.

Brian Haara (01:23:57.743)
The end of 2018, I made it just in time for Christmas.

Drew Hannush (01:24:01.714)
So do you feel like you've collected enough information to jump into another one?

Brian Haara (01:24:07.523)
Well, there's things I left out of the first one. So I left out a lot of Mary Dowling stories. She was involved in a lot of litigation. I barely touched on her. I mentioned her almost in passing.

because there is a brand called Dowling in Frasier. So she's connected there, but later she had her own brand. And she was a force of nature and had a lot of lawsuits. And she was selling booze illegally during prohibition. So some of the cases relate to that. So there's stories that I haven't told yet. And then there's deeper dives that I could take too. I mean, these distillers.

or owners of distilleries because we've talked about E.H. Taylor a lot. He was not a distiller. He was an owner of a distillery. So there's maybe to some extent a distinction without a difference, but, uh, there's a, there's a deeper dive that can be taken on him. And there's, uh, Atherton, who I mentioned earlier, that was a huge name at the time that really no one knows that he was even a distillery. His name pops up here and there around Louisville. There's a.

Drew Hannush (01:24:53.185)
Mm-hmm.

Brian Haara (01:25:17.039)
school named after him and there's you see his name elsewhere but no one knows what he did no one knows that the high school is named after a major distiller so there's a lot of people I think that I could get a deeper dive into they have to have lawsuits out there I'll be the one to find them and I think there's probably a volume two out there

Drew Hannush (01:25:33.474)
Hehehe

Drew Hannush (01:25:39.338)
Yeah. Atherton's interesting because, uh, two things I know about Atherton, Zach Coopridge is using their building now. So, uh, if you drive through south of New Haven, you'll, you'll see parts of the old Atherton, uh, distillery. I believe Thomas Lincoln worked for Atherton, um, at one point. Yes.

Brian Haara (01:25:54.791)
Nice.

Brian Haara (01:26:01.911)
I've heard that too. I haven't been able to verify that, so I'm glad to hear you say that.

Drew Hannush (01:26:07.05)
That I'm not a hundred percent sure on that either. Uh, that is one of those that may be one of those pieces of law. I do know that, uh, Thomas Lincoln was definitely in the whiskey business cause he, uh, he, he was taking barrels down the Mississippi at one point. Uh, so, um, and the, uh, the other thing is that when you're enjoying a four roses, you got a little piece of Atherton in there as well, because their yeast strain was bought by, uh, Seagrams. And that became part of the.

Brian Haara (01:26:22.052)
Right, right.

Drew Hannush (01:26:37.014)
Five yeast strains that they use not only in four roses, but also bullet I think is using those same five yeast strains

Brian Haara (01:26:44.796)
That's right. And I have listened to a, I'm trying to think which documentary it was. I've listened to so many that it blends together. But some of the old timers from Stitzel Weller have said that the yeast that was originally used, let's see, that they originally used was also a yeast used by Seagrams.

Um, and it was the Henry McKenna yeast. So it actually started with the old Henry McKenna brand and then got to Stitzelweller and got to Seagrams. So it's so many interconnections. It's, it's crazy.

Drew Hannush (01:27:22.67)
Hehehe

Drew Hannush (01:27:27.082)
Absolutely. Well, all the consolidation is the only thing that really preserved all of that for us to sort of enjoy today. It'd be interesting to taste the whiskey that just was using the Henry Kenna yeast strain or yeah. So this is really interesting. Well, hopefully one of these days I will bump into you in the research room over in Kentucky because I'm starting to work on a Kentucky project myself right now. So who knows when, when we'll.

Brian Haara (01:27:37.527)
Right, absolutely.

Brian Haara (01:27:50.87)
Excellent.

Drew Hannush (01:27:56.37)
meet somewhere and be working on the same, trying to grab the same law book at the same time. Exactly. I have a feeling you'll win.

Brian Haara (01:28:02.544)
Who will box out who, right? Well I don't know about that. Well send up a flare when you come up. We'll make a point to catch up again.

Drew Hannush (01:28:13.87)
All right. This sounds great. Brian, thank you so much for being a guest on the, on the podcast. And if people want to get a copy of your book, uh, where, where are the best places to go?

Brian Haara (01:28:24.483)
Well, maybe the easiest place to remember is just go to bourbonjustice.com. I've got a link there to both my publisher and to the sales site on Amazon. Trust me, Bezos ends up getting the better price from everyone else as much as it pains me tremendously to say it, but you'll find a link at bourbonjustice.com.

Drew Hannush (01:28:48.042)
Very good and all your social media out there as well.

Brian Haara (01:28:50.499)
Yep, find me, either search for Bourbon Justice or the name of the blog is still Sippin' Corn. So my Twitter and Instagram are both Sippin' Corn. S-I-P-P-N, which I get from the way the old timers talk about drinking their whiskey. How do you like your, how do you like it? I like to sip my corn.

Drew Hannush (01:29:02.102)
Very nice.

Drew Hannush (01:29:14.028)
Nice, very nice. Well, cheers.

Brian Haara (01:29:17.263)
Well, cheers. I appreciate you having me, Drew. Can't wait to hear more about what you find about Taylor and frankly, this Kentucky project has my interest peaked as well. So cheers.

Drew Hannush (01:29:28.941)
Cheers.