Ep. 55 - Spirits of French Lick's Alan Bishop (Part 2)

Transcript

Drew (00:00:09):
Welcome to Whiskey Lore, the interviews. I'm your host, Drew Hannush, the Amazon bestselling author of Whiskey Lores Travel Guide to Experiencing Kentucky Bourbon. And it's time for part two of my fascinating conversation with Alan Bishop, who's the master distiller at Spirits of French Lick. And in this part of the interview, we're going to dive a little bit more into some of the spirits that he's produced. We're going to talk about how he's been capturing historic yeasts. We'll discover what Split Brandy is. We're going to find some historic distilling sites in Indiana and also get a little bit more history around some of the names that Alan is honoring through the whiskeys of Spirits of French Lick. And so let's jump right back into my conversation with Alan Bishop on whiskey lore. So talk about Old Cliffy is how it's pronounced. So this is what you've called your, who's your apple brandy. And this is after a distillery that was named after. Is that right?

Alan (00:01:11):
Absolutely. Okay.

Drew (00:01:12):
Yes. So what do we know of old Cliffy?

Alan (00:01:14):
So this is a place, now, it's a nature preserve that if you're ever in southern Indiana, you can go visit. It's owned by the Indiana dnr and you can hike it. It is the only box canyon in the state of Indiana. And it's gorgeous. Literally, if I took you in there in the springtime, if I took anybody in there in the springtime, they didn't know where they were. They would swear they were in West Virginia. Mm-hmm. Because you look around at just limestone cliffs all the way around you it sets right on the Mount Carmel fault line. And so there's a couple of interesting geological features. There's a number of caves throughout the valley, and interestingly enough, the streams that come outta those caves actually run north, which is, it's a very, yeah, you'd have to see it to understand, but it can be a little disconcerting cuz there's actually a place where one of the cave streams meets another stream that comes off the other side of the fault line, and they go the exact opposite, and there's only about 15 feet of land between them.

(00:02:11):
So it's a very wow, disorienting sort of thing. So this piece of property was discovered by a gentleman named Hugh Hamer, who later owned Springville State Park. Hamer, we believe was either adopted or indentured in some way to a gentleman named Hammersley from up in New York who was looking for a new place in the Midwest to start a mill and distillery. So Hamer found this place, he bought it for Hammerly comes in, they build this beautiful mill and a distillery to go along with it because again, you're dealing with a farm service at this point. So this is very early on in Indiana history. I believe this was in 18, 18, 18 19 when they first started in there. It may have been just a little earlier than that. So Hammersley gets out of that line of business. Some interesting spring mill history here. So Hammersley was actually at Millwright, and really what he was doing was he was coming into Indiana to A build mills, but B, also buy and then retool mills in order to flip them.

(00:03:18):
And that's what he did multiple times. So he was actually the millwright at Spring Mill, what was in the Montgomery Mill as well. So he decides to sell out of that mill and distillery in the late 1820s which leaves Hamer with nothing. And so Hamer was able to buy Spring Mill at that time for kind of a song and dance because the owners were actually in Philadelphia. There was all these rumors of problems with the Mill foundation, et cetera. He bought that place for literally nothing. By the time you get into the 1840s, a gentleman by the name of Henry Robertson, who also was a preacher in his church, has bought old Cliffy. And he turns old Cliffy into a state-of-the-art distillery at least by the 1870s making a huge amount of apple brandy. It's also sort of a picnic area for the local community. They have the 4th of July out there several times throughout the years and then also several other events throughout the year for the community.

(00:04:18):
And interestingly enough, he did not allow people to drink during these events. Now, when the event was over at nine o'clock, yeah, you could tell he literally advertised it as you can come to the still house and buy as much as you want, take it with you. But there's no drinking during the event by 1900, they're making 20,000 gallons a year, mostly Apple brandy. Interestingly enough, this is a super interesting distillery as far as commerce goes, because there is no road into this valley until the 1890s. And again, it's sheer face. So everything is being produced is being shipped out via flatboat to the White River. Wow. So they're producing everything throughout the year, then putting it on flat boats and then taking it down south. They literally had a waste station for apples and corn that was on top of one of the cliffs.

(00:05:13):
And one of the really cool pieces of history that we have is a firsthand account from a book called Blue Echo Memories that was written maybe 15 years ago by a gentleman who was a cent centenarian, a hundred years old. He talked about a kid that he heard the story from. They were playing a game of tag and they were up on top of the cliff. And so there was where the way station for the apples were, there was actually a slide where they would throw the apples down to come into the mill, or they would throw the foreign in it to come down into the middle. And this kid fell down this slide and tumbled and tumbled and tumbled head over heels. And he somehow lived through it and landed in the apple bin. Wow. In the mill. And he wasn't even hurt. He was skinned up, but otherwise he was okay.

(00:05:58):
So yeah, it was a really interesting story. And another little piece of old Cliffy history here. So that valley, what's called Ca, river Valley, there were nine distilleries, commercial distilleries in that valley between years 1855 and again, 1914, roughly. Not all operating at once, but there were multiple still sites throughout that valley. And there are to this day, three remaining structures associated with those distill, which is super cool. Cool little prohibition story here for you. That was the last that I know of distillery that could have come back from prohibition. So one of the families that owned a distillery down there in the 18 hundreds was the brewers. There was a gentleman by the name of Ad Brewer, Adam Brewer, who towards the end of prohibition, ended up buying the old Cliffy mill and distillery building. And on the last year of prohibition, he was actually rebuilding everything as prohibition was getting ready to go away. He's getting the distillery up and ready to go. He is actually about to start distilling. He has a nightmare. One evening he tells his wife wakes up in a cold sweat that he had, a nightmare that he had. He was going to die that day. Right. That's already not going to be, yeah. It's not going to be a good day if you have nightmare about dying that day.

(00:07:19):
So he heads down to the mill, he's taken a load of corn on a wagon to take it down to the mill to grind it, to make the first batch of post-prohibition whiskey to come outta Washington County. And on his way down the hill, which is a huge incline, massive hill again into a box canyon, he flips the wagon and dies. And with him dies the last of those. Wow. Hoosier farm distillers. He was kind of the last one that really made it through Prohibition, had the money to do something and passed away unfortunately during that. Wow. That time

Drew (00:07:52):
Period. So is that part of the reason why you pulled this name out, is your inspiration for this? Yes. Yeah.

Alan (00:08:00):
And that old Cliffy name too, there's very few brand names from those farm distilleries, but knowing that was, there wasn't a lot of old cliffy made, but if you were going to drink, who's your apple brandy, that was the one that you wanted. Very nice. I felt like I had to do that. So

Drew (00:08:16):
In knowing this it's been in my hand for an awful long time. Time. I actually dive into it. I get baked apples with brown sugar. It's kinda like a childhood memory that comes back to me on that on the nose, which is really nice. I'm a huge fan of anything Apple. So I feel like I'm, I am primed and ready to jump into the apple brandy world. On the nose I got a little oak. But for being four years in a barrel, the oak influence isn't overly impactful here. Is there

Alan (00:08:56):
And I believe what you have there is actually the two year, if I remember, is it okay, I think that's a two year straight. Yeah. Okay. So the char that we do on everything is number two char or medium plus toast on the heads. And again, that's the idea is we're doing good clean pot distilled stuff so we can get a good solid cut on it. A little different than obviously a low rectification, low rectification Kentucky column still. And the idea is, I don't want that barrel to overwhelm that 50% that we started with what it was when it was ripe on the tree, the fermentation, the distillation. I need that blend and balance so that when you taste it, you're getting those positive attributes of the raw material that goes into the fermentation and goes into that product. But you're also getting those unique barrel characteristics, which are the spice of the pie, as it were. Yeah.

Drew (00:09:45):
So did I read that you're growing your own trees?

Alan (00:09:50):
So I am here on the farm. I've got the turly apple growing. I'm trying to get enough of it up and going that eventually we'll be able to do some kind of small batch out of it. I've got the Fleener peach we talked about earlier. I've gone outta my way to find old pockets of that ironically, cuz it comes back true from seed to almost every old still site that I go to where it's not been developed. You'll find it growing wild. So I'm trying to get that back up and going. You're never going to be able to do commercial quantities from that. But if you can do a barrel every once in a while, I don't see a reason not to. Yeah. So

Drew (00:10:25):
Let's talk about William Dalton. Where does that name come from?

Alan (00:10:29):
Yeah, so we talked earlier about Hamer who went to Daisy Spring Mill and turned that into Daisy Spring Mill Distillery. So Dalton was the original distiller at the Daisy Spring Mill distillery, which is still accident and still exists at Spring Mill State Park. We are turning it back into a functional, historic living history distillery as we see. Wow. That's a project that has happened. So the goal is to have it up and going as a demonstration distillery without distilling, but with mash ends by the summertime and by fall to have it be a legal operating distillery for Springville State Park to raise money and to also be sort of a center for the tourism of Southern Indiana distilling to tell the history of Southern Indiana distilling. So to this day, it's the most exit building related to distilling in southern Indiana we know of. There is an original 1808 a hundred gallon pot, still an 1808, a hundred gallon boiler barrel brands, all that stuff still on hand.

(00:11:33):
So Dalton was the master distiller, as we would call it now back in his day, it would've been distiller slash peacemaker for the Daisy Spring Mill distillery for 55 plus years. Wow. He's the longest tenured distiller that we know of in southern Indiana. And bearing in mind that when he was distilling on the plan that he was distilling on this distillery being implemented in the 18 era, he worked off of that same plan all the way. He started in 1830s all the way up to the closing of that distillery. So that 55 year period, he worked off of a pot still running on split wood and a boiler running on split wood during that entire era, even throughout the time that was outdated old school and made what we now know was regarded as some of the best whiskey and some of the best brandy of the time. He worked through three different owners, how good he was as a distiller. He really doesn't get the credit that he deserves. He didn't get the credit that he deserved in history. There's literally only one picture that we know of him and very little history reported of him. So we wanted to pay tribute to him with that particular bottle.

Drew (00:12:52):
He and George Dickel, cuz they don't even have a real picture of George Dickel. It's just a sketch that somebody drew for a newspaper and that's it. Otherwise they're just G, they're just guessing. Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. And to bring back those names that, well, we were talking a little while ago about Robertson County, Tennessee, and there are names of distillers who have amazing histories that nobody they were the first times I ever saw those names. And so it's just a whole piece of distilling history that has disappeared and

Alan (00:13:31):
Just gone.

Drew (00:13:33):
And it takes somebody curious enough to go in and try to dig it out. But there haven't been a lot of people doing that. Amazed me about Tennessee history is that for a state that's right next to Kentucky and has many of the same elements that Kentucky has and that distilling history can be counted all the way back into the 18th century. There's really no great documentation on that history. And that just blows my mind.

Alan (00:14:04):
Well, the other reason for doing William Dalton is this, and this is true of Kentucky as well. So we have all this history on Kentucky, but how much history do we really have on Kentucky? What we really have is the bourbon barons. Right? Right. We have the people who own things. So how many distillers who had great ideas and great processes, obviously we've got Crow, right? Yeah. We know about him and Taylor was a distiller as well. So we give him some credit and he also had a little bit of that spirituality involved in them, gone to Europe and all that stuff, which is a whole nother fun story. But how many distillers in Kentucky have slipped into obscurity and the things that they created, they don't get credit for. Because the bourbon Barrons, the guys with the money, the people who had the money, but not the talent to make things happen, they got the credit for those things.

(00:14:55):
And it's the same thing with William Dalton. So people know the story of Hamer in Indiana. There's an old Hamer whiskey that's come out. And this was our reaction to it to sort of help coerce history towards paying attention to the distiller to some extent and paying more attention to truthful facts of history. But yeah, different story there as well. People understand that Jonathan Turley owned that distillery at one point in time, and people understand that Solomon Scott, who we named another product after, owned that distillery at one point in time, but they didn't know the name William Dalton. And I don't think that, that's quite not an entire, it doesn't show the whole picture. And so Dalton was so important to the Hamer family, even though Hamer passed away before Dalton retired, that they, he's buried there next to the Hamer family. They offered him a plot with them. His tombstone is almost the same size as Hamer's tombstone. That's not something that the family would've been okay with if they didn't see him as somebody that was important to their story and to their background. Absolutely.

(00:16:02):
And I love doing that stuff. And one of the things that I do as a observer and lover of history and the distillation arts is these products that we name after places or people no one ever gets bottles one through three. They're never offered. So bottle number one always goes to the grave site or the person that we named it after or the place. So old Cliffy got bottle number one. Bottle number two either goes to the museum in the county that that person is from, or it goes to a person who plays that character.

(00:16:36):
So sometimes with reenactments, we have people, we have Lisa and Claire, we have a Mattie Gladden, they get that stuff. Bottle number three will try to find a family member to give that to. Wow. And I do that because again, if you have ghosts, you have everything. And I'm a very kind of paranoid about that. So I don't wanna wake up with one of these figures at the foot of my bed over here going, Hey, where's my bottle? And it's just one of those things, it's a respect thing as much as anything. So I want to tell their stories. I wanna be a part of bringing them back to life and people talking about them and going, Hey, do you know this? It's a whole nother nother thing when you can bring those people back around in a way.

Drew (00:17:17):
Yeah. So interesting question here in terms of, you mentioned that wheat was used in whiskeys in Indiana, and I was asked by big chief from the Bourbon Road, he was saying, I would love to know if Weller really was the first weeded bourbon. And I'm thinking if that's the story they're telling I, I'm almost thinking that, I don't know when Weller started making weeded bourbons, but Nelson's Greenbrier apparently was making it in the 1870s and calling it Tennessee whiskey. So how early were they making weeded bourbons? And is that, was William Dalton making a weeded bourbon? Is that why you assigned his name to this one in particular?

Alan (00:18:05):
So we do have some tax records from Springville and they were doing a little bit of everything and Weed bourbon was one of the things they were doing. They were also doing a rye whiskey at the time, which is interesting cuz that was pretty rare. And the most common thing they did was 100% malted corn whiskey because they've got corn and it's easy. Right.

(00:18:27):
The weeded bourbon story is kind of interesting from a historical perspective in Indiana, the earliest reference that I have them really pursuing that as sort of a style as the 1830s. If you look at the Kentucky thing, you look at Weller and I can't remember, there was a message board back in the day, and I cannot remember what it was, but you can still find it archived. But Gary Gillman and Mike Veach and all those guys used to post on this back in the early two thousands. One of the stories that came out of that was that the weed mash bill in Kentucky actually originated with a part of the Beam family, obviously predating the weller thing, but you'd have to talk to one of them to really get that story. But Indiana, definitely by the 1830s, there were weed bourbons and wheat whiskey. One of the other things that you'll find very commonly by the time that the wheat threshing machine was introduced, you will find all kinds of stories. David Voyles is a good example out of what's called Oregon Springs, about five miles away from Beck's Mill. Actually, Amie winning of the Frankfurt Bourbons Society is a direct descend of David Voyles, which is kind of fun. But he bought a wheat threshing machine in the early 1870s, I believe it was 18 71, 18 72. And when he bought it, he was able to thresh so much wheat for himself and his neighbors that he built a distillery that ran for four years making wheated bourbon and weakness.

Drew (00:19:51):
Wow.

Alan (00:19:53):
So one thing leads to another thing right now it becomes an industry all of its own.

Drew (00:19:58):
Yeah. So talk about this too, because I understand that you've actually grabbed yeast strains from some of these old distillery sites.

Alan (00:20:09):
So I'm very much a practical distiller. And one of the things I've always been interested in is I like to look at how would they have done things. So there's that concept, that historic concept of they knew how things worked, but not necessarily why they worked. And so we have this modern, very scientific understanding of yeast and how it works and it mutates and it has to be sterilized and a very big obsession in the United States with spirits and keeping things very clean and to some extent limiting the character to everything that you just want in specific proportions. So kind of the opposite of Pat heis, who I respect greatly at Wilderness Trail, who does all kinds of great yeast research. I went back and I started looking at how did practical distillers keep their yeast going, because that was a very important part of what made their product what it was.

(00:21:04):
And when they found a great yeast strain, they wanted to keep it their consistency from batch to batch. And you suddenly realize that they're dealing with multiple organisms, not just yeast. And they're doing it in a very not scientific way. It's all observation, does it smell good? Does it taste good? Does it do what I want it to do? Does it make enough alcohol? Does it make good product? And I thought, why doesn't anybody do it that way anymore? They do in other parts of the world, they just don't do it here. And so that got me interested. So yeast being what it is, alcohol yeast in particular. So alcohol yeast is very good at converting sugar into alcohol 100%. Wild yeast is not great at that. So in my brain, my theory was that if you went into an environment where alcohol yeast had been cultured and had existed at one point in time, it should theoretically still exist in that environment because it is now going to outcompete anything else in that environment.

(00:22:11):
So even if there's no building there, if there's blackberry bushes nearby, those blackberries are fermenting. That's how you get rid of the biomass throughout the year, et cetera. The yeast that's eating those blackberries should at least be a derivative of these early yeast strains because it's going to have outcompeted, all the wild yeast strains and there's food there for it, et cetera. There's no reason for it not to exist. And so the theory behind this was, let's go to some of these old still sites and see if we can find a useful yeast. Completely not scientific. This is just Alan being a practical distiller moon China. But what I found is that nine times out 10, I can find an alcohol tolerant strain. If I know that there's an old distillery or I'm in an old distillery building, or a place where there was a distillery, I can find a strain that smells good, tastes good, and converts alcohol completely. In other words, it doesn't finish out when it gets down to 5% or whatever. It finishes out all the available sugar, which is exactly what commercial yeas should do. I have no way to prove that these strains are the original strains, but there's a good chance that they're very close

Drew (00:23:21):
Or some kind of, they're a living organism so they can evolve as they go along. But yeah.

Alan (00:23:28):
Right. And then you up your chances too, if you do things like at Springville State Park, they still have three extant, 120 gallon hogs head for mins that exist to this day. The distillery closed in the 1880s. 1890s, they still have those fermenters on hand. So we swabbed those and we put that in some sterilized mash and we made several samples and all of them ran off at the same time. They all smelled the same. They all tasted the same. They all made good alcohol. Hey, let's throw this in a 1200 gallon batch and see what happens. And what happened was we got this beautiful literally cinnamon toast crunch aroma, huh? That I got from no other yeast I'd ever had. It was very unique. We did the same thing at the McCoy Distillery. The McCoy Distillery. They've been closed since 1914. The building still exists, it's now a residential garage.

(00:24:22):
It still belongs to the same family. It's all wood framed. And my theory is that yeast obviously can go dormant for long periods of time. You can dry yeast. So if yeast is inhabiting wood, that wood dries out, it goes dormant. Next time that wood gets wet, those wood sugars kind of come out. The yeast wakes up, it eats a little bit, it goes dormant. We did the same thing there. We got seven or eight samples from that distillery. They all finished the same way. They all tasted the same way. They all smelled the same way. Let's run it. Yeah. Big, bold, spicy, heavy, black pepper character. Probably the most traditional yeast that we have at Spirits of French Lick. We went to St. Louis, we pulled a yeast strain from an old lagering cave underneath St. Louis from an old brewery. We brought that back and we made a whiskey out of it and completely beautiful buttery rounds. Heavy, creamy mouth bill. Wow. Its own beast. Right. And that's just practical distilling stuff.

Drew (00:25:21):
Trial by error. The hard part is how soon do you know that that yeast is actually working in the whiskey? Cuz you gotta let it age for some time before you really kind of get a feel for it.

Alan (00:25:34):
Well, you get in a new Macon, obviously you watch your fermentation. And I have messed up, don't get me wrong. I have a yeast. I have a yeast that I'm keeping, even though it doesn't finish all the way and it throws a weird character. But I think there's some cool things you could do with it. It throws, let's say honey mustard. Okay? That's the best explanation I can give. But you can tell during the fermentation, you can tell during the distillation. And that's actually part of the reason for doing this as well, is not only the history of it, the practical distilling side of it these people back in the 18 hundreds, we tend to think that we're so much smarter than they were, but we're not. Right? They didn't talk in scientific terms, but they understood things in their own way and they were incredibly intelligent for their time and they were no dumber than we are now, or no smarter than we are now.

(00:26:22):
They just didn't use that scientific thing that we have obviously, that we get into so heavily now. And because of that, they had whiskeys that had some characters that we're not used to. Part of the reason for doing this as well is, let's see what happens. So if I'm doing 50 or 60 runs of Lisa and Claire every year I'll switch out the last three from our normal yeast protocol. We'll throw one of these different yeast strains in, we'll leave everything else the same, distill it, barrel it at the same proof. Let's see what happens in four years. And my hope is we've already seen that, that we're holding onto a lot of those interesting characteristics from those yeast. Even after two and a half, three years. What I want to do is eventually you'll be able to go to the store and maybe get a four pack of 200 mil lease en clay and all four of the same mash bill. All the variables are the same. The only difference is yeast. And let's see how much yeast plays into the character. Yeah.

Drew (00:27:20):
I asked Jeff Arnett about this, do you have any old Jack Daniels around that was pre-prohibition that you could taste to see if that banana note is in there? Because that's something that we associate with it now and wonder if it was being made that way back then. That element would be there. Like I say, the more I dig into whiskey, the more fascinating it becomes because there are so many variables. And then when you add the history element into it, and we can put a label on the bottle that looks like the label from a hundred years ago, but what inside maybe a hundred percent different.

Alan (00:27:59):
So I tend to tell people that's the beauty of craft distilling. So it's same but different as old school stuff. So we do a lot of things differently at experience of French Lick that a lot of other distillers don't do. But the thing is, short of the technology and the equipment that we have on hand, we are literally doing nothing new now. It's not going to take the same as whiskey from a hundred years ago or 150 years ago, but farm distillers 150 years ago, we're doing exactly what we're doing now. But it wasn't a marketing thing. It was, well, this is what we have on hand. I mean even all the way down to brewers caramel malt, maybe it wasn't barley, but it was corn that when they went to dry it, they roasted a little bit too far. It got a little caramelization to it.

(00:28:45):
They're doing things very similar to what we're doing now. And that that's the beauty of diving into these historic things and being a craft distiller as well, and having an open mind and approaching these things. Bourbon just as one of the categories historically that I'm interested in, that we also produce. We have this idea in our mind of what bourbon is, what is bourbon? And we have that Kentucky thing in our head and what is that Kentucky thing? That Kentucky thing is post-prohibition, six companies, five of which we're using the same yeast strain <laugh> after prohibition. They're all using low rectification Kentucky column stills. You essentially including rye, have four mash bills. Right? It's a very small spectrum, but that's what we think bourbon is. Yeah. That's not what bourbon is and that's not what it ever was. You go back to 1870, you have industrialization, right?

(00:29:39):
That spectrum's a little bigger now, but it just includes some things that were happening in the 1850s and 1860s. Now there's no oats because they're thick and they're sticky and they're hard to run through a column still. So industrialization made its own little contribution to taking things away from the diversity of bourbon. So there's a lot out there to do. There's a lot out there to explore. And the beautiful thing about craft distilling is, hey, you're not ever going to replicate exactly what happened in history, but you're going to get a taste of what that history could have been or where things could have gone B in it at a time. Right? Now that is fun because finally and it's only been like this for the past two years, people got bored during covid, I think <laugh>. But finally craft distillers are talking about alternative grains, what we call alternative grains. What back when would've been regionalized varieties that made whiskey that were similar to regionalized food. Right. Well just now at that point, the next step in this is these guys looking around and going, all right, well I'm done the grain thing. I've run red corn, I've run orange corn, I've done whatever. What does yeast do?

Drew (00:30:53):
Yeah.

Alan (00:30:54):
And then now everything just goes insane.

Drew (00:30:57):
I love your point about bourbon in that I sometimes suggest that bourbon has a very small flavor profile until I start tasting bourbons from Texas. And then I go, wait a second, I'm tasting stuff in here I've never really tasted before in any kind of whiskey. And so it's the different grains that are being used, the different types of yeast that are being used that can make even bourbon, which feels like it's narrow, widen and become much more interesting. Way

Alan (00:31:35):
Bigger. Yeah. And that's one of the reasons why we play with so many alternative grains and so many alternative match bills. And even in a traditional Nashville, the only real traditional Nashville we do at Ritz French Lick is that William Dalton, which is basically that APH snitzel Nashville, but switch out caramel malt instead of distillers malt, throw in a different yeast. We actually use two different yeast on that. One of which is a brandy yeast and then pot still distill it, no chill filtration, all that stuff. Same thing with Texas and Colorado. And that's what I'm trying to push in Indiana. And I'm hoping that as a somewhat ludite historian, that other distillers pay a little attention to it. Because my argument at this point is Texas and Colorado are really, really good at what they're doing and they're getting a lot out of attention. So I'm, I'm going to need the rest of my Hoosier

Drew (00:32:24):
Distillers to sort of

Alan (00:32:26):
Come up here and let's fight the good fight together. Let's keep our name in the game. Right?

Drew (00:32:32):
Yeah, absolutely. Let's talk about Lisa Sinclair before we go too long here, because interesting that you chose a non whisky person to highlight a bottle on. And I love that because again, you're telling a story about the region rather than mm-hmm. Necessarily telling a story about whiskey. So who was Lee Sinclair?

Alan (00:32:55):
Absolutely. And the reason we chose somebody that was non whisky there is because he would've known good whiskey at the time. For sure. So Sinclair's dad was a owner of several actually several different kinds of mills, mercantile mills and textile mills up in Chicago. Sinclair was from up in that area. He moved to Green County when he was a young man married his wife in Green County, came to Washington County and started several mills of his own by the 1870s, 1880s. He ends up becoming the majority shareholder in the New Albany in Salem State Banks. He really kind of gets us start in a community from a gentleman who's home I helped restore several years ago Mr. John Bowman, who that's a future story that we'll do something with. They were both members of several fraternal orders. Mr. Sinclair was actually a descendant of the Scottish.

(00:33:53):
So he had traveled Europe several times. He was very familiar with a lot of the cult leaning secret societies, and that's very much apparent in what he did at West Baden and the things he did also around Washington County as well. So in the 1890s, he gets interested in West Baden because he's also involved in New Albany. In Salem Railroad, which runs through West Baden from Salem, Indiana. He comes into West Baden and he buys the Baden Lick or Mile Lick Hotel, which was a small wood frame hotel that was owned by Mr. William Bows. Ironically the other leader of the Knights of the Golden Circle here in southern Indiana. He buys him out, he starts running this hotel business. After a couple years, the hotel burns down and Sinclair is done. Now the thing about French Lick and West Baden is it's always been kind of considered sort of a health area since at least the 1850s.

(00:34:53):
And before that it was a lot of French trappers, et cetera because the groundwater there is mineral water, it's sulfur water obviously good for your constitution, helps build you back up et cetera. So Sinclair is going to get outta this business. The one thing that Sinclair loves more than money in his entire life is his daughter Lillian, his daughter was born to him from his initial marriage to his first wife who died of cholera and is buried in Crown Hill Cemetery in Salem, Indiana. She's actually buried in an unmarked mass grave cuz cholera hit Salem so hard. Oh wow. They couldn't mark the graves at the time. So Lillian loved the hotel and as such she talked her dad into going back into the hotel business and she said, dad, why don't you build a, the world's first fireproof hotel. Lee being the person that he is, the personality is he's got a lot of money.

(00:35:46):
He is got a lot of influence. He decides that if he's going to build this thing back, he's going to build it back as the quote Carlsbad of America. Wow. Right. Okay. So he wants this to be the next wonder of the world. And he wants the largest free-standing dome in the world on this building. He goes to several different engineers, they tell him it's impossible. He finds a 20 something year old engineer who's never built anything his life. He designs it and makes it work. So Sinclair builds this huge free-standing dome largest free-standing dome in the world until the Super Dome was built. He also puts in a gaming room what we now realize as a casino. And he makes us sort of a attraction all throughout the United States for people to come to. We are located in West Baden, we're on Sinclair Street where perpendicular to the dome.

(00:36:38):
Lee having lived in Washington County, me being in Washington County, him working in Orange County, me working in Orange County, it made sense that Mash bill in particular hearkening back to my moon shining days using oats in a mash bill, developing that into the mash bill. It is now, when I was in my twenties before I ever got to French Lick all the way down to actually running the only two barrels I know of Copper and King's Bourbon. With that same mash bill, it made sense that we'd call it Lee Sinclair Nice. And pay tribute to the gentleman I mentioned earlier as well, making sure that those people that we name things after get the first bottles. And so Mr. Sinclair is actually buried at Crown Hill Cemetery and the only MAs Lium in Crown Hill Cemetery that MAs Lium is actually not part of the cemetery.

(00:37:25):
It's its own separate area, its own cemetery. There are four spots in that maum. One for Lee, one for Lillian, one for Lee's first wife whom he wanted move there, and one for his second wife. Okay. Now, we obviously know that his first wife is not there because she's buried in a mass grave to this day. And this is part of spirits of French Lake. It's not just the spirits and the bottle, it's the spirits of the place. It's that sort of history, a little bit of that superstition thing to this day, the groundskeeper at Crown Hill Cemetery and multiple groundskeepers throughout time claim to see Lisa and Claire walking the old part of the cemetery, looking for his first wife's grave at the dome. To this day at the restaurant, there are servers who claim that during busy times, they have caught someone opening the door for them between the kitchen and they're serving area <laugh>.

(00:38:24):
And notice it's a gentleman on a top hat and an 18 hundreds black suit. Wow. Who may in fact be Mr. Sinclair. So this is a fun little story. I wanted to make sure that Mr. Sinclair had bottle number one of our two-year-old and bottle number one of our bottled and bond. So there was a fund left behind to take care of this plot of land for his mausoleum. And as such, there should have been keys to the mausoleum. There are no modern descendants of Mr. Sinclair. The groundskeeper that had been in charge of that MO at the time had since retired. He's suffering from Alzheimer's. I believe he's passed on since then. I went and found this guy and I went three or four times and spent hours with him, literally trying to find a way to find the keys to this masum to get these bottles in there. The last time I went to visit him, I was walking out the door and he'd been out of it the whole time. And I'll never forget this, I was walking out, he coughed, he cleared his throat and he goes, so you're looking for the keys for that masum, right? I said, yeah. He reaches in his pocket and he pulls out a key chain and he goes, well I've got 'em right here.

Drew (00:39:38):
Wow.

Alan (00:39:40):
So bottle number one of the two-year-old and the four-year-old both are in Lee's Mali.

Drew (00:39:45):
Very nice. So that's awesome. Yeah.

Alan (00:39:47):
Gotta terrible. Yeah. Gotta keep the spirits happy.

Drew (00:39:51):
I loved when I looked at the mash bill for this and I saw oats because ever since I went out to a distillery in Nevada called Bentley Heritage, and they showed me oats because they were making their bourbon with oats. And so he pulled it out and he showed how it clumped up and such. But he said you would be amazed what it does to the mouth feel for a whiskey. And I got to this opinion, you know, see all these vodkas on the shelf. And when I see all those vodkas, I think the idea of vodka is that it shouldn't have any flavor whatsoever to be a really good useful vodka. And I thought, why don't they make oat vodka? Because then if it would be something that would be interesting to hold in your mouth and it would make it different from all of the other vodkas that it would have that nice mouth feel to it. And so I keep my eye out for whenever I see these other types of ingredients. Like Corra is famous in Nashville for using quinoa and all these different grains that they want to attempt to see if they can make a whiskey just out of that grain with some malted barley. And so it's fun to taste them. But oats are the only one that I can think of where it's not the taste so much as it is the mouth still experience that you get from it.

Alan (00:41:26):
So it's those long chain fatty acids that come through in oat distillation, especially in pot still distillation. And as I mentioned to you earlier, that came from, came from not knowing the history of oats and distilling. And it just came from, I knew the oats were grain when I was 15 years old. And I'd never seen those guys use them up to that point. And you know, look into distillation history or I do now looking back on it and knowing what I do about distillation around the world, you realize that oats have been a big part of whiskey for a very long time. They were often used in Ireland they were used in Scotland before scotch whiskey really became a thing. They were used in the United States quite often. And the funny thing is, and Indiana and Kentucky both up until the point of industrialization and up until the point of that low rec column, still, if you go back and you go through the old agricultural census books, you'll see that in Indiana and Kentucky, both oats were the number two crop until 1870. Really? So how many bourbons were they in? Yeah, prior to 1870, I suspect Quite a few.

Drew (00:42:31):
That's interesting. Yeah, I mean we just take for granted this, I call it Shorthanding history. We tend to think, oh well we're using corn now. And so it must have always been that that's the way it was done. But it was whatever he had on hand really. That's why when I went to Mount Vernon, the question was they were making rye whiskey, what else were they else? Were they growing here and were they using anything else? And nowadays we are all into documentation and everybody, if you're a company trying to create a consistent product, you are going to want to have the same ingredients every single time. But if you're a farmer distiller and you are just trying to get something to market, does the mash bill really matter that much because they weren't aging it to make it taste great? Or if it aged, it aged cuz it went into the barrel in the early days and just however long it took to get to wherever it was going. So there's no telling what they made whiskey out

Alan (00:43:42):
Of. Me and Brian Cushing have a working theory on this. So I do a lot of distilling reenactments and stuff like that as well, different places. And Locus Grove in Louisville, Kentucky is one of those places. And so Brian is in charge of the historic distillery there at Locus Grove. And so every year we try to pick a couple different projects that are historic. So we've done recreated the Indiana absent for the 1830s. We've done weeded bourbon from the 1830s we've done a hundred percent corn malt whiskey, all that sort of stuff. But we have a theory, even though that wasn't really a commercial distillery necessarily, except for the local neighborhood we call it the Dirty Wagon theory. So the idea behind this is that wherever you're getting your grain from, even if it's your own farm, you probably didn't take a broom and necessarily dust out the wheat before you filled the wagon up goes rye.

(00:44:37):
So maybe, yeah, one or 2% of your Nashville or whatever was left in that wagon. And you know, don't think that those things make a difference, but they do. Even that one or 2%, you know, can see a difference in the whiskey. And so I think that that was a lot of early distilling. There weren't really, I think even in Kentucky. Kentucky, obviously their marketing after prohibition was fantastic. But I do think that there's a lot of romancing the stone, as it were with here, these are the set mash bills and these are the way ways that we've always done things and here's why we did it that no, that's not, distilling again is inherently agricultural. Right. It's 100% agricultural. And so here's a good example. There are categories of spirits that have disappeared 1000000%. And so one of the pre-prohibition categories, and even by prohibition, it was rare that existed, was a thing called split brandy. And nobody knows what the hell that is. I say split brandy and everybody's like, what? What's that? Yeah, split brandy is exactly what it sounds like. It is. It's half grain and it's half fruit. Okay.

Drew (00:45:46):
Right. Yeah. So you can see that.

Alan (00:45:49):
The cool thing about that, yeah, you'd have apple and rye. You'd have wheat and peach, right? Yeah. This was a legitimate category of spirits. It was probably never sold far and wide, but it was sold in the local neighborhood because you had these things at the time.

Drew (00:46:02):
Well, I almost wonder if you did a malted barley and made a whiskey out of malted barley and then made apple brandy and then marry them together. Yeah. Because American single malt is usually very fruity. Scotch whiskeys or especially the space side, whiskeys are very fruity. They have the apple influence, the pear influence. They would blend really nicely I would think. Absolutely.

Alan (00:46:31):
Well, and other historic things that get overlooked. So for example, these Midwest distillers that were making a hundred percent malted corn, cuz a lot of them had to make their own malt on hand. Were they killing that corn? Was that corn therefore smoked? And how was it smoked? What are they using to run that kiln? Were they using oak wood? Are they using oak wood or they using hickory? Right? Yeah. How does that influence the flavor therefore of that whiskey? And we don't know until we do it, but I guarantee you that that's the case. These guys are you, you're drying down mal in one of two ways. It's either being kilned or it's going outside in the wind. In the sun. Yeah.

Drew (00:47:07):
Right. I remember going out to MB Roland out in West Kentucky and they were smoking their corn and there were people saying, oh, that's not really bourbon. You can't do that. You're influencing the flavor. But hey, who's to say that they didn't do that? This is the thing about rules. Rules are good in a way. They set a standard and allow us to understand what we're going to be getting and trust what we're getting. But sometimes they can lock us in a box and it feels like we need to edge off a little bit and say, you know what? Alright, I won't call it bourbon, I'll just call it whiskey. Let's go ahead and make it anyway because it's interesting and it's something we should try to do. But I think a lot of people avoid the word whiskey because we think of early times if you get the non bottled in bond, it's like old barrels and kind of watered down. And so in some ways those kinds of techniques probably hurt the name whiskey for a while in the American market. I agree. But I just don't think there's that much of that left now with American single malt will be a good way to say, Hey, here's whiskey, it's American whiskey. And so we can say whiskey can again denote a quality product, not something that's just good enough to be bourbon.

Alan (00:48:38):
Right. And the beauty of that, for us history nerds that really wanna see these things happen now. And obviously not replicating exactly what they were 150 years ago, cuz we can't. But the beauty of it is that craft distilling has come far enough along in the last five years. So craft distillers are now ending up on best of lists and that whole thing. Right. We've now crossed the barrier. There is no going back. And the beauty of it is, the reason that we've done that is not only because craft distilling has gotten better and it's gotten more inventive and distillers in general have learned more about what they're doing. But because that little spectrum of Kentucky bourbon, and I love Kentucky bourbon, people do get bored with it and they stray outside of it. And the beauty of it is in the next five to 10 years, some of those categories, single malt, we're already talking about it right now, and in three years we're going to be talking about it.

(00:49:35):
Like we talked about rye whiskey right now. Except I think single malts actually more accessible than rye whiskey is, I think in 10 years, especially when this next crop of home distillers that exists right now who are really pushing boundaries at home and the legal distilling industry is not paying any attention to them whatsoever. When that group gets into distilling legally, everything changes. Everything changes. And again, nothing they're doing is necessarily new, but it's stuff that you've not seen for a long time. Right? Yeah. It's stuff that we've never seen in our lifetime, and they're going to push the boundary to a place that we've never ever thought about. And the beauty of it is this is all going to become much more interactive. If one thing has become true, the tourism aspect is not going away. Even if bourbon falls off, and I do suspect that bourbon will fall off to some degree, it's not ever going to go away.

(00:50:27):
It's always going to be popular. I do believe that. But it will fall off to some degree. You can only have so many great big distilleries making bourbon at one time. Yeah. There's no way around it. But what's going to happen is you're going to have places that have classes and they bring people in, and more and more people are going to be interested in home distilling. And more and more people are going to be looking at legal distilling for the answer. What can you do with this? And you're going to see those categories become more and more expanded. And even within categories, even within the bourbon category, that spectrum is going to keep widening back out. It was in the 18 hundreds and then that I am a extremely excited for the next 10 years. Here's what I'm very excited about, drew. I'll tell you the truth. I'm excited for the day that comes as a distiller and as a historian, maybe nine, 10 years from now where I don't have to make bourbon or talk about bourbon, what I'm excited about. Yeah. Right. Yeah. I'm excited about those other categories that we've forgotten about and the things that we don't remember how to do. That's the stuff that gets me super excited. And in 10 years people are going to be ready for

Drew (00:51:31):
That. So do I sense a split brandy coming from you sometime soon?

Alan (00:51:36):
Oh, absolutely. That's for sure.

Drew (00:51:38):
<laugh> for

Alan (00:51:38):
Sure

Drew (00:51:38):
Happen. Yeah. Actually a weeded bourbon might actually do pretty well. And a you're is your weed it's just barley and wheat? Or is it corn? It's got corn, yes.

Alan (00:51:50):
So we do yeah, it's the old aph. It's also 70 corn, 20 wheat 10% caramel. But I did just lay down 35 barrels of wheat whiskey which is, let's see, 85%, 85% wheat, 5% midnight wheat, which is a chocolate malt wheat, and then 10% distillers malt.

Drew (00:52:18):
Okay, interesting. Yeah. Yep. Well that one maybe

Alan (00:52:23):
Actually as of today, we laid down barrel number 3000. Yeah. And that's what it was, was the wheat

Drew (00:52:30):
Whiskey. It'll be apples dipped in chocolate. This would be an interesting question for you, cuz I wrestle with this occasionally myself. When you go to do this historical research, there are people that you're like, there's just not enough information on for me as Dr. James c Crow it. For a guy who is so influential on bourbon, there's almost no information about him. It's amazing how little was recorded on his life. For you, who's the one person that if you could spend 30 minutes from any time in history and you could just sit down with somebody from whiskey or brandy production that you could talk to, who would that be?

Alan (00:53:20):
So this isn't even on the technical side of things, but there's one gentleman that I would love if I had a DeLorean and I was studying Southern Indiana distilling it history. There's one gentleman that I would love to go back in time and meet, and his name was Alexander Ralston. So Alexander Ralston helped lay out Washington DC alongside George Washington. He was a Freemason. He got caught up in the Berg controversy and all that stuff. He moved to southern Indiana before Indiana became a state, he moved to what's now known as Hardenberg Indiana. And he built a distillery, which by all means should not have existed prior to 1816 in southern Indiana. Apparently it was three 1000 gallon wood fired pot stills in Hardenberg, Indiana on top of what they called Irish Hill at the time. Along the way, he picked up an African American woman in Kentucky.

(00:54:21):
We do not know if she was a slave or if she was freed, but what we do know is when he got to Indiana, she was an equal partner in his business. And so he and her at the same time, are listed as the owners of this distillery and the store that existed in Hardenberg Indiana on what was then effectively the frontier. So he was there for about four or five years, and then a gentleman by the name of Aaron Harden, who had been a drunkard <laugh> way back, who then resolved himself to the Christian religion and decided that he was going to preach temperance, came through hardenberg. He bought out Alex Alexander. He tore down his distillery and turned it into two houses, which still exists to this day. One in Hardenberg and one in nearby Fredericksburg. And then Ralston ends up in Indianapolis and he helps lay out Indianapolis.

(00:55:17):
At the same time. This woman that he's with, and you'll have to forgive me for not remembering her name off the top of my head, she is counted as the first African American resident of Indianapolis, Indiana. So what I'm curious about is I would like to seeing prior to 18 16, 3 1000 gallon pot stills running off of wood. Yeah. <laugh>, how you do that. Yeah. Right. Yeah. What does your workforce look like? <laugh> B I want to know that whole story about him leaving Washington DC ending up in the frontier of Indiana. And C, how involved was she in the distilling process? Right. Yeah. Maybe she was the distiller. Could have been. It could be. Yeah. Right. And that part of the county, there's all kinds of African-American settlements that exist in until unfortunately, the Civil War, at which time again, the Knights of the Golden Circle kind of come to prominence. And I've always looked for trying to find any African-American influence on distilling in southern Indiana. I can't, of course, there's no real records of that. She's the closest I've ever come to being able to say that. Yeah. Maybe it

Drew (00:56:33):
Could be. This is the challenge we have. There's a whole slice of distilling history we'll never know about. It's what makes writing about Tennessee very difficult because Yep. When you start reading about these famous men who owned distilleries and then it says that they had so many enslaved people on the property, now you realize that likely they weren't the distillers. It was being distilled by the enslaved people. He probably oversaw it. But that's probably the most that really went on there. And there's no way we're ever going to know that history because it would've been oral tradition would've been the only way that probably would've been passed on.

Alan (00:57:20):
The other two real quick ones that I'll throw out there that I definitely interested in. So the first one is every morning on my way to spirits of French Lick from Pekin, Indiana, it's an hour drive to get there. And I have to go through Millersburg Stampers Creek Township, which I love, where those nine distilleries were. And I drive directly by the McCoy Distillery every morning. And I look at it every morning and I go, man, how cool would it be? Just flashback 1870 and be able to pull in there and what are you guys doing <laugh>, right? I wanna go in there and ask questions. What are you guys doing? Yeah, what's happening? And then the other one is, Indiana was settled by Europeans earlier than people realize. French Lick is called French Lick for a reason. It was a French trading post, the French being in this area in the early 16 hundreds. I suspect that there was some distilling happening very early on in Indiana in the 16 hundreds. And just to be able to go back to that time period, and even if people just running a little three or four or five gallons still just to have a little taste of home, I suspect it

Drew (00:58:26):
Happened. I wonder,

Alan (00:58:27):
I

Drew (00:58:27):
Suspect it, I wonder if that area was rich with Buffalo, because in reading about Nashville, Nashville was originally a fur trading post called French Lick, and it was called French Lick, or they also called the Big Salt Lick because the rock formations there had the minerals on them, and the buffalo would just hang out and get nourishment off of those rocks.

Alan (00:58:58):
Buffalo and Beaver were the two big things here, from what I understand. And ironically the trail that led from Louisville and then Fall City which is New Albany now up through here, what they call Vincent Shell, or the old Buffalo Trace related to the Buffalo trace in Kentucky, almost all the old distilleries in the frontier days were right along that area. And all the old mills were right along that area. Right. Because it's, be honest, these are primarily men away from their family early on, and it's sort of one stop shopping, you know, stop and you know, get a tavern. And in a related words, and they don't exactly mean the same thing we think they do nowadays. You know, might get stop in, get you a good drink, and have some soup from the communal bowl that has two spoons in it, and there's a girl in the back room over there and is a dusty trail, <laugh>, enjoy your evening sort of thing. So

Drew (00:59:58):
Yeah, we're going to have to keep comparing notes along the way because like I say, all this stuff that I'm running into with Tennessee, we're both researching areas on the edge of Kentucky and just absolutely fascinating to see the stuff that you brought up. Robertson County, Robertson County Old Forrester talks about the fact that they were the first two bottle whiskey. And as I was looking through Robertson County there are records of a distillery in the 1860s that was buying large numbers of bottles. So likely they were bottling before even Old Forester. We just don't know about it because nobody pays attention to Tennessee whiskey history. They only pay attention to Kentucky. So hopefully we change this

Alan (01:00:47):
Well and well, what's really interesting about that, that RC County whiskey in particular is if you look at those methods and you look at their process of charcoal mellowing, but they're doing white spirit, a lot of the times you'll find that same methodology in Western Kentucky and it's its own thing that could have become its own category, separate of bourbon and separate of what we now think of as Tennessee whiskey. But there's a lot of shared methodology, and as you get into this, and this is sort of ancillary to what we've been talking about, but I think it's interesting, and anytime you ever want me to come on talk, I'll be glad to come and talk my head off all time. But as you're going, if you find any references to rectangular or coffin shaped stills with retort systems, let me know and I will point you towards an interesting piece of literature that you might wanna read.

Drew (01:01:39):
Okay. The only square still I know of is Casey Jones, and that's at the Casey Jones distillery. Yes. Because he used to make the square stills to so they could put 'em on the back of trucks. So they were easy to haul around during prohibition.

Alan (01:01:56):
Here's an interesting story. So his cousin is Spencer Valentine of L B L Distillery, and I'm very good friends with Spencer. So that's always been the story. That's been an L B L thing. It was passed down from their family, et cetera. Right. The square, still with a thumper and a double walled condenser. There was a book published in Lexington, Kentucky by a gentleman that was originally from Philadelphia in 1818 who describes a unique method for making whiskey which involves basically making a double mash and then watering it down. But the distilling equipment he describes is a quote box still, or a coffin still with a double retort system and a double walled condenser. And I've talked to Spencer about this in the past. I suspect that someone in Spencer's family and someone in the L B L area and someone in the Robertson County area as well, maybe multiple people had worked for a distillery that was operating off of this published plan. They understood those stills, they saw them, they copied them, and then later on the history gets lost. But it definitely predates Silver Trail and Casey Jones both by a substantial amount of time.

Drew (01:03:06):
Wow. Interesting. Well, Alan, I appreciate all the times tonight, and I think we could probably just chat and chat and chat. Absolutely. And then people will see a four hour podcast. I don't know if I'm going to make it through all of that, but we will keep,

Alan (01:03:21):
It's like a Joe Rogan of whiskey,

Drew (01:03:23):
But we definitely keep it interesting. For sure. Well, thank you so much and thanks for sharing your whiskeys with me, and I look forward to someday coming up to Southern Indiana and checking out what you guys are doing. And the French Lick is more than just Larry Bird, right? Isn't that where he is from?

Alan (01:03:43):
Unfortunately,

Drew (01:03:45):
Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

Alan (01:03:47):
That's why I always get Larry Bird and then I get Isn't John Mellencamp from right up from

Drew (01:03:53):
Bloomington? Yeah. I

Alan (01:03:54):
Just desperately wanna make up lies. Like yeah, go play golf with those guys on Sunday.

Drew (01:04:00):
They're the two most famous in people from Indiana, I guess <laugh>,

Alan (01:04:05):
Axl Rose and Michael Jackson. They're up there too. But we don't have any great personalities from Indiana. Right. They're all little on the <laugh>.

Drew (01:04:17):
Yeah. My

Alan (01:04:18):
History spectrum,

Drew (01:04:19):
My history brain says, okay, we can go see President Benjamin Harrison's home in Indianapolis but I'm trying to fit other things in there. The home of

Alan (01:04:29):
I'll take you to down to Harrison County, and I will show you where William Henry Harrison had a distillery.

Drew (01:04:35):
Oh, very. Oh wow. Okay. All right. That's good to know. How much do we know about that distilling background?

Alan (01:04:43):
He had one in Terre Haute and he had one in Harrison County. The one in Harrison County is on what they call Blue Springs, which is the first or second largest spring in the state of Indiana. It operated for about four years, roughly. We don't know what he made, obviously. Probably corn whiskey more than likely is my guess. But yeah, he was definitely one of, amongst one of the very first distillers in the state of Indiana for sure.

Drew (01:05:12):
Wow. Interesting. Yeah, I just reached out to somebody who could be the first distiller in Tennessee but the mansion still exists where this family's from, but they didn't seem very interested in getting the claim of being the first to manufacture whiskey. So I may have to dig in myself to try to find all of that out. But that's the other problem with whiskey history is that it's not always something that people are proud of. So it doesn't always get documented the same way. Everything. You're

Alan (01:05:46):
Right. This may be a good the best place to close this down at Drew, I wanna throw this out there to you because I suspect that there's very few people in this industry that I can identify with on this history thing. So there's you, there's Nicholas Ente, the bourbon archeologist, the Indiana Jones of Bourbon whom I'm very good friends with, and Brian Cushing of Locus Grove. Right. That's sort of the historic guys. Those are the guy and Mike Veach obviously. So the thing I ran into here in Indiana with discovering the history that I've discovered, and we only touch on a very small amount of it tonight, obviously we could talk for hours and hours and hours, but the thing I discovered is it doesn't take very long in a state where the Temperance Movement was massive for descendants to forget their history. So the very vast majority of families that I've researched and people that I've reached out to ask questions had no idea. And we're talking people who are much older than I am. Yeah, right? Yeah. We're talking people. I'm 36 about or 37, about to turn 38. We're talking people in their seventies. Right? Two generations removed.

Drew (01:06:56):
They have no idea.

Alan (01:06:57):
No idea. Wow. The great-grand. Yeah. Was a distiller, no idea that garage in their backyard was one of the most predominant distilleries in southern Indiana. No clue. And the interesting thing is the cultural difference between some of these counties. So I mentioned earlier that I've been shot at before doing this research, and that's not an exaggeration. There are counties you can go to in southern Indiana, and I could go right now at 10 o'clock at night, if I went to Harrison County, I went to New Amsterdam, I could knock on a 90 year old woman's door and she'd answer and she'd say, what do you want? I would say, I'm studying distilling history. And she'd say, well, come on in, I'll make some coffee and we'll talk cuz everybody in her family, they were not affected by prohibition. Cuz everybody there worked in distilleries and there was an unwritten rule. Don't mess with Harrison County cuz they'll kill you.

Drew (01:07:47):
Right.

Alan (01:07:49):
Washington County, where I'm from is a little hit and Miss Orange County. Once you get people's trust and you show them, Hey, your grandpa was a distiller, they'll let you in. Okay. So the story about me getting shot at, I'll tell you that real quick cause I think you'll appreciate it. And you being doing your studying in Tennessee, just always remember, be careful. Okay. Cause you never know. All

Drew (01:08:07):
Right.

Alan (01:08:09):
So I was studying John Fleener and I knew where his distillery was. I knew where Fleener was buried at. He's buried, buried along a long abandoned old road in Washington County, Indiana, the county I'm from you have to drive through a corn slash soybean field to get to the cemetery between these other two county roads. And I'd been out there about three times. The gentleman who owned the land was an elderly gentleman, gentleman that lived alongside the road. I'd stopped, I'd talked to him. I always go outta my way to talk to these people and have everyday conversations with him, knock on the door and Hey, I'm what I'm doing. He told me the first time I ever came there. He goes, you don't have to stop here every time. You can just go on back there. As long as there's not crops in the field, whatever, you can go on back to the cemetery.

(01:08:51):
So I go back to film this video about John Fleener's grave. It's not in great shape. That cemetery has got 200 plus burials. There's maybe 10 stones still standing. Cleaners is one of them, luckily. So I just drive on past the house and I get back there and I park my truck in the middle of the field and I walk across this little creek where the distillery was, and I walk up to the cemetery and I'm walking around looking, I've been there about 10 minutes when I hear hey. And then when I say, Hey, you echoing off the hills, right? I'm

Drew (01:09:23):
Like, <laugh>

Alan (01:09:25):
Not a good noise. I look over at the farmhouse, I see this guy standing and he's got a rifle. He yells, what are you doing? And before I can say anything, he fires the rifle. Now he's not shooting at me. Yeah. He's shooting beside me and he hits the tree beside

Drew (01:09:43):
Me. It's a warning shot, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Alan (01:09:46):
And I'm just drop and hit the ground, <laugh>, what the hell's happening right now? So I finally catch up with this guy, he walks across over to the creek and I said, Hey, I'm just here, cemetery, blah, blah. And there is a law in Indiana, if you're related to somebody, if a cemetery's on private property, you can still go for granted. I'm not related, but I will lie in that

Drew (01:10:04):
Situation

Alan (01:10:05):
Related to somebody here.

(01:10:07):
So he walks up there and he goes, do you just make it a habit to trespass on people's property? And I'm like, dude, I literally, I have permission to be here. I've been here several times, whatever. And he goes, what are you researching? I told him about a little bit of the distilling thing and all that stuff, and I'm literally just shaking to the bone I've been shot at. Right? Yeah. I'm not a military guy or anything like that. I'm just researching stuff. And he goes, you might want to make sure next time you go somewhere, you knock on the door. And I was like, okay, well, I always talk to the guy and he goes, well, that guy died a couple months ago and I just bought this property. He goes, I didn't even know there was a cemetery back here.

Drew (01:10:43):
Wow. Oh man.

Alan (01:10:45):
Right. I'm sitting there thinking, well, it seems like maybe you might ask a question before the warning

Drew (01:10:52):
Shot. Yeah,

Alan (01:10:53):
Exactly.

Drew (01:10:54):
Oh man.

Alan (01:10:55):
Just a little. That's the closest I've come to being hurt you and something like this. But I will tell you that Crawford County's a good example. I love Crawford County. It's beautiful. But I will tell you I'm not stopping and knocking on any doors in

Drew (01:11:08):
That county, a brave man than me, because honestly, I don't the thought of knocking on doors never even crossed my mind. So yeah, you've definitely taken a step further than I have taken at this point. So it'll probably be a while before I knock on a door. But I will watch, I have occasionally stepped off road to go see these graveyards are sometimes just in brush somewhere. And so I have actually stepped out and gone to one before, so I could have been in the same situation that you were in that case. So yeah, I've been warned.

Alan (01:11:50):
Yeah. One of the things that I'm really wanting to do sometime in the near future, just as a real quick aside, so I've mentioned earlier that sometimes the graveyards, the headstones are all that's left of some of these stories other than what little bit has been recorded and written down. And sometimes you don't even find in that. You might find the cemetery where it distiller is buried at and find no headstones. Yeah. Or you find a headstones been destroyed. So one of the things I'm hoping to do in the next few years is sort of create a little bit, especially with this little spring mill project, maybe create some kind of fun to replace some of these headstones for some of these people that were such a big part of the history of Southern Indiana distilling if people know that there's someone of prominence buried in some of these old cemeteries that don't have funding, otherwise, maybe that brings in a little money for these places and helps take care of that history. So we'll see that that's a little pipe dream that I have, but one of these days.

Drew (01:12:42):
And to stop them from shooting at you so that they know that they have something valuable there.

Alan (01:12:49):
The other one that I very occasionally run into is, and I bet you've probably had this happen, you ever tell somebody, you ever run into somebody that as a descendant of a distiller and mention, Hey, your great-great-grandfather, whatever, great, great, great, great grandfather, he was a distiller and had them be like, no, my great grandfather have, he wouldn't have done that. He wouldn't have stood for, oh dude, okay, yeah, drew, that's a whole nother,

Drew (01:13:18):
Now you're into politics.

Alan (01:13:19):
I got one here in Washington County and the history books all say he did

Drew (01:13:23):
It.

Alan (01:13:23):
Yeah, this guy's got nothing. He ain't happen, ain't happening.

Drew (01:13:27):
Some people will. I've, I haven't had it happen in distilling, but I have had it in other situations and it's amazing how adamant some people will be on something, especially if it's something that they hold dear to themselves that they don't wanna let loose of. So

Alan (01:13:44):
Yeah, the only thing I can figure out with this guy is he was also accused of counterfeiting money at the time. So I'm presuming that this descendant thinks that if he admits to the distilling, then also the counter

Drew (01:13:58):
Is other stuff will come out. I think the statue of limitations may have run out on it. So he's hopefully. Okay. Well again, Alan, thank you so much for spending so much time tonight. Hopefully your dinner's not too cold. <laugh>,

Alan (01:14:12):
Sorry, history's

Drew (01:14:13):
Worse. Yeah, absolutely.

Alan (01:14:14):
Yeah. Thanks for having me, man. I

Drew (01:14:16):
Appreciate it. Yeah, thank you. And keep history hunting.

Alan (01:14:19):
Oh, I will always.

Drew (01:14:21):
And if you wanna learn more about Alan and the spirits of French Lick, then just head to spirits of french lick.com and find links to his Alchemist blog and his Distillers Talk podcast by checking out the show notes page for this episode@whiskeylord.com. If you're a fan of the Whiskey Lore Stories podcast, I've decided to make that a 100% listener supported podcast. So if you're a fan of it and you'd like me to continue writing stories and producing new seasons, please join in as a member of the Whiskey Lore Society for the price of a bottle of whiskey a year. You can help me create all new future episodes. Head to patreon.com/whiskey. I'm your host, drew Hanish. And until next time, cheers and Slah Whiskey Lores of production of Travel Fuel's Life, L L C.