The Whiskey Hour: Single Casks, Sherry Finishes & Why Your Ice Cubes Matter

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Eric G. Welcome to the around the House show, your trusted source for everything about your home.

I'm Eric G. Happy midweek special.

Well, today we're going to do something.

A little bit different.

You know, last week when we had Andy Pace on the show, we ended up talking everything about healthy building materials for your home.

And you know something?

We still haven't aired what was our after hours where we talk about whiskey and distilled spirits because he's that kind of expert too.

So I know for all of you out there, this episode might not be for you.

If you don't drink, you don't like whiskey.

You know something?

I salute you.

I have no problem with that.

To each your own out there.

So this might be one that maybe doesn't hit your interest, but for the people out there that want to understand a little bit more and some insider secrets that I thought was fascinating, let's listen to this short episode.

Let's check it out.

Hey, guys, welcome back to the around the House show.

This is our little after hours episode that we don't have to follow any rules of radio.

So we're going to be here on the podcast only.

Thanks for tuning in.

I got Andy Pace here, my green building brother and the around the house resident whiskey expert.

Add that to my business card.

There we go.

And he is my expert that I lean on for the great whiskeys out there.

And I don't discriminate.

I like good whiskey, I like good gin.

Those are both things that I enjoy.

But Andy, what have you been seeing out there in the world?

I mean, the whole industry is going through a little bit of consolidation, it seems, and people are buying people and people are closing and there's a lot of things happening out there.

What are you seeing?

What are you drinking?

Yeah, it's interesting because you obviously everybody saw the bourbon boom in the last, I would say, five years.

It's been really strong and that's starting to subside a bit.

That's been happening in the industry for probably 30 years now.

Right.

Companies like Diageo and Beam, Suntory have been buying up a lot of distillery.

Yeah.

And I'm not necessarily not in favor of that.

I still love the Craft distilleries for the sheer point of they can kind of push boundaries a little bit when it comes to whiskies.

But I'm still, I mean, my, my love is Scotch.

When I first became a whiskey sommelier, it was in Scotch whiskey.

Yep.

And I since trained and became a bourbon certified bourbon executive.

And I have just recently passed my Irish wish certificate.

Congrats.

Spent a little time in the Dublin this past winter and had to do some quote unquote research.

That's a great business right off, my friend.

Exactly.

Honestly, for those who listen to the other show, if I wasn't in the business of selling healthy homes and, and writing books, I'd be in the whiskey industry somehow because it's just my love, it's my passion.

But right now I'm drinking a, an Abalauer.

So Abalauer is a Speyside whiskey from Scotland.

It's a single cask from the distillery that was hand poured 11 years.

This has been a wonderful dram.

Although once this one's gone, it's gone forever.

And again, one of the sad part, right, is that you can have big brand Jim Beam and Jack Daniels and whatnot.

You can have infinite amount of bottles available and it always tastes good or like in a Scotch whiskey or a single cask bourbon, you, it might be one of 200, 300, 400 bottles worldwide from that particular cask.

And so I find myself gravitating towards single casks recently because this is where you get these.

And we all know whiskey made worldwide is all made the same.

It's the same ingredients.

The only difference is the type of wood, the time involved in the wood and where it's housed during that, that aging process.

Everything else is going to be similar.

And so it's wild to get flavors that are just so vastly different from one cast to the next.

That's amazing.

I mean, great example.

My cheap stuff around the house.

It's my.

I'm gonna make a Manhattan or something like that.

I'm a whiskey guy is I just have Buffalo Trace as my cheap whiskey out there.

But then you.

I went and saw a couple weeks ago, went and saw Chris Stapleton in town and I was at the whiskey store and it was on sale and he had his traveler whiskey, which to me was kind of one off a Buffalo Trace.

Okay.

Very similar.

It's fine.

It was the same price because it was on sale.

And I was like, oh, it's kind of cool.

But you can turn around though.

And this is the fun part.

I think with Whiskey is that you can turn around and buy 150 bottle and go, wow, that's amazing.

Or you can go, wow, that's not for me.

Oh, yeah.

I've had whiskeys that are 2, 300 a bottle.

But I go, I will never have this again.

And which is really unfortunate.

So I, being a whiskey sum, I do conduct, like, private whiskey events.

And I have my friends and family and some consulting or corporate clients that'll hire me to do events.

So I have in my whiskey collection, I probably have somewhere in the neighborhood of don't tell my wife.

900 To 1,000 bottles of whiskey.

Nice.

It has been my goal now in the last two years to kill off open bottles.

Yeah.

Which sounds like a lot of fun.

And it is.

But it's also a lot of work because sometimes I have to power through these bottles that I really didn't like, but I gotta do it.

Yeah.

In the last two years, I've probably.

Now we're talking about some bottles have one pour left.

Absolutely.

Some have a lot more.

It depends on what they are.

But I've probably killed off 50 or 60 different bottles in the last two years alone.

And I've been writing notes about every one of them and taking pictures.

Because I'll tell you what, here's one thing about whiskey that a lot of people don't understand.

Whiskey never goes bad.

You open up a bottle of whiskey, it'll still be drinkable for the rest of its lifespan.

Provided that you sound like wine.

Right?

Yeah.

It'll oxidize.

Once oxygen hits the spirit, it'll change the flavor profile ever so slightly.

With wine, it'll spoil if once you open it, you don't drink it in time.

With whiskey, it just changes.

But sometimes it changes it for the better.

Exactly.

I opened up a bottle of Kilteron.

I opened up this bottle about two years ago.

I had two neck pores of it.

I thought, this is garbage.

I was so excited to open it up, but I was so disappointed.

I let it sit for a year, and then I started tasting it again.

And about the year and a half mark after it being opened up to air, it became sublime.

This became one of my top 10 whiskeys of all time.

And here I thought, this is a sink bottle.

Yeah.

There's no.

There's nothing's gonna save it, Right?

Yeah.

That's crazy.

That's crazy.

Never a bad investment.

You just got to be patient with it.

You just got to be patient with it.

So, yeah, I mean, I'm out here on the west coast.

So I'm Portland area and we've got a few things up here in the northwest.

We've got a new one that's been popping up here that's just a regular whiskey.

Ewan Young is down here.

We got Westward.

I love Westward.

Those guys are great.

Yeah.

And they do some really interesting things too with some of their limited editions.

Just fantastic cask selection.

And this is where American distilleries, whether they're bourbon or they're single malt distilleries, are really learning the craft in Scotland.

It Scotland, the Scotch whiskey industry wouldn't exist if it weren't for the American bourbon industry.

Because here in the United States, bourbon casks can only be used once, then they get shipped overseas.

Mostly we use.

That's again why it was like it's consolidation industry.

Because they can share tasks then.

Yeah, they get shipped overseas for new make whisk Scotch whiskey to be aged in ex bourbon casks.

But in Scotland they made a point decades ago to start using Oloroso sherry casks and PX sherry casks and rum casks and you name it to add what's called a finishing cask.

So it spends 12 years in ex bourbon, then it goes for another two years in ex Caribbean rum cask.

And it picks up all of those flavors and nuances.

Here in the United States bourbon industry never did that at all until Angels Envy decided to start finishing in pork casks.

And this opened up this whole new idea of wait a second, we can do this too.

And now that American single malt whiskey is a thing.

It's now a defined brand whiskey category in the code of reference.

We're now seeing these smaller distilleries.

Heck, even Jack Daniels did this.

A port cask.

They're starting to use this fishing cask and it's making a world of difference.

So it's really helping all of us kind of expand our horizons in the whiskey business.

Yeah, and it's so cool because like up here, because we've got the Willamette Valley in my area up here we've got all these wine and and Pinot Noir casks.

You're seeing the local distillers up here filled, finishing in those, having some fun with it, doing some stuff.

And it always makes it very interesting.

And I love it when I pop into my local state run liquor store here, which I don't like those guys very often but because it's hard to get stuff through them.

But at the same point it's nice to go in there and have A tasting and go, ooh, I wanted to try that without spending 75 bucks for a mid price bottle.

Thought about, and I gotta tell you too, of one of the whiskeys I just killed.

So you've heard of the Anchor Steam Brewery.

All right.

Anchor Steam.

One of my favorite microbrewers of all time.

Yep.

Well, when that was purchased, it was actually purchased originally to be a distillery.

Oh.

And they kept the micro brewery going while they started distilling.

Got it.

They have a bottle called Old Portrero.

You got to pick this up.

You like Manhattan?

You're a love and old parent.

Trero Manhattan.

It's 100% malted rye.

Oh, it is absolutely amazing.

And the one I just killed the other night, it was task finished in a, I think a cabernet wine cask in a Manhattan.

Holy cow.

That's.

That's gotta be just absolutely amazing.

That's money.

Yeah.

And I.

And by the way, I do love certain restaurants now here in the Pacific Northwest.

We're seeing it here too, where they're house making their Manhattan and cask aging the cocktail itself.

I had one last night that was good.

And I had another one a week ago that I was like, holy crap, this is amazing.

And it's just like it just had its own life to it.

And everything was just so integrated and beautiful.

It was just so smooth.

I was like, I am happy these are $21 drinks.

Because that is keeping me from having too many in this situation.

Because it was, it was alcohol free.

I'd have been just dinking that like Kool Aid.

Yeah.

Good thing it wasn't a wedding reception with an open bar.

Right?

Yeah.

That's where things get dangerous and you got to be a little more careful.

But those are the things that I love with that.

And there's so many in for people out there that are in the audience tuning into this that are whiskey drinkers as well.

You don't have to go out and spend a big money to get good whiskey.

There are some just out absolute underpriced kind of like wine is out there where there's just these brands out there that have made it reachable that it's absolutely gorgeous to drink.

Yeah.

Not only that, because I can tell you that when I've done like blind tastings for clients, I'll pour five whiskeys in black Glen Caren glasses.

You can't see it.

You can always smell it and taste it.

Right, Perfect.

I've done it where I've had $200 bottle up against a $19 bottle.

And the $19 bottle wins just as often as the $200 bottle.

And that $19 bottle is either Jim Beam, Devil's Cut.

That's good.

It's good stuff.

Or the other one.

Mellow corn, you kid.

Mellow corn almost always comes out on top when I put it in a tasting.

That's hilarious.

That's down at ankle level in your liquor store.

Usually has dust on it, but for 16 bucks a bottle, it's amazing.

And here's the other thing too.

When the whiskey snobs, and I'm not a whiskey snob.

I mean, I'm a whiskey snob because I love whiskey, but I'm not a snob in that I don't care how you drink it.

If anybody ever tells you, oh, you got to drink that neat, you, you can't put ice in it, you can't put water in it, tell them to pound sand.

Because when I was getting my whiskey in Scotland, the woman who gave us our final test, she grew up in Poland and she told us that in Poland they drink whiskey with lemonade.

Oh.

Mixed drink.

In Japan, it's almost like a little Tennessee kind of whiskey.

Lemon drink.

Exactly, exactly Right.

And so when I talked to the distillers themselves, I was doing a tour behind the scenes tour at Belen many years ago, talking to the master distiller, and he's saying, I don't care how you drink your whiskey, we're just happy you do.

Yeah.

And the number one selling whiskey in Scotland is a blend and they mix with either water or a soda.

And so you drink it the way you like it.

I call it the altered states of whiskey.

If you try it the first time, if you really want to understand the flavor, have it neat, then add a couple drops of water.

It actually heats up the whiskey by about a degree or two and starts to release these water soluble flavors, compounds out of the whiskey.

That's why it has a stronger aroma.

Now when you taste it, you may find that you don't like it as much as you did meat.

Or you may go, oh, now that smoother, it's silkier, less bulky, whatever it is.

Then add ice.

You add ice and it shuts down flavor.

With some whiskey, you want that.

That's why bourbon is consumed with ice all the time, because it helps to get rid of some of that Kentucky hug, that burn.

Right, right.

So especially when you're in a barrel strength, that's where it gets.

Yeah, that's where it gets pretty brutal.

And by the way, guys, ice Cube size matters.

Exactly.

Right.

A hundred percent does.

And don't think that you can just go up to your fridge and go and get it out of there.

That's crushed.

You're going to have a completely different taste than if you put a round or a square chunk of ice in there, because it's going to melt completely differently.

Yeah.

Again, it's all about how it interacts with the product itself.

Again, sometimes a little bit of water, a little bit of cool temperature improves it, sometimes it doesn't.

Right.

Yeah.

But here's the thing you got to be careful of when you are using ice.

Don't just take ice out of the freezer that's subject to whatever is in the freezer giving off aromas.

Because the aroma, like, smell your ice before you put it in your whiskey.

Because if it smells like your refrigerator or freezer, do not put it in the whiskey.

You're going to ruin it, because it's all that flavor transmits into your whiskey.

See, I sold my house that had my.

My LG craft ice dispenser, and I haven't got another one yet.

So that's a problem.

But what I've been doing now is I've been creating my.

You get the mold and you do it.

No big deal.

But what I do is I put it in a Ziploc bag in the freezer.

Yeah.

So that way it's always in the Ziploc bag, and you never have to worry about that.

Your takeout food in the fridge from the night before that's heavy garlic, is now changing your flavor profiles of your content.

Exactly.

Right.

And it just does.

And that's the funny part.

And that's the funny part.

But, man, there's so many great things out there.

You and I could talk about this forever, and we still got work to do today.

But I just love what's been going on out there.

We just had some.

Some places around here close up.

That's some of the sad stuff we're seeing.

We had Rogue ales out here which had Rogue distillery.

They closed up and sold off their stuff.

So Rogue is gone.

And they were such a icon in the industry up here in the Pacific Northwest.

But I believe I could be wrong, but I think Deschutes Brewery bought those, and they've been coming out with their own whiskeys.

Oh.

So.

And I think they bought the Rogue product to integrate that into their line.

So I believe that's whose trucks I saw sitting out in front of their distillery grabbing stuff.

So the craft distillery business is the Distillation business is tough.

Understand that at a global level, every distillery is making their new make for about the same price.

It's a little under $4 for a proof gallon to make the stuff.

Yeah, but you buy it for 50, $67 a bottle because of the process involved, the aging, the taxes that are paid over the years.

I had a friend in the industry years ago, he was the president of Brown Foreman and we were sitting at his desk one day drinking a 25 year old Pappy at his desk and he had literally two full barrels of this stuff.

He's like, I don't know what I'm gonna do with this.

We'll just sit here and drink.

And so we were continuing this at his desk and he said, the problem with the craft distillery is eventually you run out of daddy's money and you have to start making a profit.

He said, you know how you become a millionaire in the bourbon industry?

He said, start with 10 million.

Yeah, that's it.

That's it.

It's like bust.

It's like owning a boat.

The two happiest days, right when you buy it, when you sell it.

Well, I mean even here in Portland we had aviation gin.

Who was Ryan Reynolds thing here?

And they just closed their tasting room down and it was beautiful.

And Ryan owned it, he brought it, he came in here and now he had bought it from a guy that I'd had on the show years ago who had a cocktail show, a different Ryan that was after my show, that he was kind of one of the co founders that.

And then he sold it, I believe.

I think Ryan might have bought his share from him or something like that.

And they're still making money, but you're starting to see those, those big places like that.

And again, it was in the worst part of Portland as well.

I mean it was down just by the freeway, by the homeless camps.

And so it was not a, it was not a, an easy place to do business as well.

But I wish these guys well out there.

There's so many great brands out there and enjoy your own that you love, right?

Yeah, I mean a lot of great brands, a lot of great product.

And again, this is why I love the craft distillers because they start pushing boundaries a bit but eventually they gotta start making profits.

And so, I mean, was it Corsair down in Tennessee?

I mean I love some of the product that they produce, but they're so small.

Dark arts in Lexington, Kentucky.

I love dark art whiskey.

Their rise in their bourbons are unbelievable.

But I was down there last year.

And they're like, we're not sure if we're going to continue on.

We don't know if we can make it.

Yeah.

And they make some of the best.

They don't do the distillery.

They're a rectifier, They're a blender.

But their blends are unbelievable.

And if you're a bourbon lover or a rye lover, you should have 20 bottles of this stuff on your shelf.

But people don't know about them because there's so many to choose from.

There's so much noise.

Oh, yeah.

So it's up to people like Neil and I to educate folks one by one.

So my event that I do, the goal of the event is to introduce people to things that they would never try.

Yeah.

And then open up their eyes and open up their palates to things that they would love to taste again.

It's so funny.

And we'll close with this one.

But you know the story about Pendleton whiskey, right?

They are Canadian club that is put into a Pendleton bottle.

Really?

Really.

It is broad.

That's why if you look where Pendleton is on the shelf, it's a Canadian whiskey.

Those rail cars show up from Canada filled with whiskey, and they get bottled and it's a.

You can buy Pendleton in Canada.

It's just like, I don't know, I can't remember what it was.

I had a buddy that actually was best friends with the founder and he told me all their secrets.

He's no longer around, but they are just getting it by the railcar load and putting it in glass and throwing it out there.

And it's one of their special select or whatever whiskeys.

But it's a.

When you see Canadian and it's based in Hood River, Oregon, where they're doing it, they're not making it there, folks.

That's that.

That's the.

That's the American whiskey way to go.

Honestly, if you look at the bourbon industry, we all know that a lot of the craft distillers actually buy their new make from MGP in Indiana, which I have no problem with.

MGP makes good products.

Right.

But like I said before, if everybody's making this stuff, all the big producers are making it for the same price.

What makes one brand different than another?

Sometimes it's just a good label and a good story.

You Brown Foreman owns Jack Daniel and they own Woodford, Woodford Reserve and Jack Daniels Single cask.

Same liquid.

Yeah.

Different marketing, different processes.

Yep.

Amazing.

That's amazing.

Any pace, brother.

Thanks for coming on again on the whiskey hour here now.

So you got it Now I'm thirsty.

I know.

Same here.

I'm like, sheesh.

Gotta call lunchtime here.

All right, my friend.

Hey, is there a place that if you do tastings and stuff, is there a place out there people can follow you on social media or something like that if they want to find out more?

Oh, my God.

My gosh.

I know it's not your brand.

You're chasing too much, but just a.

Wee dram all spelled out are all together.

Just a wee dram on Instagram.

Perfect.

There we go.

Got it.

Now people can find you.

Appreciate you, buddy.

Thanks again.

Thanks.

I'm Eric G. You've been listening to a special version and a tasty one of around the House.

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