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Independent Bottler's Roundtable
Bourbon Roundtable Part II
by John Hansell
We had a chance to call a rare gathering of bourbon producers together at the Chicago WhiskyFest in March: Craig Beam (Heaven Hill), Lincoln Henderson (Woodford Reserve/Brown-Forman), Elmer T. Lee (Buffalo Trace), Fred Noe (Jim Beam), Jimmy Russell (Wild Turkey), Bill Samuels (Maker’s Mark), and Julian Van Winkle (Van Winkle Distillery). We split the interview into two parts we called How and Why. We ran How, the part about making bourbon, last issue; Why, which you see before you, is more about bourbon’s image and why these people enjoy making it so much. Enjoy, cheers!
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Let’s talk about the hot end of the market: small batch whiskeys. Some drinkers are concerned that the small batch whiskeys will cut the heart out of the major brands, that the brands won’t have the ‘good whiskey’ in them anymore.
[Head-shaking around the table, negative grunting.]
John: They’re saying you’re culling your best stuff for the small batch and single barrel bottlings, so you’re skewing what’s left over to be not as high quality.
Jimmy Russell, Wild Turkey: No, no, that’s not so.
John: We’re not saying that, but people are bringing it up to us, and we’d like to give you a chance to give your side of the story.
Bill Samuels, Maker’s Mark: I’ll tell you my side: that’s the reason we don’t do it. In all honesty, we don’t know how to make what we do any better. We can make it woodier, we can add more proof to it, but it’s all strategy. We’ve got just one little niche. There’s been a few temptations, but it ain’t gonna happen.
Lincoln Henderson, Brown-Forman: Well, you’re small batch anyway.
Bill: Yeah, but small batch has, I think, been defined by bottling rather than by production.
Jimmy: But, you see, most people have the perception that [the distiller] just made a few barrels of the small batch, and that’s it.
Elmer T. Lee, Buffalo Trace: That’s not true. Not in our place, anyway.
Jimmy: Yeah, that’s not true. It’s regulations on single barrel. It has to come from one barrel. “Small batch” can be 50,000 barrels, I guess, if you want to say it’s small batch.
Craig Beam, Heaven Hill: Everybody’s got their own definition.
Lincoln: If you normally bottle a thousand barrels a day, and you go 999…
Jimmy: That’s small batch.
Fred Noe, Jim Beam: Smaller batch than your regular day.
John: I’ve seen some really large small batches.
Lincoln: Woodford, what we’re bottling now, of course, wasn’t produced as a small batch. We pulled from the Brown-Forman inventory. But we do it in batches of 20 barrels. And each one of those barrels has been tasted many, many times, so that we get a uniform product. But that’s such a small part of it, the entire inventory, that it wouldn’t affect… I mean, we’ve seen these things, for years and years, I’d be tasting whiskeys and find these honey barrels that are so outstanding. But you couldn’t bottle it at that time, we didn’t have a brand for it. It just went in with the rest of it. It really didn’t change much of anything. If you pull 20 barrels out of a thousand barrels it ain’t gonna change anything.
Elmer: We define ‘small batch’ at Buffalo Trace as being no greater than 35 barrels. That’s just our own definition.
Bill: For what, for bottling?
Elmer: That’s right, for bottling. Then those are mingled together in a tank.
Fred: We got to look at it as what we don’t mass-produce. You know, our Jim Beam White, we’re running it on the bottling lines at 400 bottles a minute. Small batch is hand-done, the Booker’s is in limited quantities. To think that it’s taking away from Jim Beam, the other ones, no, it’s not. Certain people like the flavor of the Booker’s. The same person’s not going to drink other bourbons. They want something with that big kick, that big flavor, which you don’t see as many liking that as, say, the Knob Creek. Even now the Jim Beam Black, we’re seeing people liking that. It’s different strokes for different folks, because there’s different flavors. People are adventuring around, moving around.
Bill: You know, another way to look at this: the two bourbon markets are very different. The traditional bourbon drinkers and the new young professional urban bourbon drinkers, probably have never met each other. This is true, and I’m not just talking about the nursing home crowd.
Julian Van Winkle, Van Winkle Distillery: Family reunions, maybe.
Bill: Maybe, and only if the young ones left home and came back for the reunions. The new bourbon customer, around the country, never ever drank bourbon, never ever would have drunk bourbon without the buzz, without the experimentation, without the courage of the bourbon distillers arousing the curiosity of these folks.
So it would’ve been a sum of zero if they hadn’t done something. And these [traditional bourbon drinkers] over here are all gonna die anyway. It’s a new beginning. It’s hard to compare: this is where the volume is, this is where the future is, and the margins, and the good taste, and the craftsmanship.
John: Let me take Lew’s question and kind of turn it inside-out: you’re saying that taking a small batch isn’t going to impact your more mass-produced product. But someone else argues that what you’re putting out as small batch, in the fancy bottle, and charging two, three times as much for, is essentially the same stuff that you’re getting in your $10, $15 bottle of bourbon, and you’re just putting it in a fancy bottle and charging more for it.
Lincoln: Not true.
Fred: Nah.
Jimmy: I can answer that for us, it’s just not true.
John: Is it a fair question?
I’ve certainly heard people ask it.
Fred: I can just speak for ours. Put
the four Small Batch Bourbons, Basil, Knob Creek, Booker’s, and Baker’s side by side, and taste ‘em, and you tell me they’re all four the same…then you got bad taste buds. You need to go to my cheaper stuff, you know.
John: Oh, I’m not saying the small batch and the regular production whiskeys don’t taste different, but they’re arguing that one isn’t necessarily tasting better than the other. They’re worth twice as much.
Fred: That’s their personal preference.
Lincoln: It’s worth it to that person who buys it because of the image, the package. If he enjoys it, and it’s worth two times as much to him, that’s all that counts. It’s gotta be. It’s not just necessarily the product, it’s gonna be the whole experience. We actually generated these spider diagrams, you’ve seen ‘em. Almost like a whiskey, not a wheel, but [taste profile]. We took Woodford, Old Forester 86 proof, Old Forester Bond, and I don’t know what else, Jack Daniel’s, and you look at those things and they’re just night and day different. And this is a real consumer testing, you put all these different attributes together and it just stands right out. It’s not the same whiskey. But that’s not saying that this whiskey is worth twice as much as this whiskey.
John: We do have some $10, $12 bottles of bourbon out there that are pretty darned good. I’ve seen them all over the shelves when I go to Kentucky.
I think a lot of that is the same kind of people who will say, ‘so and so’s distillery has X many different brands, but you know it’s all the same whiskey, they just put it in different bottles.’ They’re not getting the whole idea of how you make whiskey.
Craig: Well, it might be the same whiskey… See, say for instance, us, we use the same recipe on all of ours, excepting Old Fitzgerald has wheat in it. But we go by age. The age is different, the proof is different, and so on.
Jimmy: Age and percent of alcohol. Our formula’s the same, day in and day out. I don’t think people get that, that there’s more to it than just mashing grain, distilling it.
Craig: Sure, a 12 year old’s going to cost more than a 10, and an 18 year old’s gonna cost more than a 12.
Jimmy: Lincoln’s probably run into this, I know I have, in European countries, especially Germany and some of ‘em. “Oh, you’ve got this little place that you show, where you’ve got the copper still, and you’ve got these fermenters and all. Then over there you’ve got all them old big stainless steel tanks you’re making it in and putting it right in, bottling it and going out there.” You had ‘em tell you that, any of you? That’s the perception they have of it.
Lincoln: Nah, that’s only in Scotland they do that. I remember Jameson’s; we went down there and they had this old distillery, then across the road there was this huge factory turning out all this whiskey.
John: That’s still the truth, that’s still there; the romantic museum, and the really industrial distillery in the back.
Lincoln: But they’re not any different than us, really. We’ve got our big distilleries, and our small distilleries, and they’re all high-quality products. Just because you’re big doesn’t mean it’s not going to be great.
Bill: The other thing I would say in defense of the group is that what you see is what you get. There’s no deception. The one piece of bourbon tradition that has not gone away, and I hope it never does, is this authenticity and honesty that bourbon is so wrapped up in.
John: I think there’s still some confusion with some of the branded bourbons, people get confused and think there is actually a distillery, Corner Creek Distillery, for example. They talk about this distillery that doesn’t exist. There is some of that that goes on. You have how many labels, and how many distilleries. If there is a lack of authenticity, it might be in that area.
Lincoln: I don’t know why people are confused. I mean, look at wineries. There’s never that question with wineries. A winery can turn out 30 different products, they’re all high-quality, different. And the beer people, Budweiser…hell, they own all these different breweries.
Jimmy: What about your scotch industry?
Bill: Yeah, swapping around, and…
Jimmy: How many scotch distilleries is there over there? There’s not as many as y’all think there is.
Bill: There used to be.
Jimmy: Used to be. There used to be a lot of bourbon distilleries, too!
That’s right. Some of them are old friends: should you take away the label if the distillery closes? Which would you rather have, the authenticity, or have the brand go away? It is an issue that people bring up.
Lincoln: These are readers?
John: Readers, enthusiasts…
Lincoln: Aw, I think it’s the scotch [industry] people that are doing it.
[Laughter.]
Elmer: Trying to undercut us.
Lincoln: That’s right.
Feeling nervous, are they?
Lincoln: They should.
John: Just don’t ship any more barrels over to them.
Lincoln: In Scotland, like we were talking about, you can buy another distillery’s products, you can blend with them. In the United States, we can’t mix anything from another distillery with our product. It’s pure, it’s straight, and I think that’s an important thing that people understand.
Jimmy: If we mix other bourbons, we have to say “a blend of bourbon whiskeys,” we can’t call it a straight bourbon whiskey no more. Scotland can blend theirs, and still call it Scotch whisky. Correct me if I’m wrong.
John: They couldn’t call it a single malt.
Bill: A single malt is our analogy, probably.
Jimmy: But that’s a little misleading, too. Up until just a few years ago, all bourbons was single bourbons. Elmer, right?
Elmer: I think you’re right.
Jimmy: If we made two different formulas at the Wild Turkey distillery, we could not put those two together and bottle it. They had to come from the one distillery, which is the same thing you’re talking about with single malts. It’s changed some now, if you own more than one distillery you can say, well, just like Beam. They say Frankfort, Kentucky, Clermont, Kentucky. But up till a few years ago you couldn’t’ve done that.
That’s a regulation change?
Jimmy: That’s regulation changes. Up until a few years ago it would have had to have come from one place. And the formulas, I think the law at that time said, similar formulas. If there was a huge difference in the formulas you couldn’t even [put them together].
John: Getting back to the education aspect of the magazine and WhiskyFest: education was always a major focus. I’ve always felt that, aside from taxes, one of the biggest challenges was education of the consumer. I always feel that’s an uphill battle, not just to the consumer, but the people who are selling the products, too.
Fred: That’s why I’m traveling 25, 30 weeks a year. We’re out there doing wait staff training, bourbon tasting, we have that thing with Richard Paterson, the Great Whiskey Debate, where we do scotch and bourbon at the same time. It’s amazing. More education has to help.
Bill: The fact is, what’s driving good behavior [in the consumers] is the fear of punishment [for drunk driving]. That’s the truth. Then if you can bring some education on top of that, and make that cultural change make sense, then it’s more likely to stick. So I think it’s education within the context of fear of punishment that has caused this incredible change in the amount of responsibility that consumers are willing to take. This has happened within eight or ten years, and it’s been very good for all of us.
Jimmy: Why? Because up until fifteen years ago, how many people in the production end of it was ever out in the field talking to people? How many magazines or books was written on bourbon till fifteen years ago?
You might see some stuff about the history of bourbon.
Jimmy: The history, but nothing about the spirit. Scotch, and Irish, beer, wines, books have been written for many years, but you look fifteen years ago and there was nothing [about bourbon]. I heard the story many times, your bourbon drinker was the gentlemen who got off of work in the afternoon, they went to the bar, got their bourbon, went back behind the bar and played cards the rest of the night. Wasn’t that the way it was?
Bill: In the South.
Jimmy: I’m talking about the South. Bill, he’s turning red!
Fred: You know, watching Booker, he started doing them tastings, and they were lucky to get ten or twenty people to show up for one of the tastings. Now it’s not unusual for 300 to come here me speak about it. It just blows me away to see how many people are really interested about the product. They ask questions about the whole bourbon category, it’s not just Beam. It’s good for all of us, the more attention we can draw to the whole bourbon segment. I’m always getting questions like, who does this, and how do they do it? They all think we’re enemies, you know? I say no, it’s not like Hatfields and McCoys, hell, we’re all buddies. I usually bring up Jimmy’s son, Eddie; hell, me and Eddie, we’re good buddies. Craig, we’re cousins, how in hell can you hate your own kinfolk?
Lincoln: I know 20 years ago you wouldn’t go out here and start talking to people about what you do. You wouldn’t start really promoting your brand.
Bill: We were afraid.
Lincoln: We were afraid that we’d offend somebody. We just got way behind the scotch people.
Jimmy: The Scotch and Irish people, they were out promoting!
Craig: You’d be surprised. I go to church just about every Sunday, and I mean, people want to talk about bourbon in church.
Lincoln: That’s my church, isn’t it!
Fred: I’ll tell you what, I met a judge down in Alabama who’s wife’s on the ABC Board down in Alabama: his preacher wanted a bottle of bourbon. So we go to the courthouse, and the judge says, I don’t think it would be right to sign this bottle in the courthouse, so let’s go across the street. We go into a lawyer’s office, and I signed the bottle for this Southern Baptist preacher, and he asked if I’d come do a sermon at his church. [Laughter, and a couple “Praise the Lords”] I’ve done a lot of things, but a sermon on bourbon…
Lincoln: My relatives in Oklahoma haven’t talked to me since I started working for a distillery. That’s the worst thing they can think of. It’s all right for them to… Well, no, they can’t dance either, but they can do things in the backseat of a car, that’s what counts.
While we’re telling stories…let’s go around the table and tell when you had your first bourbon.
Bill: It was this one’s [Julian’s] grandfather [Pappy Van Winkle].
Julian: You too?
Bill: And that’s the reason I knew about before. We were down at the office for lunch, I was 11 years old, and I was starving. And he was going to feed us. But I couldn’t go until I had my two fingers. It was the first sip I had, didn’t have another for another 11 or 12 years. Those things you don’t forget! But I do remember him talking about the rye and the wheat being in the bourbon.
Julian: I’m sure mine was in some form of cough medicine. I’m talking about three or four years old. Because I did the same thing with my kids, and they all love bourbon right now. But you know, a little bourbon, honey, sugar, and lemon juice, heat it up a little bit. Got rid of that cough, and the rest is history.
Lincoln: I can see it right now: Ancient Age, Oklahoma City, during the winter break. A bunch of us got together, and we went out and bought these half pints from a bootlegger. It was illegal to buy spirits in Oklahoma. And I’m sitting there drinking this stuff straight, and that was good whiskey.
Elmer: Good whiskey, isn’t it?
Lincoln: Ancient Age was my first bourbon.
Elmer: Still is good.
Fred: I know I had cough medicine when I was a little one, I’m sure they put it in your bottle when you were a baby. I don’t recall it, but anything to shut me up! Far as my first drink, I don’t remember when it was. Long time ago.
Jimmy: I probably don’t remember it, but probably about 7 or 8 months old. You know, growing up in bourbon country, you all forgot about this, but I know they done the same thing to you. When he starts teething you stick your finger down in there and [rub some bourbon on the gums].
Fred: Ohhh, yeah! Maybe it was in my bottle.
Jimmy: Then again, like you said, when you started coughing, a little bourbon, a little honey, sugar, and lemon juice, lime juice, all mixed up to you. But really, the first time? I don’t know, it’s like everything else when you get to that high school age: anything that’s forbidden, you gotta go see if you can find some of it. You try to drink it all because you’re afraid you’re not going to get something again.
Fred: I was in military school for high school, so that was even better.
Elmer: I guess mine was in high school also. I believe I was a junior, about 16 years old. I remember it being a pretty fiery drink. I didn’t drink to amount to anything till I was in college, I don’t think.
Craig: Well, like the rest of ‘em, I’ve had some cough syrup in my day, too. Oh, that was nasty. But I remember, 1974, a tornado hit our place, on the farm, and Dad had some guys after they got off of work come down and help put up fence and help clean up stuff. They always had some whiskey around, and they’d say, “Hey, get on over so your dad can’t see and take a shot!” And I did, and I did that a few times, quite often in the next few months. I don’t remember getting drunk or anything, but I guess I was probably about 17 or 18 years old when I started drinking.
Jimmy: You know, they didn’t tell you a true story. When they started getting that bourbon for a cough, five or six years old, having a little bourbon and all, then they’d run around all winter, going “cough, cough!”
Bill: It became known as the Ohio River Valley Crud. And it’s all fabricated, just a way to get the medicine.
You mingle barrels from all over the warehouse. Does every barrel have the potential to be a great one, or is it the wood?
Bill: Yeah, if you rotate your barrels. Absolutely. Which means if you got one brand, you gotta do it, and you gotta do it right.
Jimmy: And you’ll just find some storage buildings, for some reason, ages better. Even though like ours, all sitting right up there in line, we find that some of our storage buildings ages better at certain levels than others. There’s something I think you’ll all agree with me. You can’t scientifically prove why it does that, but just certain ones. Y’all got one down there [nods to Elmer] that’ll age better than the others.
Consistently.
Jimmy: Yeah.
Fred: We got a couple houses that Jim Beam built, and Booker swears they’re the best, and he’s right. I mean, the liquor just tastes better out of them.
Elmer: That’s where the best bourbon comes from, out of them houses.
You guys should look into that feng shui stuff, how to place them on the hill.
Fred: That’s a lot of it, the direction. Dad says that’s got something to do with it, the direction it faces, how the hill is, how close it is, does the air flow through the hollow there…
John: As much as this is a science, and the more you guys learn about how to improve the quality of the product, there’s still this unknown factor.
Lincoln: Mother Nature.
Bill: But it’s uncontrollable more than unknown.
Lincoln: I know there’s a distillery that I pass on Highway 27, I mean they got warehouses up there…You [nods to Jimmy] got those over there? I mean the ones…
Jimmy: The ones that don’t have any roofs on them?
Lincoln: Yeah! That’s a unique…
Bill: Jimmy, what happened to you? Storm?
Jimmy: No, we want to get good air circulation, get it seasoned real well. [Laughter.]
Lincoln: You get a lot of sun and all. It just looks so funny up there.
Bill: What’s going on, what are you doing up there?
Jimmy: We had a tornado hit us. Again.
Bill: Did it twist ‘em?
Jimmy: No, didn’t twist ‘em, just lifted the roofs up, and I mean it took everything. There’s your racks, and sets of barrels up there.
Lincoln: That’s going to be interesting whiskey.
Jimmy: That’s the third time. We got hit hard up there in what, in the late 1970s, 1978, wasn’t it?
Fred: We got hit in ‘74. 1974 was the big one. That twisted houses, took houses and just turned ‘em into a pile of barrels. Like it picked it up, rolled it, and dumped ‘em.
Bill: And that wasn’t as bad as the ones that were twisted, where they had to take the barrels out one at a time, 20,000 barrels, one at a time, and nobody getting up there, because it wasn’t safe.
Fred: We tried to straighten ‘em up, put anchors in the hills, and tried to pull ‘em with cables.
Jimmy: We done the same thing, some of our houses at Tyrone. I’ll tell you this: it doesn’t work.
Fred: Nah, it doesn’t work.
Craig: That’s the bad thing about having your warehouses up on a hill, which may be different from everybody else, but you have to take care of that, the sides tore off of ‘em.
Lincoln: Jimmy, that whiskey’s probably going to be different, getting a lot of wind and sun, so you’ll have to take care of that.
Jimmy: Yeah, we’ll have to take care of that when it comes to making it. Now, most of that sitting out in the open had just been put in there.
Lincoln: Oh, so that could be mature pretty quick, you know.
Bill: Oh, Lincoln, stop picking on him.
Lincoln: No, I’m serious! We always want to age our whiskey quicker.
Elmer: Bleached barrels.
Jimmy: You talk about a new style, this one’s going to be…
Tornado whiskey.
Craig: Put out a new bottle: The Tornado. I can see that.
Jimmy: But we’ve had that happen to us, I guess three times in the past twenty-five years.
Elmer: You fellas are just not living right up there.
Jimmy: No, we’re sitting up high on top of a hill, is the problem! We’ve only had two, at Tyrone, that twisted the buildings. The rest of the time, plumb-bob and everything was just straight as a bead: the walls was gone, and the roof was gone. We had those two buildings at Tyrone, it twisted the buildings. We went in there, like you was talking about [nods to Fred Noe], tried to straighten them. We took all the barrels out; had to, because they were all rolling towards the middle. Some of them you had a hard time getting them out. They went in there, and they started behind where they were twisted, put in big concrete pillars, big I-beams, and started pulling with cranes… I’ll tell you, fellas: it don’t work. They’d get it pretty straight, but then it starts going back.
Elmer: What’d you finally do, just tear it down?
Jimmy: We’re going to, we ever get the barrels out of it.
Elmer: That’s about all you could do.
You hear a lot about copper in distilling, there’s gotta be copper in there. What does copper do in a still?
Lincoln: Oh, it does a lot. It cleanses —no, I don’t like to use that term, it takes out certain things that we don’t want in there, particularly sulfides. I don’t care if you’re making bourbon, or—
So this stuff binds with the copper and comes out?
Lincoln: You better believe it. You look at the copper that’s in the system after it’s been there for a few months, and it’s just black. That’s the reason they made copper stills. They found out that was the best way to do it. You’ve got to put copper in the system someplace, doesn’t have to be a copper pot still.
Jimmy: Doesn’t have to be the still, but you’ve got to have copper in there someplace.
Elmer: At our place, we’ve got a stainless still, but the condensers and the vapor piping and all that is copper. If you take it all out, you’re gonna have some problems.
Lincoln: At Early Times they do a really scientific thing. They take copper tubing, you know, like’s used for water pipes? They cut it in little pieces and just throw it in the top of the still. Really scientific.
Elmer: But it works.
Julian: Gotta market that idea. That whiskey’ll sell.
Lincoln: Now how many, 300 years ago? When did scotch start? I assume they were probably using wooden stills in the beginning, and then they went to copper. They noticed it made a much better whiskey.
Jimmy: That’s another question I’d like to ask all of you. Why’d all the old distillers keep their yeast growing during Prohibition?
Elmer: I guess they figured there was going to be an end to the damned days sometime or other.
Jimmy: It’s always amazed me, every but one of them kept their yeast going. Now they might have been back on the hill, making moonshine some place, but just about every one
of them kept that yeast growing.
Lincoln: I guess they felt like it was going to end, at some point in time.
Bill: That yeast was like the crown jewel.
Jimmy: Far as I know, everybody in the business has still got that strain of yeast.
John: Any other questions anyone else would like to bring up to the group?
Julian: When do we get to taste that real Woodford Reserve, that’s my question.
Elmer: When are you going to start using it?
Lincoln: We’re going to start bottling next month [April 2003]. But we don’t have very much. The first product, we missed a season, a maturing season, so the first stuff we made was kind of behind on maturation. We have a system of cycling whiskeys, heating and cooling, and we missed the first winter. That whiskey started in September of 1996. But the stuff from March of 1997 is ready, so that’s what we’re using.
We asked earlier what the challenges are to the industry. What do you think is bourbon’s greatest asset?
Lincoln: Just based on my experience going to Japan, I think bourbon… These people look at bourbon like it really is an important part of America, it represents America.
Elmer: Its image and its heritage is, I think, its strongest points.
Lincoln: It’s our whiskey, it’s unique to America, and it’s good. You’ve got really first-class spirits you can match up against anything in the world.
Bill: The thing it’s really got going for it is buzz among the right demographic. Lot of talk out there, lot of chatter, a lot of interest.
Julian: And a lot of potential.
Bill: Enormous potential. We haven’t scratched it yet.
Julian: I see the people at these tasting that are drinking Bowmore across the room, or Edradour, whatever, a nice single malt. They’re going to come across the room and taste a good Kentucky bourbon: same flavor profile. Look at the vast number of people you have to sell to. Really, it’s the same palate. Mostly. Too peaty, not peaty enough, that’s the difference in the single malts, but in the bourbons a wheat recipe or a rye recipe, or even rye whiskey. You’ve got a huge source of people who’ll like your product. Then you look overseas and there’s all these other people. So I don’t see an end to it, I really don’t. Hardly anyone knows about this product, the way I see it. A small percentage.
John: One thing no one’s brought up that I think is a big asset is the value. The right price point compared to cognac, or scotch, or all these other products. You can get a good quality, aged bourbon for half the price of some of the vodkas out there.
Lincoln: [Vodka} costs two dollars a case to make.
Jimmy: They make it one day and sell it the next.
Some of the bottles are really expensive.
Jimmy: More expensive than the product in it!
John: But you look at the quality of the product you’re selling for the price. For years I’ve always felt that you should be charging more.
Lincoln: Okay, why don’t you just put that in the article?
Bill: No, I think that ought to be the lead statement, the value side of it.
Lincoln: I always tell people we’re just about giving it away.
Elmer: That’s right! Just about giving it away.
Julian: That would help, for y’all to educate these people.
Jimmy: And really word it in the way, if you took the taxes off of it, how little it is.
Elmer: I was able to buy one or two bottles of bourbon when I was overseas in World War II. You could buy it free of tax. A dollar and a half for a bottle of bourbon.
Jimmy: Well, what is it on Army bases now?
Elmer: I think they pay the tax now.
Bill: They pay the state tax.
Jimmy: They don’t have to pay the federal tax.
Fred: Oh, I’ve seen some prices on stuff that’ll blow you away. That Knob Creek was $16.99 a 750 down in Alabama, at Redstone Arsenal. They were selling 1.75s for $29.99, they sold a whole barrel in a week. Them guys knew what it was, soon as it hit the shelves, snap, it was gone. They actually held some back: I was going to sign bottles, if they hadn’t put some back, there wouldn’t have been any bottles to sign there. I said, why’d you hold ‘em back, let ‘em have it!
Lincoln: I’ve got an invoice for a case of Old Forester quarts, from 1903: it’s $12.
Elmer: Lincoln, it’s been a number of years ago, but I got a letter when I was manager at the plant from a consumer somewhere up East, had found an advertisement in an old food and beverage-type journal. It was an introductory offer for James E. Pepper, for $5 a case. So he tears this damned thing out and writes a certified letter. “I accept your offer, send my case.” I had to pass that on to the Legal office.
Lincoln: Some of these places here [in Chicago] you’ll pay $12 for a drink.
Julian: In London, it’s forty-something.
Elmer: Somebody’s telling me that they had a drink of 23 year old Van Winkle over there, and they wanted £70 for it, something like that?
Julian: Sure might be. I don’t get all that, I’m on the wrong end of this business.
Well, thanks gentleman. We’ve all got to run: it’s showtime! See you at WhiskyFest!
Other Interviews & Round Tables Classics:
Rye Roundtable |
Independent Bottler's Roundtable
|
