C (101:39)
Yeah, so we, I mean, the last two episodes we've had PowerPoints because I did go on tours of distilleries and so I wanted to share some of those pictures, talk to you about my experiences going through it. But today I'm home for a while and I'm really enjoying being home. Yeah, there's still some work going on in the house. You know, everything takes longer than planned. I remember when we talked about done by Christmas and here we are, middle of February and tell me about a few weeks away. So I have been reading a lot about Canadian whiskey. Again, I thought I knew, but I'm learning new things and grabbed a bottle of the the Lot 40. This is a JPWiser 100% rye whiskey, which is cool. You know, 100% ryes are unusual, or at least they used to be until modern microbiology came along. It was not a thing you would normally do to use 100% rye. Although if you recall, when I was in Pennsylvania and got buried in the history of Pennsylvania whiskey, the old style triple stills they used, these wooden chamber stills allowed for distraction of alcohol more reliably from rye. They just didn't survive prohibition. And so today when we're strictly, you know, column pot stills and rectifiers, it's much harder to distill with rye and making malt is difficult and it tends to foam and so forth. And so rye's have not been very popular. But when you go back to the early times, it's much more common. Now lot 40 is a brand of JPWiser and the JP stands for John Philip, who was born in 1825 in Oneida County, New York. So actually an American of immigrant parents, of course, that were farmers. And he was educated in New York, but he was focused on farming. So his interest in distilling comes a little later. He's married in 1856, he'll have six children. In 1857, he starts running the Charles Payne Distillery and farm in Prescott, Ontario. So how does he end up in Canada all of a sudden? Now, Prescott is actually up the St. Lawrence river just south of Ottawa. It's only 150 miles from Anita county, too. Like, this is all the sort of Canadian American border zone there. And in fact, he was in the farming business. And so his interest in the distillery was purely for the waste product that comes out of stills which they use as cattle feed. Right. The leftovers that come from that. Although he'll get drawn into the whole distilling business. And I should point out, I'm saying Ontario. And although the word Ontario is hundreds of years old, this is 1857. This is before Canada is Canada. Confederation is not till 1867. So at this time, it's the Province of Canada, which is. Was the unification of what was once known as Upper and lower Canada in 1841. But they were kind of squabbling with each other, so they petitioned the British to largely unify them into a province, Canada. And instead of calling it Upper and Lower, they called them Canada west and Canada East. So nominally, when. When Weiser came to the Pain Distillery, he was coming to Canada West. Now, the. The farm in question was owned by Weiser's family. It was actually Charles and Amos Egert, although it had been acquired by another distillery down in the US Side that Weiser was already working for. And so the commonly known story is that he went to work for family and bought them out. The relationship was more complicated than that. It was already through an acquisition. But by 1862, Weiser is the sole owner of the distillery and is now much more interested in the distilling part. The farm pipeline is still running, and Prescott's right on the major train lines. So it's easy to get to Montreal, it's easy to get to Ontario, to Toronto, it's easy to get to. To Ottawa. And there's a train line that does connect up to the northern. The New England train lines down in the north. So that, you know, allows them to produce whiskey at scale as well as also the distribution. Now, I'm probably gonna. We're gonna do several of these, so I'll do various parts of the Canadian whiskey history as we go along. That those 1800s era. The. In the 1850s, the kind of the end of what they call the pioneer era of Canadian whiskey making, where they read all local product, just, you know, it's the traditional farms producing excess that gets turned into to whiskey that's a saleable product and so on. The transformation of the Canadian whiskey industry, the first time comes during the US Civil War. So around the time that Weiser now is sole control of the Prescott distillery, the US Civil War is on. And that means most US Distilleries are shut down for the duration. Volunteers, production problems, supply problems, all everything is pushed on the war. And so Canadian distilleries pick up the slack. The Americans are buying a lot of Canadian whiskey, including the union. And so it makes a huge explosion in whiskey production in the 1860s. And Weiser is certainly a beneficiary of that as well. And they are making what they're calling at that time Canadian whiskey, which is largely rye. Although the mash bills are not as restricted. The real restrictions on what is called whiskey is post Civil War, it's 1875 when the Canadian Food and Drug act. So now we've had Confederation, which is 1867. It's now eight years on. And so the Canadian Food and Drugs act sets up the first rules around whiskey. And we've talked about this before, but they name it Canadian whiskey. Canadian rye whiskey or rye whiskey. It has to be mashed, distilled, and aged in Canada. It has to be at least 40% alcohol, very standard stuff. Wooden vessels no larger than 700 liters. All the time they would been using gallons and a minimum of three years. They don't have to char barrels like the Americans. You can use raw wood, but most people don't. Even then, whiskey is largely made. The corn's very popular in the area, although corn doesn't grow well on the north side of the St. Lawrence. So one of the reasons the Americans grew so much corn is it grew better down there, where rye can take those tougher soils, those shield soils and so forth. So rye does pretty well up there. Weiser's famous for. In 1893, he gets a huge booth at the Chicago's World's Fair and starts selling whiskey in bottles. Most whiskey at that time is sold in casks. It's not the first. First bottles of Canadian whiskey that are out there. The Herm Walker had already was already selling bottles as well. But it was the first time that Wiser geared up for bottle production. And one of the reasons was for the Chicago's World Fair. And so Many folks who went to the World's Fair first came home with a bottle of Canadian whiskey through that World's Fair. After that it, you know, previous to that it was largely casks. JP had a number of sons. The son that liked the whiskey business most, guy named Harlow. And he got involved in his 20s. In 1895, he died of a heart attack at 36, which is unfortunate and apparently very much derailed Wiser's efforts in the business. A few Years later, in 1911, Weiser himself will pass away. Two other sons will take on the business for a while. Unfortunately, in 1912, a fire destroys the Prescott Distillery and it won't be rebuilt, at least not by the Weiser family. One of the competitors down the road in Belleville, Ontario, Carby Distillery did pick up the slack for them. So many barrel, the barrels, many of the barrel houses survived. The distillery was destroyed. And so they had the barrels, but they had to produce. They had to actually make the additions and boot bottling and stuff. So they did it through the, the Corby Distillery. And the Corby Distillery also produced some of their whiskey for them. So the Weiser line extent it stayed on for a while till about 1920 when the Corby Distillery bought the Weiser family out entirely. They bought the brand, they bought the remaining barrels, they started doing their own production, which is great timing because Prohibition's around the corner. And again, Prohibition, while terrible for the US was amazing for Canada. So Canadian whiskey explodes during Prohibition, grows immensely, and the Corby Distillery gets to a size that by 1935, the big player in Canada, that's Hiram Walker, acquires Corby, which means also acquires the Weiser line, although at that point the Weiser's not been involved for a good 15, 20 years. They also own Bally's and a few others. And we've gone through this story before with, with Hiram Walker. This is a distillery out of Walkerville near Detroit, and that's acquired by ali Domic in 1989, which is now owned by Pernod Ricard, which means that none of the Weiser stuff exists at all. It's purely a brand. The distillery is the same one we've talked about before, which has both column pot and rectification stills. They buy their grain mostly from Ontario. They have huge storage facilities and a big bottling plant. And so this particular product, Lot 40, is made in that distillery with its own distinctive recipe. So the name Lot 40 actually comes from a guy named Michael Booth, who had an ancestor named Joshua Booth. Who made whiskey going Back to the 1700s in Upper Canada, same rough era. And of course, this was largely rye. The name Lot 40 actually is the name of the lot that his ancestor got as an immigrant to start growing and also where he built his grist mill and distillery. Now, back then, the old school rye, and I'll spend more time on this as it comes around, you would malt your rye, which is very time consuming. You wouldn't malt very much of it. That was enough enzyme to do the rest. So normal old school rye distiller rye production was 90% unmalted, 10% malted, and that was enough to provide the enzymes to actually make enough sugars to make the rye worthwhile. Today we don't do that. We don't bother to malt rye at all because we've now bioengineered enzymes to break down the carbohydrates in rye to make the sugars to do the production. And so in a case of this thing like Law 40, it's 100% rye because they use a customized engine for that lot. Forties approach is again 100% unmalted rye. And then they age in new American oak barrels, but they are charred. So they're buying the berries barrels out of Missouri produced down there and charge what they call the number 2 char, which is very much a bourbon measure. But they have never had a bourbon in them. Their actual production, even though right on the bottle it says copper pot distilled. That is true, but the first distillation is in a column, still very normal. It's what bourbon also does, typically gets them in the young 60% range. And then there's a 12,000 L copper pot still that does the finishing distillation, which will raise it into the high 60s. And then they cut it to 43, although first they'll put it into barrels. There's no age statement on this bottle. The minimum, of course, the law is three years. They, according to the documentation, it's probably between six and seven years. Not old enough to be worth putting a statement, an age statement on it. So they don't do that. Now, the funny thing about law 40 Rye is that it was actually first made in the 90s in 1998, and it selled. It didn't sell. So they gave. They stopped making it mostly because rye was not all that popular. People didn't know really what it was. It had been lost, you know, through the prohibition eras and so forth, and people were mostly just drinking bourbon. And. But then it became popular and it became popular as a guy named Dave Pickerel. And Pickerel used to be the master distiller at Maker's Mark. But he and Maker's Mark famously, as a bourbon maker, does not use rye in their mash bill. They use red winter wheat as their flavor grain. So mostly corn, little bit of barley for the amylase and then the red winter wheat. That's what makes Maker's Mark Maker's Mark. But he loved rye whiskey and he wanted to make his own. So he established his own line in 2008. And the, and the branding he used is WhistlePig, which you've probably heard of. And WhistlePig famously started making rye production and they geared up. Dave was able to gear up quickly because he bought already aged rye from Canada. So this is when Alberta distillers and all these large facilities, including the Heron Walker facility, were already making rye, which they used in blends. And Dave Berkel recognized the quality of that. And actually his early editions of whistlepig, while he was still aging his own, were actually using Canadian rye. And as that became popular and all of the major brands started making their own ryes, the Hiram Walker Group responded to that, brought back this lot 40 and rereleased it in 2012. So 43%. Let's have a little taste. Very Canadian. That is to say, not a lot of punch, not a lot of burn on the nose, some unapologetic flavor, sort of spicy. It's a fun, you know, the heat comes on, it's like, ah, I'm drinking whiskey.
