Richard Campbell (122:49)
Well, look, I've been home. So last week we've been doing Canadian whiskies and last week we did Lot 40, which JP wiser, which actually Hiram Walker, like talk about the oldest school of old school Canadian whiskies. So this week I thought I'd go completely other way and go totally craft whiskey. Now, there's always been some small distillers, but it used to be really, really difficult to be a small distiller. You had to get big to survive. And so the entry point got harder and harder and harder. But craft distilling really starts in the 2000s, the modern version of it. Anyway, it really started in California. It was a guy named Bill Owens who founds this thing called the American Distilling Institute. And it was about, mostly about training new distillers, creating classes and curriculum and so forth for doing that. But it spawned up the west coast. Both Oregon and Washington had more permissive rules for small producers. And so Oregon had always been pretty hands off with distillers in general. But they did have rules for if you're small, you don't, you can, it's pretty easy. So if you're like less than 25,000 liters a year and you only sold no more than a handle, a 1.75 liter to any given person and you could do tastings up to a couple of ounces, that's about it. They've changed those laws since then. But Washington State in 2008 did this full on craft distiller licensing program where as long as you're producing less than 150,000 gallons a year, which to be clear, you know, places like Brown Fornum, like Jack, produce more than that a day, you could do, have a tasting room and do on site sales and so forth. And by the way, it worked. Within five years, by 2013, there were more than 60 craft distilleries in Washington. Like in, in the. It's happened elsewhere in the US since, but Washington State really led the ball on that. California, which originated the idea, didn't go around to passing craft distillery laws until 2015. But next door to Washington in British Columbia, same thing happened. So seeing the explosion of crafts distilleries in Washington put a lot of pressure on and so they came up with the same kind of craft distilling rules in 2013. And we talked about this, the context of Okanagan distillers with their great whiskey, which I had a chance to try because they tried to drove that right at the very beginning. And so if we've talked about this a little bit before, but in British Columbia you can get a craft distilling license if you only use BC products. So grain, fruit, whatever produce you use in fermentation, you do all the fermentation and distillation yourself in B.C. no additives, no preservatives, no artificial flavors, no neutral green spirits. You can qualify to basically be tax exempt from the, what they call the excise tax, which in B.C. is 124%. So it costs you 10 bucks to make a bottle of whiskey. You pay an additional 1250 to the government to be allowed to sell it. So starting your break even then at a 2250 bottle. But if you're under 50,000 liters, there's no tax at all at 2100 and 24% goes away. And then as you go up to 100,000 liters, it's graduated. So you pay a little bit more, a little more. And after 100,000 liters you no longer considered a craft distiller. You pay the full excise taxes. And you can't direct sell. I mean it's one of the measures of mainstream distilleries is they only sell through third party, right through retailers. And again, most commercial producers in Canada are making more than 100,000 liters in a day because they're all so very, very large. But this craft distilling was for small production, typically under 50,000 liters. And you are allowed to sell direct. You can sell through licensees. You can go to private liquor stores and you can have a tasting room where you're allowed to serve, but you're not really a bar and can sell some bottles. And so this story falls on is about a whiskey called, that comes from a distillery called the Sons of Vancouver. So very, very local. And the founders are James Lester and Richard Clouse. Now these two met in Fort St. John, which is in the central east side of British Columbia, really close to Alberta on the Peace River. This is oil patch country. So they both work the oil patch, made a lot of money because oil patch is oil patch. But you know, weren't loving what they were doing. James been the one who really studied process control as part of his apprenticeship. So he knew about flow systems and things. And they decided to bail out of the oil patch and sort of took a, took a few months off went to Mexico and partied. James went down to Australia, Richard went to Colombia. They all both bartended on the side and did some home brewing and things like that. And after a while we're kind of headed back home again. James started working at a distillery in Seattle. I don't know exactly which one, couldn't find that out, but this is in that period of the craft, craft brew distilling exploding in Washington state. And so he got really keen to do that in B.C. and when those rules came into play, it became possible he got on board right in 2013 as the first set of laws passed. But in some of the interviews that I've read of his, he did take some whiskey making classes down in Washington state as well, and he thought they were kind of a waste of time. One of his quotes was, I spent four days in a classroom with 20 other people staring at PowerPoint side slides and still wasn't equipped to open a distillery. But he tried, he got into it. He found some used dairy equipment, a thousand liter stainless steel pasteurizer which works basically as a mash tub, and a little 700 liter column still. And he started making whiskey in 30 liter barrels, so very small barrels, which is typical for small production. So James and Richard, with their experience in bartending, they very much came up with a vision of the kind of alcohol they liked to, to work with when they were bartending. And he said right off the bat that they had three main cocktails in mind. The dirty martini, which is just good vodka chilled down with a little bit of olive. The Caesar, which is a Canadian classic of the spicy version of the Bloody Mary with clamato juice and the amaretto source. And an amaretto sour is a classic sour. So it's a whiskey and the liqueur, although it's typically more, you know, when you think about a margarita, which is, is tequila with a little bit of liqueur, the Amaretto sour is the other way around. There's more liqueur than there is bourbon in it, but also a little bit of egg white and some, and some citrus, so forth. Amaretto is an interesting liqueur. The name literally means little amaro. And the Italians, of course, make amar amaros. They're all their. Every town's got their own unique version. The origin story of amaretto goes back to 1525 in the town of Serrano in Italy, where a woman steeped apricot pits in brandy. Now why apricot Prince? Well, certain drupes and apricot kernels, bitter almonds, peach Stones, all of them have benzo, Benzala, benzaldehyde, which has a very distinctive flavor to it.
