Ep 228 - what’s happening now

I’m solo talking about a few current topics and a couple listeners questions about MGP 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Bourbon Boys. Tonight you have one solo Bourbon Boy. Showtime couldn't make it. So we're going old school with this one. It'll be just me talking about a few topics. I uh got a new mic set up, so hopefully this works. I may or may not put the uh intro music on this. I wanted to get something out while we're trying to get some other stuff recorded uh to put out like official podcasts, but I wanted to have something at least for your listening pleasure, um, even if it's just me rambling for 20 minutes uh while my new puppy destroys this stuffed animal next to me on the couch. Fantastic. Uh so I got a few topics. Um uh a couple of hot button issues, not hot button, but just a couple topics that I saw uh rolling through the wire or through the the pages the past few days. First off, uh Four Roses finalizing their sale to uh Gallo. I see they got so bought too bad. I think it's interesting. Um Gallo's got some got some good products now. So I mean their the acquisition of Four Roses give them gives them a bourbon play a little bit bigger than what they I don't think they had any. I guess I could have done some show prep and looked this up. I just put these topics down like five minutes ago just to get something out uh on uh Monday after Easter. Um yeah, I mean, to me, Four Roses is a solid product. I think they really got to look into the per on the pricing on their single barrels, maybe lower that. I mean, I think they've gotten a little bit rich, a little bit too high on their single barrel pricing, just in my opinion. I think they've they've hit the tipping point. I mean, they were so low for so long, and then they went the complete opposite way, almost charging$110 a bottle now uh for single barrels, and uh that's just not gonna fly for eight-year-old juice, even though it is four roses, which is a legacy distillery, and I still go do eight-year-old picks, but I wouldn't buy one from some random person in a store that I didn't know was good already. I'd have to buy it from a trusted source for me to get them anymore. Second topic I had uh off the internet are things flying around. My dog is chewing on a tuffet of hair. Uh my dog's name is T-Rex Scooby-Doo Huffman. He's a great dane. Uh I'm gonna say Labrador mix because he's got web toes. So it sort of lowers the uh the options down for the secondary breed. Uh anyway, uh got him last weekend. He's a pretty good boy, sleeps a lot. Uh, second topic, Costco's rare character bottle. I'm seeing going for crazy amounts of money on the secondary market. And I don't know that I've seen anybody open one to try it or whether I would, you know, trust a Costco uh liquor team member to to get a good barrel. But I'm I'm sure for the price you could buy it for the store, it's probably really good. Rare Character puts out some good stuff. It was just interesting. The reason I guess the reason why it's going for that much is the fact that it had the uh the Costco hot dog sign on it, which was interesting. Costco DC, I think it said. I guess that's where it came from. I didn't read a lot onto it. I just saw everybody putting it online and going nuts over it, and everybody comparing it to other things that people were going nuts over. And uh Bourbon Notes talked about it on his one of his TikToks. I watched Bourbon Notes, Kevin C, I've known for quite a while. He's good, dude. He knows his stuff. Um couple ideas for topics that I got from somebody in my uh bourbon group. He I don't know how deep I'll be able to go into these because they're kind of they are generic uh questions. Uh the first one is the MGP, what makes MGP consistently produce a superior distillate? Talk to deeper effects like its location, mash bill, origin of grains, equipment, and processes. Um, I don't really know what grains they use. I know they're mash bills. Uh, I think the consistency that they have with theirs is because it is run like a like it's an assembly line. It's they weren't doing tours. You couldn't go there. I don't still don't think they do tours, but you couldn't go there and see, you couldn't purchase that stop it. No, sir. He's ripping the stuffing out of this bear. God, grab Donald Duck. Get Donald. Anyway, trying not to interrupt too much. And I'm not drinking yet this for this podcast. You won't hear me sipping. Hopefully, you won't hear me coughing either. Um, anyway, I mean it's it's run like an assembly line. They didn't have people in there to do picks until recently. Penelope started doing picks there at the distillery. So I've seen people go in there to do picks. I'm supposed to go there and do a pick in the near future. Um, so it's sort of uh it's almost like a Willy Wonka situation of whiskey where nobody saw the inside of it unless you worked there or you were you were there on a special occasions, they had some events, they would let people in. But for the most part, the general public wasn't in there. It was in a it's in a it's a manufacturing plant, it's not a it's not a tourist destination like a lot of the distilleries are now. They're all tourist uh destinations. MGP's never been that, they've just been production of whiskey, and that's solely what it is. I I I would say, I would I would venture to uh assume that has something to do with why they're better at this than most, why the consistency is so good, and they don't they don't differentiate their they don't change their mash bills very often. I mean they pretty much stick to the one mash bill they have, and that's what they go with. Not one mash bill, the three mash bills really, the rye, the high ride and the low rye MGP bourbons. They do have weeded and they have high they have American light whiskey too, but that's not something they focus on like the other places where you have four roses churning out eight different mash bills and cast strength and duh, and that they just produce whiskey and then send it out to people and then they decide what they're gonna do with it. I mean, the process there is pretty straightforward from what I understand. It's it's not a uh frills, it's not made for people to come in and look at it. So they got a consistent product. Plus, they age and most of their stuff is aged in uh concrete uh rick houses or buildings, so that keeps uh the change in in whiskey down a little bit. Um sort of like Seagrum's used to do, and they get a little more uh control over where they put it in the rickhouse. You put it up higher floors, they're gonna get a little more aged in the lower floors, but it's not as it the the the temperature, like I went to the Seagrum's warehouse where old Louisville is now, and it was 70 degrees outside, and I needed a coat inside that building because it was still that cool, because it'd been so cold for so long, that building had just absorbed all that cold, so it was that it doesn't heat up that fast. That was really interesting to figure that out. I really weird because I was went in there in shorts because it was so hot outside, and then I'm in there kind of cold. I'm like, it's kind of chilly in here, and the whiskey was all cold, and it was pretty warm outside. So, I mean, that's a positive of that, and that's then it's a negative too, but I mean it's good for an NDP place like what O'Lowell's doing with all those NDPs there, because you want the whiskey to sort of chill when you get it. You don't want it to, unless you're looking for futures, then you could age it outside or you could age it somewhere else if you're looking to age product, but that's that's an NDP gold mine there when you get whiskey sent in there and it just what you get is what you get, unless you want to change it. Um location, I mean, he said location, Mash, but location, it's Indiana, so you get most of the I mean it's pretty close to Kentucky, you get most of the advantages of being in Kentucky uh weather-wise without uh you know some of the disadvantages of being all around all the distilled other distilleries. I don't know what equipment they use specifically. I just know that their process is pretty pretty dialed in. They don't they don't deviate from the process too much, I don't think. Uh another question Richard Corey had was how how bottle shape and labeling play a part in appeal to purchase. I mean, that's an age-old question, isn't it? I mean, everybody's like, well, what's the best thing to label? What are you gonna do with this and that? And we've only been doing this for nine minutes. I thought it was longer than that. Oh, goodness. It's gonna be a short episode, which is probably fine. I mean, 10 to 15 minutes of me rambling by myself is probably good enough to at least keep us on mind for the next two weeks or next week. Uh, he's supposed to come by this weekend. I'm sure we'll record a couple episodes with the new stuff as soon as I can figure out how to put the dang intro and outro on this joint. Anyway, um, bottle shape. Uh I'm not sure bottle shape per se plays a lot of into it. I mean, I know you could go one way like rising tide does with their hand-blown bottles and the the things inside, and they're beautiful bottles and they're really cool, and that that's I mean, that's ultra premium bottling. So, I mean, that makes a difference. But in general, with your generic bottles, like your wine, either your wine bottles, square bottles. I mean, mostly it's it's mostly wine bottles now. You see, most NDPs use that just because of price-wise and the labeling's easier. Um, so I mean I think wine bottles are easier for people that need to ship. You don't need to worry about it like 1792 bottles or backbone bottles where you're gonna have to make special boxes for that or get special boxes and packaging, and you know, had to get bubble wrap, and then you have to do this and that. And you don't have to do that with the wine bottles. You could just buy styrofoam shipping packers and you're you're good to go. You're out, you're you're you're sliding and you're groove moving and grooving in 10 to 15 minutes. Um labeling that is that's a a big, a big uh a big bonus now. Uh I guess it always has been. It started like I've said before, I thought Smooth Angler was the originator of making things, making bottles uh collectible with their labels because they had the the logos on the front, and then people started putting stickers on the on the side. That was pretty much where it started with the bearded lady and uh the you didn't know those, you didn't know the bottles by the barrel numbers. Still don't know the bottles by barrel numbers personally. Some people do, but that was how that whole trend started, in my opinion. You started seeing that collectability, um, which in this market with so many options out there, you've got 15 different NDPs, more than that. There's probably 50 NDPs now, and they're all have similar juice. Some people hate the word juice. I don't mind it. I I prefer to say, I'll just say whiskey. They have a similar whiskey. Some have more options, some have less. Uh, I think labeling and marketing the label, I mean not marketing per se your brand, but the label and the marketing associated with the label is gonna play a huge part in how your NDP is gonna go. I think customizing labels is probably the smartest thing to do. It's a pay in the ass, and it takes a lot more time and it's more expensive, but the extra few bucks it costs to customize a label and have a label that's customizable is far gonna exceed what's gonna the cost it's gonna be. I mean, what it's gonna do for your company. And just looking for Rare Character, River Roots. I mean, all the companies that have fully customizable, well, not fully, but partially customizable labels now are blowing up. I mean, River Roots, Rare Character is putting out 15 different variations of the same whiskey. I mean, they just bought Black Maple Hill and put out a new Black Maple Hill the other day, and that's I think they said that was gonna be a one-off um bottling, I believe, or maybe it was something else, Captain's Cove or something they put out they said was gonna be. I can't remember what they said with that, but I mean they're buying all these old labels and putting out these specialty offerings. And I mean, I I love Pablo, I think he's a great guy, but I think that they've kind of overdone it to a certain extent, in my opinion, with the amount of stuff they do. Um, but that's a hundred percent my opinion. Um I still love them and I still think they do a great job, and I think they have a great product and a great brand, but I just think they've gone over overboard with it with how much expansion they've done. Um it's my two cents. I think River Roots is great. I love Onyx and Amber too, the NDPs. Three really good NDPs. I preferred Onyx and Amber's old label, and I've told Ben that, but that's just my opinion. I I like the the logo of the stores being on the front or the groups being on the front versus the back. Just my two cents. I mean, they are gonna have it on a small label on the bottom of the front versus when it was right in the middle. It was almost like you're part of the brand. I guess that's probably why they did it, did away with it. Uh, what else can I talk about? What are we at now? 15 minutes maybe. I did go wax poetic on that for a few minutes, maybe. Uh we're almost 15 minutes. Go check us out on YouTube. Or I'm on YouTube. Um Mythical Barrels on YouTube, Instagram, Mythical Barrels, and there's a Bourbon Boys uh pod on uh Instagram. Go check it out. Send me a message if you like the pod, if you don't like the pod, if you got some suggestions for what we should do, uh topics-wise, um length. I think 30 minutes, 25 to 30 minutes is a good spot. Scott, who does Bourbon Barrel Talk? Uh I think it's Bourbon Barrel Talk. Barrel Bourbon. Let me look at the name. Scott, that's the podcast I was on a few weeks ago. Go check them out too. He the pods the two we did with them were really funny. I did with them because Brandon couldn't make it. Yeah, Bourbon Barrel Talk. Um, we did one with uh airplane bottles that were dusty airplane bottles, super old airplane bottles that are really good. And it was really funny. We had Val on too from used to work at Smooth Ambler, works for uh Jeff the Creed now. All right, I'm gonna cut it off here. It's about 15 minutes. That's enough of me rambling. Uh like I said, check us out on those platforms. Uh and until next time, enjoy your pours and enjoy your family.