- Early on, a writer for
one of the traditional whiskey magazines wrote that our product tasted like sheep piss. Like sheep piss. I mean, that was so
ridiculous and so absurd. People said, "How would somebody know what sheep piss tastes like?" And if, in fact, that's
what he's drinking, he should be disqualified from
ever judging whiskey again. (lively strings music) There's a whiskey shortage
in the world right now. Not everybody realizes it,
but prices are going up. Some bottles are
disappearing from the shelves because people can't keep up with demand. Typically, you make a distilled spirit and you put it in a barrel, and you wait for eight or 10 or 12 years, and I'm not that patient a person. Generally, the stuff that we
make only takes about 24 hours. We're not a craft distiller. We're not a micro-distiller. We are a technology company that works in the whiskey space. 80% of the flavor in a
whiskey comes from the wood. There are some amazing woods out there that we couldn't build barrels from, because they would leak like a sieve. We take the clear spirit
and, along with the wood, we put them in pressure-capable
stainless steel tanks, squeezing the wood like a sponge, moving the alcohol in and
out of the porous structure of the wood. The industry thinks that's heresy. What we do is sacrilege. They think it's awful,
just like people thought the internal combustion engine was awful, and the only way to get from
point A to point B faster was to breed faster horses. Well, that has obviously changed, and we're changing the very
nature of the whiskey industry. - [Interviewer] Why even call it whiskey? Why wouldn't you call it
spirits or something else? - Technically, it meets
all the requirements of a whiskey or a bourbon or whatever we happen to be making. If we called it something else, retailers wouldn't know
what to do with it. Why should it matter how we make it? What should matter is the taste. I've always been sort of a trouble-maker. I've always been a rule-breaker. It's like, “Wow, we did something, and nobody ever tried this before.” That's pretty cool. (inspiring music)
