Why These 2,000 Bottles of Whisk(e)y Are Locked in a Vault

this episode of the modern rogue brought to you by Squarespace at squarespace.com slash road and get 10% off your first purchase also a free trial you might you should have mentioned the free trial you are so generous it's not me it's them it's them towards generous I just you told me it was you let me think it was you the messenger don't praise the messenger all right so three years ago I stood here in between you guys yep and showed you whiskey at the time it was the most amazing whiskey boat we had ever seen yeah not gonna lie I don't want to take anything away from you seems like there's a little bit less whiskey and a lot of office equipment you're drinking a lot now what happened was that whiskey which at the time had like 400 500 ish models yeah of unique bottlings largely bought by you guys oftentimes bought by fans and then donated yeah yeah it got so big it wouldn't fit in here anymore but you haven't been there yet I'm gonna tell you what's in here real quick okay go ahead going so we moved our desks up here yeah so these desks used to be in my office yep now Zach the vice-chancellor wizard Academy and I we work in here desks and Printers and all these bottles now right behind you are donated bottles that is at five videos a week we shoot and review about nine whiskey's a week so you can see how far behind we are and outside in the hallway we'll walk past a box of about another thirty that I haven't added into here in inventory yet have you at this point you guys are going to exponentially cover the planet and whiskey's that's the goal living the dream really then we got our whisky books and things and then these are simply just duplicates and things that need to be inventoried for the vault and this is my actual private personal collection these are actually mine I bought with my own money not part of the vault okay and Zach and I keep them in here and when we're ready for a drink we drink from my collection not from the school collection that's fascinating also top notes of confess Yeah right this is one of my favorites look at all that foraging on the forest floor chocolate bourbon zoo corn ography yeah pirate ship in a storm these are goods that's the Scotch malt whiskey society but we reached out to what we call the magnificent bastards the people who have built the entire channel sure we said hey we need to build a new hall do you guys want to be involved and they all stepped in because we're a non-profit right and they donated money to build a shelving the lighting all of the infrastructure I'm just gonna camera names are on all the shelves and we're gonna see him and Zach our Vice Chancellor is a woodworker built the feature wall that we're still working on what we're gonna put and you're gonna see that Turner all right let's let's spare everyone what everybody wants to know is how many bottles did this used to be when it was awesome it was around five to eight hundred how many bottles are we about to see over 2,000 last time I saw your office there's a big old windows that totin ostrich you were able to open up you ready yes wait wait oh oh that's good security procedure it is a real thing oh my gosh yeah go on in Brian prepare to be amazed okay so we are surrounded by 2,000 bottles arranged how and and of what's of what rarity so here's the thing the reasonably accessible is out and about yeah right so starting over here Bourbons or these two shows okay you get to the top you're at new make on aged spirits and corn whiskey uh hold on real quick I know this is a test for me Bourbons are we think of Kentucky we think of american-made we think of distilled in new barrels that's right okay and then the next thing you've said corn whiskey that would be more like your moonshine whiskey is literally like corn dominant grain aged in or corn aged in used or uncharred oak barrels and so on okay and then unease spirits at the very top okay got it and that is what what I would think of as Muench oh yeah even though that's not the right yeah the American whiskey that has no real category and I actually recognize many of these as local we got Central Texas yeah alright then you've got Canadian and independent bottled scotch so Canadian if there's one thing I remember from the class is that Canadians have that weird double distilled law they've got all kinds of variations of things going on okay time you find a hard rule in Canadian was you find it broken by one of the Canadian distillers but in general a Canadian whiskey is meant to be more pleasant and smooth the way a vodka would be well they tend to be more accessible and drinkable but that rules being broken by independent craft guys all the time those crafty Canadians so rye whiskey the only thing I think of with rye is the taste and smell of dill weed riot miss American Pie whiskey unfamiliar I never heard that song yeah whiskey from all over the world that's not big enough to have its own category well that's interesting so so the Sweden Belgium Australia Taiwan these are the belters yeah and then down here American malt whiskey sorry is that not I thought malt yeah Americans mozz barley instead of corn walked me through the difference at some point we learned that America's official distilled spirit is bourbon right how this is mall so it's made with barley instead of corn got it but it doesn't necessarily abide by the Scottish rules of things yeah but it's usually a hundred percent these guys all have tribal tattoos yeah yeah they all write a work on eventually we're going to put quintessential whiskies from every category on this this is just a test run to see what the bottles look like on the show so the name is on don't have any input on what nuts Keys put on really okay and there may be some ballbusting involved in what whiskey we put next to what name by the way quick side note I want you to note this name Patrick Cohn is the only person who's ever walked into the patreon.com corporate offices and the entire building stood up and gave him a standing ovation he supported so many independent projects is amazing he was your main guy before he's still our main guy screw you we get Patrick Irish is how do you define Maryland but is there a flavor I know it's not a smoky as as Scottish in general exception to that role of Connemara but typically it is more like a lighter butterscotch friendly approachable spirit would it be unfair to say more drinkable yeah whatever I would mean we've we've talked about this like for years when I was touring on on the on the road I understood for every busy Airport there was two minutes of bliss waiting me on the other side of saying double Jameson oh yes you know it's like it's like that's that's what it meant to me yeah don't love it and that's that's the accessible budget blend of grain and pot still and still I love it and then blended scotches and independent bottled releases so this is no longer a geographic base is this is flavor profiles okay but it's blended and blends and grain blends and so on and we've talked about in the past blends are basically you know what the target is you're trying to hit and you know you just need to buy a few barrels this few barrels of that now too much of this too little of that and in flavor you end up hitting lighting yeah alright here we have actuals single malt scotch in these two walls broken down by region so island Iowa and Hamilton and then over here space side island and I am linens roughly am i right and understanding that single malt scotch is sort of an evil knievel proposition where it's like we got this we're gonna see it all the way through to the end yeah it'll either hit or not absolutely whereas a blend is gonna be pretty safe it's like oh let's let's correct course by adding more for it but you can you can accommodate things sure this is luckily these guys mostly have like a hundred plus years in the in the bag they know what they're making it yeah yeah yeah but when they started who knows at the very very top we've hidden our Japanese whiskey selection which explain to me again why Japanese whiskeys suddenly became so popular overnight very famous whiskey personality made them whiskey of the year and all of a sudden it went from somebody that whiskey people knew was good somebody that the world was like oh we got to get that Japanese with oh and that it's important to bring that up because during the class you talked about how the price of whiskey is not a reflection of the quality but only the rarity it's like diamonds that's rarity if you can't get it whether because it's actually rare or because you can't get it in your area it's gonna be more expensive when I took your Somali a class that was the most punk-rock experience I'd ever have you got us all into the whisky vault you took a bunch of Dixie Cups on you pour a bunch of I'm sorry it's so good we all had Dixie Cups he's like hey let's do a shot boom we did a shot we're like all right let's get it started four hours later he reveals that that shot in a Dixie cup was the most expensive whiskey in the vault yeah he had wasted it on us to prove a point that story and presentation mattered is so punk rock t-shirt don't tell anyone totality would here you've got a locked cabinet with interesting sitting in it of things that if they run out it's gonna be really hard to replace it doesn't necessarily mean expensive right it just means although it often is but it just means if we run out of that bottle the odds of getting another one I'm gonna be pretty slim this is the place where if somebody's just you know looking around you want to communicate hey buddy if you just want some whiskey there's plenty here yeah there's nothing necessarily special about these outside of the pain in the ass it'll cause when I have to replace them I'd say what's gonna happen all right you sit down yes I'm gonna pour you a glass of whiskey that we can have however everything about what I'm hearing Brian I'm gonna pour for you my all-time favorite whiskey in the world oh my god this bottle didn't exist anymore because the new guy who took over blending for them changed the recipe so none of this if you find a bottle of this it's none of it exists on the planet anymore to be made again you've found the only remaining bottles long more than 16 specifically the brown and green label never to be made again this is how uncultured I am I'm thinking you have old coke before no plus that's true this is Longhorn 16 from the Speyside region in Scotland oh wow now this is a beautiful thing [Music] yeah subtle washer smooth honeysuckle so pretty well in and light um I suppose I don't usually expect that from a whiskey is is that it felt like candy on its way in and in the aftertaste yeah but then with a little zing of black pepper about 3/4 of the way through you talked in the class how when people say things like Oh black pepper I detect this that and the other the words themselves don't really matter so much as they are they're just markers for your mind to later understand because as you're saying and walk me past this again the nose the taste that's all touching the amygdala yeah well it's in the right brain which is pattern recognition but has no language or reality or anything like that all on its own it has to work with both sides to combine those things together right so there's two levels of communicating that level of sensory from your nose and there's there's a level which you can recognize it and then there's a level at which you can communicate it to others right so it's important that you can recognize that your own patterns right but it's also important that you're able to say what you mean and someone else understand the experience you're trying to describe so for me the smell of a can of sterno always takes me back to the first month of seventh grade at West Memorial junior high done oh that's your marker right correct but how would you explain that to me without any personal reference I would say second marker right then I would have to reduce it and say it smells sterile and slightly hostile mixed with the sweat of pubescence you know when you're looking for a shared experience yeah yeah right yeah yeah and so what we try to teach at the school is that second level and we also teach the first one which is learn to recognize your own markers right but the important part of being a whiskey Somalia is providing that journey to other people and so you have to know how to communicate what you are thinking to an accessible level so how do you respond to because we still encounter every so often somebody was like whiskey drinking dirt you know the answers yes exactly of all the people to level that accusation against the whiskey tribe are not the hood no yeah exactly well even at the school I always say like my first sip of whiskey is not an appreciative sip it's just a sip yeah because at the end of the day it's just whiskey drinking yeah well good and the mantra of good whiskey is whiskey like to drink I think it's fairly simple yeah I would think universal apparently controversial for some reason turns out yeah if people want to be here in person or virtually what is the fastest way for them to warm themselves into your heart somehow end up having the experience I'm having right if you want to be able to take other people on this kind of journey then go to whisky marketing org okay if you want to learn the things that we teach that concepts but not necessarily have to do with whisky go to wizard Academy org okay if you want to just come and take a tour of this room and have a small training session on whisky go to Austin whisky vault got it dude done it done thank you so much man Brian I was on our website like just a few minutes ago I know you wouldn't get off of it I said Jason get off that website get out of my dreams get into my car is what I said Oh Billy ocean no Billy ocean I'm Brian brushwood I was telling you to get off of my Squarespace get into this ad okay well I was doing some research and I realize just how beautiful and easy and simple our website actually is it's actually pretty good looking I can't take credit for it I didn't do any of them I was about to say like it sounds to me like you're trying to say that if you have a message to give the world you want to make it bold and beautiful with award-winning designs sounds to me like you're saying people should use Squarespace yes they've got ecommerce it is scalable 24/7 365 day support it's really everything you want but somewhere out there somebody's saying like yeah but how do I also support the modern rogue it's me guy who loves the modern rug but it's also weirdly jaded yeah you should be asking yourself that question character squarespace.com slash rogue that helps you support the show you get 10% off and a free trial [Music] we should be drinking bourbon yeah or moonshine yeah [Music]

Channel: The Modern Rogue

Views: 480,480

Keywords: modern rogue, brian brushwood, jason murphy

Id: iTsc8dhMdgU

Length: 16min 18sec (978 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 25 2020