Whiskey@Work

This was one of our favorite conversations with master distiller Allisa Henley of AJ Bond. Enjoy! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Rob and Mark crack open Heaven Hill's brand new Double Mash, a nine year bottled in bond that technically shouldn't exist, and spend the next hour proving why that's the best kind of whiskey story. They dig into the 1897 law that created bottled in bond in the first place, the century old loophole that let Heaven Hill's master distiller blend two fully qualifying bourbons into one...

A busted toilet, a twelve foot ladder, and a Sunday morning that didn't go as planned. We get into that story first, then pour a bottle of Warfield, an Idaho single malt with an organic mashbill that Rob brought back from Boise. Copper stills, dessert like sweetness, and a price tag that makes it an easy buy. This one's got a little bit of everything. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy...

Rob and Mark are back with a fresh batch of Whiskey@Work, and this one starts with Mark getting mistaken for a Texan by a parking attendant in Winnipeg. From there, the guys dig into what's really happening with Canadian liquor shelves after a year and a half of tariff drama... Manitoba pulling every American bottle, Kentucky sitting on a record bourbon glut, and a sandwich board in Canada tha...

Houston and Rob crack open the Benromach 15, a Speyside Scotch from a distillery that spent more of its life shut down than running. They walk through the wild backstory (a Scotch smuggler who named his boats things Coast Guard radios couldn't pronounce, a family that waited decades for a distillery and then sat on the answer without knowing it) and land on a flavor mystery that Scotch Whisky maga...

Rob and Mark are back from a long weekend (margaritas may or may not have been involved), and this time they've got company. John Willard, of Willard Water fame, finally shows up after years of empty promises. He brought whiskey from Tel Aviv, four bottles from Milk & Honey Distillery, a kosher, award winning Israeli whiskey that beat out Scotland and Japan on the world stage. The guys taste t...

Episode three hundred calls for something worth the milestone, so we crack open Jim Gaffigan's Father Time bourbon at its highest proof yet. We get into celebrity whiskey, the term collectors use when fame outshines what's actually in the bottle, and the one autographed bottle in the office nobody can bring themselves to open. Rob and Houston, still arguing about turkeys by the end. Hosted on Acas...

Whiskey@Work heads out to the Central States Fair and Rodeo for a ten a.m. pour with Ron Jefferies, straight from the Ford Tailgate Party tent. They crack open Pendleton, the fair's longtime whiskey partner, and get into why cowboys stay so loyal to their sponsors, why the fair always lands the week after Sturgis, and how school schedules keep messing with everybody's calendar. Ron drops some real...

Rob and Mark try something new after almost three hundred episodes: a live blind tasting where they never say what's in the glass. No brand, no history, no mash bill, nothing but proof and a state of origin. They dig into the 1976 wine tasting that flipped the industry on its head, a college study that fooled sommeliers with food coloring, and the running theory that most drinkers can't actually t...

We record this one out of a shipping crate at Sturgis, which tells you everything about the week we've had. This is close to twenty years into the Jack Daniel's tasting on the hill, and the guys in Lynchburg still know us by name. We get into the Squire program, why one of our regulars has the coin tattooed on his arm, and a Tennessee rye that clears 140 proof but drinks like hot summer afternoon...

Rob and Mark crack open a bottle of Old Grandad Bonded, the road trip whiskey that rode along with John Steinbeck across the country and earned a reputation as a natural biker's bourbon, strong enough to still taste like something and cheap enough not to sweat losing it. They dig into the Basil Hayden family history, that surprisingly high rye mash bill, what bottled in bond actually means, and th...

We're drinking a whiskey out of Spokane with a name we can't quite say on the air. Brown Family Spirits calls it Do Epic [redacted], and yes, the naughty word is right there on the bottle. Turns out the name comes from a grandfather whose life story might be true, might be embellished, and either way earns the label. Before we get into the pour, there's an AC/DC show at Mile High that has us convi...

A hockey player from New Hampshire grows corn on Kauai and decides to make bourbon. Simple enough, right? Then the birds show up. Then the neighbors. Then the liquor commission. This week we're drinking Kapahi, a Hawaiian whisky (no e, we checked) tied to a fully built distillery on the island that has never made a single drop. We dig into the whole strange story, the spice that snuck up on both o...

A friend of ours went to Hawaii and, since he doesn't drink, we gave him a mission: hit a liquor store and grab whatever's local. He came back with Old Pali Road, which gets called the original Hawaiian whiskey. That claim sent Mark digging, and he surfaced with a story about an escaped Australian convict and a still built from two whale blubber pots. Two Marine vets are behind this bottle, the ma...

A bakery, a bucket of paint, and a horse cart. Those three things somehow explain the Irish whiskey in our glasses this week. We got into Green Spot Château Montelena, and the story behind it wanders a lot further than the pour. There's a family shop that's kept one whiskey alive for seven generations, a handshake deal that saved it from disappearing for good, and a crew of Irish exiles who wound...

We've mentioned Eagle Rare on the show plenty, but we'd never sat down and asked the obvious question. Why does this bourbon even exist? Turns out it wasn't some heartfelt heritage project. It was built on purpose, with a target in mind, and the strategy behind it is honestly kind of genius. Then there's what it grew into. A ten year bourbon people actually hunt for, sitting around forty-five buck...

Allisa Henley and John Lunn talked every single day for twenty years. Two stills, two personalities, one whiskey that fit together the way the two of them did. Then John was gone before he ever got to taste the finished blend. This week we're sitting down with Allisa, master distiller behind Sazerac's first Tennessee whiskey. She didn't take the usual road in, no chemistry degree, a business backg...

Ninety-eight point six. The number's been stamped on every Blood Oath bottle since the line started, and there's a strange little reason why. We poured the Pact Nine and the brand-new Pact Twelve for our first crack at this series, and somewhere between a German doctor with a foot-long thermometer and Houston's backpack full of medical gear, we got into what makes these blends so hard to walk away...

Two New Riff bourbons that are identical down to the mash bill, with one exception: one aged four years, the other eight. So we turned it into a blind taste test. One of us poured, the other guessed, and guess who walked away mad? We also get into why a year in a Kentucky rickhouse counts like dog years, the fifty-two-year-old bottle of Jack we once cracked open, and the one rule New Riff had to b...

We've reached part three of our Colorado run, and this week it's Breckenridge Bourbon, the bottle sitting on every liquor store shelf around here. We get into the founder's story, a radiologist pulling brutal hours who was standing knee-deep in snowmelt one day and walked away convinced he should bet his house, his savings, and a chunk of his kids' college fund on a whiskey hunch. We talk about wh...

This week we're sipping Tin Cup Fourteen, the Mount Sneffels release, and following a thread that ties straight back to last week's pour. Same Colorado founder, a different bottle, and a story that wanders from a ghost town saloon at ten thousand feet to a Jules Verne novel that somehow ended up on a Colorado license plate. There's a high-rye mash bill aged fourteen years, a tiny splash of single...

Mark heads to Colorado and comes back with a bottle of Stranahan's Distiller's Experimental Series: Cherry Soda, a three-cask finish you won't find on most shelves, with only 1,400 bottles made. The backstory behind Stranahan's involves a volunteer firefighter, a physicist who liked dynamite a little too much, and a barn fire that somehow turned into one of America's best-selling single malts. Rob...

A Highland warrior in 1544 leans off his horse, plucks a tiny white flower, and tucks it into his bonnet. His clan wins the battle. Centuries later, that same lucky bloom ends up on a bottle in our glasses. This week, Rob and Houston pour White Heather 15, the blended scotch resurrected by Billy Walker (the guy who turned Glenallachie into a legend). Three casks, two countries, one Highland fairy...

It's Cinco de Mayo, so Rob and Mark are skipping the bourbon and drinking tequila their boss brought back from Mexico while admittedly day drunk. He wanted them to find out if he got taken. He probably did. The Campo Segrado añejo smells amazing and tastes like a mint julep, which sends them down a rabbit hole on the four additives that can legally go into a tequila bottle without showing up on th...

Proper No. Twelve has a wild origin story and it involves the Mountain from Game of Thrones, a UFC fighter with a handshake deal, and a buddy who walked away from millions out of loyalty. We cover the whole messy saga before cracking open the brand new Proper 12-13, a 13-year Irish single malt that's either a redemption arc or a sixty-dollar disappointment depending on who you ask. Hosted on Acast...