Phil Prichard Interview Part Two

[jankdc]

Me: So what are you doing in Cleveland?

Prichard: I’m . . . The state of Ohio has recently started listing our products up here and I’m just up here to help support that effort. And we’ve got our Double Barrel Bourbon has been listed, and our Tennessee whiskey has been listed, as a matter of fact, our white Lincoln County Lightning has been listed. Our fine rum is available by special order as is most of our products. We also make a really good bourbon. Our Double Barrel Bourbon.


Me: Cool

State Liquor Board Rep:. . . We’ve already had a little interest.


Prichard: How you doing, I’m Phil Prichard

(At this point a customer named Paul starts to ask some questions about what we were talking about, especially regarding Industrial and Agricole.)

Prichard: The French are real particular about their rum. And that’s good, as it should be. But, the long and short of it all is that they created a label on a rum that ain’t gonna fly (AOC). You know, but we can call it something else. That’s kind of the gist of what I want to talk about in Florida is, I want to get some . . . People like yourself that are rum aficionados that are talking about rums that are out there and are singing the praises of rum need too. . . If we are going to see that whole rum category ever take off we are going have to give that consumer more information.


Me: There’s a lot of people that are saying that Dave Broom did a really good job in categorizing rum with those styles that I mentioned before when we started. What do you see the problem with using those categories?

Prichard: Well, first of all you can’t buy Cuban rum.


Me: Huh?

Prichard: The first problem right up is you can’t buy Cuban rum.


Me: It’s style.

Prichard: What is a Cuban style rum? Is it a blackstrap rum or is it a . . . is it made from juice?


Me: There can be both.

Prichard: But if you have a Cuban rum that is made from sugar cane juice and you have a Cuban rum that is made from blackstrap. How is a customer going to know what he finds until he takes it home and buys it? You see, nobody knows what Appleton tastes like until they take it home and buy it. Buying rum is nothing more than a trial and error experiment. You go out and you see a rum on the shelf and you say, “Ah, well I haven’t had that rum before.” and you take it home and you get surprises out there, you surprises that you know. . . Some of them are not very good.


Me: Right. Yeah. Disappointing surprises.

Prichard: So the customers like, “Well I don’t like rum” We don’t want people to . . . When I’m out signing. . .


Me: So here’s my argument here, OK? You take rum such as . . . Two of my favorite rums, very very different. OK? Appleton 12 year: very very bold flavor, dunder, Jamaican style and then another one of my favorites is Ron Matusalum Grand Reserve, OK? Smooth, more of the classic Cuban style. Those are both “Industrial” rums, but they are worlds apart. Very very excellent rums. Like I said before, a couple of my favorite rums. But they are very very different. And so, what I’m arguing is that even if we do the agricole . . . Even if we break it down by what’s it made out of, there’s still going to be a huge discrepancy with how they are processed.

Prichard: How they’re aged.


Me: How they’re aged, the dunder, the yeast, the dunder all that other types of stuff.

Prichard: That’s very simplematic, becomes a matter of an age statement on the bottle.


Me: But it’s not just the age statement. They are both 12 years.

Prichard: See this is a path I don’t want to go down. I don’t want to go this kind of path where we’re having to distinguish between an industrial rum that you like and one that you don’t like.


Me: No no no, these are ones that I both like. They’re very different, though. There is a huge difference . . .

Prichard: Maybe I said that wrong. But what I do want to do is . . . I want to create a system that we can . . . I don’t know where to start. That’s the problem. Because if we go down that road, we’re not going to provide any information. That information has to with regards to the Appletons, this is a type of rum that we make and they have to explain what it’s going to taste like. But at least at that point somebody knows that it was made from blackstrap.

Me: Yeah, Ok, Alright. That’s cool. Uhm, what was your oldest still that you have?

Prichard: Oh, the canning pot (laughs). The canning pot on the stove.


Me: Do you still use it?

Prichard: No, no, no. We still use my second generation which is a homemade fifteen gallon pot still that we’ve made . . . We still use it, but we use it more of an experimental still today.


Me: Ok, why did you start with rum? Was it a business thing or a love a rum, or a combination of both?

Prichard: It was purely logical as we alluded to earlier. In 1999 vodka was the darling, whiskey was in the doldrums. And, we actually wanted to .. . the more we experimented with making rum and the more that I researched the history rum. Like you said, nobody was making rum out of sweet molasses. And that’s when we started realizing that we made rum out of sweet molasses in Colonial America, nobody was really creating a truly traditional American rum.


Me: So at one point you were playing with the idea of making a doing a sorghum rum.

Prichard: Yea, there is a. . . Sorghum makes a wonderful sweet molasses. In fact that was kind of like the impetus of making rum was that we thought . . . If we could take sorghum that was grown in Tennessee and we could encourage some of the farmers in the area to start growing sorghum for us and things like that it would be a little agricultural benefit to making rum. But unfortunately the federal government says that rum has to be made out of sugar cane molasses. Now the University of Tennessee was willing to go to bat for me and do a testimonial to the federal government that the glucose molecule in sorghum molasses is identical to the glucose molecule in sugarcane molasses and probably would have been about two years later we would have been able to make rum out of sorghum molasses once we had convinced the ATF and TTB that sorghum was in fact a type of sugarcane molasses. But you know . . .


Me: It wasn’t worth it.

Prichard: You can’t . . . When you start building a distillery, they are very capital intensive. So we needed to get into production and the simplest thing to do is to. . . The short answer is that we had to get into production and the easiest, quickest way was to . . . We looked at that history of rum and all this “Yo ho ho, and a bottle of rum” they were drinking American rum made from 100 rum distilleries in New England.


Me: I’m curious, how much do you spend for molasses? Per gallon, do you know?

Prichard: No, I don’t. Because molasses prices are just hard to keep up with.


Me: did you know that Cruzan get’s there for 16 cents a gallon.

Prichard: They’re using blackstrap. . .


Me: They’re using blackstrap.

Prichard: I do know that when we were started this we could buy blackstrap for about 3 cents a pound and it’s 11.75 pounds per gallon so you do the math and pretty close.


Me: Pretty close, OK. I guess that one of the things that Jim wanted me to ask you was what’s special about your barrels?

Prichard: First of all, they’re fifteen gallons, second of all we use a three millimeter alligator char in those barrels.


Me: Alligator char meaning a very very deep char?

Prichard: Three millimeters means that it’s three millimeters deep and when you look at the back of it, it looks like the back of an alligator. That’s kind of our little trademark. Now there’s two reasons that we use the fifteen gallon barrels.

Number one, it accelerates the aging. There’s twice as much surface to volume ratio in a fifteen gallon barrel versus fifty gallon barrels. So you get accelerated aging. I want you to invest in my distillery. By the way it’s going to be about five years before we find out if it’s any good or not. And then we got to see if we can sell it. And then we got to deal with this thing called the three tier system in the controlled states? Give me a break.

The short answer is that by going to the fifteen gallon barrels we were able to come on to the market relatively early with a rum that was aged about a year and a half. I’ll never never forget that review that Luis Ayala gave me when he was referring to our rum as a beautiful, honey colored amber hue. I’ll think you’ll agree we’ve gone a little bit beyond honey (laughs, pointing to his rum which is not at all amber).

Most of our rums now come out of barrels that. . . Our rums are well aged at 3-5 years. We do make a private stock rum that is ten years in a fifteen gallon barrel and it is a strong barrel aged rum. I say strong, it’s 90 proof, but the barrel characteristics are very very much there.


Me: So the bourbon how long do you age the bourbon? So 3-5 years for the rum that your aging these days.

Prichard: When we started this business, we started with bourbon that we developed a process and we aged the bourbon for 9 years in the first barrel. Then we cut the barrel and of course all bourbon is barrelled at 125 proof. And at that point we cut the bourbon from 125 proof down to 90 proof and we age that in a second new charred oak barrel. It usually goes down another 2, 3, 4-5 years after that.


Me: So this bourbon that’s new on the market, you’ve been working on this thing since . . . .

Prichard: Since 2001.


Me: Wow, that’s incredible. That’s really cool. So how is business for you?

Prichard: (sighs) Me and Mr. Obama, we best buddies. When times are good and everybody's happy, they’ll take a drink or two. When time are bad they’ll have three or four. We’re having . . . We’ve had four years of record sales.


Me: Have you?

Prichard: We sure have.


Me: Who do you feel are your biggest competitors? Is it the larger distilleries? I’m talking about rum in particular. Is it the microdistilleries?

Prichard: I’ll answer your question this way Michael, “Rising Tide Raises All Ships.” We were out there with a world class rum for many many years and with only with the advent of the craft distilleries did we begin to come out . . . See the kind of movement that . . . You go into a major house like Glaciers, Republic National’s , Southern Wine and Spirits and go back to those days in 2001 when I’d say, “Hi, I’m Phil Pritchard from Tennessee making rum” You could imagine the little chuckles that I got.

They’re not laughing anymore. But the reason for it is the whole craft distilling business has garnered the attention of these larger wholesale houses. And most of these wholesale houses have created essentially a craft division. I kind of laugh. We’re kind of the Diageo of the craft division with the variety of products that we make.


Me: And you’re one the oldest of these mi. . smaller . . .

Prichard: I think we probably were about the fourth or fifth craft distiller out there. I know that Fritz Maytag was out there early. There were some guys up in Vermont that we bought our equipment from and old Tito was out there with his vodka. You know there were some early craft distillers out there and most of them are still out there, still doing well.

(Next up a conversation on the new distilleries coming out)

[Capn Jimbo]

Again, thanks for a terrific interview...


From my reading so far, it's safe to say...

1. Phil sees four classifications of rum based on raw material -

Traditional (American) from sweet molasses,
Classical from cane juice (with great credit to Brazil's cachaca),
Industrial from black strap molasses, and
Sugar-based from table or brown sugar or granules.

Naturally, he'd like to see his own method as one of the basic categories.

2. He does not exclude styles, but sees them as subcategories.

3. He is of the ADI school of aging equals the wood area ratio.


Interestingly his first still was of the hobby variety, sounds like a stainless steel stock or canning pot, no doubt with either a 1 inch stepped down or small diameter copper take-off, and finishing with a copper worm condenser. His present experimental is a homemade 15 gallon, which still falls into the typical "Home Distiller" size range. For those who are interested:

http://homedistiller.org/forum/

This is a long established and very competent forum for home, hobby, micro and artisan distillers. It is a huge learning resource that is frequented by some very active and knowledgable distillers. It is dedicated to the art of distilling.

4. He is not interested in disguishing rums by style, but feels buying rum should be "experimental". While that may be wonderful for the distributors and wholesalers, of course that little benefits the consumer.

5. He claims not to know the price of his molasses. You can bet he knows it to a tenth of a centivo. Really.

[sailor22]

I had an opportunity to share some Rum with him last week and he is indeed a really nice guy. I got straightforward answers to my questions too.

His Family Reserve resembles the Clement single cask 8yr. even though he uses molasses and Clement uses cane. His remark about the importance of how it's aged being important in producing different characteristics rings true as these start very differently but end up more alike than different. They both wear the barrel well.

As a side note - he promised to visit Tallahassee very soon and do some sipping with The Tallahassee Whiskey Society. I'll post the date and if anyone wants to join us your welcome.