On the Road at Iron City Distilling: Bessemer Rye Whiskey, Pittsburgh Legends, and an Exclusive Look Behind the Scenes

Bourbon with Brad

The Bourbon with Brad crew takes a behind-the-scenes tour of the new Iron City Distilling facility in Pennsylvania. Host Brad interviews Mas

Key takeaways

• Master Distiller Matt Strickland practices 'radical transparency,' stating that his whiskey recipes are available in the public domain.
• The distillery prioritizes a circular economy by sourcing heritage or heirloom grains grown within Pennsylvania.

Main topics

• Bessemer Rye Whiskey production
• Historical distillation technology

Notable quotes

I don't want any of it. Because to me, it's not that the technology itself was bad... I did want us to put some honest sweat and effort into some of this stuff.

Conclusion

The episode highlights the importance of authenticity, historical reve

Transcript preview

Speaker 7 (0:01) Welcome to Bourbon with Brad. Speaker 1 (0:05) The views and opinions shared on the Bourbon with Brad podcast are our own and those of our guests. Nothing we discuss should be taken as financial, legal, business, or gambling advice. Don't make investment, business, or betting decisions based on our conversations as you should always talk to a qualified professional. Always drink responsibly, never drink and drive, and only consume alcohol if you are of legal drinking age. Speaker 7 (0:34) DACA Daily.ai is not built for everyone. It's built for the counsel who already knows that speed, precision, and early intelligence win cases, shape strategy, and protect the enterprise. We serve a small circle of tech-forward attorneys who understand the value of seeing regulatory movement before it becomes tomorrow's headline or next quarter's crisis. If you've heard of us, it's likely because someone trusted you enough to mention it. Speaker 7 (1:10) If you're here, it's because you belong to the fraction of counsel who treat information as a strategic asset, not a commodity. Dock at daily.ai. The quiet advantage for the attorneys Speaker 1 (1:22) who never wait to be surprised. Speaker 1 (1:34) We are here today at the Iron City Distilling Company. I mean what a view. I mean when we walked in here this morning, this early afternoon, right on the river, beautiful new facility, done first class as you would expect it. I've never been to the Iron City Icy Light Brewery but this is attached to the back and it has the best view probably of any brewery. I don't know, you've been... You've been up to Quebec and you've been down south. I mean, you know, what do you think? This is a pretty Speaker 4 (2:05) nice view every morning. I think, yeah, well, yeah, I tell people I probably have the best office on the entire campus. Speaker 3 (2:12) I would Speaker 1 (2:12) have to agree with that. We're here with the master distiller of the new Iron City Distilling Company. And you guys have started off with a whiskey rye, right? Speaker 4 (2:23) Yeah, that was always sort of the plan. And then there's these things. often do they it kind of evolved and we started adding more things but uh i always i knew when the company started that was what the ownership wanted was that they wanted a rye beyond that they didn't really understand what type of rye or what that was really going to look like and so from the outset i was kind of left to do whatever it was I wanted to do. Which is great. I think a lot of people get, a lot of distillers get kind of excited about those opportunities. But that's, you know, like I tell people, it's a really long leash, but that can become a noose if you don't know what you're doing. Not saying that I do, but I would Speaker 1 (3:12) never say that. I kind of think it allows your creativity to kind of come through and your personal touch to everything. Speaker 4 (3:19) I think in this day and age, people have had so much of the same liquid. And sometimes they don't even realize it. But, you know, as we all know, like a lot of the stuff that's on the store shelves these days, it's fairly ubiquitous. And, you know, you try a different label and maybe you don't know that much about whiskey, but then you go and try another label and you realize that a lot of the stuff kind of tastes the same. Some people get really excited about it, but a lot of people... know they're looking for something new and exciting so that was always that was always part of the program here was what can we do that is going to help keep whiskey exciting for people and also but do it in a way that i i feel like there's there's an ethos behind it there's an intentionality behind it and you know you can tell there's actual people behind it. So, you know, anytime I work on a project, I don't, I always look and see what everybody else in the area is doing because I want to make sure that I don't step on their toes, that I'm not going to, you know, somehow eat into their market or their consumer base. I want to be friends with everybody. But also, you know, we want to be able to stand out. And here we have this opportunity because a lot of the distillers here make really great whiskey but they're all kind of focused on the sort of post-colonial period like you know they talked about the whiskey rebellion that's what a lot of their brands are centered on and i think that's great but there's not much i i feel like i can add to that at this point and we realized that nobody was making whiskey during you know like they were during the golden era which was sort of the the 50 years leading up to prohibition when Pennsylvania really was the bigger of the big whiskey states, you know, not to take anything away from Kentucky or Maryland, but you know. Prior to Prohibition, Pennsylvania really was to help put American whiskey on the world stage. And there were these incredible distilleries here and so many of them unfortunately folded and couldn't make it through Prohibition. But they were making really phenomenal rye whiskey. I've been fortunate on several occasions to get to taste really well maintained. examples and bottles from before the 1900s and you realize, wow, you know, Speaker 1 (5:57) prohibition costs us so much. How does that whiskey, how does that taste after all those years? If it's really Speaker 4 (6:07) well maintained, and not all examples unfortunately make it through time all that well, but if it's really well maintained, these were really big, fat, chewy whiskeys. They had a lot of character to them but compared to today's whiskeys the modern palette seems to be more shows more of a preference towards oak they really like the effect of the barrel Speaker 4 (6:36) Back then you really could kind of pick out the grains a lot more. Of course, there wasn't as much of an emphasis on commodity agriculture at the time. So a lot of these distillers were working with, you know, their local farmers. That was something that was really important to us when we started. I only wanted to buy heritage or heirloom grains when they had to be grown within the state so that we could sort of help develop this. this kind of circular economy. Awesome. And we wanted to, because I kind of come from the wine world, we wanted to kind of help make some of these guys the stars. Because, you know, in the wine world, you talk about the vineyard manager and the people that sort of steward the vines to grow, you know, the perfect grapes for the perfect wine and all that. Those vineyard managers get a lot of attention, sometimes just as much, if not more, than the winemaker does. But we don't ever talk about the guys that grow our grains. Because a lot of times the grains just sort of get shipped to a large supply company and then they get mixed in with all the other stuff. Speaker 4 (7:42) you miss something really personal about all that. Speaker 1 (7:46) That's the key, right? It's the personality. And you're controlling the supply chain from the very beginning. Speaker 4 (7:54) It is. I think everything that we do in that regard is a lot more challenging. It would be a lot easier if I was willing to go the traditional commodity route. It would definitely cost us less. Speaker 4 (8:12) it wouldn't Speaker 1 (8:12) mean Speaker 4 (8:12) as much. And Speaker 1 (8:14) I think we've talked about that too, because, you know, we emphasize mostly on bourbons. And I want to talk about that because I know that's coming down the pipe eventually because as your whiskeys age and mature. But, you know, I think it's the story behind a bottle. It's the, you know, you talk about, you know, the ubiquitousness. And I'm trying to say that right because I stumble across my words. I usually clap it out. But, you know, The uniqueness of a bourbon or whiskey today is tough to find, like you said. And a lot of them are, you know, they're white labeled. They're the same kind of juice flowing around, you know, from place to place. But it's the story that always kind of, you know, is the seller. But you guys have the story and you have the uniqueness of your craft. And really coming, you know, with the wine background into, you know, and then now into the beer a little bit. you know finally landing into the whiskey and now eventually the bourbon yeah this is this is a unique uh you know a unique background that you bring it's it's neat Speaker 4 (9:16) um so we kind of view ourselves as a teaching distillery i have i i've been i've been teaching distillation whiskey making to people Speaker 4 (9:30) all over the place for a bunch of different institutions for well over a decade now. I've written a couple of books for the industry and all these countless articles and everything. So when I came into this project, I sat down with my boss and I said, there's not really any point in us having any proprietary information here. Because if I had... you know, any so-called tricks of the trade. I've already written them and they're out in the public domain at this point. So there's... It makes no sense for us to hide anything. So to this day, we have this. That was like one of the founding principles that I laid down for the company was this sort of idea of radical transparency. So, you know, there are big players in the market that they won't even tell you their match bills. And I'm like, that's one of the least important things outside of being able to comply with whether or not you're a bourbon. That's one of the least important. decisions that you can make as far as making a really good whiskey. And, you know, so I tell people like, look, you know, my last book was a textbook on making whiskey. Our whiskey recipes are in there. If we make a gin here, if you came in and you said I worked for Tanqueray or Hendrix or something and I want to know your gin recipe, every one of my guys is instructed to tell you down to the smallest detail how to make it because it doesn't matter. you're not going to be able to go replicate it somewhere else. Certainly, the whiskies are even harder. Speaker 1 (11:12) So, that's what I don't think people understand, right? Because a lot of it comes down to the uniqueness of every one of them. Even if it's just the finishing touches of the bourbon barrel, right? But you start with this beautiful equipment you got back there. I mean, to try to replicate this, it's not every mom-and-pop shop that can set up this kind of a production. It really can't. You could build this exact same distillery 20 feet away from Speaker 4 (11:37) us and there's a human element. I could give you all the recipes, all the equipment, everything, but it's still not going to taste the same. It just won't. And so, I don't, you know, maybe it'll even taste better. I don't know. Maybe I'm an idiot. I have no idea. But it just won't be the same. And so, we believe in letting people come in. So, we let our so-called, you know, I've had people from Argentina and Uruguay and... Canada to hang out with it just ask questions and learn And we let let local people come in and do it anybody that wants to come in we do that we open So that's why we consider ourselves a teaching this thing. I like it. I like it kind of coming from the tech world It's almost like open source, which I love. Yeah. Yeah, so That's how The more we teach, the more we end up learning. And if we can help somebody else get a little bit better, then they're making better liquid. It forces us to get better. Everybody gets better in the end, right? Speaker 4 (12:46) I'm a whiskey consumer just like everybody else is here. So I have a vested interest from a consumer angle for there to be more exciting whiskey on the show. Speaker 1 (12:55) Oh, yeah. Speaker 4 (12:56) And Speaker 1 (12:56) me, Perry, and Eric, and Lou have all become kind of, I would say we enjoy bourbon and whiskeys, but now we really enjoy the stories behind it because we've learned so much every week from a different one and the stories that go on behind it. Also learning that George Washington had his last stand in his general outfit down in Somerset, waiting to take on the revolt of the wheat farmers because of the first attacks. There's some amazing stories behind some of the Speaker 7 (13:29) herbans that we've had on our show. Well, Speaker 1 (13:32) and it's amazing stories. It's right here in our backyard. So tell me, how did the Vesibir name come about? you know you said you were kind of you know trying to figure out you didn't want to do the same thing that the other competitors were doing and certainly bessemer is not not anything like any of our competitors and we had the chance to try a little sip when we met with cliff for the going back 30 episodes now when we he came up and watched our second episode with us so it was pretty cool you know so Speaker 4 (14:00) bessemer kind of came about um when we when we got the company off the ground One of the first things that I wanted to do was get a consultant buddy of mine in who does a lot of work with marketing, branding, route to market strategies, things like that, design, his consultancy. Actually, I do some occasional work for him on the production side. Speaker 4 (14:32) So I've been a client, but I'm also, you know, I also am employed by him occasionally. And I thought, I was like, well, let's get him involved and just kind of see what he thinks. And I sort of told him what I wanted to do. You know, and you guys, you know, we keep using the word story. We say that around here sometimes, you know, we don't even really like the word story anymore because the story kind of implies there's some sort of fiction to it. And to us, we're like, no, we're just trying to tell you exactly what we're doing. We're not going out there and telling you that my family has some kind of crazy story, distilling history. Speaker 4 (15:15) Like that would somehow confer some you know magical knowledge on the years in which obviously it doesn't well I Speaker 1 (15:21) think inherently the part of the big story is you know, first of all, I see light, you know being brought back And so, you know, that's a big that's a big big staple here in the Pittsburgh region, Western, Pennsylvania I've got a lot of friends that are diehard, you know when they heard that not only did it come back but it seemed better I think it is and then now breaking into you know, the whiskey and soon to be bourbon business. This is exciting. That's a true story and to those in the region, it's a great Pittsburgh story. Yeah, Speaker 4 (15:56) yeah. The owner, he's born and raised here and he's done very well for himself. He's not from the alcohol business, but anytime he gets into an industry, he owns many businesses. but anytime he gets into one, if he feels like, hey, I don't really know this business as much as I should, he just does what more people should do, and he hires folks that ostensibly should know what they're talking. So that's basically what he did, and that kind of brings us back to Thoroughbred Consulting, my friend Scott, because we brought him on, and I said, look. That's not really my strong suit. I can talk about what I want the brand to be, but if we're gonna come up with a name, and we're gonna come up with a label, and all these things. I need somebody else to do that. So we brought him on and his team and you know, we went through this whole naming round. There were a lot of really good interesting candidates, but Bessemer kind of came out to us. That actually really works because if you think about the history of this region, you know, Bessemer was the process that was developed to help make steel really efficient or steel production really efficient, right? Well, steel. slash coal and iron and whiskey are the things that really made this region. So Bessemer to us, you know, the fact that we have a whiskey brand now. It just seemed to Speaker 1 (17:32) fit. Speaker 4 (17:32) It Speaker 1 (17:33) does fit. It was just a natural. It just is kind of a natural when you talk about it, when you think about it, just now being from this region for almost 30 years. And by the way, the Midwest, I'm from the Midwest too, so when I hear the O-Z-A-Z-U's, that's awesome. And we call Canada the Midwest of the North. Well, Speaker 4 (17:56) I was in Quebec, so we didn't get it. It's all French. Yeah, really heavily bastardized French. They don't think it like that. I can take that out. Speaker 1 (18:08) No, it's okay. Speaker 4 (18:10) I'm going to be there next week. They know. Speaker 1 (18:13) Yeah, they know. I love it. I love it. So, you know, we saw the first bottle. Tell me how the bottle is going. Because I saw the most recent one, and it really is just wild. Speaker 4 (18:27) Yeah. Yeah, we wanted something that, and that's something, yeah, the guys from Dermot have always been really good with that. They do a really nice wow factor with everything that they design. And once again, they presented a bunch of different ideas to us, and this one just kind of hit all the right notes for everybody. And so... Speaker 4 (18:52) It's really hard to go on the shelf these days Distributors are having a hard time selling the stuff that they have and a lot of them they hear about a new American whiskey brand like map the market saturated We don't want anymore. We can't sell to because so much of it people have had and it's not flying off the shelves like it used to. And I think that's starting to change. I think we're kind of, you know. Hit the rock bottom in a sense? I don't even know. A lot of people felt like there was doom and gloom. Honestly, I think that the industry is pretty healthy. It's doing exactly what it's supposed to do. Well, Speaker 1 (19:30) I mean the headlines have been that whiskey and bourbon sales are down 20 % And that's what I'm asking. So you guys have started this company in the last four years in the midst of these headlines and Gen Z drinking less, right? So what do you found your secret to be? Because I saw that you guys just barreled back at the end of July your 5,000th barrel, which is no small feat. Speaker 4 (19:55) For up here, it's not. I mean, obviously in Kentucky, they do that in a few days. But, you know, here, yeah, that was a big thing. Look, I mean, the industry, the American whiskey category is kind of interesting because, yeah, you know, I get up and I read the trades every morning. And so I follow closely what's going on. But I sort of saw a pattern emerge about two years ago. and everybody was sort of you know hearing all this doom and gloom and they're like oh american whiskey is going to i was like wait a minute but like i know a lot of friends and clients that are doing really well And one number that kind of stuck out to me was that overall American whiskey, the category is down like 1 % over the year. But then the people that were constantly sort of grousing about it were the big guys, Jack and Jim and so on. It's like, okay, so they're all down anywhere between 6 % and 8%. That's a massive amount of volume, I'll admit. But if the whole industry is down only 1 % then there's got to be growth coming from somewhere and that's what has effectively been happening is that It's not that it's not that people are not buying whiskey. They're just not buying Their whiskey, you know, and it's not that you know, I'm from Tennessee is I Jack Daniels knows how to make really good whiskey Jim Beam knows how to make really good whiskey It's not that it's that people want something new whiskey got boring Speaker 1 (21:30) Do you do you do you compare it to what happened in the beer industry in a sense? Speaker 4 (21:33) Yeah, I do. There's sort of the over-deliberation of IPAs and everybody was trying to help each other. And it's a lot of trend chasing too rather than just sort of being true to who you are. whatever or ideals you have about a product it's a lot of trend chasing and that was something that we were just like I don't really do that when I work on projects I certainly don't do it when I work in my own distillery because I want to drink something that's unique that's interesting that I find fascinating it's not it's not that I do anything special or different it's just I just want to do something my way and so the The folks that you see complaining about the industry being down, a lot of what was happening was they had really big PR budgets and you would see the CEOs come out and they're like, oh, numbers are down. Gen Z's not drinking whiskey and THC is coming for us. GLP-1 drugs are causing nobody to drink it. It's like, well, first of all... Gen Z actually is drinking. They're drinking about on par with every other generation at that age set. That's good to hear. Multiple studies have kind of disproven that whole theory. So, once again, though, they're just not drinking their stuff. Speaker 1 (22:56) Because Speaker 4 (22:57) they want to drink something different. They want to drink something with provenance and that has an actual story to it that actually means something. That Speaker 1 (23:03) means something, yeah. And I think that means Speaker 4 (23:04) so much more. Yeah, that's what's happening. And so everybody... You know, these days everybody's got a cell phone in their pocket. If you come out and say, oh, you know, well, this is a whiskey that, you know, that was Al Capone's favorite whiskey or whatever. That's a classic industry tale there. But, you know, and it's not true. People will figure it out really quickly. So long gone are the days that you could just kind of shoehorn liquid into some BS story. It doesn't work anymore. If it ever really did, Speaker 1 (23:37) a Speaker 4 (23:37) few people got lucky. But you have this opportunity to do something, you know, so I go out and I talk and I teach these workshops and classes and one of the things I talk about is the product development and innovation strategies. The big players would love you to believe that everything that could be done with whiskey has already been done. Speaker 4 (24:05) And honestly, that's just simply not true. I have a mentor of mine that was with Diageo for almost 50 years before he retired. He was with them back in the DCL days. He's very Scottish. He's probably forgotten more about Scotch whiskey than I'll ever know. He's a brilliant guy. I remember before he retired, I was in London and we were having a meeting as a group of us. We were going to dinner and he said, you know, a bunch of us at Diageo have an ongoing bet. He says, the craft guys can't come up with anything that we haven't done. And I said, oh wow, okay, well, I want tomato whiskey from Teff, which is like Ethiopian grain used to make their sponge bread. And he was like, oh, that's just a different type of starch, that doesn't really count. I mean, it's kind of like a ridiculous little story, right? But it was really important for me because it told me how the big companies thought. To them, Whiskey is just a commodity. That's all it is. Speaker 4 (25:18) We're not selling this liquid in this package. Well, it's okay. We'll just move it into this package. It will create a different story and we'll put it on the shelf at this price point. It'll be fine. We'll just shift it around. I've walked into distilleries that friends of mine own or used to own. They sold to one of the large players. I remember going into one and I didn't see their whiskey. I was in their bottling line, I saw somebody else's stuff. And I realized what was going on was that they were putting somebody else's stuff in their bottles and their stuff into other people's bottles. And it was just getting changed around because to the large firms, the liquid doesn't matter. Speaker 4 (26:04) What matters is whether or not, first of all, can you pay your investors a dividend at the end of the year? Are you making them happy? But it's not about the liquid. And it's certainly not about the people that make the liquid. Speaker 4 (26:19) Whether or not there's Speaker 1 (26:20) a Speaker 4 (26:20) good story to it, none of that stuff really matters. Speaker 1 (26:25) It's pretty cool because you mentioned something that I've always talked about too. So if you're always answering to the investors, you're kind of hog-tied in Speaker 4 (26:31) a Speaker 1 (26:31) way too. And that's some of the unique situation you have here with Cliff. It really seems like he would be somebody that would be really very cool to work with and gives you kind of that reign to do, as you said, he lets the experts do the... We have one owner. That's amazing, right? Speaker 4 (26:49) There's no other investors in the company. There's no bank loans. There's no subsidies. Nothing. It's just one owner. And this is his fun project. Speaker 4 (27:03) He just really enjoys it and Yeah, he'll come in and look like I want to make gin. What do we have to do to make gin? Okay, well, we'll figure out how to make gins we start making well, I want to make single mode How do we make single? Okay, we'll figure it out. Awesome. We do this, right? But yeah with with the larger firms When they're publicly owned or if they have large investment groups effectively what ends up happening is investors want returns. That's a short-term strategy for what is effectively and inescapably a long-term strategy business. So, you know, we see Diageo and we see Brown Foreman right now. And, you know, Sazerac is kind of acting like nothing can touch them. But trust me, their day is coming soon. Speaker 1 (27:52) Yeah, I think they're feeling the overall market a little bit as well. Yeah, Speaker 4 (27:56) they're lagging behind the other guys, but they'll Speaker 1 (27:59) be Speaker 4 (28:00) there too. Because they're doing the exact same thing. And I'm not saying that any of these companies make bad. I know a lot of the distillers. But they make really good stuff. But they keep making the same thing. And they could be innovating and doing something interesting, something that the consumer hasn't seen. I don't need another wine cast finished at this point. That doesn't do anything for me. I was giving a talk in New York a few months ago and Chris Fletcher was actually on the panel as well. It was really nice to speak alongside him and some other folks. But I put up a slide and I didn't name the names of the distilleries, but it was quotes from PR releases, press releases about this is the first Scotch whiskey ever finished in an ice wine cast. And then there was another one. This is the first peated scotch whiskey ever finished in an ice wine cask. Speaker 1 (29:06) This Speaker 4 (29:06) is the first Irish whiskey ever finished in an ice wine cask. And I was like, those all came out within like three years of each other. It's like, that's not really innovative. It's not. It's boring. And I'm not saying the whiskeys were bad, but you're just kind of aping other people's stuff at that point when Speaker 1 (29:26) there's so many other opportunities Speaker 4 (29:28) out there. Speaker 1 (29:30) I want to ask you, because a lot of the stuff that we talk about on the show is technology, emerging technologies. Are you finding any of the technologies out there? Are you utilizing it here? Speaker 4 (29:42) I am obsessively. Speaker 4 (29:48) I'm so anti-tech at this point. Speaker 1 (29:52) Here's the Speaker 4 (29:53) thing. It's not that all tech is bad. But when we came in, because of our owner and we have a lot of resources and we have a lot of folks here that are very good at supplying us with automation. Speaker 4 (30:13) I actually said I refuse. I mean you go to our Pittsburgh Brewing Company, our sister company, 20 feet away from us in the next building, you won't see hardly a soul because that whole place is so automated. You rarely see anybody out in the floor. To me, that's a perfectly fine way to make something, but I didn't want to do it here. We do have some quality of life conveniences. I'm not, you know, having my guys look brain up and down, you know, step ladders and stuff like that. I had to do that way too much when I started out. I don't look fondly on those days. They kept trying to convince me. They were like, oh, we could automate all your docs. We could automate all this on your stuff. I don't want any of it. Because to me, it's not that the technology itself was bad. It's that the effort that we were putting into it, I didn't want to do it just for it to be difficult, for difficulty's sake. I did want us to put some honest sweat and effort into some of this stuff because for one it keeps you honest but also even though it doesn't change