Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: All right, guys, I've got a treat for you today. I'm so fired up to have Sneaky Pete himself, Peter Kelly, one of the owners of Pedro Fativa, right here at the bar to hang out. So what the heck are you doing here, man?
[00:00:15] Speaker B: You know, the universe brought me to you. I'm actually out here for this thing called the Craft Brewers Conference. So people that don't know I also make beer. But I came out here, we've been talking, becoming friends, and I was like, you know what? I'm gonna just shoot my shot and see if you're gonna be able down to hang out, and. Oh, yeah, of course you were. So now we're here. And by. Guys, I don't know if you can, like, really understand how amazing this place is, but his tequila collection is. I mean, this is pretty great. This is the spot.
[00:00:43] Speaker A: There's been a lot of great people send me tequila, and I'm very appreciative of that. But I also, as you can tell, I also purchase a lot of tequila.
[00:00:50] Speaker B: We talked about this. Yes. You always have to buy more than you're given because we want to support the industry. Right?
[00:00:55] Speaker A: Yeah. I'll get a bottle. It'll be like where yours is right here, where it's almost gone. And I'm like, okay, I'll just order a few bottles, then have a backup bottle. And then one of the goofy things we do. I don't know if you noticed that wall when you came in, but there's all those bottles that are on that wall. I keep one of every bottle, and then now we're covering that whole wall with empty bottles.
[00:01:15] Speaker B: This is the place to be. All right. If this was in Atlanta, where I am, I would be hanging out your.
[00:01:19] Speaker A: House every night, be doing tastings here with Pedro.
[00:01:23] Speaker B: Definitely.
[00:01:23] Speaker A: Yeah. That's awesome. So tell me a little bit about the beer. What. What's your beer brand? And give us a little bit of that.
[00:01:30] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a. It's a brewery called Monday Night Brewing, based out of land.
I've been making beer for 13 years. Before that, I was a winemaker. I like making alcohol.
[00:01:41] Speaker A: I'd say so. Yeah.
[00:01:42] Speaker B: And beer's fun. Like, I. I talk about this with some people that have, you know, the context to understand this, but craft beer for a while was just really. I mean, it still is an amazing community. Right. It's very collaborative. Everyone's excited. In the beginning of craft beer, everyone just kind of wanted to step away from more of the corporate way of thinking.
[00:01:59] Speaker A: Right.
[00:02:00] Speaker B: Not just around Beer. But just a lot of people, like, hated corporate America.
[00:02:02] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:02:03] Speaker B: And they were like, I just want to do something different. The industry has just been an amazing place for attracting fun people. I would say right now, sharing this with my wife Rachel, who's also my business partner in the Tequila. And she was, I was telling her, I was like, I was like, tequila right now. The community around Tequila, I was like, it reminds me of 2014 craft beer. It was just electric. Everyone was so kind. Everyone was so connected. Everyone wanted to share ideas. Everyone just really wanted to see this thing that they love grow.
[00:02:32] Speaker A: Right.
[00:02:32] Speaker B: And right now, Tequila just feels like that community again. So I feel really fortunate to get to experience that during the time of craft beer, during its big boom. And even now, it's still fantastic industry. But absolutely. Tequila is a lot of fun. There's so many great people in it.
[00:02:45] Speaker A: I. I've heard that from a lot of people that it similar to that. So I hear people talk about that and I see it kind of the same way as well, because you have the big giant beer companies that were really kind of being snubbed by these guys that were doing the little thing, and now that's such a big thing.
[00:03:01] Speaker B: Craft beer is huge.
[00:03:02] Speaker A: And the big ones are in it too now. Right. Like, they have some of the craft beer company.
[00:03:06] Speaker B: Yeah, they definitely bought some of them. The industry is going through a little bit of a shakeout, you know, Covid strike a lot of interest. Hard. But yeah, what's fun right now inside of craft beer is that, you know, there's always been this exploration of flavor. Right. People just really trying to like, explore all the different styles beer. You know, for a while there, we went really far off into the distance. Some really crazy flavors.
[00:03:29] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:03:29] Speaker B: I like to think that just because you have a gun doesn't mean you should shoot it. You know what I mean?
[00:03:33] Speaker A: Yeah. Somebody, like, here's a chocolate coffee flavored koala poop beer.
[00:03:38] Speaker B: I'm sure that. I'm sure that's been graded. But right now, the things that I love, you know, like lager beer, just, you know, beer flavored beer in so many ways. And it's just kind of getting back to the basics. I think we're going through that life cycle right now in craft beer. But Keela is really interesting because, like Tequila, you know, where everyone's really just like, there's such a defined way of doing Tequila. Right.
[00:03:59] Speaker A: Right.
[00:03:59] Speaker B: In my opinion. And there's some people that are expressing senses of creativity, different finishing cast, stuff like that. But there's still a huge world to explore responsibly, and I think doing it in a way that honors the heritage of tequila. But there's still so much to explore, and I think that that's, like, one of the things I find to be really exciting about tequila right now is that you're still allowed to dream there, but you have to dream respectfully and responsibly. Right. But there's still, like, Omar and Rachel and I are working on so many different fun, little weird expressions and different ways of manipulating flavors, but still maintaining the things that really need to sure kind of not sway away from, you know? But, yeah, it's a lot of R and D. A lot of people don't.
[00:04:41] Speaker A: Realize how much you can manipulate a flavor just in time and temperature of cooking or how much pinka you leave on the pina.
[00:04:49] Speaker B: As a chemist before. I can always tell you, I tell this to my team all the time. I'm like, degrees matter. One number change, right? One simple shift from this one number to this next number in this process totally has a different outcome. And. And then also, just the way that we produce our tequila, there's this really wild nature to it, right? Just with the fermentation profiles that we take them through, the different, you know, wild yeast that we utilize. But it's always. I still kind of have this feeling, and Omar would attest to this every time we do a batch. Well, I'm always like, hell, yeah. I'm like, we got it. Because there's sometimes we're just the. The randomality of. As you think about what you're doing, right? Just the bio conversion, obviously, there's a huge agricultural process that takes seven years to produce this thing, and then from there, you go chop it on up, and then you cook it, and then you distill it twice. Some people do it. 3. We like to do it too. But then, like, every little component, like your sources of water, all these things can result in everything being different.
[00:05:44] Speaker A: Time of year, length of length of fermentation, like, all of those things.
[00:05:47] Speaker B: Yeah. I could go on and on, as I'm sure you could too.
[00:05:50] Speaker A: But I. I sat with a very famous master distiller, and he showed us a spreadsheet where he believes he can make 4,700,000 different profiles with agave, yeast, and water.
[00:06:01] Speaker B: It probably can guarantee. Which distiller was this?
[00:06:03] Speaker A: It's Mr. Sergio Cruz.
[00:06:05] Speaker B: Okay. Yep.
[00:06:06] Speaker A: He explained to us that a. This. A master distiller never makes a mistake. It's just a new profile. But it may not be a good one.
[00:06:16] Speaker B: It's a. That's a very clever. I think that for a lot of products that have made in alcohol, you know, I think of like the old Edison quote.
[00:06:22] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:06:22] Speaker B: Found a thousand ways not to make a light bulb.
[00:06:24] Speaker A: Right.
[00:06:25] Speaker B: You know, and I like his approach. That's definitely more conducive to him maintaining his role in his business. You know, I feel like times when we mess up, I'm like, all right, gotta go work on the resume, because this is not. No one's gonna be happy with this.
[00:06:37] Speaker A: Maybe if we put it in a barrel.
[00:06:41] Speaker B: He sound like some people I know. Yes.
[00:06:44] Speaker A: Yeah, it's. It still doesn't work. If it's not good going in, it's definitely not good coming out.
[00:06:48] Speaker B: No, most things don't get better with time, in my opinion.
[00:06:51] Speaker A: Yours are amazing. I mean, I tell you that all the time. Let's talk about your production method a little bit. I know we did a video already before, but your highlands, is that right?
[00:06:59] Speaker B: So we're in east lan Del Rio. So we're like in the very northern tip.
[00:07:03] Speaker A: Very northern tip. Okay.
[00:07:04] Speaker B: And so Omar and his family, they've been doing this for six generations, like on the family land. Omar's family land. The Martinez family land is just a magical place. It's truly beautiful. There's such rich heritage. They can tell you every little spot. Like they have a story of like what happened over there and over here. And like they truly just have lived their for six generations. And I think as. As you know, as an American and I think oftentimes in our culture, we don't really understand what that really looks like.
[00:07:31] Speaker A: Not unless you're a long time family farmer or rancher. Do you have that to truly like to.
[00:07:36] Speaker B: To know your land so well, to be so deeply connected with it. And I think that's really. I mean, if people talk about our brand, I know that we're, you know, a freshman brand very young, but I really do believe the thing that makes us. Well, that at least gives us a fighting chance to be a great brand is the Martinez family land without that, you know, and I was a wine.
[00:07:55] Speaker A: Brings you that tradition to it and.
[00:07:57] Speaker B: Some heritage like in wine. I was always reminded of this that like you can be an amazing winemaker, but if you got bad grapes, you'll never do anything good and then eat same thing. You can be a really bad winemaker and like get great grapes and still have a good thing. So I think that we definitely have a cheat code within Omar's work And then his family's land. It's a beautiful thing.
[00:08:17] Speaker A: That's awesome. I can't. Next summer down there, we're hitting you up.
[00:08:20] Speaker B: Oh, yeah.
[00:08:20] Speaker A: Cooking method.
And you're doing low, low pressure, right?
[00:08:25] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. Long cooks and even longer rests. We've jumped around. I. There's a piece of me that's the purest, that really wants everything to be the old way. But I think for a while there, at least, I had convinced myself that autoclave was not a good thing.
I've definitely stepped back and been like, okay, what are we actually trying to solve for here? Because if it's heritage, I mean, that's something I really love, the authenticity of our brand. I really want that to stay. Omar and I agreed early in our relationship that, like, we're going to do this as authentically as possible. Right. But autoclaves, like, when they're done. Right. And you're not thinking about this from, like, a mass production level, but rather, like, how do you manipulate flavor?
[00:09:03] Speaker A: Right.
[00:09:03] Speaker B: I think there's a real place for them, and we like using them.
[00:09:05] Speaker A: But I totally agree. Low and slow. I mean, it's the way to go. And you can control a little more than what you can in some of the older brick ovens. Yeah.
[00:09:13] Speaker B: There's definitely, you know, that stratification of heat, and then, you know, as you, like, start stacking things, you know, the penetration of that heat, you really got to have good ovens for it to work.
[00:09:21] Speaker A: But, you know, I spent an evening with Jimmy Salsa as he talked about his family, and we talked about the history of tequila. And he said, well, don't think that my great great grandfather didn't have a column still, because they did, you know.
[00:09:33] Speaker B: And so use what you got.
[00:09:35] Speaker A: Yeah. When you look at tradition, there's also a way to make things maybe a little bit newer and still have a great flavor profile. And I've had a lot of. A lot of cooked agave in different distilleries where you pulled one out of a low pressure autoclave and went, holy cow, this is amazing.
I think it's important that it's being done right. That's the key.
[00:09:57] Speaker B: There's, like, it's. I understand that some people go into it with the thinking of, like, you know, think about efficiencies. Right. There's definitely that piece of my brain coming from, you know, more of like a volume production environment from wine as well as in beer. But I think that it's just, like, the great things really do just take time. It takes a Very deliberate point of view of, like, this is why we're going to do this. And I can appreciate why someone will want to do something faster. Right. Especially when it comes to industry, comes.
[00:10:26] Speaker A: To when the financial side of it is playing.
[00:10:28] Speaker B: In the same way we always talk about with our repository, like we choose to do six months versus two. There's definitely ways to monetize things faster. But does it result in a better experience for your consumer? Right, right. And ultimately, that's who you should be honoring first and foremost is the people that support you. And I always hear different, like, points of views of artists. Artists like, oh, you should listen to no one, create, you know, something for yourself and it will resonate with people. But I love that. I think it's a romantic point of view, but really you should be doing what's best for your consumer.
[00:10:56] Speaker A: I mean, as a musician, that would be really hard for me to be inspired by nobody but me.
I'd only sing about boobs, butts and farts if that was the case.
[00:11:06] Speaker B: You heard it here first, guys.
[00:11:07] Speaker A: You heard it here first.
So crushing method using a roller mill, right?
[00:11:11] Speaker B: Correct.
[00:11:12] Speaker A: And then distilling under your copper. Was it stainless steel, Copper coil?
[00:11:17] Speaker B: Yes, we do. We actually do both. We have all. We have different things that we can use inside of our facility. In the beginning, we tried triple distillation. I don't know if you know anyone that really does that.
[00:11:25] Speaker A: No, I'm not a fan either.
[00:11:26] Speaker B: I'm not a fan.
[00:11:27] Speaker A: The agave flavor goes away 100.
[00:11:29] Speaker B: You just may as well just be making a vodka at that point.
But so you have double distillation. You know, the ordinario goes through. Right now we've jumped around for our second distillation. You know, like finishing at 47 up to 53. You kind of find different points. One thing that we really are vocal about that we don't do is we don't use our tail end of the distillation.
[00:11:50] Speaker A: Okay, so you're cutting heads and tails and never, never putting it back in.
[00:11:54] Speaker B: No, heads.
[00:11:54] Speaker A: Heads you're putting back in. Nails are out all the time.
[00:11:56] Speaker B: Heads have a place, tails do not have a place. And we think about the turtle, right? You know, you got the head. That's where the brain is. It controls the body. The body, you got everything good. And then a tail. That's just where the shit is. And we don't want the shit.
[00:12:08] Speaker A: It's not a fin back there. Is.
[00:12:12] Speaker B: Is not. But I do know that some people do like doing that and they can reincorporate it once again, it's more efficient process. You can kind of leapfrog and, you know, reinsert it into different runs and, you know, kind of in a, in a specific order. But we just found that we didn't like the bitterness that it brought over. And people talk about with our blanco that it feels a little more full bodied, right. Almost oily. And I think that really does play into the fact that we don't have that competition from the tail end of our distillation.
[00:12:36] Speaker A: Yeah, you have a great viscosity. I mean, it's got great legs on the, on the glass and it's super easy to drink. Real agave forward.
[00:12:44] Speaker B: You got to be agave forward. If that's not the premier thing that you get from a blanco, that always surprises me.
[00:12:50] Speaker A: I'm the only one that's had this bottle.
[00:12:52] Speaker B: What's happened?
[00:12:53] Speaker A: And it's. I told my wife, I said, you know, they have a great promotion for Cinco de. Cinco de Mayo. Get free shipping.
[00:13:00] Speaker B: Right.
[00:13:01] Speaker A: And I was getting ready to order just all three and load up. And then. And this puppy showed up like a couple of days later. So one of the things to keep in mind is you got to go to their website before May 5th.
[00:13:13] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:13:13] Speaker A: Because you have free shipping and you should buy a case of all of them. Can you sell them in the case?
[00:13:20] Speaker B: I would imagine we could, yeah. You know, the, the interesting thing about the services, like in the state of Georgia, right, we cannot go send our liquor out to a lot of other states. So what we do is we end up working with this group in D.C. okay. And so they take our tequila. And then. Because DC Is not a state, Right. So they have different rules because, you know, they're districts.
[00:13:38] Speaker A: It's D.C. yes.
[00:13:39] Speaker B: Right. It's not a state. It's very confusing. Alcohol laws in America are wild.
[00:13:43] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:13:44] Speaker B: State and even federally speaking. Yeah. It's very confusing landscape. So, yeah, then they ship it out. But the biggest feedback we've heard is that, you know, we try to provide an immense amount of value, but the shipping aspect was really expensive for a lot of people.
[00:13:55] Speaker A: Right.
[00:13:56] Speaker B: And so we were just like, you know what? I think we've done it for the past few weeks leading up into Cinco de Mayo. It's like we just want people to try the brand.
[00:14:03] Speaker A: Right.
[00:14:03] Speaker B: We're really proud of it. We're not taking this. Like, we're not some huge company, right. We don't have a bunch of money. We can't just like go spend Money and just get it put everywhere.
[00:14:11] Speaker A: Right.
[00:14:12] Speaker B: So we're growing deliberately slow in many ways just because we don't have the fuck you money. But also, like, we're. I think when you grow slowly, you grow deeply. So we're just trying to communicate with the right people, the people that understand what we're trying to do. I'm not going to try to convince anyone that this tequila is good. I like to believe that you don't have to. The liquid should do the talking, and we can be proud of it. It's this thing people always ask me with beer. They're like, what's your favorite beer? I always tell them. I'm like, you can't pick favorites amongst your children, but I can tell you which kid's the smartest.
[00:14:41] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:14:41] Speaker B: You know, and we have some very smart kids over here.
[00:14:44] Speaker A: Common question for me is, what's your. What's your favorite tequila? And I said, I always say I don't have any favorites. I have some cherished tequilas. Those usually fall into a bottle that I know I can't replace or is incredibly difficult to replace.
[00:14:58] Speaker B: And it just gets sentimental value. Maybe you enjoyed it with. Yeah, yeah.
[00:15:02] Speaker A: But some of them are just really so good, like a Fortaleza winter blend. Right. That everybody say, oh, that's my favorite tequila. Well, it's. It's not, because the bottle be gone in two days. And then. Then I'd be searching all over the world for another one and say, it's.
[00:15:16] Speaker B: Too expensive to be drinking in two days.
[00:15:18] Speaker A: So I always call those cherished bottles. And then I have what I call go, and I have several. Just go to tequilas. And this is a go to tequila. Although I didn't want to run out before you came, so I put them on the top shelf.
The top shelf almost requires a ladder.
[00:15:33] Speaker B: You can't really see this in the. In the view of the camera, but it just goes up and up.
[00:15:37] Speaker A: Yeah. So. So I had it all the way at the top because it would have been. The blanco would have definitely been gone, and the repo had been gone as well.
[00:15:43] Speaker B: Well, that's great to hear because, like, what's really what the goal was. I think that I learned this in wine and so often that people associate quality with price. I think that's because inherently people don't want to be the sucker in their story. Right. You go and you spend 500 in a bottle of wine.
[00:15:59] Speaker A: Right.
[00:15:59] Speaker B: You don't want it to suck. So you'll tell yourself and everyone else that it was an amazing Bottle of wine. Because why, why would you have spent that much money if it wasn't a great bottle? And so I saw that for years in Napa, where I was working, that if no one had any idea where that wine came from and you put it in a blind tasting, it wouldn't be the best.
[00:16:17] Speaker A: Right. Wouldn't win it.
[00:16:18] Speaker B: All right. It was just, it was just this perceived value because of what someone was willing to pay for it. So when we took the approach of trying to launch with a hyper affordable, high quality tequila, one of the things that we experienced immediately was that people would just assume that it wasn't a good tequila.
[00:16:34] Speaker A: Right.
[00:16:35] Speaker B: And then to hear you say that, that's really the goal is that I want someone to be able to have a premium experience at a sub premium price. Right, right.
[00:16:42] Speaker A: You know, our category, tequila, you know, you have a lot of really expensive bottles that have really bad tequila in them. And a lot of people don't know that, that they're buying, you know, a $200 bottle with $20 tequila in it or a $200 bottle with.
[00:16:57] Speaker B: But the bottle looks so nice, the peacock effect.
[00:17:00] Speaker A: I have the pretty bottles up there.
[00:17:01] Speaker B: I see you ringing those bells over there.
[00:17:03] Speaker A: Those pretty bottles were drank and emptied and several brought here because somebody thought this was, you know, my favorite tequila. But there's a lot of great tequilas that are incredibly affordable and in a price point. And most of the ones that I love are, and even some of the ones that we talk about, like Fortaleza, that has a high price, not because they priced it high, but because it's got such a demand that the secondary market is priced at high. And I personally don't believe it's worth the price that people sell it for.
[00:17:35] Speaker B: And they would probably agree with you. And the truth is that sometimes like we can offer it to a distributor, like this is the price they put purchase it for, but you go to get it to an account and if an accountant knows that they can go make an extra $20 on it, yeah, they're gonna put it on there. And yeah, I don't always agree with that, but I also do represent or I, I respect the fact that they represent themselves with their business and they get to choose to do what they want to do and everyone's gonna make some money.
[00:17:59] Speaker A: And at the end of the day, we are a couple of capitalists sitting here. So it's kind of hard.
[00:18:03] Speaker B: I'm like, wait, I'm not making more money, but you're making more money, Omar And I Whenever we go out and we do it, we don't. We don't have a sales team or anything. So whenever Omar and I go out, we always joke before we walk into an account. We say, you want to go make $7? That's what we make when we sell a bottle.
Yeah, we make $7 a bottle. So we're like, all right, let's go make $7.
[00:18:24] Speaker A: The perfect four stands glasses as well. Yeah, I got a little agave Social club glasses. There's also a tequila collected glass back here too.
[00:18:31] Speaker B: That's really neat.
[00:18:32] Speaker A: So tell us a little bit about this. Brand new on yeho.
Give us the story behind this one.
[00:18:37] Speaker B: Okay, so this is 1331. This is our new in Yeho. You'll hear me talk about my time in wine and in beer. But one of the things that I really love is barrel aging. That's always just been the, the, the constant through all my experience. So this is our most deliberate project. This is our celebration of time. Time is a flavor that you should never try to fake. Tequila got good at faking it, right?
[00:18:58] Speaker A: Oh, yeah.
[00:18:59] Speaker B: You know, there's all these different comics we put in. Yeah. And everything. And I've. And guess what? A lot of under. A lot of other industries do that as well. Bourbon absolutely does that. Like, so, I mean, it's not just something that's unique to tequila. And I know there's been a little bit of a rift between big bourbon and big tequila, and everyone's talking shit in each direction. But I've always been a proud supporter of the idea that thyme is its own flavor. So we wanted to present that. So 1331, 10% of this blend is Pedro Prativa. That was age for 13 months in our new world red wine Bordeaux barrels that we use in the same repo. Then the other 90% of the blend is Pedro. That was aged for 31 months in Heaven Hill 8 year barrels. And so we kind of went through a bunch of different blends and just found the threads that we liked. We picked out barrels and then we just kind of weaved it together and presented it at 43% alcohol.
We're very deliberate about the water that we used in the whole process. Gave it more time in glass. And it was funny. I remember our partners over at the Stiller, they're like, just. Just wait five months and there will be an extra niho. You'll be able to charge a bunch more for it. And I just didn't like that idea. I really wanted our first expression in Yeho. To also be a vintage and not just to be like, oh, we've released a year around in Yeho. Right. So this was kind of just our way of showing how we thought about blending and then just to celebrate the thing that we love, which is we love when tequila just gets to rest and do its thing and be deliberately presented in a way that hopefully will resonate with our fans.
[00:20:31] Speaker A: And I love that it's a higher proof.
[00:20:33] Speaker B: Like, higher proof's important.
I've seen some scores coming back in on Tequila Matchmaker. I saw someone recently didn't give it a friendly score because they thought that the alcohol presence was too much. But I do believe that when you have an aged expression, especially with that much time, it's appropriate to present it that way. I do believe that a little bit more heat is necessary because that's just what happens when you're in the barrel. And maybe I've just been drinking too much, but it doesn't really bug me.
[00:21:00] Speaker A: You know, as a person who drinks high proofs all the time. That's. I go to high proofs, talk that shit. The. The barrel note on this and the. I get the agave still, and there's.
[00:21:12] Speaker B: Like a caramel, and you got to have agave. Gambia's got to be. In my. In my mind, agave has to be first every single time. And also, that cooked agave really plays well into this expression, what we're trying to present. But the reason that we use the wine barrels really in a lot of things we do is that the difference in oak does present some flavors. Obviously, the wine that was there, it's pretty much neutralized right now, but it adds structure and complexity that when you could taste it without it, you would understand why it's there. If you don't have that perspective that we have, obviously, when we're putting these things together, it feels just maybe like it's a marketing thing or not. But really, we believe that the diversification of barrels is really important when you're going to have, like, I think a blend that is complex.
[00:21:55] Speaker A: Oh, absolutely.
[00:21:56] Speaker B: Both for repo as well as for an.
That 10 feels small, but same time, what we. We got what we wanted from it. And I didn't want it to be just, you know, a single expression of bourbon barrels because obviously that's a great flavor. Everyone loves it. I always talk about how bourbon barrels are like golden retrievers. Right? They're always fun to be around. They're great. They're so easy to work with. And wine's kind of like it can be like cats, you know, it's a little bit harder to wrangle in wine.
[00:22:20] Speaker A: Is a little bit like cats.
[00:22:21] Speaker B: So. But it's, it's fun to have this because when you taste it in its finished way and then give it some time to rest in glass before we presented it, I'm just really proud of how it turned out.
[00:22:32] Speaker A: It doesn't drink like a high proof.
[00:22:33] Speaker B: No, it does not.
[00:22:34] Speaker A: It drinks very much like an anejo that's really agave forward you get. I do get like a dryness that's like in the back of the finish, which I think is really interesting.
[00:22:46] Speaker B: But that's more of that tannic nature that you get from wine, I would think.
[00:22:49] Speaker A: Yeah. So I really like that the sweetness is there. The, the barrel. I, I don't. Maybe you can help me with the word that I use. So when I smell a barrel and I taste the barrel, I get it's like a musty barrel smell or taste. I mean, it's not a negative thing. I like it. But what's a better word for that?
[00:23:09] Speaker B: I don't know. It's like what you perceive is so individual. Right. And perception is your reality. So it's hard to be like, oh, this is what you were tasting or what you're smelling. I don't, you know, when I think of barrels, obviously I think about them differently and it's less. So what I'm going to get in the moment versus what I know I'm going to get in time. Because, you know, it's. That's the beauty of like when you make things enough and you get to taste them enough throughout the process, you can understand where they are and you have better ideas where it's going to go. 13:31. I told him that this is kind of the direction I wanted to go in. As we're doing an hour long car drive to go over the distillery, I was like, hey, this is like what I'm thinking. And he was like, he was like, that's cool. He was like, I wish you didn't go into it with such a robust idea. Let's just see where it takes us.
[00:23:50] Speaker A: Right?
[00:23:50] Speaker B: And I was like, of course we're going to try, you know, everything. I got a bunch of different hypothetical blends are going to put together. So we did about, I think nine or ten different blends that day.
A little, got a little fuzzy towards the end, but.
[00:24:02] Speaker A: You needed a little water, did you?
[00:24:04] Speaker B: I need something. All right.
And then we end up, you know, sitting down and we took the samples back home to the Hacienda and then we tried it again the next day and it was like, you're right. He's like it's 1331.
[00:24:18] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:24:18] Speaker B: I was like it's 1331. And so we end up piecing it together. And our first batch of this I intentionally also made larger than I would think about making a singular vintage product. So for us like a lot, right. This is a couple hundred cases but it's also our first expression. We're going to be growing. We're only still in Georgia and Tennessee. You know the online stuff isn't really much but we do have plans of increasing our distribution.
[00:24:43] Speaker A: Awesome.
[00:24:44] Speaker B: And this will probably be around hopefully for like a year or so with the couple hundred cases that we have. And after that just more fun. Small batch, but really proud of our first in Yeho. You get one time to tell your story.
[00:24:56] Speaker A: You told it well. You told it well.
[00:24:59] Speaker B: Thank you friend. Yeah, I appreciate the kind words.
[00:25:01] Speaker A: The smell that I'm thinking of is you. You've been to, you've been to bourbon land, right?
[00:25:05] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:25:06] Speaker A: Okay. You know when you walk in to the barrel room, this is going to sound bad the way I'm going to explain this. You know when you walk into a basement that's kind of wet, you get that like damp smell. Okay. So you know when you walk in the barrel rooms, it's kind of that damp.
[00:25:18] Speaker B: Well yes, everything's just been stuck there and it's a little bit moist and there's like some of the barrels got a little bit of fuzz on them sometimes.
[00:25:25] Speaker A: But it smells so good. You know you walk in that barrel.
[00:25:28] Speaker B: Room and you're pure oak and booze in the air like the angel shares seeping out of the barrel. Right.
[00:25:34] Speaker A: That's the smell. I'd say musty, but I don't know how to explain.
[00:25:37] Speaker B: Okay, so if you explain like that, that's a compliment to me because what I want people to get really is that I want you to get the expression of time through manipulation. Evoke. I want you to experience that barrel as though you're in that room. Right. And you smell this.
[00:25:49] Speaker A: That's what I smell.
[00:25:50] Speaker B: And there is no doubt that this is going to be like a very deliberately barrel aged product. It's also not overly sweet, which I don't love that idea. I don't like really full bodied, overly sweet Tequila.
[00:26:01] Speaker A: Right. And it's not over oaked either.
[00:26:02] Speaker B: No. You can almost add a bitterness too.
[00:26:05] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:26:06] Speaker B: That I don't like. So, yeah, but that's.
[00:26:08] Speaker A: The smell is when I'm standing in the front of one of those barrel rooms, and you're just like, gosh, it's.
[00:26:15] Speaker B: The best feeling being in a barrel room, too. When you walk in and you're like, for everyone out there that hasn't done this.
[00:26:19] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:26:19] Speaker B: When you go visit a distillery or whatever, you do just, like, ask to go to the barrel room, because it's probably one of the most, like, invigorating, romantic, like, just visceral experiences. You're just like. It's as close as you get to the product.
[00:26:30] Speaker A: Yeah. And in the bourbon world, everything is black. Like, all the trees are black. And you don't see it as much in tequila. You do in places, but not. Not overwhelmingly where all the trees on the whole property are black. Does it do that in wine as well? Does it turn everything black around the outsides of the building, or is there not as much alcohol to do that?
[00:26:51] Speaker B: I was going to say, even if it did in a winery, they would clean it up the next day.
[00:26:56] Speaker A: It's a. Goodness.
[00:26:57] Speaker B: It's the circus.
[00:26:58] Speaker A: Right.
[00:26:59] Speaker B: You know, they're like, our facilities are the best. I mean, there's such a. Gotcha. So many great lessons that I learned from my time working in Napa and working in wine in general, there's a real prestige that they have that the people that participate in winemaking and this. The ecosystem of wine, they have elevated their industry in a way that I know that we can do the same thing at Tequila.
[00:27:17] Speaker A: Gotcha.
[00:27:17] Speaker B: No one's going to, you know, take you seriously until you take yourself seriously.
[00:27:20] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:27:21] Speaker B: And I've loved that wine has really done that for themselves. And I know that with tequila, a lot of the distilleries, you'll see that some of the grades are just, like, pretty rudimentary. Right?
[00:27:31] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:27:32] Speaker B: Then, you know, but. But now there's more of this modern take of, like, how do you turn your distillery also into a destination?
[00:27:37] Speaker A: Right.
[00:27:38] Speaker B: And that's the place that we're going to be investing in probably sooner than later. Is like, how do we take where we make the thing that we're so proud of and turn it into a larger experience? Obviously, that's not.
Not even in the top 10 of priorities for us.
[00:27:52] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:27:52] Speaker B: We're like, survive is 1 through 9, and then 10 is make a good Tequila.
[00:27:59] Speaker A: Without a good dream, you can't make something happen.
[00:28:01] Speaker B: And that's without a good team. And I'll tell you, with Omar and.
[00:28:04] Speaker A: Rachel, a team and a dream.
[00:28:06] Speaker B: Rachel we always joke that Omar and I are the L on the P L. We're the lost leaders.
[00:28:12] Speaker A: You told me that.
[00:28:13] Speaker B: Yes. And Rachel is the one that's like, all right, guys, this is how we're going to monetize our business.
[00:28:16] Speaker A: Hang on a second. This is not making.
[00:28:17] Speaker B: She's like, have you thought about this? We're like, oh, yeah, it's a good point. We do have to make money.
[00:28:21] Speaker A: Well, fortunately for doing what I do here, this is a hobby and this is fun, and I'm not going to ruin my hobby and try to monetize. I'm just having a great time doing this, and if I can help you guys monetize and do well, then that's. That's really what the goal is all about.
[00:28:38] Speaker B: I like getting the drink with you.
[00:28:39] Speaker A: Cheers.
[00:28:40] Speaker B: I'm fired up.
[00:28:40] Speaker A: You're here, dude. This is so cool.
[00:28:42] Speaker B: I know. On a Wednesday, guys.
[00:28:43] Speaker A: We're here during the day, too.
[00:28:45] Speaker B: 3:23. It's between, like, seminars that I'm supposed to be at.
[00:28:49] Speaker A: I'm in the mortgage business. I'm supposed to be working right now.
[00:28:52] Speaker B: Just does not working.
[00:28:53] Speaker A: No doubt. I work too much anyway. Wow, guys, if you haven't tried this, definitely check it out. I'm going to flash the website up here right between us here. And definitely this is one that I've had a lot of people that I've talked to online that have messaged me and that have bought it as soon as it went available online, and every one of them has had a positive message back to me. Usually they're like, damn, you were right. This is really good.
[00:29:22] Speaker B: That's awesome.
[00:29:23] Speaker A: I know Jeff from Texas when he. When he got his repo and his blanco, he messaged me like an hour after he opened him and said, dude, these are amazing. So it really. They really are fantastic representations of an amazing tequila. So check it out. Order online before Cinco de Mayo. You get your free shipping.
[00:29:42] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:29:42] Speaker A: And I'm sure they'll be coming to states, you know, as they grow, and hopefully we can help support them and do that. And if you have any questions or information that you need, message me. DM me. We'll get it a little sneaky Pete here. We'll get it answered for you.
[00:29:54] Speaker B: I will try to answer, and if I don't know the answer, then hopefully.
[00:29:57] Speaker A: Omar does or Rachel, someone will have the answer. And then go back and check out our brand interview where Omar was on as well. We talked about the whole brand and.
[00:30:04] Speaker B: The whole come out today that Would have been awesome. This morning. He was supposed to, like. So I texted him this morning. I was like, so you're gonna get on the fight because we're gonna surprise you by having him show up. And a bunch of rain came through, and he's working on a project in Atlanta, and he was like, all right.
[00:30:18] Speaker A: So Omar was gonna fly in and be here. I have a third mic. Like, we would have made that happen. That would have been. So I was.
[00:30:25] Speaker B: I was kind of nervous. I was like, if Omar comes, my whole day is gonna get derailed. We're gonna be drinking all night.
[00:30:30] Speaker A: You're sleeping upstairs. I've been feeling a lot of these would have came down tonight. Oh, boy.
[00:30:35] Speaker B: You have no idea. Omar's here. Would have been like.
[00:30:38] Speaker A: And he didn't bring a case with him because these would be gone.
[00:30:40] Speaker B: Omar's a very fun person to drink with.
[00:30:43] Speaker A: Well, we're gonna make that happen. So thanks for coming out today. This was awesome. I appreciate you very much.
[00:30:47] Speaker B: Of course.
[00:30:48] Speaker A: Check out these tequilas. Thanks for tuning in. If you have any messages, put them in here, and we'll answer them for you. Thanks.
[00:30:53] Speaker B: And also just want to say thanks for supporting us for everyone else that has. And if you haven't, give us a try and let us know what you think. But we're just trying to make a good tequila at a fair price because people deserve nice things. That's what we're here to do.
[00:31:05] Speaker A: You're doing it.
[00:31:05] Speaker B: Thanks, y'all.
[00:31:06] Speaker A: Thanks, guys.
