My Favorite Movie with Brian Sprance, New Riff Master Distiller

0:00 Well, hey everybody. Welcome into another special bonus episode. Bonus. Episode. Brad, I just love doing bonus episodes of film and whiskey. It's the best man. Cause most of the time when we are doing a regular episode our research involves watching A2 plus hour movie and drinking a whiskey and with the bonus episodes that is not the case and in fact the the roles are reversed most of the time. Man, it's it's usually whiskey prep and no movie prep. Today is no exception. I've I've been enjoying my deep dive into the world of new riff. Brad We've had new riff on the show, I don't know, 5-6 Times Now. Not enough? Yeah, not not enough, But probably more than any other distillery on film and whiskey, they've been with us since the beginning.

0:44 Yeah, the the absolute beginning. I mean, we've loved all of our conversations with Jay. He's talked to Kurosawa with us, talked whiskey with us and to be frank, Bob New Riff continues to put out stellar whiskey. And so I have no problem having them on the podcast. Nor do I, man, I, I, I still tell people to this day, if you are new to the world of whiskey, if you've just started trying bourbons and Ryze and you're ready to kind of take things to the next level, especially in terms of proof. Like if you're ready to get bumped up to 100 proof. I really don't know many bottled and bond bourbons that I would recommend more highly than new Rif bottled and Bond And like I think I've gone so far as to say on this podcast before Brad, controversially, I think I I prefer the bottled and bond to the single barrel. You and I are like pretty starched, staunch proponents of the bottled and Bond bourbon and bottled and Bond rye. Yeah, you you really can't miss out on their bottled and bond stuff because it is so consistently high quality like like their single barrel stuff is is spectacular. Bob, we're we're not saying anything else, but man the bottle and bond is just always going to hit the spot and it's at a price point that most people can afford. So regardless of all that, Bob, why, why are we here talking to new riff today?

2:02 We're here because New Riff made an announcement. You know, Brad, people come to our podcast for breaking news in the world of whiskey. And by breaking we mean news that happened two months ago and we were just getting around to talking about it now, the. Breakingest of news. Back in January, New Riff announced that they're promoting Brian Sprints to Master Distiller. And this is a huge deal. I mean, not just for Brian, but because this is the first time that the title of Master Distiller has been bestowed upon anyone in the distillery's history since they launched in 2014. Brian was originally hired because of his fermentation expertise. He was a former Brewer at the Boston Beer Company. He was mentored by Larry Ebersold, who's known as the godfather of rye whiskey, and he helped shape what we know new rift to be today.

2:51 Brian is joining us on the other end of the line. He's been waiting patiently to dive in and talk a little bit. Brian, how are you today? I'm great. Thank you very much for having me. Listen, man, I'm. I'm excited to get to the part where we talk about your favorite movie, because Brad, before you jumped on the horn, I was here with Brian and we were talking about all of the wild pics we've had in the history of this, my favorite movie series. There's been one or two. But before we dive into that, let's talk a little bit about Brian himself and about his new role at new riff. So Brian, you've been with the company for a long, long time. It's been two months since the big announcement. Have you seen a lot of change in your day-to-day with this new role and are you are you settling into it or is it still feeling pretty new to? You it still feels pretty new.

3:39 I'm. I'm settling into it, honestly. One of the one of the very nice things from a lot of that I've gotten back from this is feedback from peers and lots of Co workers and friends reaching out just congratulating it's it's a it's a a kind of a heady big title you know. So I was kind of begrudgingly dragged to the finish line of accepting this title. Hannah Lowen are now CEO was always joking with me, like when when do I get a master distiller? When can I, when can I tell people we have a master distiller? And I just kind of jokingly said it's going to be 10 years. And when Larry Ebersold gives me his blessing, maybe I'll think about it. That got her off my back for a couple years and then she actually remembered and came back and said, hey, it's been 10 years.

4:22 And the cherry on top is I talked to Larry and he wants to give the blessing as well. So when you have people like Larry Ebersold and also Ken Lewis are our owner, our recently retired CEO, but still our owner want to kind of appoint you with this title, you take it, you know, there was no more pushing back against it. The nice thing is I've always been in the distillery making whiskey and one of the things that I really wanted to like kind of emphasize what is that I'm a working master distiller. Not saying that other master distillers are not, but I wanted my priority to remain in the distillery where I have my, you know, my thumb on the pulse, the heartbeat of the distillery. Everything is still, you know running right through me and hopefully things don't change for the near future. So whiskey is such a long, a long term game. A lot of these things that we've been working on whiskey wise and really a lot of things in the business are all like 5-6 seven-year old ideas that are really just now starting to come to fruition.

5:23 So it's the long game over here. But to answer your question, no, things haven't really changed at all. Thankfully I didn't want them to hang a sign on my neck that said master distiller and then send me off to I don't know, Kroger to sell bottles. I I always you know and they were very respectful and understood that I we all do a few things well in this world. Thankfully, making whiskey is is one of mine and it was just very important for me to stay in the distillery, be with my team, taste the whiskeys every day because, you know, blending a ton of whiskey and shout out to you guys enjoying the bottled and bond. We always find that that's like one of the the funnest puzzles to put together at the end of each month when we do all our celery. I mean, single barrels are a pretty easy thing. Like, that's a delicious whiskey that'll stand on its own. But like kind of taking all the components of the different aging environments that all our barrels are in and kind of painting that picture every month. It's something that's also pretty consistent. It's probably one of the things that we find the most challenging.

6:21 We just also, excuse me, I think 8 months ago we released our first malt whiskey and we learned so much from the blending of our bottled and Bond bourbon and rye whiskeys that it really helped us along and kind of putting that bigger puzzle together. So yeah, I would agree with you guys. Well, I love our single barrels as well. I think Bottled and Bond is just where it's at for us too. Yeah and I'm I'm kind of curious as as you coined it a a working master distiller like what does it look like balancing innovation going into new areas of the world of whiskey along with all the traditional aspects like you like you just talked about you know this blending process and and really like if you want to get better at shooting free throws you shoot a lot of free throws.

7:05 If you want to get better at creating whiskey you got to taste and blend a lot of whiskey. So how do you, how do you balance those things out? You know honestly it's it's it's not very difficult I'm, I'm given the time and the space to be creative. We've just learned organically throughout all of the years that that we've been doing this. Again, whiskey is such a long term thing so that some of the ideas that we're working on now and we're whether it's blending whiskeys or kind of working with new recipes that were designed and are coming of age now. You know we've had a lot of these things on our mind for five, 6-7 and eight years. So all of the things that we come out with that are new products, you know they're not very, they're not necessarily new to us, they're very old projects that we've been working on. So they feel a lot more like we really kind of understand where we're going with a lot of these projects three or four months after the the actual whiskey is made and put into a barrel.

7:55 When we do things like different grain, different multi barley varieties, heirloom corns or heirloom rise, these are all things that we have to work on projects from the ground up and almost a lot of those go back to working with our farmer Charles Fogg of hey you want to work on growing some of these heirloom grains for us. So he's got to seed the land and then he's got to grow enough to make the quantity and the quality. So you guys kind of see where I'm going. Like a lot of these things that are like they seem like innovative and new have really been like a work in progress for for years upon years and we have quite a few more projects like that that'll slowly start to see the light of day. I think this is going to be a really fun year for us as well. We really, I think this is the year where we we hit the the quality and the quantity of older whiskey that we wanted to put out.

8:44 We could have always put it out at 6:00 and 7:00 and 8:00 and 9:00. We really know that we're going to be judged long term off of the strength of our older whiskey. So you know when you're making whiskey for 10 years and you only hold 25 to 30% of it back, it takes a while to build up kind of like an inventory of things that you want to work with. But on top of the the blending that we did with the malt whiskey and the 8 year old releases, we're going to have some more fun stuff coming out. So you know, again, it's it's a lot of these projects that we've just worked so long on. That's the Super nice thing about working for an amazing person like Ken Lewis. It's it's not that like we don't look at cost of things but like at the end of the day if it's something that we think is going to be good for the whiskey or provide better flavor profiles and some of the whiskey regardless of style that we're making, you know, the answer's always a resounding yes. So when you have kind of that that space to kind of like create and we kind of laugh along the way, how are we going to build this single malt whiskey in the end that's eight years from now we'll worry about it when it comes up. Guess what years later like got to figure this one out. So.

9:49 You know. The nice thing is we we can call it naive or we just, you know, sometimes we just we don't know better and we're able to just kind of chase the things that we think are going to work. And I'm not going to sit here and tell you guys like 100% of the things that we've done are successful because that's not really how things work. But you know we try to do a lot of different things as well as you know remaining bourbon and rye whiskey is, it's a pretty traditional beverage. There's not a lot of things you can really do just skew it one way or another. You know, it's got to be 51% corn. It's got to be like play around in that like kind of what we call like the 49% is I think what we've done a pretty good job at with differentiating some of the different bourbon recipes that we've made. I want to zoom out a little bit and kind of take a, you know, 10 thousand, 30,000 foot view of the brand itself, Brad. A lot of the brands that we've worked with on the show and that we've talked to that have sprung up in the last decade or so, we keep coming back to the word transparency and how a lot of these brands have made their names on being transparent to consumers.

10:58 Now we've talked with a couple brands, Brad, that kind of hate that and they think that consumers are getting too demanding as a result. But what I've seen on our end of things is that consumers just want to know what's in my glass. I don't care if it's sourced. I don't care where it's coming from. I just want to know what I'm drinking here. And brands like New Rif have always been really, really great at being transparent about exactly the process they're using and what's in the glass. And Brian, I'm wondering from your point of view, having worked with this brand basically since it started, you were there at the start of the bourbon boom or like right on the rise of it. You've been there through all the changes in the industry in the last 10 years. What sort of trends are you seeing in terms of like consumer behaviors?

11:41 Are you finding that you guys are kind of constantly having to adapt to those things? Or it has it been more built into the spirit of the company because you have always been a more transparent brand? I mean the really, really nice thing and probably one of my favorite things about new riff that I think resonates with our customers so well is that we are a real authentic whiskey company. You know, it's very easy for us to be transparent because we've all been here. We created the story, we've created the company culture. So when you're not trying so hard, we don't we don't try like we're able to just sit down and have a casual conversation like I don't have to think of like things that I don't want to talk about or things that could be like a tripping point because the sales guys or the the marketing guys and gals like they don't want.

12:27 We're about as transparent as it gets. We want to tell everyone what we're up to just because I think in this day and age it's people appreciate and they deserve honestly like transparency and and where things are made. And when you get into like kind of, you know, we spearheaded kind of like what we wanted our bottled and bond product to be. I mean that's pretty much one of the highest, how would you like some of the highest qualifications for spirits in the world? I mean, it's gotten 4 years old. It's got to be, you know, I think it's probably one of the first like food protection acts as well. You know, it's where was it made? Who was it made by? Where was it stored? Are you know are you doing everything that these federal regulations say And when we started coming out, coming up with the idea of putting out bonded products, it just seemed like a no brainer for us. You know we're able to tell people you know we started in 2014 this is what we've done.

13:21 You know it's it's it's easy for us because it's what we've been doing. We're, we've been given such an incredible amount of freedom because we're an independently owned, a family owned company. And with that comes a lot of freedom. And you know, one of the ways that we wanted to express that freedom was to tell people exactly, 100% what we were up to. That's why I kind of like when I say I'd begrudgingly, like accepted the position of Master Distiller. I'm more comfortable with it two months into this. But it's like you would have started in 2014 and been like, hi, I'm Brian. Yeah, I made beer for 15 years. But it's my first day on the job and now I'm like that just that doesn't make sense to me. And I think what we saw a lot of, at least when we were opening up and getting kind of familiarized with like what the bourbon scene was at the time.

14:07 There just wasn't a lot of it. And there was a lot of that kind of if you have a still, you can make a business card and away you go. You know, there's no educational kind of background in the US to like become this, like Master distiller, being transparent. Long story made short, it's pretty easy for us. So I don't have to worry about what I say, because basically it's our story. It's not somebody else's. Yeah. And and I love the emphasis on team that you guys have. One of the things I've learned as we've done this podcast, Bob is that movies and whiskey are both things that take the right amount of people with the right amount of expertise, the right amount of innovation to create a great product.

14:47 And obviously new riff is is doing that with their whiskey. But I I'm curious now, Brian, when it comes to the world of movies, what what's a movie for you that you just feel, I don't know, indebted to something that you always come back to and enjoy? What? What's What's a film that you want to talk about today? All right, so a little background here. My dad was in the Air Force for 25 plus years. He was up. He was a fighter pilot for the majority of that and we were stationed abroad for a good chunk of my childhood. I was actually born in in England and I think 1985 or 1986 we, he was stationed, reassigned to. It was West Germany at the time.

15:35 It was Rammstein Air Force Base. When we got there, there was a movie coming out called Top Gun and we were like, oh man, Top Gun. Like that's what Dad does. And then when we actually went and saw the movie, like we just had this like amazing view of like what we thought like life in the United States was because like we were like when we lived over there, when we lived abroad, like my my folks always wanted to be like you know, off of the Air Force Base. So like we lived 1/2 an hour out in West Germany and same when we were in England, we lived you know, 2530 minutes away. So when we like saw Tom Cruise in like San Diego and the sun and airplanes, we were like that's obviously what America is like and we cannot wait to get there.

16:20 Also, you know when you watch a movie like 300 times, like once you know all the all the words and everything, all the mannerisms and everything, it's just one of those movies that's that's stuck with me. I think my dad would be happy to hear that because we were like, well, it's so cool that our dad is so cool. Look what he does, but also like look how cool America is and oh man, and then that's the main. So the the other answer that I loved was, I don't know why, but I first time I saw Grease, I was like, I love musicals. If only Tom Cruise had sung while flying planes, then we would have the perfect movie, I think is what you're saying. Agreed. And then when we went to us, we saw the new Top Gun. I was like, not bad.

17:05 That held up pretty well. And then I went back and watched the first one. I was like, nothing's beating that one ever. It's classic. That was going to be my question. I feel like most people in the wake of Top Gun Maverick have been like, you know, the original's pretty good, but it's no Top Gun Maverick and you're out here boldly going where no one I've heard has gone before, which is the OG. The OG Top Gun Trump's the new one. I I need, like, give me 30 seconds on why is the old one better? Because. The original's always better. It's always better. I mean, it might be few and far between of like somebody remakes a song, but come on man, like you can't have that one without the original. You gots to have the OG and that is the right opinion. The second one, while it's it's it's a really good movie as well.

17:55 I still cry when Goose dies. That's how real Top Gun was to me. I mean, the new one has no Meg Ryan so we're already missing that and and no Kelly Mcgillis. No, no great soundtrack. Like I was driving home from somewhere the other day and Take my Breath Away was on the radio and I'm like, where was this in the new Top Gun movie? Like you, you gotta have the needle drops and I feel like the new one did not have that, Brad. Yeah, the the new one, while a superior film to the original, does not quite have the needle drops of the of the first. I also will will give you this the volleyball scene is way better than the the double football scene. That's just kind of weird, like just just play a normal sport that that we all know.

18:41 I mean, that was my kind of introduction to, what's the proper way of saying watching intimate relations on the big screen as well. There's some pretty iconic iconic scenes that came out of that one as well. We won't. So what I'm hearing is this was just a very formative experience for you all around. I mean, it hit like all the main things for me at the time. I was like, that's that's exactly what we imagined the United States to be. Like, that's everything that we thought was so cool about what my dad's job was. And you know, I'm when I'm eleven years old and walking around, I think the village that we stayed in was go to housing. I mean, I have the danger zone going in my earphones like.

19:25 Yeah, man. Brian, I can't thank you enough for joining us today. As we kind of wind things down, I want to ask you, you know, new riff is always looking for ways to innovate. I know that you can't spoil a lot about what's coming in in this next year for you guys, but just generally speaking, you're in a new role. You've been working with this company for 10 years. When you wake up in the morning, what is the thing that excites you the most about going to work still? Like, is it, is it a new release you're working on? Is it just the the culture of the place? Like what is it about new riff that keeps you ticking every single day? You know, I I think I might have already said this, but like what New Riff means to me is honestly, like everything throughout the years has always been new. And a couple things that go with that are we were able to create a lot of things, not only creating whiskey, but we created a team, we created a culture.

20:18 We believe in the goal. And I don't know if it's how you quantify or when you reach it, but like, if we're not going to try to be one of the the world's great small distilleries, then then what are we trying to do here? I mean, and really the icing on the cake is that, like, we get to make whiskey, we get to taste whiskey, we get to blend whiskey. There's so much creative freedom here that I don't think you get a lot. I've, you know, I've I've worked in a corporate environment before and I understand, you know, what goes into like a small tweak of a beer recipe when you have to go through eight different e-mail things and stuff like that. I understand all that and the importance of it. But again, just like the creative freedom that I think mostly everybody within the company feels, we're also again, just we're all all on the same team, all trying to accomplish one kind of singular mission. All this talk of teamwork, Brad and Top Gun, I I think what Brian's trying to say here is behind every great pilot is a hell of a wingman, right?

21:11 How's it going, Bob? Brian Sprance, thank you so much for joining us on film and whiskey today. Thank you guys so much for having me. We'll be back on Tuesday with another regularly scheduled episode, but until then, I'm Bob Book. I'm Brad G. And we'll see you next time.