This week, the Curiosity Podcast welcomes the fascinating Bryan Davis to share his story. Davis owns and runs a distillery in Los Angeles, but it's not your typical distillery – he's found a way to change the chemical properties of rum to age it 20 years in just 6 days. And here's where things get interesting: he taught himself the science behind how to do it. Today's conversation isn't so much about what Bryan does as it is about how he got to where he is today. Listen to this episode to learn about history, organic chemistry, and business skills all wrapped into one captivating tale. Additional resources discussed: Lost Spirits Technology (website) Lost Spirits Distillery (website) The new spirit of innovation | Bryan Davis | TEDxBermuda Time Out Los Angeles | This distillery tour is like a boozy theme park for adults The Telegraph | 10 vodkas put to the test Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to get smarter withCody Gough andAshley Hamer — for free! Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.
This week, the Curiosity Podcast welcomes the fascinating Bryan Davis to share his story. Davis owns and runs a distillery in Los Angeles, but it's not your typical distillery – he's found a way to change the chemical properties of rum to age it 20 years in just 6 days. And here's where things get interesting: he taught himself the science behind how to do it.
Today's conversation isn't so much about what Bryan does as it is about how he got to where he is today. Listen to this episode to learn about history, organic chemistry, and business skills all wrapped into one captivating tale.
Additional resources discussed:
Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to get smarter with Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer — for free! Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.
Full episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/teaching-yourself-the-history-chemistry-and-business-of-spirits
CODY GOUGH: So I'm curious, for people who maybe don't even drink or have no interest in alcohol, why is it important to understand the way alcohol is made?
BRYAN DAVIS: Well, organic chemistry is extraordinarily important for everything, right? Teaching people about it using alcohol is a lot of fun because it's something that everyone understands. But again, and chemistry is something that you encounter every single day in everything that you do.
I think the story of what we're doing gets as much attention as it does not because of what we did to booze per se, because I think it's a really interesting story of maybe the idea of what does it mean to be a chemist who can be one, what does it mean to be in anything and who can be one.
And when you're in the 21st century and you have access to Google and you have access to basically everything anyone knows, how does that change society or how does that change what can or can't be done now-- I think that's the question that's most interesting about the whole thing when you zoom out to 10,000 feet.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
CODY GOUGH: Hi, I'm Cody Gough from the award winning curiosity.com.
ASHLEY HAMER: And I'm Ashley Hamer. Today, we're going to explore the limits of what you can teach yourself how to do.
CODY GOUGH: And we'll learn about the science of alcoholic beverages. Every week, we explore what we don't know because curiosity makes you smarter.
ASHLEY HAMER: This is the Curiosity Podcast.
CODY GOUGH: My guest today is inspiring and fascinating. Bryan Davis owns and runs a distillery in Los Angeles. But it's not your typical distillery. He has found a way to change the chemical properties of rum to age it 20 years in just six days, and he taught himself the science behind how to do it.
Even if you've never drank a drop of alcohol in your life, today's episode isn't so much about what Bryan does as it is about how he got to where he is today. Stick around to learn about history, organic chemistry, and business skills all wrapped into one captivating and quite amusing tale that I promise you will not want to miss.
ASHLEY HAMER: You can follow along with an interactive transcript of this episode on gretta.com. That's G-R-E-T-T-A. Visit gretta.com/curiosity to share your favorite clips with your friends while you listen.
CODY GOUGH: I'm with Bryan Davis, founder and owner of Lost Spirits Distillery. He's been experimenting for more than a decade with ways to make young booze taste old. Is that about right?
BRYAN DAVIS: Yeah, that works.
[LAUGHTER]
CODY GOUGH: Is that how you would describe what you do, more or less?
BRYAN DAVIS: Oh, God. Descriptions are so tricky.
CODY GOUGH: How do you describe what you do?
BRYAN DAVIS: I don't do a very good job of it.
CODY GOUGH: All right. I'll keep talking about. So what we'll talk about today is you have a way of aging rum or whiskey a certain amount of time after just a few days, rapidly aging. And you're using chemistry for this.
BRYAN DAVIS: Yeah. So I guess my claim to fame is that I'm the first guy to ever figure out how to make up a 15 to 20-year-old bottle of booze in a laboratory using a lot of really cool clever chemistry tricks. And so people have been trying to do it for 100 years and it's fun being able to be the first guy to do it. And it's really, really exhilarating and exciting figuring out how to do something like that the first time.
And I guess that's all new and exciting to everyone else. For me, it's sort of so 2014. But--
[LAUGHTER]
But yeah, so that's kind of the thing people talk about most. There's a lot more to the story though.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah, and we'll get the story. So we'll get into some of the chemistry in a little bit. But first I've got to ask, how did you get into this? Most products are trying to solve a problem. So what problem did you see where you thought, you know what, I need to solve this problem, and that put you on the path to what you do?
BRYAN DAVIS: Well, so I got to the path that I'm on now after a series of other steps sort of accidentally put me there with that problem. So after I left high school obviously, I went to college and I was an art student originally. And I thought I started reading about absinthe and Van Gogh and cutting his ear off after drinking it and it being hallucinogenic and dangerous and illegal and the first controlled substance and thought, this sounds like something I need in my life.
CODY GOUGH: Absinthe?
BRYAN DAVIS: [LAUGHS] And so I started making absinthe and that became something that I did for fun for a lot of years. And I used to make like a case a year. I would take it to Burning Man, use it as bribery material to get on cool art cars.
CODY GOUGH: You're a hippie.
[LAUGHTER]
BRYAN DAVIS: I don't know. I haven't been in a lot of years, but--
CODY GOUGH: You were a hippie.
BRYAN DAVIS: Sure, we'll go with that.
CODY GOUGH: All right.
BRYAN DAVIS: But I thought this sounded like something really fun. And so I spent a lot of years kind of refining it and tinkering with it and experimenting with it. And then I guess I was 25 and I think Joanne was 27. Joanne is my business partner/girlfriend for more than a decade.
And she got in a car accident and sort of had this sort of life is short moment, you know, and went screw it, let's go start our own business and not have bosses anymore. And at the time, I was designing amusement park rides for a contracting company and traveling all over the place. So I was away from her a lot.
And I thought, you know, why not, let's do it. And so then, OK, what are we going to do. So we went through a whole bunch of really terrible ideas. And then finally we were like, well, what about the absinthe thing. Well, it's illegal in the US, but it's legal in Europe. And we went, OK, well, we could move to Spain, build an absinthe distillery, revive the first traditional Spanish absinthe that anybody had done in like 100 years, which sounded like a cool fun story.
And it was a great opportunity to learn a language, I don't know, live in a different culture or whatever. So we hopped on a plane, flew to Spain, sold all of our stuff, called the State Department when we landed and asked for a recommendation to a law firm--
CODY GOUGH: Wow.
BRYAN DAVIS: --and just sort of like walked into this lawyer's office and went, how hard is it to become Spanish, right.
CODY GOUGH: How hard was it?
BRYAN DAVIS: It wasn't actually. If you're opening a business and you're bringing capital, countries tend to be very friendly with immigration rules. So we ended up getting residency visas in Spain.
CODY GOUGH: Where in Spain?
BRYAN DAVIS: Well, initially Barcelona, but the business ended up getting opened in a town called Lleida. It's more or less like an hour and a half into the Pyrenees, North of Barcelona. But yeah, beautiful country and a lot of fun and a great way to spend your 20s. I highly recommend it.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah.
BRYAN DAVIS: But yeah, so anyway we ended up building an absinthe distillery there. We should have been bankrupt about two months later. But we got stupid lucky and the US decided legalize it.
CODY GOUGH: To legalize absinthe?
BRYAN DAVIS: There's a whole actually long back story that would take longer than this entire podcast of other sub stories to that whole story.
ASHLEY HAMER: Did someone say long back story? My time to shine. To explain why absinthe was illegal in the first place, you have to understand just what it's made of. Traditionally, absinthe is made of anise, fennel, and wormwood.
Wormwood contains a toxic chemical called thujone that, by the way, is also in a few other herbs like sage and tarragon. At high doses, we're talking way beyond those occurring naturally in plants. Thujone can cause convulsions. Absinthe also has a deceptively high alcohol content, typically between 45 to 74% or 90 to 148 proof, something its syrupy sweetness masks surprisingly well.
OK, but absinthe isn't famous for causing convulsions, it's famous for causing hallucinations, right? As Bryan mentioned, in the late 19th Century, absinthe was wildly popular in France and many places in Europe. The spirit's downfall happened right around the turn of the 20th Century for a few reasons. One was that France started to prefer wine over absinthe. More importantly though, absinthe started to get a scary reputation.
In Switzerland in 1905, an alcoholic named John Lenn Frey drank himself into a stupor and killed his entire family. He had five types of alcohol in his bloodstream that day. But because absinthe was one of them, journalists dubbed the event the absinthe murders.
Around the same time, scientists found that large doses of wormwood oil caused seizures in animals. But here's the thing-- most absinthe contains so little thujone that as far as most regulating bodies are concerned, it's thujone free. Most of the scary stories about absinthe really come down to its high alcohol content.
And as far as hallucinations go, that just seems to be a long standing myth. Absinthe is just liquor, really strong liquor, but not much more. As people started figuring all that out in the '90s and early 2000s, bans were lifted and absinthe was imported again. So feel free to partake of the green fairy as long as you're of legal drinking age and you do it responsibly.
BRYAN DAVIS: But anyway, long story short, no one knew exactly where this was going. Nobody knew if this was going to end up. It had been the number one drink in France at one point, it had now been gone for 100 years, it had a great cachet and cool story. Nobody was sure was this going to come back and become the next vodka or was this just like going to be a flash in the pan thing.
Turned out to be a flash in the pan thing. And then in hindsight, it's really obvious, but hindsight is always like that, right? So the entire absinthe market collapses. We sold the distillery off to some local guys in Spain at a loss.
CODY GOUGH: Oh, no.
BRYAN DAVIS: And we came home and went, OK, well that was fun. [LAUGHS]
CODY GOUGH: Now what?
BRYAN DAVIS: Now what are we going to do? And we basically figured we'd do another distillery. That seemed logical because we had distribution, we now knew people that we were actually part of this industry now. And we thought, OK, well, let's do that.
And so we called all our distributors and said, OK, we're going to do another distillery, what do you guys need, what do you want. And they said, well, we definitely-- the market's changed. There's 500 little distilleries in the US now. Nobody needs vodkas, nobody needs gins, there's already too many of them on the shelf.
What we really need is whiskey. We could also use whiskey. Whiskey would be helpful.
CODY GOUGH: What else?
BRYAN DAVIS: Scotch, bourbon, rye, take your pick. But definitely whiskey. And if you had to do some aged brandies or aged rums, that would be cool. But those are the things that they could sell today. That was where the market was at. It's where people's heads were. And we went, OK, well, that sounds fun.
So we started sitting down and looking at the economics. And we'd sold off the distillery at a loss, we'd come back, we had a grand total of $75,000 to build our new distillery with, which I think still makes it the cheapest distillery build in all of human history or modern human history at least.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah, that's not bad.
BRYAN DAVIS: Well, I mean, it's about the cost of one of the machines, right? And so we basically had to sit down and go like, OK, first off, we can't buy equipment, we have to figure out how to make it all. So we put together the steam boilers that ran all the stills by going to apartment buildings in San Francisco and getting old boiler parts out of the basements when they were changing out their HVAC systems.
CODY GOUGH: So you kept it cheap by building everything?
BRYAN DAVIS: Mm-hmm.
CODY GOUGH: That's incredible.
BRYAN DAVIS: It was really fun. I mean, you learn all kinds of new cool stuff.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah, I would imagine you would learn a thing or two.
BRYAN DAVIS: It was really fun. it we took us like a year because you couldn't buy anything, you had to build it all. But we sat there, going on Craigslist, and finding people pulling old boilers out of apartment buildings.
And we'd go get them and salvage the parts off of it and then go get another one of the same type and take the parts that worked from one and combine them, replace the parts that didn't work from the other one and pieced together all of this sort of Steampunk looking crazy machine. And then we had to deal with the barrel problem. And that was the big 800 pounds gorilla because the economics are such that if you want to-- well, let me rewind a second.
So our distribution network we're all small wine distributors that catered to high end accounts. So they would sell stuff to-- if you're using Chicago as an example, places like Three Dots and a Dash or Lost Lake or Viennese would be their clients. But TGI Friday's won't be, right?
And so if you can't get to that really big mainstream market, you generally are playing in the specialty stuff where you're offering your customers something more interesting than what they can get from the big distributors. That means you're going to be in the same portfolio with stuff like Blackout or 25 and Kikkoman and really, really cool exotic interesting things. If you throw together a quick two-year-old bourbon that you made in small barrels, not going to work.
CODY GOUGH: No, not so much.
BRYAN DAVIS: You're going to need an 8 or 10-year-old product just to be able to sort of get to a baseline. And so we started running the math on how much money do we have to go raise to make an 8 or 10-year-old product and went like, this is not going to work. I mean, just to create a small business that would basically sustain us, you'd need about $5 million worth of inventory turning over. And so I called everybody I knew who had $5 million bucks.
CODY GOUGH: How long did that take?
BRYAN DAVIS: Like about 15 minutes.
CODY GOUGH: OK.
BRYAN DAVIS: And both of them were like no, right? This is a terrible idea. This just doesn't make business sense. And that's sort of the story of the industry and why the big distilleries have been able to go as long as they have, sort of endlessly getting bigger and bigger and creating quasi monopolies is because of that simple math.
CODY GOUGH: Do you mean the beverage industry in general?
BRYAN DAVIS: Well, the whiskey manufacturers as an example.
CODY GOUGH: Whiskey of it.
BRYAN DAVIS: So when you're dealing with aged spirits, it's generally a handful of small quasi monopolies that control it. And it's just simple economics. They already made the investment a long time ago when commodities were cheap, they filled all the barrels, they built all the inventory, and now they're turning it over.
But if you want to go compete with Jack Daniel's, you're going to need $1 billion worth of inventory in your warehouse in order to match what they've got to rotate the same number of cases which Elon Musk is not planning to go compete with Jack Daniel's on 10% margins. You're just not going to get those guys to do that. It's too expensive. They'd rather send a rocket to Mars, right? I mean, you can't blame them. This is logical, right?
CODY GOUGH: Yeah.
BRYAN DAVIS: And so we went, OK, well, it's only chemistry, right? And so this goes into that category of the naivete and its importance, right? I didn't even realize at the time that people have been trying to do this for 100 years. I just kind of went like, well, I mean it's chemistry. OK, let's go learn chemistry.
CODY GOUGH: And you didn't know chemistry before?
BRYAN DAVIS: No, but I had Google.
CODY GOUGH: All right.
BRYAN DAVIS: I was a sculpture major. I designed sort of the decorative walks through amusement park rides for a living. So this was all new to me. But I figured if I'm going to make whiskey and that's what my customers need-- so if you're making like gin or absinthe or flavored vodkas or things like that, you're basically cooking, right?
You're going to take herbs or fruits or whatever you're making, taste it, whatever you taste is what you get. You mix that in with the alcohol, you extract the flavors out of it, voila, you're done, pack up quick and easy. It's basically like cooking in your kitchen with the extra added element of a still which lets you concentrate certain flavors or remove other ones. But in essence, you're basically working like you do when you cook.
Whiskey, brandy, rum-- those spirits are different. They're flavor is entirely derived from manipulating the biochemistry of the yeast and the bacteria during the fermentation and manipulating the wood and the organic chemistry that happens after it's distilled. So you're making all of the flavors in the production process. They're all derived from the chemistry.
The ingredients are almost minimally important. The ingredients are largely food for yeast and food for bacteria. And then you're manipulating the yeast and bacteria to produce certain compounds, knowing that some of those compounds are going to be changed by the other organisms and then knowing that they're going to be distilled and then the distilled stuff's going to go into a barrel and then it's going to degrade polymers in the wood.
And those chemicals are going to interact with the chemicals produced by the yeast and the bacteria and form new chemicals. And then as all of these things build up in structure, you end up with arriving at what you know of as rum or whiskey or brandy when they're made properly, not the stuff where they add artificial flavoring and goop.
CODY GOUGH: Sure.
BRYAN DAVIS: And so the sort of real deal, quote unquote, "noble spirits" or the wood age stuff is all chemistry. And so I thought, well, OK, if I'm going to make these, even if I'm doing it the traditional way, I need to understand all the ins and outs of how this chemistry works. Otherwise, I don't know what I'm doing. I'm flying blind, right?
So I just figured, well, chemistry is the new art medium. OK, let's go figure this out. So you go to Wikipedia and you read the articles to get the vocabulary. And then if you don't know a word, then you click on that word and it takes you to that word's page and you get more vocabulary. And we don't know another word, you click that word and it takes you to the next page.
And so once you have the vocabulary, then you can go to PubMed, which is the National Institute of Health's database of all of the published scientific papers. And as soon as you have the vocabulary, you can go to PubMed and search whatever you want and then just start downloading to your heart's content and voila, all of the world's information is readily available.
CODY GOUGH: Are you a genius?
BRYAN DAVIS: I mean, I don't think so. I think I'm just a guy who picked the wrong major in college.
[LAUGHTER]
I just turned out to be a much better chemist than I ever was an artist.
CODY GOUGH: What?
BRYAN DAVIS: Yeah, I've never gotten invited to talk back at my Alma mater, but I get to go to other universities and talk to the chemistry department.
CODY GOUGH: Do you really?
BRYAN DAVIS: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: That's incredible.
BRYAN DAVIS: Well, the lack of proper discipline that I bring to it is interesting for them because you can see things through a different perspective by being undisciplined, if that makes sense.
CODY GOUGH: An academic approach is not necessarily the same as a non, quote unquote, 'academic approach."
BRYAN DAVIS: Well, they're just exceptionally thorough. And they tend to make decisions really quickly, dump things, move on and jump to the next thing. And so there's a difference when you're trying to build or engineer experiments or studies for the purpose of achieving a goal versus for the purpose of acquiring knowledge for knowledge's sake, if that makes sense.
CODY GOUGH: That makes a lot of sense.
BRYAN DAVIS: And so it's a different way of doing the same thing in essence.
CODY GOUGH: And you certainly were trying to solve a specific--
BRYAN DAVIS: Yeah, I was trying to go, OK, how do we make 10-year-old, 15-year-old, 20-year-old bottles of booze in not 10, 15, or 20 years of time so that we can properly compete with the guys in the portfolio that we're going to be having to compete with.
CODY GOUGH: How many of your competitors do you think understand all the chemistry of how this all works?
BRYAN DAVIS: Yeah, hard to answer actually. So the industry has never funded a lot of public research. So if you take all the published papers on wine, for example, you could certainly fill this entire studio from floor to ceiling and probably the studio next to it and the studio next to that and studio next to that. If you want to go get all of the published papers on how whiskey ages in a barrel, you would not be able to fill your desk.
CODY GOUGH: Why is that?
BRYAN DAVIS: The industry just didn't ever have a need to fund the research. There were only-- if you take American whiskey as an example-- it's your bourbons and rise-- more than 99% of them come from the same 11 manufacturing facilities. So 11 distilleries make all of it. Yeah, it's hundreds and hundreds of brands, but it's 11 distilleries.
And there are companies that buy from two of them and blend them together and then voila, that's now-- I don't know-- great grandpa's old secret recipe, right? And so as a consequence of that, there's no real competition, right? Those 11 companies all pretty much make the same amount this year that they made last year.
No one's trying to dramatically grow their production because that requires investing a bunch of capital into raising the number of barrels in the warehouse. And so they're all sort of growing at the same pace, producing the same amount. There's not a lot of free market dynamics there to push for improvement.
CODY GOUGH: There's not a lot of incentive for innovation because it's not going to affect the bottom line significantly.
BRYAN DAVIS: Exactly. And by contrast, you take another industry that's really competitive. Take, I don't know, jet engine manufacturing. You come up with a new cool toy for making a more fuel efficient jet engine, every airline in the world is competing, they're all buying different engines from different manufacturers that go on the planes. Those people are going to beat your door down to get their hands on any improvement, right?
But in this case, it's sort of like yeah.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah. And wine also has a zillion wineries.
BRYAN DAVIS: Right, and the wineries are all competing with each other at each other's throats, which is why in the 1970s, they started funding all of the primary research. They built the Mondavi Research Institute at UC Davis. They invested tons of money and time and energy into wanting to understand everything that was happening in the process of making a bottle of wine and understanding how to make a better bottle of wine.
CODY GOUGH: Is the beer industry doing that kind of research as well?
BRYAN DAVIS: Well, it is now.
CODY GOUGH: Oh, really? Now that everyone and their mom has a craft brewery?
BRYAN DAVIS: Yeah. And also, beer and wine are so similar that you could glean most of what you needed to know for beer from wine, at least a large part of it. There's a little bit of a difference in terms of the temperatures of fermentation and some of the goals are a little different. But it's closely related enough that they didn't have to do as much because they could pull a lot from the wine industry.
CODY GOUGH: Even though beer is made from wheat and wine is made from grapes?
BRYAN DAVIS: Yeah, but they're both made by fermenting a sugar product with yeast and their flavors are largely derived from the yeast more than they are from the starting material. Anyway, you taste the flavors produced by the yeast and a glass of beer or wine much more than you taste the grapes to the grain.
CODY GOUGH: Wow.
BRYAN DAVIS: So anyway, so not a lot of research, not a lot of published material, but some of the big distilleries had their own very well funded and quite serious research labs in which they were doing a lot of this work on their own for themselves, very slowly, not aggressively. It's not like the Manhattan Project. They've never raced to go accomplish anything. But they were tinkering with it.
And so when you get to the science labs of the big distilleries, they tend to actually have quite a good understanding of what's going on if it's not published and if it's not sort of shared with the general public in any way, shape, or form. So that's how we got to starting the process, if you will.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah. So now you're learning how to build everything. You're on Wikipedia, learning chemistry, you're reading academic papers, learning more chemistry, and you end up with a somehow magically-- after lots of-- not magic. After lots of hard, hard work, you end up with a $75,000 distillery and a pretty good understanding of the science behind everything.
BRYAN DAVIS: Mm-hmm.
CODY GOUGH: Then where do you go from there?
BRYAN DAVIS: Well, so one of the things that you find yourself asking when you're building this thing is how do you add any real value because you've got 500 distilleries and then you've got say there's 11 American whiskey distilleries and you've got 200 distilleries owned by a couple of dozen companies in the UK making scotch.
There's a lot of stuff being produced around the world in a lot of places. So you find yourself looking at the landscape going, how do I do something cool, how do you do something that adds value to this equation because there's already so much different stuff out there. How do you create something interesting?
And so we started off initially trying to, A, figure out the aging thing that we were working on; and then, B, trying to figure out how to source different peats from around the world to make peat smoked whisky out of peat that would never be used to make peat smoked whisky under normal conditions. And so we started harvesting peat bogs from all over the planet from weird locations and then bringing it back and burning that stuff to smoke barley and make basically peated whiskies out of new materials.
ASHLEY HAMER: Wait, what's peat? It's a mixture of partially decayed moss and other vegetation that's used as fuel for the fires that finish the barley malting process. The smoke it produces is really aromatic and all of those aromas get into the barley, thereby infusing the final spirit with that peaty smell and taste.
When a scotch is described as smoky, that's usually because of the peat. But what's aromatic to one person might sound a little weird to another. Peat has also been described as smelling like band-aids, crayons, permanent marker, and hospitals. That's because peat is packed with chemical compounds called phenols, some of which are also used in deodorizers and disinfectants, the same kinds used in band-aids and hospitals.
That doesn't mean scotch is poisonous, at least not in reasonable quantities. It just shows how context is everything. A smell in a hospital evokes very different feelings than that same smell in a glass of whisky at the end of a long day.
BRYAN DAVIS: And then we were combining that with the research projects. So sort of like everything we ever made was a stepping stone on the research path, if you will. So the earliest products were a combination of the weird peat stuff and figuring out how to force these stratification reaction in booze, which is the driving chemical reaction behind how booze ages.
CODY GOUGH: What is that chemical reaction? Just kind of in Layman's--
BRYAN DAVIS: Yeah, let me try to make this not too technical and try to make this not take two hours. So yeast are making alcohol out of the sugars in the booze and bacteria are also co-existing with them in the fermentation. So there's no such thing as a sterile fermentation. You can't actually make one. There's always bacteria present. Generally, they're in a very small concentration, but they're always there.
And the bacteria produce these things called carboxylic acids, which tend to taste kind of foul, but it's really small doses of them present. That gets into the spirit. And then when it gets into the barrel, those compounds get chemically bound to alcohol molecules through a reaction called stratification. And once they become the ester of that molecule, they taste like fruit.
CODY GOUGH: Oh, interesting.
BRYAN DAVIS: Yeah, it's actually really, really weird. The example I usually like to give people-- and I do like a four hour science tour at the distillery once a month. And when I do that one, the one I uses the example for everybody is ethyl butyrate which is the flavor of a pineapple. And it's made by chemically binding ethanol, which is basically vodka, to butyric acid, which is the stuff that makes vomit smell like vomit.
CODY GOUGH: Oh, gross.
BRYAN DAVIS: Yeah. And so literally, the most repulsive thing you can think of smell wise chemically round alcohol turns into pineapples.
CODY GOUGH: Wow.
BRYAN DAVIS: And it's actually true with all of the fruit flavors. Almost all of the fruit flavors are derived from an ethyl ester or an ester of one carboxylic acid or another. And if you break them apart into their constituent components, they're generally very, very foul.
CODY GOUGH: Incredible.
BRYAN DAVIS: But yeah, so we're trying to figure out how to manipulate that. And the conventional wisdom in the distilled spirits industry, like if you were a college kid going to Heriot-Watt and getting a degree in this, you'd have been taught that that's the hard part, that was the thing couldn't speed up. It turns out that's totally wrong. That was actually the easy part.
CODY GOUGH: Really?
BRYAN DAVIS: Yeah. So that reaction is done every day in laboratories, they use a strong acid catalyst to do it. Obviously, you can't add a strong acid catalyst to people's booze. And so we just sort of went like, huh, what if the wood somehow acts as the catalyst. Let's just go run the lab protocol for how you would do this in a laboratory. And instead of adding the catalyst, add wood. Hey, look, it works. OK, that was easy.
[LAUGHTER]
CODY GOUGH: All right.
BRYAN DAVIS: So that was done like a month later. So we had that toy all the way along and we kept using it on all of the different experimental products over the course of the years. And then it took another five years to figure out how to break the polymers in the wood apart. And that was the really, really hard part.
CODY GOUGH: So breaking the polymers in the wood apart-- what does that accomplish beyond what you already talked about you accomplishing?
BRYAN DAVIS: So in order to explain what I did, I probably have to explain how nature does it because in essence, the way I approach this and the way I think you approach this as a chemist in general, right, is that you're very rarely mimicking what nature does. That's usually not how we work as humans.
What we tend to do is look at what nature does, understand what nature is doing, and then try to figure out if we can hack up the source code and figure out a way to turn something into something else. You can look around the room and you can go, OK, the fabric on the wall over here that's like the sound deadening fabric of the studio-- that's made of most likely carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen molecules woven together into some sort of a polymer structure which then got woven into fabric.
The plastic on the telephone is made of the same stuff, so are you, so is the cup of coffee I'm drinking, so is pretty much everything in the room almost is made of the same three atoms woven together in different structures. And so what you're trying to do when you're playing in O-chem is, say, what thing can I use as a feedstock to then alter in some way or trigger some reaction that makes it bind up with something else to form a new structure that's a new thing.
It's not like linear, it's not like you're going, OK, I want to make a steak, I'm going to start with a cow, kill the cow, take the steak, cook it, right? Now you've ended up with the steak. It's more like, OK, I'm trying to make a steak and I'm trying to figure out how to take the fabric off of the wall, mix in the right catalyst, trigger the right set of reactions that makes the fabric restructure itself into a steak. Obviously, you're going to get fabric to steak, but you can sort of get the idea that you're trying to go in and hack at the source code as opposed to recreate the path that nature takes.
So in order to explain what we did to the barrel aging of booze, I have to probably explain how nature does it.
CODY GOUGH: OK.
BRYAN DAVIS: So you start with a fermentation, you have bacteria and yeast competing with each other, they both make some carboxylic acids. There's a whole digression here in terms of what they're doing and why that's really fun too. But so they're making these acids--
CODY GOUGH: You don't want to get into it?
BRYAN DAVIS: Well, that's 15 minutes.
CODY GOUGH: Oh, all right.
[LAUGHTER]
BRYAN DAVIS: Those carboxylic acids get partly esterified by the yeast. So the yeast make some fruit flavors out of them. And some of the other ones stay as raw off flavored acids. That's the off flavors in white spirits.
CODY GOUGH: White spirits meaning--
BRYAN DAVIS: Like freshly distilled spirits. So there's two kinds of freshly distilled spirits. There's really high rectification stuff like vodkas and gins and things like that where you strip all the flavor out of it to make it palatable kind of immediately, and then there's the stuff that's going to go into a barrel for decades where you distill it quite a bit lower and quite a bit cruder to sort of capture all of those flavor compounds because they're the feedstock by which you're going to make all the flavors.
But they taste a little off. In the background, sort of in the new make or freshly distilled spirit, there's little bits of these off flavors that just make them kind of slightly unappealing. Little bits of things like the butyric acid that tastes like vomit, right? In fact, connoisseurs call that, tasting note baby sick.
CODY GOUGH: There's a fun fact for you.
BRYAN DAVIS: Yeah.
ASHLEY HAMER: There are a lot of weird tasting notes out there. Baby sick or baby vomit is a big one. But there's also baby diaper, cat pee, nail polish remover, hamster cage, corn chips, tennis ball can, sex musk, sweaty socks, wet dog, and burst balloons. One review of Old Fitzgerald Kentucky straight bourbon whiskey noted, quote, "Cardboard shavings, not nice sweet amazon.com cardboard, old U-Haul dirty cardboard." Describing your senses in words is tough. So connoisseurs use everything they've got.
BRYAN DAVIS: So you take all that soup, and then you put that into a barrel, and gradually over the course of many years, the polymers that give the tree structural integrity are going to slowly dissolve and fall apart. And they're going to dissolve and fall apart into these different types of molecules that some of which taste smoky, some of which tastes like vanilla and sweet woody flavors, some of which tastes like other carboxylic acids, other repulsive things.
And then those things are all going to undergo that same stratification reaction, which is the magic of the barrel. And they're going to slowly all bind alcohols and then bind to each other and turn into all of these hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of different flavor compounds, all of which you find in nature and also in barrels, although made different ways, if you will. The barrel isn't really making it the way the plant makes it in nature either.
But that's sort of what creates old booze and the magic of it and where you get all those leather and tobacco and smoke and fruits and all these really complex layered flavors in there. That's nature.
So we went and looked at this process and went, OK, one, how do we force esterification to happen on demand, so take whatever molecules we got for feedstock, force those to bind to the alcohols and turn kapoof into fruits. So that was step one. And without adding any chemicals to it. You had to do it with just the booze and the wood.
CODY GOUGH: And why is that, because you don't want to change the flavor obviously?
BRYAN DAVIS: Well, generally speaking, the FDA frowns upon you adding sulfuric acid to people's food as a catalyst.
CODY GOUGH: Strange.
BRYAN DAVIS: [LAUGHS] So we sort of laid out the ground rules which are you can mess with the environment, you can mess with all sorts of things. You can play with energy in different forms here. But what you can't do is add anything to it. It had to just be booze and wood.
CODY GOUGH: So how do you trigger a chemical reaction that you want without adding extra chemicals?
BRYAN DAVIS: Well, OK, so if you want to make an ester in a laboratory, so if you want to take the puke aroma of butyric acid and turn it into pineapples, you take the butyric acid, the puke thing, and you mix that with ethanol, which is vodka, OK, and then you add a little bit of sulfuric acid to it as a catalyst. And you heat it up to a specific temperature range and then spin it in a centrifuge and voila, you get pineapples.
CODY GOUGH: OK.
BRYAN DAVIS: OK. We went and looked at that and said, OK, no one else is adding sulfuric acid to the barrels either. So the wood must be able to catalyze this reaction somehow. Otherwise, it shouldn't really happen.
And so this was a really simple experiment. We just took vinegar, which is a carboxylic acid. So the two carbon chained carboxylic acid made by a different bacteria than the butyric one and less repulsive.
But we took vinegar and vodka, mixed them together and put a piece of wood in and then took another container and put just vinegar and alcohol in it and put both of them through the exact same conditions you would put them through in a lab to make the pineapple flavoring I mentioned earlier and voila, the one with the wood in it turned into ethyl acetate which is the ethyl ester of vinegar and alcohol. And the other one just sat there and blinked at you.
So we went, OK, cool, the wood has the ability to catalyze this reaction somehow. We still don't fully understand how. But it somehow has the ability to catalyze this reaction, and we can treat it the way you would treat a strong acid catalyst. Cool, problem solved. OK, next, right?
So now we had to figure out how to dissolve the polymers in the wood into the alcohol to get all the rest of the precursors of the flavor compounds. That was way more complicated.
CODY GOUGH: Because some of the flavors of the alcohol are actually flavors of the polymers from the wood?
BRYAN DAVIS: Degradation products of the polymers, pieces of them, as they dissolve, bind up to other things to form new flavors.
CODY GOUGH: Got it.
BRYAN DAVIS: And so we needed to be able to break those polymers apart to get those pieces to put the rest of the puzzle together.
CODY GOUGH: Without introducing sulfuric acid.
BRYAN DAVIS: Again, yes, without adding anything to it. And so this was quite a bit more complicated. Now it wasn't supposed to be. The conventional wisdom said it was easy. You just had to add a teabag of woodchips, increase the surface area by 1000x, and you'll get all the same stuff in 1/1000 the time. That turned out to be total [BLEEP].
So what happens is-- the way I like to describe this when I do this sort of science class at the distillery is if you think of the polymers in the wood the way you think of a calzone-- so on the outside, you've got this crust. And then you move inside, you get the gooey crust. And then you move in a little further, and you get some sauce, and then you move a little further, you get some cheese, and then you keep going and you get some pepperonis and if Joanne's doing the ordering, you get anchovies and onions eventually in the middle, right? And that's your calzone.
Now if you take a calzone and you dunk it into a tank of booze and you let it dissolve for 20 years, you're going to eventually get a little bit of everything in the calzone dissolved into it. The calzone will basically just have vaporized into all these things that are floating around in the booze. There'll be an anchovy sitting in your tank, right?
But if you take 1,000 calzones and drop them all in for 5 minutes and then pull them out, what you got was 1,000 times the outside of the crust--
CODY GOUGH: That makes sense.
BRYAN DAVIS: --and no anchovies.
CODY GOUGH: I'm following.
BRYAN DAVIS: Right, OK. So when the polymers dissolve into the booze, there are flavors and precursors to flavors that come out of them in year one that are completely different than what come out at year 15. And so we had to figure out how to get all of the stuff out to the year 15, not just 1,000 times year one.
CODY GOUGH: You didn't just want the outer crust, you wanted those anchovies.
BRYAN DAVIS: Right, you're after the anchovy.
CODY GOUGH: Maybe not the best analogy with the anchovies.
BRYAN DAVIS: Well, yeah. Yeah, it depends if you like anchovies.
[LAUGHTER]
CODY GOUGH: Do you like anchovies?
BRYAN DAVIS: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: Well then, there you go. Perfect analogy.
BRYAN DAVIS: And so now the task became figuring out how to break the polymers apart completely. And we tried all sorts of different things, ended up finally figuring it out five years later. And it ended up being using really high intensity light to do it, interestingly enough.
CODY GOUGH: But barrels are in the dark.
BRYAN DAVIS: Again, we're not doing this the way nature does it, right? So in nature, the polymer is slowly dissolving into the alcohol over the course of decades. What we're trying to say is OK, how do we basically fire a high powered rifle at the molecular level of the polymer and try to blow it apart so that we can get the same dissolving effect that they get in 15 years, but we want to get it in like 15 minutes. And more importantly, we want to be able to control it because if we can control it, then we can probably do some really cool crazy stuff that nature can't do too.
CODY GOUGH: Sure.
BRYAN DAVIS: And so we sat there looking at it going OK, what can we dream up as ways of attacking polymers. Tried all kinds of things. And then there was this really, really obvious one day when I was standing side this old deck at the distillery. And the deck was slowly falling apart in the sun.
You know how decks fall apart where the wood sort of splits and cracks down the middle? Well, in order for the wood to split and crack like that, the polymers that give the tree its structural integrity have to be degrading. Those polymer structures are the bone structure of the plant. And so in order for you to be splitting and cracking the wood apart like that in the sun, it means the polymers had to be degrading and unhooking from each other and sort of falling apart. The bone structure of the plant had to be falling apart.
I was sitting there looking at that going, hmm, OK, so I need to put a new coat of paint on my deck for one.
CODY GOUGH: That's step one.
BRYAN DAVIS: Right? And you know that little voice in the back of your head that says things to you, right? Like not the one that says kill people, but the other one?
CODY GOUGH: Sure.
BRYAN DAVIS: No, I'm just kidding.
[LAUGHTER]
And so I'm sitting there looking at my deck. And the little voice in the back of my head is saying, gee, you need to put a new coat of paint on the deck, right? But it didn't say it in those words. It said it in sort of nerd speak, which was, gee, the sunlight is doing one hell of a number on the polymers in my deck.
And so I got about 10 feet away or 100 feet away and stopped, turned around and went, hey, wait a minute. OK, now I can't increase the amount of solvent in the barrel. I can't add more booze to the barrel to dissolve it more efficiently. But I can certainly increase the amount of light involved.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah.
BRYAN DAVIS: So we took a bunch of wood, put it in a stainless steel basket, drop it inside a glass tube full of alcohol, aimed a bunch of lights at it and started breaking the polymers apart on the surface of the wood in the basket. All of the degradation products that came from breaking the polymers apart on the surface of the wood then get trapped in the alcohol and voila, you got to the same place that they did in terms of booze dissolving the polymers over the course of like 15 years.
CODY GOUGH: So you figured out a way to age--
BRYAN DAVIS: Another way to, in this case, age the wood.
CODY GOUGH: Right?
BRYAN DAVIS: And so now that's shedding all those precursor compounds. Then take that, put it back into the first step, create the esterification environment again, and then you can put all 300 pieces together in the right order and took another year and a half of fine tuning it to get it to the right ratios to match nature. But yeah, super fun stuff.
CODY GOUGH: So how accurately can you age this? If you give a bottle of rum to a rum taster and you say, here's my rum age 20 years and then you give them a bottle of rum naturally aged--
BRYAN DAVIS: You can do it quite accurately. I mean, there's tons and tons of that stuff out or critics writing up exactly that question. And we did a whole blind competition with the master court of Somalis and all that stuff.
CODY GOUGH: How'd that go?
BRYAN DAVIS: We came in second out of six 20-year-old rums.
CODY GOUGH: Wow.
BRYAN DAVIS: Yeah. I mean, we can totally do it.
CODY GOUGH: So pretty accurate. And you do 5 year, 10 year, 15 year--
BRYAN DAVIS: No.
CODY GOUGH: So what are the limits?
BRYAN DAVIS: We can only do one age.
CODY GOUGH: Really?
BRYAN DAVIS: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: What?
BRYAN DAVIS: Well, so this goes to that whole hack versus-- you're not recreating what happens in a barrel. You're hacking the process. And so it's not like each day is the equivalent of X number of years. It doesn't work like that. So it takes us six days to run the whole process. But it's not like day one is the equivalent of a five-year-old and day two is a 10-year-old or 2 and 1/2 year old at day 1 and a five-year-old at day 2. It doesn't work like that.
You're basically triggering a series of different reactions in order to end up at a point that matches where nature would be at a certain point. And then if you run our system longer, it goes out of spec. And if you run it shorter, it's not in spec yet, if that makes sense.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah.
BRYAN DAVIS: So you can basically make like a 15 to 20 because that's a sort of hazy realm. But you make something equivalent to around a 15-year-old product, but you can't make a five-year-old and you can't make a 30-year-old.
CODY GOUGH: So people that love five-year-old aged--
BRYAN DAVIS: Yep, they're on their own.
CODY GOUGH: Sorry, you're on your own. But that 15-20 range, that's--
BRYAN DAVIS: Right, that you can do.
CODY GOUGH: Wow.
BRYAN DAVIS: You may be able to get it to go older, but younger probably not, because older is all about evaporation losses from the barrel, concentrating the flavors further. That's really what happens as booze gets older than 15 to 20 years old.
CODY GOUGH: Are you continuing to research how to accomplish that?
BRYAN DAVIS: Oh yeah, no, we have a new machine we call the Angel Sucker in the lab. It's called the Angel share, the evaporation losses. I guess I should put that in context. It sounded really strange.
CODY GOUGH: [LAUGHS]
BRYAN DAVIS: Yeah, let me rewind for a second. So when you put barrels in a warehouse, the wood is slightly porous. And so it allows a little bit of ethanol and a little bit of water to vaporize out of the barrel. And as it does that, the flavor molecules get trapped inside and their concentration keeps going up and it keeps getting richer and more densely flavored and the alcohol and the water evaporate out of the barrel walls. And by the time spirits get to be 30 years old, they lose about half of the volume of the barrel to the evaporation losses.
CODY GOUGH: Wow.
BRYAN DAVIS: Yeah, it's quite significant. So in the and that means it's doubling the concentration of the flavor molecules. So in the middle age is the term Angel's share comes from. In the 1600s, they were trying to figure out what was going on, who was breaking into the warehouse and stealing their alcohol. And so they posted monks to live in the cellars and catch the thieves, right?
CODY GOUGH: Oh, wow.
BRYAN DAVIS: And so the monks sitting in the cellars, eventually after spending years living in the cellar, came to the conclusion that absolutely no one's breaking in. We figured it out though. What's happening is that the angels are coming in the night and they're blessing the barrels, which is why they keep tasting better. And they're also taking a cut of the alcohol for themselves like they would.
CODY GOUGH: That's incredible.
BRYAN DAVIS: And so the term the Angel's share actually goes back to the Middle Ages. And so yeah, we have a machine that we're tinkering with. And we've gotten it to work sometimes. It's quite finicky, but it's a machine designed to recreate that effect.
And so we call it the Angel Sucker. And actually, it has angel statues sucking on the exhaust hoses. But that's just because why not. We're building a chapel for it in the distillery actually.
CODY GOUGH: Are you really?
BRYAN DAVIS: Uh-huh.
CODY GOUGH: Wait, you actually are?
BRYAN DAVIS: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: Oh, I've got to see pictures of this.
BRYAN DAVIS: Well, if you Google it, the distillery is quite entertaining.
CODY GOUGH: Oh, you got the photos up there already?
BRYAN DAVIS: Oh, there's all kinds of stuff online.
CODY GOUGH: What's the website for our listeners?
BRYAN DAVIS: Lostspirits.net
CODY GOUGH: Lostspirits.net.
BRYAN DAVIS: Yeah, lost like I'm lost in the woods, spirits like woo spirits, and .net like the thing you catch fish with.
[LAUGHTER]
But yeah.
CODY GOUGH: And where are these tours you give? Because I would totally go in a four hour tour to hear more about this.
BRYAN DAVIS: Well, most of them we do aren't 4 hours. I do the four hour science tour once a month. And those, you have to get on a waiting list and sign up for them. The regular tours are about two hours, and that's just a trip through the green house and then down through the jungle to the distillery, and then into the research lab.
CODY GOUGH: Where is this all located?
BRYAN DAVIS: In Downtown LA.
CODY GOUGH: Downtown Los Angeles. Of course. That's where I think of jungles being--
BRYAN DAVIS: Well, we had a little fun with the distillery. So I mentioned I used to do amusement park rides for a living. And so when we decided to build the new distillery, we thought oh, let's have some fun. And so we actually built a jungle and it's too dense to walk through. So we put a river through it so you can sail down the river to get to the distillery. And it's quite entertaining.
CODY GOUGH: This is the top of my list of places to visit the next time I go to Los Angeles.
BRYAN DAVIS: It's pretty fun. We do tours on the weekends.
CODY GOUGH: It sounds incredible.
ASHLEY HAMER: To give you a sense of what a Lost Spirits Distillery tour is like, I'm going to quote an August 2017 article from Time Out Los Angeles entitled "This distillery tour is like a boozy theme park for adults." Quote, "Each room of the distillery takes inspiration from a different movie or novel. The lobby has hints of Jurassic Park while the first tasting room is an homage to Pirates of the Caribbean.
Dimly lit and occupied by an eye patch wearing skeleton, this is where we take our first sip of Lost Spirits Navy rum. Well spiced, strong and bold with a sharpness that fades to a lingering sweetness. Next, we climb aboard a wooden boat and drift slowly down a tunnel on the distillery's cooling water. This portion of the trip is oddly serene and occurs in complete darkness.
A soundtrack of distant thunder and trilling birds surrounds us. And as we float along, we're sprinkled with a light rain, refreshing in the heat of the distillery. Sometimes the tour has different weather, Davis says enigmatically." End quote.
The author proceeds to describe the next stop of the tour. A red lit room full of copper vats and stills that look like dragons followed by the more modern laboratory, and finally a boat ride into a whiskey room, which is entirely inspired by the HG Wells book, The Island of Dr. Moreau. You can find a link to the entire article on the show notes.
CODY GOUGH: Do you ever sleep?
BRYAN DAVIS: Not a lot.
[LAUGHTER]
I also don't take days off. That helps too.
CODY GOUGH: Wow.
BRYAN DAVIS: Yeah. It's fun. I mean, we do get more time now. We built a computer system that makes the alcohol. So her name is Tessa. She actually runs the equipment for the most part. And so we actually have a lot of free time because we don't have to monitor doing-- the normal work you would do running the distillery, we generally have fully automated now. So we don't have to deal with it. We sort of just go spend our time working on the research projects.
CODY GOUGH: Do you have any competitors in terms of this specific chemical manipulation?
BRYAN DAVIS: Not really. There's a couple of companies that sort of pretend.
CODY GOUGH: There are people trying to do it, but they're not getting second place at age.
BRYAN DAVIS: Yeah, they're not-- nobody's ever really done it for real besides us.
CODY GOUGH: So for the blind tasting competition, you came in second. I would imagine there will be some purists out there who will claim that doing it naturally is going to taste--
BRYAN DAVIS: Oh, sure. And that's fine. We don't expect to replace the barrel, and we also don't expect to please every hardcore purist. It's another new interesting thing. But certainly no means are we ever going to truly replace the barrel. There's a certain kind of magic to it that you're never going to replace even if you wanted to, right?
The idea that your kids graduate in college and you brought them this bottle of 22-year-old McAllen and you're going, this went into the barrel the year you were born, and just that whole idea and that magic and that romance, you're never going to take away. But you can certainly create some new and really interesting things that sort of add to the conversation and add to the overall genre in New at interesting ways.
And then there's potentially some large maybe more economically viable impacts in a couple of other different markets. Some of the large distilleries use it as a technique for making blending ingredients to make a really concentrated version that you can use to increase the richness, a little bit of a blend that you're making or something like that. And then there are applications in some other markets in different ways that are quite compelling from an economic point of view.
But that's the boring side of the business. The exciting part is messing around in our own lab, creating an opportunity for people to have a really fun, interesting experience, sitting around debating where is the line when science goes too far, and being able to do it in the safe confines of booze.
[LAUGHTER]
CODY GOUGH: Relatively safe.
BRYAN DAVIS: Right?
CODY GOUGH: But you're not doing this with all spirits, right? Rum and whiskey are the two?
BRYAN DAVIS: We're doing only rum and whiskey now. We have brandies that we're tinkering with in the lab as well. And then we have all kinds of other projects. This is the one that everybody likes to talk about because it's the most sort of, I don't know, potentially disruptive or kind of paradigm shifting for an industry.
But we have all kinds of other really, really, really fun projects in the lab. We have one where we isolated the bacteria that create the flavor in vanilla bean fermentation and are using that to ferment other stuff.
CODY GOUGH: To give it a vanilla flavor?
BRYAN DAVIS: Well just seeing what happens if you take the bacteria that-- so well, OK, so if you want to make a vanilla bean, it's a fruit almost like a banana that gets bacterially fermented by 3 specific bacteria. And they actually create the flavor of a vanilla bean. And then that gets dried and that's what you're actually buying.
There's a type of tobacco called Cavendish that's made the same way where they mature the tobacco leaves with the same bacteria. And it's similar to a vanilla bean but not quite. And we thought, this sounds fun. What happens if we isolate these bacteria, create the right environmental conditions, and then feed them other stuff?
And so we've been feeding them wood and we've been feeding them different types of wood and feeding them different types of fruits and creating all sorts of new interesting flavors. I have no idea what I'm going to do with this yet, but it's really, really fun.
CODY GOUGH: Has anything interesting come out of it?
BRYAN DAVIS: Well, I mean, right now, we haven't made anything you can drink yet. It's also like Petri dishes you can smell. But it's really promising and really exciting and doesn't paradigm shift anything, but it's a lot of fun.
CODY GOUGH: So who's working at your lab? Do you have chemists and researchers?
BRYAN DAVIS: It's a mix. There's me. James is a computer science. Wynn is-- we got him from the Air Force's rocket program. And then Joanne's always around. And Taron who's like blogger in the whisky space and has been hanging out.
CODY GOUGH: What is going on? You have completely shifted all of my perception of what chemistry can be and who can be a chemist and who can do-- I mean, you're talking about Petri dishes and you're working with Rocket scientists and bloggers and things, not classically trained PhDs in chemistry.
BRYAN DAVIS: I mean, it's all a matter of people with the right way of thinking, right? It's not so much about the academic background per se, especially because the really good academic PhD scientists win aside in this equation. So he actually does fit that category.
But generally speaking, they mostly go to work at NASA or academia if they're really good. There's very few of those guys that you're going to go get your hands on. But you can find all kinds of people that maybe have the right way of thinking and some useful background that you can bring into the equation.
And all of a sudden, it becomes really valuable, right? You throw a computer science guy in the mix, and he's going like sweet, let's figure out how to automate the experiments then we can do three times more of them. And you get different people's perspectives coming from different disciplines, which then lend new ideas to the approach.
And there's a lot of engineering to the heart aware of the equipment. And so those skill sets actually aren't the wrong skill sets or aren't foreign and weird when you get to the side of figuring out how to build the scale equipment and have it not explode.
CODY GOUGH: How long have you been at this?
BRYAN DAVIS: Since 2009. So it's been a journey. It's fun. It takes you all kinds of interesting places.
CODY GOUGH: Are you marketing this as aged alcohol?
BRYAN DAVIS: We market it really weirdly. So we have a cult of fans that follow everything we're doing and are constantly engaged. And so they know what's up. And we don't market it in such a way that it misleads anyone. We just oftentimes say very little, quite frankly. It just sort of says Lost Spirits, Navy style rum. And that's it.
CODY GOUGH: Navy style?
BRYAN DAVIS: One example, right? And so then the customers can go to the store and maybe you see it, you think the label has a cool design, pick it up and take it home. And then you start googling going, whoa, what is this. But yeah, we certainly don't go putting age 20 years on the label.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah.
BRYAN DAVIS: That would be bad.
CODY GOUGH: I would imagine there might be some legal issues there.
BRYAN DAVIS: Yeah, and you also don't want to mislead anyone either, right? I mean, because that's not cool. And so, I mean, we're very transparent with what we're doing. But there's only so much information you can pack on to a back of a label, right?
CODY GOUGH: Yeah, I was going to say, it took us about an hour to break it down and talk through this whole process.
BRYAN DAVIS: You're not going to put this on the back of a label, right?
CODY GOUGH: Yeah on the back of a label is so what we do is we take the polymers from wood and we manipulate of the bacteria.
BRYAN DAVIS: The lab tours sort of explains it all. When people leave that, they really get a sense of-- in a lot of ways, what we're doing is taking the principles that made molecular gastronomy a thing and applying them to booze, which had never really been done. And that's pretty fun.
That's kind of an easy way to explain it is that if you take the concept that made all of those new Avant Garde restaurants like a thing-- Chicago, you have Alinea here, right? So you sort of take the principle behind what makes those restaurants tick, which is not-- they're not making traditional French cooking, right? They're looking at fine cuisine and saying, how do we make something new, interesting, exciting and stuff no one's ever done before. And we're basically taking that same kind of a premise and applying it to distilled spirits.
CODY GOUGH: And why are you manipulating whiskey and rum and not other spirits?
BRYAN DAVIS: So there's two kinds of booze. There's booze that you buy to have a drink while you watch a movie or do whatever it is you do for entertainment. And then there's booze that is the entertainment. And they're two very different things.
So there's bottles of booze that are really cool, interesting, exciting bottles of booze that you buy and then have your whiskey club over and everyone sits around the house drinking it and talking about it and being entertained by the booze versus stuff that is the accompaniment to entertainment. And so when you're talking about the former, the stuff that where the bottle of booze has to entertain you, you're trying to create the experience of like-- the way I like to describe it to people is like think the Everlasting Gobstopper. You want this bottle of booze to be able to captivate people for a half an hour.
So it's got to do something. You want it to sort of have multiple different flavors, it should have a beginning, a middle, and an end and transitions where it changes from one thing into another thing. And then if you take a sip and it numbs some of your taste buds out. And you take another sip, you get a different experience.
Some of the things that were in the background on the first sip become really apparent on the second one. And it sort of keeps changing and evolving on you as you're drinking it and keeps you engaged and entertained. And you generally only find that in whiskeys, rums, and brandies. There's not a lot of other spirits that provide that kind of experience.
CODY GOUGH: No one's having a vodka party.
BRYAN DAVIS: Right. Just sit there and taste through all the nuance and exotic flavors in the finish of your vodka. That's not really a thing.
CODY GOUGH: No.
[LAUGHTER]
BRYAN DAVIS: It's more like you're mixing it with orange juice and drinking it while you watch the fight.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah.
BRYAN DAVIS: It's a different thing.
CODY GOUGH: Unless you're in Russia maybe.
BRYAN DAVIS: I think they're also doing that.
[LAUGHTER]
CODY GOUGH: Touche.
BRYAN DAVIS: So that's why those spirits. And then now we're tinkering with some other fun stuff. We're playing with brandies, both traditional ones and some other interesting fun stuff like bringing in fruits from South America and different stuff that literally no one's ever tasted in America. And then take that and ferment it, turn it into a brandy. And all of a sudden, you get brandy of the unpronounceable fruit.
CODY GOUGH: Wow.
BRYAN DAVIS: It's fun, yeah.
CODY GOUGH: It sounds like a lot of fun. And you just, yeah, you just get to do whatever you want. It sounds like you are just having a blast doing this.
BRYAN DAVIS: I mean, we all live and die. You might as well have fun in between, right?
CODY GOUGH: Yeah. So and the reason you're kind of sticking to those couple is more for the marketability and entertainment. It's not because you can't go and chemically alter vodka, let's say, to age it.
BRYAN DAVIS: Yeah, there's just kind of nothing there to do whereas things like brandy, things like rum, things like whiskey, you can keep going for a lifetime and not run out of variables.
ASHLEY HAMER: All right, let's not be too hard on vodka. There are some vodka connoisseurs out who might disagree with Bryan on this. Spirit expert Ian Wisniewski has literally written the book on vodka. Well, a book. It's called Vodka, Discovering, Exploring, Enjoying. And in 2009, he was quoted in the telegraph defending the stuff.
Quote, "Vodka is much more than something to get you plastered. It depends, of course, on whether you want a nice drink or a nice feeling. You can certainly get pleasure from neat vodka, that is, vodka served alone without ice. But you have to adjust your expectations. Compared to aged spirits such as cognacs or malts, the details are much smaller. But the more experienced you are, the more you can discover them." End quote.
CODY GOUGH: Well, I brought a couple of questions available for the curiosity challenge to close the podcast where I try to teach you something.
BRYAN DAVIS: OK.
CODY GOUGH: We'll start with this one.
BRYAN DAVIS: Love learning stuff.
CODY GOUGH: So for the curiosity challenge, here's my question for you. Can you tell me how strong-- what's the alcohol content of the world's strongest beer, and do you know where it is brewed?
BRYAN DAVIS: Oh, boy. I think it's BrewDog out of Scotland. And I think the alcohol concentration is somewhere around 60x. It's not technically beer at that point because they freeze distilled it to get the alcohol concentration up that high. But we'll call it beer for the sake of argument.
CODY GOUGH: You were very close.
BRYAN DAVIS: Yeah?
CODY GOUGH: You were right about Scotland.
BRYAN DAVIS: OK.
CODY GOUGH: It is called Snake Venom.
BRYAN DAVIS: OK.
CODY GOUGH: And it has an ABV of 67.5%.
BRYAN DAVIS: Got it. And what was the distillery?
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
Is it BrewDog?
CODY GOUGH: Brew Meister.
BRYAN DAVIS: Oh, interesting. So for years, this was BrewDog's thing. They're very funny, by the way. If you want to really, really get a good laugh, do a Google search for BrewDog tactical nuclear penguin. For a while, it was the world's strongest beer. And it's absolutely hilarious. I think the video is the funniest thing I've ever seen.
CODY GOUGH: It is still touted as the world's strongest beer on BrewDog's website.
BRYAN DAVIS: [LAUGHS]
CODY GOUGH: It was a 32% Uber Imperial Stout and--
BRYAN DAVIS: Well, they've gone far stronger with later ones. They did one where they put them in taxidermied roadkill and it was like 62%. It was called like Sink the Bismarck or something. But anyway, technically, none of these are really beer, by the way.
CODY GOUGH: Oh, really?
BRYAN DAVIS: Yeah. The colonists in America actually, as far as I know, invented this technique. The way they used to make what was called Applejack in colonial America before they didn't-- copper was in very short supply in the early days. And they had a lot of apples.
And so they would brew apple cider and then take the apple cider in the winter in Pennsylvania and stuff and especially in New Jersey, which I believe is where this came from. They would put the barrels outside during the winter and let them freeze. And because the alcohol doesn't freeze at temperatures that water freezes at, the ice crystals that would form on the top would be all water, and the alcohol would keep getting more and more concentrated and stay in liquid form.
And so then you could basically drop a screen in and pull out the ice and throw the ice away. And you'd keep raising the alcohol concentration higher and higher and higher and higher by freezing out the water. And so technically, it's called freeze distilling. And you use it to actually make-- originally used to make a spirit called Applejack, which was the colonial strong alcohol.
And then later, these guys thought it'd be really funny to basically make the world's strongest beer by taking a brewed beer and then freeze distilling it essentially. But at that point, it really is a spirit. It's not really beer anymore. But that's a moot point.
CODY GOUGH: That's a moot point. They market it as the world's strongest beer.
BRYAN DAVIS: It's a good sounding tagline.
CODY GOUGH: It's like absinthe. What is absinthe?
BRYAN DAVIS: Right, yeah. Definitions get tricky.
CODY GOUGH: Law doesn't define it. So you know--
BRYAN DAVIS: But still, regardless of my guess there having lost, still you'll be very entertained if you get a chance to watch the video for tactical nuclear penguin and Sync the Bismarck from BrewDog. They're very funny.
CODY GOUGH: You can learn more about the Brew Meister Snake Venom on curiosity.com or search for beer in the Curiosity app. And now it's your turn to tell me-- it sounds like you're a curious guy and you like to learn things. So it's your time to ask me a question for the curiosity challenge.
BRYAN DAVIS: OK, so I was thinking about this before the show. Do you have any idea what Thursday's toast was in the British Royal Navy after they would get served their rum rations?
CODY GOUGH: No.
BRYAN DAVIS: So it's a really, really fun one.
CODY GOUGH: The British Royal Navy. When are we talking?
BRYAN DAVIS: Well, from the early, early days, the 15 or 1600s, all the way through 1970. The British Royal Navy would always serve booze rations to the sailors. And so originally, it actually started off as just a gallon of beer. But later, they added in rum to the mix, which eventually became the ration that they all got.
So initially in the earliest rum rations, they would get 8 ounces a day. The rum would always be served at above 57.5% alcohol because that's the point at which you could still ignite gunpowder with it in case your gunpowder got wet with the rum. And so the sailors would get 8 ounces of that a day. And to keep them from getting too drunk, they would give them 4 ounces of it at 10:00 AM and then 4 ounces at noon. So they didn't get it all at once.
CODY GOUGH: That's smart.
BRYAN DAVIS: It's only a two hour window though.
CODY GOUGH: I mean, it's not genius, but it's a little smart.
BRYAN DAVIS: So they had ritualized toasts for every day of the week. And Thursdays happens to be my favorite. So that's why I asked you that one.
CODY GOUGH: Why is Thursday's your favorite?
BRYAN DAVIS: It just makes me laugh. It was a toast to a bloody war and a swift promotion. So in other words, a toast to your officer getting killed and you getting his job.
CODY GOUGH: Wow. The British Royal Navy wasn't messing around. I guess they couldn't. They were busy taking over the planet at certain points in history.
BRYAN DAVIS: While heavily intoxicated on Navy rum.
CODY GOUGH: Not the worst Navy to serve in, I guess.
BRYAN DAVIS: Right?
CODY GOUGH: Unless you're commanding officer in which case, everyone's hoping for your demise.
BRYAN DAVIS: Right.
ASHLEY HAMER: Fun fact-- the British Royal Navy is also where this classic toast comes from-- "To our wives and sweethearts. May they never meet.
CODY GOUGH: Wow. That is a really, really cool toast. Well, this was an awesome conversation. Bryan, people can find lost Spirits Distillery at just lostspirits--
BRYAN DAVIS: Lostspirits.net
CODY GOUGH: .net. Thank you so much for spending so much time explaining all this.
BRYAN DAVIS: It was fun.
CODY GOUGH: --really a pleasure.
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ASHLEY HAMER: I've got an extra credit question for you, courtesy of the Curiosity app. This one's a bit of a life hack. Nobody likes to feel like they're wasting time, right? Well fortunately, an Italian philosopher and economist born in 1848 came up with the Pareto principle to help you get productive and stay that way.
Here's your question-- what's the basis of the Pareto principle? Here's a hint-- it's also called the law of the vital few. The answer after this.
CODY GOUGH: Do you like surveys? Well, I've got some really good news for you if you do. We want to hear your thoughts on the Curiosity Podcast. So we created a super quick and easy survey.
Please visit curiosity.com/survey and answer a few questions so we can make our podcast better. Again, that's curiosity.com/survey. It's quick and easy and will really help us bring you better content every week. There's a link in the show notes too. But one more time, that URL is curiosity.com./survey. We really appreciate the help.
ASHLEY HAMER: Explore history's surprising connections with a new podcast, the Thread With OZY. It's like a cross between revisionist history and 6 degrees of separation. You'll discover how various historical strands are woven together to create a historic figure, a big idea, or an unthinkable tragedy. Like how John Lennon's murder was actually 63 years in the making.
Witness how their stories hinge on the past and influence the future. The show is already a chart topper. Get the Thread with OZY, that's OZY, on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen.
Ready to check your extra credit answer? Well, here it is. The Pareto principle, also known as the law of the vital few, is another name for the 8020 rule. This concept states that in general, 80% of the results come from 20% of your actions. The take home point is that you should focus your effort on the 20% that makes a difference instead of the 80% that doesn't add much.
For example, instead of working for three hours on a single design, make six layouts of 30 minutes each and pick your favorite. You can learn more about the Pareto principle and a whole lot more on curiosity.com or on the Curiosity app for your Android or iOS device. For the Curiosity Podcast, I'm Ashley Hamer.
CODY GOUGH: And I'm Cody Gough. Thanks for joining us. Until next time.
ALL: Stay curious.
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