Alamo Distillery

Bet you can't guess what I'm doing right now or what this is? This is all a part of the whole Whiskey distilling process. I've been giving it a try give it a try at Tuesday and I don't know how this is turned into Whiskey. All I know is – where do I taste it? Can I get a taste? Well, let's do some more stuff, and then you get a sip. Hmm...Okay.

Alright, so this is the vat that you boil the corn in to get the sugar and water, to get it all going here, and once it's empty, you've gotta clean it? Yeah. All i know is…a little bit parched. It's looking pretty tasty over there. Well, you didn't clean it yet though…

This corn comes in 50 pound bags, and this is what goes into making Bourbon. 50 pounds worth? Yeah, it's actually about a thousand. A thousand? And, uh, we dont have to move them one at a time. You have dolly. Can I get a sip of that Bourbon now?

Well, so the question is, how does this liquid gold become what it is in the bottle, and Noel Burns is the man behind the legend here.

So, Bourbon. How is it made? Well, it's, Bourbon is a specific type of Whiskey, and for what we do, we process all the ingredients here, and take it from start to finish. And this is the same thing? Yes, so this is what I say Bourbon in the raw. So that is your raw grains, it's about the propotions that they are, and we put a little magic into it till it turns brown and we put it in a bottle.

So we start with the grains, you know, the corn, the barley, the wheat. We take that, we go through just a basic cooking process to be able to turn that, we grind it up you know it's about the consistency of our mill here. We go through the cooking process and that gets it into what's funcionally a sugar water. So if grandma had this, she'd make corn bread, you're making Whiskey out of it? Exactly. The point is the fermentation process. And so this is on latter days of the fermentation. You can still the bubbling a little bit. And you can smell it too. Absolutely. And it's the yeast basically, you're smelling? That's the yeast activating into the alcohol, releasing carbon dioxide.

So, what's the process for that then to end up looking like this? Well, once we remove the solids, then we put it into a still. So this is our original test batch still here. And so the whole process of the distillation is we put the liquid in the base, we boil it and the boiling of the separation between the alcohol and the water – the alcohol boils at a lower temperature, so the alcohol gas comes up the column here, and then we have a condenser at the other side, and that's what turns it back into a liquid and concentrates the alcohol.

Once we get it to the flavor profile, that we're looking for, then we put it into a barrel such as this one over here. So, it ages in the barrel, and what makes it Bourbon? There's some distinct rules about what is Bourbon. Yes. 51% corn, distinct product of the U.S., distilled less then a 160 proof, specifically multi grain, and then it's aged in a new 2hite oak American Barrel. So every time you age it it's a brand new barrel? Every time. So we're trying to get much more rich flavors, we like to leave a little sweetness in there, and so the sugar that we're leaving in there obviously leaves a little richer flavor profile.

We're using human hands, we're doing very selective on the grains over choosing, we're doing the equipment setup in very specific ways. We're a smaller volume operation, so if they're looking for a craft product, that's really where we are in the market.

Alamo Distilling Company. Vodka, Rum, Whiskey, and of course, the star of the show – the Alamo Bourbon, aged in white oak barrels for six months. Uh, worth the wait. Thank you sir!