Interview with J.W. Spanyer, November 11, 1984

Thomas Syvertsen:Dr. Spanyer, would you tell us about your early involvement with Brown Foreman? You work with Dr. Shipman and about the start of the new facilities after Repeal 33.

J.W. Spanyer:Well I had gone to Speed Scientific School and took up chemical engineering in my Senior year. I did some research work and Dr. Ernst and Dr. Shipman had gotten contracts from industry around Kentucky and one small part of that had to do with some distillation from a distillery. And then I left in 1932 1:00and got a job with Henry Vogt and the old Reynolds' Paint Company and Reynolds' Metals Company and in 1936 Dr. Shipman called me in and said he had an opening at a distillery would I be interested in it. It sounded good to me and it was a new outlook on a new industry so to speak as compared to my impression of the old bootlegger. So Dr. Shipman set up a lab in January or February, of 1936 and I came there in August. And that's where I got both feet deep in the distilling industry, 'cause we still had the manual ice. The old time distiller was still there and had his jugs of yeast and he did his fermentation certain ways. We 2:00didn't want to change that and then he retired and.

TS:Was he suspicious of you? As a chemist?

JWS:Oh always. He tested the fermentation of the mash by sticking his finger in to see if it was sour enough. Instead of running the acidity in the PH as we would. He did a pretty good job. And that was our main step was quality control so we would get a uniform continuous product and, of course, we were very careful with preserving the strain of yeast that Brown Foreman had.

TS:Technically, how was that done? I have read that there were only five strains 3:00of yeast used? Is that romance or is that fact?

JWS:Well if you count the alcohol strains there are more than that. They came in later. We weren't interested in making so called alcohol, we wanted flavor. And you could say that there were maybe half a dozen strains of yeast that were used in Kentucky for the distilling industry to make bourbon.

TS:Oh you mean just stateside there were only about half a dozen. Now were these shared among many of the distillers?

JWS:Yes, the old timed distillers had their jugs of yeast in the springs or spring houses they had to keep it cool in copper jugs that held fresh, and they would, there was a little guild among themselves that they would share it. Actually you could go into any distillery and take a piece of filter paper and 4:00dampen it and walk around in the fermenting area and with the paper in your hands you could pick up yeast and go back to the lab and cultivate it. But the Brown's were proud of their product and so we kept the same strain and about the only thing that we ever did was, it wasn't a pure strain at the time, because it was hard under the methods that they used in the old days to keep a strain pure. So we purified it and got the good strain for Brown Foreman and kept it that way for years.

TS:How would you purify the strain?

JWS:Oh, in the lab with the cultures and test tube or plates and things like that. You dilute it out and put it on a ________ plate of ___________ so that you get single cells in there instead of a group and then those single cells you 5:00can look at the characteristics and pick out the right one. We called that the single cell approach. We finally did that with Brown Foreman's strain and later on when we got into the alcohol production in '41 I think it was, when the war started, we developed a strain that was a high alcohol producer rather than a high flavor producer, because the Brown Foreman strain produced several constituents both esters and acids and _____________ with that strain. They liked that and it seemed to go over especially for their Old Forester. I am trying to think now what the capacity of Brown Foreman was when I went there in '36. I believe it was around 1700 bushels a day which would be a 1170 barrels. 6:00In fact, Brown Foreman was one of the, I think seven distilleries, that were selected during prohibition to make a certain amount of bourbon whiskey for medicinal purposes. Because they were drawing out supplies and they were disappearing.

TS:That was after 1929?

JWS:Right around 29. I forget who the other six were, but they were selling it and for a while there was, before dock shipment came, Brown Foreman had sent a couple of fellows to school here in the Starks Building run by Dr. Lentz who supposedly was from Germany and had a PhD in Distillation and all that stuff, 7:00but he turned out to be a fraud. Although he did do some pretty good favors for the gang, he taught them a few things. But he never did, they couldn't find, he was supposed to have a degree from two different universities and when they checked up on him these universities never heard of him. So after that episode with Lentz, I think that's what convinced the Browns that they ought to have their own lab and that was back in '35 I believe. Well, I won't say that we took over production right just you know like that from the old time distiller, but in a couple of years everything was run scientifically rather than by the old method.

TS:Was it the state of the art equipment that you were using at this time?

JWS:Oh yes, the equipment was, not in the lab, now no, the equipment, you talking about the plant equipment, yes we did, used the old equipment the old fashioned way except we felt we had much better control over each step through our laboratory instead of going out and just tasting each time. So the first in getting flavor in a whiskey, the yeast strain is important and secondly, the mash fill, or formulation or whatever you want to call it, the percent of corn and rye and barley malt that you use and each distiller had his own mash fill and supposedly his own strain of yeast, but a lot of the strains were used by a lot of different distillers. Then the other one was the method of distillation. 9:00We had the, a lot of the old timers had gone in for this, what they call a pot still, it is sort of a second still after the vapors were distilled off of the mash which was the fermented mash, then it was redistilled through a pot still and so the fine particles of the grain that would come over from the original distillation, they would look a little milky inside, by the second distillation that was taken out and you got a clear liquid so that cleaned it up a lot better. Now of course the residue from the fermenters after you distilled the whiskey out went over to the by-product recovery house. Originally all they did was screen out the solvents and the ____________. The old stillage was called slop for the farmer and once you screened it the thin material which contained 10:00about 7 percent solvents both dissolved and some real fine solvents was all either slop fed to cattle or pigs or turned into the sewer. That's, well when the war came on that's the end of my story. We got rid of most of the thin stillage, we called that, the screened stuff by farmers that had farms out on Dixie Highway and they would come in with their tank trucks and

TS:It must have been quite a sight.

JWS:So we got about 25 cents a barrel for it. In those days everything went by 11:00the barrel rather than the gallon. We sort of inherited that from the distilling industry.

TS: A little different from today's metric system.

JWS:Then they increased the capacity at Brown Foreman at the main plant which originally was built on the property of a distillery called White Mills back then. And we went to metal fermenters with water cooled jackets to control the temperature for fermentation, because we felt that some evidence that, especially in the summer time, if fermentation got too hot the yeast began to give off some undesirable by-products in high temperature fermentation. So we like to keep the temperature down below 80 or 85 degrees, because it would get 12:00up to 100 or 105 degrees if you just let it go. So we thought that was an innovation for quality.

TS:And then this is still used today right?

JWS:Yes, we do it, and a lot of the distillers do it. There are two ways of doing it, some of them just put coils down in the fermenters with water running through the copper pipes and if you set that at the right level you get pretty good cooling. Then some of the other distillers went to a pump that went up and came from the bottom of the fermenter and pumped the fermenting mash through a cooling, back up tubes and condensers and back into the tops so they were continuously circulating that. They all agreed that controlling the temperature of fermentation did ensure better uniformity in the quality of the whiskey.

TS:Yet a lot of distillers in Kentucky today do not do that.

JWS:Probably not.

TS:There's still the _______ in the business.

JWS:Well those were some of the changes we made to try to control uniformity in whiskey. Then we bought the old Kentucky Distillery out there at Shively and named it the Early Times Distillery, and I think that was only 50 barrels when we bought it, but I am not sure of that,

TS:That was about 1945.

JWS:Along in there I guess. Oh that was before that, no. Because in '41 we bought the _____________ Graham Distillery up in Woodford County and they sent me up there to run it. That was 100 barrels a day and we got it up to 200 maximum, but we were always short of water up there. We had Grassy Springs Creek 14:00and another little creek that would run into there and we built a lake for, so we would have the storage supply of cooling water, because usually we couldn't run through, we were lucky if we could run all the way through June, because of the shortage of water. We drilled more wells and finally had 11 wells. And the only time we ran that plant in July or August was when the war effort of '42, I think it was in October or September of '42, we were taking off producing 15:00whiskey, and we had an alcohol com in that plant, so we could make alcohol and we converted to alcohol, and that's all we ran until '45, I think it was. We got a holiday, a grain holiday, and all the grain was used for the war effort

TS:Mostly for gun powder I gather. Smokeless gun powder?

JWS:All of our alcohol was shipped to Dupont over here across the river by tank truck most of ours did. Now Brown Foreman had a much bigger still in the plant at 18th and _____________ than we did. In fact they took in what they call high wines in the first distillation which we would call whiskey, distilled at 130 16:00proof say, and they would take that and run it through their com and make 190 proof alcohol in it, because a lot of the smaller distillers around in this area didn't have an alcohol com. They would make the high wines or first distillation and ship it to Brown Foreman and they in turn would redistill it into alcohol. Because they didn't want to go to the expense of getting the alcohol com and all the condensers. But we had a small one in, when we bought ____________ Graham they had one there, so while it was a small one and it continued to operate. And when we were allowed to run 30 days, I think it was in October or August, '35, '45, or '44, I forget the date. Anyway the government gave us a one- month 17:00reprieve so we could, now we hadn't been making whiskey for about three or four years, so we could build our stocks up in our warehouse. So they were real kind to us. They gave us the month of August where we didn't have any water to speak of. So we wanted to run very badly, and we did, and of course, Brown Foreman ran too, they had plenty of water. So we built an ice house about as big as this room and we trucked ice from Cincinnati by truck, 2 trucks a day

TS:That's an interesting story.

JWS:And everybody enjoyed the ice house. We supposed to put water bombs in the 18:00caps and we had two big wells or stone built pools like where the cold water was sort of recirculated and the real hot water went out to the lake and then we put in spray pipes to spray it and that would cool it back about 15 degrees, but to get the real cold water for the finished product, we had to use this ice that we would dump in these big blocks of ice in these two big wells all through the month of August. We got by and we made some whiskey. That was quite an experience. I think we would run about 100 barrels a day then. Then in '45 when they brought me back to Louisville to take charge of the laboratory. I started from the Early Times plant out at Shively and the main plant _________________, we got all the samples and checked the whiskey out for all the warehousing. We 19:00were the only distillery as far as how the warehouse whiskey was concerned, we were the only distillery that cycled the warehouses by heating them up.

TS:So you led the industry this was the innovation of the industry.

JWS:Yes, we had, for instance, take a typical warehouse at Brown Foreman warehouse A right on the premises held 50,000 barrels and each two floors were sealed off with a concrete floor. That meant there were six chairs with barrels three to a mezzanine floor, but there were six sections within it and we controlled the temperature of that the year round. Except in the summer, what 20:00could you do with open windows, but as far as the winter was concerned, we kept the heat up to 80 to 85 degrees and we would raise it up to 85 and then over the period of a week or two let it cool down to 70 and then heat it back up, so we did a continuous cycling of it. Through that we were able to control our aging a lot better and we figured that in four years we had the equivalent of a or 6 year old marmalade. As they age it out in the country with the metal corrugated steel sides. ___________ Graham had some warehouses like that and the top whiskey on the top floors would get up to a 110 degrees in the summer time and the bottom would be at 75 or something like that and in the winter it would get down to 40 degrees so and there was quite a difference so we had to rotate that 21:00whiskey like most of the other distillers did it. So we put in heating coils in the warehouses up at _____________ Graham too, eventually. But most distillers' standard practice in that type of warehouse is to rotate the lower two floors to the upper two floors and vice versa every two years. I don't know expense-wise, maybe today with the price of heat it wouldn't work or it wouldn't be economical, it would still work, but that was another innovation that we put in to help to control the quality of the finished product.

TS:May I ask this question? What was the reaction of the other distillers to this major change?

JWS:Oh, they thought we were spending too much money with out any decent results.

TS:In other words they kind of disbelieved that this would be very useful.

JWS:They said they could do just as well by rotating it.

TS:They didn't feel threatened by this major innovation?

JWS:No. No I don't think so. The Browns were always real quality conscious and since I am on record, I won't say that some of the other distillers weren't, but from what I have seen in their warehousing and other aspects, they were not nearly as quality conscious as Brown Foreman was. On the other hand, the Seagrams were pretty quality conscious. Of course, they were primarily in the 23:00blending business, they only needed about 10 or 15 percent whiskey production, because that was the ratio of the whiskey in the blends that they used in like Secret 7 and things like that. They tried to control their quality by making fine spirits and watching them. Of course, they had bought a couple of small plants, in fact they bought T. W. Samuels back around the early 40's and then they bought a little distillery right around Fairfield, that was the 25 _____ White and they used that as the largely as an experimental plant. I think it was 25 barrels a day. That's, they really had a quite a quality of whiskey produced 24:00out there under controlled conditions. So they were quite interested in quality. The funny part of it was, although they did come out with some straight whiskeys, they never did go over very big. They still dominated in the blend market and they never made much of an inroad on the straight whiskey market. Maybe they do now, I doubt it. Well the next step that we got into was the recovery of this thin stillage. And I guess Fred Wilkey was the one that started the, or at least probably gave them the idea. He had a bunch of distillers gather out at his plant for a luncheon where he had taken the solids out of the thin stillage that we were selling to the farmers and calling it slop. He 25:00evaporated those down and taken those solids and fed those solids and used them different ways. Like to turkeys, I think this was at Thanksgiving or something cause when we got there this . . .

TS:People had bourbon turkeys, huh.

JWS:Yeah, he announced that these turkeys had been fed and supplemented with distillers solubles. Nearly everything there was a sauce for the salad made out of distillers solubles. The gravy had distillers solubles in it and the biscuits or muffins were made with distillers solubles. It was, that was pretty good.

TS:Was it marketed as a premium product?

JWS:I don't think they were too happy about that diarrhea after they ate it. One or two people had diarrhea after they ate it. I heard some complaints, but I think that was the inauguration of the idea that we ought to recover the proteins which are pretty high in distillers solubles. And there was a definite protein shortage during the war and that is when most distilleries, the government was behind it, I don't know what the financial aspects were, but I think they let you write off the cost of the evaporators in a hurry or to get your money back. Anyway the big distillers went into that, we at Brown Foreman did and. About that time the idea of a group getting together and promoting and 27:00financing research through the universities started and that is when the Distillers For Research Council was formed.

TS:Since then

JWS:I forget the exact year, but I believe Brown Foreman in our library has a copy of their annual report or conference all the way back to the beginning. And if not, I would suggest that you go up to Cincinnati and talk to Larry Carpenter. He was the Executive Director of the DFRC Distillers For Research Council. He lives on this side of Covington. I can get you his address.

TS:Thank you.

JWS:But he can, he has everything up there. Whether they moved, they used to be in the Inquiry Building, but they may have moved over into Kentucky, I don't know, but he will tell you. But that was, they raised about $100,000 a year parcelled out to different universities and worked with them. The chemists from the various distilleries worked with the different universities with projects that should be and turned out some mighty good work. For a while, some of the old time distillers were thinking, well my goodness we are going to get more for the by-product then we were for the whiskey. It didn't really turn out that way.

TS:In producing commercial alcohol, would you have some of these same by-products?

JWS:If you made it from a fermented carbohydrate, but a lot of commercial alcohol is made from petroleum products. That's, it had been cheaper, now with the price of. I think that is one of the moves of the present to ferment grain and use the alcohol in with gasoline now.

TS:Chevron.

JWS:That was done over in Cuba way back before Castro took over. They tell me that they made a lot of alcohol out of sugar cane and used it up to 20 percent.

TS:What did the Germans do during World War II? What did they use to make fuel alcohol, as you know they ran much of the German war machine on ____________. What was it made out of?

JWS:I really don't know. I would imagine out of petroleum.

TS:But they were short on petroleum too, except for those _________ oil fields.

JWS:Well they didn't have a grain industry over there. You see in Europe most of the grain was rye. In fact, when the, during the war Dr. Shipman used to say that a little flour on the Mayor of __________ put the pistol to the distiller's 31:00head and made him donate

** Side 2 **

JWS:Of course, they weren't too worried about the alcohol. They needed the gasoline and the oil. But in Cuba, I presume making the alcohol out of black strap molasses was cheap, because the labor down there was so cheap. Actually the economics of it today, I would guess is about a wash out. I wouldn't think you are going to get richer, and if the prices of gasoline keeps coming down I don't think it is going to happen, but it can be done. Way back in the 40's, I 32:00think that Fred Wilkie proposed a set of trucks that you would go like in Indiana where a lot of corn is grown or Iowa, and they had the fermenter and distill it and then move onto to the next farm. It was a good idea. I don't know what it would pay off economically.

TS:Brown Foreman had no real interest in experimenting with that?

JWS:No. We never

TS:Or did any of the other distillers?

JWS:I think Seagrams was the leader, but later on some of the big alcohol boys out in the western states Muscatine, Iowa and there are two of them out there, I have forgotten the name of them. They were, got interested in that. In fact, one of the states passed a regulation that if they made it out of corn, the state would donate 4 cents a gallon or something like that, I forget which state that was. Iowa.

TS:Iowa, I believe it was.

JWS:I don't know if that is still operating or not, I guess it is.

TS:We were talking before about the quality and one of the questions that came to my mind as we were talking and, again without mentioning any companies per se, what was the nature of governmental oversight for quality during the start of the early 30's?

JWS:I would say the governmental oversight was about 98 percent getting their taxes. They did have one experience with the government, but in _____________ in 34:00particular, they had so much trouble with bootleggers, now this is in the 40's and they found that the bootleggers were putting out such lousy stuff and they weren't getting their taxes. So they thought perhaps the public would buy a quality whiskey and they came to Brown Foreman and said would you make a white whiskey? White Lightning, that's it, they did and we made it.

TS:It was the only market, right?

JWS:That was the only state. No, it was North, it wasn't South Carolina.

TS:It was North Carolina?

JWS:So we did and we made it. And the next thing we knew in about six months or eight months they were getting the old White Lightning bottles and refilling them with the ____________ again. You can't beat the bootleggers.

TS:They undercut you.

JWS:Yeah. We even had to paraffin the barrels to put this White Lightning in and put it in the warehouse. Under Kentucky law, you couldn't call it bourbon unless it was in a warehouse for a year. And we went to the expense of paraffining the barrels so it wouldn't get any color and then we came out with White Lightning.

TS:But Brown Foreman pioneered in a paraffin type head for a barrel.

JWS:That was Dr. Shipman's idea originally and we took the main source of leakage, during aging is around the, what they call the chime, where the head fits into the v-shaped notch that's on the stays, call them a cuross. And by 36:00taking the old melting paraffin, pure paraffin wax and running the edge of the barrel head after it is tapered through that and caught, it would soak into the pores and when you make the barrel and you put the head in there and drive the hooks on tighten it up that would seal it. And it saved about a gallon and a half in a four year period per barrel. Which at $2 a gallon is what you got for four year old whiskey in those days, it was well worth it. Because it only cost you about 30 cents a barrel to put the paraffin on.

TS:In that period, you were also taxed on the evaporator?

JWS:Oh, yes.

TS:Is that still true today or has there been a change?

JWS:No, that was finally changed.

TS:When was that changed?

JWS:I guess I was there twenty years before they changed it. I don't remember exactly. They, I do know that in the old days you were allowed a certain amount of outage. The government had a table of charts and you could look it up yourself. Say the barrel holds 50 gallons to begin with and that the _______________ was say four to five gallons in the four or five year period of aging you were allowed. You should have 45 gallons in there. If you have less than that you paid whatever the tax was, $10.50 maximum. It went from 2 to 4 to 6.

TS:The late 40's was $9.50 I think.

JWS:$9 something, I think you are right, $9.50. So you would have to pay that on what should have been in there, they assumed that somebody stole the rest of it. And really that was, that wasn't very fair to the distiller, because he wasn't stealing it out of there and nobody else, well I won't say nobody ever stole whiskey out of a barrel in a warehouse, cause I know people did, but. . .

TS:Apparently, Brown Foreman had a problem in the 30's. I picked up a reference in your papers over there that women in the 30's, I don't know how wide spread this was, but the references to women putting in some alcohol into their bras and girdles in small bottles and leaving the plant. Was that a major problem?

JWS:Well it was quite a problem for a while, but when taxes, when whiskey was so cheap, it didn't amount to too much. But they would sew pockets in their skirts 39:00to have something to slip them in. See nobody ever patted down a woman when she walked up. Oh we know there was a lot got out that way. But as far as getting it out of a barrel in a warehouse, it was the leak hunters. In those days it paid you to have what they called leak hunters. They went all through the warehouses and watched for the leakage in the barrel and then they would plug it up with little cedar plugs. But whenever a barrel leaked, if it had a worm hole in it, it would spew out probably, and take a little cedar plug. The leak hunters, they 40:00weren't honest. They would, they never went for want of a drink. In fact, they used to knock the hook back a little bit and drill a hole in it and get it and then cover it up with a hook again. They had their favorite barrels.

TS:Was that a problem with Old Forester.

JWS:But the tax was pretty rough, because you were allowed to rinse the barrel with only a certain amount of water either a gallon or a gallon and a half. They didn't want you to soak the whiskey out of the stays. And they even complained, 41:00at first, we used to use the hottest water we could, like 150 degrees that would get more out of the stays. In fact, when there was quite an industry in Kentucky, I think one of the focal points was out at Bardstown where you let these barrels sit out in the field and they called it dogging the barrel after a hot day in the sun you turn it over and you could get a half of a pint or a pint out of each barrel for two or three days and you could get up to a quart or a quart and a half of whiskey out of the stays. The stays, you take a new barrel weighing about 90 pounds and after four years or five years, it would weigh about 110 to 115 pounds when you weighed the empty barrel. So that is 20 pounds of whiskey soaked into those stays that you couldn't get out.

TS:Today, how much of that is recovered?

JWS:Today, it doesn't matter, because you only pay taxes on what's left in the barrel. If there is 20 gallons gone, that doesn't matter now. There is a limit, the total limit on the bottling, depending on the size of your plant, the larger the plant the less percentage you are allowed lost. It used to be two and a half percent maximum for small plants. I think we were down to one percent level. So when you are talking about 1,000 barrels a day, if one barrel happens to be half empty from a bad stay or something that is all protected by this one percent allowance. And usually we never went over that to my knowledge while I was still 43:00at work. That law was passed just before I retired, two years before I retired. But it was much fairer then that old law, because if one barrel was short five gallons then and there were fifty barrels that were over two gallons each, you still paid on that five gallons.

TS:Was the oversight pretty rigid. We are talking about __________ now.

JWS:Yes it was pretty rigid. Because these boys were the old, as I said before or I think did, these first agents were the old revenue agents who were used to going out and hunting criminals. And they still treated us that way for a while. But that ____________________ took care of that plus the fact that the top people in the government in Washington realized that we were now a legitimate 44:00industry and should be treated as such.

TS:During my time I spent over at Brown Foreman I got the feeling that even today the government workers and the Brown Foreman workers are pretty separate from each other.

JWS:Yes they are.

TS:And I would talk to various people and ask them questions about having conversations with government workers regarding oversight people and they said, in many cases said, "I don't really know any one of them. I have had only the briefest of conversations." There seems to be an interesting sociological phenomenon.

JWS:I think that is instilled into them just like, I knew a friend of mine that worked for the IRS and even though I was a friend of his, I wanted to give him a Christmas present and he said, "I better not take that." I think they don't want any favors from the public. I think this applies to the government people that are watching the distilleries for the tax revenue. See they have to check, we did all of this too. The bottling of wine itself ________ or ________ on the bottle, that has to be controlled pretty accurately. First the distillers staff doesn't want to have to put too much in because thousands of bottles are _____________ _____ if you put a half a cc, you lose a lot of whiskey. And secondly, your label guarantees to the public that there is a pint to this 46:00bottle and there is a fifth or a quart so if it is short you don't want to get a bad name from that standpoint. So it is controlled pretty accurately on the bottling line. And the proof has to be controlled accurately. If it is 86 proof you have to have it within a tenth now. It used to be a half a point. In other words, when I first went there, if it was 86 proof you could get by with 85.5 or 85.6 so you could pick up a little bit there. Now it is one tenth either way. 85.9 or 86.1 and they control it pretty close, so when you, when it says 86 on the label or 80 well you know its right on the nose. Unless, its of course something happened, the cork has leaked or it sits for six months and it evaporated. Then your proof will come down.

TS:I noticed today that most bottles are metric on the __________ to buy one. 47:00How did that occur. I mean is this by federal pushing or was this largely by the industry pushing for a metric conversion. Well, it started in Europe, of course and I guess its not, I'm not thinking of the whiskey industry only, but particularly in pipe fitting and trims they are all different in metric units. As you find out if you earlier bought a foreign car. And they, as I understood it, years back the government decided to slowly phase out our old system for the metric.

TS:Well there was the big push during the 70's, but then in the 80's there was a lot of backsliding and withdrawal. That's what I find fascinating, I was wondering what you knew about that.

JWS:Well that's about the extent that I know and why it hasn't progressed further, I don't know.

TS:As a chemist I presume you would favor the metric system.

JWS:Yes, it makes everything so much easier. Especially when you talk to other people in Canada or see we bought a distillery up in Canada called Canadian Miss and I used to have to go up there and talk to those people and they always talked about liters, but that was alright. If you're used to talking about it, quarts and pints and so forth, gallons. So I don't know whether the industry is, I think Brown Foreman is fully metricized, whether they want the metric system 49:00or not. The food industry incidently is one that is dragging its heel. All the corn flakes and things are not packaged, they are packaged the old way. One experience Brown Foreman had and I was right in the middle of that was when we went to plastic bottles.

TS:That was a brief theory wasn't it.

JWS:We approved plastic bottles and it went over big. Everybody seemed to like it, saved a lot of freight on the weight, things like that. And the people that handled the bottles thought it was nice, cause they weren't so heavy, especially these half gallons and then some distiller decided that he had some evidence that the bottle was not 100 percent insoluble. There was some ______ that was 50:00dissolving out into the whiskey, a small amount. The FDA clamped down on it. Put a stop to it.

TS:I didn't realize that it was the FDA that had moved in on that.

JWS:Well through the ATU, I guess Alcohol Tax Unit. Not that it was carcinogenic or anything like that, but now I understand that there is another plastic that's approved and some of the distillers are trying it. So

TS:I talked with one distiller already that he has had representatives from the plastic industry trying to sell him upon the idea of the plastic bottle, but he uses a different type of seal on the top and his seal is susceptible to some melting.

JWS:Oh, so the cap itself is the problem.

TS:So apparently all parties concerned have decided that is a rather difficult problem to solve.

JWS:Well I don't know why they couldn't use the old type of seal like they used for years in the distilling industry. It was a paper seal with the, I forget the lacquer finish, ___.

TS:I mean the plastic bottle itself with the hot seal with the hot paraffin seal coming over the top would subject the plastic to melt.

JWS:Oh, I know what you mean. Like Maker's Mark. Well. Now they don't use that top anymore, that was an old fashioned thing. We always felt that plastic 52:00was good. I know even our top man was a little dubious about it, put many a bottle away and I remember Dan Street. He came in one day this was about two years later and he said, "well, remember that bottle of Old Forester you gave me a couple of years ago with the plastic bottle?" and I said, "I guess so." and he said, "Well, I got it out of the closet" and he said, "We tried it and its okay." I said, "Well, we told you it was okay when we gave it to you." But I think they will come back to plastic.

TS:Earlier this morning, we had talked a little bit about the Wilkie Brothers 53:00and Fred Wilkie of course he was involved with Seagrams. Did you ever have any associations with him. He was apparently a very interesting figure. Very strong on the liberal arts. Yet very suspicious of university intellectualism at the same time and very suspicious of the Roosevelt administration in the mid-1940's.

JWS:He didn't like Roosevelt at all. Even though Roosevelt helped get the prohibition repealed. No, I didn't know Wilkie very well, but I met him at several meetings and things like that.

TS:Did you have any interesting conversations with him?

JWS:No I was the low man on the totem pole. Dr. Shipman knew him real well and

TS:Do you recall any stories Dr. Shipman told to you.

JWS:Oh, he said he thought Wilkie had some good ideas, but he was way ahead of himself and things like that. That's all I remember him saying. But he never was one to, who stood back and relaxed, he was always doing something as I understood it.

TS:He was very interested in research, practical research.

JWS:Yes, I think it was through him that Seagrams became the top research people in the industry. Cause he believed in it. Its a shame now, that whole plants is gone - all their lab.

TS:Did you know anything about their leaving?

JWS:Oh, I didn't know that has just happened in the last few years and it was 55:00news to me when they were going to close that plant. I didn't know their sales had gone down that much, but I guess they have. I used to, Dr. Adams who was one of the head research men at Seagrams in the New York Office, their lab was on the Distillers For Research Council and we did a lot of work together. Through him I realized that Seagrams probably had the best research facilities and quality control lab in the industry. They didn't skimp on dollars back in those days anyway.

TS:Before I jump off on another area, I wanted to ask you were there other 56:00suggestions that you made to Brown Foreman or recommendations that you made to Brown Foreman that were later adopted?

JWS:I don't know. When you say me, I would say that there was sort of a team effort in talking about ways to do things cutting costs

TS:Even with team work.

JWS:I can't think of some right off the top of my head.

TS:One thing that I am totally lost from understanding is the role of congeners? Am I pronouncing it right?

JWS:The role of what?

TS:The congeners.

JWS:The congeners?

TS:Okay as I looked through some of the literature, I became more confused the more I read into it. The fusel oil and the aldehydes and the

JWS:Esters

TS:Esters and so forth. Can you, there was a good run down of these products, discuss their role in the actual making of the whiskey and as you are doing this also discuss whether these are flavor enhancers or are these largely impurities, because as I understand the literature many of these are looked at as both or some people are perceiving these one way or the other. And I am lost.

JWS:Well plain alcohol or pure alcohol has very little flavor, in fact if you look it up in the dictionary it says odorless and tasteless. I guess somebody made a big profit out of that advertisement. If it is odorless and tasteless well then they are _________ vodka. They have __________. So if you are making 58:00pure alcohol what I would say is the higher alcohol that's fusel oil. Higher alcohols are a group of alcohols, profenol(?), see the alcohol starts with methanol that's number one, ethanol, profenol is three carbons, biphenyl is four carbons and the ablealcohol(?) is five. When you get them much higher then they begin to come out as solids instead of liquids. Within the distilling industry and in wines and in beers, yeast gives off as a by-product some higher alcohols, 59:00mostly in whiskey and in alcohol they're isolated. And a few acids

TS:Does potanic come out of the barrel?

JWS:No, its in the wood. Not in production. And the esters. Now that's where most of your aroma and taste come from. Esters is a higher alcohol. But esters are a very small amount. As the esters are the aromatic compound that gives you the over all, well I won't say flavor, but that's mainly the aroma.

TS:And that's lacking in vodka?

JWS:So if you, I guess alcohol is and bourbon is just like a cigarette if you 60:00get used to a certain brand of cigarettes. You like that cigarette and you will smoke it the same way with a bourbon. If you acquire a taste and you want the same taste from now on, so if you buy a bottle today and you like it, and next month you go out and buy another bottle you want it to be the same. That is what we strove for at Brown Foreman. Incidently, when I got my doctorate degree, I did some research on the source of isolanal alcohol, which is the main constituent flavor constituent of whiskey and it primarily comes from the amino acids in the grains and two which are part of the protein is a fraction of the grains. The rye and barley malt are the highest in protein and corn is lower in 61:00protein. So and it comes primarily by controlling the amount and the Ph of fermentation.

Tape 2

TS:It takes about ten seconds to start.

JWS:The new whiskey is when it is distilled after the second distillation is 99 62:001/2 percent water and alcohol with only about a half percent or less the so called carcinures in the new whiskey. And when you put that in a barrel then you pick up more carcinures in the barrel, oak extracts, potanic acid. And during the aging process the ester content builds up considerably and the amount of fusel oil is, the higher alcohol I should say, remains fairly constant. Whatever you started with in the new whiskey is going to be there in the finished aged whiskey, but the esters, the acids in the barrel and the alcohol in whiskey combine to form esters during the slow aging process. And you get more aroma and 63:00flavor, beside the wood extracts which give flavor, so that's the aging of whiskey. You just can't take whiskey and oak juice, shake it up and mix it up and filter it, and say now that's aged whiskey, because the reactions haven't taken place. So it does, there is an aging process in whiskey that is not, as the government at one time tried to tell us that a whiskey container is just a storage container, like you're going to store a drum of oil for tax purposes. We said this is not a warehouse for just storage this is an aging warehouse. There is a different tax breakup whether or not you can take the tax off that or not. 64:00We got into a big argument with the government on that, but when we built those warehouses over in ___________, we won the argument, because over there the supports that supported the roof, normally warehouses are built so that they support themselves. It was cheaper that way and it served to function for an aging warehouse. But whiskey does take some time to age and the temperature, provided you don't get it too hot, the increase of temperature will speed up the chemical reactions. If you get it too hot its just like anything else. The 65:00solubility of the oak extracts would increase considerably with hot stuff mixed up with cooler stuff so that means if you get it too hot you dissolve a lot of things out of the oak that begin to give it a bitter taste. Like you have to be careful when you make ice tea. You can get a bitter taste because you have got too much. . .

TS:You can over do it.

JWS:Yeah. And just like ice tea is really a super saturated liquid solution because you put it in the refrigerator and it clouds up all that precipitates out. Most people think that fusel oil is the ingredient that gives you a headache.

TS:I have seen references to that and that was one of the things that I meant when I said I am more confused then ever. I used to think that, I have heard people say that it was the sugar. You have a great amount of sugar in there that does that.

JWS:There is a small amount of hexles that comes out of the barrel, corn sugars, very small. I don't see where that would give you a headache. The main ingredient that I think gives you a headache is aldehydes which is something you don't want in there to begin with.

TS:Okay.

JWS:If you have a poor fermentation you are going to get some aldehydes and they just turn right over into your whiskey. There are, there is a small amount of aldehydes formed in the barrel when it is charred. Did you ever take fat and burn it and smell the ?

TS:That is the aldehyde?

JWS:That is one aldehyde, but there are different aldehydes and those are the things, in my opinion, that give you the headache. That's what you want to be careful of. Now I won't say that if you had a whiskey with a lot of fusel oil, if you drank a lot of it, that you wouldn't get a headache, because that can happen too. I think that the toxicity of _______ alcohol is about seven times that of regular alcohol. Nobody wants to drink it. You can't, but it is there for flavor.

TS:Now is this controlled by any government oversight. I mean is there a maximum limitation on the amount of aldehyde in a barrel or the bottle?

JWS:There was one case where the government stepped in and told the distiller that he could not market that product, because he had an unusual amount of 68:00aldehydes in his whiskey. It was a poor fermentation. If you get an infection in your fermenter, you will get a lot of aldehydes produced in the product and when it is distilled over well you can't even stay in the still house, the fumes makes your eyes tear. There was one distiller that had a bad run and they got a lot of complaints when they tried to sell it. The government stopped them. So I think they redistilled it.

TS:One of the reasons I asked that question was as you know, periodically there are _____ for more intense labeling and so forth. In the 1970's there was a labeling suit so. . . But you know this is also an industry as we both know which is self regulated to a great extent, perhaps far more than most of the 69:00industries that one could think of.

JWS:That is true.

TS:So what I was trying to get at was that from a consumer perspective, is it likely, can the consumer likely expect as he purchases his various bourbons or whiskeys that the aldehyde content has been checked in the process?

JWS:Oh, it should be. In my opinion, any distiller that has this problem and it usually originates in the fermentation from contamination. He knows it when he distills it and he shouldn't sell it. He could ruin his label of his product. 70:00And it doesn't happen very often. Certainly I would imagine it happened quite frequently in the old days when some distillers slopped it in the kettle and the hogs right around where they are fermenting the ash and everything and there was a much better chance for contamination, but in my opinion the aldehydes are the main culprit as far as headaches are concerned. Now of course alcohol itself will give you a headache eventually if you drink enough. I don't know whether you are going to get drunk first or . . .

TS:I had the experience.

JWS:In other words I think you can get drunk on vodka which has no aldehydes and you'll probably end up with a headache.

TS:If I drink scotch as opposed to bourbon is there a difference in the aldehyde 71:00content? Is there a likelihood. . .

JWS:I would say off-hand that scotch would probably have slightly less, because most scotches are only ten percent whiskey and 90 percent alcohol. Scotches are blended. They take a malt whiskey which is just barley malt fermented and distilled and it makes a heavy whiskey then they blend various malt whiskeys. There are supposed to be 32 of them in Scotland and they, most scotches have about five to ten percent of the malt whiskeys and the rest is alcohol. The scotch gets its flavor from the way they dry the malt over there, the peakwood. 72:00See when you, when I say malt you can have malted corn or malted rye, you just let the, whatever grain you are using begin to germinate and sprout, when that sprout gets about as long as the kernel itself that's when the enzyme content is about at its maximum. Now the enzymes are what convert the starches in the corn over to sugar so that the yeast can ferment it. Yeast can't ferment starch, you just mix corn meal with yeast and nothing happens, but once the starches are converted to sugar then the yeast will take off. So when we say malt we are always, in this country, referring to barley which has been allowed to sprout and then dry to hold it. And here we air dry it. Over there they put a sprout of barley on just screens and build a __________________ fire under them and dry 73:00them. That ______ smoke condenses them gives you that smokey taste.

TS:Chemically speaking, what is the difference between Jack Daniels whiskey which is not technically a bourbon and one of the Brown Foreman bourbons? I realize that Jack Daniels, if I understand it correctly, uses maple hardwoods that are added into the barrel during the aging process? In other words, they use the same oak barrel, but they use sugar maples or charcoaled sugar maple for the filtration as well. Now chemically speaking, what differences do we have here?

JWS:Well, I think basically, Jack Daniels cannot be called bourbon, because it 74:00does not conform to the government regulations of what is a bourbon. That is first, that you must have at least 51 percent corn in your mash to make a bourbon. And the others, grains rye, wheat, barley can vary. To make a corn whiskey then you must have 70 percent corn in your mash. Then you would have to call it a corn whiskey. The next thing is, with bourbon, must be distilled below 160 proof off the still and that applies to Jack Daniels too. And of course, the grain formula for Jack Daniels is the same as a bourbon and the distillation is the same. The only difference is the bourbon must not be changed during the process, the original flavor, before you put it in the barrel. Jack Daniels changes that, because they run it through a heavy charcoal filter. And that 75:00takes out a lot of what you might want to call impurities.

TS:These are the sugar, the charcoaled sugar maple?

JWS:That's just charred maple wood. There is not sugar left once you char it.

TS:Okay. Sugar maples was what I was trying to figure out.

JWS:They use maple because they . . . if they had a lot of oak down there they would have been using a lot of oak.

TS:Okay, I see. I'm still trying to figure the romance from the facts here.

JWS:Well, they pulled up that romance story and that's fine, but they take these big vats, pack it with charcoal and they run this just to look through that and then it drains out of the bottom. And you have taken out a lot of the, when whiskey is first distilled, it has a, we always call it a hog track odor. It doesn't smell clean like alcohol does, because there is still fine grain particles in it. The barrel ages all that out in the four years or whenever you 76:00do it. But this way they take it all out with this charcoal. Now that doesn't take the fusel oils out, it doesn't take the esters out, but it just cleans up the odor of the whiskey. And so they have changed, if you taste it before and after it goes through there, it tastes different. And they will even have a little kit that will show you, "Heres the way Joe makes his distillen," and you taste it and smell it. "And then heres the way, after we treat it with charcoal, it tastes." They show you its different right there. Well, that's why the government wouldn't let them call it bourbon. They call it Tennessee whiskey.

TS:As Whiskey is aged over a great number of years and these various carcinures 77:00we have been talking about increasingly mixed with the whiskey, is it likely that the heavily aged whiskeys might be producing some carcinogenic material or is that relevant?

JWS:I don't think so. No, not in the barrel. What happens I think most people feel, the public feels that the older whiskey, the better it is. And that is not true at all.

TS:That's part of the myth and romance.

JWS:That's right. The reason they sell it at seven years old and eight years old is cause they couldn't sell it when it was four. If you want to get down to the economics of it.

TS:Several people have told me that.

JWS:So what distillers should do, and I guess most of them try to do, we certainly did and that's another reason why we had the heating cycle in our warehouse. And they, Brown Foreman operated pretty close on projection, what they expected to sell and what we made four years previous. And they were pretty good at that. So what we tried to do is to balance the new whiskey with the carcinures that are extracted from the barrel at a four or five year period so that it would be at its peak. If you keep on aging it, it is going to keep on extracting potanic acids and oak extracts and its going to start to taste bitter and it goes down hill. So there is a peak period of a year or two that whiskey 79:00is at its best.

TS:Which makes whiskey somewhat different from wines if I understand wines correctly.

JWS:Yes.

TS:The aging of wines does not necessarily have

JWS:No, as I understand wines, they, I think wines are at their best within the first year after they are made. Now I think they do need, especially the red wines, need some settling period. But white wines, you know, most people will tell you white wine usually starts going bad after two years in the bottle, especially if you leave it out where it can get light, because sunlight plays havoc with it. Red wines, I do believe require, or should have a year or two aging. But basically, wines as I understand it, get their, all they are going to 80:00get out of life is at the time its made and that depends on the grape crop basically that year. I guess each year the grapes taste a little different and so does wine. In whiskey that is not true, because you are distilling it, so you are coming off basically with 99 percent of anything that you would have had regardless of whether the corn was as good this year as it was last year. Whereas in a wine, you are drinking the filtered fermented solution, but that's it you're not distilling it. That's why wines taste different each year in my 81:00opinion. Of course, they do use a different strain of yeast in wine that is altogether different than you use in whiskey, but the same criteria would apply. In other words, they use the same yeast all the time for the grapes and it is the grapes that do the varying every year.

TS:I read Lawrence Chafe's book, Liquor, Servant of Man and he has references in that book to turpines, glycerin, albamum, furfural,

JWS:Yeah that's a aldehyde.

TS:Furfural is an aldehyde? What about the role of the turpines.

JWS:That comes from the wood. It is very small amounts.

TS:Is that toxic?

JWS:Oh, if it is the purest turpines, I don't think so, I really don't know. But 82:00the amount you get in the ferment is so ______________, you can get a trace of a list that long, a full page, but there's, that you get out of the wood. Part of that is due to the wood itself. Well now for instance, nobody in his right mind would take pine wood and make a whiskey barrel out of it, because it is full of residents. You know how it would taste. Well I mean you can go to the extremes with that. Yes there are very minor traces of things like ester, but they don't bother anybody.

TS:Okay. The U.S. government recognizes 29 distinct whiskeys, if my research is right, I believe that is 29 as of last year or this year. Theoretically 83:00speaking, is there down the pike a few years hence is there likely to be new whiskeys, distinct whiskeys to come onto the market? Is there research in this area?

JWS:I sort of doubt it now, we, Brown Foreman spent was it 2 million or 6 million on a new whiskey called a light whiskey. You saw that? Frost 8-80?

TS:Yes, it was 1971. Over 6 million in advertisements.

JWS:Something like that. That didn't go over and I don't know of any light whiskey that has really gone over big. There was several people in the 84:00distilling industry and you will run into all that if you go through DSI stuff that, I won't mention any names, but they didn't make it very well selling straight whiskey so they wanted to make a light whiskey and they finally prevailed upon the government to let the industry make a light whiskey which some of us did and some didn't. And our marketing boys said well if you just make a light whiskey you dilute a whiskey and call it a light whiskey. They said we have got to come up with something different. We came up with taking all of the color out of the aged whiskey. Just like if you took Jack Daniels after it was aged and put through that charcoaled vat again it would come out colorless.

TS:Back through the charcoal to take away the color.

JWS:That's in effect what we did, and it didn't go over.

TS:You think perhaps it was a little early in 1971?

JWS:I think it was that, and the fact that it didn't taste anything like whiskey. There were very few carcinures left in it. A little __________ alcohol and a small amount of esters, just enough to give it a little taste other than vodka. It tastes a little different from vodka. But it didn't go over. Six million dollars worth of ______________.

TS:Yes I know. Over 6 in advertisements.

JWS:Maybe it was the label. Frost 8-80.

TS:Well, there was extensive research done on how to produce a good label; the bottle itself was extensively researched; the use of the silver, as you may recall, on the neck of the bottle and the outline of the label and so forth. From what I picked up from looking through the records over there, this must 86:00have been one of the most researched products before actually hitting the market shelves.

JWS:It was.

TS:And to spite all that it didn't work. Its hard to understand why it didn't work.

JWS:I think this marketing is the place you ought to be at. They come up with some great ideas. Well they are great if they go over.

TS:I noticed that going back to when we had talked earlier about the stillage or slop, or whatever term you want to use, I saw that in an article in the "Atlanta Constitution Journal" of January, 1980, it said that about 28 percent of the 87:00slop produced was solid protein, which I found somewhat amazing. And, of course, we have talked earlier about its use as a dietary supplement, but I also picked up another reference somewhere that said that the stillage is not palatable, its not.

JWS:Oh, its not. No.

TS:I have never tasted it, but apparently it is not bad. I was wondering, you know, could this stillage also since it so rich in B vitamins and high in protein, it sounds like to me that it would make an excellent cracker.

JWS:They made some.

TS:Oh they did?

JWS:Yeah American Brands bought out Beam and Beam made a very, their research lab came out with wafers, cookies, crackers, whatever you want to call them. 88:00They were not bad. The ones we had at that first secret luncheon tasted a little on the acid side, because they probably didn't control the acidity of the fermentation, but the ones that I have tasted from Beam soluble were very palatable. Bernie Hurst used to bring them to our DFRC meetings and pass them around.

TS:So this is something that we may expect to see more of in the future?

JWS:Well if American Brands pursues it, I don't know. They are high in proteins and amino acids.

TS:One of the most difficult things for a layman to understand in the production of whiskey is the role of the diastase. Am I pronouncing it right, diastase?

JWS:Diastase. It is an enzyme. An enzyme is a chemical that will change another chemical from one form to another without being used up itself. In other words, maltase converts the sugar maltose over to corresponding alcohol and so on. I mean, pardon me, converts the starch over to maltose. Maltase will convert the starches over to maltose. The starches in corn are a lot of mixtures.

** Side 2 **

TS:There are repeated references to the diastase and it seemed that different sources were attributing very different functions to it and the more I read about it the more confused I became.

JWS:They are referred to when you buy barley malt for the distilling industry you want a high diastatic power which means its ability to convert carbohydrates over to sugar, that is the term used. I won't say it is a __________, but a 91:00bunch of malt together is called distates. They are a series of enzymes or a series of sugars and each enzyme is specific for a certain sugar, or carbohydrate I should say, to convert it over to sugar. Because the yeast can't ferment a starch, a carbohydrate as such it must, it could only attack sugars, so that starch has to be changed to its corresponding sugar. It doesn't matter whether its a high ______ starch or a low one. Each enzyme is a separate one and just like in your body system you have different enzymes for specific purposes.

TS:Is there anything else that we should know about its function in production 92:00of bourbon?

JWS:No, there is no particular flavor added by it. It performs its function just actually by contact that is why when you mash corn or rye with malt which is high in maltase, a distatic part, you must mix it good, because by contact it converts it and if you just put it in there and let it sit it will take a long time to get it all the way through and you also have to control the temperature, because the enzymes are very temperature-conscious, if you get them too hot you will kill them. And there is a point where anything speeds up when the temperatures are rolling chemically speaking. Theres an old rule of thumb for 93:00every ten degrees you raise the temperature this reaction will be twice as fast. But with enzymes, I call them living enzymes, you can kill them by getting the temperature too high. So we always converted our mashes at about 148 degrees temperature, because if you get up to 150 or 160 you start killing off the enzyme and you don't get a good conversion. The more starches you can convert to sugar, the more whiskey you are going to get out of the bushel of corn.

TS:In order to prevent air-born contamination and other contamination in the mash or fermenters, obviously you have to have strict sanitary control after each batch. How do you actually insure that, and is there a uniform way of doing 94:00this across the industry or does each distiller have a different method of doing it.

JWS:Well, of course, in the old days there was no vat and as you say contamination could get in. During fermentation though there is a slight protection, because there will be a cap that forms over it. Have you ever been through a brewery?

TS:I have read about it, but I have never actually witnessed it.

JWS:While the fermentation is going, it looks like it is boiling, it is going real good, then that cap will tend to form and while you can still get contamination, you are not going to use that again and the contaminant, unless it is a specific bacteria that happens to get in there that forms aldehydes, you 95:00won't have any problem, because that is going over to the by-product house and you have distilled it at a high temperature so that usually kills nearly everything. In making a sour mash whiskey, I don't know if I mentioned this or not, you use part of that thin stillage back in the next fermenter you are filling to control acidity 10 to 20 percent, whatever it takes or however you want to make it. And that gives you a little more flavor by using an acid, more acid media during fermentation. If you have a contamination then you certainly wouldn't use that stillage back. And that happens occasionally, but very seldom. 96:00I don't know of any other contaminant that would bother you. The only one that I have run into is a bug that forms a lot of aldehydes and you can smell that when you distill the whiskey, right then.

TS:Pharmaceutical firms often used to grow penicillin producing molds and other organisms from dry stillage, sometimes called corn stillage, dry solubles. Is this still true today?

JWS:It was when I left, yes, I guess so, because the dry solubles, we sold quite a bit to the pharmaceutical houses for their, I don't know which chemical they were making, there are so many terramycin and all those different things. This, the solubles were a good source of food, or at least they added it to the 97:00culture for bacteria growth and while we sold about three different chemical companies our solubles. They would pay more than the feeders. If they had a good soluble.

TS:Truly medicinal alcohol. I understand that __________ alcohol is treated to make it unfit for consumption, how do they do this, and how is it withdrawn without paying the federal excise tax?

JWS:Well, the government has a set of rules. __________ alcohol depends on the 98:00purpose. If some of the ____________ would effect the process you are going to use the alcohol for then they have an alternative to __________ and it is things like benzene, gasoline, even wood alcohol would be a _________. See wood alcohol is per se poisonous. Well, I guess, chemically speaking, you could say all alcohols are poisonous, it is a different degree of toxicity. And usually benzene is the one they use the most, that I am familiar with. You just add 2 percent, 3 percent or whatever the formula calls for and you say _____________ under a certain formula, I will take either one of them that uses aciditone for _____________. Depending on the use that this is going to be put to, if benzene 99:00would interfere with what I want to use this alcohol for, then they would let you use some other ____________.

TS:If somebody just wants cheap alcohol, they could go off to a drugstore looking for some __________ alcohol.

JWS:Well you can do that, but how are you going to get it out? It takes a special distillation to remove it. You can drink it, but its horrible.

TS:That's why I thought it was an interesting point, how. I understand that Brown Foreman claimed some diversification in the early 1950's when they had a series of chemical processes developing which were produced and marketed. I picked up some names in one of the vaults over at Brown Foreman BF10, BF20, excuse me, BFI20, BFI10, BFI30, BFI33. One was a spot check, an indicating 100:00solution for checking residual, hypo remaining in printed film,

JWS:Yeah, we were into that for several years and that was a quick developing system especially for x-rays, and I think it worked out pretty good, we didn't do very good marketing,

TS:It was patented.

JWS:Yeah, and they finally sold it to a fellow that has made a living out of it since. The idea was that x-rays, here you are in the hospital and they want to know what's wrong in a hurry, it takes seven hours to make an x-ray, to dry it and everything so the doctor could look it. Well they could do this in seven minutes, they got it down to that fine point. Now a days I imagine it is even less, but that was the basic reason for it. It did work and some hospitals put it in and in seven minutes you could get a film.

TS:I gather that this BFI10, the codes here 10, 20, 30 and 33, these substances were largely accidently found within the chemical lab over there, or . . .

JWS:No, the lab that did that under, Scott was his name. . . Hello, did you have a nice meeting?

?Meeting? Oh.

JWS:Went to exercise class.

TS:Besides the BFI10, 20, 30 and 33 which we mentioned a moment ago were there other major chemical discoveries?

JWS:From Brown Foreman? Not to my knowledge.

TS:Did you find other by-products that we have not talked about already, were there. . .

JWS:No, no. For a while we did some work on artificial flowers, but we never got too far with that. The most research, from a research standpoint, we did was on the BFI in that area of photographic x-rays, because that showed promise. I guess the marketing of it. It was a good process, but the marketing of it, it takes a lot of money I guess to get something built up. I understand now that 103:00there is probably a better method than that of doing these things, because they come up now with x-rays in just a couple of minutes. It always amazes me how they get instant replay on the TV. In color too.

TS:We talked a few moments ago about the high amount of B1 and protein in the stillage and when I began this research one of the first things that came to my mind and this may sound somewhat silly at first, but one of the first things that came to my mind is if the stillage has such a high amount of B1 and protein and so forth, if I was to take an ounce and a half shot glass full of say Early Times or Old Forester and I were to break it down chemically into some of its nutrients what would I find in terms of nutrition in that shot glass?

JWS:You won't find any B1 in whiskey. All vitamins stay in the

TS:Stillage?

JWS:Fermented mash. They don't distill over with the liquid and all of the vitamins, practically all of the vitamins come from the yeast itself. See the yeast stays in the mash and goes over to the by-products and in a brewery they harvest the yeast and they also harvest the brewer's dried grains which is the husk and the residue of the malt and so forth. And there they sell the brewer's dry yeast and you can buy that in the store. Here we don't separate it, it just goes over in the by-products, most of the vitamins come from the yeast that's 105:00left in there.

TS:Did you have anything to do with the evolution of the federal bottling or did you make any suggestions involving bottling?

JWS:No.

TS:Well, I think I have asked most of the main questions I wanted to ask you. Its been a long session. I really do appreciate it.