Tiff Christie: 0:41
When people talk about bourbon, they usually talk about barrels. They go on about the char levels and whether there was any toasting. After that, they may discuss the age and the time the liquid has spent in those nicely charred barrels, Because for most people, that time and those barrels denote the liquid's flavour. Occasionally, the conversation may turn to the make-up of the mash bill, such as the percentage of corn to rye, to barley or wheat, but very rarely do they ever talk about yeast. That is until Pat Heist and Shane Baker started Wilderness Trail in 2012. Unlike most other craft distilleries that started around that period, Wilderness Trail had a unique advantage in its founders. It had two people who made a career out of supplying yeast strains and fermentation products to breweries and distilleries with their company Firm Solutions. Over 10 years after they laid down their first distillations, we talked to Heister about fermentation, wheated whiskey and whether yeast really is the key to bourbon's flavor.
D. Pat Heist: 1:59
Thank you for joining us, Pat.
D. Pat Heist: 2:01
I'm happy to be here. Thanks for having me.
Tiff Christie: 2:04
Out of all the things, you could have applied your microbiology degree towards what led you to booze.
D. Pat Heist: 2:12
Well, you know, thinking back to when I was thinking about microbiology, I definitely wasn't thinking about booze, outside of drinking it like other college students would.
D. Pat Heist: 2:23
So you know I took kind of a crooked path to get here and you know it definitely started with my passion for microbiology.
D. Pat Heist: 2:31
I mean, the first time I ever took a microbiology class I switched my major immediately and that's when I became a microbiology major and through that I ended up in graduate school, got a master's and PhD in plant pathology, which is the study of how microorganisms influence plants and specifically in plant disease scenarios. And I did a lot of work in the state of Kentucky with the University of Kentucky on different field crops Tobacco is a big crop here, corn wheat, rye Crops tobacco is a big crop here corn wheat, rye and so I had a lot of experience working with different grain crops through my graduate career and then, oddly, took a job out of graduate school at a medical school and was a medical microbiology professor for seven years, for seven years. So from there I started consulting for companies that sold yeast and did work with distilleries and breweries and then started thinking about starting my own business, my business partner, shane Baker we go back a long way.
D. Pat Heist: 3:40
We used to play in a rock band together and he is a really good business guy. He's a mechanical engineer. We used to play in a rock band together and he is a really good business guy. He's a mechanical engineer. He was actually doing work in venture capital at the time and so when I exited out of the medical school, shane and I created the business that you spoke of in the introduction, firm Solutions.
D. Pat Heist: 3:58
So kind of going that way, and then that that company being a yeast provider and a provider of fermentation products to not only whiskey distilleries but other types of distilleries. You know rum, tequila, and then, within whiskeys, you know we've got scotch, irish whiskeys, american and worldwide single malts, bourbon and rye whiskeys, etc. But we also do a lot of business with beer providers, hard seltzer producers, even companies that make fermented beverages that don't contain alcohol, like kombucha and kefir. So we cut our teeth on all those industries and then that's how we had the knowledge. We've been in all these distilleries helping them solve problems related to fermentation. So now we have the ability to start a distillery and since Firm Solutions was a very successful company, we had the capital that it takes to correctly capitalize a distillery.
Tiff Christie: 5:00
Most people having a successful business like that would have stayed doing the successful business. Why actually start the distillery?
D. Pat Heist: 5:10
Well, it's actually so. Furnam Solutions actually continues to be a successful business. We just had our best year ever last year.
Tiff Christie: 5:19
Oh, so you're still running that?
D. Pat Heist: 5:21
Oh yeah, absolutely. We do business currently with about 600 different distilleries and breweries around the world, so we're continuing to hone in our knowledge base. So really, at the beginning, you know, when we started Wilderness Trail, it was. You know, shane and I are some of the biggest bourbon aficionados on the planet, I mean we love the spirit.
D. Pat Heist: 5:41
We're from Kentucky. We're really, you know, imbibed in the industry and we just thought it would be so cool to have our own distillery. I mean, it just kind of started off like that. We weren't intending on becoming the 14th largest bourbon producer in the world within 10 years, we just wanted to have a small outfit, and we've always been educators, not only to our clients, but you know, I'm a faculty member at Moonshine University in Louisville. I'm an adjunct professor at the James Bean Institute at the University of Kentucky, so we've always been involved with educating our clients. And so it was like we started the distillery also as an educational component of Firm Solutions.
D. Pat Heist: 6:30
You know, wouldn't it be cool if, in addition to supplying fermentation products to our customers, if we could have a facility where we could show people how to make whiskey? You know rye and bourbon, and even vodka and rum we made initially, which are very. You know you have to distill to a very high proof for vodka and you know very specific conditions for bourbon and rye whiskeys as well. So we started off kind of there and then just little by little, with you know the growth of the industry and the way that we manage that business, we're able to grow very quickly and become a very successful brand.
Tiff Christie: 7:06
How much of the success of the business do you think comes down to that level of connection, the fact that you are willing to educate and get in the trenches with your customers?
D. Pat Heist: 7:20
So our business model with Firm Solutions, helping customers solve problems, has always been a little detrimental to the business itself, because we're educating customers to be efficient on things that we help them with.
D. Pat Heist: 7:35
In the meantime, we sell them fermentation products to become more self-sufficient. It does take a little bit of business away from us, but we're big believers in raising tide raises all ships. You know, if you help somebody out, I mean there's business, but there's also helping somebody out and good, just being a good person, a good steward of the industry, and it's always really played in our favor. So we've always just really tried to focus on doing the right thing rather than the thing that protects proprietary aspects of our business, because what we found is that you know what we do is very complicated and we don't have a lot of competition, but it's just you know. So there's the selling yeast to the distillery and brewery side, but then there's the bourbon enthusiast side that we came into this business being people who got this information from other distilleries, and the thing that we really love was when other distilleries would give you information, that transparency.
D. Pat Heist: 8:44
It's what bourbon fans want, and so we know that through our other business, but now more than ever through being part of the Kentucky Bourbon Trail and the Kentucky Distillers Association, wanting to provide the best experience that you can get on the Kentucky Bourbon Trail is a lot of that knowledge that we give, and we know that I can tell you everything that I know about our distillery. And if you build what you believe is the same distillery somewhere else, even 20 miles away, there are going to be things that are inherently different, because it's not just hey, we make a mash recipe of 64% corn, 24% wheat, 12% malted barley. What's the ratio of grain to water? What is the total amount of sugar in the fermentation? What type of yeast was used? What temperature?
D. Pat Heist: 9:39
How long did you ferment for? What type of still did you use? What proof did it come off the still? What are you proofing it down to to go into the barrel? What type of steel did you use? What proof did it come off the steel? What are you proofing it down to to go into the barrel? What type of barrels? What are you coming out of the barrel at? I mean just et cetera, et cetera. There's so many more things that you don't have unless we wrote a book on it. There's just not, I mean the information we're giving to our fans is really harmless information, because, if you really wanted to dig, these days, a lot of this stuff is public information anyway. So you know we look at it a lot of different ways and of course, we want to protect proprietary information, but we also want to be very open with things that it's okay to tell people about if the yeast and the fermentation does affect the flavour and the overall bourbon, why don't distilleries talk about it more?
D. Pat Heist: 10:34
Well, in my experience first as someone who visited distilleries as a fan, it's just there, I think, first of all, the person that you get to talk to when you're taking the tour. They may not know anything about fermentation, so you really have to get to someone at a higher level and then it becomes. Well, what do they really know about fermentation? Because we've been making good whiskey for over 100 years back when they had a very rudimentary knowledge of fermentation. So fermentation can go well and you really not understand what's happening. But when things go wrong you want to be able to make sense about yeah, you want to be able to make sense about it and you want to be able to track. What did you know?
D. Pat Heist: 11:18
First of all, when something goes wrong let's say bacterial contamination comes in you lose alcohol. That's one problem. I didn't get as many barrels out of that batch, but what did those bacteria do to my flavor? It could be a bad thing, or it could be a bad thing or it could be a really good thing, because bacteria like yeast. They don't make alcohol, but they make organic acids and organic acids condensed with alcohols to form esters.
D. Pat Heist: 11:45
And esters are what give distilled spirits the fruity notes, the vanilla, the very classic flavors of bourbon. I love the very classic flavors of bourbon. A lot are due to esters and some of those esters come from contaminating organisms in the fermentation. And if we've brought anything to the table in terms of knowledge of fermentation, it's okay. We know everything there is to know about the yeast that we're putting in there. We've even done whole genome sequencing on those yeast strains. We know everything there is to know about the yeast that we're putting in there. We've even done whole genome sequencing on those yeast strains. We know everything there is to know about the DNA structures of those strains. But what about the organisms that are in there that you didn't purposefully put in there?
D. Pat Heist: 12:26
And then the older the distillery and these famous old scotch and Irish whiskey distilleries, some of the most famous bourbon distilleries. These are very old factories that have evolved their own very specific subset of contaminating microorganisms and that is what we've been studying for the last 20 years at hundreds of other distilleries and breweries, but also now for the last 10 and a half years at Wilderness Trail. You know we studied. You know we keep very good track of that. That's why we run a sweet mash process, because we built our distillery with mindfulness of why do other distilleries have so much contamination issues, so much that they have to use a sire mash process. They have to acidify the mash in order to run consistently.
D. Pat Heist: 13:19
We don't have to do that because we don't have the background contamination pressure. So we don't have to lower the pH with Baxet. We can have a successful fermentation on a day-to-day basis without doing that, on a day-to-day basis without doing that, and it results in a very different, very unique mouthfeel, very unique drinkability of the distillate. You know, if you've tried our whiskeys at barrel strength, for example, which usually land between 113 to 118 proof, or our bottle in bond, which is 100 proof, they're very palatable and a lot of that. Even at those higher proofs they lack that, what we call the Kentucky hug in the bourbon world, and a lot of that has to do with the acidity of the pH of the fermentations and how that carries over to the distillate. So so much stuff to talk about. So so much stuff to talk about.
Tiff Christie: 14:14
I imagine a lot of distilleries have looked a lot more at issues of fermentation and yeast and things like that. Have you found that the knowledge and the interest in that particular part of distilling has increased?
D. Pat Heist: 14:35
Yeah, definitely has. Has. You know well people like us that are out there giving seminars and we get invited, we speak at conferences and we write papers for trade journals and actually publish scientific peer-reviewed articles. So there is more knowledge out there, for sure. Small distilleries and in some cases even large distilleries a lot of times they're interested in knowing about these things but they simply just don't have the equipment to do it. You have to have basic microbiology, a microscope, for example. You might have to have an incubator, you have to be familiar with aseptic technique when you're culturing yeast or bacteria.
D. Pat Heist: 15:13
So there is a pretty substantial amount of equipment over and above the lab equipment that you typically see even at very large distillers.
D. Pat Heist: 15:22
They're very focused on the analytical chemistry what is going on with that distillate? But not so much what's going on with fermentation. And specifically, there are hardly any distilleries that are looking at the microbiology of fermentation outside of measuring lactic acid content of the fermenters. So most distilleries aren't culturing organisms. When Wilderness Trail has a lactic acid content in the fermenter above 0.3 percent that's our threshold, that's how we know there's some bacteria growing in here, we're going to go in there, we're going to culture those bacteria and we're going to isolate them in pure culture. We're going to store those organisms cryogenically and then six, eight, ten years later, when we're pulling that whiskey out of the barrel, we're going to be smelling that and tasting that whiskey and we're going to be saying, oh, there's that spiciness from the rye, there's that vanilla that I expect to get from the wood of the barrel, here's that bready note that I get from that yeast strain.
D. Pat Heist: 16:26
What are these flavors over here and we can look to? We can pull those organisms, those contaminants, out of the freezer and a lot of times it's just a matter of smelling them on the plate and you can smell that flavor. And so what that leads us to is some very interesting innovation possibilities Like how about if I do a sour mash, but instead of just taking liquid from a previous distillation, I grow a separate tank of mash with that bacteria or one or two bacteria of interest, I create a sour mash situation, I kill the bacteria, then I dump that over into my fermenter, just as if I would have made a sour mash. But it's more control. I'm getting very specific organic acids from a specific species of bacteria that I purposefully put in there, and then that's what's going to give me that nice kick. On the cinnamon note, you know, I mean, those type of things are what we're looking at and it's just, it's unbelievably interesting and it's a new way of doing things.
Tiff Christie: 17:34
With so many distilleries opening up and so many people producing similar-ish bourbons and whiskeys, do you think that that sort of information is going to be the future of bourbon?
D. Pat Heist: 17:50
Well, like I said, you know, we hope that any distillery would take in good information and use it to their benefit. You know, I think the bigger problem with new distilleries is the lack of experience of people starting them. Starting a distillery is kind of like if I come out of retirement and I say I always like to hang out at a bar, so why wouldn't I start a bar?
D. Pat Heist: 18:17
You know, I have no experience running a bar, or people like to start restaurants because they like to eat food.
D. Pat Heist: 18:23
You know, it's like you've got to have experience, and so there are a lot of people getting into this industry who are retiring or they got money from something else. I want to have a distillery, and they just don't have a good plan and they don't execute on the plan, so they've probably got bigger problems to solve than figuring out the microbiology of fermentation. A lot of them can't get past the startup phase, which is something that we try to help people with as much as possible through education, and I teach the first day of a six-day distillers class at Moonshine University and the first meeting that you have is them telling you why you probably should not start a distillery. So it's really immersive and that's definitely something that people need to consider, because you need to know what you're doing, and that's probably one of the biggest problems and leads to bad product. It leads to you know just people spending a bunch of money and you know, not doing their homework.
Tiff Christie: 19:24
Talk to us about the yeast. You use fresh yeast when cooking the grains, with no backset mash.
D. Pat Heist: 19:32
Why is that? Anytime you start a business, you got to look at how am I going to differentiate myself? Ok, one way that we differentiate ourselves. We're the smartest guys in the business and, again, we're up for the challenge. If anybody wants to refute that, we'll be happy to to debate. But you know, that's one thing we have going for us. But another thing is you know everybody's very familiar with the sire mash process. It's a great way to make whiskey, but sweet mash process is also a great way to make whiskey. So that's just one of the differentiators.
D. Pat Heist: 20:05
How can we and when you talk to other distilleries of you, know why do you do sire mash and you get to this consistency and all this kind of stuff? And then you say why wouldn't you do sweet mash? And they say it's too difficult. It's too difficult and I think they're lending to the fact if you don't acidify the mash, you do have more difficulties with contamination if you're at an older distillery, right? So we were able to overcome those problems just by creating a distillery that you know. We cool our mash in the mash tank rather than run it through an external heat exchanger. That's one of the major things that causes big contamination at other distilleries they use old external heat exchangers to cool the mash going from the mash tun to the ferment. So that's something that we just said okay, we'll cool inside the cooker and that eliminates that piece of equipment One of many, many, many examples that we implemented at our distillery.
D. Pat Heist: 21:07
So you know, the fresh yeast and the relative to the sweet mash process. It's just a differentiator. I mean, we're the only distillery on the Kentucky bourbon trail that runs a sweet mash process. It's just, first of all, showcases our ability. Hey, we can run a sweet mash and not have problems. But secondly, we can provide you a whiskey that gives you an alternative to sour mash, which is excellent whiskey. We're never trying to say sweet mash is better than sour mash. It's just a different way of drinking it. You know it lends a different flavor to. I mean, we're not making the same thing that everybody else is doing. So it's just one of the many things that makes our process unique.
Tiff Christie: 21:50
Do you think you can attribute your popularity to your knowledge?
D. Pat Heist: 21:55
Well, I think our size also has to do with so our plan. Initially, again, we started as one barrel a day operation and today we make 220 barrels a day. So the process of going from day one to where we are today was an extremely difficult process. I think a lot of it has to do with Shane and I are good business guys, you know, and as the time went on and in our early days, shane and I were the only two people that worked at Wilderness Trail and then, little by little, my brother came in, he became our head distiller and then we've probably got 60 people working for us now.
D. Pat Heist: 22:35
But, little by little, as we navigated through this bourbon boom that's been happening for the last 10 years, we just made decisions very quickly, very nimbly and very intelligently and things like picking up contract production when it seemed like the right thing to do. That was one of the things that allowed us to capitalize our two major expansions. Yeah, again, how in the world do you go from one barrel a day to 200 barrels a day? And you have it. I mean, we were at that capacity just after we released our first bottles. So it wasn't our brand popularity that allowed us to build the distillery. It was our intelligence of recognizing there is a big market for contract production right now, and if we have a bigger distillery we could take advantage of that. So we built a distillery with this much capacity. We can only afford to make this much.
D. Pat Heist: 23:32
So we sold all this, capitalized our growth and then little by little nowadays we're making most of our own whiskey and just doing a little bit of contract production and of course we have a parent company that's got you know a lot of different you know whiskey options in their portfolio that we're also able to support.
Tiff Christie: 23:53
The latest release you've brought out is your 10-year anniversary Wheated Bourbon.
D. Pat Heist: 23:59
Yes, ma'am.
Tiff Christie: 24:00
It's interesting to see the fact that it changes incredibly dramatically incredibly dramatically.
D. Pat Heist: 24:11
So each of those age statements, we do feel like it has kind of climbed up that maturity ladder and is getting more and more where we want it to be. Some things that have kind of changed since we started. So when we first released our weeded bourbon, every bottle was single barrel bottle in bond. So you would expect there to be some differences because every bottle came from a single barrel. This is I just yeah, I just bought one here in dc uh in the last week. This would have actually been made in february of 2014, so this is like one of the first 20 barrels we ever made. I found this bottle on the shelf here, but it says barrel number this. This was a single barrel bottling bond, so this is when we first came out, and then we went to small batch bottling bond, in addition to going from a pot still to a column still yeah. And then we got the older age statements as well.
Tiff Christie: 25:12
What is the future for Wilderness Trail?
D. Pat Heist: 25:16
Yeah. So you know, we just entered into a partnership with Campari. That's, you know, been very helpful for us. We've got a lot of extra, you know, salespeople. We've got a lot of extra brainpeople. We've got a lot of extra brain power that we're able to tap into. So we're looking forward to fostering that relationship, growing our business not only nationally here in the United States, but globally, and leveraging the global distribution powers that Campari has.
D. Pat Heist: 25:48
But you know, for us also, just getting into the older age state that's probably one of the most exciting things for me is, you know, we just hit 10 years, but I've only tasted like three barrels of our 10 year because we have so few of them.
D. Pat Heist: 26:01
So as time goes on and we get more into older expressions 12 yearyear, 15-year and just getting more used to what is our 10-year like on average across hundreds of barrels, really learning more about our process as well as, like I told you before, making more sense out of the microbiology of fermentation. I mean, if we collect the bacteria from a batch, from a fermentation today we're not really able to analyze those organisms until we start really getting mature whiskey out of those barrels years later. So that's been a very slow process. The good news is we're 20 years into that now. We've actually got 190,000 bacteria isolated and stored from distilleries all over the world. If you want to crack the flavor code on the most famous scotch Irish whiskey bourbon distilleries, it doesn't matter which one beers whatever. The secrets to those mysteries are in our freezers at our company.
Tiff Christie: 27:09
Does that mean that you will change the way you do things to achieve different flavor profiles on a constant basis?
D. Pat Heist: 27:20
Well, we certainly have that capability. I mean, we'll do anything that makes sense. It's got to make sense from a business standpoint and it's got to make sense from a flavor standpoint. So on one side of it, we're interested in this anyway, just from a quality control aspect, making sure that our product is good on a day-to-day basis is very consistent. But on the other side, from an innovation standpoint, we're interested in linking up these very specific notes that you get in bourbon. I mean, if the only way to get a cupcake icing note is to put lactobacillus brevis in there, then I need to figure out a way to do that and I don't want to just let that organism loose in my fermenter to. You know, I have to do that in a controlled manner, so we have to understand it first. So while these barrels are maturing, we're also able to do studies with those organisms. So we're looking at, you know, which ones grow the best which ones you know.
D. Pat Heist: 28:19
if we did get into a situation where we wanted to put them into the process, how would we go about doing that? And so we're kind of already looking and gaining some of that knowledge as well. Making sense out of how these organisms play into flavor, I believe, is going to pay off big time, and again, that's just a good example of some great innovation that people can look forward to with Wilderness Trail going forward.
Tiff Christie: 28:44
I think that's really interesting. The fact that you can actually affect the flavor with little organisms is quite amazing.
D. Pat Heist: 28:52
Absolutely yeah, and things that probably half the time are introduced accidentally is that all those organisms that we've been studying relative to flavor and how they affect fermentation. That's exactly what they're marketing is probiotics now. So people are eating these organisms for gut health and cats and dogs and horses and cattle, so we've probably got the world's largest repository of probiotic organisms.
Tiff Christie: 29:25
Then now we're kind of also looking at that.
D. Pat Heist: 29:27
You know these might have medical applications, so you know, next time you want to boost your health.
Tiff Christie: 29:33
Beginning of a third business. By the sounds.
D. Pat Heist: 29:35
Yeah, absolutely, we're always looking for that.
Tiff Christie: 29:39
Very quickly. Where is Wilderness Trail available? I'm assuming that it is in all 50 states.
D. Pat Heist: 29:46
We should be almost in all 50 states by now. I think we're still kind of. You know, I was in Hawaii recently and bought it, so I know that's a state we weren't in before. I just got a call the other day from, I think, south Carolina and we were in there. That was another one that we had kind of been slow about, and so we're getting into there. If we're not in all 50, we're just sewing it up.
Tiff Christie: 30:09
Yeah, and what about worldwide? Whereabouts are you outside of the States?
D. Pat Heist: 30:16
Worldwide. Well, interestingly, the British Bourbon Society did the first barrel pick of Wilderness Trail ever. So they're good buddies of ours and we keep track of them, and I think they've actually done a couple barrel picks since then. But you know, there are some retail outlets in England and I know we did some business in Germany I think France was starting to come on so little by little.
D. Pat Heist: 30:41
you should start seeing the product in Europe. We've just been talking about that recently, about making more of a global push I imagine asia would be an amazing market absolutely. Yep, that's, that's another one.
Tiff Christie: 30:54
All right, Pat. Well, people want more information on Wilderness Trail. They can, of course, go to the website, which is wilderness trail distillerycom, or connect with the brand via your socials.
D. Pat Heist: 31:08
Which are Facebook and Instagram. Yeah, I'm like the worst one. I think I have every picture that I have on Instagram my daughter's in, because I've got to get her to help me put it on there. But Wilderness Trail is on Instagram and Facebook for sure. Excellent.
Tiff Christie: 31:24
All right, pat, well, look, thank you for your time.
D. Pat Heist: 31:27
Thank you very much.