Show Notes
[00:00:33]
The Driving Eureka! Podcast – Episode 14
[00:01:27]
Segment 1 – The Tyranny of Convenience
[00:01:57]
Tim Wu Quote
[00:05:11]
Learn by Teaching
[00:07:49]
Love Learning
[00:09:10]
Be Transparent about What You Know and Don’t Know
[00:09:52]
The Driving Eureka! Book Segment
[00:10:08]
Cycles to Mastery foor Learning
[00:10:58]
The Mission of the Eureka! Ranch and It’s Learning Development
[00:11:47]
Enabling Everyone to Learn
[00:13:21]
Teaching Innovation Mastery to the Willing – How It Works
[00:16:23]
Expanding Cycles of Mastery to Universities and Colleges
[00:17:16]
Benjamin Blooms Influence on Cycles to Mastery
[00:19:42]
Universities Failing Students Rather are Failing Us
[00:22:04]
Systemizing Grading
[00:23:20]
Brain Brew Whisk(e)y Academy
[00:23:55]
Great Companies, Great Distilleries Go Deep
[00:25:03]
Going Deep on Wood for Whisk(e)y
[00:27:56]
Mission and Going Deep on Wood
[00:29:45]
Scarcity of Wood Gives Way to Limited Editions
[00:31:48]
The Classic Rock Serve
[00:34:30]
Whisk(e)y – Best Taste on Ice for 7 Minutes
Transcript
Tripp: [00:00:01] Welcome to the Driving Eureka! podcast. We share ideas and advice for helping you find filter and fast track big ideas.
Tripp: [00:00:14] Hi I’m Tripp battle advisor to global organizations on the Deming philosophy and host of the Deming Institute podcast.
Doug: [00:00:23] And I’m Doug Hall inventor speaker teacher and whisk(e)y maker. I’m also the founder of the Eureka! Ranch and author of the driving Eureka book.
Tripp: [00:00:33] This is episode number 14 of the Driving Eureka! podcast which correlates with Doug Hall’s newsletter from January 24th that you can link to at Doug Hall dot com.
Tripp: [00:00:48] Click on the menu newsletters and you can sign up for the newsletter and also read this week’s newsletter as well as the one that preceded it. This week’s feature article it’s time to resist the tyranny of convenience that driving Eureka book segment is a new way of learning cycles to mastery the Brain Brew Whisk(e)y Academy segment is great companies great distilleries go deep and then the classic rocks serve we’ll talk about two.
Tripp: [00:01:27] So it’s time to resist that tyranny of convenience you really rail against in your newsletter about we got it too good.
Doug: [00:01:40] So I was going through some papers cleaning up after the end of the year and I found an article titled The Tyranny of convenience by Tim Wu in the New York Times international edition and the closing paragraph said it well. Tim wrote.
Doug: [00:01:57] So let’s reflect on the tyranny of convenience. Cry more often to resist it stupefying power and see what happens. We must never forget the joy of doing something slow and something difficult. The satisfaction of not doing what is easiest. The constellation of inconvenient choices may be all that stands between us and the life of total efficient conformity. I mean you talk about kind of flushing it here.
Doug: [00:02:28] I mean it’s just saying you know our world is just becoming easy. Whether it’s the digital world I can read the snippet. I don’t have to read the book artificial intelligence or I needed to learn how to do so rather than actually learn how to use the saw.
Doug: [00:02:42] I’m going to watch the YouTube video that shows me how to make this one little cut in and I’m going to be you know nanometres deep with no depth of understanding on things. And he really takes a hard position. And I would agree with him that we don’t spend the time to really go deep in things. We take the convenient less travel path. We don’t really force ourselves to really learn something. And so what we’re disengaged and we’re unexcited and we’re bored because we you know if we don’t know how to do it we don’t start.
Tripp: [00:03:19] It’s a way you. So what in essence he’s seen and I assume then Doug that you take this narrative that he basically is espousing here because we have it so convenient we aren’t going deep that we’re going the path of least resistance. On the other hand you know when I sit there and I start to read what he’s saying is yeah. But we’ve worked awfully hard to get here.
Tripp: [00:03:45] So you know nowadays and it’s funny I would be curious of your read on it but you know I sit in these webinars sometimes with different companies there’s one called Teachable which is a website where you can do you know teach something that you know about. But when I listen to the conversations going on all of these people there are making all types of money teaching something or basically saying I don’t really know that much about it but I’m going to learn it as I teach it and I don’t know if that’s necessarily what what it’s railing against. But you know we have a whole series of things that are being constructed now. And on the Internet associated with well I don’t really have that much depth with it but I’m going to get some depth with it.
Tripp: [00:04:40] Is that a bad course then or. I mean yeah part of me says Shouldn’t you be in it shouldn’t you know something before you start to teach something as opposed to learning how to do it. But I experience both ways. So in other words I’ve started into something with some knowledge certainly more than the person that you know is attracted to it or you know that I’m consulting with but I me but I’m going to learn as I go to. So how would you differentiate.
Doug: [00:05:11] Yeah yeah. SC I see my thought is yes you can learn by teaching. I mean you know teaching others is a great way for you to learn it and we’ll talk about that coming up in the next segment on from from the book about how to learn in our cycles to mastery approach.
Doug: [00:05:29] And so I think that definitely is a thing but the fundamental issue is is you’ve got to have depth of knowledge. I mean to really make a difference you’ve really got to get some depth of knowledge means you’ve got to make some commitments. And I’m not saying you can do everything you can you keep convenience in certain areas in real life where you just basically skip over the service but somewhere in your life have at least one thing during 2019 where you’re going to go deep well you’re going to really struggle you’re going to try and fail and do it again and do it again and learn and really learn something really learn something become immersed in it. And as part of that process then start to teach others. Yes. If that’s if that’s your desire but if we don’t commit ourselves to something then we’re just like androids. I mean we’re just like robots going around you know as he says a life of total efficient conformity. I mean my God how boring is that. You know we’ve got to take ourselves and say I’m going to commit to something I’m going to learn this thing I’m going to M.S. I and that’s why you know we teach a fundamentals course in innovation during and then we have mastery and mastery is mastery. People like what can I do it quick. No it’s mastery Damn it. Did you see the name. You know where you really have to put some time in and you gotta get some practice and you got to apply it and you’ve got to do it. But this world of you know simple and fast things is not doing it now and I’m just gonna preemptively say it.
Doug: [00:07:07] Now you might say well jeez yeah you’re whisk(e)y you’re making your whisk(e)y fast instead of old. Well yeah but there’s no value add to slow.
Doug: [00:07:14] Ok. I mean it is what it is the mastery here is the process of putting drone together you’ve got to do a whole lot of permutations and you guys spent some time on it. And we’ve got to win our case we have 24 variables we have to mess with. Ya got to put some time in. You got to pick something that you’re going to be great at.
Tripp: [00:07:33] And so and so how do you know whether you’ve achieved that or not.
Doug: [00:07:38] It doesn’t matter it’s never ending.
Tripp: [00:07:44] Oh yeah I guess I get that but.
Doug: [00:07:45] There is no achievement I. You keep doing it.
Doug: [00:07:49] Well well let’s let’s do this for the love of learning and it’s for the love of mastery and learning a new thing. I mean Margaret England a wonderful artist she’s in her 80s. She makes incredible art. And when I see her in Prince Edward Island. My question to you what’s new is she’s like Well I’m trying this new thing now and she’s trying something new that’s not I mean that’s being alive. That’s not a life of total efficient conformity. It’s never ending.
Tripp: [00:08:16] No I get I get the fact it’s never ending. What I’m saying is is this this thought process that seems to be alive today of fake it until you make it type of a mentality I think can be very destructive. So what my question is along the line of kind of a continuum if if I don’t know and I am faking it until I make it which I think is not totally a could go as well. Is there a definitive point where you could say I’ve got enough mastery now that I can talk about this. Well how might when I say.
Doug: [00:09:01] I’m fine with it no matter where you are as long as you’re transparent about it.
Tripp: [00:09:05] Yeah. That therein lies part of the problem I think a lot of the companies.
Doug: [00:09:10] Just like whisk(e)y. I mean we tell people how we make it with time compression as long as you’re transparent I’m fine with anything. Yeah.
Doug: [00:09:16] It’s when you purport and put on airs that that I’ve got a frustration with it so I can learn from somebody who’s just learning Hey helped me learn this. I’m cool with that and I’m cool with working with Walter Werner a true master at systems thinking and learning from him. You know. Either way I’m good I’m good. Just so long as you’re transparent to me that’s the key.
Tripp: [00:09:37] Okay. And I think that that would have be a good filter for for some of the people that are out there.
Tripp: [00:09:52] It’s time now for the Driving Eureka! book segment with author and investor Doug Hall.
Tripp: [00:10:03] Well let’s let’s move to our Driving Eureka! book segment.
Tripp: [00:10:08] A new way of learning cycles to mastery and I’m really interested in this because I’m also I’m interested in how you went about putting together because you don’t steal your thunder away from here but you know especially as you got into some of the RFD and putting together your cycles to mastery training program he go through the six things brought up multiple questions so I’m going to let you speak on it for. So I’m probably going to have lots of questions associated with that about how it was developed and and how does this fit.
Tripp: [00:10:40] Yeah. Well let’s talk because we in our last newsletter you you talked about you know narrative and aim and those things. How did this fit the narrative first of all of the what the Ranch was doing and then kind of how it formed from there might be a good place to to take people.
Doug: [00:10:58] So our mission at the Ranch is to change the world. Through systems that enable innovation by everyone everywhere every day. And as we started to take our courses out our innovation in courses to campus and executive training what we found is that adults had different perspectives. Some innovation is one of those things where you make a decision in life I can do it or I can’t do it and faculty on campuses feel like they can do it or they can’t do it. It’s the same thing. And so as we started to expand we ran into all kinds of problems all kinds of issues and we needed to accomplish our mission we need to find a way to enable everybody to learn how to innovate with increased speed decreased risk.
Doug: [00:11:47] How could we help everybody do it. And the existing system of teaching as they call it is sage on stage preaching people doing some things and then tests to find the smart ones and the dumb ones. You know my job was not to find the smart ones and the dumb ones mice. My plan was to enable everybody to be able to do it to enable everybody to do it.
Doug: [00:12:09] And so it was Jake Ward of the University of Maine. He was he was at a session we were doing we’re helping out the College Board on some stuff and he said Doug I think we’re gonna have to invent a whole new way of teaching. I said Well I don’t know anything about teaching. He says so yeah. But I don’t know that anybody else does. You’ve got a system so use your system to invent it.
Doug: [00:12:30] And that’s one of those things where you go dammit I wish he had said that you know. And so you know to our point of going deep you know we looked at this and we said you know inventing a new way of teaching people like I need this like a hole in the head right. Where do you begin.
Doug: [00:12:49] And we had a method for doing it. And so I said I think this is important. And so literally it took us two years to start to put this thing together and we’re still working on it but it took two years really to get to a first prototype that was anything and we read the literature we ran experiments.
Doug: [00:13:05] I mean our goal was how come we’ve been able to everybody I don’t care who you are you can innovate and we took the work of Benjamin Bloom on the two sigma problem formative assessment Deming PDSA cycle quality control charting flip classroom a whole bunch of different parts.
Doug: [00:13:21] We put together and we created this system called cycles to mastery and we guarantee that if you were willing you can achieve mastery. And and it’s a collection of steps. The first is a digital class. We broke the class the innovation chain curriculum into skills and sub skills just like they have with advanced placement courses and on campus each week you do a skill that’s a skill every week. And there’s 48 skills in the total curriculum over a number of courses do a digital class with seven minute videos that cover each one for each sub skill. You watch those. You take a no stress quiz at the end of it which is formative assessment gives us a sense if they’re getting it or not then they do a lab class of some replications of applying it and then an application class where we take it into a broader thing and we take not just that skill but the things you’d learn the week before and the week before and we bring it all together. So you see how it fits into the whole and then there’ll be a reflection class that you write where you write a reflection on what you learned and why it matters which helps solidify learning literature shows.
Doug: [00:14:33] And then there will be experience classes. So the classic class on campus is Digital Lab application and reflection and you’ve put in assignments and the faculty gives you feedback and you can resubmit resubmit resubmit until you get it right. Because our goal is not to test you to say you got it or you didn’t but to keep challenging you until you meet you master that at 11:00 because every element we teach is important. And then there’ll be segments if it’s a class you might have eight weeks of skills and then you might have a four week experience where we give you a real world challenge to have you now put it together so you know You’ve learned it in digital you’ve done it in lab. You’ve done it in application you’ve written a reflection. Now you start to do it. I mean you got five times through this skill you really really really really learned this stuff. You really learn it. And if you get it wrong you’re given feedback and the job of the faculty is to help you get it. That’s what we’re here for is to help you get it.
[00:15:35] And I as I said in the newsletter and I wrote in the Driving Eureka! book In retrospect the decision to invest the time energy and money to invent a new system of teaching is probably the most important decision we have made. It’s enabled us to have a scalable system for truly Democratizing Innovation across entire companies countries and cultures.
Doug: [00:15:54] That’s going deep man. That’s going deep. We had to build the tool to teach the stuff we need wanted to teach that’s going deep so.
Tripp: [00:16:05] So the innovation engineering system is using this methodology is just out of curiosity is the University of Maine are they kind of build their classes other than innovation engineering around this. What you’ve learned or what’s the what’s that what’s the outreach of this.
Doug: [00:16:23] So so we’ve got it on campus. We’ve got about a dozen schools we’re about to expand to 100 or 200 more this year.
[00:16:29] And you know we help schools because we give all kinds of scholarships to make it so that they can afford to do it make it really cost efficient for students to do it.
Doug: [00:16:39] It’s it’s subsidized heavily. And so we’re using it for innovation it during we’ve had conversations with people about using this as a method of teaching other courses. And we’ve got discussions going on with some people and some companies are starting to use it but we’re so focused against our mission which is we’re not in the education systems business selling that that we’re using it for our means.
Doug: [00:17:04] And I mean one day we’ll probably do some other stuff but right now we’re very focused on changing the world buy through systems that enable innovation by everyone everywhere every day and this is a key tool to doing it.
Tripp: [00:17:16] Okay. And so I just came here. I’m am familiar with some of these things but you list six six things here that are part of it of the cycle the mastery work you mentioned the work of Benjamin Bloom on the sick the two sigma problem which I mean ask about in the second. The formative assessment Deming PDSA cycles which we’ve talked about before quality control charting flipped classroom and competency based learning let’s just pick a couple of these the one I’m probably most curious because I’m not familiar with the work as Benjamin Bloom and to signal problem what are we referencing there.
Doug: [00:17:51] So Benjamin Bloom famously wrote a thing called the Bloom taxonomy and it’s very well known in academic circles. But he also did a thing called the 2 Sigma Problem which was a way to figure out a way to help students who couldn’t get it get it.
Doug: [00:18:08] And he ran experiments with tutoring where a student didn’t get it was given feedback and to do it again and again and again. And he found that he could get 80 percent of the students to the level of the top 20 percent normally. So a mega improvement people could learn and when I read the article what it sounded to me like was a plan to study X cycle and it really impressed me. The problem with the bloom’s approach towards tutoring is it was extremely expensive to have one on one tutoring and so I said What if I use that as a foundation and using the digital tools in our way to help us get scale. And since then we know we’ve built all kinds of things that have helped make it so it’s much more efficient.
Doug: [00:19:02] But the foundation of what we’re doing is Bloom’s you know he had a fancy name for an expert tutoring or interactive tutoring or there was some name that he had with which I can’t remember at the time but. But that’s the basis which is. I mean to me it’s a PSA cycle plan to study act do it again do it again do it again. You bastard.
Tripp: [00:19:25] Yeah. That really flies in the face of the way our education system is set up today. So because it’s it’s kind of the schedule is rigid but the quality is flexible. So. And I get that and I don’t take credit for that.
Tripp: [00:19:42] That was David Langford quote from one of my Deming podcasts. But you know he said then the reverse needs to be true that the quality is is fixed and the schedule needs to be flexible meaning and I and do you know the analogy I use Doug on this is we got kids now you know grow into engineering schools and law schools and you know schools to be doctors and things of that sort. And then they flunk out of a class. It could be calculus that might be something like that and then they’re out that’s it. You know you can take it again and you know it’s kind of like you know keep beating yourself on you know in the head with a hammer until you can because it nothing’s changed in the system. You’re still educating the same way and this person or group of people because I know for instance at Purdue you know like only this guy I ran into a producer that only 28 percent really passed the calculus class and that’s their way of weeding them out. I’m sitting here. Do we have. We have a huge shortage of engineers do we really want to not allow our baby to go from you know crawl to walk.
Doug: [00:20:55] That drives me crazy that you know faculty on campus will will use math. Oftentimes they will use math to weed people out and I’m like isn’t your job to teach all these people you know. These are the aim of the system helps them to find the smart ones and the dumb ones. Yeah it takes. I don’t need you as a teacher I you just give me a test and figure that out if you want.
Doug: [00:21:18] Now your job is to enable these people to learn it. And in fact that’s what students say about eyes as they say you’re here to help us. That’s very different than most classes where they’re here to judge us.
Tripp: [00:21:32] Now I agree and that’s one thing I found refreshing about taking the innovation engineering classes is. Yeah. No you don’t. It’s not easy to pass when you go through your your things. But you know you keep you keep getting feedback from you know teacher Brad Hall and he sits over there in the back of the classroom and he’s evaluating you know and I finally figured out that he was kind of you know the wizard behind the you know the curtains.
Doug: [00:22:04] He was back there a lot of the grading and. And the thing is this so he has the rest of that. Yeah. He’s not just his opinion. He has grading standards. Oh yeah. You know what is right what is wrong and feedback. In other words we’ve systematized the grading such that you have a student take it there you take it down at the University of Alabama. You take it up in Oregon wherever you take the class you’re graded by the same standard or as you know. That’s a remarkable concept the idea of standardization of grading in college courses is something that is almost it’s like nonexistent right.
Tripp: [00:22:42] Well it also then provides feedback to what you’re missing in your in your teaching and making that better. But it’s just the whole the whole process is very interesting to me as far as I’ve not experienced anything like that until I went to the innovation engineering classes and that was it was an interesting experience but.
Doug: [00:23:02] But you can learn it. Yeah yeah yeah. No you can’t do this. I mean come on. Yeah.
Tripp: [00:23:07] If I can do this anybody can who is creating ideas. Give me a break.
Doug: [00:23:12] No there’s no excuses for not learning stuff. There’s no excuses now.
Tripp: [00:23:16] And this is an opportunity. Go deep on innovation.
Tripp: [00:23:20] All right. Well what’s move to our Brain Brew Whisk(e)y Academy. This is the Brain Brew Whisk(e)y Academy podcast where we will take you behind the scenes so you can see what it takes to build a whisk(e)y distillery business Eureka! Ranch team led by Doug Hall are creating a craft whisk(e)y Company with patented technology like has never been done before
Tripp: [00:23:55] The topic here. Great companies great distilleries go deep and you say they have a great company you need to go deep on something will you. This is kind of your theme that you’ve talked about here overall and your January 24th newsletter you’ve sparked you’ve spoken about going dead people the need for people to go deeper say Hi how is this playing out in this distillery.
Doug: [00:24:22] Well it’s not dissimilar to last weeks when we when we talked about mission. You know you’ve got that mission now let’s do the work you know get in on something and in the case of you know a whisk(e)y distillery that’s what’s gonna make you meaning fleet.
Doug: [00:24:37] Ok. So you’ve got this mission but what’s gonna be your defining point difference What are you going to really do this different. And in our case what we came to when we thought about enabling people with different whisk(e)y is we thought OK this different things we could do.
Doug: [00:24:50] We could distill it differently. We could use different grains. We could do some grains. We could do really weird grains and buckwheat and things that aren’t normally done or heritage grains or organic grains and we could do those.
Doug: [00:25:03] But when we looked at it you know 70 percent of the flavor of a whisk(e)y comes from the wood it is the wood in the interaction of the ligaments in the wood with the spirit that creates the thing that we know is a whisk(e)y the color and the flavor and so we decided that we were gonna go deep on wood. We were going to know wood like nobody in the world knows what now part of this came from my background.
Doug: [00:25:30] I’d spent over over 20 years working with Edrington that makes the Macallan who are masters of wood with regards to and particularly European Sherry oak.
Doug: [00:25:39] Which is why Macallan has this incredible luxury you know just like nothing else. It’s also the most expensive whisk(e)y in the world because of that. And so I I had understood the value of wood from that. And so we just went into wood.
Doug: [00:25:53] And so we built our systems so that we could test as quick and fast as possible so whether it’s using old oak new oak Japanese oak European oak Canadian oak whether it’s using maple or cherry or chestnut or walnut generally hardwoods is what you use whether it’s toasting it in different ways from a light toast to a char.
Doug: [00:26:23] And I said we just need know we’d better day by US and the world needs wood and we could do it very rapidly with time compression so we ran over 2000 experiments ran over 500 consumer taste tests to deepen our learning.
Doug: [00:26:34] So I mean that’s called going deep. You know we went all in on the wonder of wood. And so I mean we get it we get it. We decided to not just still but to buy raw spirit.
Doug: [00:26:48] I mean we could distill but you know I just looked at the math I saw the value add that you make if I make it. You know other than which grain you use which is maybe 25 percent of it maybe five percent of it is do you run you’re still cool. I mean it’s like I said before it’s not making beer.
Doug: [00:27:03] It’s doing spirits where it’s the whisk(e)y maker who puts the barrels together that really creates the flavors that we know as whisk(e)y.
Doug: [00:27:11] And so you know that’s what we did is we went deep on wood and wood is the way and the different treatments of wood whether it’s old world a new world. That’s our means to deliver on customizing your whisk(e)y because you basically become a wood master when you do our stuff because you can be a distiller and you can be a fancy distiller but that’s not going to have an impact on what you get in the glass. I understand people love distilling and I’m cool with that if that’s your thing. Rock on for us.
Doug: [00:27:44] We can’t get the differences from the distilling that we can get with wood to give people really different tasting bourbon. Giving people really different tastings rise or Barclays or wheats or whatever it is that we might be doing.
Doug: [00:27:56] I mean that’s where and for our mission would was the thing that we went deep on and we’ve gone deep and and I’ll be honest with you we may have gone even further we needed to go because we’ve got compulsive about it and I had to pull the team out and just say ship ship ship it out because we are weak we are addicted to knowing more about that would I mean we the work we do inspecting wood and checking wood and evaluating it is compulsive because our process goes so fast we have to having practical quality so we are I mean no one is this fanatical about wood as as as we are because wood is where the flavor comes from.
Tripp: [00:28:43] So Doug a question that comes up when I hear you say that is the you know there’s only so much wood. Right. I mean you have to find a wood that there is an abundance of to be able to make you know consistent whisk(e)y you know over a period of time in other words you if it’s a rare wood that’s great you’re going to get a taste but you may only have enough to make 50 cases or something like that is that.
Doug: [00:29:13] Yeah well it’s different it’s different things if you’re doing it. I mean in the whisk(e)y business one of the things that’s great is limited editions.
Doug: [00:29:21] And so there is a virtue when I get some very special wood that a person has or we find you know like we’ve got some 200 year old wood in all of our products or from an old barn that we that had fallen down and we reclaimed the wood clean the outside and cut it up and charred it.
Doug: [00:29:40] And so we can give an amazing taste with that. And but they can be limited editions.
Tripp: [00:29:45] You know it’s a real scarcity.
Doug: [00:29:48] There’s there’s plenty. And it doesn’t take much wood to do a bottle of whisky. It’s just it’s just not a lot of wood. So there’s no real you know it’s not like cutting down trees to make barrels. I mean this is it’s pretty easy in fact we can use barrels we can cut barrels up and do it. I mean we would do that with the with our no below product is we take European share oak and we cut the barrels out and use that.
Tripp: [00:30:11] Ok. But but you said that what was the percentage you said 70 percent of the flavor comes from.
Doug: [00:30:18] 70 percent. Yeah that’s pretty much what the experts will tell you is 70 percent is the is the wood and and the skill of the whisky maker putting the barrels together.
Doug: [00:30:28] And if we had barrels at the top of the warehouse versus the bottom of the warehouse they’re going to age differently and they’ll have it in the center of the building versus the edges of the building.
Doug: [00:30:36] And so the skill to put that together in that would that 70 percent probably 20 25 percent is the grain choice wheat tastes different than Rye which tastes different than corn which tastes different than bourbon which tastes different than barley and probably 5 percent is the distiller. Now that’s assuming that that’s still it does their job. If they if they do it badly that’s that ruins everything but if you make a dirty spirit that isn’t very good then that’s a different issue. But assuming that you’re competent at what you’re doing the value add in whisky unlike beer it’s not the distiller it is the whisky maker who manages the barrels and puts together the whiskeys and you mentioned this before but basically you’re whisk(e)y maker then uses the innovation engineering system to go through the cycles of learning and mastery associated with your whiskeys.
Doug: [00:31:33] Yeah right. Yeah. Which is no different than a chef making something and then trying four or five different versions on it to see which one customers like the best. We just happened to do the same thing and we do with quantitative research. So it’s the same thing. It’s a never ending learning how can I make the product better.
Tripp: [00:31:48] Okay. Good. All right well let’s talk about the classic rock’s serve. You threw a little bit of a curveball at me here. I’m usually looking for the next drink. This is not really about that per say it’s it’s about whisky and putting ice and water in it.
Doug: [00:32:09] Yeah. So you know only about 20 percent of people drink whisky drink it neat. Despite all the noise on it they make a lot of noise 80 percent. They add ice water or mixers with it. So most whisky over 80 percent of whisky is consumed with something in it. I happen to like it with ice. And so this week while we’re talking about going deep and talking about wood I said this was the week when we had to not do anything to get in the way of the whisky. Now that said I’d still put some ice in Philip Glass about half full put some use our noble oak product that I’ve been talking about I know below bourbon you know double golden San Francisco ninety five score ultimate challenge.
Doug: [00:32:50] And and just you know put some ice and stir it you know a dozen times or so and just sip and savor that thing and you’re gonna get you’ve got the new American oak the bourbon than the European Sherry oak. So it’s this kind of wonderful depth. So sometimes bourbons can be kind of shrill they can be kind of one dimensional and very corny as in the flavor corn here you’re gonna get just a richness and a character.
Doug: [00:33:21] Some people have said to me it’s got I’m stereotyping which is not fair because their products are not but bourbons oftentimes are kind of one dimensional scotches are oftentimes richer in flavor. But the scotches can also be somewhat dirtier. There can be some smoke and from the peat and there can be also the barley can be a bit gnarly as we say. And at the same time the you know it’ll be a lot cleaner with the bourbon and so what we’re trying to do is we do clean but rich so a way to think of this is by mixing these two Woods. We’re getting a fusion of the cleanness of a bourbon but with a richness without the nastiness of a Scotch it’s not really because it is still a bourbon but the double wood here really puts a depth of character in the sherry oak wood which you know those barrels cost like 50 times more than the regular bourbon barrels do X bourbon barrels.
Tripp: [00:34:30] Okay. And what was that like. I think that one of the previous Brain Brew Whisk(e)y Academy segments you talked about the pool you put the ice in for seven minutes and that’s kind of the optimal time. I don’t know if you were just messing with me or if that was a real thing.
Doug: [00:34:50] Yeah. No. No. So. So what happened is is we we put I I like it with ice and it’s craft distilleries so craft people make choices and you make what you love and then you take it to the world. That’s that’s how we do it. We do the testing to optimize but if we don’t like it if we don’t put it into a test it’s because of the way it is we’re doing it.
Doug: [00:35:12] And so what we ended up with is we added up a little over 20 percent more square inches of wood per bottle so if you look at a barrel so many square inches of wood divided by the number of bottles of spirit are inside. And we took it up a little bit and then we adjusted the compression that we did and we made it such that oftentimes with with whiskeys in particular bourbon sometimes and scotches some of them will they’ll fall apart. If you add ice to it the flavor drops off real quick just right off the cliff. And we wanted it to have with ice. And so we made it with extra wood and so the result is just you taste it and it’s good but it gets better over about seven minutes and then it starts down the other side. And so the second sip is better than the first and the third will be better than the second it’s general it’s a little bar trick that we do with people we say don’t try it. Now wait a little bit. I tried again and it actually gets better with ice and that’s that’s designed into the product that’s there for a reason. We did that on purpose huh.
Tripp: [00:36:23] That’s interesting. Well this this episode is going is prior to your distillery opening this weekend. So the next time we talk in your newsletter will you’ll be able to talk to the opening of your distillery this weekend is there anything you want to say about the opening night.
Doug: [00:36:46] Actually I’d rather not talk about that OK because I may or may not be officially opening we may be running an R&D experiment. Oh maybe a quiet opening.
Tripp: [00:36:58] Ok. I got you I got you remember one of our segments was about patience. All right. OK. All right. Well go deep hope everybody takes that to heart.
Tripp: [00:37:11] I mean it’s OK to have convenience but if you’re going to use the convenience and it frees you up what’s it gonna free you up to then go do you know you ever.
Doug: [00:37:21] You know all these people spend this time to free you up so they freed you up. Now what are you going to do with it. Because of that. What you gonna do with your life. Mm hmm. Get up get out get going. That’s what I’m telling you to do.
Tripp: [00:37:31] All right. Very good. Well thank you Doug. Look forward to your next newsletter. Excellent
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