How To Find the Spirit of Cincy

Add a splash of bourbon, a hint of hops, and a generous pour of local pride, and you’ve got the perfect backdrop for today’s episode.

Sponsored by Visit Cincy, we’re diving into the drinks, history, and experiences that make Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky a true destination for cocktail lovers.

First up we have Maija Zummo, the Senior Communications Manager for Domestic and international Communications for the Cincy Region and of course a proud Cincinnati native. 

Maija is a former journalist who now channels her storytelling skills into showcasing the city she loves. Her mission is to educate others about this hidden gem of a destination and invite them to discover the unique charm of the Cincy Region. 

Next up we have Bill Whitlow, the Brand Ambassador of Wenzel Distillery. Bill started behind the bar at the age of 16. After a varied career, including winning the Woodford Manhattan Experience twice and the best Mint Julep in Kentucky for 2019 and 2022, he helped open the Wenzel Distillery in Covington. 

Wenzel Distillery is a boutique personal blending experience and has expanded into a fully operational distillery.  Wenzel has won Best Finished Bourbon in the World, Best Under 12 Year Limited Release, and other Gold and Silver Medals.

I am so excited to introduce them and the whole Cincy Region — where North meets South and Ohio meets Kentucky. Just a bridge apart, Cincinnati’s German heritage and urban energy connect with Northern Kentucky’s Southern charm.

While you are there you can sip bourbon, sample craft beer, and savor award-winning cuisine. There’s tons of vibrant street art, historic landmarks, and stunning architecture to explore — all along a riverfront that’s buzzing with festivals year-round.

You can plan your trip at visitcincy.com.

Watch it on YouTube

Cocktail of the Week:

Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Maija & Bill. Just remember that I own the copyright in and to all content in and transcripts of Lush Life podcast, with all rights reserved, as well as my right of publicity. So if you want to use any of this, please email me!

This transcript is sponsored by:

Susan: It’s really great to have you here. Thank you for being on the show.

Maija: Thank you so much, Susan. I’m so excited to be talking to you today.

Susan: Now I’ve already given you a little introduction beforehand so people know who you are, but why don’t you just reintroduce yourself, tell everyone who you are, what you do, and let’s get into Cincinnati.

Maija: Fantastic. Okay, so I am Maija Zummo and I have the longest job title ever. I am the Senior Communications Manager for Domestic and international Communications for the Cincy Region.

Susan: Tell people what Cincy is.

Maija: Yes, so Cincy is a fun abbreviation for Cincinnati. Cincinnati is a city in Ohio that has a lot of ends in a lot of C’s in the spelling. People never know how to spell it, so locals call it Cincy. Kind of like Philadelphia’s Philly.

When we talk about the Cincy region from a tourism perspective, we’re referring to both Cincinnati, Ohio and Northern Kentucky. So when you live here, it’s a two for one kind of state. We’ve got Kentucky and Ohio separated by a few bridges, and it’s like one big city together.

Susan: Yes, and luckily enough, I’ve at least driven through and I’ve been to Northern Kentucky and it is linked by one really fantastic, a lot of bridges as you said, but one really fantastic bridge.

Maija: The stunning Roebling Suspension Bridge, which is a bright blue suspension bridge that connects Covington, Kentucky with Cincinnati, Ohio. If you’ve ever seen a photo, it might look familiar cause it was the prototype for the Brooklyn Bridge and it was actually the longest bridge in the world when it opened in 1867.

Susan: Oh, that part I didn’t know. That is so cool. It does look like a mini Brooklyn Bridge.

Maija: And it’s bright blue. You can see it in movies sometimes, like the Tom Cruise movie, Rain Man. It’s in there.

Susan: No way. Now, tell us a little mini history of Cincinnati, and then maybe morph that into its relationship with drinking, since we’re here to talk about bourbon blending and a whole lot of other things.

Maija: Yes. Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky are drinking cities, so we’re in the right place to have that conversation. Cincinnati in the 1800’s was a huge destination for German immigrants. So in the 1830s and 1840s about 30% of our population was German immigrants. Our first mayor was German and along with German immigrants, they brought a couple of things.

One of them was sausage pork, history and also brewing. Cincinnati was the brewing capital of the world in the 1800’s, residents drank more than 50 gallons of beer a year, which was 2.5 times the national average at that time. So men, women, children, everyone was drinking German brewed beer in Cincinnati.

We have a really popular neighborhood today where all of our hip restaurants and bars are called Over the Rhine, and as you can intuit, it is so named for the German population that lived there. Historically, Cincinnati had a canal running down the middle of it. It was part of the Miami and Erie Canal. Goods were traded down it.

The way the city was set up, there was a downtown and then a German settlement over that canal. So people always joked they were going over the Rhine River into the German area where all the beer gardens were, where there were German language newspapers where we had all the sausage makers and butchers.

So huge, huge German heritage and beer brewing heritage. On the Northern Kentucky side, we are the start of Kentucky. So today the start of the Kentucky Bourbon Trail. And so, on that side, you’ve got a lot of historic distilleries.

Susan: All right, well, before we get to bourbon, let’s just stick with beer for a sec. When you say it was the beer capital of the country, I know you said how much people drank, which is incredible! How many breweries were there, a billion breweries as well, or was this one brewery cranking out tons of beer?

Maija: So we had 30 different breweries in Cincinnati. Today, comparatively we have more than 70, so it is still a huge part of our culture.

Susan: That’s crazy. You have more than 70 now.

Maija: Yes, 70 local breweries.

Susan: Are any of them one of the original ones?

Maija: Prohibition really decimated the brewing industry here, but there is a brewing legacy. Christian Moerlein was one of the German immigrants, Bavarian immigrants who settled here and opened a really popular brewery. Today someone has that label, they’ve resurrected it. You can go to the Moerlein Lager house on the Ohio River today and celebrate some of that legacy.

The Christian Moerlein bottling plant and Over the Rhine is actually now home to a modern brewery called Rhinegeist, ghost of the Rhine, and they play on that historic legacy as well. One of the really cool things is although we don’t have those breweries anymore, we have the skeletons of those breweries.

So because this was the 1800’s, there was no refrigeration. The Germans brought over lager beer. So lager beer needs to be fermented at a very specific temperature, 50 degrees Fahrenheit. So what happened was these brewers would dig tunnels below the city streets. That’s where there are four stories below ground.

That’s where they would do their lagering. We call them lagering cellars. Prohibition came, they got filled in. Some were kept as speakeasies, but the city basically forgot about them. There’s no map of them. So what’s happening in that historic Over the Rhine neighborhood that I talked about, people are renovating these beautiful Italianate buildings and they’ll be digging and doing this work and something will fall through the floor and they’ll look down and there’s a tunnel.

The city is quite literally built on beer in Over the Rhine, in downtown because there’s these hidden brewing tunnels all underneath. So today what they’ve done is they’ve reopened them. So you can go on guided tours with a tour guide. They tell you about the German history, they tell you about the brewing heritage.

You go down some really steep stairs into some scary spaces. But they also are working the Brewing Heritage Trail, a local nonprofit that works to celebrate that brewing history. They are currently at work on an American Museum of Brewing History as well.

Susan: Gosh, so much. It’s funny when you were talking about prohibition, of course, because usually I write about spirits. I always think of it as spirits. But of course there wasn’t any beer. I know this is obvious, but there wasn’t any beer either and I never think of that.

Maija: Some of them tried to convert to soft drink facilities. It wasn’t the same. And really, Cincinnati also had a big gangster/mobster past with Prohibition. We had one a guy named George Remus who was a pharmacist, a distiller, a lawyer. He was a jack of all trades and he was really big in writing medicinal labels and still keeping alcohol moving through Cincinnati  along the Ohio River, which would connect out to New Orleans and everything like that through the Mississippi. We have a lot of illicit, prohibition past and speakeasy past as well.

Susan: I love that idea. Oh, I’ve got to go in and see my doctor and get my little you know what.

Maija: Two fingers of bourbon every three hours for whatever’s ailing you.

Susan: Right. I gotta see a man about a dog. You said a little bit about gangster stuff and since I’ve been to northern Kentucky, I remember taking a gangster tour, prohibition tour.

Maija: Isn’t that fascinating?

Susan: It was amazing. I loved Covington. I thought it was really fun. We only spent one night there, but I learned so much about it. So tell me about the city’s relationship with Over the Rhine, should I say, across the way with Covington and how it’s links to Cincinnati as well.

Maija: I’m going to tell you something really dorky that I really love. On the beer tunnel tours that you go on, as I mentioned before, the Germans brought over pork processing. We were  a huge pork processing facility in the 1800’s. Our nickname is still Porkopolis which is an unfortunate nickname.

Susan: Especially for vegetarians.

Maija: Yes, as you can imagine, the waterways of Cincinnati were disgusting. They were full of pig and all of that stuff. So one of the reasons we drank so much beer and alcohol was because they were using aquifers from the Ohio River, alluvial aquifers, to make beer and that was the only safe thing you could be drinking.

So when you go on one of the underground tunnel tours, you can actually see one of the wells that they used to reach the aquifer for the water. And this is so cool to me.  New Riff Distilling in Newport, Kentucky is one of our new modern distilleries. They celebrated a decade this past year.

They dug underneath the parking lot where they were building the facility, and they found that there was an aquifer right underneath them. It’s the same aquifer that people were using in the 1800’s to brew beer that this new distillery is using today to make their bourbon.

So it’s a literal connection between the two sides and that is our distilling and brewing history. Not only did we have distilleries back then, and again, George Remus was the big gangster and he was the inspiration for Jay Gatsby and the Great Gatsby, and parts of Northern Kentucky and Newport, Kentucky specifically was the original Las Vegas. So this was the den of inequity. This is where the Flamingo got its start.

So tons of casinos. Brothels, all sorts of bad stuff. It’s changed much today. There’s a family friendly aquarium now on the riverfront, not a brothel. But there’s still a lot of interesting, interesting history there.

Susan: Yes, I remember. Al Capone was down there as well.

Maija: Yes. Frank Sinatra, Al Capone, it was the hotbed.

Susan: No one ever thinks that befor  Las Vegas. That’s what blew my mind. I was like, I cannot believe it. ’cause it’s quite a small town as well.

Maija: Yes. They talk about how they actually have a Newport High School reunion out in Las Vegas because there’s so many residents that left from Newport, Kentucky to go move out to Vegas.

Susan: Oh my God. That is so funny. Now, were they also brewing bourbon at that time that they were making beer too, or really beer just took over.

Maija: Beer was really the main thing that Cincinnati was known for. Just even like I said, beer capital of the world that a newspaper quote from the 1800’s. I didn’t make that up.

Susan: I said beer capital of the country, beer capital of the world. I’m sorry. I correct myself.

Maija: We were drinking a lot of that beer ourselves. It wasn’t really getting exported anywhere. We were just all drinking it. So, there is a distilling legacy in Maysville, Kentucky. The old Pogue distillery actually has the third oldest distillery in Kentucky.

There’s that blend of both sides just really rooted into the culture here. And it’s really not about getting drunk, it’s just about the way the city was building its economy, the way people were working, just the lifestyle. We actually have America’s largest Oktoberfest Festival, which just took place last weekend. Almost a million people come to that.

Susan: Oh my God. You know, that was going to be my next question. You have all this wonderful legacy. How modern day consumers get to enjoy that? What kind of things do you have? And obviously the Oktoberfest is one of them.

Maija: Yes, Oktoberfest, and like I said, every neighborhood in Cincinnati basically has its own brewery in my neighborhood. We actually had three at one point in time.

Susan: Well, with 70!

Maija: Yes. Every neighborhood in Cincinnati has a brewery and then they’re chili parlor. because we’re famous for our local chili. Everyone’s got a mom and pop chili  parlor in their neighborhood and a brewery.

Susan: All right. Wait, since you made this digression, tell us what is special about the chili.

Maija: What isn’t special about Cincinnati style chili, right?

Susan: Let me rephrase this. What is particular about Cincinnati Chili?

Maija: Cincinnati style chili. Chili is kind of a misnomer. The best way to describe it would be like a thin Bolognese because we serve it over spaghetti. The chili is a beef chili with Mediterranean spices and hints of cocoa and cinnamon. It’s not spicy, it’s not sweet, but it’s a very interesting flavor.

So we put it over spaghetti and then top it with cheddar cheese, a lot of cheddar cheese. That is called a three-way. One is spaghetti, two is chili, three is cheese. 1, 2, 3 way. You can add beans, onions to it to make it a four or five way. We also serve it over hot dogs.

As I mentioned, we have  70 breweries. We’ve got more than 200. We call them chili parlors. And that’s where you go to eat your chili.

Susan: Well, okay. I’m not surprised that it’s over a hot dog. Considering you were Porkopolis right! Just to be devil’s advocate here, how did the Italian community feel about you putting it over spaghetti?

Maija: Oh my gosh. So, and if you could understand, no offense to our spaghetti, but the spaghetti that comes with a three-way is the most overcooked, mushy spaghetti. That’s the best way you can have it.

Susan: They just have to know it has nothing to do with the Italian cuisine. It has to do with Cincinnati cuisine, and that’s what you’re there to experience.

Maija: Yes. So we’ve got the chili. We also have another special meat that came from our German heritage called Goetta, and that is a pork and oat sausage. We love our meat. Everyone eats Goetta, everyone eats chili. The Goetta actually has its own festival, so that’s another way we kind of show our German heritage.

A lot of festivals here. Every  summer we host something called Goettafest. Every vendor has to have their own version of Goetta. So you’ve got Goetta fudge, Goetta pizza, deep fried Goetta, Goetta balls. It’s really unhinged. It’s also home of the world’s only Goetta vending machine. And there’s a guy that dresses like a sausage you can take pictures with. it’s Mr. Goetta

Susan: You know what? I have one thing to say. No wonder you’re also thirsty.

Maija: I know there’s a Goetta beer!

Susan: So, and what are other than the Oktoberfest and Goettafest, which I really have to experience one time in my life, what are some of the other things that you do?

Maija: Goettafest and Oktoberfest are both celebrating big anniversaries next year. So if you want to come, please come. It’s 25th for Goettafest, 50th for Oktoberfest. One of the other really unique festivals we have is called Bockfest, and this obviously involves beer. This happens in the springtime.

It is a celebration of Bock beer. So what is Bock  beer? It means goat in German, but it’s like a bready kind of beer. It was brewed by monks for a breakfast beer. The festival kicks off with a parade where people are dressed in monk outfits and there are goats that carry a ceremonial keg of Bockfest beer.

Then there’s an entire weekend celebration where people are in their authentic German outfits. Everyone’s drinking, walking around and celebrating Bock beer.

Susan: You gotta love that.

Maija: Yes. And one of the other interesting things, in addition to our local breweries, Sam Adams, a Boston Beer Company, actually is from Cincinnati.

Jim Cook who started Sam Adams is from Cincinnati. His grandpa worked at a historic Cincinnati brewery, and the beer recipe for Boston Lager is actually a Cincinnati family beer brewing recipe. So one of the cool things you can see, in addition to some of our smaller craft  breweries, is a massive Sam Adams facility in Cincinnati and Over the Rhine and across the street from that in our local food market, Findlay Market.

There is a tap room, a Sam Adams tap room where the brewers get to experiment with one-offs to see which flavor combos are going to work. It is the only place where you can try these new Sam Adams beers and experimental beers before they get turned into bottled beers.

Susan: That’s amazing. We’ve done beer now. We want to go have some bourbon.

Maija: So you’ve done your drinking on the Cincinnati side, you’re going to walk across the Roebling Bridge into Covington, Kentucky. As soon as you step foot in Kentucky, you are at the start of the Kentucky Bourbon Trail. We are an official gateway to the Kentucky Bourbon Trail, and we have nine bourbon trail distilleries up here now.

Susan: Fantastic.

Maija: Yes. So one of those is Wenzel. They actually recently opened the distillery portion. they do the blending and they also are now distilling their own. They’re the first distillery in Covington, Kentucky since Prohibition. That is really exciting, reclaiming that legacy as well. 

Susan: Yes, because when I was there, it wasn’t open yet!

Maija: We just had a ribbon cutting end of July.  It’s brand new. So if you’re ever in town, you get to go see the distillery itself and then go blend your own bourbon. But more than I think 2.9 million people were on the Kentucky Bourbon Trail last year, and the Northern Kentucky portion of that drives a big amount of tourism because we are home of CVG.

The International Airport Cincinnati’s Airport is in Kentucky, which is one of the other unique things about us. But starting that Bourbon Trail experience up here is really fun because we have these kind of quirky, smaller craft operations.

In addition to Wenzel, we’ve got New Riff, like I mentioned before, that’s a flagship. It’s been around for 10 years. It’s female-helmed. It’s also located next to America’s largest liquor store called The Party Source. The guy who started New Riff had owned Party Source, and I think it’s like 30,000 square feet of liquor. It’s massive.

We also have a distillery called Second Sight Distillery, which was started by two guys who were engineers and designers for Cirque de Soleil out in Las Vegas. They have hand built the distillery themselves. It looks like a fortune teller’s den. They’ve got a fortune telling goldfish. This pot still looks like a Zoltar machine.

Susan: I love it.

Maija: It’s really amazing and because we are this undiscovered part of that Bourbon Trail. You really get to go up close and personal with these distillers and really get some one-on-one time with them and get to see the art of distilling firsthand.

Susan: Yes, and I think people are getting more and more and more interested. It’s just not flagging. It keeps going. I mean, people have gotten so much. ever since I started my podcast 10 years ago, into spirit tourism, especially bourbon.

Maija: Well, there’s so much to learn about bourbon. It’s obviously highly regulated in America as the national spirit and it was regulated before anything else in America was. Before the FDA existed, we regulated bourbon first. There is just so much nuance within the strict parameters of bourbon, and I think that’s really fun.

One of the very cool experiences up in Northern Kentucky is that we have our own passport guided trail called the B–Line, the Bourbon Line, and that combines our bourbon trail distilleries, along with some bourbon bars and restaurants. All the bars have to have at least 100 bourbons you can try. All the restaurants have to have at least 50 bourbons. Many of them have thousands.

One of the most unique ones is Revival Vintage Spirits. This is one of the only places you can really do this. So in 2018, this is a little inside baseball, Kentucky changed the law so that you could buy bottles of alcohol from the public. You could buy bottles of bourbon from the public.

People were then able to buy dusty or vintage alcohol from people. Like your grandpa passed away and he is got a basement full of old bourbon that you don’t know what to do with. Well, you can sell that to someone now. At Revival Vintage Spirits, the owners, this co-owner, Brad Bonds, his nickname is the Indiana Jones of Vintage Spirits.

He is a true character and he has built this entire vintage alcohol empire. It’s almost like a museum but it’s not because he wants everyone to be able to have access to this alcohol. So I’ve been in there before. He’s got thousands of bottles that range from, I’ve seen one that had a prescription on it, from Prohibition.

I’ve had alcohol from 1914, like Parisian, liqueur similar to schnapps from there. And so every time you go in, he’s got this ever-changing collection of bottles from the past hundred years that he’s selling. Also there’s a tasting lounge that you can go into and starting at $5. You can go in and try different pours of alcohol from him and he’ll tell you about the history, where he got it, how it plays into not only bourbon heritage.

Everyone loves Pappy Van Winkle, right? He’ll get bottles from the family’s recipe before then and he’ll tell you why it’s better and explain how it all plays in with each other. There’s also like weird tequilas. I’ve had a weird cinnamon alcohol from the 1990s that’s no longer made that he had. It’s a really fun, very unique experience and the entry point is so affordable. So let’s say you’re in a bigger city and you want to have a vintage port bourbon, okay, it’s going to be 500 bucks in Northern Kentucky. You start at five here!

Susan: I love that he has all different kinds and not just bourbon. That’s what’s fun.

Maija: He had Havana Cuban rum which we don’t get to have in America because of the ban.

Susan: Someone’s grandmother went to Cuba in 1940s and brought it back.

Maija: Exactly.

Susan: How much fun is that? Now, I know that you guys are starting off the 250th anniversary of the United States of America, and I was wondering, what does that entail?

Maija: Yes. We are kicking off America’s 250th in Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky with an event called America’s River Roots. As I mentioned, in the 1800’s, we were this beer capital. We were also the farthest west you could go at that point in time. And we were the sixth largest city in America in the 1800’s, bigger than Chicago.

Chicago wasn’t even on the map yet. This was because of the Ohio River and the trade from the Ohio River. You could connect St. Louis down to New Orleans through the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, and we were a huge stopping point. So America’s 250^th will start here.

America’s River Roots is celebrating the role we played in the expansion and connection between north, south, east, west in America. We are having riverboats from across the nation descend on Cincinnati. We’ve got the Natchez coming up from New Orleans. We’ve got the Belle of Louisville, the Belle of Memphis.

They’re all coming in town and there’s going to be riverboats lined up all along the Cincinnati riverfront. They’re giving cruises for five days, four days, and you can hop on breakfast, lunch, dinner, themed cruises, and experience that part of American history. And there’s going to be talks about bourbon and beer on there.

There’s going to be like Dixieland Jazz on there. There’s also going to be really important conversations. Cincinnati is home to the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center because the Ohio River was that dividing line between north and south. So there’s going to be really important cultural heritage programming as well.

It’s going to be four days of riverboats and music. The Kentucky side has a bourbon experience. Cincinnati side has a beer experience, and you get to really interact with the current brewers and distillers in the region today and kind of experience both of those through some ticketed events, some free events.

Susan: Sounds really exciting. I wish I could be there. It sounds great. Now we have Bill up next, so, is there anything else that you want to let everyone know about bourbon, beer, Cincinnati, anything that we haven’t touched on?

Maija:  I don’t think so. I will just like lead up to Bill. I think that Wenzel Blending Experience is really one of the most fun things you can do in this city! Getting to hang out with Bill blending, learning about how to taste the bourbon, how the flavors work together and customize, it’s such a great way to learn about your own palate.

We were talking about there’s so many things to learn about bourbon. It just seems like such a simple thing. You get so regulated with the corn, the barrels, all of that, but there’s so much nuance within the spirit itself, so it’s really fun to learn about yourself through alcohol.

Susan: Absolutely. And I can’t wait to try it myself. So thank you so much! This was great. I just learned so much and, I can’t wait. Maybe next year, in fact, definitely next year you will see me for all those  anniversaries. I am going to try and make some, because you gave me some delicious, Cincinnati chili making kit, so I’ve gotta really boil my spaghetti down until it’s mushy.

Maija: It’s gotta be mushy!

Susan: Yes. And everyone, you can probably find those Cincinnati packets or get some recipes out and try it and then drink some of the beer and bourbon. Thank you so much again. It was great to have you on the show

Maija: Thank you, bye!

Now we have Bill!

Susan:  Hi. It’s really great to have you on the show. I’m so thrilled to be talking about blending whiskey, all that stuff. I love bourbon!

Bill: Susan, thanks for having me on. My name’s Bill Whitlow. I’m with Wenzel Distillery. I am the Brand Ambassador and operator for the distillery. We’re a pretty young operation. We just started in 2022, but we have been growing pretty quickly and we’re pretty happy with the accolades and response we’ve got from everybody.

Susan: Congratulations!

Bill: I’ve been in the restaurant industry for 25 years and I’ve been running bourbon bars for 15, 16 years at this point now.

Susan: Fantastic. Tell us a little bit about where you were before Wenzel and why a love of bourbon.

Bill: Yes, I’ve been concentrating in bourbon for over 15 years, and people have approached me before about moving from the restaurant side to the  distillery side for years. But, finally in 2020, the founders of Wenzel approached me and I thought it was a perfect time.

They wanted to do a small experience here in Covington. Nothing huge, no large aspirations for distribution countrywide, anything like that. Just a local experience, more of a passion project to do on the side. That’s how we got things going. It was a very slow start because of COVID.  It was very hard to go get our licenses, get construction done, everything like that.

We didn’t actually open up till 2022. But silver lining, the barrels we originally bought for the first stock just got older. So the bourbon wasn’t getting worse, it wasn’t going down in value. It was fun. We opened up in 2022. it was a really cool opening because it was a little bit different than people were experienced with.

We’re not the normal distillery where you just walk through and see the still and taste the different products. We’re not the normal NDP that buys thousands of barrels from one distillery and releases that until their product is ready. We created an immersive experience that we call our boutique bourbon experience.

Susan: Wait, wait. Before you go into that, let’s go way back. Can you tell me we a little bit about what they were thinking? Why do this, why in Covington, a little bit about Covington, all that stuff. All those good bits.

Bill: Actually, so Covington’s fantastic. if you haven’t been to Covington. I moved here over a decade ago. I was supposed to be here for work for one year. I’ve been here for 13 years now, and you can’t drag me outta here. It’s a fantastic city. Just in Covington, you have all the access to a bigger city, but with a little bit more of a comfortable, close knit community.

It’s really cool. A lot of people just fall in love with this area and stay. So two guys, Tony Milburn and Austin Dunbar, knew they wanted to do a project here in this building. It was built in 1873 by Henry Wenzel, who was making whiskey here previously, back in the 1870s. So it was a really cool story to it. It had been a pickle factory and all kinds of things.

So they approached me and I thought it was a really cool idea. Nobody had anything lined up originally before COVID. They wanted to do a restaurant here. But we didn’t have any fully fleshed out plans.

I helped them develop what the concept would be, what the blending would be. Of course, our original plans are nothing like what we’re doing today because you make the playbook and tear it up for whatever works.  We originally thought we were just going to be making large batches for private people, and now most of our business is doing private experiences for people.

Susan: The original idea after the restaurant and COVID was to have a bourbon tasting or a bourbon blending experience. That’s pretty novel.

Bill: Yes. I said most people would start off with a bunch of barrels from like one place. Even our first buy I think we bought from seven different distilleries in four different states, if I remember correctly. We didn’t want it to be all the same.

We wanted it to be different every time you came; different every time you tasted it. I always joke big distilleries spend a ton of time and money making sure their product tastes the same every time. We spend a lot of time and money making sure ours never taste the same twice.

Susan: I love it. How did you decide out of all of the bourbon and all of the country, what places you were going to pick from? Was it like one wheated, one rye, one something else?

Bill: The decision wasn’t quite as easy as that just because we were brand new and when you’re brand new, you don’t have the opportunity. You don’t have all the connections out there. We had a good amount of connections because some of us have already been in the business for a while, so that opened up a few doors, but we really had to go with what we were able to get through some brokers and through some favors with friends.

Luckily quickly after that, they noticed we were actually doing something and friends of ours at other distilleries allowed us to buy a few barrels here from there. We only started off our whole operation with fewer than 30 barrels.

Susan: Oh boy.

Bill: This is obviously not much. Now we have over 500 barrels, actually, over 700 barrels in storage now. So we’ve grown quite a bit. Especially our biggest leap forward, and we might not jump into this, is when we bought an entire distillery out of Savannah, Georgia, which was our biggest jumping point.

Susan: Right. Hold on. Before that, in the few bottles that you had, or the few barrels that you had. Were you looking to create a whole spectrum?

Bill: The way we wanted it to happen is we wanted it to be all traditional. We didn’t buy any wheated or anything because, the reason for that is we wanted that you as a consumer were to come and be blending this yourself and these barrels were meant to be able to easily interact with each other.

A lot of distillers for decades had a hard time trying to do four grain bourbons. We weren’t going to try to have people blending with a wheated bourbon and a traditional bourbon and trying to do what distillers took decades to really kind of match up. So we wanted to start off easy.

Susan: You can see I’ve never blended bourbon before.

Bill: No, no. I mean most people come in and don’t even realize how difficult it is or they get a true appreciation for what blending really is, and that distillers don’t just make the bourbon, they also take barrels from all through their stock that taste different and blend them together in that right proportion.

Susan: I know, I know. It is truly an art form now. So you had your barrels, you’re ready to open, did you have a large audience to begin with or did it take a while to get people in the door?

Bill: We had a pretty good beginning locally. Of course, there’s always bourbon groups all around and we’re members of lots of those, or I am. A couple of those groups came in and did private blends for their group, so they were all at the grand opening.

We had our founders blend that we did, just for the founders and put out in our gift shop in the very beginning. I mean, obviously lots of friends and family and local support. People an hour away didn’t know who we were. But we quickly were able to push through that.

We were able to start off with stuff that tastes like bourbon. We were able to put out stuff that’s anywhere from six to eight years. because we spent a little extra to make sure that we opened up with some quality product.

Susan: For someone who’s never done it before, what is the process? If I walked in the door, what would you do with someone like me who’s never done it, or a group who’s never done it?

Bill: Absolutely. That’s what’s so fun about it. We call it getting your hands dirty as opposed to just taking a tour. Which is super fun at a lot of big distilleries. You learn about their history. But all in all you see a still, you see mash, you see a lot of the same things. We wanted this to be a really interactive portion. So when you come in, we greet you, you sit down in front of samples from four different barrels, as well as all your blending equipment, your graduate cylinder, your dropper, everything else.

We start off by giving you a little history about us which includes history about the building, about Henry Wenzel, who was doing it here originally, about what we’ve been through to get the place open, and a little history about Covington and why the bourbon is important in Covington, and then we move into basically how to taste.

A lot of people doing this, they’re brand new, they don’t have a huge familiarization with how to try bourbon. So we you how to taste without blowing your palate out and we’ll teach you how to taste each of the four and not doing a normal tasting where you’re trying to figure out notes and everything.

Just think about the parts of what you like, because they’re all going to be pieces of a whole. You’re going to use these samples to create your perfect bourbon, so you’re tasting for what you like, not for the exact note. we teach you to do that. We give you a little time to enjoy it. Then we come back and we teach you how to blend, how to best start with this, start with two, and then add on from there, using your favorites, how you can add water to open it up and make it a little more palatable.

I always love to say we make a lot of bad bourbon. You just don’t taste it because we only put our best foot forward. The example is that two great barrels don’t always make a great bourbon because they could be completely crashing flavors. Even though both barrels are delicious and then a good barrel and a bad barrel don’t make a bad bourbon because sometimes that bad barrel, not necessarily bad, just what you don’t like, those flavors may be what that great barrel is missing. It might have a little funk, a little hay, a little odd flavor that is just with this sweet and full-bodied bourbon is missing to be unique to you.

Susan: So, in your opinion, and this may be not even an answerable question, what makes a good blend?

Bill: Well, for me it’s about having discernible flavors. Like I said, I’ve done bourbon for a long time and at a certain point in bourbon history in the past couple years, a lot of bourbon just tastes like bourbon. Just a lot of things taste very similar, and I like it, even if it’s not the best bourbon I’ve ever had.

I like to be able to remember something about that bourbon, you know, it had these great butterscotch notes for example. It had these great tobacco notes. it was funky, it was sweet, it was full bodied. I want to be able to remember something about it and that’s what I like about being able to do your own blend because I came in here, I wanted to do something sweet with a little spice.

So I used this barrel that was really full bodied and sweet, but I had this barrel that was incredibly spicy. It was too spicy for my palate, but I added a little bit in here and it made it perfect.

If you come and then you come a month later, you’re probably, at least two of the four barrels are going to be different and likely all four. So it’s completely different every time. So we spend a lot of time and money making sure it never tastes the exact same. It’s because the barrels that you have on your plate are different every time.

Susan: That means you can come back all the time and be constantly blending.

Bill: People do that a lot in our area. When they have family visiting, they can bring them in on a Saturday afternoon and, it’s a great time. You can sit around for an hour and a half, two hours with your family chatting, blending bourbon, trying them against each other, and it’s different when you come.

Susan: Of course, of course. Now I’m going to go back a little because I feel like we skipped over so much. Now tell me about Mr. Wenzel, the history of the place, and also what you mentioned about getting the 700 barrels.

Bill: Yes. Henry Wenzel built this building when he was 36. That was 1873 with his wife, Bertha, his five kids. They were German immigrants. They had a residence of about two blocks from here, and then they had a tavern of about two blocks from here, the opposite way. In this building, he did a few things. He made mineral water and soda water, which we have actually procured some of the original glass bottles from years ago, which is really cool. He also blended bourbon and whiskey for his tavern. The first bottle bourbon was 1870, but of course not everybody went into that process immediately.

People were still blending and putting together from barrels to put into their tavern. Now, unfortunately, the way I always say it is Henry liked his job a lot.  He passed away four years later at the age of forty. He was found jaundiced with a head bleed coming home from the tavern. Unfortunately, but that is kind of a truth from that area.

His wife Bertha then made this place her residence. Women in the 1870s were not afforded the same opportunities as men, so she had to pull some strings and figure some things out and she ended up turning this into her residence, living upstairs. Then, she rented it out to a pickle factory. For a very long time in this area, if you say the Pickle Factory, people know exactly which building you’re talking about.

Susan: I love it.

Bill: So that’s the story of how they started in this building. And then there was a lot of history in between that time to when, our founder Tony, bought this building in 2018, I believe.

Susan: I love the Pickle bit because it harks back also to the Germans who lived there.

Bill: Yes, it was really cool. This was the first building he said he ever bought, where he didn’t realize there wasn’t running water coming into the building. He had had water. I guess they were running this pickle factory without, they didn’t need that. They had waste lines, but no incoming water.

Susan: Oh my goodness. I know that does sound crazy.  Now tell me about the 700 barrels you acquired.

Bill: Yes. Right after we opened, we started doing our little thing. It was just the founders, had their own businesses. This was a passion project, so it was me and one other guy, Griffin, running the whole thing. A few months after we opened, another friend sent me this advertisement about a distillery for sale in Savannah, Georgia. It was almost like a glorified Craigslist ad.

We said let’s see what’s going on. It’s an entire distillery with their barrels. We did a little research and turns out it wasn’t this little rinky dink corporation. They had won some gold medals and things. But their area became very valuable to one of the local schools. So they had sold the building, and they said the profit they made on the building was their expected profit for like 10 years on the distillery. Plus they got the liquid. It made sense for them.

We went down and checked it out. We tasted a lot of their different barrels, checked out their equipment, did our due diligence. And loved it. So we had a very short timeline because they, apparently, had a deal before and it fell through. We only had like a month before they absolutely had to be out of the building, before the owners were going to take it over and start throwing everything in the street.

We made a deal, went back down there, decommissioned everything. Sent 14 semis, Yes, 14 semis worth of equipment and barrels from Savannah, Georgia up to Kentucky and they had barrels from different places too. So it gave us a very wide array of stock to choose from.

As well as bringing in some of their wheated, but blended it ourselves from the different barrels. And that’s what we won gold at San Francisco. We used some of the sherry they started with and we just won best sherry finished in the world, blending some of that together. It was a really cool pickup we got to do from them.

Susan: How exciting, number one, for you to be working for someone who loves bourbon, to be working on creating a distillery yourself. Have you already decided on the mash bill and do you, do you know what you’re going to do with it and want to share?

Bill: So we brought on a head distiller from one of the local distilleries, someone we’ve known for a while. He’s very talented. And we’re going to be starting off with like three mash bills, a wheated, a traditional, and a rye has many, would, the wheated. We’re going to be , following the path from the distillery that we took over in Savannah, Georgia, ghost Coast, because we love it. It’s been our most popular and we want to, you know, try to continue that kind of. What we, you know, we, it kind of helped us get the ball rolling and we want to keep that ball rolling with it.

Susan: I love that. That is a great idea too. I’m sure the guys who had to sell up or who wanted to sell up must be really  pleased about that as well.

Bill: It’s very cool. And actually, it’s a very small world. The distiller from that distillery now works at a distillery two hours away from us. He’s been here to visit. We tasted some barrels with him. And one of his oldest distillers just started working with us last week.

Susan: See it’s karma.

Bill: It’s all small, very small world.

Susan: So is there anything else you would like to tell anyone visiting or what to experience or anything about? Wenzel or Covington?

Bill: I mean, we’re super excited as we’re getting to grow with Covington. Kentucky has over a hundred distilleries, but we’re the first one in Covington since Prohibition and Covington’s the fifth largest city in Kentucky.

It didn’t really make sense to us why there wouldn’t be a distillery here. And there’s a lot of growth going on here, especially being tangential to Cincinnati. So it allows us to all grow with that together. We’re just super excited to have the new distillery open, the new event space, the new bar, and it’s going to be a really, really cool kind of symbiosis with the area.

One really exciting thing for us is, as our distillery is open, we’ve already been approved. We’re going to be on the Kentucky Bourbon Trail, on there alongside, you know, other friends as well as industry giants in Kentucky.

Susan: Oh, that’s great news. That’s great news. Well, I can’t wait to come visit.

Bill: Yes, I can’t wait to have you.

Susan: It was so great to speak to you. Thank you so much for taking the time and telling us all about Wenzel and as I said, I just can’t wait to get there. I miss Covington, I really loved it and hopefully I’ll see you soon.

Bill: Yes, thanks for having me, and we can’t wait to have you back.

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