 Well, hello, welcome. I'm Erin Schneider. I am an administrative associate with the North Central Sustainable Ag Research and Education program. Hi, everyone. I'm Ray Flanagan, communications specialist for North Central Region, Sayer. I also farm in Southwest Wisconsin. I'm here today for our next episode of Farming Matters. And I am really excited and grateful to be joined by the Glazik brothers, Will Clay and Dallas, who will give them a chance to share about their Farmer Rancher Grant project and what they learned. Thanks for having us. I'm Will. I'm the oldest and obviously best looking brother out of us three. I do a lot of farm operations and on the distilling side of things, I'm kind of the building manager while we're remodeling. Hi, Dallas. I'm the youngest brother. And my roles are working on a farm and at the distillery, mainly just the catch all of anything else that needs done, and as well as making sure all the finances insurance and legal stuff is all all in order. I'm Clay. I'm the middle brother. I'm not as involved on the farming aspect, but I did grow up on Calgary organic farm. I currently work in advertising as well as having my own design and branding company. I'm also a certified bourbon professional, so I'm very involved in the flavor profiles that we create within our whiskey and our other alcohols. So back a year ago, roughly this time. We had a grant through Sarah the arson grain collaborative and working with the integrated biological research lab at the University of Illinois, to actually take a look at corn varieties and distill them into a corn whiskey and see how different varieties affect flavor themselves. So guys outside of our farming background in 2017 we started silver tree beer and spirits, which is a company where we make our own alcohol we've been making whiskey and vodka. Since then, and the reason why we got into it was that we're looking for ways to give more profit and value to the grants we grew on the farm so we started selling to different breweries and distilleries. Since 2017 got the opportunity to actually create our own company and start making our own products and getting them on the shelves. We've now expanded where we're our vodka is in 40 different states. We're in some of the large retailers throughout the city of Illinois, and we are coming out with whiskey that's been agents since 2017. So this fall, that would be a right and then looking for a bourbon to be released and hit in the shelves next year, as well as in some other experimental whiskies with we oats doing a different blends, and we'll also be doing some with the aging processes, and someone will be, you know, as young as four years and will be as old as 10 years we got a lot of exciting stuff coming down the pipeline as well as our own facility which we are working on currently impacts on the way, looking to get our final license and start producing out there here this year, then soon will be open to the public for tastings and different things along those lines. So with the study itself, we took a look at these different corner varieties, and we distilled them to see how the different corns, how the different flavors would change between the different varieties. So here is the still itself that the University of Illinois was able to purchase through the grant money. And here's Dallas and me, where we were sitting there actually distilling and making the cuts and help them understand the kind of whiskey. The team down there at the University of Illinois with the integrated biological research lab was fantastic but they have a background in industrial, industrial alcohols, whereas we obviously are not making ethanol, we wanted to make some this little more palatable to drink. So we came down there did a few work working sessions with them and really showed them how to do still. So in the process, there's really three cuts when you're looking at a pot still like they have there. There's the heads hearts and tails, and there are a lot of other cuts out there. But usually those, you know, those stories of the, you know, moonshiner and the appellations has gone blind through making the wrong cuts so we're not going to talk about those today. The heads are at a higher ABV so so is more volatile chemicals that burn off at lower temperatures. Those tend to be a little bit cleaner more alcoholic and ethanol type or rubbing alcohol type when you think about the flavors within actual spirits. The heads are kind of the middle ground and that's what the majority of the actual spirits you consume are, whereas the tails are those lower, higher of all or lower volatile chemical compounds take more heat to evaporate. There's a lot more flavors in there but with the more flavors you do get some really bad and unwanted flavors in those spirits. So in the actual distillations you want kind of a blend of them all. So this is the key areas we're going to get your best flavor and your most actual product, but you want to kind of lead a little bit into the heads and a little bit into the tails. But there's going to be a little bit that you put aside and run into different distillation batches that are just not good to consume for flavor. So within this actual study since we wanted everything to be consistent and not be based off actual distillation temperatures or by personal bias within flavors and pulling those cuts like most disorders do. We decided just to take the absolute middle key. So that middle bar there the darkest brown is what we use for the studies so if you're looking at these as consumer products, these samples will never actually hit the market because it's very just insufficient to be making these cuts and putting them into actual products that consumers would drink, but for specific purposes this is the best way to go about it. And we did a whole blind tasting panel. So we got 16 different food alcohol distillation research professionals and also just whiskey enthusiasts to come in and do a blind tasting. This was 100% corn whiskey so there was no aging blending or any other grains added to the spirit and we went in 100 proof to keep things consistent and minimize the variables within the different samples. A perfect score is 20 and we did that with five on the nose so breaking it down to nose flavor and finish five of the nose to know the palate and five on the overall finish. And what those are so nose is kind of like how it smells you know what characteristics are you able to pick out by just putting it up to your nose and inhaling smell is a huge factor of taste. And if you think about when you're sick if you're when you're all stuffed up and stuff tastes a little bit weird the same thing happens with in whiskey. So really what you're starting to pick up on the nose is influencing what you actually are able to taste on your palate so, and we like to call that kind of preheating the chimney. When you put it up there and let the alcohol flow through a little bit it warms the palate up and allows you to build a taste better palate which is the biggest area of score. That's how it actually taste. You really want to roll that around your tongue what areas will tingly you know is it in your bitter side your sweet side. That's going to give you an idea of what characteristics are within there, and really does like does that align with the smell. If what it tastes totally differently smell that's not going to be as consistent as a product as something that's very much aligned with those two working together. You know, the lastly finish which was also at a five. It's how it is your mouth feel you know, does that flavor last long to short is a burn is it silky or creamy. Does it go down the, the suffocates, does it tingle on the way down, or is it kind of short and finish all those affect how good the alcohol is. So this is 100% corn whiskey. Want to just kind of go through and talk about some of the typical corn flavors, all most, most whiskies are blends of multiple different grains, bourbon being 51% corn on the minimum. Usually, you know, we malted barley, rye, or any other different grain variety in the mix to make their kind of the mash bill. And, and the actual whiskey itself. There's a lot of different factors and elements you get the grain water yeast and the oak and those all affect the different flavors and the conjures or the chemical elements that a symbol to create those sense and flavors within the whiskey. So we're going to just corn, we're actually we're taking away the, you know, oak which actually accommodates for up to 70% of the overall flavor within final store bought whiskey. And we use the same yeast and water across all the different corn samples again to minimize those variables and make everything consistent so there's no bias between the different samples. So corn, a great way to think about whiskey flavors is to think about different types of bread. So corn, think of it kind of that that sweet buttery corn bread, or, you know, a corn chip is going to have those sweet notes to it it's going to be very flavorful. It's going to be to be a little more harsh depending on the different profiles within it and the kind of the yield. So overall, you're looking for that sweetness of the overall corn. And again, we're not, this is not age this was just essentially moonshine or what I said so it's like to call white dog or just corn whiskey. 6 to 8% of that overall flavor can come from the barrels through the maturation process, while the kind of jerseys kind of evaporate into the barrel itself and contract based on the different seasons and pull those flavors back in. So we're looking at purely just the corn itself within the different samples. And a few of the kind of the calls within the study. We only use one grain grain sample from six different farms. They're all through the Great Lakes regions. But if we, you know, had a lot of time, probably more way to get more direct results would be to pull multiple samples from multiple different farms to make sure that you know, there wasn't one form that could come in season or no hail storm come through and hurt the old one, one strain. So it's something that maybe in the future we can look at to explain it out to we did use the same yeast and fermentation process on every single sample to keep that as a constant so we weren't adding more variables to the to the study itself because there were a lot of different variables within different corn varieties. The cuts were made by temperature, not flavor aroma. As a distiller, you're kind of going through and make those cuts based off how it smells or outtaste based on your own personal preferences is kind of the art behind distillation. But to keep that bias out of there we didn't make up the kind we took those center of the hearts cuts so everything's consistent. As far as the tasting goes tasting order we found does have a pretty high effect on how the scores are scored, because as alcohol tends to alter the power after long periods of usages, you know, as a day went on it was a long day of drinking, you know, it was very very tough work on everyone's part within the channel, but as alcohol does affect on the body and that can obviously alter how you score different products. So here's the overall scores that we have between the 16 different judges. So we took the average itself and took the standard deviation. So we, some pretty interesting things throughout the bat is that yellow dent actually had the average, the highest average score. So if you look at standard deviation so the closer the clusters, the fully only read and the blue hybrid score extremely well as far as consistently crosses 16 different judges. There's definitely a little bit surprising on our end where you know yellow dense sports so high is coolest in the Walsh Valley and also the red and the blue, being very close. The white did not score as well in the bloody butcher, who, you know, kind of send the pre study conversation we were having a lot of people thought that, or at least we're most intrigued by this corn variety and what it could bring to the table as far as flavor profiles. So looking at the actual breakdowns within the scores themselves there's some really interesting patterns we started to pick out. So we went through and marked all the yellow highlighted areas as a high score, being over a 17 so 17 to 20, the lowest scores were zero all to six, and then everything else is throughout. Because some of the patterns we pulled out we thought were extremely interesting was that 90% of the highest scores were done by the researchers. So that means that the people that were actually going through and distilling these different corn varieties were the scoring them based off. There might have been a little bit of bias within the score is because whether it was a complete blind test, but if there's some sort of sample that, you know, struck a know in their mind that you know that made it very recognizable, they might score that higher or lower based off their biases through the actual distillation process. And they also contributed to 50% of the low scores. So there's definitely a whether they knew it or not they add some, you know, unconscious biases within those samples. The next one was that 100% of the yellow dent high scores were scored by industry professionals and whiskey enthusiasts. So people that have made their entire career around making bourbon whiskey that are used to yellow dent being very corn thin on market bourbons. They tend to gravitate towards that because that's where they used to and people like consistency and change is something that kind of can be joined. And we also noticed that the standard deviation increased as the day prolonged and alcohol is consumed. So one of those last call it's that made no two slides ago is that the standard deviation was lower within the red and the blue varieties compared to, you know, as that was the order that the samples were consumed so as people started drinking their highs and lows, lows, we're getting more prevalent, opposed to kind of getting those medium ranges of scores where everything was low but more consistent. So I thought those are some really cool and interesting patterns, and I'll go back to the slide here is you can kind of see how those patterns were taken effect. As you know the researchers were up there at the top, they definitely had the highest amount of high scores and low scores, based on some of those, you know, unconscious biases of working with those grains and distilling them even though it was completely blind test. And then as you see the yellow dent, those four high scores all came down to professionals and a retailer and enthusiasts to, you know, have worked with the yellow dent corner and they made their careers around that specific corn variety. But really outside these scores, where we find the most interest or most value coming out of this test is a different flavor profiles are being created by these different corn varieties. One thing that we had all the 16 different judges do, as well as putting down the scores for each of their nose, their palate and their finish and then their overall was also right down what they're tasting and what they're smelling and what kind of flavors are getting. And we started seeing a lot of consistencies across these different judges with each sample of corn so we pulled out any of the different flavor profiles that had four or more people say the same thing. So with the with the red, a lot of people said was clean Chris has some meal fruity notes to it a little bit of kind of grassy or earthy notes and bring in that cornbread or sugary cereal which is very consistent with any sort of corn whiskey. Within the blue they said it was softer lighter so getting a better that fruity tones but it was a little more on the floral side. So think of like no blossoms. A little bit of Nanias and cracked pepper as well. The waltzy Valley, which had a very high average on there so it was like pretty high across the board. A little more earthiness to it know some cloves and baking spice but had a really creamy finish. And the rest of the white. This was after the most earthy out of all them you know people are picking up some tobacco or coffee, a little bit of muster clover in there. Yellow don't dent which even looking at the blind samples people are able to know these are pretty consistent across what people look for within actual yellow dent bourbon. So you know that sweet corn, kind of some skewed tomatoes white pepper some pitted fruit. And the bloody butcher had, you know, the cornmeal, the grassy kind of popcorn corn chips, which all aligns with what bloody butcher corners meant for which is grits and cornmeal and things on those lines. So we thought this was probably the most useful information coming out of the study itself because now we're able to take this and within our own products and also whoever can know if you're this distillery and looking to make something unique, you know that has a little more tobacco earthy tones. Maybe you might want to take a look at this study and say hey we should try to get some different white varieties. Or if you're looking for something as a little more floral look at those you know the red or the blue hybrids, but if you're looking for you know something that's a little more savory or creamy you know the wopsy value bloody butcher are good options to using that bourbon. So you can start really taking that and making something that's unique to you and what flavor profiles you're wanting to make as a distiller. There, I'm just, I'm really like blown away and, and like a lot of great ways here and just by hearing your share your story and I was thinking of all the different parts that had to line up and people along the whole from grain to glass so to speak. Oh, like for your grant project, how was that getting the grain part wasn't too bad. We just, I knew some people that had these different varieties that we're interested in, call them up and we're able to pick them up direct or ship them through the mail something like that. And we weren't working with a large amount just 100 pounds of each. And I think that overall like the university they did a great job of kind of spearheading and coordinated and a lot of the actual logistical sides of getting every all the different pieces to work together. Yes, AGC was a huge aspect as well. So really was some, we had some great partners going into it which made it a lot easier on the coordination side. What kind of happens with some of the, the end distillation of the mash part that you mentioned is that go back to the soil or get transformed and other other things to or as far as like the, the waste from the mash itself. That can actually go into make cattle feed or hog feed so you can take that and kind of strain it out get the foods out of there and have a very nutritious feed for livestock. So as far as the distillation with the, what you don't use within the heads and the tails, usually just throw that back into the next round. So, so the next batch of whiskey you make see if you can pull off some of those different flavors and get them inside the hearts, but a lot of other stories that aren't able to, you know, they keep getting in the same heads and hearts it'll take that and maybe add some flavoring to it. So it's a little bit more palatable than able to, you know, create a product similar to, you know, a peach vodka or something like that so it's not taking the best product but they're adding some flavor in there so they're able to reuse that not just throw that out. What would you recommend, like a piece of advice you would offer to another farmer or someone who was interested in, you know, whether it's whiskey or distillation or just introducing a new product that you're doing a lot of product like marketing and product testing along with like, you know, trying to figure out how to best grow the great different grains and stuff to you. I'd definitely say to jump into it and try it but, you know, if you can get some of these seeds are kind of hard to find. So get a small plot growing out a lot of the open pollinated heirloom varieties on on a farm scale can be kind of a pain. They're just, you know, they were grown before everything got mechanized, but they do offer some really unique flavors, and you can save your own seed and select for what attributes you're looking for. So it's a lot of fun to select and to build something that's truly your own. That's another thing. So like the bloody butcher that we grow might be totally different than John Webkin grows in Wisconsin and completely different than someone in New York State might be growing. Yeah, I guess another call would be from a farmer if they're looking to jump into growing these varieties, you know, have those conversations with the buyer, you know, figure out that you can actually have a market for it. Let people know that you're doing this, you know, you are talking to a brewer. Your farmer is constantly talking to brewer figure out like what they want within their different beers and tailor towards them so we can open up those markets, guarantee those cells and make sure they're able to produce at the same level that they're looking to buy. Even outside of alcohol there's a lot of cool grain studies going on right now. It's very exciting time performing. When do we get to come down to your grand opening and we're hoping for around this time next year so 2023 but I'd say 24. It's been a long process. But you know if anyone would like to sample the products before we're open to the public you can go to spirit hub.com and they can deliver right to your door and we're in 40 different states on there.