August 2012nashvillelifestyles.com

BARRELAGEDSmall batch artisan Tennessee spirits come of age at Speakeasy SpiritsBY STEPHANIE STEWART-HOWARD • PHOTOS BY RON MANVILLE

Legend has it Tennessee is a distillery state, and Tennessee whiskey seems aboutas famous a beverage as they come, with maybe the exception of Kentucky bourbon. Butuntil recently, that whole mystique sprang fully formed from macro-distilleries Jack Daniel’sand George Dickel. Now Jack and George produce some fine products, but watching theway the Kentucky bourbon trail grew up and created a plethora of distilleries, large andsmall, might long ago have set a standard for artisans here. And, thanks to a growingnumber of creative distillers, the times, they are a changin’—and that’s a very good thing.

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Let’s talk about two distilleries that joined forces to make something happen. Collierand McKeel is the brainchild of Franklin resident Mike Williams, while SpeakeasySpirits, lately creators of Whisper Creek Tennessee Sipping Cream, belongs to Jeff andJenny Pennington. Together, they’ve built a “campus” for spirit distillation and study on44th Avenue North, and they aim to grow it into something extraordinary.

It begins with Mike Williams. He proudly acknowledges descent from a couple of gentsnamed, unsurprisingly, Collier and McKeel, who back in colonial days fled to Tennessee toavoid the spirits taxes imposed prior to the Whiskey Rebellion. According to Mike, a genialkind of guy who can spin a yarn well, when he was 15, he had a school science projectinvolving collecting and comparing Tennessee water samples.

“I fell behind,” he says with a mischievous smile. “So one Saturday, my dad packed usin the car for a road trip down to the Jack Daniel’s distillery. He’d stop every 15 minutes orso, and I’d grab a sample of the nearby water in baby food jars. When we got to thedistillery, I think I shocked everybody by pulling out my baby food jar and taking a sampleat the Cave Spring. Well, when we got home, I discovered that the sample water from thespring was the same as the water on ourproperty. So I told my dad we ought to builda distillery.”

Of course, as distillers will tell you, someof the secret to good whiskey is in the

limestone filtered water. And there it was.From that moment on, distilling whiskey be-came a dream for Mike, even as he built acareer that included a decade spent in theTennessee Legislature, then work as a lobbyistafterward. On his 50th birthday, his wifeNancy (director of the Downtown FranklinAssociation) told him it was “now or never.”

For Mike, that meant not only the logisticsof creating a distillery and learning to seriouslycreate whiskey, but getting the law changed sohe could do it legally. We have a running joke inthe South that since Prohibition ended, thestrict religious types and the bootleggers havehad an arrangement—as it were—that made it

“Well, when we got home, I discovered that the sample water from thespring was the same as the water on our property. So I told my dad weought to build a distillery.” —Mike Williams

Jeff Pennington andMike Williams

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hard for legitimate businessmen to set up proper distilleries. While that part of it maybe tongue-in-cheek, at least in the current climate, there’s no question the law as writ-ten made it unnecessarily complex to open a distillery.

Originally, the arcane law insisted that for a city to have a distillery a petition wasrequired, which 10 percent of the registered voters in said city had signed. That done,a ballot referendum on the said distillery was held, which needed to be won by supermajority in a year in which the governor was also elected.

When Mike Williams jumped into the fray—eventually joined by Darek Bell ofCorsair Artisan (at the time doing his distilling in Bowling Green), plus the folks atPritchard’s and the Penningtons—he used the skills he’d learned as a member of thelegislature to turn into a lobbying tour-de-force. After an exceedingly long debate, thelaw changed to allow distilleries wherever liquor by the drink and package storeswere already allowed and in operation. Some 42 Tennessee counties opted in, andGovernor Bredesen signed it into law, then signed a barrel of Collier and McKeel tocommemorate the occasion (it’s proudly displayed at Speakeasy these days).

Williams began his operation with Bell up at the Corsair facilities at Marathon

Village, but that location was quickly outgrown. EnterJeff and Jenny Pennington, a couple who’d come to-gether after working for rival liquor distributors andwho had their own distilling dream. Jeff, son of restaura-teur extraordinaire Jay Pennington, and Jenny had metafter college when working for Best Brands (Jenny) andHorizon Wine and Spirits (Jeff).

The Romeo and Juliet of the beverage industryeventually came out as a couple, and Jeff left to starthis own company, Dynamic Digital Designs. Aftertremendous success, Jeff sold DDD to Uniguest fouryears ago; he stayed on for a year, till it in turn was soldto SouthCom. Meanwhile, Jenny started Speakeasy Mar-keting, aimed at the spirits, wine and beer industry. Bythen, the couple already knew they wanted back into thespirits industry seriously, this time with their own brand.

After Jeff left Uniguest, the couple took a trip to cel-ebrate, visiting Europe and the Caribbean, relaxing butalso planning their next move. Upon their return, awareof Mike Williams’ spearheading of the effort to changestate law, they saw their opportunity and jumped in.

“Mike was making artisan whiskey, Darek had hissmall batch liquors, Billy [Kaufman] down at ShortMountain in Woodbury was making moonshine. Wehad other ideas—we were interested in liqueurs, cordials.

Jenny and Jeff Pennington

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We came up with the idea of a truly out-standing, whiskey-based cream liqueur—‘Tennessee Sipping Cream,’” says Jeff. Andthus was Whisper Creek born.

Knowing most cream liqueurs arereally mostly vodka- or rum-based (withabout a half percent whiskey for flavor),the Penningtons set out to create some-thing really whiskey-based. They called intheir friend Chef Deb Paquette, and to-gether they whipped up an all-Americanversion of what’s often called “Irish”cream. The end result is a classic Pa-quette layering of flavors, dominated bynotes intrinsic to whiskey itself – caramel,vanilla, burnt molasses, all of which you’llpick out of Collier and McKeel whiskey.Underneath, they blended in trulySouthern flavors: fig, sorghum, smokedpecan, apple and persimmon.

The results are a rich taste and asmooth, less oily mouth feel than moretraditional cream liqueurs. It has a differ-ent taste profile, emphasizing the naturalwhiskey elements, instead of the chocolateand coffee tastes predominant in the cur-rent market’s numerous Irish creams. AndJeff and Jenny know they have somethingspecial on their hands.

Flash forward to late June, when Imake my second visit, and Mike, Jennyand Jeff show me around the campus atSpeakeasy Spirits. The energy is vibrant.Whisper Creek is just weeks away from itsfirst big bottling, and all the equipmenthas been moved into the huge convertedQuonset hut in the quiet northwestNashville neighborhood not far from theDark Horse Theatre off Charlotte Pike.(Collier and McKeel whiskey, along withMike’s other products, is already well onthe market).

After a quick tasting of Whisper Creek,and a chance to see the first of the bottlesJenny designed herself (echoing the shapeof a 19th century Tennessee ceramic jug,which just makes them more awesome),we wander from the large conferenceroom through the building, stopping in thewell-equipped lab where chemist NeilHilton is working before exiting into theQuonset hut, nearly big enough to be anairplane hangar. There, whiskey can be

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made from start to finish, as Mike proudly points out.Corn is ground, then cooked in the 1,500 gallon

mash cooker (where the barley and rye are added), fer-mented in the traditional wooden fermenter and dis-tilled with the help of the 600 gallon pot still (made ofcourse by Vendome Copper in Kentucky—the go-tosource for distillers everywhere). Hidden in a verylarge cupboard space is “Papa Smurf,” the huge steamgenerator that powers everything. Mike explains thewhole process with absolute glee.

“We operate entirely by taste here,” he says. “Youcan do that with small batch whiskey, not like at the bigdistillers, where they control everything by computer—we don’t have the high volume that requires thosecomputers.”

The newly made 140 proof whiskey, he explains, isdripped five times through sugar maple charcoal, madefrom trees his dad gets in Humphries County. Then, it’sbarreled in small barrels (where it achieves flavor andcolor faster than large barrels) to age properly.

Now, on the dedicated campus on North 44thAvenue, a revolution builds. Mike Williams and Jeff andJenny Pennington foresee the day when the Speakeasy“campus” where they’re producing daily can also houseother new distillers or would-be brewers and helpothers with similar dreams realize their goals. With trulyabundant space, the best equipment and a superbdevelopment lab, it’s clear that dream is more thanjust a possibility.

Looking around now, though filled by everythingfrom aging barrels to three tractor trailer loads ofWhisper Creek bottles (newly delivered in anticipationof bottling), there’s also room for much more to happen.And the surrounding area is ripe for growth and furtherdevelopment.

Two centuries after the Whiskey Rebellion sent twodistillers to Tennessee, their bloodlines have producedthe man who is quietly changing the state’s distillingprofile forever. Mike Williams, together with thePenningtons, and with extended regional allies thatinclude other creative spirits minds—Darek Bell andAndrew Webber at Corsair, the folks at Short Mountainand at Pritchard’s—is building the Tennessee spiritstradition into something new, something extraordinary.

We didn’t start in a bad place—Jack Daniel’s andGeorge Dickel are worth being very proud of—but it’sexciting that there’s more. And that the new is also suchfine quality, so original and so innovative in its out-look—well, that’s a sign of even more to come. FromCollier and McKeel and from Speakeasy Spirits, I thinkwe can expect great things.

Walt DeBolt, Jenny Pennington, Jeff Pennington, Janee Profitt,

Kendall Mitchell, Justin Runyon, MikeWilliams, Neal Hilton and Paxton Nanell

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