Exclusive Interview Phil Prichard
Good Morning Mr. Prichard. I understand that you are re-introducing your successful line of rums. Is that correct?
That’s one way to put it. When we set about to make rum, 22 years ago, we set a course to make a rum that was more of a traditional American rum. We have been through several packaging changes, largely due to a number of factors. We have had the price of bottles change. One time we had a custom designed bottle that I found sitting in Berlin, Germany with somebody else’s product in it. Several years ago, we created new labels as we became affiliated with Kane Fisher and his father Mel Fisher, treasure hunters that found the Spanish galleon, the Atocha with about a half billion dollars in gold, silver and emeralds. That relationship has fallen by the wayside over the last couple of years, We decided we needed a fresh, new look on the shelves. So that’s the purpose of our new packaging, to create a fresh new look with good shelf visibility and good customer appeal. We have not re-formulated the rums; they are the same type of rums we have been making for 22 years.
Wasn’t 22 years ago the beginning of the craft distilling movement?
I didn’t know it then, but I was a pioneer.
I can remember being interested in distilling back then, but there wasn’t a lot of information out there yet. There wasn’t much on the internet. There were some books that were reprints of outdated books from the early 1900’s and some small paperback books in the home-brew stores.
How did you learn distilling and get into the rum business?
My wife and I owned a Christmas shop in New York, and I don’t want to cast a dispersion, but they literally taxed us out of business. Connie says “what are we going to do?” I said “We are going to move back to Tennessee where I have friends and family.”
I had a cousin by the name of Mack Prichard. Mack and I were carrying on a conversation one evening and I said “Mack, I need to figure out a new way to make a living.” I had been a dental technician for about 30 years of my life, and I was pretty well tired of that. Out of the blue, cousin Mack says “why don’t we make rum out of locally grown sorghum molasses?” My brother- in- law was a former governor of Tennessee said “Phil, that is not a bad idea. If you put it in a depressed county in Tennessee, the government might help you build it.” Well, it turns out there wasn’t any government funds in those days to help build distilleries. So, to get by, I got into the telecommunication business when it cost 49 cents a minute to make a business call and went to work for a company that was selling it for about 13 cents a minute.
The owner was kind of put out with me with the amount of money I was making. I was putting more points up on the board than any other salesman. I let him know how important I was to the company and about 15 minutes later he let me know how important he thought I was to the company. He fired me!
So, guess what? Now I am drawing unemployment. I was always into making wine. I went into a local wine shop and lo and behold, there was this book called The Lore of Still Building. I read it and said I can do this. I literally figured out that I could take my wife’s old canning pot and convert it into a little still with a condenser propped up on her ironing board with this white dog alcohol that I made from sorghum molasses dripping off into the kitchen sink. I gave some to my wife and she said “Whew, that’s pretty good!” That was the first compliment from my worst critic.
It wasn’t too long after that I started actually aging it in small 1 and 2-gallon barrels. About that time, I happen to be sitting across the table at my 40th high school reunion from a fellow who was in the wholesale liquor business in Memphis. His name was Victor Robillio. Vick said to me “what have you been doing Phil?”
“Well Vick I have been making rum” and he says” bring me some.” I said okay. If I had left the phone ring one more time (in those days we had these little reel to reel answering machines) the call would have been recorded for posterity. But I can tell you exactly what he said. “Phil, this is Victor. I let my sales staff taste your rum today. I have two questions. When are you going into business and what is this going to cost me?” I said “Vick are you serious?” He said” Phil you are going to make a serious mistake if you don’t pursue this. This is one of the best rums in the world.”
Okay, you don’t have to kick me in the pants twice. I set about to look at this more as a commercial venture. In those days we had this set of books called the Thomas Registry. I looked under Distilling Equipment and found the Vendome Copper & Brass Company in Louisville, Kentucky. I called them and this guy named Tom Sherman, who happened to be the president of the company, answered the phone. He was more than happy to build me a still to do what I wanted, but to show you what a gentleman he was, he said I happen to know where there are a couple of stills up in Vermont that will do what you want and here is their phone number and contact information. I got on the phone and, to make the story as short as possible, I jumped in a great big old tractor trailer with Vern the trucker and we ended up in Burlington, Vermont and loaded that Vendome equipment and brought it back here and began to erect it here in Kelso.
Prichard's Distillery.
Now you have the equipment to make Traditional American rum. How did you learn how to make rum like they did in colonial America?
Well, first of all, Thomas Jefferson, in one of his publications, claimed that rum was a poor man’s brandy. I hadn’t tasted any rum on the market at that time that tasted like a brandy. Then I started doing some logical thinking and realized that in colonial America, if you were going to make bread, you didn’t use white table sugar because white table sugar as we know it today did not exist. There was not the equipment, the chemical processes, the centrifuges necessary to make white table sugar as we know it.
If you had crystalline sugar at all in colonial America, it was very expensive. It was made by diluting what we call today table grade molasses with water. You know how you make candles? You dip the string down in the molten wax over and over and it builds up in layers. To make crystalline sugar in colonial America you had to dip the strings in a very diluted solution of molasses and allow it to crystalize and then somebody had to come and pull those crystals off. So, therefore, we knew that they were not going to make rum out of any kind of crystalline sugar.
When you look at how molasses was transported in colonial America, it was all made in the West Indies, the British Isles and what have you. But if you ship sugarcane juice in a barrel from the West Indies to Boston or Providence, it’s going to be rotten in the barrel before it gets there. They had to ship molasses that was 90 to 95% sugar. That’s about where you can barrel molasses and ship it without it spoiling. We know that the American Revolution was not fought over a bunch of tea, it was on the tax on molasses.
When King George slapped a tax on molasses from foreign lands, he was taxing America’s greatest exported product and that was rum. At that time, America was the largest producer of rum in the world. There were over 100 rum distilleries in Boston, in Providence and around New England. Even George Washington made rum and made rum from table grade molasses. There are some 2,000 rum distilleries today around the world and most of them are making it from blackstrap molasses.
Remember we started out with sorghum molasses, and I had already established my standard of quality that I wanted my rum to taste like. I’ll never forget when an ATF agent named Frank Osborne sat out here on my deck at the distillery, helping me fill out all the paperwork that I needed to do to get this distillery up and running. He said, “Mr. Prichard I’m not sure that you can make rum from sorghum molasses.”
The more I pursued it, the more I found that I was practically going to have to get an Act of Congress to declare sorghum as a type of molasses. It is, however, a type of sugar cane. Sorghum, as we grow it today, is in the same family with sugarcane, genetically it is in the same “tribe” in the grass family. It wasn’t going to be easy to make the transition. We figured out that we were not going to be able to make rum out of sorghum molasses and get it on the market in any reasonable amount of time.
I contacted a company down in Louisiana called Westway Trading and talked with Arthur Huguley who was President at the time. I called Mr. Huguley one day and I said, “I’m looking for a premium molasses to make rum” and he said “I’m going to send you some 5 -gallon pails of molasses that are used by the best distilleries in the tropics.” He sent me 4 or 5 pails of that molasses and I mixed it with water to get a fermentable solution. It was blackstrap. It took me three weeks to get the smell out of my stills. I promise you, we boiled vinegar; we did everything we could to get that smell out of our still!
At that point I took a can of Sorghum molasses to New Orleans, and I walked into Mr. Huguely’s office and I said “Mr. Huguely, this is what I am looking for.” I still have this picture in my mind of Arthur Huguely, President of Westway Trading, sticking his finger into a can of sorghum molasses to get a taste of it. Where upon he got on the phone and called a guy named Francis Graugnard of Caire & Graugnard in Edgard, Louisiana and said “I’m sending this young man out (mind you, I was 60 years old at the time) and he wants to talk to you about buying fine molasses.” I went out to the Caire & Graugnard Sugar Refinery in Edgard and that’s where we found the same type of molasses that they used in colonial America, a molasses that was 90 to 95% sugar, what we now refer to as Grade A Fancy or Table Grade Molasses. That is what we used to make our rums. That plant either closed down or burned down.
Since then we have found other sources, but it has all been high grade molasses that we make our rums out of. But the problem is we had to find a molasses that would be stable in the winter time. That’s another dilemma. It’s too hot to make rum in the summer months here and it’s too hard to make rum in the winter months because the molasses doesn’t flow. From now in through probably September to mid- November we are going to be making rum.
Once you mix the molasses with water and add the yeast, does the fermentation go pretty quickly in Tennessee?
Remember, we are using a very high sugar content molasses. We are also in the whisky business. We can run a fermentation on our whiskey mash in about 5 days. But with our rum, it takes almost two weeks to burn all that sugar and get it converted into alcohol. We go from a 15% solution down to a 1%, so we got to convert 14% of that molasses to alcohol, those sugars into alcohol. It can take 2 weeks for that to complete fermentation. 10 days is not unusual, 15 days is not beyond the scope of our fermentation techniques.
Prichard's Distillery2
You have two Vendome pot stills. Can you tell us about them and how you distill your rum?
The two Vendome Stills are designed to work in concert with one another. The 550 Beer Still produces approximately 110 gallons of Low Wine. Generally, when producing rum, we like to bring the High Wine off at a pretty low proof, finding the lower proof provides a higher concentration of fusel oils. I realize a high concentration of fusel oils is not common in the production of most rums, but remember, our goal is to produce a Traditional American Rum. I’m not so sure that those early rum distillers had a good grasp of such congeners as fusel oils and the flavors imparted by such. I suspect fusel oils were a rather heavy flavor enhancer in American Rum. They certainly are in Prichard’s Fine Rum.
For some reason I thought you also had a brandy still. Am I wrong?
No, you’re not. We were approached by the owners of Barbara Mandrel’s property up in Nashville, called the Fontanel. They wanted us to build a satellite distillery up there and we did. We had Vendome custom build us a French style alembic still. Once operational, we had a tanker load of a wonderful Catawba grape wine brought down from upstate, Western New York and, my gosh, it made a wonderful brandy.
But, about a year or so ago, the owners of the Fontanel property sold Barbara Mandrel’s property to a firm in Chicago and about that time, COVID-19 hit. We didn’t know what the new owners in Chicago were going to do.
The Fontanel property is not in the main business district of downtown Nashville where the other distilleries are. We saw a serious decline in our sales because people were not coming to see Barbara Mandrel’s home-place anymore. So, we closed that facility and that beautiful alembic still and all the related equipment is sitting in my warehouse, here in Kelso, waiting for someone to come along and buy it.
Is that what is referred to as a Charentais Still?
We refer to it as an alembic still. It has the swan’s neck, what is referred to as the onion head, the reservoir, and the coil worm condenser. It’s a beautiful piece of equipment. Somebody is going to come along and want it before long.
One of the things that set you apart in the past is the use of smaller, new barrels.
What made you go that route?
We don’t use those anymore. That was true for a period of time. When we started out, we were looking for concentrated, accelerated aging and we used 15-gallon barrels. But it takes about the same amount of time to make a 15-gallon barrel that it takes to make a 53 gallon barrel. The only difference is the cost of the wood. Somewhere along the way, we made the transition from the 15-gallon barrels to the 53-gallon barrels.
Now, if we can go through your rums. Is the base rum the same for all the rums?
Pretty much so. Just a white rum distilled from a good quality molasses.
Prichard's American Rum
Your Crystal Rum, is it aged/rested and then charcoal filtered to remove color?
It never sees the inside of a barrel.
The Fine Rum?
The Fine Rum used to be the Crystal Rum aged in 15-gallon barrels, but now it’s aged in 53-gallon barrels. Every rum that goes into that blend is minimum age of 4 years and up to 7 years old.
Tell me about your Private Stock.
Private Stock is a minimum of 10 years old and as much as 15 years old. But we are running out of it.
I guess I better get to Tennessee.
You better get here pretty quick. I may have to pour you a bottle straight from the barrel.
Because it is that old, did it spend all that time in those little barrels?
It spent most of its life in those smaller barrels. About 8 years ago I think we consolidated into bigger barrels.
You really don’t have an age statement mentioned on your bottles, like some distilleries. Is that because you are blending to achieve consistency?
We do blend. There is a good story behind that. There was a real nice restaurant here in Kelso that Jimmy Bedford, Master Distiller at Jack Daniels, and his wife liked to favor once in a while. My wife and I would enjoy eating there too. One day he stopped by to visit me. We were friendly acquaintances, and he looks at my operation and he said “Phil, I have to ask you a question. I hope you understand that I know how to make whiskey and we know how to make it consistently like we make it. When you are making rum, how do you maintain consistency and quality?”
He knew what I knew and that is the fermentation that happens in the summer time is going to be a lot faster than that in the winter time. That there are variations from batch to batch in a pot still operation as opposed to a column still operation. I looked at him real candidly and said to him “Jimmy, it’s called blending.”
What do you think the rum industry needs to do to improve its stature in the world of spirits?
The biggest obstacle facing the consumer when he walks into a retail store is this myriad of bottles on the shelf all labelled rum. There is nothing on any of those bottles, perhaps maybe an age statement, that gives you any indication of what the feedstock is in that rum. What is that rum made from? Is it made from sugarcane juice, is it made from granulated sugar, is it made from crystalized sugarcane juice (I don’t even know what that means), is it made from sweet molasses like we do, is it made from blackstrap molasses? There is no defining information on that bottle to inform the public what is in that bottle!
Until the rum industry recognizes that it has to create some standards of quality, standards of definitions that will inform the public what is in that bottle, the rum industry is always going to be a myriad of choices that are like a shotgun. You don’t know what you are buying.
The best lesson I ever had in life was when I was doing a tasting at Buster’s Liquor Store in Memphis back in 2005-2006. This guy walked in, and I said” Would you like to have a little taste of my rum?” “I don’t like rum!” End of conversation. I mean just blunt as he could be. “I don’t like rum.” Finally, I caught him on the way out and I said “I understand you don’t like rum, but you understand that there are different types of rum and I make a rum that is a bit different than other people.” He looked at me with a big question mark and I said “this is a rum that is made from a molasses not typically used to make rum. It’s made from a sweet table grade molasses.” “Well, let me have a taste of it. This doesn’t taste like rum, this tastes like a brandy. This can’t be rum.” It is. It’s made from premium grade table molasses. He says, “I’ll take two bottles of it.”
One time we did a tasting in Nashville for a bunch of lawyers. Lawyers are very sophisticated. We put our bottle in a paper sack and we poured samples. Those lawyers in the room that liked Scotch, thought it was a good single malt scotch. Those lawyers in the room that liked Bourbon, thought it was a good bourbon. When I pulled it out and showed them it was rum, they couldn’t believe it.
The point I am trying to make is, to just drive it home again what I said, there has to be some guidelines to help consumers understand what is in that bottle. You and I know that a rum could be made from sugarcane juice, some places they call it Cachaça, some people call it Rhum Agricole. Technically, it’s called rum if it’s made from the products of the sugarcane plant. My gosh, as I said before, as Mr. Huguely said long ago that some of the finest distilleries in the world are making their rum out of blackstrap molasses. A rum made out of blackstrap is not going to taste like a rum made from sugarcane juice or is it going to taste like a rum made from premium table grade molasses. So, there are already three different definitions right there.
Prichard American rum2
I always thought of you as a Rum guy, but you have been successful making Whiskey, too. Was that transition difficult?
Yes. Imagine me telling you “I want you to buy stock in my company, and by the way, we are going to make rum and it’s going to be 3 or 4 years before we find out if it’s any good or not and then we have to sell it.” This is a very capital – intensive business to get into. Fortunately, I have had some friends and friends of friends that have believed in me.
The hardest question I had to answer was “why are you making rum in a whiskey state?” The answer is: that back in 1997, whiskey was in the doldrums. There were only 8 distilleries in the United States making bourbon whiskey, if I am correct. Rum and tequila were the only two products showing positive growth besides vodka.
Let’s not leave vodka out of it, because vodka was in its heyday at the year 2001, 2002 and 2003 and the shelves were stocked with premium vodkas. So, I set about to make a product that showed positive growth potential. Both rum and tequila were showing a 3% positive growth in the year 2000. You can’t make tequila in Tennessee, but you sure could make rum.
Remember, my original goal was to get some local farmers to grow sorghum so that I could make rum out of sorghum molasses, but the TTB put the kibosh on that. So, I set out to make this rum. But I still got this pressure to start exploring making a Tennessee style whiskey.
This leads me to my 5th generation grandfather. We know that he made whiskey in Davidson County, Tennessee, about an hour south of Nashville. We know that Benjamin Prichard made whiskey and he made his whiskey from white corn grown on a red cob because that was the only corn that was grown in Tennessee in the 1790’s. That’s how early he was making his whiskey. We also knew that he made his whiskey in a pot still because the Coffey or column still had not been invented yet. So, when we started out to emulate what Benjamin Prichard made, we set out to make a whiskey in a pot still using white corn.
Everything rocked along just fine when it was just Jack, George and Phil. Then, they changed the laws in 2013 to allow a distillery to be built in any county that allowed liquor by the drink. We saw a proliferation of new distilleries like you can’t believe. I’m not sure, but I think there are over 90 of them now. At that point, my neighbor up the road got rather intense about wanting to standardize what defined Tennessee Whiskey as that type of whiskey that both Jack and George made, that is utilizing the Lincoln County Process of filtering the white dog alcohol through charcoal prior to entry into the barrel. You and I know something about charcoal. We use charcoal to make water taste cleaner.
If you are using a type of charcoal that has a distinct flavor, as they do, it gives off that flavor. But that charcoal is also filtering flavors out.
Benjamin Prichard was making whiskey 50 years before Jack was even born. The Lincoln County Process had not been invented. Nearest Green had not developed the technique yet. About 2005 I set about to emulate the whiskey that Benjamin Prichard was making way back when. By dang it, we did pretty good. An awful lot of people reviewed that Whiskey and found it pretty good.
Then I got an email about falling in line: “Mr. Prichard, if you will just put your Whiskey through a minimum of charcoal, it will have no effect on the quality or flavor of your product.” As I read that email to the Tennessee legislators, somehow or another, they seemed fit to give me an exemption because we had been grandfathered. We had been making Whiskey for over ten years. So, we were grandfathered out of that law. That’s where we differentiate our Tennessee Whiskey from other Tennessee whiskeys. Interestingly, we are the only distillery in Lincoln County that does not utilize the Lincoln County process.
When I lived in Colorado, it was easy to find Prichard Rums, Whiskey and Liqueurs. So far, I have not been able to find anything in Arizona. Why is that?
That’s a problem that faces these new craft distilleries out there and that is called the three-tier system. The three-tier system is not kind to the craft distiller. There are so many of them out there that it is hard to get their attention. In the olden days, we were the craft distillery at our wholesaler. As I said there are 90 some distilleries here in Tennessee now and my wholesaler probably has more of them. So, we don’t get the attention that we use to get.
We had a nice wholesaler in Arizona. We did business with them but they eventually spun us off to their wine division, for a lack of a better term, “they didn’t understand how to sell whiskey or rum. It didn’t take long for long for that relationship to fizzle out. So, for right now, we don’t have distribution in Arizona. I do, however, have a broker out there who is working hard to find us a new home. It’s hard for these small distilleries to garner the attention of these big, big warehouses, where you are just one among many. That’s the reason we don’t have distribution in Arizona.
Torav Cyn Plygav
Can you tell me about the family crest that appears on your bottles?
Okay. TORAV CYN PLYGAV. It’s Welsh. I was living in upstate New York, near Utica, and there is a Welsh community up there. This little lady named Mrs. Lloyd, saw that motto, Torav Cyn Plygav, and started laughing. I said, Ms. Lloyd what are you laughing at? “I am laughing at your family motto.” What do you mean? “Well, it’s very difficult to give a literal translation but essentially, You will have to break me before I will yield. Or I will bend before you make me break.” She explained it several ways. I said: Ms. Lloyd, that sounds an awful like tenacity. She says, “Hell no, you Prichards are stubborn!” She knew us well. That stubbornness has served us well, not to mention my little dance with the Tennessee legislature.
And the horse?
That picture on the crest is a Norwegian Fjord Horse. You are talking to, what was at one time, the foremost breeder of Norwegian Fjord Horses in North America. We imported close to 150 horses from Europe since I bought my first Norwegian Fjord Horse back in 1975. When I bought my first horse, there were only 300 Fjord horses in North America and that included United States and Canada. Today our little breed organization has more Fjord horses in the United States than they do in Norway.
What makes them special?
They are essentially big ponies. I am talking about a pony that weighs a thousand pounds, with an 8- inch cannon bone, The greatest character of the Norwegian Fjord Horse is its willingness to work. It loves people.
I had a stallion one time and I said that stallion thought it was put on this earth to be loved by me. They have this wonderful disposition that people who discover this breed just fall in love with. They are very sweet horses.
Thank you Mr. Prichard for taking the time to answer all my questions.
Well, if you have more questions, I have more answers.
I hope this re-introduction goes well and I see Prichard’s Fine Rum in Arizona soon.
Me too!
