Ari Klafter - Thornton Distillery | Making American Single Malt, Harvesting Illinois Peat, Whiskey Terroir, Barrel Aging & Finding a Prohibition-Era Gun

I'm still thinking about this terroir.

I think I'm starting to disagree with you.

Tell me.

Because you're talking about the human influence.

And I think terroir is you remove the human aspect of it.

So

you're looking purely at like...

The science part of it, the technical

part

of it.

Almost like the things that we on paper can't control.

The difference between Pete in Illinois versus Pete in Scotland, that's terroir.

Widow Jane was famously using water from Brooklyn and New York to... use terroir in their whiskey and I think it's to me it's of those specific places using the land in that way okay

so you're talking about the physical aspects of Yeah, because I

agree, but the way that I bridge the two is somebody's got to decide they want to actually do that.

Maybe what I'm talking about.

Sometimes there's things that, and I think this is famously in Lamek beer production, like the microbes in the Seine River Valley coming and fermenting the water.

There's some things that you couldn't escape if you wanted to, but at the end of the day, I think also someone has to be like, I actually want to use this water.

I want to use this grain.

Maybe the aging environment is a little bit less controllable, but I think it's got to be somebody deciding that they want that in their whiskey, because otherwise everybody can get grain from a major supplier.

You could be using municipal water.

I think sometimes it's the individual choices that we make to showcase those things.

I do agree that Nancy Fraley's could be more intentional when it comes to doing that, but ideally what she's doing, and I think that she's excellent at embracing what she has in front of her.

I'm enjoying you being in this flash.

It's so funny.