Kristiane Weeks‑Rogers of CRAFT SPIRITS magazine sat down with distillers Alan Bishop and Erik Wolfe to explore how intentional inefficiency became artistry in their colonial‑inspired collaboration on the upcoming Wolfe & Wilson Straight Rye Whiskey. This unique project brings together two masters of the craft: Stoll & Wolfe head distiller Erik Wolfe and southern Indiana farmer‑distiller Alan Bishop, formerly of Spirits of French Lick.
CSM: First and foremost, thank you for creating this fantastic product. It’s different from the other commemorative 250 whiskey labels we’ve seen. Everyone’s bottle is special in some way, but this one is incredibly special because you took a colonial recipe and adapted it for modern times. What modern adjustments were necessary to make this happen?
Alan Bishop: Honestly, the only real modern adjustments to it are that we didn’t have access necessarily to colonial grain. And also it was run on a column still, but a very particular type of column still that Eric has. It’s pretty unique to his setup.
Obviously, we use the modern mash tone to mash in with, but other than that, I mean, honestly, I propagated the yeast, too. We stuck as colonial as what we could, all the way down to the inclusion of fruit. Some of the distillations had apples and some had raisins in the thumper. The reason for that is that we have a lot of historical evidence of the farm distillers in those times using what they had on hand. They didn’t have the distinction of all the modern rules that we have nowadays. So other than that, I don’t think there was a whole lot that we did to adjust it to modern times.
Purists pointed out that we shouldn’t have put it in the barrel, but good luck selling White Dog. And in colonial times, if it was being shipped at all, it was being made in the fall, so it would have sat in a cask over the wintertime and taken on some color anyway.
Erik Wolfe: That also was interesting how the project was born from us working together at Mount Vernon. So much of what Alan and I try to do is think about the conditions under which these whiskeys would have been created. And no, we weren’t wearing breeches and no, it wasn’t done using a period tree that we fell that had wood from that time period. But we talk a lot about how the uniting ethos amongst distillers is: You got to make it work, and you got to make it work with what you have on hand. And if you’re making decisions based on what you think is in the best interest of flavor, and then in the best interest of kind of taking the consumer on this journey, both intellectually and from a flavor standpoint.
I think so much of what this project was born out of is for Alan and I being at Mount Vernon is very much what they refer to as a liminal space. But the idea that you have two different eras (you’ve got 2026 and mid 1700s) and for brief moments when you’re there, out of the corner of your eye, you’re seeing the steam rise; your senses are in that era for that moment. So for us to try and create that liminal experience where you’re tasting something from that era. Yes, it’s informed by this prior era, but not unintentionally, because we’re trying to get it to be palatable and interesting to modern consumers.
Part of those decisions is making it affordable and accessible to people, because we could make this super esoteric, amazingly period accurate whiskey. I don’t know if anyone’s going to want to drink it, and it’s going to be so expensive for people who can afford it. Then we’re not really taking people on that journey, we’re only allowing a select few. I think for us, it was really trying to figure out how to take that ethos and really extend it throughout the project.
When you go to create a whiskey, there’s basically a decision tree. It starts with a sort of yeast and mashbill. Part of that is deciding what style you want to even make. But every step of the way from what yeast you use, how the quantity that you pitch, the grains, the proportions, how they’re cooked, how each one of those is a different branch on that tree.
Bishop: I think, too, another one of the aspects of the modernity of the thing, so as Eric was saying, you know, Mount Vernon’s kind of a liminal space. Eric and I have known each other for several years, but had never met until we worked together at Mount Vernon. There was a moment where we were rowing mash and Eric had said something along the lines of, “It feels like we’ve done this before”. That’s what spurred the project on.
Not to mention the fact that Eric understands a lot of my esoteric and more occultish leanings, as it were, and my obsession with farmer’s Almanacs. He has a lot of those same aspects, so it made sense to work together.
One of the ideas we developed early on was this distinctly American story: the story of distillers who moved into Pennsylvania, Virginia, the Carolinas, Maryland, and beyond. Over generations, those distillers kept moving west. But you never hear about any of those distilling traditions going back east.
Where I’m from in southern Indiana, the region was settled by many families of German ancestry who came out of Pennsylvania. They brought with them a lot of cultural and distilling traditions. I see the same cultural patterns here that I see when I visit places like Lititz. So part of the modernity of this project was asking: What would happen a few generations down the road? Our distilling traditions in southern Indiana were adapted from those German methods that originated in Pennsylvania.
For the most part, that’s the foundation, though there’s a bit of Scots-Irish and Welsh influence mixed in. But what if a distiller deeply rooted in those southern Indiana methods, someone who’s studied them historically, took those techniques and brought them back east, to where they first came from in America? That’s what we did: we compared notes, collaborated, and created a product together.
It all happened by chance. We’d been talking about other mash bills and projects we wanted to pursue, and it just so happened that we both had the same book on hand; one that included what looked like a mash wheel. You rarely find mash bills from the early 1800s, but this one came close to what you’d consider a modern mash bill. It detailed, by bushel and peck, how much grain to use for a given fermenter size, probably around 120 gallons originally.
From there, we just had to apply modern “beer math” to scale it up to contemporary standards. That interplay between modern technique and colonial inspiration became a central theme of our collaboration.
Wolfe: The fact that we’d both read the same obscure pamphlet from the 1750s just confirmed it. Alan and I both do a lot of weird, hopefully good, geeky stuff, and I think we’ve normalized some of it. We’ll say, “We didn’t really do that much colonial stuff,” but then realize, actually, we did. We used a yeast that Alan had collected as a wild strain and propagated back up.
Bishop: Oh, the kveik, yeah, it was a blend of over 30 different kveik strains that I propagated over a bunch of years. So I don’t know how many strains are left in it now.
Wolfe: And then we also, just because that’s what you [Alan] do, we added cheese culture to it as well.
Bishop: That was the way that they soured yeast here in southern Indiana, whereas on the East Coast you used hops to sour your yeast with. So again, that brings that east-west conversation. You know that changed when they got here. I know there was some of that out there too, but that was the common way that you soured your yeast here in Indiana.
Wolfe: What’s so interesting is how distilling evolved through these offshoots or missteps. Before hops were widely available, people sometimes used milk or cheese cultures instead. Once hops became accessible, that practice disappeared.
For us, investigating those little inefficiencies, what we call flavor opportunities, is fascinating. They might be operational inefficiencies, but they open the door to exploring flavor and imagining an alternate history: What if they’d kept doing this?
It’s further proof that distillers used what they had on hand and what they knew how to use. On the East Coast, that meant hops; in dairy regions, it meant milk culture. The leap we made, and forgive the tangents, was almost like when scientists developed the periodic table. They knew certain elements existed but hadn’t yet identified them. The cheese culture was our version of that, a missing piece we suspected was part of early whiskey making.
As a thought experiment, we believed distillers back east might have used cheese culture to enhance flavor. And sure enough, Laura Petrizio, who’s done extensive historical distilling work, found evidence of a pre-Prohibition Pennsylvania distillery using cheese culture. That discovery confirmed our hunch. Those intuitive leaps based on research can reveal the missing pieces that tie history together.
What’s fascinating for us is seeing how that flavor translated throughout the run. We expected some influence early on, but thought it would quickly be overpowered by the new make and its nuances.
So often, when people talk about flavor, they treat it like a monolith: like saying ‘apple.’ But there’s the flesh of the apple, the skin, the ratio of skin to flesh when you take a bite at different times, and how those elements inform one another. For us, it was interesting to see the different notes contained within the larger whole of the flavor and how they played out over time.
Even though we were running on a column and a thumper, one of the things Alan and I discussed was perspective. Alan, is it fair to say you weren’t anti‑column when we first met, but you weren’t exactly pro‑column either?
Bishop: I think it’s fair to say I’ve always been a pot still guy and have written a lot about it. But your setup definitely changed my thinking. It’s so different from how a low‑rec Kentucky column is typically run, and it completely shifted my perspective on what’s possible.
For example, with the fruit, I knew what would happen on a pot still. You can macerate fruit, ferment it with the grain, or throw fruit into the thumper. I knew the flavor that would bring and how it would carry through most of the distillation. But on a column still, I assumed the throughput would be so high and the contact time so short that the flavor would drop off almost immediately.
That’s not what happened at all. The flavor came and went in waves. As we measured spirit off the still in buckets, one would have a hint of apple, the next a little more, and then another that was almost pure apple, even picking up some color from the material in the thumper as the apples broke down. The distillation reduced the apples completely until almost nothing was left but skin.
And the cheese culture thing is fascinating. As Erik mentioned, I’d never found proof of it being used back east, but here in southern Indiana, it was part of an apple brandy tradition. Just like in Normandy, they raised cattle under the apple trees, and the cows ate the fallen fruit. That meant constant access to milk and naturally occurring cheese cultures, even if they didn’t fully understand what they were doing. I always suspected that idea came from somewhere, and now we know it traveled through Pennsylvania and probably originated in Germany.
From a sensory standpoint, I’ve used cheese culture throughout my distilling career because I propagate and capture most of my own yeast. What we used at Stoll & Wolfe was a controlled strain, but most of my yeasts have a symbiotic relationship, yeast and cheese culture working together. You can even get it from active yogurt if you’re in a pinch; I’ve done that before.
The yeast begins fermentation and gets about three‑quarters of the way through while dropping pH. Then the cheese culture wakes up, finishes the fermentation, and drops the pH even further. On that run, I think we were around 4.8 or lower. Typically, with cheese cultures, the finished pH on whiskey is closer to brandy, sometimes 4.1 or 4.2, and I’ve seen it as low as 3.8. That would alarm most distillers, who’d assume an infection, but we don’t lose any yield, so it’s not hurting anything.
The neat thing is that when you propagate yeast and cheese culture together using a simple dip‑back method from the 1800s, you can keep it going indefinitely. It behaves the same way every time, yeast takes off first, then cheese culture joins in to finish, protecting the fermentation from unwanted bacteria.
On the sensory side, it adds a soft mouthfeel and acts as what I call a flavor bridge. In botanical distillation, for example, a touch of licorice root isn’t there for flavor but to hold flavors together. Or if you want a hot cinnamon note, you need cayenne, cinnamon, and Ceylon working in harmony. Cheese culture does the same thing: it ties flavors together and makes them more cohesive.
When you taste a spirit made this way, it’s not linear front palate, mid‑palate, finish. Everything blends together more seamlessly. It’s especially effective for younger spirits, like this two‑year‑old, where we wanted to preserve as much grain character as possible. It holds the spirit together more tightly than not using cheese culture or relying on something like malic acid, which would be the shortcut to achieve a similar effect.
Wolfe: Something Alan and I talk about a lot with folk wisdom is that you can’t maintain social capital (to use a modern term for a very old concept) by repeating falsehoods. So many of the things people discovered long ago worked, even if they couldn’t explain scientifically why they worked. They had evidence, and that was enough.
A big part of what Alan and I discuss is a true artisanal approach to what we’re doing. When a fast‑food chain uses the word artisanal to describe lemonade, it loses meaning. But when we use it, it’s about engaging all your senses in production.
So much of being a parent is teaching restraint: don’t touch that, don’t smell that, don’t stare. Distilling is the opposite. It’s about unlearning those behaviors: touching the mash, smelling it, tasting it, being involved with the distillate at every phase of the run. Knowing what the apples taste like before they go into the thumper, what kind of raisins you’re using, all of that builds sense-memory.
For us, seeing that whole picture in this project was exciting. Each run is slightly different, and we leaned into that. We even split off some of the distillate to experiment further, using two types of cooperage. One was a standard number‑three char, and we went in at 105 proof, a lower entry proof inspired by older practices and the flavor profile we wanted. It’s more expensive, but we like to make things harder and more expensive whenever we can.
In Newtonian science, you isolate one variable and control everything else. But if you take that approach to distilling, how will you ever learn anything? Every run is inherently different, affected by atmospheric pressure, ambient temperature, grain variation, even moon phases. Dick Stoll taught me early on that you’re never stepping into the same stream twice. You have to look at the whole picture.
Bishop: Let’s get nerdy about cooperage for a second. Honestly, I’ll tell you almost anything you want to know, because good luck trying to recreate it. I have enough trouble recreating it myself sometimes.
Ground‑fired cooperage is very different from modern cooperage. Today, for efficiency, barrels are fired with intense gas flames that create a char in seconds. As distillers, we know the char is crucial, but the toast behind it matters just as much. When whiskey penetrates the wood, the char layer might be only a fingernail thick, maybe two, but behind that lies the toast, where the whiskey interacts through the seasons.
With ground‑fired barrels, the flavor profile is sweeter and the whiskey darker for its age. I think that depth comes from the ground‑fired process. It’s white off the still, of course, but seeing how a colonial‑era technique can shape flavor gives people a glimpse into what whiskey might have tasted like then. It’s another way to make things more expensive and less efficient, but always in pursuit of flavor.
Alan and I talk a lot about that balance. We used an agitator to mix a thousand gallons of mash and if I thought hand‑rowing it would make the flavor better, I’d have done it. I’m not opposed to working harder if it improves the whiskey. But using a pump instead of buckets doesn’t change the flavor; it just makes production more practical. We focus on inefficiencies that develop flavor, not inefficiencies that just slow us down.
At Mount Vernon, producing with period techniques is incredible, and backbreaking. It has its place in the whiskey ecosystem. But as a for‑profit distillery, we have to make whiskey people can actually taste. So we seek out those costly, time‑consuming, sometimes frustrating methods that ultimately serve the consumer.
Alan and I share that slightly twisted joy of knowing that, as artists, we can torture ourselves a little to make the end result better. We’re going to explore weird ideas anyway, and we’re grateful people want to come along for the ride. If we can be the bus full of weird freaks turning people on to new ways of thinking about American whiskey: what it was, what it is, and what it can be. That’s the fun part.
Bishop: There are two other people we should mention before we go. We ended up at Mount Vernon because of Steve Bayshore, a very good friend of ours who was determined that Erik and I needed to get together. That’s really where all of this started.
And of course, our poor third stooge, Aiden Pemberton, deserves a mention too. He helped us with a couple of the runs and was part of making it all happen.