Around the Barrel - Transcript: Will Haynes and Matt Giesler (The Podcask)
Will Haynes: The ubiquity of Old No. 7 in everyone's mind – I feel like, wow, it's the staple. It's the mainstay. We love getting people to expand their mind in the world of Jack Daniel’s, cause there's so many wonderful different expressions to try. And we're big fans of that.
Lucas Hendrickson: It began, as so many good things in life can, with friendship. From friendship sprang rants, ribbing, 15 minute timeouts and, eventually, a community of fans. On this episode, we talk with the guys behind the popular spirits podcast, The Podcask.
We break down how they turn curiosity about consumption into conversations, how developing your whiskey vocabulary is key and how the seemingly simple act of turning on microphones activated a global collection of fans to gather Around the Barrel.
Welcome back to Around the Barrel, the official podcast from the makers of Jack Daniel’s. I'm your host, Lucas Hendrickson. One of the best parts of any sort of fandom is finding like minded people that enjoy the same pursuit, be they wildly popular or unique and offbeat.
It's even better when you can kickstart that fandom with people you already know. Will Haynes and Matt Giesler had been friends and coworkers for a long time, and their mutual admiration for spirits led them to take the conversations they were having, add some microphones and create some content. And The Podcask, well into its fourth year, was born.
The semi purposeful, semi stream of consciousness podcast tackles not only current events in the whiskey world but has the guys trying everything under the sun and emerging from barrels from the most familiar brands to small batch stuff from all over. And if Giesler, now far better known as the Greeze, breaks into a rant every once in a while, all the better.
Will: I'm Will Haynes, cohost of the podcast. I am from all over the Southeast. Grew up in Georgia, Florida, Virginia, Alabama and now I make my home in Franklin, Tennessee.
Matt Giesler: And I'm Matt Giesler, also known as the Greeze on The Podcask. Will gave me my name out of necessity just because no one knows how to spell my last name or even say it half the time, and he likes to say that I am a little greasy on the edges.
I am from northeast Georgia and I love my hometown, but I was also happy to migrate to Nashville, Tennessee.
Lucas: Will and the Greeze, welcome to Around the Barrel.
Will: Thanks for having us.
Matt: Honored to be here, man. Thank you so much.
Lucas: Well, the honor is ours, because you guys are certainly at the forefront of the spirits podcasting realm right now. The Podcask, available at fine audio demand sources all over the internet and also thepodcask.com, correct? I get that one right?
Will: That’s right. Yes.
Lucas: Okay, fantastic. Talk to us a little bit about the idea behind the show. You guys were drinking buddies and just decided to turn those conversations into content. What was the origin point for The Podcask? And we'll go from there.
Will: Well, we both grew up in the South, and we worked together in media. I work more on the audio broadcast side, and the Greeze – he's in the video world.
And after weekends we'd get together you know, Monday morning, just kind of talk about, “Did you try anything new? Do you have any new whiskeys or any new bourbons? Did you learn anything?”
And we decided one day, “Hey, we're having these conversations already. What if we just grab some microphones and put it out and try our hand at podcasting and try to make a product that we think that people would like to listen to and maybe learn along with us?”
Matt: Oh, man. I remember coming into the office and just when we started first having these conversations about, “Hey, why don't we just turn on a couple of mics and just hit record?”
We were giddy in the office and we were like, “Bro, do you think maybe distilleries will send us a bottle of something to try? That would be – I mean, what planet would that be? That would be amazing.”
Cause at that time, I mean, Will and I – our whiskey cabinet probably involved ten expressions. I mean, and we're talking – that's post-birthday. You know, it wasn't something in the stocking for Christmas.
Lucas: Sure. The gift receiving aspects of everybody's liquor acquisition at this point. Yeah.
Will: Absolutely.
Matt: Right. And so we were looking at, “Oh man, distillers could send us stuff to sample. That'd be really cool,” and, “Wouldn't that be awesome, Will?” I'm like, “Oh man, we would totally make it if that's what we did.”
And it was funny cause we released a couple of episodes and we were noticing there's people out there that want to listen to whiskey talk, even if we didn't necessarily – I mean, we started it with a premise of, “We don't know a lot of stuff.” We don't. It was like a journey of our whiskey journey. We were very new.
Will: At the time, there weren't a lot of podcasts that were these kind of lifestyle niche podcasts. And we actually checked to see what else was out there in the space, and at the time it was really only WhiskyCast, which has been around a long time.
Lucas: Right.
Will: And that's – we kind of look at that more as the NPR of whiskey and using a lot of information, and we were more morning zoo radio. We call it whiskeytainment.
Lucas: Right. Nice.
Will: And so our premise isn’t to necessarily tell you everything you're going to ever need to know about whiskey, but it's the conversations, it's the hanging out, it's the learning a little bit here and there that really drives the heart of what we're doing. It's like hanging out with your buddies, having a glass of whiskey.
Matt: Some of the favorite parts of our listeners is going back and listening to that first time we freaked out when, you know, I learned something new. And I mean, that happened a lot and it's still happening.
Lucas: Sure.
Matt: I still don't – I can't keep a lot of info straight, and Will calls me a dumb dumb sometimes, but it's fine. They love that too.
Lucas: Yeah. I think I heard that, cause I went back and listened to several episodes, including the one you did most recently on the Jack’s Single Barrel expression that you were trying out. And I believe I heard the phrase dumb dumb, what, four times, maybe something? And that's okay.
Will: It seems like more often than not lately he's been falling in that category, but it's fine.
Matt: Dumber than a bag of hammers has been thrown out more recently.
Lucas: I love that phrase. Use it often. So, yeah, it's certainly useful.
But other than just kind of repetition in growing up, doing it in the college years when it's legal, what were your backgrounds in whiskey and spirits? Or have basically the last four years been about kind of developing that vocabulary, developing the knowledge base?
Whether or not you can retain it all the time is a different story, but what has been that whiskey journey for you in learning about tasting notes and how to describe and how to do this on a regular basis as well as keeping up the friendship and just the conversationalness of the show that you're doing?
Will: Well, I will say my first drink in a bar in college was when my cousin took me out and he ordered it for me. And I had a Jack and Coke, as I believe is many people's first segue into it.
Lucas: So many.
Will: And it grew from there. And that became – because that was the first impression I had of being able to go to the bar in college and get a drink, it kind of stayed in that lane with whiskey.
Lucas: Sure.
Will: And then it was not until I was almost out of college that – I didn't really realize that there was a group of people that enjoyed American whiskey for the nuances and the flavors until I was at a buddy's apartment.
And his roommate was maybe the biggest Jack Daniel's fan I've ever met still to this day. And he was explaining to me and my buddy how different barrels taste different.
Lucas: Oh, sure.
