[acoustic guitar notes
lead bright, resonant tones]
♪
(narrator)
Halfway down Redbud Lane,
a little northeast
of Forest City
and not far
from the town of Bostic,
Blue Ridge distillery
sits quietly
alongside Grayson's Creek
in a tranquil spot
called Golden Valley.
♪
You may be a whiskey fan
or not care a whit
for the stuff,
but either way,
you'll be intrigued
with the ingenuity
behind the mountain spirits
created by men
who seemed destined to come
together for that reason.
Their success
is all about these bubbles,
drifting up through
cut spirals of white oak
immersed in newly distilled
white whiskey,
bubbles that will
transform your thinking
about how fine spirits
can be made,
without waiting
10, 12, or 15 years
for it to age in barrels.
♪
Tim's family
was from Connecticut,
but his grandfather
purchased land
in the North Carolina
mountains
in Golden Valley.
(Tim)
So I got here when I was 16,
and I fell in love with it.
I loved everything about it.
I felt a human freedom here,
and it felt like comin' home
for the first time.
(narrator)
Tim's parents
opened his eyes to the world,
giving him a native sense
of dissatisfaction
with the way he found things,
so as a young man,
he tried some of this
and some of that:
built fire trucks,
went to diesel school,
worked in a gas station.
(Tim)
I was having
a conversation one day
where somebody was talking
about commercial diving,
and it was one of those things
where I was almost upset.
I was upset that I hadn't
heard about it before now,
almost like,
how dare people have careers
as commercial diving
and not let me know?
Like, that's not fair.
(narrator)
So he went to dive school
and eventually became
a freelance diver.
(Tim)
So I started working
inland diving;
I started working
offshore oil;
I started working
international salvage
all at the same time
because they are
very seasonal industries,
and I started
Defiant Marine.
I had $400 cash
that I went down and--
and started the company with.
Within three months,
first contract
comes out of the blue,
Deepwater Horizon,
the BP oil spill.
(narrator)
Salvage diving means
traveling the world
among a loose fraternity
of like-minded men
who come together
as projects demand.
(Tim)
You get to call
the best people
you've ever worked with
and say,
"Hey, we're going to Sicily;
hey, we're going to Egypt.
Hey, let's--
let's go to Greenland."
You have a family of--
of rough-and-tumble,
hairy-chested,
knuckle-draggin'
deep-sea divers.
You learn to create
this civilized chaos.
(narrator)
And sometimes
amid the civilized chaos,
you make a friendship
that sticks.
(Tim)
I met Bob
sittin' in a terminal
at the Miami airport,
and, uh, Bob shows up,
and you can spot--
you learn to spot divers.
And he comes walkin' in
in a pair of, you know,
black elephant hide
cowboy boots
and a pair
of Ray-Ban sunglasses
and a Hawaiian shirt
and, I think, you know,
sits down next to me
and probably made some crack
like, so you're goin'
to this job too?
You know,
I liked him instantly.
(narrator)
Bob Weihe is the gray-hair
of the bunch.
He started diving at 18
and had been at it
most of a lifetime.
He and Tim quickly bonded.
So how do you go from salvage
diving to making whiskey
in a quiet
North Carolina valley
once known
for its gold deposits?
Well, sometimes
your phone doesn't ring,
which means you've got to find
some other way
to keep your team working.
So I was sitting there alone,
trying to figure out,
how do I make Defiant Marine--
or how do we keep
this momentum going
in a way that makes sense but
diversifies us a little bit?
And I was, like,
lookin' at the still, going...
"Is it that simple?
Is it right in front of us?"
I called everybody
the next day,
and I said,
"Guys, I'm flying you in.
We're building a distillery."
I said, "I Don't know anything
about whiskey.
Don't know if I wanna."
He goes,
"It's easy."
Water, barley--
throw it in the still.
Little bit of yeast--
that's it.
And glad
that we thought that way
'cause that
was necessary, again,
to get us as far
as we've gotten.
(narrator)
The Defiant guys' ability
to look at a project
from odd angles,
as it turned out,
not only suited
whiskey-making just fine
but helped them create
a smooth,
new American single malt
in a way
that defies tradition.
I wanted to do something
that was unique,
and out of, you know,
financial necessity,
I thought about making
a single-malt vodka,
which would have been
a mash of 100% malted barley
distilled at a high-enough
proof to be a vodka.
But there's so many vodkas,
and the reason is,
is they're easy to make.
I didn't wanna make "easy";
I wanted to make "remarkable."
[easy guitar tune]
(narrator)
Beginning with the barley,
Defiant whiskey is made
with plump and juicy
two-row pale brewers' barley
with a golden amber to it.
The water comes
from a spring on the property
and is perfect
for whiskey-making,
but the oak they use
to mature the product
is Defiant's key ingredient.
(Tim)
Most whiskeys
that are on the market
are aged
for a minimum of eight years,
which means eight years
of burning up every dollar
you can put your hands on
to get spirit
into a barrel that--
you don't know if it's gonna
be successful or not,
to then go and engage a market
where you need money
for marketing
that we didn't have.
And what I had been taught--
or what I had accepted
was that
a four-year whiskey's OK,
a six-year whiskey's better,
a ten-year's whiskey's
better than that,
up to, you know,
a 50-year whiskey,
and I had been sold
on that as a fact.
The word whiskey
doesn't mean
"aged in a barrel."
The wordwhiskey is
an old Gaelic term or phrase,
uisge beatha, which means
the "water of life."
It doesn't mean
"aged in a barrel,"
and so I started
to rethink things.
I thought, wait a second.
Someone could just sit down
and say, you know what,
we're gonna put
our whiskey in a barrel
because what the wood
has in it
is gonna be complimentary.
They found it out by accident
because a barrel
was the storage and shipping
vessel of the day.
(narrator)
And then Tim
met a barrel maker
who showed him an oak spiral.
And when you put this oak
in our distillate,
you watch the amber's
washing out of this oak
within 15, 20 minutes,
like dippin' a tea bag
in hot water.
It's changing
from this white, crystal-clear
new-make whiskey,
and we found
that within 60 days,
you really reach
the saturation point,
so we like to say,
instead of putting
our whiskey in the barrel,
we put our barrel
in the whiskey.
(narrator)
The whiskey world took notice
of the Defiant new American
single malt
almost immediately.
(Tim)
We launched the brand
in 12/12/12,
December 12, 2012,
and within 12 months,
we won
best new whiskey of 2013.
(narrator)
Gary Crunkleton
should know whiskey.
His bar,
the Crunkleton in Chapel Hill,
has been a part
of the national
cocktail renaissance.
(Gary)
But I've heard that what
they do is, they run the--
the spirit, the distillate,
through wood chips,
and then, when it comes out
the other end,
it's--it's this color.
So there's no time at all
in a barrel,
and that's amazing to me.
They--there must be
some pressure
or somethin' to get
some osmosis going to--
to pick up the molecules
from the wood
to get into the whiskey,
but it's a great product.
I enjoy drinkin' it;
I enjoy mixing with it,
and again,
it's a beautiful packaging--
I'm proud that we have it
in North Carolina--
proud of it.
(narrator)
The Blue Ridge Distilling crew
makes an enthusiastic
and efficient team.
Everybody does
a little bit of everything,
whether it taste-testing
the most desirable
heart liquor,
packing product,
making breakfast,
or just enjoying the scenery.
(Bob)
I like where we're at
in Golden Valley.
I mean, this is
a wonderful place to work.
The mountain's
right out the door.
I can go for a walk
in the woods anytime I want.
(narrator)
It's an ideal place
to take a break
from those
physically demanding
Defiant Marine projects,
like that time in New York
following Superstorm Sandy.
(Tim)
And you're sittin' there
in Battery Park.
The sun's just comin' up,
and you're poppin' the cork
on a bottle of Defiant whiskey
that you make on your farm
in North Carolina
at your own distillery,
and you're the guys that are
tasked with pumpin' out
the New York City
subway system?
It's--surreal moments--
you can't help
but shake your head
and look at each other
and just quiet--
there's nothing to say.
We make it right here,
every single drop,
and we make it our way,
and it's working,
and people love it.
[resonating strings fade]