At least your presidential intern.
Let's do a tick on housing and fixed for.
They go down.
Yeah I think that's a steal.
Yeah, sure.
Dude, you said you wanted a tall, skinny steal like Abraham Lincoln.
If that ain't a presidential steal.
I'll kiss somebody dead on your butthole.
You know, the only thing I see?
We got to put the mash in up there.
Josh Now we get back to the shop, and this steal is huge.
This thing is, like, three foot taller than tickle.
Coming out with a nice two inch pipe coming out the top with a small cap going right into
the condenser. It looks like something that would have been running Abraham Lincoln's
day. Was this like three sections?
Two sections.
Two sections? Yeah. What I did here, too.
Was a good, solid.
Stuff. Yeah, well, see, look.
You see all these right here?
This is braces. It's keeping everything round, stirring it up.
And I even got a sleeve right here along this middle, so it ain't gonna leak collar.
No, it ain't going to leak.
It ain't going to separate.
I kind of like this little rim right here.
It makes it look like it's got a hat on it, huh?
You know, it does kind of look like it's got a top hat.
That's Abraham Lincoln steal right there.
Good job.
Man. Yeah.
Little cap that comes out.
It's almost reminded me of Abraham Lincoln.
He's got that eight inch stovepipe hat they used to call it.
I mean, really, this thing is looking good.
It's looking like it's ready to run.
You think it looks like Abraham Lincoln now?
Check this out. You got something for you Here, look.
What is that chair? That's his beard.
Beard? Yeah, that's Abraham Lincoln's beard.
All right, look. See? We got it. Looks like he's smiling to me right here.
We got an eye right here.
Didn't Abraham Lincoln have a mole about right here?
Right. Are you talking about a mole?
Yeah. Well, that nose.
All right. And then here's his mouth right here.
All right. There you go.
What do you think?
It does look like Abraham Lincoln.
It looks like the damn peanut man.
Well, no beard.
You guys really think that looks like Abraham Lincoln?
Yeah. Hold on a second.
I think it looks exactly like him.
I think he did a good job.
I mean, especially with that mustache thing, that beard and thing you got going on there.
Well, you did that for jars.
And seven nights ago, our moonshine forefathers, Tim Smith, went on a mission to
find out if Abraham Lincoln sold moonshine in my store.
Well, guess what, Tim?
You were right.
Outstanding. Yeah, we got the facts.
Now we know the story.
While Lincoln sold alcohol in his younger days, by the time he entered politics in
1834, he had to acknowledge the influence of the temperance movement, the anti-alcohol
movement that was also closely linked with progressive causes like abolition,
particularly up north.
As president, Lincoln was clearly sympathetic to those causes, but he also
wasn't one to criticize a drinker with General Ulysses S Grant finally turning the
tide in the union's favor during the Civil War.
Lincoln responded to complaints of Grant's drinking by saying, Find out what brand of
whiskey grant drinks and send a barrel of it to each of my generals.
Steel's not doing No talking.
Well, no, not that Steel's going to be giving any speeches.
I mean, should we put some fire on it?
So let's get this stuff out of the truck, get the supplied, because.
I'm done with this whole crazy.
Abraham Lincoln. Okay.
Yeah. Let's get bashed in.
You got to drop this tailgate chicken.
You put that corn on the tailgate.
Yeah. Let's do it.
All right.
Now it's time to just mash in.
You know, we got this sorghum syrup that we went and harvest in Kentucky.
We got the white corn that we picked out.
We got the recipe down.
I mean, you know, we're ready to go.
All right. So I'm back in Abraham Lincoln's day, and they couldn't get sugar.
They didn't have sugar, so they used a sorghum as a substitute.
But that sorghum is a highly concentrated sugar substitute, so you have to break it
down. If not, the yeast will not work.
So I'm gonna get the water going.
We fill these buckets up, get us 25 gallons of water.
I know this.
There you go.
So it's going to be five gallons of syrup, so 25 gallons of water per batch.
And we're going to do that twice to make 150 gallon batch.
That's one five.
Gallon. Five gallon.
Put that in there.
All right. That's what I'm going to weighs a ton.
Yeah, it does.
This sorghum has to be broken down.
The sugar is too complex.
The yeast will not eat it.
We need to heat it up.
So it breaks it down. It goes into solutions, is what they call it.
All right, guys, we're going to get to grinding corn.
Oh, all right.
We're good. All right.
Stick your finger in it.
Just stick your finger in and see what happen.
Stick this one right here in a hole.
Yeah. Yeah.
Cut it out to and just kind of rounded it out.
All right. Well, you know what I say we get some corn in there, right?
All right. There's some good sized kernels in this stuff right here.
Kentucky white corn. This is like hairline corn right here.
I mean, they used this back in Abraham Lincoln's day because they could eat it.
They could just steal it.
And they get used for a whole lot of different reasons.
You know, today we ain't got all these varieties of corn now.
But back then it was kind of a universal thing when.
Multipurpose corn.
This is going to make some good alcohols, but it's going to do.
The region. They grew white corn and they had sorghum as a substitute for sugar.
So I know for sure that all the moonshiners would have been using all these ingredients.
And that's what we're going to be using today.
You know, it smells like.
Sweet, sweet.
Sorghum.
Sorghum smell. Just like sorghum.
Like sorghum. That's some thick ass, sweet stuff right there.
Look at that, Josh.
Well, you know what this looks like.
What is that? It looks just like a big old tub of root beer.
Yeah. Damn, it tastes good.
Oh, that's good right there.
Oh, yeah.
It's ready to go in the barrel right here.
That's good. And I think.
We can kill the fire on it.
It's real.
Sweet.
So once you get that sorghum syrup broken down, then you can add your corn while you
got it hot. That will break down the starches in the corn.
So we're doing like, killing two birds with one stone here.
All right, boys, That's the last bucket.
Bucket number five.
It's looking good, ain't it?
Smells amazing now because the steel is so tall.
We need to add a little bit of mash at a time.
Start to burn them, let it start to heat up, and then we add a little bit gradually at a
time. It's called charging the steel.
This is a typical concept of how to heat up your steel and preheat it, because if not,
you'll be sitting around for six hours waiting for it to heat up.
This is the last of it, right, John?
That's all I can get out of it.
If you hadn't of made the steel so tall, we could have filled it up.
Well, I did what I was told.
So right now, we got the steel starting to show some steam coming out.
So it's heating up so we can get this run going.
You know, I don't think I've ever had to have a damn chair in my life.
Mud up a steel before she's hot, boys.
Well, you know, we got the presidential steel set up right here.
Yeah. Who's president of this thing?
Well, me and you probably got seniority.
I think Josh is more like the intern.
Y'all kiss you the presidential intern.
At least you're a presidential intern.
Well, I mean. I mean, you had to stand on.
He'd ever rung on the way down.
Is that not? You stand on a chair.
We got liquor flowing, fellas.
We got. Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah. We're under. We knew it was coming.
Yes, sir. That's some good liquor flowing right there.
Don't we like falling in, man?
Yeah, I'm gonna turn it up a little heat.
We're discussing who's ranking who in the presidential situation or whatever, and next
thing I know, we're making Abraham Lincoln sorghum whiskey right now.
It's coming right out.
Well, you know, the way we charged this thing, we had a lot of them heads go right
out that cat.
So we do got to clean the steel, though, because that carpet all brand new copper.
I believe this is the closest recipe to what Abraham Lincoln would have been selling at
his store. Guys, I think this right here is the jar that we need to taste.
Not sure what proof it is, but it looks like it's pretty high.
Back in the day, they was trying to make more yield.
That's what they was trying to make more volume.
She's going up there a little.
But I mean, it is a seven foot steel to seven foot steel.
I want you to be the first one to taste this whiskey.
That's what I'm talking about.
I appreciate that, man.
And the first thing I smell is sorghum right off the rip.
We did put about £150 of sorghum in it.
Hot dog, son of a gun.
That's some good stuff right there.
You think we made it? Abraham Sorghum whiskey was amazing.
It's sweet from start to finish, and the flavor just matches the smell, and it lasts
all the way through.
I think you're right. I'm smelling all sorghum.
Yeah, Josh, I'm tasting all sorghum.
Sweet. Not too much corn.
I do taste a little bit of corn on the front, but that sorghum whiskey is laying
right there on my palate. It is not going away.
It almost makes you want to taste more.
It sticks with you. It's really sweet flavor.
You know, the sorghum is there through and through.
I'm picking up some of the corn on the back.
They pair very, very well together, you know, being a presidential candidate one time
myself, yeah, if I'd have had this Abraham Lincoln sorghum whiskey with me as I was
campaigning, I believe I'd have won that election.
We traveled back to Kentucky and we learned that there's a lot more to Honest Abe than
most people know. His connection to alcohol may be the one thing he wasn't so honest
about. And then we made a recipe that Lincoln would have sold at a store.
Then, at the same time speaks of the whiskey making traditions of that region.