E.152: Deathless Dog’s Whiskey Wednesdays

Amy Gabay 00:00
This podcast is brought to you by Artspire presented by the Pump House Regional Art Center to attract, engage, and connect artists in the community through an Art Fair and Sale on Saturday, June 12. Information is at artspire.thepumphouse.org. We hit up Eddie and Dan of the Deathless Dogs again, but this time focusing on their Whiskey Wednesday’s, where they wax poetic about favorite whiskies, rate them, and of course, clink ’em and drink ’em. You can find more conversations on our website, lacrosselocal.com. I’m Amy. And I’m Brent. And this is La Crosse Local.

Brent Hanifl 01:05
You guys are coming up on a one year anniversary, aren’t you with Whiskey Wednesday’s?

Deathless Dogs 01:09
Just last week was one year. Yep. We did the Blanton’s verse Blanton Gold round two. Yeah, because that was our, that was our first video. So we recreated it. One year later, We fresh bottle popped both. So yeah.

Brent Hanifl 01:26
So was Whiskey Wednesday’s, was that basically in response to the pandemic? Or were you just going to do it anyways?

Deathless Dogs 01:31
No, I, I had the idea to do it for a while. The origin of it was in 2020, we got a bunch of shows booked, that were really good with like bigger bands and our kind of music and we were looking for ways to promote it that would be different than the usual just you know, Facebook event, post the, you know, concert poster. So I thought like, let’s just do a video each week that we have a show to do. So we did the first one, and then had a show and then everything shut down. But the first video got such a good response that we just decided to keep going, putting out the videos every week because we didn’t have any idea how long this was going to go on for. And otherwise we’d be sitting around pretty much doing nothing and everyone would forget we exist. Yeah, we want to stay relevant. We’ve kind of you know how The Rock was a pro wrestler? And now he’s better known for an actor. Oh, yeah, of course, the way we’re doing things is you know, we’re musicians, but now we’re kind of whiskey reviewers. So it’s been a very fun year for us honestly, like during the pandemic to be able to explore all these different kinds of whiskies. Different genres of whiskey, if you will, with the Irish whiskey and the scotch, the bourbon, the American whiskey, so on and so forth, brought us down a completely different road than where we thought we were going when we started the whole whiskey reviewing thing last year.

Brent Hanifl 03:00
Yeah, in some ways, it seems like you guys are growing in your appreciation for whiskey.

Deathless Dogs 03:04
Yep. Yeah, we both kind of have our unique flavor preferences. But sometimes when we come together on a bottle, like we did with like Stagg Jr. We’d like it for different reasons. And we kind of enumerate on that. And we started even if you watch like the Booker’s video where we do the blind battle between three different bottles pick up on different flavors and scents and everything. I’m over here, right, and, you know, all the notes and everything, to better enunciate what we’re trying to do try to be more credible, you know, Yeah, we’re not by any means, like experts or anything in whiskey. We don’t have any training we just drink a lot. It’s like an, it’s been if nothing else its an excuse to not just buy the same bottle you always buy when you go to the store. We have a reason to branch out and try new things. And with making the videos and because of it, we’ve discovered a lot of great new stuff that we otherwise might not have tried. Yep, absolutely.

Brent Hanifl 04:03
So for someone who hasn’t seen the show, can you kind of take us through the process like even like how do you pick a bottle each week? Or is it you know, is there a theme or is it just randomly grabbing them?

Deathless Dogs 04:13
We’ve got kind of, you know, ideas of different things we want to do based on like timeline and stuff. Also just all the bottles behind us. You see here we’ve got no shortage of things to review. But yeah, we kind of decide beforehand. We usually film like three at a time we’ll decide which three we want to do. And then we come in here and turn the camera on and usually usually a review takes like an hour of us just hanging out talking. And then I chopped that down into something about 10 to 15 minutes worth of you know, usable content and cut out all the BS between us for 45 minutes. Dan over here is a computer whiz. He like he’s been able to jog through some of our reviews and make us sound coherent, and amazing,

Brent Hanifl 05:07
You do three times. So you do three of those episodes?

Deathless Dogs 05:10
We do three episodes, like usually when we come in, it just makes more sense to do, film more than one, right? Because you’ve got everything set up. So we’ll film three episodes, but that yeah, that takes like three hours, you know, it runs for three hours, and then I chop it down, you know, by each thing into 10 to 15 minutes, usually, sometimes a little longer if we’re like doing a comparison of different bottles, but usually I try to keep it in that sweet spot of like, We learned three videos, you know, we call it batching out our videos, three videos is about the sweet spot, because when we start hitting four, or five, which we did this summer, if you watch through some of the summer videos, some of those I start getting a little goofy, we really need to be. And actually, as you were asking us earlier about how we pick our videos or whatever, we got St. Patty’s day coming up. So that was an easy one for us to pick two very hard to find Irish whiskies.

Brent Hanifl 06:13
Nice. This is kind of like a discovery thing for you guys. What have you found out about your passion for whiskey this year? Is there any something that you’ve really, I guess identified with or something you didn’t like that you’re now starting to enjoy? Or what’s like, what’s the sweet spot for a bottle price or something like that,

Deathless Dogs 06:28
It’s really helped me personally expand a little more in the price range thing, I generally always stuck in that like 30 to $40 range, for the most part, and there’s a lot of really great stuff in there. But because of this, it’s encouraged me to bump that price range up a little bit and pull down some stuff in that like 50 to $60 range that I’ve really, really liked. But it’s also shown that, you know, price doesn’t mean everything either, right? Sometimes those bottles that are in that range can be good, but it’s like I know of one in the 30s that I think smokes it Yeah. Yeah, it’s really been an experience of Yeah, just discovering what flavors in whiskey like exists, number one, and then which ones we like and which ones we don’t. Another thing that Dan and I come together on is like if I go on a vacation, he kind of gives me some ideas of things that I can find if I’m going someplace that we might not be able to get around here. And that’s been able to allow us to grab some of those rare bottles that we review stuff that you won’t see around here. Because we’ll find it, we’ll seek it out. For example, I went to Montana in August, and I was able to come down with a Stagg Jr. battle. And around here. If you find that once a year, you’re doing great. Yeah. So we kind of talked back and forth and we plan and we kind of determined like hunts, if you will be out and hunt for bottles. You know, we’re very well coordinated now at this point. And everything we do is kind of progress. This whiskey reviewing further and further. We keep making more and more progressions, we keep expanding our catalogue of booze, and we’re just gonna keep hammering away at it because we’re kind of passionate about it. Really.

Brent Hanifl 08:20
Have you heard anything surprising that you’ve heard from reviewers? I know like just watching it myself. I’ve learned a lot. Traditionally I just drink you know, Maker’s Mark or something like that I don’t really get all crazy or anything.

Deathless Dogs 08:31
There’s nothing wrong with Maker’s Mark. Kind of the cool thing that’s happened is the people that we know that have just reached out and it’s like, well, I’m you know, I’m stepping up my whiskey game now because of you guys. I’m trying new stuff or, like my uncle is just crazy with whiskey. Now he’s being like, every day looking forward, he retired and he’s just on the whiskey on sending the pictures every day. But other friends and stuff too. They’re just trying new stuff. Because it’s I think we’re kind of breaking down that barrier for some people have like, I don’t know what the hell this is like, right? They can check and see if we’ve talked about it. And then based on what we say about it, they decide if they want to buy it or not. It’s kind of cool. We’ve we’ve also gotten some really good pointers from people along the way too, especially since making the jump to YouTube. You know, a lot of people in the comments and everything, give us ideas of whiskies to look for, whiskies to try. Stuff that we’ve never heard of. I mean, we probably give you some examples just looking behind us you know we didn’t know much about like Slane and you went and got a review from the guy backwater spirits in Decorah. Yeah, I mean, it’s just, it the whiskey, it sounds weird to say the whiskey community but it really is kind of like copmmunity when you, especially on the YouTube side of things or you start to meet people that like the same things you do. Like I’m in there, you know responding to comments all the time and, you know, building relationships with people and it’s pretty cool you gain like new friends basically that you never would have otherwise met.

Brent Hanifl 10:06
Right? Have you guys been trying like the regional sort of whiskies or local even or the kind of young whiskies? Is that a thing? Like kind of newer distilleries, they can’t really, you know, they don’t have the time to age it. And now they’re like focusing on ingredients. Is that something you guys check out really at all?

Deathless Dogs 10:22
Yeah, I mean, we’re down to try different things. I think with those, you know, newer and craft distilleries, I feel like those are more about the experience of going there, you know, and having a good time and seeing how they make it being at source and getting a try it there. There can be some good stuff. But like you said, the aging, you know, is the biggest thing that they don’t have on their side in the beginning. But what a lot of them are doing are taking the stuff that they make and designing cocktails that really complement what they’ve made. It’s just a cool experience to go check it out and hang out. I definitely recommend just checking out smaller distilleries in that way. I visited J Henry back in October. And that was a really rewarding experience. J Henry is right off the interstate in between like Baraboo and Madison. So if you’re heading out that way, I would recommend that one. And last weekend, I believe, my girlfriend and I went and toured Blaum Brothers Distilling in Galena, Illinois, as well. Highly recommend that if you’re into, you know rye whiskey, they also have a fantastic. They call it Hellfire vodka, where they infuse peppers into Bloody Marys. And it’s very good. She had one, she loved it. But the thing is, it’s great to go and explore these distilleries in our area. And I do support each and every one of them. I would check them out. We also plan on doing a battle of Wisconsin whiskey review at some point in the somewhat near future. We’re going to do Driftless, Glen, New Richmond. Yeah, There’ll be there’ll be like four probably different whiskies we’ll put up from Wisconsin and just blind test them and see which one we like the best. And, you know, they make good products. And it’s in like we said, it’s just cool to go there and check it out. If you ever see one, just go. Just go have a good time. Yeah,

Brent Hanifl 12:21
What’s coming up for the show. I mean, you kind of reference there, kind of Battle Wisconsin, but you’re keeping it going, you know, you bought a camera, what’s coming up, are you gonna just keep on rocking on Wednesdays, or change up the format, or

Deathless Dogs 12:32
We are changing up the format. I think we’re gonna go from Facebook and head more into the YouTube direction. So I guess we want to make an appeal to our local crowd here, hometown people, you know, we’re La Crosse boys, it’d be great to see some support on the YouTube page and watch our followers start to really start to grow. We’ve actually made tremendous leaps and strides since December, I think when we started putting videos up on YouTube. And I think that’s the direction that we want to kind of go more towards moving forward. But yeah, that there’s no plans to stop doing the show. It’s one of those things, I think, you know, being musicians and stuff for creative people, and the last year kind of got stolen from people like us who have that creative thing. So you just kind of have to adapt and adjust and do something else. And in this adjustment, we found another thing we really like, obviously, we’re still going to keep doing music and hope to be back on stages soon. But yeah, the show is not slowing down. There’ll be every Wednesday and then potentially more videos even more times a week than just Wednesday in the future. But But yeah, there’s no signs of stopping. No, we’re only moving forward.

Brent Hanifl 13:50
Where do they go on YouTube? What are, how do they find it? I mean, it is check out Whiskey Wednesdays or is it on your band, where do they find it on YouTube?

Deathless Dogs 13:57
You can go to YouTube.com/thedeathlessdogs, that’s our channel. It’ll take you right there. Just subscribe there and then every Wednesday you’ll see that video pop up at noon, right in the middle of your work week when you kind of hate it the most. Little lunch break free. Yeah. To get to start thinking about your weekend and what you might drink. Yeah, absolutely.

Amy Gabay 14:24
La Crosse Local Podcast is a production of River Travel Media. Do you have an interview idea you’d like to share with us? Message us on Facebook @lacrosselocal. Find out more about us at lacrosselocal.com. And you can subscribe to the La Crosse Local podcast on your favorite podcast app. If you’d like us, rate us five stars. We appreciate it.