Part 1-Jeff and Jenny Pennington

00:00Hey everybody, this is Brandon Styll, host of Nashville Restaurant Radio, and there is a new way to hire and be hired in the Nashville hospitality industry. Ladies and gentlemen, Faux & Beaux. That's F-O-H and B-O-H. Faux & Beaux is a local company, locally owned and operated right here in Nashville. When you log in, you don't have to click which city because it's only here. Here's how it works. Industry professionals, you create an account, you complete a profile, and BAM! You are uploaded into the system for employers to find you. If you are an employer, if you own a restaurant, you want to come in and join, all you have to do is go to NashvilleRestaurantRadio.com, go to the home page, scroll down, click the Faux & Beaux link where you will get a 90-day free trial. It is a 100% free trial. All you have to do is go to the website, log in, create a profile, and choose between 2,500 people who are ready to start a career. I know, it sounds too good to be true, but it is not. It is amazing. There are so many benefits and features to this website. Please go create a profile now. Just see, just check it out. It literally costs you nothing. Go to NashvilleRestaurantRadio.com and scroll down from the home page, click the link, and start today.

01:31Welcome to Nashville Restaurant Radio, a podcast for and about the people of the Nashville restaurant scene. Now here's your host, the CEO of New Light Hospitality Solutions, Brandon Styll. Hello, Music City! And welcome to Nashville Restaurant Radio. My name is Brandon Styll, and I am your host, and I am just so excited today. I'm excited for Faux & Beaux coming on as a sponsor, and you know what? We went over that entire website today, and it is just amazing. If you haven't checked it out, if you haven't heard about them, it's just the coolest platform. No resumes, no weird, no awkwardness. You can record videos if you're somebody looking for a job to kind of showcase who you are and your talents. It's just a unique new way to hire and be hired, so go check it out. Again, it's really amazing. Today on the show, our guests are Jeff and Jenny Pennington, and they are the owners of Pennington's Distillery, and also happen to be friends of mine. I've known Jeff since I was a kid. We grew up four houses away from each other, used to TP each other's houses when we were kids, when that wasn't like an offense. We just kind of had fun doing it, and it's really nice to catch up with them. I cannot wait to release the video for this episode because they are literally on a boat. They are on a boat driving around on vacation, a working vacation, they said, and we have a really good conversation. We get to talk. It's kind of another love story episode where you get a husband and wife that own a company, and we get to hear all of that gushy stuff, kind of the rest of the story, if you may. But I do want to quick, before we get into that, tell you a little bit about Springer Mountain Farms Chicken because they're an amazing sponsor of mine. All of their farms and facilities are family-owned and operated, and they're conveniently located within a 60-mile

03:35radius of their home office in northern Georgia. This enables them to provide their customers with the safest and highest quality products possible. Go check them out, SpringerMountainFarms.com. I have started a new page on the website called Sponsors, which kind of talks about who is sponsoring the show and what they mean to us, and there's also a listener-supported page. If you want to help create a better podcast for me, if you want to help donate to help me make this a better podcast for everybody, I would greatly appreciate it. So we're four minutes in. Let's get going. Let's talk with Jeff and Jenny Pennington from A Boat. We are joined with Jeff and Jenny Pennington of Pennington Distillery, and you can't see them yet, but you will be able to see them shortly. They're on a boat. Welcome, guys. It's kind of fun. My first time being on a podcast while talking to people who are actively driving a boat. We're going very slow and safe. That is the definition of multitasking. So you guys, I know both of you independent of you guys knowing each other. Jenny, I think we went to the same high school. Did you go to Centennial? I did. I went to Franklin with Jeff and then transferred to Centennial when it was built. So I was there. I was the class of 97. Were you class of 98? Yes. Okay. I was the very first graduating class at Centennial, yes. And Jeff, right now, if I'm sitting in my office, if I look like this, I can see the front door to the house that you grew up in. Are you, are you, you live in your old house? I live two houses down. How funny.

05:35So I walked through my backyard. I can get to my parents house. So I live like, literally, I can see the front door. If I do this, I can see the front door. I live across the street in one house over to the left. Does your parents still live in the same house? They do. That's awesome. Yeah. So we have a they have a pool, you know, and we now have a trail I built through the yard that goes up through the backyard to the pool. So that's it's amazing. It's like having a pool in our backyard. Did Stephanie graduate from Centennial or did she stay at Franklin? Stephanie got, she went to homeschool. And she went, she was like a professional model. And then she came back and wanted to go to school quickly. And so she graduated in 97 with me, she was homeschooled. And then she went to MTSU. So, so you guys, I know you both, like I said, independently. And when you guys got together and got married, I was just like, Oh, my gosh, what a perfect couple. Because you're both hustlers. Like everything that I've known about you being in this industry, is that you're serial entrepreneurs and that you you get it done. Jenny, tell us about your history in kind of what you did post high school.

06:56So I graduated from MTSU. And I had been interviewing with some liquor distributors and was offered a job on Saturday, I believe, my graduation day. And on Monday, I started my career with Best Brands, which is based in Nashville's Wine and Spirits distributor. And I was hired as a telemarketer. So that's the person that sits in the office. And you basically call the accounts out in the middle of nowhere where they don't want to send a physical rep there. And I did that for five days. At the end of my first week, I look up from my desk and I see about four upper management men standing there and they look very panicked. And I'm thinking what's going on here. And I overhear them discussing that this person that they had trained to be an outside sales rep had been training for like three months. And all of a sudden, she decided to tell them that day.

07:56That it was not the right job for her. So I caught on to that. And I immediately was like, I am much better in person than I am on the phone. Like, please give me the opportunity. So I quickly got a promotion on day five. And the following week started calling on bars and restaurants and eventually worked my way up to become the on premise spirits manager. And I was there probably like six or seven years, I guess that really seems so long ago. And Jeff and I started dating at this point. He had left Horizon Mine and Spirits, which is now Empire. He started a digital advertising company. It was called DDD, Dynamic Digital Designs. And he had screens and all the bathrooms of like the top restaurants in town. Oh, I remember. Yeah. And, and he would get, you know, advertisers to, to, you know, spend money on the air. And I just remember being envious and thinking, you know, he's obviously working hard. But he also has that freedom that if you work hard, you can play hard and you don't, you know, he wasn't limited to two weeks vacation a year and all that. I just said, The two days.

09:11Yeah, I was gonna say, two weeks sounds aggressive for an entrepreneur. Right. So, you know, I just said, I want to join forces with him and come and do this. I can sell advertising. So I made the tough decision to leave best brands. I love them so much. I still love them today and Went and started working with Jeff, who was just my boyfriend at that time. And I'm lucky that I have really cool parents that just were very supportive. They didn't tell me I was crazy or anything and Um, you know, the DDD together, I think, two weeks before our wedding, we got a phone call from a local company is a Inc 500 company and they said, we've been watching y'all and we're interested in buying your business. And you're like, wow, it's not even for sale. But great, because we were really tired of selling advertising. We missed alcohol industry. So basically we Sold DDD and we use the money to start the distillery. The laws were changing and Jeff saw an opportunity there to maybe we could file and get our own distillers permit. We know what our first brand would be at or anything. We just did it on to that.

10:26Meanwhile, had a dream. He started another company in the middle of that, though. While we were running DDD Jenny started up a marketing company because of a lot of world customers and vendors, which was an on premise spirits manager because she glossed over that. Back then, there wasn't a lot of females in our industry was very, very male dominated. And this is only 15 years ago. Yeah, she was one of the first women spirits managers in the in our industry. So when she left a bunch of the suppliers, you know, that world, you know, the liquor, the manufacturers had reached out to the same. Hey, you know, my distributors things. Can I still hire you to help me with marketing. So Jenny's also in 2008 started speakeasy marketing and still owns that today runs a very successful business on her own there. As I like to say, the first five years as I played distilleries, they didn't make any money. She was making the money for the family with that company.

11:28And that's so I'm not going to pay it into how you started making vodka. But Jenny, what do you think the thing? What's your what's your motivation? What are the things that drive you? I mean, you started and you said day five, you had the wherewithal and walk up and say, Hey, that's a position that I want. What do you think in your personality? And then you immediately went up to being a sales manager immediately, but you worked up to being a sales manager. What about you? Makes that happen. I just think there's different kinds of people and some people can recognize problems and figure out ways to solve them. Some people like to wait and kind of get a playbook and follow the systems that you put into place. And I think Jeff and I are both people that we can recognize needs and recognize opportunities and aren't afraid to just take a risk and get out there and make it happen ourselves instead of waiting for somebody else to do it for us, I guess. And I think, you know, ultimately, the driver for me is just personal freedom in our life and, you know, being able to create our own destiny.

12:44And the sky's the limit. If you work for yourself and you work hard enough, you know, hopefully you can make it something as great as you want it to be. I love what about you, Jeff? I mean, you've been doing this. You've been on your own for a long time. And I've been watching your career for a long time. We were friends. I mean, you know, gosh, when I was like 1415, you know, we were young TP in each other's house. It's so funny, we had someone turn in, you probably don't even know this, but I told your brother and Neil, we had someone post on social media, they put our vodka in the freezer and it froze into ice. Well, that doesn't happen. So I had to tell the lady that probably her child. I told Justin, I was like, the only reason I know is because I got caught doing that. He's like, you did? I go, yeah, and I remember I told him it was Brandon Styll and his friends came over. It's like, I was trying to get out of it. I was like, oh, but we I just like the freedom. I like, I like answering, you know, when I was I enjoyed being in sales, I think sales in general. If you're if you're if you're good sales person for a company, you're typically you're you're you're a sales person.

13:49I enjoyed being in sales because I think sales in general, if you're a good sales person for a company, you're your own entrepreneur anyway. If you work in a commission based sales job, you have to get up and work or you're not going to get your commission. You've got to go call on people. And I think I just kind of stumbled into it because after college, I started, I mean college almost told me to leave. They're like, all right, you've got to finish school. You have to leave now. I was like, I don't know what I want to do. You got to go. You can't stay here. You're done. Bye. So I started, I pulled out the newspaper, looked at every job that sounded interesting or that I wanted to, I thought it would be fun. Required two to four years sales experience. So I figured at that point I was like, well, I better go get some sales experience. So I did the same thing. I reached out. I was bartending at the time. So a couple of the guys that would come in and sell a spooze was like, you're in sales. So I figured out the distributor sell liquor and I'll say, well, that sounds like fun.

14:53So I put a bunch of res, put a resume together, the only resume in my entire life. I sent it out and same thing. I got hired while I was still in about two weeks left in school and started literally the following Monday. And I did that for eight years and realized I loved being in sales. I actually started at the bottom, started POS, just stacking cases and liquor stores for about six months. Took her five days to get promoted. It took me six months. She's obviously a lot smarter. But after about six, seven years, I just realized I love sales. I loved getting out and I realized if I could sell booze, I mean, I sold a lot of products. You've been in sales, sell a lot of products you like, and then you get to sell a lot of products where you feel bad. You're like, I don't want to sell this to someone. Yeah, no, I, you know what? It's funny because I don't want to interrupt you. The when I got out of kind of the restaurant game, I did my level one sommelier in 2003 and my wife said, you know, hey, I don't want you in the restaurants full time.

15:54And I said, great, well, I'll get into liquor sales. And the idea of just me loving wine and loving spirits and loving booze was tough because I was like, I don't want to have to walk in somewhere and say, no, I think this Crane Lake is a great wine. I felt like my integrity would be lost if I felt like I had to hit quotas. I could do that with food. I can say I need to sell lettuce or I need to sell, you know, zucchini and squash. There wasn't brand specific, but, you know, I didn't want to have to do that with with booze. It's true. I mean, you feel guilty in a way. I mean, I enjoyed selling stuff and I enjoyed going because I always saw what I tell our salespeople. Now, a good salesperson acts like a consultant, not a salesman. Your job is to help them make money and be more successful, hopefully using your products at some places just aren't a fit. So some products and some are better. I mean, that's starting to one just like just like you. And there was some great ones we had in our book, but I don't want to say the company didn't let us do that. But we had big companies who we had to answer numbers to.

17:02And I had to sell brands that I just didn't believe in or not that I didn't believe in, but I knew there was better quality wines or better juice. I always tended to like the small wineries, the family owned wineries, the ones that get stories. Yeah, always. And my boss would come to me like, hey, your sales numbers are great, but you're not hitting these core brands. You're hitting all these. And so I realized, man, I want to sell. I like selling, but I want to sell stuff I want to sell and that I'm passionate about. And so I kind of decided to start writing a business plan. I wrote about four or five different business plans of things I could go out and do. And I landed in the advertising. I really believe that digital advertising was the future. It's starting to come along now and be more really ahead. I mean, actually, the whole business model started as a wine sommelier tablet, but this was before iPads. So I had gone to a restaurant in Vegas that had their wine list all digitally on these little pads. And you could do all, you know, look through all the wines.

18:07I thought it was so cool. So I started working on a wine kiosk that you could put in restaurants, you could put in liquor stores. And the whole basis was you could say, I want a 94 point wine from Spain that's under 20 bucks or I want a Sauvignon Blanc that pairs well with this fish that goes here. Or, you know, there's probably about 20 different search criteria. This, you know, really kind of beginning to Google. So I mean, and I figured out that all the first three digits of the codes told you the supplier. So you could do that. And I hired a developer to do it. And it's been about six months building it. And then I realized that the equipment was so expensive because there was no iPads back then. So to get like heavy duty pads that could go to each table, they were like 14, $1,500 a piece. Now you could go get touches for 200 a piece. And so I went to restaurants and realized it's very capital intensive. So I was actually in the bathroom at Red Door one night reading the graffiti ads. You know, I've never been there before. I was like, man, I can memorize every graffiti ad that ever was like, yeah, I mean, they're just memorable because you're stuck, right?

19:16The old rule, you got to look forward. It sounds like, you know, what if we put these in a digital version just in the bathrooms and and and so I tested it out at a couple of restaurants and we sold out the advertising like four days for the whole year. I was like, well, that worked. So kind of like every entrepreneur, you pivot to where the money is. Yeah. And unfortunately, the passion part of it was the wine kiosk model that some people started doing. And I'm glad I didn't go to rep. I saw about four or five of the companies start doing it and it didn't work like I thought it would. I guess people just didn't use it. But that's kind of how I got there until, you know, when we we actually went to Europe and we sold that company. We were going as we started still, we were going to try to find a brand in Europe that we could import and sell. And so we traveled around about three weeks and went to every kind of bar from France to Turkey, to Greece, to Spence. Terrible. Yeah. Britain and everywhere we go, we realize they got big brands, too. There's no small brands. We'd say Tennessee, no matter where you were anywhere in the world, they knew two things, Jack Daniels and Elvis Presley.

20:22So that's when we pivoted and said, well, we need to make our own our own whiskey and our whiskey cream. All right. Well, you've you've set it up well for me to move in that direction, but I'm not I'm not going to take the bait. I'm going to come back. I'm going to go back to Jenny. And I want to know I want to know more of the backstory. Right. And we're going to get to Tennessee, the Whisper Creek, because I love that story. But I want to know more about your dating and your you guys have sold this. You guys are traveling. You sell the company. And when did you know that you were going to marry Jeff? Well, not in Mrs. Redmond's history class, our freshman year of high school. We went off to different colleges. Yeah, never dated in high school. We were friends. We're in the same grade and had, you know, a group of friends, same circles, all that. So that was, I think, important because we obviously are rooted in a friendship.

21:29So after we graduated college, we both landed these jobs for distributors, competing distributors in Nashville. And it was super exciting because, like Jeff said, there weren't a lot of women. There weren't a lot of younger people in general. So to run into my buddy, Jeff, that's doing the same thing I am, was a really great moment because here's somebody, it's a peer. You can relate to them. You know, you guys are both out there hustling. So we started, you know, kind of rekindled that friendship and would hang out. You know, there's every time a new restaurant opened or a bar, we'd both be at that event or whatever. We just naturally gravitate towards each other. And I guess it started getting, I don't know if I knew I was going to marry him, but the first time I knew that I liked him, I remember I was parked on lower Broadway, which is impossible now, but you used to just be able to park out there and go in and get the order from Tootsies and all the bars.

22:33And I was sitting in my car in lower Broadway and I was like punching orders or something. I look up and Jeff is walking across the street, you know, down Broadway on the other side. And at Empire now, they made the guys wear like a dress shirt and a tie. And so he's got his, you know, rolling bag and his tie on. I think he had a supplier with him. And I just remember looking up and seeing him and be like, man, he's hot. Why have I never noticed? It was the rolling bag is what it was. It was all the wine I had on me. That's what it was. I was too competitive. I'm like, that bag is another brand. That's what I was going to say. I was going to say she started dating me so she could start stealing all my business. She was competitive. Well, you know, you got to seize opportunities. But then I knew, and then it was on like gangbusters.

23:33I mean, then it just kind of shifted and it did become romantic. We dated secretly for a long time. I mean, how long? Like six months. It felt like a long time. What was that like at industry parties? Yeah, it was a big industry no-no then. Now you can date, you can marry each other. Yeah, it's fine. Oh, wow. It was a huge deal. And I remember like feeling like that little girl on that movie, Father of the Bride, where she's like, I met a man and I'm in love. Yeah, where I had to go to my bosses and be like, I'm in love with Jeff Bennington from Horizon. And they're like, so. Such a double standard. Remember her bosses, we decided to tell our bosses on the same day. And my bosses were like, oh, man, awesome. Go get her price book. Get all her info. Who was that, Tyler? She's going to give away everything. She's going to do the same. And it was so the opposite. She was the one working me half the time. That's so funny.

24:35So Jeff, how'd you propose? Down here? Down here. You know, her parents were really awesome for dad. But you know, I thought when she told them that she was going to leave her job and go work for a guy she was dating, that they were going to get a knock on the door late at night one night. But they were so supportive. And I actually called her dad and we were coming down here for a vacation. He had a bunch of other ideas. He was going to fly a plane and grab a boat and all this stuff. Hide it in a bottle on the beach. Actually, it just took her lunch and she loves key lime pie. So I had him put it with the key lime pie. And not everything that could possibly go wrong went wrong. She was like, I'm not hungry. I don't want to eat. I was like, we're going to eat. Let's just sit at the bar. I was like, let's get a table. She's like, I don't want to get a table. Let's just sit at the bar. That's like so funny.

25:37And then at the end of the dinner, she loves key lime pie. Like obsessed with it. I'm not the key lime pie. I was like, no, I was like, I want such because you don't even like key lime pie. It's the first day of vacation. Like, do we have to start by eating dessert at lunch? No. And then the guy, have you ever put have you ever seen any restaurant with caramel on key lime pie? I don't know. He's still not over this. I still don't get it. I get the guy the ring. I was like, hey, I want you to put this with the pie, man. So he puts it on the pie and then he takes caramel drizzle and drizzled it all over the ring. On top of the ring? I get, she comes out. I get down on the, I'm trying to clean the ring. She's like, it's good. Just put it on. You know, it's funny because I proposed to my wife at Ruth's Chris the day before we went on vacation. We're going to California to visit all my family. And I was like, well, I'll arrive there and be like, this is my Beyonce. It'll be a whole special thing. And similar deal. I was like, just bring it. The cheesecake can be great because I had the whole thing planned to put on top of a strawberry on top of a cheesecake.

26:42The strawberries upside down, set the ring on it. And she's like, I don't really like cheesecake. I'm like, you do tonight. You do tonight. Just deal with cheesecake. Was it at the Cheesecake Factory? No, it was at, it was at Ruth's Chris and a friend of mine was the sous chef. And he came out and he said, I'm just going to feed you. I'm just going to bring out food. And we didn't order anything. Just brought it. Just started bringing us food, which in my opinion, if you know the chef, it's like the greatest honor in the world to be able to have them do that. But really a lot of fun. So, okay. Thank you for sharing those things because, you know, I'll tell you what I'm getting at is that on this show, I love to talk about people locally owned, locally operated businesses. And I think there's this perception sometimes when people see Pennington's Distillery or, you know, they see these pickers vodka and they kind of, I don't know if it's a perception of this is a big, big brand. I want to go, these are people that grew up in this community who fell in love in this community and started a business in this community.

27:48I mean, your signature bourbon whiskey is Davidson Reserve, which is essentially named after the county, Davidson County. I mean, everything you're doing is about local. It is what it is. And I kind of like telling that story. And so thank you for talking about it. And for those of you who are listening to this only, I'm still looking at them on a boat. They are still driving a boat while talking and I am getting more jealous by the minute because you're probably having the most fun of anybody who's been on the podcast. It's beautiful. It's like we're going to idle speed. I got to do a little auto thing. So just the only part I hope when the boats go by, it's not too loud. But I haven't heard one boat go by. I see every once in a while you guys start rocking back and forth. I see a little bit of wakes, but it's not too bad. Yeah, I feel like I'm right there with you. It's funny you say that. I hear that all the time. People like we go to places like, oh, you know, you're going to a big place. Like, yeah, that brand just, we like it, but you know, not enough people know what it is.

28:51And then I'll go into some place like, man, that brand is too mainstream. Like, I wish it was mainstream. They're like, no kidding. Please. So what about that? Like, what is your, do you get that a lot? Like, what would you tell people? Well, it just depends on the brand. I mean, you know, when we first came up with the idea of Whisper Creek, we always, we want to do whiskey. You know, we knew we wanted to do a Tennessee whiskey. That's, we really truly believe that in 10 years, there could be 20 to 30 very successful Tennessee whiskey brands, you know, just like Kentucky has bourbons. But we, it was really important to us that we could make our own distillate and we could make, you know, put our own stamp on it and not have to be dependent on someone else's supply, but that takes money. So we could actually, Jenny came up with the idea of Tennessee sipping cream when we were in Europe because everywhere we go to see Jack Daniels, we realized there's Bailey's and started doing a bunch of research from like, you know, Bailey's 90% market share. There's no American ones.

29:52Jenny came up with the idea of Tennessee sipping cream. As Jeff said, every person knows Jack Daniels on planet earth. Basically, they know Tennessee because of Jack Daniels, where people might not know what California is, but they know Tennessee. I mean, that's amazing. They're synonymous for sure. So it kind of seemed like, why not try to pair those two things? You've got, you know, apparently a lot of people like drinking cream of course, and they all know Tennessee, so let's make a Tennessee version. I used to call it the gallows shotgun effect, right? Figure out three brands shooting us a wall, see which one sticks, and you got one, right? Yeah. And it's very expensive, so we didn't have a lot of money. We had just enough money from a sale to start this, and so we decided to kind of do what we call the rifle approach. Let's pick one brand and do it really well and take it out. And it was a lot easier back then because you only have one skew, one thing, you know, eight widgets to worry about from components and dry goods parts. And we actually, when we started, our only promise was we would never sell vodka.

30:57That was like our promise to each other in 2012. She didn't admit that, but that's like, because we were, she had sold Sky, and I'd sold Absolute, and we were so tired selling different flavors every week. In the 90s and 2000s, that's all it was, right? Going to a bar, there's 400 flavored vodkas and like five whiskeys. And that's what I'm talking about. If you sell booze, if I went into that business, I got to walk in and say, you need blueberry Stoli. I have to walk in somewhere and actively sell that, and that's hard to do. And after you do that enough times, you're like, I don't want to ever do that again. And then it started turning to cotton candy and fruit lube and whipped, and it was just, it was getting old. And so that's what, that was one of the reasons we're like, you know, we can do this. And actually, after about three years, Whisper Creek, we got it, we've gotten it out to about 37 states and Canada and Mexico, a couple other countries, and realized that with one SKU and one product, you know, no matter how good it is, or how cool the branding is, that Jenny, I mean, Jenny's done all our branding and design for all our packaging, and I think it's some of the best branding out there.

32:02I think that's one of the reasons people think it's big brands, is because of how professional and well the branding's done from Jenny's side. It's really, really well done. You guys mean kudos, it's amazing. You guys have done a fantastic job. Yeah. And so then in 20, what was it, 2013, we were at Tesla cocktail, and we were thinking about, we need to do another brand, we need to find something else to kind of make some more, you know, we decided to kind of shrink back in, not be so far, you know, try to stop focus on 37 different states, and what can we do to build a little bit bigger book here? And we kept kicking around, we didn't want to move to Moonshine, because everybody was doing Moonshine, and we were actually at a bar with the alibi, I think it was, late night. We were in New Orleans at Taylor's, it was a cocktail. And somebody walked in with one of those shirts that says, Vodka pays the bills. And I looked right at Jenny, I go, juicy issues, I saw it. We were both just like. Probably because we'd been at Harris all week, like losing our asses, yeah, and we're like, God, we're broke, and we got another three days here. We gotta start making money.

33:03That's when we decided, you know, you know what, and so we came back home, started doing research, and when we sold vodka, you know, people didn't drink American vodka. Most people don't realize that Tito's been around for 23, 24 years. Everybody thinks it's like a six, seven year old brand. You know, there was decades that you couldn't give it away, or any other. If it wasn't imported, nobody would touch it. Sky even made the bottle blue, and added a lot, and they get look imported. And so we did some research. Oh, we thought our thing was beeping. What's happening now? Is there, are you guys getting pulled over? What's going on? I would have had it all on tape. And so, what was it? We, where was that? Oh, so we came back home, we started doing research. We started realizing that people were Americanizing with their vodka, just like whiskey, it was Tito's, it was Tea Betty, it was New Amsterdam, it was Kraft.

34:05So that's when we decided, well, you know, two of the biggest vodkas in the country come out of Austin. You know, Nashville's pretty cool, we think. So at least we're born and raised here. So we kind of joked a little slogan with Bill, he says our music's better than Austin, so should our vodka. We decided to come up with Pickers Vodka. We went around and around with the names for a couple years, and Jenny kept, you know, she had Pickers, and I was like, I don't know. And, you know, because he had a double play with music. Finally, after about six months, realized it's easy to remember. And so that's how we came with that. And then recently, we finally got to come up with our whiskey. So kind of filled out our portfolio and having a lot of fun and where we're at now. So I know I, the Davidson Reserves doing well, I assume. You guys are having fun with it? Yeah, it's really easy to sell something you don't have a lot of. So, you know, we're really excited. You know, we've got a great sales team, got great management teams kind of come over.

35:09We've had some change in that over the last year. But, you know, Davidson Reserve, we launched it. You never know, right? You work on this whiskey for five, six years and you hope that it's good. And we tasted along the way and we felt good. And we had some great people that came in the beginning and helped us really big master distilleries from Kentucky. So we were confident, but you never know how it's going to be taken. You know, during this whole COVID times, as we're calling it now, we received two of the biggest awards you can receive in spirits. And we really haven't gotten to promote it. So, you know, we're really excited. We just won San Francisco's double gold and best in class. Classic Olympics of spirits competitions. Congratulations. And the beverage tasting is to give us 94 points and number three North American Whiskey of the Year. I mean, right below us is Eagle Rare and Blanton's. It was like, so, but yeah, that's a good company. And it feels really good. You know, we're not like you said, we don't have a ton of it. So it's easy to sell something like that.

36:11But we also haven't really gotten to be able to promote that much because the restaurants and the bars are all closed. And that's what you need. And that's what stinks right now is the struggle with the long premise. You know, our retail has been good. It's been really, really solid because people are not stopping drinking or drinking more. Yeah. But you know, you build brands in on premise. Right now, with the on premise where they're at, it's made it tough to promote that. And so what was it? We where was that? Oh, so we came back and we started doing research. We started realizing that people were Americanizing with their vodka just like whiskey. It was Tito's. It was Tea Betty. It was New Amsterdam. It was Kraft. So that's when we decided, well, you know, two of the biggest vodkas in the country come out of Austin. You know, Nashville's pretty cool, we think. So at least we're born and raised here. So we kind of joked a little slogan with them. Our thing says our music's better than Austin. So so should our vodka. We decided to come up with Pickers Vodka.

37:13We went around and around with the names for a couple of years. And Jenny kept, you know, she had Pickers. And I was like, I don't know. And, you know, because we had to double play with music. But only after about six months realized it's easy to remember. And so that's how we came with that. And then recently we finally got to come up with our whiskey. So kind of filled out our portfolio and having a lot of fun and where we're at now. Now, ladies and gentlemen, that is going to do it for part one of the interview with Jeff and Jenny Pennington, Pennington's distillery. In part two, we are going to discuss their bourbon. We're going to talk about their bourbon and what it's like being part of the whiskey community. Winning awards and have a little street cred. And we're also going to talk about Jeff's dad, Jay Pennington. He's the innovative mind behind the boundary, South Street, local taco, urban grub. And I think he's got a new project happening right now.

38:14But we then get into Jenny's father. They have a vodka called Walton's Vodka. We get to hear that story. We also talk about COVID-19, how they've pivoted and their thoughts on the state of our country. So please tune in tomorrow, tomorrow morning. It will be out. So click the subscribe button. Maybe you'll get to see if it comes out a little bit early. And don't forget to go to our website and check out Faux & Beaux as a new sponsor and a really cool company. Thank you guys for listening. We hope you are being safe. And as always, love you guys. Bye.