A bourbon maker enjoys a pond in the woods
One of many intriguing people who show up on Cape Cod come summer
Fascinating people show up and hang out down obscure dirt roads in the backwoods every summer, keeping low profiles, offering no telltales of accomplishments in “the real world,” content to stay in flipflops and wet bathing suits as much as possible.
An example? Sean Josephs, one of three founders of “Pinhook,” a small-batch bourbon personifying American whiskey’s emergence into millenial/gen X/next-gen popularity.
Josephs and family slid into Wellfleet in late July, not for the first time; he and his wife Mani Dawes from New Orleans eloped here in 2003 before three kids arrived, and have done their best to make it back every summer.
Sean came to bourbon unrelated to Southern gentlemen, via the culinary world of the Northeast. He grew up around Boston then found his way to Manhattan, where Mani started a Spanish-inspired restaurant (still celebrated) named Tia Pol in 2004. He fell in love with the food business, then trained to become a sommelier, pouring wine in some of the city’s fancy scenes.
“I realized that being a sommelier was going to become boring,” he smiles. “Meanwhile, I fell in love with whiskey. This was long before the whole bourbon thing blew up, it was a time when you either drank bourbon in a dive bar or sitting in a leather armchair with a cigar.”
He preferred neither, so opened his own place in Brooklyn in 2008, Char No. 4, a “bourbon bar,” filling the back wall with rare bottles though the niche was still so small that one wall could handle them. Brooklyn was hipifying even faster than bourbon, and the restaurant, at 75 seats, became a hangout for seven years, good food as well as drink.
“I could see that people were making bourbon that had to be homogeneous, every Makers Mark needed to taste exactly the same,” he recalls. “But maybe we could get more creative. Why not make vintages like wine, express the character of each vintage, nuances of ingredients, climate, location?”
By 2010 he was ready to put bourbon thoughts into action, joining two friends with Kentucky roots and racehorse backgrounds to enlist a distiller to blend their ideas, rolling out first barrels in 2011.
“Pinhook” emerged out of vernacular Sean’s partners employ. In horse biz, to “pinhook” means to buy a baby thoroughbred of good lineage “with the explicit idea that you will sell the horse later to make money. So that’s like us; we buy baby bourbon and sell it when it matures.”
Each vintage is named for an unproven horse, but of course each thoroughbred embodies possibilities for a Kentucky Derby. None of the bottle namesakes have gotten there yet, but hope springs eternal and the bourbon is now in 30 states, distilled at Castle & Key in Kentucky.
Time to invoke my theory about alcohol:
Booze always seems to make most sense imbibed where it comes from. I never drank vodka until I went to Russia, but there I could drink it easily – though not as easily as Russians. I never drank rum until I went to the Caribbean, but it went down smoothly then and there. If I tried to drink vodka in Jamaica, rum in Siberia, I’m sure my body would rebel, and never crossed my mind anyway. I never drank bourbon until I went to New Orleans, where it seemed natural.
So must we go to Kentucky to drink Pinhook?
Nahhh, it’s available in select liquor stores around here and besides, one of the founders understands how great it is to hang by a pond in the Cape Cod woods.
Maybe that’s in part why it tastes fine sitting on a porch surrounded by scrub pine and oak.
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As a Louisville girl I really got homesick reading this piece. It's a lovely profile. And, yes, bourbon is best enjoyed in the Bluegrass...I hope you and Ellen can make it down there someday.