1 Million followers on YouTube, crowdsourced distillery, whisk(e)y sommelier courses and a sought after consultant for the industry. Let’s listen up.

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Stephen Semple:
Hey everyone, Stephen Semple here. In this week’s podcast, David Young is going to be interviewing Daniel Whittington. Now here’s the thing. Dave and Daniel are both just such soft spoken down to earth guys that I think there’s an element of just how big an empire that Daniel has built. So I want to share a little bit of the background of why you want to listen to this interview. Daniel has managed to build from nothing, the largest whiskey following on earth. He’s got two channels that are the top whiskey channels on the planet with a million subscribers, which puts him in the top 1% of 1%. And it’s not like he came from the whiskey industry or was a whiskey guy. He built this from scratch. He then managed to turn that into a distillery that was the first crowdsourced whiskey distillery around. Today, he is called on a regular basis by really, really big whiskey brands that want to talk to him about how to better market their whiskey. So this is a guy who is a real empire builder, and I think you’ll enjoy listening to his story.

Dave Young:
Welcome back to the Empire Builders Podcast. I’m Dave Young, and Stephen Semple is nowhere to be found. I don’t know what happened to the guy. So I’m arranging my own interview and I’m sitting here with Daniel Wittington. Hey Daniel, how you doing today?

Daniel Whittington:
I’m good. How are you doing?

Dave Young:
I’m good. We wanted to talk to you about whiskey. We’ve actually done an episode or two about whiskey. We talked about Uncle Nearest. We’ve done some kind of fun things and I don’t know, we’re both kind of interested in whiskey.

Daniel Whittington:
I listened to those. Those were good.

Dave Young:
What we wanted to talk to you about is how you have built this little whiskey empire headquartered here in Austin, Texas, and how it got started. Well, you started as the Vice Chancellor at Wizard Academy. And just for full transparency, that’s now my job and I report to you because you’re the Chancellor of Wizard Academy. Just to confuse our listeners. Stephen and I have talked about Wizard Academy a bit. When you were Vice Chancellor at Wizard Academy, one of the really cool things that I remember coming to a course is that you would invite us into your office after class and like, “Hey, do you want to do a tour of Scotland? I love Scotch Whiskey and I love talking about it and sharing what I know.” Where do your roots in scotch come from?

Daniel Whittington:
My dad’s a whiskey fan. I sort of came through that door. I was a touring musician for 18 years, and my drink of choice on tour was always whiskey. As soon as I was old enough to drink, I mean, I toured for three years before I was old enough to drink, and it just became my thing. Whiskey, I like whiskey and it was usually budget, like Jameson or it was usually Irish. As a matter of fact, on one of my first solo albums, there’s a song called Irish Whiskey, and that was it. But I’m a nerd and when I like things, I study them or research them and look them up. And so over the years, I sort of looked into whiskey and then I stumbled into scotch and discovered what was possible out there that wasn’t Irish whiskey, the flavor possibilities. And I never looked back. When I got to Wizard Academy, you guys were all wine people.

Dave Young:
Right. And so that’s been woven into the fabric of Wizard Academy since the start. And in fact, when you started doing those, the Vice Chancellor’s office was where the Whiskey Vault is now. And anybody that’s been in there knows that there’s that little corner bar, there’s like a tiny little bar.

Daniel Whittington:
That bar used to be in Roy’s office.

Dave Young:
It used to be in Roy’s office down in Buda.

Daniel Whittington:
It goes goes back.

Dave Young:
Yeah, it goes way back. That’s the office I first met a lot of the people that I still know over the years from Wizard Academy. Heisenbergs And Craig Arthur and Steve Ray. A bunch of people go back to just standing around that little bar down in [inaudible 00:05:11] and having a glass of wine. But since it was already in your office, you’re like, well, it’s a bar.

Daniel Whittington:
Well, and I didn’t know that was going to be my bar. My office was empty when I got here. It was just an empty room. And Roy was like, “I have this bar. It didn’t fit anywhere. We’re going to put it in here.” And I was like, oh, okay. A bar in my office. That sounds nice. But every class, it was wine all the time. And so I started drinking wine, and I was a wine guy early on, like in my early 20s, I got into wine and I was living in California at the time, and I started researching wine, and I started on the path of wine some and then realized I didn’t like wine as much as everybody else in that group did. And so I stopped.

So when I got to campus, I was like, oh, I guess I’m drinking a lot more wine now. But at one point I was like, I would really rather be drinking whiskey. So I asked Roy, “Hey, is it cool if I keep whiskey in my office?” And he was like, “Yeah, it’s your office. You do what you want.” And so I did. I brought in some whiskeys with my own money, I bought four or five bottles. And then one day we’re sitting around in my office with Roy and some of his clients, and he said, “Who wants some wine?” And everyone’s like, sure. And I said, “Anybody want any whiskey?” And everyone in the room said, “Ooh, I’d rather have whiskey.”

Dave Young:
“Cancel my wine order.”

Daniel Whittington:
The whole room. And then Roy was like, well shit, and I realized that might have been a faux pas. Sorry, Roy.

Dave Young:
Yee-haw.

Daniel Whittington:
And so I went and brought the whiskey over, and Roy was like, “All right, well, tell us what we’re drinking here. What is this?” And I was like, “Okay, let me tell you.” So I gave this impromptu explanation of all the whiskey in my office, and everyone had a blast. And that night, as everyone was leaving, Roy stopped and he was like, “Hey, that thing was really cool that you did talking about all that whiskey. Go get some more. What would it take to really get a good selection of whiskey in here? Because we have a whole wine cellar. What if we just really stocked this bar with good whiskey?” And I was like, “I can do that if you want. 10, 15 bottles would be plenty of various things.” He’s like, “Go do that.” And so I did and I spent about $2,000.

Dave Young:
Now this is when?

Daniel Whittington:
2013. And so we stocked it up. And so what had happened at the time was I was sort of the camp counselor on campus. We would do class all day long. We would do dinner. At the end of the first day, it was just my job to hang out with all the students until everybody wanted to go to bed. And I’m a pretty extreme introvert, so I have a trick when I’m hosting groups of people, which is if I can take control of the room. This is what Roy does too, by the way. If I can take control of the room, then I get to determine the rules of the evening. If I’m going to have to socialize with these people for four hours until they all go to bed, I can sort of make it how I want to do it.

Dave Young:
It’s not just people in mayhem.

Daniel Whittington:
Or just everyone sitting around going, yeah, let’s talk to each other. And me going, I’m spent already. But if I can …

Dave Young:
Yeah, that’ll never end.

Daniel Whittington:
Yeah. If I can take charge of the room a little bit, then I can help myself survive and create a good time for these people, but under my terms a little bit. And so I started offering to do a whiskey tasting at the end of each night of class, and it went like gangbusters. And it became a tradition within about two months. It was like people came back and they’re like, “Hey, can we do that whiskey thing tonight? I brought some of my staff and I told them about it.” And it grew and it grew.

Dave Young:
Yeah. What happened next as it’s growing. People are actually coming back and expecting it now.

Daniel Whittington:
Oh yeah. It became like, this is a thing we do on the first night. This is a new academy tradition. Because I was starting to give the tour, I wanted to do interesting things and not just say the same pitch over and over and over again. And I was getting questions I didn’t know the answer to. So I started researching whiskey info the way that I used to research wine, looking up distilleries, looking up production processes, starting to learn. I knew all the fundamentals, but I started really digging in to what’s the chemical composition of peat and why does it burn? It’s mud. How’s that happen? Because I am that much of a nerd. And I stumbled onto the fact that when it came to deducing tasting notes, while the wine guys have deductive tasting and a structured analysis of a wine, the whiskey people didn’t have one that was universally recognized. All the people doing it did it. All the people making the whiskey definitely did it, but they weren’t teaching it. And there was no deductive tasting for whiskey specifically. It’s got different rules than wine, and it’s higher proof alcohol.

And so there was a really great book by a guy named Adam, something that I can’t remember right now. It’s called Proof, and I have it at the Tower. He wanted to talk about high proof alcohol, and he’s focused on a lot of whiskey. And when he got to the section about deductive tasting, he only interviewed wine guys, wine somms because there were no whiskey somms. And I thought, man, there’s no program. Because I started looking into schools and programs. There is no program to teach marketing communications, storytelling and deductive tasting analysis and communications for whiskey. There’s a lot of consultants and people teaching distillation and production, but no one’s teaching the fundamental history and storytelling and marketing communications. And I mentioned that to Roy one day at lunch, and he said, “You should do that.” And I was like, “Yeah, am I allowed to do that?” He’s like, you have a 501C3 educational nonprofit. You are approved by the federal government to be an educational facility. Yes, if you want to do that, you can do that.” And I went, “Shit I’m going to do that.”

Dave Young:
Let’s do that.

Daniel Whittington:
Yeah. I was like, I’m going to build that program. And Roy said, “All right.” This is like March. “You’re going to hold your first class in September.”

Dave Young:
All right. So you’re like six months out now.

Daniel Whittington:
And that fire that got lit under of like, oh, there’s a ticking clock. You better get your shit together. That set everything off.

Dave Young:
So all of a sudden, it’s not just a concept.

Daniel Whittington:
Right. I’ve got to get it together. I’ve got to figure out what it is we’re teaching and what’s the structure. And luckily, I’d been at the academy for two years at that point because it was 2015, and I already had the idea of how a good class at the academy is structured and how to build a class at the academy. I’d spent two years building classes at the academy and experiencing classes that predated me and how they were designed. And I’d been indoctrinated in Wizard Academy style thinking and how we teach. So I used everything I’d learned from Magical Worlds and all the classes and all the things we teach at the school to build this whiskey program. And we launched it in September of 2015, and our class was sold out. The first class we ever held was sold out, and they’ve been mostly sold out ever since.

Dave Young:
As we record this, this is January ’23. We’ve got a whiskey one introductory class coming up in February that’s sold out. And you’ve got up until this point, three different levels. So the people that take the first class can come back and get a level two, and it’s focused on a different area of whiskey. And level three is focused on another area. And then you’re also doing level four for the very first time this year. So it’s a kind of cool way to keep people just coming back.

Daniel Whittington:
Originally we’d planned for five, but I just made that up. Five. That seems like a good number. And I did it by looking at what I wanted to teach, and it naturally broke into five. Well, over the past seven and a half years, it’s changed a lot. And I’ve refined the goal of that program at least a dozen times as we did levels one, two, and three. And I’ve been working on level four now for seven years, and I kept scrapping it. I’d build it and scrap it, build it and scrapped it. I probably built it in some way or some fashion a dozen times, at least four, all the way through to completion, including testing and then scrapped it because I would build it and then live with it. And I was unsatisfied and I couldn’t figure out why. And it was last year that I figured out why I was unsatisfied with it. And it did two things.

It let me finally finish building it, and it also killed level five when I realized there’s no level five to teach. The four is, that’s the ultimate goal for what I wanted to provide in the world with whiskey education. And so five became for us, is going to be a title that you can’t test for. It’s just bestowed upon you.

Dave Young:
Anointed A level five.

Daniel Whittington:
You become a level five. And the goal is level fives are people who are capable of teaching any of the previous four levels.

Dave Young:
I do The way that you’ve built these courses and continue to involve previous students in you do hosting, which is something that’s different from most Wizard Academy classes. So graduates of the program come back and serve their fellow new students. And then you’ve also got a handful of people that have started teaching a lot of the curriculum as they move up through the program, which is really cool. It expands it out even further.

Daniel Whittington:
Both of those things were planned from the beginning. I wanted people to understand that graduating these classes was not a marker of prestige. It was a marker of a lifetime of learning and service and serving the group that you’re giving tours to or teaching or the client that you’re working with or whatever. It’s a life of service, not a life of prestige. And we also needed help running the classes.

And so when we built the first one and I was like, oh man, we’re going to need a lot of backup to execute this thing. The very first class we ever held was a lot of work. Me and Steve Ray did almost all the work with, can’t remember, was it David Neubert at the time, and a couple others. It was a lot. It was exhausting. In that class I thought, man, from the students who graduate, I want to have a thing where anybody can come back to something they’ve graduated and they can host and serve because I want to have previous graduates in the room welcoming in the new blood. Not as, let’s see if you can pull this off, but as a rooting for you and cheering for you.

Dave Young:
We’re so excited you’re here.

Daniel Whittington:
And serving you in the background. It was a part of the show, don’t tell. Don’t just tell people this is a marker of service. Show them because the people who graduated before are here serving them.

In the early days, I was a musician in the church world, and one of the rules that I took to heart is the moment you’re in charge of something, you should be training your replacement.

Dave Young:
Okay. Yeah.

Daniel Whittington:
Because that’s what it’s for. It’s not really about you. It’s not about carving out your own little corner territory, but if you quit doing something or you have to leave or you move on, we shouldn’t have to start from scratch. As soon as we were finished with level one, I started talking to people about replacing me as teacher, because the goal needs to be that this program, and I call it the hit by a truck plan. If I get hit by a truck, this program’s going to be fine. If it needs me to survive, then we built a totally never going to sustain itself program.

Dave Young:
If you’re listening to this podcast and you’re curious about this program becoming a psalm, if you go to wizardacademy.org, you’ll find our whiskey classes. We also have whiskeymarketing.org. There’s information there, but they’re fun classes and you’ll learn a lot. I’ve gone through the level one myself and really enjoy it and enjoy the knowledge that I got from it. And sharing stories about whiskey. I’m not quite as big a whiskey nerd as a lot of you in there, but I do have my stories that I like to share. And I think that’s the fun of it. Where did the Vault come into play? Was that before or after you started the YouTube channels?

Daniel Whittington:
That was after.

Dave Young:
So we’ve got the school up and running, and then you and Rex Williams started doing videos.

Daniel Whittington:
So actually I did first. So what happened was I needed a way to show the Psalms. At this point, we had two or 300 bottles.

Dave Young:
And Psalms are the graduates of the program.

Daniel Whittington:
That we had built up, and we had turned this upstairs secret room in the mezzanine into a whiskey library, was where we would start class and end class. And it was really fun. It was a sort of resource library for the Psalms to try things and explore flavor profiles. I had already been shooting video for the two, three years that I’d been there. And Rex Williams had this company called Sun Pop Studio where he worked for clients and he shoots and edits video. So I would shoot things with my iPhone and then I’d hand them over to Rex. He would edit, we’d use them for Wizard Academy. And I was doing it for all kinds of things. It occurred to me that I should probably do a YouTube channel focused on whiskey, but my main goal was to show, don’t tell our Psalms how to talk about whiskey without being a snob or a nerd or too inaccessible. And so it was just supposed to be a resource channel for the Psalms.

Dave Young:
Just internal.

Daniel Whittington:
And it was going to be public facing, but I thought people would find the website, whiskeymarketing.org and want to see some examples of what we do. And that’s how they would find the YouTube channel. I was wrong. I started sitting down at this table in the corner of the Vault and I’d set my iPhone on a little tripod and I hit record and reviewed some whiskey, and then I sent X and he would edit it. And then after about two weeks, he showed up in the Vault and started sitting there while I recorded kind of offering like, “Hey, I would do this differently because he’s a video expert.” And then he started appearing on camera. Well, no, first he reached a hand out to have me pour him some whiskey.

Dave Young:
So it’d just be a hand reaching into a shot.

Daniel Whittington:
There’s a couple of episodes where it’s just like, and then I would like, “Hey, this is Rex.” He was like, “Hey.” He’s editing all of these and I have to pour them whiskey because evidently that’s a thing. And then one day he came, he was like, “Look, I’m going to come on camera because I think it would be better if instead of you talking to the camera and trying to show how you do this, if you just did it to me and taught me about whiskey and showed what a psalm does. To me, this dude who doesn’t know anything, that would be better content. And plus we get dialogue back and forth. And that’s where it started. And then it sort of took off. So there was a thing that happened I won’t go into, that took us from 30 subscribers to 2,000, literally overnight in 24 hours. And it was an accident. We just happened to be in the right place at the right time.

Dave Young:
Talking about the right thing.

Daniel Whittington:
Talking about the right thing. And it exploded. And we woke up to thousands of subscribers and we’re like, holy crap. And two things happened at that point. Rex got serious about it because he wanted to use it as a test case to show his clients how to do YouTube.

Dave Young:
How to build a channel.

Daniel Whittington:
And I, who had spent a career in social media at that point, because as a touring musician and this independent musician, I was in the early days of all social media. I was one of the first people to download Twitter when it launched to South by Southwest on, I had a flip phone at the time. I was texting my tweets to my tweet number and it was a pain in the ass. That’s why I got a smartphone for the first time.

Dave Young:
I got in early. But I’ve never really used Twitter much. I got in early enough that I’m @DaveYoung.

Daniel Whittington:
And I was @RhodesAudio, which was my music icon at the time, should have done at Daniel Whittington. Idiot. But I used it to book shows and fill shows and get people to show up to concerts. And it was very effective. And so I knew this whole living and interacting with your fans world. That’s how I built my whole music career, direct contact with my people. So once this channel exploded, I started living in the comments, and all of a sudden, all these people who didn’t know anything about Wizard Academy, had never even heard of us, started finding this whiskey YouTube channel. And I discovered simultaneously that we had stepped into a world that already existed on YouTube that I didn’t know about.

Dave Young:
That there were whiskey …

Daniel Whittington:
There were whiskey channels on YouTube that predated us. And they had been going around, some of them for a long time. And I had no idea, because that’s not why I started it. It wasn’t to get famous or to join this world or to get big on YouTube. It was just like, YouTube is a great hosting platform for this other thing that I want to do. That could have been whiskey as far as I was concerned. It was just YouTube was easier and free. I started talking to people in the comments and they started replying. And then I started reading their comments on the show. And basically the most powerful thing we did, period, everything else was accents, and it trimmed, and gave us a little more streamline and a little more focus. And those were nice tweaks and they definitely improved things.

But the single most powerful thing that we did was made random people on the internet, human and feel seen, and named, and called out of the shadows, and highlighted. That was it. We gave them a name, we called out their name, we talked to them like they were real human beings, not just internet commenters. And we built this little community and it grew and grew. And as it grew, the original people had their own little circle of we’re the originals, and we knew them. And we would talk about, oh yeah, they’ve been around for years. But just that, giving people a voice and making people feel seen. That’s the only reason those channels worked fundamentally. Then we started doing a bunch of other content, but it was really the naming of people that exploded. Everything. That channel and the second channel that we started are now the two largest whiskey YouTube channels by volumes. Half a million subscribers on each.

Dave Young:
You started with the Whiskey Vault channel, and how did the Whiskey Tribe sort of evolve into its own thing?

Daniel Whittington:
That was more Rex’s brainchild than mine, but it was both of us going like, “Hey, we can’t make money off of the Vault channel. We’re hitting like 200,000 subscribers.”

Dave Young:
And it’s a nonprofit.

Daniel Whittington:
It’s owned by a nonprofit, so we don’t make a penny from that.

Dave Young:
And you’re doing primarily reviews and tastings and those kinds of things. When did you start having people send bottles in?

Daniel Whittington:
Someone did it on their own. Yeah, they just mailed us in. We didn’t even ask for it.

Dave Young:
So at first you’re going out and buying bottles to review.

Daniel Whittington:
Right. Well, and we had 300 bottles already. And we were thinking, okay, well that’s like two years worth of content so we’re fine. We can get started. And then the second year people started mailing in bottles and we were like, oh, thanks. What do we do with this? Well, I guess we call them a magnificent bastard for mailing in a bottle. That launched a whole thing. Now the Vault has over 3,000 bottles and 70% of it is donated. We’ve had to shut down donations because we have no room and we don’t know where to put them anymore. But we started the second channel to one created different approach, which is more of a shenanigan fun, hitting all the hot topics of whiskey and the questions people are asking and not just reviewing. And so that one was also one that we owned, we could make money off of.

We could build our own business. And that launched into a whole other world that ended up building the single largest online whiskey community that we know of. And a Facebook group of 40, 50,000 people, and a Patreon that’s one of the largest per capita Patreons on the platform and a distillery. That’s the world’s first crowdsourced decision making distillery. It just kept rolling and that’s a whole other story.

Dave Young:
Well, it is, but it’s part of this empire building thing. It’s like you started with this little thing that you love up in the office and it’s turned into this empire. We’ll call it that because this is the Empire Builders Podcast, but it’s also transformed the Wizard Academy campus in ways because it’s given us a place to go hang out out, it’s given us a food truck to go grab some tacos.

Daniel Whittington:
Yeah. Now, well, even the school, the Whiskey Marketing School is the fifth of our classes now.

Dave Young:
What excites me as Vice Chancellor at Wizard Academy is that we’re also seeing, if you think of it as a Venn diagram, the whiskey students and the marketing and advertising students, those two circles are starting to close up a little bit. We’re seeing a lot more overlap than it was in the beginning.

Daniel Whittington:
For the first two years, there was almost no overlap.

Dave Young:
A few of the real insiders that loved whiskey, you’ve probably stepped over into the whiskey side.

Daniel Whittington:
Like two.

Dave Young:
That’s really exciting. Now, just in terms of numbers. So this love of whiskey has turned into an educational program where you’ve taught hundreds of whiskey fans how to do this deductive tasting and host people and help people learn about whiskey.

Daniel Whittington:
[inaudible 00:24:36] in on 700 to 1,000 students who’ve gone through the program for level one.

Dave Young:
And then aside from that, on the private side, you guys built a distillery. It’s interesting because it was crowdsourced so the decisions that you make …

Daniel Whittington:
We ask them what they want to do because it’s their distillery, and we’re just executing the things that they decide. And then we sell them the whiskey that they voted on.

Dave Young:
It’s been fun to watch it.

Daniel Whittington:
I didn’t start the Whiskey Marketing School in order to own a distillery. All we did is at any given moment, felt where something wasn’t finished or right or complete and make the next best decision that was in front of us based on what mattered. So every point we hit something, we just said, what do we need to do next? And then it turns out the next thing was this, but we treated it with the care that next step deserved, and then it just kept going.

Dave Young:
Okay. So I think that’s a common thread with a lot of the empires that we’ve talked about here on the podcast in that sometimes the decisions you make, I mean, you’re trying to grow a business. But sometimes you stumble across something or you make some decisions that you didn’t know how good of a decision you were making.

Daniel Whittington:
Yeah, no, never. And some of them were really bad, but people regularly ask, what does it feel like to see all your dreams come true? And I just think, this was not my dream. I didn’t dream this. We landed here. And then I looked around just as surprised as the rest of you. Hold on. This is crazy. What happened?

Dave Young:
I think it’s an exciting story, and thank you for being on the podcast and sharing it. Now, I want to invite people, if you’re ever in Austin, you need to come out to Wizard Academy to the campus.

Daniel Whittington:
Absolutely.

Dave Young:
Check out, if you look at the Crowded Barrel Distillery, that’s where the hangout is.

Daniel Whittington:
It’s from the Friday, is we’ll try to hang out there for happy hour. I may or may not be there. This is turned into a whole other the thing for me. I’m now consulting for distilleries and brands.

Dave Young:
Exactly.

Daniel Whittington:
And doing private consulting and private meetings. And so I’m only on campus on Fridays once a month now.

Dave Young:
That’s a really cool thing too, to think that, okay, well, you turned this love of whiskey into something. Now other whiskey experts in the industry are seeking you out.

Daniel Whittington:
Like, “Hey, how do we do that?” Well, because in the industry, all the education and all the consultants, they all teach process. So all the consultants to craft whiskey guys, almost all of them, are consulting on how to make better whiskey and production and business growth. And there’s very few people teaching marketing and branding and consulting in that platform, specific to the whiskey industry. Usually they’ll go find some outside branding marketing company and they’re just one of their clients. And that’s when you usually end up with really generic and shitty whiskey advertising.

Dave Young:
Yeah, that’s true. Congratulations on building your empire.

Daniel Whittington:
Thanks.

Dave Young:
This is not an empire like Ford Motor Company or something like that. But it’s certainly something that anybody that has a dream or a passion about something, if you keep pushing on it and making the right decisions, it may blossom into something you didn’t even know was possible.

Daniel Whittington:
Yeah. It’s exhausting, but very rewarding.

Dave Young:
Daniel Whittington, thank you for being on the Empire Builders Podcast.

Daniel Whittington:
Thank you. It’s good to be here.

Dave Young:
Thanks for listening to the podcast. Please share us, subscribe on your favorite podcast app and leave us a big fat juicy five star rating and review. And if you have any questions about this or any other podcast episode, email to questions@theempirebuilders podcast.com.

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