Spirits Explained

Finding Perfectly Tuned Taste with Three Chord Bourbon

Greg Horton, ReserveBar Spirits Contributor

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Neil Giraldo’s legendary musical career spans more than 40 years and includes his recent induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, a long-time musical partnership with rock superstar Pat Benatar — with whom he’s raised two daughters — five Grammy Awards, and multiple gold and platinum albums. He’s a musician, songwriter, composer, and producer who understands the process of creating music at the granular level. With the formation of Three Chord Bourbon in 2017, Giraldo brought his creative force to whiskey, leading to a new legendary partnership with whiskey maker Ari Sussman.

Tuning Into Great Whiskey

The story of Three Chord Bourbon begins in Ohio in 2016, though. Giraldo is a native of northern Ohio, and he was there in May 2016 working on a deeply personal project.

“I was working on a screenplay for a hybrid documentary film I wanted to do – still do and will finish,” he said. “And it was a give-back documentary to put local musicians in the foreground. These were musicians I grew up with in my hometown in the northern Ohio area – some stayed and some were successful elsewhere. I want to give credit to all those players who worked so hard. A lot of them ended up in regular day jobs; they weren't able to live their dreams that we all had as musicians.”

A friend recommended they approach a spirits company to secure a couple hundred thousand dollars to get a trailer made for the documentary. Giraldo liked the idea, but the more he thought about it, the more he thought a different approach was better.

A Punk Rock Bricolage

“I told him we should start our own company,” he said. “He asked if I was serious, and I was, so we started the company on May 16, 2016. We knew we needed someone to make the whiskey, so after we formed the company, we went on a national search for a whiskey maker-blender, and that’s how I met Ari,” Giraldo said. “I knew he was the right guy because when we talked about whiskey, we talked about the ways that music related to blending whiskey.”

“Neil told me that he wanted to make whiskey, and he told me about the movie,” Sussman said, “and I realized a couple things. First, Neil is very humble and thoughtful. He’s making this movie about people who weren’t as fortunate in their musical careers as he was. And then instead of just going out and raising money from a spirits company, he said, ‘Let's make our own.’ To me, that was a very clear signal that there is a do-it-yourself punk kind of ethos there, where if something needs to be done, we do it ourselves.”

Sussman left a nascent career in state politics in his 20s to move to France, where he learned to make wine and brandy. He split time between countries, and when he was in the U.S., he helped hospitality groups with wine and cocktail programs. Sussman also knows the history of alcohol in the U.S., including how important the Rust Belt was during Prohibition.

“Cleveland, Buffalo frankly, but mainly Detroit: Those are the cities where most of the whiskey during Prohibition entered the United States,” Sussman said. “Neil and I met for the first time right off I-94, the old US Hwy 12, which used to be called the Whiskey Road. It got the name because 75 percent of all the booze that came into the U.S. during Prohibition came down that street, from Detroit to Chicago, right where Al Capone's people distributed it across the United States. So, we're proudly in the cradle of bootlegging here in the upper Rust Belt.”

Putting Whiskey Blending on the Map

Sussman was already working on mapping spirits in the U.S. and studying distilling and the importance of the Rust Belt when he came across the work of Dr. Kris Berglund, a Michigan State University professor who directed the school’s first-of-its-kind distillery programs. Sussman said he didn’t have much knowledge when it came to the production side, so he wanted to meet the man who started the distillation program.

“I went up there and told Dr. Berglund that I would love to mop the floors or help out in any way I could,” Sussman said. “And he ended up hiring me to manage the facility, which I did for five years. During that time at the Michigan State artisan distilling program research center, I had the amazing fortune of working with supremely talented scientists and entrepreneurs.”

Having learned his craft from France, where blending has always been a thing, the Michigan State program helped Sussman think through the art of blending, which was the standard way of producing whiskey until Prohibition. The blending of whiskey parallels in many ways the creation of music in many ways, and both Sussman and Giraldo were taken with the idea of making a brilliant American whiskey-based on blending principles.

“I recognized that in enjoying whiskey, I was mainly enjoying components of that whiskey,” Sussman said. “We were making all kinds of experimental whiskeys, so we did what anyone in a university would do when you have 100-milliliter graduated cylinders lying about. We started blending, and when you have it down to milliliters, you can accurately make blends on a very small scale with experimental products and see what works and what doesn't.”

For five years, the team at the university distillery blended whiskeys to try to understand them better. Some affected the mid-palate, others provided distinct aromas, and some lacked texture or flavor but possessed other components. Like Giraldo with music, Sussman wanted to understand whiskey at the granular level.

“There is a process to songwriting that is very similar to what a whiskey maker does – I prefer that term to distiller given what we do,” Giraldo said. “An idea comes to you. (I don’t know where from. All songwriters are conduits, but I don’t know where it comes from.) You start writing the song, you record that song, and then, after you record it, you have to put other musicians on to finish the record in the mixing process. You then make the masters, and in the old days we’d put it to vinyl, but now you still need the digital order. Only then does it get to the consumers’ ears.”

Disrupting the Industry

The realization for Sussman was that, at least initially, Three Chord would not be a distillery. “When Neil said he wanted to start a spirits company centered around his artistic process, it occurred to me that he didn’t want to start a distillery and start making whiskey. He was talking about finding really amazing whiskeys, kind of like going out and finding a really amazing bass player and a drummer and rhythm section and bringing them in the same room. I knew that was a creative process we could apply to whiskey.”

For Giraldo, it was the perfect match: blending spirits and blending music. “The synergy between us was really critical to a successful company, because we both understood the same thing – that what Ari does and has done, and what I do and have done in my field, is to be a disruptor, in a positive sense. Bourbon drinkers around the world, they’re our audience. We’ve disrupted the industry for our audience. And one thing I’ve never done is dumb down music for my audience. The best songs I’ve written or produced, on the first listen, people are like ‘I don’t know. I need to listen again.’ But then by the third listen, they get it. They’re hooked. That’s what we’re doing with Three Chord, too.”

For their flagship Three Chord Bourbon — a name that appeals to Giraldo for its history as the core of Blues music – Sussman blended varying age statements from 2 to 12 years, with a relatively high rye content at 20 percent to complement 73 percent corn and 7 percent barley. Giraldo wanted to start with an “approachable” whiskey, and Three Chord succeeded admirably. Their bourbon starts bright with all the high tones from young whiskey, and then the aged components take over at mid-palate with an almost peanut-buttery nuttiness. The blending creates different mouthfeels from the front to the back of the palate, making Three Chord both playful and serious.

So what’s next for Three Chord? You can expect a Bourbon Cream that is perfectly tuned to complement a variety of cocktails as well as more collaborations, like this Straight Bourbon finished in Strange Family French Oak pinot noir casks. For now, you can shop their entire collection here.