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PAUL:

What happens when two friends take a shot at building something uniquely Southern in the City With Soul? You get a distillery that does more than pour. It plays! Hey, it's Paul Wolf for the front-row seat to conversations on culture from Jackson, Mississippi. We call our podcast Soul Sessions. It's the people, places and events that make the City With Soul shine.

On today's show, we're catching up with Austin Evans and Richard Patrick, co-founders of Cathead Distillery. What started with vodka and a lot of hustle has grown into one of Jackson's most iconic brands. With bourbon, gin, and liqueurs, plus a music festival that's just as soulful as their spirits. They're here to talk Cathead Jam, community, and the culture that keeps them rooted in Jackson.

Austin, I think it was 2010, and I was living in the Fondren Corner building and I met you, you live there too. And we met up on the roof deck. We were just getting to know each other. And you told me you had just started a spirits company with your college buddy, Richard. And I remember you went back down to your apartment and you got me a bottle of Cathead Vodka. And I got my first taste and have loved it ever since. A hell of a product you've brought to Jackson, Mississippi.

AUSTIN:

Thanks. Yeah. Living in Fondren Corner. I couldn't imagine living anywhere else, moving back to Jackson back in 2008. Actually, my wife and I went to Walker's the other day. We were trying to figure out how many times we had dinner at Walker's and we just couldn't come up with the answer. It was so many.

PAUL:

Too convenient to live right there next door.

AUSTIN:

Yeah, absolutely.

RICHARD:

I can claim residency at a Fondren Corner as well, by way of Austin's couch for probably the first six months of starting Cathead. Moved over here with, with not, not big plans on where to stay, but just to pile drive this business into getting started.

PAUL:

So you two met in college and then came out of college and had this idea. Where did the idea for Cathead Distillery come from?

AUSTIN:

As soon as I graduated from the University of Alabama, where we both went to college, I moved to Charleston, South Carolina. That's where my sister was living at the time. So it was easy. Lived on her couch for a little bit and convinced Richard to move there. He graduated a year after I did. And so we both were hanging out in Charleston and kind of got involved in the industry over there. It was a, it was a fun time to be in Charleston.

RICHARD:

And so, yeah, we both got into the business. I was working bars and catering companies and Richard went to a different side of the industry. So I was on the manufacturing and import marketing side of the business. We both kind of cut our teeth in the industry and in different standals. We knew we had something or enough to be dangerous, I guess is the best, probably the best way to put it.

AUSTIN:

I'm born and raised in Jackson and my father has Lemuria bookstore. And I know that I'm not literary enough to even tackle that beast. So I wanted to knew that I had to create my own path and something that had a little bit more passion for.

RICHARD:

Yeah. That was the common bond kind of early on is when all started, started becoming friends in college. Uh, you know, both of us grew up in families with small business, um, backgrounds, and we both acknowledged that we didn't want to go work for our families.

PAUL:

Now I totally understand that you want to carve your own path and what a path that two of you have carved. Here's Cathead Distillery. How many years later now?

AUSTIN:

We're celebrating our 15th year. So what started as kind of our anniversary celebration, a little basically we've got a keg party on the front porch, has turned into what now is the Cat Head Jam.

PAUL:

Yeah. And we're going to talk about that a little later on. That's a big event coming up in June at Cathead Distillery here in Jackson. I do want to ask you a little bit about the products that you're offering from cat Cathead Distillery. started off as just a simple vodka and now across the beverage spectrum, there are versions of vodka and versions of bourbon and versions of gin. How did you grow the profile so quickly and so broadly?

RICHARD:

I mean, that's a good question. It kind of all happens, I guess, serendipitously. The honeysuckle was actually a plan before I even started Cat Head Vodka. just took us a long time to get it right. And, our, our team around us has done a tremendous job scaling that product. And you know, when you have a really good, reliable team around you, it affords you to become kind of more in the innovative seat. And we realized we wanted to diversify our portfolio. So we weren't just like solely at risk on just vodka, even though today, Cathead Vodka is still our number one product we sell by volume. Cathead Honeysuckle Vodka is our number two. So, I mean, we've been really fortunate in that sense that those older products from day one have carried our business, but it's also given us an avenue to appeal to, other interests, know, whiskey lovers and gin lovers and—we call them ginophiles. And then, of course, out of the world is a lot of fun as well.

PAUL:

Yeah. Let's talk about Hoodoo Chicory Liqueur that is now part of the Hoodoo Espresso Martini. That is a collaboration with Northshore Specialty Coffee. That's one of my new favorite things to drink.

RICHARD:

Thank you. Yeah. We're a huge fan of Trey (Malone). He is just so passionate about coffee and we met Trey, I guess around 2016, 2017. He was kind of itching to do something and he moved out on the West Coast. Extremely passionate about coffee back then. Coffee and rum is kind of his thing and fast forward to last year, and we've done collaborative things with Trey, as far as like cocktail competition, using coffee and things of that nature. And we called Trey last year and we were like, I think it's time. How about we talk about, you know, working towards an espresso martini in the bottle. We don't want to make it complicated. That was one thing we identified really early on is not picking on anybody here locally at Jackson, but really it's, it's a national and global thing. It’s, you know, lot of, a lot of bartenders kind of roll their eyes when you ask for an espresso martini, not because it's not a good cocktail. It's because it's a hard cocktail or a tedious cocktail for a lot of people to make. They might not have fresh espresso. There's a lot of like quality control things that go on. You might order an espresso martini at a bar and then order it again and you'll get something that tastes totally different. We wanted to really build something that stood up: quality consistency, easy for bartenders, easy for a home bartender. There's so much anxiety for a lot of people to make cocktails at home because, you know, there's multiple components of a recipe and it might not taste the same every time. Hoodoo Espresso, the intent behind that was to really make something simple and just outstanding. And really our common bond with Trey around that is a lot of people don't know good coffee and if we can put really high-end coffee in a bottle and showcase that to people, it might be a win-win for both of us.

PAUL:

It is a 10 out of 10 winner for me. Put it in the shaker with a little ice about 30 seconds and it's ready to drink and delicious. I'm also a bourbon fan and your Old Soul Bourbon was kind of your flagship product, but that has since become so many different imprints with different years of aging and different styles. Tell me how some of that came about.

RICHARD:

I guess you could start by saying like 70 ish percent of our industry is innovation based. So you always have to be looking and testing and trying different things. And what we like about the bourbon space specifically is like, we have all these ideas of different recipes—or mash bills is what we call them. And it really shows a lot of character and creativity out of our distillers when they're, they're knocking on our door and they're like, “Hey, we, want to make something with this leftover barley and we've got this grain and we've got a beat on some heirloom corn” or something. So, you know, we have our standard mash bills that we make predominantly throughout the year. And then we have our experimental stuff, which is actually starting to become really interesting because, you know, we had our distiller pull an inventory report recently. And I mean, we've probably got over 50 different experimental mash bills in our spice cabinet, so to speak.

PAUL:

Never run out of ideas, right?

RICHARD:

Yeah. It's a lot of fun.

PAUL:

You have so many products and you're now in 35 plus states, probably more as of the airing of this, but Austin, I want to ask you, because there are so many products on the market nationwide, what is it that makes Cat Head’s products so different? What makes you stand out in the market?

AUSTIN:

I mean, that's a question you definitely ask yourself before you come to market with any product is the differentiation aspect of it. I think the main things that we look at as our backbone of it is authenticity. Working through products and flavor profiles that fit our area, our terroir, and staying focused on what we like, what people around us like down here as far as flavor profiles. And it's fun to play with the innovative aspect driving down, you know, how to get down a particular path when you're conceptually designing a product. From the ground up, from the idea up. Overall, keeping the quality as high as possible is our main focus. And I think that our products hopefully stand up to that on the long-term and focusing on the long-term in creating something that we can be proud of, the consumer can be proud of, and folks from Mississippi can be proud of to showcase elsewhere.

PAUL:

And it's also too, it's the ethos, the legend, the story of the product that really sells it.

AUSTIN:

Yeah, we definitely wanted to have something that was relatable to Mississippi, authentic and the name Cathead being representation of some of the blues history in our state. “That's a cool cat. that cat can play:” that is a term that stemmed from blues music that influences all music as we know. Something to hit home to us as we're developing and trying to understand the brand. It made sense that if the name had a good defining definition to, you know, where we are from and trying to represent it accurately.

PAUL:

Music I know is important to you guys. And that's why Cathead Jam started so many years ago. And it is back again this year from the Dream Note Foundation, your nonprofit that you founded to help students learn music and to bring music into their lives. I want to know more about this concert, this weekend event that's coming up June 6th and 7th at Cat Head Distillery.

RICHARD:

June 6th and 7th will be here before we know it. Super excited about it. I guess we got to start with our headliner because that's been a major bucket list from kind of day one of Cathead Jam. I was going through some old photos of like maybe 2016, 2017 Cathead Jam. And I got a picture of me wearing a moe. shirt and now they're headlining our festival. So, and moe. has been one of those bands since our college years that we followed around and listened to, you know, total fanboys of them. So it's so cool that they're going to be in our front yard on June 7th.

PAUL:

Yeah, I bet. mean, you ask your college selves if you would be the host for a concert for your favorite band. And you're like, are you crazy? What are you talking about?

RICHARD:

It is really fun to have, to be able to have a host of band that we're fan big fans of. It's definitely a wild feeling when they, when the stage goes up and you start to get the energy in the air and they come on stage and you're just, you just grinning in a year to year that this is happening. It's really neat.

PAUL:

And I know one of the artists that's playing a Cathead Jam. This is how much you guys believe in music. You hire local up-and-coming musicians to work there at Cat Head Distillery. TWURT Chamberlain is one of the acts playing on the stage. This guy's got a great story and as a fantastic musician too.

RICHARD:

He’s fantastic person and, his energy and smile just brightens the room. So I mean, we're absolutely grateful to work with him on the bar program at Cathead Distillery, but also like his band and just aura is incredible. And you know, we wanted to surprise them with, being our opening act for Cat Head Jam. Let me ask you this.

PAUL:

We talk about the bar program and I know that during COVID and in the years that followed. A, we couldn't get together in person, but B, you all were in the process of scaling up and kind of reorganizing things so that you could grow. But now the bar and the events are back at Cathead. I know it's become a standard hang for a lot of people, a third place, if you will: tell me about what you're offering in the evenings and on weekends at Cat Head Distillery there in downtown.

RICHARD:

What we're offering downtown is, is really a community place. I mean, ultimately, I feel like any local business has to appeal to locals or otherwise it's not real. It's not authentic. And people from out of town don't want to visit if it's not appreciated by locals. So locals first, and we want something that showcases a family friendly environment. We have tons of children these days ourselves. So they're running around all the time and their friends were running around and really a communal place for everybody. And I think that's first and foremost what we pride ourselves on, but we do offer private tours, public tours. We have a bar program. Maeve Bradley is our front-of-the-house manager and she's done a tremendous job building that back for us. And, you know, we have live music, crawfish boils, various events all the time. It's really become a place, a gathering place to have big productions like CatheadJam is one thing and we're super excited about raising awareness for our foundation DreamNote. Just the whole ethos. My mom puts it best: she's told Austin and me several times, she's like, “you guys really have combined everything that you love and built it into one place.” Obviously, booze, music, and just a family-friendly environment. So we're really grateful to have what we have and share that with Jackson.

PAUL:

Whether it's a chilled cocktail, a barrel-aged bourbon, or a full-on music fest in downtown Jackson, Cathead Distillery continues to mix authenticity with innovation. By staying rooted in Mississippi's culture and putting community first, they've created a space that's as much about connection as it is about craft. We'll have links to Cathead Distillery and the Cathead Jam in our show notes at visitjackson.com/soulsessions.

This podcast is produced by Visit Jackson, the destination organization for Mississippi's capital city. Our executive producers are Jonathan Pettus and Dr. Rickey Thigpen, and I'm our managing editor. Do you want to know more about all of the great things going on in Mississippi's capital city? You can find that at visitjackson.com.

I'm Paul Wolf and you've been listening to Soul Sessions.

Listen to previous episodes of Soul Sessions