In a Crowded Celebrity Booze Market, Metallica Made One Worth Drinking
Metallica plays concerts on a rotating stage. As the band thrashes through two-hour-plus sets of face-melting, adrenaline-pumping mayhem, the circular stage at the center of the stadium with Lars Ulrich's drumset planted firmly in the middle slowly turns a full 360 degrees. By the end of the show, every fan, between sporadic, ecstatic mosh pits, will have seen him play head on. Every fan will have had face time with lead singer James Hetfield, guitarist Kirk Hammett, and bassist Robert Trujillo. It's a show built around the fans, encompassing the fans, perfected in nearly 40 years on the road.
In August, Metallica released its own whiskey brand, Blackened, the first liquor from the band. It, too, is immersed in music. Created in collaboration with master distiller Dave Pickerell, a rockstar himself in the whiskey world, Blackened is serenaded with the band's discography new and very, very old until it vibrates, soaking in the controlled, thumping energy as flavor from the barrel. The spirit itself was born not of some later-in-life rocker despair, as the money dries up and the last farewell tour winds down, but rather an effort to make a modern whiskey for younger folks to embrace as their own, says Ulrich. And unlike, say, Bob Dylan's unenthusiastic sponsorship of Heaven’s Door, the band is fully behind it.
“I love it,” Ulrich told me over the phone a couple weeks back, during a short break from their current tour. “It's given me a new relationship with whiskey, obviously because you're super proud with what you've done. And the idea that you can reach for a bottle and go, I'm pouring some of my own beverage, that's pretty cool.”
In a market crowded with celebrity boozes, it's a whiskey worth drinking, from a band that wouldn't know how to put out a boring product if it tried.
Dave Pickerell was a titan in craft distilling. He was the master distiller at Maker’s Mark for fourteen years before leaving to pursue his own projects, including the renowned WhistlePig. Awhile back he got a phone call from a drinks guy, who told him, hush-hush like, that there was a celebrity liquor deal that might interest him. After a long talk and the signing of a non-disclosure agreement, Pickerell, a longtime Metallica fan, learned that the aforementioned deal was with Metallica itself.
“There was sunshine coming out my ears,” he told me in Philadelphia in October, hours before we headed to see the band perform at the Wells Fargo Center.
For Metallica, Pickerell wanted to do something completely new. Back in his younger days, he’d once stood in a chapel as the organist hammered out the lowest notes on the register. He’d felt the building shake and his guts tremble, and kept that knowledge for future use: “I knew that ultra-low frequency has the energy to move molecules.”
Metallica operates on ultra-low frequencies. “It's like somebody dropped a bomb on the center of the stage” when the subwoofers went off, Pickerell said. What if, he wondered, those subwoofers could move the molecules in whiskey?
He ran tests, strapping transponders to whiskey barrels, turning on the music, and measuring things like gas chromatography and mass spectrometry. After 10 weeks, that whiskey pulled the good caramels and lactones from the insides of the barrel walls much faster than it did in barrels that hadn't been subwoofed, he said. The resulting flavor was different-astonishingly so. And not only that, but different music led to different flavor profiles.
“You can taste the music," said Pickerell. "I've done blind tastings with people, and they can clearly differentiate between two batches, and the only difference is the playlist."
If you scoff at all this as marketing bologna, Pickerell said he applied for a patent, and once that was approved, planned on submitting the data to scientific journals for the whiskey bigwigs of the world to test out for themselves.
But November 1, seven days after that concert in Philly, Pickerell died. The cause of death was hypertensive heart failure. Metallica was stunned, and so was the distilling world.
Pickerell is gone, but the work of producing Blackened continues for Sweet Amber Distilling, the company Metallica started to make it.
"After the extremely sad passing of Master Distiller Dave Pickerell, Blackened will continue to move forward as a brand to honor Dave’s legacy and partnership with Metallica that he deeply treasured. Sweet Amber is proceeding with plans outlined by Dave and the band to open a distillery in the Bay Area in 2019. It’s our hope that the Dave Pickerell Distillery will be a testament to Dave and his final project,” John Bilello, CEO of Sweet Amber Distilling, said in a statement to Esquire Friday.
Even before it was made official, Ulrich wanted to carry on.
“I think that in the same way referencing when we lost Cliff, our bass player, in 1986, it felt like that the path to honor his legacy was to move forward,” he said. “To throw in the towel would be a surrender to the principles that he stood for.”
As it stands now, Blackened is a blend of quality whiskeys, ryes, and primarily, bourbons, already aged, and finished by Pickerell in black brandy barrels. Transponders on the black brandy barrels pulse Metallica music through the whiskey blend. The frequency (not volume) of the music causes the liquid to move, pulling flavor more quickly from the barrel, a process Pickerell dubbed “sonic enhancement.” (It is not, he emphasized, a rapid aging process, as some have called it.) As of December there are eight batches either sold out, currently shipping, or in the finishing stage, each serenaded with a different playlist. The naming convention starts with Batch 081, after the year Metallica was formed, and runs through Batch 088. Blackened 081 is spicy with a kick, best enjoyed on the rocks. The playlist that made it, which kicks off with "Eye of the Beholder" and ends on "Disposable Heroes," was cataloged by the entire band. Blackened 85 is sweeter, smoother, and tastes best straight. Trujillo created its playlist.
Metallica has changed plenty throughout a run that's lasted nearly four decades. Their mid-'80s days of mainlining Smirnoff and Jack and Cokes are done; "Alcoholica," as they were famously nicknamed, is no more. Ulrich still enjoys a drink-"obviously in moderation, boys and girls" he adds-while Hetfield is 16 years sober. There have been well-received albums, and less well-received albums. And the audience has changed, meaning it's not just the same old guys who've been screaming along since the first live show in 1982. There are a lot of young people at their shows, even pre-teens, and a lot of women. "It looks to me like it's 50/50 boys/girls, and that wasn't always the case. Trust me," Ulrich tells me.
But some things stay the same.
"In its best moments, when you can lose yourself in the music, lose yourself in the safety of the other three guys in the band, knowing you're all in this together, and when you break down the barrier, the physical barrier, between you and the audience, it's an incredible thing," Ulrich says. "The fact that that still happens 37 years in is very cool."
Blackened, a whiskey crafted by music, breaks down that barrier a little more.
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