By Richard Thomas

Iowa-based Templeton Rye found itself at the center of a minor flap after announcing their Templeton Rye Pork Project earlier this week. The project calls for using Templeton Rye’s spent mash grain as animal feed to raise premium hogs. Since turning spent grain over to animal feed is a standard practice in the distilling industry, ostensibly the Templeton Rye Pork Project should have solicited little or no comment. Instead, it was met with suspicious and negative comment on whiskey internet forums regarding the origins of the spent grain.

If that sounds strange or unwarranted, recall that Templeton Rye is no stranger to controversy. For years, the Iowa company spinned its tales about Al Capone, its bootlegging roots, and its Prohibition-era mashbill, all the while hawking whiskey that came from Lawrenceburg Distillers Indiana’s (LDI, also known as MGP) stock of 95% rye. Templeton has since installed a still (the skeptical can see it and the fermenting tanks on tourist videos) and admitted they source from LDI, but by then the damage had been done. In whiskey circles today, many take issue with Templeton’s continuing referral to a “good stuff,” bootlegger mashbill when the stuff in the bottles is still LDI rye.

Coming from that background, some whiskey fans responded to the unveiling of the Templeton Rye Pork Project with skepticism or hostility, posing the question of where a non-distilling bottler would get the spent grain to turn into animal feed in the first place. The answer is, according to Templeton Rye, from LDI.

“The mash used for this project is being shipped from our distilling partner in Lawrenceburg, IN” a source at Templeton Rye told The Whiskey Reviewer. However, some of the spent grain could just as easily have come from Templeton, as the company does a little distilling itself and “plan[s] to eventually do all facets of production [there].”

So as it turns out, this time the flap really is over nothing: the spent mash grain comes from LDI, just like the whiskey. Yet neither that or the fact that many agree Templeton Rye is a pretty good product will end the cynicism or the grumbling about the Iowa whiskey company, and that is the real lesson here. Once you give people good cause to think you’ve been misleading them, that’s what they’ll see whenever they look at you.