About an hour south of Atlanta is the tiny town of Senoia (pronounced suh-NOY), Georgia. You’ve probably never heard of it, but you’ve definitely seen it. Movies including Driving Miss Daisy, the 2011 version of Footloose, and Fried Green Tomatoes have been filmed there, as well as hit television series The Walking Dead. One family, the Crooks, owns most of the businesses in town, and the likely next mayor will be Scott Tigchelaar, president of Senoia Enterprises, who was responsible for a major overhaul and redevelopment of the city’s downtown area. There are only about 6,000 people living in the town, and the main attraction for locals is the dirt track racing at Senoia Raceway. It’s a small, tight-knit farming community, and on the outskirts of town you’ll find the Doc Brown Farm, where they grow more than 25,000 pounds of Jimmy Red corn and Abruzzi rye every year to make whiskey.
Doc Brown Farm and Distillers is named for founders Paige “Doc” Dockweiler and Amy Brown. Amy’s son Daniel Williams is the third founder. The trio grow grains on the 20-acre farm as well as a larger leased field just down the road with plans for expansion into more farming land as it becomes feasible. The grains are immediately cleaned and placed in totes and taken about 90 minutes away to the Distillery of Modern Art (DOMA) in Atlanta, Georgia for distillation twice a year after harvests. When the Doc Brown whiskey is being run, the Doc Brown DSP takes over DOMA, so the spirits produced are contract distilled under Doc Brown’s license.
Brown’s family has farmed in northern Georgia for generations. Her father most notably was recognized nationally for growing upwards of 100 bushels of corn per acre, a feat which he accomplished by hitching up a mule without the benefit of any automated farming implements. One of the brand names for their whiskey is Uncle Bogue, named for her uncle Matthew Bogue Brown, who was farming in Georgia in the 1800s.
Dockweiler grew up in a farming family in southern Georgia, where they grew corn, soybeans, watermelons, and cotton. By day, she’s an oncology nurse. Williams has been farming with his grandfather since he was a boy, earning enough money to pay for flying lessons. He’s now a commercial pilot for UPS and farms in his spare time, frequently taking soil samples and checking the moisture levels of the grains to see if they are ready for the harvest.
The current iteration of the family farm only dates back to 2017, when Brown and Dockweiler joined Williams in Coweta County after living in the Atlanta suburbs and tiring of the constant traffic. They began to search for heirloom grains to grow with the plan to make whiskey. After trying a few different corn varietals that didn’t do well in Georgia, their search took them to a seed-saving farmer in Alabama where they found Jimmy Red corn.
Jimmy Red corn is a red dent corn with a higher brix (sugar) content than even other red heirloom varietals like Bloody Butcher, making it optimal for yeast to convert large amounts of sugar to ethanol. It’s also more oily than typical corn, which creates whiskey with a nice rich mouthfeel, as the oils allow the various flavor compounds to spread evenly across the palate. In fermentation, the high oil content prevents foaming from the rye. While its most common use is in grits and cornbread, it has been adopted for whiskey by at least one other distillery in the United States, High Wire Distilling in South Carolina. According to High Wire, it was named for Jimmy Island and was a preferred corn for moonshiners. The varietal nearly went extinct at the turn of the century after the last known farmer to grow it died, but the last two cobs were rescued by Railey Farm and Field and the corn varietal is now being grown and selected for optimal growing on a handful of family farms across the southeastern United States, including that of Doc Brown.
The allure of this rare corn varietal has the Doc Brown Farm founders on a mission. Not only do they want to grow open pollinated non-GMO corn, but they also want to be the best possible stewards of the land so that their grandchildren can continue to farm for future generations. On the farm there are bee boxes, tended by a local beekeeper, the presence of which Brown swears increased the yield of the Jimmy Red corn, even though corn does not rely on pollinators. Alongside the bee boxes are bat hotels, which help to keep the pests that like to eat crops at bay, allowing the crops to be grown without pesticides.
The Jimmy Red corn does yield less than a more standard yellow dent corn — 60–70 bushels per acre as opposed to an average of 170 bushels per acre — and it has to be planted further apart than standard corn varietals that have been modified to withstand crowded growing conditions. Heirloom corn varietals also tend to grow to different heights than standard corn varietals, which can make harvesting a challenge. Modern farming equipment is manufactured to work only on standard crops, so anyone with variations will have to seek out alternative farm machinery, often fabricating parts to make it work. What’s more, modern farm equipment is subject to patents and trademarks, so any modifications can cause legal troubles and any repairs have to be completed by the manufacturer’s chosen technicians. Farmers growing heirloom or pedigreed crops have to know how to get creative about planting and harvests.
It takes 30 pounds of seed to grow an acre of corn, so they have to save hundreds of pounds of corn each year to have enough to start planting again in the spring. Scaling up production can take years of careful planning. Jimmy Red corn has a longer growing season than a standard yellow dent corn — 200 days or more instead of 90 to 120 — and a bad growing season would mean no corn for making whiskey.
The Abruzzi rye that grows on Doc Brown Farm has been a favorite among bakers for years, and as Dockweiler says, if it makes good bread it must make good whiskey. Abruzzi is one of the only rye varietals that will grow all the way to harvest that far south. Typically, it is grown as a cover crop over winter and tilled under in the spring for the biomass. Doc Brown Farm’s yield for rye is about 25 bushels per acre, far less than the 70 bushels per acre of the average hybrid rye varietals grown further north.
But the advantage of growing heirloom grains is the flavor. The different colors in grains represent different flavor compounds — yellow comes from anthoxanthins and carotenoids, while reds come from anthocyanins — and red corns are usually known for spicy notes like pepper and cinnamon, as opposed to yellow corn’s sweetness. Biodiversity is also very important for the future of agriculture for a number of reasons including being able to grow food in unpredictable and changing weather patterns. The work that farmer distillers are doing to diversify our foodways could someday save humanity.
For now, the grains being grown at Doc Brown Farm are going into whiskeys named for family members. Effie Jewel is one that will come out soon, named for Brown’s dad’s aunt. For this bourbon, they sent a few of the barrels to be aged in Galveston, Texas from December to May in order to see what the maturation climate might do differently with the Jimmy Red corn and Abruzzi rye distillate. The result of the experiment, which is still ongoing, is noticeable. There’s more wood extraction in the barrels that visited Texas as well as a hint of salinity from being near the Gulf of Mexico. The current release of Uncle Bogue’s Bourbon is aged for four years before being rested in a local French oak Touriga wine barrel from Wolf Mountain Winery in Georgia followed by the addition of OZ Tyler Bourbon and another rest back in the OZ Tyler spiral cut barrels. Other popular products from Doc Brown Farm and Distillers are honey and hot honey infused whiskeys, made with real honey and peppers from the family’s farms. Because these products are made with real honey they appear hazy, and Brown jokes she needs to put “it’s supposed to look like that!” on the label.
While Doc Brown Farm and Distillers is still a very small operation, the future looks bright. Farm tours are underway as a tourist attraction, although tastings and other typical distillery tour features are currently not available. There are plans for an offsite tasting room and experimental distillery just down the road. Distribution is currently limited to Georgia and direct to consumer shipping where available.
