Mike Gerrard's Blog: Travel Distilled
March 7, 2023
The Story Behind Cask Strength
Although my author profile says I only joined in March 2023, I've been a member of Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ for years, as a reader. With my first proper non-travel book coming out in July 2023, I thought it time I added myself as an author too.
The book is Cask Strength: The Story of the Barrel, the Secret Ingredient in your Drink. I'll naturally be giving it the occasional plug. Who wouldn't? But here's the story behind it.
Back in 2014 I did a trip along the American Whiskey Trail, and for me the highlight was not visiting Jim Beam or Jack Daniel's, as great as those visits were, but seeing the Brown-Forman Cooperage in Louisville, Kentucky. It was the first time I'd been inside the place where barrels get made, and it was incredible. I've likened it to Dante's Inferno - not that I've ever been there, you understand.
It was noisy, like any factory, and in some places there were flames and plumes of steam, as the barrels got charred and then quickly cooled down before they could burn. It was an experience that stuck with me, and I wrote a story about it here:
I started to get more and more interested in barrels, saving information about them, learning what I could on distillery visits, reading books by coopers, and so on. Eventually I had the feeling that I could write a good book about barrels. I worked on a brief outline, thinking what would go in it, but I was always so busy with travel writing, and especially guidebooks, which are very time-consuming, that I never finished it.
Enter the plague year: Covid. My guidebook work dried up almost overnight. As a freelance, I'd never known what it was like not to be constantly busy. I thought I'd get back to the couple of novels I'd started plotting out, but first I'd finish my outline. Till then I'd only referred to it as The Barrel Book, but as soon as the right title came to me - Cask Strength - it enabled me to focus and finish the outline.
I followed the advice I'd seen several times, about getting an agent: find someone you like in your niche and see if they thank their agent in any of their books. I had a few books by Fred Minnick, Mr Bourbon, and sure enough he mentioned his agent, Linda Konner. I found her website, and told her why I was approaching her and what about.
Fortunately she liked my idea, and had some immensely useful suggestions as to how to improve the proposal. One of these was to ask Fred Minnick to write a Foreword, and he kindly agreed. Linda kept me working on that proposal till it was as good as can be, and about three times as long as my original version. My sample chapter hadn't been long enough. I felt like a student whose teacher was returning an assignment, telling me the work was only B+ and she wanted it redone until it was A+.
Eventually Linda was happy enough to start submitting the book. We had one near miss, when one editor said she loved the proposal but the rest of their editorial team weren't so sure, so she couldn't make an offer. It was disappointing, so I was delighted when Matt Holt, a new imprint at BenBella Books, liked the book enough to make an offer. If I hadn't had an agent I'd have snatched their hands off but Linda got them to up the advance by $5,000, more than justifying her agent's commission.
Then, in a way that many authors will recognise, I began to panic. Now I had to write the darn thing. Whatever made me think I could write a whole book about barrels? The answer to that, of course, is that you write it one sentence at a time, one page at a time, one chapter at a time. And eventually you've got a book. Or at least, the first draft. And then the work really begins...
Cask Strength
The book is Cask Strength: The Story of the Barrel, the Secret Ingredient in your Drink. I'll naturally be giving it the occasional plug. Who wouldn't? But here's the story behind it.
Back in 2014 I did a trip along the American Whiskey Trail, and for me the highlight was not visiting Jim Beam or Jack Daniel's, as great as those visits were, but seeing the Brown-Forman Cooperage in Louisville, Kentucky. It was the first time I'd been inside the place where barrels get made, and it was incredible. I've likened it to Dante's Inferno - not that I've ever been there, you understand.
It was noisy, like any factory, and in some places there were flames and plumes of steam, as the barrels got charred and then quickly cooled down before they could burn. It was an experience that stuck with me, and I wrote a story about it here:
I started to get more and more interested in barrels, saving information about them, learning what I could on distillery visits, reading books by coopers, and so on. Eventually I had the feeling that I could write a good book about barrels. I worked on a brief outline, thinking what would go in it, but I was always so busy with travel writing, and especially guidebooks, which are very time-consuming, that I never finished it.
Enter the plague year: Covid. My guidebook work dried up almost overnight. As a freelance, I'd never known what it was like not to be constantly busy. I thought I'd get back to the couple of novels I'd started plotting out, but first I'd finish my outline. Till then I'd only referred to it as The Barrel Book, but as soon as the right title came to me - Cask Strength - it enabled me to focus and finish the outline.
I followed the advice I'd seen several times, about getting an agent: find someone you like in your niche and see if they thank their agent in any of their books. I had a few books by Fred Minnick, Mr Bourbon, and sure enough he mentioned his agent, Linda Konner. I found her website, and told her why I was approaching her and what about.
Fortunately she liked my idea, and had some immensely useful suggestions as to how to improve the proposal. One of these was to ask Fred Minnick to write a Foreword, and he kindly agreed. Linda kept me working on that proposal till it was as good as can be, and about three times as long as my original version. My sample chapter hadn't been long enough. I felt like a student whose teacher was returning an assignment, telling me the work was only B+ and she wanted it redone until it was A+.
Eventually Linda was happy enough to start submitting the book. We had one near miss, when one editor said she loved the proposal but the rest of their editorial team weren't so sure, so she couldn't make an offer. It was disappointing, so I was delighted when Matt Holt, a new imprint at BenBella Books, liked the book enough to make an offer. If I hadn't had an agent I'd have snatched their hands off but Linda got them to up the advance by $5,000, more than justifying her agent's commission.
Then, in a way that many authors will recognise, I began to panic. Now I had to write the darn thing. Whatever made me think I could write a whole book about barrels? The answer to that, of course, is that you write it one sentence at a time, one page at a time, one chapter at a time. And eventually you've got a book. Or at least, the first draft. And then the work really begins...
Cask Strength
Travel Distilled
Here I'll be blogging about travel and distilleries... and the spirits that people make in distilleries. And probably go occasionally off-topic.
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