When he’s not thrashing on stage with his patented Jackson guitar, metal godfather Scott Ian, the guitarist for Anthrax, is often nestled up in his den, with a rare bourbon in hand and enjoying the good stuff. “I’m a purist,” notes Ian, who takes his whiskey neat or on the rocks.

Ian then hoists a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle 20-year-0ld, a bottle he procured several years ago, and like many bourbon fans laments on the sad state of bourbon. “I don’t know when I’m going to open this,” he said on my podcast, The Fred Minnick Show. “I’ve had it, because I used to buy it regularly not knowing I needed to buy 50 of them and hold onto them.”

Ian’s a bourbon geek, hunting for bourbons when on the road and craves bourbon information as much as a good song. But he’s also a fan of all spirits. Other than a hiatus from gin and tequila in the early 1990s, “I got back on the train with them. And now there’s really not a spirit I don’t like,” Ian said on my podcast.

Ian’s not just a fan anymore.

Since 2014, Anthrax has officially dipped its toe into the spirits game, a trend hot with musicians right now. Slipknot, Metallica, Bob Dylan and GWAR all have whiskey collaborations. Anthrax’s a little tougher, though. The federal government likely wouldn’t allow a deathly illness—even if it’s in band form—on a spirits label.

That said, Anthrax’s collaborations sneak by the federal label approval process, because they are barrel picks, meaning they work with distillers to select barrels and do not exactly create their own brand. This is uber popular with bourbon geeks, making it fitting for Ian to lead the charge.

The latest, released in June, was in honor of Dimebag Darrell of Pantera, who was murdered in 2004. The Hillrock Distillery barrel pick was fruity and layered in citrus, but tasting notes aside, it was quite meaningful to Ian. Anthrax called the whiskey “Healer” in honor of the iconic Pantera guitarist. “If we arrived for soundcheck a little hungover, Dimebag would be standing there with a knowing Cheshire Cat smile, a shot of whiskey at the ready and the words ‘booze is the healer.’ And goddamn if it didn’t work. Put us right back on the horse,” Ian said in 2020.

On the podcast, Ian shared rock story after rock story like this, including riding in Tommy Lee’s private plane and being suspended in air after Lee encouraged pilot tricks. Or the time Lemmy of Motörhead poured Ian a few Jack and Cokes, leading to an awkward next morning with Lemmy. Perhaps, the bourbon helped open him up?

The bourbon geek sipped on Maker’s Mark 101, Spirits of French Lick Unpretentious High Rye Bourbon Finished in Port Casks, Angel’s Envy Finished in Tawny Port Casks, Barrell Bourbon Finished in Pear Brandy Barrels, Barrell Bourbon Armida finished in Pear Brandy, Jamaican Rum, and Sicilian Amaro Casks, Michter’s Small Batch and Distillery 291 Whiskey.

In his tasting path of picking his favorite whiskey of this flight (Spirits of French Lick’s Unpretentious), Ian went down memory lane and really opened up about his genre of music.

Do you feel heavy metal gets disrespected in the mainstream music circles?

Yeah. Even more so in the ’80s when you had the PMRC. Tipper Gore and housewives who decided we were dangerous for the youth of America. That’s when Dee Snider and Frank Zappa went to Capitol Hill to testify in front of Congress to put warning stickers on albums. The best part: there was some compromise made and the labels decided they would put content warning stickers on records, and that enabled them to be able to sell more albums because the kids wanted the record with the content warning on it. So, thank you social justice warriors for enabling us to sell more records to kids you were trying to protect from us.

What do you feel the status of hard rock/heavy metal is right now?

I think it’s super healthy, as healthy as it’s ever been. You can’t judge things anymore by album sales. Because people buying … CDs, vinyl isn’t what it used to be. The streaming numbers of hard rock / heavy metal don’t come anywhere close to the streaming numbers for pop or rap.

But Anthrax certainly is in good shape all these years later….

Next year will be our 40^th year as a band. I can still do this now and make a living at it, all these decades later, at a higher level than we did even in the ’80s. I can only judge it by the health of my band, where my band is at professionally, and things are really good….. It’s like the death business. Funeral homes are never going to go out of business. I don’t think guitar-based bands are ever going to go out of business.

Speaking of guitar-based bands. The performances are becoming more and more complex. Some time ago, there were four, maybe six, instruments. Now there’s so much going on and more wires on stage than cars in parking lots. How do you keep up with what’s going on with the stage?

I don’t know how any of that works. I still don’t understand how, with my right hand I hold a guitar pick, and I hit the string and that string vibrates, and somehow that pickup captures that vibration and sends that through a cable into a thing called an amplifier, and the sound comes out. I still don’t believe that it’s even possible. It’s so magic to me. I’ve looked at schematics and had people obviously explain to me, from A to B, how it all actually works scientifically, and I’m still like, “Bullshit, there’s a wizard in a cave who waved his wand at … at Les Paul and Leo Fender back, 80 years ago or whatever, and said, ‘OK, you guys have the power now to make this happen.’”