Texas-based Garrison Bros. Distillery was one of the first craft distillers in the country to take a regional approach to making bourbon. For this episode, Dan Garrison explains the initial challenges to making Texas bourbon, some of the lessons he’s learned along the way, and the distillery’s support of charitable causes such as the Hye Fashioned Takeover initiative.
Bourbon is America’s signature spirit, and for much of its history, it’s been synonymous with Kentucky. Dan Garrison and his Texas-based distillery were among the first to explore the possibilities of making bourbon informed by, and influenced by, other places. For this episode, Garrison explains the Garrison Bros. approach to making Texas bourbon, and talks about Garrison Bros. support of charitable causes such as the Hye Fashioned Takeover initiative, taking place through the month of September.
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Paul Clarke
Hey everybody, welcome back to Radio Imbibe from Imbibe Magazine. I'm Paul Clarke, Imbibe's Editor-in-Chief.
And it was not so very long ago at all that if you walked into any reasonably well-stocked bar or liquor store and picked out a bourbon to try, that you were almost 100% guaranteed that that bottle came from Kentucky. Today, if you walk into a reasonably well-stocked bar or liquor store and pick out a bourbon, it's still pretty likely that that bourbon came from Kentucky, but it's no longer a sure bet. That's largely because over the past 15 years or so, craft distillers across the country have embraced their own love of bourbon and have turned their attention to making bourbon that sometimes speaks very clearly and directly to the places in which it's made.
One of the people who helped get that bourbon ball rolling back then is Dan Garrison from Garrison Brothers Distillery in Texas. Dan is one of those people who came from outside the bourbon world initially, but through his love of the spirit and his own curiosity and creativity, started working to find out what a bourbon might taste like if it came from Texas instead of Kentucky. After years of effort, we now know the answer to the question, what does Texas bourbon taste like? And for this episode, we're talking to Dan Garrison about what this long adventure has been like from his perspective, the considerations he's had to take into account when making bourbon in Texas, and about some of the projects that Garrison Brothers supports, including most notably the Hye Fashioned Takeover Initiative, which is currently taking place through the month of September.
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Paul Clarke
Dan, welcome to Radio Imbibe.
Dan Garrison
Hey, thanks for having me on, Paul. I appreciate it.
Paul Clarke
It's a pleasure to talk to you again. We have chatted previously, but it's been a while. Back in 2013 for a feature that Imbibe ran on what was then the relatively new field of distilling whiskey in Texas. And at that time, your distillery, Garrison Brothers, was up and running, but you were still relatively new. Before we get to where you are and where Texas whiskey is today, let's kind of go back in time a little bit and talk about what the situation was back then and how and why you decided to go in this new direction of making whiskey.
Dan Garrison
You know, bourbon was kind of tired in the late 1990s and the early 2000s. It was considered grandfather's drink and the young people just weren't drinking it anymore. And I've been a bourbon drinker since I was 13 years old. I love good bourbon. It's the nectar of the gods, in my opinion. I believe bourbon has certain magical powers. Bourbon can increase one's faith in God and mankind. Bourbon can create legendary stories. And bourbon can bring people together. And I've seen it happen over and over and again. And I never realized just how powerful bourbon is until I got into the business and created my own.
Paul Clarke
Now, a number of years have passed since that initial launch, since you started making bourbon. And you're still here, which, for a small independent distillery, is saying something after that many years. When you look back on those early days when you first got up and running and on how you got to where Garrison Brothers is now, is there anything you'd wish you'd known back then when you were getting started? Any lessons you've learned along the way?
Dan Garrison
Yeah. A number one is it takes a lot more money to make bourbon than to make any other distilled spirit in the world. And it takes a lot more time. I'm 25 years into this now, and I'm going to turn my first profit this year. Don't tell anybody. It's going to happen. We've been struggling. We've just been pumping more and more money into it. When we originally went out for our first fundraising effort, I called all of my friends and I said, Hey, I need to raise $19 million. Send me a check. All of them that were mature enough to actually have a checking account sent me checks. And we were able to raise $1. 9 million. we needed $19 [million]. And I know we needed $19 [million] now, looking back on it, because that's how much we've spent over the past 25 years to try to keep this business afloat. And now we're finally getting to a point where we've got some serious traction. And our sales are fantastic. Everybody else in the industry is groaning and complaining. We're not. We're real happy with the way things are going.
Paul Clarke
And one thing we should touch upon is you mentioned how much you love bourbon and what bourbon means to you. One thing is most bourbon, almost all bourbon, is made in Kentucky. You are not in Kentucky. You are in Texas. Why did you decide to, I can do this in Texas, and did that pose any kind of obstacle or challenge at the time?
Dan Garrison
It sure did. We faced challenges that most craft distillers today don't face. And that challenge was educating consumers across America that bourbon can be made anywhere in the United States of America. Before I left for my first trip to Kentucky to go explore the homeland of bourbon, it was my first pilgrimage to the Kentucky Bourbon Trail. But before I left Texas, I wrote a letter to the Tax and Trade Bureau. It wasn't a letter. It was an email. And I sent it to an analyst named David Bateman. And I'll never forget it because David Bateman changed the course of my life. I asked one simple question. If I want to make bourbon in Texas and call it bourbon, can I do that? And he said, of course you can. Why would you think otherwise? And I immediately ran across the house, printed it out, took it to my wife and put it in her face. And I said, look, we're the only people in America who know this. Let's go for it. And we immediately got on the phone with all of our friends and called them and said, write us a check. We want you to be an investor in the business. Uh, we believe in you and I think you believe in me. So I'm going to make this happen. And then I went to Kentucky to go learn how to do it.
Paul Clarke
Now let's talk about your whiskey a little bit. Uh, when I was going back over your information, kind of refreshing my memory a little, I started looking at some of the choices you've made regarding your production and what that means for the whiskey. Uh, in particular at the outset, focusing on the grains that go into the mash bill and your decision to use a sweet mash process. Bring us into your thinking a little bit when you were first advising the whiskey, the bourbon that you wanted to make and how these factor into it.
Dan Garrison
Well, research came first. When I went to Kentucky, I would go to Toddy's Liquors in Bardstown and they had everything. Toddy's was very famous liquor store. Bourbon drinkers from all over the world would go to Toddy's because they knew they could get bottles of Pappy Van Winkle and other types of rare bottles that were made by some small or obscure distilleries that nobody knew about couldn't get through the three-tier system to their markets at home. So everybody would pilgrimage to Kentucky every single year. And all these collectors like me would buy rare special bottles. And so I'd bring them all back to my little, I bought a 68 acre piece of land out in the Texas Hill Country between Johnson City and Fredericksburg. And I had a little cabin, a little hunting cabin on it. And all day long I would distill and I would figure out how to distill and I would cook mash to figure out how to ferment mash correctly and to get the right levels of pH and all the chemical processes going.
And then at night I would come back to that little cabin and I would do a little blind taste test. I would pour a couple of cups into different containers and I'd move them around so I didn't know what I was actually drinking. And I wanted to get to a point, I had probably 60, 70 bottles of bourbon that I had bought in Kentucky and brought home. And I wanted to get to a point where I could taste completely blind what distillery it came from, what the age was, what the mash bill was, what grains they were using in that mash bill, what types of grains, whether the corn was food grade corn, whether the corn was feed grade corn. I wanted to be able to identify every single bourbon that was available back then. And there were literally only about 60 or 70 bourbons back then. All of a sudden in 2015, the market was flooded with all the source brands that came from MGP and all the other big distilleries that had come up, like Bardstown.
It was a great time. I mean, I learned so much in that little room and I got pretty good at it for a while. Today, know I've lost my touch to identify the bourbons the way I used to be able to. But that was my learning is, what is it about these different bourbons that I really like? And there were two bourbons that I centered on. They both came from Buffalo Trace. One was W. L. Weller, 12-year-old, and the second one was Blanton's. Those were the two that I wanted to beat. And then when I bought a bottle of George T. Stagg, that kind of changed for me. Now it was three bourbons that I had to beat. So I kept coming up with recipes and aging procedures and where I would age and what kind of barrels I would use. And I bought barrels from about five different small cooperages back in the day to get a whole range of different types of barrels to center in on what was going to create a bourbon that's better than Blanton’s. Until I could make a bourbon that was better than Blanton’s, I wasn't going to release it. There was no way I was going to go to market with it. Because as soon as someone tastes something that's too young from Texas, they're going to reject all Texas whiskeys going forward. I didn't want to make that mistake, and I didn't, fortunately.
Paul Clarke
So what choices did you wind up going with for the grains in your mash bill? You're thinking, this is the flavor I want my bourbon to taste like what choices did you make? What did you settle on?
Dan Garrison
I have always been a fan of wheated bourbons. Since my days bartending on 6th Street in Austin, Texas, I was the bar manager at a place called Anchovies, And the owner always drank Weller 12-Year-Old. And when I started drinking Weller 12-Year-Old instead of Jack or Makers, it opened up my eyes that there's something different out there and that they can taste different. And so that's what I was shooting for. And I think I accomplished that with my recipes. My mash bill ended up being 74% corn, 15% soft red winter wheat, and 11% barley malt. And I went to dinner with Elmer T. Lee up in Kentucky. And we talked for an hour and a half, maybe two hours. I told Elmer what my mash bill was going to be. And he silently kind of nodded at me. And he said, how did you learn that? And I said, by tasting your bourbons. He wouldn't tell me that I had identified his mash bill, but I think I had.
Paul Clarke
And one of the other constant pieces of conversation when we're talking about making whiskey, especially making whiskey in Texas, is the environment and the weather and what bearing that has on maturing the whiskey. Now, I live in Seattle in Washington State and distilleries here can take an approach to maturation that may be more in line with places like Scotland, just given our environment. But you're in Texas, you're in Texas Hill Country, and that's a little bit different. What are you facing when you're maturing whiskey in Texas? And how do you translate your process for that? And what does that ultimately mean for the whiskey, what goes into that whiskey?
Dan Garrison
Well, I made some really stupid mistakes early on. Barrels are expensive. They're the most expensive part of the process. They're the most expensive ingredient that goes into the process. And so I was cautious about, I wanted to use every single barrel that I could, and I wanted to use it efficiently, so I'd fill it all the way up. Well, when liquid gets hot, if you boil water on a stove, it'll overflow out of that pot because it expands. The liquid expands in the heat. And dumbass me filled, you know, my first 10 barrels up 100% all the way to the bunghole, and they all popped and cracked, and I lost those first 10 barrels. Those were my experimentals that I was trying to learn from. Needless to say, the bourbon just cracked all the staves, and they exploded in my barn, and I lost all of that liquid. So that was learning experience number one. So now I only fill my barrels up to about a 95% fill level. And that's great because that way it expands, and it forces its way into the wood, and it doesn't come out until it gets cooler.
Paul Clarke
Right, right. And then also, I mean, with this more kind of extreme weather environment that you're in, it has a bearing on how rapidly it ages, what kind of angel share you have. Is that all correct?
Dan Garrison
It does. In the early days, I was working with some startup cooperages. This was not an industry yet. There were no craft distilleries. There was Tito's, and that's about it. And Tito's didn't have to work with cooperages, obviously. I had a lot of cooperages sending me test barrels that they had made, and they didn't know what they were doing either, because they were young businesses that were just getting off the ground. And so I worked with them to improve the barrels so that the barrels would not leak, so that the bungholes wouldn't pop out, so that the barrels would be charred or toasted in a different way. I had about maybe 15 different variations of toast and char, because I really wanted to capture that red-rich color that comes out of the wood, comes from the sap and the white American oak trees from which these barrels are made, and I really wanted to make sure the barrels were right on. And I finally settled in on a combination of barrels from a place called Black Swan Cooperage in Minnesota, and another place called the Barrel Mill in Minnesota, and then finally, Kelvin Cooperage in Kentucky agreed to make me some smaller barrels. Because I needed 15 or 30-gallon barrels, and there's no way I can afford 53s, and it would have been wasteful as an experimentation process to use 53-gallon barrels or 60-gallon barrels. And the evaporation rate, our angel share rate, was about 13% to 16% in the early years that we got started. Now we've got it back down to about 8% just because of the quality of the barrels.
Paul Clarke
So what is your approach now? Now that you've been doing this for a number of years and you've kind of worked through the experiments, what is your approach to maturation? What do you need to think about in terms of the time that that whiskey is in the barrel as it relates to, like, in comparison to a bourbon in Kentucky, for example?
Dan Garrison
Sure. Well, first thing, the barrels themselves, thicker staves, if you can have thicker staves on them. I always experimented with a project that I always thought made sense because I always noticed that when you put a barrel in a rickhouse, it leaks. The first place it's going to start leaking from is the bunghole itself. So that happened over and over again. And I always thought to myself, this is ridiculous. Why am I setting a barrel on its side with a bunghole facing out and I'm losing all this liquid from it? And you can literally walk by and put your finger on it and taste the bourbon that was inside because it was all leaking out on the outside. And so I began experimenting with bung placement. And one of the things I discovered is you could put the bung in the top of the barrel and it made a lot more sense. There was no leaking because if you took that barrel and palletized it instead of putting it in a rick, then if you palletized it, you could store more barrels in more efficient use of space.
Paul Clarke
So you are storing them upright, in other words, when you palletize it, you're storing them on their end?
Dan Garrison
Exactly. And so we had custom pallets made that would hold 10 barrels on every individual pallet. And all of a sudden, the whole job of moving barrels around the distillery, like sometimes we use transatlantic shipping containers for aging because that puts a real nice touch on of the bourbon and it sweetens it up. Because inside those transatlantic shipping containers in Texas, on a 110 degree day, it's 135 degrees in there. So you're actually boiling the bourbon inside those barrels. And we do that. We like doing that. And we love the results. It can speed up the process. A cowboy bourbon, for example, that's one of the little tricks that we use, is to put it into a shipping container for the last year of its life, to really round it out and make it sweeter and more gentle.
Paul Clarke
Now, when Garrison Brothers first started, craft distillers only accounted for a very tiny fraction of American whiskey production. That piece of the pie is still relatively small, but there's been a lot of growth in terms of range and style and the number of distilleries and the geographic distribution of them, and, and of whiskeys that show some kind of connection to their place of origin. Where does Garrison Brothers fit into this broader American whiskey landscape today? And what do you see now when you think about Texas bourbon in comparison to some of the other whiskeys that craft distillers are making around the country?
Dan Garrison
Paul, when I wrote my business plan, the first thing I wrote is a mission statement. And that mission statement was, "We're going to make the finest tasting, highest quality bourbon whiskey right here in Texas. And we're going to, it's going to be the finest in America." And that's a pretty bold statement for somebody who's never made bourbon in their entire life. But it worked because once you stick to that standard, it guides everything that you do, the quality that you pay for the barrels, the money you pay for the barrels, the grains that you use. We, we go directly to farmers here in Texas to get all of our corn, all of our wheat, and all of our barley. And it's really high quality. It's, it's food grade, grade grains, instead of feed grade, grains, which historically, if you go look at the Kentucky bourbon industry, that's what was used. It was all feed grade corn. And the reason was that if you wanted to store it, you could turn it into liquid alcohol, and it stored better. Otherwise, it's just going to get moldy and gross, and, and go away. But if you turn it into liquid, it became currency. And the currency, you could trade with and you could buy other things, farm products, tractors, whatever you needed. So that's the Kentucky tradition of using feed grade corn.
Today, people using all sorts of interesting grains from, from bloody butcher red corn, to blue corn, to different types of, to different types of maize. And they're coming from all over the place. I'm here at the ADI conferences. I'm talking to you today that's taking place here in San Antonio. And I'm hearing all sorts of interesting things. I thought, you know, when I started, there were 19 distilleries in Kentucky making all 60 bottles of bourbon that were on the shelf. 19. Today, there's over 3,000 distilleries in America making whiskeys. And I'm one of them. And I like to think that we're leading from the front. We are very proud of what we're doing. And I just came off of a, a conference panel here at the ADI convention and told everybody that go for it, but you're not going to catch up to us. We're way ahead. We've already expanded into 50 states around the country. And I have a team of, you know, 20 or so dedicated salespeople that work all over the country. We don't rely on our distributors to get new leads and new placements in the market. Our team goes and gets new placements in the market. And then they call the distributor and say, make sure that delivery happens on this day. That's the way we work. We're, we're not going to rely on anybody else to get it to market.
Paul Clarke
You've also been involved in a number of projects over the years that benefit communities around Texas. You have expressions like Balmorhea.
Dan Garrison
Balmorhea.
Paul Clarke
Balmorhea, which raises funds for Texas Parks and Wildlife Foundation, and Lady Bird, which does the same for the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center. And most recently you've been active in fundraising for Hill Country communities devastated by the flooding over the 4th of July. Can we talk about some of these projects you've been involved with and why that kind of community support and connection is significant to what you do?
Dan Garrison
In 2017, there was a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico called Harvey. And everybody was predicting it was going to be a Category 5 when it hit land. And it came right over across Beaumont and Houston and points to the south of there, Corpus Christi, were absolutely devastated. And it caused more flooding than anybody had ever seen before. A good friend of mine, it was a guy named Craig Manifold, who was in charge. He was with the Texas National Guard and he was responsible for setting up the hospitals along the Gulf Coast. And he flew me down in a Huey helicopter to go see the devastation, how bad it was along the coast. And it was amazing. We stopped at every single hospital that he had set up along the coast. We also raised about $170,000 for Team Rubicon, which is a disaster relief organization that goes in in times of need and helps people rebuild their homes. They help get people off the top of their rooftops into boats to dry land. And we bought them a lot of boats for that $170,000. And so it felt really good to do what we did. We couldn't believe how much money we raised in just three days by building a website and promising that we were going to give a bottle of bourbon to everybody who donated $500 to that website. And that money would go directly to Team Rubicon. And that changed our mentality as a business. We were not in the business to make money from bourbon. We were in the business to use our bourbon to help people in the world, especially here in Texas because in 2017, we were basically only in Texas. We weren't in other states across the country. But it was a big deal. It changed our mentality. So we formed a non-profit group, which my wife runs. It's called Good Bourbon for a Good Cause. And the tenets of Good Bourbon for a Good Cause, the tenets are that we give to wide open spaces. We give to disaster relief, like the Hill Country floods. We give to veterans' causes. And we give to nature, natural places in Texas. So that's been part of what we do.
Paul Clarke
And at the time this episode runs, in September, you'll be right in the middle of another project, the Hye Fashioned Takeover Initiative. What is this, what kinds of projects does it support, and how can folks learn more about it?
Dan Garrison
Sure. Hye Fashioned Takeover, we partner with our retail partners in the bar and hotel and restaurant community. And one of the guys in Texas who's famous is, Jack Gilbert with Jack Allen's Kitchen. And he's going to do it at all of his restaurants. And what they'll do is they'll put an Old Fashioned on the menu. And that money goes to the Boot Campaign to help veterans who are trying to get counseling for PTS issues. Or if they're wounded, the Boot Campaign provides help for their family. And a lot of the money that we're going to raise through these Old Fashioneds at the restaurants is going to go directly to Boot Campaign. people can go on a website and tell their old fashioned story where they had it and where they enjoyed it. And if they tell that story on Instagram or Facebook, we're going to send $5 to Boot Campaign so that they can help veterans.
Paul Clarke
If folks want to learn more or participate in this, where should they go online?
Dan Garrison
Just go to GarrisonBros.com and there should be information there about the Hye Fashioned Takeover.
Paul Clarke
Dan, it's been good to catch up with you. Thanks for taking the time. It's been a pleasure.
Dan Garrison
Paul, let's not wait so long next time.
Paul Clarke
Absolutely.
Dan Garrison
Great to see you.
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Paul Clarke
You can find out more about Garrison Brothers Distillery and the Hye Fashioned Takeover Initiative at GarrisonBros.com. We've got the link for you in this episode's notes.
And that's it for this episode. Subscribe to Radio Imbibe on your favorite podcast app to keep up with all our future episodes. Head online to imbibemagazine.com to find our full back catalog of episodes and to dig through the many articles and recipes we've got for you there. Follow us on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Threads for all of our social media coverage. And if you're not already a subscriber to the print and or digital issues of Imbibe, then here's your opportunity to change that. Just follow the link in this episode's notes and we'll be happy to help you out.
I'm Paul Clarke. This is Radio Imbibe. Catch you next time.