To get to Hye from Austin, drive an hour west on 290, past Dripping Springs and through Johnson City, the birthplace of LBJ. After miles of scrub brush and ranch land, you’ll start passing the many winery tasting rooms that line the highway on the way to Fredericksburg, the center of wine tourism in Texas. It’s easy to miss the left at the old post office. Take that road another few miles down and you’ll eventually find yourself at ground zero for Texas whiskey distilling and the birthplace of Texas bourbon: Garrison Brothers.
While the sign on the distillery reads Garrison Brothers, it’s Dan Garrison who has been the force behind the operation since 2003. (Brother Charles joined the company in 2012, “so a lot of his stories are bullshit,” says Dan.) Initially launched with a different business partner (and under a different name), Garrison carefully picked out this spot in the Texas hill country due to its central location and proximity to the nearby wineries. “Everybody wants to come to the hill country — from Austin, from Houston, from San Antonio,” Garrison says.
On a typical weekend, the place is indeed packed with folks who are increasingly interested in something beyond those polarizing Texas wines. At this sprawling estate, a working cattle ranch spanning 68 acres, guests sip cocktails, play cornhole, dine on mouth-watering pub grub cooked on-site by chef Jeff MacDonald, and load into an open-air trailer that carts them up the hill, where they are walked through every aspect of Garrison’s production. Garrison Brothers isn’t some sterile operation that goes on behind closed doors. Rather, Dan Garrison wants everyone to see how his whiskey is 100 percent made on-site, from grain to glass. No sourcing, no tricks, nothing up his sleeve.
“People selling sourced product and claiming it’s from Texas …” says Garrison, “that kind of shit doesn’t sit well with us. We suffered real hard in the early days to get this thing off the ground. And we worked real hard to do it.”
You Can Drink Whatever You Want Here, as Long as It’s Bourbon
Now boasting at least 190 distilleries in the state, Texas has become a powerhouse in the distilling world. It wasn’t always this way. When Dan Garrison got started in 2003, there was no such thing as Texas whiskey. It’s hard to believe, but no one had previously made whiskey legally in Texas — ever. In 2007, Garrison Brothers (then operating as Lone Star Distillery) was the first operation to receive a license to distill whiskey in the state. In 2010, it sold its first bottle. Garrison Brothers would have been the first Texas whiskey ever sold were it not for a certain “man from Waco” — whose name Garrison refuses to speak aloud — who visited the distillery, carefully observed his processes, and “asked all the right whiskey questions.” When a few bottles of month-old corn whiskey from the man from Waco hit shelves in late 2009, Garrison felt like the rug had been pulled out from under him. “That pissed us off automatically,” he says. “We were taken advantage of, just being nice.”
It’s especially frustrating because Garrison Brothers only got its start because other folks in the business had been nice to him. Back in 2003, before he’d dreamed of becoming Texas’s most notable distiller, Garrison lost his job in software marketing in Austin. “I couldn’t figure out what the heck to do with my life,” he says. The tech bubble had burst and the prospects for getting a new gig were thin, so Garrison took the obvious next step: He got on a plane to Kentucky and spent a week touring bourbon distilleries.
In Kentucky, Garrison found himself in high cotton, spending a week visiting every major producer. It was here that he decided, just maybe, he could replicate what he was seeing back home. “I got a notepad and started writing down every question I could possibly think of,” he says. “And then I went back the next week and visited them all again.”
Garrison soon got connected to Theresa McAninch, then director of marketing at Buffalo Trace, who helped him with his research and opened more than a few doors. “I fell in love with her,” recalls Garrison. “She was just a fountain of knowledge. We went back to Kentucky for another trip, and she introduced me to Max Shapira at Heaven Hill. I got to meet Jimmy and Eddie Russell at Wild Turkey. I got to meet Elmer T. Lee and Harlen Wheatley at Buffalo Trace and Bill Samuels Jr. and Dave Pickerell at Maker’s Mark. And all of these people asked, ‘Why would you want to get into the bourbon business? We’re laying people off. We’re producing less and less bourbon every year.’”
For Garrison, the answer was simple. The man simply loves bourbon. “I’ve always drunk bourbon,” he says. “I’ve loved bourbon since I was 13 years old.” To date, Garrison Brothers has never made anything but bourbon, and according to Garrison, it never will. It’s even codified in the company’s mission statement: to make the highest quality, finest tasting bourbon whiskey in the world.
A Well-Lubricated Army of Volunteers
Dan Garrison didn’t build his Texas bourbon empire by himself. Master distiller Donnis Todd — employee #3 — has been his right-hand man since 2008. Todd had been fascinated with whiskey since his childhood, entranced by his grandfather making corn whiskey in the corner of his tool and die shop in Ohio and the larger-than-life stories he would tell along the way. Later, during his 10 years in the Air Force, Todd became indoctrinated into the particular world of Texas state pride. “No matter where the Air Force sent me,” says Todd, “I knew where the Texans were, because they had already put their flag up before we even had a shower. I never once saw an Ohio pennant.”
These two worlds eventually collided. As the story goes, Todd essentially showed up unannounced on Garrison’s doorstep after watching online for Texas-based TTB permit applications to hit, asking for a job. “One of the first things I asked Dan was, ‘Are you really going to make bourbon?’” says Todd. “Because I didn’t want to be a bottler. I didn’t want to be a blender. I wanted to make it and have those stories” that his grandpa used to tell.
He’s been making it every day since — and soon he’ll be making a whole lot more. During my most recent visit in July, both Garrison and Todd were beaming over the addition of a new three-phase industrial-class power line, the result of 15 years of nagging the local electric co-op. The added power will finally allow the distillery to run its 2,000-gallon still more than once a day. “We had the team, we had the skills, we could afford the raw ingredients and the barrels,” says Todd, “but we couldn’t run large enough chillers and other equipment without three-phase power.” With the new power line, Garrison Brothers, which now has 94 employees, can double its production. The company’s goal is to produce and sell 150,000 cases of bourbon per year, which will max out the capabilities of its facility. Garrison says he already knows “exactly where” he would want to build a second location, should it come to that.
To complement the new power line is a massive, $20 million expansion that is well underway, with an aggressive goal of being completed by October. A bevy of new buildings, new mash tuns, new warehouses, and new hospitality experiences will all be online in short order. Garrison points out the spot for “the last building” he wants to build on the ranch, on the site that offers the absolute best views. It will be an “oyster shack” specifically for bourbon and oyster pairings, with an accompanying swimming pool, which he wants to construct in 2024.
Hospitality experiences like this have been a key part of Garrison Brothers since the very beginning, when Dan sold $25 t-shirts to visitors who took a tour, only for them to discover at the end that there wasn’t any whiskey yet available to buy. It was all still in barrel. Garrison himself doesn’t quite understand how that all worked out. “If you asked experts how to make bourbon or how to build a business,” says Garrison, “MBAs would say, ‘This is the stupidest idea I’ve ever seen.’”
Today, visitors can drink all the whiskey they want from the on-site bar, buy their state-mandated allotment of two bottles per month from the shop, and even help out with bottling. Four days a week, Garrison Brothers brings in up to 25 volunteers from its list of 18,000 to complete the labor-intensive bottling process — which involves embossed flair and an elaborate wax dip — over the course of two days. Volunteers are fed breakfast and lunch and receive “quality control” shots of whiskey every half-hour during each eight-hour workday. Those who overindulge are sent to a hammock outside to sleep it off.
Both Garrison and Todd say that the volunteer program is one of the aspects of the job they find most rewarding. “I was in Italy last week and I’ll be damned if I’m not walking through the street when a bottler runs up to me, gives me a hug, and tells me how great Chef Mac’s lunch was when they were here a couple months ago,” says Todd.
The Eyes of Texas Are Upon Your Whiskey Labels
It only took two decades, but this year Garrison Brothers will record its first ever profit — “and it’s going to be substantial,” says Garrison — which will certainly help cement Garrison’s place as the face of Texas whiskey making.
Like most distillery CEOs, Garrison now spends most of his time on the road — up to 300 days per year — preaching the gospel of Garrison Brothers and Texas whiskey in general. In 2018, he spearheaded the creation of the Texas Whiskey Association (TXWA) and the Certified Texas Whiskey designation. At last count, 32 Texas whiskey distilleries are now members. Those folks from Waco even came onboard as founding members.
The TXWA’s goal: improve (and enforce) transparency, which Garrison says is getting worse as new operations attempt to capitalize on the Texas brand and lax COLA packaging requirements that let bottlers obfuscate the source of their product. For Garrison, if you’re sourcing whiskey, you better fess up.
The group’s rules may as well be pulled from the Garrison Brothers mission statement. “Be honest with the consumer,” Garrison says. “You can use the labeling laws and trick a lot of people through packaging. But that’s not a Texas thing. You shouldn’t take advantage of Texas pride.”
