The branding on the bottle is pretty minimal, and I appreciate it. The bottle is capped off with a synthetic cork, and the whole thing is sealed with hot wax similar to (but legally distinct from) the Maker’s Mark line. That body tapers quickly at the shoulder to a long neck, which includes a pronounced bulge in the middle to make it easier to pour. Overall, it’s a rectangular shaped body with a wider front and back but shorter sides. The Garrison Brothers distillery uses a pretty straightforward bottle design, but with some twists and splashes that differentiate the lines. Given the grain-to-glass production and the locally sourced materials, this whiskey has earned the Certified Texas Whiskey identifier. Once the whiskey has been appropriately aged, it is slightly proofed down to 57.5% ABV and bottled. Rumor has it that the latest batch was aged for about five years, but that’s admittedly pure gossip. Technically this is a NAS (No Age Statement) whiskey - meaning they don’t make any claims about the age of their spirit. From there, a selection of their whiskey is dumped into a second set of barrels from the famous Kelvin Cooperage in Kentucky to age for an additional period of time in the Texas heat.
The first set of barrels is their usual thicker barrel from The Barrel Mill cooperage in Minnesota, and the whiskey sits there for a couple years just like their standard straight bourbon line. In this case, the Balmorhea bourbon actually uses two sets of barrels in the finishing process. To combat the stress of that movement, the barrels used by Garrison Brothers are stronger and thicker than typically seen and need to be custom ordered.
This temperature swing pushes and pulls the whiskey into the wood of the barrel more forcefully, leading to a deeper and richer taste. Instead of the more gentle warming and cooling cycles experienced in places like Scotland, the weather in Austin swings wildly and severely during the year. The thing that differentiates Garrison Brothers from other bourbons is the extreme Texas heat that matures their whiskey. That mixture of grains is cooked, fermented, and distilled on site in Hye, Texas (about 60 miles west of Austin). I can’t find any indication of whether there are other grains involved here - given that the standard recipe of their bourbon is a 74% corn, 15% wheat, and 11% barley mixture, it makes sense that this is just a differently aged expression, but there’s no confirmation of that in their materials. Specifically (according to the markings on the bottle), the corn used here is Food Grade #1 White corn from a farm in South Texas. ProductĪll whiskey starts its life as a mixture of grains and, as a bourbon, a minimum of 51% of that content needs to be corn here. Garrison Brothers regularly holds volunteer bottling events where members of the public can apply to be a bottler for the day, helping the distillery to package their product for sale while “quality control” sampling some of the spirit themselves. Since their first batch was released on March 2nd of 2010 (Texas Independence Day), the distillery has continued to grow and the Texas-produced bourbon can now be found in most states in the US. The distillery remains family owned and operated with Dan Garrison at the helm and his parents, spouse, and children all working in some capacity for the facility.
GARRISON BROTHERS BOURBON SOFTWARE
In 2006, founder Dan Garrison found himself wanting to do something besides software marketing (probably one of the most stereotypical Austin, Texas professions) and was granted the first distillery permit for production of bourbon in the state of Texas.
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