If you’ve been around Garrison Brothers for a while, you’ve heard people talk about Hye Rye. Longtime fans bring it up the way hunters talk about the buck that got away. Newer fans usually just ask me what the hell it is.

Fair question. Here’s the story — and I’ll warn you up front, for most of it I had no idea it was happening.

An Idea I Never Signed Off On

From the day we broke ground in Hye, this distillery has had one job: make the best bourbon ever made. For us that meant a wheated bourbon, grain to glass, every bottle corked, wrapped in deerskin lace, and dipped in hot wax by hand. That was the mission, and I didn’t see any reason to mess with it.

Donnis Todd, our Master Distiller, agreed with me. Mostly.

Somewhere along the way, Donnis got to wondering what would happen if we made a high rye bourbon. Not because anything was wrong with what we were doing — he just can’t leave well enough alone, which is exactly why I hired him. And once somebody says the words “high rye bourbon made in Hye, Texas” out loud, the name alone about forces your hand.

Hye Rye. Come on. You’d have made it too.

I told him we didn’t need it. He heard me just fine. He made it anyway.

Texas Didn’t Make It Easy

If Hye Rye had been easy, it wouldn’t be worth telling you about.

The first rye crop failed before a single grain reached the distillery. The next attempt brought grain, and with it a run of equipment failures, fires, and delays that would’ve sent most folks home. Then there was the rye itself. Anybody who’s distilled rye will tell you it foams, and it foams a whole lot more than you think it will. Donnis still calls one particularly bad day “the foam party.” It was not a party.

And right when everything finally seemed ready, both boilers quit. We lost an entire batch before it ever touched a barrel — weeks of work, gone overnight.

Donnis and his crew came back the next season and started over from scratch. That’s the part of this story I’m proudest of, and I didn’t even know it was happening.

Five Texas Summers

Even after the whiskey made it into barrels, it kept Donnis guessing. The early pulls didn’t taste anything like our wheated bourbon. It was bold and spicy and different, and for a good while he wondered if he’d wasted all that grain and grief.

Then it hit its fifth Texas summer, and our Hill Country heat did what it always does. The spice settled into something deeper. The whiskey came together. Donnis tasted it and knew it was ready to carry the Garrison Brothers name — which was a problem, because I still didn’t know it existed.

The Party Where I Found Out

Here’s the part everybody loves to tell at the Whiskey Shack.

For years, Donnis babysat those barrels without saying a word to me. When the whiskey was finally ready, the whole team threw a party — officially to celebrate Repeal Day and my birthday. Unofficially, they were unveiling a bourbon I’d said, more than once, that we didn’t need to make.

I’d love to tell you I was right. The bourbon disagreed, and the bourbon won.

2020: Gone Before Lunch

When Hye Rye finally hit shelves in 2020, folks lined up before sunrise, and the bottles were gone almost as fast as we could hand them over. Within days, people were asking when the next one was coming. Plenty of fans wished they’d bought two. Plenty more missed it entirely and have been hunting for a bottle ever since — and those bottles don’t change hands often. One unopened bottle eventually went for $13,000 at a charity auction.

I don’t bring that up to brag on the price. I bring it up because that’s what happens when a whiskey earns its scarcity the hard way: failed crops, busted boilers, a foam party, and years of Texas heat. Nobody manufactured that story. We lived it.

The Next Chapter

For years now, the most common question Donnis and I get — at the distillery, on the road, in my email — is “when is Hye Rye coming back?”

Here’s your answer: the next batch is already sleeping in our barrel barns, and it’ll spend the full stretch soaking up Texas heat before it’s ready in the fall of 2028.

But this time we’re doing something we’ve never done before. Instead of making you camp out and pray, we’re letting you reserve your bottle now.

Here’s how it works. For $99.99, you can reserve a bottle of Hye Rye between July 27th-August 10th. 2026, while supplies last. That bottle will be waiting for you at the distillery when we release it in the fall of 2028 — we’ll tell you when to come to Hye and pick it up. And because you’re committing early, you’re locking in the price. When Hye Rye is released, the shelf price will be much higher than $99.

The idea isn’t ours. Wine folks have done this for generations — they call it en primeur, or wine futures. Collectors reserve the great vintages years before they’re bottled, because they learned a long time ago that the best ones never sit on a shelf waiting for you.

If you missed Hye Rye in 2020, you know exactly how fast it disappeared. This is your chance to make sure that doesn’t happen twice.

Some things are worth waiting for. This one’s worth planning for. Salud!

— Dan