BOURBON BLOG
Garrison Brothers was never built to be just a bottle on a shelf. It’s the drive out into the Hill Country. The turn onto Hye-Albert Road. The first glimpse of the barrel barns. It’s the smell of bourbon in the air and the good people who show up every day to make the best bourbon […]
There is a point during barrel tasting when Donnis Todd gets very quiet. He is not a particularly noisy man to begin with, but when Donnis finds something interesting, he gets still. He rolls the bourbon around in his glass. Smells it again. Takes another sip. Sometimes he walks away and comes back to it. […]
Before there was Texas bourbon, there was a man driving around Kentucky asking strangers how to make it. Dan Garrison did not come from a long line of distillers. He did not inherit a family recipe written in a leather-bound notebook or grow up rolling barrels through a century-old warehouse. In 2001, at 40 years […]
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 […]
There are a handful of days each year that make this old bourbon maker grin from ear to ear. One of them is Laguna Madre Day. Every August, I get to watch people pull into our little corner of Hye before the sun comes up. Some have driven across Texas. Others have flown halfway across […]
The Sherry Casks Came a Long Way to Get to Hye On certain mornings in Hye, the light comes in low and gold over the Hill Country and lands on the rickhouses in a way that makes even an old bourbon man stop and stare. The cedar trees look half asleep. The gravel crunches under […]
If you’ve never been out to Balmorhea, it’s hard to explain what it feels like the first time you see it. You drive for hours through West Texas, past land that looks like it’s given up on trying to impress you. Flat stretches of scrub and rock. Fence posts leaning into the wind. Heat that […]
I’ve always loved how Texas teaches you patience. Out here, the land works on its own timeline. You can’t hurry limestone. You can’t hurry oak. And you sure can’t hurry a bourbon that’s going to be worth pouring. We make bourbon in Hye, Texas, but our gratitude has always extended beyond our fences. Garrison Brothers […]
There’s a particular kind of spring morning in the Hill Country that makes you stop talking mid-sentence. The air is cool enough to keep you honest, but the sun is already warming the limestone. A breeze comes through and you catch cedar, damp soil, and that faint chalky smell of caliche dust when a truck […]
Out here the Hill Country keeps its own clock. Gates swing slow. Live oaks whisper when they feel like it. The wind rakes a rickhouse roof until it finds the right note. That is where this story started and where it kept circling back, barrel after barrel, summer after summer, until the whiskey finally said […]
There is a sound the Hill Country makes before dawn, a low hush that rolls across the pasture and slips through the oak trees like it is checking to see who is awake. You can stand outside the stillhouse and hear it. You can feel it, too, if you stand still long enough. It is […]
There’s a certain kind of treasure you only find in Texas. It isn’t always something you can hold in your hands. Sometimes it’s a place. Sometimes it’s a memory. Sometimes it’s a bottle of bourbon that carries a whole stretch of this state inside it. Over the years, we’ve made a lot of whiskey out […]
