Garrison Brothers Distillery

Narrator: Situated on rolling ranch land in Texas hill country, Garrison Brothers Distillery is one of nearly 20 legal micro distilleries in the Lone Star state that have opened since 1997. Owner Dan Garrison tries to be environmentally conscious when distilling his Bourbon.

He collects rainwater to cut the Bourbon's proof and uses high-quality organic grains in the fermenting process.

Dan: We get about 30,000 pounds of corn, wheat, and barley a month delivered to us. The wheat comes from our own fields. We have 65 acres across the way on the other...on the ranch on the other side of the property. We grind it all here daily. Fresh grain is a lot like fresh coffee. It just tastes better. The corn we cook at, for an hour here we bring it to a boil. We'll add the wheat and then we add the barley malt, and then we're gonna hold that until the temperature comes all the way down to about 80 degrees, and at that point we drop our yeast. The yeast eats all of the sugar that's been created. The sugar then turns into alcohol as it ferments in these individual fermenters. Then at the end of four days of fermentation, we're gonna have what's called "Distillers Beer." Distillers Beer is gonna be 14-16% alcohol by volume. And that Beer is then pumped over into the still.

This was originally built for Wild Turkey. He's a true antique. We call her the "copper cowgirl." She was made as an experimental still, so we've got a lot of bells and whistles on her. We pump the mash into the manhole cover here. As it heats up, the alcohol turns to vapor and a lower temperature than water. So the alcohol vapor starts rising up the chamber and then goes through that vertical pipe up there, and the alcohol vapor enters the condenser which is this horizontal tube at the top. In the condenser, it's surrounded by cool water, so the alcohol vapor then turns back into liquid form, goes through a cold bath, and inside the cold bath is a copper tube called a worm. And you can taste the corn flavor in the White Dog, and that's what we want. The White Dog is basically Bourbon before it's gone into a barrel. Once it's entered a barrel, it's officially Bourbon, no matter how long it's been in there.

They will take this barrel before they put the rings around it, and they will put it over an open flame, that chars the inside. And what that does is it softens the wood. But it allows the Distill It to expand into the wood. When it gets hot, and it gets hot here in Texas, that Distill It will soak deep into the wood and it will extract a lot of the chemical compounds that are in the wood that come from the sap in the tree. And those are sugars. Those are what gives Bourbon it's color, gives Bourbon it's caramel, it's butterscotch, it's vanilla flavor.