A hand-built distillery in a former welding shop.

Balcones Distilling is a whisky maker in Waco, Texas. Shanken News Daily, reporting in December 2014, and Craft Spirits Magazine, reporting in November 2022, both date its founding to 2008, and Shanken News Daily names its founder as Chip Tate. The company shares its name with the Balcones Fault zone, the geological line that crosses Central Texas near Waco.

The first distillery was small and largely improvised. WhiskyCast reported in 2013 that Tate and his team had built the original stills and much of the equipment by hand, and the company and local coverage describe the first site as a former welding shop beneath the 17th Street bridge in Waco. Production began in 2009. Jared Himstedt, who went on to become head distiller, helped Tate set up that first site, the trade magazine Market Watch reported.

Ownership changed early in the distillery’s life. The Oklahoma private-equity firm PE Investors, whose chairman is Greg Allen, took a majority stake in February 2013, The Dallas Morning News reported in January 2015. Tate left in 2014 after a dispute with the board; Shanken News Daily reported in December 2014 that the company had bought out his stake and that its chief operating officer, Keith Bellinger, had become president.

Blue corn, Texas malt and a downtown building.

Balcones built its reputation on grains and styles that few Texas distillers were then using. Its Baby Blue corn whisky is made from roasted blue corn, and the company calls it the first Texas whisky on the market since Prohibition. Its Texas “1” American Single Malt — the brand sets the numeral in quotation marks — is made from malted barley, and Market Watch described the single malt as the release that put the distillery on the map. Another early release was Rumble, a spirit made from honey, sugar and figs, the same magazine said.

When Diageo announced its purchase in November 2022, its release named three Balcones brands: Texas “1” American Single Malt, Lineage American Single Malt and Baby Blue Corn Whisky. The release said the team uses the Texas heat and the state’s wide temperature swings to develop flavour, and that it works with Texas-grown malted barley and roasted blue corn, often sourced locally. Balcones writes its product names with “whisky,” without an e, as in Baby Blue Corn Whisky.

The distillery itself moved in 2016. Drinks International reported in April 2016 that Balcones had left its original home under the bridge for a nearly century-old building of steel, concrete and brick on South 11th Street in downtown Waco, fitted with new copper pot stills from Forsyths of Scotland and with four times its previous spirit-still capacity. The company says it bought the building, the former Texas Fireproof Storage building, in 2011 and used it first to mature barrels before converting it into the distillery. KXXV, the Waco television station, reported in 2016 that the old site had covered less than 10,000 square feet and the new one about 65,000. Drinks International quoted Bellinger, by then president and chief operating officer, calling the building a “long-time dream project,” and said the new site gave head distiller Jared Himstedt room to develop new styles; it also added a tasting room for visitors. KXXV reported that hundreds of people came to the downtown distillery to celebrate its opening.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all craft whiskey, gin and tequila names: Tequila Ocho, Fortaleza, High West, Westland, Balcones, St. George Spirits and Empress 1908. Craft spirits brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from small distilleries that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a local bottle shop to a bar list far from home.

A craft spirits brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single bottle than by a label, a name and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its spirit is actually distilled and bottled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its spirit is made and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From private equity to a global drinks group.

On 2 November 2022, Diageo, the London-based drinks group, announced that it had acquired Balcones Distilling; the terms were not disclosed, Craft Spirits Magazine reported. In the announcement, Greg Allen, as chairman of Balcones, said the company had begun with an “innovative spirit” and had helped start a new era of whisky in Texas. Claudia Schubert, president of Diageo North America, called the Balcones team “true innovators and pioneers” in American single malt and Texas whisky, and said the deal fitted Diageo’s strategy of buying high-growth brands in fast-growing parts of the market. Diageo said it would work with the Balcones team to support further growth and bring the whiskies to more drinkers.

Balcones was not the first American craft distillery of its generation to pass to a large group. Six years earlier, High West in Utah was bought by Constellation Brands in 2016, and Westland in Seattle, another American single-malt maker, by Rémy Cointreau the same year. Diageo’s own announcement described Balcones as a Waco, Texas-based distiller.

For a design guide, Balcones shows how a local raw material and a local building can carry an identity: roasted blue corn, Texas-grown barley, a hand-built still under a bridge and a brick storage building in downtown Waco give the brand its story, and the name itself points to the geology of Central Texas. Compare it with Westland, which tells a similar regional single-malt story in the Pacific Northwest, and High West, which built its name in a Western mountain town. For this guide we use blue-corn navy, copper and limestone with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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