Two Austin entrepreneurs, a sweet-tea idea and a pool everyone in town knew.

Deep Eddy Vodka was founded in Austin, Texas, in 2010 by two Austin entrepreneurs, Clayton Christopher and Chad Auler, Sara Havens reported in The Alcohol Professor in May 2016. Christopher was already known in Texas drinks: English Wikipedia records him as the founder, in 1998, of the bottled iced-tea company Sweet Leaf Tea.

The first product followed that thread. The Alcohol Professor named Deep Eddy Sweet Tea Vodka as the brand’s first bottling, and the current owner, Heaven Hill Brands, describes the founding idea in a March 2026 brand history as “Sweet Tea meets Vodka.” A straight vodka and a run of fruit-flavoured vodkas followed; in 2016 The Alcohol Professor listed Ruby Red, Cranberry, Lemon and Peach alongside the original, and noted that the flavoured vodkas are bottled at a lower strength than the straight vodka.

The name comes from Austin itself. Deep Eddy Pool is a historic man-made swimming pool in Austin. English Wikipedia says it opened as the Deep Eddy Bathing Beach in 1902, gained a concrete pool in 1916 and became a city-run public park in 1936, with a bathhouse built under the Works Progress Administration; the pool is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and English Wikipedia calls it the oldest swimming pool in Texas. The Alcohol Professor wrote in 2016 that the pool inspired the vodka’s name, and Heaven Hill says the brand was inspired by an Austin swimming pool.

From a Hill Country distillery to Buda, and back to Austin.

In 2015 the founders sold the company to Heaven Hill Brands, the spirits company founded in 1935 and based in Bardstown, Kentucky, whose brands include the bourbons Evan Williams and Elijah Craig, English Wikipedia says. The Alcohol Professor reported in 2016 that the price was undisclosed and that the new owner had largely left the Texas team to run the brand. English Wikipedia lists Deep Eddy among Heaven Hill’s vodkas, next to Burnett’s.

Production has moved more than once. The Daily Pour reported in April 2026 that the site at Dripping Springs, in the Hill Country west of Austin, opened in 2014 as a production facility. When Sara Havens visited in 2016 it was a distillery of some 30,000 square feet with a 5,000-square-foot tasting room, turning out about 50,000 bottles a day; she wrote that the vodka was distilled ten times in a Vendome column still and charcoal-filtered several times, and that fresh fruit for the flavoured vodkas arrived at the distillery’s tanks each day. Distilling moved to Buda, south of Austin in Hays County, in 2017, according to The Daily Pour, and Heaven Hill told the publication that all Deep Eddy production has taken place there for nearly a decade. The brand’s own site describes the vodka as distilled from corn, and Heaven Hill’s 2026 history says it is distilled ten times and filtered eight times.

Dripping Springs then became a tasting room and event space. In April 2026 Heaven Hill announced that Deep Eddy would stop operating the site on 1 August 2026, with the property passing under a sublease to another vodka distillery, while Buda remained the brand’s sole distilling and bottling operation. Julie Cole, Deep Eddy’s brand director, said: “Austin is where this brand got its start, and we’re excited to bring more of that energy back to the city.”

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all gin, vodka and brandy names: Four Pillars, Ki No Bi, Deep Eddy, New Amsterdam, Chopin, Christian Brothers and Paul Masson. Spirits brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from independent 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 corner shop to a cocktail bar.

A gin, vodka or brandy 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.

A flavoured-vodka family with a hometown at its centre.

Under Heaven Hill the flavour list has kept growing. The company announced an all-new Pineapple flavour in February 2025, and the brand’s site in October 2026 listed Espresso, Lime and Orange next to the older Ruby Red, Lemon, Peach, Cranberry and Sweet Tea. Its tone is deliberately light: the site’s headline line is “Vodka is for fun.”

The brand’s marketing has stayed close to its home city. In March 2025 Heaven Hill announced Deep Eddy as the official vodka of Austin FC, the city’s Major League Soccer club, and the company’s April 2026 announcement framed the Dripping Springs exit as part of a plan to build a more prominent presence in Austin over time. In that announcement Cole described the brand as “all about good times and bringing people together.”

The name needs a little care online. Deep Eddy Pool is a public facility run by the City of Austin, with its own history and its own visitors, and searches for “Deep Eddy” in Austin often return the pool and the surrounding neighbourhood before the vodka; the brand’s own site is deepeddyvodka.com.

For a design guide, Deep Eddy shows how a spirits brand can borrow the warmth of a local landmark — a pool that Austin has swum in since the early 1900s — and carry it through a bright, fruit-led family of bottles. Compare Tito’s, the other Austin vodka, and New Amsterdam, Gallo’s vodka from Modesto. For this guide we use pool blue, deep water and grapefruit with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Deep Eddy’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.