A shack, a licence and a 16-gallon still in Austin.

Tito’s Handmade Vodka is named after its founder, Bert “Tito” Beveridge, and has been made in Austin, Texas, from the start. The company dates the beginning to the mid-1990s. Beveridge, whom the brand describes as a sixth-generation Texan, built a small shack, rigged a pot still from spare parts and gained a licence to distil in 1995, becoming the first legal distillery in Texas, according to a 2024 profile in The Spirits Business; in 2014 he told the same paper that he still distilled at the Austin site “where I, Tito, started the business in 1995.” Its first commercial sales came later: “We sold our first case in 1997,” a company manager said in 2024, and English Wikipedia dates commercial production to 1997, when Beveridge formed Fifth Generation, Inc. and established the Mockingbird Distillery, making 1,000 cases that year.

The vodka is made from corn. The Spirits Business reported in 2013 that Beveridge first distilled it in a 16-gallon pot still, and described it as distilled six times and bottled at 40 percent alcohol, and it is not aged, English Wikipedia adds. Its first big recognition came in 2001, when it won a double gold medal for vodka at the San Francisco World Spirits Competition, according to the competition’s published results; English Wikipedia credits that medal with widening its sales and distribution.

Still in Austin, still independent.

Tito’s grew without changing where it is made. By 2013 the operation had moved from that single still to a 26-acre site in Austin, The Spirits Business reported, and in 2015 Beveridge told the paper that the company had just built ten more pot stills the size of its existing eleven, with another ten on the way. The company says the vodka is still distilled and bottled in Austin, on the same land where it started, and that it has kept its packaging and advertising to a minimum.

The company has also stayed in its founder’s hands. In 2014 The Spirits Business described Beveridge as founder, master distiller and owner of the parent company, Fifth Generation; in 2015 he told the paper that the big drinks groups were “always interested in acquiring us,” but that the business remained independent. Tito’s went abroad from late 2013, after John McDonnell, formerly of Patrón, joined to run international sales, with launches planned for Singapore, the UK and Australia; by then it was already sold in Canada and in Caribbean travel retail, the paper reported; in January 2017 Slovenia became its 100th market, the paper reported. United Airlines began serving Tito’s as its only inflight vodka in 2013, the Austin television station KVUE reported.

In September 2025 the company made what The Spirits Business called its first strategic acquisition, taking a majority stake in Lalo Tequila, an Austin-based blanco tequila brand launched in 2020 by Eduardo “Lalo” González, David “R” Carballido and Jim McDermott, subject to regulatory approvals.

Its name has also been tested in court: from 2014, consumers in California, Florida and New York sued over the word “Handmade” on the label, and by 2018 the cases had been dismissed or settled, according to The Spirits Business and English Wikipedia.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all vodka names: Belvedere, Ketel One, Stolichnaya, Russian Standard, Finlandia, Tito’s and Żubrówka. Vodka brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to names that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a duty-free shelf.

A vodka brand’s identity is usually carried less by the spirit itself than by a bottle, a label and the place it names, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its distilling or grown far beyond the town where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its vodka 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 vodka is made and how its bottles and labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A founder’s name, a city and a dog.

The brand’s identity rests on a nickname, the word “Handmade” and the place. The full name, Tito’s Handmade Vodka, puts the founder first. In 2014 Beveridge said the US Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau had approved the label, and argued that the term described pot-still batches “customized and hand-built on-site” and cuts made by tasting at the Austin distillery. For the typography of the wordmark, see our separate note on the Tito’s font.

The marketing has leaned on word of mouth rather than mass advertising. When it launched outside the United States in 2013, its international sales chief told The Spirits Business that the brand would not advertise “in a mass way,” relying instead on targeted distribution in bars and shops; a 2024 profile in the same paper described its approach as getting the vodka tasted by bartenders and drinkers rather than paying for celebrity endorsements or television campaigns. In December 2017 the US trade magazine Ad Age named Tito’s Handmade Vodka among its Marketers of the Year.

The other recurring theme is dogs. Beveridge began noticing stray dogs at the distillery site when the brand was established in 1997, The Spirits Business reported in 2019, and the company later created “Vodka for Dog People,” a line of branded dog products whose proceeds go to animal charities such as Emancipet. In 2019 the company said a new German distribution deal would highlight its position as the “vodka for dog people,” citing the size of the country’s dog population.

For a design guide, Tito’s shows how far a plain founder-and-place story can carry a brand that stays with one owner and one city. Compare Ketel One, a family vodka name with a long distilling story, and Stolichnaya, a vodka whose name means “of the capital”. For this guide we use copper, brown, cream and corn gold with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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