EVERY BOTTLE HAS A STORY

Look carefully at the top of any bottle of handcrafted TX Whiskey, and you’ll find a piece of Texas history and old-world engineering.

Troy designed the caps himself in his wood shop at home. This was no easy feat: four elements in each top have to accommodate varying thicknesses of leather and be replicated on a large scale. We all thought the prototypes were incredibly cool, and we soon partnered with boot-making friends in the community and cork growers in Portugal to establish this five-step creation process:

First, we select the leather. In the beginning, most of our leathers were repurposed from boots donated by some of our friends in the community and by visitors to the distillery. Now we primarily use leather pieces from the best local boot-makers in Fort Worth. We acquire exotic skins and different colors from those extra pieces that the boot makers can no longer use.

Next, we use handmade tools to punch out a circle of leather. We then measure the thickness of the leather to determine which cork size to use. We looked for a partner to manufacture these corks in the historic cork capital of the world – Portugal – and found our solution where the world’s very best cork grows, in the provinces of Algarve and Alentejo.

Then we hammer a custom-made beach wood ring over the leather to secure it to the cork – again, using tools that were handmade by Troy. Finally, we add very small pins for reinforcement.