American Single Malts: Balcones Distilling

Editor’s Note: Alcohol Professor continues its American Single Malts series, following profiles of Seattle’s Westland Distillery and Virginia Distillery Company, with Waco, Texas-based Balcones Distilling.

Read more: Why is American Single Malt Becoming the Newest United States Official Whiskey Designation?

Perhaps because they also do barbecue brilliantly, it’s tempting to think of Texas as a place where whiskey has long since been part of the culture, but in actuality the post-prohibition whiskey industry in the Lone Star State is less than 20 years old. Located in Waco, Balcones Distilling was the second whiskey distillery in Texas, and the first focusing on single malts, when it opened in 2008. For Jared Himstedt, Balcones’ Head Distiller, making single malt whiskey in Texas has been an on-going process of discovery.

Texas Terroir

“Once on a panel, somebody asked the question: how do you differentiate your products? How do you make sure they're unique? And I just thought that was one of the funniest questions I've ever heard,” says Himstedt. “If you lean into your actual locale, it's the easiest thing in the world to do. By definition, it's going to be specific.”

Himstedt admits being late to the game where single malt appreciation is concerned, having thought of it as merely “okay” until he was in the right place at the right time for a friend to introduce him to the specific single malt that tipped the scales. “For whatever reason I was ready and man, it was Ardbeg 10. And I was like, is there more like this?”

But Himstedt and his partners, when they decided to make their own single malt in Waco, weren’t trying to recreate Ardbeg or anything like it, instead wanting to make something locally relevant and unique to Texas. “There's never been anything interesting to me about trying to do Scotch or Kentucky bourbon,” he says. “It seems like a little bit of a dissociative almost to try and pretend you're somewhere other than where you are when you're making whiskey here, with all of its nuances: everything from temperature and humidity, but also microflora, figuring out ways to incorporate wild yeast and bacteria that are native, and ingredients that have some sort of history.”

Besides sourcing barley and other raw materials from as close to his backyard as possible, the climate element has been the biggest learning curve when it comes to making single malt whiskey in Texas. “We didn't really know what the climate was going to do until we started laying stuff down,” says Himstedt. “All of your barrel extractive stuff — your wood sugar, your tannin, and your vanilla — you get that really fast and really, really intensely. It gets a lot of color, gets a lot of wood flavor, and gets a lot of body from the sugar. So some of those things are great, but the easiest thing you can possibly do here is to make an oak bomb, really unbalanced, wood-forward whiskey. That's super easy. So we’re trying to figure out how to dance with that a little bit, since we’ve never been interested in climate control.”

The Distillery

Balcones Distilling was born after Himstedt and several like-minded homebrewers gave up on trying to start a microbrewery. “Thank goodness it never worked out,” he says. After several years of on-going single malt appreciation following his successful introduction to the category with Ardbeg, the familiar sense of “wanting to do it ourselves” took over, resulting in some efforts in home-distilled whiskey. But then, “somebody’s wife’s not happy about how cluttered the garage was, and at the time Waco real estate was super cheap,” says Himstedt, so permits were acquired, credit cards were maxed out, and a 3000 square foot building was purchased, typically while everyone involved was still trying to hold down day jobs. When that proved difficult to maintain, eventually a few investors were brought on. “Every so often for an article or on a panel, someone will want to know what the path is to becoming a distiller and it's like, not this. I mean you could just as easily slip and fall and end up doing it as the way we did it.”

Now the Balcones distillery includes a visitor center with a tasting room and gift shop, and tours of the distilling facilities are also offered.

American Single Malts

“The goal was just to do single malt,” says Himstedt, when Balcones was founded, though in an effort to become operational sooner while waiting on an expensive mash tun, Balcones initially produced a 100% corn whiskey called Baby Blue made with a local strain of blue corn. (“These are also lessons in how not to build a portfolio or product,” says Himstedt.) Balcones Big Baby is a NY International Spirits Competition 2022 Silver winner. With the new TTB designation of American Single Malt Whiskey, Balcones’ Texas Single Malts will qualify for the category, and in fact Balcones was one of the founding members of the American Single Malt Whiskey Commission, made up of distillers all over the country that helped usher the designation over the finish line. However, Himstedt does not foresee changing their current labels from Texas Single Malt, except for one possible tweak: “I can put ‘single malt whiskey’ all on the same line,” he says. (You’ll notice on all Balcones’ bottles that “single malt” and “whiskey” currently exist on separate lines of the label.) On their flagship Texas Single Malt whiskey, Balcones website notes: “Texas made, Texas proud.”

The current Balcones lineup includes corn, bourbon, and rye whiskey selections, with ingredients all sourced from Texas or the region, as well as its award-winning Texas Single Malts: Lineage Texas Single Malt Whiskey—a 2022 NY International Spirits Competition Gold winner, Texas Single Malt Whiskey Classic Edition, Texas Single Malt Whiskey Single Barrel Staff Selection, and Texas Single Malt Whiskey Rum Cask Finish, whose rum was also made by Balcones.