Garrison Brothers Small Batch retails for around $85. That's more than twice what you'd pay for a comparable-age bourbon from Kentucky. The Cowboy Bourbon — their annual barrel-proof release — runs $200 or more if you can find it. Balmorhea, the double-barreled expression, sits north of $150. Those prices are the first thing most bourbon drinkers notice about Garrison Brothers, and they're the elephant in every review. So let's start there: here's exactly what you're paying for and why it costs what it costs. Whether the premium is worth it depends on what you value in a bourbon and what your palate actually responds to — not on awards, not on scarcity, and not on the romance of the Texas Hill Country.
Dan Garrison is a former marketing executive who left the corporate world to build a distillery in the Texas Hill Country. He secured his distillery license in 2006, making Garrison Brothers the first legal whiskey distillery in Texas — and one of the first outside Kentucky to produce straight bourbon whiskey.
The distillery is located in Hye, Texas — a small unincorporated community in Blanco County, about an hour west of Austin. The property is a working ranch in the Hill Country, surrounded by live oaks, limestone terrain, and the kind of open landscape that looks nothing like bourbon country and everything like cattle country.
Garrison Brothers has grown from Dan Garrison’s startup into one of the most visited distilleries in the United States — over 50,000 visitors per year. The brand has won over 800 awards at international spirits competitions.
Garrison Brothers uses a wheated mashbill: organic Texas corn, red winter wheat, and two-row barley. The corn and wheat are sourced from Texas farms — the grain supply chain is regional rather than national.
The wheated recipe (wheat instead of rye as the secondary grain) produces a softer, sweeter bourbon than a rye-forward mashbill would. The organic corn commitment adds cost. Organic grain is more expensive to grow and source than conventional grain, and using Texas-grown organic corn specifically limits the supply options.
Like Firestone & Robertson (and unlike most Kentucky distilleries), Garrison Brothers uses a sweet mash fermentation process rather than a sour mash process. No backset from previous distillation runs is added to the fermenter. Each batch starts fresh, which produces a slightly different fermentation character — generally sweeter and less acidic than sour mash bourbon.
Garrison Brothers runs copper pot stills — not the column-and-doubler configuration used by most Kentucky distilleries. Pot stills produce a heavier, oilier distillate with more grain character and more congeners. The trade-off is lower throughput: pot stills run in batches, not continuously, which limits how much bourbon Garrison Brothers can produce per day.
The pot-still choice is consequential for the finished product. Garrison Brothers bourbon has a notably thick, oily mouthfeel that reviewers consistently comment on — that’s the pot-still character showing through. It’s also one of the reasons the bourbon is expensive: pot-still production is more labor-intensive, more time-consuming, and lower-volume than column distillation.
Garrison Brothers handles every step of production on-site: milling the grain, mashing, fermenting, distilling, barreling, aging, and bottling. They don’t source whiskey from contract distillers. What you buy with a Garrison Brothers label is what Garrison Brothers made, on their ranch, in Hye.
The Texas Hill Country climate is the single biggest factor in Garrison Brothers’ flavor profile and pricing. Summer temperatures in Hye regularly exceed 100°F. The barrel warehouses are not climate-controlled. The bourbon bakes in the barrels through Texas summers, driving extremely aggressive wood interaction.
A barrel of bourbon aging in Hye, Texas for four years has experienced more intense heat cycling than a barrel aging in Bardstown, Kentucky for six or seven years. The extraction of vanilla, caramel, tannins, and color from the charred oak happens faster and more aggressively. This is why Garrison Brothers bourbon — even at relatively young age statements — comes out of the barrel dark, rich, and heavily oaked.
The cost side of this equation is the angel’s share. Texas heat drives dramatically higher evaporation rates than Kentucky’s climate. Garrison Brothers loses a larger percentage of each barrel’s contents to evaporation every year, which means less bourbon per barrel at bottling time. Fewer gallons per barrel means higher cost per bottle.
Garrison Brothers’ Balmorhea expression takes the Texas aging a step further: after the initial aging period in a new charred oak barrel (required for bourbon), the bourbon is transferred into a second new charred oak barrel for additional aging. Double-barreling means double the wood interaction — more tannin, more color, more oak-driven flavor.
Dan Garrison remains the founder and public face of the operation. His background in marketing rather than distilling means the brand has always communicated with an unusual directness — Garrison has never pretended to be a seventh-generation whiskey maker. He’s a guy who decided to make bourbon in Texas, figured it out, and built a business around it.
The distilling team has grown since the early days, with experienced production staff handling the daily operations. The operation employs a volunteer program where over 17,000 volunteers have helped hand-dip bottles in wax.
Garrison Brothers Small Batch — ~$85, 94 proof. The flagship. Wheated mashbill, organic Texas corn, pot-distilled, Texas-aged. Heavy oak, vanilla, brown sugar, spice. This is the bottle that represents the full Garrison Brothers experience: bold, dark, oily, and unapologetically Texas.
HoneyDew Bourbon — ~$55, 80 proof. The Small Batch infused with Burleson’s Texas Wildflower Honey. Lighter, sweeter, more floral than the standard bourbon. The entry point for drinkers who find the Small Batch too intense.
Cowboy Bourbon — ~$200+, 130+ proof, annual release. Uncut, unfiltered, barrel-proof. A few thousand bottles per year, hand-selected barrels. Intense doesn’t begin to describe it — dark caramel, molten oak, oily and viscous.
Balmorhea — ~$150, varies. Double-barreled — aged in one new charred barrel, then transferred to a second new charred barrel. Dark chocolate, leather, deep dried fruit, heavy tannins. The most intensely oaked bourbon in the Garrison Brothers lineup.
Guadalupe — ~$130, varies. Port-cask finished — four-year-old bourbon finished for two additional years in Portuguese port wine barrels. Strawberry, chocolate, fruity sweetness layered on the bourbon’s caramel-and-oak base.
OAKR’s blind tasting panel scores every bourbon across more than 100 flavor notes, organized into 10 macro categories. No labels, no wax-dipped bottles, no Hill Country scenery influencing the scores — just the liquid. Add a few bottles you already know you love, and the AI builds a palate profile that shows whether Garrison Brothers’ dark, oaky, wheated intensity is going to land as a revelation worth $85 or a mismatch that sends you back to a $35 Kentucky pour.
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Bourbon enthusiast, spirits industry analyst, and the voice behind OAKR's distillery guides, brand reviews, and bourbon education content. Visiting distilleries, dissecting mashbills, and translating the craft into data since 2024.
$85 for Texas bourbon. Your Spirit Match score tells you whether the dark, oaky, wheated intensity matches your palate — before you spend the money.
