OUR VISION

I filled the first bottle of what was ultimately going to be Mashbuild back in 2012. But my journey to building something great began in 1996 when I took my first job in the wine business, managing sales for a Sonoma vineyard. 

There were a lot of things to love about the wine business, but I really loved the way winemakers approached the process of blending. It was fun, it was experimental, it created a product that coated my palate in ways that a single-varietal never could. In the wine business, flavor was everything. 

As a lifelong bourbon-lover though, it was a dream come true when I had the opportunity to go to work for Jim Beam in 2004. In bourbon, flavor is obviously important… But PROCESS is everything. Every major brand stakes their business on a specific recipe (or mash bill), a specific distilling process, legacy distilling equipment, and a regimented aging process. The traditional bourbon culture is about creating something good and then doing it over and over again for generations.

When I first considered making my own bourbon, I remembered what I learned in the wine business — how blending had a way of accentuating the strengths of the individual varietals while masking the weaknesses and I wondered if you could create the same magic by blending a bourbon.

Was it possible to BUILD a bourbon with layers of complex flavors that you couldn’t possibly distill in a single facility? 

I started Mashbuild to demonstrate that while the traditional “process first” distillers are incredible, there’s still room in bourbon for tastes, aromas, and aging techniques that we haven’t tried before, that there’s room for a “flavor-first” approach, that there’s a home for drinkers with experimental palates.