Balcones Distilling
Chip Tate built the stills himself in a Waco welding shop in 2008 and coopered some of his own casks. The tour runs from New Mexico blue corn to a barrel aging through a Texas summer, and the bottle shop sells you four at most.
Why go
Balcones has distilled in downtown Waco since 2008, and the house dates the first Texas whisky since Prohibition to that year.2 The grain bill is the thing to know: blue corn out of New Mexico and malted barley grown in Texas.2 Balcones was one of nine distilleries that started the American Single Malt Commission, which grew to 170 lobbying the federal Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau for a legal definition.1
Ownership has moved twice. Greg Allen took a majority stake to fund a bigger facility, Tate was removed from every Balcones activity in 2014, and Diageo bought the distillery outright, reported by Forbes on 3 November 2022.1 It was the first American single malt distillery Diageo had ever fully owned.1 Jared Himstedt took the stills over from Tate, and Felipe Schrieberg's read on the years since is that the whisky stayed delicious and the praise has kept coming.
1
Order this / avoid
- Order: the guided tour, which covers the process from the blue corn through aging in the Texas heat and ends in a tasting.3
- Order: Baby Blue in the tasting room. It is the blue-corn whisky the house built its name on.2
- Avoid: arriving with a shopping list. Whisky sales are capped at four 750ml bottles per person every thirty days, and stock in the gift shop moves.3
Good to know
- It is shut Mondays and Sundays. The published week runs Tuesday to Saturday, noon to 9pm, so a weekend drive to Waco has to be a Saturday.3
- You can walk in. The bottle shop and tasting room take anyone who turns up, in the house's own words:
Whether you're joining a distillery tour or simply dropping by, we welcome every whisky enthusiast.
The tours are the part that goes through a booking.3 - Tours are 21 and over, and the distillery cannot take infants or children.3
- Call ahead if you want a specific bottle. The shop tells you to check what it has before you drive.3
- Access: four marked disabled spaces in front of the visitor center, and a ramp into it.3
- Say it "bal-cone-ez", which the house prints on its own page.2
Verdict
should-visit — Balcones is where American single malt stopped being a novelty, and Chip Tate did it in a welding shop with stills he built himself, which is the rare case where the origin story is also the technical claim. Waco is worth the stop for the tour alone, since the whole run from blue corn to a barrel sweating through a Texas summer happens in one downtown building. Two things hold the rung here. Tate has had nothing to do with the place since 2014, and the only bylined word on the whisky since is Schrieberg calling it delicious in passing, which is not a tasting note. Plan around the week: it is shut Mondays and Sundays.