For many, the word, “vodka,” brings to mind images of elegant, European bottles perched on the top shelves of the trendiest nightspots in the nation. For a wide range of critics and a growing number of vodka connoisseurs, however, the spirit has one name only, and that’s Tito’s Handmade Vodka, the brainchild of the aptly named San Antonio native, Tito Beveridge.
The Austin-distilled vodka sensation seems to stand out from most other vodkas on the market in almost every way imaginable. For instance, visit the Web sites of Stoli, Chopin, Grey Goose and similarly chic vodkas, and you’ll see photos of glamorous models sipping from frosty martini glasses to the sounds of music that might accompany a high-end fashion show; visit the online home of Tito’s, on the other hand, and you’ll see Beveridge himself standing outside his Austin-based Mockingbird Distillery to the sounds of country twang.
Similarly, check out the vodka aisle of almost any liquor store in Texas, and the bottle of Tito’s will most likely stand out among the sparkling, regal bottles that fill the rest of the section due to what one www.DrinkHacker.com review refers to as “a scrappy, homemade look and feel.”
But as the review continues to say, “Tito’s vodka doesn’t look like much, but as with a book, don’t judge this liquor by its cover.”
Beveridge said. “I don’t do the fancy, painted bottles that you have to spend a lot of money for. I put the money into the vodka making and the juice and keep the price to where my friends can afford it, and so far it’s working pretty well.”
Considering its glowing critical reviews and awards, as well as its increasingly large cult following, “pretty well” seems like an understatement. The vodka “tastes like clean sheets when you’re exhausted and ready for bed,” according to www.DrinkHacker.com, and is “without a doubt, the smoothest, richest vodka you will ever have the pleasure of tasting,” according to Calgary Living. It has even been likened to Beethoven’s 9th Symphony.
Perhaps the most significant win for Tito’s to date is its performance at the San Francisco World Spirits Competition in 2001, where it took home the Double Gold Medal – the prize given to a spirit that wins the competition by a unanimous vote; in other words, this Austin-distilled vodka topped Skyy, Ketel One, Belvedere and every other vodka in the competition.
As Peter Angus, vice president of sales for Tito’s, said, “Tito’s got the buzz that everyone in the industry would love to have.”
So how did a mortgage broker and mortgage banker from Texas become the owner of the first legal distillery in the state and one of the most critically acclaimed vodka makers in the world? Beveridge says it was a combination of the right background, a lot of persistence and even more word-of-mouth.
Upon his graduation from UT Austin with bachelor’s degrees in geology and geophysics in 1983 and 1984, Beveridge seemed an unlikely candidate to enter the world of vodka making. He joined the oil industry, where he worked everywhere from San Antonio and Houston to Colombia and Venezuela. He later entered the groundwater business in Austin before becoming “the mortgage guy.”
Although he’d “made beer and wine before and always thought about getting a still and taking it to the next level,” spirit making started out as a hobby for Beveridge. While he was in the mortgage business, he decided to make flavored vodka and give it to his friends at Christmas after learning a bit about vodka infusions from his uncle. However, it wasn’t until a stranger came up to him at a party and referred to him as “the vodka guy” that he “really started thinking seriously about it.”
While experience in the oil, groundwater and mortgage businesses may seem unrelated to vodka making, the skills Beveridge picked up along the way have proven very useful.
“I had this technical background, and I’d worked down in South America where we were always just rigging things together even when we didn’t have a lot of money,” he said. “So I just developed this attitude that you can make all your own stuff – improvise it – and still come up with a good product. I built a small still, condenser and boiler, and I started brewing my own beer from different stuff and teaching myself how to distill. I just learned from scratch.”
Teaching himself how to make vodka proved no easy task in the mid-‘90s, since there was no Internet and very limited information about making booze in the library; but as Beveridge has strong chemistry, physics and engineering backgrounds, he pulled those skills together and “just sort of improvised.”
After numerous rounds of trial-and-error, he bought 13 acres of “the cheapest dirt in Travis County” and set up his own one-man distillery.
Like any new business owner, though, Beveridge had financial issues.
“I tried to get some financing a couple of times, and it didn’t work out because they said I’d never get my permits,” Beveridge said. “There’d never been a legal distillery in Texas, and they said I’d never get a distributor. I was trying to get investors to put in back in the beginning, and everybody thought I was crazy, so they wouldn’t put in. It was kind of a big setback. I was underfinanced, and it took me a lot longer to try to do anything without money.”
How do you make something work when you don’t have the money to do it? The answer, Beveridge says, is to simply do a lot of jobs yourself, and that’s exactly what he did. After persisting through considerable amounts of rejection, he eventually found and negotiated with a small, Houston-based distributor that didn’t handle spirits. Then he created his own distillery from savings.
“I worked tax-free in South America, and I’d made a little money drilling,” he said. “I had a lot of credit cards for a very long time. At one point, I had 19 credit cards. I’d rack them up and pay them down over and over again.”
The other challenge Beveridge faced, especially in the early days, was the actual vodka making.
“Technically, it’s not that hard to distill something, but to actually do it without blowing yourself up is hard to do,” he said. “And then to do it to where it’s actually really tasty is really hard to do. It’s kind of like when I used to make a lot of beer. It’s not that hard to make beer, but it’s really hard to make really good beer, and it’s super-hard to make really good beer every time.”
No one can accuse Beveridge of not going the extra mile for his product. In the beginning, he did literally everything from actually distilling the vodka to screwing the caps onto the bottles himself. Today, he has about 19 employees, but according to his Web site, he still goes to the distillery every day to help make the vodka.
Beveridge attributes a large portion of his success to the word-of-mouth that began with the Christmas gifts and continues today on a much larger scale.
“I think our strength has always been that we make really great vodka, and when people discover it, they tell their friends about it,” he said. “People discover that it’s not only better than Grey Goose, but it’s half the price of Grey Goose.”
Angus, on the other hand, who has worked with Beveridge for almost two-and-a-half years, attributes much of the vodka’s success to Beveridge himself.
“Tito is truly a pioneer in the industry, and right now, a lot of folks are really amazed and are looking up to him,” Angus said. “He shows that when you put your heart and your passion into something you love and don’t take ‘no’ for an answer, you can live the American dream. Tito is living the dream. He’s an inspiration, and he’s a pleasure to work with.”
All awards and critical cheers aside, Beveridge seems genuinely passionate about what he’s doing and finds it very rewarding, -- particularly the drinking part, which “is always the best thing about it. It’s unlimited vodka – great vodka.”
He also enjoys his business because it combines his technical and engineering skills with his social nature and love of the craft.
“My granddad told me that if you do something that you love every day, you’ll probably work harder at it than the next guy whether you make a lot of money or not,” he said. “And then you’ll look back on it and think, ‘Man, that was the best ride. I did something I loved every day of my life.’ I’m doing something I love every day of my life. I’m really blessed.”
