Are you ready for North Texas's first whiskey?

Ambling onto shelves this week: boutique brown liquor from Firestone and Robertson, an impressive Fort Worth distillery started when a couple of guys who became friends through their kids discovered a mutual desire to make stuff their kids aren't allowed to try. They've renovated a huge Prohibition-era warehouse to give it a "sense of place and prominence", installing a pair of 500gal Vendome copper pot stills to instantly make them "one of the five largest craft distillers in the country".

What they're getting up to in there

TX Blended Whiskey: Releasing this week, it's been aged in both old and new oak barrels, lending a nose of vanilla bean and pear, and a palate of honey butter, banana, caramel, and coffee, the result of a careful selection of whiskeys that complement each other nicely instead of passive-aggressively saying things like "No, I think it's great that you're full-bodied"

Straight Bourbon: On this currently maturing (22mos to go) stock, they've used the pre-Prohibition practice of capturing their own jug yeast (from a pecan nut in Glen Rose), which yields a stronger bouquet than commercial strains. The extreme TX heat catalyzes flavor-infusion by expanding the white oak barrels' capillaries, allowing the contents to mature 4x faster here than in Scotland, which explains those guys running around in skirts and still loving the Bay City Rollers

Starting in a couple weeks, they'll run weekend tours where you can see the process first-hand and taste the blend -- just go easy, or you'll be running all over with no sense of place and exaggerating your prominence.