THE BOOTSTRAPPER

Meet Tito, the Vodka Titan

April 10, 2012 | Laura Benys

It is 10:51 a.m. and I am swigging a shot of Tito’s Handmade Vodka from a plastic test tube. The man who’s pouring has his name on the bottle.

Tito Beveridge—born Bert Beveridge II, Tito is short for Bertito—built the paper and guitar-strewn shed where where we’re standing back in 1995. The shed was supposed to be temporary. It went on to function as administrative headquarters, distillery, and bottling plant for the better part of 20 years. That’s how long Beveridge slogged away at this business, against the strenuous advice of friends and financial advisors, before encountering anything that looked like success.

Today, the surrounding complex produces more than 245,000 cases a year of corn-based vodka a year. And Tito’s Handmade Vodka is a hallmark of Austin. 

Keg prophecy

In 1993, Beveridge was pumping a keg at a friend’s party when a stranger recognized him as “The Vodka Guy,” meaning the flavored vodkas he'd been infusing at home and giving as Christmas gifts. “You’re the Vodka Guy,” the man insisted, even after Beveridge, then unhappily employed in the mortgage business, tried to correct him.

Up until this point in his life, Beveridge’s resume went something like this: lawn mower, geology student, seismic data processor, heli-portable dynamite crew chief, oil driller, ground water geologist, couch surfer, and finally, mortgage broker. He had lived in San Antonio, Austin, Houston, Venezuela, and Columbia. He had been laid off from several downsized companies and watched his one-man drilling company go under with the Gulf War. He was no stranger to adversity, nor was he faint of heart about things like chemicals, combustion, or building something without being entirely sure what he was doing.

He did know this, he says: “I made a list of things that I wanted in a job. I liked air conditioning, meeting girls, and working with people that have all their teeth and fingers.”

The “Vodka Guy” comment got Beveridge thinking. He chatted up local liquor stores, and listened when they told him that if he could make a really smooth sipping vodka, he could probably sell it.

This vodka’s gone to pot

To set his apart in a sea of vodkas, Beveridge decided to distill using old-fashioned pot stills, the same method used to make fine cognacs and scotches. (The big guys use commercial column stills, which require less skill and effort. They also create chemical byproducts that we laypeople refer to as “hangovers.”)

But there were no instructions. Anywhere. Texas, which had never been home to a single legal distillery, had just one resource: age-yellowed photos of lawmen arresting bootleggers. Digging through library archives, Beveridge caught glimpses of pot stills amid all the rifles and handlebar mustachess. He started sketching.

He then maxed out 19 credit cards, racked up $90,000 in debt, bought 13 acres of the cheapest dirt in Travis County ($3,000 total), and poured a concrete slab for the scrappy shed still standing today. He started an arm-wrestling match with state and national liquor licensing organizations that lasted years, and blazed a trail for every distillery that’s since cropped up in the Lone Star State. He helped start the American handcrafted distilling movement.

He and his friends also started drinking a lot of vodka.

Six is the magic number

“I bought 86 bottles of vodka, one of every kind I could find,” Beveridge says. “I poured them in Kerr jars and mixed them up. Friends would come over, we’d play music and taste vodka.”

Once they’d established the top competitors, Beveridge began tweaking his distilling process to beat them. And eventually, he discovered that his own six-times distilled vodka won, every time. At least, that’s what his friends told him in blind taste tests. What did the world think?

“The first review compared Tito’s Handmade Vodka to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony,” Beveridge says. He is amused.

In 1998, Tony Abou-Ganim, then head of the cocktail program at Las Vegas’s Bellagio Hotel, talked Beveridge into entering it in the 2001 San Francisco World Spirit Competition, going up against the likes of Ketel One, Smirnoff, Stoli, Skyy, Belvedere, and Chopin. Tito's Handmade Vodka won an unprecedented Double Gold.

This is an intervention

A few years after the accolades, business was better but not even close to booming. Beveridge was still in debt, still loading his own trucks, still screwing on bottle caps by hand. (He wound up with carpal tunnel.) On a fishing trip, his friends cornered him.

“You’ve given it everything you’ve got, and you can feel good about that,” Tito recalls them saying. “But it’s time to throw in the towel.” One, a successful realtor, offered him a job. Beveridge laughed it all off.

“I’d been in enough horrible situations in previous careers that I just kept thinking, Hey man, at least I’m out here in Austin,” he says. “I had to see it through.”

It wasn’t until 2004 that the company started turning a sizable profit, helped by devotees who demanded Tito’s from every bar and liquor store they walked into. (This grassroots campaigning is still the core of the brand’s marketing efforts, for which Beveridge praises the Austin community loudly and often.) These days, it’s on shelves across the 50 states and Canada, and other countries are clamoring for distribution.

And back home, Austin is continuing its Tito’s love affair.

Austin: Not for dream killers

The feeling is mutual. Beveridge, a sixth-generation San Antonian, gets a little mushy when he talks about Austin.

“This city is kind of like a magnet: It attracts a certain kind of person, and repels another kind,” he says. “There’s this attitude like, You figured it out enough to get yourself here, you got here, you’re okay. People aren’t dream killers.”

“Where I grew up, if I said I was going to start the first legal distillery in Texas, about 26 people would tell me it wouldn’t work, and let’s go dove hunting and forget the whole thing,” Beveridge explains. “But here in Austin, people are like, ‘That’s a great idea! I’ll hook you up with my buddy. And hey, I’ll come help out, too.’”

Visit titosvodka.com.

Published in “52 Locals Who'll Change Your Life”