BRYAN, Texas — Having just opened three weeks ago, Hush and Whisper is proving to be a unique experience.
A historic building has been reimagined by manager Caleb Clanton who has been working on this for five years
“The Varisco building isn’t done creating stories and we're excited to add more stories and add more history to downtown Bryan," Clanton said.
Providing hands-on tours of their in-house whiskey, vodka, and gin, they want to prove themselves as a real self-made establishment.
“It’d be really easy for us to buy barrels of whiskey that have already been aged from Indiana or Illinois, pump it over into a bottle, slap a label on it, and then say hey, it was bottled here in Texas you should buy it," Clanton said. "But that's not who we are. We’re making it work grain to glass distillery. Our corn is coming from 13 miles away, and we're trying to add more of our grains so that we can be as local as possible.”
However, he had a different initial take on whiskey than what you might imagine.
“So I didn't like whiskey coming into this. That was my first experience with drinking when I was too young to be drinking legally, and I threw up and I said I never want to touch whiskey again, ” Clanton said.
But while creating this distillery and trying different whiskey, he had a change of heart and hopes to create an experience like no other for those looking to expand their palettes.
“The analogy we tell people when they come in is you might not like raw onions on your burgers but you'll probably still like cooked onions in a spaghetti Bolognese. So if you just say hey, you don't like whiskey, maybe you just don't like the whiskey you've had and maybe you'd like it in our black whiskey smash. Then, for those people that just straight up don't like whiskey. Well, we make gin and vodka too and they're pretty good.”
Hush and Whisper is open Thursday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m.
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