"Texas Crafted. Globally Demanded." Swift Distillery Texas Single Malt Master Distiller Amanda Swift

This week 📢I talk🎙️with Amanda Swift Co-Founder at Swift Distillery that produces a Texas based Single Malt with Scottish Two-Row barley and yeast! 👏🍷 🎇 🎉 ✨ 👏 🥂 😁

 🎬 Watch on YouTube Here 👉🍿 

Texas single malt, women in whiskey, bourbon barrels & Sauternes finish 🥃 Amanda Swift shares distilling, aging in Texas heat & UK Amazon launch. Craft spirits story @ThirstyThursdaysat3PMEST

🔥 Engaging Summary

Amanda Swift, Co-Owner of Swift Distillery in Austin, Texas, joins me to talk science, single malt, Texas aging, and building a craft spirits brand from the ground up 🥃

From studying fire ants 🐜 to crafting award-winning whiskey, Amanda shares what makes Texas distilling different — and why bold decisions build great brands.

💡 Key Takeaways:

✅ Why Texas heat accelerates whiskey aging
 ✅ The difference between Sauternes & Oloroso cask finishes
 ✅ Why grain & yeast choices define your flavor profile
 ✅ The truth about bourbon barrels vs French oak
 ✅ Why alcohol sales are harder in the U.S. than the UK
 ✅ How Amazon UK changes craft spirits strategy
 ✅ The power of women leadership in whiskey

This episode blends science, entrepreneurship, flavor, and fearless growth.

🥃 Try Swift Distillery & taste the difference
 🌍 Explore Texas single malt on Amazon UK
 🎙 Subscribe for more founder stories in food & beverage
 💬 Comment: Are you team Oloroso or Sauternes finish?
 👍 Like, share & support independent craft distillers

NOW ON YOUTUBE!!!  Thank you for Listening! Join us on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter!

Host Jessie Ott's Profile on LinkedIn

Transcript

Amanda Swift (00:00)
Science gave me a good basis for running a business because in science you probably fail 95 % of the time. So when you're testing a hypothesis.

I would think 95 % of the time you fail at like, you didn't get a result or it's not the result you thought you were going to get, which makes you very kind of fluid in business that when something doesn't work, it doesn't really bother you. I hear this with a lot of other entrepreneurs. They're really freaked out by failure, but I think failure is just like a hundred percent part of the process. You're going to fail at things 95 % of the time and you're going to have to accept that.

But you have to learn from it. So I think that's where science really helped me in this.

Jessie Ott (00:41)
Right.

Hello everybody and welcome to Thursday Thursdays. am Jessie Yacht and I have a really exciting guest today. Amanda Swift, Co-Owner of Swift Distillery in Austin, Texas. Hey Amanda, how you doing?

Amanda Swift (01:13)
Thank

Here he is.

Jessie Ott (01:26)
I'm super stoked to have you full disclosure. Amanda is a client and she was our first product. Her product was the first one we got put on Amazon and we couldn't be happier. Super exciting.

Amanda Swift (01:39)
I am very excited for that too. I love that you can sell alcohol on Amazon. I wish we could do that here.

Jessie Ott (01:44)
I know, I know, right? we talked to Simon today. Simon is our importer distributor over in the UK and he is so excited to sell your product. He just adores you, like we all do. mean, you're so fun to work with.

Amanda Swift (01:58)
That's good. have people either love me or they hate me and I'm like not in between with people. That's how I've been since I was like a little kid. Like teachers would either love me in school or they would absolutely hate me.

Jessie Ott (02:07)
What's to hate? I don't get it.

Amanda Swift (02:09)
I am a hyperactive lunatic, so I'm really terrible sitting still. I like bounce and I do things and I'm always moving and going and I think that drives some people nuts. There's that.

Jessie Ott (02:14)
Heh.

Is that kind of

like ADHD or no?

Amanda Swift (02:24)
No, not at all. I'm usually

really focused on things. It's just that like, think his runs in my family were high energy and I never sit still. there's that phrase that people have this, you know, same 24 hours and every day. But I always like to say we have different resources because mine are, you know, unlimited when it comes to movement and everything else.

Jessie Ott (02:28)
High energy.

No.

Amanda Swift (02:45)
I'm one of those weirdos

that will get on a treadmill and start walking and then work on my emails. I'll be listening to something in my ear, making sale sheets or whatever else. I just have to be constantly moving. And I think that bugs people.

Jessie Ott (02:58)
That's funny. I wish I had a treadmill that I could walk to, walk on while I'm working. That'd be great.

Amanda Swift (03:04)
I have a cheap one from Amazon and it's like the best thing. It just slides under a bed. Like I get so much done. Yeah. If you give me motion, like I can get so many things done. I'm not really good at sitting still. So that's probably why teachers hated me. Cause I couldn't sit still.

Jessie Ott (03:09)
That's perfect.

Yeah.

Yeah,

I could see that would be disruptive. ⁓ Do you do you try to get certain amount of steps in every day then?

Amanda Swift (03:21)
Yeah.

easily get 20,000 steps a day without batting an eye.

Jessie Ott (03:29)
What? You're kidding.

Amanda Swift (03:29)
Yeah, well we have an Australian

Shepherd, so like, and I have a kid. I don't, I literally don't sit still. This is why I people nuts. But at the distillery, we non-stop move. Like, distilling is all fun and games, but like, you're either staring at a still or like, hurrying up and cleaning something. I'm just a glorified cleaner most days.

Jessie Ott (03:39)
Yeah.

No, that is not true, but that is part of it.

Amanda Swift (03:50)
No, it's,

it ain't, that I would actually think is one of the biggest parts of it is like good distillation skills are really about being clean and efficient and everything. So, and then you're always chronically cleaning something off the floor because distilling is sticky.

Jessie Ott (03:59)
Yeah.

That's true. That is true. So where are you calling from today?

Amanda Swift (04:10)
We're in Austin, Texas, although our distillery is out in Driftwood.

Jessie Ott (04:14)
How far away is that?

Amanda Swift (04:15)
It's about 20 miles, so 25, 30 minutes, give or take traffic. Austin traffic is horrendous, but I'm going out toward the country, so the drive is very nice, except when it rains. Because we're terrible drivers in the rain.

Jessie Ott (04:20)
yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

Where were you from originally?

Amanda Swift (04:30)
I'm originally from Houston. Nick and I met in high school and then I came out to the University of Texas and he went to St. Edward's and we just never left. So we've been in Austin 20 something years now. Yeah, 24.

Jessie Ott (04:38)
Okay, nice.

Nice. Nice. Well, Austin's a great, great,

great community. I've been down there a few times.

Amanda Swift (04:51)
Austin is fun. have something for everyone, which I really like. And it's a good mix of like, still has the old classic stuff, and then it's got a bunch of new kind of cool things that have come. We've gotten more libraries, more museums, more shows, more plays, those kinds of things. Tons of restaurants and shopping.

Jessie Ott (04:55)
Yeah.

Yeah. We

went for one of my birthdays. I'm born on February 29th. And so we went one of those leap years. Yeah. And we thought it would be so cool to stay on 6th Street. that's pretty bad. Duval Street, we've got. We've stayed on Duval Street plenty of times, no problem, but not 6th Street.

Amanda Swift (05:16)
⁓ you're a lead to your book. Yeah.

Yeah.

No, maybe because I went to college here, I always think of it as dirty six and like nobody really should do that after the age of 22.

Jessie Ott (05:42)
No, we had a baby with us too and he slept right through it, yeah.

Amanda Swift (05:45)
no, that is definitely not. Yeah, we stick

to like South Congress, South Lamar, those kind of areas. We actually used to live on South Congress back when it was sketchy. ⁓ No, it's not. There is a Nike store in front of the old apartment complex we used to live in, which I think is really funny because there used to be this place called Atomic Tattoo that you were guaranteed to get something gross from.

Jessie Ott (05:54)
Nice.

Yeah.

Amanda Swift (06:09)
And I think there was a pet store that was next to it, which I always thought was kind of funny. Tattoo parlor and pet store, but, you know, Austin's kitschy, I guess.

Jessie Ott (06:18)
Yeah, get your tattoo and pick up your pet or get a tattoo of your pet. Buy a pet, get a tattoo. Yeah, and it's a foodie city too. It's funny. People think that Austin is so techie and Dallas surpasses Austin by far. ⁓ In the world of, in the big world of

Amanda Swift (06:22)
Yeah

And it's a good city for drinking though.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Jessie Ott (06:41)
tech cities and hubs and all the things that they actually have the criteria for. I think one of the big problems Austin has is traffic and they don't have a very good transportation system.

Amanda Swift (06:52)
Now, I grew up in Houston where we believed in urban sprawl and they can put in a 20 lane highway across I-10 and now you're still stuck in traffic, but at least you're moving. Austin, I want to say it took him 15 years to put a single like HOV lane in, which we always called the Lexus lane because I've been here that long. And it's still not complete. I think it's now going on like a 20 year project add and it's

Jessie Ott (07:13)
Ha ha.

Amanda Swift (07:18)
probably like 10 to 15 miles of a highway that they just can't complete. So our traffic is abysmally bad. And we have no public transportation either that I would consider like effective or efficient, is, yeah. And now we have all the Waymo cars and the self-driving Teslas, which I just think is creepy because I'm 41 and having a car without a driver kind of freaks me out.

Jessie Ott (07:25)
No excuse in Texas.

Yeah.

Yeah. Well, you heard about the Waymo's blasting through bus stops for kids.

Amanda Swift (07:50)
Yeah,

and they've had a kid too. believe like he was totally fine as far as I know. I mean, he's probably traumatized because that would freak me out. I'm a parent, but like, yeah, I don't like that yet. I'm not for that.

Jessie Ott (07:54)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

We saw

it, so we were in Atlanta, we drove through Atlanta and we saw the car driving around this fall and people are in the car and they're taking selfies and I'm like, babe, we should try it. We should just give it a whirl and she's like, nah, I'm good. So we didn't do it.

Amanda Swift (08:20)
I'm gonna fully agree with you.

Yeah, I just think it's weird. Like, every time I go to HEB, which is like our big grocery store on Sunday morning, and I always see them in the parking lot with like no passengers and nobody in them. So that's like they're going either dropping off or picking up customers or they're possibly picking up groceries for delivery. Like they put them in the trunk and then they deliver them. But it just seems weird.

Jessie Ott (08:43)
I know. Well, you know, Amazon is doing drone deliveries now. They're testing that out. So, I mean, it's here to stay.

Amanda Swift (08:49)
Yeah.

I know it's not. see somehow the drone makes more sense to me than like the self driving because the drone can fly like. If yeah, it's not like they're going to hit an airplane or a helicopter or something. They can't go that high. I mean, I it could go that high, but they're not going to be at that height delivering packages.

Jessie Ott (08:57)
Yeah.

Hopefully not. Hopefully not, for sure. ⁓

Amanda Swift (09:07)
Yeah, that's, I think my Zeres

is sci-fi loving. Like it freaks me out that we're entering the like soon to be apocalyptic phase with robots.

Jessie Ott (09:16)
I know, I know. Let's change the subject. How did you come to be to open up a distillery? Like, I know you've traveled a lot and you've visited a lot, so start from the beginning.

Amanda Swift (09:20)
All right, on to your new topic.

So this starts probably the year after Nick and I got married. So 20, 19, 20 years ago, we went to Ireland for just like fun. We're going to go to Ireland and the UK. And as soon as we got off an international flight, Nick drugged me kicking and screaming to the Guinness beer tour at probably 8 a.m. in the morning. And I was like, I do not want to go drinking beer after an international flight.

give me a greasy breakfast, give me a shower and like let me sleep off my jet lag for a couple hours. And as soon as I got there I was like wow this is really interesting. Like I'd always liked single malt and whiskey in general but the concept which I get beer is quite different than making it but the concept of what went into it of like these really simple ingredients can have this huge range of flavor I hadn't really thought of a lot at that time and

That kind of got me interested. And then I was like, oh, I don't really like beer. Let's go look at like whiskey distilleries. So we ended up going to a bunch of like Scotch places and other distilleries while we were in Ireland. And we had a great time. And I had a job. I worked at the University of Texas. I did research on fire ants. So I'm a biologist by degree. But that kind of...

Jessie Ott (10:39)
Hmm.

Did you discover anything

interesting about fire ants?

Amanda Swift (10:46)
So we worked on a biological control project that's these little foreign flies lay an egg in a fire ant head and then their head pops off and a fly comes out. So that's the way they're controlled naturally in South America. But there's a small period of time where they have like a parasite growing in their head. They wander around like zombies and it's kind of cool.

Yeah, um, they're called

Jessie Ott (11:04)
What do they give to the

environment?

Amanda Swift (11:06)
Fire ants don't give a lot to the environment where they're invasive, which is what they are here, but they're good trash men. Like they clean up all the dead insects, those kinds of things. I'm sure they have lots of points down in South America. Here they're kind of a nuisance. They do billions of dollars a year of damage like farming and other environmental things, but I think science gives me...

Jessie Ott (11:26)
wow. Like termites almost.

Amanda Swift (11:29)
Yeah, Science gave me a good basis for running a business because in science you probably fail 95 % of the time. So when you're testing a hypothesis.

I would think 95 % of the time you fail at like, you didn't get a result or it's not the result you thought you were going to get, which makes you very kind of fluid in business that when something doesn't work, it doesn't really bother you. I hear this with a lot of other entrepreneurs. They're really freaked out by failure, but I think failure is just like a hundred percent part of the process. You're going to fail at things 95 % of the time and you're going to have to accept that.

But you have to learn from it. So I think that's where science really helped me in this.

Jessie Ott (12:10)
Right.

Amanda Swift (12:13)
And Nick is very much like the dreamer of the two of us. I'm the practical one and he's the dreamer. So for starting a distillery, he basically just kept saying, hey, let's open a distillery in Texas. Like, let's make scotch. I kept saying, I don't think you can make scotch in Texas. And then he was like, you just call it single malt. I was like, okay.

So probably six years or so after harassing me to do this, I finally was like, okay, let's give this a try. And we went over to Scotland, Ireland, he went to Kentucky, and then we spent time in Japan and France and kind of learned how to distill, learned, I to say a lot of what we liked and the techniques of how to do things efficiently. And from there we said, let's cash in everything we have and try this out.

We bought stills, we rented a place, and we just started making single malts. And there was a lot of trial and error early on in that. But once we kind of developed a recipe, and single malt's easy in a lot of ways because you only have barley. So you have two-row barley, water, and yeast. And then it's the combination of how you do all your techniques and then age it that gets you to the final product. So I like the simplicity of that.

which is what I think I picked up most from when I went over and got drug to the Guinness beer tour. These basic grains can make so many different things. And that's fascinating to me because I don't feel like you get that with cooking in the same way you do as alcohol. Like, you know, baking, you have your flour, your yeast, if you're making bread, kind of things. But the flavor profiles just aren't so

dramatically different unless you add different ingredients to it. you know, bread at this heart is almost always, you know, the same thing, grain, yeast, water, but the flavors are ragingly different. And I think that's what makes alcohol interesting to me is that simplicity can be so different because, you know, a bourbon and a single malt have almost nothing in common other than they come from, you know, grains and corn and those kinds of things. But

I like that.

Jessie Ott (14:19)
Yeah, it is

pretty cool and how the yeast, you know, when I went to Jim Beam, they pride, they're very prideful on their specific yeast that they have to make the Jim Beam products and whatnot. And so that's really important. Is there anything that you... Go ahead.

Amanda Swift (14:30)
Yeah.

Perfect.

I was gonna say, think bourbon and their yeast are very fascinating. We use a traditional Scottish yeast, so it's not very inventive or anything, but I greatly admire the bourbon distilleries for that because so many of their yeast have been specifically bred for them to go exactly with what their flavors are looking for. I just think that's kind of interesting from a scientific standpoint of how that works.

Jessie Ott (14:54)
Yeah, yeah, no, agreed. When you went to all these places, is there anything in particular that was unique about every experience you had that was sort of eye opening? Like Japan, was Japan different than Scotland? And where did you go in France?

Amanda Swift (15:08)
Absolutely.

So in France, we spent a lot of time in Cognac and I think Cognac is interesting to me. It's probably my favorite place we've been next to Japan is that the French have such a culture that goes with like wine making and spirit making and it's very much this beautiful art form. Like every time you talk to anybody, I want to say in that French

distilling or wine making. There are these beautiful stories about how their family did this. You know, there's this rich history of the type of stills they use or how they pick their grapes and everything is very sought out and it comes from a place of like history and art. Whereas I feel like the Japanese, it comes from this place of science. Like we spent time at Nikkei and everything they did is like scientifically calculated just

beautifully. There's an art in that too, but it's, know, they have mass specs on how barrels age and everything is done down to these tiny little degree of precision. And it makes for this very beautiful, delicate product. Because I think Japanese whiskies really stand out in how they balance these really delicate flavors to come out through their whiskies. Whereas like scotch, I don't feel as if the

Usually something will stand out more than the other. Cognac kind of balances the two for me because in Cognac you get those like floral notes, you get those sweet notes, you kind of get those like earthy notes and something will stand out slightly more than the others but they're still kind of in that harmony. Whereas I feel like in something like a bourbon

Something really stands out strongly. You you really get those like peachy notes or the really heavy vanilla's or the oaks. They're not necessarily in like harmonious balance like you get with a Japanese whiskey. So I think it's kind of just about what mood you're in of what, how you want it. And then with Irish whiskey, we spent a lot of time getting to know Brian Nation who's a really been

was really helpful to us because he used to be a Jameson and now he's off doing his own thing. He was an interesting combination of precision with blending that artistry to it. spent a lot more time working with him than I ever did. But that's one of those things I think like the Irish kind of blend what they do very well between the different like whiskey techniques of the world or distilling techniques.

Jessie Ott (17:36)
Hmm, that's interesting. I didn't know that.

Amanda Swift (17:38)
Yeah, every.

I feel like each region has a history to it like. The Scottish are obviously have that same rich culture doing it for hundreds of years. But unlike the French. They there's I want to say they're a little bit more playful in what they're doing, maybe a little bit more like robust and fun to it.

where it's still got that artistry, it's still got that science and it's got that history, but Scotch has more playful qualities to it. Like lot of the Brook Lottie stuff, I think is very playful. Like they're not totally stuck on turner scene. Yeah. I feel like Octomore does it well too. Like they've modernized in a way. It's like they're growing with their audience. I feel like Cognac has that.

Jessie Ott (18:09)
Agreed. I love that brand.

Amanda Swift (18:24)
for a hundred years, you know what you're gonna get. and I love that because I love a tradition, but I like the playfulness you get with Scotch and a lot of those brands.

Jessie Ott (18:34)
Have you tried Compass Box?

Amanda Swift (18:36)
I have not.

Jessie Ott (18:37)
I recommend it. ⁓

Amanda Swift (18:39)
I'm going have

to. Everybody tells me that and between running a business, having a small child and having a psychotic dog, I don't drink as much as I feel like I used to.

Jessie Ott (18:50)
You don't have time. But I just, if you ever get a chance and you see it on a shelf somewhere, grab one. They also break the rules and have a wonderful portfolio. I used to sell them in the military a while back and then been in touch with those guys, had John on the podcast and it was really an interesting story.

Amanda Swift (18:52)
I don't have time.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Jessie Ott (19:14)
He used to be a blender, Johnny Walker, and then started his own thing in in his kitchen. And, you know, it's just, he was one of the first to kind of push, push the, the line with the Scottish association and, ⁓ kind of the, kind of one of the first to break out of the big guys, you know?

Amanda Swift (19:19)
Yeah, that's how goes.

Yeah.

I admire that greatly. I feel like it's hard to jump off from a tradition that's there. It takes lot of bravery and guts to say, I'm going to go in another direction. I think I can do this and head off in that way.

Jessie Ott (19:45)
Yeah, agreed. Pioneers. Thank you.

Amanda Swift (19:47)
Yeah.

Yeah, when we started, there wasn't a lot of us. Like we technically filed for LLC in 2011, which seems crazy to say it's been 15 years. We didn't start making anything until 2013 and then it started to sell around 2014. I I have those dates right. There's a long time of setting it up, buying stills, getting everything ready, being brave enough to quit my job.

Jessie Ott (20:09)
Yeah.

Amanda Swift (20:12)
Kiss.

Jessie Ott (20:13)
Yeah, that's

a big commitment. This is no small expense.

Amanda Swift (20:18)
No, saying goodbye to a regular income and then like jumping forward and doing it was definitely like a, I was young enough to still be stupid and reckless, but I was old enough to like be mature enough to think I could get through this.

Jessie Ott (20:31)
Well, you are the processor and operator, right? So you, you know, it takes that, it takes a team, you know? For me, I'm the dreamer. My wife is the operator and processor. So it's a good team.

Amanda Swift (20:38)
Yeah.

Yeah.

I

feel like every couple that runs a business together, they're always kind of like yin and yang because it works. You have to have the person that's a dreamer and then you have to have the person that gets you there because I'm not really the dreamer in this. Like if I tell Nick he needs to go create some crazy barrel, he can easily go do it. And for me, it takes me a while to think, well, people like that. How does that fit into the market? And then he comes back and tells me, I've done this. And I'm like, okay, I can sell that.

Jessie Ott (20:54)
Exactly.

Hehehehehe

That's funny. That's really funny.

Amanda Swift (21:12)
That's kind of how our relationship

works.

Jessie Ott (21:14)
That's awesome.

Amanda Swift (21:14)
There's

some very stupid quote I read that I feel like sums us up perfectly is that there's two kinds of people in every relationship. The person that loads the dishwasher like a Scandinavian architect and the person who loads it like a mess addict raccoon. And I'm totally the raccoon. I'm like, I'm just gonna leave a random thing in the middle of the dishwasher.

Jessie Ott (21:30)
You

I fix all that stuff all the time. I have a certain way that I like it and I can get, I maximize the amount of things we get in there. Yes.

Amanda Swift (21:36)
Yes.

Yes. I

just randomly put things in a dishwasher. Yeah. I, yeah, I saw that and I thought that was funny. And I was like, that kind of makes sense. Like, I feel like that's true in every like business relationship with people I've met. Cause so often it's like somebody has a partner in what they do, whether they're like romantic partners, their business partner, but that just holds true for me.

Jessie Ott (21:50)
It is funny.

That's pretty funny. I would have never thought anything about that.

Amanda Swift (22:04)
Yeah.

I read it in a book somewhere years ago and I just laughed and I said, that is so true.

Jessie Ott (22:13)
That's funny. That's fun. So.

Amanda Swift (22:15)
Yeah.

Jessie Ott (22:16)
Why? Okay, so you opened up in 2011. So you did all these travels and you came back and you said this is... Like, were you... Did you take time off and go travel or did you just take trips while you were working?

Amanda Swift (22:21)
Mm-hmm.

We took trips when we were working. So Nick finished up his masters because he has a masters in liberal arts and it was based in like food anthropology kind of stuff and art and Yeah, he's a landscape painter But so he was working kind of jobs where he didn't have to be anywhere at a set time And since I was in a lab, I had to be somewhere in a framework so I would take my vacation time and go and he would go spend a little bit longer in certain places and then

Jessie Ott (22:39)
Ooh.

Amanda Swift (22:56)
While we were still distilling and doing other stuff, we ended up going back to certain places and then just kind of continued our education as we went. And now with a small child, those trips don't happen as often, but I feel like we're pretty comfortable in what we're doing. And we've trialed and eroded enough and that over the years I've helped enough people on their, you know, started their journey. So.

Jessie Ott (23:11)
Yeah.

Amanda Swift (23:20)
I feel like I'm in a pretty comfortable place if I know enough to get me through and be passable at what I do.

Jessie Ott (23:26)
Well, you're pretty passable because you're selling on Amazon in the UK. There's... Yeah.

Amanda Swift (23:31)
Yes, that's my benchmark for everything now. Amazon in the UK. Because I just would like that

here. I would love to be able to order a bottle of like whiskey or wine or gin or whatever and just have it delivered to my door.

Jessie Ott (23:43)
Yeah, it does make it pretty convenient. It's pretty cool.

Amanda Swift (23:45)
Yeah, I love Amazon Prime.

Jessie Ott (23:48)
So talk to us about your distilling and your methods and what you brought to Swift Distillery from your experiences.

Amanda Swift (23:56)
So we picked up, I want to say the barley and the yeast out of the UK. So we use a traditional two row barley that's grown.

Jessie Ott (24:02)
And that was

done from the very beginning.

Amanda Swift (24:05)
Yeah, done from the very beginning. We did look at American Barley just because I thought, we should try it. just, there was nothing here that I thought compared. And then it was easy enough for us to get it. Now I've recently, because we've had 15 years to kind of go from here to there and.

We have tried an American barley that's a non-GN barley and I really like it. This might be the first time we're going to try distilling with it. We've done some small batches. We're going to do a couple barrels, see what we think if it's a choice going forward. When we started there just wasn't anything else and I love scotch. So I thought why not get the grain that they're using? It's exactly what we need. And we've always used a traditional like M1.

distillation yeast because it's got the profile we're looking for. It's got these really nice kind of fruity and floral notes that balance out the malty and kind of those hay and grassy notes that you get with the grain. And it just works. So we stuck with that. We've used the same yeast all the way through. We've tried other yeasts over the years and just like small little batches, but never something that I thought it was worthy of changing for. And then we have always used

bourbon barrels. started using Four Roses in the very beginning because we liked Four Roses bourbon. When they got bought out you couldn't get their barrels anymore so we switched over to like Woodford Reserve, Old Forrester. We've used Heaven Hill which I think Heaven Hill worked really nicely with our Saltern finish and the like Woodford Reserve Old Forrester go really well with our Olorosa finish so.

We've played with that, but they're all like level four chars. So they're the lighter of the charring for a bourbon barrel. And then the Olorosa casks have always come from the same place. Same with the Salterin casks. Because that's just kind of, once we found them, we were like not giving them up. So we just stuck with it.

Jessie Ott (25:58)
Nice.

That's great. So how did you come to all those decisions? Like why Bourbon Barrels? Why Saturn? Why Ola Rosso?

Amanda Swift (26:10)
Well, bourbon is pretty common finish for scotch. So most scotches start in a bourbon barrel. And it really just kind of rounds out the flavor we were looking for. So you get those kind of like vanilla notes. You get those kind of like peachy stone fruit notes from the bourbon barrels. And the used bourbon barrels, you get some oak, but not too much because we always wanted to create like a lighter, easier drinking product. Whereas I feel like bourbon's got more of that like oak and that bite to it.

Jessie Ott (26:36)
Mm-hmm.

Amanda Swift (26:37)
which isn't

something we wanted to do. And then Olorosa sherry cask, again, are very common in scotch making. I just love an Olorosa finish. And the Saltern came later on. So the Saltern project was probably our second thing we did. And Saltern wine is so beautiful. It's such an interesting thing with those like tropical fruit notes that as soon as we tasted our distillate, we kind of knew that

We wanted to try that, but we had to get something more traditional first because people don't always know what a Saltern is. Once they figure it out, it goes very well. I feel like the European market is going to be more open to that because they've probably been more exposed to French wines than say the American market has. But we spent time in the Saltern region and we went to probably 14 or 15 different wineries to pick out the barrels we wanted. Because we wanted some, yeah.

Jessie Ott (27:27)
cool, that's fun.

Amanda Swift (27:29)
That was very fun. lot of drinking. It was great.

Jessie Ott (27:32)
Yeah.

Amanda Swift (27:33)
Salturn, wanted something that had some of those lemon notes too, or those like candied lemons, and that's the one we chose had those, because I think that rounds out the flavor really well for us. Because everything we do, we want to kind of keep in mind like the balance and the harmony of what we're doing, is like don't want anything to like hit you in the face, stand out too much. We really wanted to kind of do that whiskey for everyone thing that, you know, you could mix it, you could put it in a cocktail, you can have

add some water to it if you need to ice and it would still hold the flavor you're looking for. And I kind of think of ourselves as like the, you know, new, new to the category drinker or honestly like the casual drinker who's just wants to enjoy it isn't interested in like bottle collecting and those kinds of things. We're the drinking whiskey, not the put it on the shelf and forget it exists whiskey.

Jessie Ott (28:25)
Yeah. I have a few of those bottles myself. And if you, if you ask Jimmy, Jimmy Russell, cause I've worked with him and he signed me. was, I spent my 40th birthday with him on a base in Kentucky, but you, he's like, I don't make bourbon so you don't drink it. Do not put this on the shelf and not drink it.

Amanda Swift (28:31)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Jessie Ott (28:44)
That's not why I make it.

Amanda Swift (28:44)
Yeah, I I am personally

offended for the poor bottles that get left on the shelf without being open and drink and shared like I think it's your you're being cruel to your bottles. You should drink them.

I feel that way about

Jessie Ott (28:59)
That's funny.

Amanda Swift (29:00)
everything though. The people who buy and collect stuff, don't understand it because I would want to open it and try it. There's plenty of things that I'm not going to every day because frankly I don't drink every day. But there's nothing I have ever bought that I haven't opened and tried. I was gifted a hundred year old bottle of cognac and I drink it. I think it's stupid not to.

Jessie Ott (29:20)
Right.

Yeah, you should.

Yeah, you should enjoy it.

Amanda Swift (29:28)
I know, and this is one of those silly things, but you never know, you could die tomorrow and you never tried any of it. That just makes them sad.

Jessie Ott (29:35)
Right! You gotta do it.

I'm with you, girl.

Amanda Swift (29:41)
Yeah,

I don't get the collectors, but I mean if it makes them happy they can do them, but like I want to try the bottles so if you invite me over and you have a bunch of unopened bottles, I may open them.

Jessie Ott (29:48)
Right.

I'll be sure to have my wife hide the bottle. She doesn't want you to open. ⁓

Amanda Swift (29:57)
Yeah, hide the good stuff

from me because I will be opening things.

Jessie Ott (30:02)
Well,

I have, I have these unopened bottles from like the seventies of Galeano and, what's that? what's that? makes those triple sec. You got triple sec and I don't know. There's like four or five brands that are just so cool. They're unopened. I got them from my friend. Her, grandma passed away and had, she used to have parties.

Amanda Swift (30:06)
⁓

Mm-hmm.

Yeah

Jessie Ott (30:23)
and

happy hours. And so she's like, do you want them? I'm like, yeah, I'll just collect them in my, I'll just put them in my collection. And so it's, it's got it. We've got a big thing in our dining room. And so we, lights up and so it's got its own little section. The vintage stuff.

Amanda Swift (30:31)
I'm out of here.

Yeah.

All right, I'll give you that. I'll give you that. But it's not the

people that go buy like six bottles of Taylor that they wait in line or they do some lottery for. But it's ⁓

Jessie Ott (30:48)
Yeah. It is kind of crazy

what people do. Yeah.

Amanda Swift (30:52)
There's nothing that's going to possess me to go way to the line for a bottle of liquor.

I'm not good at waiting, so I have to go with that.

Jessie Ott (31:00)
Well, you're on the move. You're a girl on the ⁓ go. Gotta get my steps in. Push-ups. That's awesome.

Amanda Swift (31:02)
Yeah. I would be annoying people in line. I'd be like pacing back and forth, like doing jumping jacks. I'd eventually say, yeah, I'm just going to wall and stuff. Yeah.

My ability to do

push-ups is kind of sad. I can do like seven of them and probably not more than that. But I can walk forever or run forever. But don't make me do too many push-ups. That's not for me.

Jessie Ott (31:24)
Yeah, I don't remember.

I don't think I could do seven. That's, that's a lot.

Amanda Swift (31:27)
But the only reason I know I can

do seven is because my kid challenged me to do it the other day and that's where I fell over.

Jessie Ott (31:32)
I guess I need one of those to challenge me.

Amanda Swift (31:35)
I

know, kids are great for that. They're wonderful for your egos. Like, you know, it's a great boost when they're like, why can't you do more? Yeah.

Jessie Ott (31:41)
That's so funny.

So should we do a quick tasting and then we'll ⁓ talk a little bit about your relationship with Total Wine and all the things. Okay. Which one do we want to try first?

Amanda Swift (31:48)
Yeah.

I have an assault arm right here that is open. I could not find an open Oloroso I'm gonna have to open one. But, why did I just put the glass I had? Clearly I've lost everything today. I can't grab a glass! Why am I even-

Jessie Ott (31:59)
Okay.

This is distilled

on 1-20-20-23. So you hand write this.

Amanda Swift (32:10)
I do.

Jessie Ott (32:11)
That's impressive.

Amanda Swift (32:11)
I'm pretty

sure I put the glass that I was going to drink out of in the dishwasher earlier before you called. Yeah, right in the middle of the dishwasher, so I'm rocking it. Actually, if you can read the handwriting on these, where it's like nice and clear and pretty, it is from the wonderful teachers that are next door to us, not mine.

Jessie Ott (32:17)
⁓ right in the middle of the dishwasher.

I was gonna say that's really good handwriting.

Amanda Swift (32:33)
No, that

is a nice lady named Cindy who has beautiful handwriting. She is a retired teacher for a lot of years and has beautiful handwriting. ⁓ This one is my handwriting, which is a lot worse.

Jessie Ott (32:43)
Yeah.

Hehe.

No, it's good

too,

Amanda Swift (32:50)
No, that's definitely not my handwriting. that's probably Ely or Marcia's. have several, we have a group of retired teachers that are our neighbors help us bottle. That is my handwriting, which is bad.

Jessie Ott (32:51)
⁓ okay.

That's so fun!

It's not bad. I don't have very good penmanship either. My mom had the most beautiful penmanship. Cursive. ⁓

Amanda Swift (33:09)
yeah, I love those people that can write like calligraphy and those kind of things. is always... anybody with pretty handwriting impresses me. Mine is terrible. All right, my favorite sound.

Jessie Ott (33:19)
So,

Amanda Swift (33:23)
We use real cork just because I love the sound. Also real cork is better, but it doesn't make the sound, which I feel like is very important. It's one of those ASMR things where you pull out a cork and everybody gets happy.

Jessie Ott (33:26)
Hahaha!

Yeah.

Yeah, The Rock did the same thing when I launched Teremana in the military. He did a 30 minute segment with all the distributor partners and so he did one with us and he picked that cork because it did the pop.

Amanda Swift (33:51)
It sounds

good. I feel like whiskey you have to drink with all your senses, so you gotta have the pop. Alright.

Jessie Ott (33:53)
It does.

Just on the nose, it's this beautiful bouquet of greatness.

Amanda Swift (34:05)
really enjoy the seltzer and I'm one of those people that really likes to smell my whiskey a whole lot. I don't know. Sometimes instead of using like a Glencairn I will use a wider glass so when I'm like sitting somewhere, it kind of like permeates to me.

Jessie Ott (34:10)
Yeah.

Amanda Swift (34:18)
But yeah, I feel like-

Jessie Ott (34:21)
It's very citrusy on the nose to me. Slight floral.

Amanda Swift (34:23)
That's really...

Yeah, for us, that's something we're really picking out was the citrus notes that come out from a saturn. Because with a saturn, they're almost like candied citrus, like a candied orange peel, kind of like lemon meringue pie thing going on. I'm a good Southern girl, so there was a lot of, I'm gonna say pie in my life.

Jessie Ott (34:45)
Hahaha

Amanda Swift (34:46)
cookie dessert. compare everything to like sweets. But yeah, the floral on this, kind of have those like, I do a lot of gardening and I love springtime flowers like your zinnias, your, you know, there's kind of anything that will attract a butterfly to your garden where they have that just enough floral but it's not like an overpowering. And it's not the same kind of florals you get in gin like

Jessie Ott (34:50)
Mm.

Amanda Swift (35:11)
Gens have those really robust florals, but I like the delicateness of what we get with those.

Jessie Ott (35:12)
Right. Uh-huh. It is delicate.

Yeah, absolutely. I love that you say zinnias. That was my mom's favorite flower.

Amanda Swift (35:20)
I love the way they smell and they're just happy. Like, flowers make, like, I don't know, gardens make me happy and yeah.

Jessie Ott (35:24)
hehe

Agreed. I've been so far been pretty unsuccessful here in Florida, which is a shame.

Amanda Swift (35:31)
You guys have some crazy weather for gardening. Like Texas, I feel like we get a little better seasons.

Jessie Ott (35:36)
Yep, you do. So.

Amanda Swift (35:37)
Okay.

Jessie Ott (35:38)
That is so good. It just makes me happy.

Amanda Swift (35:40)
wouldn't yeah I love this the start time is my favorite because

I like my whiskey usually after dinner so I kind of think of it as like having a dessert and there's something about like the smoothness to it where it's got just enough vanilla that it you know keeps me happy but it doesn't the all arosa has more of those kind of like vanilla notes as a yeah

Jessie Ott (35:59)
Mm-hmm. It does. It's lighter.

I get your meringue reference because it does feel candied. Now that you say that, you kind of get that on the back end, like that kind of that candied texture and flavor that's on the back end of your mouth. ⁓ it's really unique and it's really lovely.

Amanda Swift (36:06)
Yeah, that's like-

Yeah.

French oak, you get more of the stuff like in the back of your palate. So like, you know, when you get tannins and wine where they're done just beautifully, like in a Chablis or something like that, where you really feel it like right there in your jaw. That's what I think of like the meringue-ness where it's like meringue doesn't have a lot of like feel or taste to me on the front of your tongue. It's like, as it goes down, you get all those kind of neat notes.

There's something about like tasting with like the different parts of your tongue. I looked up the senses in this once, but I can't remember all the science behind it. But it's like certain flavors you taste further back and some you taste like more forward. So I kind of like that little sensory experience. And as I don't know if anybody, when you look at our whiskey, everything is like, we don't use any kind of coloring in it.

Jessie Ott (36:51)
Interesting.

It is cool.

Amanda Swift (37:00)
So a Salterne cask you're going to get this kind of yellowy hay notes from the French oak and a Salterne is a light kind of yellowy colored wine. Which is what's... Yeah. I think people often equate light with not having as much flavor but I don't really think that's true.

Jessie Ott (37:07)
Yeah.

Yes, it is definitely light.

That's not in this case anyway, not at all. It's just, it's delicate. It's like a delicate scotch. I mean, it's just, it's a lovely experience. It's not overpowering one way or the other. It's very well balanced. And I love the after the lingering flavors. It's still so complex that I'm getting a lot of still delicious flavors.

Amanda Swift (37:22)
No. I think we...

Yes. ⁓

That's all there is to my resource.

Yeah.

Jessie Ott (37:44)
from that candied, I would call it the candied fruit.

Amanda Swift (37:46)
Yeah,

that's like that candied fruit feel and it's not that it's inherently sweet or anything,

Jessie Ott (37:49)
Yeah.

Amanda Swift (37:53)
Do we want to try the Olorosa too or you just want to stick with her? Alright.

Jessie Ott (37:55)
Yeah, let's do it. Yeah, let's

do it. Let's talk about the differences.

Amanda Swift (37:59)
Let me open this bottle because you would think as a distiller I would have a bunch of open bottles places, but apparently I don't.

Jessie Ott (38:06)
Well, you could just go to the, you just get it from the distillery.

Very, very different on the nose.

Amanda Swift (38:10)
I'm using... Yeah,

and I really did not open this at all.

I'm incapable of opening my own bottle. ⁓ but the best noise again.

Jessie Ott (38:18)
Yes, there it is.

Amanda Swift (38:19)
I know. I love the

pop. Yeah, this one is very different. I think this, I want to say the nose on this, you get some of the similarities because you're still getting what comes out from the bourbon. But this distinctly has rose and I think there's peachy, nectarine nose to it. This one is really tough. Yeah.

Jessie Ott (38:34)
Yeah.

It's definitely more complex.

Amanda Swift (38:44)
And there's no dessert vibes for this.

Jessie Ott (38:44)
And it's, I mean, yeah, you can just tell by the lees. I mean, by the legs and the color. Oops, the legs and the color.

Amanda Swift (38:50)
Yeah.

Yeah, you get a lot.

Jessie Ott (38:54)
How different.

You know?

Amanda Swift (38:56)
Yeah, I think with an oloroso just in general, it's a lot more robust of a wine than you get with a sauternes in the sense of like, you know, how much like viscosity and the rest of it you're going to get from it. But what I really like about

Jessie Ott (39:04)
Yeah.

It smells...

Sore, sorry.

Amanda Swift (39:12)
Oh no, I was going to say this always reminds me of like when I was a kid I had horses and they would come mow the fields, you know, like in the early springtime where all the flowers were growing and all the hay and stuff. And whatever reason this always reminds me of like freshly mowed like spring fields, which is like a weird bit of a style. But it's got this kind of hay, like nose to it, kind of behind the florals and the fruits.

Jessie Ott (39:30)
⁓ that's cool.

Amanda Swift (39:38)
I don't get that with the Saltern and I don't really know what the Olorosa, why it does that or what reminds me of that, but it reminds me of like happy childhood memories.

Jessie Ott (39:41)
Yeah.

So it's happiness in every glass.

Amanda Swift (39:48)
Pretty much. This to me is like my before dinner choice. Like I'm not a big have whiskey with dinner. Like I'll do a cocktail or something, or wine. But I like this before with something salty like popcorn chips or something. I don't know if any of you guys do voodoo chips. Do you guys know what those are? You need to. I love weird pairings.

Jessie Ott (39:50)
You

Yeah.

I've seen them, I've heard of them, but I've never tried them. I guess I need to.

Amanda Swift (40:15)
I do a lot of tastings and stuff and I always bring kind of funny things when I do them for people because what you've had previously and what you're drinking really play well together and voodoo chips and this, that's like my, it's my go-to. Yeah, pretty much.

Jessie Ott (40:30)
Go to snack.

Well, you can tell just obviously, like I said, by the color, but even just smelling, there's more of those heavier candy notes, I would say, whereas it's more floral on the Oloroso side. I mean, on the Sauternes side, it's like light, delicate, floral. And where this is a little bit more like robust, candied fruit.

Amanda Swift (40:42)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Jessie Ott (40:55)
Like

you said, peaches and whatnot.

Amanda Swift (40:57)
Yeah, this to me, like, even though a sulturn I think of as being kind of like a summer thing, this, were just perpetually summer, but this is very much like summery vibe to me. You've got all those kind of like fun things for fruit and all the rest of it.

This one I feel like is smoother too.

Jessie Ott (41:13)
Yeah, it is smoother. It's still, I'm still getting the flavors in the back. And I feel like it's the gift that keeps on giving.

Amanda Swift (41:18)
Yeah.

This one I really like to do this when I taste is that I hold it on my tongue and push my tongue to like the roof of my mouth with like a little bit more whiskey. I wouldn't necessarily like swallow it all down at once, but kind of hold it to the roof of my mouth as it kind of like trickles down and you get, yeah, and it really like gets all your senses going for it because it's, it opens up your palate nicely.

Jessie Ott (41:27)
⁓ huh.

Gets your senses. Yeah.

Amanda Swift (41:43)
I always feel like it would be weird when you do this, but...

Jessie Ott (41:45)
Mm-hmm.

Amanda Swift (41:48)
Tasting alcohol like you do it a lot for the job and then I try to taste you know things as people give them to me or whatever else but I always feel really weird when people are like watching me taste because I'm like am I making I feel like I'm pulling funny faces when I do it It's like sometimes it's like do you like it? No, maybe

Jessie Ott (42:02)
No, you're not. That's all in your head.

This one has all kinds of full character, full on. ⁓ It's got a beautiful finish to it. It's not a hard finish. It's almost delicate in how it just kind of lingers on and you can get those candied notes and flavors. ⁓ Really fun.

Amanda Swift (42:11)
Yeah.

Yeah. This one I thought is more

scotch-y too. Like this one appeals more to like the traditional like scotch drinker a lot of times, whereas the sotern is for somebody who's going to be maybe not so hardcore in their like of scotch, or they're a little more like a wine drinker, maybe more adventurous because the notes are just different. So I kind of like that. That's like a yin and a yang for people.

Jessie Ott (42:47)
Yeah, I think these two are... Yeah, I agree. It's pretty cool. They're delicious, Amanda.

Amanda Swift (42:51)
Yes. I enjoy it. Yeah,

here. I enjoyed cocktail too with the Olorosa finish because it can do a lot of interesting things as a proper Austinite. I love to make margaritas with whiskey. People always look at me like I'm crazy when I do this. Yeah, if I use the Olorosa, you have to use good lime juice. Like you can't, I don't know, you can't do store bought lime juice. you need to, like if you get a key lime, it's the best.

Jessie Ott (42:58)
Yeah.

Really?

Amanda Swift (43:19)
and then using agave syrup and like a pinch of salt in the margarita and keep it simple like and it's really good people always laugh at me when i tell them that but i feel like whiskey is under appreciated in the cocktail kind of thing because

Jessie Ott (43:26)
Mmm.

That sounds good.

Amanda Swift (43:37)
With cocktails, I noticed I kind of want to have some big, bold and in your face flavor. But when you pair them back and you mix them with, I want to say simpler ingredients, you get some really fun flavors out of it. And whiskey's got interesting things. I actually bake with whiskey a lot. Like a tablespoon with your pancakes. instead of the vanilla extract, use whiskey. Yeah. Most really good quality extracts are made with alcohol. You know, like.

Jessie Ott (43:53)
Interesting.

Really?

Amanda Swift (44:02)
I make my own vanilla all the time, but like when you're baking sugar cookies or something like that, add a teaspoon or tablespoon of whiskey. gives it an interesting flavor. You get just very lightly with it.

Jessie Ott (44:11)
Yeah, that's,

I like that idea. I have a book from Jim Beam. Fred Noe was the author of this book and then he's got recipes in the back. And so he had a stuffed mushroom recipe where you put a little bit of bourbon in each of the mushrooms. Makes for a very delicious stuffed mushroom. So you could do that with scotch too.

Amanda Swift (44:21)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I actually use the Sauterne pretty frequently and make like a homemade tomato sauce. I'll buy just like Roma tomatoes, hack them in half, roast them until they're, you know, you can peel the skins off and then shallot like maybe three tablespoons of our salt turn finish in a pan. Just cook off the alcohol just enough to get those shallots really nice and good. Throw in the Roma tomatoes, a little bit of basil and cream and chunk it on pasta like.

Whiskey

is underrated for cooking with or even like marinating chicken, like the things that you would use like tequila for. Because tequila has very similar notes to whiskey often. You know, there's similar-ish, I guess, that, you know, marinating your chicken with it, like a tequila lime chicken and a whiskey lime chicken that go really well.

Jessie Ott (45:11)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, that's true. So yeah, I'm like savoring it. like, I'm not wasting it on my chicken. ⁓ Talk about the differences in aging between Scotland and Texas.

Amanda Swift (45:17)
I have endless bottles of whiskey around, so I do strain things a bit.

Yeah, that's true, but.

So in Texas, we have heat and humidity, which they obviously do not have in Scotland. I think of us as like a rum climate. So Texas, where we are, is hot and humid. And there is no way I'm going to get a 15-year-old whiskey, where I am, because you would have nothing left in that barrel, just like rum. ⁓ And one of the things we do is we do a lot of climate controlling. So we keep our temperature ranges pretty tight for our barrels. So we let...

Jessie Ott (45:52)
Hehehe.

Amanda Swift (46:00)
It cooled down at night to about 65 and during the day it goes up to 75 to 80 depending on the time of year. But it's enough of a temperature swing that you get a really good aging from it. So what I can do in two or three years, it probably takes Scotland 12 years to do. And that comes down to climate. know, tequilas, rums, those kind of things are in very similar climates to us. Even bourbon to some degree.

You know, they get really cold in Kentucky, which we just almost never do and the colder it is the slower your aging goes and the more humid it is the quicker your aging goes So I have a perfect combination and you have to be careful of not letting it get too hot like we in the beginning we played with like varying our temperature ranges a little bit more, but we didn't find that was a like good thing for a barrel aging so

If you keep it tight and you keep it nice and humid, which our environment is great for that, aging goes quickly. So like I can open up a bourbon barrel that sat there for six months and have a really good idea of where it's going. You know, it's like you've, you've probably gotten a good 80 % of the aging out in those first six months. and we take really tight cuts off our stills. So I do not use anything below about 40.

3 % alcohol in the final product. So I don't have a lot of those like fusel oils or those heavy oils that have to age out because I am a younger product and I don't think I have the years to age it without it disappearing. So that makes it easier. Those tight cuts you're only getting the really like the hearts of it, the good stuff. And in places where you have those kind of years to age it out, you can age those out

Most people are surprised when they taste our base distillate of how smooth it is. It doesn't have any kind of funky notes that need to go anywhere. It's very sweet, very malty. And that I think also makes aging for us either because not getting rid of anything that really needs to be gotten rid of. I just throw that out. It wastes money, but I'd rather make a good product than, you know, it's easier to throw out a little bit of alcohol or recycle it back in your process than wait 15 years.

Jessie Ott (48:09)
Right. Unless you just want to experiment with some.

Amanda Swift (48:11)
We have to have sun barrels longer and I don't actually think it always makes it better.

Like it's not improving something. You get to a point and say, okay, it's not really getting better. I hate to say this as I've tried things in different distilleries that, know, for me, there wasn't enough of a difference between one timeframe of aging to say five years later that I thought it was necessary to do that. I feel like people expect things often because they think older is better. They think

darker means more flavor, they think those things. And when you're a giant distillery, you can't overcome that perception. You kind of have to like toe the line, but when you're smaller, you can say, hey, I made this choice because I think it's better. And people who either agree with you or don't, but you you're not on a global stage of having people argue with you that it's not quite as dark as I want it to be. Or why isn't, you know, this 15 years or whatever else, so.

Jessie Ott (49:04)
Right.

Amanda Swift (49:07)
I'm not burdened by those opinions of others that I think a lot of the giant distilleries get burdened by.

Jessie Ott (49:13)
Right. So that's quite a difference. mean, three to four years instead of 12. I mean, that's pretty interesting. And it makes it for someone like you guys starting out being able to sell it a lot sooner instead of waiting 12 years. Like who could wait around a decade?

Amanda Swift (49:29)
Yes.

I

have no idea, because we make absolutely everything we sell. So I have never sourced alcohol. I will never source alcohol. Because that's just not what I believe in doing. If people do it, great. Everybody's got their own business model. But I wanted to do grain to glass, like everything done by us. So that was important.

Jessie Ott (49:51)
Yeah. When it comes to

the climate too, in terms of when you distill, when you put the liquid in barrels, does that matter like per season?

Amanda Swift (50:01)
Yes, so in the dead of summer when it's above 100 degrees in Texas, we don't distill because I cannot keep my chilling equipment cool enough. So we cool all of our like whiskey as we're making it. So we use copper pot stills So in our condensers, we keep the water around 44 degrees.

And in the dead of summer, I cannot do that because the ambient air temperature is just too hot to chill the equipment properly. And, you know, it'll just fry your electrical components. So we don't do stuff in the summer. So usually that like late July through middle of August, we just take the time off and focus on sales and stuff or getting ready for the holidays or whatever else. As far as winter and those kinds of things.

Jessie Ott (50:26)
Yeah.

Amanda Swift (50:45)
the warehouse is climate controlled enough that there's not really a burden when we're doing that. We've had a few days in Texas where it 30 degrees and we were trying to distill and our efficiency was just slightly less, but that's mostly because we were having to use more propane to keep things hotter or heat to the same temperature, but it's minimal. You might have a 1 % loss.

in distilling on those days when it's super cold, but we don't really get those days very often. And if we did, we plan for them, I guess, in the future, but doesn't happen often enough. I've never bothered to have a work around for it. We only need to distill about 40 weeks a year. So we have enough wiggle room in our schedule when we need to like take time off for maintenance or those kinds of things. We just schedule them around the weather. Yeah.

Jessie Ott (51:20)
Right.

around it. Yeah,

that's awesome.

Amanda Swift (51:34)
Yeah, and we're tiny enough if we can always do those kind of things. So if we get an ice storm or it's really hot for too long, you know, we can make that time up later on in the year or earlier in the year.

Jessie Ott (51:43)
Yeah. Do you want to switch over to the sales side and ⁓ talk about your relationship with Total Wine and where you're kind of at today?

Amanda Swift (51:47)
Yeah.

In the beginning, we started out with traditional distribution in Texas only. And then we ended up going with Total Wines Spirits Direct for their national program, just not in Texas. And we did that for nearly 10 years and they were wonderful partners. But we could only sell in Total Wines. So eventually that got hard to build a brand with. And now we're switching to more traditional distribution in more states as we move out, but also kind of balancing what we can do online.

We've partnered with a few different like Reserve Bars, Flaviar, those kind of things for online sales. And that's really working out well because it's easier to target customers. Sales with alcohol in the US are really hard because you could run an ad, but they can't buy it online. So they go into a store and they purchase it. But you don't really know if they just blindly walked into that store or they had an ad. And that is really hard.

Jessie Ott (52:40)
Right.

Amanda Swift (52:44)
to do, and especially when you're small, because it's like you're having to balance these marketing budgets with is it effective? And when we were Total Wine Spirits Direct, it was really easy to know it was effective because they could only go to one place and get it. But as you kind of leave that model, it gets harder and harder of, know, did your in-store demonstration really work just because people walked in the store? Did they see your ad? Did they get your social media posts, those kind of things?

Jessie Ott (52:51)
Mm-hmm.

Amanda Swift (53:10)
we have an Australian Shepherd who's crazy. The dog that you're seeing

Jessie Ott (53:15)
my gosh. So cute. What's his name?

Amanda Swift (53:16)
Yeah. Yeah.

Her name's Lily and she is eight months old and completely crazy. Yeah.

Jessie Ott (53:19)
her.

⁓ yeah, eight months,

yeah. Hi, Lily.

Amanda Swift (53:26)
Can you say hi? she's hearing you.

Jessie Ott (53:28)
Hi Lily.

Hi. Hello. Hi. She's like, how are you there? And how am I hearing you? You're a pretty girl.

Amanda Swift (53:32)
Yeah.

Bye now.

You know,

And now I'm  being attacked. Oh, she's a complete lover. If you've never had a Australian Shepherd, they're like the best cuddle partners ever. Except they don't listen.

Jessie Ott (53:45)
She's a, she's a lover.

Amanda Swift (53:54)
Alright, back to sales. I think that I'm really most excited for the UK because they don't necessarily have distributors or salespeople or marketing people, whoever can walk into a store and sell it. And that is so much easier than here because you have this accountability, this traceability.

Jessie Ott (53:55)
Okay.

Amanda Swift (54:17)
that just doesn't exist here. I'm sure everyone in the alcohol industry in the US knows how frustrating it is because I'm in Texas where we have a four tiered system. So bars and restaurants buy from what's called class B, which are basically from the retail locations. And there's times where it's like I could send my salespeople out and they could go to bars and restaurants and I will not know if that bar or restaurant actually picked it up unless I

Jessie Ott (54:27)
Mm-hmm.

Amanda Swift (54:43)
physically see it there, like there's tracking software and stuff, but they don't always update quickly. And it's difficult to overcome that because I don't have a budget for probably what Diageo has, you know, where they can spend millions of dollars tracking that stuff. And I think that's probably the most frustrating part of doing sales here. And then other times you, you don't always have a clue.

Jessie Ott (54:54)
Right.

Amanda Swift (55:04)
Yeah, so that I think is probably the hardest part with sales here is you don't always get that accountability or control with stuff. And it's frustrating. It's like, you know, did what I do actually work? And it's not like another CPG product where, you know, there's online sales where they can see like, oh, I ran this ad, my sales went up by 20%. You know, it's...

trackable in a lot of ways. With alcohol I feel like you're missing that traceability and it's a challenge to make good choices with that. So I'm really looking forward to the UK.

Jessie Ott (55:36)
Yeah, me too. Me too. We got good partners over there.

Amanda Swift (55:40)
Because

Amazon metrics are magical because you can see that you ran $500 worth of ads and then you made $1,000 worth of sales or something and it's like everything can kind of match up, which is nice.

Jessie Ott (55:46)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, there's some sick metrics. You're right. It's pretty cool.

Amanda Swift (55:59)
Yeah, and I feel like everybody in our industry has the same kind of complaint is that it's just hard to track what works and what doesn't sometimes here because there's lags in everything. It's not, you know, it's not the same as other products.

Jessie Ott (56:16)
Yeah. No, agreed. Agreed, agreed. So let's switch over and is there anything else about the brand that you want to say or like where you said you're on Flaviar? Is there other places people can buy online?

Amanda Swift (56:17)
That's kind of my...

Yeah,

they can go direct to our website and we can ship to I think 42 states. We can't do most of the control states and then no Alaska and no Hawaii yet, but maybe soon.

Jessie Ott (56:34)
Okay.

Okay. Awesome.

Amanda Swift (56:41)
Probably all in

shipping costs.

Jessie Ott (56:43)
And what's your website?

Amanda Swift (56:44)
SWIFTdistillery.com

Jessie Ott (56:47)
And what is the

bottle cost? What does it cost to consumer?

Amanda Swift (56:50)
I believe it's $64.99 right now. then Reserve Bar is the other one that sells this. I don't think we're on a right now. from Reserve Bar, they often have free shipping. I think it's $72.99 from them. both, the bottles are the same cost.

Jessie Ott (56:53)
Okay.

Amanda Swift (57:06)
for either the Sauternes or all the Oloroso

Jessie Ott (57:06)
Gotcha. Yeah.

Gotcha. So let's switch over to mentors and resources. Is there anybody that you want to mention that's kind of helped you throughout your career or in learning about this industry?

Amanda Swift (57:20)
Yeah,

you know, we've had a really good relationship with people that own Pernod Ricard and a lot of the different distilleries that they own. And we spent time with varying like cognac facilities and then we spent time at Nikka. And really everybody in our industry is friendly and we've had mostly good relationships with like different distributors or people we've met. I like that about our industry. There's

I'm sure there's people that are difficult, but I haven't come across that many of them. Maybe it's because in the end it's the hospitality industry and people are just friendly. I often think if I need a name of an attorney to help me do a contract or if I need something from one of the yeast manufacturers, really, I think the industry is just friendly, which is nice. I've rarely come across anybody that I think is difficult.

Jessie Ott (57:55)
Yeah.

It is nice.

Amanda Swift (58:12)
Sometimes people are difficult to get a hold of, it's just because they're busy. ⁓ You know, I want to say, I don't know if there's anybody like that really stands out amongst anyone else. It's just truthfully, probably every time I've turned around and asked a question to just about anybody, I can generally filter through my network of people and someone will find somebody that will speak to me and answer it. And I always try to give that back to people too. It's like, if anybody comes to me and wants something.

Jessie Ott (58:16)
Right.

Amanda Swift (58:38)
I'm more than happy to help in any way I can. So would say as an industry as a whole, people are great.

Jessie Ott (58:46)
Yeah, I agree. I mean, there are people that rip people off, but they're everywhere, you know? But you're right. Once you get into your network and the people that you trust, you're good. Yeah.

Amanda Swift (58:47)
Irony.

Yeah

Yeah.

That's probably my favorite part of this industry is like whether it's other distilleries or salespeople or different marketing and PR firms. Most people are just nice and helpful, which I don't think that's the case in a lot of other industries. I have a lot of friends that are lawyers or in tech or even like medical, you know, doctors and stuff. And maybe it's because alcohol is somewhat fun, you know, it's it's not serious at the end of the day.

Jessie Ott (59:09)
Yes, they are.

Yeah. It's a leisure activity. Yeah.

Amanda Swift (59:26)
Yeah, and

we're not doctors saving lives. We're people drinking and having a good time. That maybe you just attract good people. But yeah, I really do feel like everyone we have met from people at distilleries, salespeople, like higher executives at companies, people from the big distributors to the small distributors, they're just generally nice people.

Jessie Ott (59:36)
To be.

Yeah. What about any? Yeah, I don't either. That's a common thing that we talk about here on the podcast. People have really good experiences with people in the industry. ⁓ Any resources that you want to share?

Amanda Swift (59:50)
which I don't think that happens in industries.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, not really exactly. I think in all the years we've been doing this, probably some of the more helpful people are the people I've met that have been sales and brand reps for other companies where they've bounced around and just have a lot of interesting knowledge. I enjoy learning, so it's probably the kind of oddball people I've met over the years where it's like I was at a distributor and I happen to sit next to a brand rep.

for sake and we had a really fun, crazy conversation of how we taste and how we experience things. I don't know if I have anything that really stands out amongst anything else, but I've been really lucky that I've met a lot of interesting people doing this.

Jessie Ott (1:00:37)
Hehehe.

That's awesome.

What about a situation that you want to share with the listeners about a problem that you've overcome?

Amanda Swift (1:00:57)
make this just a little bit more generic, but like in business, I feel most people think that whatever is occurring that is a problem is catastrophic. Like I feel like I have this conversation with lots of different people because I'm usually the calm one. So people call me when the world is collapsing on them. and I always tell people like the only way to really succeed at something is just keep

going forward, right? That we've had distribution end, you know, catastrophically badly. We've had, you know, we blew up a pump and shot alcohol and more all over a ceiling. You know, we've had tanks leak, we've had pipes break and freezes and all the rest of it. And that's just part of running a business. You've had relationships that just didn't work out. You've had

salespeople just, you know, call you a bourbon and pitch you horribly badly. But there's really nothing that I think warrants losing your patience over. I, that's one of those, I kind of am Zen mastery on those things is that just keep walking in the direction you think you should be going. And if life kicks you in the ass and shoves you in some direction, walk that way and see if it works. Like,

don't get bent out of shape out of the stuff. Everything is going to fall apart and most things you could probably put back together. And when it all falls apart, you'll learn something from it. You pick yourself off the floor. You keep going. Don't panic. Don't freak out. Like, just move forward. I think that's true with anything, whether you get like a medical diagnosis is difficult. Your kid is having a problem. You're really sick. Your business is behind on paying something like worrying over it.

is not going to do anything. Like, start walking in a direction and accept the fact that you might fail miserably that day, but the next day will get better and the day after that will get better and you'll get there. It's the quitting or radically like shifting positions. I think everything with the alcohol business takes at least 18 months to kind of cycle through.

Jessie Ott (1:02:40)
Nope.

Amanda Swift (1:03:04)
When you start a new sales relationship, you're going to spend six months where it feels like you have done nothing. No sales have gone through. I think that's completely normal. Then that trajectory curves up quickly when it starts to work, but it's like setting good foundations because most people don't do that.

Jessie Ott (1:03:21)
Yeah, I agree.

Amanda Swift (1:03:22)
And I think

the thing I have learned the most from, I want to say like failed relationships and things is get to know the person beforehand. Because if you cannot have dinner with them and consider them a friend, you know, you cannot call them at your worst and say, I'm desperate. I need help. Please help me. And not, know, and if you think there's any chance those people are going to blow you off, don't get in a relationship with them.

Like, you have to, I wanna say they're almost like marriages. I learned early on, we picked people because they were quote unquote, good at what they did, but we just didn't get along personality wise. And it's like you were trying to make a sinking ship work. And I'm not gonna work with anyone that I can't consider a friend.

Jessie Ott (1:03:51)
Good advice.

Yeah?

Amanda Swift (1:04:15)
You know, and I would like to think that everybody I work with knows like if they're in a bind and like even if their day is just shit not anyhow related to work and they just need somebody to talk to that I would be there for them. Like. Because I think that's how business relationships should be. They're personal like. Yeah.

Jessie Ott (1:04:30)
They are. And

they're building your brand. It's your baby. You're trusting this in their hands.

Amanda Swift (1:04:35)
Yeah, and I can.

I consider the people we work with as extensions of us. You have to let them go do what they're good at. And I think that's probably, when I was a scientist, you control every aspect of an experiment except one thing, and that you change one step at a time. Whereas business, sometimes you have to change 50 things at a time. And that mentality was really hard for me. I think that was my biggest struggle at the beginning, is that, you know, business,

Jessie Ott (1:04:44)
Yeah.

Amanda Swift (1:05:07)
isn't a science experiment, you can't change one thing at a time and hope for the best. You have to sometimes change 50. And that was a struggle for me to kind of get to. But I looked at it as you were creating 50 simultaneous hypothesis and you were just doing it all at once. And throw the scientific method out like you're sometimes going on vibes.

Jessie Ott (1:05:22)
Yeah.

Right. No, that's true. That's true. I mean, you can only control so much.

Amanda Swift (1:05:29)
Yeah.

Yeah, I think once I learned to let that go where it's like sometimes you just feel it like you just kind of know like you meet somebody and think I don't really know where this is going to go, but I really like this person and let's take this journey together. I like Simon was that way for me. Back to Simon from the beginning as I as soon as we spoke on the phone, I was like, I feel him like we've got some something going. I just like him.

Jessie Ott (1:05:57)
I know.

I do too.

Amanda Swift (1:05:58)
You were the

same way too. was like we talked about something completely different. I think when we were initially going to set this conversation up when we first met, because I thought we were getting military stuff and it was like, nope, I'm hooking you in. We're going somewhere together.

Jessie Ott (1:06:06)
Military

Yeah. Well, do you want to talk a little bit about your experience with us?

Amanda Swift (1:06:16)
Yeah, you know, I just from what I was saying, though, it's like once I met you guys, I got just a really good like, you guys are interesting. What you're doing is interesting. And you and Bob are really nice people. Like, I feel like you have good ideas. You've got kind of fresh ideas, but you've got a lot of industry experience to back that up. And it seems like you're brave enough to go on a journey that's different from what

kind of the other people are doing. You you guys seem to have stuff with duty free. You've got stuff in South America. You got stuff in the UK. I think as we expand out, you know, I think it's fun to take that journey with somebody that you're building, you're learning, you're doing something with somebody else. And you've got foundations. We all have those foundations that have got us to where we are, but we're in that like exploratory phase. And I love people like that, that are willing to like,

jump off a cliff with me and say, hey, let's go try this. And yeah.

Jessie Ott (1:07:13)
And we're looking

for that exactly in you, right? Because it's hard for people to, investing in a new country is completely different than trying to invest in a state. It's not different that you got to build it up, but you do have to take the chance.

Amanda Swift (1:07:16)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, I was going to say I like the bravery in that. That's something I greatly admire. You guys are very hungry for it, but at the same time you have foundations of you've made stuff work and you're new and I think it's like you're hungry for something new and I like that.

Jessie Ott (1:07:45)
Yeah, we are. We love it.

Amanda Swift (1:07:47)
and you're

easy to work with, which is a big plus for me.

Jessie Ott (1:07:51)
Yeah, well, I appreciate that. Thank you. And then we've got the marketing team and we've got.

Amanda Swift (1:07:53)
Yeah.

yeah,

having Sarah are great. I adore both of them. I'm hoping that in the near future that we can actually like sit down together somewhere. And I think that's one part that's strange in this world of Zoom and videos is that you see people, but you don't really get to like, you know, get a little drunk, have some appetizers and you know, people watching something crazy stories.

Jessie Ott (1:08:01)
Yeah.

I know.

I know.

Exactly. Or have,

what are those chips called? Zippos? Zippos and Voodoo chips in a little rosa. I mean, I mean the Sauternes finish. That's funny.

Amanda Swift (1:08:25)
booty chips. Yeah.

Yeah, we got to know Voodoo chips

can go with anything. We eat, a lot of theirs in my life. If you're not, those are probably like a very Cajun thing. Zaps is the name of the chip brand. And I believe they're from New Orleans. They're definitely a Louisiana company, but I believe they're from New Orleans, but Voodoo chips are very like necessary to eat. Please sponsor Voodoo chips.

Jessie Ott (1:08:36)
That's funny.

Cool.

It definitely sounds

like it's from New Orleans being that it's called Voodoo.

Amanda Swift (1:08:55)
Yes. They're

delicious. Yeah. For me, business is really about that personal touch to things. And I like that with you guys. I feel like I can trust you to say like, hey, you go tell my story. You guys know me well enough. You can kind of make it from your own voice because that's when it works the best. If you're telling something out of your own voice that kind of mimics or, you know, has the feel of the brand.

Jessie Ott (1:09:02)
Yeah.

Amanda Swift (1:09:18)
That and I like working with women.

Jessie Ott (1:09:21)
Likewise.

Yeah. Yeah.

Amanda Swift (1:09:23)
I, I,

one of those things is really important to me. And I think this became more important as a parent is that the world is hard, right? You know, there's a lot of shit that goes on, but I want to see the world be better. Like I want people to have more representation because it doesn't seem fair that it is the straight white guy and every whiskey advertisement or every Disney princess probably looks like me.

And that shouldn't be the way it is. Like, I want to see more minorities. I want to see more queer people. I want to see more representation in this world. Because we're interesting because we're different. Like, everything shouldn't be whitewashed and the same. And God knows women should go the world because we are so much better at doing things.

Jessie Ott (1:09:51)
Right?

Right, agreed.

So much better. Well, you know, there's a science in this. the way that women's brain works is, okay, let me start with men. Cause I had a, I used to have a Lean In group and I had these ladies from the brains, The Center of Brain Health from Dallas in to do like a training and talk about brain health. You should be walking around.

Amanda Swift (1:10:25)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Jessie Ott (1:10:30)
eight or 10 times a day for five minutes, give your brain a break because you'll lose your memory. That's like one little trick. And then another, so they said that men's brains actually function front to back, back to front, and then side to side. But women are like, all directions. it's just, they can handle all of it. And men, if this gets off course, they just can't handle it. You know?

Amanda Swift (1:10:33)
and then.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

yeah.

Yeah.

Jessie Ott (1:10:55)
So it's scientific. We should definitely have more women leaders. We were really close to the president.

Amanda Swift (1:10:57)
I agree.

I know. We just, yeah, sometimes this country makes me a little sad with what I see with politics and then sometimes it makes me irate me angry. Because

Jessie Ott (1:11:08)
Yeah, we're going

backwards. We're not going forwards. We just continue to turn back time.

Amanda Swift (1:11:11)
and

I feel like we're living in a world where everything is like fear marketing. I feel when you're looking at like even, you know, like Lay's potato chips or whoever is marketing something at you, they're trying to make you afraid of something, which seems very weird to me. Like every time you look on Instagram, it's very much like...

Jessie Ott (1:11:31)
Interesting.

Amanda Swift (1:11:34)
You're going to die from something. This has some chemical that might kill you in a rat study that was done, you know, with five rats and the toxicity level that they gave the rats was like their entire body weight of one chemical. it's like, you know, water can kill you too if you have too much of it. It's called drowning. ⁓ And I don't like to see that. I feel like everything is very negative with stuff. And no matter what side

Jessie Ott (1:11:37)
Hehehehehe

Right.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Amanda Swift (1:12:02)
anybody lies on, it doesn't have to be fear-based. Like, we have to start making decisions based on reasonable, rational conversations with science and sociologists and economists and people who are experts in their field helping, not political organizations that have fear-mongered you into something. And it's sad because we could make

Jessie Ott (1:12:23)
I know, it's sad.

very sad.

Amanda Swift (1:12:27)
changes. America is big enough, we're strong enough, we have enough people who are brilliant enough to make good changes, but we don't. And I hate to see it.

Jessie Ott (1:12:36)
I know.

I know. It sucks. It really does. I feel like I don't know what the future looks like. let's say goodbye. Thank you for coming.

Amanda Swift (1:12:39)
Yeah.

Yeah, we'll say goodbye. Thank you for having me. Bye.