A Distillery in Lubbock?

When we tell people we’re building a distillery in Lubbock, the responses—and the expressions that flash across their faces—are remarkably varied. The questions may wander through equipment, whiskey, timing, investment, and business plans, but they usually converge on two:

Why a whiskey distillery?

And:

Why West Texas?

We’ll save the first question for another day. The simple answer to the second is this:

West Texas is home.

Jennifer and I both lived in Midland from elementary school through high school. We cheered ourselves hoarse beneath the blinding glare of the real-life Friday night lights. My Scout troop served bowls of piping-hot, spicy menudo to visitors at the boat show in the Midland Expo Center. Jennifer glowed beneath stadium lights as her drill team danced with precision and drama to thrill the crowd.

We met during those high school years, though we didn’t date then. Our enormous and slightly ridiculous homecoming mums were exchanged with other people. Still, we grew up together in the same place, shaped by the same landscape and the same West Texas culture.

We both attended Texas Tech in the early 1990s. I remember filling luminarios for the Carol of Lights while satellite television beamed the sights and sounds of the Berlin Wall coming down. Somewhere in those college years, Jennifer and I found one another again and began dating.

It was not an entirely smooth road. Ours was a rocky, on-again, off-again affair. Thankfully, when we pulled the final petal from the daisy around the time we graduated, one we pulled was “on again”.

After we married, our professions carried us to the Dallas–Fort Worth area, where we spent the next thirty-odd years. Our parents remained in Midland and Lubbock, so our children came to know their extended family at the end of the long, mostly straight, heat-shimmering ribbons of asphalt stretching west from Dallas.

Over time, Jennifer and I began to notice something.

Somewhere around Abilene, the sky opens. The land flattens. The horizon pulls away from you. And with it comes an almost audible creak as the tension wound around your shoulders and scalp begins to release.

DFW is unquestionably part of the great state of Texas. The boundary between West Texas and the rest of the state is insubstantial, invisible, and perhaps partly philosophical.

But it is there.

And we could feel it.

North Texas was good to us. It gave us family and friends, successes and failures, smiles and tears. Our children were born there, and they have grown into remarkable people. Each is now pursuing a doctorate at a university in another state, building a career, a family, and a story of their own.

Their departure gave us an empty nest and, with it, a new kind of freedom. One unexpected lesson of the COVID pandemic was that our current careers could be pursued remotely. We realized we no longer had to remain tied to a particular city.

So we chose to move closer—to be present for our parents and extended family should they need us, and to return to the part of Texas that had never really stopped feeling like home.

We have not returned empty-handed.

We have brought with us everything the intervening years taught us: professional experience, patience, resilience, and a greater appreciation for the communities that shaped us. We have also brought home our knowledge of whiskey, our enthusiasm for the craft, and our passion for sharing it with others.

Copper Widow is our opportunity to place all of that into a bottle today. One day we may have a tasting room, and a gathering place.

We have brought our love of whiskey home.

And we look forward to sharing it with West Texas.