Les Beasley stands behind a slab of polished wood resting atop three evenly spaced barrels — a mock-up tasting counter — inside his unfinished, 60,000-square-foot warehouse in Muenster.
He’s a master distiller and founder of the award-winning Valley View-based Whiskey Hollow craft distillery that expanded to this warehouse in 2018 after a successful four years in an old bank building.
Beasley likes to say he’s “half Texan, half Missouri hillbilly.” He’s also part mechanic, engineer and scientist, and he’s always had moonshine on his mind.
In the 1970s, he drove a muscle car designed for bootlegging that ran quietly above 120 mph, took corners at high speeds and was fitted with interior roll bars. In 1981, he built his first legal still as a thesis project for his master’s degree in applied sciences and technology.
“Pick up your glass to take the smell in, OK?” he tells a Dallas Morning News reporter and photographer, raising a shot of Whiskey Hollow bourbon to his nose. “Now your senses are alive. … If you understand bourbon, you start saying, ‘This is the guy’s life experiences to get it to this stage.’”
Beasley lives by an old moonshiner’s creed, which to him means he earned his stripes by building his own still, creating his own recipes and only assuming the title “master distiller’' when another master bestowed it on him. To get this far was a dream come true.
But this tasting session is one of Beasley’s last runs producing spirits with the stills he built. In March, he filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy — one of many commercial business failures in a year that’s seen an 18% surge in filings. Beasley’s limited liability corporation listed assets and liabilities that both totaled between $1 million and $10 million.
As a result, Whiskey Hollow, and all of its property, are for sale — victims of an unforgiving business in an uncertain time.
Owing thousands to investors, contractors and the county, Beasley estimates he could lose up to two-thirds of his life savings as he hands off his dream to a buyer and begins his retirement.
A dream almost becomes reality
The warehouse in Muenster, about 90 miles northwest of downtown Dallas off Interstate 35, is a skeleton of the vibrant Whiskey Hollow expansion that Beasley dreamt up. Yet it brims with his personality and ambition.
Its facade, built with stone he selected from quarries near Austin and San Antonio, unmistakably represents the Alamo. Laser-cut Texas soldiers outlined on the doors reflect a love for the state and its history.
Behind the makeshift bar is a shiny, three-tiered black shelf that memorializes every Medal of Honor recipient since 1860, the engraved names lit from behind with a green glow.
To the left are the bones of an event space and stage for weddings and concerts. A special-ordered pizza oven anchors the beginnings of a kitchen and restaurant. To the right is an open space for a country store.
Beasley designed and welded the towering 38-foot copper column still that sits in the center of the warehouse. He can name what side of which hill the boards came from for every white oak barrel that lines the lofted area beside it.
Inside those barrels, it’s the Texas Gold bourbon that perhaps reveals the most about Beasley. For him, it’s what unites the community, culture and history he hoped to celebrate in this space.
It’s his bucket-list item.
Texas Gold
The lanky and easygoing 67-year-old insists you can get to know any whiskey and the distiller behind it in four sips.
“OK, the first sip,” he said. “You’re going to get a real intense burn, but it’s … gonna leave real quick.”
Some whiskeys feel like a drop of Tabasco on your tongue. A burn that lingers contains some of the nasty chemical compounds that boil off first in the distillation process — the methanols and aldehydes that distillers call the “heads.” Beasley throws away around $1,500 of whiskey at the start of each run in order to discard the heads and get to the “heart” — the good stuff.
“The second sip is about flavor,” he said. “A very well-made bourbon is going to be extremely complex in flavor.”
It’s also about the burn as it travels down your esophagus. Some whiskeys will burn all the way down to your stomach. Rot gut whiskey, Beasley calls it.
“A quality bourbon will warm your soul,” he said. The burn travels to your chest and then branches off sideways.
The third sip is about savoring your environment, maybe with your friends or before bed, “the top of your shoulders just nice and warm and relaxed,” he said.
These steps are the warm-up for the fourth sip.
“I’m going to explode your mouth with flavor on this … You’re going to get the boldness of the bourbon.”
Beasley’s $150-a-bottle Texas Gold bourbon is bold enough to have won awards in national and international competitions and be sought after by local hotels, restaurants and distribution companies.
To Beasley, it also was bold enough to have built the sprawling warehouse in 2018, along with a still with enough capacity for national distribution, cranking out about 100 gallons of whiskey, moonshine, rum or vodka in an hour.
He’s quick to do the mental math, breaking down each barrel into bottles and bottles into shots for cocktails. “One million dollars worth of bourbon in one day’s time,” he said.
Since he first had the idea of opening a distillery in Valley View in 2014, Beasley has been entirely devoted to this venture. Hoping to leave a legacy for his family and community, he worked 100-hour weeks and only took two vacation days in the last nine years.
The $150 bottles of award-winning bourbon, market demand and stills that can produce hundreds of gallons of liquor a day seem like ingredients for a thriving business. But the warehouse stands mostly empty and Beasley’s future is uncertain.
A gamble
Opening a craft distillery in a town of fewer than 800 residents a year after Cooke County went wet in 2013 seemed like a long shot to Beasley.
Valley View is the type of small town with a church on every corner and a square that had seen better days. Building after building had been vacated, with only a few businesses hanging on. Beasley took a chance at City Hall.
To his surprise, Valley View’s city manager at the time, Mary Hakze, approved. As far as the city was concerned, Beasley could start his business in any building on the square.
He struck a deal with the owners of the old First National Bank building. He would clean up the dilapidated bank and build his still, which would take about a year, and in return he would pay only $1,000 a month in rent.
Beasley also made a deal with his wife, Kristi, that he would build the distillery debt-free. He worked other full-time jobs as a state-certified building inspector, doing construction on the side and maintaining the machinery for his wife’s embroidery business. He used the money he earned to buy materials he needed for his still, piece by piece.
He was ecstatic, and he would lose track of time welding and preparing the space. He said his wife would frequently call at 2 or 3 a.m. to remind him to come home. It didn’t matter to him that he was welding copper, one of the most difficult materials, all by himself at 58 while wearing bifocals. He kept going.
Whiskey is risky
It’s not easy to open a small craft distillery as an entrepreneur.
“Distilling is a big chemical process,” said Adam Rogers, author of Proof: The Science of Booze. “It’s hard to do, it takes a lot of systems.”
Those systems take time and money to set up, which can pose a challenge for bourbon makers.
“There are a lot of costs at the beginning that you don’t get to make money off of for years,” Rogers said. “What comes out of the still, the clear spirit … is what goes into the barrel and sits for 18 months, two years, six years, eight years, 15 years, and then comes out brown and bourbon at the end of that.”
In some cases, bourbon makers will produce other spirits that don’t require aging, like moonshines and vodkas, while they get the business up and running.
But producing spirits is just the first challenge. Distilleries must navigate a three-tier distribution system. A distiller (tier one) must partner with a distributor (tier two) in order to sell their products to a retailer (tier three).
Once a distributor takes on a brand, success depends on how much product consumers buy off retail shelves, where distilleries face a lot of competition.
Texas is undergoing a “whiskey boom.” In 2008, there were just eight distilleries in the state. That number jumped to 190 in 2022, generating about $2 billion in revenue, according to The University of Texas at San Antonio Institute for Economic Development. Nationally, there are more than 2,200.
“If you’re a small distiller, it’s really hard to break into even the regional market, and also to support yourself while you’re getting spun up,” Rogers said.
Whiskey Hollow opens
As Whiskey Hollow’s grand opening approached, Beasley was terrified. He started with a soft launch in June 2015, opening for business on Fridays and Saturdays selling moonshine and other clear liquors that don’t require aging. This was partly a business strategy, but also motivated by worry.
He had four barrels of bourbon in the back, aged and ready to go, but he was too afraid to let anyone taste it, not even his family. Bourbon is the pinnacle of a distiller’s career, Beasley explained. The stakes were high.
One night a guest came in and “started asking pointed questions,” Beasley said. The guest asked if Beasley had any bourbon. Beasley figured the man was a reporter, gave it a thought and let him try the bourbon under one condition.
“If you will give me the God’s honest truth on whether I should keep that plugged up or not.”
The guest agreed to the honesty pledge. When the man took a sip, Beasley thought he was having a seizure.
“He closes his eyes and swishes it around in his mouth. … He puts his hand sort of like he has a knife and starts going up and down with it, faster. ... He starts leaning over. Then all of a sudden he stopped.”
“He takes his little finger and starts lookin’ at me and shaking it, and he said, ‘Les, you’d be one dumb yada yada yada if you sold anything out of that barrel for less than three figures a bottle.’”
Beasley was shocked. He thought anyone would be crazy to spend more than $50 on whiskey. He planned to charge $49.
In the following weeks, he let more visitors sample his bourbon and asked them to put a sticker on the barrel if they thought it would be worth $150 a bottle.
By Whiskey Hollow’s grand opening on Dec. 11, 2015, the barrel was covered with stickers and people filled the lobby and lined up down the sidewalk to buy some. Beasley said he sold about $16,000 worth of bourbon in the first four hours.
Momentum builds
A few weeks after the grand opening, Beasley met Tom Donovan, retired senior vice president of Moët Hennessey. Donovan had been involved in bringing Maker’s Mark whiskey to Texas.
Beasley knew how to make liquor, but the world of marketing and sales was foreign to him. Whiskey Hollow was a family business — he made the liquor and his wife managed the money. He didn’t have professional label designs or distributors to connect his whiskey to retailers.
Donovan thought Beasley had a good product and could be successful with his small distillery. It was only a few miles off I-35 and billboards could draw people traveling between Dallas-Fort Worth and Oklahoma.
“A lot of people have never seen a little distillery,” Donovan said. “He had a good deal.”
Donovan offered to mentor Beasley and connected him with people who could help put Whiskey Hollow on the map — creating merchandising and getting Whiskey Hollow liquor onto the shelves of local retailers and hotels.
In the following years, Beasley was invited to competitions. His Texas Gold bourbon won best in class at contests in New York and San Francisco and a bronze medal at the Berlin International Spirits Competition.
In 2016, the Gaylord Texan resort in Grapevine bought Beasley’s first barrel of whiskey for $35,000. In 2017, Gaylord Texan named Whiskey Hollow the best Texas-made bourbon.
With his burgeoning success, Beasley set his sights on expansion. He didn’t have the facilities in Valley View to meet increasing demand from hotels and distribution companies.
In 2018, Beasley and his wife bought an empty plot of land in nearby Muenster and planned a 60,000-square-foot warehouse with a bigger still, tasting room, event venue, restaurant and country store. Beasley wanted Whiskey Hollow to become a family-friendly North Texas destination.
He secured a $1.5 million construction loan, a $250,000 line of credit and contributed about $4.5 million of his own money and inventory toward the new facility. But he needed about $3 million more to get the building up and running. It was time to bring on investors.
He teamed up with a lawyer, created JBM Specialties LLC and began looking for investors. This process had complications, Beasley said, and cost more than expected in legal fees. That led to construction delays.
But by late 2019, the building was up and $300,000 was in the bank to finish the tasting room for a soft opening.
The pandemic hits
When Cooke County, and then the state, shut down all nonessential businesses in March 2020, the Muenster location was still not open to customers. Beasley expected the shutdown to last two weeks. But then another two weeks and another were announced.
Whiskey Hollow was making no profit, but Beasley was still paying around 12 employees to stand by. In the meantime, he continued working on the Muenster distillery.
One morning, early in the shutdown, Beasley’s phone pinged at 4 a.m. and his wife picked it up. It was an email from the federal government asking distilleries to help produce ethanol-based hand sanitizers.
“We’re not making any more alcohol,” he told his wife.
The next morning he looked up the World Health Organization formula for effective hand sanitizer. He called his contacts and ordered tractor-trailers of supplies, drawing from the $300,000 budget he had allocated to finish the tasting room.
By the end of June 2020, Whiskey Hollow had distributed about $1.2 million worth of hand sanitizer, Beasley said.
It was one thread of hope to keep the nascent business running through the shutdown, but it was short-lived. When big companies like Purell recovered from shortages, his profits plummeted.
“Even though we made sales at $1.2 million, the cost of inventory and everything else, we lost about $600,000,” Beasley said.
He stopped producing hand sanitizer but was saddled with supplies that still fill up much of his warehouse — a tractor-trailer load of kosher, food-grade glycerin, 86,000 hydrogen peroxide bottles and 150,000 16-ounce bottles. He was in trouble.
The pandemic-altered months dragged on. Traffic to the Valley View location was at a trickle, and the business he was allowed to conduct selling bottles and cocktails outside the storefront wasn’t bringing in enough profit.
By January 2021, Beasley ran out of money to pay his employees and himself.
The search for a lifeline
As pandemic restrictions continued to lift, Beasley saw a way back. He had stored inventory and had around 150 customers who wanted to buy Whiskey Hollow spirits, including big brands like Marriott, Hilton and Royal Caribbean cruise line. With no money, he was stuck.
“We had the demand, but didn’t have the bottling line in place, the budget was gone to bottle it up and give it to them, and I lost all my employees.”
Beasley tried to apply for a $3.5 million emergency loan from the federal government. He spent close to $90,000 just to do the paperwork for it — the government wanted a third-party feasibility study and appraisals. He had to hire attorneys.
A year and a half later, the loan came through but with a hitch. It required the signatures of Beasley and one of his investors to guarantee repayment of the loan. Beasley only had small investors.
“If you invested $50,000 in this company, would you put your signature on a note guaranteeing a $3.5 million loan?” Beasley said. “I’m stuck. They would laugh me out of the deal.”
No other bank would loan money to Beasley because loans were based on having operating income. Whiskey Hollow’s Muenster location had no income because it hadn’t yet been able to open for business.
His last resort was to reach out to more investors. He posted urgent investing offers on his website and a YouTube video detailing Whiskey Hollow’s assets, but again, no luck.
“Everyone would look at us and say, ‘OK, well you’ve been building this place for two and a half years with no cash flow. That’s too risky for me.”
Beasley looked at his wife. “We ain’t gonna be able to get this place open.”
Around the same time, he got an unexpected bill.
The nail in the coffin
In 2019, a Cooke County official went to Whiskey Hollow’s Muenster location to appraise the property for tax purposes. It was valued at $79,657 and the county charged Beasley $2,075 in property taxes.
In 2020, the county documented a new appraised value: $1,970,700. Beasley’s tax bill shot up to $50,517.
The county’s new appraisal was based on improvements: $1,891,043 in restaurant and warehouse progress. But Beasley said he had not made any changes to the restaurant space since the last appraisal, the rest of the warehouse remained a shell and his budget for the tasting room was blown when he produced the hand sanitizer.
With close to no income, Beasley couldn’t pay.
In 2021, another year with minimal profits, the county charged Beasley $47,217 in property taxes. He couldn’t pay.
In 2022, his tax bill totaled $51,017 and Beasley now owed $131,769 in back taxes, with penalties and interest applied. On Oct. 6, 2022, the county sent him a foreclosure notice.
“They were charging us over $1,000 a week for property taxes to a business … that wasn’t even open,” Beasley said.
He filed a request for more information with the county clerk.
“Is there any property tax law known allowed by the State of Texas for a business to be charged property taxes when the State of Texas mandates normal business operations to cease?” he wrote in the request. “If no law exists, please dismiss this immoral and egregious suit.”
He received no answer. In December 2022, he asked again, this time requesting that a jury hear his case.
“Every single person that I asked, ‘do you think this is right?’ said ‘No, it’s not right,” Beasley said. He was confident a jury would back him up.
This January, he received a notice that a final judgment of foreclosure hearing would take place later that month. He wanted to fight but a lawyer he trusted told him there was really only one way forward.
“I made peace with myself and with my family and said it’s time to hand off the baton,” Beasley said.
On March 23, he put the business into bankruptcy court.
“A little boy trying to play in the big world”
The bankruptcy court recently approved a stalking horse bid for Whiskey Hollow of $6 million — the initial low-end bid that sets the bar for other offers. Bidding will continue through this month.
He hasn’t had a paycheck since last October, but he doesn’t want pity.
“I’m sitting here on my little hobby farm, got some chickens over there, get to see some good sunrises coming in,” he said. “I don’t care if I’m not the owner, but I’d sure like to hear the mic tune up over there and see happy faces come in the door.”
There’s a lot that can go wrong in the bourbon and craft spirits business, especially for small producers hoping to expand.
“The competition is tough today,” Donovan said. “You see all these brands coming up and then all of a sudden they’re gone and then something else is in their place.”
Winning at the spirits game, perhaps more than anything, takes money.
“A lot of the big companies, a lot of the big CEOs, the Jim Beams of the world — they can do it because they got a lot of money and can keep bolstering it,” Donovan said.
Beasley understands this. He now dreams that his business ends up in the hands of a buyer with deep pockets. That dream includes an end to what he calls “the drama.”
“You know, a little boy trying to play in the big world.”
