The origin story of Sweetens Cove Bourbon started, as many good stories do, with a group of friends on a golf course. Tennis hall-of-famer Andy Roddick and his friend Mark Rivers, an Austin real estate developer, took a trip to Tennessee to play golf at Sweetens Cove golf course. They liked the course so much they rallied more friends and decided to buy the property together. The group of friends turned investors also include Peyton Manning, Nashville musician Drew Holcomb, as well as Texans Tiff's Treats co-founder Leon Chen, Kendra Scott CEO Tom Nolan, and Silicon Labs chairman Nav Sooch.
After purchasing the golf course, they discovered that one of the longstanding rituals at Sweetens Cove Golf Club was to take a celebratory shot of whiskey at the first tee. Paying homage to that ritual, good bourbon, and their friendship, they decided to create a bourbon themselves. After acquiring one hundred barrels of 13-year-old Tennessee straight bourbon, the group tapped Kentucky's first female master distiller, Marianne Eaves, to blend it. Their first release hit shelves in 2020 (during the pandemic) in Tennessee and Georgia, and at a price point of $200 per bottle, the bourbon sold out in a matter of weeks.
Eaves was asked to blend the second batch with their sights firmly set on an expansion into Texas. Eaves, who happened to be living in Hays County (near Austin) at the time, got to work in her mobile laboratory. After tasting hundreds of samples, she finally settled on a blend of 16, 6, and 4-year old bourbons to give a "full palette experience." During her time in Texas, Eaves made friends with local distillers, and they talked about the differences between Texas and Tennessee whiskey. Eaves recently told the Austin American Statesman that those conversations "probably influenced how she went about her blend for Sweetens Cove. The 16-year-old was "exceptional," Eaves says, with a red wine quality and notes of clove, baking spices and dark red fruit. It had a "mature, almost antiquey kind of oak characteristic. A 6-year-old was "much more rich and viscous, with the dark, sweet notes, the caramel, the molasses, those deep spices, like the leather and black pepper," and the toasted, charred flavor of the barrel "was even more dominant."
Roddick, who lives in Austin with his wife, Sports Illustrated swimsuit model Brooklyn Decker, stresses that Sweetens Cove was never meant to be a mass-market spirit. It is a limited edition product that is so popular there are rumors that retailers have put one-bottle limits in place for customers. Sweetens Cove landed in Texas in May, and according to the team, if the Texas expansion goes well, they might rethink their game plan. For now, however, we should be content that we can pick up a bottle of Sweetens Cove, knowing how much Texas influence is in every drop.
Sweetens Cove Flavor Profile
Nose: Sweet toasted oak, bright ripe fruit, apple peel, a hint of baking spice, vanilla bean, and caramel, opens into more robust cooperage, brown sugar, and toffee
Palate: Warm forward spice, melts into dried citrus fruit and honey, oak presence grows on the back palate
Finish: Hint of clove and dark red fruit, smoother light oak, sugars linger