Still Austin The Musician Bourbon Review

Garrett

Aug 13

3 min read

Still Austin The Musician Bourbon Review

Still Austin sits about thirty minutes down the road from me, which means I've had a front-row seat to their whole run — from the new kid in the St. Elmo district to the distillery every Texas whiskey conversation eventually finds its way to. The Musician is their flagship straight bourbon, and it's become the bottle I hand people when they tell me Texas can't make real bourbon.

Here's the thing about making whiskey in Texas: the climate doesn't do subtle. Our summers pull whiskey in and out of the barrel like a bellows, which speeds up aging — and just as often steamrolls it. A lot of Texas bourbon comes out tasting like a lumberyard fire, all char and no conversation, because the heat extracted everything the oak had to give before the spirit was ready to receive it.

Still Austin decided to fight the climate with patience instead of marketing. Founded in 2015 by three Austin families, they're one of the only true grain-to-glass operations in the state — every kernel of corn, rye, and malted barley is Texas-grown, then milled, mashed, fermented, and distilled in-house on "Nancy," their 42-foot Scottish-made column still. And instead of proofing the bourbon down all at once at bottling, they use a slow water reduction — adding water gradually while the whiskey is still aging. It's slower, it's more labor, and it would be easy to skip. They don't skip it.

So the question I sat down with: does all that intention actually show up in the glass?

The Bottle

Distillery: Still Austin Whiskey Co. — Austin, Texas
Release Year: Ongoing flagship release
Age: At least two years
Proof: 98.4
Mash Bill: 70% white corn, 25% rye, 5% malted barley — 100% Texas-grown
MSRP: $40

First Impression

The nose opens with a rich combination of butterscotch and caramel, followed by a steady layer of cinnamon. The sweetness leads the way, but the spice keeps it from becoming too heavy.

On the Palate

Pear arrives first on the palate, bringing a brighter fruit note before clove and maple syrup settle in. The maple adds sweetness, while the clove gives the bourbon enough spice to maintain balance.

The Last Sip

The finish brings the grain forward with sweet corn, charred oak, and lingering baking spice. It remains moderately long, leaving behind a warm mixture of sweetness and oak.

Final Thoughts

For a bourbon that's presumably so young, you would never know it. That's the gift and the curse of producing your own whiskey in the state of Texas — the heat hands you maturity ahead of schedule, but it will happily hand you too much of it. The Musician carries the character traits of a bourbon with far more age: butterscotch and caramel that read like a well-run rickhouse, spice that's integrated instead of raw, and oak that shows up on the finish without kicking the door in.

The slow water cut is doing quiet work here. Proofing gradually in the barrel is gentler on the delicate flavor compounds than one big cut at bottling, and you can taste the result in how softly 98.4 proof lands. There's no burn to push through — just that pear-and-clove middle that keeps pulling you back for the next sip.

At $40 and sitting on regular shelves, this is the rare craft bourbon that doesn't ask you to grade it on a curve. It competes head-up with Kentucky bottles at the same price — and it does it with a mash bill grown entirely in Texas dirt.

I think this is what's going to separate Still Austin from the rest of the Texas field: the restraint and the confidence to know when it's ready. Any good musician will tell you the notes you don't play matter as much as the ones you do. Somewhere in South Austin, somebody understood that — and then they put it in a bottle.