Tito's handmade vodka

Tito Beveridge wasn’t always known as “the vodka guy.” Born and raised in San Antonio, Tito went to Vanderbilt for a year before returning to Texas to attend UT (University of Texas at Austin), where he graduated with degrees in geology and geophysics. After college he got into the oil and gas business. He did that in Texas, and then found himself down in Venezuela and Colombia running heli-portable dynamite seismic crews. He came back to Texas, again, and started a drilling company in Houston. Eventually he got “tired of chasing the buck,” and decided to move to Austin. In Austin, Tito got into ground water geology, and then thought he would give the mortgage business a try. It was around this time, in ’92 or ’93, when he started making flavored vodka as gifts for friends. One night he was at a party and a stranger came up to him and said “Hey you’re the vodka guy,” and he said “No, contraire, I am the mortgage guy. “ But, that really got Tito thinking… When mortgage rates went up a couple points, he started going to liquor stores to ask the owners and managers if they would buy his flavored vodkas. They all turned him down saying, “No, go look at all the dust on the shoulders of those bottles there!” But then they told Tito that if he could make a vodka that was so smooth you could drink it straight then he might have something. So, naturally, Tito, who had never distilled anything in his life, asked them how one might do that. They said, “Well I don’t know, you’re the guy who wants to get in the vodka business!”