Garrison Brothers Cowboy Bourbon 2026: How to Actually Get a Bottle
September 12, 2026
Cowboy Bourbon does not sell like a normal bottle. It sells three times, in three different ways, over three weeks — and if you only know about one of those windows, you have already missed most of your chances at the twelfth edition of Garrison Brothers’ flagship annual release.
What’s actually in the bottle
This year’s Cowboy Bourbon is bottled at cask strength, uncut and unfiltered, at 141 proof — meaning it left the barrel and went straight into the bottle with no water added at all. It carries an age statement of at least 8 years, unusually old for a Texas bourbon, where the climate ages whiskey faster than Kentucky’s and most releases don’t chase double-digit years for that reason.
Master Distiller Donnis Todd hand-selects the barrels for Cowboy Bourbon each year, and Garrison Brothers’ own tasting notes describe it opening on burnt wood and gun smoke before settling into dried stone fruit, caramelized sugar, and toasted marshmallow, with a long, warming finish. Total production is 16,000 bottles, at an MSRP of $249.99.
The distillery’s own claims are worth knowing, since they’re the backbone of why this release has a following at all: Garrison Brothers says it’s the first and oldest legal whiskey distillery in Texas, and the first bourbon producer outside Kentucky making bourbon start to finish — “corn-to-cork” — on one site. The bourbon is proofed with rainwater rather than municipal water, and the barrels aged through the Texas Hill Country’s hot summers and cold winters, which the distillery credits for pulling more flavor out of the wood in fewer years than a cooler climate would. Last year’s release backed that reputation up, picking up a Platinum medal at the 2026 ASCOT Awards and a Double Gold at the 2026 SIP Awards.
The three ways to buy it
This is the part that actually matters if you want a bottle.
1. Distillery release — Saturday, September 12, 2026, 8:00am, at Garrison Brothers in Hye, Texas. The first 1,000 bottles go here, first-come, at the distillery itself. It’s built as a full event day, not just a bottle line — coffee and food from The Whiskey Shack, live music, bottle signings, tastings, and distillery tours (reserve a tour slot ahead if you want one). If you’re anywhere near the Texas Hill Country, this is the best-odds window: 1,000 bottles against a line of people willing to drive to Hye at 8am is a very different fight than a national online drop.
2. E-commerce — Friday, September 18, 2026. Only 279 bottles, one per order, with engraving offered. This is the tightest window by bottle count — fewer than a third of what the distillery sold in person — so expect it to sell out in minutes against national demand rather than a regional crowd.
3. National retail — beginning October 1, 2026. Select bars, restaurants, and retail stores nationwide start receiving allocation. This is also the least predictable window, since how many bottles (if any) reach a given store depends on your state’s distributor and that store’s relationship with it — the kind of allocation that rewards knowing your local shop rather than watching a national countdown clock.
Is 141 proof something you actually want to drink?
At $249.99 for a cask-strength, 8-year Texas bourbon with an established reputation and real award history, Cowboy Bourbon sits in an unusual spot: expensive enough to be a genuine splurge, but priced by the distillery itself rather than an inflated allocated-market number. Whether it’s worth it comes down to whether you actually want 141-proof bourbon — that’s roughly 70.5% ABV, strong enough that most drinkers will cut it with water rather than sip it neat, and worth knowing before you commit a quarter of your grocery budget to a bottle you might spend diluting.