Black Hat Booze
Software, Distilled.
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“Swordfish” was the most famous speakeasy password of the prohibition era. You’d whisper it through a peephole in the door, and if you got it right, you were in.
You got it right.
Since you know the password, you might want to know that some doors don’t have signs — just numbers.
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Software, Distilled.
Black Hat Booze is a software company built on the spirit of experimentation. Like master distillers refining a craft, we take raw ideas and run them through iterative processes until something clean and useful emerges.
Based in Gilroy, California, we build developer tools and creative software. Always experimenting. Always refining.
Black Hat Booze was conceived during Covid as a way to explore the journey of distillation. The idea was simple but ambitious: learn the craft, understand the science, and maybe create something special.
Becoming an actual distillery, it turns out, requires a significant investment and is not for the faint of heart. The regulatory hurdles, equipment costs, facility requirements, and licensing fees add up quickly. What started as a curious exploration during lockdown revealed itself to be a much larger undertaking.
So Black Hat Booze pivoted to software. But the ethos stayed the same: experimentation and learning. Mix ingredients, test the process, refine the technique. Sometimes you end up with something useful. Sometimes you just learn what doesn't work. Either way, you're learning the craft.
The best secrets hide in plain sight. Try selecting this text.
The "Black Hat" in Black Hat Booze comes from prohibition. Think speakeasies, bootleggers, experimental gins, secret passwords, and hidden tasting rooms.
The original vision was a speakeasy-themed tasting area: dim lighting, craft spirits, that sense of discovery you got when you found the right door with the right knock. The "black hat" represents the outlaw spirit of prohibition — not criminal, but rebellious, creative, willing to push boundaries to create something worth sharing.
That same spirit drives the software we build today.
We experiment with the infrastructure that the internet runs on — the stuff most people never think about. DNS, SSL certificates, email delivery, domain monitoring. The unsexy plumbing that everything depends on. We poke at it, take it apart, and see what happens when we try to make it better.
Sometimes those experiments turn into real tools — a suite of utilities that make the plumbing easier to manage, easier to monitor, and a little more fun to work with. That's the craft: tinker, refine, see what sticks.
If good, useful tools come out of that process? Great. That's a side effect of the experimentation, not the goal.
And someday, way in the future, a distillery is still not off the table. Because at the end of the day, whether it's code or craft spirits, it's all about the process, the learning, and creating something worth sharing.
During prohibition, bootleggers hid bottles in false-bottomed suitcases,
hollow chair legs, and spare tire wells. We hide things in web pages.