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—just maybe—create something special.
However, to become an actual distillery requires a significant investment and is not for the faint of heart, I've found. The regulatory hurdles, equipment costs, facility requirements, and licensing fees add up quickly. What started as a curious exploration during lockdown quickly revealed itself to be a much larger undertaking than anticipated.
The "Black Hat" in Black Hat Booze doesn't come from the hacker world (ok yes it does but) — it comes from prohibition. Think speakeasies, bootleggers, high-stakes underground operations. The era of interesting cocktails, experimental gins and vodkas, 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" represented the outlaw spirit of prohibition—not criminal, but rebellious, creative, willing to push boundaries to create something worth sharing.
So Black Hat Booze has pivoted to software. But here's the thing: BHB is about experimentation and learning.
We're not here to build a developer tools empire. We're here to try things, break things, learn from them, and see what happens. The spirit of prohibition bootleggers lives on—that same experimental mindset: 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.
If good, useful tools come out of that process? Great. That's a side effect of the experimentation, not the goal.
Right now, Black Hat Booze is experimenting with Raspberry Pi development and automation. Projects like pi-shell and Keybird came out of those experiments—trying to solve problems we ran into, learning how things work, iterating until something clicked. They turned out to be useful. That's the side effect of playing around and actually finishing something.
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.
Black Hat Booze LLC - Prohibition Redux, Hacking the Molecule
Good software, good intentions, and maybe someday, craft spirits worth the wait.