Funny you should ask. No, this is NOT the first time one of us has dabbled in the spirits game. There was a time, long ago, when one of us gave holiday spirits away as gifts around December. It started out as Vodka, then grew into Gin & Vodka. It was far more arduous than what we are doing now, but just as fun. And no one died… from the spirits.

So back in 2004 I was reading a Maxim article (I only ever read Maxim for the articles) about college kids taking “cheap” vodka and using a Brita filter to make it smell and taste better. If memory serves (it does not), I believe they were doing 2-3 passes in the Brita pitcher. Amatures! There was no way I was going to pass off “my” vodka with a measly 2-3 passes. We went bold. We went BIG. We choose 10, and what a pain in the ass that was. Vodka is not like water, so filtering through charcoal took some time. And we couldn’t do a bottle at a time (not a large enough pitcher), so we had to wait and pour and wait and pour and wait…

The first year/batch we used empty glass VOSS water bottles. Funny story, so, one of us was so focused, they simply dumped out all the VOSS water to clean/dry the empty bottles. They were too stupid to KEEP the fancy VOSS water to drink later. Again, laser focused.

After the VOSS fiasco, we looked at cork and glass bottles. We found a nice tall option which held around 150ml of our filtered vodka. Originally we created the logo and label to be clean and stark. The name:

BedHer Vodka - Drink Enough and you Might get Lucky

Now hold on, I’ll have you all know that the name was the brainchild of one very strong, powerful, educated, considerate woman (who forced me to say all those things).

We were getting return customers, so the tall bottle had to go. And the new old-school packaging didn’t fit with our original sleek look and feel. We re-tooled the look (weathered grocery bags, hand torn, inkjet printer, red wax and a signet D stamp for reasons that make sense to us). We bought smaller bottles (as displayed above) and expanded into Gin as well. Holidays were never the same after that.

We stopped for some reason. It was a pain. And we don’t have a single sealed bottle left. But we have the memories. Fuzzy, but still. And photos, we have photos. And we might still have red wax someplace…

Again, no one died from consuming our BedHer Vodka and BedHer Gin. Most everyone assumed we created it all from scratch. We even had people say it was their favorite Vodka, and could they get more?

Thus lay the foundation for our journey into William Richard, some sixteen years later. Oh, we’re keeping sealed bottles this time. And no, we are NOT giving this treasure away for free. It may very well become the most sought out bourbon on the planet…