Brad & Kathy Irwin
“Masters of Wheat”
Bradley Irwin has been an Oregon resident for nearly four decades and is very much a product of his hometown of Bend. Born in September, 1967, Brad graduated from Bend High School and went on to attend Oregon State University. Like many future distillers, Brad’s path into spirits started behind the bar. He began working as a bartender in the early 1990s and spent years tending bar on and off, developing a deep curiosity about how different spirits were made and why they tasted the way they did. During these years he built the kind of practical, sensory education that textbooks simply can’t duplicate, learning flavor profiles, watching what guests ordered, and talking endlessly about whiskey styles from Kentucky to Scotland. In those days, Brad’s professional life wasn’t limited to spirits. He and his wife Kathy also built and ran a successful event company, gaining experience in business operations, logistics, and hospitality, but eventually they sold that company, freeing both capital and energy for what came next.
By the mid-2000s, Brad’s curiosity about whiskey had outgrown the bar. At home in Bend, he began tinkering with a small still in his garage, using home distilling as a way to understand grain and flavor more deeply. During this time, he ran batches in the garage and learned through trial, error, and the occasional bad spirit. That experimental phase ended with a pivotal conversation: after two years in the garage, he turned to Kathy and asked what it would take to open a real distillery.
Kathy Irwin, a small-town girl from Bend, had been part of Brad’s life and work long before any distillery existed. Kathy is co-owner/operations lead at Meadowland Syrup, a business that would later intertwine with the distillery. When Brad proposed turning the garage experiments into a full-scale operation, Kathy stepped in as partner in the truest sense: the two of them planned the business, lined up licensing, and began laying the groundwork in 2008. Then, in 2009, Brad and Kathy opened Oregon Spirit Distillers, with what is described as Central Oregon’s first grain-to-glass whiskey production facility. Brad brought his years of bartending and his growing technical knowledge of distillation; Kathy brought business sense, hospitality instincts, and a growing passion for cocktails and flavor. She kept her day job while handling the distillery’s bookkeeping and accounting in the evenings, while Brad spent his days running the still and his nights continuing bartending shifts to keep the family afloat.
Brad had long been fascinated by how wheat can soften whiskey and by Oregon’s deep connection to wheat as a crop, so the distillery’s first release was a straight American wheat whiskey, soon followed by rye and bourbon. From the start, the Irwins committed to using Cascadian water, and today roughly 95% of their grains come from Oregon farmers, with the remainder from farms just inside neighboring Idaho and Washington.
Family has always been part of the story. Brad and Kathy are also parents, and the couple ensure that their two children play integral roles in the distillery, from finances to being friendly faces at the business. After all, the Irwins built Oregon Spirit as a family enterprise, and as the company has grown, that ethos has extended to their staff, many of whom worked their way up from entry-level roles into production and distilling positions.
Growth at Oregon Spirit came in stages. For the first several years, Brad and Kathy handled nearly everything themselves, distilling, bottling, sales, and office work, while still holding other full-time jobs. They weren’t able to pay themselves purely from the distillery until around the fourth or fifth year. However, as Oregon Spirit’s whiskeys began to gain traction beyond Bend, the team has expanded. A serendipitous reconnection with Brad’s old high school friend, Gary Bishop, led to a long-term grain supply partnership; Oregon Spirit now buys hundreds of tons of grain annually from Bishop Farms alone.
In 2014, the distillery outgrew its original space and moved into a larger building that had once housed a grain store, hardware store, and even a slaughterhouse. Brad and Kathy spent a year transforming the tired structure into a welcoming, working distillery and hospitality space that serves as a tasting room. The spot has become central to Oregon Spirit’s identity as a destination for tours, whiskey flights, and education. Brad has spoken about the importance of that tasting-room connection: visitors from across the country discover the brand in Bend and then look for it later in their home markets, fueling growth well beyond Oregon.
Along the way, Brad formalized his spirits knowledge, becoming a Certified Specialist of Spirits, and has continued to refine his production techniques. Oregon Spirit now maintains one of the largest whiskey barrel inventories in Oregon and produces a broad lineup of spirits: straight bourbon, rye, wheat and malt whiskeys, vodka, multiple gins, absinthe, and limoncello, all distilled and aged in Bend.
Nowadays, working side-by-side with his best friend and wife, Brad Irwin has earned a reputation as a capable, detail-driven distiller who built his achievements rather than inheriting them. The continued expansion has strengthened the brand’s regional footprint, while Kathy has demonstrated that her approach and hospitality resonates with customers. Today, the couple are regarded as reliable contributors to their hometown community—people who took a roundabout path into distilling, but who have made that path work through consistency, hard work, and a clear sense of direction.
Sources:
Oregon Spirit Distillers website, “Meet Our Distillers”, oregonspiritdistillers.com
Cascade Business News, “From Barrel to Bottle in Bend”, Dec. 3, 2019.
The Source (Bend, Oregon). “Spirit of Craft”, Erin Rook, October 28, 2015, bendsource.com
NCSLA “Spirit of the Wild West”, Central Western Regional Conference, 2019, ncsla.org
Sip Magazine, “Oregon Spirit Distillers Black Mariah”, Nov. 15, 2013
Meadowland Syrup official website/About Us, meadowlandsyrup.com
The Source (Bend, OR), “Where the Wild Things Are… Indoors”, Nicole Vulcan, March 31, 2021, bendsource.com
Breaking Bourbon, “Oregon Spirit Distillers Single Barrel Bottled In Bond Bourbon”, Aug. 6, 2024
Contributed by Tracy McLemore, Fairview, Tennessee
