Kyle Michels

Kyle Wayne Michels was born in May 1971. Although little is publicly documented about his childhood and early family life, his education eventually took him to Texas Tech University. In 1994, Michels graduated from the university’s Rawls College of Business with a degree in Accounting and Finance. He later established himself in Amarillo, Texas, where his business interests included real estate. Michels is married to Elaine Michels, and they have a daughter.

His eventual entry into the spirits business began in a far less conventional fashion. After watching the television series Moonshiners, Michels and his friend Ryan Barnard decided to try making moonshine themselves. Their early results were less than satisfying, and the two men soon redirected their attention toward vodka. That experimental period was not without incident: Michels later characterized some of their mishaps as small explosions. Eventually, however, they produced a vodka they considered suitable and became convinced that what had started as experimentation deserved a proper production site.

Michels’ real-estate experience proved useful in turning that idea into a business. In Amarillo, the partners acquired a former Yellow Freight building that had originally been constructed in 1942 and began transforming it into a distillery. The building provided a permanent home for an enterprise that had progressed from an informal attempt at moonshine to a commercial spirits operation.

The name they chose firmly tied the new business to Amarillo. “Bomb City” is one of the city’s nicknames, derived from the nearby Pantex Plant, the government-owned facility associated with the assembly and disassembly of the nation’s nuclear weapons. Michels and Barnard carried that identity into the packaging as well. Bomb City spirits were bottled in a distinctive container incorporating fins and other visual elements suggesting the shape of a bomb, giving the young distillery an appearance immediately connected to its hometown.

Bomb City Distillery opened its tasting room on July 16, 2019, becoming the first operating distillery in the Texas Panhandle. Its initial commercial product was 80-proof Bomb City Corn Vodka, which helped sustain the operation while Michels pursued the much slower process of developing whiskey. Bomb City sourced its whiskey grains in the Texas Panhandle, extending the local foundation already established through the distillery’s name, location, and branding.

Whiskey, however, imposed a timetable that vodka did not. Bourbon could not simply be distilled and prepared for sale; the grain spirit had to enter new charred-oak barrels and remain there while maturation produced the desired color, aroma, and flavor. For a small distillery whose earliest commercial years centered primarily on vodka, building a whiskey inventory therefore required planning, storage space, capital, and patience. Barrels had to mature while the rest of the business continued operating.

That patience finally produced Bomb City Bourbon in 2025. Made from a mash containing corn, rye, and malted barley, the whiskey used corn as its required bourbon foundation, rye to contribute spice, and malted barley to complete the three-grain recipe. The inaugural release consisted of only 280 bottles, making Bomb City Bourbon a genuinely limited introduction rather than a large-scale commercial launch. Initially, the whiskey was available only through the Amarillo distillery, maintaining a direct connection among the bourbon, the people who produced it, and the Panhandle community represented by the Bomb City name. The small release also reflected the realities of an independent distillery whose whiskey stocks had accumulated gradually while vodka remained the foundation of its earlier business.