Scott Yeates
Scott Yeates was born in 1983. A Denver native, he attended St. Anne’s Episcopal School, then enrolled at Colorado State University, graduating in 2005. After college, Yeates built his first career in commercial real estate. In 2007, he founded SW Development Group, a company that concentrated heavily on affordable housing. By the middle of the following decade, his development résumé included multifamily, office, retail and land projects, while his company was developing hundreds of affordable-housing units in Colorado.
The turn toward spirits came in 2016. Yeates had joined friends Scott Burg and Mike Zakhem on a backcountry ski trip near Haines, Alaska. Days were spent skiing steep terrain, while evenings brought the friends together over whiskey and stories about their adventures. Once, when poor weather prevented the group from skiing, they spent time at a local distillery, further connecting the experience of spirits with friendship, travel and storytelling. For Yeates, those evenings provided the germ of an idea: whiskey could become the centerpiece of a business built not simply around selling liquor, but around people gathering and sharing happy experiences.
Yeates returned to Colorado with enthusiasm but without any professional distilling experience. He began educating himself, consulting people in the spirits industry and even taking chemistry classes to better understand the science behind distillation. Through a friend, he eventually met Scott Coburn, who had worked at Utah’s High West Distillery. Yeates initially sought Coburn’s advice about what qualifications he should look for when hiring a distiller; Coburn ultimately submitted his own résumé. Yeates, Burg and Zakhem moved ahead as the founding partners, with Yeates taking the lead in developing the business and Coburn bringing professional whiskey-production experience to the operation.
The company they created became Mythology Distillery, a name that expressed the philosophy Yeates wanted behind the bottles. Rather than referring narrowly to ancient Greek or Roman legends, “Mythology” represented the stories people create through their own travels, friendships and experiences. Yeates explained during the distillery’s early days that everything has a story and that new mythology is created through adventure and new stages of life. Even the bottles carried that theme, pairing people with fanciful “spirit animals” and giving the characters stories of their own.
Mythology opened in Denver’s Lower Highlands neighborhood on August 25, 2018. A custom Vendome copper still stood behind the bar, while the room incorporated elements inspired by the founders’ travels, including Moroccan tile, an enormous table fashioned from an antique Indian door and walls decorated with American oak whiskey-barrel staves. Mythology initially produced grain spirits that included rye-based vodka while establishing its whiskey program. From the beginning, however, whiskey occupied an important place in the identity of a company conceived during nights spent sharing whiskey after skiing.
Yeates and his production team eventually made blending the defining feature of Mythology’s whiskey program. Rather than presenting sourced whiskey unchanged, Mythology selects mature whiskeys from different distilleries and treats them as components of a new finished product. Different lots are screened and numerous combinations are created in the laboratory. Those combinations are compared through blind sensory analysis, ratios are adjusted, and the chosen recipe is then scaled by weight into production-sized stainless-steel blending vessels. It is an approach in which blending itself—not merely the origin of the individual barrels—is central to the whiskey. Best Friend Bourbon became one of the clearest examples. The current expression combines a 15-year-old Kentucky bourbon with two high-rye Indiana bourbons aged four and six years. Its name and label continue the Mythology concept: “Best Friend” depicts the quiet companionship between a farmer and his dog at the end of a day. Hell Bear American Whiskey takes the blending philosophy in another direction by combining straight rye whiskey with straight bourbons. Rye supplies much of the spice and structure, while the bourbon components add caramel and vanilla characteristics. Mythology subsequently used Hell Bear as the foundation for one of its more distinctive experiments, Syrah Finished Whiskey. Working with Oregon winery Dominio IV, the distillery transfers Hell Bear into freshly emptied Syrah barrels. The wine finishing contributes berry, chocolate, baking-spice and dark-fruit characteristics to the rye-and-bourbon foundation, extending Yeates’s interest in building complexity through blending and secondary maturation.
The whiskey portfolio continued to broaden. Thunder Hoof is a ten-year-old rye, while barrel-proof versions of both Hell Bear and Best Friend allow the blends to be tasted at greater strength. Mythology’s whiskeys have accumulated national and international competition recognition along with the company’s other spirits. At the 2024 San Francisco World Spirits Competition, Thunder Hoof received a Gold medal, while Best Friend Bourbon, Hell Bear American Whiskey and Syrah Finished Whiskey each received Silver medals. Mythology reports more than 60 national and international awards across its spirits portfolio and multiple recognitions as a top Colorado distillery.
Success eventually created a practical problem. Mythology was operating from multiple production locations around Denver, making consolidation increasingly attractive. Yeates and Burg were already living in Steamboat Springs, and the mountain community also offered a setting far closer to the outdoor identity that had inspired the company in Alaska. After five years in Denver, Mythology moved its headquarters and production operation to a 1.5-acre property in Steamboat Springs in July 2023. The former Butcherknife Brewery property was transformed into a 5,000-square-foot distillery accompanied by a 5,000-square-foot whiskey rackhouse. The rackhouse was designed with an earthen floor to preserve natural humidity, and a sound system was installed to send sound waves through the building during Steamboat’s cold winters, when low temperatures cause whiskey barrels to contract. The larger campus also brought together production and the social side of Yeates’s original idea, with a cocktail bar, restaurant and outdoor Whiskey Garden centered around a fire pit. By late 2023, all Mythology products were being produced and distributed from Steamboat Springs, and the completed campus celebrated its grand opening in June 2024.
Yeates remains Mythology’s president, but whiskey has not entirely displaced the interests that preceded it. He continues to be involved in housing issues and serves on the board of the Yampa Valley Housing Authority. In September of 2017, Yeates married his wife, Lauren, and they live in the Steamboat Springs area and spend time skiing, camping and biking with friends and their appropriately named dog, Whiskey. He was also named 2026 Routt County/Steamboat Springs Business Leader of the Year.
Yeates had learned the business, surrounded himself with experienced production people and developed a company in which whiskey blending became a specialty. The resulting bourbons, ryes and American whiskeys remain closely tied to the idea that first occurred to him in Alaska in 2016. Mythology began with friends coming off a mountain, pouring whiskey and retelling the day’s adventures. Nearly a decade later, Yeates has built a Colorado distillery specifically designed to make that same ritual possible for someone else.
Sources:
Mythology Distillery, “Our Story,” Mythology Distillery, mythologydistillery.com
Steamboat Magazine, “Whiskey and Stories: The Perfect Pairing,” Kaitlyn Kinshella, March 5, 2024, steamboatmagazine.com
Denver Westword, “LoHi Distillers Create a New Mythology for the Neighborhood,” Linnea Covington, August 6, 2018, westword.com
Mythology Distillery official website, mythologydistillery.com
Denver Westword, “Mythology Distillery Has Made the Move from Denver to Steamboat Springs,” Kristen Kuchar, July 10, 2023, westword.com
Contributed by Tracy McLemore, Fairview, Tennessee
