When Longhorns head coach Mack Brown persuaded Cottrell to flip his commitment from Oregon to Texas, he did so by selling the school’s alumni network in the business world. Even as he blossomed into one of the state’s premier recruits in the class of 2012, he also played the trumpet, collected movies, and fished.
#Vodka grapefruit pro#
He’d daydream about Sunday afternoons in a pro uniform - “To say I never wanted to go to the NFL would be kind of crazy, because that’s every kid’s dream at the end of the day,” he says - but the sport was a passion, never an obsession. That tracks with plenty else about Noble Wolf’s unlikely ascent.Ĭottrell picked up football at 7 years old. “I didn’t want to be a statistic getting killed by a person from Craigslist,” he says with a sheepish grin, implausible though it may sound. Cottrell sometimes omits one of the finer points, though: he pressed one of his teammates into coming with him as backup that day he met the man in black leather. He has told the tale of his recipe so often that it’s now part of the Noble Wolf mythology, right along with the company’s name being an homage to his high school alma mater, Plano West Senior High. The 26-year-old recounts the story today while leaning on a stack of boxes inside his distillery, which is housed in a warehouse a few miles up the road from UNT.
#Vodka grapefruit plus#
For $80, plus the price of a burger and soft drink, Cottrell was handed the foundation of what would become Noble Wolf Vodka, his Denton-based brand that was named Texas Vodka of the Year at the New York International Spirits Competition in 2016. Which is how Cottrell found himself at an Austin location of Five Guys meeting a man dressed head to toe in black leather who promised a recipe and a test batch in less than a week.
And what did Cottrell know? A defensive end for the Longhorns, he had never distilled a drop of alcohol in his life. To the best of his knowledge, no one had ever tried it before. He figured those 11 words wouldn’t amount to much, not after a handful of chemistry professors at the University of Texas cautioned him that securing a recipe to distill vodka from grapefruits - his plan to break into the beverage industry - could cost upwards of $10,000. Bryce Cottrell kept his Craigslist post to the point: Looking for organic chemist with background in distilling and/or winery brewing.
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