Spirit of Texas Distillery

Pecans in the barrel

Texas pecans go into the barrel with the spirit as it ages. Shaun Siems, Head Distiller at Spirit of Texas Distillery in Pflugerville, keeps that choice close to the making rather than the label. He founded the distillery in 2009, and the founder’s role still sits with the production role: President, Head Distiller, and the person accountable for what enters oak and what leaves it. His training did not begin in a distilling school. DeVry University sits behind a long technical life in semiconductor metrology, including work as Metrology Engineering Manager at Samsung Austin Semiconductor from 2000–2024. Since 2024, he has also served as Staff Engineer I - Fab Planning there. That background matters less as biography than as temperament. Metrology asks for measurement, repeatability, and a low tolerance for drift. At the still house, the same discipline turns toward grain, rum, whiskey, wood, and time.

An engineering hand on Texas spirit

Siems states the aging decision plainly: “We actually put Texas pecans in the barrel with it while it ages.” The method gives Spirit of Texas Distillery a material anchor, not a decorative one. Pecan Street Rum carries the local tree in its name and, by Siems’s account, in the barrel. Straight Silver Rum and Pfluger Single Malt Whiskey sit in the same small portfolio, each one attached to a founder who has not separated ownership from the bench-side work. The house has received a San Francisco World Spirits Competition gold medal, recognition that belongs to this distillery and to Siems’s production. Awards can flatten a place if they arrive before the method. Here the useful order is the reverse: the barrel, the Texas pecans, the spirit, then the medal.

The still house and the long way

The room at Spirit of Texas Distillery is best understood through its decisions rather than its décor. The still house holds a maker who came to distilling with an engineer’s habit of checking the process, then keeping the result tied to a particular place. Pflugerville is not used as scenery. It appears in the work through Pfluger Single Malt Whiskey, through the distillery’s name, and through the pecans Siems puts into aging spirit. The warehouse side of the craft is quiet by nature: filled barrels, waiting wood, flavor taken on slowly. Nothing in that part of the method rewards haste.

What remains in the hands

Spirit of Texas Distillery matters because the line between founder and maker has not been handed off. Siems opened the house in 2009 and remains the person named to the head distiller’s work. That continuity gives the spirits a single accountable hand, from the choice to age with Texas pecans to the release of Pecan Street Rum.