WHY NICOLE AUSTIN OF DIAGEO’S BLADE AND BOW IS A RULE-BREAKER
Nicole Austin is a magic maker at Diageo, one of the world’s biggest spirits companies. She came out of craft distilling, brought a humble and defiant creative streak to Diageo, and continues to push boundaries from cocoa‑infused whiskey to 31‑year bourbon and canned cocktails.
Nicole Austin grew up as the kid who was great at math and science but desperately wanted to be good at art and music like her friends. That tension shaped everything that came later.
Nicole studied chemical engineering because it was the obvious path for someone who excelled in chemistry and math, even though her guidance counselor told her she did not have the discipline to finish the degree.
“Being the very defiant teenager that I was, I was like, I’ll show you,” she said. She suspects her counselor was using reverse psychology, but it worked. She pushed through a tough program and tried to become, as she put it, “the best chemical engineer” by sheer stubbornness.
That path led her into environmental engineering in New York City, which sounded noble but turned out to be a lot of time in the sewers. She came away with an insider’s view of the city that most of us never see. But environmental engineering was far from the creative work she had imagined.
The light‑bulb moment came not in a lab but in a bar. A bartender explained to hear how a particular whiskey was distilled, and she realized she had gone to school to learn how to distill jet fuel and could use the same skills to make whiskey instead.
“As soon as I heard that, this is it, this is what I want to do,” she recalled. It took her a few more years to break into the spirits industry, but once she did, she found the closest thing to art that her math‑driven brain could create.
Distilling an Education
Nicole’s first major foothold in whiskey came through Kings County Distillery, which, at the time, was the first distillery licensed in New York City after Prohibition. She joined in 2010 and served as their master blender through 2016, all while keeping her day job because five‑gallon stills were not going to cover Brooklyn rent.
Her years at Kings County were full of experiments that set the tone for the unique work she does today. One day, the distillery’s co‑founder came back from a visit to Mast Brothers chocolate with a sack of cocoa husks and the declaration, “We should distill these,” he said.
Nicole, the engineer, knew she could not ferment cocoa husks because they lack sugar, so she pivoted to infusion. “I put cocoa husks into white whiskey and made this amaro-like, cocoa-y chocolate whiskey basically which was highly irreverent and actually really good,” she said.
Those early experiments were happening in parallel with another jump in her education: working alongside the late Dave Pickerell, the legendary consultant who helped launch and refine distilleries across the United States.
“Dave, who was known as the Johnny Appleseed of craft distilling, hired me into a role where I traveled and helped set up and tune operations all over the country. It was a great class in American distilling.”
She moved to Ireland in 2016 to serve as commissioning engineer for Tullamore D.E.W. That job taught her what it means to bring a large, complex distillery online for a historic European company.
She lived in Ireland until 2018, when Diageo recruited her to move to Tennessee as the general manager and distiller for Cascade Hollow. From there, her role grew into something broader and more unusual: Director of American Whiskey Liquid Capabilities and Development at Diageo.
Diageo’s American Whiskey Playground
Nicole said her current job title could mean whatever she and her boss want it to mean. In practice, she works with a wide range of Diageo’s American whiskey brands, including Blade and Bow, Bulleit, IW Harper, as well as George Dickel Tennessee Whiskey, and its many sub-brands at the historic Stitzel-Weller Distillery.
Many people do not realize how many American whiskey brands sit under the umbrella of Diageo, a publicly traded company. For Nicole, her brand portfolio is “a very big playground.”
Coming from the craft side of whiskey, she never imagined herself working for a global corporation. But Diageo’s big‑company resources and creative freedom are one of the reasons she has been able to push into ultra‑aged bourbon and unconventional products in ways that most craft distillers could never afford to attempt.
Diageo, headquartered in London, trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker DEO in the form of American Depositary Receipts, or ADRs. Its primary listing is on the London Stock Exchange under the ticker DGE.
For those who love words, the name “Diageo” combines the Latin word “dies” (day) and the Greek root “geo” (earth). Together, Diageo represents “every day, everywhere.”
The Story of Blade and Bow
One of the most delightful brands in Nicole’s quiver is Blade and Bow.
Blade and Bow Kentucky Straight Bourbon was introduced in 2015 as a new brand in Diageo’s American whiskey portfolio, created specifically to honor the heritage of the historic Stitzel‑Weller Distillery.
After Prohibition, the Stitzel and Weller families built Stitzel‑Weller into a major producer of high‑quality bourbon. Decades later, Diageo reopened the distillery to visitors and gave it a new role as the home for Blade and Bow, I.W. Harper, and Orphan Barrel.
The Blade and Bow name is a nod to that past. “Blade and Bow comes from the two parts of a skeleton key,” Nicole said, “the straight blade and the curved, ornate bow.” Nicole loves that it ties directly back to the keys that once hung on the distillery’s front door, a small physical link to a much bigger story.
Those keys matter because each one stood for a step in making bourbon. “The keys represent mashing, fermentation, distillation, maturation, and of course blending,” she said. Over time, they became a way of talking about more than production, but the magic of the results.
“The keys grew into a symbol of what Blade and Bow stood for—hospitality, warmth, and taking the time to enjoy the finer things in life with a glass of whiskey.”
After Prohibition, the Stitzel family, who had come to America with distilling knowledge and partnered with the Weller family’s sales organization, built a distillery that became a major supplier of high‑quality whiskey to a wide range of brands.
So Many Rules to Break and Bows to Take
Nicole admitted she has not entirely lost the rebellious streak from her teenage years, even if she now describes herself as a “bougie suburbanite.” She has poked fun at the unwritten rules of whiskey age, ready-to-make cocktails, and legal definitions.
In an age of ageism, Nicole is a proponent of ultra-aged whiskey, when done right. If you hang around whiskey circles, you may hear a lot of old rules about 30‑year American whiskey being an undrinkable plank of oak. She has pushed hard on what whiskey enthusiasts and casual drinkers thought they knew about maximum age in bourbon.
She credits the patented rickhouse design at Diageo’s Stitzel‑Weller brand for making her view on ultra‑aging possible. Unlike many other warehouses, the Stitzel-Weller facility includes generous windows and airflow, and relatively loose packing, which help preserve the structural integrity of barrels over decades.
“We can create perfectly pourable 30- and 31-year aged whiskey in a way that would destroy casks in hotter, more enclosed buildings,” Nicole said. “With some careful blending and selection, you can skim off the cream and there’s some lovely stuff there.”
Nicole accepts that not everyone will love ultra‑aged bourbon. “I see the limited volume as a built‑in safeguard. For Blade and Bow’s 31‑year expression, there were only 176 bottles.“
Her love of ready-to-drink cocktails also breaks with tradition.
“I partnered with Social Hour, a canned‑cocktail company that teamed up with George Dickel in November 2021 to release the Harvest Whiskey Sour, a canned whiskey sour made with 13‑year‑old George Dickel Tennessee Whiskey,” she said.
George Dickel, produced at the Cascade Hollow Distilling Co. in Tullahoma, Tennessee, is part of Diageo’s American whiskey portfolio.
Taking much-aged whiskey and putting it into a can would have seemed sacrilegious a decade ago. Nicole looked at it differently. High‑quality ingredients make better cocktails, she thought, whether they are shaken at a bar or poured from a can.
Nicole created Cascade Moon Edition No. 1 in 2020 as her “little fun brand,” a limited‑edition line under Cascade Hollow Distilling Co.
“Cascade Moon is where odd, defiant releases that did not fit the main George Dickel line could flourish,” she said. “I’ve used Cascade Moon to play with expectations around age, proof, and even legal definitions. I released a 15 year old cask-strength but the funny joke was that it wasn’t whiskey because the cask strength was under 80 proof, so it was playing with people’s expectations.”
The release transformed that 15‑year Cascade Moon barrel‑proof offering into a playful jab at drinkers who equate age and proof with quality before they’ve even tasted the brand.
The Future of American Whiskey
“Whiskey has always been a mirror for how America sees itself,” Nicole said. “I love American whiskey precisely because it is a product of place; by law and by tradition, it has to be made here. It is one of the few truly American culinary creations, alongside cocktail culture itself, that did not simply migrate here from somewhere else and then adapt.”
Nicole pointed to the use of new charred oak and corn as defining characteristics that make American whiskey different from other global styles. Those elements grew out of local agriculture and innovation rather than imported templates.
She also sees craft whiskey’s rise as a way of restoring the regionality that Prohibition and its aftermath almost erased. Before that era, many distilleries supplied many brands, and regional styles were more varied.
American single malt, Nicole told me, is one of the most hopeful signs for the next chapter of American whiskey. “It’s not just Scotch whiskey made somewhere else,” she said. “It’s our expression of a single malt whiskey, rooted in our own places and climates.” She sees those new malts as another way craft distillers are bringing back regional character and expanding what American whiskey can mean.
Nicole is a high‑profile woman in a field still perceived as male‑dominated, but she does not accept the idea that women are newcomers.
“Distilling actually originated with women,” she said. “The period in which only men’s names showed up on billboards and bottles was a blip in a much longer history.” More than 100 years ago, women were prominent in managing the George Dickel distillery.
The Whiskey Way Forward
Nicole Austin quit an engineering career in the sewers of New York for a fledgling distillery that could barely cover the rent, then jumped from craft distillers to corporate behemoths without giving up her appetite for defiant projects.
“I used to think whiskey was 80 percent science and 20 percent art, and now I know it’s the opposite,” she said.
She thinks the art of whiskey has been undervalued. “Whiskey is both art and science,” Nicole said. “While others lean into the science, I believe, as an engineer and contrarian, in the art and magic of whiskey.”
Mash bills and yeast strains dominate many conversations, as if fermentation is the whole show. From Nicole’s perspective, the distillery is where you can make mistakes, but the difference between good and great whiskey lies in what happens afterward.
“The majority of the flavor development happens in the scientific interaction of wood and spirit and time and oxygen,” she said. “The art is in how you steward barrels, where you place them, what proof you enter them at, and how you choose and blend them years later.”
Nicole refuses to accept conventional wisdom about what whiskey can be.