The distillery with an AI-backed plan to lift their spirits
Published on October 15, 2025
Bespoken Spirits isn’t your typical whiskey distillery. Yes, they’re based in the American bourbon heartland of Lexington, Kentucky, and yes, they often make private label whiskeys for clients. But everything from how Bespoken Spirits distills their whiskey to how they market it is done with the help of AI. Jordan Spitzer, their head of flavor, can finish a whiskey in days instead of years—while precisely crafting its taste—using their machine-learning backed approach. And Wane Lindsey, their director of marketing, credits AI tools with helping his tiny team punch way above their weight.
The result is a whiskey that may not be traditional, but still tastes great—and in a fraction of the time it would otherwise take. That’s time they can spend on the creative side of their craft and the work that has the most meaning: building brands and bespoke spirits that people will want to drink.
On season two of the Dropbox podcast Working Smarter, Jordan and Wane share how AI has helped them explore creative new ways to make and market whiskey—and why, no matter how smart our tools get, there’s still no substitute for human taste.
You can read an excerpt of our conversation with Wane below.
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How big is the marketing team at Bespoken Spirits?
It's very small. It's me, a manager, and an associate. So it's three of us against the world. Most of the bigger companies have much bigger teams, and many more resources. The teams at a lot of these micro-distillers are generally small, and so what typically happens is they outsource a lot of marketing work to agencies. But here at Bespoken, we pretty much handle everything in house, which makes us lean, cost-effective, and keeps our fingerprints on everything that we do.
Why is that important?
As a small company, it allows us to move really quickly when a client comes in and says, “Hey, we want to make a whiskey that tastes like this.” Or in Lynyrd Skynyrd’s case, we do their whiskey called Hell House. They had drank Crown Royal their whole life, and Canadian whisky for an American band didn't really make much sense. So it was like, “how do we make an American whiskey that tastes like Crown Royal?”
AI allowed us to do a bunch of different samples very quickly. Traditionally, we'd have already tried making a few things in order to present a sample that made sense for them. But in this way, we were able to take their feedback, go to the lab—Jordan spit out probably 12 different samples—and we eventually landed on one that made sense. But it allowed us to do that in weeks instead of, again, years, which allowed us to go to market in months instead of 5-10 years. So yeah, as a company, it allows us to do things much more effectively.
Dropbox Dash: Find anything. Protect everything.You also use AI as a creative partner for a lot of your marketing efforts. Some of that is work you would have previously done yourself, so why bring AI into the mix? How does it help?
I'm a creative at heart, so if I had to sit in my room and come up with ideas for a brand or its identity, I could do that. But sometimes you sit down and creativity doesn't strike when you need it. So when my creativity isn't working, I bet AI is—and I bet it gives me a spark that I might need in order to do the rest of my work. It allows my brain to work quicker and move faster.
It's something that we always come back to and refine. We don't fully rely on it. Because I think if you were to do that, then it doesn't become as emotional. But it allows us to think outside of our brain—and really, what we rely on as a marketing department is using tools to help us move quicker. In today's landscape there's a lot of noise online, and you’ve got to be able to move really quickly. And so all of our AI tools allow us to do that.
How would you say that AI has changed the way that you and your colleagues collaborate and work together?
In every way. Not only in the way that we're communicating, it's the way that we're analyzing data. It's the way that we're communicating that data to our exec team. It's the way that our outside partners are sending us reporting. It's something that I instill in everyone that I work with. If you don't know the answer to a question before you ask someone else for it, go ask AI and try to figure it out, because I bet you can get the answer pretty quick.
I personally hate having the same conversation twice. We have a lot of brands that we manage and a lot of outside partners. Communication is key, and being able to rely on AI to communicate effectively—and not only more efficiently, but I'd say more robustly—is everything. We use it all day, every day. We're able to move like a team of 20 and we're a team of three.
How do you strike that balance between knowing how much work to do yourself versus how much work you can or should offload to AI?
It's something that we constantly optimize, right? Say you have a really busy week. You might lean heavier on using AI as your main communication tool. But next week I might have a little bit more time to focus on my human output. I don't try to get too caught up in, “Am I using it too much or is it using me too much?” or whatever. The results are the results, and if we're creating compelling content—especially if it’s driving interaction and engagement—then we're doing the right thing.
Given all of the success you've had with these tools so far, how important do you think AI is going to be to the future of Bespoken Spirits?
I think it's everything. We're creating these private label brands pretty consistently, and with that comes the need to understand different audiences a lot quicker. We're working on a lot of projects for colleges, where they're using it as a fundraising tool to generate money to put better athletes on the court or on the field. Now as someone who grew up in Wisconsin and lived in Austin, Texas, what do I know about Oxford, Mississippi? Not much. I know that tailgating is probably a really big experience there—or at least that's what I've read. But AI is allowing us to learn about these micro communities in more of an effective way. I see it as an integral part of anything we do on the marketing side in order to be successful.
It sounds like you treat AI as just another tool in your toolkit—something assistive and helpful, but that’s not doing all the work for you. Why is that important?
I've grown up believing that the most effective marketing is honest and true. My fear is that, if we fully relied on AI to cheat the process, we lose what makes us different—you know, that organic emotional attachment that only a human can have. And I think I would lose the enjoyment that I have in actually doing my job, which is a big part of it, right? I love what I do, and if I was just finding shortcuts to do what I do, I don't think I would feel as fulfilled.
This interview has been edited and condensed. For more interviews and past episodes, visit workingsmarter.ai
The Author
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