Bishop has the hardware to back up that claim. In the 2023 Ultimate Spirits Challenge, American Metal Whiskey was named a Chairman’s Award Finalist, earning 92 points out of a hundred. And he’s just getting revved up. Bishop wants the rumble of an engine to truly echo through each sip of his whiskey. Off the record, he shared a new distilling technology developed by American Metal Whiskey that is currently patent pending. Though he said it was too early to divulge the specifics publicly, if and when the patent is approved, American Metal Whiskey’s finishing process will have some serious horsepower behind it. “Just stay tuned is all I can say,” Bishop insists.

Before he entered the automotive and now boutique whiskey business, Bishop was part of the father-sons team behind Blue Buffalo Co. pet food, which sold to General Mills for $8 billion in 2018. After exiting the pet food industry, Bishop made his first foray into custom cars as a collector. He then founded North American Motor Car, through which he bought and sold some of the most sought-after vehicles in the country, including timeless classics, exotic supercars, hot rods, contemporary muscle cars and custom and vintage motorcycles. When he won a custom motorcycle built by Orange County Choppers at a charity auction, Bishop visited the famous shop to meet the fabricators. There, he found a kindred spirit in lead fabricator and shop manager Josh Allison. The two hit it off and ultimately decided to launch their own shop in Connecticut. Shortly thereafter, the whiskey became an extension of their efforts at American Metal Customs.

In marketing his whiskey, Bishop has pulled some pages out of his father’s old branding playbook. One of the original “Mad Men,” summer resident Bill Bishop leveraged his advertising expertise when launching the beverage company SoBe in the nineties. Deploying ingenious and often irreverent branding and guerilla marketing, Bishop and his partners propelled SoBe to wild popularity before it was acquired by PepsiCo in 2001.