But Mr. Tate was unhappy tilling the bureaucratic fields and left to try his hand at information technology consulting. On the side, while caring for a growing family (he has five children), he began to dream of turning his love for home brewing into a business; when it became obvious that Texas was flush with new breweries but had almost nothing in the way of distilleries, he decided to make whiskey instead.

In 2008, with an initial investment from Stephen Germer, a local businessman, Mr. Tate opened Balcones — named for a geological fault zone that runs about 450 miles from South Texas to near Waco — in a dusty former welding shop just west of the Baylor campus.

Mr. Tate took an idiosyncratic approach to making whiskey, even for a start-up distillery. Instead of buying stills from Kentucky or Scotland, which could easily have cost over $100,000 each, he designed and built his own. He used local blue corn instead of buying in bulk from a commodity grain supplier. He even made his own barrels.

A compact man with a receding hairline and a thick, meticulously brushed beard, Mr. Tate seemed to revel in a swaggering nonconformity. More than one person mentioned that he kept a loaded pistol in the distillery. (“It’s Texas,” Mr. Tate told me.)

“He was very bold,” said Lew Bryson, the author of “Tasting Whiskey” and a longtime beer-and-spirits journalist. “He’s not trying to make whiskey like other people make whiskey.” Mr. Bryson recalled that the first time they met, Mr. Tate said he made the best whiskey in the world.

The effort and passion paid off: Mr. Tate’s whiskey was a hit almost from the moment it landed on shelves in 10 states in 2010. His first release, a young whiskey called Baby Blue, won a double gold, the highest honor in its category, at the prestigious San Francisco World Spirits Competition. Soon his stills were running almost nonstop, and he was adding employees every month.