In the Spotlight: Chris Wiedmar

Morning, friends - Logan here. I’m still riding the high of UK beating Florida by 30 - a sentence that would’ve seemed like a complete fabrication just a few years ago. Wild times in the SEC, and Coach Stoops might have just salvaged his reputation with that win. Anyway, you aren’t here for my thoughts on college football…

This week, I sat down with Chris Wiedmar, CEO and co-founder of Hogshead, to explore how technology is transforming one of Kentucky’s most iconic industries - bourbon. Hogshead is building a digital marketplace for buying, selling, and managing barrels of aging whiskey, bringing transparency and efficiency to a historically opaque market.

What started as a challenge to buy a few barrels for a bourbon brand turned into the founding insight behind Hogshead. Chris and his team realized that despite Kentucky having over 16 million barrels of bourbon aging in rickhouses, there was no standardized way to track, price, or trade them. Hogshead set out to fix that by combining marketplace software with data analytics to help distilleries, brands, and investors better understand the value of their liquid assets (pun intended).

As bourbon barrels become recognized as financial assets rather than just aging inventory, Hogshead is building the infrastructure enabling that market to function. The platform enables producers and brokers to list inventory, buyers to evaluate market data, and everyone to operate with a level of visibility that’s never existed before in the industry.

Beyond bourbon, the company sees opportunity across other barrel-aged spirits like rum, tequila, and scotch, connecting global markets through a single digital platform built in Kentucky.

What We Discussed:

The inefficiency behind bourbon sourcing
How Chris’s experience running Party Horses (shoutout episode 183) revealed how difficult it is to buy barrels and why Hogshead exists to solve that.

The evolution of bourbon as an asset
Why whiskey barrels are now viewed as an investable commodity and what that means for distillers, investors, and collectors.

Building a two-sided marketplace
How Hogshead is bridging tradition and technology in an industry where relationships have always been the currency.

The Bourbon Boom and Market Shift
How the C*vid P*ndemic caused a bourbon surge led to oversupply, shifting the market from being dominated by brokers to reorienting to a buyer’s market - and why that created the perfect timing for a data-driven platform like Hogshead to emerge.

Modernizing a legacy industry
What it takes to bring software, data, and standardization to a centuries-old craft and what that leads to next for Hogshead.

Listen to the episode on Spotify

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts

We hope you enjoy this episode! If you have any thoughts after listening, feel free to shoot me a message at [email protected]

Have a great week, friends!

LinkedIn | Instagram | Twitter | TikTok | YouTube | MiddleTech.com

Real Estate more your speed? Check our sister brand, DevelopLex.