By Eric Griffey
Photos by Brooks Burris
Will and Sarah Rucker know how to throw a party. Together, the couple becomes the consummate host, and their Ryan Place home is a frequent venue for neighborhood cookouts, school fundraisers and any other occasion where great food, drinks and company intersect.
During one recent cookout, the dining room table overflowed with various cheeses and specialty appetizers. Sarah held court in the kitchen, while Will lined the grill with fresh cuts of flank steak that perfumed the family’s patio area as internal temperatures reached optimization.
“If it involves the Ruckers and food, I’m in,” one partygoer quips. For their neighbors, the Ruckers’ home has become a station of the cross for anyone seeking a sense of community. Years ago, the pair began a tradition of raising a blue flag to signal that their home and kitchen were open.
What began as an invitation among friends has since become the philosophical backbone of one of Fort Worth’s most ambitious hospitality projects: a sprawling distillery, event venue and gathering place inside the former Rahr & Sons Brewing Company complex near South Main Street.
Blue Flag Distillery’s story is less about whiskey than persistence — about two men who spent years chasing an idea through failed leases, abandoned plans and expensive dead ends before finally landing in a 37,000-square-foot building that once seemed impossibly out of reach.
“We had all these moments where it felt like the thing was falling apart,” Rucker opines recently while sitting inside the cavernous former brewery. “And every single time, somehow, it turned into something better.”
Today, the former oil and gas veteran and his business partner, brewer-turned-distiller Nate Swan, are building a distillery centered around American single malt whiskey, a category formally recognized by the federal government only last year. The two men arrived there by very different paths.
Rucker spent years in operations management in the oil and gas industry, including a stint living overseas in Malaysia.
Swan, meanwhile, came up through Fort Worth’s craft beer scene, first as an unpaid volunteer at Rahr before eventually becoming head brewer and later head of operations.
Together, they have created something distinctly and wholly of Fort Worth: equal parts neighborhood hangout, industrial experiment and hospitality obsession.
“This whole thing started with the idea that people want places to gather,” Rucker says. “That’s really it. We just decided to build the kind of place we wanted to spend time in.”
The original blue flag tradition dates back to 2016, when Rucker and his wife began hosting increasingly regular porch gatherings at their home. Friends would drift over for drinks, conversations would stretch late into the evening, and eventually someone would realize nobody had made dinner.
Rucker wanted structure.
“We said, ‘Let’s just do this intentionally once a month,’” he recalled. “Then the question became: How do people know they’re invited?”
The answer came from a childhood story a friend shared about neighbors who hung a yellow towel over a fence whenever kids were welcome to swim.
Rucker ordered a blue flag from Amazon.
“That was literally it,” he said, laughing. “First one we found.”
The flag soon became shorthand in the neighborhood. If people saw it flying, they stopped by.
Years later, when Rucker began contemplating what came next professionally, that spirit of hospitality lingered in the background.
In 2018, he and a close friend began holding regular meetings they jokingly called “beer and coffee.” One week, they would drink beer and talk honestly about what they wanted life to look like in five or 10 years. Two weeks later, they would reconvene over coffee and discuss how to make it happen.
For Rucker, the answer kept circling back to ownership and hospitality.
“I knew I wanted to build something,” he said. “Something where people gathered.”
At first, he explored buying businesses. He examined everything from moving companies to industrial manufacturing operations. Eventually, he looked inward at his own love of discovering and sharing craft spirits and began researching distilleries.
One early possibility involved purchasing a struggling vodka company. The deal ultimately collapsed, but the process introduced Rucker to the world of craft distilling.
“I realized I loved the industry,” he said. “There’s manufacturing, there’s process,
there’s creativity — but then there’s also hospitality. You get both sides of it.”
Around the same time, Swan was charting his own unconventional course through Fort Worth’s brewing scene.
After graduating from UNT with a degree in radio, television and film, Swan took what he assumed would be a temporary job at Lifetime Fitness. He stayed eight years.
At home, meanwhile, he was roasting coffee beans, making kombucha and experimenting with fermentation projects that bordered on obsession.
“I’m the guy who always wants to know how deep the rabbit hole goes,” Swan said.
An accidentally over-fermented batch of kombucha eventually led him into home brewing. Soon after, he wandered into Fort Worth’s brewing community, where he met longtime brewer and supply shop owner “Stubby” and began learning the craft in earnest.
Swan eventually started volunteering at Rahr & Sons Brewing Company while still working his day job. A fellow home brewer has approached him about a beer-making job in Minnesota, but Swan lacks experience working in an industrial setting.
“For five months, I worked for free,” he said. “I loved it. If somebody didn’t show up that day, they’d ask me to clean tanks or help out. I just wanted to be there.”
In 2012, Rahr hired him as an assistant brewer.
Over the next decade, Swan became one of the more respected brewing operators in North Texas, spending time at both Rahr and Martin House Brewing Company before eventually crossing paths with Rucker through mutual industry connections. The partnership clicked quickly.
“We were very aligned philosophically,” Swan said. “Quality mattered. Process mattered. Hospitality mattered.”
What followed was nearly four years of false starts. One potential location near White Settlement Road ballooned into an $8 million proposal that proved impossible to finance. Another site collapsed after a landlord backed out at the last moment, despite signed paperwork and checks already written.
A third property dragged through months of delays before construction issues derailed the timeline entirely.
“I remember walking out of one of those meetings thinking I should be furious,” Rucker says. “And instead, I just thought, ‘OK, let’s go find the next thing.’”
Then came the former Rahr property.
Initially, the idea felt absurd. The building was far larger than anything Swan had planned for or financed.
“We raised money for an 8,000-square-foot project,” he says. “This place is 37,000 square feet.”
But almost immediately, the building began creating opportunities they never anticipated. Partnerships formed. An event business followed. And then came the stills.
The custom copper stills — designed by legendary Texas whiskey figure Chip Tate — had been sitting unused in a warehouse north of Fort Worth after another distilling venture dissolved. Rucker and Swan acquired them through an investor relationship that materialized almost overnight. (As is industry tradition, the partners gave two of the still names: “Dolly” and “Parton.” The two await inspiration for the remaining unnamed stills.)
“There aren’t many stills like these anywhere,” Rucker says. “They were specifically designed for single malt whiskey.” The whiskey itself remains years away from sitting on retail shelves across the country.
By law, the American single malt category requires aging, meaning Blue Flag’s signature product is still quietly maturing in barrels. In the meantime, the distillery has launched gin production, beer brewing and events while continuing to build its brand.
The approach reflects the personalities of both founders.
Rucker speaks frequently about hospitality, intentionality and neighborhood culture. Swan talks like a craftsman obsessed with variables and refinement. Together, they describe their products the same way: sophisticated yet approachable.
They do not want intimidating whiskey.
“We don’t want people to feel like they have to sit in a steakhouse to drink our stuff,” Rucker says. “We want it to be high quality, but we also want it to feel welcoming.”
Swan approaches spirits the same way he once approached brewing.
“I’m not interested in shock-value whiskey,” he says. “I want somebody who really knows what they’re tasting to think it’s excellent. But I also want somebody new to whiskey to enjoy it immediately.”
That mindset extends to the building itself.
Rather than rushing into widespread distribution, Blue Flag focuses on creating experiences inside the distillery first — tastings, events, theater performances and neighborhood gatherings that echo the original porch parties that inspired the name.
On some level, the blue flag is still flying, only now, it hangs over an entire campus.
“We spent years wondering why things kept falling through,” Swan said. “Now looking back, it feels like this was always where we were supposed to end up.”