Aaron Chepenik

“Smoke Wagon Master”

Aaron Chepenik’s story starts long before the embossed bottle and the Latin motto, before the late-night Instagram Lives and the cult runs that vanish from store shelves in a breath. It begins, instead, with a kid who studied film in upstate New York and then detoured, hard, through the sort of jobs that teach you how to work: construction, driving trucks, hauling your own weight and then some. Those years weren’t glamorous, but they left him with a practical streak and a taste for solving concrete problems. They also sharpened his eye for mood and scene, a filmmaker’s instinct he would later pour into glass.

In Los Angeles, he found the room where all of those impulses fit: a dark, atmospheric bar called the Chalet. It was here, in 2003, that Chepenik met a frequent patron, the screenwriter and director Jonathan Hensleigh. The two men hit it off; one from the hands-on trenches of nightlife, the other from the structured chaos of Hollywood, and soon opened two bars together: The Griffin in L.A., and a sister Griffin on Fremont Street in downtown Las Vegas. The partnership made sense. Hensleigh could parse contracts and strategy; Chepenik could build, blend, and make the night hum. They weren’t just talking about selling drinks; they were learning what people actually wanted to drink.

By the late 2000s, their collaboration shifted from serving spirits to making them. In a warehouse near the Neon Museum, surrounded by pallets and copper, they launched their own distilling effort. The first-born spirit wasn’t whiskey at all but Silver Dollar Vodka, a Nevada-themed project whose bottle carried a replica Morgan silver dollar and a wink toward the Comstock Lode. From the outset, the brand language felt like cinema: symbols, motifs, the West as myth made modern. The packaging wasn’t gimmick for gimmick’s sake; it telegraphed place and pride.

Whiskey arrived next, not because it was easy, but because it was right. Nevada laws in those years nudged young producers toward a model built on sourcing and blending rather than cooking a mash from scratch. So Chepenik and Hensleigh did the practical thing: they partnered with MGP in Lawrenceburg, Indiana, acquiring barrels that had already begun their patient conversation with oak. Those barrels would spend time aging in century-old brick in Indiana, and then they would ship west to breathe desert air in Las Vegas, where heat and dryness promise their own alchemy.

When the whiskey was ready, in 2015 for the first batch, Chepenik named it “Smoke Wagon,” after a 1873 Colt single-action revolver. The name carried a flint of frontier swagger; the bottle, with its raised sagebrush and crossed revolvers over the state outline, completed the statement. Inside the glass, the identity was forged not by a single age but by a blend: younger spirit for tannic muscle and energy; older bourbon for softness and depth. Chepenik tasted it neat, on ice, and in cocktails, dialing ratios until the whiskey sang across formats. If you want to understand why the brand later grew like a brushfire, you can start there, with the workman’s obsession over how the thing actually drinks.

Recognition came fast. In 2016, Smoke Wagon Small Batch took gold at the San Francisco World Spirits Competition. More medals followed. Wynn Las Vegas put Smoke Wagon into its Tower Suite Bar Private Collection, positioning the local whiskey as part of a 71-bottle shrine to the spirit. For a city that imports so much of its liquor, Smoke Wagon felt like a home-team anthem: Vegas-born, desert-aged, unabashedly Western.

The audience widened in a thoroughly twenty-first-century way. Chepenik’s casual, behind-the-scenes videos on social media, warehouse tours, blending chats, and cork-pop cameos—helped demystify bourbon without neutering its romance. He looked like a guy who did the heavy lifting because he was. And yet, if you listened closely in interviews and print features, there was a studied discipline under the charm. He’d spent years in bars, learning how people read a label, how they order, how the palate shifts as ice melts. That practical schooling showed up in every batch he blended. 

Growth in whiskey, however, is a game of patience. Barrels tie up cash for years; inventory is a living calendar. In 2024, the company struck a multimillion-dollar deal with Advanced Spirits to secure long-term barrel inventory from its longtime partner MGP. The arrangement freed capital for building the brand while locking in future whiskey, exactly the kind of pragmatic, infrastructure-minded decision that separates a hot boutique label from a durable one. It was another pivot that looked, in hindsight, like an inevitability.

Multiple reports that Chepenik is a bachelor seem to ring true—a plainspoken cadence of the guy who blends the barrels and is married to his work of making top-quality spirits. Likewise, it does not appear that Aaron has ever taken the time to have kids, though neither are the case for Chepenik’s still-partner in Smoke Wagon, best friend Jonathan Hensleigh.

So you can trace the arc in a straight line if you want: film school, blue-collar graft, L.A. bars, a downtown Las Vegas stake, a vodka that nodded at the state’s silver past, then a whiskey that christened the present. But the truer picture is layered. Chepenik’s is an American small-business story told through oak and evaporation. It insists that history is a tool, not a costume; that blending is both craft and judgment; that the West still means something you can taste. Ultimately, the whiskey is more than just a product on the shelf. It’s the vector for all the tinkering, all the practical decisions, and all the stubborn, careful labor that began when a kid with a film degree reached for a life where the scenes were real, and the lights were the color of Nevada sun.

Sources

  1. Brooke Wanser, “Distillery gives nod to Nevada with its vodka, whiskey,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, December 15, 2016

  2. Matt Villano, “Tower Suite Bar Private Collection at Wynn Las Vegas Features Whiskey From Local Distillery,” Wynn Stories, c. 2019–2021.

  3. KTNV 13 Action News, “Las Vegas distillery inspired by Nevada history, building a promising future,” updated 2025. (Nevada law context, production scale, move to larger facility, public profile.)

  4. American Whiskey Magazine, “Advanced Spirits finalizes multimillion-dollar deal with Nevada Distilling Co.,” Sept. 12, 2024. (Barrel-financing partnership for long-term growth and MGP supply.) 

Contributed by Tracy McLemore, Fairview, Tennessee