Josh Mahan is coming up on two big milestones: his daughter Pepper’s fourth birthday, and the four-year anniversary of his other child, Fat Baby Bourbon. While this marks some of the scariest moments of his life, it serves as a luminary to the strength and power of his daughter, and what he’s done to honor that fire.
At just two days old, Pepper suffered the unthinkable — a stroke. The Mahan family was told she would never walk or talk and their joyful thoughts of Pepper living an independent and fulfilling life had vanished before they could even begin to celebrate her birth. As the turmoil and despair piled up, a crack in that wall of sadness began to let in light: Pepper started to show progress. “The doctors couldn’t believe what she was able to overcome. She defied the odds,” says Mahan. “She’s our little miracle baby, and I wanted to pay tribute to her fighting spirit.”
Originally working in the technology sphere, Mahan focused on whiskey as a passion product. He had begun the process of getting a distillery and had run into some red tape for licensing around the time Pepper was born. Taking a page out of his daughter’s book of perseverance, he forged forward.
The bourbon itself is distilled in the Hudson Valley and shares many qualities with Pepper: It has a temperate balance of sweetness with just the right amount of kick, has been aged four years to perfection, and is loved universally.
Now an active kid with a clean bill of health, Pepper — and the bourbon named in her honor — continues to make an impact in the lives of others. “Honestly, she’s lived up to her name; she’s got a spicy little personality.” A percentage of the whiskey sales go to a Westchester-based charity that Mahan’s wife Rachel founded and runs, Stronger Than Tears, which helps to support the hospital bills of children with chronic illnesses.
For Mahan, the brand has become so much more than a glittering jewel on a bar cart — it is a storyteller about how we handle adversity through the eyes of a 2-day-old who refused to quit. “I think I learned more from Pepper than anything to not give up the fight, and to do so with a positive outlook,” he says.
“She’s our little miracle baby, and I wanted to pay tribute to her fighting spirit.”
— Josh Mahan
“Despite the suffering and the pain that she was experiencing all the time, the kid would always be smiling and always have an upbeat demeanor. What a lesson for everybody that we’re all going to have adversity in some shape or form. If we’re perceiving it the right way, with that positivity, then we’re going to be that much more likely to succeed, even though all the odds are against us.”
Fat Baby Bourbon
Sleepy Hollow
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