Two Trees Beverage Wins Gold and Platinum at the 2026 SIP Awards — And the Story Behind the Bourbons Is Just as Interesting as the Medals
On August 25, 2026, a small but increasingly hard-to-ignore bourbon operation out of Fletcher, North Carolina, collected two of the more prestigious hardware pieces available on the international competitive spirits circuit. Two Trees Beverage Company, a subsidiary of Green Cove Springs, Florida-based MDWerks, Inc. (OTCQB: MDWK), received two 2026 SIP Awards — a Gold Medal for Two Trees Wood-Crafted Bourbon in the Small Batch Bourbon (up to 10 years) category, and a Platinum Medal for Land of the Sky Straight Bourbon Whiskey Finished with Oak in the Straight Bourbon Whiskey category. For a brand that operates well outside the Kentucky establishment, those are not small achievements.
What makes the wins genuinely interesting to anyone who follows American whiskey isn't just the medals themselves — it's the context surrounding how these bourbons are made and what the recognition signals about where the craft spirits space is heading. Two Trees is not a conventional operation, and the SIP Awards are not a conventional competition. Together, they tell a story about an industry in motion.
What the SIP Awards Actually Mean
Not every spirits competition is created equal, and the bourbon world has seen its share of pay-to-play showcases where a gold medal means little more than a check and a submission form. The SIP Awards operate differently. The SIP Awards are an annual spirits competition using a rigorous double-blind tasting by consumer judges, serving as a benchmark of excellence in the spirits industry and recognizing brands for quality based on aroma, taste, and finish. The consumer-judging model is a deliberate design choice — it strips out the insider bias that professional judges can carry and forces each bottle to win on what it delivers in the glass, not who made it or how much marketing budget sits behind the label.
Renowned for its rigorous blind-tasting methodology, the SIP Awards offers a level playing field for spirits of all scales and origins, where evaluators assess each entry without any bias — an approach that ensures the most deserving brands are recognized and celebrated. For a craft producer competing against far larger, far better-capitalized operations, that structure matters enormously.
The 2026 event was the 18th annual SIP Awards, a major blind-tasted global spirits competition judged by consumers. Eighteen years of consistent methodology means the competition has accumulated enough institutional credibility that a medal here carries genuine weight in retail conversations and distribution negotiations — exactly the terrain where smaller brands need every advantage they can get.
The Significance of Platinum
Within the SIP Awards framework, medals are not distributed on a simple pass/fail basis. The tier structure reflects meaningful scoring distinctions. The Platinum Medal Award is reserved for spirits that achieve exceptional scores, representing exemplary products that stand out for their superior quality and character within their categories. That means Land of the Sky Straight Bourbon Whiskey Finished with Oak didn't just place — it scored at the top of its class against a field drawn from international entrants. For a straight bourbon produced in North Carolina using a process that bends or outright breaks traditional production timelines, earning Platinum at the 18th annual SIP Awards is a legitimizing moment.
The Bourbons on the Podium
Two Trees Wood-Crafted Bourbon
Two Trees Wood-Crafted Bourbon earned a prestigious Gold Medal and recognition as an outstanding international beverage in the category of Small Batch Bourbon (up to 10 years). The name itself carries a descriptor — "wood-crafted" — that signals the production philosophy at the heart of this brand. Rather than aging in a traditional 53-gallon white oak barrel stored in a rickhouse for years at a time, Two Trees takes a different path to extract those critical wood-derived flavors that bourbon drinkers are chasing.
Two Trees Wood-Crafted Bourbon is colored and flavored with Appalachian white oak chips, with the charred wood contributing a sweet nuttiness to the full corn-forward flavor, bottled at 45% ABV (90 proof). The use of Appalachian white oak is not incidental — sourcing wood from the same mountain region where the distillery sits gives the spirit a regional identity that's worth noting. The choice to select, toast, and char the chips in-house rather than purchasing commodity wood products means the production team controls a key flavor variable that most traditional distilleries cede entirely to cooperages and climate.
Land of the Sky Straight Bourbon Whiskey Finished with Oak
Land of the Sky Straight Bourbon Whiskey Finished with Oak earned a prestigious Platinum Medal and recognition as an outstanding international beverage in the category of Straight Bourbon Whiskey. The "Straight Bourbon" designation carries legal weight under U.S. federal standards — it means the spirit must be produced from a grain mixture of at least 51% corn, distilled to no more than 160 proof, entered into new charred oak containers at no more than 125 proof, and aged for a minimum of two years with no additives other than water. The "Finished with Oak" addition indicates a secondary maturation step in which the spirit spends additional contact time with oak, layering more wood character onto the base bourbon.
The Land of the Sky expression takes its name from a nickname historically associated with the Asheville and Western North Carolina region — a nod to the mountain geography that shapes the brand's identity. Independent reviewers who have examined earlier iterations of this expression have noted its character as a wheated bourbon style, with a mash bill built from corn, wheat, and malted barley, aged and then finished in toasted white oak barrels, and bottled at 46% ABV. The toasted oak finish — separate from a charred finish — tends to introduce softer, sweeter wood notes rather than the more aggressive smoky bitterness that heavy char produces, which likely contributes to its broad appeal with consumer judges.
The Company Behind the Bottle: MDWerks and the Sustainable Technology Play
To understand Two Trees Beverage Company fully, you have to understand the corporate structure it operates within — and that structure is genuinely unusual in the spirits world. MDWerks, Inc. (OTCQB: MDWK) describes itself as a forward-thinking company leading the charge in the world of sustainable technology. That framing would seem incongruous for a bourbon company, until you dig into how Two Trees actually makes its spirits.
Using two eco-friendly processes, Two Trees produces sustainably matured, wood-crafted beverage alcohol products. The environmental angle isn't just marketing language — it's the operational core of the business. Traditional bourbon aging is resource-intensive: it requires vast quantities of virgin white oak barrels (each used only once under bourbon regulations), large warehouse footprints that consume energy for climate management, and years of holding inventory before a dollar of revenue can be recognized. Two Trees has built a business model specifically designed to compress and reconfigure that process.
The Spirits Rapid Aging System
The most technically significant piece of the Two Trees operation is its proprietary Spirits Rapid Aging System, or SRAS. The Company's SRAS units leverage patented molecular energy wave technology that swiftly and sustainably transforms distillate to maturity, delivering traditional taste profiles in a fraction of the time — weeks versus years — without sacrificing quality and with greatly reduced environmental impact and cost. That's a bold claim in an industry where the romance of barrel aging and the patience it requires is practically baked into the marketing of every major brand. But the results showing up at blind-tasting competitions suggest the approach is producing spirits that hold their own against traditionally aged product.
The concept traces back to the distillery's founders. The idea to launch Two Trees Distilling Company began in 2016 when two friends, Chad Slagel and Keith Mort, appeared on the popular Discovery TV series Moonshiners alongside well-known moonshiner and TV personality Tim Smith, with Slagel and Mort appearing on the show to introduce their invention — the Whiskey Time Machine — which can achieve the same effect of aging whiskey in a barrel for five years in less than one day. That origin story — two home brewers going on a TV show to pitch what amounts to a time machine for bourbon — sounds like something from a pitch competition, and in a sense it was. It worked.
Two Trees selects, toasts, and chars all the wood used in the production of the wood chips used in the aging process, allowing the company to use less than 10 pounds of wood chips to age a whiskey in about 24 hours. That comparison to traditional barrel aging — which requires an entire 53-gallon barrel, typically weighing around 110 pounds when filled and consuming years of warehouse space — represents a dramatic reduction in material inputs per bottle produced.
The expansion of SRAS capacity has been a major focus for the company. A new, larger SRAS unit was built to augment an existing unit to accommodate demand for Two Trees' aged white-label distillates and award-winning spirits portfolio, with MDWerks' subsidiary RF Specialties, LLC designing and building the new SRAS unit — expected to approximately quintuple spirits production capacity at the Two Trees facility. Quintupling capacity while maintaining the quality that produces SIP Award-winning results is the kind of scaling challenge that defines whether a technology-driven spirits brand can graduate from an interesting experiment to a serious market player.
The SRAS technology isn't just being used in-house, either. MDWerks has signed contracts with two industry-leading spirits companies for the deployment and licensing of the proprietary SRAS — the first with one of the largest distilleries in the United States, and the second with a leading U.S. wholesaler and broker of bulk spirits, each with options for additional SRAS deployments. When companies of that scale are licensing your aging technology, the validation extends far beyond what any medal can provide.
A Track Record That's Building Year Over Year
The 2026 SIP Awards wins are not an isolated event. Two Trees has been accumulating competitive recognition across multiple years and multiple expressions, building a track record that's increasingly difficult to dismiss as a fluke. In 2025, Two Trees received three prestigious SIP Awards: a Silver Medal for Two Trees Snarly Yow Bourbon Whiskey and both a Silver Medal and an Innovation Award for Tim Smith's Climax Honey Raspberry Flavored Whiskey. The Innovation Award for the Climax Honey Raspberry expression is particularly telling — it signals that competition organizers and judges recognized something technically or conceptually novel in the product, not just competent execution.
Tracking the trajectory from Silver in 2025 to Gold and Platinum in 2026 across different expressions tells a story of a production team that is refining its craft, not coasting. Silver to Gold is progress; Gold alongside Platinum across two separate categories in a single year suggests the operation has hit a meaningful stride. These honors underscore the quality, depth of flavor, and consistency that Two Trees continues to deliver across its portfolio of fine spirits.
The Portfolio Beyond the Medal Winners
The two award-winning expressions represent only a portion of what Two Trees has built. Two Trees Beverage Co. includes a robust portfolio of sustainably matured spirits, including the Two Trees Wood Crafted Bourbon, a wood-crafted vodka, and a 12-SKU flavored whiskey collection spanning flavors including Crisp Apple, Scorched Brown Sugar, Cinnamon Spice, Peanut Butter, Sea Salted Caramel, Candy Apple, Carolina Peach, Michigan Cherry, and others. A 12-SKU flavored whiskey line might raise eyebrows among the straight-bourbon-only crowd, but it reflects a savvy commercial reality: flavored whiskey is a genuine volume driver at retail, and building a financially sustainable bourbon brand sometimes means you fund the craft side of the portfolio with the accessible side.
They also produce the Two Trees Folklore series, which includes two bourbons, a rye, and a single malt whiskey, plus two ready-to-drink cocktails — an Old Fashioned and a Manhattan. A rye and a single malt alongside bourbons in the Folklore series suggests the distillery is interested in exploring the full range of American whiskey styles rather than narrowing its identity entirely to one category. The RTD Old Fashioned and Manhattan are the kind of convenience-oriented products that increasingly strong on-premise and off-premise distribution platforms are built on.
The CEO's Perspective
MDWerks CEO Steven Laker weighed in on the 2026 wins in terms that connected the competitive success directly to the company's technological thesis. "We are excited to share that Two Trees has once again been recognized at the SIP Awards — this time with a Gold Medal for our Wood-Crafted Bourbon and a Platinum Medal for our Land of the Sky Straight Bourbon Finished with Oak. These awards are a testament to the skill and creativity of the Two Trees team and to the strength of our sustainable finishing technology."
That framing — crediting the technology alongside the team — is deliberate. MDWerks is not simply running a craft spirits brand; it is making an argument that its proprietary approach to spirit maturation represents a scalable, licensable technology platform. Every award Two Trees collects at a credible blind-tasting competition becomes evidence in that argument. Gold and Platinum at the 18th SIP Awards aren't just good press for the brand; they are data points in a technology validation story aimed at an audience that includes potential licensing partners, institutional investors, and the major distilleries that might someday standardize on SRAS technology the way the wine industry adopted temperature-controlled fermentation tanks.
What This Means for the Wider Bourbon Market
The Accelerated Aging Question
The bourbon establishment has always treated time as non-negotiable — a spirit becomes what it is through years of slow interaction between distillate and wood, driven by the seasonal temperature swings of a Kentucky or Tennessee rickhouse. That orthodoxy is being challenged from multiple directions simultaneously, and Two Trees is among the more credible challengers given its growing competitive record.
The broader question isn't whether accelerated aging techniques can produce an acceptable product — at this point, that debate is essentially over. The question is whether they can produce excellent product, the kind that earns Platinum medals in blind tastings against the world's full range of straight bourbons. Two Trees is building evidence that the answer may be yes. These accolades reinforce MDWerks' sustainable finishing technology and bolster its premium spirits market positioning.
Environmental Stakes in a Resource-Hungry Industry
It is no secret that wood enhances the flavor of premium spirits, as many alcohol brands continue to use barrel aging to meet consumer demand for the special and unique flavor characteristics that come from wood — but these delicious flavors typically come at a cost, with the environment feeling the effects, including deforestation and carbon dioxide emissions from aging loss and warehousing. That's a candid acknowledgment of a problem the industry has been slow to confront publicly. Every 53-gallon barrel used in traditional bourbon production is a one-time-use item — once filled with bourbon and emptied, it can be repurposed for Scotch or beer aging, but for American straight bourbon purposes it is spent. The cumulative barrel demand from the American bourbon boom of the last decade has put real pressure on cooperages and white oak forests alike.
A production model that achieves competitive spirit quality while using a fraction of the wood input represents a meaningful environmental contribution, not just a cost efficiency. As environmental, social, and governance considerations increasingly factor into purchasing decisions by distributors, retailers, and on-premise buyers, that story becomes commercially valuable in ways that didn't exist fifteen years ago.
The Craft vs. Scale Tension
Two Trees occupies an interesting position in a market that has traditionally forced brands to choose between craft identity and scale ambitions. The SRAS technology, if it continues to prove itself in blind tastings, offers a path toward scaling production without the compounding capital costs that traditionally make scaling bourbon so brutal — you have to produce years before you can sell, which means carrying enormous working capital in liquid form in a warehouse.
The need for sustainable wine, beer, and spirits production has never been more pressing, and Two Trees Beverage Co. is ready to lead that charge. Whether that leadership ultimately expresses itself through the brand's own retail presence, through SRAS licensing deals with major distilleries, or through some combination of both, the competitive hardware now sitting in the Two Trees trophy case gives the company a story that lands cleanly with every stakeholder it needs to reach.
What Bourbon Drinkers Should Take Away
For the whiskey drinker who is curious but skeptical — who has heard the "rapid aging" pitch before and remained unconvinced — the SIP Awards results deserve a fair look. Consumer judges at a double-blind competition are not evaluating process or philosophy. They are evaluating what's in the glass. When Land of the Sky Straight Bourbon Whiskey Finished with Oak earns Platinum under those conditions, it means people who didn't know what they were drinking chose it as an outstanding representative of its category.
That's the only test that ultimately matters for a bourbon. Not the pedigree of the distillery, not the romantic story on the back label, not the age statement or the grain source or the rickhouse location. What matters is whether the liquid holds up when someone who doesn't know who made it decides it's excellent. Two Trees passed that test twice in 2026, and did so on the heels of three SIP Awards in 2025. The body of evidence is accumulating, and for anyone who takes American whiskey seriously, that's a brand worth watching and a bottle worth tracking down.
