Media Coverage

One of my favorite weekend rituals is pulling out the Washington Post weekend magazine and browsing through it on a leisurely Sunday morning.  And one of my favorite sections in the magazine is Closer Inspection by Kris Coronado.  How thrilling, then, is it to be featured in the magazine ourselves? (Very thrilling, I must tell you!)

Kris explores the distillery process, from grain to glass.  Here she is talking about the bottling operation:

The staff likes to call the distillery's Enolmaster bottling machine 'the whisky cow.' The hand-operated system fills four bottles at once.  "We usually have a group of volunteers that come in and help us bottle," Harris says.

Read the full story online, here.

Jake Emen discusses White Whiskey on The Whiskey Reviewer, and kindly quotes us about the philosophy of white whiskey in general:

Next in my adventure with white whiskey came Mosby’s Spirit, which I sampled on a recent visit to Catoctin Creek Distilling Company. This didn’t smell like your typical whiskey, either. Instead, there was a light, lemon citrus on the nose, with fresh floral aromas, backed up by a deep grainy profile.

Pure grain was the dominant force when tasting Mosby’s, producing something was, at least for myself, astonishingly easy to drink after my prior experience. Surprised by this, I asked Catoctin’s co-owner and distiller, Scott Harris, about what’s going on in the world of white whiskey these days.

“What I think some distillers get wrong is that they basically produce a spirit that they’re going to be putting away for a long time,” Harris said. “But you have to make money in the short term so you take some of that and you bottle it. So a spirit that should be aged for four years or something like that is oilier, and muskier, and not as pleasant. Some people like it, but not everybody likes it. Therefore, I think they make a mistake of putting something into a bottle which should be going into a barrel.”

So how does one make a better product? “When we started producing the Mosby’s, we aimed to produce a white whiskey that was truly drinkable on its own as a white spirit. It’s meant to be drank white,” Harris said.

Read the full review here.

The May 2013 issue of Northern Virginia magazine has a wonderful story on our efforts to build a "green" distillery on Main Street in Purcellville.  They highlight several of the aspects of the production that will result in a very efficient and energy saving production plant, one of the only of its kind!  Melissa J. Lyden reports:

Catoctin architect Dieter Meyer: "Re-purposing one typical existing downtown building is the equivalent of recycling 1.34 million aluminum cans.  A very strong case has been made, that the greenest building is the one that already exists."

Read the entire story, here.

Becky appeared on the Kojo Nnamdi show on WAMU 88.5. From the show description:

Small-batch craft distilleries are popping up across the country and region. They make everything from gin to rye to vodka, often with a focus on local ingredients and unique flavors. We talk with three local makers about what goes into getting a distillery off the ground and onto shelves at bars and liquor stores.

Other guests for the hour were Mike Lowe, of New Columbia Distillers, and Chris Cook, of Sloop Betty.

It was a great show! You can see the original show site, here.

Maggie Wolff Peterson wrote a nice article in Valley Homes & Style featuring our distillery.  There are some gorgeous photos of the process and the products as well, courtesy some of our favorite photographer friends.

Open the front door to the Catoctin Creek distillery in Purcellville, Va., and enter a wave of fragrance: the tang of fermenting grain. In a nearly nondescript industrial park, a good half-mile from the historic and lovely center of town, Scott and Becky Harris are doing something that nobody has done, at least legally, in Loudoun County since Prohibition. They’re making whiskey.

Read the full article, here.

Jake Emen visited us in January and subsequently reviewed us on The Whiskey Reviewer. This is perhaps one of the most thorough and accurate pieces of coverage on the distillery:

If you live in or around Washington D.C., then it’s likely you’ve been seeing more and more of Catoctin Creek these days. In 2012, they increased their production to 40,000 bottles, double 2011′s level, and they have formed a variety of local partnerships. So it is that you’ll find the private label 515 exclusively at J&G Steakhouse at the W Hotel in D.C.; or if you went to D.C. Brau brewery, you’d see a rack of Catoctin Creek barrels put to use; or if you went to the 2012 Farmland Feast, you’d have seen their whiskey up for grabs in a charity-auction… and on down the line from there. From top to bottom, Catoctin Creek is a very locally-focused, community-driven operation. Enthusiastic volunteers actually do all of their bottling by hand during their filled-to-capacity weekend bottling workshops.

Read the full review here.

Modern Luxury DC does a fascinating article, tracing the life of a barrel from oak grove, through whisky, syrup, and finally to its end.  This is a great insight to a different kind of recycling program.

Under federal law, the casks can only be used once for the whiskey, so Harris sells them to anyone who's interested.

Read the full article, here.

Cville Weekly wrote an outstanding and very in-depth article on the state of craft distilling in Virginia.  Giles Morris covered Virginia Distilling Company in Nelson County, Copper Fox Distillery in Sperryville, and us as well.  Here he is interviewing Rick Wasmund, owner of Copper Fox:

“It’s not always easy to sell in Virginia. Part of our benefit is that we’re an hour and a half from D.C. There we can self-distribute. I can have a bar owner taste my stuff and if they like it, I can take an order and bring them cases the next week,” Wasmund said.

...

“I like the engineering challenges. The physical production challenges of making great whisky. We’re always trying to stretch ourselves and make it better but we’re also trying to make more of it. That’s fun,” he said.

Read the full article here.