America 250: Rye Whiskey, The Talk Part 2
Catoctin Distillery in Purcellville, Virginia, hosted a talk for America 250. This is the conclusion...
America 250: Rye Whiskey, The Talk Part 1
What Rye Remembers
My grandfather had a beautiful bar in his house in Oklahoma. Blue-collar man, oil money, but he had built something that looked like it belonged in a gentleman’s club. Polished cherry red brick from Chicago. Ceramic decanters with hunting scenes. And a row of bottle toppers, each one a little ceramic head marking what was inside. The gin had a chubby British man. The cognac had a Frenchman in a beret. The Scotch had a Highlander. And the rye had a Canadian Mountie.
I did not think anything of it at the time. Why would I? Rye meant Canadian. That was what you reached for if you asked for rye at any bar in America from the 1950s until well into the 2000s. Seagram’s. Canadian Club. Crown Royal. The bottle might say rye, but the liquid inside need not be made from rye at all. Under Canadian law, it only had to taste like rye. The American grain, the American tradition, the American taste—all of it had been replaced by a word that no longer meant what it once had.
That Mountie on my grandfather’s bar was a monument to forgetting. And, it turns out, forgetting has a history, too.
The death of American rye was not sudden. It was structural.
Before Prohibition, rye whiskey dominated the mid-Atlantic and the Northeast. The great distilleries were in places like Monongahela in western Pennsylvania, in Baltimore, and in Philadelphia. These were urban operations—factories, really—built for scale, tied to rail lines and shipping routes, producing enormous quantities of whiskey for a nation that drank a staggering amount of it. By some estimates, Americans in the late nineteenth century consumed nearly a gallon of spirits per person per week. Rye was the baseline. It was what went into the Manhattan, the Old Fashioned, the Sazerac. It was the spirit that built American mixology.
When Prohibition arrived in 1920, those urban distilleries could not survive. A factory in Pittsburgh or Baltimore is expensive to maintain. If you cannot use it, you cannot let it sit idle. The buildings were sold, repurposed, and turned into shoe factories and warehouses. The equipment was scrapped. The expertise is scattered.
By the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the production capacity for American rye had been dismantled.
Bourbon survived differently. The Kentucky distilleries were rural. They sat on land that could be farmed. They had access to medicinal whiskey permits that allowed limited legal production. And they had corn, which grew easily and cheaply in the region. When Prohibition ended, bourbon was positioned to rebuild. Rye was not.
Into that vacuum came Canadian whisky. The border was porous during Prohibition, and Canadian producers continued to operate legally throughout. Their product was available, familiar enough, and close enough in flavor profile that American drinkers accepted the substitution. Over time, the substitution became the standard. Rye stopped meaning a grain. It started meaning a style—a style that Canada owned.
By the time my grandfather arranged his bar in the 1950s, the transformation was complete. American rye was a memory, and the memory was fading.
But memory is stubborn, and some traditions do not die. They go underground.
Virginia’s Appalachian geography rewards discretion. Hollows and ridges, gravel roads that wind into places where a stranger would be noticed long before he arrived. During Prohibition, and for decades afterward, unlicensed distilling persisted in these hills. Moonshine is the word we use, and it carries a romantic charge—white lightning, mason jars, car chases on mountain roads. The reality was harder. It was a cash economy for people who had no other means of exchange. It was a risk of arrest, of fines, of violence when deals went wrong. It was a way to turn grain into money when legitimate work had dried up.
The Depression deepened that logic. When the economy collapsed, the ability to produce something tradeable mattered more, not less. Families that had been distilling for generations kept distilling. The skills were passed down. The stills stayed hidden. The tradition continued in a form the law refused to recognize.
An ATF agent who attended one of the distillery talks I have been following told a story that has stayed with me. As recently as 2010, she helped bust a moonshine operation along I-81 that was the size of a commercial distillery. They had forklifts. They had pallets of product. They were selling to hotels in Philadelphia and New York, moving the whiskey in milk cartons to avoid detection. The only reason they got caught was that someone noticed a small farm receiving industrial quantities of milk cartons every week.
That operation was illegal, and I am not romanticizing it. But it was also a continuation. The knowledge of how to turn grain into whiskey had never fully disappeared from Virginia. It had simply moved out of sight, waiting for a legal path to return.
The revival began around 2009…
The revival began around 2009, though it did not announce itself as a revival at first. It announced itself as a curiosity.
Craft distilling was not new. Small producers had been making spirits across the country for years. But the idea of making American rye, real rye, from rye grain, in the places where rye had once been king, was still unusual. Most of the rye on the market was either Canadian or sourced from a single industrial producer in Indiana, MGP, whose juice-filled bottles had dozens of different labels. If you bought rye in 2009, there was a good chance you were buying MGP with someone else’s name on it. The same liquid, different labels. That was the state of American rye.
Scott and Becky Harris decided to do something different. They founded Catoctin Creek Distillery in Purcellville, Virginia, becoming Loudoun County’s first legal distillery since Prohibition. They were not trying to recreate the nineteenth-century industrial rye. They were trying to recover something older—the flavor of rye as it had been grown in Virginia before consolidation, before the grain became a commodity measured only in starch yield and ease of harvest.
They work with a single farmer in the Rappahannock region, near where the river empties into the Chesapeake Bay. He grows their heritage grains and mills the rye before delivering it. The varieties have names that sound like heirlooms because they are. Riman. Abruzzi. Indy Dillon. Black Sea Shore, a variety that grows seven feet tall and was once planted along the Chesapeake to block salt spray from reaching the tobacco fields. These grains were not bred for industrial efficiency. They were bred for flavor, for hardiness, for the specific conditions of the mid-Atlantic coast. When you distill them, the whiskey tastes different. It does not taste like the MGP standard. It tastes like something that has a place.
Scott described the surprise that people express when they taste his rye. They expect spice, heat, the aggressive bite that rye has come to mean. What they get is fruit, nuts, and a complexity that does not match the category they understood. He has learned to say: this is what rye tastes like when it comes from Virginia.
When it comes from grain grown for flavor rather than yield.
The operation at Catoctin Creek is small by industrial standards—roughly the same size as George Washington’s distillery at Mount Vernon in 1799, producing about 100,000 bottles a year. But scale is not the point. What struck me about the talk was how deliberately they have built the distillery to connect to place, not just in marketing but in practice.
The production cycle is zero-waste. When they distill the rye mash, ninety percent of what remains is water and grain—spent mash that becomes cattle feed. Sara Brown, who runs Oakland Green Farm in Lincoln, takes it for her hundred head of cattle. Her family has been farming that land since 1740, nine generations of Quakers working the same ground. She gives them beef in return. The heads—the first, undrinkable part of the distillation—serve as sanitizers and cleaners. The hearts become whiskey. The tails are redistilled, cleaned up, and become the base for gin. Nothing goes to landfill.
The building itself is a piece of Purcellville history. It was built over a hundred years ago as the town’s first car dealership, the Samuel Case family selling automobiles on a dirt road when cars still looked like horse-drawn mistakes. Later, it became a furniture workshop. Now it holds copper stills and oak barrels. The roof is covered with 160 solar panels, generating about eighty percent of the distillery’s electricity. They are certified organic, kosher, and powered largely by the sun.
Becky Harris has become a force in the industry beyond the distillery itself. She served as president of the Virginia Distillers Association, lobbying for laws that allowed craft distilleries to sell bottles on-site and offer tastings—both illegal when they started. She later became president of the American Craft Spirits Association. During COVID, she was the one who convinced the FDA to fast-track approval for small distilleries to produce hand sanitizer when the commercial supply chain collapsed. Thousands of craft producers across the country pivoted to making sanitizer because Becky Harris opened the door.
That argument—that terroir matters for whiskey the way it matters for wine, that small producers can do what industrial operations cannot, that the old ways are worth recovering—is still contested in the industry. But the recovery of heritage grains is not just a marketing effort. It is an attempt to reverse a loss. The industrial consolidation of the twentieth century erased regional variation. It made rye into a single, replicable flavor profile. The craft revival aims to restore variety.
This year, Virginia is releasing a commemorative whiskey for America 250. It is a blend of four spirits from four Virginia distilleries: rye, bourbon, wheat whiskey, and single malt. Each distillery contributed a component. A team of distillers worked together to find a blend that balanced the flavors, that let each grain speak without overwhelming the others. The bottle will be available through the state ABC stores, in limited quantities, for a one-time release.
I have not tasted it yet. I am told it is good. What interests me more than the flavor is what the project represents. Four distilleries that could have seen each other as competitors instead chose to collaborate. They pooled their whiskey the way earlier Virginians pooled their grain—not for efficiency, but for something shared.
The blend is a symbol, and symbols matter. It says, “We are still here.” We remember what this place used to make. We are making it again.
Whether that is enough, I do not know. A commemorative bottle does not undo history. It does not name the enslaved people who distilled rye on Virginia’s plantations for two centuries. It does not redistribute the profits that flowed upward to the men who owned the land and the people who worked it. It does not resolve the tension between celebrating a tradition and reckoning with how that tradition was built.
But it is a start. And maybe that is what a 250th anniversary is for. Not to declare the work finished, but to mark a point on a longer road.
I keep returning to the question of what a bottle carries.
A bottle of Virginia rye, made today from heritage grain, holds more than whiskey. It holds the colonial fields where rye was grown alongside tobacco. It holds the kitchens and stillhouses where enslaved women and men did the work of distilling, unnamed in the records, credited to no one. It holds the bartenders of the nineteenth century—Jasper Crouch, John Dabney, Jim Cook—who turned Virginia’s spirit into Virginia’s signature drink and built reputations that could not be fully erased. It holds the tax collectors and the farmers who refused to pay, the rebellion and the troops, the constitutional question of who bears the burden when the government comes looking for money.
It holds Prohibition and the long forgetting. The Canadian Mountie on my grandfather’s bar. The decades when rye meant something other than what it had meant. The illegal stills in the hollows, the knowledge that would not disappear, the ATF raids that proved the tradition had never fully died.
And it holds the revival. The heritage grains. The single farmer in the Rappahannock. The husband and wife in Purcellville. The commemorative blend. The argument, still being made, that place and memory matter, and that the old ways are worth recovering.
Timothy was fourteen when he worked the stills at Mount Vernon. We do not know what happened to him after 1802. We do not know if he ever distilled again, or if he taught anyone what he knew, or if the knowledge simply went with him into a life the archives did not follow. What we know is that he was there, and that his labor made the whiskey, and that the whiskey was sold and drunk and praised while his name appeared only on a list of property to be divided.
The bottle on the shelf is never just a bottle. It is a chain of hands. Some we can name. Many we cannot. The work is to keep looking, to keep asking who made this possible, to keep refusing the polished version that leaves the labor out.
Rye remembers, even when we forget. The question is whether we are ready to remember with it.
Awesome writing about a piece of the past that we can still taste.