Last week, we caught up with Rick Wasmund, CEO and Master Distiller at the Copper Fox Distillery in Sperryville, VA. Their Wasmund’s Single-Malt Whisky is the only spirit of its kind in the world, and it was great to get inside the head of the guy who makes it. To meet the distiller in person, Wasmund is doing an event at Marvin tonight at 5:30 p.m. He’ll be pouring samples of Wasmund’s Batch 20 and, hopefully, the Shenandoah Lemonade cocktail mentioned down in the interview.

Can you give us an overview of the Wasmund philosophy/approach?

We set out to make an original whisky. Malt the barley with fruit-wood (apple and cherry) smoke, truly … different woods in the aging process. It’s important that people realize that they are two fundamentally different things: the flavors that are developed in the malting process, and the flavors that are developed in the aging process. It’s easy for those two to get lumped together. But yea, we started with the theoretical: what would happen if we tried this new process, using the fruit-wood smoke and then aged on the fruit-wood chips. Then we had a product, and from there we made adjustments. If there’s a philosophy, it’s that we wanted to make an original expression of whisky. It seemed obvious that it was an idea that just demanded to be made. We’ve had about a year and a half of tweaking now, adjusting the apple-wood, doing a lot of experiments. And it’s exciting because every tree, every part of a tree, is different. You can only use about 10% of the wood from a given tree. We do pre-experiments on everything, now, and some turn out better than others.

So with the traditional floor-malting that you guys do, obviously, there aren’t many people still doing that. Are you the only ones still doing it?

We’re the only distillery in North America that is malting our own barley. And in the world, the whole universe, we’re the only ones using fruit-wood smoke for the drying phase. It’s that unique. It’s all connected: the reason we malt our own is so we can use the fruit-wood to add flavor in the malting stage, and make our adjustments as we go along.

Did you have any distilling experience prior to opening the company?

Prior to going to Scotland, the only experience I had was in Chemistry class. We had the keys to the lab and the teacher liked us. We gave him some of the … purified water. But other than that I had never worked in a distillery. I was in the insurance business, so it was really quite a change. I worked with small manufacturing companies when I was in insurance, so I wasn’t completely distanced from the effort involved. I think it’s analogous to having a kid, and I don’t have kids. But people say you love them more than you can imagine, and they’re more work than you can imagine. Well, it’s the same thing with Wasmund’s. It’s everything you’ve got, and then some more.

Photo by Eric Denman