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Giving it his best shot

November 15, 2008 6:19 am

SPERRYVILLE

The 49-year-old New York native got out of the financial planning business at about the same time some of his former clients may have felt they could use a good stiff drink.

When the stock market began lowering spirits, Wasmund began distilling them in an old apple storage shed in the Rappahannock County hamlet of Sperryville.

Within earshot of the rush of a fast-moving stream and in the morning shadow of a picturesque mountain, the retired financial expert cooks up a batch of Wasmund's Single Malt Whisky about once a month.

"We're just little guys with big dreams," Wasmund says as he takes a pen and painstakingly inscribes the batch number on each of the bottles now ready for market.

"Every so often I even draw a smiley face on a bottle just to prove that [the labeling] was not done with a machine," he adds.

To be sure, Wasmund's operation is low-tech. His mother, Helen, hand rakes the barley as it undergoes the malting process on the brewery's concrete floor, and a simple wood stove heats a second-story kiln that dries the grain before grinding.

Fruitwood burned in a pan on that stove sends smoke up to the kiln to help flavor the barley. Wood chips in cloth sacks are suspended in the wooden barrels to add more flavor to the whiskey as it ages.

Most of Wasmund's stirring and raking tools are handmade, as are the barley bins. Washing and holding tanks are mostly converted items from milking parlors.

LEARNING THE CRAFT

A tour of the distillery makes it clear that a great deal of thought and innovation have gone into Wasmund's setup, but this novice whiskey-maker has gone a bit beyond the practical and traditional.

"We play music for our [whiskey] barrels and roll them around," he says as progressive rock blares in the background.

It is unclear whether rock-and-rolling adds to the flavor of the product.

Wasmund moved to Sperryville from Florida in 2002, but he became interested in making whiskey after attending a Johnny Walker tasting event some years earlier.

By 2000, he was so consumed by the idea that he traveled to Scotland, where he toured a number of distilleries and wound up working a six-week internship at Bowmore Distillery.

He says he absorbed every bit of information he could during that stint. He also considered possible ways to make a new and better product--such as improving the flavor of whiskey by using various woods.

"I did experiments with fruitwoods like cherry, apple, peach and mango to try and improve the flavor," he says. "And I did experiments with aging."

STARTING FROM SCRATCH

By 2004, Wasmund was ready to go into business, and obtained the necessary zoning permits from Rappahannock County.

Around that time, he attempted to buy out another distillery. But when that deal fell through, he started his new operation, Copper Fox Distillery, from scratch across the street from his mother's antiques shop.

He began cooking in December 2005, and that first batch, stored in charred white-oak bourbon barrels, was ready for bottling about nine months later.

"We're the only distillery in North America that malts its own barley," says Wasmund. "And we do it the traditional way."

Wasmund uses a strain of barley called 'Thoroughbred' that was developed by Virginia Tech. He buys his grain exclusively from a Northern Neck farmer named Billy Dawson, who has an operation at Heathsville.

He makes two "runs" (from 100 percent malted barley) during each distilling process, with each run producing enough to fill one barrel. After the whiskey has aged, the bottles are hand-filled, hand-labeled and hand-delivered by Wasmund and his one employee.

Wasmund takes a sniff of a batch of his single-malt whiskey and smiles. "That's good," he says. "It's a nice clean whiskey, but it's got the character of the barley."

Donnie Johnston:
Email: djohnston@freelancestar.com