Catoctin Creek was founded in 2009 by Scott and Becky Harris in Purcellville, Virginia, in the rolling Loudoun County farmland at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains. It holds a specific claim: the first legal distillery in Loudoun County since Prohibition, and Virginia's first legal whiskey distillery since the same era. For a state whose whiskey heritage predates the founding of the republic, that gap is striking.
Roundstone Rye — named for the road the distillery sits on — is the flagship. It is made from 100% rye grain, all of it certified organic, mashed, fermented, distilled and aged on site. The 100% mash bill is unusual in American whiskey, where the legal minimum for rye is 51%, and the organic certification is rarer still. Becky Harris, a chemical engineer by training, serves as chief distiller and has become one of the more respected voices in American craft whiskey.
The standard Roundstone Rye bottling is 80 proof, which sounds gentle until you taste it. Rye at this strength can become thin and shy, but the 100% mash bill gives it real spine. What you get is rye's essential character — cracked pepper, herbs, dry grain, a touch of honey — presented without bourbon-style sweetness or high-proof heat to hide behind.
It is rye for thinking about, rather than rye for shouting. A Manhattan made with Roundstone is distinctly herbal; an Old Fashioned, distinctly spiced. Neat, it reads as a portrait of the grain itself, drawn in Virginia ink.
Organic, purist and proudly Virginian.
