Distiller magazine

60 distiller P ull up any footage shot on that late June day in 2016, in the sleepy resort town of White Sulphur Springs, WV. Listen to the sound of rain, harder than any this mountain valley has known in forever. Watch as the torrents rush city streets, passing through and around homes that rise out of the water like the wooded islands of the Greenbrier River. Wait for the uncanny vision of a house on fire floating down a river of brown floodwater until it crashes into an overpass. e record of devastation in real time of a small town from natural disaster is a strange and common phenom- enon of our era, and it's hard not to watch with a sense of defeated resignation. Small towns like White Sulphur don't usually recover from such an event; everyone moves away while waiting for the relief money to come in. Except that's not what happened here. Visit the cooperage of the WV Great Barrel Company, and we will at some point tell you the story of our town. We will tell you how everyone came together to keep our community intact. How many of the founders of our cooperage raised money to rebuild — on higher ground — neighborhoods swept away in the flood. We will tell you that the first families moved into their new homes by anksgiving. We will tell you that, at a certain stage during the flood recovery, the Barrel Company founders realized that they needed to do more. In order to really make a positive impact, they needed to create jobs in our community. e founder of Smooth Ambler, a beacon of social engagement in the county, became involved. e idea of a cooperage arose. It stuck. e work began: making barrels in West Virginia out of tight-grained Appalachian white oak. "But if we're going to do it," the founders decided, "let's innovate the cooperage process. Let's consistently, safely, precisely build the best barrels on the market." We tell this story because we want distillers to know why we are here. We want you to know what inspires us, and what — to us — is most important. For us, it's community. It's integrity. It's innovation. It's leaning into the place you are and working together to make positive change — whether the place you are is a town, a barrel factory or an entire industry. WV Great Barrel Company was founded to do good and to do better. is ethos drives us to make the highest quality white oak barrels in the world. It shows up in every step of our process, and it informs the way we work with distillers to become partners in support of making the very best whiskey and aged spirits possible, in the most consistent way. Materials Matter We believe distillers should have the opportunity to be as involved in the process of sourcing their wood as they WV Great Barrel Company SPONSORED CONTENT by Cate Crabtree, WV Great Barrel Company What the origin story of a state-of-the-art cooperage has to do with making great whiskey A WV Great Barrel. Right: Lead Cooper James Miller inspects staves. Photo © Mark E. Trent

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