Rye Revivalists

Becky Harris wasn’t much of a whiskey drinker when she and her husband, Scott, started a distillery. It was the late aughts, and Harris, a chemical engineer, was gearing up to re-enter the workforce after taking some time away to raise their two sons, when Scott, then a government contractor, floated the idea. Her first question cut to the most important point: “Can we make money doing that?”

Harris had worked on such diverse processes as polystyrene and contact lens manufacturing, which she calls “really freaking hard,” so she wasn’t worried about mastering the technical aspects of making whiskey. Instead, she focused on discovering what she liked and, in turn, what her customers would like. “You just have to go into it with curiosity and a desire to explore,” she says.

The Harrises opened the doors to their distillery, Catoctin Creek, in 2009, focusing from the start on rye whiskey. At that time, the style was just starting to revive after nearly a century in the doldrums, the victim of Prohibition and changing tastes. American whiskey culture had largely forgotten that rye, not