Virginia distillery expanding to Williamsburg

Rick Wasmund, the owner of Sperryville-based Copper Fox Distillery, is more than a little invested in his business’s latest expansion.  He and his family will live in a 1952 motor court complex in Williamsburg, which will become Copper Fox’s second distillery.

“There are nine buildings here; we’ll live in one of them,” Wasmund said just after the expansion was announced in December. “The other eight, one of them we’ll keep as hotel rooms … then the rest will all be dedicated to production.” 

Copper Fox will invest more than $2 million in the expansion and create 28 jobs (at the time of the announcement Copper Fox had 11 full-time employees). The complex on Capitol Landing Road was purchased from the city of Williamsburg for $600,000. An opening date for the new distillery has not been set.

“This is a great day, it’s fun, we’re going to have some cocktails and refreshments after that, but then very shortly a lot of work begins,” Wasmund said during the expansion announcement. “We are going to have to keep a tight pencil, and this is going to be a big job.”
The distillery will malt, produce and age its own products and offer on-site tastings to the public. It also will malt barley and grains for other distilleries and craft brewers on an on-demand basis.

Copper Fox’s Sperryville facility currently produces 11,000 9-liter cases per year. Wasmund projects that with the new facility, Copper Fox will produce 40,000 more 9-liter cases in that same amount of time. The company, which was started in 2000, currently makes rye and single-malt whiskeys and gin.

Copper Fox received a $50,000 grant from the Agriculture and Forestry In­­dustries Development Fund (AFID) for the project, an amount that was matched by the city of Williamsburg. As a condition of the AFID grant, Copper Fox also says it will purchase all of its grains from Virginia producers.
Distilleries have recently seen an uptick in the com­­monwealth. According to the Virginia Tourism Corp. there were about 15 distilleries in the state in December 2014, up from five distilleries in 2008.