A drink with… Scott Harris, Catoctin Creek
The co-founder of Virginia-based rye whiskey brand Catoctin Creek discusses the challenges facing craft distillers, and its return to independence.
*This interview was originally published in the January 2025 issue of The Spirits Business magazine.
What are the biggest challenges facing your business, and the spirits sector?
The spirits industry has been seeing about a two-year downturn of about 25% depending on the different sectors you’re in. The problem is there’s so much bulk whiskey out there that the prices have plummeted, so you’re sitting on whiskey that you’re selling – at best – at cost. These inventories don’t last forever; they’re subject to evaporation. Our inventory has grown and shrunk with the times; as a small family-run company, we don’t have the unlimited pocketbook to just throw whiskey into the barn and age it forever with no regard to cash flow.
Are you looking to diversify your business model and revenue streams?
Some companies have decided to do things like ready-to-drink cocktails, even cannabis infusions and things like that. We are not looking at that. Maybe I’m being stubborn, or I’m just being true to my brand and our mission. But we’re a whiskey company.
We make whiskey, and that’s what we want to sell. We’ll continue to innovate on the products we have and have new product offerings that are exciting.
Where are you looking in terms of expansion and export opportunities?
We’re in 20 states, and we’re not looking to expand into new ones at this time. We’re holding what we have and dealing with the consolidation of US distribution. A lot of the small family-run distributors have consolidated into two or three big players. That has been difficult for craft distilling. Distributors, at this point, with the downturn, are uninterested in taking on new brands, especially small ones. They just want bottles that are easy to turn. So I think we’re going to enter a phase where there’s a lot of big-name stuff on the shelf, and a lot of the small, interesting stuff will start to disappear, which is sad. In some states and countries, there are still small family-run distributors who are interested in what’s new, different, or special. We’ll look for those opportunities, maybe in Europe and East Asia.
What are you working on at the moment?
One of our perennial annual favourites is our cask-proof Roundstone whiskey with a maple finish. That one is flying off the shelves. We’ve always done fun collaborations with local producers, and the one we did for December is very special. It’s a six-year-old single malt whiskey that was grown in Loudoun County, where we live. The grain was grown, malted, fermented, distilled and aged here. It was first staged in virgin, new charred white oak, then aged in local red wine casks and finished in a local brewery’s Imperial Stout casks. So it represents everything from the county.
Catoctin Creek was part of Constellation Brands’ portfolio but is in family ownership again. How did the business benefit from the deal?
The relationship was beneficial for us. With a lot of the money they invested, we were able to grow our business capabilities. We bought a building that we use for warehousing now, and we also have used that money to expand our production capability. Just before we dissolved the relationship, we had invested over US$1 million in production equipment upgrades, tripling our production capacity, and so now we can produce more than 300,000 bottles per year without any kind of expansion required. Like Becky [Harris], my wife, the president of the company and the chief distiller, says, after this happened and we got independent again, she was like, ‘well, it’s a big, scary world out there, but at least it’s ours, so we get to start that future and make those decisions now on our own’, which is good, absolutely.
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