A look inside Ragged Branch’s new Augusta County home, from its towering rickhouse to a bourbon portfolio built on Virginia grain and old-school methods.
Part of the Bourbon Bishop Virginia Craft Whiskey Starter Trail
Ragged Branch was originally planned as a stop on my Bourbon Bishop Virginia Craft Whiskey Starter Trail in the Virginia Spirits Trail app; a curated way to explore some of the Commonwealth’s craft distilleries. At the time of my visit, however, the distillery wasn’t yet open for the kind of public visitor experience featured at the other stops as its new tasting room and hospitality space are being developed.
That doesn’t make Ragged Branch any less worth knowing about. In fact, getting a look inside the new distillery and rickhouse offered a pretty fascinating glimpse at where this Virginia bourbon producer is headed.
There are plenty of beautiful drives to Virginia distilleries, but the road to Ragged Branch feels like part of the experience.
As you get farther out, the landscape opens up.
Rolling farmland. A few houses tucked into the hills. Mountains sitting in the distance.
Then Ragged Branch appears almost as an interruption to all that open space. It feels appropriately rural. And that’s important because Ragged Branch has always been a distillery with a pretty direct connection to the land around it.
- Distillery: Ragged Branch Distillery
- Location: Waynesboro, Virginia
- Opened: 2014
- Known for: Farm-to-glass Virginia bourbon and rye, high-malted-barley bourbon, Bottled-in-Bond expressions, and its growing Augusta County production operation
- Hosted by: Head Distiller Tom Casey
A Much Bigger Ragged Branch
Ragged Branch has changed considerably since it began making whiskey in 2014.
The new Augusta County facility gives the distillery dramatically more room to make and age whiskey, and you can see that growth before you even get inside.
The new distillery is big.
But the rickhouse is what really caught my attention.
Walking through it, I immediately thought of Kentucky.
The barrels are stacked incredibly high, with rows of barrels positioned and rolled back into tall vertical stacks. It’s a style of barrel storage I haven’t seen much of in Virginia, and standing there surrounded by all that whiskey made the scale of Ragged Branch’s growth pretty obvious.
I was told the new rickhouse is holding roughly 3,000 barrels, while the new facility has increased production capacity by roughly four times.
They’ve already made more than 500 barrels this year, and I was told they may already be nearing the end of their production for the year.
That’s a significant amount of whiskey for a Virginia craft producer.
And it sounds like Ragged Branch is just getting started.
Built for What’s Next
The new facility isn’t simply a bigger version of what Ragged Branch had before.
It feels like infrastructure for the next version of the company.
There’s room for substantially more production. More barrels. More experimentation. And, eventually, more people to experience it.
That’s important because the visitor experience hasn’t quite caught up with the production side yet.
The new tasting room and hospitality space are being developed down the road, with the hope of creating a destination that can accommodate visitors in a much more traditional way.
For now, Ragged Branch isn’t really operating like a distillery where you can simply show up, take a tour and spend an afternoon tasting through the lineup.
That’s why it didn’t ultimately become one of the active stops on my Virginia Craft Whiskey Starter Trail.
But getting invited behind the scenes gave me a chance to see something most visitors can’t right now.
The operation before the finished visitor experience.
And sometimes that’s pretty interesting in its own right.
Farm to Glass in Virginia
Ragged Branch’s connection to agriculture is one of the things I appreciate most about the brand.
The whiskey starts with grain, and the surrounding landscape makes that connection pretty hard to miss.
Ragged Branch grows its own grain and emphasizes a traditional approach to bourbon production, from milling and mashing through distillation and maturation.
The result is whiskey that feels tied to its place.
You’re not just making bourbon somewhere in Virginia.
You’re making bourbon surrounded by Virginia farmland.
And the further you drive into the property, the more that becomes part of the experience.
“Ragged Branch’s connection to agriculture is one of the things I appreciate most about the brand.”
A Lineup With Plenty of Personality
The tasting was where Ragged Branch really started to show some range.
Even within a fairly traditional bourbon and rye lineup, there were some noticeable differences between the expressions.
And, as always, some worked better for my palate than others.
Signature Bourbon
The standard bourbon showed off the more classic side of Ragged Branch.
Despite the higher malted-barley component, it still delivered recognizable bourbon characteristics without feeling overly familiar.
Classic bourbon notes were there, but the malted barley added another layer to the profile.
It’s a good reminder that a mash bill doesn’t have to radically change the identity of a whiskey to make a difference.
Sometimes it just adds another dimension.
Wheated Bottled-in-Bond
This was one of my favorites of the tasting.
The wheated Bottled-in-Bond had a really nice mouthfeel with pastry notes and darker sweetness.
It felt rounded and complete without any one characteristic dominating the glass.
There’s a richness here that makes it easy to understand why wheated bourbon continues to have such a devoted following.
For me, this was one of the pours that really clicked.
Cowboy Cut
The Cowboy Cut takes Ragged Branch in a much bolder direction.
Big cola. Root beer. Leather. Black tea.
There’s a lot happening in the glass.
I’ve found some Ragged Branch expressions can lean toward a tannic character that isn’t my favorite, and that was still present here, although this particular pick was less tannic than other examples I’ve tasted.
The profile is undeniably distinctive.
It just isn’t necessarily where my palate wants to spend the most time.
Seven-Year Bourbon
This was probably the biggest surprise for me.
The seven-year bourbon brought creamy vanilla and a more mature profile that reminded me of some of the older MGP bourbons I’ve enjoyed.
It had the kind of maturity that immediately makes you stop and reconsider the age statement.
This was another clear standout for me.
Honey-Finished Bourbon
Then Ragged Branch took things somewhere completely different.
The honey-finished bourbon starts very sweet before moving into a funky honey character with a viscous texture and a big, proofy finish.
What I liked was that the sweetness didn’t completely overwhelm the whiskey.
There was enough proof and whiskey character underneath it to keep things interesting.
It’s an unusual expression, but in a good way.
Bottled-in-Bond Rye
The rye gave me one of the biggest contrasts between nose and palate.
The nose was fantastic.
Bright fruit. Deeper sweetness. Plenty of character.
But the palate didn’t quite follow through for me.
It carried some of that same tannic quality I noticed in the Cowboy Cut, and again, that’s simply a profile I don’t particularly gravitate toward.
The nose alone, though, was enough to make me want to revisit the whiskey.
The Next Generation
There’s another transition happening around Ragged Branch that goes beyond the new production facility.
The family has also acquired 92 acres that will become the foundation for a new operation led by the next generation.
That project will eventually have its own identity, with plans to produce bourbon and clear spirits while putting a significant emphasis on cocktails and hospitality.
For now, the operation will continue serving Ragged Branch bottles and using Ragged Branch whiskey in cocktails as that new space develops.
It’s an interesting moment for the family.
Ragged Branch is growing into a larger production operation while another piece of the family business is beginning to develop its own identity.
And eventually, those two stories will be experienced separately by visitors.
“That’s probably the best way I can describe Ragged Branch right now. It’s in motion.“
A Distillery Still in Motion
That’s probably the best way I can describe Ragged Branch right now.
It’s in motion.
The production facility is bigger.
The rickhouse is filling.
Production has increased dramatically.
The whiskey lineup continues to expand.
And the visitor experience is still being built.
That makes Ragged Branch a little different from some of the other Virginia distilleries I’ve visited.
At places with an established tasting room, the experience is largely finished.
You arrive, take the tour, taste the whiskey and head home with a bottle.
Ragged Branch gave me a look at something different.
I got to see the machinery behind the next stage of the company.
And standing inside that enormous rickhouse, surrounded by thousands of barrels, it was pretty easy to see that there’s going to be a lot more Ragged Branch whiskey coming.
Final Pour
I came away from Ragged Branch with two very different impressions.
The first was the whiskey itself.
There are expressions here that really worked for me. The Wheated Bottled-in-Bond and seven-year bourbon were standouts, while the honey-finished bourbon showed that the distillery isn’t afraid to take its whiskey in interesting directions.
There were also expressions where the tannic character simply wasn’t my preference.
That’s part of tasting broadly.
Not every whiskey has to be for me.
The second impression was the scale of what Ragged Branch is becoming.
It’s easy to think of Virginia’s craft distilleries as small operations producing whiskey in relatively limited quantities.
Ragged Branch is moving beyond that.
A new distillery. A huge rickhouse. Thousands of barrels.
More than 500 barrels produced this year already. And roughly four times the production capacity of the previous operation.
That’s a pretty significant evolution.
And the fact that it’s happening in the middle of all that farmland makes it even more interesting.
The whiskey is growing. The operation is growing.
And the visitor experience is still catching up.
I think that makes Ragged Branch one worth watching.
Bourbon Bishop Bottom Line:
Ragged Branch is a Virginia bourbon producer in the middle of a pretty significant transformation.
The whiskey lineup has plenty of range, from the pastry-like richness of the Wheated Bottled-in-Bond to the mature vanilla character of the seven-year bourbon and the unusual sweetness and funk of the honey-finished expression. Some of the rye and bolder expressions lean more tannic than I personally prefer, but there’s enough variety here to make the lineup worth exploring.
What may be most interesting, though, is what’s happening behind the bottle. A dramatically larger production facility, roughly 3,000 barrels in the new rickhouse, more than 500 barrels produced this year and a new visitor experience on the horizon all point toward a very different Ragged Branch in the years ahead.
The tasting room isn’t quite ready for prime time yet. The whiskey operation already is.
This piece was written in conjuction with my current Virginia Spirits project. Check out the Bourbon Bishop Virginia Craft Whiskey Starter Trail Here, only on the Virginia Spirits Trail App
If you enjoyed this piece, check out my past distillery visit articles here.
This visit was hosted by the distillery. All thoughts are my own and not influenced by the experience.
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