By Michael McElroy, Head Distiller, Open Road Distilling Co.
There’s a lot of vague language in craft spirits. “Handcrafted.” “Small batch.” “Artisanal.” Most of it means nothing, and the industry knows it. So rather than tell you our spirits are made with care, I’d rather walk you through exactly how each one is made — including the parts most brands don’t volunteer.
We do two different things at Open Road Distilling Co., a Virginia craft distillery in Reston Town Center. We distill some of our spirits on site, and we blend others from whiskey distilled elsewhere. Both are real crafts. They’re just different ones, and we think you should know which is which.
Our vodka starts with a corn-based neutral spirit. We combine it with pure water and run it through traditional pot stills — not a column, which is what most large vodka producers use because it’s faster and yields more.
During the run, the spirit comes off the still in three parts. The first portion, the heads, and the last portion, the tails, both carry compounds you don’t want in a finished vodka. The middle section — the hearts — is what we keep.
Where you make those cuts determines the character of the vodka. Cut wide and you keep more volume. Cut tight and you throw away a significant amount of what you just made. We cut tight. It’s expensive, and it’s the single biggest reason our vodka tastes the way it does.
Gin is where the still gets interesting.
We source botanicals from around the world, combine them with neutral spirit in the still, and let them soak overnight. The next morning we begin heating slowly, and once the vapors rise, we start collecting.
Here’s the part I like: a still works like a prism. A prism takes light and splits it into a spectrum. Our still takes the aromatics of each botanical and separates them by volatility, carrying them over in sequence — the lightest first, the heaviest last. That ordering is how we know where we are in the run, and how we know when it’s time to stop collecting.
After distillation we bring the gin down to bottle strength with water, slowly.
Our American Gin took a bronze medal at the 2025 American Craft Spirits Association competition.
Here’s where a lot of brands get evasive. Our Independence Bourbon and Eagle Eye Rye are not distilled in Reston. They’re blended here from whiskey distilled elsewhere, and I’ll tell you precisely how.
Bourbon can legally be made in any state. We went looking across the country and identified four distilleries producing genuinely distinct bourbons — as far north as Ohio, as far south as Texas. Each contributes something the others don’t.
Blending is its own discipline, and it’s harder than people assume. We’re choosing barrels by maturity, by state of origin, by house character — looking for whiskies that either showcase the best of a particular style or represent something bold and unusual. We taste through a range of barrels and select only the ones that serve that batch. Then those blends go into our own warehouse barrels for additional aging, to build flavor, complexity, and depth beyond what arrived here.
Then we proof. Bringing a blend down to bottling strength means adding water, and how fast you add it matters enormously. Rush it and the whiskey turns harsh. Our proofing takes at least three weeks. Slow water makes smooth whiskey — that’s the whole principle.
We don’t chill filter, and we don’t add caramel coloring. Chill filtration removes the compounds that cause a whiskey to go cloudy when cold, but it strips flavor along with them. Caramel coloring makes young whiskey look older than it is. We’d rather the whiskey look and taste like what it actually is.
Every time we taste through barrels for an Independence Bourbon or Eagle Eye Rye batch, one barrel stands out above the rest — even among barrels that were already exceptional.
We pull that one and set it aside to keep aging.
The cost is real. The longer a barrel sits, the more evaporates — the angel’s share — and with extended aging that loss is significant. What’s left is a single-barrel whiskey with complexity you can’t get any other way.
When a reserve barrel reaches its peak, we harvest it. Proofing here is minimal; the goal is to open up the aromatics without diluting what the extra years built. This year’s releases came in at 107 proof. That reads high to some people, but the roundness these barrels developed carries it — there’s warmth without heat.
Our Reserve Rye earned silver and our Reserve Bourbon bronze at the 2025 American Craft Spirits Association competition.
Our ready-to-drink Old Fashioned is built on bold rye character and Grade A maple syrup, then aged for one week in rye barrels so the components integrate rather than sit next to each other. That week is the difference between a mixed drink and a finished cocktail — you get herbaceous spice, warmth, and sweetness in balance instead of in sequence.
It took silver at the 2025 American Craft Spirits Association competition, and it’s now carried in Virginia ABC stores across the state.
We didn’t come to distilling from distilling. Metropolitan Hospitality Group has been running restaurants across Northern Virginia and D.C. since 2005, and over those years we developed a fairly obsessive process for tasting and revising recipes. At some point it became obvious that the limiting factor in our cocktails wasn’t the recipe — it was the spirits available to build them with.
So we built the distillery. Every spirit here was designed to work in a cocktail on a busy Friday night and to hold up poured neat. Those are different demands, and most spirits only satisfy one.
The distillery is at 1871 Fountain Drive, Suite 100, in Reston Town Center. There’s a working production floor, a tasting room, and a bonded store, and we run daily tastings — you can book one here or take a tour and see the stills.
Ask us anything about the process. It’s a better conversation than a label.
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Michael McElroy is Head Distiller at Open Road Distilling Co. in Reston Town Center, Virginia, where he oversees production of American Vodka, American Gin, Independence Bourbon, Eagle Eye Rye, the Reserve Series, and the Maple Old Fashioned.
