Sipping into History at Weldon Mills Distillery | NC Weekend

I know a lot of people heard bourbon has to be made in Kentucky. That's marketing. North Carolina was making bourbon long before Kentucky was ever a state. Weldon Mills Distillery has been open for right around four years. This version was constructed in 1892 and it was operational as a corn mill. Barrel mill, corn mill, made sense to incorporate it into a bourbon distillery when those were two key ingredients for bourbon. These barrels right here are 53 gallon barrels. We're primarily a bourbon distillery. That's what we hold ourselves out as, but we also make other quality of spirits. We make whiskey, gin, vodka, flavored whiskey, flavored gin, flavored vodka. We have rum coming and we've even partnered with a Mexican tequila distillery and now we're going to have six different tequila offerings as well. It's not the roots. It's a sweet potato flavored whiskey. When you're doing the tastings at the mill building, you can do four for free where you can pick and choose which four you want, or you can do different flights. A bourbon flight, a whiskey flight, a gin flight, a tequila flight, a vodka flight. Ten shots basically, vodka, gin, whiskey, bourbon, and it was fantastic. This is really amazing. Someone actually mentioned it to me and said, hey, did you know that there's a Weldon Mills Distillery? And I'm like, didn't know that, but let's go check it out. We have over 30 different products. We originally started off with just bourbon. Our first bourbon that we made was Soldier's Cut bourbon and it's at 82 proof for the 82nd Airborne Division. Then we have our other three bourbons. We have our Weldon Mills Select, our Weldon Mills Reserve. Then we have the All Malt, which is the only all malted grain bourbon in the world. We also have two lines of vodka. We have Three Hamlets gin, which is great for martinis. We have a fun little cinnamon vodka. It's super smooth. It's green. It's green with food coloring. We just want it to be fun. We wanted it to look like Nerve Agent because the name is Weapons of Mass Destruction or WMD. I think it's a good ambiance. The tasting was fun, you know, the bartenders were fun. Drinks are great. I like everything. If you don't want to just do samples, you can head over to the bar and we have craft cocktails designed by our mixologist specifically for the type of spirit they're using in those cocktails. They actually put it on a platform and covered it and smoked it, and I've never seen that before. It just gives it that little extra pizzazz that's fantastic. We just actually stopped in for a tasting and they were having a tour, so we said, okay, let's try it. There's just so much history in this area. They'll hop on the trolley, take the trolley over to the distillery building, and right there they're going to learn all about the distilling process. I mean, from grinding grains to cooking a mash to distillation process, they're going to learn the whole thing. From beginning to the end of bottling, it was quite interesting, you know, and it was good to learn that some of the stuff we see on TV is not necessarily actually how they do it, but it was educational. The tour was very good. I enjoyed the trolley ride. I also like that when they're actually doing the tour that they're doing a bunch of historic guidance along with it. I like to see that they're taking some of our historic buildings and doing something positive with them. They're not just sitting and dwindling away. We want to create an experience for folks. We want folks to be able to come over to Weldon, walk along the riverfront, get embraced in all that is bourbon making. That's great. That's what I'm looking for, you know. I'm not looking for national spirits. I'm looking for local spirits and a cool place like this. I like to buy local stuff, stuff that, you know, you can't get everywhere and brag about it to other people. We just want folks to have a good time, a getaway. They're choosing to spend their valuable time with us. We just want to give everybody an experience that's unique to our little neck of the woods. The Weldon Mills Distillery is at 100 Rockfish Drive in Weldon and it's open every day at noon. For more information, give them a call at 252-220-4235 or go online to weldonmills.com.