Driving down the mile-long unpaved driveway off County Line Road, across wide fields thick with soybean plants and through vales of shaded woodland, you cross the unmarked county line from Prince George into Sussex and seem almost to enter another era.
It’s easy to imagine that someone might have chosen this secluded place to set up an illegal still long ago, but Three Brothers Distillery is perfectly legal, and what owner David Reavis is making here is nothing like moonshine.
“I wanted to make something different,” said Reavis, a North Carolina native and Navy veteran whose full-time job is teaching performance management and process improvement for the U.S. Army.
An experienced beermaker, Reavis spent more than three years researching the distillation of spirits, travelling around the country and studying the distilling industry and its history, in preparation for opening Three Brothers. “My goal is to bring back those awesome traditional big flavors” from the era before Prohibition, he said.