How one American distillery is navigating Trump's tariffs

PURCELLVILLE, Va. — Becky Harris was not a big whiskey drinker before she co-founded the Catoctin Creek Distilling Company.

She was a chemical engineer specializing in industrial production. And she has learned to trust her palate.

"You know, people have been making whiskey with almost nothing for hundreds of years," Harris said. "We kind of came in, came at it with that aspect."

Becky Harris and her husband, Scott Harris, started their distillery 16 years ago. Now, Catoctin Creek operates out of a former Buick dealership on Main Street in Purcellville, Virginia. And their rye whiskeys have, for over a decade, regularly won awards in competitions and magazines.

Rye was once the dominant form of whiskey in the U.S., and Catoctin Creek sources its rye grain from farms in Virginia. It gets mixed with boiling water, fermented, distilled, barreled, aged and poured into glass bottles made in Pennsylvania.

But even this small, independent American business — making a quintessentially American product with American ingredients — has been hobbled by tariff policies under Trump's first and current terms.

"This is not our first do-si-do with tariffs," Scott Harris said.

About 10 years ago, during a classic-cocktail renaissance in the U.S., the Harrises expanded their business to Europe. They went to trade shows, building relationships with distributors and working to create a footprint for rye whiskey on the continent.

You could find their bottles on bar shelves in Italy, Germany and the Netherlands. At the time, European sales accounted for more than 10% of their company's revenue.

Then, suddenly, that revenue was gone.

The first Trump administration imposed tariffs on steel and aluminum produced outside the United States. European countries retaliated by placing tariffs on uniquely American products, especially products made in states led by powerful Republicans. The European Union placed a 25% tariff on American whiskey in 2018, and Catoctin Creek's European business folded practically overnight.

"We never got another order again from Europe," Scott Harris said.

So the duo pivoted. After riding out COVID-19 disruptions, they began to focus on international markets closer to home: Canada and Mexico. They developed relationships with high-end Mexican restaurants and continued to hit the trade-show circuit to drive expansion.

Then, in 2025, Trump returned to the White House and almost immediately began threatening tariffs against America's neighbors. Suddenly, the Harrises found themselves in an uncomfortable, familiar position — distributing partners have "gone silent."

Scott Harris said that even though their products are not currently subject to import duties in Mexico, his customers in Mexico fear that a new development in U.S.-Mexico trade relations could quickly change that.

"If [Mexican distributors] were to buy that product, and then 30 days from now the administration decides to put tariffs on, then they're screwed. So they don't want to do it."

Like much of the U.S. spirits industry, Catoctin Creek has again had to navigate a disruption to its markets. But the company is also facing tariff-related disruptions to its supply chain.

Glass bottles are the distillery's biggest expense, and the Harrises have made a point of sourcing their glass from a manufacturer in Pennsylvania. But as tariff anticipation rose and tariff announcements were eventually issued, they noticed that their glass order was being postponed in the production schedule.

"Suddenly it's not coming in January," said Becky Harris. "Oh, it's coming in March now. It's now coming in June."

The Harrises believe that as other companies shifted their glass orders to American manufacturers to avoid paying tariffs on imported bottles, their glass supplier moved Catoctin Creek, a relatively small company with a small production run, down the priority list.

And because they can't sell their spirits without bottles, the Harrises now face hard decisions about where else to buy them from.

"The irony of it then is that the small business that never bought any foreign glass is now having to buy glass from China at 107% tariff," Scott Harris said.

"And honestly, like, when should we buy them?" Becky Harris asked. "We have to buy them now, so we've got some on order. But, you know, if these tariffs go away within a week, suddenly we've overspent on these bottles, and it's too late and we just have to eat it."

Nick Bloom, an economist at Stanford University and co-creator of the Economic Policy Uncertainty Index, told NPR in March that the levels of economic uncertainty they're seeing this year are the highest they've been in a generation.

"What is really striking is usually politicians have this air of stability and calm and statesmanship … and they generally don't want to portray uncertainty," Bloom said. "So what is completely unprecedented is seeing this as a deliberate policy move from a government."

All that unpredictability, all the hemming and hawing, is what makes tariffs so difficult to navigate, says Scott Harris.

"I mean that's what business hates most, right, is uncertainty," he said. "And we are living in peak uncertainty right now."

For now, on this day, bottles are still being filled, packed and shipped. Becky Harris still has meetings to attend later, as her husband prepares to go on a business trip.

"The parts where we do get to interact with people who are actually drinking is really the fun part," Becky Harris said. "That's what makes all the other headaches worth it."