If there’s a way to attach a whiskey barrel to a bicycle, I’m not seeing it. The barrel isn’t large—about the size of a football, with a two-liter capacity—but still, as I assess the bike, then the handsome white-oak barrel, and then back to the bike, I can’t see a way to engineer it. Not helpful are the amused reactions I’m getting to my pleas for advice: from my cycling tour guide, from the distiller, even from the nice old lady sweeping the distillery’s front porch.
This would be the Copper Fox Distillery, in Sperryville, Virginia, where since 2006, in a tin-roofed, cinder-block facility tucked back on a gravel road, Rick Wasmund and his pal Sean McCaskey have been producing a range of small-batch rye and single-malt whiskeys. The whiskeys’…