The craft breweries in Virginia Beach might be better known, but distilling craft spirits became a booming tradition in the region as far back as the 1920s during Prohibition. Today, distilleries in Virginia Beach blend art and science to create an incredible variety of flavors that can be enjoyed in fun-tasting rooms locally and taken home as souvenirs and gifts.
Beach Vodka
Inland
Beach Vodka has a tasting room in a bright, airy and inland (but appropriately beachy) space near Oceana Air Station. It’s a rescued but new-and-improved brand. The former Beach Vodka closed its doors in 2019, attracting the attention of Stephanie Somers and Tony Gower Jr., who thought it was a loss for the community in which they’d grown up, as well as a business opportunity for them. After research and investment in a high-tech still imported from the Netherlands, the new Beach Vodka opened in July 2022. Unlike some distillers that branch out into flavored products and other types of spirits, Beach Vodka uses corn-based ingredients and its high-tech still to make one thing well: Beach Vodka. It uses its creativity devising drink recipes, such as the Beach Crush, Chick’s Beach Mule, Sandbridge Spritzer and Jetty Margarita.
Chesapeake Bay Distillery
ViBe Creative District
Operating out of an iconic former surf shop in the ViBe Creative District, Chesapeake Bay Distillery is serving up vodka and other spirits that it distills and bottles in-house. Its unique spirits include spicy Ghost Pepper Infused Vodka and Mutiny Island Vodka. With Mutiny Island, the distillery is pioneering vodka created with breadfruit. Lt. William Bligh, whose devotion to breadfruit helped inspire the famous mutiny, would approve of its notes of honeydew, banana and citrus. Chesapeake Bay makes its other vodkas and whiskey with 100 percent corn but also makes tequila with Mexican agave and rum with unprocessed panela sugar. Don’t leave without trying the distillery’s Dr. Stoner’s line of herb-infused vodka, whiskey or tequila, each made with 19 herbs and spices, producing their own unique flavor profiles and aromas that will surprise and delight. Drop into their tasting room to sample each spirit on its own or in a prepared cocktail shooter, a lemon drop or a bloody Mary.
Tarnished Truth Distilling Company
Oceanfront District
Tarnished Truth Distilling Co. is in the Historic Cavalier Hotel in the Virginia Beach Oceanfront District. The small-batch distillery boasts the area’s most famous and grand location and is the country’s first craft distillery inside a hotel. The oceanfront Cavalier opened in 1927 and hosted and entertained some of the most famous people of the time, including 10 U.S. presidents. It was saved from demolition and given a four-year, multi-million-dollar renovation to restore its public spaces to their original grandeur while upgrading and enlarging the guest rooms and suites to modern standards of luxury. One of the public spaces, the Hunt Room, has a grand fireplace rebuilt with the original bricks and a large window overlooking the Tarnished Truth production room. Tarnished Truth also has a private tasting room where tours conclude with samples of its spirits, including the signature Old Cavalier Bourbon, High Rye Straight Bourbon Whiskey, Bourbon Mash Moonshine, Fourth Handle Coastal American Gin, Old Cavalier Bourbon Cream and AVA Vodka. A store sells bottles of the company’s products as well as other branded merchandise.
Waterman Spirits
Oceanfront District
At Waterman Spirits, it’s all about pride. Pride in the ingredients it puts into its vodka and pride in the distilling process. All to ensure that owner-operator Mariah Standing can be proud of what she shares with friends, family and the public. The small-batch distillery and tasting room across Atlantic Avenue from beachfront hotels uses only corn certified to have been grown organically — without pesticides, fertilizers or harmful chemicals. So, better tasting for you, better for the environment. A further step toward cleaner, brighter-tasting beverages is using coral-based filtration instead of the more typical charcoal. Standing says coral filtration raises the pH level of the vodka to give it a smoother taste. Just like the ingredients it uses, the coral that the company uses is sourced with the environment in mind. It doesn’t come from living coral and doesn’t harm beach or reef ecosystems. Coral filtration of water in the distilling process is cited by some of the finest distilled products in the world. Standing put seven years into developing her company after being frustrated at the inconsistency of the taste of the vodka used in the popular Orange Crush cocktails introduced to Virginia Beach by the local restaurant company owned by the Standing family. In addition to its organic vodka, Waterman makes Waterman Spirits Organic Orange and Organic Grapefruit vodka, an Organic Orange Liqueur, and The Perfect Crush.
About Our Writer
Terry Galvin was 6 when he got his first boat, an 8-foot aluminum johnboat with oars. His family lived in a house on the water and soon, he was driving the family power boat, water skiing and learning to race sailboats. When he wasn’t boating, Terry was reading, a behavior that later lead to a career as a newspaper writer and editor. He was working for the Virgin Islands Daily News when Terry met his wife of 30 years, who shares his love of the water and humors his need to hunt down locally owned restaurants wherever they go.
