WITHERSPOON DISTILLERY WRITTEN BY AMBER G. CHRISTENSEN-SMITH
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t’s difficult to imagine how an old Piggly Wiggly grocery chain store, inhabited by squatters for nearly a decade, could be turned into an absolutely unrecognizable whiskey and bourbon distillery. Natasha DeHart, co-founder of Witherspoon Distillery, takes us through the space explaining, “It was completely abandoned.” The now gutted and overhauled craft distillery resides in a once overlooked neighborhood that is now thriving and growing…and the investment is paying off. Witherspoon Distillery, located in Lewisville, Texas, is quite a find for this—until
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recently—overlooked area of downtown where people may have shied away from previously. In 2012, Quentin Witherspoon, founder, and the DeHart’s joined together to bring a dream to fruition. “My husband and I are homebrewers, and Quentin was making moonshine in his garage. They were in the Marines together and it happened to be that we all moved back to the area at the same time; a mutual Marine friend came to visit and linked the two of them up,” shares Natasha. “So we just started talking about opening a distillery and it just happened.
PHOTOGRAPHED BY AMANDA JOY CHRISTENSEN
It is definitely bigger and better than we dreamed.” The distillery space swoons with towering barrels and the whir of machinery as you walk through. People are busy, in the mental state of creating and crafting. “We did a lot of background work. We originally opened at another plant that was much more modest,” explains Quentin. The space they are in now was a once light industrial section and the space was much bigger and rent was more reasonable than other downtown areas. With their move into the local area, Witherspoon Distillery’s growth has influenced the
businesses in Old Town for the better. Quentin goes on to say, “The city has been extremely accommodating throughout the entire process; we bring in a lot of business for the city.” There weren’t restaurants in the area and it was a straight up gamble to choose the location without the typical traffic a distillery might want— but the way Witherspoon has encouraged growth by not competing with restaurants and rather working with them for success in a symbiotic way has created a unique and prosperous business. Natasha and the rest of the gang couldn’t be happier with the
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