Pour One with Chris Bower & Rett Murphy

The co-owners of Eda Rhyne Distilling Company talk creation, destruction, resilience and impact in the spirited south.

WORDS Carrie Honaker

Moonshiners, bootleggers and illicit distillings come to mind when you mention Appalachia’s history with spirits. Still, an older cadre of tonics and brews tell a different story of the region, though knowledge of those distillations is disappearing.

Eda Rhyne in Asheville, North Carolina, is trying to change that. Co-owners Chris Bower and Rett Murphy come from families of guerrilla gardeners and folk medicine foragers. Micro-habitats that spread across the Blue Ridge Mountains encompass 2,500 plant species, and more than 1,000 have medicinal properties. Traditional folk remedies of this area often relied on spirits that extracted the healing qualities of the botanicals. Bower and Murphy cultivate and utilize rare heirloom grains and native botanicals coupled with knowledge of the “ancient art of the hills” to produce their award-winning spirits.

In 2024, Garden & Gun crowned Eda Rhyne, named after a woman from an old Haywood County ghost story, with its prestigious Made in the South Award for the distillery’s Appalachian Fernet.

In September 2024, surrounded by artisan food producers and farmers in the cradle of Italy’s Piedmont region, Bower and Murphy poured tastings of their wildly popular Appalachia-produced Amaro at the Terra Madre Salone del Gusto, Slow Food’s flagship event. Turin’s cityscape was the setting for celebrating the organic, local, heirloom craft producers across the globe, and Eda Rhyne was the only U.S. producer invited.

As the Italians toasted Bower and Murphy’s success in producing an amaro even their nonnas would love, the images of Hurricane Helene’s catastrophic flooding happening back home in North Carolina filtered in, gutting them. Barrels of seven-year-old whiskey distilled in the old-fashioned double pot system with rare heirloom-grain Seashore Black Rye, poised for release in just a few weeks, washed away along with the years of work highlighting sustainably growing native ingredients coupled with heritage folk knowledge bottled in their herbal spirits that speak to the incredibly biodiverse Appalachian terroir.

Here, we check in with them on the journey of agriculture-forward distillation, the complicated process of recovery after a once-in-a-lifetime natural disaster and what gives them hope moving forward.

Chris Bower, Rett Murphy and Lead Distiller Rider Burton foraging

Your operation leans on heritage grains and native botanicals. As a farmer and a forager, what is the importance of using those products over mass-produced ingredients?

Chris: Rett was a farmer for 15 years. He was inspired by his grandmother, who was a guerrilla gardener before there was such a term. My grandfather taught me my first medicinal and edible plants in the woods. The big issue to me is companies using concentrated flavors. They’re not dealing with plants themselves. Continuous stills and large-scale distillation are very efficient, but that leads to using genetically modified grains and industrial farming, which depletes the land. We try to honor not only the plants but our relationship with the plants. When you can put your fingers in the soil at an organic farm, you know what’s happening with that land and how it’s being tended. When you go out into the forest to forage, you’re creating a relationship with not only the land but the specific plants. That kind of relationship makes you appreciate what we have on this planet. One of our biggest issues today is people are so disconnected from nature, disconnected from the cycles, the process and the lessons that plants can teach us.

Rett: Eda Rhyne grew out of wanting to highlight the native botanicals of this region and work with local farmers to get them to grow historical grains from this area. Pre-World War II, many more people were growing small grains in the South. They spent generations developing those small grains that grow in the warmer climates of the South with fewer wintertime chill hours. After the industrialization of agriculture, most of the grain production moved to places better suited for mass production. However, many of these cool, Southern-grown varieties were lost. Today, farmers are involved in bringing that small-grain production back to the South, saving the legacy of these heirloom grains.

In your opinion, what are we doing right and what are we doing wrong in the face of this loss of connection to our natural world?

Chris: Forest conservation protects the land from human damage and exploitation by industry, and that’s great. But in another way, it’s harmful because we are an essential part of the environment on this planet. We are an essential element to the forest. When you leave people out of the forest, invasive species take over, wildfires burn out of control. There needs to be balance so more people have a relationship with the land.

Rider Burton, Rett Murphy and Chris Bower / Evan Anderson

In the aftermath of Hurricane Helene and the damage it dealt, how do you feel climate change affects local-sourced spirit distillation over mass-produced commodification of grains and ingredients?

Chris: A storm of this scale, it’s hard to wrap your mind around or even know how it will change our local ecosystem. The forestry department released a report [in November 2024] saying we might have lost 40 percent of our trees in this region. What does that look like? I have no idea. What local medicinal, wild plants remain? It’s too early to say. Entire landscapes have changed, farmlands totally gone. I don’t even know how to wrap my mind around the devastation. Our Lindera Spice Bush Vodka is crafted with a foraged spice bush, and all the places I used to go are washed away. Those trees are gone. I will have to go out and see if I can find spots that weren’t affected. It’s about figuring the process out all over again.

Going forward, we must support small farmers carrying on and saving these heirloom grains from extinction. This is a big part of our vision when it comes to our whiskey production. Unfortunately, that’s one of the tragedies of the storm—we just started working with several rare and endangered corn varieties, making our test runs using these grains. These farmers need support now so they don’t give up on these rare and endangered grains that people have forgotten about so they can do more industrialized farming. They have such unique characteristics. They are complex and very distinctive, making an exciting tasting experience.

The floods and damage are devastating, and you are just on the cusp of rebuilding. What insight can you offer on overcoming disasters and rebuilding for a sustainable future facing those challenges? What needs to change or improve for the future?

Rett: We’re moving forward, leaning into the stuff we’re known for and trimming down the number of products we sell. We were very lucky to have a separate location in Weaverville; more than half of our barrels were spared by being there. But the bottles, the boxes, the labels and all the packaging was destroyed. We’ll reset our bottling system for a lower capacity when that comes in. We will return to an easier management system that doesn’t cost as much money, focusing on slowly building it back. Rye harvest comes in June, so we can go back to trying to make whiskey. We can’t make gin until mid-spring because we must wait for some botanicals to bloom.

Asheville is at a scary moment right now because one of the things that has made the town special and so loved is the concerted effort to support small businesses so that they stick around. There are no big-box stores or fast-food restaurants or chains. Travelers support the local artists, creative people, talented chefs and bartenders who are so important to this place. Because of the devastation, many places are struggling with the idea of going into more debt to reopen. I’m worried that if people don’t push to support what businesses remain, there’s a chance we’ll slip into that cookie-cutter type town, and all of the great people that made Asheville, Asheville, will move away. Only maybe two percent of Buncombe County had flood insurance, and maybe five percent of the flooded businesses and homes had flood insurance. I got a one-line email stating that, unfortunately, as per page 12, I didn’t have flood insurance. But the real value of what we have built here is intangible and can’t be washed away in a flood. It’s the recipes, the connections and the people’s love for our products, our community. That stuff is stronger than it’s ever been. The other stuff hurts real bad, and we’re going into a lot more debt, but the real value, it’s still here.

How have you found hope in the face of such loss?

Chris: There’s only one thing we can do: keep going. The love, those recipes, how we make our spirits, that’s not lost. We lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in glass, equipment and raw materials—but our vision still stands. We’re not giving that up because it means so much to share this with people and see someone smile because they’re enjoying something you’ve made. That’s what we’re here for, and that’s what we’re just gonna keep doing.