Honking Goose Distillery is named after the two guard geese at Beeloved Acres, our family farm in Amissville, Virginia. Cammie is an African. She runs the duck flock. Or, rather, the duck flock runs to keep up with her. O’Flage is an Embden. He supervises the chickens, nipping at any that we have to shoo into the coops after dark. There’s no staying out after hours without O’Flage having his say about it!

Put the two names together and you have Cammie O’Flage. Pronounce it a few times. Yeah, our puns are fowl, but its all in good spirits!

A word about our guard geese. They’re a bit like our farm guardian dog. They put on a big show, but aren’t mean - unless you’re looking to poach a chicken dinner on the hoof! When visiting, don’t be put off by flapping wings and loud honks. They’re just announcing that you’re at Honking Goose Distillery! Or they might be using fowl language. As this is a public web site, though, we’ll stick with the first story.

So how did a distillery get started on a family chicken farm? Blame the farmer, not the chickens. During COVID, the farmer learned to tend bar because, well, what else to do when everybody’s staying home? Tending bar lead to exploring local distilleries, which lead to “Gee, why can’t we make good stuff like this ourselves?” Two years of construction and licensing later, we are working on production recipes for whiskey, rum, brandy, and gin. Next up: build out for a tasting room and on-prem sales!

Today, Honking Goose Distillery a nano distillery operating inside a pretty cool barn on a family farm, surrounded by massive trees, poultry, horses, goats, and the beautiful Shenandoah mountains. Yes the 74 year old tractor in the run-in shed works. No, we don’t fuel it with our whiskey (that would be foolish, not to mention a no-no because we don’t have an alcohol fuel manufacturing license!).

And that’s who we are and how we got here!