Boar’s Nest Distillery in Harman has more flavors than you can shake a tusk at.
Making moonshine is family heritage for Sheldon Vance. “Great granddads, my granddad, great uncles, uncles—everybody’s had their hands into it a little bit,” he says.
He got his own hands into it as a hobby years ago and, with the flavors his wife, Rebecca Vance, created, their distillations became popular with friends and family. “We decided to do a business with it and spread it to a lot more people.”
The Vances opened Boar’s Nest Distillery—named for the infamous Dukes of Hazzard bar and a family boar-hunting tradition—in Harman in February 2025. They started out with just a small sales counter where customers can sample flavors and make purchases. But business is so good that they’ve already added an adjacent stillhouse for distillation, grain storage, and label printing, and they’ve upgraded to a larger still.
A visitor to the distillery can choose from a rotating mix of almost 30 fruit- and cream-based flavors and toasty, oak-infused plain or maple ’shine. Popular flavors include the Bloody Mary, Coconut Cream Pie, Peach Cobbler, and Piggy Loops, which tastes like the milk out of a bowl of Froot Loops cereal. On an entirely different spectrum are the oak spiral–infused flavors, American Oak and Sugar Maple, which are aged quickly using oak spirals rather than for months or years in oak barrels. “It’s intended as a version of a bourbon, but we can’t call it that because bourbon has to be aged in a barrel,” Vance says.
And there are seasonal flavors. Candy Cane, Chocolate-Covered Cherry, Egg Nog, and Peppermint Patty are on the shelves now for holiday gifting and celebrating.
When you go, you’ll want to stock up—so far, in West Virginia, Boar’s Nest products are sold only at the distillery in Harman. They will also soon be available at bars and liquor stores in the Oakland–Deep Creek area, which are subject to lower State of Maryland taxes.
Boar’s Nest Distillery is open Friday, Saturday, and Sunday and by appointment on other days—message them on Facebook to set a time. 145 Mott Street, Harman, boarsnestdistillery.com, “Boar’s Nest Distillery” on FB
READ MORE ARTICLES FROM WV LIVING’S WINTER 2025 ISSUE
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