Revival: An Orphaned Barrel

About Mena

There’s a particular kind of person who sees plants not as just something pretty, but as something more, ingredients. A person that walks through a field and mentally catalogs what could be foraged, distilled, transformed. Mena was that person long before she ever touched a still.

Mena spent her early career behind the bar at a small bespoke cocktail program, but calling her a bartender was a BIG understatement. She was the in-house alchemist—building tincture libraries, foraging botanicals, blending her background as an herbalist and gardener into drinks that told stories. Every cocktail was a small act of translation, turning the language of plants into something everyone could taste.

Fast forward to 2020 when Covid hit, and the bespoke cocktail bar closed. Like so many makers, Mena found herself suddenly out of work. But, as luck has it she got a call from a local brewery and distillery that needed help producing hand sanitizer—cooking down beer, extracting the alcohol, re-distilling it. Unglamorous work, but necessary. During her time there, one of the owners, Brad Shall, told her that if she “didn’t suck too bad,” he’d teach her how to make real spirits.

Most of the botanicals she needed were already growing in her garden— of course—but small hiccup, the wormwood was too young to harvest. So she gathered what she could, loaded up her car until it looked like a mobile apothecary, and drove toward Tennessee. On the way, she stopped in Asheville to meet an Appalachian herbalist named Rebecca Buyers who had wild wormwood waiting for her. It was the kind of serendipity that feels less like luck and more like the universe saying yes, this is your path!

She didn’t suck. And he kept his word.

After her lesson from Brad, Mena produced her first whiskey, a Bloody Butcher corn whiskey. It was a hit and four months later, she got a call that would’ve terrified most people, she’d been accepted onto Moonshiners: Master Distiller  season 2 for the absinthe episode. She had just two weeks to prepare.

Story of an Orphaned Barrel

Eventually, the Raleigh distillery closed, unfortunately these things happen in the craft world more often than anyone wants to admit. And when it did, Mena had to walk away from everything, including the barrels she’d filled years before—her first attempts, her early experiments, her “spirit babies,” as she called them.

But the world kept spinning and she moved on, because that’s what you do, but she never stopped wondering what happened to them. Where did they go? Did anyone care for them? Would they ever see the light of day, or would they end up forgotten in some warehouse, slowly evaporating into nothing?

Years passed. Then one day, Ben from Devil’s Foot reached out with a message that must have felt like hearing from a ghost, “I have your barrels!”

Somehow, through the unpredictable paths that barrels take when distilleries close, through whatever series of phone calls and handshake deals and fortunate accidents they’d made their way back to Asheville. Back to the mountains. Back to the same town where Mena had stopped to pick up wild wormwood on her way to that first competition, when everything was just beginning.

For Mena, it was more than just recovering lost inventory. It was seeing a part of her story she thought was finished suddenly come full circle!

And for us here at Devil’s Foot, it was exactly the kind of moment that reminded us why we’re in this business, not just to sell drinks, but to honor the makers, to preserve the stories, to give care and attention to things that deserve it.

What Makes These Spirits Special

Here’s what you need to understand about The Revival Series, these spirits weren’t made by someone following a recipe handed down from a big corporation. They were made by someone who was becoming something—learning the craft in real time, experimenting, failing, trying again. Someone who was literally growing the ingredients in her backyard while her whole life was being uprooted.

And you can feel that love and passion in this liquor.

The Heirloom NC Bloody Butcher Corn Rye Whiskey? That’s the first whiskey Mena ever made. Think about that. Somewhere between hand sanitizer production and a reality TV competition, she filled a barrel with something that would become this. The Oak Barrel Aged Rum and Imperial Cask Whiskey followed as she found her footing, each one a marker of growth, of confidence building, of a distiller discovering her voice.

These aren’t spirits designed by committee or produced at scale. They’re small-batch, deeply personal, and truly one of a kind. They represent a specific moment in time—both in Mena’s life and in all of our lives during those strange, uncertain pandemic years when everything felt fragile and we were all just trying to make something beautiful out of the chaos.