Richard Chapman

Bogue Sound Distillery

Richard Chapman didn't set out to reopen a chapter of Carolina history; he wanted to finish a personal to-do list. After long careers in textiles, construction, and real estate, a lifetime of family stories about stills and sugarcane nudged him toward one last, stubborn dream: to build a working distillery that felt like home and a small museum all at once. That ambition became Bogue Sound Distillery, a place where tins of family lore sit beside gleaming stills and the smell of toasted grain hangs like an old, friendly promise.

Chapman’s interest in spirits wasn’t born in a single eureka moment. It arrived sideways through a chemistry background in college, a string of careers that taught him how to run a business, and a family history that traced back to Scotland and to a great-grandmother whose name would later grace one of his bottles. Those threads, formal study, practical trades, and hereditary memory, braided together into the distillery’s DNA. The Vitzellen Vodka label, for instance, honors Alice Vitzellen Conoley, Chapman's great-grandmother, and ties the product to the people and places that shaped his taste for tradition.

Bogue Sound, perched near its namesake coastal waterways in eastern North Carolina, opened its doors to locals and road-trippers as much for storytelling as for spirits. Chapman and his wife, Margaret, set out to make more than liquid; they wanted an experience. Tours wind through artifacts: a restored 1923 Ford Model T nods at rum-runner lore, an early 1900s Williams grist mill speaks to the agricultural roots of the craft, and family items such as photographs, tools, and handwritten labels stitch the modern distillery to an older Southern tradition. The distillery’s product line, from Vitzellen Vodka to a White Dog and a single-malt labeled John A.P. Conoley, reflects that blending of personal history and contemporary craft.

If Chapman’s story has a quiet backbone, it is family. He is married to Margaret Chapman. Together, the Chapmans run the business as a family enterprise and regularly feature family history in their branding and tours. Their daughter Sissy Chapman has spoken publicly about the distillery as her father’s project, a late-career pivot to check items off a bucket list and to build something that would carry the family name forward. Those family ties show in how the distillery frames its mission: hospitality, history, and hands-on production rather than anonymous industrial scale.

Chapman’s approach to distillation mixes pragmatic, evidence-based care with an almost museum-curatorial sense of stewardship. The process is described on the distillery’s site as hands-on: grain is ground on site, attention is paid at every step from mashing to inspection, and some sustainability practices, like using recycled rainwater to cool equipment, are emphasized as part of the operation’s conscience. That careful, almost artisanal approach aligns with his earlier careers: textiles demand process control, construction demands project rigor, and real estate demands an eye for what people will respond to. All those disciplines feed into how Bogue Sound composes a bottle: part chemistry, part craft, part storytelling.

Visitors often remark not just on the spirits but on the sense of place: the way the property feels curated to communicate a lineage. Chapman positions the distillery as both product and public history: tours are as much about the Conoleys and Vitzellens and the moonshine tales of the coast as they are about the distillation vessels. That blending of narrative and production gives him a unique place in North Carolina’s growing craft spirits scene: he’s neither the garage-tinkerer nor the large-scale bourbon behemoth but something in between, a family-run operation that sells access to a story as much as it sells a bottle.