Moonshiners
[
Discovery Channel] and the
movie
Lawless
[
based onMatt Bondurant’s
2008
novel
The Wettest County in the
World
]
have certainly increased interest.”
Upscaling
the
Downhome Recipe
By any name, modern moonshine qualifies
as a craft spirit, made attentively, often in
small batches. Like vodka and gin, white
whiskey can be bottled and sold quickly—
no aging required. This also gives craft
distillers a chance to show their skills
and highlight regional flavor (dare we say
terroir?) without the barrel—like Tuthill-
town’s Hudson New York Corn Whiskey
made from local state corn, and Death’s
Door White Whiskey, made from hard
red winter wheat harvested from Wash-
ington Island, WI.
Many of these craft distillers are ex-
perimenting with grains and processes
to create products unlike anything on
the market. One unique distinction in
the moonshine distillation process is the
addition of sugar into the mash prior to
fermentation. MB Roland Distillery’s
True Kentucky Shine uses this process
with white corn to create notes of citrus
and apple peel. They also make two corn
whiskies, White Dog and Black Dog, the
latter using corn that is “dark fired” in a
small tobacco barn that gives the final
product a smoky flavor similar to Islay
Scotch whiskies.
Corsair Distillery set up shop in Ken-
tucky to produce Wry Moon unaged Ken-
tucky whiskey, pot-distilled from 100%
rye. When the laws changed in Tennessee,
they expanded their operation to Nash-
ville. Utah’s High West Distillery makes
an unaged oat whiskey they compare to
a blanco tequila; Western Oat Silver
Whiskey has a mash bill containing 85%
oats and 15% barley malt. They also pro-
duce OMG Pure Rye, made from 80% rye
and 20% malted rye. And Woodinville
Whiskey Company in Washington makes
Headlong White Dog Whiskey from a
bourbon mash bill of corn, wheat and
malted barley.
Category
Expansion
Though the TTB does not recognize un-
aged white whiskey as a category, research
firms like Technomic track corn whiskey,
which grew 60% in 2011 to reach 80,000
9
L cases nationally. Midnight Moon
posted the largest gain, going from 7,000
to 30,000 cases in 2011. But the shelves
are getting crowded, and this isn’t neces-
sarily going to be an easy point of entry.
Joy Richard, bar and beverage manager at
Boston-based Franklin Restaurant Group,
says “I think distilleries are going to have
to pull out all the stops when it comes to
offering interesting options.”
Flavors are already playing a major role
in the moonshine genre. Midnight Moon
se l ec t i on
moonshine
Now that white whiskey is legal, producers are tapping
the allure of moonshine while ramping up production.
Pictured here: scenes from Ole Smoky, the first
licensed distillery in the history of East Tennessee.
Opposite page: an Ole Smoky White Manhattan.
