Stories in the Shine

Few things say “hillbilly” in that condescending Hollywood way than the word “moonshine.” But when you visit the new breed of legal shiners in West Virginia, you learn how they fill every barrel with the complex, distinctive stories of Appalachia.

Story by Mickie Meinhardt | Photographs by Gunner Hughes

June 30, 2020

Glen Price, owner and founder of Black Draft Distillery in Martinsburg, West Virginia.

Now, Price makes his own, part of a growing class of legal moonshiners bringing the drink farther and wider and, in turn, a kind of legitimacy it's never known. Yet there’s still a lingering stigma which Price’s emphasis on everywhere hints at:  West Virginians (or all Southern mountain people) are not what the stories make us out to be; stories that center around the “hillbilly” label both shine and West Virginians have been saddled with for generations. The state has been painted more poorly than perhaps any in the nation, as “backwater,” “hick,” “white trash” people that marry their cousins and have too many babies. Moonshine gets slicked with the judgmental oil by proxy. Everyone has an opinion on it, even those who’ve never had a single sip, and their opinions tend toward the binary — one of either deep condescension or respect depending on who you are and where you’re from: city or country, north or south, east or west, Appalachia or … everywhere else. Other Southerners aren’t immune either. When I asked a friend in Florida if he knew anyone who made it, he replied, “What am I, a hillbilly?” 

Moonshine isn’t innocent though, and some of its negative reputation was earned. When your region has a history of making a very powerful drink, it will also have a history of drunkenness and alcohol abuse. A 100-proof (or more) liquor is dangerous in the wrong amounts or hands, and throughout its history, shine claimed many lives and livelihoods and tore apart families. There are quite a few in West Virginia and Appalachia who won’t touch it and even condemn it — they’ve seen what it can do. 

By and large, the negative generalizations of shine and West Virginia both were borne of profound misunderstandings (like most generalizations) of the traditions and cultures surrounding both. Like America’s own history, the story of West Virginia moonshine is complicated and contradictory. But there’s no denying that every electric sip of shine is a story, every jar a product of ingenuity, gut, grit, and history that no mass-market bottle on a liquor barn shelf can replace.

“Making good moonshine isn’t that different from telling a good story, and no one tells a story like a woman. She knows that legends and liquor are best spun from the back of a pickup truck after nightfall, just as she knows to tell a story slowly, the way whiskey drips through a sieve. Moonshine earned its name from spending its life concealed in the dark, and no one understands that fate more than I do.” 

– Wren Bird’s opening lines in Shiner: A Novel by Amy Jo Burns, 2020

Author Amy Jo Burns was not at a party the first time she tried moonshine, though she was with family — her infant son, who accompanied her on a research trip to Black Draft Distillery for the book that would become her latest and just-released novel, Shiner.

“I'm so grateful my first taste was Glen’s,” she told me as we corresponded throughout April while quarantined, our original interview date to a distillery sidelined by COVID-19. “You can really taste the grain in his recipe, and the flavor is nothing like what you find on liquor store shelves. Maybe it was the barn's atmosphere, or maybe it was because his wife poured me my first glass while Glen held my 1-year-old son, but tasting his moonshine was like being invited to be part of a longstanding family tradition — secrets and all. I think of that day I spent with him every time I pour myself a glass or make a cocktail, and that's what makes it feel like home.”

Shiner is the story of Wren Bird, a 15-year-old girl raised on an isolated West Virginia mountaintop. Her father, Briar Bird, nicknamed “White Eye,” is a one-eyed snake-handling preacher and faith healer; her mother, famed local beauty Ruby Day, is Wren’s guiding light and the book’s source of sanity. Briar makes the family abide by “the rituals of snake-handling law”: No phones or technology, handmade clothes, and their only income is provided by donation to Briar’s weekly (and weakly attended) sermons. Wren is home-schooled, friendless, and caught in a love-hate relationship with her father’s profession. On one hand, she loathes what he’s forced the family into, but on the other, she’s mesmerized by the snakes and the stories. The whole novel is a trip, but the moonshine storyline drew me in most: After tragedy strikes, Wren begins to fold into the myths of her mountain home and comes out a storyteller and shiner in her own right. And it made me wonder what a modern moonshiner might look like — a case of a book unraveling a mental thread you just have to follow.

Burns is from western Pennsylvania (the setting of her first book, the memoir Cinderland), but grew up visiting family in West Virginia. Long in love with the state’s beauty and mystery, she knew she wanted to set her second book there. The interest in shine was an accident, another case of a writer following a thread: Up late with postpartum insomnia and researching Appalachian traditions, she “fell down the rabbithole,” after discovering the almost unreal accounts of old moonshiners who felt oddly like kindred spirits.

“They have such faith in their process,” Burns explained. “Like writing, it’s never-ending, and it’s primarily a solitary process. Moonshiners are so misunderstood as people who are evading taxes. But really they do this for a love of their land, for love of it as an art, for love of their people. It reminded me so much of why I wanted to be a writer in the first place — love for stories.” She had never tried moonshine before she ended up at Black Draft, but after tasting Price’s and hearing his story as part of her research, she knew shine would be the beating heart of her novel.

Glen Price's original stills and barrels at Black Draft distillery. 

Glen Price’s moonshine story, on the other hand, started in a horse barn. I first heard it over the phone in March, our in-person interview also sidelined by quarantine. For years, he’d kept black draft horses on a small farm in Martinsburg as a hobby for kids in the community. When one died and he was left with an empty barn, he thought, Well, might as well make some shine and see what happens.

It took off, was what happened. He started with a 10-gallon still and some pure white corn, just as it was always made, and the first run was a hit. So he made some more. And word spread. And he made some more. Soon he was running into Virginia, Maryland, and even Washington, D.C.’s hallowed halls.

“I was going into the Senate Hart building muling out of a backpack,” Price said. “It was wild, but I knew eventually we were gonna get busted.” 

Unlike most moonshiners, Price has a friend in the government: U.S. Rep. Alex Mooney, who represents the state’s 2nd Congressional District and has long declared himself a big fan of the shine. (Mooney’s wife’s family are Cuban refugees and owned a distillery in their home country as an offshoot of their sugar operation, and Price says there was a kinship between their families because of that.) 

Rep. Mooney helped Price on the road to getting legitimized, and Price now runs a small but brisk operation with three kinds of moonshine — the original First Harvest, plus mint julep- and coffee-flavored versions — along with two bourbons and a vodka. It’s still a family-run operation and the product is the same, it’s just all within the bounds of the law now — a fact I wondered about, and really the one that drew me to investigating moonshine in the first place. If moonshine is, by definition, an illegally produced alcohol, then can you still call it that once it’s legal? And does the recent legality of it somehow reduce that spirit’s wild spirit?

Moonshine holds a particular and somewhat conflicting place in the American mythos. An illegally-produced spirit borne to the Appalachian frontier from Scots-Irish immigrants who wanted some good drink and didn’t see any reason the government should interfere with things they made on their own land, its name has come to embody both the cheeky pioneer spirit of American rebellion, and no-good, rotten-scoundrel, tax-evading drunks. The reality is somewhere in the middle, but unlike Fitzgerald, most people find it hard to hold those two opposing ideas in their heads at the same time.

Ironically, moonshine is not an American invention or even an American word; the term and the beverage came from the British Isles, where “moonshine” was first used to reference illegal liquor in the 1780s. Every culture has its version of it, and it’s all largely in pursuit of the same root purpose: avoiding taxation. (There is a stigma for a reason.) People have been making liquor for a long time — in 350 A.D., Aristotle wrote in Meteorology about evaporating liquids, including wine, into vapor and condensing them into stronger forms. But not long after, governments realized they could raise revenue from the sale of liquor. So they taxed it and required licenses to produce it. That did not go over well anywhere, at any time, so illegal industries flourished practically everywhere.

Texas Liquor Control Board Agent Red Zwernemann stands with an illicit liquor still seized during an operation during the 1940s. Photo courtesy of Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission archive.

Anything that can be fermented (which is a lot of things) can be made into a spirit with the right science. Hence potcheen, or poitín, Ireland’s grain alcohol; samogon, Russia’s potato vodka; hjemmebrent, Norway’s sugar spirit; lao-lao, Laos, rice; feni, India, cashew fruits or coconuts; arki, Mongolia, horse’s milk; waragi, Uganda, bananas or sugarcane. In Joseph Earl Dabney’s 1974 book Mountain Spirits: A Chronicle of Corn Whiskey and the Southern Appalachian Moonshine Tradition, he notes Americans have loved their spirits since Jamestown, when they were safer to drink than water, and made them from “blackberries, persimmons, plums, whortleberries, sassafras barks, birch barks, corn stalks, hickory nuts, pumpkins, pawpaw, turnips, carrots, potatoes, and small grains.”

But corn whiskey soon emerged as the clear favorite, best made by the Scots-Irish immigrant farmers who settled the “western” colonies, first Pennsylvania and then down the Appalachians. It was more profitable to make whiskey than sell cornmeal, and almost every frontiersman in the colonies drank it. (It’s worth noting that most records only discuss white Americans, who could own land and farm it; Black and Indigenous people are largely left out of the narratives I uncovered.) By 1790, there were 2,500 known distilleries in the 13 colonies, 570 of them in Pennsylvania. Of course, the government caught on, but when they stepped in to take a share, it launched the four-year Whiskey Rebellion. Most of those farmers couldn’t afford to pay taxes and fought the excise by going underground, or rather, to higher ground: the untaxed (albeit hostile and hard-to-tame) mountains of Appalachia, where the cold, clear streams provided the perfect coolant for the vapors of their boiling fermented mash. While some continued to produce whiskey legally — creating the American bourbon industry — many didn’t, and by the early 19th century, “moonshine” was almost exclusively a term for those operating on the sly, manning their stills under the light of the high, clear moon.

Made illicit, the craft soon lost its respectability. Law-abiders and -upholders painted the immigrants and their descendants as filthy drunks who cared for nothing but their spirits. Caricatures of hillbillies making “mountain dew” abounded for over a century — consider the old logo of the lemon-lime soda with that name featuring a dopey shiner, bootleg bonnet on his head and bottle in hand, over the slogan “It’ll tickle your innards!” 

However, bad reputations are often borne from some truth. The proliferation of shine across Appalachia did lead to high rates of alcoholism, and even today the region has one of the highest rates of substance abuse. But how much of that can be blamed on moonshine today is debatable. It’s not the wild frontier anymore, with a still in every backyard. Shining is much rarer these days, and systemic failings (or purposefully insidious efforts) to keep the poor poor have had much deeper impacts than homemade hooch ever could.

“I usta hear people complain whiskey men ought to get out and work for a living. The fact was, they were the ones really working already.”

— Arthur Young, moonshiner, quoted in Mountain Spirits

Like many moonshiners, Glen Price speaks highly of corn. And while no shine or shiner’s process is the same, most past and present will agree: Moonshine is corn. It can be made with some small percentages of other grains, typically barley or rye, and sugar, the ultimate alcohol accelerator, but too much of either and you get something not quite right. Price has been using the same traditional combination of 80% corn, 15% rye, 5% barley since he began, with no sugar added. 

“I should be able to taste the shine in it,” he said. I asked him what that meant.

“Corn!” he cried into the phone. “It is all about the corn. You have to be able to taste it.” 

I believed him — and Amy Jo, who now keeps a supply of Black Draft moonshine at home, echoes this sentiment, but wished I could confirm firsthand. At the time of our phone call, I didn’t know if I would get to taste Black Draft’s shine; they don’t ship, and quarantine had made travel unsafe. In lieu, I phoned every liquor store in a 30-mile radius of my home for something approximate. 

“You want what?” more than one cashier asked. “We have Ole Smoky,” some replied, which I knew wasn’t what I was looking for but bought anyway. The brand is notorious as the first truly popular legal moonshine and slick with flashy marketing. The Apple Pie version I took home is only 50 proof and tastes like candy — resplendent with cinnamon sugar, a hangover in a shot glass. And no corn at all.

Finally, I found a tall bottle of 100-proof “Virginia Lightning” corn whiskey, distilled by Belmont Farms in Culpeper, Virginia. It did smell like corn, much more so than I expected, and the aftertaste rings of it too — along with that lightning burn. That’s the other thing moonshiners unanimously agree on: Moonshine better be at least 50% alcohol, or 100 proof. Anything less wouldn’t be worth the trouble. 

“There’s a certain sting you get used to,” Price said. “I like the corn flavor in my moonshine but some people don’t, they want it hotter going down. That’s when you make it out of mostly sugar; it gets hard and hot going down and anything you add takes on that flavor, more like a vodka.” That corn sweetness is part of the true moonshine magic. And that’s why so many generations took the time to do it right — because when they did it was damn good, and then it sold damn well. 

At least, that’s how it used to be made. But many who adhered to the quality corn traditions are old or dead — the shiner accounts in Mountain Spirits and The Foxfire Book, a collection of stories on mountain culture published in 1972, are from men who were elderly 40 years ago. Since then, moonshine and other illegal spirits around the world have been sickened with the fever of quantity over quality, opinions on which have been heated for a half century. (See the “How Good Whiskey Is Being Ruined” section in The Foxfire Book.) 

At best, that might mean an all-sugar formula made to be flavored, like Ole Smoky’s. Price says shine was never flavored when he was growing up. 

“Moonshine’s here for you to get drunk!” he says. “It’s a means to an end. It’s not for connoisseurs.” He said he was judicious about the two flavors he added. The Julep is for those going to the races, and the coffee was a partnership with local Martinsburg roastery Black Dog. They sell well and allow him to keep making the true shine just how he likes to. But it’s the original simple recipe that locals still adore. Take one of his regulars, a man in his 70s named George who picks up two cases for himself and his wife several times a year; they take a shot together every evening as a nightcap.

At worst though, shoddy shine can be addled with chemicals, often acetone or methanol. These might be added to crank up the proof and produce that signature burn, or from a distiller’s failure to toss the “foreshot,” or first run of the still, which is entirely methanol. There are accounts of people all over the world suffering blindness, paralysis, or death due to adulterated illegal liquors.

Perhaps if people knew what went into making real moonshine, that is, small-batch and non-industrial, they’d pay it more respect. That means laboring over a boiling vat of grains to produce the mash that will ferment into beer (which many old shiners reported loving more than the actual spirit distilled from it). Then cooking the beer to release alcoholic vapors that are captured in a vent, run through copper tubes immersed in a cooling box, or cold mountain stream, and collected as condensed liquor. Then repeat; that first run is a “singling” but to make good shine, you need to run it through again for a “doubling.” (This is a deeply simplified explanation; the true step-by-step process is long and tricky with a million chances for error.) The stills of old were also dangerous, multipart contraptions with the potential to break or blow or scorch you. And for most of moonshine’s history, this was all done outside, on a mountain, in the elements. An unnamed older moonshiner in Mountain Spirits notes, “You stay out there and take all kinds of exposure. If you ain’t got a shed over you and if it comes up a rain, you stand right there and take it.” Not to mention they’d have to carry all those materials and ingredients — enormous copper tubs, copper wiring, lumber, bushel after bushel of corn, giant bags of sugar — up the mountain and through the woods while making sure no one was following them.

Modern technology has made the process safer and simpler but not much shorter. Dan Taylor, the other distiller at Black Draft, who has worked with Glen Price for five years, says their moonshine run takes about six days from start to finish. And a lot of that is boring. There were clay targets in Price’s tasting room above his original still. When asked what they were for, Price laughed. “Six hours of watching liquor drip? You get fucking bored!”

One might wonder why anyone bothers at all with moonshine; the stigma, the process, the ready availability of cheap high-proof alcohol down at the liquor store. For people like Price and Taylor, it’s tradition. Descendants of those original Scots-Irish have been making corn whiskey their way in the mountains for more than 200 years. Keeping that practice alive still means something to some folks.

That, and it’s still damn good money.

“‘Here,’ he said, and I took the glass and brought it to my lips. ‘This is how we share our secrets.’”

– Shiner

When I first fell down this rabbit-hole, the chief question that interested me, one I didn’t know if I would get an answer to or if there even was an answer for, was: Can there be such a thing as legal moonshine? By definition, it seemed to me, there couldn’t be. 

In practice, however, there can be simply because there already is. As Kevin R. Kosar notes in Moonshine: A Global History, since Ole Smoky essentially created the market for it in 2009 in eastern Tennessee, dozens of legal moonshine purveyors have sprouted up. Some are from big brands, like Jim Beam’s Jacob’s Ghost, others more “craft,” capitalizing on the marketability of the haute hillbilly trend that goes somewhat hand-in-hand with the rise of “original,” “authentic,” and “heritage” as advertising buzzwords. 

In short: A moonshine in ill-used name only. Ole Smoky now has “more than 20 creative flavors crafted from the authentic family recipe,” international distribution, and three branded and tourable distilleries. The company has quite a lot of pride in their product and process; the website boasts: 

“Like other moonshiners and bootleggers, we know it’s considered risky to tell stories of moonshine glory. The consequences of talking back in the day made it something you just didn’t do. But those days are gone, and it’s hard not to brag when you’re makin’ & sellin’ Ole Smoky Moonshine.” 

One taste and you know those days are gone indeed. Ole Smoky’s “pure” shine is only 80 proof, which would probably be more offensive to shiners of yore than the sugar content.

Other brands following that model include Midnight Moon, borne on the back of legendary shiner turned NASCAR racer Junior Johnson (portrayed in the movie The Last American Hero by a 23-year-old Jeff Bridges); Popcorn Sutton’s, also named for a famous former shiner; and Tim Smith’s, a shiner featured on the Discovery Channel show Moonshiners, all with some story of making it “like they used to.” That’s not unusual — liquor marketing has always stretched the truth. But perusing website after website where the maker’s spirit was referenced almost snidely as “likker” (quotations included), I couldn’t help tasting hillbilly voyeurism in it all; like the same people with an appetite for “Duck Dynasty” or “Honey Boo Boo” might see drinking it as a form of blue collar slumming or a joke jar to bring to a party and not a “real” spirit. 

I posed my chief question to Price. Isn’t this an oxymoron? Clearly there’s a benefit — no running from the law — but what about the optics? I imagined the old timers frowning at the prospect of legal cooperation, something of the liquor’s wildness taken away. 

“Well,” he said slowly, pausing to consider my question carefully. “We have a storytelling culture. You know: ‘Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.’ And that’s moonshine. There is an ingrained shadiness to it. You don’t get that exactly with beer and wine. It’s part of the legend, and sure, we put that out there. That’s part of the draw.

“But at some point, you’re going to need to jump the shark. Twenty-dollar jars out of the backyard don’t pay the bills, not anymore. You can only sell so much underground. So to get bigger you gotta sell more, and to sell more you have to be on the radar, and if you’re on the radar, at some point you’re gonna get busted.” 

The benefits of legality far outweigh the negatives of losing your cred, in other words. And for Price, there’s something to be gained from working with the government. Instead of running from the law, he has an influence over it. 

“They’re really friendly to us, and we were able to open right away,” he said. “They’re so supportive of distilleries in our state — way before other states got on board. There’s a sense that they want this to help show part of our culture.” 

And then there is his recent virus-age innovation. Like most distillers, Price has been making hand sanitizer since March, and shortly after he began, he got a call from the Internal Revenue Services: they wanted him for a contract, 300 gallons of sanitizer a month for six months. Needless to say, his operations had to change a fair bit. He and Taylor used to do only 50 gallons a month in spirits, and the new demand required them to open a warehouse down the street to keep up. The irony that his business is booming in the worst recession in almost a century isn’t lost on him, but he said he was proud to offer jobs to more than 30 out-of-work locals. 

“It’s a community effort,” he said.

Price’s embrace of the law does make him a bit of an anomaly in parts of West Virginia. 

“I still have relatives who bury cash in their backyard because they don’t trust the government,” he said, laughing. “West Virginia’s whole culture is a middle finger. The reason we’re a state is they said, ‘Screw you guys, we’re heading to the hills, and if you want me, come get me.’” (There is a reason the state’s motto is “Wild and Wonderful West Virginia.”) He thinks that idea might be some of the draw with moonshine, too.

“When we do tastings in D.C., there’s still a stigma attached to some of it. People might laugh or be skeptical, but once they taste it you can change their mind pretty quick. And they love the nostalgia. It comes back to that middle finger. It was made illegally, and this … ” — meaning his way of making shine — “is how it should be, before it was bastardized.” 

Ultimately, he believes the availability of legal moonshine gives it a better reputation, especially with small-batch distillers like himself or Kings County Distillery in New York, whose former operators are friends of Price’s and helped him get off the ground. (And who make a damn fine shine, too.)

Burns tends to agree. “I think there's a real dignity and honor that comes with getting to put your name on something you're proud of. Circumstances dictated that moonshiners didn't really get to do that, until now.”

The traditions live on — in the sip of real shine distilled first for pride, not profit, in the warm glow wrought by hard work. 

“The person got it from their uncle who got it from his cousin who got it from his bud — when you go to Black Draft, it’s just like that,” Burns said. “It shows you how much love goes into the bottle. You’re tasting the earth, the distiller himself, and his work.”

“People want to be told a story with something like this. Especially today.”

Like Burns, I didn’t expect to fall down this rabbit-hole. But West Virginia has a strange power; really, the tendrils of this story began taking hold of me years ago.

I visited West Virginia as a child on a family trip and was awed by the rolling green mountains and hairpin roads that carved impossible paths through them, a stark difference from my straight, sea-level hometown. But it was reading the collected stories of Breece D.J. Pancake 15 years later that truly cemented the state in my imagination. Pancake’s intimate tales of life in coal country showed me that it was okay, even beautiful, to write about the small-town lives around me; that with an unflinching eye but compassionate delivery, you could make the stories you’d always heard known to, perhaps important to, the world. I’ve felt inexplicably drawn to the state since, perhaps because no one tells stories about the ordinary people where I live much either. I found kindred spirits in Pancake’s maligned area, especially after the 2016 election and the media’s uniform painting of places like West Virginia and my Maryland hometown as “Trump country.” I wanted to see it again.

So, in 2018, I took to the road with photographer and frequent collaborator Gunner Hughes. We drove Virginia’s Skyline Drive down into eastern West Virginia to see what we could see of the state, through the hills and hollers, over and into gorges, visiting the abandoned and reportedly haunted Lake Shawnee amusement park and the former mining town of Thurmond, population 5. There is something mystical about West Virginia when the sun goes down and that phantom blue that gives the Blue Ridge Mountains their name creeps in. But you can see the ways it’s been left behind, too: run-down or abandoned homes on every road, many yards with long-rusted cars on cinder blocks. Many communities are isolated and some that we drove through had barely a handful of stores and eateries, some of them boarded up, one always a gas station; there are only a few cities with the kind of large retailers most Americans depend on. We were very much aware that, while this was a few days trip for us, it was a reality for the residents — one that’s hard to escape. The systems of poverty and injustice have long kept West Virginia down; their land mined and fracked, their people used for cheap labor, their education and healthcare resources fewer and farther between than most. (It is one of six states with just one abortion clinic.) 

At a certain dusk hour in the mountains, everything seems to grow at once brighter and more saturated, but also immensely quiet, as if you’ve entered the witching hour on hallowed ground. Perhaps West Virginia should be our most hallowed ground; a state that has kept its culture close and continuous, its history on its sleeve, its freedoms and ethos preserved, all while weathering constant exploitation. That its residents — some of the poorest and least tended-to by the government in the country — don’t have much respect or trust for outsiders isn’t all that surprising. That trip convinced me that everyone in the country should take a good drive through all that green, to see what they’ve been so wrong about. 

I understood Pancake’s stories on a deeper level after that trip — the small moments of beauty, the larger ones of suffering. They’ve drawn me back to writings about the state over and over since, and I thought about Pancake again while reading Shiner, forming questions I wanted to spin out the answers to. I felt the spirit of his hardscrabble characters in Wren and Ruby Day. I thought about the men whose accounts I read in The Foxfire Book, who would have been his contemporaries. What did he think of them? What would he think of the way West Virginia was portrayed now? Pancake took his own life in 1979, at the age of 26; only six of his stories were published in his lifetime, mostly by the Atlantic, and the collection was published posthumously. I wondered how he might have helped shape the state’s current narrative as it met the modern age. No doubt just as inscrutably, but with that tacit tenderness. As I’ve researched and written this, carefully combing through story after story of shiner and shine, I’ve kept that balance he struck in mind. It is a bit like moonshine: A contradictory and revelatory thing.

In late May, I finally got to taste Price’s shine. As quarantine restrictions began to lift, both of us felt safe enough for me to make the four-hour drive out to Martinsburg for socially distant photos and the chance to taste Glen Price’s shine. I arrived with Gunner, nearly two years exactly from our first trip, with masks and hand-sanitizer wipes. We didn’t need the wipes. Black Draft and Price know how to keep clean; after all, they’re distilling now to keep us virus-free.

The operation on the farm is indeed small, with the horse barn-turned-tasting room only three former stalls long and an adjacent building that’s more like a shed housing the two mash tuns and two 150-gallon stills. The whole place smelled like corn. Every spirit they make comes from the same recipe and same base run, which Taylor scooped small shots of from a blue drum. They smelled like what I imagined: corn and liquor. We hesitated — it was not even noon — then shrugged and kicked back the shots with Taylor and Price. 

Fire, sweetness, a shiver. This, I thought, is what I’ve spent three months reading about and longing for. We tasted tiny amounts of the other products too, even a limited-edition rye a local judge coerced Price into making that he thieves straight from the barrel for us. But it’s the shine I’m here for and the shine I take home, the plain for myself and the coffee version as a gift for a friend. After all this time waiting, the score feels particularly satisfying.

Price doesn’t know what the future holds. The sanitizer operation is a lot of work, logistics, and headaches. He’d like to be back to a slower pace, but at the same time, it’s exciting, turning this little illegal operation into one that will soon supply not only the IRS headquarters, but also Kroger and Piggly-Wiggly grocery stores, Ace Hardware, and the Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Dallas-Fort-Worth airports with a desperately needed supply. He doesn’t know if that will continue after this year, but he does know one thing: The shine is here to stay. 

“Now we have people driving up here every day asking if they can buy liquor because they’ve seen our labels [on the sanitizer]. More people know about us than ever. That’s something.”

I don’t intend to take shots of 100-proof liquor on the regular, and so, when I returned home, the shine went into the liquor cabinet for some future special occasion I couldn’t yet see. But Memorial Day weekend rolled around unexpectedly warm, so I squeezed some lemons into a Mason jar for homemade lemonade and topped it with a single shot of Black Draft shine. I took it outside, excited about my little moment of sunshine and shine-shine, but one sip and I knew my mistake: I couldn’t taste the corn over the lemonade. I thought on Price’s comments about moonshine not being made for cocktailing and went back inside. I sniffed the jar of moonshine, felt the vapors infiltrate my nose like they have other Americans’ for centuries. I raised it to my lips and took a small sip. I shivered, and I smiled. That was more like it. The taste was so deeply familiar it could have been my hundredth. Or perhaps it was all the stories that made it so soul-sweet. As Wren Bird closes Shiner, she says:

We’d give our children their own stories to tell. We would take part in this West Virginia earth and let it take part in us.

And once the winter faded and the rains came and the corn grew high and strong — we would cull it and grind it, soak it and shine it. We’d let the heat of the fire refine us and the cold of the creek wash us clean. And like the hills that watch us get born and die and be born again, we would rise.

Mickie Meinhardt is writer and literary event host who splits her time between her hometown of Ocean City, Maryland and her adopted home of Brooklyn, New York. She is the Events Director for Guernica magazine, the co-founder of New York writer's variety show Same Page, and the founder of the literary wine project The Buzzed Word, now a live series in New York and elsewhere. Her work has appeared in Guernica, The Bitter Southerner, Eater, and The Seventh Wave, among others, and she holds an MFA from The New School where she was a Creative Writing Fellow. You can find her most places on the Internet @mickiemyheart and her wine writing @thebuzzedword.

Gunner Hughes is a photographer on the run. Maryland born and bred, with a stint in Florida, and a hiatus in New York City. He is now based on the road, somewhere south of The Mason-Dixon.

Header photo: John Bowman (right), in his garage, explaining how a moonshine still works to Mary Hufford and John Flynn. Courtesy of the American Folklife Center, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D. C.

On Flannery O’Connor & Race

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