Before stepping to the still, E. has already pointed out three five-gallon sealed buckets in which he creates a pre-cook “mash”: a mix of seven pounds of cracked corn, seven pounds of sugar, water, and yeast. When the ingredients have fully fermented to create a moonshiner’s mash-y “beer”—it takes about ten days for the fermentation to go flat, killing all the yeast—the time for distilling has arrived.

E. dumps ten gallons of the mash into the still’s cylindrical bottom, seals the still’s peaked top tightly with a rubber grommet, attaches the condenser coil or “worm” to the tiny aperture at the top of the still, and adjusts the still’s interior heat to precisely 190 degrees Fahrenheit. Within an hour or two, 120-plus-proof alcohol—which evaporates at a lower temperature than water—begins rising from the mash and moving into the copper tubing of the condenser coil, whose exterior is cooled by water. Eventually, as the distilled steam moves through the condenser, it cools back into liquid, emerging from the coil as “first run” moonshine.

E. points to a chart on the wall next to his still, which tracks the correlation between cooking temperature and the strength of the alcohol trickling from the condenser’s tip. “That’s one of the things I love about this—it’s all science,” he says. “At 190 degrees, we get a product that’s 58.5 percent alcohol. It’s that simple. Sure, it takes time and a little attention. Each run needs about twelve hours to finish, and you don’t ever want to be too far away from a still when it’s working, but it’s worth putting the time in.”

He then goes on to show how, after the first run, he repeats the process, “doubling” his liquor to get rid of any residual methyl alcohol by-products, checking its percentage of alcohol at the same time with a hydrometer that floats just ahead of the tip of his condenser. To complete the process, he stores the finished whiskey for several months in charred oak barrels, which he buys from a producer in Arkansas. Each run makes roughly eight gallons.

“And then it’s ready to drink,” he says, adding that, most years, he makes a few hundred gallons and largely gives it away to friends. “It’s just for fun.”

Proudly, he points out that with the exception of the corn and sugar (which are bought at the local Tractor Supply Co. and a supermarket), the rest of his kit was purchased online. “You can get everything there,” he says. “I bought the still for $450. We buy barrels from one place and distiller’s yeast from another. The suppliers ship it all to me, via UPS.”

We drink. The sour mash is amazing. Smooth, clean tasting. Better than most commercial bourbons.
“You know, I’ll bet 90 percent of what I know about making whiskey I learned online,” E. says. “There are online chat groups devoted to it. On one, there are at least five hundred active members. We trade information: mistakes and successes we’ve had. The rest of what I’ve learned is mostly through trial and error. And it’s turned out to be really fun. Everybody says, ‘If you’ll keep at it for two years, you’ll learn to make a pretty good whiskey.’ And they’re right.”

Open for Business
Contrary to statements by some federal officials, today there remain dozens of “known” large commercial distillers moving untaxed corn whiskey in the American Southeast. And as the newer stripe of boutique-batch moonshine has started creeping into the culture, it has started showing up in some of the South’s hipper restaurants, where it’s sometimes served surreptitiously to favored patrons.

But the happiest moonshiner in the region no longer even has to hide from the authorities. His name is Chuck Miller, and he’s been making the only legal corn whiskey off a farm since, as he puts it, “George Washington himself was in the distilling business.”

Working on 124 acres of corn, hay, and cattle livestock, Miller and his wife, Jeanette, got into legal moonshining for the same reasons his predecessors did. “We had five children, and I had to think about supporting them, paying for college,” Miller says. “And that was hard on 124 farm acres by doing traditional farming, but I had to elevate income off the farm. So, back in the late 1970s, Virginia wanted to support a local wine industry, and for a few years, I tried to make wine. But, man, that was hard work.”

Then one day, several years after abandoning his wine-making endeavor, Miller stepped back, looked at all the corn growing on his property, and thought: “My granddad was a moonshiner, though my father decided not to do it. And I thought, if you can make wine legally, why can’t you make legal corn whiskey? So I called the ATF and the state authorities and said, ‘I want to make corn whiskey.’ And, somewhat to my surprise, they said: ‘Okay, but you’ll have to do the paperwork.’”

Remarkably, both state and federal authorities were not only helpful, they provided expertise and financial assistance. Miller points to the two-thousand-gallon copper-pot still, built back in 1933, which he found for sale in a nearby county. “The government actually helped me to buy this,” he says.

Certainly, there were hurdles on the way to Miller’s success. For example, while both of his corn whiskey products—Virginia Lightning (white) and Kopper Kettle (a char made with corn, wheat, and barley)—emerge from the double distilling process at 150 proof, Miller must water them down to 100 proof, the strongest alcohol allowed for sale in Virginia and surrounding states. To get acceptable water for this, Miller had to install a $50,000 five-level water purification system, which, like the distilling machinery, is regularly inspected by state and federal officials.

Most of the rest of his operation, however, issues from Miller’s own homeplace. And because his family recipe is a purist one, which doesn’t employ the use of sugar, even that “exotic ingredient” is left out of the mix.

“I grow and harvest my own corn,” he says. “We start with good limestone-filtered springwater from our own earth. The only thing we buy is yeast. And Jeanette and I do most of this ourselves. We run one batch a week. Then each Thursday, I have three women who come in and put labels on the bottles and who help me keep the place clean. I sell it to the state for seven dollars a bottle, and they slap another seven dollars in state and federal taxes on it, and sell it themselves, so I don’t even have to fool with marketing.” A cat-who-ate-the-canary grin is now resting on Miller’s face.

In the past few years, in fact, the Millers’ products have even developed an international following. “One of our biggest markets for Kopper Kettle is Japan,” Miller says. “You’d be amazed how much we ship there. It’s actually kind of famous there.”

Miller also notes that, these days, because his is the moonshine the authorities know and trust, it’s become the measure against which all illegal brews are judged. “When they catch an illegal moonshiner with his goods,” Miller says, “they put it through a spectrometer to see how it compares with mine in terms of toxins and impurities. It’s kind of funny to think of, but we’ve become what the standard for moonshine is. And I guess that’s something, right?”

And what of the financial imperatives that birthed his business? “Oh, moonshine’s been very good to us,” Miller says. All five children are now adults, Jeanette adds. All are professionals—and all college and graduate-school educated. Miller grins and shakes his head. ”And that corn whiskey,” he says, “it paid for a lot of it.”