By Donovan Webster | June/July 2009 | Features

Moonshine

It goes by countless names, but no matter what you call it, moonshine is experiencing a golden age—and it tastes pretty good too

Today, Baker says, most modern moonshiners have made an active choice to keep their tradition alive. “They’re selecting this from a far wider array of economic options,” he says. “Like other populations in America, moonshiners have become postmodern. They might farm, sure, but they also might work an office job; they travel recreationally far from their homes. They have favorite Caribbean islands, favorite hotels in Las Vegas—but they still choose to make moonshine as a personal preference. It ties them to their land, to the traditions of that land.”

To test Baker’s statement, I later ask my friend D. if he has a favorite place to stay in Las Vegas.
“Oh yeah, absolutely,” he tells me. “If it’s my choice? The Bellagio.”

Legal Matters
Among other aspects of moonshine’s renaissance, it also seems to be thriving because law enforcement is distracted by other concerns.

“These days, we’re pretty busy chasing illegal weapons and violent criminals—mostly gangs,” says Steve Cordell, agent in charge for the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) in Knoxville, Tennessee. “Like everywhere else these days, East Tennessee has developed a gang problem that keeps us occupied. But I will say we’ve seen a rise in the making of moonshine over the last few years. For a while it went away, and now it’s returned some…and I can’t tell you exactly why. Still, it’s probably impossible to calculate how big today’s illegal whiskey industry is, but it is around.”

And in that part of the world, it’s remained pretty gettable, too. In fact, the most famous moonshiner in East Tennessee only recently shut down his still for good. On January 26 of this year, Marvin “Popcorn” Sutton was finally—with his fourth moonshining conviction since the 1970s—given his first prison term, his three previous convictions having resulted in probational sentences. Despite having been convicted of moonshining in the past, Popcorn would openly sell his “likker,” as he called it, to virtually anyone who wanted it, either from the still house on his farm, in Parrottsville, Tennessee, or from his antiques shop just over the state line in Maggie Valley, North Carolina.

A scrawny, deeply funny man with a fan of gray beard that always covered the top of his overalls bib, Popcorn openly showed his distilling techniques for broadcast on the History Channel and the Discovery Channel. Then, after a 2007 fire at his still house that required the local authorities to put it out—and revealed roughly 900 gallons of already finished White Lightning on his farm, plus another 798 gallons nearby—Popcorn was headed for court again.

“Mr. Sutton,” asked federal judge Ronnie Greer at Popcorn’s sentencing in January, “what am I supposed to do with you?”

In the end, despite Popcorn’s pleading that he would “never again make whiskey,” and despite a fearsome populist campaign from YouTube and Facebook to the local newspapers, Judge Greer sentenced an ailing sixty-two-year-old Popcorn to eighteen months in federal prison, on one count of illegally producing and selling untaxed liquor, and a second count of possessing firearms as a convicted felon. “I regret that your behavior has brought us to this,” the judge said. “Mr. Sutton, good luck.”
Popcorn, like everyone in the courtroom that day, was stunned. “Mister,” he told me afterward as he waited under house arrest for orders to report to prison, “what Judge Greer gave me? It’s a death sentence.”

Popcorn wasn’t kidding. On March 16, still under house arrest, his orders to present himself at federal prison finally arrived. And in a characteristically obstreperous Popcorn Sutton move, he proved one last time that the confinements of conventional society didn’t apply to him. Taking a length of hose out to his beloved Ford Fairlane, Popcorn connected one end to the car’s tailpipe and ran the other inside the vehicle’s passenger compartment, closed all the car’s windows, and, sitting inside, started the engine.

He was found dead by his wife a few hours later, the car’s engine still running. His obituary was published in newspapers across the country, including a particularly sensitive half-page “Remembrance” in the Wall Street Journal.

Still, Popcorn Sutton aside, Agent Steve Cordell of the ATF says moonshine remains far down the agency’s list of priorities. He also notes that, several times a year, often during the investigation of other crimes, large-scale moonshine distillers are sometimes uncovered and apprehended. Though what they see more often are scraps of evidence that moonshine distilling continues to exist.

“If we’re conducting a weapons raid up, say, in northeast Tennessee, it’s a very normal thing to find a couple of gallons of moonshine around the site, too,” he says. “It’s something ingrained in that culture. But in those cases, mostly, it’s not being sold. It’s being traded and given away at parties. It’s just part of life there.”

Basement Brew
This combination of law-enforce-ment distraction and laissez-faire is most likely another contributing reason for moonshine’s resurgence. And that’s a good thing for another moonshining friend, E., who lives in a small- to medium-size city somewhere north of the Tennessee-Virginia line.

Employed in the tech industry, E. got into moonshining four years ago. “I don’t know why, exactly,” he says. “A friend and I just got curious. We’d been seeing moonshine getting passed around at bluegrass festivals and things, and we wanted to try to make it ourselves.”

Standing in a well-lit cinder-block room beneath his house—a room closed off from the rest of the basement by a heavy wooden door—E. has one hand resting on his still: a 100 percent copper ten-gallon pot with a peaked Georgia Ridge–style top, all of it resting atop a gas-powered fryer burner to provide distillation heat.