MANNERS & MORALS: Legal Lightning

MANNERS & MORALS

Since 1791, when the U.S. imposed the first tax on whisky, moonshiners have plied their intermittent trade in Dixie’s piney woods. They still make a lively dew. At times they garnish their mash with manure to speed fermentation; occasionally a rat, hog or snake crawls into the vat, gobbles its fill dies, and floats there until the batch of moonshine is ready for the still. Sometimes the fermenting corn is tinctured with Clorox or lye to beef up its punch (moonshine is rarely more than 75 proof).

Because they evade taxes and otherwise violate state and federal laws, moonshiners are the constant prey of federal and state officials. But policing them is like policing weeds. With their portable stills, copper coils, sugar and corn, they are suddenly in or out of business on any ridge or in any gully. In recent years, with demand increased because of high taxes (up to 56% of the purchase price) on legal liquor, moonshiners have been working overtime. Last year revenuers cooled 22,913 stills in the U.S. But they missed even more. The ones they missed cooked an estimated 35 million gallons of raw popskull. Of all spirits consumed in the U.S. last year, one gallon in four was moonshine.

In North Carolina, the”Moonshine Capital of the World” (3,846 stills seized in 1954), state officials have inaugurated a shrewd new strategy against moonshiners.

On the shelves of state liquor stores there has appeared a civilized but untamed 100-proof corn liquor respectably labeled”White Lightning —Clear as the Mountain Dew” and respectably distilled on order by a subsidiary of the Brown-Forman Distillers Corp. in Louisville. The North Carolina Board of Alcoholic Control had decided that it would stop trying to wean moonshine guzzlers, and would offer them a better product.

White Lightning is produced from a mash of 85% corn. 15% malt -no rats, snakes or lye. It is aged less than 30 days, and then the aging process is stopped by storing it in uncharred. paraffin-lined barrels. At $4.40 a quart ($2.25 a pint), it costs less than most aged amber whiskies but slightly more than moonshine ($3.50 to $4 a quart). North Carolinians snapped up the first consignment.”Man,” said one satisfied customer last week, “that’s just like I was raised on.”