I think that one reason mountain made moonshine (white lightening) worked so well was because it was so strong. It absolutely forced you to breathe, after preventing you from breathing, or else.
You can legally buy the watered-down stuff in the Smokies now and it works but not like the old shine.
My grandmother’s brother spent a short time at Brushy Mountain during the depression after getting caught making it at home, only two miles from where I live now. When he got out of the pen, he switched his old still over to making molasses. There are stills back in the mountains now, but they are rare.
I lived way back in the mountains when I was a single mother in my 20’s. A stream ran behind my house, and you could smell the still runoff in the stream. My dad found the still and the people working it. Very nice people if you were local. Dad came back down the hill carrying a gallon jug so Mom could make ‘medicine’. LOL I think Mom’s cough medicine is why I don’t drink now.
The local doctors that bought real moonshine from the highland moonshiners have all died and big pharma pays doctors too much to pedal their legal poison. Lowlanders switched to meth. Meth cookers are easier for cops to catch than traipsing around in the mountains for moonshiners. Moonshiners aren’t the only dangerous animals back in the mountains.
There I go reminiscing about things nobody cares about again. Dang it! 🤪
I LIKE THE BRANDY IDEA.
Great memories and family history; I hope you are writing them down. I wish I knew half of what my grandmothers did. Using pasture mushrooms, why to pick berries in a new slashing, treating infections, and on.
Hey, I care 🤠! My my Mom’s side has kin that made shine and wine out of a great variety of materials just over VA/w.VA line from their roots area. It was (is?) epic. Many types of wines that they’d run off to 140-160+ proof moonshine. And those moonshines were incredible, smooth, and they’d retain a light flavor of their base material, peaches, blackberries, tomato and dandelions among a few. Always had some of both at the family reunions. My mom got a hand crank telephone from the great uncle on that side. He had a rooster that made the Tasmanian devil (cartoon) seem like a kitten…