Beech Tree News Network

Down in a holler, at the base of a mountain, near the Warrior River, in the great state of Alabama, lie the remains of a moonshine still.  The still belonged to Garey’s father, J.D., now gone these past twenty-four years.  After a particularly hard crop year, J.D. is reported to have said, “I’ve decided to raise gourds and make moonshine.  It kills gourds if you work them, and moonshine works itself.”  

Much to the chagrin of Garey’s mom, Aggie, J.D. began making moonshine with his partner Red during the mid-sixties.  Aggie made sure Garey kept his nose out of it during his time in high school, but when Garey turned nineteen, J.D. brought him onboard.  He gave Garey one piece of advice that Garey always heeded, “You can make it or you can drink it, but you can’t do both or you’ll get caught.”

There are four ingredients to moonshine: mash, sugar, water, and yeast.  Unlike most moonshiners in Kentucky at the time, Garey and his dad used wheat bran for mash, instead of corn.  Corn tends to be heavier than wheat bran, and sometimes it would sink to the bottom of the vat and scorch.  J.D. started off with two six-sacker stills—one sacker was 100 gallons.  He later expanded to two ten-sacker stills.

Garey tried his best to explain to me how the still was operated, but after forty-five minutes using visual aids including, but not limited to, my kitchen stove, a pink Halloween bucket and a valve stem, my brain glazed over, so I’m going to hit the highlights.  They had a big vat where they put all the ingredients, the mixture had to start fermenting, which meant the bran mash would bubble up to the top.  They covered that until the bran started sinking back to the bottom, which meant it was time to light a fire under it—they used home-made diesel burners and a 55 gallon drum of diesel fuel that fed the burners.  They stirred the mixture with mops, so it wouldn’t scorch.  When the bran began to roll and produce steam, they capped it with a modified washtub and sealed the edges with biscuit dough.  Pipes from the vat led into a condenser cooled by spring water.  Pipes from the condenser carried the finished product to buckets.  The whole process took six to ten days, depending on the ambient temperature.  They carried hundreds of gallons of water and hundreds of pounds of sugar into the area then carried hundreds of gallons of moonshine out of the area.   I’m exhausted just writing about it. In my opinion, J.D. should have stopped with gourds.

The summer Garey helped J.D., Garey was the follow-man and J.D. was the driver.  They had a 1959 Mercury.  The car had standard leaf springs.  If you load 200 gallons of moonshine into the trunk of a car with simple leaf springs, it’s going to nearly drag the ground, a dead give-away to any ATF agents in the area.  Garey and his dad jacked up the car with a bumper jack and put heavy coil springs above the leaf springs.  After the moonshine was loaded, the car had the look of any 1959 Mercury.  Garey’s dad was very smart and very cautious.  During the fermenting process, before he covered the brew, he put a thread under the cover and slightly over the vat.  When he returned to the area to check the vat, if the thread had moved, he walked away, knowing it was smarter to lose the brew than to get arrested.

When Garey and his Dad were ready to make a delivery, they would load the moonshine into the trunk of the Mercury.  J.D. would drive and Garey would follow.  They would drop the car off on a side street in Birmingham, at a predetermined spot.  J.D. would climb into the car with Garey, and they would drive to a nearby restaurant where they met Bill, the middle man.  Bill would enter the restaurant with a folded newspaper that he placed on the table when he joined J.D. and Garey.  The three men would drink coffee until the public phone in the restaurant rang.  Bill would answer the phone.

It was at this point in the telling of the story that I interrupted Garey.  “Ok, wait,” I said, “This sounds like an episode of Elliot Ness and “The Untouchables.  You guys watched too much TV.” 

“You’ve got it all wrong,” Garey said, “TV got the idea from J.D. and Bill.”  Garey continued with the story.  It seems, when Bill talked to the guy on the other end of the phone, and confirmed the product had been delivered as promised, Bill handed the folded newspaper to J.D.  Inside was a folded envelope filled with cash.  Bill left the restaurant and a few minutes later, J.D. and Garey left, drove back to the Mercury that was now filled with empty bottles, ready for the next batch.

Eventually, J.D. was caught by an ATF agent.  Garey was already back at college.  Aggie was so embarrassed she didn’t go back to church for a year.  J.D. was given a probated sentence and abandoned his moonshining operation for good.

Twenty-five years later, Garey asked J.D. for his moonshine recipe.

“I don’t think you need it,” J.D. said.

I think he was right.