By Richard Thomas In what one pundit called “The Golden Age of Whiskey Books,” moonshine has been getting a disproportionate amount of attention. I imagine this is because illicit liquor-making makes for such good non-fiction storytelling, and just maybe the hipster chic that attached itself to moonshine several years ago helps just a bit too. Yet most books on the ...

By Richard Thomas When Templeton Rye launched its product several years ago, they accompanied it with a marketing campaign full of tales of Prohibition-era bootlegging and Al Capone. The company soon got itself into trouble in whiskey circles for its misleading claims of making a rye based on Iowa bootlegging recipes, when it was in fact bottling LDI’s 95% rye. ...

Car racing and moonshine are as Southern as fried chicken and sweet tea, and one of the things the corporate suits who run NASCAR are eager to forget is how not just their sport of stock car racing, but their very own racing organization is based squarely on a foundation of moonshining and bootlegging. Just in case anyone does, Neal ...

By Richard Thomas The Kings County Distillery Guide to Urban Moonshining:How to Make and Drink Whiskey is not really a technical manual on how to make whiskey, although a primer on home distilling/micro-distilling is part of this short book. Instead, this is really more of a memoir by the proprietors of Kings County Distillery, David Haskell and Colin Spoelman, a ...

By Richard Thomas Technically, James Higdon’s The Cornbread Mafia is about pot-farming in Central Kentucky, and not about whiskey-making. Even so, the history of whiskey-making in Marion County is heavily interwoven into the story. In a different venue, I endorsed Higdon’s book as a must-read for any lover of True Crime or recent Kentucky history. From a bourbon-lover’s point of ...