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 One of the problems confronting early entrants into the American micro-distilling boom was finding someone to build a copper still to suit their needs. In just one example, the Barrel House Distillery in Lexington, Kentucky told me that when they opened in 2008, they had to go to the Hoga Company in Portugal to find what they ...

By Richard Thomas Rating: B+ Part of the whiskey boom is the way whiskey is finding its way into all sorts of products, and while “Jack Daniels in everything” might dominate your supermarket shelves, the better examples of whiskey in food are more usually found in more niche-oriented shops. One of those better examples comes from Milwaukee Mustard Co. In ...

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 ...