Shinin’ On the Upper Cumberland

Credit: Roaring River Distillery

Chad Hunt is a classic moonshiner.

He makes it the same way those on the Upper Cumberland Plateau have made it for decades. The only difference, maybe, is that Hunt can now ply his trade right out in the sunshine, too. The master distiller makes al the now-legal liquor right on the square in Gainesboro — unafraid of revenuers or law men — at his Roaring River Distillery.

Drop in for a visit and buy some great moonshine during the week Tuesday through Saturday. Or, you can order moonshine at the Roaring River Distillery website.

I talked with Hunt last year for the State and Beale podcast (available any where you get your podcasts). Here’s a bit of our conversation.

State & Beale: How did you get into making moonshine?

Chad Hunt: My great-grandfather spent two years in an Alabama prison for making (moonshine). So, the tradition goes through generations over to me.

I always tell people I started off drinking it. Good at drinking it. Then, I started making it with my parents. We started bootlegging it back when we lived in Nashville. We make it, take it to Nashville, and sell it to the city slickers there.

We drank a lot of it. We know what it's supposed to taste like. If we make something’s that good, we could sell it. So, we decided to take the middle man out, and started making it [and selling it] ourselves.

S&B: Where did you get your recipes?

CH: So, the recipe that we use is a traditional Upper Cumberland recipe. Depending on what part of the world you're in, the main ingredients [for moonshine] are going to be whatever was grown in that area. So, around the Upper Cumberland white corn was always prevalent.

We just took, took a basic recipe and kind of put our own twist on it until we found something that we liked.

S&B: What was running moonshine like before it was legal?

CH: It wan’t much like what you see on TV. They glorify it and make it Hollywood-like. (Laughs.) You had to be careful what you did but it wasn’t as bad as people made it out to be.

S&B: Not like the Duke Boys, running from the law?

CH: We weren’t jumping any bridges or anything.

S&B: Tell me about your process.

CH: My technique and process came from questioning old-timers about their techniques. I’d combine a lot of their techniques and create my own.

We still do it the old-fashioned way like you were down at the creek. Both of our stills that we have — Big Bertha and Little Lincoln — both were taken out to a creek and ran the same exact way that we run it in the distillery.

There's no computers hooked up to them or anything like that. I use natural gas to heat them but I had them on propane before. So, you can pack the whole still up take it to the woods with you and use it. Or, you could use wood fire if you felt inclined to do so.

We build our own equipment.  There's not many places that have stills they made themselves or that they can even take out of the building and operate. A lot of them are bolted down to the ground and they’re computer-controlled or all-electronic. When their power goes out, they’re done distilling for the night. If our power goes out, I keep her on.

S&B: What varieties and flavors do y’all have?

Credit: Roaring River Distillery

CH: We've got the clear and then I believe we've got 20 different flavored moonshines now. We have anything from cinnamon roll, apple, root beer, blackberry… Pretty much a flavor for anybody's palate that comes in. But one of our biggest sellers out of the flavors is actually our dill pickle moonshine, which was quite surprising. But when you mix the moonshine in with the dill pickle juice, that kind of counteracts any burn in the alcohol.