Modern Moonshine: The Revival of White Whiskey in the Twenty-First Century ed. by Cameron D. Lippard and Bruce E. Stewart (review)

This anthology is about the moonshine revival of the past ten years or so in southern Appalachia. By moonshine editors Cameron D. Lippard and Bruce E. Stewart generally mean unaged, or "white," whiskey. The authors of the eleven essays included here use the term moonshine broadly to refer to unaged distilled spirits, produced from corn, from sugar, or from a combination of both, whether or not those spirits are produced legally. Some purists prefer to reserve the term moonshine to mean only illegal whiskey; as one observer is quoted as saying in an essay by Daniel S. Pierce, "'if it's legal, it ain't moonshine'" (p. 62).

In fact, illegal distillation of spirits on a large scale in the United States was mostly discontinued by the end of the twentieth century, due mainly to economic forces. Yet the past decade has seen a "legal moonshine" revival (p. 12). Starting around 2010, there was a wholesale, rapid change in "the legal landscape governing the production of spirits" (p. 108). By 2018, according to Kenneth J. Sanchagrin, all fifty states had changed their laws to make the production and sale of distilled spirits more accessible to small producers. In the meantime, consumer tastes have continued to change toward a preference for local products; for "hand-crafted" spirits perceived as having a connection to a particular place; and for old-fashioned or "authentic" products, perceived as having deep roots in the past. This moonshine revival has been centered in the South, and particularly in Appalachia. The American South is now home to 28 percent of the craft distillers in the United States. And the growth of the market for legal moonshine has been rapid. Ole Smoky distillery in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, sold 50,000 cases in 2010. In 2013, it sold 280,000 cases.

The moonshine revival has historical and symbolic resonance aplenty. Modern Moonshine unpacks the phenomenon from a number of angles. The jacket copy says the book is "[t]he first interdisciplinary examination of the legal moonshine industry." Its two coeditors are a historian and a sociologist. Contributors include a media studies professor, an American studies professor, a criminologist, a geographer, and a historic preservationist. There is even a comprehensive chapter on changes in state distillery laws, written by Sanchagrin. (However, his chapter is emphatically not to be considered as "a substitute for formal legal advice regarding the distillation of spirits from a licensed, local attorney," as its first endnote insists [p. 133n1]).

The book is interdisciplinary, in the best way, in the venerable tradition of the field of Appalachian studies. The publisher apparently made the decision not to put the term Southern Appalachia in the title, but these essays are firmly centered on Blue Ridge Appalachia—that is, western North Carolina, East Tennessee, northwestern South Carolina, and southwestern Virginia, with forays onto the Cumberland Plateau and into West Virginia.

Major topics in Appalachian studies are covered here, and many of these articles draw directly from classic works in the field. Indeed, while the ostensible topic of Modern Moonshine may seem somewhat narrow, its purview is broad, and the book provides an overview of major issues in Appalachian studies. Moonshine thus becomes a framework or lens through which the authors reexamine other big topics—namely, the industrialization of Appalachia; stereotypes, perceptions, and misperceptions of the people associated with the region; the nature of tourist economies; and the representation of Appalachia in contemporary popular culture and "moving image media" (p. 67). This book likewise draws on the considerable historical scholarship of the history of illicit liquor production, a body of work produced mainly in the past decade or two.

Somewhat unusual for an interdisciplinary academic collection, Modern Moonshine is satisfying...