Moonshine Nation by Mark Spivak

Author:Mark Spivak
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lyons Press
Published: 2014-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

At the new Piedmont Distillers facility in Madison, I sit down in a conference room with Joe Michalek to taste some moonshine. We begin with Catdaddy, the product that enabled Piedmont to make its bones. The attractive nose exudes cinnamon and nutmeg notes; there’s a profusion of baking spices in the mouth, with a peppery edge in the mid-palate that turns sweet on the finish. It’s Christmas in a glass, and extremely appealing.

With the Midnight Moon products, the fruit infusions are the clear winners—but at this point, of course, I’ve already seen the gourmet-quality fruit going into the jars on the bottling line. The Apple Pie, their largest seller, has sweet cinnamon aromas on the nose, followed by a tart mid-palate filled with mouthwatering acidity and a long, spicy finish. The Cherry is remarkable: tart and sweet, lush and opulent, richly textured, spicy and splendid. The Midnight Moon Original offers soft corn notes and firm alcohol scents on the nose. It’s more flavorful in the mouth than the nose would lead you to expect, and has a nice peppery edge.

“I know the category is popular right now,” says Michalek, “and a lot of people are jumping in. But many of them are making a different kind of product—they’re not high-proof, and they’re using extracts and coloring rather than real fruit. If your proof is lower, say 40 or 60 rather than 100 like ours, you’ll obviously save money on excise taxes. But you end up with something totally different. It’s almost like a ready-to-drink cocktail. So I think our product will stand up to them and survive, because of all the extra expense and effort we go through.

“Our whole reason for being is quality. What you’re tasting now is basically what I tasted that night in the woods. It’s what intrigued me so much about moonshine—except, of course, that our stuff is triple-distilled, and it’s a grain neutral spirit.”

I asked him why he decided to use grain neutral spirits (GNS) as opposed to a corn whiskey.

“We did a lot of taste tests, and the people who participated always told us that they preferred the purity of the neutral spirit. We tried a 160-proof corn, and we did all the flavors with it, but people said unanimously that they wanted neutral. We used all sorts of different recipes and fiddled with the sweetness level, but always came back to the theory that we wanted the fruit to shine through.”

“Who’s your customer? Are you targeting whiskey drinkers, or focusing on the recreational drinker who’s migrating into spirits from another category?”

“Moonshine has been made in North Carolina and around the country for decades,” he says. “For centuries, actually. Our customers are buying into the American heritage. It’s the history and the intrigue. And while a lot of people may buy it initially because of the intrigue factor, we’re getting our repeat business because of the juice in the jars.

“Our demographics tell us that the whole category of moonshine isn’t a regional thing. It’s an American thing.

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