White lightning

If you have the right connections, in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia you can still down clear liquid from a Mason jar under cover of night. "Moonshine," or illegal whiskey, has run through backwoods Virginia's veins since the day colonial farmers turned surplus corn they couldn't cart over the mountains into liquid courage. Though Virginia went "dry" in 1916, and the entire country followed four years later, the demand for home-brewed mountain spirits never quite dried up.

In fact, illegal moonshine is making a comeback in southwestern Virginia. The Virginia Alcohol Control Board investigated 22 stills in the fiscal year that ended last June. That's the highest total since a federal crackdown called Operation Lightning Strike in 1999. Twenty-nine people were convicted. Though retirements and budget cuts prompted it to disband the Illegal Whiskey Unit in 2009, the agency continues its efforts with, you might say, spirit.

Special agents who have full police powers for enforcing alcohol-related laws seized five stills in raids across southwest Virginia in March alone. Agent Chris Goodman said that other investigations are ongoing since the moonshine trade seems to be re-emerging, perhaps because of the tough U.S. economy.

Even the stills that operate with government sanction have a backwoods feel. In Culpeper County, a 1939 Ford flat-bed pickup with two bullet holes through the windshield and a "Driver wanted, night shift" sign taped inside rusts under a shed roof. Chuck Miller, in a straw cowboy hat and flannel shirt emerges from his screen door and waves.

On the wall of Miller's Belmont Farm shop hangs a large oval portrait. A square-jawed man in a 1920s style suit and a woman with her hair done in Marcel waves keep watch over a shelf full of dusty glass bottles and brown jugs. "Johnny Miller" and his wife ran a whiskey distillery illegally for years, eventually handing it down to their grandson Chuck.

"Grandpa didn't have a license," Miller, a retired airline pilot says, not even after prohibition ended.

Though he has moonshiners in the family tree, Miller chose to bring his Belmont Farm "Stillhouse" out of the woods twenty four years ago. His license hangs, framed, on the wall inside his tiny office in the bellows of his distillery.

Virginia is one of eighteen "control" states in the U.S. where the sale of all bottled liquor has been regulated through government-run retail stores since the repeal of the eighteenth amendment in 1933. The Virginia ABC operates about 330 locations throughout the Commonwealth.

"Of course they want your tax money," Miller says, but he willingly displays the Virginia ABC logo in his shop window, and complies with all necessary regulations.

Shield your eyes from the mid-day sun, follow him out under the shadow of two towering corrugated metal silos, and open the lid on an industrial stainless steel vat to get a whiff powerful enough to knock a man over.

Inside Miller's still room, water gushes from a spigot across the concrete floor, and a simple matrix of car-sized cylindrical tanks generates a noisy hum. A heavy, yeasty smell permeates the air near the open yeast tank, which slowly churns a sea-foam frothing mixture. The plink-a-plunk of a bluegrass banjo competes for airwaves from a radio in the recesses of the building.

Miller explains that the gleaming, two-thousand gallon copper "pot still" brushing the rafters in the corner takes in a boiled corn mash mixed with propagated yeast sugars and pumps it through a "thump keg," which releases the mixture at 150 proof. After passing through a copper coil condenser and cold water pipe, the liquid goes back to the pot still and repeats the process four times before entering a water room to be diluted.

"The state of Virginia makes you cut it down to 100 proof," Miller grunts.

As a final step, Miller runs his premium, four-time distilled spirits through a charcoal filter in order to remove any residual corn oil before it reaches the bottling room.

"The guys in the woods don't do that," he grins.

Homemade whiskey from non-licensed distilleries goes through a similar process, and is much cheaper than state-taxed liquor, but also poorer quality. The old habit of using car radiators as condensers is not obsolete, and toxins such as residual glycol from antifreeze may appear in the alcohol as byproducts of the materials used to build shoddy stills. Lead poisoning is just one of several dangers inherent to producing whiskey under such conditions.

The bootlegger image continues to capture imaginations almost as much as the kick of the liquor does. Aptly timed around recent hype, a depression-era crime thriller movie called "The Wettest County in the World" featuring Tom Hardy and Shia LaBeouf is currently in production.

Set to hit theatres in 2012, the film is based on the riveting book of the same title by Matt Bondurant whose fictionalized account of a true story uncovers the bootlegging history of the notoriously alcohol-saturated Franklin County, Va., where dodging taxes and health inspectors is still a proud legacy for some.

Meanwhile, others take pride in a legacy of sturdy black boxes with official logos in gold trim and white lettering. Miller sells his whiskey on site, but holds up a bottle to the light and claims with admiration that the signature "Virginia White Lightning" is popular in LA, New York City, and Miami.

While the Va. ABC busts criminals around the state, Miller fills charred Virginia white oak barrels with his famous whiskey and feeds his cows the leftover corn mash.

"There's a little alcohol left in it, so I got the happiest cows around," he winks.

Virginians like Chuck Miller, straddling history and the present, have a choice to make about which side they'll come down on. Whether you take away a jug of Miller's new amber-colored "Kopper Kettle," or simply buy postcards with pictures of the distillery on them, Miller will give them to you in a brown paper bottle bag. His grandfather watches from the wall.

"He never was legit," Miller says, looking up at his grandfather's heavily-eyebrowed face, "but he was tough."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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