Free Long Way Home by Bill Barich

liquor per acre.
    Deep in concentration, Miller looked up at my approach. He has jolly eyes, bright blue, and a practiced smile.
    â€œWe’re toasting some apple wood,” he said, fiddling with his hat brim.
    â€œWhat will you do with it?”
    â€œPut it into a mesh bag, then sink it into a vat of whiskey. It adds some flavor.”
    Miller makes two whiskeys, Kopper Kettle and Virginia Lightning. Kopper Kettle is a triple-grain product—wheat, corn, and barley—mashed and fermented in copper tanks, then double-distilled in a potstill before aging for two years in a barrel. Virginia Lightning is pure corn whiskey. It’s not as raw as real moonshine, but it weighs in at a solid 100 proof and can knock your socks off. Kopper Kettle’s a smoother, milder 86 proof.
    True moonshiners haven’t entirely disappeared from the Virginia hills, in fact. In Franklin County, the state’s moonshine capital, folks horde more sugar, a primary ingredient, than they could possibly consume. A Mason jar remains the favored container for white lightning—also called popskull, skull cracker, ruckus juice, happy Sally, and plain old rotgut—occasionally with a peach at the bottom for color.
    NASCAR might yet be a speed demon’s fantasy if it weren’t for moonshine. Some of its early heroes honed their tactical skills by outrunning the authorities on their delivery routes. Junior Johnson got his start at fourteen, for example. As for the word “bootleg,” it derives from the colonial period when the rascals who sold whiskey to Native Americans, often to the disgust of their compatriots, tucked a bottle into a boot and covered it with a pant leg.
    Chuck left the apple wood to his helper and guided me around. Once he wanted to open a winery, but the vineyard he planted kept flooding, so he hit on the moonshine scheme instead, renovating an old workshop for the distillery and incorporating materials from a defunct church, including two pews. He has a pack rat’s affection for his two-thousand-gallon potstill, solid copper and built at the end of Prohibition, and also owns an antique Filabelmatic rotary gravity pressure filler for his bottles, a relic from 1945.
    â€œYou’re a good scavenger,” I complimented him.
    He took it in stride. “Gotta be if you’re going to make it in this old world.”
    â€œWhat can you tell me about your secret recipe?”
    Miller looked askance. “Nothing. It’s a secret.”
    At the distillery’s gift shop, Chuck introduced me to Jeanette. The shop stocks an assortment of geegaws, apple wood chips among them, and there’s an Informational Room where you can watch a History Channel video about Belmont Farm, or read about it in National Geographic . Miller doesn’t miss an angle when it comes to promotion.
    After breathing the vapors from so many vats and barrels, I felt ready for a free sample, but the law forbids Chuck from pouring any, so I bought a fifth of Kopper Kettle on faith, and my faith was later rewarded. With nothing more to be said of distilling, the talk turned to the presidential candidates. Miller saw lots of similarities and enumerated them.
    â€œOne, they both want out of I-raq,” he contended. “Two, they both want progress in Afghanistan. But McCain supports free enterprise, and that’s better for businesses like us. Obama will raise taxes. He’s a socialist. I’m not in favor of killing little babies, either.”
    Jeanette cringed. “It’s just so emotional this year. Chuck and his brothers fight about it all the time.”
    I remembered John Steinbeck’s return to Monterey in Travels , and how he battled nightly with his Republican sisters. “We ended each session spent with rage,” he wrote. “On no point was there any compromise. No quarter was asked or given.” There wasn’t much compromise in Chuck Miller, either, nor did it seem