From the April 2015 issue
American whiskey is having a moment. According to the Distilled Spirits Council, revenue from “super premium” bourbon and Tennessee whiskey went up 104 percent between 2008 and 2013. Lesser hooch made nice gains, too, as Americans developed a newfound appreciation for a liquor historically synonymous with saloon brawls and slurred arguments over who done left the T-tops off the Monte Carlo right before that there rainy spell. Bourbon is respectable now, chic and popular with the swells. To find out why, and maybe to enact some quality bootlegging dirt-road fantasies, we decided to take a V-8–powered southern road trip across the hills and hollers of Peak Whiskey.
If you’re going to venture deep into NASCAR country—and, for that matter, the sport’s liquor-running foundations—you need a machine with some bona fides. The Australian-built SS is Chevrolet’s current NASCAR muse, its 415-hp V-8 and rear-drive platform lending some connection, however tenuous, between the cars on the street and the ones on the high ovals. This thing’s so Southern, it’s built in the Southern Hemisphere. G’day, y’all.
To understand whiskey’s present, you have to learn about its moonshine past, which, ahem, also happens to be a big part of its present. At least in North Carolina. The term “bootlegging” tends to conjure up Prohibition-era operations, but illicit distilling persisted long after passage of the 21st Amendment made drink legal again. Even when liquor is lawful, the revenue man wants his cut, and thus making your own hooch is a creative form of tax evasion. That’s why Rosco was always chasing them Duke boys, in case you haven’t put that together.
Roger Holmes (left) and Robert “Rooster” Kitchen (right) surely wouldn’t be standing around with actual moonshine in canning jars.
So I begin my voyage outside Fayetteville, North Carolina, talking moonshine with a man named Rooster. I’d met Robert “Rooster” Kitchen at a party where, as happens in North Carolina, there was some moonshine about. It turned out he knew a lot about the stuff. As in, he agreed to show me where one might make moonshine if one were to engage in such an activity. And he’d bring an old family bootlegging car, a 1941 Plymouth Special Deluxe sedan.
