For as long as there has been whisky, there has been homemade whisky. Indeed, early whisky was all homemade. But however, wherever, or whatever from a drink is made, it cannot be called moonshine, poitin (poteen) or peatreek unless it is illicit; unless there are laws against making, transporting, or selling it. Historically, the laws prohibiting the unlicensed manufacture of liquor have been about one thing only: money. Thus the eternal and persistent enemy of the moonshiner is the taxman, the revenuer, the exciseman, the gauger. The two sides of illicit whisky, the criminal and the lawman, have long played a cat-and-mouse game that has at turns been funny, tragic, and downright criminal. That game has also contributed tremendously to the legal whisky industry, to folklore, and to the cultures of the places that produce it. From Scotland to North Carolina, from NASCAR to Bobby Burns, illicit whisky – and, more particularly, the adversarial game of either going after it or getting away with it – has definitely made its mark in the world.
Irishmen and Scottish Highlanders have been making their own whisky for the better part of a millenium. It’s only natural: to tell a native of those Gaelic isles that one’s own grain, grown from his very own farm, cannot be used to make whisky is like saying that it cannot be used to make bread or that the farmer cannot milk his own cow. By this way of thinking, it is simply not right to tax whisky or to prohibit its production. The very attempt to tax whisky, to arrest, fine, or imprison people for making it is considered an outrage, it is robbery, it is tyranny. The moonshiner, or poteenman, became a Robin Hood figure, certainly in his own eyes, but also in the eyes of the community. Everyone knows who makes the illegal booze. They know where he makes it, everyone loves drinking it, and all can be counted on to do their part to keep it around; everyone, that is, except for the honest treasury agent. Distillers of illicit whisky have tried just about everything imaginable to hide their operations, to trick the law, and to beat the system. Though if there is anything that governments are good at, they are good at collecting the money that they feel they are owed, and they always do collect in one way or another. So who would risk the law just to make whisky, and why?
The stereotypical illicit distiller of lore is rural, rustic, and uneducated. In “Chasing the White Dog: An Amateur Outlaw’s Adventures in Moonshine,” Max Watman posits the idea that the moonshiner as a hillbilly is a false image, one that many in the post-Reconstruction South wanted to create. The likely reason is that many Southerners wanted to distance themselves from the image that many in the U.S. had of Southerners at the time (and, to some extent, still do) as lawless, backward, and ignorant – as if to say, “We’re not the problem, it’s just those undesirable few.” In reality, most Southern and Appalachian distillers were just like their distant cousins in Scotland; they were farmers who produced whisky from their own land and they were usually very popular socially. But why would they risk so much against such stiff resistance? First of all, the whisky maker believes that it is his right. Secondly, and much more importantly, there was good money in it. Simply put, grain enjoys much higher yield per bushel, and profit margins, when it has been turned into alcohol than when it is sold simply as raw grain. However, homemade alcohol can only command a good price when there is a market, and the market for illegal booze is, ironically, always and only created by government tax policy. When taxes on the legal product go up, people look around for an affordable substitute and the moonshiner gets into the business of providing that substitute. In 1555 and 1579, the Scottish Parliament passed acts mandating that barley be used for bread instead of whisky. In “A Double Scotch: How Chivas Regal and The Glenlivet Became Global Icons,” Paul F. Pacult points out that those 16th Century acts began a 350-year period characterized by “an onerous litany of measures to regulate and tax distilleries.” How onerous? Gavin D. Smith, in “The Secret Still,” shows that the license duty levied on whisky was increased to 9 (GBP – British Pound) per gallon in 1797. To put that into perspective, 9 (GBP) adjusted for inflation (as well as decimalization of the pound in 1972) is 870 (GBP) today. According to Smith, the average illicit still cost 5 (GBP), or 470 (GBP) today. With such tax rates, it is clear why illegal distillation would be very attractive, when an entire still was just more than half the cost of the duty on a gallon of licensed whisky.
With prohibitive tax rates on legal whisky, the incentive to make an illegal product is clear. With the decision made, the difficult part of making and selling whisky without getting caught begins. How does one run an illegal still and make it difficult to be discovered by excisemen who are constantly searching? In the Appalachians, hiding a still was sometimes as simple as putting it in the woods. However, in Scotland, which has been largely deforested for its entire recorded history, distillers had to be clever and trust their neighbors. Distillers would often hide stills underground or in caves. Some even did as George MacDonald Fraser described in “The Sheikh and The Dustbin” and distilled whisky in a boat in the middle of a lake so that the entire operation could be dropped overboard at a moment’s notice and retrieved later when the heat had gone.
Once made, the whisky also had to be smuggled. One story related in Smith’s “The Secret Still,” tells of smugglers reclaiming the contents of a confiscated barrel. Two excisemen locked the seized barrel in their 2nd floor room at the inn and went downstairs to have dinner. The smugglers bribed a chambermaid to go into the room and tell them exactly where the barrel was. They then went into the room beneath it and drilled a hole through the ceiling and the barrel and drained its contents into a new barrel and made off with it. It was more common however, for smugglers to use the dead or fear of disease to put the excisemen – or gaugers – off of the trail. Gaugers were never very popular with the people and would usually not risk being wrong to order that a coffin be opened and searched on its way to a funeral. Additionally, few gaugers would risk smallpox or some other deadly and contagious disease for the few pounds he would get from a successful seizure, so whisky smugglers often got the wife and kids involved and told them to act sick. 
The gaugers were no dummies, though. One story tells of a gauger who was wise to the dead body at a wake trick and simply walked up to the corpse and placed a pinch of snuff under the deceased’s nostrils, whereupon the corpse immediately sat up in a fit of sneezing. Stuart Mchardy tells a story in “Tales of Whisky and Smuggling” about a gauger from Ireland named Kelly who, having found nothing while searching a known distiller’s house, went down the road to the nearest neighbor and told him that his neighbor’s still had been found. Kelly asked the man to hitch a wagon and help him take the still into town. As Kelly predicted, the distiller’s neighbor stopped the wagon about 50 yards from the distiller’s house, right in front of the hidden still; he had been duped into showing Kelly where the still was. Sometimes, the gaugers were even sympathetic. A story in “The Secret Still” tells of a gauger searching a whisky smuggler’s home. The gauger sees the homeowner cover a barrel with a blanket and offer him a seat. When the gauger left he told the smuggler that while he is bound to report everything he sees, he is under no compulsion to report what he sits on.
The relationship between the two sides of the law was not always friendly and fun, though; in fact, it rarely was. On both sides of the Atlantic, the distillers, smugglers, and shine runners knew what was at stake and they would stop at nothing to get away from the law. At its most harmless, the commitment to not getting caught led young men in the American South to hot up their cars. Moonshine runners would tune up their engines and beef up their suspensions to handle the extra weight of a load of shine. According to Neal Thompson in “Driving With the Devil: Southern Moonshine, Detroit Wheels, and the Birth of NASCAR,” shine runners in the 1930s would often run 200 gallons of liquor per trip, resulting in an extra 1300lbs in the car. The suspension was modified to give a loaded car the appearance of an unloaded one and to enable cornering with so much weight. Unloaded, these modified cars with hot motors and beefy suspension were the fastest things on the road and before long, the young men who drove them just had to find out whose was the best.
Whisky running never just stopped with fast cars though. The runners and smugglers were nearly always working for someone else, someone more representative of a criminal element. Violence was rarely far from the operation. In Ireland, the practice of kidnapping excisemen and holding them until court was out of session so that they wouldn’t be able to testify was not unheard of. In 18th and 19th Century Scotland, the whisky was moved to market in pony trains, sometimes by dozens of men and it would require soldiers to stop them; blood was frequently shed. Gaugers like Malcolm Gillespie and his American counterpart Eliot Ness were no strangers to whisky smugglers who did not hesitate to shoot at anyone who got in their way. In many places, the idea of killing an exciseman was commonplace and considered almost amusing. Gerald Carson relates the story in “A Social History of Bourbon” of a revenuer who came upon a little girl sitting on the porch of her family home in the woods. He asked the little girl if her parents were home to which she replied, “No sir, they’re up at yon‘ still.” The revenue man asked the girl for directions to the still. She agreed to tell him in return for a dollar. As he started to walk toward the still the girl shouted to him that she wanted her dollar. “I’ll give it to you when I come back” he said. The little girl coldly replied, “Mister…you ain’t comin‘ back.” To be sure, that story is folklore, but the attitude that it conveys is certainly true; the history of violence against revenue officers in the U.S. and Britain is undeniable.
So what about the drink that so many people risked so much to make or to regulate? Was illicit whisky any good? By the standards of the legal product of today it was almost certainly not. The illicit distiller is always restricted by the nature of his endeavor. Because his operation must be hidden, it is difficult, if not impossible, to use the best equipment; who would want to anyway when there is the likelihood of it all being seized? Because the stills are not in a precisely controlled industrial climate but are outdoors or hidden in an urban basement, many factors of production are too variable to create a high-quality product. Because the illicit distiller is always under threat of being caught, he is always in a hurry. He may distill his whisky twice or he may not. Either way, there is no legal requirement for him to tell the consumer how or how many times it was distilled. Because the whisky is illegal no matter what it is made from, there are no regulations governing moonshine and peatreek the way that bourbon and Scotch are tightly regulated. Illicit whisky can be made from anything that can be distilled into alcohol. Much of moonshine in recent times has been made from sugar, not because it is good but because it is cheap. Max Watman described drinking such moonshine “As if you took the stomach acid from acid reflux and strained it through a cheesecloth and blended in a dash of simple syrup to sweeten it.” However, none of this is to say that there wasn’t any good illicit whisky. Dozens of Scottish distillers began on the wrong side of the law. Today there are even many licensed drinks sold as moonshine.
All whisky has its origins in the unlicensed product. The knowledge of making whisky and the discovery of the benefits of wood aging were priceless contributions of illegal whisky to what would become the legal industry. Illicit whisky has also shown the folly of taxing something into oblivion, so that nowadays, legal, safe, high quality whisky is widely available. Without the efforts of so many people on both sides of the Atlantic who were willing to risk prison to make whisky, the knowledge of making it may not have survived those centuries of prohibitively high taxes. Without the efforts of the law officers who pursued the illicit distillers and whisky smugglers, regulations making whisky safe may never have come about and governments would still be encouraging the illicit trade through prohibitive taxes. The cat and mouse, the constant struggle between the moonshiner and the revenuer eventually led to a climate in which governments have become willing to allow people to have alcohol and, as a result, most whisky drinkers have come to prefer the legal product from their local bar or package store. For all whisky drinkers today, thanks is owed to those who made moonshine, as well as those whose intent it was to prevent its production.