Moonshining: "How To" from Short Mountain Distillery

At Short Mountain Distillery, we learned how to make top quality Tennessee Moonshine from 150 years of tradition.  While we believe nothing beats a century and a half of expertise as far as moonshining is concerned, we thought we’d give you a couple of tips on how to shine.  No Short Mountain back hill secrets here, those are kept exclusively on the lips of our actual shiners, but to give you a basic idea of how moonshine is made, here’s a quick brewing lesson.

How to Shine:

Step 1: Grind. Grind corn into a meal.

Step 2: Soak.  Let the corn meal sit in hot water in the still.

Step 3: Mix.  First mix the corn meal with malt to make sugar then yeast to start fermentation.  This mix is called mash and is the beginning of a completed moonshine.

Step 4: Turn it up. Increase the heat in the still furnace to 172 degrees Fahrenheit.  If anyone ever told you there’s no such thing as a magic number, they were wrong.

Step 5: Evaporate.  As heat in the still increases, the alcohol from the mash evaporates through a pipe that leads out of the top of the still.

Step 6: Thump.  A thump keg filters out any solid material from the mash that also was forced out of the still through the production of alcohol steam. 

Step 7: Worm box.  Once the steam filters through the thump keg, it is cooled off and turned back into liquid in the worm box, usually cooled with running water from a creek.

Step 8: One last filter.

Step 9: Drink.

To put it short, making moonshine (and most alcohol) involves two processes.  The first is fermentation.  Fermentation occurs when yeast breaks down sugar.  The residual substance produced from this chemical reaction is alcohol.  After alcohol is formed, anything that is distilled, is further purified, by evaporating the alcohol to separate it from the yeast and the sugar, then condensing it back into liquid form for consumption.

If you’re in Nashville and are interested in visiting an authentic Tennessee distillery serving Tennessee bourbon and Tennesseemoonshine, Short Mountain offers distillery tours.  Visit our Website today!