The Red Flannel Rag

Let’s Make Some Moonshine

According to my dad, the process of moon shining began with setting the mash.

Mash was whiskey before it fermented. The recipe included one-half bushel of rye, ten

pounds of cracked corn, fifty pounds of sugar, and one cake of yeast, and warm water

about the temperature of dishwater —about one hundred and twenty degrees.”

Sometimes homemade y east was used. Uncle Shirley told me, “At first we used

what we called ‘rivels’ that was made by takin’ and mixin’ a light cornmeal batter just as

if you was gonna make corn cakes. Then you let that batter ferment or sour then you

worked other cornmeal into it to make it thick enough to roll. You made it into rolls,

about two inches thick. Then you sliced it off into slices about a half of an inch thick and

laid ‘em out to dry. One slice in a barrel of mash [mash was fermented grain, sugar,

water, and yeast] would start the fermentation. That was before we had the yeast like

you can buy today.”

My dad went on to explain how to set mash. “We would take fifty -gallon wooden

barrels, set two of them real close together, and build a wooden pole pen around them

“If it was hot weather when we set our mash, we just camouflaged the pen after we got

the mash set in the barrels, but in cold weather we needed to pack insulation around

them to hold in the heat for the fermentation process. We used different things — leaves

or wet sawdust. I sometimes packed my mash barrels with barnyard manure so the

natural heat of the tightly packed manure would make the mash ferment faster.” He

chucked as he said, “I have made whiskey many times, right in the middle of a manure

pile.” Each barrel was filled with the ingredients in the recipe.

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