The Red Flannel Rag

While my mind was wandering, Uncle Shirley and Dad continued to describe the

moon shining process. “After the mash was ready to ‘run” [distill], we got up early in the

morning. At about two or three o’clock we got out of bed to make the dough to see the

cap onto the still. Uncle Shirley stopped to explain the dough, “The cap dough was

made from flour and water, and had to be made sticky so it would seal the cap on the

still.”

Mom was well known for the dough she made to seal the still cap. She bragged to

me many times, “The dough had to be fresh, so the men got me out of bed, even as a

teenager, at two- o’clock in the morning to make dough when they were getting’ ready for

an early morning run of moonshine. They’d tell me how good my dough worked when

they got home at night.”

Moonshiners wasted no steps. When they left home to go make moonshine, they

carried with them the ingredients to reset their mash barrels at the end of their workday.

Off they went, before daylight, with heavy bags of sugar and grain on their backs,

walking through rugged mountain hollows and up rocky creek beds. The work was

strenuous, because they had to choose remote locations, inaccessible by car, to better

hide their operation from the revenuers.

A crude homemade still was used to run the mash. Uncle Shirley described a still

to me, “In makin’ we used a round copper boiler. Mine was big enough to hold two

barrels or one hundred gallons of mash. The boiler had to have a lid or a ‘cap’ as we

called it. We’d build a level fire pit out of river rocks and put the boiler on it so we could

build a fire under it. We had to make our moonshine where there was lots of cold

water.”

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