ROCKY MOUNT, Va. — A new stainless-steel still fills the corner of Henry Law’s garage, where he and his sons will heat fermented mash to make their family’s once-infamous moonshine.
The shiny modern still is not far from a camouflage-patterned apparatus in the woods behind Law’s house, where he spent decades helping build his family’s clandestine operation in Virginia’s Franklin County, known as the “Moonshine Capital of the World.”
Law, 71, can still recall the rush he felt on the nights he lugged copper piping into the woods — only to sprint back out when the police arrived.
Now he and his sons are legal distillers, bottling the family recipe as “Law’s Choice.” They make hundreds of gallons in the still annually — liquor that’s sold in bars across the county, which licensed its first moonshine distillery about a decade ago.
The recipe was passed down through four generations, and it’s a formula Law said “people would die for.” They mash corn, wheat and sugar, and let it ferment for days before distilling it to produce the clear, strong spirit that — unlike whiskey — is put into bottles unaged.
But in his view, a key ingredient is now missing: the outlaw factor.
“It’s a big difference, man,” he said. “You don’t get that rush anymore.”
The money’s not as good now that it’s all legal, he said, since taxes eat into his profits. To make up for the loss, he began appearing on the Discovery Channel docuseries “Moonshiners,” which follows liquor producers in the Appalachian Mountains.
Commercial production of moonshine is legal in every state, as long as makers have the right licenses and permits. That commercialization has brought the liquor into the mainstream. College students in Washington state can take courses on the practice. Families can attend new moonshine festivals in Ohio and West Virginia. And Law and his Discovery Channel co-stars have become celebrities among fans of the show and on social media.
Courts have issued conflicting rules on a 158-year-old federal ban on home distilling, and the fight to overturn it could reach the Supreme Court. A federal appeals court in April declared the ban unconstitutional. Days later, though, another appeals court upheld the constitutionality of the ban, calling it a “necessary and proper means” to collect taxes on liquor.
The Hobby Distillers Association and four other plaintiffs brought the case against the federal government. They and their lawyers said everyone should have the freedom to make moonshine at home. It’s their hope, some involved in the case said, that overturning the ban could bring about a “craft spirits revolution” — similar to what homebrewing did for craft beer in recent decades.
Law doesn’t blame other distillers for wanting to get in on the action. But in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, moonshining is all but unrecognizable to Law.
He tries to pass the family heritage on to his sons, even as commercialization has erased the mystique around the spirit known for being distilled in the dark of night. There’s no more adrenaline — no juking, no running, no outsmarting police, Law said.
“That’s over,” he said. “You’ll never see it again.”
Spilling secrets
A moonshiner’s child used to learn two things, Law said on a recent afternoon as he and his sons trudged through the woods behind his house. First, they learned their family’s recipe. Then, they learned how to keep a secret.
His father, Amos Law, served time in jail for his illegal production and was a “moonshine legend,” the Roanoke Times wrote after his 2019 death. Until the turn of the millennium, federal and state agents would raid the hills, seizing stills from farms and homes.
Henry Law said his father taught him how to curl copper around wooden planks to make a still they hid in the woods surrounding Rocky Mount. He also learned how to gauge the proof of his liquor by examining the bubbles as they settled at the top of a Mason jar.
“I wasn’t taught how to make liquor,” Law said. “I was told.”
His family owned a fleet of vehicles, and Law said he used to transport the liquor as far north as New York. If they thought law enforcement had identified the transport car, the family had workers who could quickly repaint it and send them back onto the road, Law said. There were five families who ran the game in Franklin County, Law still boasts, and his was one of them.
Now Law and his sons don’t have to run from the police. Instead, he said, they fend off “retired CEOs with millions of dollars” trying their hand at moonshining.
“People will follow us around like puppy dogs trying to pick us for our recipes,” Law said as he stomped through overgrown grass along the path to his still in the woods.
On “Moonshiners,” he gets the chance to spread the lore behind the beverage for 800,000 or so viewers who tune in.
“I want to keep this story alive. I want to hand … down the true stories, the real stories,” Law said. He recently filmed another season, which premieres later this month.
He understands the show doesn’t always portray the craft like he remembers. Once, he said, producers asked his family to don overalls for the camera — something he never wears in real life. He declined.
But the Law family likes signing autographs and getting recognized. In Ireland, when he visited last year, he shared shots of whiskey with fans of the show.
Others in Franklin County said there’s a declining appetite for the region’s moonshining past. Jody Alton “Duck” Smith, whom Law described as a peer to his father with double the operation, said he wanted to teach his son and grandson how to make the liquor, but they’ve shown no interest.
“It was just so much different than what it is now,” said Smith, 79, who was sentenced to time behind bars for moonshining in 2009.
The moonshiner was once a mythical figure in Appalachia, said Emelie Peine, an east Tennessee native who teaches a moonshining class at the University of Puget Sound in Washington state. It symbolized a self-reliance of Appalachian mountaineers, she said — a distillation of an American appetite for whiskey and a resistance to taxes.
“The illicitness of it is part of what makes moonshine, moonshine,” Peine said.
Even though those days are over, Law still gets a rush of excitement thinking about his outlaw past. In one scene of “Moonshiners,” Law’s co-star tells him that a plane has been circling above.
Law gazes skyward and offered some advice, despite law enforcement not sweeping the area for moonshiners in decades.
If the plane is turning away from them, everything’s fine, Law tells his co-star. If it’s turning toward them, they’ve got to run.
Handing it down
The Laws now have the gleaming, professional-grade distiller, but Law still made sure his sons learned to make moonshine the way he did in the woods.
They boiled the fermented mash in homemade copper stills, hand-welded — and often repaired after police tried to destroy them with pickaxes. He always kept a portion of his old batches, like a sourdough baker, to put in a second barrel called a “thumper” — where the steam would pick up flavor as it drifted toward a condenser.
Over hours, liquor would dribble out of a coiled copper pipe, hot and about 160 proof. It became weaker over time, and the Laws watched until the bursting bubbles signaled the alcohol content had dropped to about 90 proof, similar to a strong whiskey.
It takes ingenuity to make liquor in the woods, Law said. “It’s a science to it all. And the old country boys, they know that science.”
Law now has to use an instrument to proof his liquor. But from time to time, he said he still hides the tools from his sons and tests them to check the progress using just their eyes.
“They’ve been handed down generation to generation,” Law said, gesturing to his sons. “I’m able to hand it down to them now.”
On a recent afternoon, before they coated themselves in bug spray and ventured down to the old still in the woods, Law polished the professional-grade stills in his garage.
To prove he hadn’t lost the moonshiner spirit, Law picked up a jar full of liquor and gave it a shake, just once and with a gentle grip. He studied the bubbles as they clung to the surface of the liquor.
“Just about 100, 105 proof,” he declared.
Behind him, one of his sons picked up another jar of moonshine and gave it just one shake. Silent, the brothers tried to take in their dad’s lesson, watching until every bubble burst.
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