Today marks the one year anniversary of Short Mountain Distillery opening its doors to the public and three years since the hard work began to make this day possible.

It was an exciting three years serving an extraordinary team as Chief Operating Officer during this time. I could not have written the business plan or built a distillery around making moonshine without the help of Cannon County voters in 2010. Building a heritage brand image around local moonshine culture would have never been a reality beyond the law change without the commitment and support of Billy Kaufman and his brothers Ben and David.

I recently left the distillery in February to pursue a project I hope helps save the planet, but I thought it was important to take this opportunity to highlight some of the first year successes we achieved as a team. The captioned slideshow below really helps tell this story using hundreds of photos I took. Here’s to many more years of making our whiskey heritage shine to the world from Woodbury, Tennessee!

Short Mountain Distillery’s first year by the numbers:

• we created several local jobs and saw over 15,000 visitors at the distillery in Cannon County
• we launched two products: Short Mountain Shine and Short Mountain Apple Pie
• we sold over 2,500 cases of moonshine now available in stores across the state of Tennessee
• Short Mountain Shine (105 proof authentic Tennessee Moonshine) won the Gold Medal in the International Review of Spirits Award from the Beverage Testing Institute
• we appeared in over 100 media pieces, including a three-part Discovery Channel mini-series How Booze Built America
• we surpassed every industry consultant’s benchmark for success and helped ignite an American moonshine revival

This recently aired WCTE Living Green segment was filmed last summer and shows you how we make our award winning 105 proof authentic Tennessee moonshine on Short Mountain the old timey way.

The Tennessean has a nice story on the five courses of amazing Southern cuisine from Loveless Cafe that our moonshine will be paired with at Manhattan’s prestigious James Beard House this Valentine’s Day.

A three part mini series called How Booze Built America will air in a couple weeks on the Discovery Channel and features several folks and locations from the Middle Tennessee area. It’s hosted by Mike Rowe of the popular show Dirty Jobs.

Short Mountain Distillery was the site of a full day of filming back in June. Our upcoming release of Short Mountain Apple Pie Moonshine may or may not make an appearance, but I’m sure the effects will. Mike sat with our three living legends of moonshine at the end of a long day of filming and made sure close to a gallon of it got gone.

Several local Civil War reenactors from the Armies of Tennessee and Dr. Kristofer Ray of APSU will also help add some historic context to the story.

The role booze had in building our country is as evident in today’s recovery from the worst economic recession in American history as it was in our rebellious beginning. As I write some big checks to the federal government on the production and sale of our moonshine, I’m reminded of the role the Whiskey Tax played in paying for America’s Revolutionary War. I’m also reminded how down right pleasant the IRS is these days compared to our founding father George Washington who sent soldiers to make sure the taxes were paid… and how that very decision by our government helped create the illicit heritage of backwoods moonshine production we are only now beginning to revive.

In a couple of weeks, this is the story America will learn again thanks to the awesomeness that is Mike Rowe. Once the promos are posted, I’ll share them here. Several TV guide listings across the country have the first episode appearing at 10 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 19, but local media reports Sept. 18. There is no information on the Discovery Channel website yet. I’ll post correct times once they are available.

UPDATE 9-12-11: A few more details appear in a newly posted “exclusive” from TV Guide. Discovery’s new three-part series How Booze Built America premiers on Wednesday, Sept. 19 at 10/9c.

Discovery Channel issued the following release later this afternoon: Mike Rowe Puts On His Thinking Cap (and Drinking Shoes) in Discovery’s New Three Part Series HOW BOOZE BUILT AMERICA

In HOW BOOZE BUILT AMERICA, Mike Rowe will crisscross the country, stiff drink in hand and beer goggles firmly strapped on, to take an in depth and slightly unusual look at the story of our nation.  Between reenactments of actual historical events, and current day interviews with historians and experts, Rowe will make the case that alcohol is clearly one of the key ingredients that formed our culture and our country.

UPDATE 9-13-12: We posted the promo (above)

A slightly blurry photo of the Tennessee Squire Room at Jack Daniel’s Distillery

You may not have realized it before, but there’s a secret room at Jack Daniel’s Distillery in Lynchburg, TN that not even the tour guides are allowed to talk about. It’s called the Tennessee Squire Room.

It was built 12 years ago as a 25 x 14 room trimmed and floored in pine and densely packed with pieces of history shared by other Tennessee Squires. The website for Tennessee Squires is password protected, and if you weren’t aware the Tennessee Squire Room even existed upon your visit you won’t find the distillery staff willing to help you discover it. It’s that kind of secret.

On my first visit to the Tennessee Squire Room, I was asked to sit at the back of the main lobby. Moments later, a woman appeared and asked if I had a tour. When I told her I had, she smiled patiently and said nothing like it was my turn to guide the conversation. I took the hint and told her I was a Tennessee Squire. “Right this way,” she said, briefly mentioning she would have waited all day for me to say so.

To become a Tennessee Squire, you gotta love Jack, and you have to be nominated by a current Squire who can only nominate one person in their entire lifetime. I have Bartt Baird, a former co-worker at WKRN-TV, to thank for my nomination.

As a Tennessee Squire, you get a very nice gold-embossed deed to a small plot of land and a certificate making you an honorary citizen of Moore County. You’ll occasionally receive letters from locals asking permission to let their cows graze your land or problems with skunks or possums. You also get to hang out in the Tennessee Squire Room and share the Jack Daniel’s experience through the many items left by other Squires. You’ll find one I left among the challenge coins, and I’ve probably already told you too much.

This is the good stuff. It takes days to get here, and the final hours can drag on for nearly half a day as the spirit slowly trickles from the still.

The spirit run takes time, and it takes patience. It takes a little choreography and then it takes waiting for time to do its thing. You don’t always know what you’re going to get, but you can have an idea from the taste of the beer before it’s reborn in the heat of a separate stripping run.

It’s an amazing ancient craft full of deep archetypal processes for those mesmerized by the alchemy of it all. Like most ancient crafts that capture the imaginations of the passionate, there are some basic steps decorated with secrets, some shared in fellowship and some unlocked and seared into memory through necessary failure. Every drop is a chapter. Every bottle is a story.

They’re pink, blue and white and represent a good year’s worth of ignoring television and Twitter.

This isn’t all of the permits required before we can legally sell our authentic Tennessee Moonshine, but combined with the others they ought to get us from Memphis to Bristol without too much worry about going to prison. Now if we can keep the ’51 Chevy pickup under 70MPH as we travel the state, we should be fine.

God Bless America, and God Bless the Shine.

Yesterday, I showed you a glimpse of our federally approved label for Short Mountain Shine along with the news that we signed distribution deals with all four regions of the state of Tennessee.

I thought I’d throw this photo of the bottle out there after a failed attempt yesterday to photograph the bottle for an upcoming tourism pamphlet. This isn’t an image we’d use, but it showed just enough to tease, and I’m a teaser. You can tell we used a sample label sent to us by our printer.

You’ll be able to taste a sample and purchase a bottle at our distillery on Short Mountain in Woodbury, TN once we open in late March. Shortly after that, it will be in stores throughout Middle Tennessee’s 36 county distribution region.

If it sounds familiar, that’s because it’s already famous. Most old-timers in Middle Tennessee know something about it, and it was sung about by Uncle Dave Macon on the October 1939 NBC television debut of the Grand Ole Opry. Who knows? Maybe one day the bottle will make a special appearance on one of country music’s biggest nights.

Short Mountain Shine is a respectable 105 proof authentic Tennessee Moonshine made from a family recipe handed down for generations. As Billy likes to say, “It’s the best moonshine ever made, made even better.”

Sacha and Billy open one of the boxes of Golden Rule coins.

Billy’s great grandfather, Jesse Shwayder, never missed an opportunity to attribute the success of the iconic American brand Samsonite to the Golden Rule. He even went out of his way to communicate this deeply held philosophy in a very special way as mentioned in this TIME magazine article from 1965.

The world’s largest manufacturer of luggage is named after the Bible’s powerful Samson. Its president has a name to match: King David. The firm’s official corporate philosophy is the Bible’s Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”* All company officers and salesmen carry a marble encircled by a gold band on which the Golden Rule is printed, take it out for inspiration when they have a business decision to make.

This philosophical approach — wedded to some pragmatic business practices—has paid off handsomely for Denver’s Samsonite Corp. The firm now accounts for more than a quarter of all U.S. luggage sold, and its sales last year reached a record $55.9 million. Last week, as orders from vacation-bound Americans flooded into Denver, Samsonite raised its 1965 sales estimate from $60 million to $64 million.

Last week, a package arrived with a very special coin inside that will come with every bottle of our authentic Tennessee Moonshine, Short Mountain Shine. They’re Golden Rule coins bearing the moon and the stars, and we hope they shine a little light into your world.

Homemade moonshine is often proofed by “checking the bead,” shaking it to see the size and duration of bubbles.

Most people around the world know Tennessee for two things: country music and whiskey. They kinda go together if you think about it. Since a change in state law allowed more distilleries, whiskey’s spirited cousin promises to put Tennessee moonshine on the global map.

Ole Smoky plans to open second distillery
Ole Smoky Distillery, a Tennessee-based moonshine distillery, plans to expand operations and open its second distillery in the Smoky Mountain town to meet the demand for its products. Ole Smoky co-owner Joe Baker said he and Chuck Edwards have purchased Legends Restaurant on the downtown Parkway and will make different spirits at that site.

More moonshine distilleries in the planning stages:

‘Full Throttle Saloon’ TV star plans to open distillery in Trimble
Ballard, the star of the wildly popular reality series “Full Throttle Saloon” on the truTV network and successful business owner, received permission from the Trimble Board of Mayor and Aldermen to open a 9,000-square-foot moonshine distillery at the eastern end of South Main Street, where a cotton gin once stood.

Tennessee has a few moonshines on the market in addition to Ole Smoky. Collier and McKeel’s White Dog is a traditional sour mash recipe of corn, rye and malted barley used to make their aged Tennessee Whiskey. Popcorn Sutton’s Tennessee White Whiskey uses a recipe of a third generation Moonshiner that lived and distilled his moonshine whiskey in Cocke County. Corsair offers Wry Moon Unaged Kentucky Whiskey and Pumpkin Spice Moonshine and Prichard’s Distillery produces Lincoln County Lightning Whiskey.

At Short Mountain Distillery, we just received federal label approval for our first moonshine: Short Mountain Shine, a 105 proof authentic Tennessee moonshine. It’s made using a family recipe handed down for generations made with organic corn and spring water from our farm.

Jeff Schuler snaps a few photos of Josh Smotherman, Short Mountain Distillery’s Head of Production.

When our welder saw all the lights being set up Friday he joked with Ricky that we were going to make him famous. I told him he better get Ricky’s autograph while he can.

If it weren’t for a final piece of compliance I would have had all three of our moonshiners fire up the still right then just to warm us all up. The temperature in the shiner’s shack must have been close to freezing, but once the shiner’s took their jackets off for photos and the stories started flying, the room warmed right up.

Friday was one of those personal moments of pride after looking through the photos and seeing and feeling the history we are about to make together. I can’t wait for you to meet these living legends of our state’s whiskey making heritage.