Have You Been Watching The Moonshiners?

 We've been enjoying the show about moonshining on the Discovery Channel, and we have fun spotting bogosity in the well produced depiction of the way moonshiners might work.  One of the sad truths about real moonshining is that much of it is made primarily with sugar.  The corn in the mix does little more than provide a little flavor, and that type of whiskey isn't what moonshining used to be.  Not so many year ago, moonshiners would soak their corn, let it sprout, dry it, then take the malted corn to a mill and have it cracked before they mixed their mash.  The enzymes produced in the sprouted corn converted the corn starch to sugar, and that produced the alcohol, instead of cane sugar in poorly crafted illegal whiskey.  I bought this burr mill many years ago from the miller who ran it near Martin, Kentucky, and I asked him whether his mill had ground malted corn; and YES it did!  (The red Sears engine in the background ran this mill.)

 Just about every major creek in Appalachia had a place to have corn ground, so folks could have their daily bread.  Most folks didn't have much money, so the miller would take a toll, typically about 1/10 of the corn to pay for milling.  Malted corn couldn't be sold to corn-less customers, so millers simply remembered how much was ground for moonshining, and took the toll later, of unmalted corn from the same customer.  This engine was on a remote creek in Pike County, and it's mill, barely visible in the background of the last photo, undoubtedly ground malted corn, too.

 D.T. Bohon is a pretty rare label on gas engines, and we tried to purchase this engine on several occasions.

We drove up to look at it one day, and it was gone.  I hope it went to a collector, and not a scrapper.