Vintage Moonshine Still Designs

Vintage and Antique Distillation Stills & Apparatus Components

When we ponder the good old days gone by and the term "moonshiners," it's likely that images of mountain men dressed in dirty overalls, huddled around a fire and crude metal tanks under a full moon, drinking liquor out of mason jars and jugs with "XXX" inscribed on the side. During the late 1800s and early 1900s, moonshine became a illicit source of income for many corn farmers looking to subsidize their finances. Farmers could enhance their annual corn crop profits much dramatically by converting it into whiskey, rather than loading it up and selling it in the domestic consumption markets.

With illegal liquors being produced without any sort of regulation, it wasn't uncommon for batches of moonshine to become liquid poison from being produced in stills made with repurposed automotive parts like radiators. Batches of moonshine would often contain traces of antifreeze and gasoline, as well as other toxins like paint thinner and embalming fluid.

Many of these law defying moonshiners made their concoctions deep in the woods of the Appalachian Mountains. Differing from legal distillers, moonshiners chose not to license their distilling operations or pay taxes on the products they produced. The production of illegal liquor, typically a cheap whiskey made with corn mash, was popular long before the days of Prohibition.