SHINE ON

I can't walk a city block without hearing some Armani Joe yucking it up about moonshine. Well maybe I'm exaggerating. But it's not that far off the mark. Garden & Gun, a magazine so miserably drowned in its own blueblood it can't bring itself to write about the Real South, has actually published not one, but two stories on the illegal tipple in as many years, which means shine is as ubiquitous as Carolina barbecue, or overweight, ruddy-faced Georgia lawyers shooting farm-raised quail on Thomaston estates.

How do I feel about it? Ambivalent at best. Like one interviewee says in a G&G piece, shine is like the Confederate battle flag for him and the like; but the flag's garnered so many unfortunate connotations, folks don't fly it as much. Making, moving, and drinking shine has taken its place as sign and signifier both. It's a thing, a feeling, a connection. You can make it, drink it, give it away as a gift. You can talk about it with folks at the barber or hardware store. Argue about who cooks up the best tasting batch. Discuss and compare recipes--if you're open to that sort of thing. Or wax poetic about when rural stills outnumbered deer stands. It's a liquid stuff that's pure South.

First shine I tasted was game two of the 1991 World Series. Watched it from a tiny B&W television in an Emory at Oxford dormitory room nearly as tiny. Was handed a half full Mason and told I was already blind drunk; a sip or two of this wouldn't hurt. I sipped more than twice. The Atlanta Braves lost that night and I didn't wake up until lunchtime the following day. A shineover isn't like a hangover. You feel like a deflated basketball drowned in an uncovered non-winterized suburban swimming pool. Soggy, mud- and dirt-encrusted, writhing with larvae. I was not repelled, however. Fall break that same year I had my second taste, at a North Georgia retreat near Rabun Gap, passing the pickle jar and then taking turns sprinting through the campfire. I survived. Somehow.

Things are different now. Shine has elbowed its way onto liquor store shelves. It's not the same of course, but the gist of what's being sold is unmistakable. Georgia Moon Corn Liquor. Troy & Sons White Whiskey. Junior Johnson's Midnight Moon. Even goddamn Brooklyn has its own: King's County Moonshine. Is it the same? No. Of course not. But I'm certainly not going to say these commercial varieties are more refined. They aren't. Cooked up corn liquor isn't what it used to be. It comes in flavors (check the cherry looking Robotussin type tipple in photo above). It can taste like apple pie and cherries and muscadines and crabapples. It can be clear as Noontootla Creek and strong and true as Jehovah God's wrath. And this stuff aint made in Brooklyn, or given fancy paper labels or peddled from craft liquor store shelves. Sure it's annoying. But all this attention hasn't hurt shine or its cookers, yet. It's made it mean more than it possibly could. And unlike the Confederate battle flag, stripped those bad connotations from its thread, made it something OK, acceptable. Normal, even. How bout a sip?