Moonshine

Welcome to Add to Bar Cart, where Cool Material’s writers and editors recommend the spirits that they’re enjoying most right now. It never made sense to me that more breweries don't have small distilling operations attached to them. Roughly speaking, you have to make beer to make whiskey--whiskey wash is…

White whiskey is the oldest kind of whiskey, but you wouldn’t know it from how new it feels to the whiskey industry. It’s only just starting to get wide releases from distilleries and the spread is exactly as you’d expect it to be. Craft distillers putting out new expressions of…

Before you can be famous for great whiskey, you have to invent whatever comes before it. For the Irish, that was poitín (puu-tcheen). It means “little pot” in Gaelic, named for what early Irish distillers used to make the spirit. It’s been the subject of poetry, music, stories, fairy tales,…

Moonshine, as we know it, hasn’t been moonshine for very long. It started in England as a word to describe any work done at night by the light of the moon and wouldn’t describe illegal liquor until the late 1800s. The practice of distilling moonshine also didn’t start as a…

In all honesty, there are only a few situations we've ever been in that truly call for 100% clear whiskey. Moonshine certainly has a time and place, but we probably wouldn't have pegged it as something you wanted to proudly display on a bar cart or in a tin collection…