whisky, corn | The Oxford Companion to Spirits & Cocktails

, is an often overlooked and sometimes ridiculed class of American whisky that is, by regulation, made from a mash of at least 80 percent corn (bourbon need only be 51 percent corn). There is no age requirement, but if it is aged, it must be put to rest in used or uncharred oak. The result is a spirited, often “green” drink, with a notably sweet corn-oil taste and lacking the astringent woodiness of bourbon.

Corn whisky has been a southern specialty in the United States from the middle of the eighteenth century. As a widely reprinted 1885 newspaper article put it, only partly facetiously, “It is nearly certain death to offer a drinker from Florida or Georgia any but corn whisky.” In the years after Prohibition, however, the style had a hard time getting reestablished, with much of its former constituency going to the more widely available bourbon. By the 1960s, corn whisky had become a rarity.

However, modern craft distillers took a shine to corn whisky, with the Balcones and Berkshire Mountain distilleries releasing notable examples of aged product, which had only been available previously from Heaven Hill in their bottled-in-bond Mellow Corn. See Heaven Hill.

Moonshine is often called “corn,” “corn whisky,” or “corn liquor,” but this is more a figure of speech than an accurate representation of any correlation between corn whisky and moonshine, as the producers of bootleg liquor do not abide by the regulations that govern taxed spirit.