The 1978 federal legalization of homebrewing may have been the Big Bang moment for American craft beer. A handful of pioneers were brewing before that, but the legislative change transformed brewing from a largely clandestine, niche hobby into a fully legal grassroots force that helped to create a new sector of the industry.
That’s not an isolated case—when laws relax, there tends to be a broadly positive impact on the target sector. In Italy, for example, a similar change in 1995 clarified that homemade beer for personal consumption was exempt from excise duties. That sparked a homebrewing boom that went on to fuel the country’s own birra artigianale movement.
American craft distilling also has benefited from a wave of legislative changes rolled out over the past few decades—yet these have largely excluded home production, despite its place in American folk heritage since the nation’s earliest days and, in modern times, its role as a proving ground for aspiring pro distillers. That role has been most evident in the Appalachian Mountains, a region stretching from Georgia north through Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia, where centuries of moonshine culture have, in recent years, given rise to several successful craft distilleries.
“If you ask whether people still make moonshine at home, I’ll just say it might or might not still be happening,” says an official in Virginia’s Franklin County, a historic moonshining stronghold. “But people must understand this is not necessarily something to make money from, at least not anymore. It is part of our heritage—it’s how our communities have interacted with the fruits of our land for centuries.”
Ronald “Rooster” Hodges, Roosters Rise-N-Shine Distillery, Moneta, Virginia. Courtesy Roosters Rise-N-Shine Distillery
Going Legal
Chris Prillaman opened Twin Creeks Distillery in 2015 in Rocky Mount, the Franklin County seat, with the explicit aim of preserving that heritage.
Prillaman’s great-grandfather, James Walter “Peg” Hatcher, is a legendary figure in the illicit whiskey trade; Hatcher was famously involved in the Great Moonshine Conspiracy trial of 1935. Having lost his father at an early age, Prillaman says he was raised by “mountain folks” who taught him everything about their culture, including bluegrass music and moonshining.
After launching his business, he seamlessly integrated many of the practices he had learned during his years in the mountains, including recipes, sourcing grain from local growers, and the use of refined sugar as a base for his higher-volume liquors. “When you make a pure grain alcohol, you just take the spent mash and ‘sugar’ it again,” he says.
In true moonshining fashion, Prillaman also retained the tradition of flavoring his base spirit with fresh fruit, most often plums and peaches. “It really depends on what’s available seasonally and what the grower can afford to give me,” he says. “I don’t just get ripe peaches; I get the ones the grower doesn’t need—the overripe ones you can just squeeze in your hand … and turn into pulp.”
Like Prillaman, Ronald “Rooster” Hodges was a longtime moonshiner before eventually going legal in 2021 with the launch of Roosters Rise-N-Shine Distillery in Moneta, Virginia, about 25 miles northeast of Twin Creeks. Hodges, too, drew on his earlier illicit experience with a classic “sub” (submarine) still, taking both inspiration and know-how from his amateur setup into his newly licensed business.
He continues to combine sugar with corn, wheat, barley, and rye, and he bottles his spirits at high proof: 50 percent ABV for his White Dog and a hefty 55 percent ABV for Lightning Strike.
The Brady brothers, Tim, Brian, Andy. Courtesy Brady’s Distillery, Roanoke, Virginia. Photo: Jennifer Griffin
From DIY to ROI
With or without any connections to moonshining heritage, amateur distilling offers spirits enthusiasts a relatively clear pathway into small-scale professional production.
“Our first still was a used beer keg that I disassembled and replaced the rubber with silicone, added copper tubing I bent into a bunch of coils, and put it through a sports water cooler with ice,” says Andy Brady, who cofounded Brady’s Distillery in 2020 just outside Roanoke, Virginia, with brothers Tim and Brian.
“It worked okay,” Andy says. “The spirit was tasty, and I still have a bit of it left. It’s fun to compare that five-gallon setup to the results of our current setup.”
Brady’s current system is a fully commercial setup, with no remaining components from the original DIY equipment. That means the team has had to adapt and learn new processes from scratch.
“The scale-up wasn’t a one-to-one transfer of the recipes, so it required a lot of tinkering and adjustments to maintain the flavor profiles we were aiming for,” Brady says. “The larger equipment is exactly that—larger—but the science behind distillation doesn’t change. Each step just takes longer, although it also allows for greater precision in producing the best spirit per run.”
While scaling up came with a learning curve, starting with a smaller setup also had clear advantages. It allowed the brothers to experiment with recipes on a very small scale, so they could launch the business only after they had developed spirits that people would actually want to buy.
Home distilling gave the Brady team a solid foundation on which to build, so they could then move on to refining those recipes using professional equipment and further developing them for the market.
“An Entirely Different Beast”
From a production standpoint, home distilling can offer a serious advantage when transitioning into a commercial operation. Yet it does little to prepare distillers for the real challenges of going pro.
“The actual production isn’t the problem,” Hodges says. “It’s the bureaucracy that makes everything so much harder. For me, it’s become easier to have a partner distillery produce the base spirit. He handles much of the paperwork and the heavy labor, while I just pick it up, bring it to my facility, and bottle it.”
Indeed, the extent to which former home-turned-pro distillers struggle to adapt to larger setups may vary considerably—but virtually all agree that the bureaucracy and regulations that surround the distillery are a burden that comes with a significant learning curve.
The Brady brothers, for instance—all three of whom are well acquainted with the administrative demands of entrepreneurship through running multiple separate businesses—argue that operating a distillery is the most challenging project they’ve ever managed.
“In any other business, if we lose a box of rubber gloves, we can just write it off,” Andy Brady says. “But losing a gallon of spirits is an entirely different bureaucratic endeavor. Home distilling is just a hobby. Turning it into a business is an entirely different beast, and I’d recommend anyone considering it to spend a lot of time talking to existing distilleries and researching as much as possible beforehand. Then, after all that research, just assume it’s going to be 50 percent harder, with an 80 percent smaller profit margin and 90 percent more red tape.”
A recent federal court ruling—emerging amid a broader shift toward a less punitive approach to small-scale alcohol production—may help alleviate some of these challenges. In April, the 5th U.S. Circuit Cort of Appeals in New Orleans ruled that a 158-year-old federal ban on home distilling is unconstitutional, upholding a landmark 2024 decision and delivering a definitive victory to the Hobby Distillers Association and its members.
The ruling—which currently applies only to the 5th Circuit’s jurisdiction, covering Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas—allows home distillers to obtain a TTB permit to operate legally. It marks the first time in more than a century that the law recognizes home and amateur distilling as a legitimate hobby that can be regulated rather than outright banned.
Crucially, by allowing home distillers to produce for personal consumption in full compliance with the law, the decision could also help prepare aspiring pros for the administrative demands of running a distilling business.