Moonshine facts for kids

Moonshine (also called white lightning, mountain dew, hooch, "Tennessee white whiskey", and many other names) is an alcoholic drink that is made illegally. But is usually hidden well from the law.

In movies

In 1958 Robert Mitchum made a film "Thunder Road" about a moonshine "runner" who makes one last-and fatal run.

The part of the "runner" being killed was loosely based on the death of a actual runner named Rufus Gunther of Cocke County Tennessee in January 1953

The movie part of the burning car going over the cliff was reused in the 1963 Perry Mason episode "The Case of the Bouncing Boomerang"

Images for kids

• 

  A modern DIY pot still

• 

  A thermal immersion circulator, like this sous vide stick, is used to evaporate ethanol in plastic stills or spiral stills.

• 

  Former West Virginia moonshiner John Bowman explains the workings of a still. (November 1996, American Folklife Center)

• 

  A typical jar of moonshine, with a sample being ignited to produce a blue flame. It was once wrongly believed that the blue flame meant that it was safe to drink.

• 

  The Moonshine Man of Kentucky, an illustration from Harper's Weekly, 1877, showing five scenes from the life of a Kentucky moonshiner

• 

  Moonshining, a scene from the archipelago of Loviisa in the 19th century, by Berndt Lindholm

• 

  A historical moonshine distilling-apparatus in a museum