A fourth-generation female moonshine distiller shares the story of her Virginia community.
Story by Su-Jit Lin
Shoot for the stars,” they always say. But why, when you can aim for the shine of the moon? Or at least honor a tradition created by the light of it.
In the Moonshine Capital of the world, Rocky Mount in Franklin County, Virginia, father-daughter duo Chris and Anna Prillaman of Twin Creeks Distillery have now been doing just that for a full 10 years, peddling “clear liquor” like their signature Sugar Shine as a symbol of their Appalachian culture.
… Legally, that is. Off the books, but not off the record, Anna makes the family’s fourth generation of moonshine makers. Her forefather, James Walter — colloquially known as Peg Hatcher — was one of the few who were prosecuted and convicted during The Great Moonshine Conspiracy Trial of 1935, where “80 people were indicted, but not everyone did time,” she says. “Grandpap Peg pulled time in ’39; my 93-year-old great-grandma remembers seeing him in that trial.”
That wasn’t the end of the Virginia bootleg community’s tussles with the law, either.
“Fast forward to the ’90s to Operation Lightning Strike, when feds came to bust people supplying grain, containers, warehouse storage” for dodging taxes, she reveals. “It was devastating because we were sending the sugar shine everywhere in mega volume, crossing so many state lines that they had to bring the feds in. They took farms, tractors, and many did hard time.”
But both times, as those who were convicted served, the community came together to support those on the outside, neighbors “carrying the load for a lot of families, putting food on neighbor’s tables, and circulating money in the community.”
Among the families that were supported during the two busts? Anna’s.
“Our whole family’s been tied up in the whole liquor scene. (Chris’s) daddy died when he was 14, and when he died, those mountain folk took him in and practically raised him,” she says. “He was hanging out with 60-year-olds playing music, making liquor … so it’s always been kind of a part of our life, and our history with it.”
Because of that, it’s not just the spirit we call moonshine that defines the community and her family’s place in it. It’s the spirit of moonshine.
As she explains, “It’s not just about the liquor, but the whole culture. People making the stills, farmers growing the grain and fruit. It’s a whole community centered around bootleg as a way of life and means of survival … a way of life since settlers came to these parts. The music, the history, the support …”
And it was keeping those surrounding elements alive that inspired her father to go legal, literally building a distillery with refurbished family heirlooms like the old copper pots and worm boxes and upcycled items, turning a milk tank from a failed dairy farm into a still.
“The whole idea behind the distillery is to preserve what he’d been fortunate enough to grow up in,” Anna says. “A lot of folks have a similar story to his, and we want to keep those alive and the way of life of the people who took him in. Making moonshine is a dying art, and it’s leaving with the people. Not a lot of people are moving in here, but many people my age leave.”
Anna did, herself. “I left, went to college, and lived in Colorado … but there’s nothing like where you’re rooted,” she says. She acknowledges she might be a bit of an outlier. Her parents had her when they were 17, 28 years ago, but because they did, “I had a lot of family, friends, and just people in this area that we’re pulled together tight. When a whole village raises a child, the roots become so deep, you’re not gonna pull ’em up.”
So, back she came to the family history and music of Rocky Mount.
The latter is a secondary defining trait of the area, its style nicknamed “moonshine music,” says Kathryn Lucas, director of PR for Visit Virginia’s Blue Ridge. “Franklin County is the gateway to the Crooked Road, which is Virginia’s Heritage Music Trail. The immigrants and people who settled in Southwest Virginia created a form of music that features fiddles, banjos, and more, which has been around for generations and is still a very important fabric of that community. So you’ll see that often in many different arenas, like the Harvester Performance Center in Rocky Mount” … and the Twin Creeks tasting room. There, Mountain Music Wednesdays are a weekly occurrence, where “often, just locals will come every week to play and dance, and anyone who shows up with an instrument is welcome to join,” Anna says.
Among them is her dad, who plays the same fiddle Peg played when the Library of Congress came through the area, recording him for a session that still lives in the archives today.
“If there’s one thing Dad loves, it’s this fiddle,” she laughs, which is why it appears in the Twin Creeks logo, since again, it’s the spirit of the culture that inspires their spirits.
But make no mistake, Twin Creeks isn’t only about heart. They’re serious about their moonshine.
“A lot of times, what we call clear liquor gets a bad rep because you see it in a jar and people think, ‘It’s just moonshine,’ rated the same as what they had in college or whatever,” Anna says. “But it’s all in the mash and how it’s distilled. For example, you pour vodka and corn in a mason jar, and they’re gonna say that’s moonshine, hooch, bootleg, whatever … But mash is really a deep subject. Even though they may look the same, they’re all different, in proof, in taste, and other details. My dad refers
to it like this: it’s like baking a cake. It’s all in what you put in it, pre-baking. So you can have a bunch of corn liquor, but when you put the seven products side by side, it’s all different because of the mash bill.”
For that reason, their highly regarded Sugar Shine is rated neutral and mixes so well in cocktails.
“It’s called first sugar,” Anna says. “When you make a pure grain alcohol, you take the spent mash, what you’ve already run and distilled, you ‘sugar’ it back. So this is the first shot, first run of liquor after the pure grain,” which is all sourced locally.
In fact, Twin Creeks exclusively specialize in small-batch liquors made with grains and fruit harvested locally and distilled using age-old methods. The ancient copper submarine-type still is on display at the tasting room in Rocky Mount, along with preserved wooden mash forks and mash boxes, copper worms, and thumper barrels.
This isn’t exactly good business, though.
“It’s easier and cheaper to go to distilled spirit plants and buy bulk alcohol, but I really, really value working with county farmers,” Anna says. “It’s such an important thing to us because I believe the quality starts there and runs all the way through until consumption.”
For that reason, the apple and peach brandies are made with real local orchard pomace, as opposed to their flavors being added later on, which is a common misperception.
She explains, “When we make brandy, we use fruit that’s so ripe, really soft, and we pick them out and put them in big tubs, mix all them into a big soupy mix, and we let it ferment naturally. When that mash is done working, we scrape the cap off, de-seed, and run that pomace out into liquor.”
All of that work yields only seven to eight gallons of brandy from a 250-gallon tote of peaches. So it’s good that Chris and Anna aren’t in it for the money.
“We don’t have deep pockets or the rich education to go along with today’s fancified distillery trends. We don’t have commercialized cold stills, we don’t buy bulk from spirits plants … we have a real connection, with copper subs right out of the woods, people who work with us, not for us, carrying the load, and a lot of pressure and weight … but faith that the good Lord will shine down on us and carry us through,” Anna says fervently.
“We just want people to feel part of our family, and hope that everyone that steps in our distillery’s door leaves appreciating the history and culture of what we do.” Preferably with a jig in their feet, a song in their heart, and a good stiff drink in their hand.
Buy Twin Creeks Distillery products at ABC stores in Virginia, Spirit Hub in Illinois, from the tasting room, and at the Franklin County-sponsored Moonshine Heritage Month family-friendly festival every April.
