NPR

Moonshine Makes A Comeback in Virginia. And This Time, It's Legal

While the revival has taken off around the country, it's especially strong in Virginia, where many of the twists, turns and car chases that are a part of moonshine lore took place.
Onlookers watch as suited men stand in front of a large copper kettle still for making illegal liquor, with boxes of bottles and funnels spread before them all for the manufacture of booze, circa 1900.

In 1620, the Rev. George Thorpe sent a from a plantation near Jamestown, Va., to England describing a "good drinke of Indian corne" that he and his fellow colonists had made. Historians have speculated that Thorpe was talking about unaged corn whiskey, and that his distillation efforts on the banks of Virginia's James River might have America's first whiskey. Nearly 400 years later, Belle Isle Moonshine, just 30 miles away, up the river in Richmond, is again producing unaged corn whiskey — what

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