ISSUE 85, SPIRITS, Part 1: Popcorn Whiskey
Popcorn Whiskey
An imaginative distiller can transmute any grain and a good number of root vegetables into spirits. Indeed, there has always been a contingent of adventurers in the distilling community who perpetually quested to create novelty batches. I’ve always kept my eyes and ears peeled for tales of sweet potato beer and spirits, of sucrat (sorghum spirits), and about manufacturers of popcorn whiskey. Of the three, popcorn whiskey must be reckoned the most conventional and therefore the most saleable of these spirits. It is, after all, made from corn, a grain at the heart of Moonshine, Tennessee Whiskey, and Bourbon.
There is something of a paradox about popcorn whiskey. Popcorn is a form of flint corn—corn whose kernels are densely packed with starch and whose skins encapsulated the corn seed entirely. These kernels pop when heat cause steam expansion of the moisture in the starch to expand and bust open the cap of the kernel. Hard, self-enclosed flint corn kernels are the most difficult to process. But in certain areas—areas where weevil pressure hinders corn crops or where the growing season is quite shorts—flint corn varieties are the only type of maize to thrive. There farmers plant the crop, sell the pop corn to stores, and also try to diversify revenues from the plant. I’m talking about the short season northern flints found in New England and the upper Midwest. Also the coastal flints in the South where weevils rip gourdseed and dent corns to shreds.
New England, the home of temperance and the old cradle of American Puritanism, needed spirits to be sold under its ancient category as medicine. In Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1897 we see John Pevey advertise, “The finest article in the line of medicinal whiskies is the genuine popcorn whiskey sold by John M. Pevey, 155 Middle Street” [Lowell Sun, May 22, 1897, p3]. Purveyors of the product further South did not need to be so circumspect when touting its virtues. Frank C. Tullidge of Cincinnati declared, “Popcorn whiskey is the most wonderful whiskey that ever drove the skeleton from the feast or painted landscapes in the brains of man. It is the mingled souls of wheat and corn. In it you will find the sunshine and the shadow that chased one another over the billowy fields; the breath of June; the carol of the lark; the dews of night; the wealth of summer and autumn’s rich content, all golden with imprisoned light. Drink it and you will hear the voice of men and maidens sing the ‘harvest home,’ mingled with the laughter of children. Drink it and you will feel within your blood the star-lit dawns, the dreamy, tawny dusks of many perfect days. For many years this liquid joy has been within the happy staves of oak, longing to touch the lips of man” [The County Record, March 31, 1898, p9]. Can any 21st century ad writer approach the eloquence of this paean?
Alas for Tullidge and those who desired to experience the wealth of summer in their veins, the U. S. Government outlawed by Constitutional Ammendment the sale of Alcohol in the United States in 1919. Prohibition did of course not completely stop the production of popcorn whiskey. In 1929 Baltimore popcorn salesman John Collosen was arrested by federal agents with a coil and a tub of popcorn mash at his home. He was charged as a manufacturer [Charleston News & Courier, June 28, 1929, p1]. When Prohibition was repealed Popcorn Whiskey popped back into existence with Frankfort Distillery Products offering it is as a cut-rate alternative (69 cents a pint) to Four Roses ($1.39 a pint). Shortly thereafter popcorn whiskey ceased to be.
Yet it remained in culture memory as a kind of horizon of willingness to make do with what was available. That said, the famous late 20th-century North Carolina moonshiner Popcorn Sutton did not earn his name from using popcorn as his mash corn (Hickory King was his favorite if he could get it), but earned the moniker for attacking a faulty popcorn vending machine in a bar.