Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/57654
Down story and photos by Fred Minnick I 've interviewed a lot of whiskey founders in my career, but none with quite the fashion sense of Chuck Miller, founder and Master Distiller of Culpeper, VA–based The Original MOONSHINE. Miller is straight out of an old Hollywood western, with his crooked, beat-up and sweat-stained straw cowboy hat, his long salt-and-pepper (mostly salt) sideburns and a red hand- kerchief covering his neck. He talks slow and fast at the same time in a Jimmy Stewart style that is lost on today's culture. But Miller ain't no saint like the characters Stewart played. Miller is a moonshiner, just like his grandpa. "Yessir, my granddad made a lot of whiskey during Prohibition," Miller says of his grandfather, Theodore George Miller. "He never had a real job—just made a lot of money making 'shine." Once, Miller's granddad was making a run to Washington, D.C., and federal agents were waiting for him at the Fourteenth Street Bridge. They shot up the truck, putting bullet holes in the windows, but his granddad escaped and returned to the farm later that night. "Grandpa never got caught," Miller says. The Start of a Still Miller has always been a farmer. In the 1980s, his farm was facing hard times and he was sitting on a lot of corn. Instead of selling it for less than its value or letting it rot, Miller decided to start making whiskey. "I knew there were a whole lot of moonshiners making that illegal stuff in the woods," he says. "But the law was catching 72 / the tasting panel / march 2012 The Original MOONSHINE founder Chuck Miller on the front porch in Culpeper, VA. Farm on the CHUCK MILLER FOLLOWS IN HIS GRANDFATHER'S FOOTSTEPS WITH THE ORIGINAL MOONSHINE